The FCC imposed heavy fines on NBC and Fox when Bono and Nicole Richie used the F-word on live television.  But after David Ortiz told the fans at Fenway Park, and the millions more watching on television, “This is our fucking city, and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom” – the FCC Chairman tweeted “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.”

The City of Boston deserves the nation’s respect.  Its people weathered the crisis with courage and resilience.  Its law enforcement personnel performed their duties with brave professionalism.  There was a wonderful unity.  For those of us who grew up in Boston during the anti-war 60s and 70s, the spectacle of college students thronging the streets to wave American flags and cheer policemen and soldiers was strangely marvelous.

Yes, Boston deserves its status as the Hero City.  But in our long war with terrorism —  a war in which the Marathon bombing was merely one battle in a long series, past and future — should Boston stand as a Model City?

To answer that question, attention must be paid to the goals and motives of terrorists.  As this article is written, available evidence suggests that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaeve acted on their own.  But all terrorists, whether part of international networks executing carefully planned attacks – as in the 9/11 or London Underground  bombings — or lone wolves – as was the case with Fort Hood army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan — share certain characteristics.

Terrorists are not out to “win.”  At least not in the conventional sense.  They do not expect the cities they attack to unfurl a white flag and surrender.  They are not intent upon conquering and occupying territory.

Terrorists do not expect to escape.  Suicide bombers determine their fates themselves.  But even those who try to get away, as the Tsarnaev brothers did, understand that they will be eventually caught or killed.  Long before the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaeve, the younger brother, tweeted: “I will die young.”

Then what do terrorists want?

They want to be noticed.  They want the world to acknowledge their relevance.  They want the world to acknowledge their power.  They want to stop the world in its tracks, and command its attention.

Now consider what they achieved in Boston.

They killed four innocents, and managed to maim or injure almost two hundred others.  But the shockwaves of their malevolence extended far beyond those crimes.

In the wake of the bombing, Boston and its surrounding communities went into a defensive crouch, as nearly one million people “sheltered in place.”  Boylston Street, the heart of the business district, became a ghost town and remained so for nine days.  At the height of the crisis, there was no public transit, no taxi service, no Amtrak service.  The public schools and dozens of colleges shut down.  City employees were told not to report to work.  Courthouses closed, and jurors were sent home, as the justice system ground to a halt.  The Boston Red Sox and the Boston Bruins postponed their games.

Now this is one way to deal with terrorism, and it carries with it certain advantages.  It enhances public safety.  No one knew whether other explosive devices remained in Boston’s public areas.  Citizens locked inside their homes are less exposed to danger.  And streets bare of vehicular traffic make it much easier for law enforcement to track and pursue terrorists.

But other cities have dealt with other crises differently.  On the morning of July 7, 2005, 52 civilians were killed and over 700 injured as terrorists detonated three bombs in the London Underground, and a fourth on a double-decker bus.  By 4 pm that same day, bus service had resumed.  Subway service, except in the damaged stations, resumed the next morning.

Israel has withstood scores of suicide bombings, and tens of thousands of rocket and mortar attacks on its civilian centers.  It has developed a strict protocol for handling crime scenes.  Victims are evacuated, body parts respectfully removed.  Then clean-up crews arrive to remove the wreckage and repair the walls and the glass.  Within hours the affected facility – a bus station, a restaurant, a market – is reopened and back in business.

A quick return to business as usual is not callousness.  Israeli cities are dotted with plaques bearing the names of the victims of terrorism.  They are not forgotten.

But Israelis, Londoners, and others realize that the goal of terrorism is to inculcate a sense of vulnerability and helplessness.  Therefore, one of the most effective anti-terrorist tactics is the prompt return to normality.  Showing up at work the next day, or boarding a bus, or patronizing a pizza shop – such mundane actions by a resolute citizenry demonstrate the failure of terrorism to terrorize.  These actions defeat terrorism by illustrating its futility.

Boston reacted very differently, and that difference may send a regrettable message to the thousands of other Tsarnaeves lurking in other cities, leading gray inconsequential lives.  Many would-be terrorists have now seen how easy it is to paralyze a great city.  They have seen how simple it is to command attention.

Is Boston Strong?  Absolutely.

Was Boston wise?  Time will tell.

Today, the Baroness Thatcher (after her retirement from politics, she was given a peerage) was laid to rest.  In death as in life, Margaret Thatcher poses problems for feminists.  As the first and the only female Prime Minister of Great Britain, she shattered a ceiling whose hardness resembled granite more than glass.  Yet once in office, she did not fit the role expected of women pioneers.  She did not merely part company with contemporary feminists.  She disdained and ridiculed them.

The feminists hate me, don’t they?” she asked in a 1982 interview, three years into her tenure as Prime Minister.  “And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.”

“I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she announced, and many feminists gladly returned the compliment.  They have accused her of pulling up the drawbridge behind her once she had gained entry into the corridors of power.   They have noted that in her eleven years at Ten Downing Street, she appointed only one woman cabinet member, and that one was to a rather unimportant position in the House of Lords.   Alexandra Petri, a Washington Post blogger, has recorded Thatcher’s place in feminist history.  Or rather, her lack of place.

Look at your average list of Female Trailblazers and Great Women in History and Women Leaders — Ashley Judd’s there, Chelsea Clinton, even Princess Diana — but there’s a giant hole shaped like the Iron Lady. The Guardian’s list of 10 Best Female Pioneers includes Coco Chanel and Kathryn Bigelow, but Margaret Thatcher? Go fish.

The Guardian’s list of the Ten Best Female Pioneers includes Eva Peron, but Thatcher’s nowhere to be seen. She does make About.com’s list of Top 100 Women of History, but then again, so does Rosie the Riveter, who is literally a fictional character.

Yet Thatcher’s position on feminism was more nuanced than her critics, and Thatcher’s own dismissive comments, might suggest.

Throughout her career, she urged women to get involved in the political process, both as voters and as candidates.  On occasion, she didn’t mind extolling her own sex above the other one.  She famously quipped: “In politics if you want anything said, ask a man.  If you want anything done, ask a woman.”  She referred to the House of Commons as “a dreadfully male-dominated place.”

Because Thatcher is enshrined as a champion of individualism, it is tempting to judge her as an individual, separate and apart from her contemporaries.  But she was not an isolated phenomenon.  Margaret Thatcher was actually a member of a small but distinguished company of women leaders.  Judging her not just as an individual, but as a member of that select company, helps one to understand her character and her love/hate (some might say, hate/hate) relationship with feminism.

To understand Margaret Thatcher, one need also study her contemporaries Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir.

These three women ushered in a historic development.  From earliest history to modern times, the only women to lead great nations were those who inherited or married into power.  Once in power, some — such as, Elizabeth I of England, and Catherine the Great of Russia — proved themselves every bit as accomplished and ruthless as their male compatriots.  But they owed their power, at least initially, to circumstance.

Then, in the brief period of thirteen years, from 1966 to 1979, these three very different women emerged onto the world stage.  They made their own way onto that stage, the same way men did.  They entered politics, they ran for office, they lost and they won, they made friends and they made enemies.  Ultimately, following the same road men took, they rose to national leadership.

Margaret Thatcher was not the first of the three.  She was the third.  The first, Indira Gandhi, became Prime Minister of India in 1966 and served until 1977.  She was elected again in 1980 served until her assassination in 1984.  The second, Golda Meir, became Prime Minister of Israel, in 1969 and served until 1974.

Thatcher, who became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 and leader of her nation in 1979, was a contemporary and an admirer of the Indian and the Israeli.  Despite the differences in their political and economic philosophies, the three women had much in common.

They all lacked brothers.  Golda Meir grew up in Russia in poverty, and five of her siblings died in early childhood.  Her only two surviving siblings were both sisters.  Margaret Thatcher had but one sibling, a sister.  Indira Gandhi was an only child, the pampered daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian’s first Prime Minister.

The absence of brothers during their childhood meant that none of the three experienced the assignment of traditional gender roles at home.  Without boys around for contrast, they grew up without any basis for comparison.  This led to the belief, formed in early childhood, that they were boys’ equals.  This belief was not some kind of political opinion.  It was a core conviction, almost a part of their DNA.

Decades after her childhood, Gandhi reminisced: “… I felt that I could do what I liked and that it didn’t make any difference whether I was a boy or a girl.”

Golda Meir was equally definite that her sex didn’t matter.  Interviewed by the famous and provocative journalist Oriana Fallaci, she gave this opinion on feminism:

Listen, I got into politics at the time of the First World War, when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I’ve never belonged to a women’s organization…the fact of being a woman has never, never, I say, been an obstacle.

Margaret Thatcher applied this same indifference to gender roles to her own family.  When asked what she would do if forced to choose which child to educate – son Mark or daughter Carol—she said she would select the more intelligent one.  “If money were short and I had to choose between educating my son or my daughter, I would choose entirely on merit.”

Another common trait among the trio was their war records.  Many feminists, even today, hold to the frankly sexist viewpoint that the world would be a more peaceful place if there were more women leaders.  Women are, by nature, more reasonable and practical, they say, while men are more insistent and bellicose.

The careers of Thatcher, Gandhi, and Meir lend no support to that notion.  All three led their nations in successful wars.  In the case of Golda Meir, there was of course no choice.  Her nation was attacked on Yom Kippur in 1973, and its survival was at stake.  But for Thatcher and Gandhi, their wars were matters more of choice than of necessity.  In war as in childhood, the three women illustrated the same pattern: girls are no different than boys.

For both Gandhi and Meir, no less than for Thatcher, feminism was an alien doctrine, something which they could observe but to which they could not relate.   “I am in no sense a feminist,” Gandhi wrote to an American friend in 1952.  Year later, speaking at a New Delhi college, she elaborated:  “I am not a feminist and I do not believe that anybody should get a preferential treatment merely because she happens to be a woman.”

Golda Meir echoed the sentiment.  “Women’s liberation is just a lot of foolishness,” she said. “It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.”  Meir was even more outspoken when she responded to Fallaci’s inquiry into her attitude toward “women’s lib”:

Do you mean those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and and hate men? They’re crazy. Crazy. But how can one accept such crazy women who think it’s a misfortune to get pregnant and a disaster to bring children into the world?  And when it’s the greatest privilege we women have over men!

To the extent these women cared about what would now be termed “women’s issues,” they cared only because such issues impacted what they considered truly important.  Gandhi and Meir both lived their early adulthood under British rule.  Both were devoted to the cause of national independence.  If that helped women, all well and good.  But nationalism, not feminism, was their object.  During the British Mandate, Meir worked for the Women’s Labor Council and the Pioneer Women.  She later noted: “I was attracted to them not so much because they concerned women as such, but because I was very interested in the work they were doing, particularly in the agricultural training farms they set up for immigrant girls.”

Similarly, Thatcher cared first and foremost about revitalizing the torpid British economy, which meant breaking the unions’ stranglehold. Gisela Stuart, a senior Labor Party leader, recently noted: “The left likes to forget that you have to go a long way to find something more chauvinistic than the brotherhood in the trade unions. She broke their power.”  Taking on the macho world of the unions may have elevated women’s status in society, but that wasn’t her purpose.  Her goal was to empower the economy, not the women.

Margaret Thatcher’s exit today marks the passing away not only of a remarkable woman, but of a remarkable class of women.  We are long past the time when a politician – male or female – could say “I hate feminism” or could call feminists “crazy,” and hope to get elected.  In today’s world of identity politics, one’s sex, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and age are all expected to shape one’s values and opinions.  Thatcher and her sisters would have none of that.  They believed firmly in their complete ideological autonomy.  In that belief they were perhaps naïve.  But the belief gave them the courage and the steel to take the stage, to take command, and to boldly say: “Shoo, lesser men.  It’s my turn now.”

Bin Laden well understood that al Qaeda’s brand name was in deep trouble, in particular, because the group and its affiliates had killed so many civilians.  ….  So badly tarnished had the al Qaeda brand become that bin Laden noodled with changing the name of his group. In an internal memo, bin Laden pointed out that “[President] Obama [says] that our war is not on Islam or the Muslim people, but rather our war is on the al Qaeda organization. So if the word al Qaeda was derived from or had strong ties to the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims,’ or if it had the name ‘Islamic party’ it would be difficult for Obama to say that.”

A recently declassified transcript of an audiotape seized during the raid documents bin Laden’s trademark concerns.  The following transcript was translated by the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, located in Monterey, California. 

* * *

UBL Transcript No. 716, Abbottabad, 04152011, 1930 GMT.   Transcribed from an audiotape seized by US Navy Seals (DLIFLC translation).  “UBL” refers to Usama bin Laden.  For security reasons, the other voices on the audiotapes are referred to as Person of Interest (POI) 1 and POI 2.

[Muffled sounds, apparently of persons entering room and sitting on carpets.]

UBL: Yes, Amal, you can leave the coffee there.  And the dates.  Don’t forget the dates.

[Sounds of plates and cups being moved.]

UBL: My brothers, I thank you for coming.  We have a problem which we must discuss.

POI 1: What is it, Sheik al-Mujahid?

UBL: It is our brand.

POI 1:  Brand?  I swear to you, Sheik, we do not brand.  Beheading and amputating hands now and then, yes, that we do on occasion, but branding, never.  It is forbidden.

UBL: Not that kind of brand, Faizul.  I mean the al-Qaeda brand.  Our trademark.

POI 1: We’ve used the al-Qaeda mark for over 20 years.  We all like it.  Got a nice ring to it. 

POI 2:  Yes, yes.  It is a fine trademark.  And catchy.  What’s the problem?

UBL:  Let us face facts.  The al-Qaeda brand has lost value and become tarnished.  Once mujahideen from all over the Middle East would approach us, offering us anything to be recognized as affiliated with us.  The name al-Qaeda opened doors.  So we didn’t need C4 explosives as much.

POI 2: What happened, O Lion?

UBL: Too many civilians, particularly Muslim civilians, kept getting killed by people operating under our name.  Killing innocent Muslims does not enhance the value of a brand that’s supposed to be associated with protecting Muslims.  Understand?

(Coughing sounds.)

POI 2:  No.

UBL:  Last August, I wrote to Mukhtar Abu al-Zubair in Somalia.  You know, he’s been telling people that his al-Shabaab militia is part of al-Qaeda.  I told him “Please, Mukhtar, you’re killing us.”  Of course, I did not mean that literally.  He only kills Somalis, as far as we know.  But he’s killing our brand.  So I told him, “Please, when you are fundraising, just tell people we have only a brotherly Islamic connection, nothing more.”  Ditto with al-Qaeda in Iraq.  They behead Muslims, and then they post the beheadings on the YouTube.  This is very bad for the brand.

PO2: What should we do, Sheik?

UBL: Do you remember Faisal Shahzad?

PO2: Of course, the Pakistani fellow.  Moved to Connecticut and tried to detonate a car-bomb in Times Square.  I helped train him.  Nice young man, a little on the shy side. 

UBL: Well, while he was in New York, I asked him to look around to see if he could get some good trademark advice.  There are many fine attorneys in New York City.

PO1: But Sheik.  New York lawyers.  I mean, look.  They are all Jews, the sons of pig and apes.

UBL: Yes, and their hourly rates are so high.  Well, Shahzad put me in touch with Sidney [last name redacted], and Sidney and I discussed the matter by Skype.

PO2:  What did you decide?

UBL: It’s complicated.  First I said, Sidney, why can’t we  change our name to something holier and less tarnished, you know, something with “Muslim” in it?  I said, Sidney, wouldn’t you agree that would be a good marketing ploy?  See, President Obama –

[Spitting sounds.]

UBL: — President Obama, he is always going around saying “The U.S.A is not making war on Muslims, it is making war on al-Qaeda.”  So I said, Sidney, can’t we just remove the word al-Qaeda and substitute a brand that includes the word “Muslim”?  Like “The Muslim Unity Group.” Then what is President Obama –

[Spitting sounds.]

UBL: — going to say?  “The USA is not making war on Muslims, it is making war on the Muslim Unity Group”?  Everyone would be like: “Huh?  Come again?”

POI 2: The Muslim Unity Group.  I like it.  It does not sound like the kind of brand that beheads a lot of people.

UBL: But Sidney said no.  He explained that we cannot call our organization the Muslim Unity Group, because the words are generic.  It’s simply the thing itself.  You adopt a name that’s generic, and you don’t get any rights.  Everyone can start using the same name for their organization, and then the name becomes generic.  When a mark becomes generic, it dies.  Lawyers call this “genericide.”

POI 2: Genocide?

UBL: No, genericide.  The name becomes generic.

POI 2: Oh, I see.  Genericide.  Because I thought you said, you know, genocide.  It’s like, you know … Death to All Trademarks!

[Laughter.]

POI 1: Yes, yes, my brothers!  We will issue a fatwa against the trademarks!  We must wage jihad against all trademarks, Allah akbar!

[Laughter and giggling.]

UBL:  You guys.  A fatwa against the trademarks….  (Laughter and coughing.)  Come, come, my brothers. Get serious.  Faizul, put down the scimitar.  You’re going to poke somebody’s eye out.

[Loud background noises, metal clattering.]

UBL:  Now, according to Sidney, the strongest mark we can adopt is a name that has nothing to do with the product.  He called it an arbitrary mark.  Like Apple for computers.

POI 2:  That is so.  My nephew received such a computer at the end of Ramadan.  It is a fine machine, and though it is called Apple it bears no fruit of any kind.

UBL: So that got me thinking.  Apple enjoys a very good reputation.  Its products are respected, and although the Company competes fiercely, it does not amputate the hands of those who sell rival products.  So Sidney and I decided.  We will change our brand from al-Qaeda to Apple Pie.  You might ask “Why Apple Pie?”  Here are my reasons.  First, as I’ve said, Apple has positive connotations.  Second, since the mark has nothing to do with our products, it is what Sidney calls an arbitrary mark, and therefore it is very strong.  Third, and finally, Apple Pie has a special spot in the hearts of all Americans.  To compare something to apple pie is to say it is very American.  So then, what will President Obama –

[Spitting sounds.]

– say about us?  Will he say: “The U.S.A is not making war on Muslims, it is making war on Apple Pie”?  That would be blasphemy to the American people.  They would rise up and stone him. 

POI 1:  Yes, apple pie is a holy food to Americans.

UBL: So, my brothers, I have instructed Sidney to file an application to register Apple Pie as our new brand.  He is preparing the papers now for me to sign.  Soon, we will no longer be al-Qaeda.  We will be Apple Pie.

[Long silence.]

POI 2: Well, this has been very interesting, Sheik.  I always enjoy our visits.  But if we’re going to avoid the traffic and drones, we had better be going.

* * *

The audiotape ends at this point.  Shortly after the meeting, the CIA received intelligence from local sources that helped them identify the Abbottabad compound as Usama bin Laden’s hideout.  Neither POI 1 nor POI 2 has been located.

To move from cabinet member to President is of course a promotion. For mere mortals known by both their first and last names, promotions usually depend on how well they handled their prior jobs. Do the same rules apply to Hillary? If they do, has her performance as Secretary of State earned her a promotion?

Hillary Clinton (the switchover to using both names signals that we’re about to get serious here) is a polarizing figure. To her admirers, especially those in the media and the entertainment industry, she is a rock star, a glittering symbol of what modern American womanhood can be. To her detractors, she is a doctrinaire ice queen, with all the ideological baggage of her husband but without her husband’s warmth and humanity.

What does an objective assessment reveal?

To begin, the record shows Hillary Clinton as one of the most intelligent and hardworking cabinet members in recent history. (There is no risk that her successor, John Kerry, will surpass her in either category.).  As Secretary, she traveled nearly a million miles, visited 112 countries, and spent 401 days on the road.  That amounts to more than a week per month away.

She put those leviathan labors to good use promoting women’s issues, including establishing an at-large ambassadorship for that purpose. She helped transition Myanmar from military dictatorship to democracy, securing the release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi in the process.

But looking beyond her smarts, her drive, and her Burmese success, one sees little in her State Department tenure to justify star status. A modern Phileas Fogg, traveling around the world, would find little to suggest that America is  better off or safer  thanks to Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

After leaving Washington, the hypothetical jet-setter might head South to evaluate this hemisphere before crossing the ocean to check on the other.  The biggest threat to American interests has been the radical leftism championed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.  Chavez has established close military ties to Iran, has propped up Cuba’s communist regime to the tune of $5 billion annually, and has assisted terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Basque ETA.  Even as Chavez’s health fails, his influence and prestige grows, extending to Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.  Neither Clinton nor her administration has done anything to check his impact.

American influence has declined to a particularly galling extent in Argentina, where President Kirchner just established a joint Argentine-Iranian task force to probe the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires.  As Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon noted, assigning Iran to the investigation, “is like inviting a murderer to investigate the killing he committed.”  But the appointment is more than an affront to Israel.  It is a reflection of American impotence in Latin America.  Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, to illustrate the unimportance of South America to his foreign policy initiatives, once described Argentina “as a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” President Kirchner’s move is a thumb pointed at the eye of America.

If our traveler crosses the Pacific, he will find still less ground for praising the past four years of American statecraft. In another thumb to the American eye, North Korea has just tested a third nuclear device. China has displayed more sanity but no less truculence toward our allies Japan and the Philippines. Russia has become more hostile than at any time since the Cold War, going so far as to bar American parents from adopting Russian orphans.

Flying over the Asian subcontinent, our traveler finds only increasingly hostility – or apathy – toward the United States.  Iran is doggedly proceeding down the path toward nuclear power status, unfazed by what it considers to be empty threats from the administration.  Iraq is falling into the Iranian orbit, and follows that country’s lead more than our own.  Pakistan harbors terrorists with impunity.  Afghanistan is corrupt and falling apart.

Each of these countries presents its own peculiar pathologies, and generalizations are dangerous. But they all exhibit one common trait: over the past four years, during the tenure of Hillary Clinton, their respect for and deference to the United States has diminished.

Our traveler would find that the position of the United States in the Arab world in the wake of the Arab Spring has also worsened. We have seen in Egypt, and are likely about to see in Syria, that the departure of repressive autocrats presages the arrival of radicalized, anti- Western fanatics. Our foreign policy has been positively innovative in its capacity for failure. Somehow, we have figured out a way to fail to support the repressive status quo while at the same time failing to gain any credibility with the forces undermining that status quo.

Visiting Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, our contemporary Phileas Fogg would see an example of where the United States has done worse than achieve irrelevance. In Tunisia, irrelevance would be an improvement. The full story behind the tragedy at Benghazi remains to be told, but what has emerged so far amounts to a State Department scandal. Though warned by our late ambassador of the dangers he was facing, the Department did nothing to secure his safety. When anti-American fighters carried out a well-planned assassination, Clinton’s Department supported the White House’s disinformation campaign, designed to deceive the American public into assuming that the violence was the result of an amateurish anti-Muslim video, rather than a carefully orchestrated terrorist assault.

Our traveler would find the same strain of virulently fundamentalist Islam that fueled the growth of the Taliban and al Qaeda has now spread to North and Saharan Africa. We see it not only in Tunisia, but also in Algeria, where terrorists briefly captured an oil refinery and caused the deaths of over eighty Western workers; and in Mali, where fundamentalist forces have taken over half the country and bid fair to turn Mali into another Afghanistan.

The United States has only one truly reliable ally in the region — which we have managed very effectively to antagonize.  In September 2012, when Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United Nations to warn the world about the growing threat from Iran, the President found time to meet with David Letterman, Beyoncé, and Jay Z, but not with the Israeli Prime Minister.  Secretary Clinton did not help the situation.  The day before Netanyahu spoke, she announced that the United States would not set a deadline on talks with Iran – thus encouraging the Iranians to continue their game of pretending to negotiate while building new centrifuges.

Hillary Clinton may have achieved rock star status in some quarters, but that gleam has not enhanced the image of the United States abroad.  According to the most recent Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project, taken in July 2012, confidence in the administration’s international policies has declined in every major international region in the past four years.  Approval in mainly pro-American Europe was down 15 points from 78% to 63%.  Approval in the largely anti-American Muslim countries declined from an already low 34% to an abysmal 15%.  In Russian, the drop was 18 points, from 40% to 22%.  And in China, the decline was an incredible 30 points, from 57% to 27%.

These disappointing numbers are not entirely Clinton’s fault of course.  There are strict limits to what a Secretary of State can achieve.  She must operate within the constraints set by the White House.  It was National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, not Secretary of State William Rogers, who opened China, because Richard Nixon elected to pursue his China policy from the White House, not Foggy Bottom.  She is also constrained by the accidental march of history.  Secretary James Baker could build a grand coalition to confront Saddam Hussein because that dictator invaded Kuwait on Baker’s watch.  Perhaps, given the chance, Hillary Clinton could have performed as well or better.  But history did not so favor her.

Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that America has not become safer, or more secure, or more popular, or more relevant during Secretary Clinton’s tenure. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case.  When all is said and done, she has done little of lasting significance. She can rightly say that she worked hard and tried her best. She can pass off her mediocre record of accomplishment as the result of constraints set by the President, or by history. But none of these possible rationales would make for a good campaign slogan in 2016. She is not going to win the White House amid chants of “Vote for Hillary! It could have been worse!”

If Hillary decides to run for President in 2016, there may be sound reasons to support her. Her record as Secretary of State will not be one of them.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax …. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

This, of course, is the famous “47 percent” statement, secretly recorded in May at a private fund raiser in Boca Raton, held in reserve, and then opportunistically published in September, as the race was tightening, by the left-wing Mother Jones.

Some people are forever associated with numbers. In Massachusetts, Ted Williams will forever be No. 9. Bill Russell will be No. 6. And Mitt Romney, by virtue of remarks which Yale Law School has recently named the No. 1 quote of 2012, will forever be associated with No. 47. Indeed, if one runs a Google search for “47” (just 47, without the percent sign or word), one finds that 99 out of the first 100 articles are about Romney. (The one exception is a Wikipedia article on the number itself. Apparently, Wikipedia features an article on every number. Some editor there has a very boring job.)

Immediately after their publication, Mitt Romney apologized for his remarks. When Joe Biden cited the comment during the vice presidential debate, the only defense Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan could offer was: “”I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way.”

But here’s the thing. Mitt Romney was right.

Now when I say that Romney was right, I’m not talking about the exact percentage of people who pay no income tax. According to the Tax Policy Center, the correct number for 2011 was 46.4% of households, not 47.0%. And I’m not referring to Romney’s view that his “job is not to worry about those people.” Obviously, a presidential candidate should worry about every voter, no matter how unlikely he is to receive his vote. Romney spoke at the NAACP convention, after all.

But when Romney said that nearly half the population are dependent on government, and believe that government owes them benefits as an entitlement, he was right. Absolutely right. And that ought to concern 100% of us.

If Romney erred at all, he erred by understating the situation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 49% of Americans today live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits, an increase of about 20 points from the early 1980s.

According to the Office of Management and the Budget, over the past 50 years, during good times and bad, during Democratic administrations and during Republican administrations, the portion of the federal budget devoted to social welfare payments has risen from about one third of the federal budget to two thirds.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, during that same 50 year span, entitlement transfers—government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens—have grown twice as fast as overall personal income. They now account for nearly 18% of all personal income in America—up from 6% in 1960.

These worrisome statistics (and more) have been gathered and summarized by Nicholas Eberstadt, author of “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” To Eberstadt these trends represent more than a fiscal problem. They represent a moral problem.

As the government spends more on entitlements, the percentage of men willing to work for a living has declined. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of adult men working or seeking work dropped by 13 percentage points between 1948 and 2008. Today, 7.2% of men in their late 30s (the prime working period) have simply removed themselves from the workforce — more than twice the percentage in Greece.

In his admittedly clumsy way, the candidate Romney was sounding the same alarm bell rung more eruditely by the scholar Eberstadt.

Is the alarm justified? According to William Galston of the Brookings Institute, it is not. Transfer payments, after all, are merely payments from some members of society to other members. We’re all in this together, taking, yes, but also giving. As long as we remain a Nation of Givers, Galston says, we’ll be all right.

But the transfer payments are not being paid for by some fanciful Nation of Givers. Our national debt is $16.5 trillion and growing at a rate of $3.82 billion per day. That means that our children, grandchildren, and generations unborn will have the honor of becoming the true Nation of Givers. Galston acknowledges this fact, but deems it an “intergenerational compact.” A compact is a glorified word for agreement or covenant. As every first year law school student learns, there can be no agreement without an offer and acceptance.

When did our children and grandchildren, when did the unborn, accept the role of paymaster for the current beneficiaries of our welfare state? I don’t believe they were ever consulted on the matter. If they had been, they might have responded as the Illinois man from an Abraham Lincoln story did. When confronted by a local citizens’ committee with the prospect of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, he announced, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d just as soon it happened to someone else.”

Another, more insidious problem with Galston’s “Nation of Givers” response to Romney’s and Eberstadt’s alarm is a syndrome that might be called the Law of Relative Unease. If we were all truly in this together — receiving a degree of comfort from our status as Takers and receiving an equal degree of unease from our status as Givers — then some kind of equilibrium might emerge, preventing the problem from getting out of hand. A rational citizenry, no matter how much it enjoys transfer payments, would not overburden itself. But that’s not how the political mechanics work.

Under the Law of Relative Unease, when a citizen is confronted with the possible loss of a specific governmental program designed to benefit him, he is uneasy. Granted, when confronted with alarms about the cost to society of an unbridled welfare state, he is also uneasy. But he may be one of only a small group to benefit from a specific transfer payment program, while he is merely one of hundreds of millions to bear the overall societal cost. The loss of his specific, favorite transfer program makes him much more uneasy than the alarms over the general, societal fiscal crisis. Why should he give up the real and tangible benefit of a specific transfer program for the far more remote and impersonal end of restoring society’s fiscal health?

That is why it is so difficult to persuade a Nation of Takers to step back, to see the big picture, and to curb their taking.

And that is why Mitt Romney was right.

According to Shakespeare, a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. But Shakespeare never worked on Madison Avenue, and he did not study branding.

Businesses have long understood the importance and financial value of brands. According to a 2012 study by the branding experts at Interbrand, COCA-COLA is worth about $78 billion (that’s billion with a “B”), followed closely by APPLE. Remember, we’re talking about only the brands, not the inventory, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and other tangible “things” that stand behind those trademarks.

Businesses have also understood the occasional need for re-branding. When Philip Morris USA figured out that its tobacco products were tarnishing the reputation of its KRAFT and other non-tobacco lines, it changed its corporate name and logo to ALTRIA. When AIG realized that its acceptance of a federal bailout in 2008 was hurting its retirement and financial subsidiaries, it re-branded them as SAGEPOINT FINANCIAL and VALIC.

Social activists may consider themselves above the dull sublunary world of commerce, but in fact they are often its most apt students.

A recent Time Magazine cover story on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade notes that Planned Parenthood is considering a re-branding campaign of its own. Gallup polls show support for abortion rights fading, particularly among young Americans, and that more people now regard themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” Paradoxically, other polls show that two thirds of the population agree with the holding of Roe v. Wade, that women have a constitutional right to abortions. So Planned Parenthood sees the problem as one of labels, not issues. According to Time, the “pro-choice” label may not be attractive to young people, many of whom prefer the broader and more embracing label “reproductive justice.”

Re-branding is not limited to social causes on the Left. Last year, Campus Crusade for Christ officially changed its name to “Cru.” The 60-year old ministry decided that “Campus” was too limiting. In fact, the ministry’s activities extend beyond schools to businesses and churches. “Crusade” seemed too warlike. Ministry leaders feared that it suggested that they aimed to impose their beliefs by military force. “Cru” was chosen out of 1,600 possible names. Other contenders were Communitas, the Latin word for people coming together for a common good, and Power to Change, which is the name of the Canadian ministry. The move – especially the omission of “Christ” from the name — proved very controversial, with critics charging the ministry with giving in to political correctness.

Political activists have also understood the need for re-branding. One of the first examples was the comeback of Richard Nixon. After his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Nixon ran for governor of California in 1962 and lost big. Frustrated and angry, he held a press conference and told reporters that “they wouldn’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Most observers assumed that his temper tantrum marked the end of his political career. And it did – for the Old Nixon. In preparation for the 1968 presidential election, Nixon teamed up with a young television producer named Roger Ailes, who helped create the “New Nixon”: a kinder, gentler, and far more telegenic version of the old politician. Richard Nixon went on to win two presidential elections, and Roger Ailes went on to become head of Fox News.

The fate of the word “liberal” offers another example of re-branding in the world of politics. Once “liberal” had a certain cachet, evoking wide-ranging education (as in “liberal arts”) and individual rights (as in “classical liberal”). Prominent free-market economists such Nobel Prize winner Frederich Hayek proudly called themselves “liberals.” The postscript to his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty, is titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

But that changed in the wake of Great Society failures in the late 60’s. In 1972, George McGovern was trounced in the presidential election by Richard Nixon (who, by then, had been re-branded yet again, this time into the “New New Nixon”.) “Liberal” became a discredited term. In the 1976 Democratic primaries, liberal candidates began referring to themselves as “progressives,” a trend that helped them attract moderates but which alienated their fellow liberals.

During the recent presidential election, Mitt Romney freely and frequently referred to himself as a “conservative” — even going so far as to call himself a “severe conservative.” On the other side, Barack Obama never referred to himself as a “liberal” – not even a relaxed liberal. Obama knew what he was doing (or not doing). According to a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, the term “progressive” is viewed far more favorably than the word “liberal”; two-thirds of those polled had a positive reaction to the former compared with just half for the latter. The gap was especially high among Republicans. Most (55%) had a positive reaction to the word “progressive.” On the other hand, 70% had a negative reaction to the word “liberal.”

Re-branding is a limited remedy. Ultimately, products – whether Coke, causes, or candidates – succeed on their own intrinsic merits, not through their brand names.

Coke’s own experience with re-branding is instructive. In 1985, the Coca Cola Company took the most successful soft drink in history and changed its formula. The Company figured that as long as it kept the famous COKE label on the cans, people would still drink it. They figured wrong. The Company received over 400,000 complaints from irate customers. Some callers, according to a psychiatrist hired by the Company to listen in on calls, sounded as if they were discussing the death of a family member. Company celebrity spokesman Bill Cosby resigned.

After three months, the Company brought back the original product, which it re-branded, with some embarrassment, as COKE CLASSIC. Despite an extensive advertising campaign designed to boost the new product, consumers deserted (the new) COKE for (the old) COKE CLASSIC. By 1990, recognizing its mistake, the Company re-branded its new and unsuccessful COKE product as COKE II. By 2002, the new product had quietly disappeared from store shelves. In 2009, the Company essentially restored the status quo ante by re-re-branding its original product, removing the word “CLASSIC”, and restoring it to just plain COKE.

The experience might have vindicated William Shakespeare observation in updated form: “A Coke by any other name would still taste as sweet.”

Spielberg’s obsession with historical accuracy extends even to background.

In two scenes featuring General Grant, viewers will notice standing behind him the silent, striking presence of an American Indian in the uniform of a Union Army officer. 

(Parker, left, in film)

He is not there for setting.  The man depicted is Ely Parker, a lawyer, engineer, life-long friend of Grant, and full-blooded Seneca, whose life story would justify a movie of its own. 

It deserves telling.

Ely Parker was born in 1828 at IndianFalls on the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, near Akron, New York.  His father, Seneca Chief William Parker was a veteran of the War of 1812.  In his long and eventful life, Parker himself would rise to the rank of Chief, and to wear the Red Jacket medal, originally awarded by President George Washington to Chief Red Jacket after their peace negotiations, and inherited by Jimmy Johnson, Parker’s grandfather.

Parker was educated on the Reservation, then taken up to Canada where he was taught to hunt and fish. 

A brilliant, bilingual student, Parker attended college, then “read the law” at the offices of Angel and Rice in Ellicottville, New York.  He was not allowed to take the New York bar exam because, as an American Indian, he was not a citizen. 

Denied a chance to pursue a legal career, Parker caught a break when he met a young lawyer named Louis Henry Morgan at a bookstore.  Morgan, a great admirer of Indian customs, relied on Parker as a source, and dedicated his classic work, The Iroquois, to him. 

Morgan was well connected in society, and he used those connections to help his Indian friend gain admission to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he studied engineering.  After graduation, Parker’s career flourished. He worked on the GeneseeValleyCanal in 1849, and on the Erie Canal. Later, he accepted the position of superintendent of construction in Galena, Illinois, where he met a down-and-out store clerk and army veteran named Ulysses S. Grant.

In 1846, a Seneca named John Blacksmith sued the Ogden Land Company for trespass upon a sawmill yard on the Reservation.  The Company claimed rights to the land under a treaty with the Indians which had been ratified by Congress.  The case wound its way through the New York state courts for a decade.  Blacksmith died, and Parker, as administrator of his estate, joined his widow as plaintiffs.

The case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Indians were represented by John H. Martindale.  But Ely Parker attended and apparently played a decisive role in the argument.  According to a New York Times account: “All who heard their cases argued before the Supreme Court of the United States … will recollect seeing this same Indian, and that he was well posted on the points he desired his counsel to press upon the attention of the Court.”

A letter-writer to the New York Times, who criticized their coverage of the case because it seemed to imply that the Indians “were very nearly the equal … of their white neighbors,” ironically reinforced the impression that Ely Parker was the brains behind the legal case:

I have not a word to say in the disparagement of the intellectual ability of Ely S. Parker, their head chief, and cheerfully unite with [the Times correspondent] in awarding him the credit for making valuable suggestions to his counsel on the argument of the case in the Supreme Court of the United States. Indeed, I am inclined to the belief, that to him is due the credit of originating and suggesting to his counsel the only available point in the case, and the one on which it was there decided, for the case had been ten years in the Courts of this State, and this point was never before made, nor was it made in the Supreme Court of the United States, in the original brief of counsel for the Indians, filed pursuant to the rules of the Court.

The winning argument, apparently contributed by Parker, was that since the treaty had been made by the Indians with the Government, only the Government, not the Ogden Land Company, could enforce it.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Parker proposed raising a regiment of Iroquois volunteers to fight for the Union.  The Governor of New York rejected the offer.  He tried to enlist in the Army as an engineer.  Secretary of War Simon Cameron told him that, as an Indian, he could not.  

Finally, Parker used his contact with his old friend Grant to obtain a commission as a captain in the engineers in May 1863.  After playing a significant role in the Siege of Vicksburg (he was praised by the commanding general), he was transferred to General Grant’s staff during the Chattanooga Campaign.  He stayed with Grant for the duration of the war, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.   Despite his erudition and perfect English, enlisted men referred to Parker as “the Indian,” “Grant’s Indian,”or “Big Indian.”

His legal training played as much a role as his engineering background during his military service.  He wrote much of Grant’s correspondence.  He also penned one of the most important documents of the Civil War: the articles of surrender, which are in his handwriting.

Parker was at Appomattox when General Robert E. Lee arrived to sign the articles.  Lee mistakenly assumed Parker was black, and ignored him.  Realizing his mistake, Lee apologized and shook his hand, saying , “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker responded, “We are all Americans, sir.”

Parker remained Grant’s military secretary after the war, eventually leaving the service with the rank of brigadier-general.

On Christmas Day, 1867, Parker married Miss Minnie Orton Sackett. General Grant was his best man.  Ely and Minnie had a daughter, Maud Theresa Parker, who lived until 1956.

After his election as President, Grant appointed Parker Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first Indian to hold the post.  His friend and supporter Louis Henry Morgan would later follow him in that job.

It would be sweet to recount that Ely Parker’s life thereafter was happy and prosperous, but that is not the way history works.  He was caught up, undeservedly, in the atmosphere of corruption permeating the Grant administration.  Although a congressional investigation cleared him of all charges, he resigned at its conclusion.  He invested in the stock market, made money, then lost it all in the Panic of 1873.  Eventually, he found work as a supply clerk at the New York Police Headquarters.  He died in poverty in 1895.  His left his wife only a carbon copy of the Appomattox articles of surrender.

Though generally unknown, Ely Parker is a hero among American Indians.  Asa-Luke Twocrow, an Oglala Sioux who was working behind the scenes as a rigger on the film,  called it a great honor to be tapped to play him.  “It’s known that Ely was striving to improve relations between Native Americans and the white man,” Twocrow said, “and he was often chastised for it. It’s kind of a shame that he is not more widely known.”

Spielberg’s film, a serious Oscar contender, has increased interest in Abraham Lincoln and his times.  Perhaps it will also generate interest in Ely Parker, a member of one of the continent’s oldest peoples, who fostered an end to that continent’s bloodiest conflict.

(Parker, left, in history)

It wasn’t always so.  Let’s compare a recent apology, to another classic example that occurred about a thousand years ago.

Earlier this month, the South Korean rapper PSY issued an apology.  Shortly before his appearance at a White House Christmas concert, a little-noticed 2004 performance went viral, causing much embarrassment.  In that earlier show, PSY rapped the following lyrics:

Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully.

These are not the sort of words one expects from a White House guest.  PSY apologized on December 7, a day he apparently wished not to live in infamy.  Here is what he (or, more likely, his PR firm) said:

While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted.  I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.

Now let’s examine this putative apology.

What exactly was PSY sorry for?  For advocating murder?  No.  He was “deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted”?  Of course, PSY does not do the interpreting.  His listeners do.  So PSY was nobly taking responsibility, not for anything he did, but for something the public might do.

Note the phrase “could be interpreted,” as if there are alternatives.  How many different ways are there to interpret an imploration to kill the daughters and mothers of American soldiers slowly and painfully?  Is there a “neutral” way to interpret those words?  A “comedic” way?  Is there a “nice” way to construe the words?  Please.  There is no possible way to interpret those words as anything other than vile.

Finally, note how PSY failed to acknowledge that he caused damage.  Instead, he used the mealy-mouth qualifier “any” in the phrase “for any pain I have caused by those words.”  “Any” means we don’t know the amount.  “Any” means the amount could be zero.  PSY (or his PR people) could not even acknowledge causing pain.

Behind the oily baloney of the language loomed the hard reality of his career interests.  PSY was not sorry that he had called for the slow and painful death of American wives and daughters.  He was sorry that the general public had become aware that he had called for the slow and painful death of American wives and daughters.  After all, he rapped those lines in 2004.  He had eight years to apologize.  The fact that he waited all those years to apologize shows what he was truly sorry for: getting caught.

To see a serious, major league apology, we must turn away from this pathetic poseur and travel back in time almost a thousand years to the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV.  When Pope Gregory VII tried to reform the investiture process by which bishops were appointed, Henry insisted on retaining the traditional right of emperors to appoint them.  He renounced Gregory as pope.  Gregory, in turn, excommunicated Henry, a development that did not sit well with Henry’s fellow German princes.  Fearing rebellion, Henry decided that he had better make things right with the Pope.

Henry did not content himself bemoaning how his words could be misinterpreted.  He issued no proclamations expressing regret for “any pain” he might have caused the Holy See.

No, Henry did more than that.  In January 1077, Henry traveled south from Germany, across the Alps, to Canossa, where the Pope was waiting for him. He traveled barefoot.  When he arrived at the gates, the Pope wasn’t inclined to see him.  So for three days Henry wore a hair-shirt and cooled his heels, if one may use that idiom for a man who has just walked barefoot over the Alps in the dead of winter.  Finally, Henry was granted entry.  He knelt before the Pope and begged forgiveness.  The Pope accepted his apology and welcomed him back into the Church.

To paraphrase Mark Antony’s funeral oration: “Here was an apology.  When comes such another?”

Such another has not come for a very long time.  Modern apologies have become so patently synthetic that they are not taken seriously.  In fact, they are rarely even accepted.

Tiger Woods issued a public apology for cheating on his wife Elin, and announced that he was seeking treatment for “sex addiction.”  Neither his wife nor his fans were deceived.  All understood that he was very sorry for getting caught, not for engaging in multiple affairs with golf groupies.

Rush Limbaugh announced, on his radio show, that he was “sincerely” sorry for calling Sandra Fluke a slut.  Sandra Fluke announced to Barbara Walters, on The View, that she would not accept the apology, since it was given under pressure from sponsors who were pulling out from his show.

One does not have to be a celebrity like Elin Wood or Sandra Fluke to reject a public apology.  Karen Klein, the Western New York grandmother who was mercilessly bullied by students on a school bus, rejected their apologies, noting they were probably written by others, and were released to the media first.

Can we improve our apology skills?  Of course, we can.  This is America.  But doing so requires some serious introspection.  We need to analyze our apologies and determine why they suck so severely.  When we do, rules for improvement emerge.

1. Apologize to the one wronged, not to the general public.  Apologies must follow the rules of privity in contract law: only the parties to the transaction are bound.  If you wronged A, apologize to A, and only to A.  Emperor Henry went directly to Pope Gregory to apologize.  PSY might have been more credible if he had apologized – in person — at a USO event or at a veterans organization.
2. Apologize without qualification.  Apologies for “any harm that might have been done” or for “how my words might have been interpreted” are not apologies.  They take back with one hand what they offer with the other.
3. Apologize without assurance of acceptance.  Whether or not to accept the apology is entirely the prerogative of the wronged party. Therefore, a true apologist is a risk taker.  He must extend the apology knowing that it might be thrown back in his face.  His willingness to face that humiliation imbues his gesture with sincerity.

In the interest of equal time, I should mention that apology recipients sometimes need to mind and mend their ways.  It doesn’t pay to overplay one’s hand.  Pope Gregory learned that the hard way.  After receiving Emperor Henry’s apology and issuing his forgiveness, Gregory backed one of Henry’s rivals in the incessant struggles for power in Germany.  Henry suppressed the revolt, and then journeyed back to Italy, only this time not as a barefoot penitent.  This time he returned with an army.  Gregory excommunicated Henry a second time, and insisted that Henry do penance.  Henry replied “Been there, done that,” or its Latin equivalent, and proceeded to enter Rome, depose Gregory, and install a friendlier archbishop as pope.

Gregory died shortly thereafter in a castle by the sea.  His last act was to issue an edict, vainly exhorting all of Christendom to join a crusade against Henry.

Sometimes it’s better to accept an apology and quit while you’re ahead.

Will a qualified buyer emerge to purchase the brand, and to ensure that TWINKIES — like PAN AM and ZENITH — remains alive, if only in some shrunken, transformed existence?

Or will TWINKIES go the way of all flesh, to that trademark graveyard populated by the likes of ATARI, BORDERS, CIRCUIT CITY, and TOWER RECORDS; marks once famous and ubiquitous, now lost, and by the wind grieved, ghosts which will never come back again?  (Pardon, Thomas Wolfe.)

In the past, those were the only choices for brands of failed businesses.  But in recent years, a new, dubious industry has emerged to offer a third choice.  Companies like Strategic Marks of Irvine, California, identify lost marks and try to revive them without the authorization of their erstwhile owners.  Most see these marks the way the Coroner of Oz saw the Wicked Witch of the East, as “not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.”  But to Strategic Marks and its audacious founder Ellia Kassoff, these marks have an afterlife.  They see them the way Miracle Max saw Wesley, the hero of The Princess Bride: “only mostly dead.”  And as Miracle Max explained: “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.  Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

Such marks are popularly known as “zombie” marks.  For all intents and purposes, zombie marks are dead.  The products with which they were once associated, have disappeared from the shelves and showrooms.  But if these marks are corpses, they are not completely cold corpses.  They retain some warmth in the form of the public’s fond memories and associations.

Strategic Marks identifies such beloved but discontinued brands, and then disinters and tries to revive them. In some cases, such as the ASTRO POP candy brand, this involves dealing with the last owner and negotiating an assignment of rights.  But in other cases, the company treats unused marks the way one might treat a ten dollar bill found on the sidewalk.  It assumes they belong to no one, and takes possession.

Kassoff noticed that Macy’s Inc., which years earlier had acquired the rights to famous department store marks such as FILENE’s and JORDON MARSH, had retired those brands and converted their stores to the MACY’S nameplate.  So he decided to pick them up off the ground, like a lost bill.  He applied to register the marks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and announced plans “to bring back the old shopping experiences and brands you remember….  Something we believe has been lost.”

Macy’s filed oppositions to his applications, and then sued Strategic Marks in federal court in San Francisco.  Its lawsuit, now pending, will probably be decided on the basis of the legal test of “abandonment.”

Under conventional principles of trademark law, a brand is not truly property, the way buildings or cars or patents or copyrights are.   Those examples are all legally protectable as property whether or not their owners choose to use them.  But trademarks are different.  They are consumer protection devices.  They enable shoppers to differentiate one company’s goods and services from those of another, and to identify the source of a product.  Because of this utilitarian function, trademark rights arise from and depend upon actual use.  Most marks begin as common words or names or designs, symbols which were once freely available to all.  When they acquire their source identifying power, they become legally protectable trademarks.  Correspondingly, when their owners abandon them by discontinuing use, they lose that source identifying power.  They return to the public domain, whence they came.  Dust to dust, and all that.

The law presumes that a mark unused for three years has been abandoned.  That presumption may be rebutted by evidence that the owner intended to resume use when business conditions permitted.  In the legal fight between Macy’s and Strategic Marks, Macy’s will argue that it has not abandoned FILENE’s and JORDON MARSH and the other once famous department store names.  It will point to the “Brand Heritage” pages of its website, where consumers can now purchase cheap T-shirts, lunch bags, and zip totes, adorned with these iconic brands.  Strategic Marks will argue that this is token use, insufficient to rebut the legal presumption of abandonment.

While Strategic Marks and Macy’s fight it out in San Francisco, the bankruptcy of Hostess Brands, Inc. plays out in New York.  The fate of TWINKIES remains unknown.  To acquire the mark, an interested buyer will have to pay not just for the word, but also for the public’s association of that word with a much-beloved if little-nutritional food product.  That is because trademarks may not be sold or acquired in isolation.  Attempts to do so are deemed “naked transfers,” and are void under the law.  Trademarks may be transferred only in transactions that include their associated goodwill.

What if no qualified buyer emerges?  And what if Hostess Brands, Inc., the owner, dissolves and disappears? Or what if a buyer does emerge, but then chooses not to use the mark, abandoning it instead?

In such cases, TWINKIES would wander the world as a zombie trademark, dead in the legal sense, but very much alive in the memories and associations of the junk food citizenry.  It would be a tempting target for a company like Strategic Marks.

Could anyone then stop Ellias Kassoff from manufacturing some new food product and calling it TWINKIES?

The answer is probably No.  Once legally dead, the mark TWINKIES would become merely the word “twinkies.”  It would return to the public domain, its birthplace, available to anyone who might wish to risk building a business around it.  But the new user would be entitled only to the word, not the goodwill that once surrounded it.  The public would still be entitled to protection from confusion as to source, even after the mark’s death.  So Strategic Marks or some other would-be Lazarus would not be entitled to trick consumers into thinking that they were getting a product connected to the late, lamented Hostess Brands, Inc. product.  If they did, they might face legal exposure.  True, Hostess Brands, Inc. would no longer be around to sue them.  But its competitors would, and they might well have claims against the new user for false and misleading advertising, and unfair competition.  State and federal consumer protection agencies might also have standing to sue, to safeguard junk food addicts from confusion.

Interestingly enough, if TWINKIES becomes a zombie mark, the safest course for a new user would be to associate it with an unrelated food product.

TWINKIES 100% natural crunchy granola bars, anyone?

According to this version of political history, the electorate is becoming increasingly Hispanic.  About 50,000 Latino citizens reach voting age every month.  That represents 600,000 potential new voters every year.  Exit polls show that Obama did phenomenally well with this constituency, winning their votes by a 71-29 percentage margin over Romney.  Obama’s Chicago tacticians devised ingenious methods of identifying and contacting these voters, and getting them to vote, thus fueling his narrow but decisive victory.

Therefore, if you believe the conventional wisdom, the Republican Party faces a choice.  It can ignore this rapidly expanding constituency and face the prospect of permanent minority party status.  Or the Party can revamp, softening its positions on immigration to appeal to Latino voters.

There may be good reasons for the Republican Party to make such a change.  (That’s a subject for another day.)  But the Party should not do so merely to win back the White House.  For with the advantage of a little time and perspective, one can see that the conventional wisdom about Obama’s reelection is wrong.

Obama’s campaign organization was not particularly effective in mobilizing his supporters.  In fact, it turned in a lackluster performance.  Obama did not win because he energized the Hispanic vote.  In fact, he did noticeably worse among these voters than he did four years ago.

What’s wrong with the conventional wisdom?

The basic flaw is that it is based on exit polls.  Such polls estimate the percentage of those surveyed who voted for one candidate or the other.  But percentages don’t win elections. Raw vote totals do.  To draw worthwhile conclusions from the November results, one must toss exit polls and percentages to the side, and focus on vote-volume, i.e., the number of actual votes received by the candidates.  How many people voted for Obama?  How many people voted for Romney?  How many people stayed home and did not vote for anybody?

When the focus shifts away from exit polls and percentages, to actual vote-volume, certain truths emerge.

First, despite all the talk of Obama’s awesome ground game, his campaign was ineffective in getting citizens to go out to the polling places and actually vote for him.  In 2008, he received 69,498,516 votes.  (Unless otherwise stated, all the figures in this article are drawn from the invaluable Politico.com website.)  In 2012, he received 64,970,512 votes, a drop-off of 4,528,004 or roughly 6.5% of his 2008 total.

Some might counter that it is unfair to compare Obama’s 2012 performance with his 2008 performance.  In 2008, Obama was a fresh face in American politics.  In 2008, the country confronted a financial meltdown for which Republicans, who occupied the White House, were held primarily responsible.  In 2012, Obama occupied the White House, and he had a record of four tough years to defend.

But remember, the conventional wisdom, in addition to holding that Obama’s campaign ran an awesome ground game, also holds that the electorate is increasingly Hispanic and that Hispanics are overwhelmingly Democratic.  Adding 50,000 new, mostly Democratic voters, to the electorate every month should have allowed even a tarnished 2012 Obama to surpass the 2008 Obama.  After all, 50,000 new Hispanic voters per month for 4 years constitutes about 2.4 million new voters, the vast majority of whom were supposed to have supported Obama.  But Obama’s tally did not rise by 2.4 million votes, or even some fraction of 2.4 million.  It declined – and by over 4.5 million votes.

Such a performance simply doesn’t square with the notion of a masterful ground game.  Obama’s ground game was mediocre at best.  Its formidable reputation is more likely the product of the excellent relations between the Obama campaign and the press than of any tangible results.

Second, there is scant evidence that the Hispanic vote measurably boosted Obama’s vote-volume relative to Romney’s.

Of course, citizens do not check off boxes identifying their ethnicity, so no one can say with certainty how Hispanics voted.  But one can count actual voter tallies in counties where Hispanics predominate, and draw conclusions at least about trends.

According to the Census Bureau, Los Angeles County, California, home to 4.7 million Hispanics, is the most heavily Latino county in the United States.  Its population was 47.1% Hispanic in 2011. The next four most heavily Latino counties, in order, are Harris County, Texas (home of Houston), Miami-Dade County, Florida, Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix/Scottsdale). Now if the Hispanic constituency is growing and voting overwhelmingly Democratic, one would expect Obama’s volume of votes in these five counties to have expanded between 2008 and 2012, and his margin of victory over his Republican opponent to have increased.

But that did not happen.  In fact, almost the exact opposite occurred.

In Los Angeles County in 2008, Obama received 2,075,842 votes.  Four years later, his count total dropped to 1,781,383, a decline of 294,459 votes.  Romney’s 2012 vote total in the County also declined, but by only 134,620 votes (from 889,594 in 2008 to 754,974 in 2012).  In other words, not only did Obama’s vote volume, in the most heavily Hispanic county in the nation, decline between 2008 and 2012, so did his margin of victory.  In 2012, Obama’s Los Angeles County margin of victory shrank by 159,839 votes compared to 2008.

We see much the same story in the other heavily Hispanic counties.  In 2008, Obama carried Harris County, Texas by 19,099 votes.  In 2012, he lost the County by 585 votes.  That’s a tiny margin of defeat to be sure, but according to the conventional wisdom he should have won, and by more than his 2008 margin of 19,099 votes.  In 2008, Obama carried Cook County, Illinois, his home base, by a whopping 1,141,288 votes.  In 2012, Obama won big again – but his margin declined to 959,919 votes, a drop of almost 20%.  In 2008, Obama lost Maricopa County, Arizona by 144,282 votes.  Of course, he was running against John McCain, an Arizona Republican.  What happened in 2012, when he was running against a Massachusetts Republican with a supposedly larger Hispanic electorate?  He lost again, this time by 147,805 votes, an even larger margin.

The one heavily Hispanic county where Obama actually bettered his 2008 performance was Miami-Dade County, Florida, where his winning margin increased from 139,280 to 208,174.  But the reason for his bounce had nothing to do with the conventional wisdom.  According to local press reports, Obama improved his electoral performance because Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, had once supported unilaterally lifting sanctions against Cuba.  Obama’s campaign publicized Ryan’s stand among Miami’s Cuban-American community, a traditionally Republican voting bloc.

In short, despite the conventional wisdom about a rising tide of pro-Democratic Hispanic voters, Obama saw his vote margin decline in four out of the five most heavily Latino counties.  And he saw his margin grow in one of the five only because he managed to run to the right of Republican ticket on the issue of sanctions on Cuba.

Some might dismiss these numbers as resulting from the fact that California, Texas, and Illinois were reliably blue or red states.  (Florida and Arizona were another story, but we’ll set that aside.)  Perhaps Hispanic voters didn’t bother to vote in 2012 because they knew their votes would not have made a difference.  But those states were just as reliably blue or red in 2008. If the conventional wisdom were right, then one would still have expected the Obama vote margin to increase, if only to reflect the growing population of Democratic-oriented Hispanic voters.

Moreover, if we move away from safely Democratic California and Illinois, and safely Republican Texas, to the closely contested state of Nevada, we see the same trend running contrary to the conventional wisdom.

The most heavily Hispanic county in Nevada is Clark County, home of Las Vegas.  According to the Census Bureau, the County was 28.7% Hispanic in 2011.  The Obama campaign knew that to carry the swing state of Nevada, it had to amass a large majority in Clark County, so it poured resources into the area. Television advertising was intense, and precinct workers went door-to-door, reaching out to the same sympathetic voters over and over again, to ensure that they would vote.  If there were any county in America where we should have seen tangible results from the supposedly potent ground game, and the supposedly expanding reservoir of Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters, it would be Clark County.

What actually happened?  Obama did increase his vote-volume, by 8,774 votes.  But Romney, without the benefit of an effective ground game and facing an increasingly Hispanic electorate, increased his vote-volume by 31,822 votes, nearly four times as much.  As a result, Obama’s margin of victory in Clark County diminished, from 122,803 in 2008 to 99,755 in 2012, a drop off of 23,048.

Examining the actual voter tallies leads to this conclusion: The conventional wisdom is clearly wrong.  There was no awesome Obama ground game.  There was no surge of Democratic Hispanic votes.

But then why did Obama win anyway?

The answer lies, again, in vote-volume.  Or, more precisely, in non-vote-volume.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the number of eligible voters increased by over eight million citizens in 2012 compared to 2008.  But turnout declined by five million voters, from 131 million in 2008 to about 126 million in 2012.  That means that there were about 13 million more non-voters in 2012 than in 2008.

Obama won because Romney lost.  Romney could not energize an apathetic electorate enough to oust a weak and vulnerable incumbent.  Team Obama was like a baseball team held to two runs in a game.  Lousy hitting, sure.  But if the visiting team can score only one run, the home team wins, lousy hitting or not.

Mitt Romney is a good and decent man, who doesn’t remotely resemble the Snidely Whiplash cartoon image promulgated by the Obama campaign.  But he was an uninspiring candidate.  He changed positions on key issues.  He repeatedly shot at his own feet, with remarks that were as dumb as they were alienating.  (I don’t worry about the 47% who pay no income taxes.  My wife drives a couple of Cadillacs.)   His discomfort with crowds was palpable.  He fought hard for his Party’s nomination but once he had it, he showed little relish for the arduous job of being a presidential candidate.

Every electoral defeat is an opportunity to learn.  Often, the best source for instruction is the victorious opponent.  But in this case, the Republican Party would be making a mistake if it looked to the Obama campaign for lessons.  Of course, in 2016, the Republican Party should work to improve its ground game.  Of course, it should compete for the Hispanic vote.  But its main task should be to look at itself.  It needs to change a primary system that allowed one buffoon after another to take center stage and tarnish the Party’s brand.  But even more, it needs to find a candidate who can excite the fastest growing constituency in the electorate.  No, that isn’t the Hispanic community.  It’s the growing army of tired, surly, and cynical non-voters.