Opinion L.A.

Candidates go PG-13 on the press

Patt Morrison — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:45:00 -0700

It may become part of the decathlon known as the Republican road to the White House -– to get down and potty-mouth about the news media.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's base is probably cheering him to the rafters after he took a vulgar swipe at a New York Times reporter's question Sunday following a Santorum speech in Wisconsin to the effect that Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare law made him "the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama."

After Santorum's remarks, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny zeroed in on that remark, asking Santorum to elaborate: "You said that Mitt Romney is the worst Republican in the country. Is that true?"

Santorum asked, "What speech did you listen to?"

Zeleny asked again, and Santorum, jabbing a finger toward Zeleny, said "stop lying" and "quit distorting my words. If I see it, it's bullshit. C'mon, man, what are you doing?"

The next day, and evidently in a more cheerful frame of mind, he used the incident as a kind of campaign medal, telling the Fox News Channel, "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you're not really a real Republican, is the way I look at it." And he told CNN that he was making the case that Romney could not criticize President Obama’s healthcare law because Romney "wrote the blueprint" for it. "And to then say, you know, spin this as Rick Santorum said he's the worst Republican in the country."

Candidates can never go wrong slamming the news media. Santorum may have been referring to an incident during the 2000 presidential campaign when then-Gov. George W. Bush, talking to his running mate Dick Cheney at a Labor Day event, was picked up by an open mike when he indicated the press corps and said, "There’s Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from the New York Times." Cheney evidently agreed and said, "Oh yeah, big-time."

Bush said he didn't realize the mikes would pick up his voice, but he did not apologize.

(Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made a vulgar comment about a Secret Service agent during the presidential campaign, but he made it on the record to a reporter, after the agent on Kerry's detail accidentally knocked him down on a ski slope in Idaho. "I don't fall down. The son of a bitch" -- the agent -- ran into him, Kerry told the reporter. Different circumstance from Obama's gaffe to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught on an open mike in South Korea on Monday: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.")

Maybe one of the most renowned press attacks was President Nixon's, heard on White House tapes siccing the IRS on L.A. Times Publisher Otis Chandler.

On Oct. 7, 1971, more than a year before election day, Nixon ordered the attorney general to check on whether Chandler's gardener was a "wetback," and mentioned that he had ordered an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Chandler family. "I want this whole goddam bunch gone after.... Every one of those sons of bitches," Nixon said.

He also told the attorney general, John Mitchell, to have the Immigration and Naturalization Service raid The Times looking for illegal immigrants.

A day earlier, The Times had reported on 36 illegal immigrants taken into custody during an immigration raid at a tortilla factory owned by Romana Banuelos, whom the White House had just nominated for the position of U.S. Treasurer (she would become the highest-placed Mexican American in government).

The president told Mitchell that "as a Californian, I know. Everybody in California hires them. There's no law against it, because they are there, because -- for menial things and so forth. Otis Chandler -- I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he's a wetback. Is that clear?"

The Times had decades earlier steadfastly supported and encouraged Nixon; in the midst of Nixon's 1952 ''slush fund'' scandal, The Times' headline had been "Sen. Nixon's Defiance of Smear Hailed."

And George McGovern, the Democrat running against Nixon in 1972, didn't say it to a reporter but to a heckler. McGovern leaned forward and whispered in the man's ear, "Listen, you son of a bitch, why don't you kiss my ass?"

Like Santorum, McGovern too made some political capital out of the incident.

By the next day, McGovern supporters were showing up at rallies with buttons reading "KMA."

ALSO:

Santorum's faulty premise on healthcare reform

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COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: Rick Santorum speaks on March 25 at South Hills Country Club during a public rally near Racine, Wis. Credit: Gregory Shaver/Journal Times, AP Photo

His Excellency, Ambassador Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Patt Morrison — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:03:14 -0700

To find the earliest stories the Los Angeles Times wrote about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I had to search for his birth name -– Lewis Alcindor Jr. He was a New York high school student being courted by UCLA and other powerhouse basketball schools.

So it took a bit of mind-bending to go from reading about that teenage school kid to interviewing the sports legend who’s about to turn 65 -- the man who, when I talked to him for my "Patt Morrison Asks" column, joked that his arms, the arms that pulled off that phenomenal "sky hook" shot, are getting too short to read the newspaper.

Life after basketball has meant some TV and movie roles (he was hilarious in "Airplane!"), writing and co-writing a slew of books, and now as a U.S. global cultural ambassador. Check him out with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the event in January, where he says, "I remember when Louis Armstrong first did it back for President Kennedy, one of my heroes. So it’s nice to be following in his footsteps."

He’s made his first trip abroad in that new iteration, to Brazil, and I asked him about the job description, and his visit to Brazil.

"They want me to speak to disadvantaged kids about their future with an emphasis on education, and answer questions about Americans and democracy and what it’s like here in this place we call America."

I wondered whether Brazilian kids knew who he was.

"Yes, I was surprised! They have three or four [Brazilian] guys in the NBA, so the kids there now play the game. They have courts in some of the slum neighborhoods."

And what did they want to know about the U.S.?

"They were very taken with President Obama. They [also] have a history of slavery there. To see President Obama become president, it really gives them a different idea about the potential of democracy. That was something they all wanted to ask about, [whether] this democracy stuff can work for [them]."

--Patt Morrison

Photo: Former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar poses with a jersey of Barcelona's basketball team during the official presentation of the friendly basketball game between Barcelona and the Lakers at the Palau Blaugrana in Barcelona on June 1, 2010. Credit: Josep Lago /AFP/Getty Images

Regulation or rule of law, Gov. Romney?

Patt Morrison — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:25:49 -0700

There's a line that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney must know well, the one about the vast difference between campaigning and governing.

He's in ''campaigning'' mode now. In a speech at the University of Chicago on Monday, the Republican presidential candidate was seeking his inner Ronald Reagan when he cited supply-side Nobel economist and University of Chicago legend Milton Friedman:

"Milton Friedman knew what President Obama still has not learned, even after three years and hundreds of billions of dollars in spending: The government does not create prosperity; free markets and free people do."

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

Well, after a fashion.

Regulations, he said, ''erode our freedoms.'' Yet much of the "freedom" he talks about for business and markets can't exist, much less thrive, without government.

Businesses don't want to do business in countries that don't have the government structures in place to protect them -- look at Iraq, for starters.

Businesses want to do business in nations that have law enforcement that isn't corrupt and court systems that can guarantee that contracts are enforced by laws, not by guns.

Businesses want a culture and a legal climate that operate by the rule of law, not by bribery or nepotism. They want a government that enacts and enforces regulations and laws that guarantee and protect intellectual property, patents and copyrights laws, and thus make it easier for enterprise and creativity to flourish.

Businesses also enjoy the advantages of publicly planned and publicly built and publicly maintained railroads and harbors and roads and highways that make the movement of goods and services and workers and customers possible. I don't see Wal-Mart constructing its own ports and railroads.

Businesses depend on deep-pocket, government-created, reliable infrastructure networks and systems like sewers and electricity and water. It's hard to do business in a place where power and water sources are haphazard, available for just a few hours a day. Businesses need to know that when a client or employee or they themselves flip on a light switch or flush a toilet or turn on a tap, the light comes on, the sewage is processed and cleaned and not dumped raw into the water supply, and the water that comes out of the faucet is potable and free of diseases that can weaken the health and therefore the buying power of consumers and workers alike.

Schools -- good schools -- can provide a competent workforce to businesses and prosperous customers to buy their products.

Business and government work hand in glove; good government is one big reason that business can work. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney crafted a climate protection plan, and he praised a regional greenhouse gas initiative as "good business."

Government can be the safety net for business at its best -- and its worst, protecting business from its own excesses and pitfalls.

Regulations can help to keep the public's -- meaning the customers' -- faith in business. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt created the precursor to the FDA, which gives consumers the confidence to buy the products, to eat the food and to take the pills that businesses produce.

"Caveat emptor" only goes so far. If you choose an airline flying planes whose standards of construction and material quality are not quality-inspected, and the plane crashes, then you, the passenger, never get the chance to make the consumer's choice to fly another airline.

When tainted food gets into the food chain and people die (it's happened, from fast food beef burgers to spinach) people stop buying it until they hear reassurances -- not from the food producer but from federal inspectors -- that the problem has been found and addressed, and the food is safe to eat.

And business and consumers are the beneficiaries. People make choices about what restaurants are safer to eat in, what cars are safer to buy, even what amusement park rides are safe enough to put their kids on, in part because someone who doesn't work for the company that made those products -- a government inspector or regulator -- set some quality and safety standards, and enforced them.

There are similarities here to what I wrote when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger inveighed against taxation "in principle" -- and presumably the things taxes pay for. I suggested that if he really wanted to do without taxes, he, like all of us, would be faced with paving his own roads, pouring his own sidewalks and digging his own sewers. In which case, I said, I'd be over to borrow a shovel.

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Americans Elect -- bring democracy into the digital world

--Patt Morrison

Photo: Mitt Romney speaks on economic freedom and the threat the U.S. deficit has for future generations at the University of Chicago on March 19. Credit: Tannen Maury / EPA

Jerry Brown and the ghost of Proposition 13

Patt Morrison — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:12:26 -0700

The year is 2012, all right, but what Gov. Jerry Brown has managed to do by turning two potential tax ballot initiatives into one makes it feel like 1978 all over again.

Brown had his own tax ballot measure planned for November, one that would have added a half-cent to the sales tax statewide for four years and raised taxes on the wealthy. But the Courage Campaign, the California Federation of Teachers and some others had their own "millionaires tax" ballot measure heading for the same election.

The compromise cuts the sales tax hike to a quarter-cent over four years and tweaks the upper-income tax to apply graduated increases for seven years to some six- and seven-figure brackets. All this depends on getting enough signatures to get it onto the ballot. (A third measure, a millionaires tax for education promoted by L.A. civil rights attorney Molly Munger, is evidently going forward.)

So, why a compromise? Why not let both go to the ballot and duke it out with voters?

Because over decades, both the research and the political gut-checking show that the more similar measures appear on the same ballot, the smaller the chances that any one of them passes.

If anyone knows this by hard example, it's Brown.

By 1978, some California homeowners' property taxes were going through the, well, roof. Assessments varied wildly, and the elderly -- some of whom were living in houses they'd already paid for -- worried they would lose them to taxes.

Enter Howard Jarvis, who worked for Proposition 13 in part as a lobbyist for a landlords' association.

Brown, then as now the governor of California, came way late to the game. So did the Legislature. Incredibly, California had a nearly $5-billion surplus, most of it, paradoxically, from income tax, not property tax. (It would have one right after Proposition 13 passed too, but it had to give it to schools and cities to make up the difference after property tax revenue tanked.)

What they came up with -- Proposition 8 -- would have limited property tax increases but only for owner-occupied homes.

It seemed like a plausible option to Proposition 13. After all, it was ostensibly the concerns by homeowners that started the tax revolt in the first place. And a Times poll about a month before the election found that voters didn't know much about Proposition 8, but when they did, they preferred it to Proposition 13 by double digits. As my Sacramento colleague George Skelton wrote then, "In the minds of most voters, Proposition 8 still is a mystery."

On the heels of that poll, Brown and other Proposition 8 supporters launched a TV ad campaign to persuade voters to abandon Proposition 13 in favor of 8; otherwise, Brown warned, the effect would be "devastating" to state services.

It's worth noting that in the nearly 35 years since Proposition 13 passed, commercial property owners have generally fared better than homeowners because such property changes hands less often, which means that some business owners are paying taxes far below the market rate. Homeowners now shoulder more than two-thirds of the state's property tax burden.

Proposition 8 was too little, too late. People were already fired up over Proposition 13. Yet even with all the voter fury, Proposition 13 paradoxically got 64.8% of the vote. If Proposition 13 had been subject to the very rules it would itself set in stone -- requiring a two-thirds supermajority vote for all future taxes, from the legislature to city hall to the state ballot -- it would not have passed.

Lesson very painfully learned, and remembered, 34 years later.

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-- Patt Morrison

Photo: A 1978 photograph was snapped in Manhattan Beach. Credit: Los Angeles Times

The Klimts and the Supreme Court

Patt Morrison — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:51:21 -0700

It was about art, but it wasn’t an art case that E. Randol Schoenberg presented to the Supreme Court in 2004. It was about the legal matter of jurisdiction.

Schoenberg was representing an elderly Los Angeles woman, Maria Altmann, the Vienna-born heiress of a Jewish fortune that had vanished into the hands of the Third Reich. The trove included two striking portraits of Altmann’s aunt by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. My "Patt Morrison Asks" column visits with Schoenberg about the high-stakes case.

Schoenberg’s argument that the law regarding international jurisdiction and seized property as applied to those and other Klimt paintings should be restored to the family won the day in the 9th Circuit federal court. "The issues in the lawsuit -- jurisdiction, retroactivity, immunity -- had almost nothing to do with the [historical] facts." But then the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"I went in with gallows humor and low expectations." To Schoenberg's surprise, the Supreme Court sided with him 6-3. "That was huge." His reasoning: not to make the case "a sob story about an old woman seeking vengeance or whatever, but a legal argument that was very technical and not pulling at the heartstrings." And he directed it at Justice Antonin Scalia.

"My argument was pitched directly towards Justice Scalia because he had written a concurring opinion in a previous case which I thought was really good for us. I thought if I get Scalia I’ll get some others. If I don’t get [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and [Justice John Paul] Stevens I’m lost. My problem was the middle, and I thought if I can get Scalia, then the ones in the middle might come along, and that’s what happened. [I presented] it in a dry way, which I thought would appeal to him."

And, he bought Scalia’s book in the Supreme Court gift shop.

ALSO:

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Photos: Gustav Klimt's five paintings

When art and politics collided in L.A.

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: E. Randol Schoenberg. Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times.

Two massacres: Kandahar and My Lai

Patt Morrison — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:30:00 -0700

Whatever military justice ultimately delivers to the soldier accused of methodically killing 16 Afghan civilians, most of them women and children in their beds, the case says all the worst things about how a few -- or even one -- American soldier going rogue can wipe out not only blameless civilians but years of nuanced and carefully constructed foreign and military policy.

The one that came to mind was the My Lai massacre, the March 1968 incident in Vietnam where as many as 500 civilians -- mostly women, children and the elderly -- were massacred by U.S. soldiers, in an incident that ended up shaping the outcome of that war.

The reason it came to mind is because, some years ago, Times photographer Robert Chamberlin and I were traveling the country, interviewing people -- some of them just at random -- about the impact of the Vietnam War on the nation's culture and psyche.

We talked to dozens: an exec with Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm; a musically inclined Vermont dairy farmer who stamped out 45 records of his patriotic songs on a device on his kitchen table; a brother and sister we encountered at a picnic table alongside an Oklahoma highway -- siblings whose father was still missing in Vietnam.

And in Columbus, Ga., the city alongside the huge Army base of Ft. Benning, we went into a jewelry store. We wanted to talk to a man who managed the store for his in-laws. His name was William Calley, and he was a former lieutenant and the only soldier convicted, by a military jury, of the premeditated killings of 22 old men, women and children in My Lai in 1968. (As many as 500 civilians were killed by Calley and others in his unit, but of the other service members charged, only Calley was convicted.)

The My Lai massacre was one of those seminal incidents that changed public perception of the Vietnam War, like the 1972 image taken by my friend Nick Ut, of the Associated Press, of burned children running screaming down a road after they had been accidentally napalmed by the South Vietnamese.

I thought of Calley when I heard of Sunday night's killings of the sleeping Afghans. It was immediately and forcefully condemned by military and civilian leadership -- unlike My Lai, when military leaders initially commended Calley's unit and the U.S. leadership resisted the idea that the Calley unit had done anything wrong.

When the news of My Lai emerged, the servicemen who had intervened in the massacre, putting their helicopter between Calley's soldiers and the civilians, actually received death threats; mutilated animals were left on their doorsteps. Their fellow soldiers called them traitors, and the helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, said that a senior member of Congress remarked that "if anybody goes to jail in this My Lai stuff, it will be the helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson." It took decades for their courage to be officially honored.

The soldier in the Afghanistan killings could face the death penalty. Calley's sentence of life in prison at hard labor was whittled away, and he ended up serving under four years of house arrest. President Nixon issued a limited presidential pardon to Calley.

Americans initially thought Calley's conviction was wrong; Americans' revulsion at the shooting of the Afghan civilians has been, by contrast, almost universal.

Whether this incident has the power to change the course of the U.S. role in Afghanistan, as the My Lai killings did in Vietnam, is another matter.

Back in that Columbus jewelry store, I tried to ask Calley about the incident. Years later, the local paper reported, he told a Kiwanis group that he was "very sorry" about My Lai. To me, he just walked away.

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--Patt Morrison

Photo: Bodies of women and children killed by U.S. troops near the village of My Lai, South Vietnam, in March 1968. Credit: Ronald L. Haeberle/Life Magazine, AP Photo

What Sherwood Rowland taught us about science, and the Earth

Patt Morrison — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:35:00 -0700

Good thing Sherry Rowland was working 40 years ago instead of now.

Otherwise, he might not have won the Nobel Prize, and we might all be a lot closer to dead -– as individuals, as a species and as a planet.

If UC Irvine chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who passed away Saturday, had been starting his work now on how chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, damage the Earth's protective ozone layer, it might be getting the same kind of manipulated skepticism and politically cynical slamming that global climate change now receives.

As it was, Rowland had to battle and scrap for his carefully researched warnings to be believed, but within 15 years of publishing his findings, the nations of the world -- the United States among them -- agreed to phase out CFCs. Believe it or not, manufacturers had stopped using them even before the Montreal Protocol was signed.

The Nobel committee, in honoring Rowland and co-discoverer Mario Molina, said their work may have "saved the world from catastrophe." These guys should have been wearing Spandex superhero suits, for what their work accomplished.

In 1990, with the inspiration of C. Boyden Gray, who worked in both the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations, a cap-and-trade law was up and running to control acid rain. But when it comes to global climate change, the current GOP generation mocks this market-driven solution as "cap and tax."

I interviewed Rowland a couple of times, most recently half a dozen years ago, when the neo-paleo-anti-science crowd was in full-court press as naysayers on human-generated global climate change. Legitimate scientists with nuanced questions about data and formulas being used were lumped in with random cranks as "proof" that the body of scientific evidence is wrong and that science is no more than just another untrustworthy special-interest group.

Rowland told me he did get his share of attacks in the 1970s. You might say that. Radio Free Europe reported that a trade publication called Aerosol Age suggested he was a Soviet KGB agent, and DuPont took out full-page newspaper ads to question his chops.

Almost 20 years after his Nobel Prize, Rowland told me that "the planet is in for a rough century as we try to put together substitutes for the energy that we need in order to prevent very substantial climate change coming from rapidly rising temperatures."

Yet like global climate change, many of the obstacles to fixing our problems also look to be man-made. As I wrote a few years ago, the public doesn't like it when scientists engage in discussions that politicians recast as political, not scientific, and it doesn't like it when scientists detach themselves from "real world" concerns. Rowland remembered a sci-fi story from the 1950s, about a comet imperiling the Earth. Inside a lab, scientists were clamoring for a peek into a spectroscope; outside the lab window, people were getting fried by radiation right in their wingtips.

Rowland's work on CFCs and ozone was a model, just like the world's political response to it.

And in spite of the dire warnings that banning CFCs would tank the economy, guess what: American know-how and technology came up with an alternative, business embraced it and, whatever the dire warnings, our armpits don't stink, we still have spray paint and we've maybe bought the ozone layer up there a few more centuries.

If we down here don't mess our second second chance.

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Sherwood Rowland, the scientist who saved the world

--Patt Morrison

Photo: Sherwood Rowland is seen in 1989. He died at his Corona Del Mar home on March 10. He was 84. Credit: University of California Irvine / AP Photo

The CEO for Silicon Valley's CEOs

Patt Morrison — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:03:29 -0800

Carl Guardino is a CEO, but perhaps like no other -- head of a group of more than 350 CEOs. That may not sound out of the ordinary, but these CEOs head some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley.

In a place where the really important people are in "cutoffs and flip-flops," Guardino is the guy in the suit, the guy with a degree in political science -- "the only true science" -- not in engineering.

But he grew up in Silicon Valley when the area was still the "Valley of Heart's Delight" and full of orchards, not start-ups. The Silicon Valley Leadership Group he heads is a business organization like few others. It endorses many business-friendly reforms in governance and tax matters, but it is also committed, like its founder David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, to making Silicon Valley livable for the have-nots as well as the super-haves. His board members are on board with measures that put housing and transit within reach for teachers and police officers and firefighters and waitresses and car repair shop employees who live and work there too. "The fabric of the valley," he says, "is contingent on all of those people's success."

Silicon Valley is a model many other places would like to copy. "A friend once designed a map of the U.S. called 'the Siliconia of the United States,' all the regions wanting to capture the magic and imagination [of] Silicon Valley." To make that happen, says Guardino, those places too will have to care about the quality-of-life issues for all of the local population, not just the CEOs' employees.

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-- Patt Morrison

Photo: Carl Guardino talks with reporters after meeting with Gov. Jerry Brown in March 2011. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Putin's crying game

Alexandra LeTellier — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:06:37 -0800

So we hear that those were tears of joy from Vladimir Putin as he claimed victory in Russia's presidential election.

They couldn't have been tears of surprise. The results had supposedly been in the bag for weeks, and a third term, on top of his years as prime minister, means Putin could wind up being Russia's top canine for more than 15 years -- more a reign than an administration. "Moscow does not believe in tears" read one protest sign in Moscow, alluding to an Oscar-winning Soviet movie of that title.

Tears from Pootie-Poot? (That's the nickname President George W. Bush gave to the usually stony-faced KGB alum.)

The lachrymose moment outside the Kremlin after this week's vote, crocodile-style or not, makes one more stern-faced pol whose tears now tear down the modern horror of sobbing statesmen.

Abraham Lincoln cried. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee cried. But in our recent times, until not very long ago, men's tears were deplored. Weeping, after all, was a symbol of weakness; women did it, right? Politician's wives and daughters, when their man lost, did, but not the man himself.

Look at poor Ed Muskie, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1972 race. Not only did a New Hampshire newspaper print a phony letter, planted by a Nixon campaign dirty trickster, accusing Muskie of having laughed at a slur -- "Canuck" -- on French Canadian Americans, but the paper accused Muskie's wife of drinking and telling dirty jokes.

When Muskie's forces rallied in front of the newspaper a few days before the primary, in a lashing snowstorm, an unusually impassioned Muskie defended his wife with obvious emotion. Some reporters said those were tears on Muskie's face; the candidate himself said it was anger, not weeping, in his broken voice and snow, not tears, on his face.

And that was the end of Muskie's candidacy.

One or two manly tears have crept down men's faces and into the acceptable arena. Remember
the public service announcement with actor "Iron Eyes Cody" and the single tear rolling down his cheek at the despoiling of the American landscape?

Decades later, President Clinton selectively and effectively bit his trembling lower lip and got teary-eyed -- and got elected. Politics' current most famous weeper, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), practically cries at the drop of a concurrent resolution -- certainly, as the New York Times pointed out, at golf tournaments and children saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

Britain's shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, has confessed to being moved to tears by "The Antiques Roadshow." Former President George H.W. Bush broke down delivering a speech and was comforted by his son Jeb. Republicans wept all over Capitol Hill in 1998 when their new speaker, Bob Livingston, resigned in the middle of the Clinton impeachment crisis when it turned out that Livingston had had his own extramarital peccadilloes.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders cried at a news conference announcing that he had changed his mind about same-sex marriage after he learned that his daughter was gay and in a committed relationship.

Even today, Mitt Romney can talk about the moment in 1978 when he heard -- apparently on his car radio -- that blacks were being admitted to the Mormon Church's priesthood, and "I pulled over and, and literally wept."

But there's still a double standard for female candidates. Democratic congresswoman Patricia Schroeder abandoned her exploratory campaign for president in 1987 with a speech that ended in tears -- but the criticism of her did not end.

Hillary Rodham Clinton kept her composure even when her husband did not, but the pundits speculated that it was one choked-up moment, after losing to Barack Obama in the 2008 Iowa caucus, that helped to propel her to a win in the New Hampshire primary -- maybe because voters had never seen her cry, through all the years of political strife and personal stress.

The perception is that crying is women's default response, so they get no credit -- in fact, they get scorn -- when they give in to it. Men, on the other hand, are supposed to keep back the tears, so when they do give in to weeping, it must be because of some overwhelmingly potent emotion.

But as far as Putin goes, the thought that a former KGB guy could be so moved as to cave in to tears -- well, what that moment made me think of was Jon Lovitz as the "Master Thespian" character on "Saturday Night Live," who grandly proclaimed his emotive tricks to be "Acting!"

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--Patt Morrison

Photos, from top: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who claimed victory in Russia's presidential election, is seen tearing up as he reacts at a rally of his supporters on March 4. Credit: Ivan Sekretarev / Associated Press. Sen. Edmund Muskie denounces Manchester Union Leader Publisher William Loeb in front of the newspaper's building on Feb. 26, 1972. Credit: New York Times / Associated Press. Iron Eyes Cody. Credit: Keep America Beautiful Inc. House Speaker John A. Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the first session of the 112th Congress on Jan. 5, 2011. Credit: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press

Missing James Q. Wilson

Patt Morrison — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:50:07 -0800

Almost once a month, for something like 10 years, I got to have dinner with Jim Wilson.

That's James Q. Wilson, the influential scholar and the "broken windows" theorist who died Friday in Massachusetts.

Jim and Roberta Wilson, married nearly 60 years when Jim died Friday, had returned to Los Angeles from Harvard in 1986 and were living in Pacific Palisades, not far from Jim's teaching positions at UCLA and at Pepperdine.

In time, they joined the book group that former Mayor Dick Riordan and I, along with attorney Bruce Merritt, began over 15 years ago.

Ours is a gabby bunch, many of us interrupting and talking over one another, but when Jim had something to say, everyone stopped to listen. He spoke vividly, precisely and concisely, and never with less than a fully reasoned and deeply insightful observation.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan had once assured President Nixon that James Q. Wilson was "the smartest man in the United States," so he was without doubt the smartest man at that dinner table.

I was always tickled whenever I wound up sitting next to Jim, for the pleasure of the droll sotto voce asides he'd sometimes make about the main conversation raging over the book we had all just read.

We disagreed on some books but found ourselves aligned on others. I was so pleased to have introduced him to a book that he later told me had become a favorite: Jay Winik's "April 1865: The Month That Saved America." And during the memorable and voluble evening when we all went hammer and tongs over one of the who-wrote-Shakespeare books, he and I were on the same side -- the Shakespeare-wrote-Shakespeare side -- against our British dinner companions who believed so ordinary-seeming a man could not have written such extraordinary plays.

The months when Jim and Roberta weren't at our book group, they had gone off on a lecture or book tour or on family visits, riding horses in the mountains or snorkeling -- or was it scuba diving? -- in some exotic waters.

They moved back to Massachusetts a few years ago to be closer to their family. We all missed his sage and sensible presence. With his death, I am reminded exactly how much.

ALSO:

Ripping off Los Angeles

L.A.'s mayor under the microscope

James Q. Wilson: A political scientist's unswerving honesty

--Patt Morrison

Photo: James Q. Wilson is shown in Boston in this 1972 file photo. Credit: AP Photo, File