The White Working Class was Bamboozled

The White Working Class was Bamboozled The Color of Law By David A. Love, JD BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor

Originally, this was to be a commentary on the plight of the white middle class, but that demographic no longer exists in America. So, let’s talk about the swindling of the white working class. And although it has all come to a head in the past few years, it is a story that is years in the making. If Stockholm Syndrome relates to the feeling of empathy that kidnap victims have with their captors, then certainly what we are witnessing today is a Stockholm Syndrome of those on the losing end of American capitalism. To single out white working people is not to assume that others are immune from identifying with those who would exploit them financially - their own economic kidnappers, if you will. At the same time, it was white working folks who made a deal with the devil a long time ago. And now they’ve been sent the invoice from that Faustian bargain. Allow me to explain. American capitalism has promoted the mythology of the “American Dream,” the notion that everyone has a chance to get rich. In pursuit of that dream, poor and working white Americans chose their enemy years ago. They made a conscious decision to side with the “1 percenters” whose feet were firmly placed on their neck, rather than with similarly situated black and brown common folk. They decided it was those of a darker hue whose progress stood in the way of their own movement up the ladder. Generation after generation, they fought and died in wars, someone else’s beef, designed to protect the interests of the 1 percent. They opposed social programs that had any chance of helping blacks, even if they stood to benefit from the programs themselves. And ultimately they failed to join forces with workers of color to build a strong labor movement. As a result of that fatal decision, the jobs moved offshore to where the labor costs were cheapest. Chinese slave laborers are now making our iPhones, iPads, X-Boxes and other toys, and now even Chinese workers are becoming too expensive. The most impoverished European immigrant had neither a pot nor a window to throw it out of. But at least he or she was not black, and thus could be considered a real American. Though poor whites had far more in common with their poor black-, Latino-, Asian- and Native-American counterparts than with some Wall Street banker or fat cat industrialist, nonetheless they viewed racial minority groups and others as the enemy. That’s how scapegoats are created. So, the blame is not placed where it should, which is the über-wealthy sucking the lifeblood out of democracy. Rather the problem is identified as affirmative action, or welfare queens, or undocumented Mexican immigrants. Solutions to the nation’s woes are offered in the form of mass incarceration and the death penalty. Tighter social controls are introduced in the form of bans on Sharia law and Latino studies, voter ID, draconian anti-immigrant legislation and prohibitions on same-sex marriage. Culture wars are the ultimate shell game, a cheap parlor trick of smoke and mirrors to mask the wide scale corporate theft taking place. These cultural issues - which also include gun proliferation and the war against a woman’s reproductive rights, including contraception - will do nothing to improve anyone’s station in life. Yet these time-tested culture wars are fought because someone is betting that the common folk will take the bait. And usually, such is the case. Meanwhile, the sanctimonious and self-righteous rightwing among us, a morals police and Christian Taliban of sorts, would distract us with fertilized egg personhood and mandatory sonograms for women seeking an abortion. But in the face of injustice, like the white clergy in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, they “have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” King called the contemporary church “a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are.” So, those who obsess over the sex lives of private citizens have said little about our national scourge of economic inequality or the suffering of the poor - you know, the stuff Jesus talked about. Preoccupied as they are with birth control bans and zygote rights, they were conspicuously silent when the living among them suffered and the innocent died. Last year, when the state of Georgia killed Troy Davis, an innocent black man, they said nothing. And they had remained silent seven years earlier, when the state of Texas wrongfully executed Cameron Todd Willingham, an innocent white man. Yet, there is hope that for their own sake, people will not fall for the shell game forever. There is a chance that citizens are waking up, resisting the Stockholm Syndrome, and refusing to act against their economic self-interests. The spirit of the Occupy movement has liberated the public discourse, an alternative to the neo-segregationist Tea Party and its reliance on racial scapegoats. David A. Love wrote this commentary as the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, a national nonprofit organization that empowers exonerated death row prisoners and their family members to become effective leaders in the movement to abolish the death penalty. BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. and a contributor to The Huffington Post, the Grio, The Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He also blogs at davidalove.com, NewsOne, Daily Kos, and Open Salon. Click here to contact Mr. Love.

Initially thought to be "just" a water leak involves 100's of gallons of flammable chemical at Sherman Hospital, Elgin. How safe do you feel today, Elgin?

Hazmat response at Sherman after 12-hour delay

By Tara García Mathewson

A portion of Sherman Hospital will be closed in coming weeks as cleanup crews repair damage from what was initially believed to be just a water leak but really involved hundreds of gallons of a flammable chemical.

The geothermal lake behind Sherman Hospital, 1425 N. Randall Road, provides an environmentally friendly heating and cooling system with pipes running inside the building from beneath the water level.

According to Assistant Fire Chief Dave Schmidt, one of the pipes in the lower level of the hospital burst at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday. Methanol, an antifreeze used in the geothermal process, was filling the hospital along with the water, necessitating a hazardous materials or HAZMAT response.

“When we realized it was methanol in the water mixture, we immediately called the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and used their direction on how to direct the operations going forward and who to call and when,” hospital spokeswoman Michelle Kustra said Monday.

The Elgin Fire Department and the South Elgin Hazmat team were not called until shortly after 7 p.m., according to Schmidt. They remained on the scene, along with a cleanup team from Wheeling-based SET Environmental Inc., until about 10:30 p.m.

Elgin firefighters went in with hoses ready beside South Elgin hazmat team members in their suits as a precautionary measure.

“Even though the room was being ventilated, there was an outside chance the atmosphere could be conducive to lighting if there was a spark,” Schmidt said. No one was injured while the broken pipe was replaced. And Schmidt said the situation was not deemed critical enough to evacuate anyone from the hospital.

The affected areas were unoccupied administrative space and an outpatient testing area, according to Kustra. Those rooms will continue to be sealed off while cleanup continues and carpet and drywall is replaced.

Kustra said 5,800 gallons of water escaped and 8.5 percent of it was methanol.

This is the first time there has been a problem with the geothermal system’s piping, according to Kustra, but officials are reviewing the infrastructure as a follow-up to the hazmat response Sunday.

Copyright © 2012 Paddock Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Why are the Republicans not thinking like these wascally Democrats in Michigan?

DEARBORN, Mich.-- As the state of Michigan prepares for Tuesday's presidential primary, questions remain about whether Democrats could skew the results via crossover voting.   (Who has these questions?  Tell me please.  I don't.  Do the Democrats give a tinkers damn about which Republican Candidate wins the Michigan Primary?  I think not.)  The state of Michigan has no party registration requirement, so any registered voter can participate in Tuesday's Republican presidential primary, including Democrats and independents.

But select party leaders surveyed by Yahoo News say they're not concerned about the potential impact of crossover votes.(To the best of MY very limited knowledge, I am the only political analyst around who has suggested cross-over voting as a winning political strategy IF  in particular, the Republican Party seriously wanted anybody other than Obama in the White House from 2013-16.  I have blogged time and time and time again, that if the Republicans were serious about defeating Obama, the way to do it is to beat him in the primary with the most unelectable Democratic candidate possibly, which, they would almost surely view to be Barbara Boxer - full disclosure, I think Barbara will make a wonderful candidate and an even better President, and I am going to vote for her, on principal!

"The Michigan Republican party believes that voters who vote in a primary do so because they're encouraged and inspired to participate in the process… not to create some type of mischief," state party spokesman Matt Frendewey told Yahoo News. In other words, Michigan Republicans are fine, civilized, upstanding Christian folk who would not resort to such treachery!

In the past, Democrats and independents have been credited with some major vote outcomes in Michigan: surveys from the 1996 reportedly indicated that 16 percent of voters in that year's Republican primary were Democrats and 17 percent were independents; many believe John McCain won Michigan's 2000 presidential primary with the help of Democrats and Independents;  (And who, pray tell, are these, the "many" who believe this?  Ya cannae even quote a one of 'em, laddie?) and others suggest Republican Gov. Rick Snyder won the 2010 primary with a boost from those same voting groups. (Damn it ta hell, mon, who, I demand to know, are these "others" who so belive this?  And upon what do their belifs rest?"

Frendewey said that the state GOP has been focused solely on Republican turnout for this primary and has made no efforts to appeal to independents or "soft Democrats." I(So the GOP party can blame the voters then for voting for the wrong candidate when whomever it is gets the snot smacked out of him ... UNLESS .... the Republicans decided they want a viable candidate, and are planning to make tremendous TV coverage of the otherwise very boring Republican Convention when ... and open vote is held, and a compromise candidate is nominated, say, someone with the Charisma of Sarah Palin, or the experience of Mike Huckabee, or the intelligence, integrity, and world view of a Bob Kerrey. Intriguing possibility!)

For their part, Democrats say they have made no effort to encourage their fellow party members to vote on Tuesday.

United Auto Workers' President Bob King when asked last week at an anti-Mitt Romney rally in Detroit if he's encouraging auto union members (who typically vote Democratic) to participate Tuesday, he rejected the suggestion. "No, we're not," King told reporters. "I'm urging my members to work hard, to rebuild the right to organize, the right to collective bargaining, to support President Obama, and really we want to build a broader movement…" he said.

The state Democratic party chairman also flatly denied any efforts to promote Democratic participation.

"We do not encourage crossover voting," chairman Mark Brewer told Yahoo News.

Brewer made that comment in a phone interview this weekend even though he put out a statement last week highlighting a video of two Republican state Senators encouraging Democrats to vote in the primary:

Democrats who accept this invitation will still be able to vote in our May 5th caucuses. If Democratic crossover votes affect the results on February 28th, Republicans will have no one but themselves to blame.

Statements such as this combined with the state's history have kept questions about crossover voters in the news. And other outlets have helped stoke interest in the subject.

Liberal Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas launched a call for Democratic voters to participate in open Republican primaries in Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in an effort he dubbed "Operation Hilarity." (He made the same plea in Michigan in 2008.) Curse you, KOS, you make us look like juvenile deliquents. OH! WAIT! I'm urging the same thing of REPUBLICANS because Barack Obama is the wrong man, at the wrong time, for the job he was annointed and appointed to have from way way back in time, probably after he got his coke-sniffin' nose accepted into HAHVAHD and one of those liberal goof-ball East-coast effetist academics goes: AHA - just what we need - the perfect (not quite black) face to put into the alleged office of the most powerful man in the world, who, in reality, is simply a tool for Goldman Sachs to rule and run the world.

It's difficult to gauge exactly how many Democrats and Independents will head to the polls to vote Republican on Tuesday. Public Policy Polling-- which conducted robo-calls in Michigan-- on Sunday estimated that just 5 percent of likely primary voters in Michigan are Democrats and that their impact may not be felt at all. "They're splitting their votes 28-28 between Romney and Santorum," the survey outfit stated in its report.

Nice to know that SOMETHING in this country is growing (even if it IS EXTREME POVERTY)

25 Feb, 2012:  By David Walsh

Extreme poverty in US has more than  doubled since 1996 - 

 

A policy brief recently issued by the National Poverty Center (NPC) reveals that the number of households in the US living on less than $2 a day per person has increased by 130 percent since 1996, from 636,000 to some 1.46 million today.

This means that some 4 million people in “the richest country on earth” (according to US capitalism’s apologists) are surviving on less than $60 a month each, i.e., essentially on no income whatsoever.

The policy brief, authored by H. Luke Shaefer, University of Michigan, School of Social Work, and Kathryn Edin, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, studies the results of the fifteen years since the 1996 “welfare reform,” signed into law by President Bill Clinton, which fatally slashed the social safety net.

“This reform,” the authors comment, “has been followed by a dramatic decline in cash assistance caseloads, from an average of 12.3 million recipients per month in 1996 to 4.4 million in June 2011; only 1.1 million of these beneficiaries are adults.

“Thus, in the aftermath of the Great Recession while millions of American parents continue to experience long spells of unemployment, they have little access to means-tested income support programs. Has this produced a new group of American poor: households with children living on virtually no income?”

The answer is yes.

In studying the most deprived in the US, the policy brief, whether pointedly or not, explains that the researchers developed “a definition based on one of the World Bank’s main indicators of global poverty, meant to measure poverty in developing nations.” They adopt the World Bank’s standard for determining the poorest of the global poor, subsistence on $2 a day or less.

The study draws data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), collected by the US Census Bureau from sample households every four months. The most recent data comes from the beginning of 2011.

In passing, the study notes that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, has increased from an average of 25.5 million recipients per month in 1996 to 45.2 million in June 2011, a 77 percent increase in a decade and a half.

Children have been especially hard hit. The brief estimates that “about 2.8 million children lived in extreme poverty at the beginning of 2011.… This was roughly 16 percent of all children in poverty.” The number of households with children in extreme poverty has risen sharply since November 2008. The study dismisses the notion that the American safety net “is strong, or even adequate, when one in five poor households with children are living without meaningful cash income.”

As to the demographics of families living in destitution, the NPC researchers found that 37 percent of the households in extreme poverty in 2011 were headed by a married couple and 51 percent by a single female.

Some 48 percent of these households were headed by white non-Hispanics, 25 percent by African Americans and 22 percent by Hispanics in 2011. The report comments, “Thus, extreme poverty is not limited to households headed by single mothers or disadvantaged minorities, though the percentage growth in extreme poverty over our study period was greatest among these groups.”

The report points to impoverished households having access to the meager in-kind benefits still available in the US, such as SNAP, section 8 vouchers or public housing units and public health insurance, but adds this understatement: “Still, the in-kind safety net is leaving many households with children behind. And even families who receive them will arguably have a hard time coping with no cash on hand.”

The NPC policy brief concludes by reiterating its central conclusion that the prevalence of severe poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011, with its growth concentrated “among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform.” Both Republicans and Democrats championed the latter as a measure that would put the poor “back on their feet.” Instead, a combination of legislative ruthlessness and a deteriorating economy have produced a significant population living in wretchedness.

To drive home the point, a new study from Kids Count, “Data Snapshot on High-Poverty Communities,” reports on the high percentage of children in some of America’s largest cities living in concentrated poverty.

Detroit leads the nation in this category, with 67 percent of children residing in high-poverty neighborhoods. Some 57 percent of Cleveland’s children live in such conditions, along with 49 percent of children in Miami, 48 percent in Milwaukee and 43 percent in both Fresno, California and Atlanta.

Overall, 22 percent of children in large cities live in communities of concentrated poverty. About 8 million children in the US as a whole reside in such economically deprived areas.

In Michigan in 2010, 341,000 children lived in high-poverty areas, an increase of 124,000, or 57 percent, over 2000.

The author also recommends:

Kids Count report: Extreme poverty doubles in Michigan

[1 February 2012]

Even the harpie MO DO gets that the Republican Party's candidates seeking the office of POTUS are bat shit crazy. And MO ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, by any means.

February 25, 2012

Ghastly Outdated Party

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

IT’S finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.

Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.’s trumped-up invasion of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., that defeating Obama — “the most dangerous president in modern American history” — was “a duty of national security” because “he is incapable of defending the United States” and because he “wants to unilaterally weaken the United States.” Who killed Osama again?

How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Gingrich and Rick Santorum?

“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.”

After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home from the Senate, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.” That from the man who accused Anita Hill of perjury.

Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.

Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the “right height” of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.”

Romney’s Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told the Ripon Forum: “If we are only the party of Wall Street and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant.”

Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, went on Glenn Beck’s Web-based show with his family and offered this lunacy: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country. He evidently wants home university schooling, which will cut down on keggers.

His wife, Karen, suggested that her husband’s success is “God’s will” and that he wants “to make the culture a better culture, more pleasing to God.”

The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”: he suggested that he was denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions.

With music, red wine and a big-screen TV, he made a move on his wife, Rita, while she was watching a news report about the bill. “And she looks at me and goes, ‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ ” Albo said as his colleagues guffawed.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side.

They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

But why would anyone want to end prostitution, except that committed by politicians who are whores for corporate America?

February 25, 2012

To End Prostitution, Start With the Demand Side

To the Editor:

In “As Other Crimes Recede, Street Prostitution Keeps Its Wily Hold” (news article, Feb. 13), you report that New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, is directing law enforcement to arrest those who buy prostituted human beings for sexual exploitation.

Commissioner Kelly, by adopting this human-rights, women’s-rights-based approach, joins the growing ranks of leaders in law enforcement who have made ending sex trafficking their priority.

For too long, prostitution laws have been enforced in a gender-discriminatory manner. Those being sold and arrested are overwhelmingly women and girls. Those who buy the prostituted, or sell them, are overwhelmingly male, and face far fewer, if any, legal consequences for their actions.

If we are to stand a chance at ending sex trafficking, we must deepen our understanding of the end point of sex trafficking, which is prostitution. Those of us who reject the notion that prostitution is sex work (when did human sexuality become work anyway?) and see it as an end result of some of the worst social conditions possible (sexual abuse in childhood, poverty, gender inequality, racism) must fashion remedies that address those conditions.

Rather than make social injustice more tolerable, we must work to end it — in our lifetime and forever.

NORMA RAMOS
Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
New York, Feb. 14, 2012

To the Editor:

That other crimes recede but prostitution persists is no surprise to those who work on sex trafficking. (In The Wisdom of Whores, autor discusses the reasons for prositution - ONE reason given by actual whores that she interviewed is because SEX IS FUN! And, as any guy who has courted more than a handful of gals will know, it is FAR cheaper to pay a prostitute for sex than to work one's way into the tender graces of one that you are serious about spending the rest of your life with. 

Focusing on demand is the right approach and needs to be tried for more than two days, as it was in New York City recently, before judging its efficacy.Yes, just why IS there such demand, and what could possible be done about it?  I'd suggest teaching our children that SEX IS FUN, and when done responsibly, can bring great joy, relief, exercise, and incredible sharing opportunities.

And this must be accompanied by an explicit policy that treats those who sell as sex as victims of crime and not criminals

Those of us who have met with women and children in prostitution — from India to New York City — know that these women and children are far from criminals. They are often the most marginalized, vulnerable people in our society. They are in prostitution not because of choice, but because of lack of choice. (One must distinguish between ENFORCED SEXUAL SLAVERY and voluntary prostitution.  This article fails to make that distinction, or even acknowledge that it exists.)

The reason countries like Sweden have successfully reduced prostitution is that they have recognized that those who buy sex should be held accountable, and those who sell sex should be treated as victims of violence and given the services (education, mental and physical health services, drug and alcohol treatment, and job training) that any victims need and deserve.

PAMELA SHIFMAN
Director, Initiatives for Girls and Women, NoVo Foundation
New York, Feb. 14, 2012

February 25, 2012

The Greatness of Ike

By ROSS DOUTHAT

THIS year, two decisions will be made with long-term implications for how we think about the presidency. In November, voters will decide whether to give Barack Obama a second term in office  {The Republican Party, by virtue of its insane candidates has assured the Bland One Re-election}. And sometime before then, the National Capital Planning Commission will decide whether to go forward with Frank Gehry’s plan for a Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.

The Gehry design is, well, Gehry-esque: it reimagines the traditional monumental form, using huge metal screens to depict the landscape of Eisenhower’s Kansan childhood while devoting far less space to his accomplishments in World War II and the White House. (The only significant statue will portray Eisenhower as a barefoot boy, rather than a war leader or president.)

The design has been widely criticized — by the Eisenhower family, by architectural traditionalists and by right-of-center columnists like George Will and David Frum. Some of the critiques are purely aesthetic, but the most important ones are substantive: as planned, the critics argue, the memorial sells the supreme allied commander’s greatness short.

What’s interesting, though, is that by emphasizing Eisenhower’s ordinariness rather than his heroism, Gehry is arguably being conventional rather than radical. As conceived, his memorial would ratify Eisenhower’s current place in our national memory, not revise it.

Gehry’s vision, as The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott writes, implies that while “Eisenhower was a great man ... there were other Eisenhowers right behind him, other men who could have done what he did.” Far from being a bold reimagining, this is a near-perfect summary of the way many Americans already regard their 34th president.

It’s not that Americans don’t like Eisenhower or think fondly of his service to their country. (Jean Edward Smith’s new “Eisenhower in War and Peace” is the latest in a line of briskly selling Ike biographies.) But he is not nearly as beloved as many of his midcentury contemporaries. He’s overshadowed as a war leader both by F.D.R. and by his many colorful subordinates, and his two-term presidency has attracted little of the posthumous enthusiasm that made his “give ’em hell” predecessor a folk hero and his martyred successor an icon.  {One imagines that since Ike cut the marginal tax rate on top bracket income earners from 92% to 91%, there are few in that top bracket that remember him with any particular fondness.}

In a 2011 Gallup poll on the greatest president, Eisenhower came in a lame 12th, in a tie with Jimmy Carter. He performs solidly in scholarly surveys, but he’s frequently ranked behind his prominent 20th-century rivals.

In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.

But ultimately Eisenhower is underrated because his White House leadership didn’t fit the template of “greatness” that too many Americans pine for from their presidents. He was not a man for grand projects, bold crusades or world-historical gambles. There was no “Ike revolution” in American politics, no Eisen-mania among activists and intellectuals, no Eisenhower realignment.

Instead, his greatness was manifested in the crises he defused and the mistakes he did not make. He did not create unaffordable entitlement programs, embrace implausible economic theories, or hand on unsustainable deficits to his successors. He ended a stalemated conflict in Korea, kept America out of war in Southeast Asia, and avoided the kind of nuclear brinkmanship that his feckless successor stumbled into. He did not allow a series of Middle Eastern crises to draw American into an Iraq-style intervention. He did not risk his presidency with third-rate burglaries or sexual adventurism. He was decisive when necessary, but his successes — prosperity, peace, steady progress on civil rights — were just as often the fruit of strategic caution and masterly inaction.

Perhaps “other men” could have achieved this combination of steadiness, competence and successful crisis management, as the Eisenhower memorial’s impersonal design seems to suggest. But few of them have occupied the Oval Office these last 50 years. Instead, from the 1960s down through the eras of George W. Bush and Barack Obama — from “pay any price, bear any burden” to “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — the defining vices of the modern presidency have been hubris, recklessness and overreach.

This is why the memorial controversy really matters. Eisenhower deserves a monument that puts him where he belongs — in the very first rank of American leaders — because the nation needs to be reminded of where true presidential greatness lies. Plenty of politicians combine inspiring rhetoric with grand ambitions. Far fewer have the gifts required to steer the ship of state away from every rock and reef, and bring it, eight long years later, undamaged into port.