Obama in China

Watching early reports on President Obama's visit to China this morning, two thoughts:

1) The Chinese are clearly enjoying their ongoing rollout as a premier world power (I don't like "superpower," it's a debased usage like "supermodel"). As in so many other areas, the Chinese understand the role the US plays in this. A visit by the American head of state is still different from a visit by any other leader. Obama is the right kind of American politician to handle that: he knows how to gain by giving, something the previous administration had no instinct for at all.

There is also a palpable sense that both sides realize that if they can somehow develop a working partnership they can be twice as strong as either can alone ("Chimerica"), leavened by underlying doubts on both sides about the ultimate intentions of the other. Economically, for example, although China may have a strategic advantage because of their truly awesome reserve of US dollars, they could only do serious damage to the US by beggaring themselves. Obama's political style is salutary here: he can make it easier to get concessions (floating the yuan, enforcing copyrights, stopping underselling) by helping the Chinese save face (an all-important factor in Chinese diplomacy).

2) The Bush-Cheney administration was committed to maintaining the security status quo along the Pacific Rim: dozens of bases and a nuclear armada right in China's face. This Pax Americana is no longer tenable politically or financially. With the end of the Cold War (a work in progress) the US must find a way to stand down as the global gendarme or go broke. This is easier said than done.

There are three options: a) Try to maintain the status quo. I take that to be a clear non-starter; not even our allies in the region want that. b) Solve all the regional security problems (insure Japanese security, reunify the Korean Peninsula, peacefully settle the issue of Taiwanese status, etc.). That option is a dream, equally obviously. 3) Have the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Russians handle regional security.

Notice that my critique is not primarily of the big bad USA. It is the Asian powers, on my view, including liberal parties in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, who make free use of anti-American rhetoric, but who have thus far been far from willing to put their money where their mouths are. Only China (perhaps with help from Russia) can deal with North Korea. They don't want to because of the expense. They would like to send the bill to the Japanese and the Americans. China's "Middle Kingdom" intransigent style of diplomacy has also achieved exactly nothing towards resolving relations with Taiwan. Thus even Bill Clinton had to continue the saber-rattling policy of sending nuclear-armed carrier groups into the Taiwan Strait when China's hawkish generals would indulge in one of their periodic rounds of threats, and Obama will too. The Chinese need to do better than that if they want the Americans to go home. I hope they do, because most Americans want the Americans to go home too. I certainly do.

Did You Hear About Glenn Beck and the Chinese Communists?

I confess that I've never actually sat down and watched Glenn Beck's show on Fox. I'd watch a show if only for the purpose of writing this post, but G. and Sophia wouldn't stand for it. From plenty of sampling in the media I had a pretty good idea that conspiracy rhetoric was a big part of the schtick. You know, where you draw the sinister and shadowy connections. So I hopped on over to YouTube to have a look and sure enough I found evidence that this was a theme.

Well, "big deal," right? Except that Glenn Beck works for the Australian Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox. Mr. Murdoch owns Star TV, the biggest station out of Hong Kong, and he works closely with the government of the People's Republic of China. These deals are of Chinese government influence over content on his channels in exchange for access for Mr. Murdoch to the $50 billion advertising revenue of Chinese state-owned TV. (Here is an Esquire magazine article on the topic with lots of good links, although it embarrassingly repeats over and over the error that Murdoch is "an American businessman"). In fairness to Rupert Murdoch he has publicly asked the Chinese government to open up to the world's media. Those who know him smile and say he wants the money. Glenn Beck works for the same people who produce television news for the Chinese Communist Party. Literal fact.

All paranoia aside, it may be that Mr. Murdoch's worst crime here in North America is his hugely successful "Fleet Street"-ization of American TV news, turning it into a tabloid media more familiar in the UK and Australia, patently biased, patently exploitative. The counter-argument is that it's good that we know what we're watching. And Glenn Beck is nothing, after all, compared with what people are going through in Central Asia.

Obama's Nobel Four Days Later

The surprise awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was Friday 10th, four days ago, so now there has been enough time to inventory some arguments/reactions to the Nobel Committee's action.

The Norwegians may not be alone in perhaps sincerely believing that for a black man to win the presidency of the United States is grounds for a Nobel in and of itself. This may be exactly right so far as I can see, although the Europeans do have an alarmingly cartoonish perception of American multiracial society.

People were quick to interpret the award as a slap at Bush, both those who applauded such a snub and those who resented it. I think that's maybe overestimating Bush's importance at this point, and I doubt that the Committee's intentions were primarily spiteful. Perhaps some were thinking of European anti-Americanism and the Atlantic community, so to the extent Bush is a factor in that he's a factor (there is probably some truth in all the views of the award).

Bush may also indirectly factor into the sense that the Europeans (and make no mistake, the Nobel reflects European opinion quite specifically if it reflects world opinion at all) see the US as an older, somewhat maladjusted colleague who needs lots of stroking; there is a palpable sense of hopefulness in the comments of European leaders that perhaps the Prize will inspire the Americans to do good instead of evil.

There is an interesting question as to what sort of function the Nobel Peace Prize is to serve. "What sort," as a precise function is indefinable. The Prize is predicated, for one thing, on the idea that the members of the committee themselves are enlightened promoters of peace. In practice this is unavoidably political. Why have such an award at all if no good is to be done with it? Thus the award has grown forward-looking, an act of potential influence as much as of retrospective appreciation.

This was the principal emphasis of Obama's own remarks Friday morning. "This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity," he said, thus directing public opinion to the Committee's intentions and beliefs as distinct from his own. It was a West Wing kind of moment as the White House managed to put together an effectively classy response to something very big that had been thrown over the transom before breakfast that morning.

As to that, politically it's an overall plus for Obama notwithstanding that it is an eyebrow-raiser. It really is extraordinary to see the Swedish Nobel Committee throw its weight behind an American president. It's an illustration of how quickly the Europeans could rally back with the Americans if the Americans were doing good things. And there is no doubt that in the long run the Prize increases the individual's personal stature (Theodore Roosevelt, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchu).

But let's be cynics and assume that the Europeans are more interested in manipulation than seduction. The idea is that having the Prize makes it harder for Obama to exercise American military power. I think that's overstated. In fact one could make an argument that increasing his authority this way makes it easier for him to do what he likes, war or peace.

Specifically it has been said that the Committee wants to discourage an American attack on Iran. That could be given the provinciality of the Norwegians: they may be under the impression that an American attack on Iran remains possible (after 9/11 a Frenchman fulminated to me that the Americans might bomb targets in France).

The really pressing issue, and the one that just possibly (although I doubt it) swayed the Committee to throw the Prize to Obama at the last minute, is Afghanistan. I'm a Democratic Party loyalist and a big fan of Obama, but let's talk turkey for a minute here. The Democratic candidate always has a problem signaling toughness on foreign policy in campaigns against the Republicans. In 2008 Obama had the advantage that the Iraq war was extremely unpopular. He needed to run against that war but avoid coming across as too dovish. So he ran saying that he would prosecute the war in Afghanistan and go after Osama bin-Laden. Now his generals want 60,000 more troops.

The war in Afghanistan is a mistake. Al-Qaeda is operating in Pakistan, and elsewhere. Afghanistan cannot be pacified (ask the Russians, the British, the Mogols, Alexander...). The central government is, as Lincoln would say, "highly metaphysical," as most of the country is governed by regional chieftains. This is indeed a defining moment. The US needs to get out now. That, like health care reform, will only happen with real leadership from President Obama. He can only prove his strength by withdrawal. That's how he can earn his Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile I'd love to be a fly on the wall when he talks to Al Gore about getting the Prize. Inevitably Gore will tease him that he doesn't have an Oscar, but I think Obama has a plan: if he fixes the college football playoff season, and he's working on that right now, I think he would be a cinch for the Espy. Take that, Al Gore!

We're #37 - Paul Hipp

We've Got "Death Panels" Right Now

That's right. Bureaucrats deciding who will live and who will die, with an eye on the budget. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, not exactly known for its left-wing sympathies, reports that HMOs in the state deny on average one out of five claims. I'd suggest reconsidering if you're insured by PacifiCare: they reject 40% of all claims by their livestock - er, I mean clients. Cigna's a little better: they only refuse care to one out of three people who need it (remember these claims are only filed after a sick or injured person sees a physician).

Of course it's not surprising that the present system includes assiduously working, merciless "death panels": the current system is a for profit system. The private bureaucrat isn't trying to conserve budget money, they're trying to make profit money. According to Republicans, that's alright: if you've involved yourself in a business exchange and the other person turns out to get to kill you so he can make some more money, that's the free enterprise system at work. Private "death panels" (that are hard at it every day, right now) are acceptable.

Meanwhile, one of the several health care reform legislative packages includes (among many other things) the provision that, by request of the patient, public option-insured patients could receive end-of-life counseling. This would be, for example, advice about wills, about hospices, and so forth. A study published in the August 18th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that such counseling improved both the quality of life and the longevity of terminally ill patients (and this study was, surprisingly enough, reported without criticism by Fox News, which has degenerated along with the Republican Party itself into hysterical reaction; I guess Mr. Murdoch's people can't stay on top of everything).

It might be useful to point out to your conservative friends that we have "death panels" right now, and that the president is trying to get rid of them.

Puerto Rico and the "Public Option"

The phrase "health care reform" actually covers several different, interrelated problems. All of the problems are essentially financial. One problem is the high cost of medicine in the US, a consequence of unbridled capital-driven medicine. This will be hard to fix. The health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry are wealthy and powerful, and they will not go down without a fight. The "single payer" option is basically nationalization of health care. It would wipe out these for-profit industries. I support single-payer because a) I think health care is a civil right and b) the present system appears to be unsustainable. However 1) it does not look to me that single payer is politically feasible and 2) after all even us liberals must agree that such a radical change would put us well into the realm of unforeseen consequences and as a matter of fact I really hate bureaucracy: I hate it so much that I actually know how to spell it. If we are to have single payer, it will come at the end of a process that will take years.

However much of the borderline-hysterical opposition to health care reform is confusing two things: "single payer" and "public option." These are completely different issues. I believe that we will end up with some sort of public option in the US as a result of the push for reform that we are seeing now. But public option isn't anything like socializing health care. Public option is an entitlement program for people who cannot afford health insurance. It is an attempt to address the problem of over 40 million people, mostly women and children, who have no health insurance in the US today.

I live in Puerto Rico, and we've already got the public option here - we've had it for years. It's called La Reforma. Anyone can go on La Reforma who wants to, there are no income qualifications or anything like that. It is strictly a matter of choice. In fact even a state employee like me (I'm a professor at the state university) isn't on La Reforma. We've got Triple S, recently changed from Blue Cross. Our paycheck deductions vary depending on which of a couple of different options we choose. It's pretty good coverage that includes prescriptions, dentistry and even psychiatry. In other words, my family's health insurance is just like that of most of you states-side readers. As professional people we don't have anything to do with La Reforma.

Of course the public option could conceivably be competitive, just like the U.S. Post Office has been a competitive carrier for most of our lives. There was a junior professor here a few years ago, a young and single man who was living on a shoestring, and he actually took his chances with La Reforma in order to save the money in his paycheck. Like I said, anyone can choose it, rich or poor. But a parent or a middle-aged person or most of us would prefer better coverage. It's not about us. It's about the poor.

La Reforma is on the scruffy side. You can "choose" your doctor, but only from the list of doctors who accept the plan. That's no different from my family's private coverage, it's just that fewer doctors accept the public plan. There is a myth of "choice": we don't have a big problem, but we do encounter doctors and other health service providers from time to time who don't accept our plan. We get our meds at Walgreen's; Walgreen's doesn't accept La Reforma. Scruffy doctors, scruffy pharmacies, health care that's not as complete and not as high-quality as that of a family with employer insurance or private insurance. But better than no insurance at all. That's what the "public option" is: a minimal medical safety net for the poor. It's an absolute scandal that the US doesn't have it.

US Imperialism, Chinese Imperialism

It is usually the case that ethnic and religious conflict turns out under analysis to be economic and political conflict. The oppression of one group by another almost always has to do primarily with profit and control, and these are the issues that push ordinary people to the point of violence. This is the case with the recent rise of ethnic violence in far-western China. Han Chinese are migrating into Tibet and Xinjaing, with predictable push-back from the native populations. The migration is essentially economic, including many examples of the classic story of the young man seeking economic opportunities far from home. However this migration has been greatly augmented by Chinese government settlement policy. Although China's economy continues to grow, a drop-off in exports has led to sharp rises in unemployment. In order to avoid unrest in Chinese areas, the western regions are being used as a safety-valve to redistribute idled workers. China also wants to firm up control of Xinjiang as it plans to develop oil and gas pipelines from central Asia and exploit other important natural resources in the region.

What warrants some critical attention is 1) the Chinese government's role in settling Han Chinese in these areas as a matter of policy, 2) the Chinese government's refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of these policies in favor of anti-Western demagoguery, and 3) the problem that ordinary Chinese, at home and abroad, have in overcoming a centuries-old mindset formed by foreign exploitation in order to grow up and accept the responsibilities of a great power.

It is clear that we are living through an epochal time in Chinese history. All Chinese, as well as the Chinese government, must understand that this means that China and the Chinese will be coming under much more criticism in the years to come, both internally and externally. A thicker skin will have to be developed. Americans (like me) are exceedingly familiar with this phenomenon. The most basic fact of life pertinent to this discussion is that the strong person can bear to hear criticism, the weak person cannot. There is no clearer proof of weakness and insecurity (not to mention wrongfulness) than an inability to confront criticism from others.

The specific problem confronting the Chinese government is ethnic violence in Tibet and Xinjiang. These two regions together constitute far-western China. Neither area has historically been inhabited by Han Chinese. They are ethnically, linguistically, religiously and historically non-Chinese areas. I will discuss Tibet, where China's crimes are much graver, in future posts. Chinese conquests, native revolts, and reconquests date back about 250 years in Xinjain ("Uyghuiristan," more accurately). A little bit of historical background helps one gain a sense of the situation, but I will keep it brief.

The first Chinese invasions of East Turkistan, or Uyghuristan, occured in the mid-1700s. Then as now Chinese policy was frankly expansionist, and Chinese settlements were built on conquered Uigher lands in the late 1700s. However China lost control of Uyghuristan through a series of revolts in the early 1800s and for most of the 19th century the country was under Uigher rule. In a scenario common throughout the Far East for centuries (and to this day), the Chinese minority was the focus of native hostility as they tended to be successful merchants and to resist cultural and linguistic assimilation (similar to traditional perceptions of Indians in East Africa and Jews in Central Europe). In 1863 there was a genocidal anti-Chinese rampage that killed over 7,000 Chinese. China reconquered Uyghuristan in 1877 and the new province was given the name "Xinjiang" (meaning "new frontier") for the first time in 1884. However after the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century Uigher leaders reasserted themselves, effectively triangulating with the Russians who have long contested this region with the Chinese. The East Turkestan Republic was declared in 1933.

In 1943 a Chinese Communist delegation visited the country, but fearing a plot the government ordered all Chinese communists killed; Mao Zedong's brother Mao Zemin was one of the victims. The Red Army defeated the forces of the Eastern Turkestan Republic in 1949. Maoist attempts at cultural genocide of the Uighers in the 1960s (part of "The Great Leap Forward") led to massive Uigher refugee flows into Soviet-controlled areas in 1962. In recent years there have been significant ethnic riots, with large but uncertain numbers of deaths, in 1990 and again in 1997, when police roundups during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan led to a series of riots and bombings. The East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) has existed for many years but suffered a severe setback after 9/11 when the US government accepted and cooperated with the Chinese description of Uigher nationalists as "terrorists." In fact a number of Uighers were held for years at Guantanamo Bay.

The present disturbance originated in Urumqi, the largest city in Uyghuristan, which has been part of the enormous Chinese construction boom of recent years and which subsequently now has an Han Chinese ethnic majority. Apparently stories about ethnic violence among workers in China's Guangdong province led to an outburst of Uigher-on-Han attacks in the city, followed by counter-attacks by gangs of Hans. The government admits to approximately 200 deaths, but has worked hard to cut off internet and other communication access to the area. Journalists have been allowed to interview Han victims in hospitals, but not Uighers. Uigher sources, predictably, claim that China has understated the extent of Uigher casualties.

Another city to watch, though, is Kashgar, the center of Uygher culture. Here cultural genocide on a scale approaching the destruction of the culture of Tibet is occurring while you read these words. The old city, the world's best-preserved example of traditional Central Asian "Silk Road" Muslim culture, as well as the center of contemporary Uygher culture, is being bulldozed away. A small Disneyland-style area will be preserved for tourism. Meanwhile aggressive settlement, far exceeding anything the Israelis have done in Palestine, will insure that the Uygher culture is exterminated forever. Kashgar is closed to outside communication, foreigners found there are driven to the airport and sent away, local people found with foreigners face imprisonment and possibly death.

Finally, there is the issue of Chinese demagoguery in response to criticism of Chinese imperialism in Muslim areas. The Chinese government (I draw a sharp distinction between the Chinese government and the Chinese people) has for years blamed unrest in Uygheristan on local nationalists, using the familiar language of "terrorism." Now, however, the perception that there is a conflict between China and Uygheristan must be downplayed, so there is a return to blaming sinister foreigners (read the US and the "West") for the "problems." Just as in the US, this propaganda is primrily aimed at a domestic audience, as no outside observer would agree that anyone other than the Chinese government itself is responsible for cultural genocide and ethnic settlement in Uygheristan. How ironic that the rationale given for foreign plots is that the area is rich in resources and the likely route of energy pipelines: that is the reason that China is destroying Uygheristan!

The US is guilty of the same hypocrisy in Iraq and the Middle East in general: if you are going to go to violence in order to assure your access to valuable resources, perhaps each power has as much right as another to struggle for survival in this way. But it is better to have the real motives on the surface, in the discussion. In Iraq and Uygheristan, the issue is oil. National governments will continue to practice the diplomatic and rhetorical dark arts, but ordinary people can be expected to rise above their provincial sympathies and try to see things clearly. Too many Americans are not up to this challenge, but the problem is worse among Chinese.

Republican Misrepresentation of Sotomayor's Role in "Ricci vs. DeStefano"

There isn't much chance that Judge Sonia Sotomayor will not be confirmed later this month as the next Supreme Court Justice, the first latino/a (and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx no less) to go on the Court. So I'm just going to focus here on something that is very important about what we're watching this week whether she is confirmed or not, and that is the way the right wing (and to that extent the media) are misrepresenting the actual facts about Judge Sotomayor's ruling on Ricci vs. DeStefano. There has been some reporting that this issue will be the focus of Republican criticism.

Remember as we review the facts of Judge Sotomayor's participation in that case that most Senate Republicans understand that the perception that Republicans are attacking Sotomayor because she is a latina is political poison for the Party. The only big electoral state the Republicans carried in 2008 was Texas: everyone can do the math.

Listen to the Republicans this week. They will be implying (sometimes baldly stating) that Judge Sotomayor endorsed reverse discrimination in the Ricci case. The Ricci case, they will loudly state, is the proof that Judge Sotomayor is a reactionary affirmative action reverse racist. Here are the facts:

1) Both sides in the original situation appealed to the same legislation, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Service Board of the City of New Haven invalidated the results of the firefighter's promotion exam because the Board was worried that they might be sued under Title VII. Ironically, the firefighters who had passed the exam (17 whites and 1 latino) then sued the City under that very law, Title VII. Two things to notice: a) Both sides appealed to the same law. This was not a dispute about the constitutionality of the law. b) The Civil Rights Act is legislation that was passed by Congress. Any judicial proceeding affirming the right of the City to act under its interpretation of the Act is affirming the constitutionality of a law passed by the legislative branch. Nothing more, nothing less.

2) The 18 firefighters' case was heard in Federal District Court by Judge Janet Bond Arterton, a Clinton appointee. She ruled against the firefighters in a "summary judgement." That is, she ruled that there was not sufficient reason for the Courts to overturn a decision of the City. Again, this is basic everyday "constructionist" jurisprudence, of the kind conservatives support. No policy-making, and upholding the authority of the elected lawmakers.

3) This is the most important detail, I think: the case next went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. There is was heard by a three-judge panel. The presiding judge, that is the judge that wrote the opinion, was Judge Rosemary Pooler. The third judge was Robert David Sack. Pooler wrote what is called a per curiam decision all of eight sentences long. Such decisions are anonymous and unanimous, and are used by courts where there may be disagreement among the judges but a collective view that it is not worth fighting it out. So Sotomayor played, relatively speaking, a very small role in this case. The Second Circuit simply upheld Judge Arterton's ruling, which simply stated that the City's Board had been acting properly within its understanding of the law. Sotomayor did not write this ruling, and it is an anonymous and unanimous ruling. She sat on a three-judge panel that was presided over by someone else. That's it.

4) The Supreme Court ordered a review of this case certiorari, meaning it exercised its authority to instruct the Circuit Court to send the case up for review. That is, the Supreme Court intervened in the process to cause a case to go up to the Court that otherwise would have come to an end. The Court ruled in favor of the firefighters on June 29th, along the expected 5-4 ideological lines.

Remember the gist of these facts as you listen to the Republicans all week telling us that Ricci vs. DeStefano is proof that Sotomayor is biased and an activist. It is sheer distortion. Get a better sense of Sotomayor here, for example, or here.

(Here and here are two earlier posts tagged Sotomayor.)

Chavez and Honduras

First of all, let me join the chorus and say that Honduras (or rather, the Honduran political and military elite) ought to bow to international opinion and to today's resolution from the Organization of American States and reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya. President Zelaya was not acting outside of the constitution when he pushed for a referendum on amending the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for reelection (and to presumably propose other amendments as well).

However I am blogging today to lament the political tone-deafness of the left, who quickly fell into a by-the-numbers, knee-jerk reaction of blaming perfidious Yanqui for the coup, led by the patently demagogic Hugo Chavez, who, by the way, is as responsible for this coup as anyone. President Zelaya won the 2005 Honduran presidential election by 4%, the smallest margin of victory in Honduran electoral history. Difficulties in delivering his (admittedly progressive and supportable) efforts to reform the Honduran economy have led to erosion in his standing in recent polls. It is, in fact, improbable, given the available numbers, that President Zelaya would succeed in being reelected even if he had the constitutional right to run (which, remember, he does not). Nor was the Honduran Supreme Court's decision to overrule his firing of the country's military chief and his insistence on going ahead with the referendum unconstitutional, whatever names one wishes to call the members of the Court.

So where do I go on all of this? Zelaya ought to have appreciated that politics is the art of the possible, that his election had been a good thing, and to continue to work for progressive transformation of Honduran politics and economics. But instead he fell too much under the influence of Hugo Chavez, who probably put the situation over the tipping point when he sent a plane full of ballots and other election materials to Honduras, alarming many people beyond the right-wing elite. Chavez was so intent on cultivating another example of his Castroist formula for moving a country towards one-party rule that he pushed Zelaya to go too far too fast. It was obvious to anyone paying attention that Zelaya did not have the popular or the institutional support for this kind of maneuver.

If you want to keep repeating what you've been chanting since your momma taught you the mantra while you were in your crib, that this is all the fault of perfidious Yanqui, that's an easy thing to do. You know the words to the song. But if you want to be part of building an independent, culturally and politically distinct Latin America you might try listening to some other tunes. I acknowledge Castro's motives and his good heart. But the economic failure of his revolution is at least as much the fault of his centralist policies as the bloqueo, which meanwhile serves the Cuban Communist Party's political interests immeasurably: there would be no Cuban Communist Party today if not for the bloqueo. Chavez, meanwhile, is a demagogue, a racist, and a war-monger. So let me ask you, my lefty reader (the only kind I have): are you helping to advance progressive evolution in Latin America? Or are you just pleasuring yourself?

"Say the Magic Words" on Iran

Responding to Republican criticisms of President Obama's response to the political crisis in Iran, and demands that the president get "tougher" or "lead" the international response, Democratic Indiana Senator Evan Bayh wondered on Chris Matthews' Hardball show last night, "What are the magic words that would satisfy them?" (the Republicans). (And although Bayh is well to the right of me and I don't agree with much of what he says, a good example of the American discussion is this surprisingly sophisticated discussion during his appearance on Fox News Sunday.) This is an excellent question on several levels.

First, just asking the question draws attention to a fundamental reality: there is nothing much more than rhetoric that anyone outside of Iran can offer. Military action is unthinkable; I'm assuming we don't need to spend much time discussing that. Economic and diplomatic sanctions of various kinds have been in place for many years, and tightening them (or even maintaining them as they are) is a bad idea for two reasons: they make things worse for ordinary Iranis who are already in difficult economic straits (this election was largely fought out over domestic economic policy, not foreign policy), and sanctions and other punitive actions change the subject from an internal Irani political struggle to a struggle with hostile outside powers: exactly the kind of narrative change that the hard-liners want.

Which leads to the second level of meaning of Bayh's question about "magic words": to whom would President Obama be speaking when he uttered these mysterious words that would satisfy his conservative critics in the US? To the Iranian regime? That would just be handing them ammunition for their demagoguery. To the Iranian people? Do US conservatives want the president to egg them on into more dangerous territory, without any ability to back them up? That has happened before. To the international community? The Europeans a) have made it clear that they are tired of, and hostile towards, US domination of international security politics and b) very badly need to prove to the world, to the US, and to themselves that they can indeed provide a real alternative to the US on security problems and get real results, and the US badly needs for them to develop this capacity as well.

So that leaves the president talking to the US. More precisely, the Republicans would like to get into a political football game with the administration and see if they can score some points. So they are appealing to the US public: "See, the Democratic president isn't tough enough. He's weak in his response to the crisis in Iran." This is their inevitable position, because their only goal is to regain political power. And that means that there are no magic words that would satisfy them. This is the card that they have to play, and they have to play it.

What Obama needs to do is not speak to the Iranians or to "the world," he needs to educate the American people. His speech in Cairo was truly extraordinary in any number of ways (showing respect for the Koran, for example), but one of the most important things he did was to simply state publicly that the US had helped to engineer the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically-elected Mohammed Moseddeq and installed "Shah" Reza Pahlevi, who ruled autocratically and without democratic process until the Islamic revolution of 1979. All this because Mosaddeq dared to challenge the monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British government's largest financial asset at the time. By simply acknowledging these events, President Obama probably did, in fact, contribute to the atmosphere of transformation now welling up from the young population of Iran. The Republicans, in their belligerence and willful obtuseness towards history, would push the Iranian mindset back to 1979; Obama is 2009.

An irony is that speaking in Cairo, with a speech that was listened to closely across the Muslim world, a large part of Obama's audience was already well aware of the Cold War history of US and British excesses in the region. But it is in the US that this needs to be understood, not just for reasons of principle, but for the very urgent practical reason that it explains the need for US reticence on current events in Iran. Any perception that the US is actively meddling in the events happening there now will play straight into the hands of the hard-liners. Obama understands this. Who are worse: the Republicans who don't understand this because they don't bother to know our history, or the Republicans who understand this perfectly well?

The tricky part for an American president is that he must never appear to be anything less than completely patriotic, making explicit lectures about past errors and misdeeds difficult. But I think that Obama should just lay it all out there. The Republican Party assumes that Americans are idiots (just the way they like it). What happens when one assumes that they're smart? I teach students for a living and I can answer that question: assume people are smart and they quickly reveal themselves to be just that.

Sarah Palin is a Demagogue

A demagogue is someone who appeals to people's sense of victimization or to their simple prejudices in order to motivate them with feelings of anger, outrage or spite. In ancient Greece (the source of the word: demos, people, and agogos, leading), entrenched aristocracies were frequently overthrown by demagogues, the sense of the word at that time being "organizers of the common people." Greek conventional wisdom, however, took a negative view of this progression, as typically demogogues emerged as tyrants, meaning rulers who were governed by no law other than their own beliefs and desires.

Today the word demagogue means someone who capitalizes on the resentments or passions of some group of people, usually including the sense that the demagogue is exaggerating or misstating the facts, in order to use the target group as a means to power. Eva Peron, who represented herself as a common Argentine woman as opposed to the local Latin oligarchy, is one modern example of a demagogue. The most striking example of demagoguery in the 20th century was Hitler's use of the Jews, who he portrayed as sinister manipulators and not "authentic" or "pure" Germans, to focus and thus control and direct anger and violence that had in fact built up as a result of German defeats in World War I. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are contemporary examples of demagogues: they are able to blame the United States for the sufferings of their own people and as an external threat that necessitates authoritarian rule.

Sarah Palin is a demagogue. Her rhetoric is strikingly consistent: she is a common person from humble origins (a victimized woman who may help herself to feminist rhetoric when convenient), motivated by a higher law than secular laws (Christianity), and angry and indignant about elite and less purely American forces that are active in sinister plans to deprive the volk of their political autonomy.

I don't think that Palin will ever again be on a national political ticket because I just don't think she's got the right stuff, and so I wasn't much interested in discussing her further, but the other night I saw on TV an extraordinary scene of protesters in front of David Letterman's studio in New York and I felt compelled to take a couple of minutes to spell this out. These people were whipped up into a frenzy. The history of demagogic success is full of tales of broad swathes of national populations who thought "it can't happen here." Sarah Palin understands as well as everyone else that Letterman was not referring to her fourteen-year-old daughter (I'm not going to bother with the ritual "His joke was tasteless but..." caveats). Without any doubt she despises feminists (by the way) behind closed doors as part of the Godless liberal left. She has no compunction about using her children and her family as chessmen in her rhetorical machinations. She saw an opportunity to demagogue an issue and she took it.

She traffics in anger, resentment, innuendo, exaggeration, provocation and distortion. She presided over political rallies where members of the crowd called the Democratic candidate a traitor, a terrorist, a communist, a Muslim, an Arab, a monkey and a nigger, routinely calling for his murder well within her earshot, and only took steps to clean up the perceptions of these rallies when it became politically necessary (in fact she scarcely bothered: it was McCain who took conspicuous steps to clean things up). She is a vicious, dangerous person. That is a plain fact.

The Sotomayor Discussion on the Island

Some of my North American friends have asked me about the reaction to President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. I'm surprised that there has been such a muted reaction here on the island: not as much press coverage as I would have expected, and so far not a single Puerto Rican friend or colleague has mentioned it. Puerto Ricans have mixed feelings, not all of them attractive to contemplate. Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx: this means that a lot of the locals don't consider her to be a "real" Puerto Rican. This alienation between the approximately 4 million Puerto Ricans who live on the island and the approximately 4 million Puerto Ricans who live in the States has deep roots.

The initial large waves of immigration occurred during the Great Depression and during and after World War II, and many of these migrants were from the poorer and blacker sectors of the society. Puerto Ricans, who have a very complex genetic heritage and a society that is, relative to most societies worldwide, not very racist, nonetheless have deeply conflicted feelings about their African heritage. In the Caribbean racism takes the form of "whiter than, blacker than," rather than the one-or-the-other mythology of the North. So the islanders, many of whom are more similar in identity to middle-class people from other Latin American countries than they are to the US urban underclass, often look down on the "Nuyoricans." Depressingly, it is not hard to find people who say "She's not Puerto Rican."

Then there is the "status" issue, that is, the question of the formal relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. Many nationalists feel that Puerto Rican participation in US institutions is part of a creeping assimilation (the pejorative term here is "annexation"). These elements resisted the conducting of presidential primaries by the US parties here last year, primaries that I saw as a very positive development: the tension is between a farther-off goal of Puerto Rican independence (something I am not against and that I predict will eventually occur) and the nearer-term effort to enfranchise Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens but second-class ones who have no senators or congressmen, nor the right to vote for the president (this includes me, by the way: as an island resident, my civil status is exactly the same as all other residents). This while more than one out of ten US soldiers overseas is Puerto Rican: I take that to be an outrage against the US Constitution.

Finally there is an intensely willful insularity among islanders, a manifestation of the deeply ingrained instinct to passive resistance that has evolved over centuries of colonial domination. Ask a Puerto Rican on the street who the Vice-President is and the odds are high that they will have no idea. A paradox of Puerto Rican politics is that the lower the socio-economic status, the more likely that the individual will favor statehood: Uncle Sam protects them from the oligarchic Spaniards; and at the same time the lower classes are more likely not to speak English and to understand very little about US institutions and political life. (The haute bourgeois Puerto Rican professors at the university, who actively work to prevent the students from becoming proficient in English, are almost universally fluent English speakers themselves).

So all in all, I have to report that the reaction is distinctly depressing, considering that Sotomayor's mother was born in Lajas, an area on the southwest coast about a half-hour's drive from where I'm sitting, and that Sonia Sotomayor herself is a native Spanish speaker whose father never learned to speak English. But the circumstances of Puerto Rican political life are both tragic and complex. The marginalized are always turned against each other.

There is some good news to report, however, at least good from a Democratic partisan perspective. In yesterday's El Nuevo Dia, one of the biggest papers on the island (maybe the biggest) and one that could fairly be described as center-right politically, I found an article on page 20 (I'm always on the lookout for any Sotomayor coverage). "Espadas en alto por Sotomayor" was the headline: "Swords raised for Sotomayor." It was a short piece consisting of interviews with two Puerto Rican politicians.

The first was Ramon Luis Rivera, the alcalde of Bayamon, a large municipio that comprises part of the greater San Juan metropolitan area and that consists mostly of large, dense working-class neighborhoods (five of my mother-in-law's six sisters live there). Puerto Rico is divided into 78 municipios, which are a cross between cities and states: "alcalde" translates literally as "mayor," and the head of state of the island is called the governor, but the alcalde is a sort of mini-governor of a geographical region, usually centered around a city of the same name. Bayamon is one of the largest municipios on the island in terms of population and is as I said part of the San Juan urban area, making Sr. Rivera the political equivalent of somewhere between mayor of Newark and governor of New Jersey.

Rivera has been affiliated for many years with the US Republican Party. Many higher-level island politicians affiliate with one or the other US parties, for reasons of political expediancy. But the discussion in the US about the nomination of Sotomayor is turning him around. "Me han sorprendido declaraciones fuera de lugar de varios lideres republicanos": "I have been surprised by the statements coming from various Republican leaders." He singled out comments by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who have both accused Sotomayor of being a racist. "Sotomayor no solo tiene todas las calificaciones de su capacidad juridica y profesional, sino que tambien le daria un balance filosofico al Tribunal Supremo de Estados Unidos": "Sotomayor not only has all the judicial and professional qualifications, but she will also give philosophical balance to the Supreme Court." Exactly the point that the right-wing Republicans are attacking. He goes on to mention Republican opposition to President Obama's stimulus plans, and unlike the Sotomayor nomination, the issue of stimulus money is on the lips of Puerto Ricans everywhere one goes. The economic situation here is much more desperate than in the States. He concludes that he has been a Republican "hasta ahora," but now he has "la carpeta abierta," that is, the issue is open.

The other politician mentioned in this article was Jose Enrique "Quiquito" Melendez, like Rivera a member of the Partido Nuevo Progresista Popular, the pro-statehood party that is generally viewed as the most conservative party (although that is another complicated discussion; some of the PNP's leaders are affiliated with the Democrats, and their main rival the PPD, the "Populares," also represents some conservative elements such as the Catholic vote etc.: a discussion for another time). Melendez is the PNP's candidate for an upcoming Puerto Rican Senate vacancy, and he was recently dispatched to Washington to meet with the (extremely conservative) Republican senators Don Young of Alaska and Dan Burton of Indiana, who is certainly one of the most right-wing senators today. The original agenda was the legislation on yet another plebiscite on statehood sponsered by Young and Burton, but Melendez also raised the issue of the Sotomayor nomination, urging the Republicans to support it.
His reaction to that conversation was along the same lines as the comments by Rivera: "El Partido Republicano no puede ponerle trabas innecesarias a una candidata que tiene todas las calificaciones": "The Republican Party cannot put unnecessary conditions on a candidate who has all of the qualifications."

The reason all of this is significant is that Luis Fortuno, the young and recently-elected governor, has been very clear about his ideological allegiance to the Republican Party as well as to statehood. Now, however, he is scrambling to deal with a budget in free-fall, quite possibly ruining his chances of re-election by announcing over the past two weeks that he will cut the public payroll by some 30,000 people, and sending out last Monday the first 7,816 dismissal slips in the mail: the kind of thing that is the kiss of death in Puerto Rico's traditional patronage politics. To reform and rehabilitate Puerto Rico's finances he will need every ounce of help he can get from Democratic-controlled Washington. Now the Sotomayor nomination is throwing a major wrench into his plans: perceived Republican prejudice may pull the domestic political rug out from under him.

Thanks a lot, Newt and Rush.

Talking Points For Defending Sotomayor

When despairing of the inane political football games that Supreme Court nominations too often become, we might take some consolation (cold comfort, I admit) in the fact that it has always been so, and in fact if anything 19th Century Court politics were even rougher than they are today. It's also likely that Sonia Sotomayor's nomination will go through; it's hard to see how the Republicans could stop it. Still, we will now have an interlude of fussing and fighting and it's useful to try to pull out the most salient talking points.

Those points are not, I don't think, the most obvious ones. The obvious points are as follows:

1) Obama continues to follow a recent trend started by Clinton and, after initially stumbling with his arrogant attempt to appoint an old crony, Harriet Miers, hewn to by Bush in his appointments of Roberts and Alito: appoint extremely accomplished jurors. This is definitely a good idea as the corpus of law only grows more complex and simply larger with each passing year. In the case of Sotomayor, we have a jurist who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, was an editor of the Yale Law Review, worked for the legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and has now served eleven years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City.

2) Democrats and liberals like myself also have nothing to complain about: we have the first Latino/a nominee in the history of the Supreme Court - and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, no less! That's maybe the best part. A woman diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, raised by a single mother. Not only that, but she is most famous (until now) for ending the baseball strike in 1995 coming down on the side of the players, thus avoiding what would have been the first cancellation of the World Series in 90 years. Her overall record is liberal but hardly "activist" (as her attackers will begin shouting on cable today), with plenty of examples of ruling against liberal outcomes on the basis of constitutional law.

But here are three points to keep especially "on-message" as the right wing tries to tar Judge Sotomayor: a) She was a prosecutor in Manhattan for six years. b) She was recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but the President who actually appointed her was George H. W. Bush, and most importantly c) as a Judge on the Couirt of Appeals in New York City, most of her rulings have not concerned "social" issues. She has been working most of this time on complex cases involving the financial and banking industries as well as communications technology, just the kinds of cases that are likely to come before the Court in the next few years. These are the things one might want to mention in public debate with the dittohead troglodytes.

New Democratic Senators Hall of Shame

Twenty-nine Democratic Senators voted in October 2002 in favor of House Joint Resolution 114, "To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq." In subsequent years as the war proved to be long, bloody and expensive, as we learned that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," and above all as the war became exceedingly unpopular with the public, there was plenty of weaseling and squirming and rationalizing about that vote. Democrats among the 29 have basically two lines: first, they were misled about the facts, and second, they respected the president's executive prerogatives.

Yesterday we saw a breathtaking buckling under by Senate Democrats who were stampeded by absurd rhetoric about "releasing terrorists on to the streets of America," exacerbated by overblown accounts of former detainees returning to the struggle and a general demonizing of all of the 200-odd men still held in Guantanamo. Stampeded, that is, by spurious and exaggerated claims that many of them undoubtedly knew to be so. Forty-eight Democrats voted for Amendment 1133 which stripped $80 million of funding to close Guantanamo from House Resolution 2346 which, by the way, authorized $91.3 billion for more war funding.

But the cravenness of this isn't even what bugs me most. It was the other half of the original 29 pro-war Democrats' rationalization that I'm thinking about today. "Hey," they said, "we supported the Republican president. We gave him what he wanted. We got in line like good soldiers." So I'm wondering: was there something about first-term President George W. Bush that inspired such institutional loyalty, such faith in the executive's good intentions, that first-term President Barack Obama lacks? And there are sixteen Democratic Senators who I would particularly like to hear answer that question: the 16 who were among the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize the war in 2002, and were also among the 48 Democratic senators who voted yesterday to deny President Obama funds to close Guantanamo.

Here, in alphabetical order, is the Gang of Sixteen: Democrats who gave Bush what he wanted to make the mess (basically because they were politically cowardly and willfully obtuse) and refused to give Obama what he needs to clean the mess up (basically because they are politically cowardly and willfully obtuse):

Baucus, MT
Bayh, IN
Cartwell, WA
Carper, DE
Dodd, CT
Dorgan, ND
Feinstein, CA
Johnson, SD
Kerry, MA
Kohl, WI
Landrieu, LA
Lincoln, AR
Nelson, FL
Nelson, NE
Reid, NV
Schumer, NY

Some of them are very prominent, some of them talk a pretty good game - all of them should be ashamed.

Is David Corn Eddie Munster?

I always figured Marilyn would be the successful one! Seriously though, David Corn, the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a writer for the excellent CQPolitics, as well as the co-author with Michael Isikoff of the just-out-in-paperback Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, has been doing great TV work lately and you can count me as a fan.

But I still say he looks like Eddie Munster.

Moment of Truth for Republicans on Abortion

For the record, my own position on abortion is "safe, legal, and available to all," that last clause referring to my opposition to cutting federal funds to hospitals where abortions are performed even when medical professionals recommend the procedure. But a winning phrase from the Clinton years is "safe, legal, and rare." And Democrats have an effective strategy for reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies: real (as in explicit) sex education, and access to birth control including condoms (the only method that also prevents the spread of STDs) and the "morning after" pill. The public is smart: a concerted sex education effort and access to birth control will certainly reduce the frequency of abortion and any common-sense person can see that.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have a self-contradictory position: they want to outlaw abortion, but they also oppose sex education and making condoms and other forms of birth control available to young people. For some reason (and Lord knows I'm not the one to ask) Republicans are against sex. And since they are against sex they are against knowledge (education) about sex and even against safe sex (sex with condoms and other forms of birth control). But they are also against abortion. That's the contradiction, at least from a public health-policy perspective.

The Democrats can absolutely wipe the floor with the Republicans on this one, but we need to understand that the audience is the broad, centrist public and the message needs to go out on point and relentless: explicit sex education and access to birth control is the most efficient strategy for reducing the number of abortions. The empirical facts are a slam dunk on that one. So you say you're anti-abortion? Then we can assume you're in favor of sex education and birth control. Or we can assume you're a hypocrite...CHOOSE.

A Conversation About the Indian Elections and Kashmir

I was thinking about a post on Sunday's landslide victory by the Congress Party in India yesterday when I had this exchange with a good friend, an Indian academic working in the US. She graciously agreed to my posting our conversation, good for me since she knows more than I do!

Indian Friend: Maybe not so exciting as the Obama win but, I hope you agree, ALMOST!
(opened champagne last night)

AB: Yes I've been sketching a possible blog post about the Indian elections this morning. I was disappointed that the NYT coverage did not bother to explain just how reactionary/violent the Bharatiya Janata Party really is, or even remind its readers that the BJP has actually been in power in the recent past. Instead the NYT chose to emphasize the comparatively less important set-back for the Communist-led coalition, spinning this as a public referendum on the need for "economic reform." They're going to make a Noam Chomsky out of me yet. But you know things are bad when the big old, bad old Congress Party are the good guys by miles! Which at this point they are. Anyway, everybody repeat three times: "US-Pakistan alliance bad, US-India alliance good." If you can't remember after three times, chant it again.

IF: Hey Andy,
I think the NYT emphasized the Communist setback because that was indeed a real surprise, whereas the BJP one could certainly be explained, even if it was bigger than expected. What was also not emphasized in the article is that the Congress victory is significant not only as a mandate vis-a-vis the BJP but also vis-a-vis the Kashmir separatists - and I hope that gives Obama (and Clinton) a message not to meddle in that region!

But you know things are bad when the big old, bad old Congress Party are the good guys by miles!

Disagree. Except for the short bad period of Indira Gandhi's obsession with personal power, the Congress has been pretty much on track re secular democracy. And it sure helps to have a Prime Minister who's a PhD in economics!

AB: Don't get me wrong, I've always supported Congress. Has there ever been a choice? As to Kashmir, I'm slightly confused by your comment: granted that both the Islamic militants and, notoriously, the Indian Army have committed many excesses at the expense of the native Kashmiris, it has not been my sense that the Kashmiris themselves are Muslim separatists generally. Do you disagree? If not, expect Congress to resist Islamicist incursions of all kinds, which they will see (more or less correctly on my view) as proxy antagonism from Pakistan. Would you support a fundamentalist Islamic Kashmir aligned with Pakistan? Do you think that Congress would acquiesce to that? I'm not concerned about "terrorist havens" or any of that nonsense, rather about Kashmir itself. Is it your view that the jihadis coming in from Pakistan and Afghanistan a more progressive force than the Indians?

IF: Don't get me wrong, I've always supported Congress. Has there ever been a choice?

Yes. Congress's best point has been its secularism. Its bad points have been its attempts to control the judiciary and of course its continuation of dynasty politics. The BJP started, btw, as a party to counter Indira Gandhi's attempts to turn India into a police state in the late 70s, which sprang from her desperate attempts to hang onto power. That's when she declared her infamous Emergency. I was desperate to vote but was underage by 1 month (voting age was then 21). Indira Gandhi's younger son Sanjay was even worse than her. So yes, the BJP was at that time a good choice. After Indira Gandhi's assassination the Congress has not been dominated by any one individual and that, I think, has been what saved it.


As to Kashmir, I'm slightly confused by your comment: granted that both the Islamic militants and, notoriously, the Indian Army have committed many excesses at the expense of the native Kashmiris, it has not been my sense that the Kashmiris themselves are Muslim separatists generally. Do you disagree?

Yes, of course there have been excesses. But until recently it appeared that India was trying to hold on to Kashmir at all costs, because the militants kept demanding a boycott of the elections. However the state elections (last Decmber, when I was there) and last month's national election has shown an overwhelming majority are against separatism. This, I think, should eradicate the militants' goal to romanticize themselves as resistance martyrs. And therefore I think a clear indication that things should start returning to normal. The excesses must be dealt with of course, but if it were a case of an army holding an entire region against its will that would be far greater "justification" for terrorist attacks as well as for Obama's interference.


If not, expect Congress to resist Islamicist incursions of all kinds, which they will see (more or less correctly on my view) as proxy antagonism from Pakistan. Would you support a fundamentalist Islamic Kashmir aligned with Pakistan?

It would be dangerous, but if that's what the people wanted there would be no grounds to oppose it.

Do you think that Congress would acquiesce to that?

No, for several reasons:
1) It's not what the majority wants
2) Even if, hypothetically, the majority had voted that way, this doesn't take into account the sizeable Hindu minority that has fled the valley in the past 19 years.
3) If this were to happen it would set a precedent for all kinds of ethnic break-away regions in India.
4) By insisting on elections, Congress (led by Omar Abdullah, an absolutely excellent candidate - young guy in his mid 30s) basically called the separatists bluff. (There were 2 separatist candidates for the state elections in December).

I'm not concerned about "terrorist havens" or any of that nonsense, rather about Kashmir itself. Is it your view that the jihadis coming in from Pakistan and Afghanistan a more progressive force than the Indians?

I'm not talking about progressive. But certainly one can't FORCE people into democracy. If the majority in Kashmir WANT jihadi rule, what gives India the right to IMPOSE itself on Kashmir? That's why I'm so happy about the Kashmir elections. I'm not saying the Kashmiris want to be part of India necessarily because of democracy. But they do want to cash in on India's economic boom that's for sure. They also know that one of their main economic assets was tourism, and the only way their tourist industry can thrive is under India. There's no way the jihadis are going to encourage "houseboats for honeymooners"! They've really been hurting economically in the past 19 years.

So that's why I'm very very happy about the Kashmir elections. If it had gone the other way, it would have justified the 1990s view that Kashmir was India's Vietnam.


This is how the Kashmiri separatist candidate's defeat was described in Dawn.

Check out CNN-IBN if you get a chance on www.livestation.com. It is NOT, despite its name, IBN (Indian Business News) a business channel. There ARE other better news channels in India but this seems to be the best one available on Livestation.

A Matter of Perspective

Conservatives have been telling us for years that energy conservation was a silly idea: "You're only going to save maybe 1% of our crude oil consumption that way" they'd scoff at this or that proposal (at lots of proposals: because there are lots of ways to conserve energy!), "It's just a drop in the ocean!" And that was the argument: saving a little is no use, so forget it.

I'm not sure what's supposed to be "conservative" about this attitude. It has no relation to the commonsense frugality of my parents who grew up during the Great Depression, for example. Nor does it resemble the humble traditions of thrift and saving that hardworking immigrants have been bringing to this country for centuries. It is the cynicism of hopelessness, at best, and the cynicism of those who know that their personal interests are served at the expense of others, at worst. The fact is that when billions of barrels of crude oil are being consumed every day, 1/2 of 1 percent, say, translates into an awful lot of oil. With numbers of vast magnitudes the fact that must be realized is that even a small percentage of a very large number is, in real numbers, itself a very large number.

This old argument comes to mind watching the (I would say cynical) reaction of the media to President Obama's announcement of $75 billion dollars of savings in federal spending announced this week. By trimming here and trimming there, closing this office and canceling that order, the White House, busy enough with other things, has announced that they have saved a sum equal to approximately 1/2 of 1 percent of the federal budget. And out come the cynics: "A drop in the ocean," "A political stunt," and so forth. I beg to differ.

Every householder knows that it does indeed make sense to cut out the monthly sushi outing, or hold off on ordering that new CD from Amazon, when pressed with a big mortgage payment, a large credit card debt, college bills and so forth. $500 a year in savings: that's a month's worth of credit card payments, or a month's worth of groceries, or a new piece of furniture. That's real money! And guess what: do what the Obama administration has done three months into its term 199 more times and: no deficit at all. 200: is that so large a number? Meanwhile, lots of folks, apparently, figured for a long time "Hey I owe $12,000 on my credit cards: another 60 bucks for this gizmo doesn't change that situation." That way lies madness. That way lies the impasse at which we have arrived.

So yes, it is a matter of perspective when we're talking about trillions of dollars of deficit spending. But the moral of that has been backwards in the media this week, and I'm not talking about know-nothing Fox, I'm talking about MSNBC, even. The implication of trillions of dollars in debt is not that 1/2 of 1 percent savings is nothing. The moral is that it's a WHOLE LOT. When I save 1/200th of my annual budget, that's good. When Obama saves 1/200th of the annual federal budget, that's not just good, that's great.

Empathy on the Supreme Court

Why not put Bill Clinton on the Supreme Court? Obama and Hillary need to keep him busy, and it's the only box big enough to hold him. Plus he's a notorious empathizer.

Speaking of that, I'm marveling at this week's conservative attack on President Obama, who made the outrageous assertion that he wanted to appoint someone to the Court who might have empathy for ordinary people. Horrors! This is more of the Keystone Kops routine we're seeing from a right wing that is now led by Rush Limbaugh. How great is it to have political opponents who are spending the week declaring themselves to be against empathy? Rhetorical geniuses they are not.

Meanwhile, I'd love to have an interview with Justice Clarence Thomas about all this. He wasn't quite four-square against empathy in his dissent to Virginia vs. Black in 2004, when the court upheld a right to cross-burning under the 1st Amendment. "Those who hate cannot terrorize or intimidate to make their point," he wrote, adding the interesting metaphysical observation that burning a cross was more like burning a house than it was like making a statement; one could, after all, burn down a house to make a point. So how about it, Justice Thomas? For empathy, or against it?

John Wilke 1954-2009

My old college buddy John Wilke passed away last Friday at the age of 54. I have known him and his wife Nancy for 31 years. John was a staunch liberal from before the day I met him until the day he passed away. He had a very "straight"-looking demeanor and was always polite and diplomatic, but he was burning with righteous indignation at corporate greed and exploitation when we were students at New College in the 1970s and that spirit carried him through Columbia Journalism School and on to a distinguished career as an investigative reporter. He was a thorn in the side of the mighty; if you were to ask Bill Gates about him you'd get an earful.

John told me he had cancer some months ago, and we had an e-mail conversation about death and dying, but he was never anything but his always positive self. He never said he was dying, he was reflective but never complained. Here are obituaries from his employer of 20 years The Wall Street Journal, his sometime employer The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.

Two Points About the Torture Debate

Two quick points about the political football game Washington is having this week over the "torture memos."

1) The "debate" about the torture memos and what to do about them is, most unfortunately, a distraction that helps the Republicans, on my view. It allows them to kick up a bunch of gorilla dust (for example, I'm doubting the Cheney people sent someone over to inform Nancy Pelosi that they had waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, but you would think that they had from watching cable). Just put it all out there (without cherry-picking either) and walk away, and it will take care of itself.

2) One thing that does make me mad, though, is the way the military just sort of tossed those loser guards from Abu Ghraib and not a single officer even so much as fell on his sword for a sweet pension deal, while we now know (and had every reason to think at the time) that the policy of rough interrogation was coming down from the very top. The attitude of the brass seems to be, "Well those kids weren't our professional torturers, so it's not the same thing." Seems a bit low for all the officers to run off and let those hillbilly kids go down.

Media Cheerleading For the Destruction of Somalia

I posted the YouTube interview (actually Davey D interviewed him) with the Somali-born rapper K'naan below and on Facebook last Tuesday. I was disturbed by the sceptical response it elicited from my mostly educated, mostly liberal readers and Facebook friends, so I did a little more research into K'naan's claims, that I will report below (well, report on the reporting: I'm just a guy in his pajamas). Since then, the media has been devoting a great deal of attention to the tearful homecoming of the American hostages as well, of course, to the heroic conduct of the Navy SEALs who killed three Somali pirates (all aged between 17 and 19), presenting the story in the crowd-pleasing form of the heroic rescue after the terrible ordeal, without so much as a mention of the background of problems for Somalis that puts the piracy in context.

So I was interested this morning when I saw that the NYT had an editorial on the problem, and I turned to it immediately. The NYT is my basic newspaper, and I'm not the sort of cranky, correcter-than-thou lefty, like Noam Chomsky, say, or the late Harold Pinter, who indulge themselves in a blanket rejection of the motives or integrity of the NYT, not that I'm naive (Chomsky has done good work in the past on media coverage of Cambodia, Indonesia and other places). But this morning my old friend the NYT, I'm sorry to say, pushed me too far, and here I am, spending some time this beautiful Saturday morning giving you some background on the situation in Somalia.

Somalia, a failed state ruled mostly by local warlords for years, has the longest coastline of any African country. With no national government with any effective international influence, it has been the site of illegal dumping of waste, mostly from European nations, for many years, including nuclear waste. International organized criminal networks, long involved in the lucrative business of dumping toxic waste illegally, have colluded with private companies in this practice. There is some persuasive documentation that as a result of this abuse of the lawless situation along the Somali coast, local people have suffered various illnesses including birth defects that are associated with pathogens in the environment.

In addition to the illegal dumping, Somali waters are exploited without any compensation to Somalia by international fishing fleets that have not only taken fish that a country with a functioning international presence would be able to harvest with its own native fishing fleets, but have actually fished these waters out of large numbers of commercially desirable fish species through the use of banned equipment such as fine-mesh drag nets.

Another shocker is that the Islamic Courts Union government that was ousted with US support in 2006 had actually successfully curbed the pirates, who quickly got back into business (along with the international mafiosi no doubt) after those evil religious people were thrown out.

All of this needs attention from the media that it is not getting. One of my friends on Facebook, sceptical of K'naan's claims, actually made the argument that if these "pirates" were organized Somali nationalists trying to defend Somalia and to make a point, we would have heard about it in the media, wouldn't we? And that's the point I want to make today: not only are we not being given this essential background to the pirate situation in media coverage, but the media is actively cheerleading us on to forget about the human dimension of the pirates altogether. We hear about the terrible "ordeal" of the "hostages," as if they have been through hell; not one American as been so much as injured by these people. It is also not lost on the Somalis or on many other people that the US media got on this bandwagon only after Americans were seized. These seizures have been happening for years to crewmen from the Philippines, Egypt and other countries without any accompanying orgy of jingoism in the American media. It's really insidious and they're going to make a Chomsky out of me if we don't start getting some background.

And hurrah for K'naan, I've watched the interview twice now and he's getting lots of stuff right, he's really smart. I found out about this when a friend e-mailed me the interview after he found it on Rock Rap Confidential.

Knaan on Nuclear Waste Dumping Along the Somali Coast

The Dam Starts Breaking

I was surprised to read in the NYT this morning that the Cuban American National Foundation, which has for many years been the main lobbying vehicle for the anti-Castro Cuban exile community, is now calling for expanded official relations, loosening of travel and remittance restrictions, and increasing business relations. This is particularly striking since the CANF, under the leadership of Jorge Mas Canosa (who died in 1997), was the Cuban equivalent of AIPAC: a lobby capable of single-handedly keeping US policy on a hard-line track. There is no other comparable group in the Cuban exile community. The CANF has not today gone so far as to call for an end to the economic blockade and rescinding of the Helms-Burton Act, but they did in their new proposal acknowledge that the old (ancient: since the early 60s) policy has failed. They can have no illusions that this proposal is a significant step toward full normalization of relations with Cuba.

There is a confluence of circumstances just now that together comprise a real opportunity to get to a Cuba policy that is not insane ("not insane" is a sort of step-one goal for US foreign policy at this point). The Cuban community in the US has changed considerably both through latter-day immigration and the coming of age of the grandchildren of the original exiles: neither group shares the emotional attitude of the 60s generation. US politicians of both parties needed Florida to win the presidency and it was true until recently that the Cuban vote could swing that (one of Bill Clinton's lowest moments was when he signed Helms-Burton). Meanwhile Yankee gradually started to pay attention to the US's own interests: both the US Chamber of Commerce and, believe it or not, the Pentagon have endorsed an end to the blockade for some years now. To top it all off, Bush-Cheney managed to turn Guantanamo Bay into a symbol for one of the darkest episodes in all of US history, tarnishing America's image in the world for years to come. I haven't expected Obama to spend political capital on the Cuban issue, he's got too much on his plate, but there does come a point where it's politically so easy that there's no reason not to make the change.

One last thing, the bad news, I guess, for my liberal-left readers and friends: I've been to Cuba, spent weeks living with faculty (and Party members) from the University of Havana, traveled out to small towns in the interior (where I was the guest of the local military commander, among others), wandered in Havana far from the tourist spots, and my opinion is that the centralized economy of Cuba doesn't work. Cuba is very poor, the quality of life is low, and these conditions cannot all be explained away by blaming the bloqueo. I am not a friend of the Castro government. I would like to see multiparty democracy and markets in Cuba. And you know what would be the most effective way of bringing an end to 50 years of a well-intentioned, patriotic, non-kleptocratic, but utterly failed dictatorship? Full normalization. The Party wouldn't last twelve months.

"...the rest of the world must change as well"

"The United States must change," President Obama told the Europeans, "but the rest of the world must change as well." I thought of that today reading about the latest North Korean missile launch. Readers of this blog know that I strongly support a standing down of the US as global cop, with the concomitant reduction of the size of the US military and its budget, and a general unwinding of the post-WWII "leading role" of the US. But the international community will actually have to do most, not just some, of the work required for this to occur.

For the moment I think we can forget the Europeans so far as helpfulness is concerned. The only thing more precious to the Europeans than their typically chauvinistic and masturbatory anti-Americanism is the fact that the US absolutely handles all military security for the European continent, from the tiniest "mouse that roared" disputes to the largest conflagrations. The Europeans are of no use and will not be of any until they can, at a minimum, handle military security on their own continent; at the moment there is no doubt that they cannot. They have let this go on because the United States indirectly subsidizes European social "safety net" policies by continuing to pay for European military security, and they've kind of got us: what alternative do we have? Let Europe burn? They are rather effectively holding us hostage.

Asia is a different story. The question for today is, what to do about the failed and dangerous state of North Korea? Two stories illustrate the situation pretty thoroughly: First, GOP candidate-in-waiting Newt Gingrich telling Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday that he would have "disabled" the missile (Newt being Newt, his favored weapon was ray guns. No, it's true. Check for yourself), and second, the continuing reluctance of China, at this point North Korea's de facto patron and protector, to take any strong action because of the problem of paying for huge influxes of economic migrants if the North Korean regime were toppled, a burden they would share with the South Koreans in any event.

There's one more country with a border with North Korea, and that's Russia. Another big story this week was about Russia and China working on the idea of a global currency to replace the US dollar, part of a larger strategic aim to work together to establish real hegemony in Asia (that is, to push the Americans out of Asia).

Say, Russia? Um, China? Here's one American who would like absolutely nothing better than for the US to be out of security commitments in Asia altogether. Heave ho! But, uh, guys? That means you're going to have to deal with it.

Who Will She Be?

I've been very impressed the past couple of days by Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic governor of Michigan. She's very articulate and fast on her feet, deftly supporting President Obama and the auto industry, including ousted CEO Richard Wagoner. I've been enthusiastic about Kathleen Sibelius, Democratic governor of Kansas, for a long time. Both of these women look like presidential material to me. Of course, any woman who wanted the Democratic presidential nomination would have to get through Hillary Clinton, who I am proud to say I supported for the nomination most of last year. The point is, the Democrats are the party of women, and their bench is deep: women in the Democratic Party will assert their claim for spots on the ticket, presumably after we try to reelect this administration in 2012 God willing.

So it was particularly obnoxious, I thought, to get a media blip today about how Sarah Palin was predicted to be the first woman president. If she's on the ticket in either 2012 or 2016, I'd say the GOP will be in big trouble. The argument is that it's the conservatives who can elect a woman, but the opposite is true. It's not about tokenism: the Democrats are the party of women, just as they're the party of blacks, and the party of gays. Anyway, if the Republicans can't find a responsible, centrist candidate the next time they have a shot, their time in the wilderness will be quite long.

Charisma Gap

This week's faces of the Republican Party in the media are Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Only Gingrich has any chance of running for the 2012 GOP nomination, a prospect almost as delightful to Democrats as Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin would be. Meanwhile there is a question as to whether Obama is becoming overexposed, in the media sense of being in our faces too much. This can happen and he needs to be sensitive to the possibility, but so far I think he is deliberately being the Anti-Bush: Bush, through a combination of natural aloofness, natural inarticulateness, and a philosophy that the president ought not have to explain himself too much, ended up seeming out-of-touch. Obama is behaving as much like Theodore as like the other Roosevelt: the presidency is a "bully pulpit" and we live in times when the public needs to be continuously updated and educated on what's happening.

I think Obama is also trying to humanize (as in cut down to size) the presidency. He is essentially a technocrat, a fact obscured by his recent historical political successes. If he keeps talking publicly as much as he has been so far, the public (and the media) will tune out a bit, and that might not be a bad thing for the institution. Some unglamorous, nonsuperstar officials are trying to make the trains run on time and keep the lights on, and if you're interested in that sort of thing you can tune in, otherwise you can seek entertainment elsewhere.

It was ironic today when the Czech president denounced the stimulus spending strategy of the US: the Eastern European politician thinks that the Americans are too socialist! When the crisis is economic it sorts out the wheat from the chaff, it's real work to figure out any of this stuff enough to start to get a handle on it. For example Paul Krugman is all for stimulus spending, in fact he thinks that so far the government has not spent nearly enough, yet he is equally adamant that the banking policy of buying up bad assets is a terrible mistake. I confess that this is too deep for me at the moment, but I'm working on it!

Testing Obama

The first 100 days of a presidency, when the new president still enjoys the support and hopes of the public, is a time to get things done, and Obama is doing that. It is also a time for severe testing from his antagonists: will he buckle under pressure? I am glad to say that our man shows no sign of doing that. He is severely and dangerously hampered by the economic crisis, but my sense is that the public is clear enough on the fact that this is a crisis created by funny-money Republicans and their corporate clients. Not that Obama should leave that to chance, and he isn't, repeatedly referring to the fact that he "inherited" the crisis. He also keeps saying, "I'm the President now and I accept responsibility," which among other things is a graceful way of saying "I'm in charge here and you're not." MSNBC stuck with his town meeting in California last night and I thought he was masterly. He knows that his function is essentially political and that he needs to stay in permanent campaign mode, and he's doing that, and he's great at it. Good for him.

He is being criticized for discussing the Final Four, and for going on Jay Leno tonight, but he understands that he needs to communicate with the public and maintain a relationship with the public. He will reach a huge audience on Late Night (not including me - way past my bedtime). That is not "neglecting" the economic crisis, it's functioning as the president. As to that, I'm as disgusted as everyone else by the AIG bonuses, but it has become a distraction. $160 million is big money but it's nothing compared to the money that the government is using for the bailouts, the stimulus package etc (and I am supporting the government at this point). The Republicans have double-downed on that: if he fails they hope to win big, but the flip side is that if he succeeds they definitely lose big. And aren't they the ones arguing that the economy will turn itself around in a year or two? In which case credit will go to...Obama.

On the sports thing, remember how Hillary had a Yankees/Mets problem? She couldn't have it both ways, and as a carpetbagger, she couldn't claim lifelong allegiance (that's how the local politicians finesse it). Sarah Palin got outed by the media for making the same speech about the local sports team in every city she visited. True fans have feelers for that. I always wondered why Bush, one of whose sole actual interests was baseball, didn't discuss it more. Mr. Regular Guy probably figured that the best way to stay out of trouble was just to say nothing, and he was aloof enough in general that it fit. Obama is a real person (politicians: are you listening?). He knows that sports is polarizing but he also knows that it's all in fun. It's a way for people to talk to each other (half of the men in any bar wouldn't be able to converse at all if they couldn't get into something about sports). He's not gaming us. He's being himself. He's into basketball - so sue him!

Which brings me to my last thought for now: out of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, which would you least like to sit down and have a beer with? I know not everyone will agree with me, but Bush is a white-knuckle drunk, tight-lipped and with a chip on his shoulder, hypervigilant about "authenticity," always the sure sign of an inauthentic man. Meanwhile I'd love to hang out with either Bill or Barack, relaxed, smart as whips, enjoying themselves, generous-hearted and articulate.

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Irish Peace is Easy

The despicable murder of two British soldiers and wounding of two others and of two pizza deliverymen, for God's sake, at a British base in Antrim outside Belfast is a bizarre recidivist act almost certainly carried out by the so-called "Real IRA," a benighted group of social misfits who cannot summon up the strength of character to give up hating. Hating is like a drug, in the sense that getting intoxicated on the hatred constitutes an escape from unpleasant reality.

There also continue to be belligerent and bigoted Orangemen; Ian Paisley only managed to back into civilization within the past few years. But the real story of Northern Ireland today is the total marginalization of both groups from the vast majority of people living in the province. Belfast and Derry today are prosperous middle-class communities where most people have only a vague idea of whether their neighbors are Catholic or Protestant, and couldn't care less. The violence is carried out by poor, ignorant slum-dwellers on both sides who have been left behind by recent Irish history.

As to that: Irish peace is easy. There is absolutely no danger to the economic or political interests, let alone the physical safety, of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland posed by unification under the Republican government in Dublin. None whatsoever. And this is a fact that will be readily admitted by the great majority of Protestant northerners on the street. Reunification would be best done by a majority vote in a plebiscite that demonstrated that a majority of Protestants as well as Catholics favored it, and this could be organized over the heads of the reactionary Orangemen leaders, so far as I can see, today. But there is also nothing stopping the British from withdrawing unilaterally: as I said, the possibility of some sort of bloodbath in that event is long, long gone. The British government should stop posing as the virtuous guardians of public safety in Ireland (have they ever been that since the 17th century?), and start making concrete steps towards full withdrawal and the reunification of Ireland. And that would be that.

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Time for Marijuana Reform

Something that has troubled me for a long time is the absence of any public debate (or media coverage) of the US's out of control rate of incarceration. With 5 percent of the world's population, we hold 25 percent of the world's prison population: 7.3 million people, one out of every 31 adults in the country (in 1982 it was one out of every 77 adults). Beyond the outrageous fact that the US imprisons more of its citizens than any other country, there is a long trail of statistical evidence of pervasive racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, consider the following:

1) a study by the Sentencing Project in 2005 found that almost half (45%) of the estimated 1.5 million drug arrests in the US that year were for marijuana.

2) An article in today's NYT reports that spending on prisons is growing faster than any part of the budget except Medicare spending; it costs an average of $29,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

3) A recent study by the Congressional Research Office reports that marijuana sales may account for more than 60% of the $8 to 25 billion of Mexican drug cartel profits through the sale of drugs in the US. This is the money paying for the weapons used in the escalating violence that is destabilizing Mexico.

4) It has long been recognized that taxes on legal marijuana would be a significant source of revenue for states. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in California, where the annual budget gap is now at 42 billion dollars, marijuana is the most valuable crop, with an estimated worth of 14 billion dollars: completely untaxed.

5) The main obstacle to legalizing marijuana is political: public opinion has been consistently against it. But the situation is not static: Gallup reports that today over a third of respondents favor legalization, and the trend line is strongly towards pro-legalization. Going a little further into the politics: almost half (44%) of men between ages 18 and 49 favor legalization, as well as almost half (49%) of residents of Western states, half (44%) of independent voters, more than one out of three (37%) of registered Democrats, and a majority (54%) of self-described "liberals." This indicates that a popular Democratic president could reform federal marijuana laws without undue political risk; Attorney General Eric Holder stated last week that the government would halt DEA raids on medical marijuana vendors.

People, this one's really not that hard, is it? Full legalization of production, distribution and sale, with full taxation, sales through licensed vendors with proof of age, just like alcohol. It's not just "OK": it's urgent.

Real Withdrawal

Count me among those liberals who don't like the sound of 50,000 US troops in Iraq after the so-called "withdrawal." President Obama has to listen to the military leaders and make tough decisions, and I'll keep supporting him through this, but 50,000 troops in Iraq is 50,000 too much. But then, I don't think that we should have any troops garrisoned in Germany, or Japan. I don't think that present-day Russia could occupy Finland, let alone Poland, let alone Austria; the idea is simply ridiculous. Anyway, Europe needs to handle its own security. North Korea is even more ridiculous to consider a threat. What I want for the USA is what Canada and Australia have: a prosperous Anglophone democracy that is not considered to be, and does not consider itself to be, at the center of world affairs. I don't want to be at the center of world affairs.

Not only that: it's dangerous and against our interests for the US to be the world's biggest arms dealer. We need to get out of the business. Live by the sword...we don't need this. We don't need to be spending more on the military than all of our allies combined. It's time to stand down.

Meanwhile, speaking of arms races, let me address Michelle Obama's sleeveless dress. I know nothing about sleeveless dresses, but I do know what I like. Strong shoulders, strong arms, strong back: magnificent. That's what a First Lady should look like.

Finally, as to taxes: go get those rich people! That alone is worth my vote. Redistribute the wealth! I'm all for it.

A Good Day for Obama

I'm home today and I've had the TV on, first Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's press conference and then President Obama's town hall meeting in Ft. Myers that just concluded. I'm not going to go into substance, just want to make some observations. I thought Geithner was impressive. He comes across as a hard-charger, and I thought he was surprisingly articulate for someone unaccustomed to public performance (he did use a teleprompter). Meanwhile Obama was great. He's finding his stride. They dominated the news cycle entirely. They're on the offensive. What I liked best was all the explaining, all the respect for the public's intelligence. I'm a little tired of Bush-flaying, time to move on, but compare Obama's performance, with an unselected crowd in a county that voted for McCain, with any comparable performance by Bush. No comparison. Night and day. Smart people: Allah be praised.

Down to the Hard Core

Republicans these days like to claim that the Bush-Cheney administration wasn't really a conservative Republican administration at all, a sweaty, desperate maneuver that may nonetheless serve some function at least by helping some of them go on. The rest of us might do well to note that the last administration was full-speed ahead on tax cuts and deregulation as a way to strengthen the economy for the past eight long years, and that the result of this strategy was ever-more disparity between the rich and what used to be called "the poor" but what we might as well now call "everybody else," and the current position of the economy, butt-up in the ditch. Thus one can only shake one's head in disbelief at the latest soundbite coming from the congressional Republicans, that their stimulus proposal contains "more job-creation" than the Democrats', a slogan based on the entirely discredited notion that giving all the money to rich people is merely efficient administration and not willful sabotage of the government, a project they enthusiastically support when they think no one is listening.

Meanwhile President Obama was probably making a rare slip into snarkyness when he tossed off the line that Republicans shouldn't just sit around listening to Rush Limbaugh, and I imagine Obama regretted his loose tongue this past week as Mr. Limbaugh has enjoyed the (as everyone is saying) "ka-ching" cachet of being singled out in this way. But after a couple days of this, I'm wondering: maybe it's not such a bad idea if the conservative movement is identified in the public eye with Rush. His followers are legion, but not that big of a legion. When he says that everyone is expected to bend over and grab their ankles because Obama is black (and lord knows nobody ever criticizes black people, right?), if everyone else is paying attention we might start to notice that there are bigger legions out there. Limbaugh as titular head of the conservatives: I find that that grows on me.

From Baseball to Basketball

George W. Bush was a baseball president. Understanding baseball was the key to understanding his methods. In baseball you have to maintain consistency over hundreds of innings, racking up statistical victories. Steady relentlessness is everything, and the view is long. Barack Obama is a basketball president. In basketball you set up the play in a fast-moving situation, looking a few steps ahead.

Applying this to the wrangling about the stimulus package, what we have today is a Democratic president who is politically armed to the teeth, with the country behind him, the party heavyweights gathered close, and a legislative majority, and he's the one making nicey-nice and heading up to the Hill. And we've got the Republicans, dangerously exposed and vulnerable, and they're the ones complaining and being obstreperous. That sure looks like a set-up to me.

This isn't 1993

Barack Obama has outlined an ambitious agenda for his first "one hundred days," the initial months of a presidency when new presidents traditionally exploit their mandate, their "honeymoon," and the political difficulty of attacking a president who still enjoys the hopeful expectations of the electorate. This agenda includes closing Guantanamo, drawing down the troops in Iraq, and moving on a much larger bailout of the economy than anyone has ever seen. This week, perhaps because it was felt that something ought to be presented for the gay community to atone for the Rick Warren flap, we hear that Obama intends to rescind the "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay military personnel.

This item invites reminiscence of the early days of the Clinton administration. Clinton tried to establish a gay-tolerant military. He also (with the prominent participation of his wife) tried to move forward on an ambitious reform of health insurance and health care. Notoriously Clinton met with failure on these and other early initiatives. There was even a Time magazine cover of the "incredible shrinking president." Some speculated that he would be altogether unable to govern. Today, mindful of this history, some are cautioning that Obama should go slow. I think that Obama is nothing if not measured, but more importantly there are huge differences in the political circumstances of 2009 as compared to 1993.

Bill Clinton won the election of 1992 by a plurality, splitting the vote with Bush and Perot. He managed to win the Democratic nomination that year largely because more senior Democratic politicians (Mario Cuomo for example) made the calculation that the incumbent Republican would win reelection after Reagan's domination of the previous three elections. Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, public confidence in Republican foreign policy was high: "triumphalism" was the neologism of the day. Clinton and his ally Al Gore were Democratic Party upstarts. Their strategy of staking out centrist positions squeaked them into office but did not endear them to the Democratic establishment or to the liberal electorate. They were on their own.

Today the situation is entirely different. The incoming Democrat has been elected with one of the biggest electoral vote margins of modern times. The outgoing administration leaves in public disgrace, with the Republican Party bleeding voters. Both the economy and US foreign policy are widely perceived as in critical condition. Obama has packed his incoming administration with the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country and with officials with deep connections to the Congress. There is token resistance to a stimulus package from some right-wing backbenchers, otherwise everyone wants to get in on the action. Resisting Obama is, for the moment at least, politically unwise in the extreme.

Under these circumstances Obama, if he continues to be as adroit as he has been so far, ought to have little trouble with, for example, closing Guantanamo and reaffirming our commitment to the Geneva Conventions. I'd say he can still pile a little more onto his plate. Here's my suggestion: unilaterally normalize relations with Cuba, rescind the blockade, rescind Helms-Burton. If Obama were to do that, Cuba would be completely transformed within twelve months: no more Cuban Communist Party, no more loss of business to the Canadians, Spanish, Japanese and Argentines that would more sensibly be handled by US farmers and business. I don't see how anyone could stop this.

0-2 for Harry Reid

Harry Reid badly miscalculated when he tried to punish Joe Lieberman for supporting John McCain and for speaking at the Republican Convention. In the end the Senate majority leader had to stand by Senator Lieberman's side before the cameras while Joe smilingly explained that he had been given everything he wanted. This week Sen. Reid appears to have done it again, putting his foot down that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich could not succeed in appointing Roland Burris to fill the remaining two years of Barack Obama's senate seat, as it now appears he may.

There are two questions with which I am not interested today: First, I don't care to go after Harry Reid except on one particular point. Secondly and more importantly, there is a legitimate issue as to whether Roland Burris is likely to be a good senator, but this issue is mitigated by the fact that a) it's impossible to know such a thing for certain and b) in two years the voters will be able to make the choice for themselves.

I think that the issue with Harry Reid here is an attitude that party bosses in Washington are entitled to power in state politics. On the right the idea of "states' rights" is a shibboleth (not an incoherent one) for conservativism shading off into libertarianism shading off into racist and fascist elements. But progressive political reform also confronts the centralization of power and loss of respect for voters.

The voters of Connecticut, for example, took the really extraordinary step of re-electing Joe Lieberman as an independent after he had lost the Democratic senate primary: as clear a political mandate as one could have. You're welcome to be his ally, or not. In the Illinois case, Gov. Blagojevich is not only under no indictment as this is written, he also continues to be the democratically elected governor of Illinois. His right to a legal process is absolute. The state legislature may or may not be able to impeach him. But all the party leadership in Washington needs to remember is this: the Illinois state government will send their choice for senator when they have determined who that will be. There is a process, and no reason to think that the process needs help. Just as an independent senator doesn't need guidance from party elders.

Bush's Last Day Party

So it's official we're going to have a Bush's Last Day Party at our house on Jan. 20th. I just signed up to make it a host party for MoveOn.org. We already have our life-sized Barack standup for pictures, and I'm devising a "Pin the Donkey on the Ass" game with prizes. Plus beer 'cause Barack is Irish.

Don't Hurt the Shoe Guy

If you threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein your whole family would have been tortured to death. It's really important that everybody gets it that you can throw a shoe at the president of the United States and live to tell the tale. That's why I signed up as a fan of the shoe-throwing guy on Facebook. Today we're hearing reporting that people overheard his being beaten, that he has broken ribs, and so forth. Big mistake. President Bush needs to make sure that the shoe-throwing guy isn't harmed. Unfortunately Bush has spent the last eight years trying to turn the US into Paraguay, so I'm not optimistic.

Caroline, Be a Kennedy, Not a Bush

I always thought it was fitting that George W. Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court in 2000. It's just so declasse to be elected by popular vote don't you know, so much germ exposure, and do you know some of those people have never even traveled abroad (er...never mind). All the good stuff - RNC chairman, CIA director, baseball commissioner - these are appointive posts.

The case of the Bushies comes to mind this week with the news that Caroline Kennedy has announced that she is actively seeking New York Governor Paterson's appointment to the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. It's one thing to announce that one is running for election. That is the first appeal in a campaign of appeals to the voters, who are many. But to announce that one is running for appointment is not an appeal to the appointer, who is one. You appeal to one person, preferably, in person. A public announcement puts pressure on the appointer, enough so that this may have been a miscalculation. Maybe Paterson will feel obliged to decline to appoint her so as not to appear to have caved in. (And Paterson himself has not ever been elected governor: curiouser and curiouser.)

Another curious thing is the kind of boutique nature of this Senate seat since the patently carpet-bagging Hillary Clinton moved to New York to campaign for it in 2001 (granting she did an exemplary job by all reports). Caroline Kennedy is someone who, like Hillary Clinton, might easily be elected to this Senate seat by the voters of New York on the basis of associations, popularity and name-recognition. But as a potential appointee she conspicuously lacks any formal qualifications, and the governor, presumably, is supposed to appoint a professional caretaker (a politically adventitious one of course) to fill the seat until the next election. I think it would be great to have Caroline Kennedy in the Senate, but there are fundamental procedural problems here that she may not overcome.

(Three days later: sure enough, now some are in favor of Kennedy and some opposed: Cuomo had more support in a poll reported on MSNBC last night. So now Paterson will take a political hit whether he appoints her or not, through no fault of his own. If I were him I'd be mad. And I wouldn't appoint her.)

GOP's Last Stand?

The Senate Republicans, in their theological zeal to avoid developing a national automobile industry policy of any kind, have voted to scatter our automobile industry to the winds, and the workers be damned. Make no mistake that under bankruptcy it will be the salaried workers who get the shaft. Pensions, health insurance, stock options and everything else they have will be on the judge's block. It is Republican opinion that bankruptcy is the best way to get at the union, which is obviously the source of all the problems, representing as unions do today some five percent of American workers, and espousing such radical notions as that workers worldwide should not be forced to accept wages reflecting the labor market in, say, Bangladesh.

What is striking is that the Senate GOP makes this stand in the teeth of dire warnings from all quarters: Bush, Obama, Wall Street, Senate Democrats and everyone else within shouting distance have warned of the consequences of abandoning hundreds of thousands of workers and an industrial plant stretching across the Great Lakes. It's almost a ritual flaming out of the Republicans, a kind of noble hari-kari on the ruins of Reaganismo. Because it is now the old guard of the "movement" conservative Republicans in the Senate who will now possibly be remembered as, if not the party that shot down the American auto industry, at least the party responsible for the distribution of suffering when the bills came due: the politically culpable party.

Myths of Chicago

I'm not buying the "corrupt Chicago" line about Rod Blagojevich's outlandish flameout. East Coast elites would not hesitate to point out that Albany is the problem in New York state politics, not NYC. Chicago municipal politics is a stepping stone to national politics in its own right and its elite is a national elite (the Daley family, Jacksons Rev. and Jr.,Harold Washington etc). Blagojevich is a reflection of an old political-machine culture, to be sure, but look to Springfield for the problem and count your blessings that you've got Chicago.

Game of Chance

The recount in the senate race in Minnesota gives me another opportunity to make a point that I thought was important during the Florida electoral debacle of 2000. In 2000 the lawyers for the two parties were quick to step in and define the process as a legal one between the parties: may the best lawyer win. In the end the Supreme Court essentially appointed Bush, acting out of a well-intentioned but misguided sense of duty to resolve the crisis. The issue here as I see it is about who the interested party is, and I would argue that that party is the electorate, not the political parties.

The fact is that in a state-wide vote involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes, any margin in the three digits is a statistical tie. In that circumstance there literally is no truth about who won the election. The phrase "margin of error" refers to the logical impossibility of establishing, within such a narrow margin, which candidate actually received the majority of votes. While Minnesota has a good reputation for clean and fair processes, I don't think that a recount process that ignores the problem of the margin of error is in the best interests of the voters, considered generically. The political point is that the interests of the voters considered as a group is not the same as the interests of either of the parties.

Say I voted for Franken (or Gore) and my neighbor voted for Coleman (or Bush). The outcome is a statistical tie within the margin of error. At that point my neighbor and I have an equal right to satisfaction. That is, every voter, granting that the electoral process has not determined the winner (it is a tie), deserves an equal chance of satisfaction as that of every other voter: we are not the political parties, we are sovereign individual voters. The fair thing to do is to flip a coin (or any other equivalently random process). That way my neighbor and I enjoy equal chances of satisfaction, uncorrupted by the vagaries of a highly politicized legal process. It doesn't matter what the parties want: the parties are not sovereign. The voters are sovereign, not at all the same thing. That is why a game of chance is actually the most rational way to decide an election when the vote has fallen within the margin of error.

As of this evening my guy, Al Franken, is up by about 600 votes. Doesn't matter. Flip a coin.

Bring Back the State Department

A perspicuous column by David Brooks in today's NYT inspires me to weigh in at this moment when the incoming administration will have an opportunity to make some basic reforms not only of US foreign policy, but of the foreign policy apparatus itself.
One of the most institutionally destructive episodes in United States history was the evisceration of the State Department in the period from the onset of the Cold War during the Truman Administration through the "loss" of China in 1948 and the subsequent McCarthyist witch hunts for "communists" in government in the early 1950s. The State Department, long a preserve of professional, career diplomats, linguists and scholars, became a favorite whipping-boy of politicians of the time who painted Foggy Bottom as elitist, intellectual, internationalist and not to be trusted. The by-the-numbers worldview of the Cold War painted every regional conflict as a chess piece in a strategic struggle between East and West, and every regime around the world as a proxy of one side or the other. Under those circumstances professional diplomats, always unpopular in an anti-intellectual, populist country, became unacceptably inconvenient as any nuance of understanding was a rough spot to be smoothed and covered over with Cold War rhetoric.
This minimalist worldview led to the partition of Vietnam after democratic processes in that country produced results inconvenient to Washington's Cold Warriors, and to American support for dictators of the worst sort around the world. It also led to the eclipse of the professional State Department in favor of the unbridled Imperial Presidency, with its own in-house foreign policy apparatus under the new, Orwellian language of "national security." Today we are left with a State Department with little or no power compared to the National Security Council and the Defense Department, one that is woefully incompetent in the areas of language and intelligence (broadly construed, as it should be, to include historical and cultural expertise).
Bottom line: US foreign policy has long been politicized, with no independent, professional voices allowed to be heard in the White House.
In an earlier post I recommended that NATO be disbanded as we evolve a new set of trans-Atlantic security arrangements, ones that do not assume a forward role for the US particularly in matters pertaining to European security. I also think that the National Security Council and the post of National Security Adviser are relics of the Cold War era. Let's streamline and professionalize our government and get back to the days when a professional State Department gave advice that was independent and professional (admittedly State like all parts of government has always had a degree of politicization; maybe we can do better).
While we're on the topic, I think that the choice of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State is a good one. Now the Clinton's fortunes are tied to Obama's, but more than that Obama has put the interests of the country first: far from mixing the message, the presence of the Clintons (plural) as US foreign policy players sends the message to foreign leaders that the US government is unified. That the vice-president-elect is the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee amplifies this effect even more.

Barac O'Bama of Moneygall

Cabinetry

Obama cabinetry that is. Obama has invoked Lincoln as an executive role model for forming a cabinet for a long time. Lincoln famously put his chief political rivals in his cabinet - William Seward to Secretary of State, Salmon Chase to Secretary of the Treasury and Edwin Stanton to Secretary of War - as immortalized by a brilliant series of novels by Gore Vidal, a superbly-timed book by underrated public intellectual Doris Kearns Goodwin and books innumerable. There are a number of things to be said for this kind of approach. One's enemies are kept close, their fortunes yolked to yours. Ideally they altogether cease to be enemies as the national project moves forward, but idealizations are idealizations. I wouldn't take either the cynical view or the lotus-eating view. It looks to me that our man is stocking up on political power, both within the Democratic Party and beyond, and in this respect is indeed closer to the Lincoln model than the other model currently on offer, the Kennedy "best and the brightest" model. His cabinet decisions so far have been lining up political heavyweights for the battling ahead.
I think that this a good thing. What I liked about John Edwards 2.0 was his understanding that reform of government policies involving the automotive, banking, financial, insurance, medical, pharmaceutical and oil and gas industries would necessarily involve fights that some would win and others lose, and that some of these antagonists are very powerful and will not concede anything easily. We do need to revalue and reemphasize intelligence and analysis, as the Kennedy brothers consciously tried to do after the sleepy 50s, but the situation calls for some tough political battling, and in turning to Clinton, Daschle, Emanuel and such Obama is clearly shopping for political firepower.
An example of the battle that is unfolding right now is the fight over how to protect the automotive industry. Although many advocates of bankruptcy are sincere in their good intentions for the industry, it is true that taking that course would be hugely advantageous to the stockholders at the expense of the workers. I say, money comes with strings attached. The US does indeed have an interest in a population of several hundred thousands of workers, many of them highly skilled and experienced as machinists, electricians and for many other trades, not to mention a huge physical plant for manufacturing and transportation that extends from western Pennsylvania to Minnesota. Not only that, but auto markets worldwide are expected to greatly expand as demand rises from developing countries in Asia and elsewhere, where most consumers want cheap, efficient, reliable cars. The US ought to do what is in the best interests of the country, and that is to take this opportunity to rebuild the auto industry from the ground up. An American auto industry that had a cultish devotion to energy conservation, minimizing the carbon footprint, capitalizing on waste flows, fuel efficiency and economy would be a very formidable industry internationally. I suspect that it would not be the younger generation of workers who would resist such a cultural shift, but the older managers and owners. Just a hunch. Meanwhile it is an ideal opportunity to design such a retooling and reform with a new labor dispensation in terms of pensions and above all health insurance.
Neither management types nor union types much like this kind of liberal ranting from the blogosphere, I know, but calm down: all of these things can be achieved well short of any sort of nationalizing or union-busting or choose your poison. It is not unreasonable to point out the obvious outlines of a national manufacturing policy, and liquidity should not simply be pumped out into the monetary ocean. Companies that have the will to adapt should be helped. In fact, the US automobile industry has demonstrated great adaptability in the past. At the same time, Obama's need to amass some political authority could not be more clear.

George W. Bush is a True Conservative

"He ran as a conservative," goes the line from the Republican Party apologists, "but he didn't govern as one." All those people who supported him for reelection in 2004 can't wait to throw him over the side now. The claim is that the massive spending and resulting cosmological debt-hole are, by definition, non-conservative. Conservatives stand for fiscal responsibility, right? And if this administration ends in fiscal disaster that means, by definition, that this is a non-conservative administration, right?
Not so fast. Here are three ways in which Bush Administration spending, and the resultant problems, are straightforward products of conservative thinking:
1) The biggest elephant in the room is military spending. All empires, from the Athenians and Caesarean Romans of antiquity to the Spanish and British Empires, have declined when their international commitments, and therefore their military burdens, broke their banks. It's like any other burst of energy in nature, the bubble expands until the energy is spent. There is no sane reason for the United States to sustain the current level of military spending. It doesn't make us safer. We must stand down as gendarme of global security. Conservatives (who have morphed over the decades since WWII into messianic imperialists) simply refuse to face the fact that the foreign entanglements that Jefferson warned about, and the economic and social militarization that Eisenhower warned us about, are not sustainable under contemporary economic reality. Today's conservatives either think that the US can maintain global military supremacy for all time (in denial about the plain fact that all things come to be and pass away), or worse, think that the US is destined to fulfill Biblical "end times" prophecy. George W. Bush isn't their problem, they are our country's problem.
2) Conservatives espouse "fiscal responsibility" in only the narrowest, most selective sense. They mean, for the most part, that the government ought not to fund programs that help the poor, that protect the environment, that support public and higher education, and so on. Pro-business conservatives have an economic model that is predicated on consumer spending. That nice check for $1,200 or so that you got last year? You were supposed to go down to the mall and spend it. That was the idea. That people ought not to consume more than they need, that saving is a virtue, that usury is a moral wrong: none of that is any part of contemporary conservative philosophy. "Fiscal responsibility" is not a real philosophy for conservatives: it's a code for limiting the size and role of government. Thus the question as to whether helping the poor, protecting the environment, supporting education might actually be fiscally responsible policies in the long run has no interest for them. Deregulation of the financial industry is itself a deeply perverse expression of "responsibility," as conservatives seek to lessen, not maintain, financial protection for ordinary citizens. Their resistance to progressive taxation is also not an instance of "fiscal responsibility," rather it is an expression of faith in supply-side economics.
3) The current administration has very self-consciously spent the federal government into the ground, as a way of weakening and diminishing it. Whether or not that is a good goal, consider the hypocrisy of conservatives who now run away from this project, that they supported in the most full-throated way while they were supporting Bush and Cheney through two elections, much as all the macho talk about how the federal government ought not be in the business of paying for regional disasters was forgotten in the face of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Now they want to tell us that these are not conservative policies after all. Nonsense.

The Amazing Lieberman

I can't say I much care for Joe Lieberman's foreign policy views. He would, by all appearances, gladly court global war and human catastrophe on an historic scale in the pursuit of his support for Israel. He is hostile to any attempt to reach out diplomatically or economically to the Palestinians, whose very existence he questions. He thinks, for reasons that elude me, that escalation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would further Israel's interests, and he advocates attacking Iran for the same reason, although what would happen next if the US attacked Iran is anybody's nightmare: it would be a classic instance of the dog catching the car. He is an Israeli defense hawk more belligerent than majority public opinion in Israel itself, sitting in the United States Senate. And he pursues this apocalyptic agenda at the expense of any other political interests he may have: amazingly enough, this is someone who votes with the Democrats 90 percent of the time. You read that right.
Which brings me to my reason for discussing him today: you've got to love the audacious political career that this man has charted for himself. He was Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate in 2000, the first Jew on a national ticket (and a practicing Orthodox Jew at that). In that election, Lieberman's credentials as a foreign policy hawk and (remember?) an avatar of "values" were considered to be an asset to the ticket. And of course he was very nearly elected. Then, by 2006, anti-war sentiment in the Democratic Party had built up such a head of steam that Lieberman lost the Connecticut Democratic primary for nomination to the Senate to the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. At that point, politics being what it is, his old cronies (ie Chris Dodd) went over to campaigning against him. But wait: the Republican candidate was a disaster, and the meltdown of that campaign freed up enough conservative voters that Lieberman was elected as an independent. That was, I thought, tip-your-hat sort of stuff: now Lieberman could do anything he wanted, and that included continuing to caucus with the Democrats. If that were the end of the story it would be a great story.
But it goes on! Lieberman, caucusing with the Democrats and continuing to vote with the Democratics on most Senate votes, went out on the stump for McCain in the 2008 election. He didn't just say "I support McCain." He traveled around at McCain's elbow for months, whispering handler's instructions in his ear, and the final audacity was to go to the GOP convention in Minneapolis and address the delegates. At which point many Democrats said OK, you've pushed us too far, you're out. But wait: the Dems didn't get the 60-seat majority they needed to have a veto-proof Senate (and there will be battling over filibusters as well). So Lieberman goes on. Harry Reid talked tough about throwing him out as Homeland Security chairman, but when their post-election meeting finally came it was Lieberman who was calling the shots, walking away from the meeting saying that the Majority Leader's propositions were "unacceptable." And there we sit. After all, Lieberman is an independent, and not only that but it was the Party, not him, that declined to put him forward as the Democrat senator from Connecticut. He asked for the nomination.
No, I don't like a messianic Middle East hawk. Don't like that one bit. But the career? Brilliant. At some point you've just got to hand it to the guy.

Inventory of the Goodies

Friday night Sophia went trick-or-treating for the first time, it was great to see her carefully sorting through her bag of goodies like I remember doing as a kid. Last night lifelong liberal Democrats like me got a treat, not a trick, for once and I've done a little sorting today myself.
State by state, the news is better than I thought it was last night. All three contested Rocky Mountain states, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, went for Obama. New Mexico was expected, Colorado was in play the whole campaign, Nevada is striking and reflects demographic changes in the region. One of the McCain campaign's scenarios was to flip the Rocky Mountain states, didn't happen. That's a new map, I voted for Jerry Brown in 1992 in the Colorado caucus when Gov. Moonbeam won it, 16 years later we've got a growing, politically fascinating region that the Democrats should fight for. Indiana is maybe the single biggest win for the Democrats, a true upset and Obama did it with increased turnout by urban African-American voters combined with white working class support: it wasn't suburban liberals, it was a brilliant campaign by Obama and the 50-state strategy of the grossly underestimated Howard Dean. Obama won in Florida and Virginia, and appears to have won North Carolina by a slim, 5-digit margin. As recently as August the pundits were out there saying that the Democrats had no chance in Florida. Three big southern states for the black Democrat and his Yankee running mate.
Which brings me to the big picture. This time around, the Democrats won California, New York, Illinois, as usual. They also took Florida. If they can build on the win in Florida, the Republicans are left with: Texas. One big state. And that's not enough. Not only that, but Latino voters went big for Obama. That was a real unknown (like so many things that we could only know by actually having a black candidate for President). There were real indications that Latino voters wouldn't go for a black candidate, that the two ethnic identities could be played against each other (by the Republican Party: who else?). Well no: Latinos went for Obama by 73 percent in Colorado, 76 percent in Nevada, 69 percent in New Mexico, 57 percent in Florida. And have you heard? There are lots of Latinos living in Texas! I've heard it on good authority!

Don't Forget Jesse Jackson, Don't Forget 1988

Watchin' TV and Cookin' Food on Election Night

6:55 PM: Collateral Damage: Pat Buchanan (of course I'm watching MSNBC, I'll flip around later) says that people have invested high expectations in Obama, but do they really know what they're getting in terms of policy agenda? Buchanan's purpose is to question a liberal mandate, but I think also that the fact that the great mass of these people about to vote for Obama aren't political animals means that the McCain-Palin campaign managed to insult a lot more people than they were aiming at with all these attacks on socialism, anti-Americanism and so forth. We were all asked to accept the suggestion that the sitting Speaker of the House, the sitting Senate Majority Leader, and the Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees of the Democratic Party, as well as large geographic swathes of the country, were anti-American, socialist, etc. Sarah Palin, by the way, advertised herself as the "first Christian" mayor of Wasilla, unlike, say, the Lutheran man she displaced for that position. Bullies insult people, but they need to know when to stop. To put it in terms that the GOP nominee might understand: you were dropping too much ordnance. Too much collateral damage. Sound familiar?
7:39 PM Watch Where You Aim That Thing: Howard Fineman reports on MSNBC that African-American voter turnout is up everywhere that the Pennsylvania state GOP ran Reverend Wright ads this week. (The McCain campaign wasn't running them.)
Indiana (admittedly it's a tiny number of precincts reporting) is going for Obama. Another Pat Buchanan moment earlier today was when he started explaining one possible McCain scenario: "Say McCain wins Indiana and..." Say he wins Indiana? If McCain loses Indiana it's the end of civilization as we know it. Meanwhile I just flipped, as promised, over to Fox and glory be: they're reporting from the same planet as everybody else. Much better graphics, even.
8:24 PM (7:24 Eastern, remember): Both Maine and New Hampshire showing 67% for Obama. Iowa isn't the only place where a whole lot of white people are voting for Obama. New Hampshire is significant as a place that's been very kind to John McCain over the years. Meanwhile Indiana and Virginia are showing for McCain. Maybe deciding to do this running post thing will turn out to be more dramatic than I thought. I hope not.
10:39/9:39 Eastern: Fox has called Pennsylvania and Ohio for Obama. By my calculations McCain can't win without Pennsylvania. Anna K. just called all excited, but also reminding that it's not over. I don't think that any unexpected states are going to flip either way, but Obama is well ahead in Florida, Virginia isn't called yet and interestingly North Carolina is actually looking stronger for Obama than Virginia. Meanwhile Louis Fortuno has won the governer's race here, and that means that the whole university administration will be replaced, which under the circumstances is good news for us professors. I'll stay up a little later but this does look like a wrap - because no surprises either way. Hundreds of thousands of people gathering along the river in Chicago, I wish we were there.
Chris Matthews reports that there are as of tonight no Republican congressmen (or women) in New England. Not a one. Not that Christopher Shays was a bad guy.

Noon in Puerto Rico on Election Day

It's 11:47 AM Atlantic Time here in Puerto Rico, an hour ahead of Eastern (they "fall back," we stay the same, no DST). From everything that I can see (OK, obsessively stare at), we're on course for victory for Obama tonight. But it's not in the bag or at least if it is in the bag we can't yet tell. Like everyone else, I just want it to be over so we can move on, an apparently universal emotion today aggravated for G. and me by the closure of the university here since last Wednesday because of political and labor problems. Sophia has got her wading pool set up outside. When cars go by we can hear the party flags flapping in the wind.
Speaking of that, Puerto Rico is going through some political changes itself. Anibal Acevedo Villa, the Popular Party governer who initially got good marks when he took over from the patently oligarchic Sila Calderon (PR's first woman governor), has seen the public sour on him as he was unable to tame the endemic corruption that undid the last Nuevoprogressista governor Pedro Rosello as well (stateside readers: the Populares/PPD are the party of the status quo, the Nuevoprogresistas/PNP are the pro-statehood party). These are structural problems with a deep cultural dimension and it's going to take a lot to change things; people are more just angry than they are resolute to do anything in particular. They are, however, likely to turn the government back over to the Nuevoprogresistas today. This was helped by the effective ousting of Rosello who very typically tried to claim the nomination for himself once again (he had one of his loyalists step down to free a senate seat for him after losing both the last election and extensive legal challenges). Fortuno, the PNP candidate this time, thus represents a fresh face in contrast to both Acevedo and Rosello.
An interesting development here is the visible evolution of Puerto Rican party politics past its traditional focus which has always been the status issue. The younger faction that has taken over the PNP may develop the party along Democratic Party lines (something Rosello also tried to do), and if that succeeded, and the PPD came to represent an essentially conservative posture (they are the party of the Catholic Church as well as other populist/conservative elements), politics in PR would indeed be transformed. Meanwhile the same evolution of a more rational political discourse is evident regarding the PIP, the independence party. They are under intense pressure this election from yet a fourth party, the new Puerto Ricans for Puerto Rico (PPR? I'm not sure), which is polling around 6 percent vs. the PIP's truly dismal 2 percent (it's true that a likely PNP victory tends to bring out the "melones," so called because they talk a PIP (green) line while voting a PPD (red) line in the voting booth. I cannot yet make out what the new party stands for: for the moment they are the Cinderella ticket and are catching basically a free ride. The problem for the PIP considered as a nationalist party is that, for various historical and social reasons, it is also the self-styled vanguard party of the left. This turns out to be disastrous over the long term. Without the people the PIP is a party but not a movement. There is no reason that the nationalist movement needs to be the socialist movement, and some very practical political reasons why it shouldn't be. That might sound like an opinion hostile to independence, but the opposite it true: my view is that the single biggest political problem for Puerto Rican nationalism is the identification of the movement with the left, and with (inevitably) anti-US sentiment. What an irony that the left-wing intelligensia that dominates the PIP is itself the single biggest obstacle to the nationalist movement's success! But as I say, we can see things changing and today is a big day for local politics here.
Meanwhile the US election is more important and will make more of a difference here as well as in the States. The Republicans can try to hold the line and not suffer too big of a defeat, and I'd say that's more likely than a blowout. But a blowout would be much better for the country, that is several notches too far over to the right. Progressive taxation, regulatory enforcement, health insurance for all Americans: that's the way to put the middle class back in power, and it's not going to be easy to do.
I'm getting slightly more traffic today than usual, at least for a Tuesday. Anybody who does happen to read this: everybody's got to vote. More is better. If we could flip a couple of red states and break 300-325 on electoral votes Obama's first hundred days will be much more successful.