MoveOn.Org Executive Director Eli Pareiser states, in a Feb. 1 2008 e-mail reporting on the results of a poll of MoveOn members favoring Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton 70.4 - 29.6%,
"Something big is clearly happening. A few weeks ago, MoveOn members we
surveyed were split. But with John Edwards bowing out, progressives are
coming together. Obama won over 70% of the vote yesterday, and he's moving
up in polls nationwide. As comments poured in from MoveOn members across
the country, the sense of hope was inspiring. Here's how Christine Y. in
New Jersey put it:
"'I've never felt so strongly about any one candidate in my entire life.
He's truly an inspiration to all of us--especially the younger generation.
I will stand by him 100% for as long as he's willing to stand up and fight
for this country!' ...
"To be clear, we won't always agree with all of Obama's positions. And
MoveOn members said overwhelmingly that, regardless of who wins the
Democratic nomination, we'll work hard to win the White House in 2008.
Whatever happens in the primary, we'll push the Democratic nominee to
campaign progressively and then we'll push them to fulfill their promises
after they win.
"The building of a progressive consensus around Senator Obama is tangible.
Earlier this week, John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline Kennedy said Obama
is the first presidential candidate to be as inspirational as her father.
Yesterday, progressive magazine The Nation said that electing Obama is "a
chance we can't pass up." And then DailyKos.com, the most widely read
progressive blog, announced Obama won 76% in a reader poll this week.
"It's time to get to work electing a president who is inspiring a nation
and is talking about big, progressive change."
Friday, February 1, 2008
A Week in the 2008 Presidential Campaign
As reported in the New York Times:
Monday, Jan. 28 - It's reported that Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy will endorse Barack Obama, spurning Bill Clinton plea.
Monday, Jan. 28 - Neocon columnist William Kristol says he's cancelling dinner plans for Thursday so he can see the debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
"Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. But why is he playing any cards? He wasn’t supposed to be in the game. But just as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary. ...
"Right now, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls in almost all the big states voting. She is a tough and capable campaigner, and she may be able to hold on to those leads. But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it? Liberals and Democrats can get basically the same policies without the Clinton baggage, and in choosing Obama, they can nominate a more electable candidate....
"Meanwhile, [in addition to the Kennedy endorsement and a possible Gore endorsement,] Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader during most of the Clinton presidency, is actively supporting Obama. Talk to Democrats in D.C., and it’s amazing how many who know the Clintons well — many of whom worked in the Clinton administration — are eager that they not return to the White House.
"This week, the Clinton team will dump every bit of opposition research it has on Obama. We’ll see how Obama responds.
"But the moment of truth could come at the Democratic debate Thursday, in Los Angeles. Edwards may have dropped out by then. If so, it will be a one-on-one showdown.... Will Obama hold his own? ...
"[T]his could be the week Obama upsets the Clintons."
Tuesday, Jan. 29 - reporting on State of the Union address, front page center photograph shows Hillary reaching across Barack Obama to shake hands with Ted Kennedy while Obama turns away to speak with a Senate colleague.
Tuesday, Jan. 29 - Moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks suggests, "Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party... [when l]ast week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. ...
"And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to endorse Obama.... The Kennedys and Obama hit the same contrasts again and again in their speeches: the high road versus the low road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus the past; and most of all, service versus selfishness.
“'With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion,'” Senator Kennedy declared. 'With Barack Obama, there is a new national leader who has given America a different kind of campaign — a campaign not just about himself, but about all of us,' he said.
"The Clintons started this fight, and in his grand and graceful way, Kennedy returned the volley with added speed. ...
"[I]n the speech’s most striking passage, he set Bill Clinton afloat on the receding tide of memory. 'There was another time,' Kennedy said, 'when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier.' But, he continued, another former Democratic president, Harry Truman, said he should have patience. He said he lacked experience. John Kennedy replied: 'The world is changing. The old ways will not do!'
"The audience at American University roared. It was mostly young people, and to them, the Clintons are as old as the Trumans were in 1960. And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents.
"How could the septuagenarian Kennedy cast the younger Clintons into the past? He could do it because he evoked the New Frontier, which again seems fresh. He could do it because he himself has come to live a life of service.
"After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you. ...
"Sept. 11th really did leave a residue — an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with that desire. ...
"It’s not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this election. But there was something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.
Wednesday, Jan. 30 - Commenting on Obama's State of the Union snub of Hillary, Maureen Dowd writes:
"Nobody cared about W., whose presidency had crumpled into a belated concern about earmarks.
"The only union that fascinated was Obama and Hillary, once more creeping around each other.
"It would have been the natural thing for the Illinois senator, only hours after his emotional embrace by the Kennedys and an arena full of deliriously shrieking students, to follow the lead of Uncle Teddy and greet the rebuffed Hillary.
"She was impossible to miss in the sea of dark suits and Supreme Court dark robes. Like Scarlett O’Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red.
"But the fact that he didn’t do so shows that Obama cannot hide how much the Clintons rattle him, and that he is still taking the race very personally. ...
"Their relations have been frosty and fraught ever since the young Chicago prince challenged Queen Hillary’s royal proclamation that it was her turn to rule.
"Last winter, after news broke that he was thinking of running, he winked at her and took her elbow on the Senate floor to say hi, in his customary languid, friendly way, and she coldly brushed him off.
"It bothered him, and he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.
"Again and again at debates, he looked eager to greet her or be friendly during the evening and she iced him. She might have frozen him out once more Monday night had he actually tried to reach out.
"But now Obama is like that cat Mark Twain wrote about who wouldn’t jump on the stove again for fear of being burned.
"It was only after the distortions of the Clintons in South Carolina that he changed his tone and took on Hillary in a tough way in the debate there. Afterward, one of his advisers said that it was as though a dam had broken and Obama finally began using all the sharp lines against Hillary that strategists had been suggesting for months.
"Why had it taken so long for Obama to push back against Hillary? 'He respected her as a senator,' the adviser replied. 'He even defended her privately when she cried, saying that no one knows how hard these campaigns are.' ...
"Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.
"As first lady, Alpha Hillary’s abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it. She voted to enable W. on Iraq so she could run as someone tough enough to command armies. ...
"Obama is right to be scared of Hillary. He just needs to learn that Uncle Teddy can’t fight all his fights, and that a little chivalry goes a long way."
Thursday, Jan. 31 - Gail Collins writes that "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been extremely testy toward one another, but so far the rancor at the top has not trickled down. The Democratic voters haven’t seemed angry at all. In fact, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a chipper group. Racing to the polls in droves. Not a single reference to holding one’s nose or the lesser of two evils. “I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” said Mike Sherzan, an Iowan who was for Edwards in the caucus while his wife was for Clinton and his son was with Obama. (Basically, everybody’s son is with Obama.)
"It would be nice if the two survivors could work a little harder on encouraging that mood. Anger is out. So 2006. So ... Tom DeLay.
"Hillary could start by purging her campaign of the lingering sense that the presidency is her due and anyone who stands in her way is a particularly mean chauvinist. You cannot run a campaign with the slogan: “Vote for Hillary — Think of All She’s Been Through.” ...
"Some of the Democratic resistance to Obama’s magic comes from people who are wary of politicians who want to win their hearts. Every great candidate has golden moments when the campaign merges perfectly into the zeitgeist of the people. But sooner or later it passes, and you’re left with a tired, flawed human being making a pitch to crowds of slightly deflated citizens. One of Hillary’s selling points is that we’re pre-deflated. We’ve known her so well for so long.
"The Obama let-down would be way harder to handle. Earlier this week, his campaign visited Barack’s sort-of ancestral home in El Dorado, Kan., a small town outside Wichita where the community college gym was rocking.
“'An hour-and-a-half wait. It was well worth it,' said Hardy Stegall of nearby Pretty Prairie.
"It was Obama’s first visit. His grandparents, the Dunhams, kept chasing the American dream west until they wound up in Hawaii. Stanley Dunham started out in El Dorado, where he managed a furniture store and, family legend has it, once decked the high school principal. At the rally, Obama told the story of how Stanley married a young woman from the right side of the tracks and how their daughter married a man from Kenya, who left her a young single mother whose son is running for president.
“'Their journey, like so many others, speaks to a simple truth ... the future is what we decide it is going to be,' he said.
“'I never thought he’d come here,' said Stegall, almost beside himself with pleasure.
"And to tell the truth, I never imagined sitting in a gym in small-town Kansas, watching people whoop for a black, Hawaii-born, grandson-of-a-son of the Kansas soil who promised to bring their hometown values with him to the White House.
"We may remember this as a great campaign, people. Presuming they don’t screw it up."
Friday, Feb. 1
The front page story reports, "Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met for debate [in Los Angeles] Thursday, sitting side by side and sharing a night of smiles, friendly eye-catching and gentle banter. Cordial as the encounter was, the candidates did not mask their own divisions, even as they previewed the attacks one of them will ultimately make against a Republican rival.
"Still, it was almost as if the battle was to see which of them could outnice the other.
"At the end of the nearly two-hour encounter, as the audience of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities rose to its feet at the Kodak Theater, Mr. Obama held Mrs. Clinton’s chair as she rose. The two rivals, almost hugging, held each others’ elbows and whispered in one another’s ear, offering a striking image that captured the tenor of the debate." ...
"[The] tone Thursday night was largely friendly. Each candidate laughed agreeably and nodded at the other’s remarks, and they praised each other at different points and looked ahead to the battle with the other party.
“'They are more of the same,' Mrs. Clinton said of the Republican candidates. 'Neither of us, by looking at us, is more of the same — we will change our country.'
What's going on here? There's something in the air - maybe they won't screw it up.
Stay tuned for Super Tuesday.
Monday, Jan. 28 - It's reported that Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy will endorse Barack Obama, spurning Bill Clinton plea.
Monday, Jan. 28 - Neocon columnist William Kristol says he's cancelling dinner plans for Thursday so he can see the debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
"Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. But why is he playing any cards? He wasn’t supposed to be in the game. But just as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary. ...
"Right now, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls in almost all the big states voting. She is a tough and capable campaigner, and she may be able to hold on to those leads. But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it? Liberals and Democrats can get basically the same policies without the Clinton baggage, and in choosing Obama, they can nominate a more electable candidate....
"Meanwhile, [in addition to the Kennedy endorsement and a possible Gore endorsement,] Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader during most of the Clinton presidency, is actively supporting Obama. Talk to Democrats in D.C., and it’s amazing how many who know the Clintons well — many of whom worked in the Clinton administration — are eager that they not return to the White House.
"This week, the Clinton team will dump every bit of opposition research it has on Obama. We’ll see how Obama responds.
"But the moment of truth could come at the Democratic debate Thursday, in Los Angeles. Edwards may have dropped out by then. If so, it will be a one-on-one showdown.... Will Obama hold his own? ...
"[T]his could be the week Obama upsets the Clintons."
Tuesday, Jan. 29 - reporting on State of the Union address, front page center photograph shows Hillary reaching across Barack Obama to shake hands with Ted Kennedy while Obama turns away to speak with a Senate colleague.
Tuesday, Jan. 29 - Moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks suggests, "Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party... [when l]ast week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. ...
"And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to endorse Obama.... The Kennedys and Obama hit the same contrasts again and again in their speeches: the high road versus the low road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus the past; and most of all, service versus selfishness.
“'With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion,'” Senator Kennedy declared. 'With Barack Obama, there is a new national leader who has given America a different kind of campaign — a campaign not just about himself, but about all of us,' he said.
"The Clintons started this fight, and in his grand and graceful way, Kennedy returned the volley with added speed. ...
"[I]n the speech’s most striking passage, he set Bill Clinton afloat on the receding tide of memory. 'There was another time,' Kennedy said, 'when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier.' But, he continued, another former Democratic president, Harry Truman, said he should have patience. He said he lacked experience. John Kennedy replied: 'The world is changing. The old ways will not do!'
"The audience at American University roared. It was mostly young people, and to them, the Clintons are as old as the Trumans were in 1960. And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents.
"How could the septuagenarian Kennedy cast the younger Clintons into the past? He could do it because he evoked the New Frontier, which again seems fresh. He could do it because he himself has come to live a life of service.
"After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you. ...
"Sept. 11th really did leave a residue — an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with that desire. ...
"It’s not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this election. But there was something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.
Wednesday, Jan. 30 - Commenting on Obama's State of the Union snub of Hillary, Maureen Dowd writes:
"Nobody cared about W., whose presidency had crumpled into a belated concern about earmarks.
"The only union that fascinated was Obama and Hillary, once more creeping around each other.
"It would have been the natural thing for the Illinois senator, only hours after his emotional embrace by the Kennedys and an arena full of deliriously shrieking students, to follow the lead of Uncle Teddy and greet the rebuffed Hillary.
"She was impossible to miss in the sea of dark suits and Supreme Court dark robes. Like Scarlett O’Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red.
"But the fact that he didn’t do so shows that Obama cannot hide how much the Clintons rattle him, and that he is still taking the race very personally. ...
"Their relations have been frosty and fraught ever since the young Chicago prince challenged Queen Hillary’s royal proclamation that it was her turn to rule.
"Last winter, after news broke that he was thinking of running, he winked at her and took her elbow on the Senate floor to say hi, in his customary languid, friendly way, and she coldly brushed him off.
"It bothered him, and he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.
"Again and again at debates, he looked eager to greet her or be friendly during the evening and she iced him. She might have frozen him out once more Monday night had he actually tried to reach out.
"But now Obama is like that cat Mark Twain wrote about who wouldn’t jump on the stove again for fear of being burned.
"It was only after the distortions of the Clintons in South Carolina that he changed his tone and took on Hillary in a tough way in the debate there. Afterward, one of his advisers said that it was as though a dam had broken and Obama finally began using all the sharp lines against Hillary that strategists had been suggesting for months.
"Why had it taken so long for Obama to push back against Hillary? 'He respected her as a senator,' the adviser replied. 'He even defended her privately when she cried, saying that no one knows how hard these campaigns are.' ...
"Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.
"As first lady, Alpha Hillary’s abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it. She voted to enable W. on Iraq so she could run as someone tough enough to command armies. ...
"Obama is right to be scared of Hillary. He just needs to learn that Uncle Teddy can’t fight all his fights, and that a little chivalry goes a long way."
Thursday, Jan. 31 - Gail Collins writes that "Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been extremely testy toward one another, but so far the rancor at the top has not trickled down. The Democratic voters haven’t seemed angry at all. In fact, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a chipper group. Racing to the polls in droves. Not a single reference to holding one’s nose or the lesser of two evils. “I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” said Mike Sherzan, an Iowan who was for Edwards in the caucus while his wife was for Clinton and his son was with Obama. (Basically, everybody’s son is with Obama.)
"It would be nice if the two survivors could work a little harder on encouraging that mood. Anger is out. So 2006. So ... Tom DeLay.
"Hillary could start by purging her campaign of the lingering sense that the presidency is her due and anyone who stands in her way is a particularly mean chauvinist. You cannot run a campaign with the slogan: “Vote for Hillary — Think of All She’s Been Through.” ...
"Some of the Democratic resistance to Obama’s magic comes from people who are wary of politicians who want to win their hearts. Every great candidate has golden moments when the campaign merges perfectly into the zeitgeist of the people. But sooner or later it passes, and you’re left with a tired, flawed human being making a pitch to crowds of slightly deflated citizens. One of Hillary’s selling points is that we’re pre-deflated. We’ve known her so well for so long.
"The Obama let-down would be way harder to handle. Earlier this week, his campaign visited Barack’s sort-of ancestral home in El Dorado, Kan., a small town outside Wichita where the community college gym was rocking.
“'An hour-and-a-half wait. It was well worth it,' said Hardy Stegall of nearby Pretty Prairie.
"It was Obama’s first visit. His grandparents, the Dunhams, kept chasing the American dream west until they wound up in Hawaii. Stanley Dunham started out in El Dorado, where he managed a furniture store and, family legend has it, once decked the high school principal. At the rally, Obama told the story of how Stanley married a young woman from the right side of the tracks and how their daughter married a man from Kenya, who left her a young single mother whose son is running for president.
“'Their journey, like so many others, speaks to a simple truth ... the future is what we decide it is going to be,' he said.
“'I never thought he’d come here,' said Stegall, almost beside himself with pleasure.
"And to tell the truth, I never imagined sitting in a gym in small-town Kansas, watching people whoop for a black, Hawaii-born, grandson-of-a-son of the Kansas soil who promised to bring their hometown values with him to the White House.
"We may remember this as a great campaign, people. Presuming they don’t screw it up."
Friday, Feb. 1
The front page story reports, "Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met for debate [in Los Angeles] Thursday, sitting side by side and sharing a night of smiles, friendly eye-catching and gentle banter. Cordial as the encounter was, the candidates did not mask their own divisions, even as they previewed the attacks one of them will ultimately make against a Republican rival.
"Still, it was almost as if the battle was to see which of them could outnice the other.
"At the end of the nearly two-hour encounter, as the audience of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities rose to its feet at the Kodak Theater, Mr. Obama held Mrs. Clinton’s chair as she rose. The two rivals, almost hugging, held each others’ elbows and whispered in one another’s ear, offering a striking image that captured the tenor of the debate." ...
"[The] tone Thursday night was largely friendly. Each candidate laughed agreeably and nodded at the other’s remarks, and they praised each other at different points and looked ahead to the battle with the other party.
“'They are more of the same,' Mrs. Clinton said of the Republican candidates. 'Neither of us, by looking at us, is more of the same — we will change our country.'
What's going on here? There's something in the air - maybe they won't screw it up.
Stay tuned for Super Tuesday.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Progressive Liberty: Subject to Democracy & Constitution Respectively
Principles of Progressive Liberty suggest any humane society should provide for the most basic needs of all its citizens. This means, among other things, that government should guarantee that every man, woman, and child have access to basic healthcare. It's a cop-out to suggest that government is incapable of organizing a working and efficient universal healthcare system - look at the various alternatives in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, and pick the best aspects of each. It's not rocket science, folks.
Does this mean that the Constitution mandates such government involvement?
In a word: No.
The Constitution sets up the structure of the government and imposes strict limits on governmental infringements of individual liberty; policy decisions, by contrast, are properly left to the democratic process. If the People desire a Progressive Society - as I believe they should - then they have the opportunity to create that society by voting for representatives who will legislate to that end. That's what republican Democracy is about - accountable majorities enacting policy; and if the majorities don't adequately reflect the People's wishes, someone else is elected who will.
Then if at any time the democratically-accountable majority legislates in ways that inappropriately infringe individual Liberty, the Constitution (as enforced by the Court) steps in. That's what Liberty is about - limited government constrained by a Constitution that protects, above all else, individual freedom.
Does this mean that the Constitution mandates such government involvement?
In a word: No.
The Constitution sets up the structure of the government and imposes strict limits on governmental infringements of individual liberty; policy decisions, by contrast, are properly left to the democratic process. If the People desire a Progressive Society - as I believe they should - then they have the opportunity to create that society by voting for representatives who will legislate to that end. That's what republican Democracy is about - accountable majorities enacting policy; and if the majorities don't adequately reflect the People's wishes, someone else is elected who will.
Then if at any time the democratically-accountable majority legislates in ways that inappropriately infringe individual Liberty, the Constitution (as enforced by the Court) steps in. That's what Liberty is about - limited government constrained by a Constitution that protects, above all else, individual freedom.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Obama Momentum After Iowa
It's truly something to see a black man convincingly win the caucuses in 2% white Iowa. Question is - can Barack Obama's momentum carry through into New Hampshire and the early primaries?
Indications are that it can - it turns out that Obama is an extraordinary candidate.
As I've suggested previously, the man offers what no other candidate in this field (or any other candidate in any other field in a couple generations) does - hope for a way past the bitter partisanship and cynicism of modern politics. Oh sure - there will always be sniping and partisan gamesmanship, but Obama seems determined (and maybe, just maybe, he is able) to rise above the fray as a uniter instead of divider.
Listen to some of the comments in today’s New York Times. First, this from Bob Herbert:
“The historians can put aside their reference material. This is new. America has never seen anything like the Barack Obama phenomenon…. Mr. Obama’s message of hope, healing and change, discounted as fanciful and naïve by skeptics, drew Iowans into the frigid night air by the tens of thousands on Thursday to stand with a man who is not just running for president, but trying to build a new type of political movement….
“Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here.
“Senator Obama’s victory speech was a concise oratorical gem. No candidate in either party can move an audience like he can. He characterized his stunning victory as an affirmation of ‘the most American of ideas – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it….
“The Clintons, [by contrast,] especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently….
“However this election turns out, Mr. Obama can be credited with a great achievement…. More than anyone else, he has re-energized that process and put some of the fun back into politics. And he’s done it by appealing openly and consistently to the best, rather than the worst, in us.”
And this from Gail Collins:
“Nearly 40 years later [after Hillary Rodham (Clinton’s) now-famous Wellesley commencement address in which she denounced politicians as ‘always looking for some way to cut a grubby deal instead of setting their sights on the impossible dream’ and claiming that she and her generation were ‘searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living’], here she is, … campaigning in New Hampshire … warning voters that the guy who is promising to turn the whole process into something that people could actually feel good about is peddling ‘false hopes.’
“Meanwhile Barack Obama gives his folks the ecstatic experience. ‘They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,’ he told them Thursday night, creating a patriotic lump in every throat in the room.
“How could you be 21 and not be for Barack Obama?
“How could you be 53 and not wonder how this relative stranger will hold up when the disasters arrive, when things get truly nasty and the crowd starts seeing him as mortal?
“But if she were around right now, Hillary Rodham the commencement speaker would probably be an Obama girl.”
Indications are that it can - it turns out that Obama is an extraordinary candidate.
As I've suggested previously, the man offers what no other candidate in this field (or any other candidate in any other field in a couple generations) does - hope for a way past the bitter partisanship and cynicism of modern politics. Oh sure - there will always be sniping and partisan gamesmanship, but Obama seems determined (and maybe, just maybe, he is able) to rise above the fray as a uniter instead of divider.
Listen to some of the comments in today’s New York Times. First, this from Bob Herbert:
“The historians can put aside their reference material. This is new. America has never seen anything like the Barack Obama phenomenon…. Mr. Obama’s message of hope, healing and change, discounted as fanciful and naïve by skeptics, drew Iowans into the frigid night air by the tens of thousands on Thursday to stand with a man who is not just running for president, but trying to build a new type of political movement….
“Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here.
“Senator Obama’s victory speech was a concise oratorical gem. No candidate in either party can move an audience like he can. He characterized his stunning victory as an affirmation of ‘the most American of ideas – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it….
“The Clintons, [by contrast,] especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently….
“However this election turns out, Mr. Obama can be credited with a great achievement…. More than anyone else, he has re-energized that process and put some of the fun back into politics. And he’s done it by appealing openly and consistently to the best, rather than the worst, in us.”
And this from Gail Collins:
“Nearly 40 years later [after Hillary Rodham (Clinton’s) now-famous Wellesley commencement address in which she denounced politicians as ‘always looking for some way to cut a grubby deal instead of setting their sights on the impossible dream’ and claiming that she and her generation were ‘searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living’], here she is, … campaigning in New Hampshire … warning voters that the guy who is promising to turn the whole process into something that people could actually feel good about is peddling ‘false hopes.’
“Meanwhile Barack Obama gives his folks the ecstatic experience. ‘They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,’ he told them Thursday night, creating a patriotic lump in every throat in the room.
“How could you be 21 and not be for Barack Obama?
“How could you be 53 and not wonder how this relative stranger will hold up when the disasters arrive, when things get truly nasty and the crowd starts seeing him as mortal?
“But if she were around right now, Hillary Rodham the commencement speaker would probably be an Obama girl.”
Monday, December 31, 2007
New Year - American Soulsearching in the Bush Era
As we bring down the curtain on 2007 and take stock in where we stand as a nation at the end of Year Seven in the reign of George W. Bush and the Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, it's worth taking a look at today's OpEd page editorial in the New York Times.
In substantial part, the piece, entitled "Looking at America," states:
"There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
"It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001....
"Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
"In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
"We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
"Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
"The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could....
"Prisoners are held [in Guantanamo Bay] with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
"In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
"The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
"These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
"We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America."
In substantial part, the piece, entitled "Looking at America," states:
"There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
"It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001....
"Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
"In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
"We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
"Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
"The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could....
"Prisoners are held [in Guantanamo Bay] with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
"In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
"The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
"These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
"We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America."
More on Tolerance - Walter Isaacson's "Einstein"
More on the topic of tolerance, which I suggest is the core animating principle of the U.S. Constitution in my working book, "Toward a More Tolerant Constitution - Of, By, and For the People"....
From Walter Isaacson's much-lauded new biography on Albert Einstein (another on my holiday wish-list of books):
“[Einstein's] success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. ‘It is important to foster individuality,’ he said, ‘for only the individual can produce new ideas.’…"
From Walter Isaacson's much-lauded new biography on Albert Einstein (another on my holiday wish-list of books):
“[Einstein's] success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society. ‘It is important to foster individuality,’ he said, ‘for only the individual can produce new ideas.’…"
Sunday, December 30, 2007
On Tolerance: Christopher Hitchens and "God is Not Great"
The title of a book I'm currently working on is (something like) "Toward a More Tolerant Constitution - Of, By, and For the People" basically arguing that governmental TOLERANCE of individual rights is a (if not the) core animating principle of the U.S. Constitution.
In a related context, Christopher Hitchens hits the nail on the head in his 2007 National Book Award finalist, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (one of my holiday wish-list books):
"[T]he mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the 'meaning' of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them.
And yet - the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what 'he' demands of us - from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction - itself composed of mutually warring factions - has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need...."
"[F]aith ... is the beginning - but not the end - of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning - but by no means the end - of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.
"For this reason, I would not prohibit [religious faith] even if I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitsvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.
"And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments.... Religion poisons everything."
How, then, does this passage from Hitchens' new book relate to my own book project? It relates in that the U.S. Constitution was specifically designed as nothing more than a device to prevent others, who claim to know everything under the guise of governmental authority, from destroying all "the hard-won human attainments," whether they be matters of religious freedom of the sort Hitchens speaks, or, more broadly, other precious individual liberties. As Justice Brandeis said in 1928, “The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
In other words, so long as my beliefs and actions cause no direct harm to others, the Constitution requires the government to "respect" - i.e., to tolerate - those beliefs and actions; in short, any law, regulation, or other government action that fails to so tolerate me and my beliefs and actions is unconstitutional.
The religious focus of Hitchens' book is relevant as well in light of the increasingly dominant - and inappropriate - role religion has come to play in American politics. For evidence, we need only look so far as the disastrous courses on which our evangelical president has steered the nation largely on the basis of his own religious dead-reckoning; and sadly, if the groveling comments toward the religious right of most of the current presidential candidates are any indication, it appears the situation is not soon to change. If this is so, it will be all the more incumbent upon ordinary Americans to speak out loudly and forcefully in protection of the hard-won constitutional liberties.
In a related context, Christopher Hitchens hits the nail on the head in his 2007 National Book Award finalist, "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (one of my holiday wish-list books):
"[T]he mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the 'meaning' of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them.
And yet - the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what 'he' demands of us - from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction - itself composed of mutually warring factions - has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need...."
"[F]aith ... is the beginning - but not the end - of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning - but by no means the end - of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.
"For this reason, I would not prohibit [religious faith] even if I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitsvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations.
"And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments.... Religion poisons everything."
How, then, does this passage from Hitchens' new book relate to my own book project? It relates in that the U.S. Constitution was specifically designed as nothing more than a device to prevent others, who claim to know everything under the guise of governmental authority, from destroying all "the hard-won human attainments," whether they be matters of religious freedom of the sort Hitchens speaks, or, more broadly, other precious individual liberties. As Justice Brandeis said in 1928, “The makers of our Constitution … conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
In other words, so long as my beliefs and actions cause no direct harm to others, the Constitution requires the government to "respect" - i.e., to tolerate - those beliefs and actions; in short, any law, regulation, or other government action that fails to so tolerate me and my beliefs and actions is unconstitutional.
The religious focus of Hitchens' book is relevant as well in light of the increasingly dominant - and inappropriate - role religion has come to play in American politics. For evidence, we need only look so far as the disastrous courses on which our evangelical president has steered the nation largely on the basis of his own religious dead-reckoning; and sadly, if the groveling comments toward the religious right of most of the current presidential candidates are any indication, it appears the situation is not soon to change. If this is so, it will be all the more incumbent upon ordinary Americans to speak out loudly and forcefully in protection of the hard-won constitutional liberties.
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