Henry I, Who Would Be King

Henry I of England had a problem. Henry wanted to be king, but he had no support for his bid.

The church resented him because of his opposition to Anselm of Canterbury. The people opposed him as a Norman. The Nobility simply didn't accept him.

His brother William Rufus was dead, and his brother Robert of Normandy had not returned from the crusades. If he could take the crown before Robert arrived home, and gain the support of the nobility, he could take and keep the throne.

Without the support of the English nobles, he would not likely live long as King of England.

To gain the support of the church was simple enough. He had only to make nice with Anselm. Gaining the support of the people was simple enough as well. Malcolm III, King of the Scots, had a daughter who was one of their own and his marriage to Edith mollified the subjects to his reign.

Of course this match served to further alienate the Earls and Barons of the realm and their support was critical to his success. He would have to take drastic measures to win their favor and secure his position as England's new Sovereign.

The solution was a common enough parchment with a decidedly uncommon arrangement of ideas recorded upon it. The Charter of Liberties would declare that even a King was subject to limits of power, and that his courts was entitled to liberties he could not subvert.

As has been the case throughout history, such concessions are made only when desperation wrenches them from the grips of those with no other options for retaining their power.

Liberty is never granted willingly. Liberty is taken. It is won. It comes at a cost. It is also fragile and most often fleeting.

The Charter of Liberties would not last. All of the agreements Henry I made with the nobles of England would be revoked in time, but the ideas that a King's appetite did not preclude some precious liberties to his nobles, and by extension, eventually, his subjects, would slowly take hold.

Future Kings would find themselves forced to follow Henry's path and concede ever greater portions of their once absolute power to common men. The Charter of Liberties was the precursor to the Magna Carta, and indeed, even our own Declaration of Independence has it's roots in these Barons' insistence of equality to their King under law.

As time marches on, liberty ebbs and flows. Powerful rulers seek greater control of their subjects. Subjects with knowledge of past liberties seek to restrain those who would rule. This is the Constitutionalist Process. Laws constraining the powerful are erected and eroded. Rebuilt and breached. polished and tarnished.

In the general course, liberty grows. Haltingly, with loss and gain. Measured in decades and centuries, like the slow thaw of glacial sheets at the end of an ice age. Each spring the seeds of liberty give birth to tender blooms, claiming a few more precious, ice free feet of land. Each winter, the ice fails to regain quite as much territory as it held the season before.

"The United States is undergoing a profound demographic transformation. Non-Hispanic whites are likely to become a minority by the year 2042."¹

Many think that this trend favors the Democrats overall, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this would always be the case. But, in my travels I've come to understand that people is people. They have the same basic wants and fears. As other ethnic groups supplant whites as majority population groups within the US, I see no reason to expect that they will not also supplant them as a majority in middle class representation as well.

If this were the 1930's we might expect something akin to apartheid to develop, preserving the, now minority, white population's position as the representative middle class. We are not in the first half of the 20th century any longer, though, and class structures are not hereditary prisons in our political and economic model. Indeed, despite increasingly strident language of class warfare rhetoric, mobility both up and down the social and economic ladders within the US is more fluid and more common than ever before. The rich don't always get richer, and the poor enjoy a standard of living that other countries' middle classes envy.

As current minority groups increase in population and increase in middle class representation, I expect to see them adopt many of the same positions and concerns of the current middle class. People is people.

As families move through economic "classes" their political favor and their votes will undergo a shift to reflect their changing status. Over time, as the middle class becomes increasingly composed of groups who are now counted in the minorities, the simple fact of being a member of one of these groups will no longer be an invitation for the democrats to count their votes.

President Clinton and President Reagan were both able to speak to the current, largely white majority, middle class, and also speak to minority groups with great success. Future presidential hopefuls will find themselves in the new position of having to address those groups together, because they will be the same group to an ever increasing extent.

The Democrats may very well find that the lines of the old landscape are eroding beneath their feet, and if they don't address themselves to these shifts may find themselves without an audience. The Republicans may not fare any better. They seem entrenched in a position that depends on a white middle class, and while they address themselves, generally well, to middle class concerns, they are largely inept at doing so in a way that embraces encroachment on that class by non traditional members.

1. Ghost Story: Realignment was just an illusion.
2. Senator Brown does not yet have a US Senate page to link to

Is President Obama's greatest sin snubbing the media?

From the outset he had the media, if we exclude talk radio, in his camp. The reporters and anchors themselves became the news for a few cycles as stories of gushing journalists filled the papers, each outlet pointing to the emotional outporings of the other. Even in those cases where journalists seemed to maintain their composure, there was a tendency to give him the benefit of the doubt in most instances, just as on the more conservative leaning radio waves, there was the default position of finding any possible fault.

So, fast forward, almost a year in there was this little media blip¹² a bit back about reporters being unhappy about the level of access they had to the president and his penchant for giving lots of speeches but no conferences. In fact, President Obama has not held a press conference in over six months. That's more than half of his presidency.

"At issue is whether the president has an obligation to take questions on a regular basis from the group of reporters that cover him daily. The reporters say yes. The White House says, well, we choose to do that differently." - ABC News³

This was going to be the transparent president. He was going to give the people unrivaled access to himself and to the peoples business. In our time, why would the press expect that that access would be through any vehicle but themselves? They are, after all, the self anointed intermediary of the people.

The thing is, President Obama's administration can more tightly control their message and advance their agenda by taking it straight to the people through the White House Blogs⁴, Twitter⁵ and Facebook⁶ than they can through the traditional filter of the media.

There is one possible miscalculation in this idea. The press in this country either loves you or hates you. Ambivalence does not sell newspapers. The news outlets are for profit corporations and it is their business to sell their product, which just so happens to be the news. Lofty ideals like objectivity aside, lists of facts are boring, boring, boring and so subjectivity comes into the picture one way or another in how those lists are parsed and presented.

The press isn't reporting on President Obama the way they used to.

When Senator Elect, Scott Brown⁷ won the Massachusetts special election for the senate seat vacated by Senator Ted Kennedy⁸, the Democrats lost their filibusterer proof super majority. Given the start that the press gave President Obama with their coverage, one might expect the event to result in stories about how the Democrats still hold a majority position in the US Senate ⁹ with 59 of 100 seats held by members of the President's party. That isn't what is happening though.

Instead we are reading report after report about the administration's legislative agenda being in shreds. Some few voices in the wilderness, mostly at MSNBC¹⁰, still carry the message of hope and change, but increasingly their voices are growing fainter as the clamoring throngs of the press adopt a harsher timber and a harsher language when covering the president and his party.

I'm left wondering if these are the death rattles of the traditional media, or at least the tradition as we now know it. The subjectivity of the media is more apparent to more people than ever before, and having built their house on objectivity, they are loathe to admit the truth. This is an incongruous slap in the face to the average American delivered every day with the morning cup of coffee. People sense that the surface veneer of objective journalistic reporting is thin and fragile, and it continues to become more difficult not to look through it.

Tonight president Obama will deliver his first State of the Union speech, and the way the press covers it could be very telling. He could very well be going in to this thing under damned if you do, damned if you don't conditions. Whether he is bold and forceful as some want to see or contrite and re-conciliatory as others are hoping, the press will have their say. I will be watching to see what they press says as much as to see what the President says.

I'd love to hear back from you! Should the President court the media and grant them the access they want in order to recoup their favor? Should he continue to pursue social media as his connection of choice with the people? What do these approaches mean for those who simply aren't hooked in to social networking?

1. ABC: Obama Gives Speeches, Interviews But Few Press Conferences
2. FOX: Obama Going on Six Months Without a Press Conference
3. Ref:1
4. Whitehouse Blogs
5. Whitehouse on Twitter
6. Whitehouse on Facebook
7. Senator Elect Brown
8. Senator Edward M. Kennedy
9. The U.S. Senate
10. MSNBC News