Tom Keane

The politics of joy

Running for president is no easy decision, full of worries about family, money, and rubber-chicken dinners. For Jeb Bush, there are other considerations as well: Is America ready for its first three-fer? Will voters elect a man whose first name is an acronym? (Jeb stands for “John Ellis Bush.”) And then this one, straight from the candidate himself: “Can I do it joyfully?”

Best of luck with that.

It’s an odd coupling of the two words. Politics and joy? Sounds like alcohol and automobiles or orange juice and toothpaste. They’re possible to mix, of course, but beware.

I get what Bush is trying to do. Partly he is reacting to the Republican travails of four years ago. Those primaries were notable for their viciousness. It was evident to most observers that Mitt Romney would ultimately win. Nevertheless, several GOP candidates launched scorched-earth attacks on him, notably Newt Gingrich who (bizarrely for a free-market conservative) described Romney’s work as “vulture capital.” The eventual nominee entered the general election severely weakened. Bush, the most Romney-esque of the field (in that he’s relatively more centrist) is sending a warning shot across the bow: This time around, play nice.

Then too, Bush seems to have a good political ear. Politics has become increasingly partisan and unpleasant in Washington, and Americans wish it were otherwise. By large majorities, voters describe the federal government as “broken.” Bush, a self-styled problem solver, wants to project an image as someone who is free from the muck.

And, of course, he may actually believe it. A joyous politics is one that speaks to people’s better side. It’s one conducted on positive and not negative terms. It’s one that attempts to transcend divisions and bridge differences.

But it doesn’t always work.

The antecedent to joyous politics is William Wordsworth’s poem “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” which describes the many virtues of the joyful leader, from keeping the law to self-sacrifice to an unerring focus on “high endeavors.” In American politics the “happy warrior” moniker has been applied to an affable few, including Alfred E. Smith (by Franklin Roosevelt in 1924), Joe Biden (by Barack Obama in 2012) and, most notably, to the cheerful Hubert Humphrey, senator from Minnesota, vice president under Lyndon Johnson and Democratic nominee in 1968.

But joyful politicians aren’t the same as joyful politics, as Humphrey’s story illustrates.

Humphrey kicked off his run for president in late April 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and in the midst of enormous turmoil over the Vietnam War. In direct reference to the grimness of those times, he called for a campaign grounded in “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, and the politics of joy.” It was not to be.

The sitting vice president was widely jeered, tagged with the same pro-war brush as the administration. The two anti-war candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, presented themselves as stark contrasts; Kennedy’s assassination in June cast a pall over the race for the nomination. In late August, the Democrats had their rancorous national convention in Chicago. The images beamed out to viewers around the country weren’t pretty. While party insiders handed Humphrey the nomination inside the hall, outside demonstrators and police clashed violently, alienating voters and ultimately swinging support to the GOP’s Richard Nixon.

Oh, joy.

If “joyful” to Jeb Bush is simply about temperament, then he may well be able to remain upbeat and smiling even as his opponents savage him and the primaries grind on. But if “joyful” means something different — a new and more aspirational politics — it’ll be hard to maintain during the upcoming campaign.

The grassroots, particularly within the GOP, are a surly bunch, filled with naysaying: no to Obamacare, no to gay marriage, no to new immigrants, no to choice, no to taxes and no to government in general. Keeping a positive message in the midst of that will be difficult. Indeed, successful politicking almost requires tearing down your foes even as you build yourself up. Bush may well have some joyful days, but — like Humphrey — he more likely will find them filled with acrimony.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on December 30, 2014.

A good year for Obama, nation’s economy

When it comes to the nation’s economy, 2014 was a very good year. Next year promises to be even better. Barack Obama deserves credit, but many recoil at the idea.

A year ago at this time, it seemed that at long last the nation was poised to rebound from the devastating recession of 2008. The glimmers of hope were there: The unemployment rate was trending downwards, private-sector jobs were being created, the GDP looked ready to grow significantly, and many economic forecasters (admittedly, practitioners of an art, not a science) were optimistic.

Pointing this out, however, provoked backlash. Many simply denied anything good was happening at all, determined — evidence to the contrary — to see the glass as not only half-empty but with a major leak. Others couldn’t stomach the notion that the reviled Obama could be a success at anything (indeed, the level of vituperation directed at this president remains exceptionally, perhaps uniquely, high).

Yet a year later those glimmers of hope are now quite bright.

The Dow Jones has just hit 18,000, a historic peak. The price of gasoline is down by more than a third from its $4 highs. The US economy grew at a 5 percent clip in the July-to-September third quarter — a startlingly high number — and 2015 looks to be strong, as well. Meanwhile, the inflation rate for the last 12 months is a barely discernible 1.3 percent. And the US budget deficit — remember the horrified cries from those who opposed Obama’s economic stimulus? — is now at its lowest level since 2008.

The 2008 crisis threw millions out of work and was of such soul-wrenching consequence that many of those folks simply gave up. Yet there have been 2.65 million new jobs created so far this year and the unemployment rate has fallen from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to 5.8 percent last month. And the drop in the labor participation rate (a measure of how many want to find a job) seems to have plateaued — at around 63 percent — and may be starting to rise.

That’s not to say everything is perfect. Ideally the unemployment rate would get below five percent and the labor participation rate would climb to around 66 percent or more. Wages, although now rising, are still not where they should be, underscoring this country’s too-high inequality and the perils of maintaining a robust middle class. And there is a feeling by many that the economic rebound has been a too-long time coming – although arguably the reason for that was Congressional insistence on budget balancing instead of even stronger stimulus measures.

Still, on balance things are alright. These really are the good old days. We should be counting our blessings, not disparaging them.

So why not give the president his due? After all, he’s been in office for six years. When things are going badly (e.g., ISIS), there is no question we heap blame on the White House. George H. W., Bill Clinton and George W. may indeed have laid the groundwork for those troubles, but Obama’s been in the White House long enough to now bear responsibility.

The reverse, it would seem, should be true when things are going well.

Granted, one could be stingy with praise if America were simply part of a world-wide surge of growth. In that scenario, Obama is just a lucky beneficiary along for the ride. But the rest of the globe isn’t doing great at all (and indeed, in our interconnected planet, that poses long-term risk to the United States). Unemployment in the European Union is 11.5 percent, and growth is almost flat. Japan is in recession. China may have hit a marker as the world’s biggest economy, but growth there is slowing. Russia is a basket case.

To the Obama haters, none of this matters. That, it seems, is the black-and-white nature of our political discourse: one is either all good or all bad. In truth Obama (and almost all politicians) are a mix. The president can be deservedly zinged on many fronts. But when it comes to the economy — a core responsibility for any nation’s chief executive — he fairly deserves a good grade: Not an A, perhaps, but certainly a solid B or B+.

This column was first published in The Boston Sunday Globe on December 28, 2014.

Is the Sony hack attack a PR stunt?

Here’s my theory about “The Interview” and the Sony hacking scandal: It’s all a PR stunt. And even if I’m wrong, that’s the way it’s playing out. We all want to fight terrorism.

The scenario: Confronted with a mediocre movie seemingly destined to fail at the box office, Sony executives concocted a bold plan. First came the hacking, with the late November release of Sony employees’ social security numbers, e-mails, salary information, and even copies of unreleased films. The perpetrators were supposedly a group calling itself “Guardians of the Peace,” which, to be frank, sounds like the runnerup name for another 2014 hit movie, “Guardians of the Galaxy” (not for nothing, that’s a production Sony Picture Imageworks worked on).

I can hear your objections. Much of the released information was scandalous. Producer Scot Rudin, for example, called actor Angelina Jolie “a minimally talented spoiled brat.” Also revealed were racially-tinged emails about Barack Obama between Rudin and Amy Pascal, head of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Why would Sony subject itself to such embarrassment?

All in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

But wasn’t the FBI able to prove the hacks came from North Korea? This is, of course, the same agency that a recent inquiry found had mishandled evidence at its offices all across the country. On top of that, moviemakers are masters of illusion. The folks at Sony who had me believing Jonah Hill was hanging on to a helicopter on “22 Jump Street” shouldn’t have had a hard time pretending to be North Korean hackers.

Then came the threats. “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places ‘The Interview’ be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to,” the Guardians of Peace inarticulately warned on Dec. 16. Theatrical chains freaked and Sony pulled the film’s planned Christmas Day release.

All of the sudden, we had a full-blown crisis. In a press conference, President Obama said Sony “made a mistake” in backing down. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” he added, “any more than Boston didn’t run its marathon this year because of the possibility that somebody might try to cause harm.”

We can see where this is going. Sony will, after some dithering, agree to release the movie. We’ll all puff up our chests and patriotically flock to theaters, acts of defiance against anyone who dares try to bully us. Those who attend will walk around with buttons proclaiming, “I survived ‘The Interview.’ ” We’ll start wearing “Sony Strong” T-shirts. Critics who disparage the film will be castigated as tools of Kim Jong-un.

And Sony will clean up.

You may think this fantasy, but there’s precedent. To promote a book, for instance, PR maven Ryan Holiday bought billboards which he then pretended were being defaced by those offended by the book. That stirred real-life protests and even provoked editorials in the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. The book sold well. And during the Super Bowl this year, J.C. Penney sent out outlandish tweets that seemed like someone drunk had taken over its account. They got enormous attention; the drunk act itself was faked.

Indeed, let’s hope Sony-hack is bogus, because the opposite seems even more absurd. It’s one thing for someone to steal information from a computer system; that’s old-hat by now. But to think, as Sony and movie chains apparently do, that North Korea could somehow hurt theatergoers is a flight of fancy, a case of Hollywood believing its own fantasies -- such as the seminal hacking movie, “War Games” with a very young Matthew Broderick.

Many commentators have decried the cancellation of “The Interview” as an example of just how nervous and scared we are. That may apply to some celebrities and moviemakers, but not the rest of us. Obama was right in his Boston Marathon analogy: More people ran in 2014 than 2013 and the crowds were undiminished. Indeed, the most desired viewing locations were right where the two bombs went off. Afraid or not, we refuse to be intimidated.

So, PR stunt or not, Sony, just release the movie. We’ll all go.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on December 23, 2014.

Jeb Bush should have Democrats worried

Hillary Clinton delays, Elizabeth Warren demurs, Jeb Bush explores, and Mitt Romney fades. The Democrats’ newly resurgent left pines for a Warren run. So too do Republicans. As Democrats seem more inclined to move left, the GOP may be moving to the center, and it’s there that presidential elections are won and lost.

Clinton appears to have a lock on the Democratic nomination. A McClatchy-Marist poll from earlier this week, for example, found her support at 62 percent with others trailing far behind: vice president Joe Biden at 11 percent, Warren at 9 percent. That’s in line with surveys from the likes of CNN and Quinnipiac University, all of which show the former First Lady and Secretary of State with what looks like an insurmountable lead.

But is she really running? Ever since Obama was reelected, people have been asking, and Clinton hasn’t been answering. Her reticence is sensible. The election is still two years away, after all; attention focused on her before the midterms would have been a distraction. In all likelihood, Clinton will announce her intentions come the new year.

Still the delays have prompted speculation. Maybe she’s ill. Maybe she really doesn’t want it. Maybe she’s too tired or old for the fight.

Or maybe — polls notwithstanding — she’s not what Democrats want.

She’s out of step with the times, goes the argument. The Democratic Party is shifting left, there’s Clinton Fatigue, and her brand of safe, middle-of-the-road politics doesn’t enthuse the young adults, minorities, and disaffected that the party relies upon.

Enter Elizabeth Warren. Like Clinton’s delays, Warren’s demurrals madden some. “I’m not running for president,” she told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in a recent interview. He pushed back: “You’re putting that in the present tense, though. Are you never going to run?” She gave the same answer, “I am not running for president.”

“You’re not putting a ‘never’ on that,” Inskeep observed. Warren repeated herself again: “I am not running for president.”

Shermanesque, Warren is not.

And for good reason: She’s got a serious shot.

Democrats seem decidedly dispirited and enervated. Warren, on the other hand, is electric, feeding off of rising worries over bank bailouts, campaign finance, income inequality, and anger at police treatment of minorities. Primary contests tend to be dominated by true believers, exactly the kind of folks that Warren could energize. As Barack Obama was able to use his star power to overcome Clinton’s seeming inevitability in 2008, Warren’s newfound celebrity could do the same in 2016. And even if she didn’t win, she could — as de facto head of what seems an emerging left-wing, Tea Party-like faction — force the party to accommodate to her politics.

Meanwhile, yet another Bush looks set to run, thrilling establishment Republicans. The name, the connections, and the money could make Bush so formidable in the primaries that he wouldn’t need to pander to his party’s right wing. There would be no repeat of the shenanigans of 2012, with its anybody-but-Romney refrains and cast of crazy characters at each other’s’ throats, each at some point at the top of the polls.

Those hopes may be overstated. Yes, with Bush in, Romney’s out. (Romney’s been denying an interest in running anyway; the flame of his candidacy has been kept alive by those who are also cheering for Bush.) But the likes of senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and governors Rick Perry and Chris Christie won’t roll over easily. Bush will face a fight. Still it’s realistic to think he can consolidate the field early.

And then, of course, would come the general election. The true-reds and true-blues will vote as expected. But those in the middle — more pragmatic and less ideological — will look for someone with whom they can feel comfortable. At this juncture, the moderate former Florida governor seems to fit the bill.

Democrats should be worried. Even though Clinton now polls ahead of Bush in general election matchups, a different nominee — Warren or perhaps Clinton pushed to the extreme — would not have the same appeal to centrists. Liberal stalwarts may not care, thinking ideological purity should trump crass concerns about winning. But the upshot might be a third Bush in the White House.

This column was first published in The Boston Sunday Globe on December 21, 2014.

How goes the war on Christmas?

APRIL TO October is fighting season in Afghanistan — the other months are just too wretched. December is fighting season in the United States — the other months we have better things to do.

I write, of course, about the perennial war on Christmas. Halfway through the month, we’re all up on our high horses, forces clashing. How goes this year’s combat, you ask? Just dandy, thank you. Even better, while battlegrounds in previous years have often been in far-off places like Washington state, 2014’s skirmishes are right in our backyard.

We begin in Copley Square. Each year, Boston’s main library is decorated with large green wreaths with red ribbons. Let’s see: green and red — hey, those are the Christmas colors! And so Back Bay resident Esther Weissman takes umbrage, demanding not their removal — “The wreaths are lovely,” she says — but that the Boston Public Library display a menorah as well. The city refuses, arguing that wreaths have nothing at all to do with Christmas.

Journey now across the river to Cambridge, where the Peabody School has just banned Santa! The jolly old fellow used to make regular appearances at the public school’s holiday concert, but this year, apparently because of one complaint, he did not grace the stage. The school notes that Santa will still appear at a family sing-along on Dec. 23, but no matter: We can see the camel’s nose under this particular tent, can’t we? What’s next for Cambridge? Does it ban chimneys?

Could be. The University of Maine, for example, wants to ban candy canes. That was the upshot of an e-mail from school administrators that warned employees “not to decorate any public areas with Christmas or any other religious-themed decorations.” And what exactly are those religious decorations? They include “Xmas trees, wreaths, Xmas presents, candy canes, etc.” You’ll be relieved to know, however, that it is OK to have “plain trees without presents underneath, decorative lights, but not on trees [and] snow flakes.”

Sounds like we need a lawyer here. What exactly makes a candy cane a candy cane — its unique hook-like shape and red stripes? Would a brown-striped un-hooked piece of candy get a pass? And then there is the matter of decorative lights on trees: they’re allowed separately, but seemingly the conjoining of the two miraculously turns the profane into the sacred.

Ahh, I do love Christmas.

Granted, these do feel like “First World problems.” If wreaths, Santa, and candy canes are the things that trouble our thoughts, life must be pretty good. Then, too, the war looks downright petty when compared to the other preoccupation of this particular December: the wave of outrage over police killings in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island, N.Y., and elsewhere.

On the other hand, the war on Christmas fascinates because it genuinely engages a stew of real issues over a holiday that has multiple meanings and origins. It pushes us to think hard about how much role religion — or quasi-religion — should have in the public realm. The holiday coincides with the winter solstice, and to a degree it has co-opted the non-Christian symbols and feasts that — well before Christianity — marked the year’s shortest period of daylight. And, obviously, Christmas has become a critical driver of the national economy, a fact blasted by comedian Chris Rock in a recent “Saturday Night Live” monologue. “From what I’ve read, Jesus is the least materialistic person to ever roam the earth,” he observed. But nevertheless, “we turned his birthday into the most materialistic day of the year.” He’s likely right.

Wreaths have their origins in pagan rituals, Santa was never in Bethlehem, and putting lights on evergreens likely won’t sway anyone’s spiritual leanings. But the fact that we debate them is probably quite healthy. Since the founding of the nation we’ve wrestled with how to accommodate religion in a diverse country. For the most part, it’s something we’ve managed quite well, even if at times — such as determining the religiosity of a candy cane — it can seem, well, just a little silly.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on December 16, 2014.

Yes, the CIA torture report should have been released

The ponderous title, “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” begs for a nickname: the “torture report.” Released by the Senate Committee on Intelligence this week, it was originally written in 2012 and has caused an uproar, with critics and defenders firing rhetorical salvos at one another. It may be, as the Senate Committee minority report and CIA both argue, that the report is politically motivated, that it doesn’t tell the full story, and that the conclusions it reaches are unwarranted.

But it should definitely have been released.

It almost wasn’t. The voluminous study — more than 6,000 pages — focuses on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the methods the CIA used to try to extract information from those it thought had knowledge of that plot and others. Originally classified as top secret, some members of the Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, wanted it released. After several complicated rounds of negotiations, agreement was eventually reached by a majority of committee members: They would publish a redacted version of what amounted to a 525-page summary. The details would be omitted.

Others also resisted making the report public. Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly called Feinstein just before the documents were to be unveiled, begging she hold off. Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, warned, “Foreign leaders have approached the government and said, ‘You do this, this will cause violence and deaths.’ ” Former CIA head Michael Hayden similarly worried that, “this will be used by our enemies to motivate people to attack Americans in American facilities overseas.”

The arguments all boiled down to this: The report would be a big PR hit on the United States. It would be embarrassing. It would hurt the stature of the nation on the world’s eyes. It would inflame some to lash out.

All of that is probably true. For what the report contains is disturbing and explosive. It portrays the CIA — or at least many officers in the CIA — as callous, inhumane, and brutal. It argues that the torture tactics the agency deployed were largely ineffective. And it depicts an agency that was essentially rogue, unwilling to be held accountable to anyone, be they the White House, Congress, the Justice Department, or even the CIA’s own Office of Inspector General.

A reader can’t help but come away wondering how a nation that professes to such high ideals could have engaged in the activities it did — in the same way, quite frankly, that people reacted to stories about the priest-abuse scandals that enveloped the Catholic Church.

Bad news hurts, and the first impulse of many is to try to keep it hidden. Allow us to deal with it on our own, runs the argument. Don’t expose it to the light of day where it can damage reputations, undermine institutions, and provoke our adversaries.

When that argument carries the day, the sad consequence is that change rarely occurs. People make excuses, efforts at reform are half-hearted, and no one insists on a full accounting. Examples are easy to find. Until the crimes of many priests were exposed, the Catholic Church papered over the activities of abusers, sometimes ignoring them, occasionally moving them to new assignments, minimizing the damage, and never addressing the pain of victims. So too, until the revelations by Edward Snowden of widespread spying by the National Security Agency, there was little impetus for reining in the agency’s actions. But even those upset with what Snowden did, such as intelligence director James Clapper, had to admit that “It’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen.”

Public outcry and public pressure can be an extraordinary tonics. Indeed, that’s the reason we have laws at both the federal and state levels that require government meetings be open and records made public. If we have a right to know why a restaurant was granted a liquor license, shouldn’t we also have a right to know how the CIA conducts its activities?

In a democracy, the answer to that question has to be yes. The people govern. And the people cannot govern unless they know what is being done in their name.

This column was first published in The Boston Sunday Globe on December 14, 2014.

Rocket fuel for the soul

Did the lift-off of the Orion spacecraft catch you by surprise as much as it did me? We’re going to Mars? Since when?

Spaceflight has many detractors, yet a new NASA mission could prove a wonderful thing. Last Friday’s launch was un-manned, a test of a capsule that could be the first step in taking humans on trips of millions of miles and lasting multiple years. If things go well — and if funding is available — NASA hopes for a manned launch in 2021 and an exploratory mission in 2023. A flight to Mars, perhaps, might happen in the 2030s.

The movie “Interstellar” notwithstanding, I thought we had given up on this stuff. The last time humans went into deep space was two generations ago. Richard Nixon had just won his second term as president, and a month later, in December 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the last two humans to have walked on the moon.

Since then, well, we’ve just been too busy: impeachments, pardons, malaise, springtime in America, communism’s collapse, presidential nookie, war in Iraq, terrorism at home, another war in Iraq (and Afghanistan too!), and economic collapse. Really, isn’t that enough to occupy a superpower’s time? Yes, we did have the space shuttle system — 135 trips in all; two, sadly, ending in disaster — but that was piddling. Those launches were all low earth orbit, just a couple hundred miles above the planet’s surface. The moon, by contrast, is about 240,000 miles away.

It was all foolishness anyway, at least in the minds of some. “Is human spaceflight obsolete?” asked the late James Van Allen in 2004, and his answer was an unambiguous yes: “Risk is high, cost is enormous, science is insignificant.” Van Allen’s opinion mattered because he was a well-known space scientist; indeed, the Van Allen radiation belts, the mass of charged particles surrounding the earth, bear his name. Others jumped on the bandwagon. “If God wanted us to live in outer space, we wouldn’t have inner ears,” mocked Michael Lind, co-founder of the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. (By that logic, however, I guess God also didn’t want us to get into boats and cross the oceans.)

The anti-space arguments begin with the observation that the race to the moon was less about science than it was international one-upmanship: Our rockets are bigger, fly faster, and travel farther than yours. Others question the scientific gains. NASA cites a lengthy list of spinoffs from spending on space, including infrared ear thermometers, Tempur-Pedic, and freeze-dried ice cream. Some are less than impressive; then too, one wonders whether simply spending NASA’s budget on direct R&D might have produced even more wonders. Moreover, the spinoff argument doesn’t really justify the underlying activity. Wars too generate enormous spinoffs in areas such as artificial limbs and emergency wound care. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to fight them.

And even when we do go into space, the naysayers claim, humans are unnecessary. Robots can do the job better and more cheaply — and without risking human life. As did voicemail with receptionists, robots can now replace astronauts.

Why, then, was the successful launch of Orion so thrilling?

Because we need to believe in something greater than just ourselves.

The arguments against manned spaceflight all miss the point. Apollo may have had its origins in the Cold War, but the rocketeers aboard those craft didn’t think of themselves as soldiers or generators of spinoffs. They were pioneers, representatives of humanity’s soul.

For the last four decades we have all, literally and figuratively, been grounded. We squabble over land and wealth. Our best and brightest devote themselves to creating new dating apps. We measure achievement in money and utility. We have lost, it seems to me, the ineffable — our sense of purpose.

What does it mean to be a superpower? We’re no longer the world’s biggest economy; China has those bragging rights. We have the strongest military but as we’re all too aware, sometimes might doesn’t mean much. So what then should the United States do? It’s unlikely that humanity as a whole will collectively unite to explore space. Some nation needs to seize the initiative. Some nation needs to take the risk. Some nation needs to inspire.

Why shouldn’t that nation be us?

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on December 9, 2014.

Internet sales taxes and the changing retail world

It’s only fair that Internet retailers should collect sales tax, the same as brick-and-mortar stores. But fairness can take a backseat to politics and, despite a push this year to have Congress equalize the playing fields between the two, it’s a good bet that 2014 will pass with no new legislation in place. Traditional retailers will bemoan what in effect amounts to a government-imposed surcharge on their businesses. States and localities will bemoan the loss of revenue (by some estimates, as much as $23.3 billion annually). But even without legislation, the situation may yet resolve itself: Internet and conventional retailing are beginning to converge.

Long, long ago in Internet time — say five or ten years — the virtual and physical worlds of retailing were almost entirely separate, each seemingly in direct competition with each other. People would buy locally, or they would buy online. And as the Internet became ever more pervasive, it was clear who was losing the battle: the antiquated old guard. Cyber Monday stole sales from Black Friday. Internet bookstores undermined mega-retailers such as Barnes & Noble (which, ironically, had earlier undermined local bookstores). Shoppers — in what became known as “showrooming” — would visit stores to handle and try out products, only then to buy them online. And one thing that particularly stung was that — at least in states with a sales tax — brick-and-mortar stores were at an automatic price disadvantage. (In Massachusetts, for instance, at 6.25 percent.)

The reason is that long-established law says stores must have a physical presence in a state in order to be subject to sales tax. Thus, Internet retailers — like mail-order catalogs before them — are exempt (except, obviously, in their home states). For years, major retailers and state associations have pushed for a fix, and last year, with Senate passage of the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act, they seemed close. But the measure is now hung up in the House, as conservatives such as Ted Cruz denounce it as “a job-killing tax hike, plain and simple.” Given the GOP’s anti-tax fervor, it likely won’t move.

So why is it then, that when Massachusetts’ residents buy from the number one e-tailer of them all — Amazon.com — they have to pay sales tax?

Because Amazon has a physical presence in Massachusetts. And the reason it does speaks to how dramatically retailing is evolving.

Humans like instant gratification. When many of us buy something, we want it immediately, not in three or four days. That’s something brick-and-mortar stores can do easily. Online retailers cannot. Amazon knows this and so has been setting up warehouses around the country to let it deliver packages to customers more quickly. It’s also why the company has rolled out same-day delivery in a number of cities — including Boston. It’s a smart strategy, but those warehouses are enough to give Amazon a physical presence in a state, meaning it now has to collect sales tax, which it’s now doing in 23 states.

It’s a lesson for any e-tailer that wants to grow big (which, of course, is all of them): You need to get closer to your customers, meaning you eventually need some physical presence in a state. Indeed, some online retailers, such as JustFab, are now opening their own brick-and-mortar stores.

From the other direction, old-line retailers are now adopting online tactics. Chains such as Best Buy or Pier One, for example, allow customers to shop online or in a store. They can pick up items on-site or get them shipped. And they are increasingly finding that “showrooming” is taking a backseat to “webrooming,” with consumers conducting research on the Internet and then going to a physical store to make their purchases.

All of which leads to this prediction: Online and traditional retailing will eventually look like two sides of the same coin. Such hybrid stores will offer the best of both the virtual and real worlds, letting consumers touch and feel goods, meeting their desires for instant gratification and providing all of the convenience of online shopping. Real estate developers will doubtless cheer that malls are here to stay. Cheering also will be tax collectors who — even without federal law — should find it ever easier to levy the sales taxes they eagerly desire.

This column originally appeared in The Boston Sunday Globe on December 7, 2014.

Let’s ban tips

Waitstaff shouldn’t have to grovel for their wages.

Legal Seafoods, the iconic Boston restaurant chain that says it isn’t a chain, is caught up in lawsuits brought by waiters and bartenders. They’re upset that some of their tips were used to pay staffers who roll cutlery into napkins, a seeming violation of Massachusetts’s restrictive laws on tip pooling. But there’s an easy solution, one that would be better for waitstaff, an improvement for customers, and even good for the company’s bottom line: Ban tipping altogether. Even better, Legal can do this on its own — no government permission necessary — and perhaps the non-chain might even spark its own revolution, helping to get rid of an antiquated custom that never should have been adopted in the first place.

Ban tipping, you ask? But isn’t tipping necessary “to insure promptitude” (the phrase that’s the alleged origin of the word)?

Not at all. Perhaps that argument could be made if we tipped at the beginning of a meal, waving around, say, a couple of 20s and saying to a waiter, “This could be yours, if. . . ” But that’s not what we do. We tip when we pay the check. Leave 10 percent or 25 percent, it doesn’t matter. The meal is already over; the servers have already done their jobs. Perhaps if you’re a frequent customer and you always get the same waiter, a good tip from the last visit might get you extra attention the next time around. But waitstaff turn over frequently, most of us go to a variety of restaurants and, anyway, it’s hard to remember names, faces, and tipping patterns during a dinnertime rush.

In truth, waiters will treat you well for the same reason that every other non-tipped worker treats you well: That’s their job and they take pride in their work. If not, just leave a comment on Yelp.

Michael Lynn, professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, has made a career studying tipping. His research shows that the quality of service itself has far less influence on tip size than does, say, writing “Thank you” on checks. Tipping pushes waiters to upsell, often to customers’ detriment. It puts waitstaff in conflict with other workers. And waiters learn to stereotype customers, figuring out that some (e.g., well-dressed, white middle-age men) tip better than others (such as seniors). Tipping, in effect, encourages discrimination.

Tipping was invented in Europe, symbolic to many of the class differences between the moneyed and the servile. Egalitarian Americans resisted it. “Every tip given in the United States is a blow at our experiment in democracy,” wrote critic William Rufus Scott in 1916. “The custom announces to the world that at heart we are aristocratic.” Some states tried to ban it. Nevertheless, it caught on, even as Europeans largely abandoned tipping in favor of service compris — fixed service charges.

Indeed, tipping is enshrined in law. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 doesn’t apply to waitstaff; for them the minimum non-tip wage is just $2.13 (in Massachusetts it’s $2.63).

Scott’s argument from a century ago still resonates. Why treat differently those who serve us? Your enjoyment of a meal at a restaurant depends upon far more than your table-side waiter. Chefs and cooks, bussers, cleaning staff, management, and even those who roll napkins profoundly affect your experience. It is tradition, not logic, that keeps tipping in place. It’s a tradition that should be cast aside.

Some restaurants have. California restaurateur Jay Porter is perhaps the most vocal proponent of banning tipping. “I got rid of gratuities at my restaurant, and our service only got better,” he wrote last year. By adding an 18 percent service charge to each bill, he was able to increase waiter compensation to $25 an hour and pay kitchen workers more. With all employees under the same compensation structure, everyone now focused on customer satisfaction. Customers and staff were happier; Porter’s restaurant did better too.

The restaurant industry in general clings to the idea of tipping, seeing it as a way to reduce its costs. But the savings it thinks it obtains are largely an illusion. Waitstaff — almost alone among all workers — shouldn’t have to grovel for their wages. Treat them and pay them like the professionals they are.

This column was first published in The Boston Globe on December 2, 2014.