Three Serious and Intractable Problems and Norman!

America faces three serious and intractable problems as follows: 1) the strong pro-spenders outnumber the weaker anti-spenders 2) we persist in experiencing a lack of serious presidential leadership that is  fiscally responsible 3) America's culture has shifted from rugged individualism to a culture of profligate entitlement As long as these three conditions exist and deficit spending continues America's economic future will be captive, employment will be restrained, the dollar will sink and the middle class will continue to be hard pressed As time for the final debate on the debt ceiling nears I suspect the wind will begin to fizzle out of the stock market.   Should this debate result in meaningful resolutions of our amoebic spending and we set ourselves on a track toward true fiscal responsibility this would bode well for the market because our economy has flexibility and would respond. If, as I fear, Obama digs his heels in and the spenders gain the upper hand and the anti-spenders sink, as they have consistently, then this could result in  serious market headwinds. What is needed is addressing adjustments and modification in Social Security, Medicare  and selective cuts in spending where there is flagrant waste and counterproductive spending.  This is really not a difficult task for anyone with half a brain dedicated to doing what is best for the nation and its future.    "You arrive home to find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood ... And your home has sewage almost up to the ceiling.  What should you do ... raise the ceiling, or remove the crap???" (See 1 below.) --- At home with Norman! (See 2 below.) Dick ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1)David Malpass: Nothing Is Certain Except More Debt and Taxes The Senate fiscal-cliff bill still means higher taxes on every working American. So much for just going after 'the rich.' By DAVID MALPASS Whatever ultimately emerges from the fiscal-cliff negotiations over the past 48 hours, the country will survive. But the damage can't be undone. Taxes are going up for all working Americans. And so is the size of government. Businesses have been waiting to see whether a second Obama administration will encourage the economy. During the fiscal-cliff negotiations, however, the president made clear that his goal isn't to get business going again but instead to expand government and redistribute income. He offered no real spending cuts and instead used the year-end deadline to divide America into classes—to the point of campaigning on New Year's Eve against higher earners. Though the president talks about fairness, his policies penalize profit and investment. This hurts aspiring Americans more than it hurts those who have already made it. The deal that emerged from the Senate early Tuesday morning is being sold as a tax cut for the middle class, but the expiration of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday means that working Americans' take-home pay will drop. The bill reduces the value of tax deductions for upper incomes and, with the new open-ended 3.8% Medicare tax that was enacted under ObamaCare, income-tax rates on families and small business owners earning over $450,000 have been pushed above 44%. The Senate bill makes the tax code more complex, provides for no spending cuts and creates four deadlines—for the debt-limit increase within weeks, the March 1 automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, a second sequester on March 27 (to make up for overspending since the first sequester) and the March 30 expiration of government spending authority. These deadlines will keep Washington negotiations on the front page for months but with little likelihood that government will cut programs, sell assets or downsize the 1,300 federal agencies and commissions. No wonder many House Republicans balked at what was presented. The New Year's Day legislation is breathtaking in its largess. The Senate bill extends 52 tax credits, mostly for one year, ensuring huge annual lobbying fees and political contributions. Section 206 provides a juicy capital-gains tax exemption for contributions of property for conservation, meaning wealthy environmentalists with extra acreage will be able to take a tax deduction for the appreciated property and have the environmental organization preserve it, adding to the value of the primary property. Section 312 provides faster tax deductions for "motorsports entertainment complexes." Section 317 allows expensing of film and television productions, meaning lower taxes for Hollywood. The bill devotes much space to tax credits for government-approved energy schemes, providing taxpayer subsidies for energy-efficient new homes, existing homes, appliances, cellulosic biofuel and "Indian coal facilities." Underscoring the complexity of the tax code, the bill takes seven pages to index the alternative minimum tax for inflation because it takes side trips to curry favor with the owners of plug-in electric vehicles and with first-time home-buyers in the District of Columbia. The pattern across the developed world is for politicians to negotiate with each other and, after much drama, make the brave decision to downsize jobs through taxes and mandates rather than downsizing government. This country is no different: Whatever tax and spending decisions Washington makes over the next few months, the likelihood is that government will be bigger in 2013 and the fiscal problems even more urgent. There has emerged from the budget negotiations no process to cut government programs, limit the debt or reform the tax code. Many tax rates have now gone up and almost no spending restraint has been implemented, hurting 2013 investment and hiring. Even if the spending sequester is allowed to proceed on March 1 or substitutes are found, the cuts will be a small fraction of the spending binge in recent years that left a string of $1 trillion deficits. The Congressional Budget Office scores the Senate bill as adding $4 trillion to the national debt by 2022. That assumes the sequester or equivalent spending cuts are fully implemented in March, which seems unlikely. Some are hoping that during the coming confrontation over the debt-limit increase fiscal conservatives will be able to recover lost ground on spending. That won't work, because the debt limit doesn't provide much leverage. The debt-limit statute was written specifically to make it easier to increase the debt, not as a way to limit the debt. It should be repealed and replaced with a law that cuts spending when there is too much debt. While Republicans rightly want to stop the unending growth in debt, the current debt-limit statute gives most of the power to the president, allowing him to shut down parts of the government and blame holdouts until he gets enough votes for more debt. Rather than rejecting an increase in the debt limit, fiscal conservatives should offer a lasting remedy. This would be a debt-to-GDP limit that, when exceeded, would give the president the power to underspend congressional appropriations and to propose fast-track reductions in entitlements—but would also require him to make monthly reports to the public on excess spending and prohibit raises for government employees making over $100,000. Fighting under the current rules isn't working and leaves government inexorably bigger. The country can't afford this approach. Demographics are making it harder each year to restrain spending or win elections on the platform of limited government. The rules pit fiscal conservatives against themselves, leading to bigger government. Regardless of how the current crisis is ultimately resolved, there is sure to be another. Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats should use every opportunity to strengthen the framework for limited government, in order to restrain federal spending and allow the private economy to grow. Mr. Malpass, a deputy assistant Treasury secretary and legislative manager for the 1986 Tax Reform Act in the Reagan administration, is president of Encima Global LLC. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) At Home With Norman Podhoretz BY ROBERT S. GREENBERGER ·  Having abandoned the left six decades ago, The 83-year-old former editor of Commentary and grumpy grandfather of the right is still waiting for the majority of American Jews to follow suit. A youthful Norman Podhoretz, with abundant black wavy hair, looks out from a sepia photo, circa 1943. He is standing with nine other boys in a Brooklyn schoolyard, all wearing identical dark club jackets with a big “C” on the breast pockets and smiles on their faces. The “C” stands for Cherokees, the street gang to which they belonged. While sitting in the den of his comfortable apartment on a quiet tree-lined street on New York’s posh Upper East Side,Podhoretz recalls that the main requirement for Cherokee membership “was to be tough and not to back down from a fight.” The Cherokees long ago faded from the Brooklyn landscape, but Podhoretz has remained loyal to their credo for more than seven decades. At 83, Podhoretz is a short, stocky man, bald, with a fringe of gray hair circling his shiny pate. He is virtually the last surviving member of the New York Family, a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who were at the cutting edge of left-wing politics in the middle of the 20th century. In the 1970s, Podhoretz scandalized the group—and broke permanently with many of his closest friends—by abandoning his long-held leftist views and turning to the political right, taking Commentary, the influential magazine he edited for 35 years, along with him. Later, he became the proud patriarch of a neoconservative family: His son John is the current editor of Commentary and a columnist for The New York Post,and his son-in-law is Elliott Abrams, a feisty political infighter who was a top adviser to President George W. Bush. Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, has been for decades a prominent conservative writer and activist in her own right. Podhoretz’s influence extends far beyond his family ties, however: Many consider him to be the intellectual godfather of the neoconservative movement. In June 2004, Bush seemingly endorsed that view by awarding Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. “The biggest deal imaginable,” Podhoretz called it at the time. “It’s the most wonderful honor ever to come my way.” The medal might have been the capstone to Podhoretz’s long career, but it wasn’t the end of it. Most members of the New York Family have long since passed on or ceded the political stage to their children, and the war in Iraq soured even many Republicans on the so-called neo-cons. Nevertheless, Podhoretz remains in the fray. Still spry mentally and physically, he continues to churn out articles and books. He says that “after loafing for a few months,” he is busy writing again. With two of his obsessions, Iran’s nuclear program and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, likely to remain at the top of the foreign policy agenda for years to come, the pugnacious octogenarian doesn’t intend to retreat from the arena. When asked, for example, whether the apparent success of economic sanctions on Iran has changed his view on the necessity of a military strike, the old Cherokee refuses to yield any ground. “I’ve been saying for something like seven years that nothing will stop Iran from getting nuclear capability, and neither sanctions nor diplomacy will work,” he says dismissively. “If there is no military action taken within the next few months, or maybe years, then Iran will become a nuclear power.” When he smiles, it is a kindly, grandfatherly smile—even when he is talking about bombing Iran. Podhoretz was born in 1930 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, not far from that schoolyard where the Cherokees preened for the camera. He is the son of Jewish immigrants who had come from Galicia, in Central Europe, along with millions of other refugees seeking a better life in America. Norman’s father Julius was a milkman who always had steady work, even during the Depression, but he never made much money. The family lived in a cramped apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, but Norman’s immigrant parents made it clear to him that their life in America, however meager, was vastly preferable to what they might have had in Europe. Podhoretz says his parents were “lapsed Orthodox,” but they gave him a strong Jewish identity. “What I got from them was this strong sense of connection to Jewish culture, and I never had any problem with my identity as a Jew,” Podhoretz told me. Like his parents and other Jews of similar background, Podhoretz gravitated toward the political left as he grew up. But while his older sister Millie joined a Communist front group called American Youth for Democracy, Norman could never become anti-American in any way. He cherished America and had faith in its leaders. During World War II, his family assembled by their radio to listen to the “Fireside Chats” delivered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Norman—along with millions of other Americans—was buoyed by the reassuring patrician voice that came through the speakers. Too young for military service, Norman and his friends aided the war effort by recycling tin foil from cigarette packs and saving dimes for stamps that slowly grew into $25 war bonds. The war’s end was bittersweet for Podhoretz. “Now I would never get a chance to find out what it was like to be a soldier fighting for my country and whether I was man enough to take it,” he later wrote. The fact that a dozen or so of his relatives served and all of them escaped injury “helped bolster the romantic fantasies I entertained about going to war and giving my all for the ‘land of the brave and the free.’” His Brooklyn neighborhood was an urban stew—one-third Jewish immigrants, one-third Italian immigrants and one-third native-born Americans, mostly African-Americans. Inevitably, gangs formed along ethnic and racial lines, and as an adolescent, Podhoretz was part of the urban street life as a member of the Cherokees. “I actually lived a kind of double life,” he told me. “I was very good at school, of course, and well-behaved. I was a star pupil from kindergarten on. But my friends outside school, my gang, were the bad boys—that was who I was.” The teachers at Boys High School, which was academically rigorous, quickly pegged Podhoretz as an intellectual superstar and urged him to aim for the Ivy League. One English teacher took a particular interest in the milkman’s son. She knew he had the academic chops for Harvard but found his social graces lacking. “She took me out to dinner,”Podhoretz later recalled. “I didn’t know what fork to use, how to use a napkin. She did this deliberately in order to humiliate me so that I would learn how important it was to master these arts and therefore be a fit candidate for admission to Harvard.” Even as he grappled with the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork, Podhoretz was getting another education with the Cherokees. At 14, he and his friends often hung out at a pool hall frequented by hustlers and bookies. “We were teenagers, and we didn’t have a lot of money, but we did hang around pool halls, we did a lot of gambling, we did a little drinking and chased girls,” he recalls. Despite those distractions, Podhoretz ended up graduating third in his class from Boys High and won a scholarship to attend Columbia University. Because his family couldn’t afford to pay for a room in a dormitory or fraternity house, Podhoretz lived at home in Brownsville and commuted to Columbia, where he was studying literature. “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan,” he would later write. This allowed him to keep a foot in both worlds, but it also led to his first brush with trouble. During his freshman year at college, even as he was beginning to acclimate to the rarified world of the Ivy League, Podhoretz impregnated a Brownsville girl. The girl’s parents insisted on an abortion, and he didn’t object. He was already smart and ambitious enough to know that he didn’t want to be married to a woman he didn’t love just because of a teenage fling. Podhoretz dutifully escorted the girl to a seedy part of New Jersey to visit a shady doctor who specialized in abortions, which were then illegal. It took the nervous Podhoretz two trips to summon the courage to actually get to the doctor’s office.  One of his Columbia classics professors helped him cover the cost. Podhoretz worked hard at Columbia, and he quickly attracted the notice of the famous professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Before meeting him, Trilling had heard from other Columbia professors that Podhoretz was a brilliant student. But Trilling decided this for himself after reading Podhoretz’s review of his book, The Liberal Imagination, in the student publication, The Columbia Review. Trilling said it was the most intelligent review the book had received, and later he recommended Podhoretz for both a Fulbright Fellowship and a Kellett Fellowship. Podhoretz won both of them, and after graduating from Columbia in June 1950, he headed to Cambridge University in England to continue his studies. After his first year at Cambridge, the young graduate student embarked on a long summer vacation that was to include his first trip to the fledgling State of Israel, a country that eventually would become almost as dear to him as his own. From London, Podhoretz planned to travel to Paris and then go on to Greece and Tel Aviv. On the first leg of his trip, he met Jacqueline Clarke, a woman six years his senior. She was independent and attractive. Her father had been an Irish toolmaker who died when she was six, and she lived with her mother in London. Podhoretz was instantly attracted to her, and he commenced his first serious romance. Clarke had been a Communist Party member at 16 and had had a fling with a cartoonist for the Daily Worker, a left-wing newspaper that faithfully supported all the views of the Soviet Communist Party but overlooked its dark totalitarian side. To the youthful Podhoretz, she was an exotic creature. Together, they visited Athens, and when he talked endlessly, she taught him an important lesson: “Why don’t you stop talking and just look,” she said, “There are wonderful things to see around you, but have you seen any of them?” He listened and took her advice. Norman and Jacqueline would remain close friends and spend time together in London after their travels were over. But after Athens, in that lovely summer of 1951, they went their separate ways and Podhoretz flew on to Israel.  He had never been an ardent Zionist, but he felt compelled to visit the Jewish state to honor his father, who wanted his only son to value his religion and culture. At his father’s request, Podhoretz had taken classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while at Columbia, and he viewed his trip to Israel in a similar vein. He stayed in Israel for six weeks and had mixed impressions. Describing some of them in a long letter to Trilling, he wrote: “I covered almost every inch of Israel, spent lots of time in kibbutzim, fell in love with the Yemenites, argued endlessly about What is Judaism, Who is a Jew and Why Not? explored Tel Aviv (which is vile) and Jerusalem (which Jehovah did well to choose as his city)…and finally went away a sadder and wiser man, with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth.” As a graduate student, Podhoretz was exempt from the draft, and he could have continued his studies in Cambridge to avoid military service. In the summer of 1953, however, he decided it was time to put on his country’s uniform. ButPodhoretz was only patriotic up to a point. “I didn’t want to join up in the military because you had to join for three years,” he explained. “If you got drafted, it was only two years.” Podhoretz returned to New York, but he had to wait five months to get his wish. While he was waiting, he wrote six articles for Commentary. Launched eight years before, in 1945, by the American Jewish Committee, the thoughtful, provocative monthly magazine was envisioned as a “Jewish Harper’s, only more scholarly,” according to Podhoretz. While not reflected in its circulation numbers, Commentary had quickly become an influential liberal voice in intellectual circles. Its bylines included many luminaries of the 20th century: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Gershom Scholem and Norman Mailer. Podhoretz first met with Commentary founder and editor Elliot Cohen in the summer of 1952, while on a summer break from Cambridge. Cohen asked him to review Bernard Malamud’s novel, The Natural. That review, published in March 1953, was so well-received that Cohen was eager for Podhoretz to contribute additional pieces. So while he waited for Uncle Sam to summon him late in 1953, Podhoretz cranked out more articles for the magazine. His pieces on television drama, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and other topics so impressed Cohen that he was promised a job once the Army was done with him. When he was finally drafted, Podhoretz’s new friends at Commentary gave him a going-away party and some gifts, including a Parker “51” fountain pen. The send-off was so elaborate, Podhoretz later said, it was like having his bar mitzvah all over again. In his later years, Podhoretz would become known as an enthusiastic proponent of U.S. military power, but his own military career was less than heroic. To a girlfriend back home, Podhoretz wrote that basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey was “the most horrible experience I’ve ever gone through.”  The other men could run tirelessly and do pushups, and he could not. They could quickly take apart a rifle and put it together again, and he couldn’t. For the first time in his life, Podhoretz was at the bottom of the class. At his army induction, Podhoretz told the personnel interviewer that he had supervised English undergraduates while at Cambridge. Assuming he was a teacher, the Army automatically assigned him to communications intelligence. To train for his assignment, Podhoretz spent four months at the Army Security Agency School in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. There he learned how to decode military communications traffic from all over the world. Wearing earphones, Podhoretz and his fellow soldiers listened to Morse code transmissions, quickly typed out the dots and dashes, and forwarded the sequences to the cryptanalysts. The Korean War had just ended, so after completing his training at Fort Devens, he was sent to Germany as part of the army of occupation. The future Cold Warrior ended up spending about half of his two-year hitch delivering a series of Pentagon-sponsored lectures on the differences between Communism and democracy. “The course was outlined in a group of pamphlets prepared by the Defense Department and was supposed to be conducted by an officer. But the poor second lieutenant to whom this job was handed in my outfit nearly had a nervous breakdown as he was delivering the first lecture and had to leave the podium before he even finished,” Podhoretz recalled in his 1999 book, Ex-Friends. “After searching unsuccessfully for a replacement among his cadre of officers, our company commander found out that there was a lowly enlisted man on the base who had any number of college degrees. Desperate enough by now to go against the regulation calling for an officer, he offered to relieve me of my regular military duties if I would take the job.” The day after he was discharged from the Army in December 1955, Podhoretz went to work as an assistant editor at Commentary. From that perch, he was welcomed into the New York Family, the group of literary luminaries that now included Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. It was a time when ideas mattered, and when members of the Family gathered for cocktails in one of their Manhattan living rooms to discuss them, they did so with a passion and erudition rarely matched today. “To the members of the Family, the arts, politics and the relations between them were matters almost of life and death,”Podhoretz later observed. By the time Podhoretz joined Commentary, he was already romantically involved with the woman who would become his wife. Midge Rosenthal Decter was nearly three years older than Podhoretz, and she had been raised in a far different environment: the lily-white world of St. Paul, Minnesota. Her family was solidly middle class, and after graduating from the University of Minnesota, she moved to New York to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary and then at New York University.  The two first met in the late 1940s, when both were at JTS. But Midge was about to be married to Moshe Decter, a writer and social activist, and they lost touch. In 1955, when Norman and Midge encountered each other again, Midge was a divorcée with two young daughters. When Podhoretzjoined Commentary, Midge was working there as a writer and as Elliot Cohen’s secretary, but she soon moved on to the Zionist magazine Midstream to avoid a messy office romance. In 1956, they married and moved to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, not yet the trendy liberal neighborhood it would become. They were early pioneers in the community, which they chose because they had children and it had spacious, rent-controlled apartments. The area had a large Jewish population and a lively cosmopolitan feeling along busy Broadway, which slants across parts of the neighborhood. Norman and Midge were—and remain—intellectual soul mates. Like him, she eventually migrated from the political left to the political right. She would later work as an editor for the Hudson Institute, CBS Legacy Books, Harper’s, Saturday Review/World and Basic Books. Politically and personally, Midge and Norman rarely disagree. “We like each other,” she says simply. “I knew Norman when he was a kid.”  She downplays her influence on his ideas, saying only that by giving him four children, she sparked his concern about the decline of public education. At Columbia and Cambridge, Podhoretz had been a staunch anti-communist, but by the late 1950s, he was gravitating toward what would become known as the New Left. Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes and his “cult of personality” convinced Podhoretz, and many others, that the Soviet Union might move away from totalitarianism. Podhoretz began writing articles criticizing the Cold War, calling for a nuclear test ban and nuclear disarmament. “The whole approach was that the country was not living up to its ideals or potentialities, partly because of the Cold War,” he explains. Even then, Podhoretz was attacking liberals—but from the left.  He and his fellow New Leftists believed that the Democratic Party had become too timid and that it was necessary to radically reconstruct American society in order to eliminate poverty, racism and other injustices. Podhoretz’s boss, Elliot Cohen, struggling with mental illness, committed suicide in 1959. Podhoretz was determined to be his replacement. In interviews with the publication committee, he vowed to move Commentary to the left and make it less Jewish in its subject matter and roster of contributors. In 1960, Podhoretz got the job. Commentarybecame the intellectual center of the New Left, and its circulation and influence soared. In the first year under his leadership, subscriptions rose from 20,000 to 25,000, and by 1965, they had soared to 60,000, an all-time high. But the turmoil of the 1960s steadily eroded Podhoretz’s beliefs. The New Left morphed into a youth “counterculture” that rejected the institutions and conventions of its elders and wanted to upend, rather than perfect, American society. The movement that Podhoretz had helped to promote had become to him increasingly anti-American, celebrating drug use, sexual promiscuity and an “anything goes” attitude that Podhoretz couldn’t abide. He famously attacked the Beats and Allen Ginsberg—whom Podhoretz never forgave for editing one of his own poems without permission and running it in The Columbia Review—as “know-nothing bohemians” who “know nothing, stand for nothing, believe in nothing.” “It never occurred to any of those kids, or even the grown-ups, that the system they described was what was responsible for the prosperity they enjoyed,” he says. Podhoretz was particularly disturbed by the New Left’s comparisons of the United States with Nazi Germany. “I simply could not stomach any of this,” he later wrote. “I still loved America, and my own utopian aspirations were directed at perfecting, not destroying it.” The Vietnam War cleaved the country in two, eventually sparking violent anti-war demonstrations in America’s streets.  Many on the New Left now argued that America was no better—and perhaps worse—than the Soviet Union.Podhoretz had been an early opponent of the war, but he simply could not accept the idea that America was evil. Meanwhile, the nonviolent civil rights marchers of the early 1960s were being pushed aside by black militants who openly advocated violence. Podhoretz was appalled when his fellow Family members, joined by liberal celebrities and socialites, embraced “radical chic,” fawning over Black Panthers who brandished weapons and wore berets. Among the many radical groups in the 1960s vying for political space, Podhoretz thought he detected the fetid smell of anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semitism surfaced during the New York City teachers’ strike of 1968, which set the community-controlled school board in Brownsville—now largely black—against the mostly white and Jewish United Federation of Teachers. In 1963, his explosive piece, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” described the fear and distrust he had for African Americans, despite his liberal leanings. “I find that I am not afraid of Puerto Ricans, but I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street,” he wrote. “The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself.” Meanwhile, Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War the year before had transformed it from underdog to conqueror, and anti-Zionism began to become acceptable in some leftist circles. It didn’t happen overnight, but by the late 1960s, Podhoretz’s political journey from left to right was well underway. “I was reacting against the anti-Americanism of the left, and that drove me out of the left. It’s as simple as that,” he remembers. “But, you know, when it turned out that this was also affecting Israel—that the anti-Semitism was coming back in the package—that made it doubly imperative to take the kind of stand I was taking.” Under Podhoretz’s leadership, Commentary began running articles attacking the New Left as anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-Semitic, and calling its revolutionary spirit “futile and dangerous.” The magazine became a consistent critic of liberal views, whether the issue was crime, poverty, education, race relations or art. These were the views of Podhoretz’s intellectual friends, and many never forgave him. It didn’t help that in 1967 Podhoretz published Making It—a book Trilling and Podhoretz’s publisher had advised him against—in which he accused leftist artists and intellectuals—his circle of friends—of being obsessed with accumulating status, fame and wealth, while claiming otherwise. He wrote: “Every morning a stock-market report on reputation comes out in New York. It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so’s book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two. Because of the dirty little secret, many of the most avid readers of this daily report would indignantly deny having a subscription to it…” Norman Mailer, a member of the Family, penned a scathing review of the book—after initially telling Podhoretz that he liked it. Mailer called the book “brutal—coarse, intimate, snide, grasping, groping, slavering, slippery of reference, crude and naturally tasteless,” adding that the Family was “furious to the point of biting their white icy lips…No fate could prove undeserved for Norman.” In a 2007 interview in Paris Review, Norman Mailer explained why the book caused such a rupture, conceding that his own scathing review of it might have exacerbated the conflict. “In the first half, his thesis is that the dirty little secret among the left, among artists and intellectuals, is that they really want to make it, and they want to make it big. And they conceal that from themselves and from others,” Mailer recalled. “And then he starts to give portraits of all the people on the left who have made it—pious, sweet little portraits, with people who we know goddamn well are not that at all. “Podhoretz is nothing if not active and enterprising,” Mailer continued. “So the moment he moved over to the right, he had to be far to the right. And so I feel that I’m responsible, to whatever degree, for helping to have shoved him over there. Which is too bad, because he now is paying for his sins on the right by having supported the war in Iraq and he has to live with it—has to live with all the idiocies of the neoconservatives.” Podhoretz’s attacks on members of the Family became increasingly personal—as did their criticisms of him—and he used the pages of Commentary to air his grievances. In 1997, just months after Allen Ginsberg’s death, Podhoretzpublished an article entitled, “My War with Allen Ginsberg,” which detailed their friendship and falling out—and whatPodhoretz saw as Ginsberg’s moral failings. In particular, Podhoretz focused on Ginsberg’s sexual promiscuity and drug use. He wrote: “Ginsberg was also fulsomely praised [in his obituaries] as a pioneer of the gay-rights movement, which indeed he was. Yet so far as I have been able to determine, no one thought to draw a connection between the emergence of AIDS and the rampant homosexual promiscuity promoted by Ginsberg… And I could find only one mention (in the Weekly Standard) of Ginsberg’s active sponsorship of the abominable North American Man Boy Love Alliance (NAMBLA), an organization devoted to the legalization of homosexual pedophilia.” On Ginsberg’s drug use, he wrote: “Moreover, persuaded by propagandists like Ginsberg that they could try marijuana with impunity, untold numbers of kids were getting hooked on it, and a certain percentage of these, having thus dipped a toe into the drug culture, would soon plunge into the deeper and more dangerous waters of LSD or heroin or cocaine.” Ginsberg had earlier said that Podhoretz “has a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often.” In his 1999 book, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer, Podhoretz also went after Mailer for his sexual promiscuity and drug use. “Combining the skill of a professional juggler with the talents of a White House scheduler, he could keep a number of affairs going simultaneously for years, some of them even overlapping with his successive marriages,” he wrote. “Where he found the energy and the time for all this while still turning out many pages a day always baffled me. Evidently, living that way fed rather than drained him.” But according to the book, it was Podhoretz’s betrayal of Mailer that undid their friendship. Podhoretz had proved a loyal friend to Mailer, who affectionately called him a “foul-weather friend.” Even after Mailer stabbed his wife, Adele, with a penknife in 1960, Podhoretz stood by him, yielding to his plea not to turn him in to the police or a mental institution. However, when Podhoretz hosted a party for Jackie Kennedy and failed to invite Mailer—who was infatuated with the Kennedys and was trying to get on their good side—he says Mailer was furious and their friendship never recovered. Meanwhile, Decter also was attracting fire from the left with her attacks on feminism and liberal child rearing. In The Liberated Woman and Other Americans (1970) and The New Chastity and Other Arguments (1972), she argued that women who proclaimed their desire to break the chains of male oppression really were afraid of having children and becoming responsible adults. The goal of women’s liberation, Decter argued, was “to keep (a woman) as unformed, as able to act without genuine consequence, as the little girl she imagines she once was and longs to continue to be.”Decter went even further inLiberal Parents, Radical Children (1975), blaming liberal parenting for producing self-centered, spoiled children who believed they could change the world. As she explained on C-SPAN in 2001: “There’s the evidence of women in their late 30s and 40s who are now desperately looking for husbands, or unable to find husbands, have discovered—guess what?—they want to have children. They never knew this before because their heads were so rattled with this stupid propaganda… There’s so much suffering all over the place, and women suffer and maybe they suffer more than men in Africa and in Muslim countries. And then you look at American women. They’re healthy, they’re vital, they’re employed, they are educated, and for them to claim that they’ve been oppressed is just—it’s immoral.” As Commentary became “an extension of his own personality,” in the words of Nathan Abrams, author of NormanPodhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, Podhoretz’s rightward march continued throughout the 1970s, especially on the Cold War. He considered détente to be a form of appeasement. “I thought that we should not be figuring out how to be friends with the Soviet Union,” he says. “We should be figuring out how to win the Cold War, how to win the war against them.” In the 1980 presidential election, Republican Ronald Reagan was arguing the same thing. Podhoretz enthusiastically backed Reagan; the lifelong Democrat’s conversion to conservatism was complete. As he wrote just months after the election: “What we need is an economic policy that will unleash the productive energies of an artificially hampered people and thereby foster growth; a program of rearmament that will make our defenses invulnerable and provide us with the power both to contain Soviet expansionism and to protect our vital interests in the Persian Gulf; and a legal structure that will encourage the revitalization of the values of ‘family, work, and neighborhood.’” By that time, Commentary had become so influential that opinion pieces occasionally translated into high-level government positions. The most famous examples were Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote the 1974 essay “The United States in Opposition” and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who attacked Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy in her 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Both went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick later credited Commentary with rallying the country against the Soviet Union: “Norman forged a community which managed, just barely, to develop enough courage to confront the Soviet Union and Israel’s tormentors,” she told Momentin 1995. During the 1980s, Commentary began promulgating ideas that would later became foundational in neoconservative thought on foreign affairs: the threat of terrorism and radical Islam, the imperative of American global leadership and the advancement of democracy, and skepticism of international institutions. As Abrams writes, “Neoconservatism wasPodhoretz’s personal ideology, in which he pushed his own ideas for the future direction of America.” Decter also turned her attention to the Cold War. In the 1980s, she headed the Committee for the Free World, which sought to publicize the threat the Soviet Union posed to the United States and to Israel. The group’s goal was “to alter the climate of confusion and complacency…that has done so much to weaken the Western democracies.” As Commentary marched right, tensions with the American Jewish Committee grew. Although AJC remained committed to Podhoretz’s editorial independence, his extreme conservative views meant that many top members of AJC despised the publication. To offer a liberal counterpart to Commentary, AJC started a new bi-monthlymagazine,Present Tense, in 1973. However, in 1990, as funding was drying up, AJC stopped subsidizing both magazines. While Present Tense quickly died, Podhoretz secured funding from right-wing foundations and individual donors and kept the magazine housed at AJC. Podhoretz stepped down as editor of Commentary in 1995 and was succeeded by Neal Kozodoy. In 2007, Commentary made a complete break from AJC and formed its own independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) to house the magazine. It could then court conservative donors directly, instead of going through AJC bureaucracy. Two years later, Podhoretz’s youngest son, John, took over Commentary. Since the elder Podhoretz left, circulation has dropped to near 26,000, according to the Commentary website. But Podhoretz is still a respected and influential voice of the right. In 2002 and 2003, he was an outspoken proponent of ousting Saddam Hussein, arguing that the Iraqi dictator directly threatened the United States. In his 2007 book, World War IV: The Long Struggle AgainstIslamofascism, Podhoretz described the war in Iraq as a single front in what would be a decades-long war against radical Muslims whose objective is “to murder as many of us as possible” and destroy “the freedoms we cherish and for which American stands.” He predicted that after Iraq, it would be necessary to topple the ruling regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria to lay the groundwork for democracy in the Middle East. If anything, the Arab Spring has only darkened his worldview. “I shared George W. Bush’s belief that there was a hunger for freedom in the Arab world,” he tells me. “But the Arab Spring has persuaded me that I was overly optimistic, if there is a tendency, as we have already seen, for the Islamic forces in the Middle East to take power, and if most of the people in the region are in favor of the Islamic program and the imposition of Sharia law. This is true in Egypt. And in Syria, if and when Assad falls, he will be succeeded by an Islamic group, either the Muslim Brotherhood or something worse—and I don’t know if there is something worse.” He has also publicly come to the defense of Sarah Palin. “True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership,” he wrote in a 2010 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. “What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn.” He concluded the piece by saying: “I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.” Four decades after he went through his own political evolution, with many friends and old acquaintances shed,Podhoretz remains perplexed that so few of his fellow Jews have made the same journey. In his most recent book, Why Are Jews Liberals?,  written in 2009, Podhoretz sought to explain the phenomenon, which shows little sign of abating. In presidential elections, Jews typically support the Democratic candidate by margins of better than two-to-one, even in years of Republican landslides. In a piece published the same year in The Wall Street Journal, Podhoretzmade his best case for a Jewish shift to the right. “I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation…that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history,” Podhoretz wrote. “If anything bears eloquent testimony to the infinitely precious virtues of the traditional American system, it is the Jewish experience in this country. Surely, then, we Jews ought to be joining with its defenders against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic to the philosophical principles, the moral values, and socioeconomic institutions on whose health and vitality the traditional American system depends.” The most recent presidential election has resoundingly demonstrated—once again—that the vast majority of American Jews just don’t see it that way. But the old Cherokee intends to keep on fighting. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------