US politics should not lend themselves as a model
January 17, 2021 in Opinion Letter from America: with KENNETH MUFUKA
Unaware that the audios were still on, former British Prime Minister David Cameron complained bitterly to his mates. They had just concluded a meeting of the G-8. Then US President Barack Obama, Cameron said, was the most narcissistic leader he had ever met. He never lost an opportunity to lecture them on the virtues of the US democracy, which he believed to be the mother of all democracies. “My foot,” Cameron said, “does not the young man know that the UK is a thousand years old?”
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has navigated a half-century in American politics by relentlessly positioning himself at the core of the Democratic Party. Wherever that power center shifted, there Biden has been, whether as the young senator who opposed court-ordered busing in school integration cases or the soon-to-be 46th president pitching an agenda on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great.
Eddie Beard was a symbol of that: a Providence housepainter who went to Congress.
He walked the chamber with a brush in the breast pocket of his $50 suits, the only blue-collar rep in the late 1970s.
When he lost in 1980 after three terms, he did not become a lobbyist or corporate guy. He ran a Central Falls tavern for six years, then headed elderly services for the City of Providence.
Eddie that’s what everyone called him was the real deal.
Sadly, just shy of 81, he took his leave from us this week from the toll of Parkinson’s.
I saw some of that when I was perhaps the last journalist to interview him.