American Madness

I know most New Yorkers (and the vast majority of the press) believe that Eliot Spitzer will win the primary and general election hands down.

They question why Tom Suozzi is campaigning, in what appears to be a futile Sisyphusian ordeal.

I do not know why he is running, but I know that asking “why” is the wrong question. The right question, the moral responsible and pertinent question is who SHOULD win the primary and who would make a better governor. The far more compelling answer is Tom Suozzi.

I met Tom once, at a back-yard fundraiser for a local Long Island judge. The crowd was thin and Suozzi’s time was wasted at the event. He was then in need of a bigger audience as he was running for chief executive of Nassau County, a deeply troubled area that had for decades been run by an entrenched Republican leadership.

But Suozzi made an effort for smaller reformers and they repaid him. He took over Nassau and you can read about the results, which are astoundingly positive. If this doesn’t seem like much of a resume, consider that Nassau’s $2.4 billion budget is greater than that of 16 states. That is a key Suozzi statistic, and justifiably so, as he has turned the County around.

Suozzi could do much to fix NY State, which is (as I need not remind anyone) in bad need of political reform.

Spitzer, on the other hand, despite all his sound and fury, has achieve only headlines. Anyone on Wall Street or in the insurance world familiar with his research settlement or his other corporate “reforms” could tell you how counterproductive they have been both to commerce and, ironically, to individual investors. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, with which most people have a conflicted relationship, has been correct on Spitzer for some time now. Go back and read their opinions: they are well articulated. (Here’s a good one, in which the Journal notes that Spitzer tends to accuse with proof that falls down upon scrutiny: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006805.)

(Here’s another: The Passion of Eliot Spitzer: Is he telling the truth as he tries to “take people out”?)

I have seen Spitzer up close, as well, and I am continually amazed that news reports fail to report the smell of sulfur that lingers in his wake.

One man has a tangible record of reforms. The other has a tangible record of publicly attacking large corporations and pushing them to newsworthy (but dubiously effective) settlements.

I urge registered Democrats to look closely at the records of both men, and make a decision based on that, and not on Spitzer’s image as a reformer. Alas, unlike the more populist-minded states, registered Republicans or Independents in New York State may not at this point (that is, within eyeshot of a primary) change party affiliations to vote, so please push your Democratic friends and relations to consider this issue!

Suozzi and Spitzer will debate tonight on NY1 at 7pm.

You can watch on TV or via the web site below:

http://ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=3&aid=61268

…this one could be entertaining. Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobigraphy of Kola Boof is about a Sudanese-American women who claims to have been the mistress of Osama bin Laden. Boof is a self-styled “womanist poet” and, it would appear she and James Frey are a matched pair. She claims, in one lurid passage, to have performed sex acts on Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abdullah Azzam, and Sayyid Qutb in Morocco in 1996. Peter Bergen points out in his review that “in 1996 bin Laden was living in Sudan, Ayman al Zawahiri was imprisoned in Dagestan, Azzam had been assassinated in Pakistan thirteen years earlier, and Qutb had been lying in his grave for three decades.” Cheeky Brit. Read all of Bergen’s review on his website at www.peterbergen.com.

Jennifer Senior of NY Magazine wrote a great article on positive psychology and the study of happiness. My favorite part is the conclusion where Jennifer calls into question the goal of being happy, and gives strong support to the theory that we depressives are the sane ones. After all, isn’t the real goal to live a good life, not necessarily a happy one?

There is a well establish study showing that people who identify themselves as optimists tend to be mildly delusional:)

One of the most interesting bits of American research to surface—repeatedly—in books about happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion. The study itself was fairly simple: A group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none—the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100 percent helpless.

It’s a fascinating finding with a hell of a lot of implications. New marketing campaigns for optimists, anyone? Check out the article for more details.

If you’re a positive minded professional, who just wants the happiness action items, then read Happiness: A User’s Manual.