Yes, We Can Torture

Glad to see my political donations have gone to good use.

More news the U.S. media isn't covering. Yet again, from The Guardian.

Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at 'torture'

Obama professor among 250 experts who have signed letter condemning humiliation of alleged WikiLeaks source

More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago. . . .

The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by the United Nations' rapporteur on torture. . . .

The protest letter, published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning's reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that prevents punishment without trial.

In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say "he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency".

[Benkler] said Manning's conditions were being used "as a warning to future whistleblowers" and added: "I find it tragic that it is Obama's administration that is pursuing whistleblowers and imposing this kind of treatment."

Perhaps Obama will hire John Yoo to draft a response.

The Banality of Bush White House Evil

As a follow up to my previous post, I recommend Frank Rich's article in today's New York Times - "The Banality of Bush White House Evil."

His conclusion:

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

The Dark Side

"When you cross over that line of darkness, it's hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it's well outside the norm. You can't go to that dark a place without it changing you."

Unidentified former CIA interrogator

A few weeks ago, I started reading The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer, a writer from the New Yorker who has been investigating the Bush administration's torture program for several years. Just as I finished the book, President Obama released four crucial memos on the program, all of which Mayer had discussed in her work.

The Dark Side may be the most disturbing book I've ever read about my own country. Not because of the accounts of torture, as bad as they were, but because it became clear after 360 pages of accumulating detail and revealing interviews, that the United States of America under the Bush administration had bureaucratized and institutionalized torture. The memos and reports released in the last week only confirm this tragic and terrifying state of affairs.

It is one thing to cross over into the dark side in the heat of the moment. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, given the horrible nature of what happened and the genuine concern about additional attacks, it's not hard to imagine some interrogators getting out of control. (Ironically, the experienced and highly trained FBI agents conducting interrogations in late 2001 and early 2002 did not get out of control but conducted several crucial and legal debriefing sessions that revealed highly valuable information. They were subsequently removed by the CIA, with blessings from the highest levels of government, and, when it became clear that detainees were being tortured, FBI Director Robert Mueller forbade his agents from participating in further interrogations. For a good description of this devastating turn of events, see "My Tortured Decision," an op-ed by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who was directly involved in the initial, pre-torture, debriefing of Abu Zubaydah.)

It is another thing altogether, however, to systematically and rationally develop a torture program, to intellectually lay out legal groundwork over a period of years for making torture the established norm. In that case, we have crossed the line of darkness and employed logic and reason to justify our new-found citizenship on the other side. We have embraced evil and legally changed its name to "light."

"[Torture] has become bureaucratized. . . . Brutalization doesn't work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul."

Daniel Coleman, former FBI interrogator

What has genuinely puzzled and disappointed me in the past week has been Barack Obama's inconsistent pronouncements on torture, especially his vague and weak call for the country to move on, to look toward the future, by basically sweeping Bush's illegal program under the rug. Apart from the fact that a torture program violates numerous national and international laws and treaties, and the president doesn't even have the legal right to decide what can and cannot be investigated; apart from the horrible international precedent of the United States willfully refusing to investigate its own involvement in torture; I am stunned that Obama doesn't recognize what a crucial moment this is in our nation's history.

You cannot cross over the line of darkness and then hope to move forward simply by ignoring that you're on the other side now.

If individual interrogators in the CIA and FBI are speaking publicly about losing one's soul from torturing others, where does that leave us as a country, when we implemented a systematic torture program and used our legal system to justify it?

If the United States of America doesn't deal honestly and responsibly with the Bush torture program, we are betraying the very ideals upon which this nation was founded. We may "move on" by ignoring what we've done, but it won't be in the right direction.

In a 2005 piece in the Los Angeles Times, "America's Anti-Torture Tradition," Robert Kennedy, Jr. wrote:

"In 1776," wrote historian David Hackett Fischer in "Washington's Crossing," "American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements … was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution."

The fact that the patriots refused to abandon these principles, even in the dark times when the war seemed lost, when the enemy controlled our cities and our ragged army was barefoot and starving, credits the character of Washington and the founding fathers and puts to shame the conduct of America's present leadership.

Fischer writes that leaders in both the Continental Congress and the Continental Army resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with a respect for human rights. This was all the more extraordinary because these courtesies were not reciprocated by King George's armies. . . . Captured Americans were tortured, starved and cruelly maltreated aboard prison ships.

Washington decided to behave differently. After capturing 1,000 Hessians in the Battle of Trenton, he ordered that enemy prisoners be treated with the same rights for which our young nation was fighting. In an order covering prisoners taken in the Battle of Princeton, Washington wrote: "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren…. Provide everything necessary for them on the road."

John Adams argued that humane treatment of prisoners and deep concern for civilian populations not only reflected the American Revolution's highest ideals, they were a moral and strategic requirement. His thoughts on the subject, expressed in a 1777 letter to his wife, might make a profitable read for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as we endeavor to win hearts and minds in Iraq. Adams wrote: "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this — Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."

Perhaps the most disturbing piece of news that has come out in the last few days is that a number of detainees were tortured not to gain information to prevent an impending terrorist attack, but to prove the non-existent link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, in order to justify the administration's poorly conceived invasion of Iraq. That is, the Bush administration tortured people simply to satisfy their own political agenda.

Rachel Maddow and Ron Suskind discussed this issue last Wednesday, in one of the better segments I've seen on the torture program revelations:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"They were torturing people. No question. They did disgusting things to people. Their attitude was, 'Laws? Like who the fuck cares?'"

Former CIA official with extensive knowledge of the CIA program

As usual with systematic programs of torture and brutalization, the most troubling and creepy aspect is how many innocent people became victims.

The CIA, concerned about the paucity of valuable information emanating from [Guantánamo], in the late summer of 2002 dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was. The report he wrote up from this sensitive, early reconnaissance mission is classified top secret. But after he left the Agency, he described what he found. . . . [H]e concluded that an estimated one-third of the prison camp's population of more than 600 captives at the time . . . had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. . . .

A later study by a team of law students and attorneys at Seton Hall University Law School bolstered the CIA officer's impressions. After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees' cases in depth, they concluded that only 8% were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs.

Several detainees, including ones with no connection to terrorism, were killed during interrogations. Other innocent people were tortured in secret prisons for months or even years. Mayer writes at length about one detainee, Khaled el-Masri, a car salesman from southern Germany (and a German citizen), who was detained while on holiday in Macedonia because he had a similar name to an Al Qaeda terrorist. After being tortured for a few months, it became clear that the CIA had made a mistake. Yet they refused to release him. Someone at Langley was sure he was holding out on them. Finally, after six months, the CIA flew Masri to Albania, drove him blindfolded down a long road, and kicked him out of the car. He was later flown back to Germany.

He had lost so much weight, and looked so haunted and aged, the airport authorities accused him of using someone else's passport. When he arrived at his apartment, it was deserted and ransacked. His wife and sons, he learned later, had assumed themselves abandoned and moved [to] Lebanon.

There's so much to talk about. I haven't even touched on the bizarre reverse-engineering of the military's SERE program, which was developed to help American soldiers withstand torture, into our own torture program. In a surreal and typically incompetent Bush administration twist, we took a communist program intended to produce false confessions for propaganda purposes and tried to use it to extract useful information from detainees. As Rachel Maddow said before her interview with Colonel Steve Kleinman, former military interrogator, "What could possibly go wrong?"

What gave me hope while reading The Dark Side was the brave conduct of many people in the U.S. military, the FBI, various intelligence agencies, and within the Bush administration itself, who refused to participate in the administration's torture program and who tried to stop what was happening.

The right-wing and even the mainstream media may try to paint those who are against torture as being "on the left" or "liberals," but the reality is that the push-back against the Bush torture program began among people who were usually conservative, some of them very conservative. But they believed in the U.S. Constitution and knew it was being damaged.

In one of many examples Mayer details in her book:

"The senior uniformed lawyers for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines . . . all sent extraordinary memos of dissent to Haynes. . . .

The Defense Department promptly classified them as a secret. In 2005, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, who had been a military judge advocate general himself, publicly revealed the passionate memos. He noted that the authors were 'not from the ACLU. These are not from people who are soft on terrorism, who want to coddle foreign terrorists. These are all professional military lawyers who have dedicated their lives, with 20-plus year careers, to serving the men and women in uniform and protecting their Nation. They were giving a warning shot across the bow of the policymakers that there are certain corners you cannot afford to cut because you will wind up meeting yourself.'

The memos from the uniformed lawyers to the politically appointed general counsel were brimming with barely concealed disbelief at the direction the Justice Department was proposing for the soldiers to take.

Mayer writes in the Afterword of The Dark Side:

[W]hat began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush Administration was warned that the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America's ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.

So where do we go from here? It's hard to tell.

I don't know what to make of President Obama. On one hand, he released the four torture memos. On the other, he seems irritated by having to deal with the repercussions of releasing the memos. One day he makes declarative statements about not prosecuting CIA interrogators who conducted the torture, even though he has no legal or constitutional right to make that decision. Then, after people point out that he doesn't have the authority to make that decision - despite Rahm Emmanuel and Robert Gibbs declaring otherwise - he rightfully says it's in the hands of the Justice Department. Then, the next few days, he tries his best to quash investigations.

On such a grave and important issue, Obama has been indecisive and inconsistent, failing his first real test of leadership in an unplanned crisis. When he released the memos, he should have declared without hesitation that the United States of America would follow the law and investigate the Bush torture program. Period.

It's not a political issue. It's the law. If a Republican robs a liquor store, arresting him is not a partisan act. If a Democrat cheats on her taxes, arresting her is not a partisan act. Obama could've said he would pardon CIA interrogators if they were found guilty of torture, but by trying to supersede the power of the Attorney General and saying there wouldn't even be an investigation, he sent all the wrong messages. By bungling the release of the memos, equivocating when he should've been clear and strong (trying to placate too many people?), Obama has now turned the issue of the Bush torture program into a political one.

Even worse, the media narrative, fueled in large part by Washington insiders and often stunningly ignorant pundits, has devolved into chatter about the "politics" of releasing the torture memos and what it means for Obama. Perhaps in this age of impunity, when so many people have gotten away with so much, the media can only discuss the politics of breaking the law. Instead of recognizing the legal issues involved, or discussing the serious repercussions of a supposedly civilized country developing a torture program in the 21st century, we get to watch Sean Hannity offering to be waterboarded for charity and the smug Meet the Press crowd echoing Obama's empty "we need to move forward" mantra.

One of the notable exceptions to the glassy-eyed media drones has been Glenn Greenwald at Salon. His writing on this topic has been informtive, knowledgable and politically astute in a deep way. Yesterday's column, "Democratic Complicity and What 'Politicizing Justice' Really Means" was another excellent read.

But what happens if we don't investigate?

Already, as Mayer points out in The Dark Side, countries that torture are now pointing to the United States and saying, "See, they do it, too!"

Meanwhile, corrupt and repressive states, including Egypt, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, have all justified their own brutality by citing America's example. Egyptian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak declared that the U.S. treatment of detainees proved that "We were right from the beginning in using all means . . . to combat terrorism."

So, we've abandoned George Washington and John Adams for Hosni Mubarak and Robert Mugabe? Is that what America has spent the last 230 years working towards? Are we to usher in a new age of torture and barbarism at the beginning of the 21st century? Will that be our legacy?

I suggest you write to Attorney General Eric Holder (AskDOJ@usdoj.gov) and ask him to investigate. I suggest you write to your Senators and U.S. Representatives and tell them how important this matter is. And write to the President himself.

There are a myriad of critical reasons to investigate the Bush torture program. But there is also a spiritual principle involved. We as a nation crossed over the line of darkness. We are torturers now. The only way back from from the dark side is some form of confession and repentance. Acknowledgment. The cosmos/life/G-d/karma - whatever you want to call it - doesn't put up with sweeping things under the rug. Until we deal honestly and justly with what we have done, we as a nation will never be able to move forward.

Speaking in Tongues

The current issue of The New York Review of Books features an article by Zadie Smith called "Speaking in Tongues," which discusses the mutability of our voices as we move from one culture or background to another, and how this applies to Barack Obama and the possibilities of his presidency.

It's a fascinating essay, and I highly recommend reading the entire piece. I'm afraid my efforts to provide you with good, coherent excerpts will only butcher her work and wind up being too long for the blog anyway. But I'll make an attempt.

After discussing her own move from a working-class section of London to Cambridge and how it affected her physical voice, she explores the figure of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmallion:

By the end of his experiment, Professor Higgins has made his Eliza an awkward, in-between thing, neither flower girl nor lady, with one voice lost and another gained, at the steep price of everything she was, and everything she knows. . . .

How persistent this horror of the middling spot is, this dread of the interim place! It extends through the specter of the tragic mulatto, to the plight of the transsexual, to our present anxiety —disguised as genteel concern—for the contemporary immigrant, tragically split, we are sure, between worlds, ideas, cultures, voices—whatever will become of them? Something's got to give—one voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular.

But this, the apparent didactic moral of Eliza's story, is undercut by the fact of the play itself, which is an orchestra of many voices, simultaneously and perfectly rendered, with no shade of color or tone sacrificed. . . . Shaw had a wonderful ear, able to reproduce almost as many quirks of the English language as Shakespeare's. Shaw was in possession of a gift he wouldn't, or couldn't, give Eliza: he spoke in tongues.

It gives me a strange sensation to turn from Shaw's melancholy Pygmalion story to another, infinitely more hopeful version, written by the new president of the United States of America. Of course, his ear isn't half bad either. In Dreams from My Father, the new president displays an enviable facility for dialogue, and puts it to good use, animating a cast every bit as various as the one James Baldwin—an obvious influence—conjured for his own many-voiced novel Another Country. Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson. . . . This new president doesn't just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president; we're so unused to it. . . .

The conclusions Obama draws from his own Pygmalion experience, however, are subtler than Shaw's. The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.

For Obama, having more than one voice in your ear is not a burden, or not solely a burden—it is also a gift. . . . [I]n the first chapter, [he discusses] the failure of his parents' relationship, characterized by their only son as the end of a dream. "Even as that spell was broken," he writes, "and the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been."

To occupy a dream, to exist in a dreamed space (conjured by both father and mother), is surely a quite different thing from simply inheriting a dream. It's more interesting. What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? " The Man from Dream City." When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. " Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," said Cary Grant. " Even I want to be Cary Grant." It's not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.

2.

But I haven't described Dream City. I'll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That's how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you're not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It's the kind of town where the wise man says "I" cautiously, because "I" feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun "we."

Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of "I." By speaking so, he wasn't simply avoiding a singularity he didn't feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can't see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.

It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn't so strange to them. . . .

Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama's doubling ways. "He says one thing but he means another"—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he's a capitalist, but he'll spread your wealth. He says he's a Christian, but really he's going to empower the Muslims. And so on and so forth. These are fears that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. Who is he? people kept asking. I mean, who is this guy, really?

3.

For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility. The apogee of this is, of course, Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing, he is black and white, male and female—he is everyman. The giant lacunae in his biography are merely a convenience; if any new facts of religious or political affiliation were ever to arise we would dismiss them in our hearts anyway. Was he, for example, a man of Rome or not? He has appeared, to generations of readers, not of one religion but of both, in truth, beyond both. Born into the middle of Britain's fierce Catholic–Protestant culture war, how could the bloody absurdity of those years not impress upon him a strong sense of cultural contingency? . . .

Shakespeare's art, the very medium of it, allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can't seem to: speak simultaneous truths. (Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?) In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. He grew up in an atmosphere of equivocation, but he lived in freedom. And he offers us freedom: to pin him down to a single identity would be an obvious diminishment, both for Shakespeare and for us. Generations of critics have insisted on this irreducible multiplicity, though they have each expressed it different ways, through the glass of their times. Here is Keats's famous attempt, in 1817, to give this quality a name:

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Smith then discusses the 19th-century English Historian Thomas Macaulay and his writings on the great statesman Halifax, whom he describes thus:

His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capacious. His polished, luminous, and animated eloquence...was the delight of the House of Lords.... His political tracts well deserve to be studied for their literary merit.

In fact, Halifax is familiar—he sounds like the man from Dream City. This makes Macaulay's caveat the more striking:

Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings valuable frequently impeded him in the contests of active life. For he always saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian.

To me, this is a doleful conclusion. It is exactly men with such intellectual peculiarities that I have always hoped to see in politics. But maybe Macaulay is correct: maybe the Halifaxes of this world make, in the end, better writers than politicians. A lot rests on how this president turns out—but that's a debate for the future. Here I want instead to hazard a little theory, concerning the evolution of a certain type of voice, typified by Halifax, by Shakespeare, and very possibly the President. For the voice of what Macaulay called "the philosophic historian" is, to my mind, a valuable and particular one, and I think someone should make a proper study of it. It's a voice that develops in a man over time; my little theory sketches four developmental stages.

The first stage in the evolution is contingent and cannot be contrived. In this first stage, the voice, by no fault of its own, finds itself trapped between two poles, two competing belief systems. And so this first stage necessitates the second: the voice learns to be flexible between these two fixed points, even to the point of equivocation. Then the third stage: this native flexibility leads to a sense of being able to "see a thing from both sides." And then the final stage, which I think of as the mark of a certain kind of genius: the voice relinquishes ownership of itself, develops a creative sense of disassociation in which the claims that are particular to it seem no stronger than anyone else's. There it is, my little theory—I'd rather call it a story. It is a story about a wonderful voice, occasionally used by citizens, rarely by men of power. Amidst the din of the 2008 culture wars it proved especially hard to hear.

In this lecture I have been seeking to tentatively suggest that the voice that speaks with such freedom, thus unburdened by dogma and personal bias, thus flooded with empathy, might make a good president. It's only now that I realize that in all this utilitarianism I've left joyfulness out of the account, and thus neglected a key constituency of my own people, the poets! Being many-voiced may be a complicated gift for a president, but in poets it is a pure delight in need of neither defense nor explanation. Plato banished them from his uptight and annoying republic so long ago that they have lost all their anxiety. They are fancy-free.

"I am a Hittite in love with a horse," writes Frank O'Hara.

I don't know what blood's
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child's mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father's underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in
the birches,
and I've just caught sight of the
Niña, the Pinta and the Santa
Maria.
What land is this, so free?

Frank O'Hara's republic is of the imagination, of course. It is the only land of perfect freedom. Presidents, as a breed, tend to dismiss this land, thinking it has nothing to teach them. If this new president turns out to be different, then writers will count their blessings, but with or without a president on board, writers should always count their blessings. A line of O'Hara's reminds us of this. It's carved on his gravestone. It reads: "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible."

But to live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by an accident of birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed. . . .

It's my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it." But that may be an audacious hope too far. We'll see if Obama's lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice "I love my country" while saying with another voice "It is a country, like other countries." I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.

Commemorate the Inauguration!

For those wanting to commemorate today's historic occasion, I can think of no better option....

The Chia Obama Handmade Decorative Planter.

It comes in two models: Happy (seen at left) and Determined (below).

Only $20 at Amazon.com.

Act now!

Happy Birthday, Rev. King

Had he lived, Martin Luther King Jr. would've turned 80 years old today.

The inauguration of Barack Obama seems like a pretty good 80th birthday present. King knew it would happen. One day.

And it did.

Here's a two-minute excerpt from a speech he delivered on March 25, 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama.

The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008

Foreign Policy has the full list. Here are some highlights:

1. “If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.”

—William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

2. “Peter writes: ‘Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there?’ No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out. … Bear Stearns is not in trouble. I mean, if anything they’re more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear! That’s just being silly! Don’t be silly!”

—Jim Cramer, responding to a viewer’s e-mail on CNBC’s Mad Money, March 11, 2008

Six days after the volatile CNBC host made his emphatic pronouncement, Bear Stearns faced the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned bank run. Amid widespread speculation on Wall Street about the bank’s massive exposure to subprime mortgages, Bear’s shares lost 90 percent of their value and the investment bank was sold for a pittance to JPMorgan Chase, with a last-minute assist from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

3. “[In] reality the risks to maritime flows of oil are far smaller than is commonly assumed. First, tankers are much less vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds. Second, limited regional conflicts would be unlikely to seriously upset traffic, and terrorist attacks against shipping would have even less of an economic effect. Third, only a naval power of the United States’ strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments.”

—Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007

On Nov. 15, 2008 a group of Somali pirates in inflatable rafts hijacked a Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude in the Indian Ocean. The daring raid was part of a rash of attacks by Somali pirates, which have primarily occurred in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates operating in the waterway have hijacked more than 50 ships this year, up from only 13 in all of last year, according to the Piracy Reporting Center. The Gulf of Aden, where nearly 4 percent of the world’s oil demand passes every day, was not on the list of strategic “chokepoints” where oil shipments could potentially be disrupted that Blair and Lieberthal included in their essay, “Smooth Sailing: The World’s Shipping Lanes Are Safe.”

Hopefully, Blair will show a bit more foresight if, as some expect, he is selected as Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence.

5. “[A]nyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of ‘recession.’”

—Donald Luskin, The Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2008

The day after Luskin’s op-ed, “Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line,” appeared in the Post, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the rest is history. Liberal bloggers had long ago dubbed the Trend Macrolytics chief investment officer and informal McCain advisor “the Stupidest Man Alive.” This time, they had some particularly damning evidence.

10. “I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it.”

—Henry Paulson on National Public Radio, Nov. 13, 2008

Unfortunately for Paulson, shortly after his vote of confidence, Citigroup’s stock price plunged 75 percent in one week, closing below $5 for the first time in 14 years.

My own worst predictions for 2008:

1. Bill Richardson would become president. (I even put money on that one.)
2. Bill Richardson would become Secretary of State.
3. John Edwards would become president. (I even put money on that one.)
4. John Edwards would become Attorney General.
5. I would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
6. Liam would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
7. Liam would at least finish has dissertation.
8. Hillary Clinton would become president.
9. The Beatles would finally re-unite.
10. Big Brown would win become the first Triple-Crown winner in 30 years.
11. Obama would win the popular vote in the Texas primary, putting an end to the Clinton campaign.
12. My wife would throw me out of the house for listening to Waylon Jennings so much. (Thanks, dear.)
13. Spain would find a way to lose the Euro2008 Finals match against Germany. (Viva España!)
14. The Democrats would find yet another way to lose the presidential election. (Viva Obama!)
15. Fred Astaire and/or Lester Young would finally be recognized with a National Holiday.

Personnel is Policy - Obama and the Progressives, Part 2

An interesting exchange last week on The Rachel Maddow Show, between Rachel and David Sirota, discussing some of Barack Obama's choices for his administration:

MADDOW: They are essentially sort of a center-right economic team, no big ideological choices there unless you consider sort of Clintonian economists to be a big ideological statement. . . .

SIROTA: Well, I do think they are ideological. I think they are center-right and they are, basically, a lot of free market fundamentalists. And I think that what Wall Street tends to react to is it likes some of its own. And so, Obama is in this weird position where he has to basically tell Wall Street that he’s going to have some of their own, but he’s also got to tell the public that he’s going to change, that he’s going to push a policy change.

And so, the tough thing for Obama to do -- the question is, is whether he can get some of the people who are at the center of this crisis, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and get them to carry, actually, radically new policies. That’s the trick for him.

MADDOW: Well, Obama advisors are telling the "Washington Post" today that his economic picks, the people who he has chosen, they don’t signal that he plans to govern from the center. They are trying to assure people that he is a progressive. The question is - it’s sort of policy over personnel here. Can he implement a progressive approach to the economy with those folks that are on his team in place?

SIROTA: That’s the question. You know, Grover Norquist, the conservative activist that says, "Personnel is policy." Obama is basically saying, "No, I’m going to be different."

I think it was David Axelrod who told the "New York Times" -- he said, you know, he’s not hiring people for their vision, he’s hiring people to effectuate his vision. Now, that would be unprecedented, to hire sort of ideological economic advisors who are going to carry out a more progressive ideological agenda from Obama.

But that’s essentially what he’s saying. He’s trying to have that -- basically split that difference and tell Wall Street, "I’m hiring some of your own," but he’s also telling America they’re going to carry a progressive agenda. And I think that’s certainly a new thing in our country.

MADDOW: One worth watching and probably worth holding his feet to the fire over, I imagine.

Some questions:

1) Is it true that "personnel is policy"? Many other conservatives besides Grover Norquist think so. Here's just one example, from a 2001 article from The Heritage Foundation: "Personnel Is Policy: Why The New President Must Take Control Of The Executive Branch."

It is often said, correctly, that personnel is policy. The nexus between personnel management and policy management is therefore crucial. Good policies cannot be advanced without good, capable, and committed personnel to formulate, implement, aggressively promote, and steadfastly defend them. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald W. Reagan were noteworthy in this respect for making strong and effective Cabinet appointments and solid White House staffing decisions.

Why do conservatives believe that "personnel is policy," while most liberals seem to think that Obama will put forth policies that contradict those of the people he's hiring to be in his administration?

I don't have an answer.

But, if I may dip into football for a moment. . . . When Eric Mangini became coach of the New York Jets a few years ago, he implemented a new 3-4 defense - his new policies, if you will. The problem was that his nose tackle and middle linebacker had been drafted under the previous coach to play in a 4-3 defense, so they were too small to handle the new scheme. It was a disaster, both for the the team and for the individual players. Jonathan Vilma had been an All-Pro linebacker and the leading tackler in the NFL in the old scheme, but he was getting manhandled in the new one. Finally, after struggling for two seasons, Managini traded Vilma and some others, and he went out and got players who would fit what he wanted to do. In football, at least, personnel is often policy.

2) Is Obama a Progressive? Or does he have progressive policies?

Does it matter? Isn't there more to being a good president than your policies? Does he have integrity? Will he make good decisions? Is simple competence enough at this point?

3) If he's not a Progressive, will he be willing to work with Progressives to implement some of their policies?

Will Progressives ever be able to see Obama and his policies clearly? Can they achieve an un-romanticized, post-Bush analysis of the situation? Or do we just keep hoping Will.i.am makes another video? If Progressives misread Obama, and if they aren't organized and pro-active, will they spend the next four or eight years on the sideline?

4) What is a Progressive, anyway?

Do they have anything to do with the original Progressives, who worked with Evangelicals to push for Prohibition? Are they free-market fundamentalists? Are we just using "Progressive" because "Liberal" became a dirty word?

5) And what is a Liberal, anyway?

What beliefs do Progressives and Liberals hold when it comes to economic policies? Foreign policy? Social policies?

Jonathan Vilma, formerly of the New York Jets. Political Metaphor?

6) For the second time recently, an intelligent Liberal source - Rachel Maddow - has suggested that center-right economic policies like those espoused by the Clintons aren't ideological. A couple of weeks ago, it was The New York Times, as I discussed in my first post on Obama and the Progressives. I thought the Times was being disingenuous, because they believe in and push these economic policies, and I can see how they benefit by making them seem "pragmatic" rather than ideological. Globalization is inevitable. That's one of the primary Neo-liberal mantras to disarm opposition to their policies. Their pre-emptive strike against anyone who would question what are, ultimately, just theories.

But it's interesting to hear a smart person like Maddow falling for this line of thought. Luckily, in this case, someone could say - No, wait a minute, these people are ideological. "Free-market fundamentalists." That doesn't sound so pragmatic, does it?

7) Is it coherent, politically, for Progressives and Liberals to continue to support candidates with center-right economic policies? Why do they complain so much about the repercussions of those policies when they support and vote for the people who implement them? Why do many Democrats seem not to care or even know that Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA on the country? Or financial deregulation? Or media deregulation? Or privatization of the government? Does nostalgia constitute a viable political philosophy?

8) What is the relationship between the policies pushed by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin in the 1990s and the current economic meltdown? If there is a relationship, why is Barack Obama hiring so many Rubin associates and disciples?

9) What does it mean to be "on the Left"? What policies and ideas does someone on the Left in the year 2008 actually support? Is there a Left in the United States? How does it relate to the Left in places like Europe or South America? Do Progressives and Liberals belong "on the Left" - even if they support capitalistic, center-right economic policies?

10) Do linear terms like "Left," "Center" and "Right" do justice to the complex social, economic and political beliefs that most people hold? What are the alternatives?

11) Are you a Progressive if you're against Proposition 8? Are you on the Left? What if you're against Proposition 8 and you support the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CFTA)? Are you still on the Left? Are you still a Progressive or a Liberal? Are you Andrew Sullivan? What if you're against Proposition 8 and you want to invade Iran? What does that make you? Hillary Clinton?

12) Will Obama push for passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement when it comes up for a vote in the next year? Will the new Secretary of Commerce, Bill Richardson, help him push it through? Does anyone remember Bill Richardson's role in pushing through NAFTA? Does anyone care?

13) Do I hold coherent political beliefs? Why do I dislike being thought of as a Liberal? Why did I leave the Democratic Party? Am I a Progressive? Am I on the Left? Am I in the Center? Am I somewhere a little below and behind? Can I be conservative in some things and radical in others? Can one be a Left Conservative? (Norman Mailer thought so. Is that good or bad?) Can you be on the Left if you get tired of Leftists? Can one respect some of Marx's insights and not be a Marxist? What if I listen to The Clash? Is it okay that I like The Clash but despise Communism? Have people on the Left ever really come to terms with the fact that their ideology led to such a horrible end? Can one respect aspects of Capitalism - like buying CDs by The Clash - and not be a Capitalist? Can anyone in 2008 NOT be a Capitalist? Can one respect aspects of Anarchism but think many anarchists are assholes? Can I enjoy watching football and still be a Progressive? What about my inexplicable urge to beat up Weezer fans? If I'm a Progressive, is it okay that I slammed back a few Brooklyn Lagers last night? Can I like Subcomandante Marcos but not like Rage Against the Machine? What if I like Fugazi? Is it okay that I hate the Democrats as long as I hate the Republicans more? Am I just a contrarian? Does all of this go back to not liking bands as much once they get famous? (How to explain my love of The Beatles, then?) Why did it seem like there was a Left in Spain but only Liberals here? Should I support the bailout of the automakers? Haven't they been part of the problem for decades? But what about all of the workers? Why have we given hundreds of billions of dollars to the firms on Wall Street that caused all the problems to begin with? Why did we give them so much money so easily but make the automakers beg in public for a paltry 34 billion? If we bail out the automakers, can we please, please, please stipulate that the Ford family relinquish ownership of the 0-13 Detroit Lions? Seriously. They've had the team for almost 50 years and have driven them into the ground.

13) Why am I writing about all of this?

Sigh . . .

When McCain Lost the Election

From Political Wire:

Suspending Campaign Doomed McCain

A post-election assessment by Wilson Research Strategies concludes that though Barack Obama "leveraged a Democratic advantage on the economy throughout the campaign," it wasn't until John McCain's "ill-fated efforts to 'lead' on the bailout that he truly lost control of the issue."

My own political analysis at the time wasn't quite that well-developed or intelligently expressed, but it was one of the few occasions during the campaign that my instincts were good.

I sent a brief email to Liam the day McCain suspended his campaign:

Subject: McCain Is Nuts

And I think he just lost the election.

Two days earlier, as the stock market collapsed, McCain had delivered his infamous remark that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

By then suspending his campaign, he not only seemed lost in dealing with the economic crisis, he also called into question his own leadership skills. Rather than appearing presidential, he seemed erratic and confused.

The impression was even more pronounced when compared with Obama's cool-headedness.

I haven't seen any post-election analysis that mentions The Letterman Factor, but one wonders how much impact David Letterman had when he tore McCain to shreds on national television that night. He immediately understood the lack-of-leadership implications of McCain's stunt, and he slammed the candidate brutally before millions of viewers.

"You don't quit.

You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves. I think someone's putting something in his metamucil.

What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

The one factor ignored in the Wilson Research Strategies report is how well Obama turned McCain's stunt against him. He brilliantly suggested that McCain couldn't do two things at once - a crippling charge against a man who wants to lead the country in a time of crisis. And by refusing to cancel the first debate that was scheduled two days later, as McCain foolishly suggested, Obama looked confident and strong while his opponent seemed desperate.

Obviously, there were many reasons why McCain lost the election - the pick of Sarah Palin being another major element. But I do think the week of September 22-26, 2008 was the pivotal point in the election, when the nation turned away from McCain as a possible leader. Amazingly, it had nothing to do with his opponent; it was a purely self-inflicted wound.

There are several other interesting chunks of information in the WRS report, which is presented as an easy-to-follow slideshow.

Transition - Obama and the Progressives

For progressives who weren't sure yet, The New York Times spells it out:

President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.

Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury — suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.

After eight years of the catastrophic combination of arrogance and incompetence that marked the Bush administration, I think most people are hoping Obama will be a pragmatic president.

It's disingenuous, however, for the New York Times to suggest that center-right Democrats are somehow free of ideology, as opposed to Democrats on the left. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) always had a clearly defined set of beliefs, ideas and goals that they adhered to strictly as they moved the party to the right: privatization, corporatization, globalization, reducing the size of government, ending welfare, hawkish defense policies, etc. One can agree or disagree with the ideology of the Democratic center-right, but it's naive- or, as I suspect in the case of the Times, intellectually dishonest - to pretend it doesn't exist.

(Conversely, one can be on the left or right and still be pragmatic. I would argue that Russ Feingold and the late Paul Wellstone have been examples of this on the left.)

So, what does it mean for Obama to govern from the center-right? Only time will tell.

Before I'm accused of being disillusioned, I would argue that disillusionment arises from a large gap between expectation and reality. The real cure, then, for disillusionment is to see things as clearly as possible. So what is Obama's starting point? Is he a progressive who's moving to the right? Or has he always been in the center-right of the party? Progressives who believe Obama is "one of them" are the ones who are going to become disillusioned when they feel like he's "shifted" to the right.

Personally, I think Obama has always been closer to the center-right of the party. As I wrote in May 2007, after reading The Audacity of Hope, "His style of politics may be fresh, but I don't think you're going to find much difference, in the end, between Barack and Hillary."

Reviewing the same book, Publishers Weekly called Obama's policy positions "tepid Clintonism." With the exception of the invasion of Iraq, there was very little to distinguish the two candidates. Yet many Democrats fought each other furiously during the primaries over who was more progressive, Obama or Hillary. The battle reached an absurd peak during the run-up to the Ohio primary, when both sides tried to claim the other was a nefarious supporter of NAFTA.

The problem for Obama is that he was elected in large part by a new mobilized army of progressives. In the primaries, he defeated Hillary Clinton - who initially had all the advantages of money, party establishment support and name recognition - because he captured the technological innovations, the new-found fundraising power, the organizing skills, and the youthful energy of progressive groups such as MoveOn, DailyKos, and ActBlue. These same groups, along with the old-left machine of labor unions, helped him in the general election out-organize and out-spend McCain across the board.

The last center-right Democrat, Bill Clinton, betrayed the labor unions, who also helped get him elected, by shoving NAFTA through Congress against their wishes and despite his promises. What happens this time if a center-right Obama winds up opposing them on important legislation? Already, the bailout of the automobile industry may put this relationship to a test. Will they remember what Clinton did? How will they react?

When Clinton was initially elected after 12 years of Reagan and Bush, there was a great sense of relief among Democrats. But as his administration began to implement more and more of their center-right agenda, people opposed to those policies - environmentalists, labor unions, anti-globalization critics, etc. - began pushing back. Tensions culminated (in the United States) in the Battle of Seattle, and, electorally, in the Nader campaign of 2000. Several important environmentalists supported Nader, including David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, who would say that the Clinton-Gore record on the environment "is worse than the Reagan-Bush record." This internal war within the Democratic party subsided for the most part after the tragedy of 9/11, and after an effort to join forces against the Bush administration. But it's a civil war that's been dormant not dead.

The public has placed incredibly high expectations upon Barack Obama. Many of these people are young, energetic and well-organized progressives. If Obama is ineffective, or if he moves too far to the right and doesn't deliver a sense of change, if he disappoints in general, their disillusionment could be equally historic.

Obama may, by nature and temperament, be in the center-right of the party. But he needs to pay attention to everyone who worked hard to get him elected. There are no political advantages in ignoring progressives or taking them for granted. They need to be included in the public conversation about the future of the country.

For their part, progressives need to see Obama clearly and know that he will govern from the center-right. If the administration is pragmatic, however, and not driven by ideology, then progressives can have confidence that their voices will be heard if they make effective arguments. They paid money to attend this ball; they have every right to be allowed on the dance floor.

What they cannot do is be naive about Obama's starting point and get disillusioned because he's "moving to the right." They cannot be passive-aggressive, letting resentment build up because the Democrats in charge are, once again, ignoring the progressives.

What happens, for example, to the relationship between Obama and progressive groups if he appoints John Brennan to head the CIA? Would that be a decision based on pragmatism? Or center-right ideology?

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald at Salon opined on Obama's recent appointees and the prospect of Brennan:

I'm both entirely unsurprised and basically undisturbed by the fact that Obama's most significant appointments thus far are composed largely of standard Washington establishment figures and pro-Iraq-War hawks, and are devoid of people "on the Left". That is who Obama is -- he's an establishment politician who, with a few exceptions, is situated smack in the mainstream middle of the national Democratic Party. . . . As I've said many times, I intend to wait and judge Obama on the policies he pursues, not the administrators he appoints to carry out those policies.

But John Brennan is a different matter. To appoint someone as CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence who was one of George Tenet's closest aides when The Dark Side of the last eight years was conceived and implemented, and who, to this day, continues to defend and support policies such as "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition (to say nothing of telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping), is to cross multiple lines that no Obama supporter should sanction. Truly turning a page on the grotesque abuses of the last eight years requires both symbolism (closing Guantanamo) and substantive policy changes (compelling adherence to the Army Field Manual, ensuring due process rights for all detainees, ending rendition, restoring safeguards on surveillance powers). Appointing John Brennan to a position of high authority would be to affirm and embrace, not repudiate, the darkest aspects of the last eight years.

Greenwald may be okay with Hillary while Brennan bothers him; progressives with other agendas will be disturbed by other choices. What's happening, however, is a slow, steady realization on the part of many progressives that Obama's appointing a lot of center-right people and few if any progressives. How will they react?

The last major left upheaval in this country grew out of major disillusionment with the Democratic Party on the part of young people who were energized, organized, and represented a new generation with new technology. And they were first excited by a charismatic young president.

It will be interesting to see how this new generation of progressives - who are very different from the young radicals of the 1960s - responds to a center-right Obama presidency. Will they see him as pragmatic? Or will they see ideology in the guise of pragmatism? For the sake of the country, I hope it's the former and not the latter.

Change We Can Believe In #27

Obama gives the word and Joe Lieberman gets to keep his chairmanship of Homeland Security.

Obama wants Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State.

Obama wants Larry Summers, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, to be his Treasury Secretary.

Obama wants Eric Holder, Bill Clinton's Deputy Attorney General, to be his Attorney General.

Obama hires about 40 other former Clinton staffers to be in his administration.

Obama meets with John McCain, reportedly offering him Secretary of Defense.

Wait, no, George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense is going to be Obama's Secretary of Defense.

Next up, Obama asks George W. to stay on as Secretary of Education. Karl Rove will run Health, Education and Welfare.

The United States will be one big happy family.

So, get used to it.

Or else.

Barack Obama and Bi-Racial Politics

The November 17 issue of the New Yorker has several good articles on Obama and the 2008 Presidential Election. You can read most of them online. Here's the Table of Contents.

I particularly recommend David Grann's "The Fall: John McCain’s choices" and Ryan Lizza's "Battle Plans: How Obama won."

Best of all, however, is a long article by the Editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, entitled, "The Joshua Generation: Race and the campaign of Barack Obama."

Much has been made of Obama being African-American, but we sometimes forget that his life experience has been that of a person with a white mother and a black father. Obama himself spends most of his first book, Dreams from My Father, talking about this fact and how he struggled in his attempts to navigate the contours and difficulties of being bi-racial. Perhaps coming from a bi-racial family myself, and hearing stories from my father and aunt, I was particularly struck by this aspect of Obama's book.

Remnick covers a lot of ground in his article, but his look at Obama's bi-racial background and how it's played out in his career and in the 2008 election was, for me, the most interesting part.

The historian David Levering Lewis, who has written biographies of King and Du Bois, told me that after reading Obama’s books he had the sense of a young man almost alone in the world, trying to find a place. “The orphanage of his life compels him to scope out possibilities and escape hatches,” he said. “This very smart mother was somewhat absent, and certainly the father was, and the grandfather marched with Patton, but he was not a rock. Obama is in the world almost solo and he learns to negotiate.”

- - - -

As [Harvard professor Randall] Kennedy followed Obama’s career, he was struck by the uniqueness of his background and how it may have affected both his temperament and his public appeal. “He’s operating outside the precincts of black America,” Kennedy said. “He is growing up in Hawaii, for God’s sake. And then, when he comes to the mainland and tries to find his way, he has to work at it. He does have to go find it. He is not socialized like other people. I can’t help thinking that he might have thought it a burden at the time, but maybe some of the things he missed out on were a benefit to miss out on. For one thing, he didn’t absorb the learned responses, the learned mantras and slogans, the learned resentments of that time that one got in college.”

- - - -

“I don’t think Barack’s candidacy was like any other candidacy,” Axelrod said. “He was the first African-American to come along as a legitimate contender whose candidacy was viewed in the broadest terms.” In his Senate race, Obama had campaigned hard and successfully in southern-Illinois towns nearer to Little Rock than to Chicago, and in white areas of northwest Chicago where Harold Washington had been booed in 1983, when he first ran for mayor. “Barack would come back from these white towns and say, ‘They’re just like my grandparents from Kansas,’ ” Axelrod said. “That’s one of his gifts: there is no room he walks into where he doesn’t feel comfortable and make the people feel that way. It’s both his personality and his background—one contributes to the other. There’s no doubt that being biracial contributes to a sense that he doesn’t compartmentalize people by race or ethnicity or background.”

Even black leaders who were initially wary of him came to recognize his advantages. “His background helped,” Al Sharpton said. “He had a primary understanding of peoples that we may not have had. He could meet with me and then with a representative from Kansas and understand the nuances as well as the content of both conversations.”

It's an excellent article - give it a read.

Is There an Echo in Here?

The New Yorker: George Packer has a new article entitled "The New Liberalism," comparing Barack Obama and F.D.R.

Packer was one of the centrist liberal cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq.

He's a graduate of Yale (1982).



Time: Peter Beinart has a new article entitled "The New Liberal Order," comparing Barack Obama and F.D.R.

Beinart was one of the centrist liberal cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq.

He's a graduate of Yale (1993).



Are these guys sleeping together or something?

Evidently under a portrait of FDR.

The Lieberman Dilemma

Get an early start on your Obama disillusionment.

From Political Wire:

Lieberman Likely Saved By Obama

"With President-elect Obama's fingerprints seemingly everywhere, momentum appears to be building among Senate Democrats to let Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee," according to Roll Call.

"However, Democrats still say they are exploring options for penalizing Lieberman in other ways for his disloyalty to the party during the 2008 election cycle. Those options might include stripping him of two plum subcommittee chairmanships, or taking away his membership on either the Armed Services or Environment and Public Works panels."

Though, personally, I think Obama, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin should take Joe Lieberman out back of the Capitol and kick his ass, I can understand (barely) letting the traitor stay in the Democratic caucus.

I can understand (barely) letting him keep his membership in Environment and Public Works.

But why would Barack Obama and the Democrats want this ass-clown to remain chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee? He's been on the wrong end of every major policy decision concerning Iraq, the war on terror, FISA, Kyl-Lieberman, etc. His politics on these matters are indistinguishable from those of George W. Bush.

Is it because of this?

Christ, I haven't even finished reading Ryan Lizza's article in The New Yorker that everyone's talking about - on how Obama won.

Here's the case against Lieberman.

And here are the 19 Senators on the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee who determine committee chairs. Members include Clinton, Kerry, Kennedy, Boxer, Biden and Reid. Contact them, especially the senators from your state, if you want real change in how we conduct Homeland Security and the war on terror.

UPDATE: Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who's on the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, has come out publicly and said Lieberman should be stripped of his Homeland Security chairmanship.

"I am one who does not feel that somebody should be rewarded with a major chairmanship after doing what he did."

Fellow Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, also spoke out against Lieberman: "To reward Senator Lieberman with a major committee chairmanship would be a slap in the face of millions of Americans who worked tirelessly for Barack Obama and who want to see real change in our country," Sanders said in a statement. "Appointing someone to a major post who led the opposition to everything we are fighting for is not 'change we can believe in.'"