The Post-Cold War Candidacy

Gregory Scoblete (generally anti-Iraq War) asks, Will Obama Really Withdraw from Iraq? Which also might be titled, "Why Can't Barack be More Like Chomsky?"

The only way for Obama to truly deliver on his pledge to "end the war" in Iraq is to sketch out a new American compact with the Middle East - one that breaks fairly radically with the conventions of the past. This is not the same as promising bargaining instead of bombs and bluster, or arguing, as Obama has frequently done, that our resources are more urgently needed elsewhere. Rather, it is about recasting the debate over Iraq and the Middle East from what is the "responsible" thing to do to a debate about what we are responsible for.

He nonetheless asks a lot of good questions, which many Obama-skeptics on the right have not quite framed as well as he does.

To believe that Obama is serious about ending America's commitment to Iraq is to assume either that the progress Iraq has made to date is irreversible (which almost no one believes) or that he has placed the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq ahead of other regional interests. After all, it is impossible to maintain America's traditional sense of responsibility over events in the Middle East and simultaneously remove large numbers of troops from Iraq, come what may.

And this, which certainly is on target:

For many, Obama's reluctance to challenge the current principles of America's involvement in the Middle East is a reassuring "move to the center." To others, it is a reminder of how narrow the debate on foreign policy really is. Rather than debate the ends of American policy, we debate the means.

Followed by this provocative idea:

Such a narrow debate is one of the unintended consequences of America's Cold War victory. A broad, bi-partisan agreement on the nature of U.S. interests and the threat posed to them by the Soviet Union was vital - it allowed the United States to consistently contain communism even as presidential administrations (and thus tactics) changed.

Much like this consensus, our interests in the Middle East are largely derived from the Cold War era, when American power-balancing was necessary to reduce Soviet influence. Rather than adjust those interests when the threat from global communism disappeared, Washington remained content with the status quo. Today, our presidential candidates debate the utility of their policies in advancing agreed upon interests. They debate within the status quo.

I'll have to mull that over some more, since I recognize that I have a reflexive tendency to cast contemporary problems in terms of the Cold War, therefore I don't trust my snap judgments. It is undeniable that the Cold War severely warped America, and that our minds have not yet stopped flowing through the channels it carved in them. It's also true that U.S. journalism's fixation with the present tense overlooks even recent historical influences. That "journalism" includes blogs. So the Cold War is often the obvious thing left out in discussions of modern America and its policies.

Scoblete thus suggests Obama "fashion himself as a 'post Cold War' candidate, willing to realign America's foreign policy in response to the world as we find it today." One problem with that is that the Cold War warped the rest of the world, too. The modern geopolitical landscape is a post-Cold War battlefield, littered with rusting artillery and unexploded mines. Saddam was a bit of both.

His sunny expectation that Middle Eastern governments, left to themselves, would act in rational economic self-interest, that (he is quoting other writers here) "Middle-Eastern governments have even more incentive than do consuming states to worry about the security of oil production facilities, ports, and shipping lanes," seems overly hopeful. Didn't Iraq and Iran in the 1980s give the lie to that?

Scoblete attempts to sketch how Obama could take that path and dovetail it not with the anti-war movement, but with mainstream American politics, including conservative pathways. Good reading for those who like to be challenged.

[Hat tip, The Glittering Eye]

Somewhat along the same lines, the indispensable Brit David Aaronovitch reminds his fellow Brits, Eventually, we will all hate Obama too.

George W. Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator's house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank's naive and inferior imperialism.

Often those who express their tiresome anti-Americanism will suggest, as do some of the more disingenuous anti-Zionists with regard to anti-Semitism - that they, of course, are not anti-American, and that no one really is. But, coming as I do from an Anti-American tradition that wasn't afraid to proclaim itself, I think I know where the corpses are interred. For example, the current production of Bernstein's Candide at the English National Opera is a classic of elite anti-Americanism, in which we are invited to laugh at the philistine invocation of “Democracy, the American Way and McDonald's”. The laughter that accompanied this feeble satire showed our proper understanding that we, the audience, had a proper concept of democracy, and would never soil ourselves with an Egg McMuffin.

At which point it might be pertinent to note that Egg McMuffins are selling like hotcakes in Europe right now.

Europe is now McDonald's largest region by revenues, despite having roughly one-quarter the number of outlets as the US. Last year, revenues from company stores and royalties from franchisees topped $8.9 billion in Europe, compared with $7.9 billion in the US. It's a trend that analysts expect to continue when the world's biggest restaurant group reports second-quarter results on July 23. West expects US sales to rise by 3.4 percent, vs. 9 percent for Europe (19 percent if you include the foreign currency impact). This year, he reckons, McDonald's, the most American of brands, will generate 55 percent of its earnings outside the US.

McDonalds now serves more than 10 million customers a day in Europe. But there's a secret: They do it by being just a little less like McDonalds, and a little more like Europe:

McDonald's kept its trademark golden arches logo in Europe but got rid of the red accompanying it. Instead, restaurants feature a warm burgundy color. The pointy roofs are being phased out and replaced by simple olive green facades, and the bright neon lights in the restaurants were dimmed.

"French fries and cheeseburgers remain the best-selling items," the article notes, but even that might change:

"A huge chunk of the company's success comes from giving locals the kind of foods they like, instead of force-feeding American menu items to them," said Ron Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a Chicago-based restaurant research firm.

There's porridge in Britain and pasta freshly cooked to order in Italy. In France, there's a smaller-sized burger on a ciabatta roll slathered with a sophisticated mustard sauce — and served with a glass of wine.

The goal, you see, is not to bulldoze the world's cultures into one generic, bland mash. It's not even to force Romanian peasants to love McNuggets. It's to separate people from their money in a way that makes them feel like they're getting a good deal. And for all we know, measured in their terms, they are.

That's a hard game to beat us at. European philosophical approaches have attempted it for decades, generally with miserable results:

A group of young communist militants had proudly gone from France to Moscow in 1930. They enrolled at the Lenin School for foreign Communists and dutifully imbibed the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; they also undertook training in handling guns and conducting clandestine correspondence. The idea was that the French Communist Party should acquire a cadre of able potential leaders for the political struggles ahead. The curriculum also involved some weeks of work in a Russian factory. The French delegation had come to the USSR with an assumption about the effortless superiority of Russia’s workers as a revolutionary vanguard, so the sloppiness of the Soviet labor force came as a shock. Russian workers, unlike the French workers they knew intimately, lacked conscientiousness: They turned up late and did as little work as they could get away with, and they were uninterested in outsiders suggesting ways to improve efficiency. Waldeck Rochet, a young Frenchman, said to his friend Henri Barbé: “Were we to tell the French workers what we’re seeing here, they’d throw cooked apples at us. But we’re caught in a trap and compelled to stay.”

Hope

2009 will close out the most fundamentalist Christian, right-wing, and philosophically authoritarian White House in U.S. history.

Signs are that it will be followed by the administration of a man whose political inner circle could become the most America-skeptic, left-wing, and statist kitchen cabinet in U.S. history. All built around a personality cult.

No wonder a secular, traditional, patriotic political independent like me feels this just is not my millennium.

We come from an administration where political loyalty and a sheepskin from Pat Robertson's law school was the ticket to authority in the Justice Department. Political loyalty and a skepticism about the universe being more than 10,000 years old was a ticket to blue-pencil authority over government science reports. Political loyalty and a correct position on Roe v. Wade, for pity's sake, was the ticket to getting a job overseeing the desperately essential work of building up Iraq after we took control of it.

We head for an administration where -- we'll see. At least one odious, unrepentant '60s rich boy radical friend of Barack won't be making policy decisions in the Department of Education or channeling millions of tax dollars to his pet causes. But only because the accidental searchlight of scandal happened to light on Bill Ayers. Every week or so seems to bring up another like him. Even at this rate and with seven months left, some are bound to get through.

Obama, in his short political life, seems to have been in a MoveOn-colored cocoon, so that when he sits down at a Pennsylvania farm wife's kitchen table he might as well be the leader of another country. Benevolent visionary or not, that difference remains.

McCain doesn't matter. I like him well enough, but this election isn't going to be about him.

I keep thinking of Harold Macmillan's quip that watching the Kennedies come to power in Washington, D.C., was "like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city." This election is really about Hope: I hope the real Obama is more in his rhetoric than his friends.

Veep VIPs Vet Vets

Obama has a number of retired brass on his short list, including James Jones:

Jones, a Vietnam vet born in Kansas City, MO (swing state alert!), was a career military officer rising to one of the highest posts possible. Now retired, Jones has been critical of the number of troops currently in Afghanistan.

Oops. Does that mean if Obama follows his advice and puts more Americans in harm's way, he'll be a "chickenhawk?" Or is the whole point of having a military man as vice president to provide chickenhawk-meme cover fire? Could be the first meme-driven candidacy.

Seriously, in the four-year madness, is there any ritual more pointless than the breathless anticipation over vice president picks, and the speculation over what they will mean to a presidency?

Sauce for the Gaffer

He should borrow a line from Mr. Koch, my 7th grade math teacher, who used to follow up some verbal slip with, "My tongue got caught in my eye teeth and I couldn't see what I was saying."

So it seems Obama is gaffe-prone. Well, anyone who talks non-stop during his waking hours and has his every word recorded, parsed, and pounced on is going to have his share of them. Like any aspirant to the White House. And any occupant thereof. Like the current one. I think this is the right take on it. But obviously some Obama-haters will make the predictable hay of it. And what's to stop them? The same sort of verbal bungling got Reagan and Bush pegged as "dunces" by their enemies. Will there be books published of "Stupid Obama Quotes"? Like the chickenhawk meme, it comes home to roost. Some people just never seem to get that.

Also, I don't know anything about Obama's forebears or when and where they served, but it's possible he's confused because the British and American armies that overran the western German concentration camps and transit points did get a full dose of Auschwitz: though none of these were death camps, the Nazis had evacuated many of the inmates from the death camps as the Soviets approached, and they ended up in their miserable emaciated state in the hands of the western Allies at Dachau and other places. That's how, for instance, Anne Frank ended up at Bergen-Belsen.

Wright and Wrong

The Rev. Wright says (with obvious irony):

“It’s to paint me as something — ‘Something’s wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with this country … for its policies. We’re perfect. Our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them,’” he said.

Creating a false dichotomy that elevates him to the pinnacle of truth by reducing to a simple evil a complicated land full of people well aware of the conflict and contradictions in its past and present. I had this nagging sense I had heard his sort before, though in radically different garb. Now I remember where.

Elitism

I think I understand what Obama was doing.

Obama has come under fire by opponents after he told an audience in San Francisco last week that economic problems led voters in some small towns to become "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion" as an outlet for their frustrations.

He wasn't telling things as he sees them. He was trying to explain central Pennsylvania to San Francisco. To do that, he had to put it in language they understand, and leave out anything that is not allowed by their worldview.

Which is most of the things that are regarded as virtues or truths in Pennsyltucky.

It was a noble attempt at building national unity and transcending our differences by making the cast of "The Deer Hunter" comprehensible to the moonbats of Haight-Ashbury.

It wasn't Lincolnian, however. It was all very ... dare I say it ... Clintonian. In the Bill Clinton sense. Obama in '08 actually reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Now what I'd like to see Obama do is sit down in some roadhouse in Perry County, order a Yuengling (all you do is say "lager," and they pour you one), and explain San Franciscans in the terms the locals can understand.

That would be a marvel.

The Outsiders

Obama on patriotism:

I love this country not because it's perfect, but because we've always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery; war and depression; great battles for civil rights and women's rights and worker's rights, generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise. And as long as I live, I will never forget that I am only standing here because they did .... That is the country I love. That is the promise of America.

He may not frame it the way you would or list the same categories you would. But do you see that it is the kind of thing you say when you are within the American tradition and intend to stay there?

Which ought not even to be a consideration in a presidential campaign, but nowadays it has to be.

In fact, Obama's rhetoric is closer to the original patriotism of the young country, whose citizens saw it very much as a work in progress, with divine guidance but distant goals, than is much of what passes for patriotic speech today. "My country, right or wrong," whether uttered by Decatur or Schurz, always had a sincere qualifier: May she always be right. And an unspoken commitment to do one's part to make or keep it that way.

In the early republic, Americans furiously debated highly divisive issues, from slavery to Indian removal, economics, foreign relations, big government, religion and politics, war and peace -- easily as fractious as the topics we mangle one another over today. But the debaters were of a broad consensus that America was a place meant to improve and to achieve its potential, and that solutions to these problems and the power to accomplish them lay in the inherent virtues of the people and the nation. They typically framed their arguments in appeals to the moral and enlightened qualities in their fellow citizens. As late as Lincoln's time, he (and Seward) could write of "the better angels of our nature."

Yet it seems to me something entered the American discourse about the time of Thoreau and Garrison. It stood outside the American experience, and said the country and the people in it were so tainted and inherently wicked that the problems, not the virtues, defined America, and the solutions lay outside the nation and the people. And the proper place for a moral person was in opposition to America as it is.

It had as its necessary antimatter the slavery apologetics that repudiated the Jeffersonian vision of human equality and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.

It has been with us ever since. One side-effect is the sort of protest or civil disobedience that makes no attempt to convince anyone or change anything, and is aimed only at expressing the moral superiority of the protester to the country he inhabits.

The very challenges our forebears debated now became the stigmata that mark the country as fatally flawed. On the left, it has almost become an academic shibboleth that the taint of the treatment of Indians and slaves was so great that it drowned in blood and tears any claim to special virtues for America.

In every election, one side will tell you that the system is working, even if it splutters and knocks. They will tell you the country is on the right track, even if it swerves.

And the other will persuade you you're being cheated and that things are hopelessly off track and need to be fixed.

No party has a lock on those positions. Democrats and Republicans will switch seats regularly. What has been lost in the rhetorical degradation of our politics is the discernment to talk those lines within the boundaries of a patriot's speech. There is a danger in being too negative about the country. That is a tight rope to walk. But it is not necessarily anti-patriotic, just as the position that asks you to stay the course is not necessarily complicity in whatever flim-flam may be breaking up the national compact.

Obama, in that speech, clearly takes his stand inside the line that separates the patriot from the political anti-patriot. There and elsewhere. I think he sees the line and knows it for what it is and is careful of it. He need only read Frederick Douglass, who had a sure sense of it, despite much greater cause for stepping over it than many of his modern admirers can claim. And I am willing to take Obama at his word on that much.

But that means Obama must also see, and know, how much, how vast a weight, of his support is outside that line. And that he will have to reckon with this someday.

Race Race Race

That Obama speech tickets line was longer than I thought. Some people who saw the end of it said it was more than a quarter mile from end to end. Even some people who got tickets didn't get in to hear the speech, I'm told.

The mayor offered him a change of venue to the municipal minor league baseball stadium, but the campaign refused it. Better to have a guaranteed overflowing tech school gym than risk a half-empty stadium, I suppose. You'll piss off 100 people locally but impress 10,000 nationally.

I think he also coveted the tech school for its name: Thaddeus Stevens, the great abolitionist, who founded it in his will. Never mind that, for all his commitment to anti-slavery, Stevens was a mean-as-dirt hardball politician, who occasionally represented slaveowners against their runaways early in his legal career, bitterly persecuted Masons, and who derailed Winfield Scott at the 1840 Whig convention by -- literally -- dropping a note to the Virginia delegates that suggested Scott just might have abolitionist tendencies.

The stadium is named for the local shopper publication. I think "Obama speaks at Thaddeus Stevens School" probably has more political cachet than "Obama speaks at Clipper Magazine Stadium."

The school is mostly minority students, but apparently no tickets were set aside for them. In exchange for the headache of having to spend the morning trapped in a media event, they didn't even get to see the speech.

This has been a painful election season for my newsroom co-workers, who of course are all Democrats or left-of-Democrat Independents. The two most vocal and persistent anti-Bush, Chomsky-quoting, Michael Moore-worshipping employees split when the campaign began: One went for Kucinich, the other for Ron Paul. For a blessed interval, they weren't speaking to each other. Recently, alas, they've patched it up. Every time some good news seeps into the paper about Iraq, one will drift over to the other's desk, and they'll rehearse the talking points about war crimes, etc., etc., until both feel comforted again, then they'll drift apart.

But for the more mainstream Demos, the frustration over the ongoing Hillary-Obama fight is palpable. For me, as a non-Democrat, it's like watching professional wrestling: "Wow, that looked like it hurt. I wonder if it's real?" I can enjoy the spectacle from a safe distance, popcorn in hand.

Ever since 1840, American presidential elections have doubled as national discussions of issues. Some more than others. This one has that quality, and among the topics necessarily up for discussion is race. Obama has -- sometimes, fitfully (Icepick is right) -- offered a fresh start to that discussion, with a post-Civil Rights perspective and a broad embrace of Americans, including alienated whites.

That, to me, is a wonderful new beginning. The old discussion of race in America devolved into minutia, after its breathtaking charge. In 1940, more than two-thirds of whites believed blacks were less intelligent. Today, less than 6 percent think so. Before World War II, in the North as well as the South, fewer than 40 percent supported any kind of desegregation. Today, between 95 and 100 percent of Americans support the idea of integration. That percentage among whites is actually higher than among blacks.

Then we hit the wall. I'd describe the wall in terms used by Tamar Jacoby in her insightful book "Someone Else's House": "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that. But, as Jacoby writes:

"That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is along, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

As a result, the discussion on race has largely devolved into the kind of things you bicker about when you've given up on real progress: Scrubbing little totems of Confederate imagery off Southern state flags; should "Huck Finn" be banned in schools? Why can't white people use the N-word when rappers use it all the time?

Obama, at times, starts to frame a new discussion that just might break through the deadlock. I was born in the middle of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. I've lived to see one through to a conclusion. I'd like to at least see the other get on track for one.

There will be no pure hero class and no pure victim class in it. We'll have to give that up. That view has been part of the simplified picture sold to us by civil rights hagiography. Reality is more complex. Everyone comes to this discussion with baggage of one sort or another. Everyone with the capacity to be selfless for the sake of patriotism, or to behave otherwise.

So, in the part of this election that is about choosing a president, I am probably not on Senator Obama's side. But in the part that is a national discussion, insofar as it touches on race, I'm on his side, as I see it, all things in the balance, the ugly but unavoidable rhetoric of Rev. Wright included.

Sign O the Times

I mentioned in a comment below that Obama will speak Monday two blocks from my house. I want to see this guy speak as much as anyone else who enjoys witnessing history. It has nothing to do with voting; I like to see comets, too, but I don't want to live on one.

That there was going to be some sort of local appearance had been rumored for a few days. But the confirmation, the time and location, and the directions for getting tickets only became public late Friday. Tickets were to be distributed starting this morning at 9 a.m. I went down to see if I could snag one and got to campaign headquarters about 9:40. The line was out the door and around the ample parking lot. I haven't seen such a line since Disneyworld opened. What I saw was at least a football field long, if you had stretched it out, and I didn't even find the end of it.

Now, this is a red county. Though it's shifted a little to the blue lately, it's still more than 2-to-1 GOP by registration. What I saw out there this morning probably equaled the whole number of registered Democrats within five square miles of the building. I don't believe all the people in the line were Democrats, but it was an astonishing sight nonetheless.

The line was moving, too. About every 30 seconds someone would come out the other door with tickets in hand. But I didn't have time to wait in that line. But after I finished my chores around noon, I went back to see if any tickets were left. The line was just as long as it had been three hours before.

Color Words

I was surprised that Obama's race speech garnered such an intense negative reaction among so many educated Republicans who are well left of Pat Buchanan. A lot of that concentrated on the appearance of weaseling out of his church connection, or obscuring the depth of his debt to Rev. Wright, I suppose. And many who slammed those qualities took a line or to to praise the general tenor of his rhetoric when it was purely about race in America. And partly, too, they may fear him as a candidate.

But a lot of my peers also went after his word-painting as enshrining victimhood, or worse things.

So I wonder how they will take to this?

"Black Americans were a founding population. Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding." As a result, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that."

That's Condi Rice talking, in an interview with the Washington Times.

It seems to me utterly unobjectionable as history, consistent with modern American patriotism (and even with current Republican party membership), and a view any compassionate thinking person could have. It doesn't tell you what to do about it. But it obviously opens that discussion along some familiar lines.

Good enough for you?

Two Thoughts on Obama

1. What a great day for white Americans! The man who is about to break a historic barrier, and could become the first black president, is half white. So much for us to be proud of. Another first for the white community!

Which is tongue in cheek (I'm talking to you, Greenwald) but does reflect my notion of the artificiality of race in America, however authentic the consequences of people's belief in its reality.

Now the serious thought. I've been wondering why l'Affair Wright doesn't make me go ballistic, the way it does some people who generally are in my camp.

For years I lived and worked in a region just north of the Mason Dixon Line, with two historically black colleges and an established black community with powerful churches. The colleges were rapidly degenerating, but they had been, in living memory, in the black Ivy League -- Thurgood Marshall was a graduate of one of them -- and the older professors were worthy of that tradition.

Obama is roughly my age. When he talks about the gap between the old and the young among politically active blacks, I know what he means. I got to cross paths many times with that older generation, while living with the younger in a mostly deracinated social life. One man in particular stands out: A gray-haired chemistry professor whose name I suspect "Reader" remembers (though she may not share my judgment of him). He headed up a community race-based organization and fought his battles there, in the university where he worked, and anywhere he found them. I covered several long lawsuits he brought, some of them hopeless case, some of them necessary ones, but all firmly and equally rooted in his sense of justice. He led, for instance, the fight that overthrew a ward system that deliberately diluted the black vote in the county seat.

I thought he was wrong in many cases and quixotic in others. In retrospect, he was more right than I realized, but I was young. He was firm in his convictions. He did not suffer fools patiently, black or white. But he was patient in explaining himself to those, black or white, who were listening. He used the right word, always. He never gave up. His mere presence commanded enormous respect. I doubt he ever knew my name, but I consider him a personal hero.

The men such as him were occasionally intemperate in the language they used in their crusades. They often seemed obsessed with the last fight, not the next one. Yet I would not have wanted that community without them. They were a necessary irritant.

Others among them I found more congenial. Generally they were not community leaders. In researching the history of that community (including the black history) I got to know the janitor at the historical society. He would take me into his "office" (a glorified and windowless closet) and tell stories and show me his own collection of clippings and artifacts. He was as proud as the professor, but he had a deep human kindness that the activists often lacked. I realized his perception of the community's past was richer and more nuanced than that of the librarians -- or the board of directors. He should have been running that place. Instead, he was sweeping up the plastic cups after the corporate fundraisers in the galleries. I dedicated my first book to him.

Hints Obama is Conceding Pa.

Speaking as one in the Pennsylvania media, we're seeing signs that Obama's campaign here is either late and severely disorganized, or else he's not seriously contesting Hillary's lead in Pennsylvania and devoting resources elsewhere. Which means it looks like April 22 won't be the knockout and he's looking to North Carolina and Indiana.

The Domrémy Candidate

Obama's speech. I think it's a good one -- breathtaking, in fact. I've only read it, not seen it, mind you. But if you skim the campaign boilerplate, the rest of it says things I don't think I've ever seen come out of the same mouth in the same breath. Truths about black people, white people, Americans all.

I paused for a long time when I came to this bit:

As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Somebody's going to jump on him for bungling the quote ("The past is never dead. It’s not even past.") and for not knowing what Faulkner meant by it. Fact is, ever since Faulkner put it on paper in a not-very-successful book, the quote has jumped out of his text and become national property. We all understand it, in a general way. The more so in the South, but all of us understand it.

And it is, after all, appropriate. It is said, in the play, to a woman named Temple with a violent, dark past, who has just said she is dead. She is seeking to save the life of a black nurse sentenced to death for killing Temple's child. The plot is pure Faulkner, and regardless of the quote, he belongs in this speech. It is a knot of tortured personal histories, bound tight in race and region.

The people tend to enter his speech in pairs, contrasting pairs. He is the son of "a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas" the grandson of "a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas." Obama himself, with his atypical family tree, is paired with his wife, "a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters." He closes with a story of his white campaign worker Ashley Baia and the (oddly nameless) black man.

But the main figure in the speech is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Who can be paired with him? Well, Martin Luther King Jr. makes a cameo, but it's not him. I say, Faulkner is Wright's double. They are mirror images of the same thing, in Obama's perception; human and humanist geniuses, intemperate voices trapped by the circumstances of the crippled world that they cannot stop living in. It's a shame Obama didn't say more about Faulkner.

Obama -- with his writers -- seems to have climbed some high mountain and looked out on the land and seen the broiling angers not as immediate heat, but as irrational expressions in real thwarted lives. Even in people who would hate him for who he is. The ability to see that is rare enough in a politician. I understand why hearing some politician actually up and say it is an experience to some people like finding a fountain in the desert.

It solidifies my belief this election is only partly about choosing the next president. It also is a national revival. These happen maybe once in a generation. In the 19th century, when so many were excluded from direct participation in politics, they were religious revivals or outpourings for social improvement. Now, they are political campaigns.

Obama's case is most obvious, but people also are plunging into the fray for Hillary who never did anything like this before. Yet this year will be remembered as 08ama. Amba had a great post before I left (can't find it now) pointing out the substantial similarities of Obama's political style and career to Jack Kennedy's. He brings the rhetoric, the life story, and the charisma. Yet it's only partly about personality. Which is where Geraldine Ferraro was wrong, though in a different year she'd have been right. It's the people who are ready to catch fire.

Many have years of disillusionment with the government. Their habit of slacker aloofness is a pose, and it is dry tinder before a rhetorical lightning strike that goes to the heart. They will wade through their own tears of ecstasy to answer the altar call. Their sudden sense of collective power in democratic participation will stay with them for a long time.

For the rest of my life and probably yours, this country will have leaders and servants who, when asked what got them started, will point to these weeks.

Kennedy was a terrible president. The clan's attitudes and actions in the Oval Office were almost antithetical to the idealism he inspired. The practical effect of his foreign policies wasted lives and almost destroyed the world. Yet those people stayed inspired, stayed in the process and became the next generation of political movers in America.

I still don't think I'm going to vote for him. I don't think I want another Jack Kennedy experience. But I'd be wary of working too hard against him. Not because of the backlash. Because, right or wrong for the job, this candidacy refreshes the tree of liberty.

Michelle

Funny, this afternoon I was having the same impression that hit Dan at Protein Wisdom:

... couldn’t we just elect Michelle Obama and get all this crap out of the way?

She's as smart as Obama and as ruthless as Hillary. Gods protect the nation that crossed us when she was in charge. And, with the two-fer empowerment, we could retire whole library wings of anti-American academic propaganda. Obama would make a great Husband in Chief -- host and inspirer and shepherd of good causes. And taxpayers wouldn't have to foot the invoice for Hillary changing the White House locks on Bill after every other weekend.

Downside: We'd have to listen over and over to the worst popular Beatles song ever recorded.

Obama's Time Machine

Never mind the middle name and the costumes. This is not going to help Obama with me:

Obama said during the debate with Clinton that once he withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, if al Qaeda were to form a base there, "then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."

"I have some news," McCain said. "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It's called Al Qaeda in Iraq. My friends, if we left, they wouldn't be establishing a base, they'd be taking a country and I'm not going to allow that to happen."

Advantage McCain. Even with his war wounds, he still can hit the hanging curve ball, if he gets one. But this is odd, from the news service reporting it -- Reuters, naturally:

McCain was somewhat undermined by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, who told U.S. lawmakers Wednesday that Al Qaeda in Iraq had suffered major setbacks last year and although still "capable of mounting lethal attacks," the group had suffered hundreds of members killed or captured.

How does that "undermine" him? McCain, not Obama, backed the strategies that led, in essential ways, to this success against the enemy which, McConnell takes pains to say, is still deadly, and which, no doubt he would agree, would surge right back if the U.S. pulled out ASAP.

Even Obama didn't take this silly line of argument.

Obama hit back at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, saying McCain had joined President George W. Bush in supporting a war "that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged."

"I have some news for John McCain, and that is that there was no such thing as al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq," he said to cheers.

He mocked McCain for his oft-repeated remark that he will get al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden if he has to follow him to the "gates of hell."

"So far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq," Obama said.

Which is about the only retreat option he has there, but it's a weak one. Nobody is voting for him to be president of 2003. If he's going to run on a platform of reversing the flow of time, then I want to see the paperwork on that. If he's going to present himself as someone who believes Saddam-in-charge was better for America than no Saddam, then please say that in so many words. If neither of those things, then he better talk more about the future, less about a past he can't change.

Obama and the Arabs

Start with this interesting observation from Tamara Cofman Wittes, who is attending the 5th annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha. She finds the Muslim participants notably free of rancour against the Americans, compared to past years. She gives some reasons:

But changes in the region and in U.S. policy also help explain the slackening of the resentment that has accompanied our past years’ discussions on America’s role in the Muslim Middle East. Violence in Iraq is down, there’s new (if fragile) hope for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and pushy rhetoric from the White House, once directed at autocratic Arab allies, is now reserved for Iran, which Americans and Arabs both perceive as threatening. A cynical colleague of mine here argued that the positive tone from the regional leaders at the conference reflects age-old realities of international politics: when America is weak, he said, everyone loves to beat up on us—but when America is stronger, everyone wants to be on our side. That’s great—as long as the current lull in Iraqi violence lasts.

If the American policy in Iraq works the way it's supposed to, it has the desired effect on the region. Which means there is this much more accrued evidence the basic neo-con theory was not flawed. Which is worth noting because it might get overlooked in a lot of commentary on her post, which likely will dash off to the next observation: "The most powerful explanation for the change is evident in the overwhelming fact that all anyone at this conference really wants to talk about is Barack Obama."

A friend from the Gulf tells me her young relative was so excited about the Democratic candidate that he tried to donate money over the Internet, as he’d heard so many young Americans were doing. Then he found out he had to be a U.S. citizen to do so. Another young woman, visiting from next-door Saudi Arabia, said that all her friends in Riyadh are “for Obama.” The symbolism of a major American presidential candidate with the middle name of Hussein, who went to elementary school in Indonesia, certainly speaks to Muslims abroad.

But more important is just the prospect of a refreshing shift in the the breeze off the Potomac. More than the changes in the region, it seems to be anticipated changes in Washington that are drawing the eyes of my Arab counterparts and giving the conference its unusually forward-looking tone. We’ll see how long the honeymoon lasts!

Seems fair enough. Most people everywhere are looking forward to a change in the relationship between the White House and the world. I'm looking forward to the opportunities it presents for breaking up old logjams and testing new ideas or methods. And to the usual anti-Americans being on their heels for while till they settle in on a new set of twisted narratives of What Is Really Happening.

Combined with the "symbolism" of Obama's middle name. Belmont Club confirms the power of this:

There are two ironies here. The first is that while Barack Obama has gone out of his way to say that he is 'not a Muslim', in a wider sense the Muslims have taken him into their bosom. An acquaintance, writing from Jakarta says the same feeling is pretty strong over there too. While in America he projects the image of rallying America he simultaneously conveys the impression of being on the side of the Arab too.

Which wisely does not suggest Obama does this intentionally. He didn't choose his middle name, and he's been accused by some strident people of trying to hide his middle name, so it would be odd if he were to be accused of flaunting it at the same time.

But it's also possible to wade into this issue from the other direction and drag all your wrong ideas with you and screw it up.

American foreign policy for the past seven years has demonstrated a hostility towards the interests of numerous Arab and Muslim nations, and an indifference to the concerns and disagreements of many allies in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and elsewhere. [ed. -- and before that it was the Golden Age and Everybody loved us. Osama planned those attacks all through the '90s because he knew we were going to turn mean after Bush was going to steal the election.]

I predict many bloggers who harbor fears of billions of Muslims and millions of Arabs because of a few thousand extremists from those populations will point to this article as proof that Barack Obama is somehow sympathetic to terrorists. [ed. -- nice to get your rant on against a hypothetical enemy that you can't even be bothered to go out and identify to gauge its importance. Or is it your custom to be driven by reaction to a few extremists from those populations?] That they have zero evidence doesn’t matter. If a moderate, non-threatening Muslim or Arab citizen likes Obama, that means he’s evil and dangerous.

With logic like that, it’s hard to see how such people ever gain the courage to crawl out from under their beds to face an American society built largely from some of the world’s more authoritarian, imperialist and brawling societies: Germany, England, Ireland and the descendants of Spanish conquerors. [ed.--What? I mean, this is likely to be risible nonsense, but first you have to figure out what he's trying to say. Can you? I can't. Maybe it's "Don't you dare identify our civilizational rivals by their worst traits, but don't dare do anything else to yourself?" In which case, other progressives say it much better.]

Obama’s candidacy offers powerful symbolism to the world. His father was a Harvard-educated African. His stepfather took him to live in Asia’s most Muslim nation for a couple of years when he was a very young boy. That same Indonesia received a great amount of aid after one of the globe’s worst national disasters in recorded human history, producing a fresh impression that our country had more than war and weapons for Muslims. But the initial aid offer that came from our current president after that record tsunami was relatively meager until private US citizens stood up to lead the way (I believe the actor, Sandra Bullock, led the way with an astounding million dollar donation).

[ed. -- there's revisionist history, and then there's bad revisionist history. This is the latter. The outpouring from private citizens and non-governmental charities came before the bureaucratic commitment to international aid agencies. Within hours, the donation meter at Amazon.com had hit $15 million. Which was a lot more than a Hollywood B-lister's tax deduction. A lot of Americans don't wait for the government to do something. As for what the government did, the biggest contribution it made was the Navy's work in feeding the survivors and protecting them in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. Which saved more lives than all the U.N. bureaucrats in all the world. Must have something to do with being descended from Irish imperialists.]

So Obama, just by being born and living as a normal boy for his first seven or eight years, represents something different to two great continents, through nothing he initiated at all. On the other hand, you can’t fault him for any of that. His symbolism is what it is. [ed.--Thank the gods for the Internet. No trees died to preserve that sentence.]

And on it goes. Wherein Obama is the salvation of mankind -- and he doesn't even get around to Obama's ethnic appeal to white guys because Obama is halfway a white guy! Wherein electing Obama will "motivate young potential anti-American warriors to consider non-violent alternatives" and offer "an alternative kind of hope to the post-death glory promised by fanatical jihadists." Would-be jihadists! You, too, can study hard and go to Harvard Law!

But don't tune out before you reach the precious rumination on the Great Ladder of Victimhood:

As I’ve observed through long life experience that there’s no way to resolve the question of who’s suffered the most bias in the world (Jews? Blacks and browns? Women? Numerous tribes who were conquered and colonialized? Christians? Muslims? Buddhists?) that will ever satisfy other groups who’ve suffered, the world, to advance civilization, must demonstrate that such discriminations must yield, one by one, to more enlightened views.

There is no ‘right’ order to accomplish that in. The most important thing to remember is that we must move forward in a world where many struggle to move us backward. And that forward momentum advances freedom, cooperation, ideals, hope and greater civilization than anything else we can work together to do.

So Obama has a high-degree-of-inspiring-the-world," and Hillary has a "medium-degre-of-inspiring-the-world." McCain? What did you think he was going to say? "I’m certain Senator McCain’s team is the least well-rounded of the three, reliant on too much use of the military to try and achieve our nation’s best interests." Like those aircraft carrier groups that got to Sumatra within hours of the tsunami with powerful water-desalination capabilities and working helicopters and tons of food and top-notch medical care. While the U.N. heads were still trying to coordinate their first meeting and reserve all the rooms in the 5-star hotels of Jakarta. What would Obama have sent? Autographed glossy photos of himself?

And I think most Americans, of every race, religion and political philosophy needs to recognize that and vote accordingly, not because of what some entrenched politician or pundit tells them, but because of what has become visible to billions across the globe and to tens of millions of Americans.

The security and advance of our nation and world depend on our capacity to do so, rather than get stuck into rigid ways of thinking that have made our progress uncertain and slow and at times, regressive.

Lesson 1: Be wary of people who want you to live for the word "progress" but won't define it for you. Lesson 2: Be wary of people whose thinking includes ideas like "regressive progress." Lesson 3: Don't listen to people to tell you to vote because of your fear of the world, because the "security" of our "nation" depends on it. Lesson 4: Why not just skip the middle men and let the rest of the world actually pick the American president, instead of parsing blog posts from Doha to guess what they want us to do?

Obama and Che, cont'd.

The Obama campaign responds to the Che flag flap:

"This is a volunteer office that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign. We were disappointed to see this picture because it is both offensive to many Cuban-Americans -- and Americans of all backgrounds -- and because it does not reflect Senator Obama’s views. Barack Obama has been very clear in putting forward a Cuba policy that is based on one principle: freedom for the Cuban people."

A fair enough job, I think. Appropriate weight for the purpose. Let's watch the follow-up.

NRO attempts to not like it but basically gives up after two tries.

Lone Star Times thinks he's got the flag-person triagulated. If he's right, she's the source of this rather un-Che-like sentiment:

"It’s wrong to try to implement restrictions in my private property. I own this piece of land. This is America. I should be able to do anything I want with it."

The Obama phenomenon now -- propelled by the media, but rooted in the mass mind -- has all the hallmarks of a crusade or a first crush. It is sweeping up people who mistake their fixations for Obama's. It no doubt includes many people who fit Thoreau's description of one type who sometimes came out to talk to him at Walden: men with just one idea, like a hen with one chick, and that a duckling.

Obama and Che

The rational mind can dismiss the flap over pictures taken inside an Obama campaign office showing a Che/Cuba flag hanging behind a desk. It was a bad choice by one person in a vast campaign.

But, surely, Obama doesn’t need to publicly weigh in on the decorating choices of every low level staffer? Let alone “renounce” affinities which he’s never shown?

Yes, afraid he does. If voters behaved in entirely rational and used nothing but logic in weighing candidates, we'd never have ... well, look at that wall chart of U.S. presidents through history.

This is a test for Obama. A small one, an early one, but it's a "Swift Boat Moment."

A certain number of people whose votes he'll need in November (if not in March) are going to be viscerally put off by that image. Especially for a candidacy like his, which relies so much on the instinctive feeling people have for him, rather than their thought processes, that picture is going to be a big block of ice in the room.

Plus it's a chance for us to see how well he can put out a fire. You want to know if a man can stamp out a trashcan blaze in his own office before you hire him as Fire Chief.

He Said What?

[posted by Callimachus]

I'm reading Barack Obama's speech at the Wilson Center ("as prepared for delivery"), and it's his usual recipe of genuinely stirring rhetoric (does anyone on the trail this year have better speechwriters?) that often covers thin thinking (e.g., Iraq is sinking because of the presence of our troops, yet Afghanistan can be saved from the same fate by -- an infusion of our troops).

Whatever he said about Pakistan in this speech seems to have set people buzzing. His defenders are trying to play it down:

At least one pundit on the left, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD says that Sen. Obama supports unilateral war on the middle east with this speech - but Sen. Obama said no such thing! Again, the Senator is simply echoing the concerns of the vast majority of Americans in that he will actually follow through on the post-9/11 rhetoric to bring Bin Laden and his ilk to justice. If we have to cross Pakistan's border to kill Bin Laden, so be it.

It seems to me most likely that's what he is saying. Though lines like this one:

The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

suggest he sees Pakistan as a potential "battlefield" in the sense that Iraq and Afghanistan are, he may not mean that literally.

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

The comparison of a hypothetical situation to one in which a surgical use of special forces, or even a drone missile attack, would have done the job does not suggest he means a full invasion.

Meanwhile, I like the contrast he draws in this passage:

And we know what the extremists say about us. America is just an occupying Army in Muslim lands, the shadow of a shrouded figure standing on a box at Abu Ghraib, the power behind the throne of a repressive leader. They say we are at war with Islam. That is the whispered line of the extremist who has nothing to offer in this battle of ideas but blame -- blame America, blame progress, blame Jews.

We know we are not who they say we are. America is at war with terrorists who killed on our soil. We are not at war with Islam. America is a compassionate nation that wants a better future for all people. The vast majority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims have no use for bin Ladin or his bankrupt ideas. But too often since 9/11, the extremists have defined us, not the other way around.

When I am President, that will change. We will author our own story.

Except I can't help thinking the "they" who paint this relentlessly negative picture of an oppressing and exploiting America are not merely Muslim extremists, but also a substantial chunk of his own domestic political faction. Who haven't always taken the trouble to draw a distinction -- if they even sense one -- between the Bush Administration or certain fringe tendencies in our culture, on the one hand, and the overall American culture and behavior. Who made Abu Ghraib the enduring image of the modern American military? It wasn't Bin Laden.

The extremists have defined us, but in many ways we have defined ourselves to their liking, or given out the raw material for that biased and negative definition of us. In more ways than one.

Would He Say This?

[posted by Callimachus]

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about the Sudanese government. It is brutal. Ruthless. A regime that butchers its own people to secure its own power. It has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams ....*

They're bad guys. The world, and the Sudanese people, would be better off without them.

But I also know that Sudan poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to its neighbors, that the Sudanese economy is in shambles, that the Sudanese military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community it can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, it falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war to secure Darfur will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Sudan without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

... The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not – we will not – travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

It's the heart of Barack Obama's Iraq speech, of course, with only the names changed. Ask yourself if the circumstances are essentially different than those he opposed when confronted with the difficult choice of what to do about Iraq in 2002. Is a humanitarian justification for sending Americans into a battlefield ever valid without overriding national interests also at stake?

And while you're at it, you might wonder why so many of the same people who are eager to see America throw its weight around to protect the suffering innocents of Darfur are at the same time shaping a narrative that says the people we will leave behind to be butchered like goats in Iraq when we withdraw, according to their demands, more or less deserve to die because they were fool enough to cast their lot with the "imperialist" occupiers against their own culture and nation.

And while you're at it you might wonder how those people expect us to fight the inevitable al-Qaida offensive and insurgency that will greet us in Sudan -- or any other place American troops set foot in South Asia or North Africa -- after they've declared to themselves and the world that we cannot fight, and have no will to defeat, such tactics as they will bring against us. The current war is in a place called Iraq. That is a geographical fact, not a military one. This war is waiting for us everywhere, any time. If we don't learn it sooner, we will have to pay dearly to learn it later.

The West has made a mistake so ancient Lycurgus warned the Spartans against it: It has fought one enemy too often, with too little will to defeat him, and thus taught him how to beat us. If we don't defeat "them" there, it's no certainty "they" will follow us home. At least not at once. But you can be sure they will follow us elsewhere.

While you're at it, you might wonder what kind of foreign policy speeches Democratic White House hopefuls would be making today if Saddam still were in power, mocking and taunting and scheming, playing the U.N. like a sideshow sucker and merrily filling those mass graves.

While you're at it, you might wonder what sort of rage the Arab-language media and autocratic regimes in Islamic lands would be whipping their clients into with images of Iraqi children starving or dying for want of embargoed medical technology.

* [The first elipsis, by the way, is the phrase "developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity." I omitted it because I don't think anyone is accusing Sudan of those things, so it obscures the parallel I'm calling attention to. It is not particularly relevant to the bigger question Obama -- and I -- ask, which is what wars are worth fighting and how do you recognize them, because its weight goes to the side of the argument that Obama swiftly rejects.

His phrase is judiciously worded -- certainly better so than most of what the White House said in those months, and it's close to what I felt was accurate at the time on those matters.

But I think it's worth noting here, incidentally, since it shows the weight of the things Obama, and a great many others, considered and rejected when forced to choose on Saddam. It was a tough call, and it does no service to those who made it to pretend it was a no-brainer because everyone but neo-con fools knew in 2002 Saddam had no WMD capacity and never would.]