Tribunus Plebis

The President's remark about the Cambridge police department was justifiable

2009-07-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, who's reviewed every presidential press conference for over 30 years, called President Obama's remark last night about the Cambridge Police Department's arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates "refreshingly blunt." But many in the media have railed against the president for calling the arrest "stupid." Was it? The President obviously based his remark on the fact that the policeman in question must be presumed to have been acting within what he believed was departmental policy. So the president was entitled to presume that that authorized arresting someone who had not otherwise committed a crime but who was loudly criticizing the officer. Is that "stupid"? It is, unless you believe that free speech about police officers to their face should be illegal. I would submit to you that any policeman who believes it is appropriate to arrest someone who is criticizing them too harshly had better opt for a line of work in a more sensitive setting, like a hair salon or a toy store.

Let's not forget that conservatives have been brow-beating us for decades about the sacrosanct status of anyone who wears a uniform -- that they can do no wrong, are the shining emblems of our national honor, and all the rest. Of the great majority of police officers, this may well be true. But we should not forget the fact that police brutality is a worldwide reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_police_brutality. Policemen have the capacity to overreact, just as those they encounter.

I once dated a woman who had been a police officer in a major American city for ten years, until she resigned because of physical harassment from male officers. She once told me: "Do not ever argue with a male police officer. Half the men on any police force are in that line of work because they enjoy physical confrontations. They are just waiting to be challenged." Was it stupid for Gates to yell at the officer? Yes. Was it stupid to arrest him? Yes. The President was right.

Obama challenges the Iranian regime's repression

2009-06-15T20:21:00.000-07:00

Today President Obama quite forcefully though subtly challenged the Iranian regime, in his comments on events there. Instead of opining on whether he thought the elections were fraudulent, he focused on the issue of whether the regime's response to the protests was legitimate, suggesting that violence against peaceful protesters (his deft reframing of the issue of violence) was against a universal value, the right to dissent. He also said, "...there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed..." In other words, the Mousavi presidential campaign lifted the people's hope that their voices would count, and now they feel betrayed. Obama's test of a satisfactory course of events could therefore be defined this way, as if it were a statement to the regime: If what you do from now on sharpens that sense of betrayal, you will lose your people's trust and thus your legitimacy.

How could another Ahmadinejad anointment be anything but another betrayal? Every one of us with access to blogs or the media -- and especially to Iranian bloggers -- should keep repeating Obama's equation and perhaps lend it more specific political content, because the part of the regime not glued to Ahmadinejad needs to see that they have only one way to regain the people's trust, and that's to order a re-vote.

Right now the movement in the streets is based mainly on political rage -- it doesn't have a concrete goal. If the goal were a Guardian Council order for a re-vote, it would paint the regime into a corner -- courtesy of Obama's equation.

Cheney Unhinged

2009-05-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Self-righteousness is necessarily facilitated in intelligent people by a lack of self-awareness: The person who proudly and dogmatically claims he is right about a matter that otherwise rouses a respectable debate is usually a person who doesn't notice his own pride and dogmatism. So it was with former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech today, exonerating himself and his late administration (which in George W. Bush's present silence seems as if it belonged chiefly to Cheney) of any misdeeds in prosecuting their war on terrorists. He maligned the motives and mischaracterized the statements of Democrats, damned President Obama with faint praise when he wasn't implying that Obama is naive, ridiculed the president (without naming him) for using "euphemisms" in referring to the war on terror -- moments after the president said that it was indeed a war -- and then turned around and kept using the Republicans' insistent euphemism about torture: "enhanced interrogation techniques" (which congressional Republicans are now shortening to "EIT's", not even wanting to use that phrase).

While in the middle of a speech half-devoted to unctuous and sarcastic dismissal of those who disagree with him, and while denouncing unnamed individuals for "phony moralizing" about torture, Cheney's seeming inability to notice the ironies in his own language led him to say this: President Obama's decision "to completely rule out enhanced interrogation techniques...is recklessness cloaked in righteousness." To paraphrase one of the wisest people who ever lived, he who cannot see the stick in his own eye tends to complain loudly about the mote in someone else's.

Apart from condemning the new Administration's refusal to use "enhanced interrogation techniques", the other half of Cheney's speech dredged up the dread of further terrorist catastrophe that was widespread after 9/11 and warned of even worse future attacks which he implied were more likely because of President Obama's policies. This was the strategy of his speech: Recreate fear of an external enemy which he accused the present administration of taking lightly, in part to distract his listeners from the self-inflicted and widely acknowledged disasters of his own administration. Cheney even had the temerity to suggest that having a public debate about torture would exhibit "weakness and opportunity" to terrorists thinking of attacking again. In other words, free democratic discussion must be stopped, because it might get us killed. This is a man whose sensibility seems so drenched in fear of our enemies that he believes it justifies every bloody method wreaked upon them. It is a philosophy that sacrifices the principles he professes to defend in order, supposedly, to protect them. As one American military officer famously said in Vietnam, "We destroyed the village in order to save it."

But the macabre heart of Cheney's speech was this: "You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States...When just a single clue that goes unlearned…one lead that goes unpursued…can bring on catastrophe -- it's no time for splitting differences. " In other words: Obama won't torture, so he will cause a nuclear attack on an American city. This speech must therefore be recognized for what it is: the single most demagogic political attack on an American president, by another American political leader, in living memory. That its central charge was insinuated and not directly stated does not dilute its malice. Cheney did not have the courage frontally to accuse the president of what he argued would be the consequences of the president's actions. But cowardice is often found in those who predicate their arguments on fear and loathing.

The mainstream news media seem oblivious to these back alley methods of Dick Cheney's political rhetoric, so mesmerized do they appear to be by his buttoned-down corporate style. But make no mistake about it: The former vice president realizes that the new president is well along in forging an entirely different public consensus about how the United States should conduct itself in the world. It isn't clear if the fear-ridden, hostility-feeding language which Cheney deploys arises from his own need for self-justification, or whether it may be part of a deliberate strategy by him and his acolytes in the conservative movement to try to reignite the recriminations and hostilities that surged back and forth through our political debates when he was in office. But whatever the reason, Cheney's belligerent speech today raises the stakes for those who would prefer to have America steered by the rationality and composure of President Obama's approach to the risks and threats facing the United States. The bile aimed at Barack Obama by Dick Cheney, and the rancor against him that it may further stir on the right, should make clear to all those who prefer a stable new course for our country that the president deserves our support as never before. We have to make the choice we made last November again, and again -- because those who lost have not conceded.

More on Obama's decision-making on torture issues...

2009-05-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is not a devious man. The chief reason he gave for changing his mind and declining to release the 29 photos showing American soldiers torturing Afghans and Iraqis was that military commanders, particularly in Afghanistan, asked him not to do so, because they felt it would heighten the risk of violence to their soldiers serving there. Because the Republicans had trashed Obama six ways to Sunday about his lack of national security experience for two solid years during the presidential campaign, with McCain practically accusing him of being an unrealistic peacenik, it was inevitable that he would have to build a trusting relationship with senior military commanders once he took office. So far he's done that skillfully. Declining to release photos now which the White House fully expects to come out later anyway is a tactical concession to these commanders, a sign of his respect for their judgment. And it's also a way to maintain distance between the White House and the developing four-alarm media circus about Cheney and his torture-defending road show, which could otherwise engulf the Obama presidency at this point if the president became a central actor in determining precisely what will happen in adducing evidence that could lead to meaningful legal actions against Bush officials.

The political moment for firmly establishing this presidency as likely to be formidable and successful is still fragile. A lot of political insiders are extremely impressed with how Obama is handling himself, and the public seems to agree. But the Washington press corps and the broadcast media are another matter. They're mischaracterizing what he is doing and saying on a daily basis, in their nightly cartoon strip of our politics. He has to maintain as much distance from that level of coverage as possible. The torture debate has already levitated away from the factual record and become an inside-the-Beltway slanging match. The only way to rescue it is for there to be patient, exhaustive congressional hearings, which Pat Leahy and others are organizing as we speak. If Obama were to instruct DOJ to start investigations, then the media would depict Obama as Inspector Javert pursuing the accursed Cheney, and the public would believe that Obama had been willingly caught up in another Washington political obsession rather than doing the job he was elected to do. The White House staying out of this debate as much as possible actually helps the debate about Bush's torture practices to be less political and more about real evidence.

In American history no president or vice president immediately after the completion of his term has ever been the subject of investigations -- initiated by the new administration -- for criminal violations. Until substantial evidence of that wrong-doing is evident to the public, any initiative by Obama for such investigations would set off a political firestorm not seen since Watergate. Let the evidence accumulate. Let the public come gradually to a judgment. Sometimes it's right for presidents to follow public opinion instead of lead it, particularly if collateral damage to the president's other priorities -- in the form of diminished news coverage and poisoning the political atmosphere -- can thereby be avoided. Obama was not elected to be an avenging angel imposing retribution on the political leaaders he supplanted. He was elected to save the economy, restore America's positive influence in the world, and change -- not reinforce -- our delirious political culture.

Why Obama didn't order release of the "torture photos"

2009-05-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

Every elected democratic leader in history has required the respect and loyalty of the senior combat commanders of his military, especially if there are active military conflicts which he has to manage. Afghanistan may be in peril of slipping back into chaos or control by the Taliban, thanks to Bush's neglect of that conflict and the resources consumed by his war in Iraq. That could lead to the reconstitution of a terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and vastly strengthen the Taliban position in Pakistan, where nuclear weapons are stored. That would not only defeat President Obama in '12, it would return the neo-con gang to power in Washington.

Barack Obama campaigned on the promise of finishing the job in Afghanistan, i.e. stabilizing the country to secure it against repossession of any of its territory by transnational terrorists. If you liked any of Obama's promises, you cannot fault him for wanting to make good on all of them. Two senior U.S. commanders responsible for Afghanistan asked Obama not to release the photos of U.S. soldiers torturing Afghan prisoners, because they were afraid that would endanger American soldiers -- by stimulating new acts of terrorism or other violence against them. It is not serious to believe that any president would disregard such a request.

The president knows that the torture photos are likely to be released eventually anyway. Not releasing them now does not give Dick Cheney or any Bush official any measure of protection against whatever sanctions can be taken against them by foreign or U.S. prosecutors, or further exposure of their crimes by congressional investigators. But by removing himself further from the causal sequence that leads to those hearings and investigations, he denies the news media any ability to claim that he is using his presidency to persecute his predecessor's -- a claim that the media as well as the Republicans would be sure to make. To have a successful or even historic presidency, he has to use his window of peak political power to begin to solve the central problems felt by the majority who elected him, and that means the economy, health care, and the other long-neglected public needs that jeopardize this country's ability not only to recover from this serious recession but to compete in a world changing faster than Bill Clinton can talk.

The choice that President Obama faced was not complex: Successful political leaders minimize political risks in order to keep dry the powder of their influence over all the other political actors in government who have to be herded toward the changes he wants to make. They also have to make sure that even non-political actors in the system, such as influential military leaders (or the heads of independent regulatory agencies, or even Supreme Court justices), believe that he respects their professional judgment -- or else they will be trashing his, behind his back. To release these photos over the objection of military commanders would have made more difficult the president's task of gaining more of their confidence for tougher decisions ahead where he may have to turn down their advice.

Torture is a Crime, Not a "Daring Proposal"

2009-05-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, America's most prestigious private organization commonly believed to represent the foerign policy establishment, has waded into the torture debate. He says:

The issue is whether those who argued that such techniques were not illegal -- and therefore should be available -- ought to be tried. They should not. To begin with, prosecution of Justice Department officials would have a chilling effect on future U.S. government officials. Few would be brave or foolhardy enough to put forward daring proposals that one day could be judged illegal. Putting things down in writing is a useful intellectual exercise that is also central to good decision-making. With the threat of prosecution, serious memos on controversial matters will increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. Prosecution would also set a terrible precedent. One would have thought today's politics sufficiently partisan and poisonous without adding legal threats to the mix. Even knowing this was a possibility would discourage people from entering government in the first place.

This sounds reasonable but is in fact outrageous. It has become clear that Bush Administration political appointees in the Department of Justice and in the White House prepared, endorsed and accepted policy recommendations that authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" that are now regarded as internationally criminal prosecutable torture by a preponderant number of legal authorities and observers in the U.S. as well as in the governments of our allies. The hair-splitting and rhetorical convolutions in which the DOJ Bush lawyers engaged, as shown by publicly disclosed documents, suggest that they were aware of the potential that violations of law could be involved. For Mr. Haass to describe the endorsement and recommendation of potentially illegal acts as "a useful intellectual exercise that is...central to good decision-making" would be an ironic though understandable statement if the government were an authoritarian regime, but not if the government is democratic and bases its laws on the enforceability of human rights guaranteed by its own Constitution.

This has nothing to do with "partisan and poisonous politics." It has to do with whether the United States will or will not respect the rule of law and the international conventions it has endorsed which condemn torture. This is not an issue which can be decided as a matter of what is convenient for the careers of policy advisors. It is a question of fundamental values. Mr. Haass seems to have had difficulty noticing that.

The Republican Party: Defenders of Torture

2009-04-22T22:41:00.000-07:00

Because the Republicans are now explicitly defending torture under Bush and Cheney (while using the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques"), since it allegedly succeeded in getting information useful in stopping terrorist attacks (which of course cannot be disclosed), they are implicitly asserting that the ends justify the means. But if the same people who choose the means also define the ultimate ends (i.e. win a nebulous and perpetual "war on terror"), then how does even that justification become an enforceable standard? It's just another way of saying that if they have power, the Republicans will do anything to achieve what they have decided is in the national interest. This is a road to the same authoritarianism that they accuse, rightly or wrongly, Iran and Venezuela of practicing. So, they abandon morality in public life even as they demand that we practice their version of it in our private lives (e.g. stop being gay, practice abstinence), and they commit the rankest hypocrisy by asking for state power to torture you if you're suspected of being a terrorist, even as, ridiculously, they accuse President Obama --- who refuses to torture -- of being a dictator. This is a political party in an advanced stage of serious alienation from any rational standards of consistency, logic or public ethics. It has also abandoned respect for the rule of law and rendered itself unfit for national power so long as its present leaders and thinkers would set the agenda.

Cheney is contemptible

2009-04-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

Comment on "Cheney Slams Obama Again, Calls Overseas Trips 'Disturing'", on The Huffington Post -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/cheney-slams-obama-again_n_189268.html

Watch him on television and the first thing you notice about Dick Cheney is his corporate slickness, oozing a calm and reasonable manner, as if he were still CEO of Halliburton. But that masks a deep-seated, unreconstructed reactionary temperament. What first marked him out as someone who was willing to subordinate globally accepted standards of decency and human rights to his insistence on American hostility to perceived enemies everywhere was his vote in 1986 as a member of Congress against a resolution calling for the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the leader then of the movement that eventually liberated South Africa from the racist, fascist grip of the apartheid regime, which had subordinated and brutalized its black population for a century. At the time, the Reagan Administration believed that Mandela’s movement was dominated by communists, a line of propaganda peddled by the Administration’s white friends in Pretoria. So it is no surprise now that Cheney is savaging Barack Obama, another man with an African name who, like Mandela, understands the real meaning of human rights and, unlike Cheney, comprehends the higher aspirations of the world's peoples. Dick Cheney helped plunge America into infamy with his advocacy of torture and helped persuade George W. Bush to waste $2 trillion on an unnecessary war in Iraq that killed or injured over 31,000 Americans and killed over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. He is beneath political contempt. He is not fit to shine Barack Obama's shoes.

Why Republicans Still Oppose Seating Al Franken

2009-04-15T20:51:00.000-07:00

On his blog on the Think Progress web site yesterday, Matt Yglesias was trying to understand how and why the Republican Party is still pouring energy into former Senator Norm Coleman's futile litigation to prevent his Democratic opponent Al Franken from being seated in the U.S. Senate, in the wake of a Minnesota court's declaration that Franken won the election. Yglesias marveled at “the level of party discipline that the Republicans have been able to muster in 2009″ which he calls “really impressive.”

But that praise is misplaced, when you consider two underlying facts. First, there is no coherent substantive vision of what the Republican Party stands for, in the wake of their removal from national power last November. In the absence of substance, disputing process (e.g. a close election) is a substitute for thinking. It’s also an unconscious way of refighting 2008 and trying to get a different result. Second, the extremist sloganeering by broadcast bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck has frightened into silence virtually all rational thinkers in the Republican elite, so the only outlet for the party's energy is trying to obstruct Democrats’ consolidation of power and their recasting of the purposes of government, through legislative or legal stunts as in Minnesota or absurdly ascribing socialist motives to a president whose ideology is quite unfrightening. Meanwhile puerile projects like the Fox News-promoted "tea-bagging" protests further define the president's opponents as grasping at straws while pleading for the world to please stop believing him.

It is one thing to muster party unity in the cause of constructive change. It is quite another to apply it to obstruction. The latter is only going to deepen the Republican Party’s association with negative, disruptive news. Until rational thinkers and speakers who have constructive ideas related to real public needs emerge among Republicans, they and their antics will be merely sound and fury, transfixing broadcast reporters and bloggers but very few other Americans outside their dogmatic base.

It's about Obama, not Geithner...

2009-03-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

We tend to be over-focused in our politics on publicly visible policy-executing personnel rather than the philosophy and intelligence guiding those people, which hopefully reside in the decisionmaker to whom they report. In the case of Timothy Geithner, that's Barack Obama. The media and the right-wing don't give two cents about Geithner. It's Obama they've been after -- the right-wing to destroy him politically, and the mainstream media to chronicle the carnage and pick over the carcass. It's no accident that a media star like Arianna Huffington joined other on-screen avatars of liberal dogmatism in wanting to heave Geithner over the side, once the vultures appeared to be circling him. Better to burnish their reputations for leading the pack than having tediously to defend the president's political flank.

But once Geithner's plan was actually unveiled, the stock market promptly went up like a rocket. So does that mean Wall Street suddenly loves Obama, as liberals like Arianna were deserting his Treasury chief? No, and here's why: Stock traders -- who aren't exactly political geniuses -- had been in a state of nervous anxiety about Geithner's plan for weeks, fanned by negative media and Republican distortions. On Monday they read the plan, realized it had a chance of working, and were deliriously relieved (Rush Limbaugh may want a depression, but the business community really doesn't). Here's what Steve Pearlstein, an often contrarian and independently thinking financial columnist for The Washington Post had to say, in part: (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/23/AR200903...)

...the plan looks to me like it has a good chance of bringing significant amounts of private capital back into the financial system and relieving banks of some of their worst assets. On first blush, the Geithner plan looks rather complicated, but its general design is rather simple:

The government will go in as partner with private investors in newly created investment vehicles that will compete to buy up loans and securities backed by loans that banks want to sell in order to strengthen their balance sheets. As with most investment funds, this public and private equity or risk capital will be supplemented with additional funds that will be borrowed from Treasury, the Federal Reserve or from private investors who will receive a government guarantee that their loan will be repaid.

If the investments wind up making money, the profits will be split with the government in the same proportion as the equity that was put in. If the funds lose money, the initial losses -- roughly the first 15 cents on the dollar -- will be borne in the same proportion by the government and the private investors. Any losses beyond that will be borne by the government.

In the meantime, the banks will be able to strengthen their balance sheets in ways that will allow them to attract new private capital from investors who no longer will worry about the bad loans on the banks' books. They will also have the cash from the asset sales with which to make new loans...

The blogosphere was full of [Paul] Krugman-like criticism of the Geithner plan yesterday, with some complaining that it would be a windfall for hedge funds and other private investors and others arguing that it would fail to attract private capital. It's hard to see how both could be true...

Krugman's assumption...is that the current, depressed market prices for loans is the correct price, from which he jumps to the conclusion that all big banks are insolvent and need to be nationalized. But even a casual observer can see that these markets are broken not simply because many loans are bad, but because of a lack of investment financing. It is the interaction of the two problems -- in econospeak, solvency and liquidity -- that has caused the market to break down and prices to collapse.

As for the nationalization mantra, it's hard to see what that would accomplish. If the government were to take them over and assure depositors and creditors they would be repaid in full -- which is what you need to do to avoid a collapse of the financial system -- then there is little effective difference from a plan designed to rid banks of their bad assets. Nationalization doesn't make the bad loans go away -- it simply moves them from the banks to the government, with the government on the hook for any additional losses.

Pearlstein is paying attention to the substance of what the Obama Administration is going to do, not the theatrics of the surrounding political culture. From both the right and the left, most of the denizens and purveyors of that culture are assaulting Obama's plans and programs because they don't mirror their ideological preferences or they simply want him to fail politically. Unlike Bill Clinton, who habitually divided Solomon's baby and split the differences between his supporters and his opponents in order to cut deals he could celebrate as political achievements (politics being his arena), Obama is engaged in the art of what's politically possible without sacrificing the substantive core of what's needed to resolve the crisis at hand, in order to pave the road to change (the real world being his arena).

Obama is not trying to pull the rabbit of utopia out of the hat of economic disaster. He knows that that would be a bridge too far. Rather he's trying to quell that disaster so that political space remains in which to accomplish what he promised to do in his campaign -- to take the country in a substantially new direction in its economic conduct, its social fairness, its role in the world and, yes, its political culture.

The Geithner Plan and the Krugman Backlash

2009-03-23T20:31:00.000-07:00

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman appears to have begun his own personal depression on the news of Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan to separate threatened banks from their nonperforming ("toxic") assets. But in attacking the Obama Administration for collaborating with the banks in order to prevent their implosion, he's made one misleading statement: "...the whole point about toxic waste is that nobody knows what it’s worth." The reality is that that is true only when such assets are sitting inert in a financially threatened bank's portfolio of assets. The only way that a financial asset's value can be determined is through a market, in which potential buyers bid the price up or down. All other methods -- such as a Nobel laureate speculating about its value -- are arbitrary.

Let's think this through: The Geithner plan assumes that lots of investors will buy nonperforming mortgage-related assets if they are stripped from banks and marketed via a public fund. Why? Not only because the government is assuming a good deal of the risk, but also because the underlying mortgages represent ownership of houses that will sell to buyers who can service those mortgages at a certain price, which is not zero (remember that wage-earners, who still comprise more than 90% of employable Americans, have regular income and need housing). If you can't service any longer your mortgage of $200,000 but could service a mortgage of $150,000, and the location of the asset in a fragile bank prevents the asset from finding a new investor, then a newspaper columnist's gloomiest estimate of its market value -- say, $100,000 -- might make it seem very toxic. But we know that such an estimate of that one asset is undervalued, because a $150,000 mortgage can be serviced. Until the asset, representing the nonperforming loan, is priced in a market, its true financial value can never be ascertained. That's the whole point of Geithner's approach: Let the only reliable mechanism (in our economic system) for determining the value of anything, a viable market, do that in the case of these assets.

When the Mellon Bank was on the brink of collapse in the late 1980s, an investment house created a "bad bank" into which Mellon's nonperforming assets were placed. This restored Mellon to solvency, and it became a healthy credit-issuing institution again -- and Pittsburgh heaved a sigh of relief. The "bad bank" eventually sold all of the bad loans, and very little money was lost. The point of doing this was to enable Mellon to do what it was supposed to do: serve the community as a source of credit. The latter is what many banks today cannot readily do because of uncertainty about the weight of these "toxic" assets on the banks' viability. The complexity of the Geithner plan is a function of the sheer scale of the general financial crisis today, as well as the administration's decision to acquire the cooperation of the financial industry instead of terrifying it with the prospect of broad nationalizations and prolonged Washington decision-making about its future.

At the present moment we may not like bankers all that much, because of their past egregious risk-taking, but we are having a historic crisis of confidence in our economic system which is unfolding too quickly for the president and the Congress to invent a whole new financial system, just because a lot of us are outraged and want to punish the bankers, or because some columnists don't want the government to do anything remotely similar to what the Bush Administration might have done. Obama picked Geithner to be Treasury Secretary because he knew he had an excellent working knowledge of the present financial system. Geithner's plan is going to be implemented, because congressional approval isn't necessary. Denunciations of the plan without constructive suggestions about how to improve it will accomplish nothing except fray public confidence in Obama's decision-making. That's the objective of the Republicans and right-wing populists, reinforced by the fear-mongering of most of the broadcast media (and now further abetted by populists on the left). If this onslaught succeeds in lowering Obama's poll numbers sufficiently, the general media may then pronounce Obama a failure, and that could put at risk most everything else that this new president is trying to do.

Paul Krugman has been a trenchant critic of the unexamined love for unbridled capitalism exhibited by the Bush Administration. But whether anyone likes it or not, we still have a capitalist economy, and its abuses have put at risk our collective economic future. Until the immediate effects of those abuses are flushed out of the system, the present toxicity of our national politics offers no prudent context for considering a more fundamental restructuring of the system. Populists picketing financial traders' mansions, gyrating congressmen predicting economic armageddon, and even fervent columnists with cosmic wisdom are not necessarily the best sources of guidance for either that restructuring or the hydraulics of the flushing that's necessary. There's a cooler cat in the White House, and we should listen to and not just lecture him.

Why the media keep getting it wrong about Obama...

2009-03-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Field, 3/21-/09:

On Politico today there was a good example of how the media systematically "misunderestimate" Barack Obama: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20254.html This article piles on the supposed evidence of how President Obama is allegedly overexposed, focusing on the venues of his appearances, his "branding" or his style -- while entirely missing the cumulative content of what he is communicating. One consultant was quoted as being skeptical about Obama "betting the success of his policies so heavily on the strength of his personality," as if the President was merely engaged in a series of personal performances. Just as they did throughout 2008 during the campaign, when the political press corps and their media-consultant talking heads continually criticized Obama for supposedly too-theatrical mass rallies and repetitive, boring town-hall meetings, they are paying far too much attention to the external aspects of his appearances and virtually no attention to what he is actually saying. The public doesn't merely see a presidential candidate or a president, it also listens to what's being said. On the Jay Leno show last night, Obama gave affable, concise, easily understandable but quite substantive answers to Leno's surprisingly numerous questions about the financial and economic problems facing the country. This was 20 minutes of pure, clear content, unfiltered by the disputatious egos and tendentious attitudes of White House pool reporters and political pundits, and it reached 15 million households. It was brilliant political television. We are dealing with an entirely new kind of president, for a new, far more serious time in our nation's life. The people get it. The media mavens don't.

Hillary Clinton's approach to human rights in China

2009-03-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn't precede or follow her recent visit in Beijing by lambasting the Chinese government for their human rights violations, she was harshly criticized by some American human rights advocates, both progressive and conservative. They overlooked her candid explanation that there were ways of assisting rights and democracy apart from a visiting dignitary denouncing the offending government. Indeed, a few days later, the State Department's annual report on human rights was sharply critical of China, which reacted by bitterly denouncing the U.S. Nevertheless the web site of one rights advocacy group focused on China harshly criticized Mrs. Clinton on its web site: “She chose what makes us animal over what makes us human. What good can come of filling our bellies at the expense of starving our spirit? Where does history tell us that our fortunes will improve by acquiescing to tyranny?” Mrs. Clinton hardly acquiesced to tyranny. This was a hyperbolic statement that probably says more about the ideological frame or emotional reaction of who it was coming from (and it wasn't that smart politically, as a way to persuade the Administration to be more vigilant about human rights).

Since the Tibet crackdown, few if any observers of China have been under any illusions about the authoritarian, repressive character of its government. A routine verbal swipe by Hillary Clinton would have done precisely nothing to make Beijing's rulers think twice about their contempt for the political rights of those they govern. But the world is in the middle of several overlapping crises: a slow-motion but still-unfolding financial panic, a serious nose-dive in production and employment in many nations, the possibly imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran (as well as the possible use of military force by Israel to forestall it), and turmoil in Pakistan. The Chinese can play a substantial, favorable role in global diplomacy on all of these four problems -- it would be in their interest. And, yes, we need them to buy plenty of Treasury securities so that our domestic, recession-fighting stimulus can be financed. These are all very serious matters. In the long term, there is nothing inconsistent with subdued official U.S. rhetoric about human rights at various moments and quietly increased U.S. assistance to democratic and rights activists around the world who are the ones whose action will really determine whether rights and democracy eventually come to countries like China. Hillary couldn't have liberated China on her first trip there, and she won't be the one who does it anyway.

The President's plan is not a "gamble"...

2009-03-01T21:56:00.000-08:00

The British writer Godfrey Hodgson recently wrote on openDemocracy.net that there was a "reality gap" between President Obama's plans to resolve America's economic crisis and the resistance he faces, implying that the president's "rhetorical tools" might not be up to the task and that the "political obstacles" are ferocious (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/barack-obamas-reality-gap). Another way of putting this, to use a British reference, is that Hodgson sees congressional foxes in the way of a presidential hedgehog. The ancient Greek reference -- "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" (revived for modern consideration by Sir Isaiah Berlin) -- is apt. The one big thing that Obama knows is that the American public has decisively rejected not only the specific policies of the previous failed Republican administration, but also Washington's culture of special interests and obstruction of the national interest, which have immobilized the political system for most of the last two generations. By trying to obstruct Obama's proposals, his Republican opponents are merely re-enacting the despised failed narrative. So the president has enormous political wind in his sails, which is predicated on far more than his "rhetorical tools" or the public's yearning that we get through the present economic crisis with the American way of life intact. Obama's proposals are not, as the pundits are now wrongly calling them, a big political gamble, because he realizes that unless his proposals are seen by the people as proportionate to their manifold discontent, their support will quickly wane. He is not gambling on a political opportunity. He is embracing a political necessity. The stakes are no higher for him than they are for his country. The people recognize that the president understands their demand for bold action. That is the reason that he has their respect and, most probably, their patience.

The conservative obsession with the size of government

2009-02-25T06:44:00.000-08:00

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder remarked about President Obama's speech last night before a joint session of Congress that it read "as a President justifying his plans to expand government." In other words, a speech about the nation's economic crisis was not really about that, it was about some kind of liberal agenda to expand government. Only an ideologically blinkered conservative would have that interpretation, because only conservatives are existentially obsessed with the size of government. They have that obsession because they have an absolutist definition of individual freedom as always engaged in a zero-sum game with government, whether or not that government is based on the consent of the people. Equally hostile to the freely elected government in Washington or authoritarian-minded rulers in Iran or Russia, American conservatives are essentially anti-democratic. So they reject any innovative usage of government even in their very own democracy. And that's why they don't comprehend Obama. He's beyond a zero-sum view of freedom-or-government, because he realizes that if the people he democratically represents want him to exercise vigorous public leadership to solve public problems, he had better do that, or else he'll simply be using his paycheck to do his own bloviating -- which is the modern Republican equivalent of governing. Leading America in 2009 is not about parsing the size of government. It's about saving the economic system that created the recent boom in the first place -- something that Republicans, amazingly, don't seem to have any ideas about -- re-establishing a system of justice based on the rule of law rather than the whim of a president, and restoring a proper humility to the use of American power elsewhere in the world, so that national security is not reliant solely on military force. Republicans have no ideas about how to do those things, either. They are flat on their political backs. And we know who is putting fresh vitality back into national leadership. It ain't Bobby Jindal.

In defense of Cass Sunstein

2009-01-18T15:32:00.000-08:00

Cass Sunstein, a lawyer and former professor at The University of Chicago Law School, has been appointed by his friend Barack Obama to be the new director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a heretofore obscure job that Sunstein, one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, will no doubt make into a think tank influencing the full regulatory sweep of the Obama Administration. In a prolific career, Sunstein has ranged far beyond the law, writing books on FDR's fostering of new economic rights, the influence digital technology is having on democracy, and the roots of radical extremism. At the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago in 2007, I heard Sunstein give a brilliant talk on the dynamics of group polarization (the kind of thing sociologists would study) and its role in creating terrorists. Sunstein's mind is supple and his writing is very accessible, two traits that the new president no doubt finds appealing.

On Hullabaloo yesterday (one of the major political blogs on the left, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/), digby tore into Sunstein after confessing that she knew little about his work. Mischaracterizing it based on comments from other bloggers, she punished him for, among other things, suggesting that regulatory control should shift to the extent possible from coercive measures to incentives, and claimed that this meant it might as well be coming from the usual free market-worshipping conservative playbook. So much for trying to ascertain where a writer or thinker is actually situated along a spectrum of views from left to right (to the extent that that spectrum is still descriptively useful). For digby, if Sunstein is willing to think about modifying traditional regulatory schemes in order to coax markets toward outcomes consistent with national policy, rather than simply order them to comply, it means he's a right-winger in disguise. Apparently she's not willing to let Obama's people explore any fresh policy alternatives if they are not branded and vetted as issuing from the playbook on the other side of the ideological spectrum, which is presumably the one that worships command economies and state dictation of commercial life.

For another view of Cass Sunstein, it's useful to consider his ideas about political extremism in the context of the search -- in which Western foreign affairs ministries and law enforcement agencies are engaged -- for new long-term policies that might help curb terrorism, inasmuch as existing policies, on which enormous sums have been spent in recent years and which have required vast deployment of military forces, don't seem to have discouraged terrorist networks from replenishing their ranks. Sunstein has written a bracing book ("Going to Extremes") on one dimension of the subject: how radical extremism is incubated. Bringing behavioral psychology and political sociology to his analysis, Sunstein offers crucial support to the fundamental progressive understanding that radical groups hijack legitimate political grievances and that unless those who have those grievances see that extreme violence is likely to hurt and not help their causes, and that there are alternative ways to fight for their rights, there will continue to be a market for that violence. Clearly, Sunstein is a thinker so much more adept than most of the so-called conservative intellectuals that his appointment signifies that Obama wants not only to govern differently, he wants to extinguish the hold of the conservative paradigm on the political class.

Admittedly, Sunstein is not a predictable, programmatically minded social democrat, so if you deplore those who believe that effective government need not be "bigger government" -- which is to say, if you agree with conservatives that the debate about government should be about its size rather than its efficacy -- you won't be able to see how useful Sunstein's work is, in the struggle to rebuild a national consensus about the importance of public action, public resources, public regulation and public well-being. No new president, merely by being elected, can suddenly announce a new political order that everyone will happily embrace. Part of creating a new order involves changing the way people think. And that requires dismantling the default beliefs of conservatives, which have become the default beliefs of the political class. Conservatives have been "drugging the public mind" (a great phrase of Lincoln's, about Southern slave-holders' defense of states' rights) for two generations now. Sunstein has been a great ally in undermining the premises of their ideas.

It's not time "to scream bloody murder"...

2009-01-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

Many vocal progressive bloggers seem to believe that Barack Obama is revealing himself -- by his appointments and his willingness to evaluate entitlement programs -- to be a closet conservative. One commenter on a major blog today insisted that "it's time to scream bloody murder" about Obama. The tendency of progressives to do this -- indeed, the habit of doing it, so well-developed (and well-motivated) during the Bush years -- is self-marginalizing when it comes to influencing the thinking of independent and not especially partisan voters whose support gave Obama such a decisive, mandate-creating majority last November. Obama obviously intends to reinforce and expand that mandate, and he's succeeding in doing so. Government is not merely a policymaking picnic, followed by spending programs. A president can't get change out of a democracy without developing and sustaining reliable popular support that will help him or her command the heights of governing, so that the elaborate, creaky, balky functioning of government -- legislative as well as executive -- can be pushed decisively to produce change. And again, that's obviously Obama's strategy. "Screaming bloody murder" at Obama will not only be regarded as irrelevant by anyone who does not already want to hyperventilate, it will lessen and not amplify the screamers' influence on actual events. Screaming at politicians may make the screamers feel better, but it will accomplish absolutely nothing. If you want to influence Obama, ignore him -- and persuade the kind of people who voted for him that he hasn't yet embraced the kind of change they voted for.

Claims of Obama's abandonment of his core beliefs are premature...

2009-01-15T19:25:00.001-08:00

Today in his nationally syndicated column, E.J. Dionne claimed that Barack Obama is avoiding ideological differences and went on to claim that "ideological differences in the United States are rather small." Both of these claims are nonsense. Most Democrats in Congress as well as in the country have disagreed radically during the Bush years with most Republicans about the war in Iraq (Democrats believing that wars should not be used to rearrange other parts of the world politically); climate change (it's real, and not, as many Republicans insist, a myth); regulation of markets (on which Democrats have lately been proved right); and civil liberties (if they're sacrificed for security, we will cease to be the nation we thought we were). These are matters of profound ideological difference, and Democrats' beliefs imply one common belief: In a democracy, the instrument of the people's will is government, and it should be used to prevent the theft of our prosperity in the name of prosperity, and of our liberties in the name of liberty. There is no doubt that on all these fundamental questions, Barack Obama is an unambiguous Democrat. He is not and has never been a Republican, overt or covert. It remains to be seen if his decision to rise above emphasizing partisan differences at the time of his inauguration indicates that he is trying to rise above what have been his clear ideological beliefs. But we don't know that yet, and we have no evidence in his record or his life to suggest that he is only ephemerally attached to his ideas and beliefs. (Obama's recent disparaging of "ideology" is a clear reference to the kind of rigid ideology espoused by so many who served in the Bush Administration. The way he uses the word doesn't imply that he doesn't have core beliefs or ideas.) No one can read his account of how he felt about protecting the children of the projects on the South Side of Chicago, whose parents he successfully organized in order to force the city to free their buildings of asbestos, and really believe that he is a detached political calculator who does not feel deeply about the people who he is now going to lead as president. That kind of feeling is what makes a Democrat a Democrat. We're a long way yet from having to "go postal" about Barack Obama, as one prominent Democratic blogger -- digby on Hullabaloo -- suggests might be imminent, unless he stops showing so much solicitude for the views of Republicans. As his soaring approval rating shows, it is politically astute beyond the skill of any recent new president for him to be willing to listen to his opponents' views before undertaking action on many fronts that is sure to upset them.

The Kaine mutiny (of Virginia moderates)...

2009-01-09T09:32:00.000-08:00

Based on a comment on the blog, The Field, 1/8/09:

Barack Obama has appointed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This wouldn't have happened if former Virginia governor Mark Warner and then Governor Kaine hadn't turned the state from red to blue in recent years (preparing the way for Obama's capturing its electoral votes in '08). This was one of those things that seemed impossible at the outset -- and then inevitable once it was done, given the sudden discovery of demographic change in northern Virginia. But social statistics don't turn themselves into votes, without a political strategy to win those votes.

The strategy was deceptively simple: the Democratic aspirant for governor would stipulate the importance of good social values and campaign doggedly in socially conservative areas of the state, embracing and getting happy with everyone who'd turn out for a rally. Southwest Virginians couldn't believe the amount of time that Warner and Kaine spent down there. Each of them won just enough of that formerly hard-right base to require the Republicans to hold every last northern Virginia moderate suburban taxpayer.

Then the Democratic candidate would campaign heatedly in northern Virginia, emphasizing his pragmatic invest-in-education and invest-in-roads programs. This was catnip to moderate Republican businesspeople and distressed soccer moms who saw the grip on the state capitol held by anti-tax, anti-anything conservatives, who'd let the suburbs' traffic dissolve into gridlock and insufficient school budgets create visible angst at the local level. It didn't hurt that Tim Kaine was married to the daughter of one of Virginia's most beloved Republican governors. Caricatured by the right as a smiling socialist-in-disguise (heard that one before?), Kaine sailed right by those tactics and pulverized the right with pragmatism.

Now if you know Tim Kaine, you know that he comes equipped with a passionate social justice commitment, deepened by his time working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras (and if you want deep history about that, see the terrific movie, "The Mission", with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro). So this improbable, cherubic-faced, balding, eyebrow-cocking nerdy guy who wants to remake the world followed in the footsteps of his telegenic precedessor Mark Warner, and completed the destruction of the time-tested electoral model for eternal control of Virginia by conservative Republicans. All that Barack Obama had to do in Virginia in '08 was paint by the same numbers.

The Virginia legislature still has a lot of John McCain types from Newport News, and Sarah Palin-loving types from down in Southside. But their comfy political tyranny in Virginia is history. No one should wonder why Barack Obama thinks a lot of Tim Kaine.

Blagojevich, Burris, the U.S. Senate, and Corruption

2009-01-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

Those who believe that the U.S. Senate doesn't have the authority to refuse to seat Roland Burris, the former Illinois state official who was appointed to the seat by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, or who believe that it's embarrassing to refuse to seat a nice man who would be the only African-American Senator, are ignoring two crucial realities.

First, a seat in the United States Senate is not the property of any governor who has the authority to appoint a person to fill a vacancy, and any person so appointed has no "right" to occupy that seat on such authority. The seat belongs to the people. This is a political process, and as the Supreme Court has said on many occasions, the Congress needs to be given ample leverage as a body representing the people and as a separate branch of government to conduct its affairs, unless some egregious violation of rights is being committed.

Moreover, the Senate is entitled to act reasonably topreserve its integrity as an institution. The governor who made this appointment was only a few weeks ago arrested by the FBI because a federal prosecutor believed he had sufficient evidence to indict him for making such an appointment in exchange for campaign donations or other favors, and the timing of the arrest was dictated by the prosecutor's fear that the governor could imminently make a Senate appointment after having solicited such donations or favors. The Illinois political process has not had sufficient time to impeach the governor and remove him from office, but that is predicted to occur in a few weeks. Defiantly, the disgraced governor has gone ahead and made an appointment. It is impossible to know whether or not Blagojevich obtained any consideration from Burris for appointing him, but if the Illinois attorney general and secretary of state don't trust this appointment, why should the U.S. Senate? The Senate has every right to defend the integrity of its membership from any appointment made by this governor.

Second, no federal office should be occupied by someone appointed by an executive who is accused by a federal authority of extorting bribes from prospective occupants of the office. If our political leaders cannot prevent such an executive from using this kind of appointment for his own purposes, forget about discouraging corruption in our national political affairs. There is something much larger at stake here: the public's confidence in our democratic institutions. They will not believe that our politics is free from the suspicion or the fact of corruption unless and until it is.

Roland Burris is being used by Rod Blagojevich to enable him to cling to some appearance of political authority and effectiveness, in the face of impending impeachment. The Senate is not obligated to follow suit. This farce must end, without Blagojevich's appointee being accepted. If that is not the outcome, the public should assume that it will take much longer for our politics to undergo fundamental change.

Redefining the political narrative...

2009-01-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

Comment on the blog Hullabaloo, 1/4/09

Unless President Obama or the activists, writers and political leaders who support him succeed in redefining the narrative of contemporary political history early in his presidency, any programmatic gains are likely to be short-lived. Bill Clinton's biggest failure as president was deliberately to avoid trying to refute Ronald Reagan's inaugural nostrum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Clinton bragged about outdoing Republicans in trying to make government smaller while making it more effective. He seemed happy to flail about in the ideological strait-jacket with which Reagan had fitted all Democrats: Government was an evil to be minimized -- it was a kind of theft, of money earned by good people (mostly white) but taken by government and given to bad people (mostly not white). This was the toxic brew that helped Reagan -- famous for emblematically attacking one particular black "welfare mother" -- to attract working-class Democrats. Given the flaccid, exhausted state of the intellectual right now, and the freaky guns-and-oil, states-rights hollering of the Palin faction (the only part of the GOP now with any energy, albeit negative), the time is perfect for a new framing narrative.

That narrative has to restore the idea that the people themselves, on whose power the Constitution is based from its very first line ("We the People"), should demand that government actually do what the Constitution says it must do -- "promote the general welfare" -- and if that means reinventing the health care system, regulating polluters as harshly as they poison the environment, and punishing Wall Street titans who use public bail-out money for personal bonuses, then such policies shouldn't merely be defined as pragmatic given the present crisis, they should be explicitly and repeatedly justified as supported by the people in having elected a leader from the other party and also as normal, positive uses of public power. That Obama is trying to transcend partisan rancor actually helps the work of constructing this narrative, since no enduring historical narrative can survive the inevitable vicissitudes of elections every two years unless it transcends party fist-fights on the Sunday talk shows. Let Obama trumpet a new era of tolerance, unity, and a kind of domestic patriotism tied to regenerating our economy and reconstituting our society. The greatest presidents were those who used government vigorously to fight back crises and build national strength by what were considered unprecedented means (Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax, albeit temporary, and the first to have the federal government invest in universities). National majorities don't rally around minimalism in the face of huge challenges, quite the opposite.

Don't underestimate Obama's ability to summon this kind of spirit and elicit a sense of enthusiasm for a new bow wave of reform. But it won't be sustainable unless there is a new narrative. That narrative should certainly explain why the country has been driven into a ditch, and the predicate of that is simple: If we elect presidents who spend almost 30 years abusing the idea of government, and they appoint incompetent or corrupt people to run the government, we will get wretched government. Yet this shouldn't be a narrative in narrow partisan terms, but rather a narrative that subsumes progressive goals in a new definition of what it means to love and work for our country and of what we should expect our government to do.

An invocation and an injunction...

2008-12-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

The progressive left and the gay and lesbian community have risen in outrage at President-elect Obama's choice of the evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration next month, noting that Warren is against abortion and also supported the California referendum prohibiting gay and lesbian marriage. As one example of this outrage, on the much-respected blog Hullabaloo, its creator digby claimed that Obama's choice of Warren was "validating the views of the Christian Right" and suggested sarcastically that Obama was now happy to dispose of support from liberals and to replace it with what he could get from social conservatives. This misinterprets the nature of a presidential inauguration and misreads Obama's mind.

A presidential inauguration is the one official ceremony of American government that traditionally has been conducted so as to unite, if only briefly, the entire nation in a moment of respect for our democracy and our shared civic life. If those who've denounced Rick Warren for his stands on social issues are raising a new standard for inaugurations -- that only individuals who agree with the policies of the new president should be allowed a visible role on the historic day -- then they might also need to exclude the outgoing president as well as congressional leaders of the other party. Inaugurations have traditionally been used to try to heal partisan and ideological divisions, not cement them.

Rick Warren has, apparently, treated Barack Obama with great respect, listened to his views, refrained from endorsing his opponent (though he appeared to agree with McCain on more issues), and permitted Obama to address his congregation on more than one occasion. The full number of Warren's followers isn't limited to those who share his religious views. They also include the 20 million purchasers of Warren's spiritual self-help book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." Warren's constituency is vast, and it's not limited to social conservatives, much less opponents of abortion or gay and lesbian rights. Unless Warren is to be branded as representing only two of his positions on social issues, giving him an inaugural role would seem to fit easily within the typically ecumenical, inclusive frame of the occasion.

But let's also look at what are likely to be the broader political reasons for such a choice by Obama, which may ultimately benefit and not harm progressive policies as well as the interests of the gay and lesbian community.

In most of the Western democracies, conservative parties and their allied media have controlled mainstream political discourse for more of the post-war period than their competitors. This includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and Australia -- while Canada, New Zealand and the Nordic countries have had a more equal alternation between left and right, and the discourse has not been driven primarily by the right. There has been one main strategy for the left to attain power in the first group of countries: Make rhetorical feints to the right while capturing power in a crisis or recession, and then hold onto power in a centrist disguise while governing as progressively as seems possible. Clinton and Blair were the last two practitioners of this strategy, which did lead to partial re-regulation of markets and more resources for education, health and the environment.

Impatient with this kind of moderate-left governance, the progressive left in the U.S. has frequently marginalized itself, by chasing after fringe Don Quixotes like Ralph Nader or divisive internal challengers like Ted Kennedy in '80. This has always contributed to conservative election victories. In interviews and speeches, Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to terminate both partisan and ideological rancor. Why has he said this? Because the right's discourse is always ready to be more excessive than that of the left, since its victories depend on fear of the left -- they purvey and benefit from the rancor. Obama could not hope to deprive the right of its historical advantage in co-opting the media and political discourse by quickly pushing the most socially contentious progressive-left policies (or by embracing the opposite policies) upon taking power after an election decided on other grounds. The political media would obstruct every other initiative or urgent matter he wished to advance, in their obsession with social issues focused on sex and gender. Just look at how anxious they've been to change the subject of his presidential transition from new people and new policies to the sideshow of a corrupt governor from Obama's state.

This new president will be the first since Franklin Roosevelt to have both the latter's self-confidence and inspirational power and the inheritance of a national crisis so profound as to endanger the very viability of our economy, offering him enormous leverage for change. I think he is going to use this opportunity to try to move the country's discourse -- and with it, the way we even define the nation's purpose -- decisively away from the self-absorbed, intellectually bankrupt frame of reference given to us by an exhausted, frightened and increasingly frightening American right. If you were determined to transform the nation's default political assumptions, which have been largely conservative, would you begin by instantly gratifying everyone to your left and risking being labeled as a social revolutionary, thus reigniting the same kind of intemperate debates which spur the media to inflame political discord even further? Or would you begin by calming and reassuring all those who are alarmed that a highly intelligent, African-American former community organizer was about to assume the White House at a time of supreme presidential power (courtesy of his overreaching predecessor)? The left underestimates the undercurrent of apprehension focused on a man who embodies and doesn't merely articulate the need for dramatic change. Better to lower the temperature of precipitous critics by showing that you're going to govern on behalf of everyone, even those who might be afraid of who you are and what you may do.

Thus far the common traits of Obama's Cabinet appointees have been their competence, political skills and prodigious intelligence, which have impressed the gatekeepers of mainstream thinking. Apart from stagecraft, that is all that's been happening so far in this transition. The new president hasn't been sworn in yet, but those who stand the most to benefit from a new political discourse in America are swearing about who's giving the invocation at the swearing-in. They seem happy to echo unwittingly the acrimony of the old discourse, instead of permitting this unprecedented figure with a great gift of persuasion to fashion a gentler way of introducing the nation to a different way of governing, and a different way of talking about it. One thing certainly to be enjoined now, after a period of extraordinary intolerance by the right, is a little tolerance from the left. That's what the President-elect is offering.

Lincoln and Obama

2008-12-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

Politico has an article today quoting the historians Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz as decrying the comparisons of Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. The article suggests that Wilentz sees Obama's comments about Lincoln as "brazen", and that Foner says that comparing oneself to Lincoln is "hubris". But neither historian has any real basis for criticizing Barack Obama for comparing himself to Lincoln because Obama hasn't done that. He's only identified Lincoln as having had certain attributes of character and political leadership which he'd like to emulate. There is nothing "preening" about that. What's wrong with Obama taking as his presidential model the greatest president we've ever had? Would we rather he look to Chester Arthur or Warren Harding? And there certainly is a basis in fact for noticing similarities between Lincoln and Obama at the beginning of their presidencies: Each man had spent more time in the Illinois legislature than in Congress before being nominated for president, each man was initially given no chance by political insiders of being nominated, each was a man whose presidential prospects rose dramatically after the extraordinary impact that his speeches had on his listeners, each was known for his writing ability, each was a lawyer who revered the Constitution and the other founding documents, each man emphasized that "reason" rather than passion or prejudice should guide our politics, and each was impressed with the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (Lincoln met him, Obama read him). Neither Sean Wilentz nor Eric Foner are privileged guardians of Lincoln's legacy. That belongs to all of us, and all of us in this democracy are entitled to judge Obama's accomplishments as president by any model we wish, including that of Lincoln. "Let history judge" is not the standard. Let the people judge.

Feathers ruffled on the left

2008-12-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

Feathers are ruffled on the left of the Democratic Party about the supposedly insufficient liberal hue of some of President-elect Obama's key appointments so far. Into the fray comes Obama aide Steve Hildebrand, who in a now-famous post on The Huffington Post gently chastises these critics for their temerity. This condescension to his intra-party critics doesn't do any favors for Obama. It's one thing to reach out to your partisan foes who share key concerns with you, i.e. an interest in strong national security. Being gratuitously dismissive of the way that part of your base expresses its concerns is quite another. But the reality is that Obama's appointments so far have tilted toward experience and professional competence at the slight expense of ideological purity, and that's a wise trade-off -- especially when you consider that there are few if any people on the left of the Democratic Party who have experience equivalent to the most critcized appointees, such as Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Gen. James Jones as National Security Advisor. Remember that Obama and the Office of the Presidency itself are both brand new (after the financial "bail out") to the job of managing the nation's financial system -- the new president absolutely needs an insider like Geithner. And remember too that Obama is brand new to the job of managing relationships with the defense and intelligence establishments of the 20 or 30 countries that are our key NATO and other allies -- while Gen. Jones knows that professional landscape like the back of his hand. Obama is not the kind of man who'll be a puppet of his inner circle, and well-traveled heavyweights like Jones or Hillary Clinton have long records studded with various statements that are easy to characterize as insufficiently this or egregiously that on one issue or another. Their past words are not necessarily prologue to their future actions. But Obama needs their tactical expertise. And for their part, the critics are useful in flagging issues to monitor. It's all good.

What John F. Kennedy Represented...

2008-12-07T13:38:00.001-08:00

Al Giordano, writing on his blog The Field about the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate, has suggested in essence that it would reinforce the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, replacing a Clinton (whose husband made peace with "corporate interests" during his presidency) with a Kennedy. But I'm not sure that, in any meaningful way beyond networks of people oriented to Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton, there is a "Kennedy wing" in the Democratic Party which is more liberal than a "Clinton wing". Too much is made of left, right and center when it comes to Democrats: What unites them is paying attention to the lives and communities of real people, and taking public action to lift up our whole society -- rather than being mesmerized by party dogma that locks us into various fears and hatreds, as Republicans displayed again during the presidential campaign.

What President Kennedy represented was not some kind of canned liberalism (he was superficially criticized at the time, by the older generation of Adlai Stevenson lovers, for being too conservative). He and his family and followers in the '60s were about far more than political labels; they embodied an intelligent boldness about renewing American leadership -- in science, security through peace, civil rights, and all the other larger and liberating dimensions of our life together as Americans, and as human beings. He incarnated the spirit of leadership. I think that's what Teddy and Caroline Kennedy saw in Barack Obama. And that's what's different from Bill Clinton's way of operating, which was to take existing political beliefs and invent a way of getting elected and surviving within them. What was his vision? A "bridge to the 21st century"? Just what did that mean?

In the 1980's, Gary Hart (who was among those who had originally been propelled into political life by the example of the Kennedys) embodied that spirit of intelligent boldness, and it's unfortunate that his personal indiscretions forced him out of politics. If, as expected, he'd been elected president in '88, Bill Clinton would have stayed in Arkansas and the progressive spirit of Democrats might have been reasserted long before now. In January 2008, Gary Hart unhesitatingly endorsed Barack Obama. He saw the same thing that Teddy saw: This man will grasp the future. Obama is not only about his own political success. He's about our common success.

Pragmatism doesn't preclude dramatic change

2008-11-28T19:41:00.000-08:00

An article by the progressive author and media critic Norman Solomon, "The Ideology of No Ideology" (http://www.truthout.org/112608R), notes that many pundits' characterization of President-elect Obama's appointments as reflecting "pragmatism" rather than ideology can't really be accurate, since the people selected certainly have ideas. Then he goes on to shed doubt about the past ideas of some appointees, claiming that Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner and economic advisor Lawrence Summers favored the deregulation of corporate power that brought on the present financial meltdown. In these remarks, Solomon joins many on the left who have begun to measure the ideological inseam of Obama's appointees and question their suitability for service to Obama -- as if Obama were not the best judge of that.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama's appointments have -- every one of them so far -- been relentlessly technocratic. He has chosen people who know how the present system works, before assembling a full team with whom he says he wants to change it. If he recruited people who did not know how to restructure the nation's financial system, which is necessarily dependent on private capital formation and private employment, American economic power would go right down the drain -- and nothing progressive would be done for the rest of Obama's time in office, because there would be no public resources to draw upon. The nation is having an unprecedented financial crisis. When you're in a ship and a storm comes up, you want a crew around the captain who've been through storms before. Noam Chomsky is not going to be able to advise Obama about how to revive the nation's mortgage credit system.

But if technocratic appointments are a form of pragmatism in the midst of crisis, it does not follow that knowledgeable pragmatists will merely acquiesce to the prevailing arrangements of economic power or any other dimension of the existing system. That might be the tendency in calm seas, but getting a ship to shore when it otherwise might sink can make pragmatic sailors take extraordinary measures.

To imply that a pragmatic imperative cannot override a decision-maker's favorite ideas or that a true pragmatist may be empty of useful ideas -- both of which Solomon argues -- overlooks the political reasons for Obama's explicit preference for technical intelligence above partisan or ideological attachments in choosing people to help him cope not only with the present economic crisis, but also with the crisis in international confidence in American policy-making, and the decline that has become visible in the nation's scientific, educational and physical infrastructure. The recent election produced a leader who many Americans still regard as startling and largely unfamiliar. Obama knows that better than anyone. In order to enlarge and consolidate his perceived mandate to govern and expand the popular acceptance of the changes that he says he wants to make, it makes perfect sense to enlarge the strategic and tactical capacities of the group he's assembling to govern and thus boost the public's confidence in his government.

Less than a quarter of Americans according to the exit polls on November 4 said they were "liberal", much less progressive. That was markedly less than those who said they are conservative, even though the majority leans toward specific policies that anyone would recognize as progressive (e.g. for public investment in infrastructure and human resources, against involvement in foreign wars unless homeland security is at stake). Obama has said he wants to transcend if not historically subvert the entire mainstream-media discourse about liberal and conservative, left and right -- in order to assemble a new, enduring majority for policies that his most fervent supporters believe are more progressive than they are centrist, much less conservative. One way to do that, until serious change is underway, is to embrace pragmatism -- the determination to "get 'er done" -- which has not only strong roots in popular discourse but also in American political philosophy (and constitutional jurisprudence, with which Obama is not unacquainted). In this context, the larger economic crisis, while painful and fraught with risk to the nation, is a historic opportunity.

Bearing in mind this context, let's examine the political basis of the selections of Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Secretary of State, and Rahm Emmanuel as White House Chief of Staff, each of whom has been roundly criticized from the left as being too likely to favor the use of military power in a foreign crisis. Going in reverse order: Rahm Emmanuel is not known primarily for foreign policy expertise. He started out as a fund raiser for Illinois political candidates, became an inside campaign operative, and then decided to run for Congress himself. Lots of people in politics start out as a "process" person, and about lots of them it can charitably be said that they are reliable party line followers, vote so as to please their constituency, or tack toward interests that fund their campaigns. Their votes in Congress tend not to enforce deeply held principles. Rahm Emmanuel has been accused of sympathizing with Israeli hawks. But as an American politician first and foremost, he is extremely unlikely to be a peddler of military intervention for its own sake inside the Obama White House; he's only likely to point out the political consequences of option A vs. option B. That he will be Obama's chief of staff should tell us that Obama does not want substantive foreign policy direction from his chief of staff.

Hillary Clinton has policy interests and great intelligence, sufficient to supply her with a substantive philosophy. Does she have one? Over the years her discourse has been all over the map, having taken political positions that have either given her prominence at the moment or that situated herself in a well-protected spot in the public debate. But because she was excoriated by the right-wing throughout her husband's presidency as being an extreme liberal, she began her service in the Senate wanting to wrap the national-security cloak around herself in order to counteract that charge and, and more importantly, develop the reputation of being tough enough to be president, because she would be the first serious woman presidential candidate in history. If there was going to be a way for her to back a military intervention at about the time of the Iraq war, it's possible that her opportunism would have driven her to it. Does that make her likely to favor war in all circumstances? No. Unlike Joe Lieberman, she never spent time smooching up the neo-cons or writing bellicose op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. If Obama picks her for the State Department, it will be because he thinks her global recognizability and kerosene-and-pitchfork personality will help sober up any ornery dictators or state sponsors of terrorism who he sends her to deal with. She'll make Condoleeza Rice look like a drum majorette. But to become a heroine as Secretary of State will require enormous diplomatic strides, even a major peace agreement. To make history from Foggy Bottom, you can't defer too quickly to wars planned across the river.

Joe Biden is more knowledgeable about foreign policy than Clinton, but also more embedded in the weeds of it to such an extent that his rationales for particular positions and programs often begin to sound incoherent. He knows too much and says too much and can't sell much of it to anybody. He was picked as Obama's running mate for other reasons: (1) Other possible nominees that Obama reportedly liked more would have been pounded by the media as inexperienced on the national stage (Sebelius, Kaine) or too conservative and dull (Bayh); and (2) Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and would therefore be Exhibit A against the expected McCain charge that Obama wasn't ready to be in the White House. Also Obama liked his personal narrative and commitment to family (very big things for Obama). How Biden stood on the war in Iraq or even the overall vector of his views on foreign policy did not seem to factor at all into Obama's choice of him. Biden will be in the room when major foreign policy decisions are influenced or made, but he will not have his thumb on the scale.

Could Obama have chosen people for these positions who would be more progressive on key issues and still have delivered equivalent political advantages? That's far from clear. But what is crystal clear is that as progressives think about opportunities to make their case against any problematic nominees or against particular suggested courses of action by the new president, they should make sure their views are seen as a reasoned and serious analysis, rather than as pique about a loss of ideological purity. Analysis based on criticizing Obama's embrace of pragmatism at a time of national crisis is self-marginalizing. If progressives want to help the inner progressive in Obama to emerge more readily, they should not start their relationship with him by denouncing him for doing things that he may have other, extremely good political reasons for doing and which will not inhibit or preclude an eventual progressive direction from the preponderance of what he does.

Thus far, not only is Obama getting good "process knowledge" in his earliest appointees, he's also scoring so highly with the mainstream media and policy community, that his ability to summon and sustain political force, so as to work his will with Congress, Wall Street and "main street" will be unprecedented for a new president since Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. He is not trying to build such a formidable position of power in order to do timid, incremental things or to do the bidding of those who created the present crisis and did nothing to get him elected. Marxist blogs are alive with charges that Obama is a caged pigeon of capitalists, but Marxist blogs are written in Fantasyland.

Barack Obama wants to consolidate his electoral mandate and govern from strength -- in an age when a fickle media can pound the living daylights out of the public's perception of a president. Remember how George W. Bush went from Hero of the War on Terror, to Incompetent Buffoon, in two years flat? He was neither -- he simply refused to pay attention to reality, jammed his way forward on the basis of an arrogant ideology, and in the process did historic damage to the nation's economy and world position, which finally not even the mainstream media could ignore. That's one way that ideology can most definitely matter, but perhaps not in the way that Norman Solomon would recommend.

Plea to the chattering class...

2008-11-26T12:26:00.000-08:00

The estimable Arianna Huffington has a new post on her blog in which she claims that the rumored nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has had "an enormous effect" on Barack Obama's "brand." She then speculates about what famous novelists of the past might have done with this gripping drama. Excuse me: I think everyone with access to a blog would do well to set aside the "brands", "memes", and "narratives" which they believe define the identity and opportunities of our elected leaders. Barack Obama defined reality on November 4 when he won a popular-vote victory larger than any previous presidential nominee who was not an incumbent. Teeth-gnashing about Hillary Clinton, caterwauling from National Review editors in love with Sarah Palin, post-election tantrums about media coverage from Time magazine's Mark Halperin, and all the rest of the psycho-drama from the chattering political class will have a shelf-life of maybe two hours, if we'd all just start focusing on the concrete realities of what is happening to the American economy and what the newly elected president is going to do about it. The nation has borrowed the price of its future from Chinese banks, the outgoing president is a laughing-stock, and the meter is still running on two wars where Americans are dying on dusty roads. Can we please, then, stop speculating about who leaked what to whom about Hillary -- and stop paying attention to those who do?

Obama's "post-partisan" style helps him, not Republicans

2008-11-24T19:13:00.000-08:00

From a Comment on Hullabaloo, digby's blog, 11/24/08, "Crisis Management":

digby is right to reassure us that Obama's pragmatism will not affirm the irrational fears of our friends on the left that he'll govern from the "center right", since pragmatism dictates boldness in clearing away the misguided policies from the right that have created the present crises. But she shouldn't be worried either about Obama's feints to exhibit bipartisanship -- for that is what they are. Commander of the bully pulpit already, he will govern with decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and a probable sky-high approval rating as he takes office. Because he doesn't need to be bipartisan in function or reality, being bipartisan in tone and gesture will make any Republicans who haven't been Palinized grateful to share any photo-ops with him -- because, wanting to be re-elected themselves, they know they will not have any coherent strategy for substantive opposition, in the middle of national crises, for the foreseeable future. They are peering over the edge into a political abyss. To be pulled back by the new president himself will put them in his pocket. It is cost-free for Obama to embrace bipartisanship -- or really, to be post-partisan -- at a time when he dominates the stage, because he can dictate its terms.

The cynicism of Bush's press secretary

2008-11-24T18:43:00.000-08:00

From PoliticalWire.com, 11/24/08:

Quote of the Day

"I'll give you eight months." -- White House press secretary Dana Perino, quoted by the Washington Post, on how long the "glowing press" will continue for President-elect Obama.

Comment by Tribunus Plebis:

There is as much cynicism and arrogance as ignorance in this remark by Dana Perino, for these reasons. First, she clearly believes that negative media coverage received by a president is at some point automatic, rather than based on a president's performance. To the extent it's automatic, that means her boss, W., got negative media through no fault of his own. (She'd obviously like to believe that, since her daily veneration of her boss seems to be coming from an alternate universe in which he has not in fact botched most aspects of his presidency.) Second, it's presumptuous if not arrogant for her to assume that Obama's ability to govern in a way that doesn't trigger the usual inside-the-Beltway attacks is no greater than any other politician -- she is essentially devaluing his ability to do better than the norm. Third, given the multiple crises facing the nation, and the consequent greater unpredictability of events, she has utterly no idea what might condition media coverage of Obama (other than his own performance) in eight months' time. So her remark, like most everything else from the Bush White House in the past eight years, was simultaneously glib, dismissive and simply wrong.

Enough About the "Team of Rivals"

2008-11-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

The pundits and mainstream media have overworked the "Team of Rivals" meme -- that President-elect Obama might like to copy Lincoln's inclusion in his Cabinet of his former political rivals. This idea comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book of that name, which Obama reportedly liked, although the book is not a reason to copy the idea -- it was overwritten, repetitious, and chock full of irrelevant details (e.g. about Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping sprees and the soirees of Salmon Chase's daughter). Moreover, the book's theme -- that Lincoln recruited his former opponents as his advisors -- was first noticed when he did it 148 years ago; it's not some blinding new historical insight.

The reality is that there are huge differences between 1860 and 2008 that limit the relevance of this analogy. First, in 1860, the political class (Governors, Senators, nationally experienced politicians) was far smaller than it is today. The professional talent pool available to Lincoln (a man of towering intelligence, who wanted to be challenged by his colleagues) was by today's standards very modest -- and half of it had just seceded to form the confederacy. Lincoln would have been foolish to overlook his rivals if they were talented, as was clearly the case with Seward. But today enormously talented potential Cabinet secretaries are ten times more numerous.

Second, the U.S. was plunging into a nation-rending internal conflict of unknown duration in 1860: Lincoln had to show that he was doing everything to unite diverse points of view within the remaining Union, if he expected to prevail in that conflict. Today our problems are severe but they are not similarly existential. Given the diverse, direct and instantaneous ways that a president can communicate with the nation, beyond having his statements and actions reported in newspapers (as was the case in 1860), a president doesn't need to use the composition of his Cabinet to show us that we can't allow our divisions to obstruct the effort to solve our problems.

Third, as ambitious politicians, Lincoln's Cabinet secretaries' rivalry with each other was as intense as their previous rivalry with him. Except within the precincts of his own heart, and occasionally with intimates, Lincoln was a man of preternatural serenity, unconcerned about back-stairs criticism from subordinates or their dislike of one another. He simply overlooked his Cabinet's animosities, so long as he could milk from them individually the kind of intelligence and productivity that managing a government in the middle of a civil war required. But today we live in a media-saturated age in which politicians have vast retinues of followers and flunkies who happily feed internal back-biting to an army of reporters and commentators. If Lincoln and his Cabinet had been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, their internal rivalries would have distracted the Union and possibly torn apart his administration's effectiveness.

In addition, because political rivals are politicians, that means they are generalists, usually without great specific expertise. Today the complexity of financial, industrial, environmental and international-security challenges require reservoirs of knowledge that elected politicians simply do not have time to acquire. The Cabinet room should have that knowledge inside the room, not sitting in offices back in the departments.

If one of President-elect Obama's former rivals for the presidential nomination is a superb choice on the merits to head a particular Cabinet department, he or she should be appointed. But not because assembling a "team of rivals" is good for its own sake.

The nation's real calling

2008-11-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Read the core of Vice President Dick Cheney's video endorsement today of John McCain:

"John is a man who understands the danger facing America. He's a man who has looked into the face of evil and not flinched. He's a man who's comfortable with responsibility and has been since he joined the armed forces at the age of 17....the time is now to make him commander-in-chief."

There is little rationale offered for electing McCain other than his supposed experience of looking "into the face of evil." Cheney is declaring that McCain shares his view, that bellicose confrontation with unnamed enemies is the chief role of the president. It is in fact a worldview which, when implemented with continuous use of military force, becomes self-fulfilling. Today the United States has more enemies in the world than at any time in its history, and Mr. Cheney -- through his decisive influence on George W. Bush -- bears much of the responsibility.

It may be helpful at this moment to remember some words from the Christian tradition, which is usually invoked by fearful conservatives to justify belligerent American actions in the world. In Chronicles, God does not urge his people to look into the face of evil, he says "seek my face, and turn from your wicked ways, then...I will heal your land." [emphasis added] St. Paul insisted: "Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good...See that no one renders evil for evil, but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men."

There is also this cautionary passage in Ecclesiastes: "There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler. Folly is set in great dignity...He who digs a pit may fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake." Indeed, throughout the entire Bible, most references to evil have nothing to do with battling or warring against it, but are injunctions to avoid practicing it yourself, promising that those who do justice, will receive justice.

Isaiah is the prophet who coined this memorable line: "Refuse the evil, and choose the good." Let me apply that to November 4: Let us refuse those who talk constantly of evil while ignoring the failures of their own actions. Let's choose those who say we can do better, who know that good will come to us only as we do the good work -- here and abroad -- that is our true calling as a people.

The rail-splitter in 2008...

2008-10-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

Today The New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for President. The editorial was thorough, workmanlike and unequivocal. But of equal interest today is the editorial in which The New York Times endorsed Abraham Lincoln for President in 1860. Without seeing any of the eventual greatness in the man, the editorial was a bit condescending in tone – but summed up its appreciation of Lincoln by describing, tongue-in-cheek, the habits of mind of a “rail splitter” (which is how Lincoln’s campaigners described him, referring to one of his first jobs as a young man). The Times said this about the man from Illinois:

“Rail-splitting is not an exciting occupation. It does not tend to cultivate the hot and angry passions of the heart…It teaches a man to strike heavy blows, and to plant them just where they are needed – but he learns, also, to deal them only when they are needed. A skillful professor of this science will not be likely to go around splitting things in general – putting a wedge into every crack he sees and driving it home merely for the love of the thing. He has an eye to utility. It is only when things have fallen into decay a little – when the fences are down and the cattle and swine wandering into forbidden territory, rooting up useful crops and doing more harm in a day than a careful farmer can remedy in a week, that he splits rails to repair the breach and fence in the troublesome brutes.” It would have been hard to give a clearer assessment of how Lincoln actually governed in the ensuing years, navigating the country through the worst crisis of its history.

Today The New York Times said that “leading America forward will require…sober judgment and a cool, steady hand. Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance.” In contrast, during the week last month when the Congress at first rejected the financial crisis bail-out package and John McCain suspended his campaign and rushed to Washington, USA Today editorialized: “The Republican candidate's erratic performance this week was far from reassuring.”

But fortunately there is a rail-splitter available again…

What the Election Has Come Down To...

2008-10-20T20:56:00.001-07:00

If we take seriously the language of presidential candidates and their running mates, then what the outcome of this election has come down to -- according to John McCain -- is whether a majority of white Americans in swing states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Missouri is prepared to believe his campaign's insinuations that Barack Obama is (a) a terrorist, or at least the friend of terrorists, (b) a "socialist", (c) a racist, because he hasn't disavowed his friend Rep. John Lewis's criticism of racist language used by people who go to McCain and Palin rallies, and (d) a Muslim. None of these claims and insinuations are true, although the first three are subtly or directly interwoven into McCain's and especially Palin's remarks at campaign rallies, as well as illustrated in sinister, shadowy television ads. That some of their supporters have absorbed and begun to regurgitate these lines is readily apparent: http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/10/note-to-palin-crowd-your-roots-
are.html

That video was broadcast worldwide on Al Jazeera, and it's a perfect example of what Colin Powell was talking about on "Meet the Press" last Sunday: That the words and images of some Americans' prejudice against Muslims and people of color are "killing us" around the world -- meaning that a big chunk of our political discourse is reinforcing the image of America as a mean-spirited, religiously antagonistic and racially bigoted nation of people which has, by the way, dumped the world into an economic crisis caused by our egregiously leveraged credit practices.

The final round of campaign rhetoric on which Senator McCain and Governor Palin are now embarked is rife with these images and themes of race, violence and radicalism. They are attempting to win an election based on making less well-educated, undecided white voters afraid of a black man who is a former University of Chicago constitutional law professor distrusted by the left-wing of his own party because it suspects he is too moderate. Inasmuch as many privileged political pundits who have known McCain well for many years say that he is a swell guy who would never really think these odious things about an opponent, then the intellectual premise of his campaign, at its 11th hour, is based on hypocrisy and cynicism. His strategy has come down to pandering to the worst residual forms of intolerance in order to try to eke out a plurality in a handful of socially conservative states that, in a close election, might theoretically be enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College -- an antiquated, undemocratic mechanism for electing a president -- although most pollsters now expect that Barack Obama will win a substantial popular vote victory. If this were to occur, the world would see that the United States had elected a president based not on "the better angels of our nature" but instead on our worst instincts. It would have every right to dismiss our pretensions to promote civil society and democratic principles elsewhere in the world.

We are better than that.

McCain and Palin call Obama's ideas "socialist"

2008-10-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

The intellectual progenitor of most modern socialist parties was Karl Marx, whose philosophy was broad, ramshackle but ruthless. You could plow through thousands of pages of his writings without finding a single idea for government that would work in 21st century America or be happily embraced by many Democrats. But you don't have to do that research, to prove that Barack Obama isn't a socialist. Strip away all the ornate antechambers and upper stories of Marx's ideological palace -- which when imposed on modern nations always leads to their decline -- and you find one elemental, insistent idea: The state should own the means of production, all of them. Meaning that except for Korean laundries and unlicensed plumbers, the state should own every damn productive unit in the economy. No American presidential candidate has ever subscribed to that idea, least of all the unexcitable, distinctly unradical Barack Obama. So the McCain-Palin flaming steak of rhetoric about Obama being a socialist is just another piece of Flying Wallendas exaggeration. It's a lie if they know what socialism actually is, and if they don't, then it's clear they're at the stage of the campaign where they will say anything that might generate a headline which two or three voters will actually believe, while simultaneously driving their "base" absolutely hysterical with fear and hatred. That won't only create a long hang-over for the conservative faithful. In an age of political polarization and partisan animosities, it's irresponsible.

The perversity of the McCain-Palin attacks on Obama

2008-10-11T18:07:00.000-07:00

Whether intentional or unintentional, there's a perverse psychology behind the false allegations about Barack Obama made in recent days by John McCain and Sarah Palin, in public speeches as well as television ads. They've accused Obama of friendship with a terrorist, on the basis of his having been present at a few fundraisers and foundation board meetings with William Ayers, who'd been in the domestic revolutionary group Weathermen almost 40 years ago but is now a respected member of the Chicago educational community. In return, McCain-Palin supporters at rallies have shouted "kill him" (meaning Obama) and have expressed fear about Obama being a Muslim (which he is not). Considered together and in the context of American history, the content of McCain's sinister-looking ads and Palin's exaggerated remarks in fact are tantamount to an incitement to hatred, and potentially an incitement to violence.

Claiming that Obama is "not who he claims to be" cues many fundamentalist Christians to believe that Obama is a Muslim (since many of them already believe that Muslims are barbaric). Insinuating to entirely white audiences that Obama's identity is ambiguous ("Who is he really?") can easily tap racial uneasiness from those who harbor such feelings. Claiming that Obama consorted with a terrorist amalgamates what has already been encouraged -- fear of a black presidential candidate -- with many white Americans' long-standing bias or resentment toward blacks generally, and combines that with fear of terrorists. This in turn blends the historically toxic prejudice against African-Americans with the new fear and loathing of foreign enemies like Osama bin Laden.

Similar combinations of false beliefs, when summoned by self-serving, unprincipled politicians before in American history, have led to social upheaval, riots and killing. However indirectly, by encouraging people to sip this lethal cocktail of prejudice and fear, the McCain campaign is resorting to a depraved kind of political rhetoric that has never before been used in modern presidential campaigns by any major party. They are bringing the radical, twisted fringe of American political conflict into the center of their language and are thereby polluting our public debate and disgracing themselves.

The financial crisis and the election...

2008-09-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

None of us who favor the election of Barack Obama should take satisfaction in the carnage on Wall Street, however much it creates the possibility of an Obama landslide. The 401(k)'s and pensions of everyone are suffering, and the credit freeze is leading to lay-offs of workers, today. The now-failed "bail-out" package was a technical mechanism to extract bad debt from threatened financial institutions, as well as an emergency psychological measure to reassure world credit markets that the U.S. government would act to stop the domestic panic and prevent a major global economic implosion. Without some sort of legislation out of Congress in the next week of equivalent size, more American financial institutions (including small local banks) will fail, the Fed will have no choice but to print more money, and inflation and unemployment will rise simultaneously. How many more points on the unemployment and bank failure numbers are Obama enthusiasts willing to accept, for a few more electoral votes for him on November 4? The reality is that if there is no decisive government action to halt the credit crisis before the election, President Obama will inherit a much more seriously weakened economy and be digging out from a deeper hole for far longer into his new administration. What happens this fall can affect his ability to govern progressively. Let's hope that some sort of systematic U.S. government action proportionate to the world credit crisis is taken soon, because we all want this new president to be able to act on the plans and priorities he's talking about. You do not want his entire first term to be digging out from under more debris left by the fecklessness of Bush and the obduracy of congressional Republicans.

McCain's disrespect...

2008-09-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Today Arianna Huffington commented about last night's debate between McCain and Obama that McCain's best moment was when he said he saw "KGB" when he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes. Just why is it a good moment for a presidential candidate when he essentially calls the leader of Russia a spy and a thug (which is the common image in the West of a KGB agent)? This was another example of something we've seen before during this campaign: McCain's tendency to be belligerent toward other leaders who deviate from some aspect of his worldview. It was also a brash, foolhardy thing to say about the leader of a country with whom the U.S. must work on a range of serious global problems. Are we to believe that Putin will forget this, or dismiss it as campaign rhetoric, if McCain were to be elected?

But John McCain has denounced one foreign leader after another all year: the Iranian leaders, Hugo Chavez, various other dictators -- and he cast an aspersion at the prime minister of Spain. Now the U.S. has great differences with most of the leaders that McCain doesn't like, and some of them may have said incendiary things. But America's leaders shouldn't parrot their style. Unless the president of the United States and those running for the office maintain some semblance of decorum in talking about the people with whom they are forced to deal once in office, the present reputation of the United States for bullying other nations will be compounded with the additional problem of American leaders becoming known for insulting other leaders. This is exactly what we do not need as a president: someone who personalizes our national interests and invests his likes and dislikes with gratuitous hostility.

It may also be clear now, on the evidence of the first debate, that McCain has a general tendency to denounce or ridicule those with whom he disagrees. His condescension and lecturing tone toward Senator Obama in the debate was a form of disrespect for a fellow member of the Senate and, by extension, for the millions of Americans whose votes for Senator Obama in the primaries won him the nomination of his party. If McCain can't practice simple courtesy on a program watched by 60 million Americas, why should we think he will be able to enlist the trust and goodwill of those whose cooperation he'll need to govern effectively?

McCain campaign blames Obama (and his black "advisor") for the financial crisis

2008-09-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

Today it became clear that the McCain campaign is trying to suggest that if it weren't for black people like Barack Obama and Frank Raines (past head of Fannie Mae, the privatized former federal agency which helps insure the flow of mortgage funding), the financial crisis wouldn't have happened.

This afternoon on C-SPAN radio, an economic advisor to John McCain argued that the financial meltdown this past week was caused entirely by Fannie Mae (rather than by the Bush Administration's deregulation, Wall Street's credit default swaps -- called "financial weapons of mass destruction" by Warren Buffett -- or by irresponsible practices by investment banks, cited by Secretary Paulsen).

Lately a McCain television ad has been running, showing shadowy pictures of Obama and Frank Raines, who is African-American and whose Fannie Mae bonuses were the subject of a civil lawsuit. The ad said that Raines was a major economic advisor to Obama, though the Obama campaign swiftly denied that, and various media outlets challenged the facts of the McCain ad.

Take a look at the Raines-Obama ad yourself, with the Washington Post's refutation of its claims:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/09/obamas_fannie_mae_connection.html

On Friday, McCain himself claimed that the financial crisis was somehow caused by corrupt lobbying, in which Obama was entangled, though he offered no proof of the latter (because of course there is none).

When you view these things together, it looks like McCain is trying to insinuate that Obama and his black cronies created the financial crisis. This amalgamates distortion and lying by a presidential campaign with racist insinuation, trying to connect white voters' anxiety about the financial crisis to supposed latent doubts about Obama because he is black. It is utterly outrageous and frankly suggests that McCain is completely unfit for the presidency.

Outflanking McCain on "Reform"

2008-09-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

While it no longer seems as if John McCain's media-sensation VP pick Sarah Palin can pull enough white women voters to the Republican ticket to prevent Barack Obama from being elected, there is one more gambit that he could attempt, to lend superficial credence to his claim of being a "reformer" -- in his apparent strategy to out-change Obama, the inventor of the "change" brand in this cycle. He could give a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and propose significant structural reforms in the federal government itself, in order to bring "real change" to Washington. I predict that unless Barack Obama outflanks McCain in proposing a major package of changes in the way that our government represents the people, McCain just might try something like this. While it would be recognized by the political class as a campaign gambit rather than a sincere initiative, it could work with independent voters who dislike both parties and want a real shake-up in Washington.

From Obama, a serious proposal for significant changes in the way government functions would put beef on the plate of his claim to represent real change, and he'd be offering a solution that's proportionate to the indictment he's made about government today. A majority of Americans believe that an increasingly corrupt and ineffective Congress and executive branch – which mainly serve the interests of those who can buy access to policymakers – should be returned to the control of the people. That requires changes not only of personnel in Washington, but of how and when voters pass judgment on candidates for federal office.

Here's my proposed package, of statutory and constitutional changes: (1) Each citizen must be given the right to vote for president (a right they do not now possess, according to the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which said that state legislatures make the rules for presidential elections), to have each person's vote counted, and to have that vote counted equally (requiring direct election of the president by national popular vote and abolition of the Electoral College); (2) All contributions for campaigns for national office (president and congress) must be limited to citizens – no organizations of any kind should be permitted to contribute money -- so that people, not interests, control Washington; (3) A recountable paper trail must be established nationally for all electronic voting systems, and such systems should be standardized nationally for federal elections; and (4) Concurrent presidential and House terms of four years should be created, with a four-term limit on House members and a three-term limit on members of the Senate, with a procedure for mid-term special-recall elections for the House and the President. The people themselves must be given the means of breaking the influence of special interests. The breakdown of democracy can only be fixed by strengthening the central position of the people in how our system works.

The announcement of such proposals by either candidate would surprise the media, galvanize the support of undecided independent voters, and dramatically establish that candidate as the unquestionable leader in bringing more change to American elections and American government since at least the time when women were given the right to vote.

The urgency of defusing Sarah Palin

2008-09-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Obama campaign wizards are whistling past the graveyard if they think they can ignore Sarah Palin, because her telegenic impact will help sell her fallacy-filled attacks on Obama to a wide swath of independent, working-class white voters in swing states, and that could be the difference in this election. Right now she is back in Alaska to undergo briefings on foreign policy and a vast range of issues about which she knows nothing, since she is the least well-educated and least politically experienced nominee for the vice presidency since the erstwhile poet William Orlando Butler in 1848 (he had served only 4 years in Congress, before winning notoriety in the war against Mexico). The Obama campaign should take advantage of the hiatus in Palin mediamania afforded by her cramming sessions at home, by running very hard but entirely factual ads debunking her supposed reformist record in Alaska and insuring that voters in swing states know that as a mayor she tried to fire the city librarian for refusing to censor books, has said that she believes the war in Iraq is part of God's plan, and has repeatedly misrepresented her own record and that of Barack Obama in the past few days. If the tone of these ads is "more in sadness than in anger," and they build an accurate picture of this person's unfitness for national office -- based on her alarming views on energy, climate change, and civil liberties, as well as her penchant for trashing her opponents -- the skepticism of a majority of the electorate about her readiness for the vice presidency will harden into rejection, and John McCain's media-mesmerizing attack 'babe' (the word that right-wing talk radio hosts are using for her) can be disarmed.

Vainglory and venom...

2008-09-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

Comment on "The Field", http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/shockingly-bad#comments

John McCain's speech last night was about two things: fighting against enemies, and his own past. It was as if he believed his personal history should be sufficient reason to drape the presidency on his shoulders, as if it were an honorary degree -- as if he felt he deserved to be president for what he'd already done, rather than for his spirit and proposals for the future. But there was also a logical fallacy at the heart of this speech: He insisted that he was serving a cause greater than himself, even as he talked primarily about himself -- as if he saw himself as a kind of Mother Teresa of martial selflessness. In a word, he was vainglorious. And the night before, Sarah Palin delivered a speech that one pundit called "venom-filled". In light of the Republicans' constant invoking of the Christian faith, perhaps they and their nominees should remember the gently sarcastic rebuke that St. Paul gave to himself and some of his followers: "Do we begin again to commend ourselves?" The great apostle knew that overweening pride -- much less ridicule of those who disagree with you -- is not the way to persuade others to join a cause beyond themselves. This week neither McCain nor Palin practiced the values they preached.

Reality-free Palin...

2008-09-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

The chief problem with Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention tonight is that it gave absolutely no indication that she was aware that the nation's economy and standing in the world are in tatters, and that a large majority of the electorate is vividly aware of those realities. The America of snowmobiling Dads and families that love babies with special needs, which she says she represents, is also an America that has spent -- under her party's leadership -- close to $1 trillion on wars that haven't improved our security, and that has a currency in international free fall as well as a housing market which has cratered. Those problems are what the next president will face, though she showed no awareness of them. And let's not forget that the president whose ex-speechwriter wrote the words she spoke is issuing executive order after executive order expanding domestic spying, legalizing the invasion of data privacy by customs officials, and otherwise constricting Americans' civil liberties. That happens to be the America we live in, not the air-brushed postcard we got from Sarah Palin tonight. The Republicans can show a photo of Mount Rushmore above her head to try preposterously to lend an historical reference to a vice presidential candidate who is egregiously unqualified for national office, but this entire act tonight falls flat. We will not be fooled -- or insulted, as Governor Palin did repeatedly to Senator Obama. Her condescension was appropriate only in the context of a convention where personal invective was hurled at opponents by politicians who routinely claim to have some higher brand of morality than the other party. Tonight Ms. Palin, Mr Guiliani and other speakers spent more time reinforcing their party's richly deserved reputation for hypocrisy than they did actually finding substantive reasons to object to the election of Barack Obama.

Behind the Palin gambit: trying to destroy a rational election

2008-09-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

It's now commonly assumed that the principal reasons that John McCain selected one-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate were to excite the religious right and tempt undecided women voters to embrace the Republican ticket, since they now have one of their own to turn out for. But there was more to picking Palin than that.

The predictable volume of the blogosphere storm about Palin shows that McCain is achieving at least one of his objectives in selecting a sure-to-be-controversial nominee: diverting attention away from Obama in the wake of the Democrats' terrific convention and Obama's solid acceptance speech. Morever, the paladins of the mainstream media -- believing that unfavorable information about politicians must first come out of the mouths of their quotable foes -- are bending over backwards to avoid noticing anything questionable about Palin. This will force Democrats to start pointing out the enormous problems with her being one step away from the presidency.

Mark my words, as soon as Democrats turn their fire on her, they'll be accused of being anti-women. Obama himself is right to steer around making remarks about her, but Biden needn't do so. Her various hard-right positions and her admissions of ignorance about government (such as saying last month that she had no idea what a vice president does) should be turned into campaign ads against her immediately, or else the Republicans may succeed in defining her as just a colorful frontier-state straight-talker.

They will be doing that to frame the second wave of attention to Palin, which McCain's people surely realized was inevitable: media investigations into her firing of the head of the Alaskan state police, for resisting her attempts to get him to dismiss her state-trooper ex-brother-in-law. The Alaskan legislature started an investigation of this apparent abuse of power, and the report is due eight days before the November election. The McCain campaign was probably untroubled by this scandal -- because it could be portrayed as partisan (again, "unfairly attacking a woman"), and would deny more media time to Obama.

This hints at significant new negative ads about Obama coming soon from the McCain campaign. Combined with feigned but towering outrage at criticism of Palin's dearth of relevant experience for national office, the McCain campaign will be trying to manipulate and distort the nature of news coverage over the next several weeks -- to embroil the fall election campaign in a storm of negative attacks, counter-attacks and media insanity, to distract voters from anything substantive, since on substance, McCain loses.

Palin in power: the end of rational government

2008-09-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

By nominating Sarah Palin for vice president, the Republicans will cease to be a serious political party contending for professional leadership of the most prominent democratic nation on earth. By selecting, as the would-be second-in-command of this nation, a person who believes that religious creationism should be taught in public schools, that all men and women should not use contraception, that human beings have played no role in global warming, and that it's appropriate for elected officials to intimidate police officers, they will have exhibited to everyone watching this election that they have contempt for science, the rule of law, and individual rights. Ms. Palin's access to power would be the symbol of the death of rationality in American public life that would be the logical end of continued Republican rule. The election of Obama has now become an existential necessity for this country, if Americans wish to have any hope not just of continuing to lead the secular democratic West, but of remaining in any position to compete in the open global technological society of the 21st century.

Playing it safe with his VP choice will downsize Obama himself...

2008-08-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

"My friends", unless you want to hear that phrase every day after next January 20, please hear this: The credentials of Obama's VP choice will have no effect on the election, because the VP's credentials have not ever been the reason why a presidential nominee won in November. The only two effects are the subjective effect that it has on the nominee's base and the media when it's announced, and what the choice says about the nominee.

Kathleen Sebelius is the only conceivable VP selection at this point who would both excite the Democratic grass roots and electrify the news media. (Selecting a woman VP did not have that effect in 1984, because Mondale had no chance to win, and Ferraro was plucked from obscurity in the House as a Hail Mary pass. But any woman that Obama picked might actually be one step away from the presidency.)

To those who ask if selecting a woman other than Hillary will alienate Hillaryites, I say this: Not if he announces the choice before Saturday of this week, because that will turn the next several days into the Coming of Kathleen. Striding together into Denver, they would be embraced by countless Democratic women politicians eager to be seen with them, praising Sebelius to the rafters. Hillary would have no choice but to join the chorus, because any damning by faint praise would be seen as focus on her own interests rather than the party's.

In contrast to the media frenzy that such a VP choice would create, Bayh, Biden, Kaine or any other traditional white male politician would entail no surprise and deliver no excitement; the sense of deflation would be palpable in less than two days. In what now looks like an unnecessarily close election from Democrats' perspective, and with a qualified progressive woman governor of a Republican state (with great media sparkle) available, any more conventional choice would contribute nothing to Obama's momentum.

He can't win this election by making safe choices and hedging his bets, or else he'll seem more conventional himself. Since returning from Berlin, Obama has frittered away the summer weeks as if he were expecting to saunter to victory in November. But that won't happen. In the first five months of this year, he raised the nation's expectations by unexpectedly capturing this nomination. He has to renew and meet those expectations with a bold VP selection that seems proportionate to the urgency of the stakes in this election. (And he will inoculate himself against an unfavorable comparison if, as seems likely now, John McCain springs his own surprise to great media effect when he announces his VP pick.)

There has not been such interest in the vicissitudes of a presidential campaign in American politics since 1992 or perhaps 1960. Obama needs to increase the tempo and not dampen it, if he's to retain the upper hand in this election.

Clinton's comparison of the Florida primary dispute to Zimbabwe

2008-05-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton abandoned any respect for the truth when she compared the Democratic Party’s refusal to accept the results of the Florida primary (held in violation of the party's rules) to the Zimbabwean dictator Roberto Mugabe’s falsification of election returns a few weeks ago. For the past five years, brave democratic dissidents and protesting Zimbabweans who are both white and black have been arrested and beaten by Mugabe’s security forces, women activists have been raped and killed, and entire neighborhoods known to be politically opposed to Mugabe have been bulldozed. Nothing approaching such repression has happened in the United States since the lynchings and killings of blacks in the South, at the height of segregationist fury in the early 20th century. For Senator Clinton to equate the Democratic Party’s actions on the Florida primary dispute with the murderous brutality of an anti-democratic tyrant is more than an exaggeration, it’s an insult to the party she wants to lead and the intelligence of her listeners -- and indirectly it disrespects the truly portentous stakes in Zimbabwe, whose people who are struggling to surmount infinitely worse abuses of the democratic process than could have occurred in Florida.

Clinton as Obama's Vice Presidential Running Mate?

2008-05-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Field, 5/7/08,

http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=1171#comments

There is only one characteristic that Senator Clinton would bring to the Democratic ticket that’s been proven by the 2008 primaries to work in drawing significant numbers of additional voters to the polls: she is an articulate, intelligent woman, who plausibly could be president. That’s why older women have been her most stalwart constituency.

However, the Democratic Party is no longer short of women with gravitas at the national level; Clinton is not unique. And the most compelling one, by far, is Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. More feminine than ferocious, she is endearing on camera but also visibly intelligent and calmly articulate, is natural in manner and not a self-absorbed performance artist like so many politicians, has captured the hearts of her Republican state, was raised in a politically savvy family (her father was governor of Ohio), and would terrify any strategist for the McCain campaign, since she would immediately put in play Midwestern states that would otherwise be safely Republican and reinforce Obama’s appeal to independents and moderate Republicans everywhere. Had Bush lost just the state of Kansas in ‘00, he wouldn’t have been president, and McCain is very unlikely to have any greater margin of error. A great offense gains yardage on the other team’s turf and doesn’t merely defend its own.

Take another look at her endorsement of Obama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nHp90Z2NJk, and try to tell me you can’t see that there’s some special political chemistry at work here, in such a ticket.

The only obvious objection is that a governor with no national security or foreign policy experience wouldn’t strengthen the ticket in that respect. But Obama will not be elected because a vice presidential candidate has more such experience than he does; indeed, it might be seen as a concession that he himself is under-qualified if he chose a running-mate who had that experience. And just how empathetically and knowledgeably would a retired general, or Senator Webb of Virginia whose sole expertise is defense, answer questions from a nurse whose house is being foreclosed? Obama will dissolve any qualms about his knowledge of national security with how he answers questions about such issues in the debates against McCain, or he won’t — and if he doesn’t, his vice presidential running mate won’t be able to bail him out.

Visualize these two people together on the podium in Denver, and try to imagine a more attractive ticket, a more natural pair with nevertheless different characteristics, or two candidates who could better model the ethnic, age and gender diversity of America while still being from the Heartland and not from Washington. “Change You Can Believe In” would have an even bigger meaning after this Illinois man and this Kansas woman, this sensational senator and this seasoned governor, were nominated in Denver.

The reality behind the Obama "religion and guns" flap

2008-04-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Daily Kos, April 13, 2008

The reality is that the Clinton campaign has traction at this point only insofar as it receives or invents another opportunity to hyperventilate about wedge issues -- which aren't substantive but are really rhetorical distractions. And that's what Hillary is doing now, by taking a new ride on her Let's-Bash-Barack bandwagon, in reaction to Obama's "clinging to religion and guns" remark about working-class voters who feel threatened.

Substantively, Senator Obama was describing reasons why people who've been left behind by the economy and been forgotten by government turn bitter -- and he was right: When they're down and out, people take comfort in what gives them a sense of strength and self-reliance, and in many parts of America, that means turning to God and falling back on the old stance of "don't tread on me" (sometimes signified by the rifle your father gave you, hanging in the back window of the pick-up you drive to church).

Obama didn't say that being religious or liking guns was a function of bitterness or fear. "Say a prayer and pass the ammunition" is not just a wartime expression, it's an attitude based on circling the wagons and hunkering down, and Americans have had plenty of crises in their history when they felt like doing just that. But it's not just an American instinct -- it's a common response anywhere chaos looms, and many Americans may be facing the worst economic disarray of their lifetimes. They didn't produce the conditions that are now battering the economy, but they've got to cope with them -- which government has failed to do.

And that's what Obama was saying. His words showed no condescension or elitism, only an attempt to understand what people are feeling. What he hasn't done is to pander to their fears, or try to alienate them from his opponents, something Senator Clinton seems unable to resist doing.

To Fix the Economy, Fix Washington

2008-03-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Field, 3/29/08 - http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=962

Nothing builds (or rebuilds) the appeal of a political candidate more than having a superior public argument in the thick of a campaign. Barack Obama may not survive Hillary Clinton in shape to win in November, unless she is forced out by one or two decisive Obama victories soon, and that won't happen unless he makes a fresh, commanding argument at this point in the campaign.

None of his people should be lulled into any sense of inevitability just because the pundits are now saying she is highly unlikely to win. He can't wait for party bigwigs to pull her offstage. He has to take this nomination by main force. To do that, he needs to make a new argument, which is consistent with his innate identity as a powerful voice for change and as a personal harbinger of it.

Because Obama has had a good two weeks now tactically -- thanks to the Philadelphia speech which pretty much got the Wright affair behind him, the Richardson endorsement, and now the endorsement by Senator Casey of Pennnsylvania -- Obama can afford to go on the offense. And he should, or else he'll find himself in the final weeks before Pennsylvania responding to more Hillary attacks. But if he succumbs to the conventional wisdom about the politics of this primary and tries, tactically, to outbid Hillary on economic issues of concern to the white working-class, it won't work: The perception of her strength on that has hardened in the media, and that reinforces the general perception that she's a fighter for them -- which they now appear to believe.

It would be harder for Obama to dislodge that perception, than to jump over it and drive home another issue as decisive -- an issue on which he's perceived as naturally stronger. He has enough media money and enough free media to give visibility to any issue he wants to. But it has to be an issue that dovetails with the cumulative, valid, existing perceptions about what motivates him -- and that issue is this: fundamentally changing a broken political system.

Here's the strategic logic behind why this could translate into fresh new victories in the upcoming states. The white working class is indeed worried about losing jobs and now also worried about either losing their homes or losing sufficient resale value to have enough for retirement. But Obama cannot win a bidding war with Clinton by promising to apply more money to these problems, because he will never top her on pandering to those fears. And if he tries, he will rob himself of the comparative advantage that makes him far more appealing to independents than another redistributionist Democrat.

He must change the way that economic issues are perceived by asking why the economy has been brought to the precipice. And the answer is that the political system has been sold to the highest bidders, which has shifted opportunities away from those who work for a living, to those who can afford to buy access to politicians in Washington. It's not that factory workers can't be productive or don't have the capacity to compete. It's that the tax system and the mortgage finance system and the regulatory system have been mismanaged or corrupted by the way our political system has been rigged.

So changing the impact of the economy on working-class people in Johnstown or Scranton or Bethlehem or Allentown has to start with changing politics in Washington. And then Obama could say: "Let me tell you something that my opponent cannot: No one owns me -- just look at my tax returns. And I don't owe anything to anybody who profits unfairly from what goes on in Washington. I hate that system as much as you do. And if I do nothing else when I get to the White House, I promise that I will change it. It's time not only for equal economic treatment in America, it's time for equal political treatment -- because we will never fix our economy once and for all, unless we fix our political system once and for all. And we can't do that, without someone completely new in the White House."

This is an argument that renders Clinton's language and indeed the premise of her candidacy obsolete. It overrides any constituency-based appeals based on promising more breaks or programs or benefits. People have heard those appeals for election after election after election. They know that politicians promise to do more, and then they don't. The reason they don't is simple: The political system no longer works for ordinary Americans. And that's what Obama can change, and Clinton won't.

If he makes this kind of argument, and makes it passionately, he has a legitimate chance to win in Pennsylvania and will almost certainly win decisively in North Carolina and Indiana -- and thereby end the contest for the nomination.

Obama as the Voice of Public Reason

2008-03-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 3/22/08 - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erica-jong/why-am-i-so-afraid_b_92876.html

If Erica Jong doesn't know why she is "so afraid" of what is happening in this election year, she shouldn't be pop-psychoanalyzing a serious, fearless political figure like Barack Obama. To call this man a "stallion...drunk on his own rhetoric" is not only completely inconsistent with Obama's public demeanor, which is consistently cool and self-controlled, it is personally demeaning. Ms. Jong seems to have no realization that the language of presidential candidates conveys the argument of their propositions to the nation, about why people should follow their leadership, and in that sense all "rhetoric" should be powerful if it is going to be effective in a democracy. Rhetoric is not merely "words", as Senator Clinton constantly suggests. It is at the heart of functioning self-government, because without a sensible analysis of the current predicament and a vision of tomorrow offered to those who vote, the nation's decision-making about the future cannot be rational. "Rhetoric" is the vehicle of public reason, and Senator Obama is modeling the use of such reason as no other presidential candidate has done since Franklin Roosevelt. That is why he is headed toward his party's nomination.

Buckley the Dissident

2008-03-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 3/12/08, Reply to "Ira Glasser Remembers William F. Buckley, Jr." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-glasser/ira-glasser-remembers-wil_b_91175.html

As Ira Glasser attests, William F. Buckley, Jr., was the kind of conservative who liberals could like -- not only because he was personally gracious, but because unlike many on the right, he actually listened to those he was debating. He did that because he relished ideas, he respected democracy, and he distrusted conventional wisdom.

In the 1960s, I had read "Up From Liberalism," Buckley's book that challenged liberal orthodoxy. As a young student who had done precinct work for Republicans but probably couldn’t tell you why – other than loyalty to my family’s political roots – Buckley spoke like lightning to my fatigue with all the stereotyped arguments of the era.

Then I plunged into the intellectual crises of the ‘60s with my Baby Boomer friends. One thing I couldn’t do, however, was fall in line with the gung-ho, pro-Vietnam War enthusiasm of many conservatives. I was appalled at their cavalier disregard for the costs of that war, as I am today about the Iraq misadventure. When Republicans fell into line with Richard Nixon in ’68 – a man whose campaign that year was philosophically inert and substantively disingenuous -- I realized that the party's establishment would swallow and digest any idea or leader, so long as elections were won and the system didn’t change. By ’72 I was for McGovern, because at least he “spoke truth to power”, as Buckley had in the ‘50s. And I never looked back -- still preferring maverick outsiders like Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, because they too challenged the group-think of those who were inured to the system as it was.

I only saw Bill Buckley in person once -- at a 2003 conference and celebration of the life and work of the late Malcolm Muggeridge, the great British journalist and television host. Muggeridge had reported from Stalin's Russia, edited "Punch", and was the man who'd brought Mother Theresa to the world's attention, through the BBC. Like Buckley, Muggeridge was an entertaining raconteur, a foe of the reigning establishment of his youth -- and also a thoughtful, tolerant Christian. Like Muggeridge, who was his friend, Buckley was a bit of a rebel, a bit of a knave, and loved the friendly clash of ideas. He was a natural dissident with a dash of dry sherry, topped up with cackling good humor. He was a good man.

A Foreign Trip for Obama? Not now....

2008-03-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Comment on The Field [edited], 3/10/08 - http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=870#comments

A foreign trip by Obama before the Pennsylvania primary (which is now rumored) would be a disastrous idea: First, it would appear to many as if he were conceding that he didn’t have enough foreign policy experience, and were doing a last-minute, cram-for-the-exam trip. Second, it would concede Pennsylvania to Clinton, and friends, Pennsylvania is NOT Ohio. Philadelphia is Atlanta, which Obama won decisively: a huge African-American core population, surrounded by well-educated, upscale white suburbs. Pittsburgh has a blue-collar image, but has been strikingly prosperous in the last decade. The rest of the state is socially not unlike parts of Wisconsin or Iowa, in which Obama did quite well. Third, a foreign trip would be reported by the media as if it were either a stunt or a rock-star tour. Neither image has anything to do with the issues faced by hard-working Americans who are staring into the abyss of a financial collapse. Fourth, Hillary would barrel through Pennsylvania, channeling John Edwards, asking “Where’s Barack? Why isn’t he here, answering your questions and listening to your problems?” She’d be on the scene, and he’d be AWOL from American democracy in action — that’s how it would be spun. Fifth, remember, it’s about delegates. Every one in Pennsylvania counts.

What Obama has to do is stay home, reframe the election, and refreshen our sense of what he stands for -- this way: “What kind of government are we going to have? A government of, by and for the special interests? A government in which the oil industry writes energy legislation and drug companies write health care laws? A government run by people who make negative attacks and refuse to release their tax returns? And how do we change government? Certainly not by returning to the past, by asking those who already had their chance to come back again and try one more time. No, it’s time to change the way we do government in America, and that can only be done by making a clean break from the past, from all those who are comfortable with Washington and have benefited from business as usual. It is not merely time for a change. It is time to remake our government altogether, in the image and in the interests of those who’ve been left out. This election is for you — the ones whose voices have been ignored, and whose votes have been taken for granted, and who were promised prosperity but instead got war and recession. The incompetence, the dishonesty, the negative attacks, the stranglehold of money on our government: All that comes to an end, when I walk through the front door of the White House, and take its power, and use it for you…”

About the calls for unity in the Democratic race...

2008-03-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

High-minded calls for unity coming from Mrs. Clinton's supporters or Democratic big-wigs, now that many assume she will win the Pennsylvania primary and therefore the nomination, are only thinly veiled attempts to end the contest before all voters have been heard from or to distract us from this reality: The cause of bitter division within Democratic ranks at this point is Hillary Clinton, whose continuing distortions of Senator Obama's record and whose mocking and denigration of his speeches and experience have far exceeded the level of negative politics in any previous race for the Democratic nomination in the modern period. If she is nominated, and if Obama supporters sit on their hands in the fall, it is because they'll have reached the conclusion that someone capable of such disingenuous accusations and derogatory campaign tactics shouldn't be president. If she is nominated after this kind of campaign, she will have only herself to blame if the party cannot be unified. So the first precondition of unity is an end to Mrs. Clinton's attacks.

Obama v. Clinton: The Right Kind of Critical Campaign

2008-03-07T20:52:00.001-08:00

Comment on The Daily Kos, 3/8/08 [edited] - http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/8/11633/01082/747/472168

There has been a tide of advice to Barack Obama about what he should emphasize from now until the Pennsylvania primary. But now is the time to focus voters' minds on questions that frame the entire election, in a way that favors him and disadvantages his opponent.

To anyone not programmed to believe everything she says, Mrs. Clinton's behavior has lately been over the top, distorting Obama's record and belittling his eloquence. Since the means you use affect the ends you get, it's likely that this is how she would govern -- denouncing those who get in her way, and twisting and belaboring every point in order to drown out other voices. "She will wear a great nation down," Peggy Noonan has aptly predicted. And in Washington or anywhere else, you don't make problems easier to solve by poisoning the atmosphere in which problems are discussed.

Since Obama stands for changing the way we do politics, he's obligated to make this a major issue -- and it can win the nomination race for him. He can simply say: High-spin, take-no-prisoners politics damages our democracy. It substitutes noise for reason, and accusations for arguments. Distracting and dividing the people is how Bush has governed. Is that what we need more of?

One example: the Clintons' dragging their feet on releasing their income tax returns means they don't want to be held easily accountable for who owes them and who owns them -- and we cannot change politics unless we have leaders who are accountable.

Summing it all up, he could say: Aren't we all sick of the system in Washington? How much longer do we have to wait, to have a president who believes that too? We presume to preach democracy to everyone else in the world, while refusing to make it rational and honest in America. We say we are patriotic, but patriotism means insisting that we have the kind of government that's worth our patriotism.

This would turn the dross of Clinton's attacks into the gold of a higher purpose for Obama, by calling voters to the cause of regenerating our democracy -- and rejecting Clinton's tactics of stooping to conquer.

by Tribunus Plebis on Sat Mar 08, 2008 at 09:24:27 PM PST

The Obama phenomenon: It's the message, not the man

2008-02-24T18:45:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/24/08

John Tomasic is wrong when he says that "Obama mania, like Reagan love, has to do with faith in the person..." Although Barack Obama is a confident speaker, with as low a center of gravity and as calm a demeanor as any presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower, he could not be generating the response that he has, if he were merely a "rock star". Politics is different than entertainment, because it concerns reality -- the national reality, which most people believe is now as distressing as it has ever been in their lives. The mortgage debt crisis, the endless wars in the Middle East, the collapse of the value of the dollar, the failure of major parts of our national infrastructure, as wide a chasm between the rich and the poor as seen since before the Great Crash of 1929, and a titanic wave of anti-Americanism from Bolivia to Belgrade to Beirut: The alarms are going off on every side.

Only Barack Obama is offering a call to national action that is proportionate to the alarm that people feel. Both Clinton and McCain are walking advertisements for business as usual, and the majority is distinctly uneasy with that choice. This is not about personality, it is about the central message that Obama is delivering: You have to take back your government, we must unify our people, and we can overcome every one of these challenges – “yes, we can.” This primal desire to defy the size of the coming apparent general crisis, to rise to overcome these threats to the American promise, is what is manifested in the response to the clarion call for commitment and sacrifice that Obama is making. His eloquence is merely the means to the end of rallying and redefining patriotism, married not to war but to national renewal. We already knew that something of that scale would be needed. We only needed someone to summon it from us.

The major shifts we need...

2008-02-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

Two major shifts are necessary in the governing ideas and actions of the

United States

, at home and abroad:

First, the national government is failing

America

. It no longer works for the American people. An increasingly corrupt and ineffective Congress and executive branch – which now only serve the interests of those who can buy access to policymakers through the political-campaign process – must be returned to the control of the people. That requires changes proportionate to the government’s corruption and ineffectuality: (a) each citizen must be given the right to vote for president (a right they do not now possess, according to the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore), to have that vote counted, and to have that vote counted equally (direct election of the president by national popular vote; abolition of the Electoral College); (b) all contributions for campaigns for national office (president and congress) must be limited to citizens – no organizations of any kind should be permitted to contribute money -- so that people, not interests, control Washington; (c) free broadcast air time must be given to all general-election candidates for national offices -- so that they need not spend inordinate time on fundraising rather than the people's work -- although that air time must consist solely of candidates themselves, not theatrically produced commercials; (d) a recountable paper trail must be established nationally for all electronic voting systems; and (e) concurrent presidential and House terms of four years should be created, with a four-term limit on House members and a three-term limit on members of the Senate, and a procedure for mid-term special-recall elections for the House and the President should be created.

Second, to restore America’s influence in the world, the money and resources that our government distributes all over the world must be provided to the people of countries that suffer from dictators, enormous inequalities, and massive violations of human rights, rather than this aid going to governments. Help must flow to nongovernmental organizations and indigenous groups working for the people’s rights, and all assistance to undemocratic governments must cease. Our assistance should focus on strengthening the democratic means by which people solve their own problems, not particular outcomes in terms of regimes or economies. We must help people develop the capacity to fight for and obtain their rights, develop their own societies, and govern themselves – not coerce or manipulate them, much less use violent force as a way to produce political outcomes that we want.

These changes amount to a simple proposition, which is the same at home and abroad: The United States will stand with people who are working to achieve their rights and freedom – and it will help strengthen their capacity to have a “fair start in the race of life”, in the words of Abraham Lincoln.

The limits of military force in national security

2008-02-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

Military force abroad can only secure what a domestic and international political environment can tolerate. The United States is reviled today around the world because it started a war of choice (not demonstrably related to the terror threat to its own homeland) that was a total fiasco for several years, opening the door to chaos and killing over a hundred thousand Iraqis in the process -- and, not so incidentally, costing the American people a trillion dollars by some estimates.

If we believe that represents a viable way to produce rights and democracy, notwithstanding the world's rejection of the method, then we are out of step with what George Washington called on Americans to have: "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Americans do not have their freedom solely because they have military power, as if they lived in a fortress. We have our freedom primarily because our values, our diplomacy, our commerce, and our culture have largely created the kind of global society --developing now for a generation -- in which we can and must necessarily live, at peace, in the future. If we use our military power in a way that makes the rest of the world disregard all those other things that we offer to the world, and distrust us because we shoot first and ask questions later, we will indeed be in constant peril.

Speeches Matter

2008-02-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/14/2008

Because the pursuit and exercise of power, rather than leading people, is the great motivation for the Clintons, everything in a campaign is simply a means to that end for them. Speaking with the people -- proposing a vision as well as priorities for action -- is not an end in itself for the Clintons. But in a democracy, the exchange of ideas and the formation of an understanding between those who would lead and those who provide the legitimacy of electing them is the entire point of having a government based on popular consent rather than on appropriated power. To be a citizen (and not only a leader) said the philosopher John Rawls, you have "a duty of civility to appeal to public reason." Otherwise you cannot persuade people to follow you. Barack Obama understands and personifies that duty. Hillary Clinton doesn't appear to comprehend it. She tries to manipulate us with constantly changing slogans in order to conjure up the image of someone we can supposedly trust. Her latest one-word slogan is "solutions" rather than speeches, as if "solutions" can somehow be defined without words. Another tall skinny man from Illinois, having served only a few years in the Congress, gave a single speech in New York City in 1860, which propelled him to the presidency. One of the sponsors of that event wrote to him later and said "very long will your speech be remembered in this city." He said the speech "was so weaved and linked with truth" that it "convinced" people -- it captured and solidified their consent to that leader's vision and argument. The leader was Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama is following in his footsteps.

posted 02/14/2008 at 21:07:04

The Obama music video

2008-02-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/3/2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

I got home tonight and came across this strange and riveting music video -- it made the tears well up, and I've been watching presidential elections since 1960 and thought nothing could do that anymore. This video represents the way a new political generation is feeling about Obama's candidacy. This isn't artificial, it is real in the hearts of those who are drawn to who he is and what he represents. Even people who are apolitical, who haven't followed the Bush disasters in all their fine print feel on some level, I believe, that something has gone terribly wrong with how we are governed. But many people's grave misgivings have been largely suppressed, or are inarticulate. Yet people yearn now for some proportionate catharsis, in a democratic way. Hillary Clinton, much less John McCain, are ambassadors from the past, and they can't give it.

Enter Barack Obama, who embodies it. He's a categorical discontinuity with the past. Just electing him would cross a watershed line in our politics. No party establishment has embraced him. He hasn't punched his ticket and lined up the usual suspects behind him. Nobody owns him, and nobody owes him. Obama says: It's your country, it's your government, and so it's your power. Use it. Do it now. Yes, you can.

There has been no major American political figure who has been able to summon people's hope like this since Franklin Roosevelt. We cannot miss this opportunity. There is the potential here, through this man's candidacy, for not only a victory and a mandate of historic size, but also for a new relationship between the people and their government. That's what is summoning us...

posted 02/03/2008 at 01:31:40

Obama v. Clinton on Television

2008-02-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/1/2008

Setting aside the substance of the most recent debate for a moment -- and both candidates' batting average was high in that regard -- let's think about the subjective subtext or impression that each candidate left. Hillary took visible control of the stage, of the camera, and also of CNN's Wolf Blitzer from the outset, projecting and thrusting herself at the audience as much as simply talking to them. And talk she did -- often giving long, interminable answers, riffing from one wonkish point to the next, as if the debate were a policy circus and she were one of the Flying Walendas. Meanwhile Barack just sat there, dignified, composed, still, as if he were a highly intelligent Buddhist monk. When he answered questions, he answered them -- he got to the point. His body language was quietly coiled. If you were taking in only the words they dispensed, it sounded like he was losing the debate -- until Iraq. But was it really Iraq that turned the tide for him? Or was it the fact that his entire manner was just wearing better as the debate progressed, that his evident comfort in his own skin, and simple directness in fielding questions, made you feel as if he didn't need to throw his stuff at us in order to be who he is, and to be, in a word, fitted for the role of president? Mrs. Clinton was auditioning for our favor, vamping it up. Obama was simply having a conversation with us. And that eventually is what makes voters most comfortable with a candidate. If he wins, this will be a reason why.

posted 02/01/2008 at 01:09:10

The Obama-Clinton Race in Microcosm

2008-02-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/30/2008

George Lakoff is right. For proof, consider these core statements about Edwards' withdrawal by Clinton and Obama:

Clinton: "Sen. Edwards is a friend of mine, he was a colleague in the Senate, and I have the highest regard for him, and I"m really admiring of what he has done to make sure that poverty was on the agenda here in America. He encouraged all of us in his passion and advocacy, and I hope he will continue that work because it is really important that we stay focused on what we"re going to do to help people. You know, I"m out here talking about making the economy work for everybody. And it needs to work for the middle class, working people, it needs to give a life line to poor people like we did in the 1990s, so in any way that I can be part of this effort to try to target poverty I am going to be."

Obama: "John Edwards has spent a lifetime fighting to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the struggling, even when it wasn"t popular to do or covered in the news. At a time when our politics is too focused on who"s up and who"s down, he made a nation focus again on who matters " the New Orleans child without a home, the West Virginia miner without a job, the families who live in that other America that is not seen or heard or talked about by our leaders in Washington. John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this " that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose. So while his campaign may end today, the cause of their lives endures for all of us who still believe that we can achieve that dream of one America."

Clinton referred to herself eight times in four sentences. Obama talked about Edwards and what he represented. This is the Clinton v. Obama choice in microcosm. Her candidacy is about herself. His candidacy is about the country.

posted 01/30/2008 at 22:03:16

Empire and Terrorism

2008-02-16T12:08:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/29/2008

Gary Hart is absolutely right. The Bush-McCain policy of squatting in Iraq with permanent military bases has the look and effect of maintaining an American empire in a part of the world that has resented our presence since the moment Iraq was invaded and began to disintegrate. What he doesn't mention is that Bush and McCain justify this policy by claiming that the threat and occasional use of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in that region is necessary to quell Islamist terrorism, which would otherwise kill Americans in their beds. But if military garrisons and attacks are the only or most visible means of curbing terrorism, they will -- as they did in Iraq -- inflame the very danger they are supposed to douse. An entirely new strategy -- to pull out the political and social roots of terrorism, and not merely whack the weeds of radical fighters who spring up in opposition to U.S. forces -- is desperately needed. Which is why a totally fresh perspective is desperately needed in the White House.

posted 01/29/2008 at 23:04:37

The Cold War and the Legacy of President Kennedy

2008-02-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/27/2008

Steve Clemons says that John F. Kennedy was "a hard core Cold War hawk" who "approved the invasion of other nations and approved of regime change as a tool of American foreign policy." This is a serious distortion of American history and a slur on the full record of the Kennedy presidency. Within months of taking office, President Kennedy -- despite his doubts -- allowed the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba mounted by Cuban emigres to receive U.S. air support. Its failure taught him the perils of American military involvement in "regime change." He would never have attempted the kind of pre-emptive full-scale military attack on another country that Bush performed in Iraq. And as for being a "Cold War hawk," if that were true, President Kennedy could never have called for negotiations on a nuclear arms test ban with the Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War, and in the same speech, call for a new era of "world law." That speech was delivered 45 years ago at American University, where tomorrow Edward and Caroline Kennedy will endorse and embrace Senator Barack Obama. They know the Kennedy legacy better than anyone. We should trust their judgment.

posted 01/27/2008 at 23:47:19

The Clinton Campaign and Negative Politics

2008-02-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/14/2008

The Clinton campaign's strategy this week seems clear: to try to tarnish Barack Obama's integrity by using surrogates to regurgitate innuendos about his past, and to use Bill to throw out a constant flurry of invented "how dare he?" political charges, to goad the Obama campaign into constant rounds of he-said-she-said political recriminations. If he takes the bait, it would only divert him from mobilizing the full reach of his potential support, which dwarfs anything she could ever muster.

As David Bender suggests, this would work in capturing the nomination only at the cost of irretrievably dividing the party. I know a number of die-hard Democrats who prefer Obama without previously having felt any disregard for Clinton, who are now disgusted with the disingenuous and self-absorbed nature of her behavior in this campaign. Not only is there an effective ceiling on her general-election support due to the antagonism (perhaps undeserved) that most Republicans feel toward her, there is a brand-new disdain that many liberal Democrats are now developing toward the tactics and the discourse that the Clintons are deploying in their drive to discredit their chief rival. Unless she is either defeated decisively in major states on February 5, or substantially modifies her strategy of slamming Obama with distorted claims about him, she could dissolve the chances of a Democratic victory in November.

The Clintons seem to think they can win only by playing old-fashioned, ends-justify-the-means politics. That should make clearer to Obama his only available strategy: ignore them, make more robust the vision of the America he wants to lead, and mobilize with a passion the new, younger voters who have seen in him the promise of a new political future for this country.

posted 01/14/2008 at 23:05:03

Obama, Edwards and Changing the System

2008-02-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/10/2008

As he usually does, Paul Loeb has focused on a fundamental truth: A substantial majority of Democratic caucus and primary voters thus far are rejecting the traditional politics of the Washington power game, represented by Hillary Clinton, in favor of two candidates -- Barack Obama and John Edwards -- who champion the power of the people to accomplish decisive change in our corrupt and broken political system.

As Obama has explicitly said, this change will not occur unless the equivalent of a massive popular movement embraces a candidate who is determined to change the way that we are governed at the national level, giving that candidate a clear mandate to do so. And as Edwards has said, we will have to fight for that change -- not cross our fingers and hope that another anointed favorite of the party establishment will manage to win an election and then govern differently.

The only Democratic party presidential victories in the past 40 years were achieved by two candidates who were underdogs with no Washington experience when they first ran, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. What gives anyone any reason to believe that Hillary Clinton is more interested or able to serve this explosive, popular demand for fundamental change in the way Washington works, than her rivals? Has she said anything that would convince us that this would be her passion? She desperately wants the job, but does she just as desperately want to change the system? There is no evidence of that. Consequently, as an admirer thus far of John Edwards, I won't hesitate to vote for Barack Obama if I believe that, of the two of them, he has the best chance of being nominated, by the time the schedule of primary elections reaches my state.

[Update: I did vote for Barack Obama, on February 12.]

posted 01/10/2008 at 21:22:05

Hillary Clinton's Comment on Dr. Martin Luther King

2008-02-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/8/2008

Today Hillary Clinton implied that Barack Obama overrated the accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, saying that "Dr. King"s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act...It took a president to get it done." This is actually as serious a distortion of recent American history as any presidential candidate has uttered in the memory of this writer, who lived through and vividly remembers those events. Had there been no civil rights movement, no demonstrations and boycotts and protests -- driving up the cost of segregation and destroying the legitimacy of legalized racial subordination in America -- the conscience of the nation and the nationwide demand for change would never have supplied President Johnson with the political support he needed to drive through civil rights legislation.

The real history of that movement fully supports Senator Obama's reason for citing it: The people who powered that movement forward, who marched and were beaten and marched again, were the decisive force for change. Had they not acted, had they not put their lives on the line, and had they not won the hearts and minds of most Americans, no president would have been able to win congressional approval of such significant changes in our laws, helping to assure equal rights for all Americans. Senator Clinton either did not know what she was talking about, or, what is more likely, instinctively overemphasized what politicians in Washington can do to execute change. As Senator Obama has said, if the people do not rise up and demand change, presidents and politicians are not likely to embrace it.

posted 01/08/2008 at 19:47:08

'Trench Warfare' in the Democratic Presidential Race

2008-02-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/6/2008

In Tom Edsall's superb account of the furious re-strategizing going on in the Clinton campaign, he cites the remark of a Clinton operative, who said that with extended primary warfare against Obama, Hillary will be able to prove that "there is not even a second level to Obama, there is no depth." The problem with that assumption is that it defies reason. It makes no sense that a president of the Harvard Law Review who has had a meteoric rise in politics would not have "even a second level." However fast it may have unfolded, Obama's record is not one that you put together with a smile and a speech.

But the claim that Obama is all bling and no beef is also disproved by the fervent support that he has from his home base, the Chicago political community, spanning all racial and ideological types. From Hyde Park liberals to the sons of old ward-heelers, Obama seems to have won their ardor. If there's one crowd who wouldn't waste their time and money on someone with "no depth," it's Chicagoans.

As for the supposed parallel with the Mondale-Hart ten-rounder in 1984, Mondale was able to battle back because he had raised far more money than Hart had before the latter's break-through. He pummeled Hart with negative ads in post-New Hampshire states before Hart could bounce back. But this time, the outsider agent of change will have at least as much money as the candidate anointed by the party establishment.

The Clinton campaign is fantasizing if they think that a long harsh campaign will spoil the people's honeymoon with Barack Obama. It's more likely to prompt the belief that Hillary Clinton is tarnishing the party's presumptive nominee in order to cling to her own fading chances.

posted 01/06/2008 at 22:55:16

Obama - Idealism and Passion

2008-02-16T11:52:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/4/2008

Gary Hart is right to suggest that Barack Obama is reviving the language of idealism in American politics, but it won't be sufficient to get him elected. Reaching for the rafters with soaring rhetoric is fine for some occasions, but effective candidates also have to develop a practical conversation with the American people.

The reason Huckabee won in Iowa on the Republican side is that he knows how to talk with people as if he were having coffee with them. In this context it's useful to ask why John Edwards still got 30% in Iowa, even after turning himself into a one-dimensional cartoon of anger at corporate America. It's because the animation of his language exhibits real passion for the rights and lives of ordinary people who feel sidelined by the system.

There is little equivalent sense of identifying with ordinary people coming from Obama, who sounded last night as if he were on Mount Olympus, conferring with the gods of history. Fine, for the peroration of his convention acceptance speech. But democracy is practical as well as aspirational politics. It's about divining the urgent concerns of the moment, as people feel them in the day-to-day text of their lives, and giving voice to those aspirations in terms that people believe represent a practical way forward. We are talking here about the depth psychology of moving a majority to mass action, of how you create a mandate for a wholly new direction for government. Such a majority cannot be mobilized unless it feels that the would-be leader whose words are inspiring also understands the hard realities of living which the existing system has produced and that he knows how to change that system. Obama hasn't made that sale yet. Let us hope he can.

posted 01/04/2008 at 13:10:01

Populism and Presidential Politics

2008-02-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 1/2/2008

The presidential candidate who has given greatest voice to the energy behind the populist "uprising" that David Sirota sees is John Edwards. Yet whenever Edwards speaks about the bias of the political system against the interests of working Americans, he is attacked by Republican pundits for waging "class warfare."

The very use of that term is a pejorative dismissal by Republicans of any attempt to talk about the egregious inequality of rewards for those who participate in the American system. Our society rewards some people very handsomely -- such as mortgage bankers and software inventors -- but often keeps others who are arguably just as critical to our future, such as young teachers and nurses, on not much more than a subsistence level. As glaring as these inequalities are, Edwards' argument actually has little to do with economic or social outcomes. His chief point is that the system in Washington is stacked against anyone who cannot pay handsomely for access to government decisionmakers, and so the allocation of public resources disproportionately favors those who can buy that access. Two examples: New Orleans is ignored by most Republicans who simultaneously hand obscene contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater for a failed reconstruction of Iraq, and the regulation of coal mines is underfunded as miners are trapped in accidents at a higher rate. This is not a simplistic "class war" argument, it merely borrows from the reality of the front pages of the past seven years.

Edwards and others like him are not reincarnations of William Jennings Bryan. They more closely resemble Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election. The latter were passionate reformers, on behalf of righting the imbalance between public interests on the one hand and entrenched privileged interests on the other hand, in influencing the conduct of government. This is an argument about the fairness of how we are governed, not the fairness of the distribution of wealth, however skewed that may also be. And that argument -- about the fairness of the political system -- is the real potential power behind any 2008 "populist uprising."

posted 01/02/2008 at 00:51:38

Hillary Clinton as a Polarizing Figure

2008-02-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 12/19/2007

It should be obvious now that, for whatever reason, Hillary Clinton is the most polarizing figure in the Democratic Party, both internally and in relation to the other party. Her own actions have in great part made this so: her legendary defensiveness toward critics, her campaign's howitzer-firing at opponents, or the usual impenetrable bubble around the person herself (though this is a common phenomenon with mega-celebrities). Not only has this made it difficult for ordinary voters to appraise the substance as distinct from the image of Mrs. Clinton as a candidate, it has made it virtually impossible for the media to do so.

Her intensity, and the angst of those who dread the prospect of her candidacy or return to the White House, make it extremely difficult for the public to come to any reasoned judgment about her. Democratic voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and the following primary states have a responsibility to take this into consideration, as they think about supporting her. Do they want this kind of candidate to be the nominee, who must try to lead the national debate about the country's future, when it is hard for her and the rest of us to get past the debate about her? Will the election then really be about the country, and the profound changes that it must face, or will it be about her?

posted 12/19/2007 at 14:01:08

Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton's Course in Foreign Policy

2008-02-16T11:42:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 12/18/2007

It is well that Richard Holbrooke has resurfaced, because his status as one of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy advisors confirms the belief that she represents the ideas and priorities of the foreign policy establishment, of which he is a proud member.

Mr. Holbrooke argues that Mrs. Clinton would not make the mistakes of her allegedly less experienced husband when he took office, citing as an example the latter's supposed failure to "act earlier" in the case of Bosnia. But what exactly would Mr. Holbrooke suggest that Bill Clinton have done "earlier" on Bosnia? Should the U.S. have intervened militarily, in the midst of Slobodan Milosevic's bloody adventurism there? Unlike the 1999 bombing campaign, which punished Serbia for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, such intervention would have required American ground forces, possibly just as large as were used in Iraq. Would Americans have accepted the same costs in Bosnia that they ultimately rejected in Iraq, given that U.S. security was no more at stake in the Balkans than in Iraq? Or does Mr. Holbrooke mean that Mr. Clinton should have been more vigorous in his diplomacy? That war began in 1992, before Bill Clinton took office, and European diplomacy, NATO air strikes, and other efforts to suppress it began before Mr. Holbrooke joined the State Department in 1994. Just what does Mr. Holbrooke believe President Clinton could have done but did not do, and which he implies that his wife would do?

We particularly need to know if that action could entail the use of American forces in a theatre of war in which the U.S. has no security interests -- because that was the reality in the Balkans, and that is a presidential action which Americans today would likely not approve in 2009. And that is precisely the worry about Hillary Clinton, who not only voted for the Iraq war, but voted to brand a part of the Iranian military as a terrorist organization -- thereby handing to President Bush the arguable justification to use American military forces against Iran, in the name of fighting terrorism.

posted 12/18/2007 at 15:37:13

Human Rights and National Security

2008-02-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

Comment on The Huffington Post, 11/25/2007

Jane Smiley's defense of the necessary primacy of human rights in American foreign policy is timely and indisputable. But she takes her argument too far when, in answering Tim Grieve's criticism of Bill Richardson (for saying that human rights are more important than national security), she calls national security meaningless and a mere form of "tribalism." Nuclear deterrence, which she says is obsolete, is in fact still quite active, inasmuch as Russian nuclear forces are most certainly aimed at American targets -- a fact we should not forget as Vladimir Putin more flagrantly violates his own people's human rights with every passing month and now regularly castigates the United States and its political system.

But the most germane point is that human rights and national security are not in a zero-sum relationship: The United States can and should defend and try to advance human rights by all nonviolent, noncoercive means at home and abroad. That will augment the tangible security of Americans. Yet the increased belligerence of the Russian government, the rising military power of China, and the capability of non-state terrorist groups to inflict mass casualties are real or potential threats to the security of Americans, and that reality is not mere "tribalism." There will continue to be the need for traditional military means of self-defense, even by a U.S. administration whose priorities are substantially transformed in the direction that Jane Smiley, and this writer, prefer.

posted 11/25/2007 at 17:18:15