What We've Learned from History Is We Don't Learn from History

Grace: 00:00:00

Hi, it's Grace. And this is Frogmore Stew.

Grace: 00:00:03

Have you been watching the Democrat National Convention? I have. And soon we will have some on the ground correspondence with a few of our friends who are there. But I have a few thoughts that I wanted to share today.

Grace: 00:00:19

There's so much enthusiasm and excitement around the new Democratic presidential ticket. But as we watch this transformation of energy within the party, I've been left wondering if the people that run the party have learned anything. News reports have said that Biden continued to believe that he could win the election, and he almost didn't step down. He still believed he could win. And that he has resentment that the party he's belonged to for so much of his life basically booted him out.

Grace: 00:00:55

He's the sitting president. He's the head of the party. I've listened to all of the reports laying out why we should feel bad for him. Anything from, he didn't get a real convention because of the pandemic, so he had no balloons and no cheering people, so this would have been his big night. There are people saying boo hoo because the party forced him out.

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I've even heard that he said, the voters chose me. Which really makes my head explode. Surely he knows that there weren't any real challengers because the party that Biden currently leads would have squashed them. surely he knows that the people voting for him in the primaries were voting for their party, and probably not the person. Surely he sees the complete about face this race has done. And certainly he knows Americans crave inspiration from their president.

Grace: 00:01:55

So now, instead of him being nominated at the convention, this is his swan song. And if he wasn't pissed enough already, they put him on super late Monday night, way past prime time for the East Coast. So then there were all these sorts of theories of why they did that. And the official line was that they were running over on time.

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But I bet there's more to it than that. What if he had another bad night like he had during the debate? Can you imagine what a bad look that would be for the Democrats? And that would pull every story of this amazing convention away from the excitement and all onto Biden again. They're moving forward, and it's about time.

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But the storyline that sticks out most to me is the lesson that I believe should be the biggest takeaway, the most important job of anyone that has a leading role in a business, a nonprofit, Or even as a parent, is knowing when you are no longer the best person to do that job or to lead in the role that you're in.

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There's so many different factors as to why someone would come to that realization. Every job and every role varies, but knowing when your experience, although valuable, just isn't enough. And oftentimes when you're passionate about your jobs, you convince yourself that only you can fix the issues.

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I believe Biden felt and still feels that way, he wasn't so cocky as to say it out loud like Trump, but his actions and late departure from the race show us that.

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There's a lot of self importance and self aggrandizing that comes with politics, but I actually think that for the citizens of this country, the self importance and narcissism started in the seventies when it was dubbed by writer Tom Wolfe as the me decade. And I now believe the people that came out of that generation are exiting stage left, or at least they're slowly getting pushed off the stage.

Grace: 00:04:04

The me decade and those that bought into it is what fueled Reaganomics and cuts to so many social services hostility with no empathy, hostile takeovers, and even shows like The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

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It was a decade that said you deserve it all. And as Americans, we are universally oriented around individual liberty and personal expression. So those messages were easy to swallow. Those beliefs were an easy pill. But how does that translate now with these new generations? Is it selfies and OOTDs? And for those of you that don't know, If you don't have teenage daughters, that means outfit of the day.

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The generations after Gen X are into community and empathy and constant contact. So are we now moderately narcissistic people living in a highly narcissistic culture that was built in the 1980s? There's a reason teachers make you do the group project, and it isn't to learn that you alone can fix problems.

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Will the next generations learn from this presidential debacle that knowing when to pass the baton is one of the most important things in leadership? Nikki Haley said it clearly. Here she is.

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The other story I've been following this week is from Axios News because it has some ties to a not too distant and a very similar situation. Axios News reported earlier this week that Trump spoke on the phone about a week ago with Benjamin Netanyahu and discussed the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.

Grace: 00:05:50

They cited two U. S. sources who were briefed on the call. After that story was published, the Israeli prime minister's office issued a statement denying the call took place. But then the office came back and said he did not speak with Donald Trump to discuss the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal. What in the world is going on? There have been crucial negotiations happening with senior U. S., Qatari, Egyptian, and Israeli officials to try to close the remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas.

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Solidifying a deal for peace and getting the hostages released would be a major political win for Biden and one last FU from him to the country that he was still capable of doing his job.

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And many have said that Trump continues to say he wants to free the hostages and get a deal done. But Trump's also in a heated race for his political life. And in politics comes political games. Look no further than the bipartisan border deal that he squashed because he needed to campaign on the border crisis.

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It's a winning storyline that he continues to spout over and over. And if it had been fixed by a bipartisan committee, that wouldn't bode well for his campaign.

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So there's a story that rings eerily familiar on the hostage crisis, and it starts in 1979. The U. S. was not in a great place.

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Inflation was high, and we were just coming out of the war in Vietnam, and morale in the country was down. Ronald Reagan, a former actor, was running against incumbent President Jimmy Carter. The Middle East, particularly Iran, wasn't as much of a daily conversation as it is today in the U. S. November 4th, 1979, just before the beginning of the presidential election.

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Prior to this date, Iran had a monarchy. And a man named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was also called the Shah, was the leader of the country, and by most accounts was pro West and pro Israel. His focus was on modernization and westernization, and that put him at odds with Iran's conservative religious leaders.

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So what happened on November 4th, 1979? While the Shah and his family were out of the country on a vacation, radical Iranian students took over the U. S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. This is the beginning of the Iranian revolution.

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This would put a conservative religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in power and ensure Iran's future to be led by extremist conservative religious zealots. Americans surged with patriotism over the hostage situation and came together to demand they bring the hostages home. They even had a song that inspired people all across the country to tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree to signify support. Reagan was worried he'd lose the election. So his campaign managed a multi pronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election. The mission of the operation was to sabotage the re election campaign of his opponent, Jimmy Carter. In the spring of 1980, Carter decided to mount a military rescue of the hostages.

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It was called Operation Eagle Claw, and it was a disaster that ended in an aborted mission with eight American deaths and ruined military planes and the hostages still in captivity. The crisis dominated the headlines and every news broadcast, and it really made the administration look weak and ineffectual.

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Carter's team went into overdrive to negotiate a deal with the Iranians to free the hostages, Reagan's team knew that Carter's administration was getting closer and closer to a deal to free them. And the Reagan team believed that if the hostages were freed before the election, Carter would win.

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They dubbed this process the October surprise. They sent members of Reagan's election team to Jordan, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel with the mission being asking various Arab leaders to urge the Iranians not to release the 52 hostages until after the election. The message was clear.

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Don't release the hostages before the election. Reagan will win and will give you a better deal. The problem with this was that Iran's assets had been frozen by the U. S. government in the way of sanctions. And they needed to release the hostages for those assets to be unfrozen. They needed the money because they themselves were fighting against an invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

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So Reagan had to offer them something so big they couldn't refuse. Arms. And it worked. The Iranians did not agree to any deal until after the election. In the end, it was Carter, not Reagan, who secured the freedom of the hostages. Just hours before Carter left office on January 20th, 1981, he completed the final and very complex negotiations with Algeria as the intermediary.

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And in a final salt in the wound, the flight carrying the hostages from Tehran didn't clear Iranian airspace, until minutes after Reagan was sworn in. Within a week of the inauguration, Reagan's new Secretary of State, Alexander Hegg, signed off on a secret arms sales deal to Iran, a country that had just held Americans hostage for 444 days.

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And that is now believed to be the sprout of connection that would later become sending arms to Iran through Sweden, culminating in the Iran Contra affair of 1985 to 1986. There's a great Warren Buffett quote that says, What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. In Carter's farewell address on January 4th, 1981, he warned that a growing distrust in the government's ability to solve problems was driving Americans toward single issue groups and special interest organizations to protect their own views and interests. He reminded the nation we are all Americans together and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.

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That's all the Stew for today.