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Roundup: Historians' Take

This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.

Stanley Kutler: Bush’s 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy

Source: Truthdig.com (11-29-08)

[Stanley Kutler wrote “The Wars of Watergate,” and he liberated the Nixon tapes. ]

The times are unprecedented. Not since 1861 have we watched the last gasps of an outgoing administration with such anxiety. Then the nation was concerned with drift and inertia; now we watch for further ideological mischief.

Republicans were aghast in 2001 to discover that President Bill Clinton’s staff allegedly had dropped the “W” from White House computer keyboards. Frat house stuff. George W. Bush has left a legacy significantly more troubling, measured by the breakdown of normal government processes, as well as of constitutional guarantees and practices. We watch last-minute rushes to implement new administrative rules, to transform and burrow political appointees into tenured civil servants, to further weaken environmental safeguards, to shift public funds to a desired end, and to lay down policy declarations to leave the current administration’s successors bound or embarrassed until they are undone.

Think, for example, about the fate of official records. Will they be removed or shredded to further obscure this administration’s doings? Nourished on secrecy from its inception, and carefully concealing many of its activities through the years, the Bush administration may be determined to make one last play for secrecy by taking its records and storing them in a Dallas warehouse, pending a Bush library. In these waning weeks, a group of us is locked in legal combat with Vice President Dick Cheney and his corps of unseen advisers, seeking an injunction to prevent them from leaving office with their e-mail records. [Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, et al., v. Richard B. Cheney, et al, Civil Action No. 08-1548, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia]. Cheney and his team are resisting at every turn, following a strategy of running out the clock and thereby implicitly admitting their intention to destroy or take their records.

If Barack Obama as president would withdraw Bush’s infamous Executive Order 13233, which effectively repealed the Presidential Records Act of 1978, Bush and Cheney still can expect to seal their papers for at least 12 years. If Richard Nixon is their model, count on at least 20.

The president-elect’s Web site promises he will reverse Executive Order 13233 nullifying the timely, lawful release of presidential records. John Podesta, who heads the transition team, acknowledged that, as president, Obama will, “when appropriate,” reverse that order. Some will remember John F. Kennedy’s famous “stroke of the pen” promise for a federal fair housing ordinance in 1960—unfortunately, Kennedy’s pen paralysis resulted in an 18-month delay.

Bush’s order subverts the 1978 law’s provisions for public access to presidential records. It requires the Archivist of the United States to withhold materials if a former president asserts executive privilege, even if the incumbent president disagrees. Put another way, any assertions of privilege for the papers of Bush and his father must be honored by the incumbent president. Maybe now this is clearer.

Bush’s order also stands the right of access on its head. Now, the burden is on the researcher to show a “demonstrable, specific need.” In short, researchers retain a very expensive right to litigate. In 1988, the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia emphatically rejected President Ronald Reagan’s order directing the Archives to accept any claims advanced by former President Nixon to block release of his presidential materials, repudiating Reagan’s contention that the Archivist might legally and independently support a former president. The Bush order is no different, for it requires the Archivist to honor the former president’s claims even when the incumbent disagrees with them. Such a course constitutes nothing less than the incumbent’s abdication of his obligation of fidelity to the law.

Bush’s action provides no end to the mutual back-scratching for that fellowship of ex-presidents. If the incumbent and former president agree to block release, the president and his Department of Justice must defend the assertion of privilege, thus saving his predecessor potentially significant legal fees. Richard Nixon wrote endless volumes of memoirs to support his lawyer habit.

Make no mistake: the Bush order broke new ground. Allowing a former president’s family or personal representative to assert privilege is novel, if not bizarre. It delegates and brazenly enlarges an ever-more luxuriant executive privilege upon former presidents—something the Bush administration has been very adept at doing for itself. The shadowy doctrine of executive privilege has been elevated to a personal right, extending a lifetime, and even beyond. You can take it with you, if Bush has his way.

The order is beyond audacious. Incumbent presidents decide and judge the nature of national security, not former presidents. If the incumbent sees no national security issue at stake, why should a former president, ever anxious to preserve and enhance his reputation, make that determination?

Bush’s order already has freed his father from scholarly scrutiny, now some four years overdue. Only the timely and gracious intervention of Nancy Reagan prevented President Bush from sealing the Reagan papers. Those documents might tell us more about George H. W. Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra affair, other than having to go to the bathroom, or something like that, when the sordid business was discussed in the National Security Council’s proceedings.

Repudiating Executive Order 13233 is essential. This is not a partisan matter; even the Republican-controlled Congress favored repeal in 2004, but Tom DeLay effectively buried it for Bush, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., similarly blocked action in the Senate last year. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.—of all people—led the move to repeal; apparently he believed this was the only way he could get at the Clinton papers.

The prospects of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney proclaiming executive privilege long after they fade from their official duties is staggering. Their penchant for secrecy undoubtedly would insure significant gaps in any attempts to fathom the history of their deeds and actions. President-elect Obama has given us a promise. It must be delivered.

Posted on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 10:55 PM | Comments (4) | Top

Ron Radosh: Will Bush-bashing End?

Source: Pajamasmedia.com (11-29-08)

There is a strange symmetry between the Bush hatred that emanated from the Left and what the writer John Avlon calls “irrational Obama exuberance.” Barack Obama has not spent one day as President, yet his admirers speak and write as if he has not and will not do anything wrong. I agree with Avlon that Obama’s centrist Cabinet choices have encouraged confidence in his ability to tackle our country’s problems. But when President Obama steps into the oval office, like any other President who is a human being, he will call some shots incorrectly, and polls will reflect disillusionment among his followers.

If you consider Obama the closest man can get to God, you are probably among those who think that George W. Bush is the closest man can get to being the devil. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford writes in The National Post, “liberal Americans who see the Republicans as the party of the devil have enjoyed eight years of intense self-righteousness.” These are about to end, thankfully. As Obama takes over our nation’s helm, hopefully more reasoned opinion will prevail on the question of George W. Bush’s legacy as President.

Speaking about this himself, the President told an interviewer that he would like to be known “as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” and as a person “who first and foremost, did not sell his soul to accommodate the political process.” He would like to be known as a leader who “rallied people to help their neighbor, that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get their prescription drugs and Medicare as part of the basic package.”

Whether or not Bush’s hopes are fulfilled will only be told by future historians. Today’s academy has already reached its own judgment. A year or so ago, the eminent historian Sean Wilentz wrote a cover story for Rolling Stone, in which he called Bush “the worst President in all American history.” Most of his colleagues readily agreed with his call.

Read More...

Posted on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Juan Cole: India ... Please Don't Go Down the Bush- Cheney Road

Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-30-08)

Many Indians have called the attacks in Mumbai "India's 9/11." As an American who lived in India, I can feel that country's anguish over these horrific and indiscriminate acts of terror.

Most Indian observers, however, were critical in 2001 and after of how exactly the Bush administration (by which we apparently mainly mean Dick Cheney) responded to September 11. They were right, and they would do well to remember their own critique at this fateful moment.

What where the major mistakes of the United States government, and how might India avoid repeating them?

1) Remember asymmetry

The Bush administration was convinced that 9/11 could not have been the work of a small, independent terrorist organization. They insisted that Iraq must somehow have been behind it. States are used to dealing with other states, and military and intelligence agencies are fixated on state rivals. But Bush and Cheney were wrong. We have ente red an era of asymmetrical terrorism threats, in which relatively small groups can inflict substantial damage.

The Bush administration clung to its conviction of an Iraq-al-Qaeda operational cooperation despite the excellent evidence, which the FBI and CIA quickly uncovered, that the money had all come via the UAE from Paksitan and Afghanistan. There was never any money trail back to the Iraqi government.

Many Indian officials and much of the Indian public is falling into the Cheney fallacy. It is being argued that the terrorists fought as trained guerrillas, and implied that only a state (i.e. Pakistan) could have given them that sort of training.

But to the extent that the terrorists were professional fighters, they could have come by their training in many ways. Some might have been ex-military in Britain or Pakistan. Or they might have interned in some training camp somewhere. Some could have fought as vigilantes in Afghanistan or Iraq. They need n't be state-backed.

Keep your eye on the ball.

The Bush administration took its eye off al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and instead put most of its resources into confronting Iraq. But Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Eventually this American fickleness allowed both al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup.

Likewise, India should not allow itself to be distracted by implausible conspiracy theories about high Pakistani officials wanting to destroy the oberoi Hotel in Mumbai. (Does that even make any sense?) Focusing on a conventional state threat alone will leave the country unprepared to meet further asymmetrical, guerrilla-style attacks.

Avoid Easy Bigotry about National Character

Many Americans decided after 9/11 that since 13 of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabis, there is something evil about Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia itself was attacked repeatedly by al-Qaeda in 2003-2006 and waged a ma jor national struggle against it. You can't tar a whole people with the brush of a few nationals that turn to terrorism.

Worse, a whole industry of Islamphobia grew up, with dedicated television programs (0'Reilly, Glen Beck), specialized sermonizers, and political hatchetmen (Giuliani). Persons born in the Middle East or Pakistan were systematically harassed at airports. And the stigmatization of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans was used as a wedge to attack liberals and leftists, as well, however illogical the juxtaposition may seem.

There is a danger in India as we speak of mob action against Muslims, which will ineluctably drag the country into communal violence. The terrorists that attacked Mumbai were not Muslims in any meaningful sense of the word. They were cultists. Some of them brought stocks of alcohol for the siege they knew they would provoke. They were not pious.
They killed and wounded Muslims along with other kinds of Indians.

Muslims in general must not be punished for the actions of a handful of unbalanced fanatics. Down that road lies the end of civilization. It should be remembered that Hindu extremists have killed 100 Christians in eastern India in recent weeks. But that would be no excuse for a Christian crusade against Hindus or Hinduism.

Likewise, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as a Sikh, will remember the dark days when PM Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards after she had sent the Indian security forces into the Golden Temple, and the mob attacks on Sikhs in Delhi that took place in the aftermath. Blaming all Sikhs for the actions of a few was wrong then. It would be wrong now if applied to Muslims.

Address Security Flaws, but Keep Civil Liberties Strong

The 9/11 hijackings exploited three simple flaws in airline security of a procedural sort. Cockpit doors were not though to need strengthening. It was assumed that hijackers could not fly planes. And no one expected hijackers to kill themselves. Once those assumptions are no longer made, security is already much better. Likewise, the Mumbai terrorists exploited flaws in coastal, urban and hotel security, which need to be addressed.

But Bush and Cheney hardly contented themselves with counter-terrorism measures. They dropped a thousand-page "p.a.t.r.i.o.t. act" on Congress one night and insisted they vote on it the next day. They created outlaw spaces like Guantanamo and engaged in torture (or encouraged allies to torture for them). They railroaded innocent people. They deeply damaged American democracy.

India's own democracy has all along been fragile. I actually travelled in India in summer of 1976 when Indira Gandhi had declared "Emergency," i.e., had suspended civil liberties and democracy (the only such period in Indian history since 1947). India's leadership must not allow a handful of terrorists to push the country into a nother Emergency. It is not always possible for lapsed democracies to recover their liberties once they are undermined.

Avoid War

The Bush administration fought two major wars in the aftermath of 9/11 but never able to kill or capture the top al-Qaeda leadership. Conventional warfare did not actually destroy the Taliban, who later experienced a resurgence. The attack on Iraq destabilized the eastern stretches of the Middle East, which will be fragile and will face the threat of further wars for some time to come.

War with Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks would be a huge error. President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani certainly did not have anything to do with those attacks. Indeed, the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, which was intended to kill them, was done by exactly the same sort of people as attacked Mumbai. Nor was Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani involved. Is it possible that a military cell under Gen. Pervez Musharraf trained Lashkar-e Tayiba terrorists for attacks in Kashmir, and then some of the LET went rogue and decided to hit Mumbai instead? Yes. But to interpret such a thing as a Pakistan government operation would be incorrect.

With a new civilian government, headed by politicians who have themselves suffered from Muslim extremism and terrorism, Pakistan could be an increasingly important security partner for India. Allowing past enmities to derail these potentialities for detente would be most unwise.

Don't Swing to the Right

The American public, traumatized by 9/11 and misled by propaganda from corporate media, swung right. Instead of rebuking Bush and Cheney for their sins against the Republic, for their illegal war on Iraq, for their gutting of the Bill of Rights, for their Orwellian techniques of governance, the public gave them another 4 years in 2004. This Himalayan error of judgment allowed Bush and Cheney to go on, like giant ter mites, undermining the economic and legal foundations of American values and prosperity.

The fundamentalist, rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, which has extensive links with Hindu extremist groups, is already attacking the secular, left-of-center Congress Party for allegedly being soft on Muslim terrorism. The BJP almost dragged India into a nuclear war with Pakistan in 2002, and it seeded RSS extremists in the civil bureaucracy, and for the Indian public to return it to power now would risk further geopolitical and domestic tensions.

India may well become a global superpower during the coming century. The choices it makes now on how it will deal with this threat of terrorism will help determine what kind of country it will be, and what kind of globalimpact it will have. While it may be hypocritical of an American to hope that New Delhi deals with its crisis better than we did, it bespeaks my confidence in the country that I believe it can.

Posted on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 10:09 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Daniel Martin Varisco: Mumbai and the Blame Game

Source: Tabsir (11-29-08)

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.]

Must every country have its 9/11 moment and must these tragedies continue to be the work of extremists who attack and kill as if they were commanded by Allah? This is a rhetorical question, of course. The latest events in Mumbai have trumped the economic slump in the news. Once again billowing smoke from a famous building clouds the sky; again Islam is tainted as the religion that fosters terrorists. And the blame game begins anew.

The sheer audacity of the attack, more like a Rambo commando raid than the hijacking scenario that felled the Twin Towers, is staggering. How could such landmarks have been targeted in tandem? Where was the security? These are the questions inevitably asked after the fact. As reported in Al-Jazeera, here is the unfolding of the drama:

Following are the key events in the crisis (all times are in Mumbai local time):

Wednesday 26, 2008:

Shooting starts at Chhatrapati Shivaji rail station, one of the world’s busiest, handling thousands of passengers each day.

Within the hour other attacks occur at four other locations: the Nariman House, home of the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch; Leopold’s restaurant, a landmark popular with foreigners; the Trident-Oberoi hotel, a five-star landmark; the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, a landmark of Mumbai since 1903.

Shooting breaks out in south Mumbai, quickly followed by attacks near the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the civic body that governs Mumbai, and the Cama hospital and the GT hospital in the city centre.

Just after midnight, armed men attack the Vidhan Sabha, the legislative assembly, the lower house of state legislature in India.

Thursday 27

A large fire breaks out at the Taj Palace hotel and an hour later authorities begin escorting people out of the hotel.

Indian security forces are brought in to try to regain control of the Taj hotel and the Oberoi hotel.

Members of the National Security Guard start doing room-to-room searches at the Taj hotel and within the hour surround the Nariman House. Local media show people being rescued from the Oberoi hotel.

A little-known group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedeen claims responsibility for the attacks.

Indian troops continue to battle armed men in the city.

Friday 28

Firing and explosions are reported from both the Taj Mahal and Trident-Oberoi hotels.

Officers kill two gunmen inside the Trident-Oberoi hotel and ended the attack.

Dozens of people are evacuated from the Trident-Oberoi. A bus carrying the rescued guests was seen leaving the scene and police are said to have control of the building.

Meanwhile explosions and gunfire continue intermittently at the Taj Mahal hotel.

An airborne assault gets under way at the Nariban House, where commandos are beseiging a centre run by the ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group Chabad Lubavitch. Attackers holed up in the building are said to have hostages. The seige is punctuated by gunshots and explosions.

Troops storm the Nariman House, reportedly killing the gunmen inside. The troops emerged from the building to applause but the bodies of five hostages are recovered, including that of the rabbi that ran the centre.

Pakistan warns India not to play politics over the incident, but says the two countries face a common enemy and agrees to send its spy chief to share intelligence on the attacks.

There is little doubt “who” did it as most of the perpetrators appear to be dead, nine out of estimated ten of them. But little is yet known about the individuals behind the who. One rumor is that they are members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based group which aims to end Indian rule in Kashmir. If revenge on Americans and Britains was the aim, as is reported from eyewitness accounts, then the raid was a failure. Only 15 foreigners are among the estimated 150 casualties thus far. So far only five Americans were killed.

Why did 100 men commit an act that was sure to result in their own deaths? What did they hope to accomplish by willy nilly killing just about anyone in their way? The pundits and pandits will debate these slippery questions until the next tragedy. An article to be published in Time Magazine by Aryn Baker dredges up the colonial history, highlighting the Muslim-Hindu divide in India (and by extension Pakistan) to the Sepoy Mutiny:

On the afternoon of March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey, a handsome, mustachioed soldier in the East India Company’s native regiment, attacked his British lieutenant. His hanging a week later sparked a subcontinental revolt known to Indians as the first war of independence and to the British as the Sepoy Mutiny. Retribution was swift, and though Pandey was a Hindu, it was the subcontinent’s Muslims, whose Mughal King nominally held power in Delhi, who bore the brunt of British rage. The remnants of the Mughal Empire were dismantled, and five hundred years of Muslim supremacy on the subcontinent was brought to a halt.

Muslim society in India collapsed. The British imposed English as the official language. The impact was cataclysmic. Muslims went from near 100% literacy to 20% within a half-century. The country’s educated Muslim Élite was effectively blocked from administrative jobs in the government. Between 1858 and 1878, only 57 out of 3,100 graduates of Calcutta University - then the center of South Asian education - were Muslim. While discrimination by both Hindus and the British played a role, it was as if the whole of Muslim society had retreated to lick its collective wounds.

Blame British imperialism: it remains an easy target. But how far back can the blame game extend? Did the Muslim armies ask permission when they first invaded and slaughtered Hindus? Or perhaps the anger is directed at Timur, who not only conquered Delhi some 610 years ago, but dispatched virtually all the inhabitants, sending tens of thousands into eternity without pity? Or perhaps more recent history is at fault. Such tragedies can always be blamed on the Americans or the Israelis, as though the foreign policy or domestic policy of a state creates an open season for killing any of its citizens.

There is only one way to end the blame game; this is a path provided by a native of India who dealt with oppression and colonial power plays with a human rather than a divine dictate. His name was Gandhi. Among the truths he passed on is the following: “Retaliation is not the solution. The policy of an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” The men who took the lives of other men and women in Mumbai over the past few days were blind, blinded by a hate that reduces their God to the worst level of human nature. The lessons found in sacred writings of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad echo the wisdom of Gandhi. When mortals usurp the divine for vengeance, they dishonor the very notion of God’s greatness.

We should not be blind to injustice nor deny the misdeeds of the past, but those who kill in the name of any God dim the world for us all. There were no Muslim martyrs in Mumbai (except perhaps those who were innocent victims in the killings), no cause great enough to justify taking life. There is room enough in this world for Allah, Yahweh, the Trinity, all the gods and goddesses of Hinduism and even those who deny that divine entities exist. Because we humans have so many blood baths in our history, we owe it to future generations to replace retaliation with tolerance, lest blindness damn us all to more of the same; and for that we will only have ourselves to blame.

Posted on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 9:21 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Jonathan Zimmerman: Nepal's ban on private schools is unjust

Source: Christian Science Monitor (11-28-08)

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."]

In 1983, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Nepal to teach English. I was posted at a school in the Himalayan foothills, in a part of the country that everyone called "Red."

At first I thought the name referred to the color of the mud that clogged the region's roads and rivers during the monsoon. But then I discovered the real meaning: My district was a Communist hotbed. And nobody was more "Red" than its teachers.

Communist affiliation was illegal at the time in Nepal, so my colleagues were reticent to discuss the matter with their American visitor. By the end of my two-year term, however, most of them had opened up to me.

Their message was simple: Only a revolution could save Nepal. And it would start in the schools, which would teach so-called scientific Marxism to a new generation.

So what happens, I asked, if the people don't want their schools to do that? "It's simple," one colleague told me. "We shall make them want it."

I thought of these conversations last week when I read that the new Maoist government in Nepal planned to close all private schools. The announcement triggered loud
protests from opposition parties and especially from parents, who vowed to resist the measure. If the goal was to make them want a Red education, it's not working.

The crisis dates back to 1996, when the Maoists – still barred from elections – vowed to take over the schools. In the countryside, especially, they kidnapped teachers and students for political indoctrination and forced labor. They also designed new curricula, hoping to hasten the day that my teacher colleagues envisioned back in the 1980s.

A fourth-grade Maoist syllabus introduced children to dialectical materialism alongside homemade guns. Fifth graders would study grenades and booby traps as well as Spartacus, the Roman slave rebellion leader.

To avoid this mixture of terror and propaganda, many parents kept their children at home. Others sent them to a burgeoning network of private schools, which soon came under Communist fire as well.

In Pyuthan, the district where I taught, Maoist attacks forced private schools to close in 2001. Four years later, amid another round of violence, private schools across the country shut down. They reopened two weeks later, following a concerted campaign by parents, students, and human rights organizations.

Now these same groups are protesting the new Maoist government, which entered electoral politics two years ago and won a parliamentary majority this spring. Tired of Nepal's endemic corruption and inefficien
cy, voters wanted something new. They also hoped that legislative politics would moderate the Maoists, who would now have to compromise with other parties.

It hasn't worked out that way. Turning a deaf ear to protests, the Maoists are moving ahead to ban private investment in primary and secondary schooling by 2011. The goal, they say, is to reduce inequality in education.

But, there's every reason to believe that the ban would reduce education, period. At least 1.5 million Nepali children attend private schools, which now account for almost one-third of the country's 41,000 schools. If their schools are closed, where will these students go?

Some will stay home, just as they did during the first Communist attacks. Others will flood into the strapped government schools, which are already so crowded that they often hold classes outside.

That's what happened in Kenya in 2003, when the government eliminated fees for its public primary schools and closed private ones. Most of the private-school kids had attended "slum" schools, which were less expensive – but frequently more effective – than government institutions. By eliminating private schools in favor of "free public education," then, Kenya did its public an enormous disservice.

Around the world, indeed, private schools represent a key component of education for the poor. In Nigeria, the government reports that 50 percent of children are too impoverished to attend school. But roughly half of that number – a quarter of school-aged children – attend unregistered private schools, which often provide better services for less money.

Eight years ago, in its Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations resolved to achieve universal primary education by 2015. But the best way to do that is to encourage private schooling, not to squelch it.

It's also a good way to promote democracy, which requires a diversity of ideas – and schools that reflect them.

That's why another UN resolution, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declared that parents "have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."

That's exactly correct: a prior right. And my Nepali colleagues were wrong.

Nobody should be forced into a single type of education, anywhere in the world. And so long as that continues, none of us are free.

Posted on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 5:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Victor Davis Hanson: The Hysterical Style

Source: Real Clear Politics (11-27-08)

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]

Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.

News magazines depict President-elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for The New York Times even dreamed that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.

We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer "me generation" that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.

We haven't seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation's computers would simply shut down on Jan. 1, 2000 -- and with them the country itself.

Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others -- and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy -- sanity will return....

George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the "worst" president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower -- who had previously never been elected to anything.

As for Bush's legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-7 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, Bush's supposedly "worst" presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.

But these days even that modest assessment that things aren't that bad -- or all that different from the past -- may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.

Posted on Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 6:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Naison: Any Long Term Solution to the Economic Crisis Requires Raising Wages and Redistributing Income

Source: Special to HNN (11-26-08)

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]

The roots of the current economic crisis in the United States are strikingly similar to those which provoked the Great Depression of the 1930's. In each instance, the economic collapse followed a long period of economic expansion in which profits far outpaced wages, leading to massive speculation in unregulated financial products and the stimulation of consumer demand by having wage earners to take on large amounts of personal debt. When the speculative bubble collapsed, as it did in 1929 and 2008, weakening or destroying major financial institutions, consumer demand could not keep the economy afloat once credit was no longer available. In 1929, this produced a three year economic contraction that led to a third of the nation's labor force being unemployed and the steel and auto industry operating at less than 30 percent of its capacity. In 2008, we are not at that point--- yet. But we are seeing a profliferation of store closing and bankruptcies among major American retailers, a wave of home foreclosures, and the impending collapse of the American automobile industry. With all of these leading to further job losses, and further drops in consumer demand, it is hard to see where the power to reverse the economic free fall will come from.

The current strategy, of both the Bush Administration and the incoming Obama administration, seems to be to inject funds into the collapsing banking system to make sure credit is available, and develop a stimulus package that will put income into consumers hands through a combination of job creation and transfer payments (food stamps, unemployment insurance). All this is probably necessary to prevent the economy from shrinking at the rate it did in the early Depression.

But because consumer credit will never again be so freely available through the major instruments used to promote it in the last 20 years- primarily credit card debt and second mortgages on homes- it is hard to see how American consumers can again become the engine of economic growth unless working class and middle class incomes start growing at the rates they did between 1945 and 1970. Some of this income growth can be encourage by lowering tax rates on middle class incomes and developing a program of national health insurance, but any long term solution requires a national wage policy to address income inequality and improve the bargaining power of American workers.

Even Larry Summers, President Obama's new economic advisor, recognizes that economic inequality is one of the major causes of the nation's economic collapse. According to today's NY Times, Summers is now arguing that the lack of middle class income growth is "the definining issue of our time" and using the following parable to illustrate his point:

" To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s," Summers argues, " every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago."

Since no such voluntary program in income distribution is ever going to take place, how do we assure that working class and middle class incomes rise sufficiently to be a source of consumer demand as well as provide a decent standard of living to most Americans?

I have two policy suggestions which would ecourage such an outcome:

First, that the federal government impose an income standard on any bank, insurance company or manufacturer that receives a federal subsidy that its highest paid executives make no more than 10 times the salary of that company's lowest paid worker. Two highly successful companies, Ben and Jerry's and Costco, operate with such a standard, and there is no reason that it could not prevail throughout American industry. This would give company managers a strong personal incentive to raise wages throughout their enterprises and would prevent huge portions of corporate income from being directed into executive compensation.

Secondly, the Congress and the incoming administration should revise labor law to make it much easier to organize unions, encouraging unionization drives in the lowest wage sections of the American economy, especially retail trades, food processing, agriculture and the hotel and restaurant industry ( including fast foods). Strong unions will assure that workers get a fair share of corporate profits and that low wage workers can become consumers without incurring huge amounts of debt.

Only policies such as these can create an economy where consumer demand rests on a firm enough foundation to promote economic growth without uncontrolled debt and speculation.

Promoting econmic equality is not only a strategy for national unity in times of hardship, it is the only way out of the mess we are in.

Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Martin Kramer: What do the financial crisis and U.S. Middle East policy have in common?

Source: Sandbox, a blog run by Martin Kramer (11-26-08)

[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.]

Behind the financial crisis was a well-practiced mechanism for concealing risk. The risk was there, and it was constantly growing, but it could be disguised, repackaged and renamed, so that in the end it seemed to have disappeared. Much of the debate about foreign policy in the United States is conducted in the same manner: policymakers and pundits, to get what they want, conceal the risks.

In the case of the Middle East, they concealed the risks of bringing Yasser Arafat in from the cold; they concealed the risks of neglecting the growth of Al Qaeda; and they concealed the risks involved in occupying Iraq. It isn't that the risks weren't known—to someone. The intelligence was always there. But if you were clever enough, and determined enough, you could find a way to conceal them.

But concealed risk doesn't go away. It accumulates away from sight, until the moment when it surges back to the surface. It did that after Camp David in 2000, when the "peace process" collapsed in blood; it did that on 9/11, when hijackers shattered the skies over New York in Washington; and it happened in Iraq, when an insurgency kicked us back. This tendency to downplay risk may be an American trait: we have seen it in U.S. markets, and we saw it in U.S. election-year politics. In Middle East policy, its outcome has been a string of very unpleasant surprises.

A case in point is radical Islam. One would think that after the Iranian revolution, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the terrorism of Hezbollah, the Rushdie affair, the suicide attacks of Hamas and Al Qaeda, the Danish cartoons, and a host of other "surprises," that we would not be inclined to ignore the risks posed by radical Islam. And yet there are batteries of interpreters, analysts and pundits whose principal project is to obscure if not conceal the risks. Here are some of the most widespread variations on the theme:

Worried about Ahmadinejad? Pay him no mind. He doesn't really call the shots in Iran, he's just a figurehead. And anyway, he didn't really say what he's purported to have said, about wiping Israel off the map. What the Iranians really want is to sit down with us and cut a deal. They have a few grievances, some of them are even legitimate, so let's hear them out and invite them to the table, without preconditions. Iran isn't all that dangerous; it's just a small country; and even their own people are tired of the revolution. So pay no attention to Ahmadinejad, and pay no attention to the old slogans of "death to America," because that's not the real Iran.

Worried about the Palestinian Hamas? You've got it wrong. They merely represent another face of Palestinian nationalism. They aren't really Islamists at all: Hamas is basically a protest movement against corruption. Given the right incentives, they can be drawn into the peace process. Sure, they say they will never recognize Israel, but that is what the PLO once said, and didn't they change their tune? Anyway, Hamas controls Gaza, so there can't be a real peace process—a settlement of the big issues like Jerusalem, refugees, borders—without bringing them into the tent. So let's sit down and talk to them, figure out what their grievances are—no doubt, some of them are legitimate too. And let's get the process back on track.

Troubled by Hezbollah? Don't believe everything they say. They only pretend to be faithful to Iran's ayatollahs, and all their talk about "onwards to Jerusalem" is rhetoric for domestic consumption. What they really want is to earn the Shiites their rightful place in Lebanon, and improve the lot of their aggrieved sect. Engage them, dangle some carrots, give them a place at the table, and see how quickly they transform themselves from an armed militia into a peaceable political party.

And so on. There is a large industry out there, which has as its sole purpose the systematic downplaying of the risks posed by radical Islam. And in the best American tradition, these risks are repackaged as opportunities, under a new name. It could just as easily be called appeasement, but the public associates appeasement with high risk. So let's rename it engagement, which sounds low-risk—after all, there's no harm in talking, right? And once the risk has been minimized, the possible pay-off is then inflated: if we engage with the Islamists, we will reap the reward in the form of a less tumultuous Middle East. Nuclear plans might be shelved, terror might wane, and peace might prevail.

The engagement package rests upon a key assumption: that these "radical" states, groups, and individuals are motivated by grievances. If only we were able to address or ameliorate those grievances, we could effectively domesticate just about every form of Islamism. Another assumption is that these grievances are finite—that is, by ameliorating them, they will be diminished.

It is precisely here that advocates of "engagement" are concealing the risk. They do so in two ways. First, they distract us from the deep-down dimension of Islamism—from the overarching narrative that drives all forms of Islamism. The narrative goes like this: the enemies of Islam—America, Europe, the Christians, the Jews, Israel—enjoy much more power than the believing Muslims do. But if we Muslims return to the faith, we can restore to ourselves the vast power we exercised in past, when Islam dominated the world as the West dominates it today. The Islamists believe that through faith—exemplified by self-sacrifice and self-martyrdom—they can put history in reverse.

Once this is understood, the second concealment of risk comes into focus. We are told that the demands of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran are finite. If we give them a concession here, or a foothold there, we will have somehow diminished their demand for more concessions and footholds. But if their purpose is the reversal of history, then our gestures of accommodation, far from enticing them to give up their grand vision, only persuade them to press on. They understand our desire to engage them as a sign of weakness—an attempt to appease them—which is itself an enticement for them to push harder against us and our allies. And since they believe in their narrative of an empowered Islam with the fervency of religious conviction, no amount of insistence by us that we will go only so far and no further will stop them.

Our inability to estimate this risk derives in part from our unwillingness to give credence to religious conviction in politics. We are keen to recast Islamists in secular terms—to see them as political parties, or reform movements, or interest groups. But what if Islamists are none of these things? What if they see themselves as soldiers of God, working his will in the world? How do you deal with someone who believes that a paradise awaits every jihadist "martyr," and that the existence of this paradise is as real and certain to him as the existence of a Sheraton Hotel in Chicago? Or that at any moment, the mahdi, the awaited one, could make a reappearance and usher in the end of days? How do we calculate that risk?

So what are the real risks posed by Islamic extremism? If I were preparing a prospectus for a potential investor in "engagement," or a warning label on possible side effects of "engagement," they would include these warnings:

Iran: The downside risk is that Iran will prolong "engagement" in such a way as to buy time for its nuclear program—perhaps just the amount of time it needs to complete it. At the same time, it will use the fact of "engagement" with the United States to chisel away at the weak coalition of Arab states that the United States has cobbled together to contain Iran. If "engagement" is unconditionally offered, Iran will continue its subversive activities in Iraq and Lebanon until it receives some other massive concession. Indeed, it may even accelerate these activities, so as to demand a higher price for their cessation. If the United States stands its ground and "engagement" fails, many in the Middle East will automatically blame the United States, but by then, military options will be even less appealing than they are today.

Hamas: The downside risk is that "engagement"—even if conducted indirectly through various mediators—will be the nail in the coffin of Mahmoud Abbas, and of any directly negotiated understandings between Israel and the Palestinians. It is true that Israelis and Palestinians aren't capable today of reaching a final status agreement. But the present situation in the West Bank allows for a degree of stability and cooperation. This is because Israel stands as the guarantor against Hamas subversion of the West Bank. "Engagement" with Hamas would weaken that guarantee, signal to Palestinians once again that terrorism pays, and validate and legitimate the anti-Semitic, racist rhetoric that emanates daily from the leaders and preachers of Hamas. It might do all this without bringing Israeli-Palestinian peace even one inch closer.

Hezbollah: The downside risk is that "engagement" will effectively concede control of Lebanon to an armed militia that constitutes a state within a state. It will undermine America's pretension to champion civil society and pluralism in the most diverse Arab state. It will constitute the final rout of the beleaguered democracy forces within Lebanon, which have been consistently pro-American. It will compound the unfortunate effects of the 2006 summer war, by seeming to acknowledge Hezbollah as the victor. And it might do all this without bringing about the disarming of a single Hezbollah terrorist, or the removal of a single Iranian-supplied missile from Lebanon.

One would have to be a relentless pessimist to believe that all the downside risks I have outlined would be realized. But every serious advocate of "engagement" should acknowledge the risks, and explain their strategy for mitigating them. And it isn't enough to say: don't worry, we're going to practice "tough engagement." Perhaps we might. But most of the risks arise from the very fact of engagement—from the legitimacy it accords to the other party.

In the Middle East, the idea that "there's no harm in talking" is entirely incomprehensible. It matters whom you talk to, because you legitimize your interlocutors. Hence the Arab refusal to normalize relations with Israel. Remember the scene that unfolded this past summer, when Bashar Asad scrupulously avoided contact with Ehud Olmert on the same reviewing stand at a Mediterranean summit. An Arab head of state will never directly engage Israel before extracting every concession. Only an American would think of doing this at the outset, and in return for nothing: "unconditional talks" is a purely American concept, incomprehensible in the Middle East. There is harm in talking, if your talking legitimates your enemies, and persuades them and those on the sidelines that you have done so from weakness. For only the weak talk "unconditionally," which is tantamount to accepting the enemy's conditions. It is widely regarded as the prelude to unconditional surrender.

The United States cannot afford to roll the dice again in the Middle East, in the pious hope of winning it all. Chances are slim to nil that the United States is going to talk the Iranians, Hamas or Hezbollah out of their grand plan. Should that surprise us? We "engaged" before, with Yasser Arafat, and we know how that ended. We downplayed radical rhetoric before, with Osama bin Laden, and we know how that ended. We assumed we could talk people out of their passions in Iraq, and we know how that ended.

It is time to question risk-defying policies in the Middle East. The slogans of peace and democracy misled us. Let's not let the new slogan of engagement do the same. The United States is going to have to show the resolve and grit to wear and grind down adversaries, with soft power, hard power and will power. Paradoxically, that is the least risky path—because if America persists, it will prevail.

Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 7:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ezra Klein vs. Eric Rauchway: Is the Great Depression Relevant?

Ezra Klein in the American Prospect :

Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, and Justin Fox all make much of Christina Romer's expertise on the causes of the Great Depression. And, indeed, Romer does seem to be an expert on the Depression. She even wrote the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on the subject. This is a point you frequently hear in Ben Bernanke's defense, too: He's also an expert on the Great Depression. But can this really be so useful? It's hard to believe that a complex financial crisis in 2008 is so similar to a complex economic crisis in 1929 that you need an incredibly subtle understanding of the latter to effectively apprehend the former. Presumably most economists know enough not to repeat the basic mistakes of the 1930s, and the question is which economists know enough to avoid the possible mistakes of the 2000s. Is there any real reason to assume otherwise?

Eric Rauchway at blog edgeoftheamericanwest:

Granting that I have a vested interest in the position that knowledge of history is relevant, here’s the specific case I’d make on behalf of Romer (and Bernanke) and then the general case.

(1) The Specific Case. The Great Depression remains unique in degree and perhaps in kind. We want to keep it that way. Inasmuch as the present crisis bears some resemblance to the early phases of the Great Depression we want experts of that unique catastrophe to be on the lookout for ways to halt the slide into disaster.

Specifically, Bernanke and Romer have studied how the financial crisis of the late 1920s turned into the broader economic crisis of the early 1930s. It looks like this is where we are now, with the financial crisis beginning to affect consumer spending.

People generally know that this happened, but Bernanke and Romer have specific ideas about why, and are familiar with the historical data supporting those theses. Assuming they have pretty sharp minds they should be able to spot related trends in the current data and formulate or recommend policy accordingly. Which leads to …

(2) The General Case. Ezra’s concluding question seems to boil down to, now that we have the social science, why do we need the social scientists?

Well, to some degree you don’t, of course. The whole point of social science is to draw general conclusions from specific data, and those general conclusions should be able to predict further findings. So Bernanke and Romer sift through the data, and produce a model that explains what happens, and the model should have predictive value no matter who applies it.

But that “incredibly subtle understanding”, which comes from poring over the data, is potentially quite valuable, especially in a complex crisis that may not unfold exactly like those of the past. Someone who’s familiar not only with the model—the “basic mistakes”—but also with the data that went into the model will know all of the caveats and qualifications that don’t make it into the general statement.

And such a person would be the best qualified person to catch exceptions and nuances in current flows of information, so as to say, “wait. We don’t want slavishly to follow the model, here, because….”

For the same reason, I hope the people crafting the president-elect’s infrastructure-investment program have a good empirical understanding of how the New Deal infrastructure-investment programs did and didn’t work. If you want to do more than derive the basic benefit of just paying people to dig holes and fill them again—that is to say, if you want lasting infrastructure as well as short-term stimulus—you need to take into account the weirdnesses of American federalism, the business of contracting and hiring, and the existing state of plans for infrastructure development. It would be good to know the details of how that panned out last time.

Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 1:10 AM | Comments (3) | Top

Victor Davis Hanson: What Went Wrong?

Source: National Review Online (11-25-08)

Conservatives have already in the three weeks after the election come up with three competing explanations — and remedies — for their congressional defeats and the victory of the relatively unknown Barack Obama.

Post-election voting patterns and statistical data can be interpreted in various ways to support any of the following three exegeses, which I understand as being roughly the following:

It was a sort of fluke. Party faithful will shrug that almost everything conspired this year against the conservative brand: two wars; the sinking economy; eight years of presidential incumbency; a biased, unethical media; Bush’s low ratings; the absence of an incumbent president or VP candidate on the ticket; more exposed Republican congressional seats than Democratic ones; a charismatic path-breaking opposition candidate, etc. The stars were wrong, rather than the ideas.

So, the theory goes, just make McCain appear a little younger, Obama sound a little bit more like John Kerry, and take away the mid-September financial meltdown, and — presto! — a Republican would now be in the White House.

Remedy? Not much other than fielding younger, more charismatic candidates. The failure was people, not ideas, and best symbolized by the damage done by the creepy Jack Abramoff, Larry Craig, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, or Ted Stevens whose ethical lapses became the Republican bumper-sticker.

Even had an ethical but colorless Bob Dole or Gerry Ford run in 1980 on Reagan’s identical platform, he would have most likely lost to Carter. So it’s the candidate, stupid.

In this way of thinking, someone like Jindal, Palin, and other fresh new faces will save the party in 2012, especially as hope and change soon proves neither hopeful nor different. Democrats, after all, just replaced their 91-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd as Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee with equally entrenched 84-year-old Sen. Daniel Inouye; and are now talking about re-empowering the big unions that helped ruin Detroit, are hiring all the Clinton retreads for a second try in the Obama administration, and seem to want to use the ancient Freddie/Fannie/postal service model to expand the government.

It was too narrow a base, too exclusionary a message. This second theory — favored by New York and D.C. columnists, Schwarzenegger Republicans, and “helpful” Democrats of the “we miss the old good McCain of 2000” school — posits that all these new young, minority, and independent voters can’t break through the anti–gay marriage, anti–illegal immigration, anti–affirmative action, anti-abortion firewall, and so are diverted from the low-taxes, small-government, and strong–national defense message that they otherwise might welcome.

Remedy? Junk the social agenda. Become more libertarian. Try to make existing Great Society programs run more efficiently, rather than shrilly barking at what you couldn’t cut, even if you wanted to. Be a little more neo-isolationist abroad, a little more laid back at home. Turn off talk radio, and read more of the Wall Street Journal.

It was the namby-pamby, con-lite sell-out that did us in. In this view, conservatives and evangelicals didn’t turn out as in the past, because the ticket and its short coat-tails abandoned a conservative message. Take away Bush’s mega-deficits, and conservatives could have run on fiscal sanity. Why were right-wingers boasting about federal bailouts? Why print more money on top of the $10-trillion-and-rising national debt? No drilling in ANWR? Close down Gitmo? No talk about creepy Islamic terrorists? No more “personal responsibility” lectures about drugs, alcohol, illegitimacy, crime, and drop-out rates? Didn’t the party see that gay marriage lost everywhere, and with help from minorities as well?

Remedy? Run as a true conservative, energize the base, and out-debate and outthink your liberal opponents.

I supposed one could cop out, and claim that there is truth in all three explanations. But my sense is that most people — who, after all, get a job, eventually buy a house and have to maintain it, have children, and respect the traditions of their families’ past — end up by necessity more conservative than liberal. The challenge is not to water down the conservative message, but to beef it up, even while making it more persuasive to those who are skeptical....

Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 4:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Tyler Cowen: The New Deal Didn’t Always Work, Either

Source: NYT (11-23-08)

[Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.]

MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school.

The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. It’s worth sorting through this grab bag now, to evaluate whether any of these policies might be helpful.

If I were preparing a “New Deal crib sheet,” I would start with the following lessons:

MONETARY POLICY IS KEY As Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz argued in a classic book, “A Monetary History of the United States,” the single biggest cause of the Great Depression was that the Federal Reserve let the money supply fall by one-third, causing deflation. Furthermore, banks were allowed to fail, causing a credit crisis. Roosevelt’s best policies were those designed to increase the money supply, get the banking system back on its feet and restore trust in financial institutions.

A study of the 1930s by Christina D. Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (“What Ended the Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History, 1992), confirmed that expansionary monetary policy was the key to the partial recovery of the 1930s. The worst years of the New Deal were 1937 and 1938, right after the Fed increased reserve requirements for banks, thereby curbing lending and moving the economy back to dangerous deflationary pressures.

Today, expansionary monetary policy isn’t so easy to put into effect, as we are seeing a shrinkage of credit and a contraction of the “shadow banking sector,” as represented by forms of derivatives trading, hedge funds and other investments. So don’t expect the benefits of monetary expansion to kick in right now, or even six months from now.

Still, the Fed needs to stand ready to prevent a downward spiral and to stimulate the economy once it’s possible....

Posted on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Frederick Kagan: Out of Conflict, a Partnership

Source: NYT (11-23-08)

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at the United States Military Academy.]

IRAQ offers the Obama administration an extraordinary opportunity. Overall violence and American casualties have dropped remarkably since the surge began last year. Iraqi security forces have grown in size and effectiveness. American and Iraqi troops have inflicted a series of defeats on insurgents and militias. The slow but steady construction of a new post-Saddam Hussein state structure will lift the burden of securing Iraq against internal disorder from American forces in the next couple of years, if current trends continue.

The situation remains delicate, however, as Iraq moves into provincial elections in January and parliamentary elections at the end of 2009. Although Iraqi forces increasingly bear the burden of fighting (and, increasingly, peacekeeping), they will need continuing American support. The government of Iraq has recognized all these facts by forging the status of forces agreement with Washington, which was endorsed by the cabinet a week ago and sent to the Council of Representatives for approval.

The agreement encapsulates the basic reality in Iraq today: Iraq is an independent, sovereign state able to negotiate on an equal basis with the United States; Iraqis and Americans both want American troops to leave Iraq as quickly as possible and believe that a withdrawal will be feasible by 2011. Above all, the agreement highlights Iraq’s desire to become a strategic partner with the United States, an opportunity the Obama administration can seize.

Leaving aside the debate in America about what ties global Al Qaeda has to Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraqis overwhelmingly think that they have indeed been fighting an arm of Osama bin Laden’s organization. Every major political grouping in Iraq rejects Al Qaeda and supports the fight against its ideology. Iraqis increasingly pride themselves on being the first Arab state to reject the terrorists....

It is vital that we help see Iraq through during its year of elections, and avoid the temptation to “front-load” the withdrawal in 2009. It is equally vital that we develop a broader strategic relationship with Iraq using all elements of our national power in tandem with Iraq’s to pursue our common interests. President Obama has the chance to do more in Iraq than win the war. He can win the peace.

Posted on Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 7:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Philip Carl Salzman: What Anthropology has to offer to strategic studies

Source: Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH blog) (9-25-07)

[Philip Carl Salzman made these remarks to a working session on strategic studies and the disciplines, convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.]

There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second half of the 20th century.

That lesson is “culture matters.” If we want to understand people, to grasp what people are doing and why they do it, we have to examine their own perspective. As Geertz said, we have to see things “from the natives’ point of view,” whether the natives are from Brooklyn or Calgary, Palermo or Bucharest, Baghdad or Quetta.

The reason that we must understand things “from the natives’ point view” is that people act according to how they perceive the world; according to what they value, what they disdain; and according to what they hope for, and what they fear. If we want to understand how people will act, we must understand the world from their perspective.

If we want to engage with people, to influence their actions and to win them over, to bring them into a counter-insurgency effort, to engage in economic exchange, to encourage development, to block their initiatives, or to fight them, we must understand why and how they act as they do. And thus we must know how they see the world.

When I say that we must grasp the natives’ point of view, I am not saying that people are the prisoners of the norms and rules of their society, hemmed in by the “cake of custom.” Cultural anthropology has moved beyond such an overly normative view of mankind. Rather, following the lead of Max Weber, and latterly, Fredrik Barth, we understand that people are goal-oriented, making decisions, choosing one alternative over another in order to advance their own goals. In other words, everyone, everywhere, acts strategically, at least in part. An anthropological approach to “strategic studies” is to study the strategies of people and peoples in the world as they pursue their goals. We had better know the strategies of other folks before we formulate our own.

Of course, culture, ways of understanding and evaluating the world, or, once again, as Geertz says, culture as “models of” the world, and “models for” action in the world, is not the only thing in the world. People may not just pursue their own visions, but must cope with the constraints of institutional limitations. British social anthropologists have stressed the ways in which societal institutions–such as chief, markets, descent groups, exogamous marriage patterns, ancestor worship, etc.–are constrained by their interconnection with each other. One consequence of which is that some institutions or patterns of action are incompatible. For example, sharing and mutual welfare in a large kin group, on the one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other hand, tend to be in conflict.

As well, people everywhere must cope with other populations and cultures, and their goals and strategies. Peoples and cultures often intrude upon one another, interfere with one another, and consequently every group must have a “foreign policy.” Everyone is constrained one way or another by other peoples and other cultures.

And, of course, people, whatever their culture, must cope with the challenges and constraints of their physical and biological environments. Culture, to some degree, incorporates strategies for dealing with the environment, to adapting to the environment while pursuing their other goals.

Once we have some idea of others’ cultures and the bases of their strategies, we are in a strong position to consider our own. Recently I received an inquiry from an Army Major in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Currently he is a graduate student at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School , and was assigned my book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, for review. In that book, I stress the tribal foundation of Arab culture, and discuss its implications for state formation.

One question that this major raised was what I thought, in the light of my analysis, of the U.S. Army’s counter-insurgency manual’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government.

In the light of my analysis—that there were no legitimate governments in the Middle East, and that in many regions, including urban areas, only tribal or sect-based organization was regarded as legitimate by the local population—I replied that the counter-insurgency handbook’s position that counter-insurgency should always be directed toward supporting the legitimate government was a rationalization meant to justify our intervention in our own eyes according to our own values.

The emphasis on a legitimate government might not be a rational response to our practical interests in a particular region. For example, if we want to counter an insurgency, we might need to collaborate with non-governmental, even anti-governmental organizations, such as tribes. This is what happened in al-Anbar province of Iraq, where the American Army gave support to the Sunni tribes when they rebelled against the impositions of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and in turn the Sunni tribes gave the Americans support as the Americans pursued Al Qaeda. If our interests and ambitions are to block an anti-American or anti-Western initiative, we might be wise to be satisfied with that result, once achieved, and allow local folks to carry on according their vision, rather than try to impose ours.

Another way to put this is that our culture matters in how we see the world. In trying to act upon the world, we must consider whether and to what extent our interests and desires coincide, or whether our interests are more limited than our desires. This question underlies some of the disagreements between foreign policy “idealists” and “realists.”

The al-Anbar case is an interesting one for the general argument I am presenting here. No one needed a good cultural anthropologist more than Al Qaeda in Iraq. Mostly non-Iraqis, the Al Qaeda fighters and functionaries pushed around local Iraqis, not realizing or appreciating that they were members of tribes, or the significance of that fact. They did not consider how the local Iraqis would receive their impositions, or understand that the Iraqi tribesmen had the capability to mobilize militarily in support of their own autonomy and self-determination. As a result, local Iraqi tribesmen rebelled against Al Qaeda, fought them, and turned for the first time to ally with the Americans. If Al Qaeda had had a good cultural analysis of al-Anbar, they might have acted with more restraint and respect, and might have advanced their cause rather than being crushed, as they have been.

In sum, one contribution of cultural anthropology to strategic studies is to urge pre-strategic studies of peoples’ presuppositions, values, goals, and strategies—those of other peoples and those of our own—before moving to formulating strategies to act on the world. For to act effectively in the world requires that we know our own biases and that we know other people’s trajectories.

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 8:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anthony J. Badger: Can Obama lead another New Deal?

Source: CNN (11-21-08)

[Anthony J. Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College. He is the author of "FDR: The First Hundred Days," "North Carolina and the New Deal" and "The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933 --1940."]

... The situations in 1933 and 2009 do have similarities. In both cases, there is a discredited outgoing administration, a financial crisis, a lame-duck Congress which finds it difficult to act, a new President who is a talented communicator and has a popular election victory and large congressional majorities.

But 1933 was also very different from the situation that will face Obama in January. The Depression had been going on for four years. Between a quarter and a third of the industrial workforce was out of work. Farmers, who were a third of the workforce then, were desperate.

There were none of the stabilizers that exist now to protect ordinary Americans: no bank deposit insurance, no social security and the welfare and relief resources of private charities and local and state governments were exhausted.

The day FDR took office, the banks in New York and Chicago closed. The whole U.S. banking system ground to a halt.

The result was that Congress was desperate for bold leadership. Constituents let their representatives know that they expected them to support the president as if the country was at war.

When FDR proclaimed a national bank holiday and worked to reopen the banks, Republicans and Democrats supported him. The House passed the banking bill -- and they only had one copy of it -- in 43 minutes.

When Roosevelt addressed the nation on Sunday, March 12, it was a tremendous gamble. He told Americans it was safer to put their money back in the banks reopening the next day than to hide it under the mattress.

They believed him and the next day the money flowed back into the banks that had been allowed to open. There was no Plan B: If people had continued taking money out, absolute disaster would have followed.

Despite four months to prepare -- FDR was the last president to be inaugurated in March -- Roosevelt had no great template to put into effect when he took office. He seized opportunities. He used the banking proposals of holdover Republican officials at the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

He proposed the National Recovery Act only after Congress threatened to pass share-the-work legislation that would have mandated a maximum 30- hour work week.

He only brought Harry Hopkins to Washington to set up a national relief program after existing appropriations relief allocation to the states ran out. He did not favor bank deposit insurance but accepted it. He accepted large public works spending reluctantly....

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Stanley Kutler: Kissinger Unplugged

Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (11-20-08)

[Stanley Kutler liberated the Nixon (and Kissinger) tapes in 1996. His court settlement insured that everyone would have the pleasure of hearing their leaders at work.]

Thomas Friedman, the one-time eloquent cheerleader for the Iraq War, a liberal voice who deemed it realistic to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding the loss of a useful buffer against Iran to the rest of the Western world. Oh, those heady days of Iraqis greeting us with flowers and their reconstruction costs paid by oil revenues! And that wonderful irony of the world turning against us while we provided it with legions of mercenaries, priming the oil pumps.

In a recent column (November 19, 2008), Friedman remarked, "The two most impactful [sic] secretaries of state in the last 50 years were James Baker and Henry Kissinger. Both were empowered by their presidents, and both could candidly talk back to their presidents."

Surely Friedman is joking about Henry Kissinger - "talk back"? That, of course, is the Kissinger Friedman knows from Kissinger's endless spin performances for journalists who doted on him and conveyed his every word, every thought. The shameless, uncritical reporting of the man and his deeds is one of the travesties of recent journalism, and Friedman is one of its particularly crafty practitioners.

Friedman's depiction of someone who "could candidly talk back" to President Nixon is not the Kissinger we know from his taped conversations with his President. Undoubtedly there are exceptions, but the tapes overwhelmingly reflect Kissinger, in a familiar, fawning, and obsequious manner. The hundreds of hours released now of the taped conversations provide ample grist for future historians to correct Kissinger's hardly-deserved standing as some Prince of American Diplomacy. Do we care that he thinks Hillary Clinton would be an excellent Secretary of State? Is he sucking up for some advisory role?

Sample Robert Dallek's recent book, NIXON AND KISSINGER that extensively mined mining the taped conversations, with countless examples of Kissinger in his best sycophantic mode. Better yet in these Internet days, take a look at Kenneth Hughes's web site, Fatal Politics, for some real-time recordings of Nixon and Kissinger's conversations In particular, see his recent Episode Five in which the two unindicted co-conspirators scheme for a "decent interval" between American withdrawal from Vietnam and the clearly-recognized collapse of their South Vietnamese allies. "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway," Nixon said in 1972. His Master's Voice readily agreed: We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two," Kissinger told Nixon. "After a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater."

Here is an example (from hundreds) offering the real flavor of the Nixon-Kissinger relationship. It is from a March 10 conversation between the two:

Nixon: The idea that we have to keep a residual force in South Vietnam--I'm not really for it. I don't think the South Vietnamese are--
Kissinger: Well, it'd be desirable, but I--I don't--
Nixon: Face it: I don't think the American people are going to support it and it isn't like Korea somewhere--
Kissinger: Above all, Mr. President, your re-election is--
Nixon: Yeah.
Kissinger: --really important.

Kissinger talk back? No, Nixon had a very useful prop.

Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 8:53 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Tom Engelhardt: The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq

Source: TomDispatch.com (11-20-08)

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast of Engelhardt discussing how and why he decided to write this essay on military resistance to withdrawal from Iraq, click here.]

It's the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn't matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it's an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen -- the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives -- wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, "We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions… Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely." Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least "two to three years."

For those who needed further clarification, the Wall Street Journal's Yochi J. Dreazen spelled it out: "In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large U.S. bases there and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if the fighting resumed as American forces left the country."

As for the Obama plan, if the military top brass have anything to say about it, sayonara. It's "physically impossible," says "a top officer involved in briefing the President-elect on U.S. operations in Iraq," according to Time Magazine. The Washington Post reports that, should Obama continue to push for his two brigades a month draw-down, a civilian-military "conflict is inevitable," and might, as the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss suggests, even lead to an Obama "showdown" with the military high command in his first weeks in office.

In a nutshell, the Pentagon's argument couldn't be simpler or more red-bloodedly American: We have too much stuff to leave Iraq any time soon. In war, as in peace, we're trapped by our own profligacy. We are the Neiman Marcus and the Wal-Mart of combat. Where we go, our "stuff" goes with us -- in such prodigious quantities that removing it is going to prove more daunting than invading in the first place. After all, it took less than a year to put in place the 130,000-plus invasion force, and all its equipment and support outfits from bases all around the world, as well as the air power and naval power to match.

Some have estimated, however, that simply getting each of the 14 combat brigades still stationed in Iraq on January 20, 2009, out with all their equipment might take up to 75 days per brigade. (If you do the math, that's 36 months, and even that wouldn't suffice if you wanted to remove everything else we now have in that California-sized country.)

Getting out? Don't dream of it.

Going to War with the Society You Have

Back in December 2004, when a soldier at a base in Kuwait asked about the lack of armor on his unit's Humvees, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have…"

Rumsfeld was then still focused on his much-ballyhooed "transformation" in warfare. He was intent on creating a Military Lite -- the most pared down, totally agile, completely networked, highest of all high-tech forces that was going to make the U.S. the dominant power on the planet for eons. As it turned out, that force was a mirage. In reality, the U.S. military in Iraq proved to be a Military Heavy. In retrospect, Rumsfeld might have more accurately responded: You have to go to war with the society you have.

In fact, the Bush administration did just that -- with a passion. After the attacks of 9/11, the President famously pleaded with the American public to return to normal life by shopping, flying, and visiting Disney World. ("Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.") The administration and the Pentagon led the way. As the Pentagon's budget soared, its civilians and the high command went on an imperial spending spree the likes of which may never have been seen on this planet.

For them, Iraq has been war as cornucopia, war as a consumer's paradise. Arguably, on a per-soldier basis, no military has ever occupied a country with a bigger baggage train. On taking Iraq, they promptly began constructing a series of gigantic military bases, American ziggurats meant to outlast them. These were full-scale "American towns," well guarded, 15-20 miles around, with multiple PXes, fitness clubs, brand fast-food outlets, traffic lights, the works. (This, in a country where, for years after the invasion, nothing worked.)

To the tune of multi-billions of dollars, they continued to build these bases up, and then, in Baghdad, put the icing on the Iraqi cake by constructing an almost three-quarter-billion dollar embassy of embassies, a veritable citadel in the heart of the capital's American-controlled Green Zone, meant for 1,000 "diplomats" with its own pool, tennis courts, recreation center, post exchange/community center, commissary, retail and shopping areas, and restaurants -- again, the works.

In other words, abroad, we weren't the Spartans, we were the Athenians on steroids. And then, of course, there was the "equipment" that Mullen referred to, the most expensive and extensive collection you could find. As the Washington Times's Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote back in October 2007: "Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees." And don't forget "the 300,000 'heavy' items that would have to be shipped back, such as ice-cream machines that churn out different flavors upon request at a dozen bases…"

As Dr. Seuss might have put it: and that is not all, oh no, that is not all. In July 2007, for instance, the Associated Press's Charles Hanley described U.S. bases holding "more than the thousands of tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery pieces and Humvees assigned to combat units. They're also home to airfields laden with high-tech gear, complexes of offices filled with computers, furniture and air conditioners, systems of generators and water plants, PXs full of merchandise, gyms packed with equipment, big prefab latrines and ranks of small portable toilets, even Burger Kings and Subway sandwich shops."

And it doesn't stop there. In mid-2007, when the issue of our "stuff" first became part of the withdrawal news, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out: "You're talking about not just U.S. soldiers, but millions of tons of contractor equipment that belongs to the United States government, and a variety of other things… This is a massive logistical undertaking whenever it takes place." So, one might ask, what about those many tens of thousands of private contractors in Iraq and all their materiel? Presumably, some of them, too, would have to withdraw, mainly through the bottleneck of Kuwait and its overburdened ports. This would, as the military now portrays it, be an American Dunkirk stretching on for years.

The Argument of Last Resort

Now, back in the days when we had less experience fighting losing wars, Americans in retreat simply shoved those extra helicopters off the decks of aircraft carriers in chaos, burned free-floating cash in tin drums, and left tons of expensive equipment and massive bases behind for the enemy to turn into future industrial parks. At the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975, while everything in sight was being burned or destroyed including precious advanced electronic equipment, money actually rained down from the Embassy incinerator on the roof upon amazed Vietnamese allies huddled below, waiting for a promised airlift to safety that, for most, never came.

Withdrawal then was unsightly, unseemly, and environmentally unsound. But, as we know, the lessons of Vietnam were subsequently learned.

Today, the Pentagon and the military top command plan to be far more responsible consumers and far better environmentalists, however long it takes, and the Department of Agriculture's "stringent requirements" for the "power-washing" -- this, in the desert, of course -- of every object to be returned to the U.S. will help ensure that this is so. "Ever since U.S. authorities found plague-infected rats in cargo returning from the Vietnam War," the AP's Hanley has written, "the decontamination process has been demanding: water blasting of equipment, treatment with insecticide and rodenticide, inspections, certifications."

And don't forget the shrink-wrapping of those helicopters -- who knows how many -- for that long, salt-free sea voyage home.

Think of this as a version of the Pottery Barn Rule that Secretary of State Colin Powell supposedly cited in warning President Bush on the dangers of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it." For the departure from Iraq, this might be rewritten as: You bring it, you own it.

You might say that, in the end, Bush's secret plan for never withdrawing from Iraq was but an extension of his shop-till-you-drop response to 9/11. The idea was to put so much stuff in the country that we'd have to stay.

And now, as the mission threatens to wind down, the top brass are evidently claiming that an Obama timeline for withdrawal would violate our property rights and squander a vast array of expensive equipment. You'll hear no apologies from the military for traveling heavy, despite the fact that they are now arguing against a reasonable withdrawal timetable based on the need to enact a kind of 12-step program for armed consumer sobriety.

Ever since the President's surge strategy was launched in January 2007, this argument has been a background hum in the withdrawal debate. Now, it's evidently about to come front and center.

A new president will be taking office. His withdrawal plan -- he spoke of it more accurately on CBS's 60 Minutes as "a plan that draws down our troops" -- is a modest one. After those American "combat brigades" are out, it's still possible, as one of his key security advisers, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, told National Public Radio last summer, that as many as 55,000 U.S. troops might remain in an advisory capacity or as residual forces. And yet, with the Iraqis urging us on, so many of the arguments against withdrawal have fallen away, which is why, when Barack Obama sits down in the Oval Office with his top commanders, he's going to hear about all that "stuff." For those who want to drag their feet on leaving Iraq, this is the argument of last resort.

As Donald Rumsfeld so classically said, in reference to the looting of Baghdad in April 2003 after American troops entered the city, "stuff happens." How true that turns out to be. When it comes to withdrawal, the most militarily profligate administration in memory has seemingly ensured that the highest military priority in 2009 will be frugality -- that is, saving all American "stuff" in Iraq.

Irony hardly covers this one. The Bush administration may have succeeded in little else, but it did embed the U.S. so deeply in that country that leaving can now be portrayed as the profligate thing to do.

By the way, in case anyone thinks that the soon-to-be-Bush-less Pentagon has drawn the obvious lessons from its experience in Iraq, think again. It still seems eager to visit Disney World.

According to Wired Magazine's reliable Danger Room blog, military officials are now suggesting to the Obama transition team that the next Pentagon budget should come in at $581 billion, a staggering $67 billion more than the previous one (and that's without almost all the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars being included).

But like Rumsfeld's Military Lite, the Pentagon's Military Heavy plans are likely to prove a mirage in the economic future that awaits us. Perhaps the U.S. should indeed salvage every bit of its equipment in Iraq. After all, one thing seems certain: Washington may continue in some fashion to garrison an economically desperate world, but it will never again have the money to occupy a country in the style of Iraq -- largely because the Bush administration managed to squander the American imperial legacy in eight short years.

Someday, Iraq and all those massive bases, all that high-tech equipment, all those ice-cream machines and portajohns, will seem like part of an American dream life. Money may never again rain from the sky.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Brian Britt: Drinking the Kool-Aid

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (11-20-08)

[Brian Britt is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech, and currently a fellow at the Zentrum fur Literatur-und Kulturforschung Berlin. Emi Scott provided research assistance for this piece.]

Thirty years have passed since the murder-suicide of over nine hundred members of Jim Jones's People's Temple, on November 18, 1978. A sign hanging in the pavilion of Jonestown at the time read, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today there is still no consensus on how to understand or respond to Jonestown. Academics have produced dozens of theories in hundreds of publications (some point to Jones's charisma, others to his vulnerable followers, social control techniques, or utopian zeal), but these "cult studies" and biographies fail to explain how familiar people and ideas could yield such destruction. Meanwhile, Jonestown haunts American popular speech in a phrase that makes parody of disaster: "drinking the Kool-Aid."

While public memorials have been slow to appear and modest in scale, the widespread use of the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" in American speech and writing marks a place for Jonestown in collective memory. A database search of recent news publications and broadcasts, along with such sites as the online Urban Dictionary, confirm the phrase's popularity. Used most often to describe irrational or blind support for a trend or leader, the term appears most frequently in political contexts. In August, for example, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson said current Governor Jim Doyle was "drinking some Kool-Aid" when he predicted that Barack Obama would carry Wisconsin in the presidential election. As if to silence the voice of Jones, whose deadly preaching at the "white nights" can still be heard on recordings, "drinking the Kool-Aid" aims to reduce Jonestown to a soundbite and religious rhetoric to mere words.

According to Rebecca Moore, the trivializing phrase is symptomatic of cultural dissociation and amnesia. The prevalence of the term since 2001, when many commentators compared Osama bin Laden to Jim Jones, may point to a growing awareness of and discomfort with religious violence. According to David Chidester, this avoidance is itself religious in nature: "rituals of exclusion" were mobilized from the outset to isolate Jonestown from mainstream consciousness. Likewise, James W. Chesebro and David T. McMahan argue that coverage of Jonestown and other murder-suicides in The New York Times reduces these events to grotesque and burlesque formulas, keeping them safely distant from ordinary life.

For scholars of religion, Jonestown grimly demonstrates the relevance and complexity of their field. In 1982 Jonathan Z. Smith noted that religious studies had yet to grapple with the ecstatic experiences and utopian vision of what Jones called "revolutionary suicide." Smith called for careful comparative interpretations of Jonestown that acknowledge the humanity of Jones and his followers. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas went further, finding fault with the anti-religious prejudice of most responses: "We assume that being modern involves at least agreement that no one ought to take religion too seriously, especially if it is going to ask any real sacrifices from us…[W]e should take seriously what happened there as an act of revolutionary suicide that should initially be morally honored and respected."

Smith's and Hauerwas's challenges remain: Jonestown still makes no sense without rigorous analysis of "religion." Recent studies of Jonestown's aftermath and reception represent first steps toward a reckoning with the issue, yet considerable resistance remains. Homegrown religious violence, especially mixed as it was in the People's Temple with the politics of race and social change, creates deep discomfort. Despite all that has been written and learned since Septemer 11, 2001, the avoidance and trivialization of Jonestown indicate how far we have to go. The modern American movement called Pentacostalism, which was so violently appropriated by the People's Temple, now claims about a quarter of the world's Christians, and it is growing very quickly in Africa and Latin America. An understanding of this diverse and vibrant religious movement must attend to all its cultural and historical manifestations, including Jonestown.

Whether use of the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" opens a window on the American psyche, it certainly reflects a failure to think carefully about the categories of religion and secularity, memory and forgetting. Defenders and critics of religion alike tend to regard religion as a benevolent but limited feature of private life. The defensiveness of people of faith thus mirrors the dismissiveness of skeptics. The popularity of "drinking the Kool-Aid" asks for clearer thinking about the power of religion and the words spoken and written in its name. Such clarity is the first step toward acknowledging the humanity and familiarity of Jones and his followers.

Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 7:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Juan Cole: Obama is the anti-Malcolm X

Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-20-08)

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

Ayman al-Zawahiri attacked Barack Obama in a video released on the internet on Tuesday. Fox News reprinted the whole transcript here. I'm a little bit confused by this step, since I thought the US networks had agreed under pressure from Bush only to carry excerpts from al-Qaeda, and the US elite has been deeply critical, to say the least, of Aljazeera for carrying 2-minute clips. (Of course, all this brouhaha is hypocritical, since Rupert Murdoch's satellite service in Asia carries both Aljazeera and Aljazeera English; Murdoch owns Fox News). Fox seems to be the only network carrying the full English text (which was provided by al-Sahab, the al-Qaeda video production company (see the videos below).

The headline in most comments on the video was that al-Zawahiri used a racist slur against Obama, calling him a "house Negro" and referring to the distinction Malcolm X made between pro-white slaves who lived next to the mansion, and the "field Negros" who toiled beneath the whip and hated their master.

In the video, al-Zawahiri does pointedly refer to Malcolm X's distinction. But he speaks in Arabic of "`abid al-bayt," "the house slave," and does not use the word "Negro" (which the al-Sahab translators are rendering 'zinji.') The connotations and implications are much the same, but it is not exact to say that al-Zawahiri used the phrase "house Negro" himself.

The Egyptian physician and mass murderer made a key error in his analysis, however, since if we were to take Malcolm X's parable seriously, Barack Obama would have to be assigned the role of the master.

In the past 50 years, the United States has, by dint of enormous daily ethical struggle, altered the dynamics of race. It is no longer the case that African-Americans only have a choice of serving under a white elite or rebelling against it. They can be senator or president in their own right. There is still a great deal of economic and educational inequality, and one election will not suddenly change that, but America's Apartheid days are gone. Al-Zawahiri, formed intellectually in the late 1960s, is stuck in a paradigm, of a worldwide revolution of people of color against the white global ruling class, which is nonsensical when Japan and China have the second and fourth largest economies, respectively, and when the United States has an African-American president.

Ironically 89 percent of the true heirs of Malcolm X, the contemporary American Muslim community, voted for Obama; and they had a 95 percent turnout, the highest in their history.

Al-Zawahiri celebrates what he sees as the US admission of defeat in Iraq (insofar as it has committed to leave by 2011). That al-Zawahiri can gloat about the withdrawal in this way underlines how foolish Bush and his cronies were to attempt to militarily occupy, over a period of several years, a major Arab Muslim country with a strong history of popular resistance to imperialism. Bush by his arrogance and ignorance granted this talking point to al-Qaeda.

Still, it has to be said that radical Sunni fundamentalism was never a majority tendency among Iraqi Sunnis, and appears to be spiralling down into insignificance. The real victor in Iraq is not al-Qaeda and its ideological soul mates, but rather the pro-Iranian Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Zawahiri viciously attacked Iran in his last video, and spoke darkly of an Iranian alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So if Bush was defeated in Iraq, so was al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda (insofar as their ideological soul mates, the Sunni radical fundamentalists there, have been largely rolled back).

Al-Zawahiri complains about Barack Obama's warm feelings for Israel and his willingness to pray alongside Jews, characterizing that gesture as a declaration of enmity toward Muslims. But Egypt and Jordan are majority-Muslim and they have peace treaties with Israel; and 65 percent of American Muslims believe that a peace settlement can be reached with Israel that is also fair to the Palestinians. So the issue cannot be one of simply enmity toward Islam (are Egyptians and Jordanians self-hating Muslims?)

The terrorist mastermind is even more scathing toward Obama's hopes of talking to Iran and of sending more troops to fight in Afghanistan. "That has failure written all over it," al-Zawahiri pronounced.

It is absolutely clear toward the end of the video that al-Zawahiri is petrified of Obama's popularity and is very afraid that he will be a game-changer in relations between the Muslim world and the United States. Hence his flailing around talking about house slaves, as though Obama were not (as of Jan. 20) himself the most powerful man in the world, catapulted into his position by nearly half of American whites (who voted for him in higher proportions than they did for Clinton and Kerry).

Al-Zawahiri has seen a lot of Muslim politics, and if he is this afraid of Obama, it is a sign that the new president has enormous potential to deploy soft power against al-Qaeda, and al-Zawahiri is running scared, trying to pretend it is still the 1960s, when it just isn't.

Hassan al-Subaihi argues that before the election, Arabs overwhelmingly supported Obama, but that his appointment of Israeli-American Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff has divided them into a number of camps, each with a different view of the new president. Ironically, he finds that Palestinian intellectuals are among the most realistic and yet positive about Obama. The least hopeful are the radical fundamentalists (e.g. Hamas) and the poorly educated.

Obama has the opportunity to be the most popular US president in the Middle East since Eisenhower. If he is wise, he will defeat al-Zawahiri not just by military means but by stealing away al-Zawahiri's own intended constituency. Obama is about building communities up; al-Zawahiri is about destroying them. If Obama can convince the Arab publics of this basic fact, he will win.

The Zawahiri video is subtitled in English:

The Zawahiri video, Part I:



And, here is Part II:

Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 6:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James Oakes: What’s So Special About a Team of Rivals?

Source: NYT (11-19-08)

[James Oakes, a professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics.”]

INSPIRED by the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, President-elect Barack Obama is considering appointing a “team of rivals” to his cabinet — if rumors about the nomination of Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state are true. But there’s more mythology than history in the idea that Lincoln showed exceptional political skill in offering cabinet positions to the men he had beaten in the race for the 1860 Republican nomination.

For one thing, there was nothing new in what Lincoln did. By tradition, presidents-elect reserved a cabinet position, often secretary of state, for the leading rival in their party. John Quincy Adams inaugurated the practice by appointing one of his presidential rivals, Henry Clay, to that post. It was a controversial move in 1824; enemies of Adams denounced the appointment as a corrupt bargain.

By the 1850s, the practice had become a tradition. In that decade, Presidents Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan installed in their cabinets men who had been major rivals for their party’s nomination. Daniel Webster, who lost the Whig Party nod in 1848, became Fillmore’s secretary of state. William Marcy, after failing to win the 1852 Democratic nomination, took the same position in Pierce’s cabinet. Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee in 1848 and a man whose presidential dreams never diminished, was appointed Buchanan’s secretary of state in 1857. These were not notably successful administrations. Most historians agree that Pierce and Buchanan rank among the worst presidents in American history. There was nothing particularly unusual, or even impressive, when Lincoln followed this well-established practice.

Nor is it quite correct to say that Lincoln installed his “enemies” in the cabinet. Rivals for his own party’s nomination are not the same thing as political “enemies.” It would have been inconceivable, for example, for Lincoln to offer a cabinet appointment to his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas....

There is little doubt that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. But not much of what made him great can be discerned in his appointment of a contentious, envious and often dysfunctional collection of prima donnas to his cabinet.

Related Links

  • Matthew Pinsker: Lincoln and the myth of 'Team of Rivals'

    • Posted on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 3:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: In paperless world, seniors may be left behind

    Source: USA Today (11-19-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is author of Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century.]

    My grandmother is 101 years old. She has slowed down lately, as you might guess, but she still reads the newspaper every morning.

    And she has never been on the World Wide Web.

    I thought of Grandma recently when I learned that one of America's most venerable newspapers — The Christian Science Monitor — had decided to abandon its print edition. Starting in April, the paper will appear online only. Other smaller papers around the country have done likewise.

    For its own part, the Monitor plans to introduce a new in-print weekend magazine. But the rest of the paper will appear only online, and many observers expect other newspapers to follow.

    That's very bad news for elderly readers such as Grandma, who use the Internet much less than the rest of us. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, only 28% of Americans 70 and older go online. And the rest of us are forgetting about them. Consider the surprise and mockery that greeted John McCain earlier this year when the 72-year-old GOP presidential candidate admitted that he didn't surf the Internet. A senior citizen who doesn't go online? That's news?

    One day, it will be. After all, 72% of 51- to 59-year-olds and 54% of 60- to 69-year-olds already use the Net. As these Americans age, more and more of them will go online. In the future, then, even the very elderly will be heavily wired.

    But we're not there yet. Nobody knows how frequently our oldest citizens go online, but it's probably not often. In a 2007 survey, for example, just 6% of American centenarians said they have been on the Web. For people like my grandmother, then, the demise of print newspapers would mean the end of newspapers, period.

    And for the rest of us, it might mean something else: the decline of sustained concentration, deliberation and analysis. When we read on the Web, recent studies suggest, we're much more likely to skim a piece — or to stop reading it altogether — than when we encounter it in print formats.

    If you're reading this essay online, you can click on any number of nearby links and windows right now. Maybe you already have. But if you're reading it on paper, there's a better chance that you'll stay focused on the piece until you have finished it.

    You're also more likely to form the mental connections that make for real learning. The Internet is an astonishing source of information, allowing us to access vast pools of data instantaneously. Even so, it will never provide the tools to interpret this material: to put it in context, to compare it with what came before, and so on.

    That's precisely the type of knowledge that senior citizens can impart, of course, because they've seen the broadest swath of history.

    So I have a modest proposal: As newspapers move to online-only formats, they should also spearhead a nationwide volunteer effort to supply readers for senior citizens. To be sure, thousands of Americans already read the paper to elderly neighbors and family members. But this service will become ever more critical in the coming years, as more and more news outlets shrink or cancel their print editions.

    The next time you visit an elderly friend or relative, bring your laptop. You'll expose her to news events and trends. In exchange, if you pause to listen, she'll give you the deep wisdom that too often eludes our digitized world.

    That's what Grandma does for me.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 8:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Niall Ferguson: Wall Street Lays Another Egg

    Source: Vanity Fair (12-1-08)

    This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.

    Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. And all the time new financial life-forms were evolving. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including fancy new “collateralized debt obligations” (C.D.O.’s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of “derivatives”—contracts such as options and swaps—grew even faster, so that by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. In the space of a few years their populations exploded. On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships.

    New institutions also proliferated. In 1990 there were just 610 hedge funds, with $38.9 billion under management. At the end of 2006 there were 9,462, with $1.5 trillion under management. Private-equity partnerships also went forth and multiplied. Banks, meanwhile, set up a host of “conduits” and “structured investment vehicles” (sivs—surely the most apt acronym in financial history) to keep potentially risky assets off their balance sheets. It was as if an entire shadow banking system had come into being.

    Then, beginning in the summer of 2007, Planet Finance began to self-destruct in what the International Monetary Fund soon acknowledged to be “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” Did the crisis of 2007–8 happen because American companies had gotten worse at designing new products? Had the pace of technological innovation or productivity growth suddenly slackened? No. The proximate cause of the economic uncertainty of 2008 was financial: to be precise, a crunch in the credit markets triggered by mounting defaults on a hitherto obscure species of housing loan known euphemistically as “subprime mortgages.”

    Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest-rate cuts and offers of funds through special “term auction facilities.” Yet the market rates at which banks could borrow money, whether by issuing commercial paper, selling bonds, or borrowing from one another, failed to follow the lead of the official federal-funds rate. The banks had to turn not only to Western central banks for short-term assistance to rebuild their reserves but also to Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds for equity injections. When these sources proved insufficient, investors—and speculative short-sellers—began to lose faith....

    Since these events coincided with the final phase of a U.S. presidential-election campaign, it was not surprising that some rather simplistic lessons were soon being touted by candidates and commentators. The crisis, some said, was the result of excessive deregulation of financial markets. Others sought to lay the blame on unscrupulous speculators: short-sellers, who borrowed the stocks of vulnerable banks and sold them in the expectation of further price declines. Still other suspects in the frame were negligent regulators and corrupt congressmen.

    This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part in this latest sorry example of what the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay described in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

    As long as there have been banks, bond markets, and stock markets, there have been financial crises. Banks went bust in the days of the Medici. There were bond-market panics in the Venice of Shylock’s day. And the world’s first stock-market crash happened in 1720, when the Mississippi Company—the Enron of its day—blew up. According to economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the financial history of the past 800 years is a litany of debt defaults, banking crises, currency crises, and inflationary spikes. Moreover, financial crises seldom happen without inflicting pain on the wider economy. Another recent paper, co-authored by Rogoff’s Harvard colleague Robert Barro, has identified 148 crises since 1870 in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in gross domestic product (G.D.P.) of at least 10 percent, implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6 percent per year....

    Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Matthew Pinsker: Lincoln and the myth of 'Team of Rivals'

    Source: LAT (11-18-08)

    [Matthew Pinsker, author of "Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers' Home," teaches Civil War history at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.]

    People love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals." More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his "political genius" through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a harder look, especially now that it seems to be offering a template for the new administration.

    "Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet," is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin's thesis, adding, "Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis."

    That's true enough, but the problem is, it didn't work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

    Lincoln's decision to embrace former rivals, for instance, inevitably meant ignoring old friends -- a development they took badly. "We made Abe and, by God, we can unmake him," complained Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Joseph Medill in 1861. Especially during 1861 and 1862, the first two years of Lincoln's initially troubled administration, friends growled over his ingratitude as former rivals continued to play out their old political feuds.

    In fairness, Goodwin describes several of these more difficult moments, such as when Secretary of State William Seward tried to seize political command from Lincoln during the Ft. Sumter crisis. But she passes over their consequences too easily.

    Though Seward, the former New York senator who had been the Republican front-runner, eventually proved helpful to the president, the impact of repeated disloyalty and unnecessary backroom drama from him and several other Cabinet officers was a significant factor in the early failures of the Union war effort.

    By December 1862, there was a full-blown Cabinet crisis.

    "We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln confided to a close friend after being deluged with congressional criticism and confronted by resignations from both Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Goodwin suggests that Lincoln's quiet confidence and impressive emotional intelligence enabled him to survive and ultimately forge an effective team out of his former rivals, but that's more wishful thinking than serious analysis.

    Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.

    Simon Cameron was the disgraced rival, Lincoln's failed first secretary of War. Goodwin essentially erased him from her group biography, not mentioning him in the book's first 200 pages, even though he placed third, after Seward and Lincoln, on the first Republican presidential ballot. Cameron proved so corrupt and inept that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives censured him after he was removed from office in 1862.

    Chase was the defiant rival. As Goodwin acknowledges, the Treasury chief never reconciled himself to Lincoln's victory, continuously angling to replace him. Lincoln put up with this aggravation until he secured renomination and then dumped his brilliant but arrogant subordinate because, in his words, their "mutual embarrassment" was no longer sustainable.

    Atty. Gen. Edward Bates was the disgusted rival. The elder statesman -- 67 when he was appointed -- never felt at home in the Lincoln Cabinet and played only a marginal role in shaping policy. He resigned late in the first term. His diary reflects deep discontent with what he considered the relentless political maneuvering of his Cabinet peers and even the president.

    "Alas!" Bates wrote in August 1864, "that I should live to see such abject fear -- such small stolid indifference to duty -- such open contempt of Constitution and law -- and such profound ignorance of policy and prudence!"

    Only Seward endured throughout the Civil War. He and Lincoln did become friends, and he provided some valuable political advice, but the significance of his contributions as Lincoln's secretary of State have been challenged by many historians, and his repeated fights with other party leaders were always distracting.

    John Hay, one of Lincoln's closest aides, noted in his diary that by the summer of 1863, the president had essentially learned to rule his Cabinet with "tyrannous authority," observing that the "most important things he decides & there is no cavil."

    Over the years, it has become easy to forget that hard edge and the once bad times that nearly destroyed a president. Lincoln's Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous.

    Lincoln was a political genius, but his model for Cabinet-building should stand more as a cautionary tale than as a leadership manual.

    Related Links

  • Blogger: Did Team of Rivals Actually Work For Lincoln?
  • James Oakes: What’s So Special About a Team of Rivals?

    • Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 10:27 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Juan Cole: Should Obama chase Osama?

    Source: Salon (11-18-08)

    In Sunday's interview with "60 Minutes," President-elect Barack Obama reaffirmed that "it is a top priority for us to stamp out al-Qaida once and for all," adding, "and I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out al-Qaida." Obama argued that the Saudi terrorist "is not just a symbol" but is rather "the operational leader" of the organization, which he said is still planning attacks against U.S. targets.

    Obama's quiet seriousness of purpose is a welcome contrast with George W. Bush's swaggering pronouncements about bin Laden being "wanted dead or alive," or his darkly comic standard answer to the question of why bin Laden has not yet been caught. "He's hiding," Bush likes to say.

    And for those who believe Bush, obsessed with Iraq, has either not tried very hard or has secretly avoided capturing bin Laden, Obama's words are probably reassuring. Now American attention will return to the real author of 9/11, and a more determined effort might yield fruit. But the question is whether the new president should really focus his attention on bin Laden, and spend his political capital in a renewed attempt to bring him to justice. There are many reasons why a stepped-up and publicized pursuit of bin Laden may prove costly to Barack Obama.

    The first is the danger of failing, just like his predecessor. After the bravado of the early post-9/11 period, and vows to catch his quarry, Bush came up empty. An enemy who struck at the beginning of his first term is still at loose in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands at the end of his second.

    Some in the region believe that Bush never caught his nemesis on purpose. A secular-minded newspaper in Afghanistan said in October that French troops in that country as part of the NATO contingent had for some time alleged that they were on the verge of capturing bin Laden when their American counterparts stopped them from doing so. The paper referred to a French documentary that featured interviews with the troops and that maintained that the Bush administration needed bin Laden to be at large in order to justify its military expansion into the region.

    This theory is a more sinister variant of the view that capturing Osama was simply not very high on Bush's list of priorities, and that he put all his resources instead into destroying Saddam Hussein. Already in spring of 2002, as his administration geared up for what was supposed to be a swift and stunning victory in Iraq, Bush was trying to deflect attention from his failure to capture the author of 9/11. Bush downplayed bin Laden's importance, and said he didn't seem to be at the center of any command structure. He decried the supposed fallacy of focusing on "one person" and admitted, "I truly am not that concerned about him."

    Should the next president now be playing up bin Laden's importance? Does bin Laden merit such attention? In a speech at the Atlantic Council last week, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, largely concurred with the points Obama has been making about the continued centrality of al-Qaida in its Pakistani haunts to U.S. security concerns. Contrary to Republican politicians who still speak of Iraq as the central front in the "war on terror," Hayden forthrightly announced, "Al-Qaida in Iraq is on the verge of strategic defeat."...

    Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: Can McCain be Obama's friend in Congress?

    Source: CNN (11-16-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    ... With his reputation severely harmed as a result of the campaign -- some Republicans furious at [John McCain] for having lost the White House with a poor campaign and some Democrats furious with the negative tone that his campaign embraced in September and October -- he will have an interest in building a positive legacy.

    McCain's best bet would be to form a bipartisan alliance with Obama on as many issues as possible -- perhaps with an economic stimulus bill, immigration reform, exiting Iraq and new regulations on Wall Street....

    In fact, there is a long tradition of this kind of cooperation in congressional history. We have seen how this can work on foreign policy.

    Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who coined the phrase "politics stops at the water's edge," worked closely with President Harry Truman in 1947 and 1948 to find support in the Republican Congress for the creation of the modern national security state.

    In 1953 and 1954, Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas worked with President Dwight Eisenhower on a series of foreign policy issues. The White House was under attack from conservative Republicans led by John Bricker, who sought to curtail executive power on foreign affairs.

    Bricker proposed an amendment to limit the ability of the president to enter into international agreements without Senate consent. Many southern Democrats supported the amendment fearing that the U.N. Charter opened the opportunity for the president to expand civil rights.

    Eisenhower thought the amendment would be extremely dangerous and handcuff the president when dealing with foreign policy. He turned to Lyndon Johnson, who brought along Senate Democrats to stifle the measure. Johnson hoped to make Senate Republicans seem like the obstructionists in Washington and to boost his own reputation as a leader.

    Johnson's adviser, George Reedy, explained that the contrast of Republican intra-party warfare and "a dignified but pointed record on all issues" from the Democratic Party would be "potent campaign ammunition." The strategy worked. Johnson was selected as majority leader in 1954.

    These alliances have also furthered the social agenda. As president in 1964, Johnson turned to Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen to help him push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate. In the 1960s, Southern Democrats, who chaired the major committees and were masters at using the Senate filibuster to block bills they opposed, were the chief opponents of civil rights.

    So when Johnson pushed for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 he needed Republican support to break a filibuster. He found a partner with Dirksen, one of several Republicans who saw how the GOP could benefit from embracing civil rights as Democrats were divided.

    "We dare not temporize with the issue which is before us," Dirken said in a speech before the Senate, "it is essentially moral in character. It must be resolved. It will not go away. Its time has come."

    Dirksen's role in the passage of civil rights defined his role in the history books....

    Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 12:40 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Norman Markowitz: Obama's Mandate for Change

    Source: PoliticalAffairs.net (11-13-08)

    [Norman Markowitz, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1970. "My work is in twentieth century U.S. political history. I write and teach from a Marxist perspective." ]

    In the aftermath of a truly historic election, the right-wing and its long-time centrist political allies have been trying to regroup and get a handle on just exactly what happened. Right-wing radio talk show hosts, after calling Obama every conceivable name and claiming that his victory would mean an end to civilization, are now contending that he “has no mandate to govern.”

    Right-wing pundits now emphasize that President-elect Obama's congressional majority equals Bill Clinton’s in 1992, that his margin of victory fell below George H.W. Bush in 1988, and anything else they can think of to minimize what has transpired. Some are even trying to talk themselves into believing that Obama will be a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter, and will set the stage for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge.

    It is not just the usual suspects of the right-wing media who are minimizing Obama’s triumph, however. The editors of Newsweek, for example, who traditionally claim to be “above” partisan politics, have proclaimed the US to be “still” a center-right country. Their logic is that Obama must “move to the center” (by which they can only mean the right) to govern. They insist that “radical” proposals like major social investments in jobs and infrastructure, revival of progressive taxation, enactment of anything beyond the most limited labor and social legislation, will fail because it has little real support among the people. The unspoken fear is that Obama will move to the left, and in the process move the center of politics to the left.

    All of these arguments fly in the face of the evidence. Barack Obama received more votes in absolute numbers than any presidential candidate in history. While the rate of voter turnout fell far below the numbers one finds in the rest of the developed world, it was the largest vote in decades. Barack Obama’s 8 million plus popular vote margin was the biggest for any Democratic presidential candidate since Johnson’s 1964 landslide. Only Johnson in 1964 and Franklin Roosevelt in his four victories did better than Obama in percentage terms among Democratic presidential candidates since the Civil War.

    Put in historical perspective, Obama distinguished himself significantly from other recent Democratic presidential winners. Unlike Carter who enjoyed large polling margins throughout much of the campaign in 1976, Obama did not nearly lose this election. Nor did he win in a three way race as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and 1996, during both of which Clinton failed to win a clear majority. Obama fared far better than John F. Kennedy's razor-thin majority in 1960 and Harry Truman's narrow upset victory over the Republican candidate in 1948.

    Obama won a solid victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College and will have a solid majority in Congress.

    Obama certainly has a mandate, and it is a mandate for change. Obama's slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” was reminiscent of slogans like the “New Deal” of Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign and the “Great Society” banner under which Johnson won in 1964. In the latter cases, those slogans translated into the major policy domestic agendas of those administrations.

    For the people who elected Obama and the increased Democratic majority, “change we can believe in” isn’t about bailouts for corporations and banks. It isn't about wearing American flag pins on your lapel while the military budget continues to escalate and bankers and corporate CEO’s wine and dine. “Change we can believe in” isn’t about a spruced up version of trickle down theory or the same policies behind a fresh face in the White House.

    It is about reversing and repealing the policies that have both led to the immediate financial crisis and looming global depression. It is about ending the post-World War II policies that led to the long-term stagnation and decline of the labor movement. It is about creating a national public health care program more than 50 years after it was established in other major industrial nations, and handling a national debt which has increased 10 times since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981.

    A “single payer” national health system – known as “socialized medicine” in the rest of the developed world – should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.

    In addition, passing the Employee Free Choice Act to make joining a union easier and to expand the base of union voters who supported Obama by nearly 50 points on Nov. 4 seems only logical. It would also provide a massive boost for working families struggling with stagnant incomes, high health care costs, retirement costs and job insecurity.

    The best way to win over the the portion of the working class in the South or the West that supported McCain and the Republicans is to create important new public programs and improve the social safety net. National health care, significantly higher minimum wages, support for trade union organizing, aid to education should all be on the agenda. These programs will improve the quality of our lives lives directly, giving us greater security and establishing the social economic changes that will bring reluctant voters into the Obama coalition. That is how progress works.

    The right-wing propaganda machine will scream socialism, and that is also a good thing. Because the more socialism comes to be identified with real policies that raise the standard of living and improve the quality of life for the working class and the whole people, the more socialism will be looked at seriously. A stronger left that follows the tradition of the Communist Party in its unbreakable commitment to a socialist future and to educating people about the value and necessity of socialist policies in the present could follow.

    Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 11:59 PM | Comments (2) | Top

    Juan Cole: Iraqis View Security Agreement as having a Flexible Timetable

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-17-08)

    Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Iraqi cabinet approved the security agreement between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government. It will now go to the Iraqi parliament, where it will be voted on on November 24. Out of 36 cabinet members, 28 were present for Sunday's vote (a lot of Iraqi politicians actually live in Amman or London because of the poor security situation). Of the 28, 27 voted in favor.

    Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) was in Tehran. He sent word back that ISCI cabinet secretaries should vote for the agreement. Iran had earlier opposed the agreement, but appears to have been persuaded to cease lobbying Shiite members of parliament against it. Al-Hakim's group, along with the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, controls many of the Shiite votes in parliament.

    Despite some reservations, the Kurdistan Alliance also voted for the agreement. Kurds were afraid it would limit their quest for semi-autonomy and control of more of Iraq. On the other hand, they very much want the US troops to stay, since they see them as protectors against Arab dominance.

    Typically, the Kurdistan Alliance and the major Shiite parties can put together a parliamentary majority, so the agreement looks likely to pass.

    Two members of the Sunni Arab fundamentalist coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front also voted for the agreement. (Update: Time says 2 IAF members voted for it, one against, and 3 were absentees.) One of the three parties in that coalition, the Iraqi Islamic Party, wants the agreement to go not only to parliament but also to a national referendum. Al-Zaman says that the leader of the IIP, Tariq al-Hashimi, is asking for the referendum because Shaikh Abdul Karim Zaydan, the spiritual counselor of the Muslim Brotherhood of Iraq, has given a fatwa against the agreement. The Iraqi Islamic Party is a branch of the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Hashimi is therefore in the uncomfortable position of defying his own party's spiritual guide. If the measure went to a referendum, the IIP would be off the hook.

    There is a dispute among Iraqi parliamentarians as to whether the agreement can be passed by a simple majority (i.e. 51% of those MPs present, assuming there is a quorum) or by a supermajority of 2/3s. Some are saying that they should pass legislation specifying which it is. The al-Maliki government maintains that this issue is decided by the president.

    Al-Zaman says that President-Elect Barack Obama was shown the agreement and agreed to be bound by its provisions.

    In contrast, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, expressed dismay that he was not shown the agreement before the cabinet vote. Iraq is a member of the Arab League, and the latter feels that any treaty that affects the sovereignty of one of its members is in its purview.

    Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said that as soon as the agreement is passed, Iraq will go to the United Nations Security Council to ask to be removed from Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and for permission to abrogate Order 17 issued by US viceroy Paul Bremer.

    Of order 17, , Tom Engelhardt wrote:

    ' Order 17 is a document little-read today, yet it essentially granted to every foreigner in the country connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution. Foreigners--unless, of course, they were jihadis or Iranians--were to be "immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States," even though American and coalition forces were to be allowed the freedom to arrest and detain in prisons and detention camps of their own any Iraqis they designated worthy of that honor.'


    The Iraqi government believes it can by signing this bilateral agreement with Bush get back its full sovereignty and escape the humiliation of being in receivership to the United Nations and having Bremer's law give foreign carpetbaggers the run of Iraq. This belief explains why even the proud Nuri al-Maliki is willing to sign on the dotted line.

    Dabbagh was emphatic at a news conference that "The Iraqi government has the right to request the abrogation of the agreement when its own security forces are ready, even if it is before the end of the stipulated timetable."

    Some Western observers have assumed that the 2011 date is non-negotiable once the agreement is signed, but that is not true. Insisting on a provision that any side could bring certain articles of the agreement to a premature close was one reason the Iraqis sent the agreement back to the US a month ago.

    In other news, the Iraqi High Electoral Commission has permitted the placing on the ballot of a measure that would amke Basra a regional government in its own right, analogous to Kurdistan. If this measure went through, Basra would own all new oil fields that are discovered and developed.

    Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 3:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Allan J. Lichtman: How Obama Can Be Another FDR (Follow 4 Simple Rules)

    Source: Britannica Blog (11-17-08)

    [Allan J. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. His six books include Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 and The Keys to the White House.]

    In planning his transition to the presidency, Barack Obama could do no better than follow the precedents for governing set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Congressional Democrats should heed the FDR model as well. Roosevelt not only won an unprecedented four presidential elections, but he also transformed the Democrats from a weak minority to American’s dominant party. From 1933 to 1981, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for 44 of 48 years.

    Roosevelt succeeded as a policy maker and politician by following four simple rules that ought to guide the Obama administration as well.

    1. Strike Early. Newly elected presidents are strongest in the early days of their administration before buyer’s remorse sets in for the public and opposition in Congress has a chance to organize and gain strength.

    FDR steered Congress 15 major bills through Congress in his first hundred days. Obama will not match that record – no president has done so. However, he should use his transition time to develop a roster of proposed legislation for his first hundred days. If possible, he should clear his bills with the Democratic congressional leadership and committee chairs during the transition period.

    Roosevelt also used his executive powers during the first hundred days. For example, FDR issued executive orders that took the nation off the gold standard and declared a national bank holiday that closed insolvent institutions for four days. Likewise Obama could reverse Bush-era executive orders that restricted access to presidential records, subjected anti-war dissidents to possible confiscation of their property, and weakened anti-pollution laws, restricted access to family planning, and limited stem cell research. He could also announce plans to close Guantanamo Bay, honor the Geneva Conventions, and reject the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war.

    2. Bring the People With You. Congress is like Wall Street. It operates on fear and greed. Members of Congress will be fearful of challenging a president who has public backing and greedy to enact popular laws that they can bring to their constituents in the midterm elections of 2010.

    FDR pioneered the direct communication between a president and the public through his fireside chats on the radio. He also worked through the conventional media by holding twice weekly press conferences.

    Obama should use his oratorical skills and mastery of new media to sell his program directly to the American people. But he should also follow the other FDR precedent and make himself far more accessible to the press than President George W. Bush.

    3. Think Big and Broadly. The watchword for FDR’s policy-making was “bold, persistent experimentation.” FDR had no fear of implementing big ideas that ensuring bank deposits, regulating the stock market, guaranteeing collective bargaining rights, or providing old age insurance and minimum wages. He was also willing to explore different approaches to recovery from the Depression and reform of the economic system. FDR kept what worked such as banking regulations and Social Security and discarded what did not, such as attempts to form industry-wide codes on wages and production under the National Recovery Act.

    Today economists are offering solution to our economic woes that range from nationalizing the banks to letting the markets work their magic free of government interference. Obama should recognize that there is no consensus answer to recovery and reform and experiment with a mix of market and regulatory approaches.

    4. Don’t Govern from the Middle. Great presidents don’t move to the middle they move the middle to them by changing the conversation about government and implementing programs that work. That is what FDR did for liberal governance in the 1930s and Ronald Reagan for conservative governance in the 1980s.

    No political leader in the history of the government has gained major political success or produced fundamental changes in national policy by attempting to move to the middle. Rather the so-called “center” of American politics is the graveyard of mediocre one-term presidents like William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, George H. W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter. The centrist presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton won two terms in office, but they both lost control of Congress in their first term and failed to pass on the presidency to a candidate of their party.

    By following the example of FDR Obama can prove that it is possible to learn from history and not merely be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

    Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Ruth Behar: The Anthropologist's Son

    Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (11-28-08)

    [Ruth Behar is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. During the spring semester of 2009, she will be a visiting professor in the humanities at the University of Miami. She is co-editor, with Lucía M. Suárez, of The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).]

    Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro earned a Ph.D. in anthropology with an 800-page dissertation about blacksmithing in Indonesia. She spent long stretches of time learning to love and rescue the cultures and communities of total strangers, at the cost of not always being around while her son was coming of age in Hawaii. Yet she had an indelible impact on him, teaching him to appreciate cultural diversity and have faith in people's ability to understand each other across borders and identities.

    The fact that Barack Obama's mother was a cultural anthropologist has been noted with curiosity and amusement. A few commentators dismiss her anthropology credentials by describing her as part of a radical American fringe, while others represent her favorably, but as "unconventional," "free-spirited," or "bohemian." That reputation is based on her two brief (and interracial) marriages and her wanderings through Javanese villages in an era when the stay-at-home mom was the public model of the American mother. Many now find it difficult to comprehend her passion for her adopted culture and her desire to live for years among the subjects of her research and advocacy work, though what she did was nothing out of the ordinary within anthropology.

    As a cultural anthropologist, I think Obama's family background is something to celebrate. But even more important, I think the time is ripe for cultural anthropology to become a fundamental part of American education and public culture. Anthropology needs to be taught alongside math, science, language arts, and history as early as elementary school and definitely throughout the high-school years. Its insights about the perils of ethnocentrism, racialization, and exoticized stereotypes need to become part of our everyday vocabulary.

    Students shouldn't have to stumble upon cultural anthropology, as I did, in their last year of college. I remember being thrilled to discover an academic discipline that focused on the complications of developing empathy with people who hold different worldviews. And I was enthralled by the idea of fieldwork, which calls for immersion in the day-to-day existence of people who might initially seem strange and incomprehensible, so that by grappling with our differences through face-to-face interactions, we might move beyond dehumanizing portrayals of "the Other." For a Cuban-Jewish immigrant like me, who'd become all too familiar with the fraught experience of explaining who and what I was to others who wanted to box me into a single identity, the study of cultural difference was absolutely liberating.

    I eventually learned that the discipline's origins were not as humanistic as my ideals. Anthropology's fascination with cultural diversity arose in the early 20th century from Westerners' ruthless pursuit of colonial power and the arrogance of their presumed cultural superiority. The role of anthropologists was to elucidate the worldviews of "savages" in the third world before those cultures were swept away by modernity and capitalist development. Then in the 1950s and 60s, testimonies about the Holocaust revealed savagery in the heart of civilized Europe. Decolonization liberated Africa and Asia, and those who were once colonized began to ask, who was calling whom savage?

    The discipline survived that crisis, and anthropologists became expert interpreters of cultures in transition....

    Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 at 3:14 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Luke A. Nichter: President Obama and Bretton Woods

    Source: German blog Atlantic Community (11-16-08)

    [Dr. Luke A. Nichter is Assistant Professor of History, Tarleton State University-Central Texas.]

    On the occasion of this weekend's G-20 meeting in Washington, the global economic crisis seems more entrenched than ever. Calls for the return to a Bretton Woods-like system can be heard around the world. The Washington Post has said that a new Bretton Woods "could reform the IMF" (October 20). The Times of London has reported Prime Minister Brown's call for a new international financial architecture (November 14). Le Monde has printed favorable coverage for a "Bretton Woods acte II" (November 14). Before getting caught up in the momentum of "reform", the incoming administration of President-elect Obama should carefully heed the lessons of history.

    The Bretton Woods system was set up in July 1944 by 44 nations in New Hampshire. The system allowed the recovering economies of Europe to accumulate U.S. dollars--including postwar American aid such as the Marshall Plan--which could be converted to gold at the rate of 35 dollars an ounce, guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury's gold reserves. The American guarantee was maintained in exchange for other countries' obligations to ensure monetary discipline at home.

    The United States did not have this same discipline imposed upon it, so American debts could be paid by issuing new currency. During the late 1950s and 1960s this occurred with greater frequency as a result of ballooning American foreign aid programs, Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives, and the funding of growing American involvement in Southeast Asia. After 1958, the total number of dollars in circulation had eclipsed the gold held in reserve, a violation of a key tenet of the Bretton Woods system. This ultimately set in motion a series of monetary crises throughout the 1960s.

    After a gold crisis in 1960, the Eisenhower administration worried that the entire Atlantic alliance might collapse. The Kennedy administration once mused that payments deficits worried the president more than nuclear weapons, and President Lyndon Johnson was concerned that he might be blamed for a global economic depression. This system was also painful for American consumers. Expansionary monetary policies without a devaluation of the dollar attracted imports, causing inflation, increased prices, and reduced exports. Thus, even in its purest form, the Bretton Woods system had a certain amount of instability built into it from the beginning.

    Knowing that American gold reserves could not withstand a mass conversion of dollars into gold, throughout the 1960s American policymakers created a series of political inducements to compel Europeans (and later, Japanese) to hold onto their dollars rather than exchange them for gold. Beginning in 1961, the U.S. negotiated "offset" agreements with West Germany. In 1963, the Group of Ten leading industrial nations began discussions to develop a new monetary system, without success. Then, in 1968, Special Drawing Rights were created in an attempt to meet shortages in liquidity.

    This was the system that Richard Nixon inherited in 1969. Nixon ignored the advice by Milton Friedman and Paul Volcker that the change in administration was an ideal time to overhaul Bretton Woods. Friedman argued that the dollar must be set free from the burden it carried as the pivot to the system. Ignoring advice to act in 1969, Nixon announced his New Economic Policy on August 15, 1971. Considered to be the mortal blow to Bretton Woods, Nixon suspended the conversion of dollars into gold, and included a host of other domestic initiatives (e.g. wage and price controls) and international programs (e.g. import taxes) that were in the spirit neither of Bretton Woods nor Nixon's conservative beliefs.

    The lesson here for the Obama administration is that references to a "new Bretton Woods" must be understood carefully. Many calls for such a system appear with little context, and do not take into account the fact that the system depended on perennial manipulation, or that it was solvent for less than half of its existence. In 2009, there are too many unanswered questions. What would the currency pivot and reserve asset be? What will the responsibilities of membership be? What will the mechanism of enforcement be? What will the penalty for not playing by the rules be? Calls for reform are simple, but answering these questions are much more difficult. The system was unable to meet the liquidity demands of the 1960s, and it appears dramatically more out of step today.

    Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 6:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Mark Naison: George Bush's Refusal to Rescue General Motors Cements His Legacy of Hardship and Pain

    Source: Special to HNN (11-16-08)

    [Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]

    The refusal to support an emergency loan to General Motors during the final days of his administration may go down in history as the most arrogant and ill informed decision George Bush has taken during his entire presidency- other than his decision to invade Iraq.

    The General Motors Corporation is the anchor of an entire region, with factories and parts plants employing large portions of the population in Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky while its dealerships and suppliers are a major source of employment in every portion of the nation. Allowing this company to go bankrupt, and risk dissolution, while the federal government is rescuing banks and insurance companies who employ a fraction of the workforce General Motors does, displays a staggering insensitivity to the human costs of unregulated markets and laissez faire economics

    If General Motors fails, factories and dealerships will close, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, hundreds of thousands more will lose their pensions. But that's only the beginning of the hardship. Business districts dependent on GM workers and their families will be abandoned and boarded up,,towns and municipalities will be forced into bankruptcy. and tens of thousands of homes owned by GM workers and retirees will go into foreclosure. The psychological costs of this trauma may be even greater. Every lost job, every lost pension, every failed business, leaves deep scars, some of which last a lifetime, and puts families and communities in jeopardy.

    Just look at cities like Youngstown Ohio, Homestead Pennsylvania and Flint Michigan which were hit by factory closinngs in the 1970's and 1980's .They have not recovered TO THIS DAY, Their factory districts are still scarred with vacant lots and piles of rubble, large sections of their residential neighborhoods look like ghost towns, their business districts are shabby and struggling, and young men stand idle outside bars and groceries.

    That this happened, episodically and incrementally in cities across the nation in the 70's and 80's is one of the great tragedies in modern American history.To allow it to happen again, on a much larger scale, because of refusal to use 25 billion dollars from a 700 billion dollar bailout package on the grounds it was meant for banks, not an automobile company, is simply unconscionable.

    Only someone who has never walked the streets of Flint, or Youngstown, or Buffalo, or North Philadelphia.could make a decision like that. I would like to take Mr Bush and Mr Paulson on such a walk. Let them see the boarded up factories, the weed filled lots, the aba ondoned churches with stained glass windows once lovingly constructed with the contributions of thousands of immigrant workers. Let them visit the schools and look into the eyes of the men on street corners who have long given up on looking for work.

    Take that walk with me,, Mr President and Mr Secretary, and then tell me, and the people who live in Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, that we have to let "the market" resolve the fate of General Motors,

    When factories close and industries fail, we lose income, we lose confidence, we lose pride, we lose hope we lose a sense of purpose.. James Mc Murtry, in his song, "We Can't Make it Here Anymore:" lays those consequences out with brutal clarity

    That big ol' building was the textile mill
    It fed our kids and it paid our bills
    But they turned us out and they closed the doors
    We can't make it here anymore...

    Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 6:19 PM | Comments (3) | Top

    Michael Beschloss: Presidents for generations have turned to Lincoln for solace and guidance

    Source: Newsweek (11-24-08)

    At midnight a few days after his nomination for president in 1952, Adlai Stevenson sneaked out of the Illinois governor's mansion in Springfield and walked the few blocks to Abraham Lincoln's home. After ascertaining that no one had seen him, he was let in by the caretaker and sat down for an hour in Lincoln's rocking chair. Afterward, while walking home, he later told a friend, he felt a "deep calm" as he faced the prospect of serving as president of the United States.

    It is no surprise that President-elect Barack Obama says he has been rereading the words of Lincoln; the 16th president has been a source of solace—and guidance—for American leaders for well more than a century. Like Stevenson, whose ancestor had been a Lincoln campaign manager, Theodore Roosevelt had listened to tales of his family ties to the great man since he was a child: his father had worked in Lincoln's government and escorted the president and Mary to church.

    Roosevelt hung a Lincoln portrait above the fireplace of his White House office, intoning that he aspired—"so far as one who is not a great man can model himself upon one who was"—to do "what Lincoln would have done." Eager to expand his own authority, he pointed to Lincoln's seizure of unprecedented power during the Civil War, insisting that he belonged to the "Lincoln-Jackson school" of presidential might.

    However, Roosevelt sometimes privately derided the faith in the people's wisdom that was such a hallmark of Lincoln. Fearing "the tyranny of the mob," TR felt that Americans were best ruled by well-born, elegantly schooled presidents like himself. He told his sister that 51 percent of the time, the people's voice may be the "voice of God," but the rest of the time it was "the voice of the devil … or a fool."

    Much of Franklin Roosevelt's interest in Lincoln focused on how he could steal the first Republican president from the pantheon of Republican icons for political exploitation by Democrats. He said the Republicans had broken their ties to Lincoln by becoming the party of big business. He did not explain how the racism of Southern Democratic senators or his opposition to an anti-lynching bill equipped his own party to claim the Great Emancipator....

    Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Stanley Kutler: From LBJ to BHO

    Source: Truthdig.com (11-12-08)

    [Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings. ]

    Barack Obama’s victory on Nov. 4 may have rung down the curtain on the Civil War, a war that did not end at Appomattox as the history books have it, but instead has raged and festered within American political and cultural life ever since. Victory has many fathers and mothers. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Viola Liuzzo, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are just a few of the memorable people who labored to reverse the long tide of American racism. They are prominently and rightly remembered in the history books.

    The 36th president of the United States seems strangely absent in the current celebrations. Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson is not fondly remembered. When Bill Clinton ritualistically invoked his patron saints among his Democratic predecessors, he rarely mentioned LBJ.

    Johnson today is best remembered for plunging the nation deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam. He pursued a war that deeply divided us at home and left an angry scar across the nation. But LBJ alone is not responsible for that war. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy made the initial commitment. Johnson’s successor, Richard M. Nixon, willfully maintained the war for four more years, resulting in 25,000 more American deaths and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese—despite his knowing for four years that we could not “win.”

    Vietnam was a painful lesson for the limits of American power, but one brazenly brushed aside by George W. Bush and his neocon co-conspirators in 2003 as they went hunting for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Sadly, the misinformed nation largely acquiesced, as it, too, had forgotten its history.

    In domestic affairs, LBJ found his place. A longtime virtuoso for the give and take of the legislative process, he scored notable policy successes, many of which remain with us despite the promises of Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to eradicate all memories of those achievements. But Johnson deserves our best memories for his contributions to reversing racism. Those triumphs provided the tools that certainly made Obama’s victory possible.

    Johnson prodded, cajoled and pushed the Democratic majority in Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. Yes, pushed, for that illusory Democratic majority included the likes of such staunch segregationists as Strom Thurmond, D-S.C., Richard Russell, D-Ga., and John Stennis, D-Miss., among other old-line Southern Democrats.

    LBJ needed a coalition and left a rich legacy for “reaching across the aisle” and working in a bipartisan manner. The Republicans, far different from their successors of today, considerably enabled the great civil rights victories. Their leader, Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., like LBJ, was a connoisseur of congressional processes and politics. An icon of the Republicans’ conservative Midwest base, Dirksen was no stranger to the traditional practices of his party, especially its unwritten contract with its like-minded fellow-conservative Southern Democrats. Dirksen generally disdained principles but proudly included “flexibility” among his few. Like Johnson, he recognized the moment—“an idea whose time had come,” using Victor Hugo’s words that became a theme of the civil rights movement.

    The black protests that began with college students sitting at a segregated North Carolina lunch counter ultimately had to find their expression in concrete achievements. After Birmingham, Ala., police unleashed their fire hoses and dogs on protesters, President Kennedy addressed the nation on what he called the moral question. Johnson knew it was more than that.

    Kennedy’s request for legislation got mired in Southern obstructionism, but his successor quickly responded and made the cause his own in ways Kennedy never could. Johnson provided the necessary passion, skill and energy that eluded Kennedy. After suffering an eight-month-long filibuster, LBJ finally secured the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a crucial voting rights section had been gutted, and blacks remained at the mercy of local customs and state officials who creatively found ways to deny them the right to vote.

    In March 1965, the president addressed Congress, asking it to resume work on civil rights, but now to focus specifically on voting rights. His speech deserves to be better known. Unlike Kennedy’s “moral” plea, Johnson knew firsthand how exploitation explained the racial divide in America. Poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, lack of dignity—all resulted from the exploitation of one group by another. Johnson knew it from his own experience, as he said. In his speech, he promised several times, “We shall overcome.” With a style and cadence that became so familiar to us in 2008, Johnson added: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”

    After the voting rights bill passed, presidential aide Bill Moyers found LBJ rather downcast. “Why?” Moyers asked. “Because, Bill,” the president replied, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”1 It is true that Strom Thurmond, Newt Gingrich and the Southern Democrats who became Republicans indeed profited from the 1965 legislation.

    Johnson was right, but only for a short run. Forty-odd years is not terribly long, given the eventual payoff in 2008. The Voting Rights Act broke down prevailing Southern laws and customs barring black voting, and soon black votes and officeholders rose dramatically in the South. But not until Obama’s run in 2008 did the black vote reach such incredibly high figures, both for registration and turnout.

    Two weeks after his inauguration, President Obama will begin the celebration of the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial. By his example, he marked this year’s LBJ centennial in a very special way.

    1 Robert Dallek, “Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President,” P. 170.

    Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 1:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Warren Goldstein: Suddenly I'm feeling patriotic!

    Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (11-28-08)

    [Warren Goldstein is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford and author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).]

    It was Wednesday, the day after, and I wanted the election news, so absorbing for so long, now wondrous, to keep coming and coming. Trying to squeeze every drop of meaning from the morning paper, making my Web-site rounds, I was listening to my local NPR station when the host asked, "Is there a new progressive patriotism in America?" Calls flooded in proclaiming a resounding Yes, and I began figuring out how to put an American flag on my front door.

    Saturday evening, my wife, Donna Schaper (a United Church of Christ minister who serves a storied activist church in Greenwich Village), and I were tuned into A Prairie Home Companion when Garrison Keillor launched into a patriotic medley. I turned to Donna and said, "You've got to do something patriotic in church tomorrow: 'America the Beautiful' or 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" She proposed "God Bless America" — and I objected: "too over the top."

    Let me back up. Born in 1951, pure midboomer, I grew up moving every year or two because my father was a career naval officer. I used to love his crisp white uniforms and dreamed, briefly, of becoming the first Jewish admiral — until I found out Uriah Phillips Levy had already claimed that honor. I learned to play "Stars and Stripes Forever" on my clarinet. And I supported the Vietnam War vigorously until the fall of my senior year in high school, when my friends and teachers began to convince me otherwise, and my father fought a losing battle against my "too liberal" environment.

    The war took over everything. (Say "the war" to anyone in my generation, and the only one that registers is Vietnam.) Deeply influenced by the now-late William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), I became a historian mostly to understand how U.S. history had given rise to the Vietnam War. And I wanted nothing more to do with patriotism. I was ashamed of the pillage that followed the flag in Vietnam. I saw the emblem brandished at pro-war rallies, dividing our country into deep factions. It pained me to hope for an American defeat in Vietnam, but every alternative struck me as worse — for everyone.

    For the next four decades, I felt profoundly marginalized by mainstream American political culture. Including the flag. I studied the "100 percent American Campaign" born in World War I-era domestic repression, and saw how the American Legion wrapped itself in the flag as its thugs beat up and killed labor radicals. Sure, civil-rights marchers had carried American flags, but by the time of the big Washington antiwar marches, those symbols had all but disappeared. Then we got Richard M. Nixon's partisan patriotism, with its flag lapel-pin totem....

    So when Donna interrupted her own order of service last Sunday to ask her pianist to play "God Bless America," I said (to myself) "Oh, no!" — but began, haltingly, to sing. And as I sang, emotion that I didn't expect, and didn't even know might be there, welled up inside me, and the tears flowed; I'd forgotten a handkerchief and didn't care and just kept singing. And did I have company! I spoke to a dozen other people about my own age at coffee hour afterward, including several academics; all had resisted at first ("I've hated that song," one historian told me) and then given in, joyfully and tearfully. A longtime leader of the Village Independent Democrats had brought a batch of flag-lapel pins — I grabbed one, and the rest were gone by the end of coffee hour. What's going on here?...

    Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008 at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Allan Lichtman: The Keys to the White House ... Why McCain Lost

    Source: Britannica Blog (11-14-08)

    There is no end of after-the-fact explanations for John McCain’s defeat in this presidential election.

    As always, the Johnny-come-lately pundits can’t agree with one another. We’ve heard that McCain lost because he wasn’t conservative enough or because he was too conservative. We’ve heard that he lost because he picked the unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate or because he didn’t let Palin be Palin in the campaign. We’ve heard that he lost because he futilely accused Barack Obama of associated with terrorists or because he didn’t devote enough time and energy to attacking Obama’s questionable associates. We’ve also heard that he was heading for victory until the economic meltdown of the past too months or that he never really had a chance to win the general election.

    You should take all of these post-facto explanations and follow the philosopher David Hume’s recommendation for works of superstition: consign them to the flames.

    As readers of this blog know, the defeat of the party holding the White House was predictable long before John McCain and Barack Obama were selected as their party’s nominees. See, Lichtman “The 13 Keys to the White House: Why the Democrats Will Win,” Britannica Blog, posted October 4th, 2007.

    The Keys to the White House, a historically-based prediction system first pointed to the defeat of the incumbent Republicans in a paper presented at the conference of the International Institute of Forecasters in June of 2005 and in a paper published in the February 2006 edition of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. In a paper presented at the August 2007 conference of the American Political Science Association and a paper published in the Fall 2007 edition of Foresight, I used the Keys to predict that the Republican candidate would receive 46 percent of the two-party popular presidential vote. According to the latest count, McCain has netted 46.6 percent of the two-party vote.

    The lesson of the keys is that the American voters are far smarter and more pragmatic than the pundits would have us believe. The voters keep their eye on the big picture of presidential performance and vote out of office an incumbent party that fails to govern effectively. The failures of the Bush administration and the defeat of any Republican candidate for president were evident years before the either the nomination contests or the general elections campaigns began.

    Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008 at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Timothy Garton Ash: Obama must show the way to a goal set by Russell, Einstein - and Reagan

    Source: Guardian (UK) (11-13-08)

    [Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]

    As he embarks on the uphill struggle to translate dreams into realities, one strategic goal President-elect Barack Obama should embrace on his inauguration day is that of a world freed from the threat of nuclear weapons. In doing so, he can build on an impressive body of detailed, bipartisan, unofficial policy planning in the United States. He can expect an enthusiastic response from hundreds of millions of his supporters around the world who are hoping he will think and act big. He can be equally sure of crocodile smiles masking determined opposition from several countries that possess nuclear weapons, as well as other states and dark forces who would like nothing more than to have them - and, in some cases such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, are actively working towards acquiring them.

    This dream is almost as old as nuclear weapons themselves. Many of the essential elements of what is being proposed today can be found in the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal report of 1946, written in part by the nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer but soon buried under the rising cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, which brought us to the edge of nuclear catastrophe. It emerges again, from the left, in the manifesto drafted by Bertrand Russell in 1955 and signed by Albert Einstein. And again, from the right, in Ronald Reagan's spontaneous offer to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit of 1986, to which that Obama of the Soviet politburo responded: "We can do that. We can eliminate them."

    So the dream has never died. But arguably we are further from it today than we were even at the height of the cold war. As Ivo Daalder, one of Obama's advisers on this issue, notes in a recent article in the Foreign Affairs journal, there are now more than 25,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and nearly 3,000 tons of fissile material - enough to make 250,000 bombs - stored in more than 40 countries. The US and Russia still maintain, on round-the-clock alert, strategic missiles capable of devastating each other's cities at 30 minutes' notice. In 1995 Russia mistook the launch of a test rocket in Norway for a submarine-launched nuclear missile aimed at Moscow, and came within two minutes of ordering a retaliatory nuclear strike on the US.

    Yet that's almost the least of our nuclear worries. Far more likely is a rogue state or a terrorist group getting its hands on a few kilograms of enriched uranium or plutonium, and crafting it into a crude but still devastating bomb. And here's the new, 21st-century twist to this old story: to face another great challenge of our time, that of global warming, we will need more enriched uranium, not less. Until we achieve affordable mass usage of inexhaustible sources of energy such as the sun, using more nuclear power is one of the ways we can slow the growth of our carbon dioxide emissions. The International Energy Agency has called for 1,400 new nuclear power reactors by 2050. The devil lies in this detail: if you have the facilities to enrich uranium to the level needed for civil nuclear power generation, it's but a small step to producing weapons-grade uranium. One small step for the nuclear scientist, one giant leap for the terrorist and the tyrant.

    So one reason the dream must be revived is that the nightmare, which seemed to recede after the end of the cold war, is getting closer again. Today it may be many small nightmares rather than one nightmare to end all nightmares, but small is hardly the appropriate word. In the US, the issue returned to salience with a remarkable op-ed article titled "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons", published in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007 and signed by four grand old men of American foreign policy - two of them Democrats, two Republicans: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn. Detailed thinking has been carried forward by an initiative based at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (where I write these lines) and the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington. Encouragingly, this has been a significant plank in the foreign policy part of Obama's electoral platform. The president-elect has promised to "make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of US nuclear policy".

    The question is: how? Different models are canvassed in detail, but everyone agrees that you have to do two big things. You have to persuade the states who already have nuclear weapons - whether or not they are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty - to commit themselves to reduce, rapidly and radically, and eventually to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Zero is the goal. And you have to create an international, comprehensive, verifiable and enforceable regime covering, one way or another, the production, storage and use of all nuclear fuel in every corner of the world, so that none of it gets into the wrong hands. Each of these is, on its own, a tall order. But you have to do both.

    Britain has already signed up in principle to the logic of zero, although at the same time justifying the modernisation of its nuclear deterrent by a very broad rationale of keep-hold-of-nurse in an uncertain world. But what about France, China or India? Let alone Israel and Pakistan. And, of course, Russia. Russia and the US between them account for 95% of the world's nuclear weapons. Without Russia, you won't get far. Of late, Russia has not been happy with the west in general, and the US in particular. Among its particular gripes are the promise of Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and the stationing of US-led missile defence facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. It will require statecraft of a high order, from European capitals as well as from Washington, to persuade Russia to regard this as a joint project for humankind and not just another western plot.

    For historians, there's a particular paradox in the missile defence angle. As you can see from the now declassified records of the Reagan-Gorbachev conversations at the 1986 Reykjavik summit, what kiboshed the briefly flowering consensus on eliminating all nuclear weapons was the Soviet Union's implacable opposition to Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative and Reagan's equally unshakeable commitment to proceeding with it. Twenty-two years on, missile defence, the nephew of SDI, may become an early diplomatic obstacle to reviving the Reykjavik dream...

    Posted on Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 11:20 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Alonzo Hamby: Why liberals now call themselves progressives

    Source: Conservativenet (11-12-08)

    The resurgence of "progressive" is an interesting semantic phenomenon.

    In the days of Robert La Follette, Sr., Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, it meant a middle-class reformism that favored honest government, the employment of professionals and experts in administration and policy-making, and a more equitable society characterized by justice and opportunity for all classes and groups. In those days, more often than not, "liberal" still meant small government and laissez-faire, connected vaguely with the Jeffersonian tradition.

    From the 1930s on "liberal" began to displace "progressive" as the preferred term for the reforming groups of the century. I think the rationale was a far broader definition of the "term liberty" to include material well-being, as in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.

    By then also "progressive" was taking on a somewhat different usage. The Communist party of the United States (and the Comintern) after 1935 sought unity with (and influence over) "the progressive forces" of Western nations in a "Popular Front" against fascism (a term the CPUSA interpreted very broadly after 1945). One US result was the Progressive party of 1948, a vehicle largely controlled and manipulated by the CPUSA in the interests of the Soviet Union. The Progressive party of 1948 was, appropriately enough, rejected by the political heirs of the the leader of the Progressive Party of 1924, the elder La Follette.

    After 1948, "progressive" fell into disuse among reformers. Today, a good many. e.g., E. J. Dionne, want to resurrect it because "liberal" has taken on a bad odor in the larger political dialogue.

    My own sense is that neither term is very good. The controlling impulse of today's Democratic party is akin to European social democracy, pressing more toward equality of condition than equality of opportunity.

    I don't expect, however, to see our President-Elect, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, or assorted Democratic intellectuals adopt the term "social democratic" any time soon.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 9:29 PM | Comments (4) | Top

    Victor Davis Hanson: Win One For the Messiah!

    Source: National Review Online (11-12-08)

    Just one punch of the ballot is all it took. Now suddenly almost every one, here and abroad, is supposed to appreciate the newfound morality of the American people, change their own prior wicked ways, and do what they must for newly elected Barack Obama.

    Some columnists are now putting Europe, Russia, China — and the whole world — on moral notice: we Americans did the right thing in electing the first African-American president and a charismatic, hip, commander-in-chief. They must now, too — or else!

    Our divine edict from on high is simple: O wide world of little faith: Don’t blow it! So Europeans buck up for Barack, and get back in Afghanistan! Illiberal Russia, hands off those democracies on your borders and don’t make Barack do something we will all regret later! China, keep Barack’s air clean and don’t dare burn any more dirty coal!

    Excuse me?

    The world may be temporarily awestruck with the wise and all-powerful Obama, but it’s not quite ready to coalesce into a kinder, gentler global family — one people, under one Messiah, indivisible, with peace and justice for all.

    In fact, Vladimir Putin doesn’t care a whit that Barack Obama is a path-breaking African-American, much less the first person of color to be an American president. The Chinese can’t quite appreciate in translation Obama’s mellifluous cadences. France’s cool Sarkozy isn’t swayed much by the Obama sunglasses, snazzy polo shirt, or nifty outside jump shot.

    All these states have interests — not deities. For the most part, either their enmity with or fondness for the United States antedated George Bush. The world’s mental map wasn’t erased away when Bush took power. Being the planet’s most powerful democracy, and a free and confident world peacekeeper, either excites admiration or earns envy — and even the most crude or the most elegant American president can’t change much that simple fact of global human nature.

    To the small degree Obama’s superior charm and style will improve things, the Russians may toast, backslap, and bear hug Obama — before seeking to body slam him against the wall on Polish anti-missile sites. The smiling Europeans will scurry around mumbling “Yes, but of course!” — as they shirk even more. An unhinged President Ahmadinejad will endlessly write rambling letters to Barack Hussein Obama as the last centrifuges come on line. The jihadists will sigh rather than swear as they continue to try to blow us all up. ...

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 9:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Andrew Bacevich: On Killing the Right People

    Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (11-11-08)

    [Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.]

    Reports in The New York Times have revealed the existence of a hitherto secret counterterrorism campaign conducted by U. S. troops in Pakistan, Syria, and other countries. The campaign reputedly dates from 2004 and has included nearly a dozen raids conducted by special operations forces that swoop into a target area, wield death and destruction, and then as quickly make their escape.

    We can safely assume that the governments of Syria and Pakistan, not to mention the organizations targeted by these attacks, have known about these activities for some time. In other words, "secret" in this context means keeping the American people in the dark about actions taken in their name. We can only speculate about various sources, whether acting independently or at the behest of high authorities, have chosen at this juncture to spill the beans.

    In truth, the existence of such a program, fully consistent with the Bush administration's penchant for using force and for defining executive authority in the widest terms, hardly qualifies as surprising. True, these raids, which have regularly trampled on the principle of national sovereignty, makes all the more laughable the Bush administration's condemnation of Russia for violating the sacred sovereignty of Georgia. Yet at this point no one pays much attention when the United States claims to stand on principle.

    More germane is the question of who exactly we are killing. Having learned about this secret war being conducted on their behalf, Americans now have an obligation to find out more. That obligation is both moral and political. The moral obligation is to ascertain whether or not the people we are killing are in fact terrorists, that is, members of organizations engaged in actively plotting attacks against the United States. If we are killing people who are not terrorists, then these special operations attacks are profoundly wrong. Indeed, in that case, they amount to little more than state-sponsored terrorism of the sort that Washington quickly and rightly condemns in others.

    The political obligation is of a different sort. The issue here becomes one of effectiveness: even if these operations are actually netting some bad guys, are we in fact reducing the overall terrorist threat as a consequence? Or are the attacks merely creating propaganda opportunities that Islamists exploit to promote anti-Americanism, while recruiting new jihadists to replace those just eliminated? Can we be certain, in other words, that we are not simply engaging in an endless game of whack-a-mole?

    In this regard, recent U.S. operations not directly related to this program of secret raids should set off alarm bells. In Afghanistan, site of an overt war that has taken a turn for the worse of late, U.S. and NATO forces have been involved in a series of incidents in which they have killed not Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, but innocent civilians. No reasonable observer is accusing coalition forces of intentionally targeting non-combatants. Yet whether attributable to incompetence or negligence or simply the fog and friction of war, the evidence that we are routinely killing the wrong people in Afghanistan is becoming difficult to refute. In the most recent example, earlier this week a U.S. combat aircraft assaulted what turned out to be an Afghan wedding party, killing nearly forty civilians.

    In Pakistan, site of a semi-covert war conducted mostly by remotely-controlled, missile-firing drones, U. S. officials insist that we are indeed killing terrorists even as Pakistani officials tell another story. Who is telling the truth -- whether the truth is even fully knowable -- is anyone's guess. What cannot be disputed is that the chief observable result of these Predator attacks has been to bring Pakistan perceptibly closer to the brink of internal collapse. In short, even if every accusation of killing innocent Pakistanis is false, the attacks are producing results that are the inverse of what they are intended to do.

    Americans should not rush to render an adverse judgment of this program of secret attacks. Yet neither should they accept at face value official U. S. explanations or what they get from leakers offering a partial and selective version of the story. There is a need here for sober stock-taking, which must begin with a thorough-going, no-holds-barred investigation. There are two key questions. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the smart thing? Alas, don't look for the Pentagon, the Congress, or the media to provide answers to these questions.

    Instead, add another item to President-elect Obama's already crowded agenda.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 9:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Daniel Pipes: Obama Wins, Muslims Divided

    Source: Phiadelphia Bulletin (11-12-08)

    [Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.]

    Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the seventh-century figure central to Shiite Islam, is said to have predicted when the world will end, columnist Amir Taheri points out. A "tall black man" commanding "the strongest army on earth" will take power "in the west." He will carry "a clear sign" from the third imam, Hussein. Ali says of the tall black man: "Shiites should have no doubt that he is with us."

    An Iranian in Tehran sports a badge of Barack Obama. (AP: Hasan Sarbakhshian)
    Barack Hussein in Arabic means "the blessing of Hussein." In Persian, Obama translates as "He [is] with us." Thus does the name of the presumptive American president-elect, when combined with his physical attributes and geography, suggest that the End of Times is nigh – precisely what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been predicting.

    Back down on earth, the Muslim reaction to Obama's victory is more mixed than one might expect.

    American Islamists are delighted; an umbrella group, the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Election, opined that, with Obama's election, "Our nation has … risen to new majestic heights." Siraj Wahhaj, Al-Hajj Talib Abdur Rashid, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Muslim Alliance in North America responded with similar exuberance.

    Hamas, and Islamist movements in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, India, Indonesia and the Philippines delighted in Obama's election. Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch generalizes that jihadists and Islamic supremacists worldwide showed "unalloyed joy." The New York Times finds public reaction in the Middle East mostly "euphoric." John Esposito of Georgetown University emphasizes the Muslim world's welcome to Obama as an "internationalist president."

    But plenty of other Muslims have other views. Writing in Canada's Edmonton Sun, Salim Mansur found John McCain the "more worthy candidate." Yusif al-Qaradawi, the Al-Jazeera sheikh, endorsed McCain for opposite reasons: "This is because I prefer the obvious enemy who does not hypocritically [conceal] his hostility toward you… to the enemy who wears a mask [of friendliness]." Al-Qaradawi also argued that twice as many Iraqis died during Bill Clinton's two administrations than during George W. Bush's.

    For tactical reasons, the influential Sunni sheikh Yusif al-Qaradawi wanted John McCain to win.
    Iran's hardliners also favored a McCain victory (according to Iran's former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi) "because they benefit more from enmity with the U.S., which allows them to rally the Islamic world behind their policies and at the same time suppress dissent at home." The Taliban took note of Obama's election promise to increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan, warning that, should he fulfill this plan, "jihad and resistance will be continued."

    Iraqis are intensively divided about Obama's plan quickly to withdraw U.S. troops from their country. That plan, plus promises to end U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and to negotiate with Iranian leaders, rattled the leaders of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf governments.

    Some commentators argue that Obama cannot make a real difference; an Iranian newspaper declares him unable to alter a system "established by capitalists, Zionists, and racists." Predictably, the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff confirmed Palestinian perceptions of an omnipotent Israel lobby. A commentator in the United Arab Emirates went further, predicting Obama's replication of Jimmy Carter's trajectory of flamboyant emergence, failure in the Middle East, and electoral defeat.

    In all, these mixed reactions from Muslims suggest puzzlement at the prospect of a U.S. president of Islamic origins who promises "change," yet whose foreign policy may buckle under the constraints of his office. In other words, Muslims confront the same question mark hanging over Obama as everyone else:

    Never before have Americans voted into the White House a person so unknown and enigmatic. Emerging from a hard-left background, he ran, especially in the general election, mostly as a center-left candidate. Which of these positions will he adopt as president? More precisely, where along the spectrum from hard- to center-left will he land?

    Looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, will Obama's policies reflect Rashid Khalidi, the ex-PLO flak he befriended in the 1990s, or Dennis Ross, his recent campaign advisor and member of my board of editors? No one can yet say.

    Still, one can predict. Should Obama return to his hard left roots, Muslim euphoria will largely continue. Should he seek to make his presidency a success by moving to the center-left, many – but hardly all – Muslims will experience severe disillusionment.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 8:16 PM | Comments (2) | Top

    Beverly Gage: Do Rookies Make Good Presidents?

    Source: Time Magazine (11-5-08)

    [Beverly Gage: Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, due in February. She teaches U.S. history at Yale University.]

    For 10 exhausting months, Americans worried that Barack Obama might be too inexperienced to serve as President. On Nov. 4, a majority of voters decided that he is in fact "ready to lead"--or at least that he had better be. This suggests that Americans know their history. When it comes to presidential success, experience isn't all it's cracked up to be.

    Does Experience Matter in a President?

    Given the recent Sturm und Drang over the experience question, one might imagine that American Presidents have mostly followed the Johnson/Nixon model, clawing their way from House to Senate to the vice presidency before landing in the Oval Office. In truth, American presidential politics has often been a rookie's game. Some presidential newcomers have hit the ball out of the park, delivering moments of true political greatness. (Think Abraham Lincoln.) Others have offered up inning after inning of rookie mistakes.

    As a group, White House rookies tend to fall into three categories. First come the military heroes--Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower--who ventured a leap into electoral politics only to produce lackluster administrations. (The great exception is George Washington, whose success in office remains uncontested but whose "rookie" status could hardly be helped.)

    Next come the technocrats like William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, who both arrived with long résumés of appointed posts but virtually no electoral experience. This category might also include Jimmy Carter, who despite several years in the Georgia legislature and governor's office maintained an essentially bureaucratic outlook toward White House affairs. All three proved wanting as popular leaders, unable to rally mass support for their programs. All three were limited to a single term.

    In the last category are the charismatic youngsters: 42-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy, 46-year-old Bill Clinton. Of our many presidential rookies, they have been among the most ambitious, championing transformative programs for national change. They have also marked the presidency with their outsize personal traits: Roosevelt's masculine bluster, Kennedy's legendary charm, Clinton's much discussed indiscretions....

    [HNN Editor: Gage goes on to compare Obama with Abraham Lincoln, who'd served in the Ill. state legislature and served a single term as a member of Congress, and Woodrow Wilson, who served just two years as NJ governor before election as president. She thinks the Wilson example may be the most relevant.]

    Like Obama, Wilson had spent his adult life immersed in university politics. Wilson's essays on American history feature the voice of a professor, not a machine candidate. Obama is himself something of a Wilsonian progressive, a man who puts his faith in transparency and voluntarism rather than New Deal--style interest-group wrangling. He also maintains some of Wilson's reserved and intellectual approach to managing the national welfare....

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 3:21 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Niall Ferguson: 'A World War without War' (Spiegel interview)

    Source: Spiegel Online (11-11-08)

    [Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.]

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Ferguson, were you moved when you saw the future president, Barack Obama, in Chicago?

    Ferguson: Yes, it was a very moving moment. It was similar to the release of Nelson Mandela. When Obama was born, in 1961, mixed marriages between blacks and whites were still illegal in one-third of the American states.

    SPIEGEL: Historically speaking, that was yesterday,

    Ferguson: Of course. But we are talking about ordinary discrimination, not just the legacy of slavery. And it had not disappeared. It is astonishing that the transformation from a racist America to an America that elects a black man to the White House was possible within that period of time. Even the world's most dogmatic conservative ought to be moved.

    SPIEGEL: You initially favored John McCain?

    Ferguson: I have become a convert in the last six months because of Obama's extraordinary combination of rhetorical genius, coolness under fire and organizational skills. This was the best election campaign we have ever experienced.

    SPIEGEL: Which doesn't necessarily have to mean a great presidency.

    Ferguson: What it means is enough: the death of racism, the end of the original American sin and, most of all, the right reaction to end the economic crisis. Obama can stimulate self-confidence because he is so calm and collected. He will not simply put an end to the crisis or ensure that banks lend money again. He is a politician, not the Messiah. But he can change the national mood. Americans are lucky that they were able to elect him now, just as the panic reached its climax. It is as if they had voted Roosevelt into office earlier, in 1930, and not in 1933.

    SPIEGEL: Shouldn't the world have seen it coming, the economic crisis we are now experiencing?

    Ferguson: Of course, it has been clear since 2006. I know that for many people it doesn't feel that way. They are horrified because they were taken by surprise, and they are in a panic because the enemy comes from within. The system is the enemy. And they don't understand the nuances of the crisis, which makes them afraid.

    SPIEGEL: In retrospect, historians are usually right. What did you foresee in 2006?

    Ferguson: Excessive debt. The debts of private households and the financial institutions reached levels that could no longer be offset. Then came the bubble in the real estate market, when prices doubled even though the houses weren't worth the money. But most of all, there was the ignorance of the bankers, hedge fund managers and financial experts in the political arena, who did not want to recognize something that was plain as day.

    SPIEGEL: Namely?

    Ferguson: That a liquidity crisis could happen. That they would run out of money. "Impossible," everyone was saying at the time.

    SPIEGEL: It sounds a little self-opinionated for you to claim that you had predicted all of this for years.

    Ferguson: Oh, I've been wrong before. The thing I was wrong about was the trigger.

    SPIEGEL: The trigger?

    Ferguson: I had believed that the price of oil would be the cause of the world economic crisis, and that the necessary trigger would be a second defenestration, a second Sarajevo and perhaps even a war, a truly major war.

    SPIEGEL: Iraq and Afghanistan don't count?

    Ferguson: Too small. I had believed that a geopolitical event would lead to a credit crisis, but this crisis is so fundamental that it was capable of triggering itself. Money disappeared, and now companies can no longer refinance, can no longer borrow anything. Now it'll be bloody.

    SPIEGEL: Are the bubbles happening with greater frequency than before, or is this just the way we perceive it? Or has the world economy consisted of a single super-bubble for some time now, as speculator George Soros says?

    Ferguson: There have been bubbles large and small, again and again since 1700. First there was the tulip bubble and then, in 1890, it was all about the gold mines. No, we haven't even changed the rules of the game. If a central bank makes loans available to speculators at low interest rates, we have a bubble. Always, it's guaranteed. Yesterday, today and tomorrow again...

    Posted on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: What Obama should do with Biden

    Source: CNN (11-10-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    ... [Joe] Biden has often said that his role model for the vice presidency is Lyndon Johnson, who served with John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963 before becoming president.

    Biden has explained that "People knew -- as they know about me now -- that he understood politics in the broad terms of Congress, and he understood the detail of the legislation."

    Biden has the right idea about what he could contribute as a long-term senator in the office of the vice president -- but has it wrong in terms of how he sees the history. Ironically, Lyndon Johnson should be a model for how the new administration should not treat the vice presidency.

    Johnson was miserable during his time in the office and Kennedy did not use him well. LBJ could have been an enormous asset. He was a southerner and former Senate majority leader who could have helped Kennedy sell programs such as civil rights and Medicare in a Congress dominated by Southern conservative Democrats.

    But instead of using Johnson as a legislative deal-maker, he isolated him from the political arena. Tensions between Johnson and Senate Democrats were partially to blame. Johnson's ego got in the way when he tried to keep his office in the Senate and suggested to Democrats that he should be invited to head their strategic meetings. His colleagues rejected the suggestion.

    At the Democratic Conference meeting on January 3, 1961, Johnson was devastated when he heard colleagues who helped him gain power say they didn't want him there. Sen. Al Gore Sr. said, "This caucus is not open to former majorities."

    Kennedy was also leery of Johnson's ambitions and circumscribed his interaction with Congress. Johnson's biggest roles were to help promote the national space program and to lead the White House Committee on Equal Employment, from which he pushed for civil rights initiatives.

    Kennedy also sent Johnson on numerous overseas trips. According to his biographer Robert Dallek, "Kennedy was happy to have Johnson gather intelligence on what senators and representatives were thinking, but he had no intention of allowing him to become the point man or administration leader on major bills." Johnson bitterly remarked that the president was making no use of him in dealing with the Hill: "You know, they never once asked me about that!"

    In the end, Kennedy did not have much success with legislation. Most of his major proposals languished in the congressional committee system and he was forced to use executive power to develop programs like the Peace Corps. The decision to constrain and isolate Johnson was clearly a mistake and didn't help his cause.

    Johnson is also a negative example in terms of how, after becoming president when JFK was assassinated and then winning a race for the presidency in his own right, he treated his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. From the start, Johnson understood that Humphrey could be an enormous source of strength with legislative relations.

    The Minnesota senator had served as Johnson's chief liaison to northern liberals in the 1950s. He had proven enormously effective as Senate Whip at obtaining the votes needed for passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

    But from the start of his vice presidency, the relationship was full of tension. One month after the election, LBJ said that Humphrey was constantly trying to appear in the press and, after letting him see a memorandum about rumors that Johnson was dying from liver disease, he said "You'd like that, wouldn't you Hubert...."

    Initially, Johnson did use Humphrey to help him sell the War on Poverty. According to the Senate Historical Office, Humphrey, known by many as the "field marshal on Capitol Hill," regularly "delivered votes from lawmakers who seemed immune to blandishments from any other quarter." Humphrey chaired a number of key committees on civil rights.

    But, like Kennedy, Johnson eventually excluded Humphrey and limited his role. The problem came when Humphrey expressed strong doubts about America's escalating role in Vietnam. In 1965, Humphrey privately told the president that if they ended up "embroiled deeper in fighting in Vietnam over the next few months, political opposition will steadily mount."

    Johnson's response was brutal. He did not allow Humphrey to participate in deliberations over the war and stripped the vice president of many duties. According to one aide, "He was frozen out, really sent to purgatory for a full year."

    Johnson eventually brought Humphrey back into the inner circles of decision-making in 1966, but only after Humphrey changed his tune and agreed to sell the war in Vietnam in Congress. The decision would undermine his chances for the presidency in 1968.

    Obama should think about Lyndon Johnson as a perfect example when he decides what to do with Biden -- but not in the way that Biden has suggested. Obama needs to use Biden to strengthen the chances for the administration's programs as they make their way through the House and Senate during extraordinarily difficult times.

    If Obama takes Biden's words to heart and replicates Johnson's experience, he will lose one of his best weapons.

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 8:44 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: The Press Pack Turns on Obama

    Source: TheDailyBeast.com (11-11-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    The presidential honeymoon is like the Tooth Fairy—it doesn’t exist, even though some people insist on clinging to the concept. There is no chance that President Barack Obama will enjoy any honeymoon period. This period allegedly occurs during the first one or two months after the inauguration when the media and political opponents supposedly give the new president time to set up his presidency and allow his initiatives to pass without criticism.

    While approval ratings tend to be higher in the first months of office, there never has been the kind of honeymoon period often talked about. The sociologist Steven Clayman and his colleagues have reviewed the transcripts from White House press conferences dating back to 1953 and found that the White House press corps can be extremely assertive in the first few months, particularly if the economy is struggling.

    When Bill Clinton began his presidency, the press was ruthless. Just two days after Clinton was sworn into office, NBC reporter Lisa Myers commented that “from up close, the Clinton White House looked like the ‘Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players” while Fred Barnes, the conservative pundit, quipped that “he hit the ground back-pedaling.”

    Obama has already come under attack. Conservative talk radio hosts jumped on remarks he made about Nancy Reagan, séances, and speaking to dead presidents. Obama called Mrs. Reagan to apologize for his remarks.

    Nor does the opposition party like to sit still. When rumors surfaced in early February 1953 that the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, was considering a naval blockade of Communist China, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, up and coming Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, insisted that the president needed to come clean, explaining if this meant “the first step toward global war.”

    Sparkman said that if Eisenhower took actions without consulting Europeans, he could cause an “irreparable split with our allies….” The following week, Democrats openly criticized a statement from Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Benson, which suggested that the administration was planning to renege on its promise to provide price supports for perishable goods like meat and eggs.

    After President John Kennedy delivered his State of the Union Address in January 1961, Senator Barry Goldwater called it “just a continuation of the Kennedy campaign speeches.” Though Goldwater said he admired Kennedy’s determination to fight communism, he added, “The President does not seem to understand the economy of the country. Either that, or he has been ill advised.” Representative Charles Halleck, the House Minority Leader, warned that Kennedy was pushing “spending proposals that will cost billions.”

    When President George W. Bush spent his first day in office in January 2001 re-imposing restrictions on federal aid to international organizations that offered abortion counseling or assisted women in receiving abortions—the same day that he picked the anti-abortion Missouri Senator John Ashcroft to serve as Attorney General--Democrats and even some Republicans were furious. “It is ethically wrong and it is morally wrong,” said Representative Nancy Johnson, a Republican from Connecticut.

    Indeed, President-Elect Obama has already come under attack. Conservative talk radio hosts jumped on remarks he made about Nancy Reagan, séances, and speaking to dead presidents. Obama decided to call Mrs. Reagan to apologize. Even among Democrats, the blogosphere has been buzzing with debates about his potential cabinet appointments, with strident differences emerging between the left and centrist Democrats over individuals such as Larry Summers for Treasury.

    While a honeymoon period has never really existed, opening days are becoming even more contentious for new presidents. There are several factors at work. The 24 hour, seven days a week news cycle, accelerated by the Internet, has opened the door for instantaneous and unedited attacks. The fragmentation of news outlets in recent decades, as well as the open partisanship of on-air radio and TV personalities, has increased the number of journalists willing to attack and able to do so with relative ease.

    Then there is the polarization of contemporary politics. Differences between the political parties has widened and intensified as the number of centrists in the Republican and Democratic parties has greatly diminished. Civility has often disappeared. Even though Obama was able to win votes in traditionally red states and appeal to some Republicans disaffected with the status quo, it remains unclear whether there is any true abatement of polarization.

    After all, polarization stems from deep structural forces not susceptible to rhetoric, such as gerrymandering, congressional procedures, demographic change, and partisan imperatives. Assuming that polarization is alive and well, both parties will have more than enough of an incentive to attack, and to attack early.

    Finally, there is the never-ending campaign. In recent years, the campaign season has become longer. Realizing the high cost of campaigning and importance of name recognition, potential candidates start earlier and earlier in the political season. Frankly, the campaign for 2012 has already begun. Politico has already reported that Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich will be speaking in Iowa at the end of the month to the Republican Governors Association. Mike Huckabee will be in Iowa to promote his new book and Governor Bobby Jindal will make his way to the caucus state to speak to a number of civic organizations.

    The best bet for Obama is to accept that presidential honeymoons don’t exist. The fact he has brought in Rahm Emanuel, a tough, hard-nosed partisan to serve as his chief of staff, and that he made this appointment so quickly after the election, is a sign he is well aware of this history and ready to do battle in Washington.

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 8:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    David Beito: Paul Krugman's Prescription for Disaster (Response by Alonzo Hamby)

    Source: http://www.historiansagainstwar.org (11-11-08)

    [HNN Editor: At the bottom of David Beito's post is a response by Alonzo Hamby.]

    Paul Krugman calls for Obama and his advisors to push an expanded version of the New Deal (see the link below by Mark R. Hatlie). According to Krugman, they should boldly throw caution to the winds and “figure out how much help they think the economy needs, than add 50 percent. It’s much better in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus.”

    Obama should reject this advice. If he listens to Krugman, the likely result will be a wave of stagflation that makes the experience of the 1970s look mild by comparison. Such a prescription would both continue and accelerate Bush’s fiscally reckless policy of propping up malinvestments through massive increases in spending, deficits, and easy credit by the Federal Reserve. As the continuing fall of the stock market and the rise of unemployment indicate, more bailouts and more “shock socialism” do not work. Obama made a fatal mistake in failing to oppose the aptly described billionaire bailout.

    This call for a hyper New Deal rests on a flawed view of history. According Krugman, the only reason Roosevelt failed to bring recovery was because he spent too little, not too much. At the same time, he tries to have it both ways by stating that the crisis of the 1930s would have been “much worse” without the New Deal.

    A key problem with Krugman’s analysis is that it does not adequately explain why the decade-long New Deal era depression lasted so much longer than previous depressions. Prior to the 1930s, depressions (as in the sharp and short downturn of 1921 and 1922) had typically lasted for two to three years. The predominant anti-depression policy before Hoover and Roosevelt was to cut spending, balance budgets, and let prices, profits, and wages readjust to more sustainable levels. Yet Krugman regards this older approach for curing depressions as “much worse” than the New Deal. The logical implication of his argument is that the New Deal, modest as it was, would have made the Great Depression at least somewhat shorter than previous downturns. The fact that it did not stands as a stunning indictment of FDR’s policies.

    The unprecedented duration of the depression also represents an indictment of Herbert Hoover’s approach. This was because Hoover intervened too much not, as Krugman would have it, too little. Krugman’s article neglects the relevant point that Hoover had pursued a mini-New Deal from 1929 to 1933 via programs such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Federal Farm Board. It was Hoover, not Roosevelt, who was the first president to reject the advice of the “leave it alone liquidationists.” Instead of letting malinvestments (or toxic assets in today’s parlance) readjust at a lower level, he desperately propped them up. In great part because of Hoover’s high wage policies, real wages were actually 12 percent higher in 1932 than in 1929! Meanwhile, of course, unemployment advanced to record levels as businesses saved on payroll costs by laying off workers. Perhaps if Hoover had listened to the advice of the so-called “liquidationists,” the depression would have been over by 1931.

    More troubling, at least for opponents of war, is Krugman’s dubious contention that “What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.” The evidence does not support the view that that war was beneficial for the economy. In a seminal article for the Journal of Economic History, Robert Higgs convincingly challenged the Keynesian theory of World War II as put forward by Krugman and others.

    While unemployment disappeared during the war, it was hardly a step forward. Moving men and women from the unemployment lines to the killing fields of Anzio did not represent economic progress in any meaningful sense. During the war, Americans at home suffered from rationing, shortages, more accidents on the job, longer hours, and many other measures of economic deprivation. Moreover, as Higgs points out, “real personal consumption declined. So did real private investment. From 1941 to 1943 real gross private domestic investment plunged by 64 percent; during the four years of the war it never rose above 55 percent of its 1941 level; only in 1946 did it reach a new high.”

    According to Higgs, genuine prosperity did not begin to return until the last months of 1945 and 1946. This prosperity occurred under a policy of reverse Keynesianism which included massive reductions in spending because of demoblization, rapid steps toward price decontrol, and scaled back deficit spending.

    Higgs sums it up:

    World War II, the so-called Good War, has been a fount of historical fallacies. One of the greatest—and one of the most pernicious for subsequent policymakers—is the notion that prosperity prevailed during the war. Although Americans might have been dying in the Pacific and European theaters of war, people on the home front actually benefited from the war, because it propelled the economy at long last out of the Great Depression. This view of the war would be sufficiently egregious if it were true, but despite the claims of historians for the past half century, it is not true.

    Obama's best hope to bring lasting recovery is to let the economy go through a short, but sharp, readjustment. He needs to remove the malivestments not, contra Krugman, perpetuate them. Obama can faciliate this readjustment to a more sustainable level by cancelling the bailout, cutting spending, and pruning deficits. Another worthy goal would be to dismantle the Federal Reserve which helped to create this mess through its easy credit policies.

    Most of all, however, Obama should end our costly empire by closing down our overseas bases and bringing home the troops. Only then, can we start to get our financial house in order and move towards genuine economic well being.

    Read More...

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 8:11 PM | Comments (3) | Top

    Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom: Racial Gerrymandering Is Unnecessary

    Source: WSJ (11-11-08)

    [Ms. Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Thernstrom is professor of history at Harvard University. They are the co-authors of "America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible" (Simon & Schuster, 1997).]

    The conventional wisdom among voting-rights advocates and political scientists has been that whites will not vote for black candidates in significant numbers. Hence the need for federal protection in the form of race-based districts that create safe black constituencies where black candidates are sure to win.

    But the myth of racist white voters was destroyed by this year's presidential election.

    Although six out of 10 votes cast for Barack Obama came from whites, he did not win an overall majority of white votes -- he lost among this group 43%-55%. But no Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 has won the majority of whites. The reason is simple: Just as African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately Democrats, whites are now disproportionately Republicans.

    Remember Mr. Obama's weak performance with working-class white voters during the primaries? Many speculated at the time, and right up to Nov. 4, that those voters who pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton would defect to John McCain.

    Not so. Mr. Obama's 43% share of the white vote in the general election was actually a tad larger than that of John Kerry in 2004 (41%) or Al Gore in 2000 (42%).

    So what happened to all those "racists" or "rednecks" that John Murtha spoke of so recently? If there had been that many of them, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia and Florida would have gone the other way, and we would have a President-elect McCain today. Racism is the Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark in the night....

    Black candidates can win in multi-ethnic and even majority-white districts with color-blind voting. Mr. Obama should make it a priority to give more aspiring black politicians the opportunity to stand before white (and Latino and Asian and other ethnic) voters. He won, so can they.

    American voters have turned a racial corner. The law should follow in their footsteps.

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Daniel Pipes: Foreword to Hamas vs. Fatah ... The Struggle for Palestine

    Source: Daniel Pipes Website (11-11-08)

    Divisions among Palestinians generally do not receive their due attention, Jonathan Schanzer correctly points out, in the immense academic and journalistic coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, an official, propagandistic, and inaccurate party line holds sway. To quote Rashid Khalidi, a former Palestine Liberation Organization employee now teaching at Columbia University,[i] a "uniform Palestinian identity" exists. The Palestinians are one—full stop, end of story.

    This simplistic and ahistorical understanding largely dominates how outsiders see the Palestinians, to the near exclusion of other, more nuanced analyses, and the party line afflicts the whole history of the conflict—the period before 1948,[ii] the heyday of pan-Arabism, the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and especially the 20-year period, 1987 to 2007, that Schanzer studies in the following pages. As he puts it, "While the mainstream American media overreported the violence between the Palestinians and Israelis, the ‘other struggle for Palestine,' which began to play out between Fatah and Hamas, received little to no coverage in America."

    Many differences divide Palestinians—Muslim and Christian, urban and rural, sedentary and nomadic, rich and poor, regional—but Schanzer, a highly talented historian of the modern Middle East, establishes here the nature, extent, and significance of two specific intra-Palestinian tensions: primarily that fight between Fatah and Hamas, for this has the most acute and immediate political importance, and secondarily the dichotomy between the West Bank and Gaza.

    Hamas versus Fatah traces the history of the two groups' relations from the emergence of Hamas in late 1987 to the Hamas conquest of Gaza in June 2007, then surveys the implications of this hostile but subtle relationship. In summary, Schanzer traces the simultaneous weakening of Fatah and strengthening of Hamas over this period. By 2008, Fatah's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is enfeebled, "no more than the president of the Muqata compound in Ramallah," while Hamas rules the roost in Gaza, threatens to seize power on the West Bank, sends hundreds of rockets into Israel,[iii] and even challenges the government of Egypt.[iv]

    This dramatic shift in fortunes can be attributed to many factors, but perhaps most of all to the fact that whereas Yasir Arafat's Fatah was all things to all Palestinians, Hamas represents a coherent movement, with a fixed outlook and specific goals. Time and again Schanzer demonstrates how the discipline and purpose of Hamas has given it the edge over the corrupt and amorphous Fatah.

    Palestinian self-destruction, neglected or not, ranks as a major U.S. foreign policy concern, especially since 1993, when Washington cast its lot with Yasir Arafat, Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian Authority, hoping against hope that Western backing would transform a revolutionary movement long allied with the Soviet Union into an agency of good government and status quo aspirations.

    Among its many conceptual mistakes, this hope implied devoting too little attention to the competition raging between Fatah and Hamas since 1987 for the backing of the Palestinian street, a competition that impelled Fatah not be seen as going easy on Israel but as aggressively anti-Zionist as Hamas. Given that Fatah was in negotiations with successive Israeli governments and it had to make gentle noises to the Israeli and western media, the organization had to take a particularly ferocious stance on the ground. What American (and Israeli) policy makers tended to dismiss as incidental turned out to have deep and abiding consequences; suffice it to say that the Palestinian constituency for accepting Israel as a Jewish state has steadily lowered since the heady days of late 1993, to the point that it now represents only about a fifth of the body politic.

    Schanzer also documents the cost for U.S. foreign policy of inattention to the Fatah-Hamas fitna (Arabic for "internal strife"). For one thing, it led to a misreading of the Palestinian mood in the period leading up to the January 2006 elections, causing Washington to keep promoting them in the happy expectation that its favorite, Fatah, would win; when elections came, the crushing victory by Hamas over Fatah came as a shock. For another, in early 2007, what Schanzer calls "relatively weak mainstream media coverage" of Fatah-Hamas fighting meant that the June conquest of Gaza by Hamas came as another surprise to the Bush administration. In brief, those responsible for American interests neither anticipated nor prepared for the two climatic events in Hamas's rise to power, a situation as embarrassing as it is revealing. So limited an understanding of the issues almost guarantees severe policy mistakes.

    Why, given the extent of intra-Palestinian differences and their importance, has this subject been so rudely ignored? Schanzer prudently stays away from this sensitive topic, but what keeps researchers away in droves should at least be mentioned. I believe it reflects the fact that few academics have a genuine interest in the Palestinians. Rather, they devote outsized attention to this otherwise small and obscure population because it represents a convenient and potent tool with which to malign Israel.

    Organizations intent on criticizing Israel's every move[v] by default become masters of tiny Palestinian grievances. They document in loving detail residential and transportation patterns in the West Bank, water and electricity grids in Gaza, and impediments to reaching holy places in Jerusalem. Those intent on showing Israel in a bad light must champion the Palestinians with allegations of mass executions, torture, denial of hospital services—but this should not be confused with genuine concern for the Palestinians. Nor does it lead to an understanding of Palestinian life.

    It particularly pleases me that the author undertook some of his initial research for this study while at the Middle East Forum, the research institute I direct, notably his studies on Fatah versus Hamas,[vi] on comparative Palestinian uprisings,[vii] and on the Gaza–West Bank split.[viii] This last discussion, elaborated here in chapter 11, offers a particularly valuable review of the many and growing differences between the "two Palestines," a subject on which there is hardly anything in English but the writings by Jonathan Schanzer.

    Most books on the Arab-Israeli conflict tread well-worn ground. Hamas versus Fatah offers an original analysis of a key topic.

    Notes

    i. Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, "Arafat Minion as Professor," Washington Times, July 9, 2004.
    ii. For a recent and notable exception, see Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
    iii    . Izz al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades Web site, "In January 2008 Al Qassam Brigades fired 540 rocket and missile and killed two Zionists," February 2, 2008.
    iv    . Cable News Network, "'Dozens Hurt' in Gaza Border Clashes," January 27, 2008.
    v    . An excellent case study of this phenomenon can be found in Erik R. Nelson and Alan F. H. Wisdom, Human Rights Advocacy in the Mainline Protestant Churches (2000–2003) (Washington, DC: Institute on Religion & Democracy, 2004).
    vi    . Jonathan Schanzer, "The Challenge of Hamas to Fatah," Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2003).
    vii    . Jonathan Schanzer, "Palestinian Uprisings Compared," Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2002).
    viii    . Jonathan Schanzer, "A Gaza-West Bank Split? Why the Palestinian Territories Might Become Two Separate States," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin (July 2001).

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 4:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Nathan Kozuskanich: How a search of Early Republic newspapers turned up evidence relevant to the Supreme Court gun case

    Source: Readex.com (11-1-08)

    The quest for original intent has dominated Second Amendment scholarship, a trend further solidified in the Supreme Court’s recent gun case, District of Columbia v. Heller. In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia insisted that the “normal meaning” of the words of the Second Amendment must be used to understand the Framers’ intent, not “secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation.”1 But how can scholars (and justices, for that matter) determine the normal meaning of words? How can we divine what the Founders meant when they recognized the right of the people to keep and bear arms?

    The debate over the Second Amendment has largely revolved around whether the right to bear arms protects an individual right to self defense or a collective right to keep arms for service in a militia. To date, most scholarship has sampled select quotations from a relatively narrow set of sources to determine the meaning of key phrases like “bear arms.” Readex has now made it possible to search the historical record in a systematic and comprehensive way. Indeed, digital archives with keyword search capabilities can help us understand the meaning of historical phrases with relative certainty.

    My research into the Second Amendment, published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, uses keyword searching to access the considerable volume of material in the Readex digital archives.2 The Early American Imprints series contains over 15,500 documents from the crucial period of 1763 to 1791, 273 of which contain the phrase “bear arms.”3 If we discard the many reprints of the Bill of Rights, all quotations of the text of the Second Amendment in Congressional debate, irrelevant foreign news, reprints of the Declaration of Independence and all repeated or similar articles, 111 hits remain, of which only two do not use the phrase to explicitly connote a military meaning.4 Using the same method of sorting results from the 132 papers published from 1763 to 1791, the Early American Newspapers database returns 115 relevant hits, with all but five using a military construction of “bear arms.”5

    The sources prove that Americans consistently employed “bear arms” in a military sense in times of peace and in times of war. The results show that the militia and the common defense was a perennial concern often discussed in pamphlets and newspapers, unlike the individual right to self-defense. ...

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Martin Gilbert: What might have happened if Haig had his way?

    Source: Times (UK) (11-11-08)

    [Sir Martin Gilbert’s books include The Atlas of the First World War.]

    Imagine: in October 1918, Lloyd George’s Cabinet is planning for a prolonged struggle in 1919. Haig’s solution promises to avoid a confrontation even bloodier than the Somme or Passchendaele. The Government agrees. Germany’s main condition is to keep the vast swath of Russia that her troops have occupied since the Bolshevik revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March.

    With peace made with Germany on Haig’s terms by mid-October, the British troops already in Russia have a German ally to help them to crush what Churchill calls “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism”.

    The even worse spectre of a Bolshevised Germany is also averted. German revolutionary activities in the ports, and in Berlin itself, are crushed by German troops from the Western Front.

    The Kaiser re-enters Berlin before the revolutionary railway workers seize the junctions and prevent his return (as they intend to do in November). Hitler, returning from the hospital where he was treated for gas inhalation, finds not a demoralised Germany, but a confident, victorious one, of which he can be proud. Nazism never comes to pass.

    In the Middle East an early peace with Turkey hardly dents British ambitions. General Allenby has been master of Jerusalem since the end of 1917. Only the French suffer, as Damascus is still under the Turks: but for Britain that is a bonus, forestalling French ambitions where they most clash with those of Britain. Lloyd George, with his prewar experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer, sees yet another benefit. Britain’s mounting war debt to the US grows no more. The Cabinet discussions of how the war would be fought in 1919 are against a background of growing British indebtedness. By making peace with Germany, Britain can destroy the eleven-month-old Bolshevik regime. Imperial Russia pays the vast war debts it owes Britain, debts that the Bolsheviks will refuse to pay.

    With that money Britain really is able to build a postwar Britain “fit for heroes”...

    Posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 7:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Martin E. Marty: Base Rebuilding

    Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (11-10-08)

    If you trust the blunt instrument of exit polls, you will have followed up after the presidential election by reading somewhat contradictory observations by experienced columnists. To put an old cliché to work, Naomi Schaefer Riley in the November 7th Wall Street Journal sees the glass half full for those who notice "Evangelical" and "Catholic" cohorts "staying the course" and not deserting the Republican ranks. Looking at the same statistics but parsing them differently, Laurie Goldstein in that same day's New York Times sees their glass half empty, since Mr. Obama had "succeeded in chiseling off small but significant chunks of white evangelical voters who have been the foundation of the Republican Party for decades, especially among the young."

    The exit polls left a mix of data that will keep analysts busy for a long time to come, especially since the Republican campaign for November 2012 began November 6. What else did Sightings observe? Catholic voters this time around switched, and their majority voted Democratic, as they did in olden days. It is hard to be sure about trends, however, since this time a large component in what a long time ago had been the Catholic bloc is made up of Hispanics, whose agenda is not the same as that of non-Hispanic Catholics. Anti-abortion rights and anti-same-sex-marriage rites are the two enduring warm-button issues for many Catholics, but only one-fourth of them say that the abortion issue is highly important for them, however their bishops instruct them to vote.

    Mainline Protestants are always the hardest group to analyze; evidently a slight majority of them voted Democratic, but they do not line up so predictably on the two issues that keep Catholics and older Evangelicals "loyal." While mainliners tend to be very politically involved, in the main they do not choose their congregational or denominational affiliation on the basis of partisan directives on any issues, including the two which are up front on the right flank among the culture warriors. African-Americans went hugely for the Democrats, even though they are usually typed as "social conservatives." Their divided mind confuses the scene, creatively, I might add.

    The Christian Right has been pronounced dead or dying after the elections of 1964, 1976, and 1988. Now their setbacks, intra-partisan divisions, and the re-settings of agenda priorities among "Evangelicals" and "the Born Again" may tempt some commentators to write first drafts of obituaries again. While their base is too small and their themes too narrow for them to attract coalition partners and thus win electoral majorities in any near future, it is firm enough to demand notice. Some of us who look for good signs in these bad economic times might hope that the desperate economic (and health-care and educational and foreign-policy) crises would push the warriors to the edges of the stage. Those who are wearied by the attack ads of the recent campaign and deafened by media distortions on the religious front all around might hope that political combat would replace culture wars.

    Could we be so fortunate? While nobody asked me to formulate Laws, I offer my long-held observation and thesis, Marty's Law: No one ever wins culture wars. The political public may move on and return to other focuses. Those who think they have "won" religiously-based culture wars never really vanquish the opposition, and those who have "lost" come back to fight another day. When the dust of battle settles, nothing but that dust has been settled, and national life continues on bloodied ground.

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Robert H. Zieger: 'Labor did it' again

    Source: Gainsville Sun (11-9-08)

    [Robert H. Zieger is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida.]

    In 1948 when Harry Truman was asked to what he attributed his stunning upset victory over Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, he replied "Labor did it."

    He was referring to the unprecedented commitment of financial and manpower support to his candidacy contributed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial organizations (CIO), at that time separate national labor bodies.

    The endless TV, newspaper, and Internet discussions in the aftermath of Barack Obama's remarkable victory brought Truman's quip to mind. Pundits have highlighted a number of factors to account for Obama's showing.

    African-Americans turned out in massive numbers, awarding the Democratic candidate a remarkable 97 percent of their votes.

    Obama, it appears, won the battle for the "hearts and minds" of Latino and Hispanic voters, seemingly by a two-to-one majority.

    Fifty-five percent of women supported him, as apparently did a majority of voters earning over $200,000 in family income.

    Virtually every expert has highlighted the vote of young people, noting both the massive turnout among those in the 18-to-29 year-old bracket and the 70 percent support they awarded Obama.

    Neglected in most of these postmortems, however, is the role that organized labor played in the campaign. Indeed, in this election the AFL-CIO and its affiliated organizations conducted labor's largest political mobilization ever.

    Consider these facts:

    * Union members and their families comprised about 21 percent of the voting public.

    * Union voters backed the Obama-Biden ticket overwhelmingly. Sixty-nine percent supported the Democratic candidate. In key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio and Florida, Obama-Biden outpolled McCain-Palin by 41 points among union voters.

    * More than 250,000 union volunteers walked the neighborhoods and distributed flyers. They made 70 million phone calls.

    * The AFL-CIO's My Vote, My Right program protected voters from harassment and petty challenges by placing 2,700 union volunteer poll monitors at key locations.

    * While McCain captured a majority among those over 65 years old, retired union members supported Obama by a 46 point margin.

    * McCain won among veterans, but union veterans went for Obama by a 25-point margin.

    Labor activist are well aware that President Obama and the Democratic congressional majority will face difficult issues and will have to be responsive to a wide diversity of viewpoints.

    At the same time, however, working people and their unions do expect that their efforts in the campaign entitle them to sympathetic consideration of their legislative and political goals. They are determined to promote health care reform, more equitable taxation, and changes in economic policy that will benefit low-wage and middle-income families....

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 9:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jim Sleeper: Swear Him in as 'Barack Hussein Obama'

    Source: TPM (Liberal blog) (11-9-08)

    Even as we all lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama."

    During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.

    Sure, the mind reels. Hussein is a title of honor applied to metaphorical descendants of the prophet Mohammed. An American president bearing that name proudly would enact what philosophers call a transvaluation of values -- a wicked case of cognitive dissonance for millions of people like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

    German minds reeled 65 years ago, too, at the ascendancy of an American named Eisenhower to command the allied forces and, five years later, to be president. After all, German-Americans had been a despised, persecuted minority here during World War I, less than three decades before Eisenhower's ascent.

    To be sure, the situation now is even more polarizing for Muslims, here and abroad. Islamicists, confronted with a Hussein in the White House, will rage that the Great Satan has stolen and polluted a holy name. But where were they when the phony pietiest Saddam Hussein, an admirer more of Stalin than Mohammed, was butchering millions?

    Unlike the rule of that Hussein and of oil sheiks, mullahs, and the Taliban, the very prospect of our Hussein's inauguration is raising millions of young Muslims' democratic hopes even higher than America has raised their material and sensual ones. (And, given present circumstances, it's telling that just when Obama's election was about to reflect Western democracy's deepest strengths, the iconically Western Gordon Brown was begging the Saudis to aid the International Monetary Fund.)

    Notice, too, the symbolic and substantive impact Barack Hussein Obama is having on African-American youths' already waning attraction to the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan lives a stone's throw from the Obamas in Southside Chicago. Farrakhan endorsed Obama with a kind of desperation last summer, only to be rebuffed. That tells us all we need to know, as I explained here then, successfully, to nervous Jewish voters.

    Still other ironies in Obama's name are rich beyond measure. Barack is Arabic for the Hebrew Baruch, meaning "blessed" in both tongues -- another of the many achingly poignant, almost illicit, intimacies between the two languages and religions. The most famous Jew to bear the name was the medieval philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who crossed Christian and Jewish lines, blurring them in order to transcend them.

    Obama's story draws all three lines of Abrahamic religion -- Christian, Muslim, and Jewish - into a convergence more promising than that drawn more than a century ago by the Rev. George Bush, a Presbyterian scholar, brother of our president's fifth-generation lineal antecedent, and the first teacher of Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic and ancient languages at New York University in the 1830s.

    In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived: An Attempted Proof of the Restoration and Conversion of the Jews, which interpreted the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel to prophesy Jews' return to Palestine from all over the world in what Bush insisted was the not-distant future.

    I doubt that our departing president has read his ancestor's exegesis, and if he doesn't know the Book of Ezekiel, Barack Obama certainly does. In his speech on race in Philadelphia last winter, Obama recalled that, for his black Congregational Church in Chicago, "Ezekiel's field of dry bones" was one of the "stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope" that "became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears."

    Not incidentally, the Rev. Bush, who imagined the Jews' return to Palestine as a prelude to Armageddon, also wrote the first American book on Islam, a Life of Mohammed, declaring the prophet an imposter. That's two additional reasons why America's Christian, Jewish, and Muslim prospects are brighter with Barack Hussein Obama than with any of the George Bushes we've known, not to mention with Karl Christian Rove.

    Obama may be no more a messenger of God than Rove or "W" are, yet at moments his campaign did flash intimations of the awful sublimity of the Hebrew God's thundering in history; of the Christian pilgrim's exalted, arduous journey; and of the Muslim ummah's bonds of communal faith.

    And he does understand -- as did an Abraham who was called Lincoln -- that this republic should keep on weaving into its tough, liberal tapestry the threads of intrepid Abrahamic faith that have figured so strongly in its beginnings and triumphs. That Obama draws this understanding from intimacies with Ezekiel and Indonesia and Southside Chicago makes him providential enough.

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 6:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Ruth Rosen: Women Sealed the Deal

    Source: TPM (Liberal blog) (11-9-08)

    For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted.

    Well, this time they did, and there is no doubt that women were a decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama.

    To listen to the pundits, however, you'd think that only youth (bless them!) and minorities turned out in overwhelming numbers to stand on endless lines to elect the first African American and liberal and brilliant president.

    Frank Rich, whom I admire tremendously, even missed the boat. In his Sunday New York Times column in The Week in Review, Rich never mentioned the amazing gender gap that catapulted a young and relatively unknown senator to become our 44th president.

    Just take a serious look at the numbers. As the data in the Week in Review in the New York Times reveals, women constituted 53% of the electorate, while only 47% of men voted. Among those who voted for Obama, 56% were women and 43% were men. Among unmarried women, a whopping 70% voted for Obama.

    There are many variables in this data that need to be explained. The extraordinary female vote almost certainly came largely from minority and young women. But even white, married women, who usually vote more conservatively, went for Obama.

    Does this matter? Yes, and here's why. For years, women have been saying that we are invisible in this political culture. The consequence of this invisibility is that our poverty, our economic insecurity, our need for health care, child care, elder care, and equality in wages and training are also ignored.

    So, with all due respect to those who are praising the young and minorities, and rightfully blessing their energy and enthusiasm, take a good hard look and notice that it was women who, in the end, sealed the deal.

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 6:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: Let's See That Audacity In Action

    Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (11-10-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    Democrats in Washington are juggling their policy lineup. In preparation for January, President-Elect Barack Obama and the congressional leadership must decide which issues to roll out first and which should be left for another time.

    The urban crisis should be at the top of their list. Much of this campaign centered on the middle class. Politically, it was a logical focus for Democrats who wanted to win the White House.

    But the cities are in desperate need of repair. They cannot wait for another election cycle. The not-so big secret about Hurricane Katrina was that weather was not the main reason that the city was in shambles. The hurricane made things worse, but like so many other cities, decades of total neglect and harmful policies allowed racial and economic inequality to define life in the inner cities. In his award-winning book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, the historian Tom Sugrue demonstrated how urban decline predated the riots of the 1960s, and was rooted in housing and employment discrimination, as well as the flight of jobs out of the cities, dating back to the 1940s.

    With the current economic crisis, the situation will only get worse. Mayor Nutter just announced rather draconian budget cuts for Philadelphia which reveal how much worse conditions might get.

    Why should President Obama make the urban crisis a top priority? Why take the risk? The first reason is that African Americans constituted a crucial part of President Obama's coalition. He was able to mobilize voters who for too long had been disaffected and disenfranchised from national politics. Obama has raised the hope that this time things will be different. Since the end of WWII, the African American community has been hit hardest in the inner cities. Job flight has left them without viable economic opportunities. Decaying educational systems, often made worse by the requirements of "No Child Left Behind," make it almost impossible to get ahead.

    The second reason for making the issue a priority is more practical. America is currently suffering from a severe economic crisis, one that could easily get worse if the federal government does not act soon. Now is the time when politicians need to link Main Street to the "Corner," and not just link Wall Street to Main Street.

    The support for government intervention in the economy is much stronger now than it has been in recent decades. Senator McCain's attacks on "socialism" didn't work this time. Many blue collar and middle income voters in states like PA and OH supported the Democrats, defying the so-called "Bradley Effect" and showing support instead for substantial economic assistance. There have even been some Republicans, including Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback, who have broken with their party and emphasized the centrality of tackling these issues.

    This situation offers Democrats an opportunity to make urban renewal part of an omnibus economic package. Democrats finally have leverage to push for measures to deal with a variety of issues -- inner city schooling, job growth, sentencing and prison reform, and other challenges -- in exchange for the financial assistance sought by automobile makers, Wall Street investors, middle class homeowners and the rest of America.

    The Obama-Biden campaign made broad promises about urban policy during the campaign. Their campaign said that Obama would establish a White House Office on Urban Policy to coordinate government efforts and make sure federal dollars were used well. The campaign also said it would back the creation of innovation clusters to boost local economies and strengthen workforce training. The Democratic campaign also discussed the distribution of capital through the Small Business Administration to bolster under-served businesses. Finally, they said they would create "promise neighborhoods" to deal with intergenerational poverty through a network of services and to work on programs to help poor Americans enter the work force.

    At a minimum, the economic stimulus package should include infrastructure repair programs that place great emphasis on the cities and make certain that public jobs are allocated toward residents in those areas who are in need of gainful employment.

    In the brilliant television show The Wire, viewers were able to see how deeply entrenched the problems are that plague the inner cities of America, where the drug trade is often the only economic game in town. Improving the cities will require a long-term effort and involve multiple interventions. But we must have the audacity to believe that conditions can be improved and do something to make that happen. Now is the time to begin the process.

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Richard Reeves: The Fifth 'Pivot Point' Election

    Source: Richard Reeves Website (10-31-08)

    "Do Elections Matter?" That was the title of a conference of historians, journalists and other interested parties sponsored by The New York Historical Society last week. The answer, of course, was "yes" — and this one matters a good deal more than most.

    The tone of the day's talk was set at the beginning by Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale. In a presentation I agreed with, Amar raised the possibility that the 2008 election could be remembered as the fifth "pivot point" election in the presidency's 219-year history.

    In Amar's reading, history was changed and the United States was headed in new directions by the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932 and either 1968 or 1980, depending on whether you believe the conservative ascendancy we are living through right now began with Richard Nixon in 1968 or with Ronald Reagan in 1980. (I would choose 1980.)

    In the 12 years following adoption of the Constitution, the new nation was governed by its Federalist founding fathers, led by George Washington and John Adams. Then, in 1800, Adams was defeated by Thomas Jefferson, a founding father but not a Federalist. Then, until 1860, the presidency was held by the Democratic Party created by Jefferson and institutionalized by Andrew Jackson — a reign interrupted only briefly by a few relatively unimportant Whig administrations.

    In 1860, the new Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, took office and held power for 72 years — with a couple of Democratic exceptions, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, neither of whom ever won 50 percent of the vote — until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Then, I would argue, with the exception of the above-party presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and the aborted presidency of Richard Nixon, the New Deal Democrats basically ran the country until the election of a Republican, Ronald Reagan, in 1980.

    And for all practical purposes, Reagan is still president, represented now by a diminishing imitator, George W. Bush.

    That is the thesis. Amar then expanded the idea by arguing that the "pivot point" elections were quite similar to each other — and to the election of 2008. Each of them, he says, was marked by the same conditions: economic decline, over-reactive wars or war talk that led to repression of civil liberties at home.

    In 1800, John Adams ended Federalist rule by over-reacting to war fever and pushing through the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were the repressive Homeland Security laws of their day. The Jefferson-Jackson era lasted until the 1850s, when the country moved toward civil war because Democrats, many of them Southerners, proved incapable of finding a national policy to deal with the issues of slavery. Lincoln's party reigned until economic collapse led to the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Failed wars in Southeast Asia and the Iranian hostage crisis led to the elections of Nixon and Reagan. The Democrats managed to elect two presidents in the Nixon-Reagan years, but neither of them, Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, ever won 50 percent of the vote.

    Amar believes that a significant inertia was produced after each of those pivot elections; the ideas that made presidents of Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan produced issues that kept their constituencies alive and well for years, even decades, after their own administrations.

    And now 2008. The country is engaged in two unpopular and probably unwinnable wars, the economy is in dangerous decline, and civil liberties have been aggressively repressed by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terror.
    Therein, historically, lies the strength of the candidacy of Barack Obama. Despite his obvious political talents, it is hard to imagine a young, black two-year senator rising toward the presidency if his Republican opponent could have preached the winning doctrine of peace, prosperity and low taxation.

    But there is no peace. There is no prosperity. And, whether through taxes or borrowing, the voters are going to foot the bill for the misjudgments and mistakes of the last eight years. The next question, in Amar's terms, is how solid a coalition and how many Democratic terms might follow an Obama victory — or, to be consistent, a Bush-Reagan defeat.

    Posted on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Eric Alterman: A Liberal Supermajority (Finally) Finds Its Voice

    Source: Nation (10-29-08)

    [Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and "Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York, and a history consultant to HBO Films.]

    Readers of the Washington Post woke up one recent Friday morning to a remarkable juxtaposition of two ostensibly unrelated articles. The first was a news analysis titled The End of American Capitalism?, which heralded the apparent demise of laissez-faire as the intellectual underpinning of the nation's economic system. In the same paper was another story: Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally, which described a John McCain event characterized by hysterical crowd attacks on Barack Obama as an ally of terrorists, a "socialist" and other angry epithets. By coincidence, the thread that connected these two disparate stories could be found that morning in the New York Times, in an implicitly self-critical column by David Brooks. He wrote:

    Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals.... Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.... But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts.... What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.

    Brooks--a nearly perfect product of the right-wingers' long-term investment in the fertilization of the conservative imagination, having done stints at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard before being invited to the Times and PBS's NewsHour--was unwittingly explaining the connection between the collapse of Friedmanite capitalism and the mindless fury of the Republican base. The upshot is that conservatives, having fed at the trough of power for the better part of three decades, are out of ideas and have targeted their appeal to a coterie of Americans remarkably similar to the minority coalition enjoyed by Barry Goldwater in 1964, with an angry, retrograde message that harks back to Joe McCarthy. McCain's baffling, fumbling performances at the presidential debates reflect this confusion. He didn't know whether to attack Obama or defend what remains of his reputation. Pathetically, he ended up accomplishing neither.

    Liberals and progressives, however, are in the opposite position. Obama has proven an inspirational messenger, speaking to and for a public eager to embrace the kind of politics that has been demonized and trivialized for the past eight years by mainstream media desperate to deflect the right's accusations of "liberal bias." According to the Pew Center's extensive national survey, released well before this endless election got under way, roughly 70 percent of respondents believe that the government has a responsibility "to take care of people who can't take care of themselves." Two-thirds (66 percent)--including most of those who say they would prefer a smaller government (57 percent)--support government-funded health insurance for all citizens. Most also regard the nation's corporations as too powerful, while nearly two-thirds (65 percent) say corporate profits are too high--about the same number who say "labor unions are necessary to protect the working person" (68 percent). When it comes to the environment, a large majority (83 percent) back stricter laws and regulations, while 69 percent agree "we should put more emphasis on fuel conservation than on developing new oil supplies" and 60 percent say they would "be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment."

    Yet the MSM--with precious few exceptions--remain wedded to right-wing assumptions long since discredited by reality. We don't need to look at extremes like the infamous performance of ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson in the Clinton-Obama debate in January--one that may possibly have cost that network any hope of participating in the general election debates. Just examine the thrust of the questions asked during the Obama-McCain contests. Even absent distractions like lapel pins and preacher politics, virtually all questions regarding the financial crisis assumed that the meltdown calls for a drastic reduction in public investment--as if Keynesianism, rather than Friedmanite economics, were somehow at fault. And why was just about every foreign policy question predicated on the alleged efficacy of neocon-style threats of the use of force? Where were the questions about the need for collective action to combat climate change? Where were the debates about the causes and effects of the global migration and food crises? Why did we hear not a single inquiry about the challenges to labor and environmental standards arising from the billion or so workers in China, India and elsewhere, who stand ready to displace millions of Americans in our increasingly globalized workplace? And where were the questions about torture, wiretapping US citizens and restoring respect for our Constitution?

    In a wonderfully apoplectic editorial titled A Liberal Supermajority, frightened Journal editors worried that an Obama landslide could presage "one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933." Among the coming horrors: "Medicare for all...[a] green revolution...ational, election-day voter registration...the end of Guantanamo and military commissions...'net neutrality' rules...."

    America's liberal supermajority has watched as its country has been degraded and dishonored for the past eight years while many in the MSM have either cheered, acquiesced or looked the other way. If you ask me, the pundit with the greatest gift for political prophecy right now is the late, great Sam Cooke: "It's been a long, long time coming, but I know a change is [finally] going to come."

    Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

    Posted on Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Martin Gilbert: The British heroes after Kristallnacht

    Source: Times (UK) (11-10-08)

    [Sir Martin Gilbert's book Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, is published in paperback by HarperCollins.]

    No event in the history of the Third Reich provoked such immediate outrage outside Germany as Kristallnacht: the destruction of synagogues and prayer houses across Germany and Austria, the looting of Jewish homes and businesses, and the murder of as many as a hundred Jews in their homes and in the streets. This orgy of destruction was followed by the immediate deportation of 30,000 Jewish men to concentrations camps.

    Foreign journalists who witnessed the events of the night of November 9/10 reported in the fullest details to their newspapers. Foreign diplomats alerted their foreign officers to the anti-Jewish excesses of that night.

    In response to the press coverage and parliamentary pressure, the British Government welcomed in more than 9,000 Jewish children before the escape routes were closed by the outbreak of war. Several thousand Christian families took these children into their homes.

    History is the collective actions of myriad individuals, few of them well known or famous. Among those who showed that nobility of spirit that characterised the rescuers of Jews in those final ten months of peace were two teachers in the West of England, James and Kathleen Crossfield. They took in Pauline Makowski, a ten- year-old Jewish girl from Stuttgart.

    Writing to me two years ago, Pauline Makowski recalled: “I was fostered by a Christian family from January 16, 1939 until I left their home in 1947 to train as a nurse. Their home was always regarded as my home and their children still regard me as their sister. They were exceptional people and their generosity of spirit should be acknowledged.” Pauline's parents did not survive the war: they were, in her words, “part of the lost six million”.

    Another potential haven for Jews after Kristallnacht was Britain's Palestine Mandate. Largely as a result of the efforts of a British diplomat in Berlin, Captain Frank Foley, the restrictions on Jewish immigration were set aside or bypassed. Foley's work as British Passport Control Officer in the German capital was the “cover” for his Intelligence activities in Germany.

    After Kristallnacht, Foley asked the British Mandate authorities in Jerusalem for extra certificates, including those for a thousand young Jews who would thereby be allowed to leave Germany. Benno Cohn, then a leader of the German-Jewish community, recalled how Foley “did everything in his power to enable us to bring over as many Jews as possible... One can say that he rescued thousands of Jews from the jaws of death.”

    The rooms of the British Consulate where Foley had his offices were transformed into a shelter for Jews looking for protection. One witness recalled how the wives of those who had been taken to concentration camps were “besieging the consulate for a visa that meant liberation for their husbands. It was a question of life or death for several thousands.

    During those days, Captain Foley's extensive humanity became obvious. Day and night he was at the disposition of those seeking help. Generously, he distributed every kind of visa, thus helping the liberation of many thousands from the camps.” Among those who saw Foley at work was a young Dutch Jew, Wim van Leer. “The winter of 1938 was a harsh one,” he later wrote, “and elderly men and women waited from six in the morning, queuing up in the snow and biting wind. Captain Foley saw to it that a uniformed commissionaire trundled a tea-urn on a trolley along the line of frozen misery, and all this despite the clientele, neurotic with frustration and cold, doing little to lighten his task.”

    How does one pay tribute to efforts such as Foley's to save lives? On November 20, at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband will unveil a plaque, to commemorate - in the words of the plaque - “those British diplomats who, by their personal endeavours, helped to rescue victims of Nazi racial policy.” They include Foley, and the British Consul General in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, who made extraordinary efforts after Kristallnacht to process as many British entry visas as possible...

    Posted on Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 7:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Sam Tanenhaus: Harnessing a Cause Without Yielding to It

    Source: NYT (11-8-08)

    The historic victory of Barack Obama contained many dramas, but none was more important than the climactic turn it symbolized in the present-day fortunes of two outsize forces in recent political history — the civil rights movement and the conservative movement.

    Together they have probably been the most powerful engines of political change during the past half-century, but they have also exacted large demands from the two parties and their leaders. And it happened again in this election.

    For Senator Obama, the fraught alliance between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party was a persistent though unwelcome theme in this campaign — whether it was the crisis occasioned by the recorded sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or the defeats Mr. Obama was dealt in the primary by blue-collar voters whose distrust of him seemed to replay the racial anxieties of the 1960s, when civil rights protest loosed a white “backlash” that divided the Democratic Party.

    John McCain, for his part, was haunted by his uneasy and at times hostile dealings through the years with the movement conservatives who helped elect every recent Republican president. In choosing to solicit their support, Mr. McCain alienated the moderates and independents who ultimately deserted him.

    The tangled nexus between movements and parties has been complicating American politics since the middle of the 19th century. To a great extent, both major parties owe their identities to movements.

    The modern Democratic Party was shaped by the populism of the 1890s, the antibusiness reformism of the 1930s and the civil rights crusade of the 1960s. The Republican Party was formed by abolitionism in the 1850s, anti-Communism in the 1950s, antitax revolts in the 1970s and 1980s and the evangelical conservatism of the 1990s and 2000s.

    In each instance, a movement and a party came together. But the partnership was seldom satisfactory to either side. This isn’t surprising. While movements are driven by specific causes (punishing “robber barons,” ending “big government”), parties stay relevant by adjusting to new conditions....

    Posted on Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 7:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Thomas Sugrue: Obama's election means ...

    Source: Boston Globe (11-9-08)

    [Thomas J. Sugrue's new book, "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North," has just been published. He is Kahn professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.]

    ON ELECTION NIGHT, Barack Obama addressed nearly 200,000 supporters in Chicago's Grant Park - the place where, just 40 years earlier, antiwar protesters, hippies, yippies and black radicals clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Alternative visions of America had collided on Chicago's streets: dissent versus "America love it or leave it" patriotism, militancy versus law and order, sexual libertinism versus family values. Obama's Grant Park celebration - just like the election of 2008 - exorcized the ghosts of 1968, perhaps forever.

    Campaigns in the 40-year period leading up to the election of Barack Obama hinged on the great question that Americans, both left and right, raised in the aftermath of the 1960s protests: "What side are you on?" Post-1960s politics fostered polarization: the "silent majority" versus raucous minorities, the Christian nation versus its libertine detractors, hard-working middle Americans versus welfare cheats, small-town gun owners versus latte-sipping urbanites, red states versus blue states. This year, John McCain attempted once again to turn the election into a plebiscite on the 1960s, from his first general election ad on the "Summer of Love," which contrasted McCain's military service and love of country with beaded and bearded protesters on the home front, to his campaign's attempt to brand Obama a socialist and pal of '60s fringe radicals like Bill Ayers of the Weathermen.

    In 2008, however, the return to cultural warfare failed. Barack Obama distanced himself from the 1960s, reminding voters that he was but a child in Hawaii when America exploded in conflict. The activists who protested in the streets in the 1960s and the "silent majority" who railed against them are aging out. Their passions are mostly irrelevant to many younger people who grew up, like Obama, in the world that the 1960s made, a place where cultural differences were a source of pride, not conflict. Obama - and the voters who propelled him to victory (a majority of whom are his age or younger) - inhabit an ethnically and racially diverse America. Hippies and yippies are a thing of the past, but the values of sexual freedom and liberty have entered the mainstream; they even touched Sarah Palin's family.

    Generation Obama has its own issues: global warming, worldwide epidemics, the threat of terrorism, and the collapse of the financial markets, to name a few. McCain's evocations of small-town values, of dissent and the silent majority and campus radicalism, left those problems unaddressed. Obama's rhetoric of unity - of common purpose and common cause - threw the dated politics of division and resentment into the dustbin of history. The cultural warriors, fighting over law and order, God, guns, and family values, will not be silent during the Obama administration, but they are increasingly relics of the past.

    Posted on Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 6:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Eric Foner: Obama's election means ...

    Source: Boston Globe (11-9-08)

    MOST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS do not fundamentally alter the American political landscape. Even when the party in power changes, the basic assumptions governing policy generally remain the same. But in a few critical elections, the advent of a new president is a transformative moment that reshapes American public life for a generation or more.

    Thomas Jefferson's victory in 1800 was a deathblow to the Federalist Party and its goal of wedding the young Republic to the interests of its financial and mercantile elite. The election of 1828 ushered in the era of Jacksonian democracy, which far outlived its namesake's eight years in office. Lincoln's election in 1860 marked the end of slaveholder control of the federal government. McKinley's in 1896 created a Republican majority that lasted (with an interruption by Woodrow Wilson) until the Great Depression. The political alignments and attitudes toward public policy brought into being by Franklin D. Roosevelt after his victory in 1932 persisted into the 1960s. And Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 opened an era of deregulation, deindustrialization, anti-unionism, and the militarization of foreign policy - norms that the three presidents who followed did little to change.

    Future historians may well view Barack Obama's victory as another of these critical elections, the end of the age of Reagan and the beginning of something substantially new. This is not primarily because of his race, although in view of our tortured racial history the election of the first black president indeed represents a watershed. Nor does it arise from the decisive nature of his victory - Jefferson had an extremely narrow margin and Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote. Some landslides, like Eisenhower's in 1952 and 1956, do not mark the advent of a fresh political paradigm. Obama's opportunity rests above all on the fact that his victory arises from a powerful popular desire for change after one of the most disastrous administrations in American history and the wreckage of the ideology that has guided American politics since 1980. Perhaps the end of Reaganism came two weeks ago when Alan Greenspan, the high priest of deregulation during his years as Federal Reserve chairman, admitted that market fundamentalism had failed.

    With its widespread use of today's technology - the Internet, cellphones, text messages - and its massive mobilization of first-time voters, the 2008 campaign will be viewed by future historians as a 21st century prototype. In his personal ancestry, Obama embodies recent social changes that point the way to tomorrow's America - a nation where the old black-white template has given way to a reconfigured landscape of race.

    Obama has the bad luck to come to power in the midst of an economic crisis. He has the good luck to do so in a country yearning for strong leadership and a renewed sense of political possibility. No president can perform miracles. But if, like his most successful predecessors, Obama seizes the occasion by striking out boldly, articulating forcefully a new philosophy of governing at home and relating to the rest of the world, we will add 2008 to the very short list of elections that have truly transformed American life.

    Posted on Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 6:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Robert Dallek: Barack Obama will never become one of America’s forgotten presidents

    Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-8-08)

    [Robert Dallek is the author of several presidential studies, including books on John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and, most recently, Harry Truman.]

    In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, who lost the popular vote to Grover Cleveland, but won the deciding electoral vote, declared that Providence had dictated his elevation to the highest office.

    Providence indeed, a Republican Party boss sniffed, confiding that the new president "would never know how many people were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to put him in that office".

    Today, it is doubtful that more than a handful of Americans would know anything at all about Harrison, his election or what he did as president. Nor would most voters know much, if anything, about other more recent presidencies.

    Occasionally, however, we get a landmark election that resonates for years. Barack Obama's victory was one of those moments. The first African American to win the presidency, the second youngest man ever elected to a first term (only John Kennedy was younger), and the largest voter turnout in decades add up to much more than a passing mention in the history books.

    Of course, if Obama were to prove a great bust - an orator without a ground-breaking programme or the wherewithal to put across more than just the most commonplace legislative and foreign policy initiatives - he'd become another one of the many forgotten presidents, or at best an asterisk as the country's first black chief executive.

    I'm betting otherwise. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F.Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan - the most memorable of the 18 presidents who served in the last century - Obama seems likely to become an unforgettable personality who presided over a transforming administration.

    All those presidents made themselves into household names by the power of their rhetoric and larger-than-life characters.

    All of them had the gift of gab: Theodore Roosevelt used what he called the "bully pulpit" to bring Americans to his side, while Wilson gave speeches which some said were so lyrical that you could have danced to them.

    FDR's "fireside chats" on the radio remain a yardstick for every aspiring politician to measure themselves against; Truman's "Give'em hell Harry" 1948 campaign stands as a model of how the spoken word can convert reluctant voters. JFK's brilliantly crafted inauguration speech and live televised press conferences have kept him in the country's memory for almost five decades; more recently, Reagan's charm and ability to reach mass audiences made him "the Great Communicator."

    There is no better example of the power of presidential personality than the anecdote about the woman who stopped Eleanor Roosevelt on the street after FDR's death to say: "I miss the way your husband used to speak to me about my government."...

    Posted on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 5:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: Obama and Iran

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-8-08)

    President-elect Barack Obama said Friday that "Iran's development of a nuclear weapon, I believe is unacceptable. . . Iran's support of terrorist organizations, I think is something that has to cease."

    What I cannot understand is why American politicians who speak publicly on this issue do not at least acknowledge that to the best information of the American intelligence community, Iran has no nuclear weapons research program,as opposed to a civilian enrichment research program. A pdf of the National Intelligence Estimate on this issue is here. The Bushies and "anonymous senior officials" vowed that the NIE would not be allowed to enter the national debate on this issue and that they would ignore it and go on insisting that Iran has a weapons program. Since they lost, can't we lose the alarmist rhetoric on all this? Some of the information in the NIE was based on information brought out of Iran by defectors.

    It is legitimate to maintain suspicions of Iranian intentions and activities in this regard. I'm not saying we should be patsies. But let's just talk straight about the issue, based on what real evidence is available.

    Also, if the only real reason Iran is accused of supporting international terrorism is its arming of Hizbullah in south Lebanon, that is a pretty problematic charge. The recent agreement among political parties in Lebanon recognized Hizbullah as a kind of Lebanese national guard charged with defending the Lebanese south against Israeli aggression.The cabinet statement refered to "the right of Lebanon's people, army, and resistance to liberate the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, Kafar Shuba Hills, and the Lebanese section of Ghajar village, and defend the country using all legal and possible means." The word "resistance" refers to Hizbullah. The European Union has declined to designate Hizbuallah a terrorist group.

    Usually the phrase "supporter of terrorism" conjures up the image of shadowy groups plotting to blow things up in Vienna or something, not a militia defending national territory against foreign incursions. Hizbullah did commit terrorist acts in the 1980s and 1990s, but I'm not sure what it has done that would technically deserve the name in the past 10 years.

    It would be nice if Washington would itself foreswear all deployment of terrorist groups to obtain its goals.

    Anyway, can't a new administration speak in a more nuanced way about all this?

    Obama also said he would respond "appropriately" to the letter recently sent to him by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad (the first such missive sent by an Iranian president to an American one on the occasion of the latter's election since the 1979 revolution).

    Ahmadinejad wrote to Obama,

    ' "As you know the opportunities provided by the Almighty God, which can be used for elevation of nations, or God forbid, for their collapse, are transient. I hope you will prefer real public interests and justice to the never ending demands of a selfish minority and seize the opportunity to serve people so that you will be remembered with high esteem.

    On the other hand, the Americans who have spiritual tendencies expect the government to spend all its power in line with serving the people, rectify the critical situation facing the US, restore lost reputation as well as their hope and spirit, fully respect human rights and strengthen family foundations.

    Other nations also expect war-oriented policies, occupation, bullying, contempt of nations and imposing discriminatory policies on them to be replaced by the ones advocating justice, respect for human rights, friendship and non-interference in other countries' internal affairs.

    They also want US intervention to be limited to its borders, especially in the Middle East. It is highly expected to reverse the unfair attitude towards restoring the rights of the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans.

    The great nation of Iran welcomes basic and fair changes in US policies and conducts, especially in the region.'


    Reuters shows scenes of Iran and interviews Iranians on the street about their hopes for an Obama administration.



    Despite its religious conservatism, Iran has announced a $2.5 bn. stem cell research program that resembles Obama's aspirations far more than it reflects the politics of George W. Bush.

    Posted on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 5:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Michael Levy: The Myth That Race Didn’t Matter

    Source: Britannica Blog (11-7-08)

    [Michael Levy is Britannica's Executive Editor. He received a bachelor’s degree (1991) in political science from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate (1996) in international relations and comparative politics from the University of Kentucky.] With Barack Obama carrying some 53% of the vote in Tuesday’s election and winning states that Republicans traditionally have won–particularly Virginia and Indiana (where the GOP had won every election since LBJ’s sweep in 1964)–a narrative has formed that there was no Bradley Effect in the election and that race mattered little. Indeed, some commentators have argued that there was a Reverse Bradley Effect and that being African American was an advantage for Obama.

    It is true that Obama performed extraordinarily well compared to other northern Democrats–the last three Democratic presidents (LBJ, Carter, and Clinton) have hailed from the South and southerner Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, while northern Democrats (Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry) have failed to make any inroads into the Republican heartlands. And, Obama’s percentage of the vote was higher than any Democrat since LBJ in 1964.

    In self-congratulatory mode, commentators have been pointing to the exit polls and the maps, showing that Obama did very well compared to other Democrats across the board–among Latinos, African Americans, and even among whites (he won 43% of the white vote according to the exit polls, compared to John Kerry’s 41%).

    But, buried in the results is the fact that while Obama did very well across the country, making almost all areas of the country bluer than they had been in 2004, in some areas he performed worse–much worse–than John Kerry.

    The New York Times map on voting shifts (click on voting shifts on the left) shows this bluer America, but look closely and you’ll see that some areas got not only a little redder but a lot redder.

    For example:

    • Bradley (how appropriate a name, yes?) county, Arkansas: Kerry +5% over Bush; Obama lost by 14% (a net of -19% for Obama)
    • Cameron parish, Louisiana: Kerry -39%; Obama -65% (-26% net for Obama)
    • Humphreys county, Tennessee: Kerry +16%; Obama -3% (-19% for Obama)
    • Knott county, Kentucky: Kerry +28; Obama -8% (-36% net for Obama)
    • Pushmataha county, Oklahoma: Kerry -19%; Obama -43% (-24% net for Obama)

    There are other examples as well where Obama underperformed Kerry, primarily centered from West Virginia southwest, though there were a few pockets in Arizona (to be expected), Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.

    Thus, though Obama improved by about 4 to 5% nationally over Kerry’s total, there are locales where Obama underperformed–badly–versus Kerry.

    This is not to say that the country hasn’t made great strides and that Obama’s victory doesn’t represent a great step forward in racial reconciliation, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that race didn’t matter. It did matter–just not everywhere.

    Posted on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 4:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jeremy Young: Communities of Rumor and the American Electorate

    Source: ProgressiveHistorians (11-8-08)

    [Jeremy Young is a doctoral student in 20th-century U.S. history at Indiana University. He has been blogging for six years at a variety of locations around the web and is a writer for the History News Service.]

    I really can't understand people who look at Sarah Palin, who listen to her obvious incompetence, and see an inspiring leader and future President. Or people who felt the same way about George W. Bush in 2000. Or people who not only hate gay marriage, but honestly believe that it's the greatest threat that faces America today. It's not a matter of disagreeing with those people, as I do with, say, libertarians; their opinions and views simply feel alien to me. How can people in my country look at the same events I'm looking at and see them so differently? Are they wrong, or stupid, or something else?

    A book I read last week, Alain Corbin's The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 (translated by ProgressiveHistorians blogfriend Arthur Goldhammer), suggests an answer. Corbin's book concerns a similarly head-scratching event: in a remote village in industrializing France in 1870, a group of townspeople suddenly turned on a local noble, convinced themselves against all evidence that he was a Prussian and a Republican enemy of the French Emperor, and proceeded to torture him to death over a period of two hours and then burn his corpse in the public square. (They did not, as rumor had it, actually eat him.) Setting aside the stark brutality of the act, how could these upstanding townspeople ignore mountains of evidence and eyewitnesses who insisted they had seen the man many times and that he lived two towns away, and remain convinced that he was in fact a Prussian spy? And in what universe were the monarchical Prussians and French Republicans the same thing, or in any way related?

    Corbin's answer to these questions is very interesting. I'm simplifying his argument a bit, but in brief, he suggests that there are two types of people: those who have access to a steady stream of reliable information about the wider world (in this case, city-dwellers, bourgeois, and the rich) and those who don't. People with little direct knowledge of events, like the peasant murderers in The Village of Cannibals, continue to get indirect knowledge, but it comes in the form of rumor, of bits and pieces of truth intermingled with scraps of various lies. Contrary to what some of us blue-state folks imagine, these people aren't stupid or irrational. Instead, they do the same things the rest of us do with the information they have: take it in, try to make sense of competing data, construct a coherent mental narrative, and interpret observed events in light of that narrative. What's more, they don't do this in isolation, but in near-constant communication with one another -- forming what can perhaps best be described as a "community of rumor." Certainly some people in that community have a better understanding of the wider world than do others, but it's very hard to tell which is which when everybody believes something different. Eventually a consensus is reached, and that becomes "truth." It's a process very familiar to us in the "reality-based community," except that the raw material -- actual, comprehensive knowledge of situations and events -- is missing. There's nothing wrong with the way these people think -- the problem is with the information they have to start with.

    In the case of Corbin's villagers, a lot of their reasoning was sound given the information they had to go on. A lot of their confusion centered on the issue of taxation. The Orleanist monarchy, which ruled from 1830-1848, had imposed a crushing tax on the already-poor peasants. When the Republicans came to power, they had promised to repeal the tax but hadn't followed through, leading the peasants to view them as double-crossers probably in league with the monarchy. The Emperor (Napoleon III), on the other hand, repealed the tax immediately when he first took office in 1849; obviously he was on the side of the peasants and cared about their welfare. In 1870, when the Empire collapsed, the peasants were terrified about what would happen to them without their beloved Emperor. Meanwhile, wild rumors spread about the Prussians, a known militaristic power with expansionist designs. They wanted to attack the Emperor, which meant they must be in league with the monarchists and the Republicans (and also the Catholic clergy, who had also opposed the Emperor for seizing their property). Perhaps the Prussians had spies even now among the French peasantry! Maybe they were members of the old aristocracy, the strongest supporters of the monarchy (and therefore Republicans and Prussian sympathizers). It turned out that the cousin of the murder victim had been in the village advocating for the Republic. When the victim was told about this, he was surprised that his cousin would do such a thing and responded that he didn't think it was likely. There was the evidence! He was sticking up for a known Republican; therefore, he must be a Prussian spy. And so the villagers murdered him, expecting that the Emperor would award them medals for their action. (Instead, four of them were guillotined.)

    There's certainly an element of mob hysteria in all this, but what's surprising is how many of the connections make sense if certain important information is omitted or not known (for instance, that many monarchist politicians were actually friendly with Napoleon III, or that the Republicans were opposed to all forms of undemocratic power, or that nobody in France actually supported a foreign invasion by the hated Prussians). The same forces are clearly at work in the "American heartland" where "hockey moms" and "Joe the plumber" live. It's easy to dismiss as stupid people who believe that, say, Obama is a secret Muslim or that gays are out to take over the world -- but such a view is both untrue and unfair. How can we expect someone to listen to our truth that Obama is a Christian when their co-worker is sending them an e-mail forward saying he's a Muslim, and their father-in-law is convinced he's a terrorist? Why are we more right than those people are? How do they know who to trust? And if they're not sure, should they vote for someone who might secretly be a terrorist?

    These people are suffering from what Dan Cohen diagnosed at his recent IU lecture as the biggest problem of the information age: abundance. There's simply too much information out there, and so much of it is contradictory, that people who don't have a lot of time on their hands can't really make sense of it. But they still try, and what they do is turn to others in their communities of rumor who seem to have more information or a clearer sense of what's going on. For many people, ministers and church leaders seem like the obvious choices. For others, it's friends or co-workers who seem up on the news and send out e-mail forwards with their findings. It's often the loudest people, or the most prominent people, that ordinary Americans trust. And the Republicans have become experts in exacerbating this problem by feeding wild rumors about Democrats and liberals through this network of authority, often targeting the most trusted locations, like churches and e-mail. Get people started forwarding around e-mails about Obama being a secret Muslim, and it becomes true and real. Once these ideas have taken root in communities of rumor all over America, reasonable people in those communities will refuse to consider even abundant evidence to the contrary. What Corbin shows us is that it's not because they're somehow alien, but because they are in fact just like the rest of us: resistant to ideas that contradict what they know to be true.

    How to fix this problem? There's no easy answer, but Corbin's work suggests that the remedy involves getting more information more reliably to more people. How can this be done? Al Gore argued in his book that the internet was the answer, because it put all the knowledge in the world at the fingertips of every American. But the internet is chiefly responsible for the problem of abundance. It doesn't fix the problem so much as it exacerbates it, adding a huge flood of new information to the already overstrained mind of the average busy American. People are always going to turn, for the most part, to "information filters" they feel they can trust. (Tina Brown's new website, The Daly Beast, is a perfect example of a product designed expressly as such a filter.) Perhaps the challenge for liberals is to make sure those filters themselves are well-informed and present that information to those who trust them.

    Posted on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 1:44 PM | Comments (26) | Top

    Norman Markowitz: Ten Truisms of Capitalism From the Mouths of Robber Barons

    Source: http://politicalaffairs.net (Marxist Thought Online) (8-22-08)

    [Mr. Markowitz is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and Contributing Editor to Political Affairs.]

    1. "We are not in business for our health." A statement attributed to J. P. Morgan, when fellow parishioners in New York's Trinity Church criticized him for "investing" Church funds in lucrative East Side slum property. Capitalists have never been in business for anybody's health and today that is most evident for pharmaceutical firms and insurance companies.

    2. "What do I care about the law. Ain't I got the power." A quote from the early great Robber Baron, Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose most recent relatives designed designer clothes and, in the case of Wyatt Cooper of CNN, have become TV news people. Vanderbilt's statement gives us insight into the capitalist class view of legality, namely that it is something to manipulate and enforce to increase capitalist wealth and power and to undermine and where possible ignore when it seeks to regulate or limit capitalist wealth and power.

    3. "The Public be damned!" A quote attributed to Cornelius Vanderbilt's son, William, in response to popular criticism of his creation of a private monopoly in New York Street transit and his subsequent doubling of the fares. Today capitalists have PR firms to make sure that they are never caught saying the public be damned but their policies in most areas continue in that vein.

    William by the way, was very badly treated by his father until, he won dad over by cheating (according to anti-monopoly scholars) union army cavalry stationed on Staten Island during the Civil War on the price of hay that he was selling them from a farm. Then his father finally respected him and took him into the business.

    4. "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." A very famous quote attributed to Robber Baron Jay Gould, whose fellow big capitalists called the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street." Actually, the struggle to unite the working class, to fight against all forms of racist and other prejudices, is an attempt to prevent Gould's boast from being carried forward in policy, which capitalists in their use of scabs, immigrants and minorities to break strikes, along with police and militia drawn from the working class, have done many times in the past, especially before the enactment of federal labor laws in the 1930s.

    5. "In a Republican district I was a Republican. In a Democratic district, I was a Democrat. But I was always for Erie." Another quote from Jay Gould explaining his and most capitalists approach to politics. The Erie Railroad was a company he both controlled and used in a number of wildly corrupt activities in the 1870s. The quote shows the capitalist class conception of representative government and its approach to non Communist, non socialist political parties. At one point, Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt were bribing New York state legislators hand over fist in a battle to obtain railroad franchises. The cost of bribes got so high that they actually held a meeting in Albany to fix the price of bribes(a sort of bribe cap) to protect both of their interests.

    6. "God gave me my money." A quote attributed to a frustrated John D. Rockefeller in response to critical inquiries about how he had attained his wealth. Rockefeller was a religious man, but the quote gives us insight into the capitalist view of religion, as a justification for inequality and exploitation. Rockefeller endowed religious and secular charities, practicing what Andrew Carnegie, a fellow great capitalist called the "gospel of wealth," that is, charity from the rich as a substitute for public social programs. Tax reform led by political progressives also led Rockefeller and other like minded big capitalists to set up foundations which enabled them to spend monies for charitable purposes that they would in large part have to turn over to the government and also provide them with good PR.

    7. "Character." The response that J.P. Morgan near the end of his life gave to a congressional committee in 1911 investigating his enormous finance capitalist empire. Morgan probably believed it. Like the great capitalists who called themselves "captains of industry" and "industrial statesmen," he saw himself as superior not only to workers but to small businessmen, professionals, politicians in the great market struggle of life and the corporations he create. For the great capitalists, the wealth they garnered was proof of their moral superiority. When Morgan died in 1913, the syndicate of industrial/bank capital that was the Morgan interests controlled an estimated 13% of the investment capital of the world. Today, corporate leaders and even many of their small imitators have adopted the military term CEO to replace the nineteenth century "captain of industry."

    8. "What good is ten million if you can't have real money." A statement from Jesse Livermore explaining his suicide in the 1930s. Livermore was a famous Wall Street speculator of the 1920s who lost most of his wealth in the depression. At the time of his suicide, creditors were closing in but he still possessed 10 million. This shows in effect the difference between what capitalists and workers (including those who call themselves middle class) think about money. I don't know what Livermore would have said when he heard that John McCain defined being rich today as having a $5 million annual income, although McCain (who didn't deal with total assets of course) would probably see men like Livermore as the kind of "entrepreneur" on whom American progress and prosperity was based(the way men like Livermore were seen in mass media before the great depression). Certainly he would do what he could to keep Livermore's taxes as low as possible and to bail him out financially. regardless of what that meant for taxpayers,

    9. "There are no social classes in America. Only the middle class." A wildly irrational statement, proclaiming in effect a capitalist "classless society" attributed to Herbert Hoover in the 1920s(as President, Hoover found out the hard way that there was a working class which would not passively accept his platitudes that "the economy is fundamentally sound" and federal relief "would rot the moral fiber of the people" as the depression deepened). While Hoover was not in the same league as Rockefeller, Morgan, or the Vanderbilts, he was a very wealthy and successful capitalist who hung unto his wealth even as he lost the presidency. Unfortunately, capitalists, in the U.S. particularly continue to use the term "middle class" in the sense that Hoover did to spread a false consciousness among workers that their interests lie with their employers and that government taxation, minorities, undocumented workers, and the poor are the result of their economic problems

    10. "Take the money and run." A term that was the title of a Woody Allen movie which connects many dots over the centuries of the capitalist mode of production. In pursuit of greater markets and cheaper natural resources and labor, capitalists have always taken the money and run, explaining that this was the road to progress and prosperity, whether they called it "free trade" as they did in the 19th century or "globalization" and "outsourcing" as they do today. It is as much a truism as the Communist Manifesto's call for the workers of the world to unite because they have nothing to lose but their chains.

    Posted on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 3:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Reidar Visser: The Obama Administration, Iraq, and the Question of Leverage

    Source: http://www.historiae.org (11-7-08)

    [Reidar Visser, research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and member of the Gulf Research Unit at the University of Oslo, has a background in history and comparative politics (University of Bergen) and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies (University of Oxford).]

    With Barack Obama’s victory in the American presidential elections there are expectations of changes in US policy in Iraq, involving a substantial reduction of force levels. In the so-called Obama–Biden plan for Iraq, this is expressed as follows:

    “The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months… Under the Obama-Biden plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel. They will not build permanent bases in Iraq, but will continue efforts to train and support the Iraqi security forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism…
    Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that the U.S. must apply pressure on the Iraqi government to work toward real political accommodation. There is no military solution to Iraq’s political differences, but the Bush Administration’s blank check approach has failed to press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future or to substantially spend their oil revenues on their own reconstruction… As our forces redeploy, Obama and Biden will make sure we engage representatives from all levels of Iraqi society—in and out of government—to forge compromises on oil revenue sharing, the equitable provision of services, federalism, the status of disputed territories, new elections, aid to displaced Iraqis, and the reform of Iraqi security forces.”

    So, the US forces will withdraw in large numbers, but beyond that, and of interest to those who care for Iraq itself, can Obama realistically hope to achieve anything other than a unilateral withdrawal, such as the ambitious reconciliation aims outlined above? Much of the answer to this question has to do with the issue of leverage. In this regard, the Obama–Biden plan embodies several basic assumptions about the motives of the Iraqi leadership that were set forward more comprehensively in a report by the Center for a New American Security in June this year, authored by Colin Kahl, Michèle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, and titled Shaping the Iraq Inheritance. Put briefly, the Democratic view is that Nuri al-Maliki has a strong desire to keep US forces a little longer in Iraq so that they can help him strengthen his position (by “rebuilding” the Iraqi army); accordingly the US should be in a position to offer an extended stay (or a “residual force”/more training and advisers) as some kind of bonus to Maliki. This theory is described in the report by Kahl et al. as “conditional engagement”.

    What appears to be missing in these assumptions is an appreciation of some of what happened in Iraq in 2007. This is not to suggest that “the surge” was such a wonderful success. So far, no significant political institutional reform has materialised as a result of the decline in violence; without this kind of political reform “the surge” in itself is worthless because it is based on temporary stop-gap measures like an infusion of US troops and the bribing of armed militants. However, Nuri al-Maliki the person has been enormously strengthened by the surge. A year and a half ago, any suggestion that Maliki would be the next strongman of Iraq would be met by ridicule. Today, his emergence as a powerful figure with an increasingly independent position vis-à-vis his political coalition partners is an undeniable fact. The Iraqi army is stronger than at any point since 2003 and is becoming a potential tool of repression that many other authoritarian rulers in the region are envious of. And Maliki has rediscovered an ideological superstructure that is making him increasingly immune against criticism at home: using the language of centralism, Iraqi nationalism and at times anti-federalism, he has become independent enough to challenge even some of his longstanding coalition partners such as the Kurds and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

    When it comes to the leverage of the next US administration in Iraq the question is not so much about the “objective” strength of the Iraqi army but rather about what Nuri al-Maliki perceives to be his room for manoeuvre. In that regard, he seems increasingly tied to a nationalist discourse of Iraqi sovereignty that takes a critical line with regard to foreign interference. Hence, it seems more and more likely that if faced with an Obama offer of “conditional engagement” Maliki's most likely response would be essentially that Iraq is an independent country which is not willing to be bullied into constitutional reforms at the behest of foreigners. He would be thankful to the Americans for their support their support so far in making him a strong ruler, but he would feel strong enough to decline the offer of extended support if this comes with too many strings attached: a SOFA, maybe, but no more than that. He might hope to see his electoral base boosted in local and parliamentary elections, or he could turn to the army and other security forces where he has an increasing number of friends. Failing that, he could always turn to Iran – it may be symptomatic in this regard that the pro-Iranian Daawa/Tanzim al-Iraq is part of Maliki’s new coalition for the local elections even if ISCI apparently plans to run separately.

    What are the alternatives to “conditional engagement” in the Democratic camp? What if Maliki feels stronger than US politicians think he is? The Biden scheme of a grand compromise on federalism has few supporters in Iraq south of Kurdistan, although Iran might be interested in the regional aspect of a “Dayton-style” settlement where it might exploit the desire of Obama to mark a contrast to the Bush administration’s tough line. If Obama goes to the opposite extreme in terms of offering Iran a regional role, Iran would emerge stronger than ever and could use its influence with the Maliki government to effectively control oil reserves similar in scale to those of Saudi Arabia. However, other pro-Obama groups have worked out policy suggestions that are far better grounded in Iraqi realities than the schemes of Biden, for example the report Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge by Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch and Peter Juul. But they, too, stake their entire argument on an assumption about the Maliki government’s perception that may turn out to be incorrect. Their thesis is quite the opposite of that of Kahl et al.: only the prospect of an early US withdrawal can focus minds on the Iraqi side and will force them to make compromises – not out of any altruistic motives, but because those in power supposedly will feel they need such compromises in order to survive in their current positions. Again, it seems likely that Maliki, who as early as in 2007 spoke of national reconciliation as something that had already been accomplished, may not see the need for any wide-ranging reform.

    There are two other Iraq alternatives that have received only limited attention by Democratic policy-makers. The first one is exceedingly straightforward and would consist of singling out the 2009 parliamentary elections as the key to reform and Iraq’s last chance to repair itself (the new parliament would then appoint a more representative constitutional revision committee than the current one). The United States could focus all its energies on making those elections as inclusive and free and fair as possible, and in doing so would be quite immune against accusations of meddling in Iraqi affairs. The second alternative is more radical, and builds on the idea of an externally induced shock as well as exploiting US leverage where it still exists: Kurdistan. Political scientist Liam Anderson has earlier proposed an internationally guaranteed “autonomy plus” status for Kurdistan along the lines of the Åland Islands in Finland; by building on this idea one might also create a corollary involving Kurdish withdrawal from the constitutional process in the rest of Iraq, where much of the problem has been artificial alliances between the two biggest Kurdish parties and pro-federal Shiite politicians that enjoy only limited backing in the constituencies they purport to represent, and where what is needed is radical recalibration and constitutional reform directed by Iraqis who are more representative and who can offer resistance to the attempt by the Kurds to impose a pro-federal agenda on all of Iraq. Both these approaches come with the advantage that they are much more difficult for Nuri al-Maliki to simply reject and therefore also involve a greater degree of real US leverage.

    Posted on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Michael Lind: Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic

    Source: Salon (11-7-08)

    [Michael Lind is the Whitehead senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life.]

    The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.

    In the past generation Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi and I, in different ways, have used the idea of "republics" to understand American history. Since the French Revolution, France has been governed by five republics (plus two empires, a directory and a fascist dictatorship). Since the American Revolution, we Americans have been governed by several republics as well. But because we, like the British, pay lip service to formal continuity more than do the French, we pretend that we have been living under the same government since the federal Constitution was drafted and ratified in 1787-88. Our successive American republics from the 18th century to the 21st have been informal and unofficial.

    As I see it, to date there have been three American republics, each lasting 72 years (give or take a few years). The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004.

    Yes, you read that correctly -- 2004, not 2008. A case can be made that the new era actually began four years ago. True, Bush, a relic of the waning years of the previous era, was reelected. But immediately after his reelection, the American people repudiated his foreign policy and his domestic policy, including Social Security privatization. In 2006 the Democrats swept the Republicans out of Congress, and in 2008 they have recaptured the White House.

    To be sure, every shift in partisan control of government does not amount to the founding of a new republic. Obama did not win a landslide or have long coattails. His coalition is a slightly larger version of the Democratic Party that was forged in the partisan realignment of 1968-72. And the public is still divided among liberals, moderates and conservatives much as it has been for a decade or two. But my scenario does not depend on Obama's election or even on Democratic control of Congress. The Fourth Republic might have gotten off to a start -- a bad start, but a start -- under Republican auspices.

    Policy shifts, more than public opinion polls or election results, suggest that a truly transformative moment may be upon us. The first three American republics display a remarkably similar pattern. Their 72-year life span is divided into two 36-year periods (again, give or take a year -- this is not astrology). During the first 36-year period of a republic, ambitious nation-builders in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton strengthen the powers of the federal government and promote economic modernization. During the second 36-year phase of a republic, there is a Jeffersonian backlash, in favor of small government, small business and an older way of life. During the backlash era, Jeffersonians manage to modify, but never undo, the structure created by the Hamiltonians in the previous era.

    We see this pattern of Hamiltonian nation-building and Jeffersonian backlash in the First, Second and Third Republics of the United States. Between 1788 and 1824, the ideas of the centralizing, nation-building Federalist Party of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton succeeded. Although Jefferson and his small-government allies controlled the White House and Congress for much of this period, in practice they implemented a streamlined, cheaper version of the Federalist plan for America. Jefferson's Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, for example, supported a program of infrastructure and industrialization not all that different from Alexander Hamilton's. And Jefferson himself, contradicting his small-government philosophy, exercised sweeping powers as president, purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France on his own initiative and promoting a federal embargo on U.S. exports to Britain and France. The first Jeffersonian backlash came later, under Andrew Jackson and his allies between 1824 and 1860...



    Posted on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 9:07 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Simon Schama: Barack Obama recalls Abraham Lincoln as America revels in making history

    Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-7-08)

    [Simon Schama is a British professor of history and art history at Columbia University.]

    So by mid-morning in the capital there were no papers to be had: no Washington Post, no New York Times, no Chicago Tribune. By the time I was back in Union Station, all the vendors had to offer lying forlornly in their bins were copies of Investors' News and, believe me, no one was buying that item.

    America wanted to freeze-frame its moment of rebirth; wanted to have that headline shouting, like the Boston Globe "O-BABY" fixed in memory. This was the day when well-nigh everyone you talked to – and this included Republicans – said it made them proud to be an American. On this one day they – million upon million of voters – had done something a nation seldom gets to do: vindicated their democracy; taken back their country from the manipulators of power; returned to the ideals around which the republic was founded. No wonder heads were held high. At the diner strangers lifted palms for a high five and you slammed yours back.

    By the Lincoln Memorial a tourist pointed to the sky and shouted: "There's a bald eagle!" It was, of course, one of Washington's overgrown gulls wheeling by the Washington Monument, but the patriotic birder could be forgiven his myopic excitement since heady symbolism was in the air. A young woman slowly mounted the steps of the beautiful memorial from where Martin Luther King told the immense throng, stretching as far as the eye could see, about his revelatory dream and that though he might not live to see it realised, he knew it would one day come about. The woman set a single white rose at the foot of Lincoln's statue. It joined a crowd of flowers. People had been coming to the memorial through the night as Obama delivered his victory speech in Chicago, wanting somewhere to pay homage to the transforming moment; to set, as the President-Elect said, with his unerring feel for the right words, "their hand on the arc of history".

    Obama has something of a pardonable obsession with his fellow Illinois citizen – so much so that his speech on Tuesday night in Chicago quoted Lincoln's first inaugural address in 1861 without at first identifying him – as if the whole watching political nation would automatically know who he was talking about, especially since Lincoln's words spoke achingly of a national reconciliation even on the very threshold of civil war.

    It's easy enough to guess what Lincoln, the 16th president, would make of Obama, the 44th. But what about the third? It was from Jefferson's hand that so much of the tragic atrocity, as well as the ennobling idealism of the American experiment, followed. For unlike Washington, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who proclaimed to the world as a truism that all men were created equal, could never bring himself to free his 100 or so slaves. And although Jefferson professed to believe in the universal fraternity of mankind, he thought black people intellectually inferior to those of European descent and patronised appallingly the most gifted of their race – like the scientist and inventor Benjamin Banneker.

    In August 1791, Banneker presumed to write to Jefferson in Paris asking him, as a man of enlightened ideas, to "eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us" since "your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that the Universal Father hath given being to us all and that he hath made us all of one flesh but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties".

    This was all very nice. But then Banneker took a step too far, adding his dismay at finding that Jefferson himself was one of those who detained "by fraud and violence a part of my brethren groaning under captivity and cruel oppression" and that "you should at the same time be guilty of that which you professedly detested in others". Jefferson wrote back crisply from Paris that "no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men". But then he added, with fatal condescension, that "the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America".

    Jefferson insisted that no one "wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be". But his ardour apparently stopped well short of emancipation.

    And there, in a historical nutshell, you have the entirety of the American race tragedy; the raw contradiction between profession and deed; a contradiction that endured from the Civil War to the battle to end segregation and the first unequivocal commitment of the government to enforce voting rights made by Lyndon B Johnson in both speech and statute in 1965. As he signed that Voting Rights Act – the law that made Barack Obama's victory possible, via the astounding registration drive his campaign mounted – LBJ is said to have declared that one of its results would be that the South would now be lost to the Democratic Party.

    For all his sins and tragic flaws, Johnson was in this respect at least a brave and righteous prophet who did the right thing. So how he would have relished the exhilarating irony of this week when his own state, Texas, stayed deepest red-Republican, but the Old Dominion, Virginia, the home of the founding fathers and four of the first five Presidents of the United States, went Democratic for the first time since his own sweep in 1964, so that an African-American could be elected president and the original sin of the republic finally wiped clean.

    There is another respect, too, in which American ideals, to which custodians like Lincoln clung in the face of bitter reality, have at long last been vindicated. Government "of the people, for the people, by the people" now has indeed a better chance of not perishing from the earth. For the election embodied the victory of democratic optimism over cynical manipulation...

    Posted on Friday, November 7, 2008 at 6:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    David Greenberg: Nothing's the Matter With Kansas

    Source: http://www.dissentmagazine.org (11-5-08)

    IN THE 24 hours since the networks declared Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States, one storyline has washed away all others: our joy, individual and collective, in the historic election of our first black president.

    Gone, suddenly, were all those campaign-trail arguments and analyses about which we spent untold hours typing out tortured email messages, half-baked blog posts, and bickering rejoinders. The swiftness with which this grand symbolic victory over race prejudice displaced once-consuming controversies was bracing because it underscored how ready most Americans were, in the end, to evaluate the candidates and the campaign without an overweening regard for race.

    When the big day came, the much-awaited Bradley Effect was a no-show; it disappeared like the Halloween phantoms of last week. The allegedly racist blue-collar whites who preferred Hillary Clinton to Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania, it turned out, had all along favored her because of their interests—not their values: She had spoken in a language of practical economic populism, not airy reform. But this week, when these voters stuck with the Democratic Party, as they had in the 1990s, they silently rebuked the prior disparagements of liberal nabobs. For most of them, after all, the issue had consistently been the economy—a reality underscored by the temporal coincidence of Wall Street’s implosion and Obama’s breakaway from McCain in the polls. Of 94 surveys taken since September 26, not one had McCain winning.

    Surely, in some pockets, racism persisted and will persist; but like the racist townspeople in Blazing Saddles, who rallied behind Cleavon Little’s dandy black sheriff to fend off the evil governor’s dark designs, they put self-interest ahead of bigotry. I don’t know about Kansas, but nothing seems to be the matter with Pennsylvania—thank you very much, Mr. Frank.

    Ironically, Obama benefited as he never could have imagined by ABC News’s discovery back in the spring of the Reverend Wright tapes. He was able to dazzle the commentariat all over again with his Niebuhrian speech on race—and then, when Wright made clear that he was having none of it, Obama was able to stay afloat by cutting loose his surrogate father like the newly crowned King Henry IV regarding Falstaff. (“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;/How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!...Presume not that I am the thing I was;/For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,/That I have turn’d away my former self.”)By the time the fall rolled around, the old man was old news, and besides, John McCain had pledged not to go there—his aspiration to high-mindedness happily converged with the shrewd calculation that revisiting the Wright mess would only boomerang back to him.

    It helped, too, that for the campaign’s crucial October weeks Obama assumed a more workaday idiom, at least until the election was in the bag. On Election Night, he forgivably returned to his favored cadences and sometimes cloying allusiveness (“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin…”). But in the end Obama’s messianism seemed, for once, utterly beside the point, given the euphoric reactions of Americans in plazas and living rooms from coast to coast.

    Henry Louis Gates wrote: “Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. . . . My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!”

    For months throughout the summer and fall—with the exception of the short-lived Sarah Palin boom—Obama’s election felt ploddingly inevitable. It took his actual victory this Tuesday at the polls to make it seem so mind-bogglingly unreal.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    David Greenberg: Landslide? Not Exactly

    Source: TheDailyBeast.com (11-5-08)

    While 2008 represents an unmistakable repudiation of contemporary conservatism, Obama didn’t redraw the electoral map.

    The advent of America’s first black president inexorably calls forth the word historic. Uttered so frequently last evening, as it will be in the days ahead, the adjective would have been drained of meaning but for the palpable momentousness of Barack Obama’s election. Gone was the pretense of post-racialism; revealed was liberal America’s pride in the often-unsung progress toward equality and toleration achieved in the civil rights movement’s aftermath.

    Yet equally historic in its own way, albeit less widely noted, was the decisive victory of party. November 4 marked a resounding win for the Democrats just one election cycle after some panjandrums, seduced by Karl Rove’s Nixonian talk of a permanent Republican majority, prepared to consign the party of liberalism to an eon of darkness. Not since the early 1950s had one party seized control of the House, Senate, and White House in the space of two years—Eisenhower and the Republicans did it overnight in November 1952—but even after that trifecta, the incoming Republicans’ congressional margins (eight seats in the House, one in the Senate) had been too slender to give Ike a true mandate. To find another turnover as stark as the shift of 2006-08 requires spooling back to 1932.
    But while 2008 represents an unmistakable repudiation of contemporary conservatism—not just of George W. Bush but also of the right’s chosen leaders in the Congress, the courts, and the media—this is not 1932 redux (financial crisis notwithstanding).

    Landslide, another word bruited about in giddy Democratic circles as the returns came in, does not, alas, apply. Franklin D. Roosevelt painted virtually the whole electoral map in a single color; so did Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan. Obama, though he improved impressively on the performances of Al Gore and John Kerry, didn’t redraw the electoral map. On the contrary, the crude red state/blue state shorthand that came into journalistic favor after 2000 had always been a misnomer, one that obscured the memory of Bill Clinton’s geographically far-reaching victories, which netted 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996. Obama’s pick-up of “red” states such as Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico in fact merely returned them to the Democratic column.
    It was Clinton’s election in 1992, in fact, that dethroned Reaganism. But Bush v. Gore allowed the Republicans to believe that their ideology still reigned supreme; then the rally-round-the-flag effects of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq let the new president sustain popular support in the face of foreign threats. Throughout the Bush years, however, America remained a 50/50 nation—a fact George W. Bush forgot, or ignored, at his peril.

    Ironically, then, Obama is poised to continue, not to overturn, the Clinton legacy. In his hard-fought primary battle against Hillary Clinton, Obama galvanized the party’s leftist factions, as well as independents, by painting the Clinton and Bush years as an undifferentiated period of Washington decadence. But at the Denver convention he started citing, as Clinton used to, the statistics about job growth and poverty reduction in the 1990s that spoke to the efficacy, and not just the good intentions, of liberal economics and social policy.

    That apparent peacemaking gesture to the former president soon became an important argument for the nominee’s election. When McCain surged in the late summer, even taking the lead for a spell in the polls, Obama realized he had to find a language to speak to blue-collar Democrats who, voting their interests more than their values, had flocked to Hillary in the spring. What he arrived at scarcely resembled the soaring oratory of the early primaries: a plainspoken version of Clinton’s “putting people first” rhetoric. If the language didn’t come naturally to Obama, it faithfully reflected his party’s ideology and usable legacy. Equally important, in the wake of the financial crisis, it proved vastly more reassuring than McCain’s erratic, incoherence on a subject that had always been his self-confessed Achilles’ heel. It was appropriate, then, that it was Bill Clinton who called the election outcome. “I predict that Senator Obama will win and will win pretty handily,” Clinton said with confidence in mid-September, after he received Obama at his Harlem office. “That’s what I think is going to happen.”

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Geoffrey Hosking: The 'credit crunch' and the importance of trust

    Source: History & Policy (11-6-08)

    [Geoffrey Hosking is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and formerly Leverhulme Research Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. geoffreyhosking@mac.com.]

    The so-called 'credit crunch' which began in the summer of 2007 has now evolved into something altogether more significant and disturbing. A climax of sorts was reached on 7 September 2008, when Hank Paulson, Secretary to the US Treasury, announced that the Federal government would be guaranteeing the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two institutions which provided the financial backing for some 80% of recent US mortgages. A right-wing Republican administration, champion of the free market, had in effect nationalised the largest financial institution in the country; there could be no clearer indication that this is the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s. There swiftly followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the greatest corporate bankruptcy in history, the forced take-over of Merrill Lynch and the emergency rescue of the world's largest insurance company, AIG. Therewith three of the top five US investment banks went under (Bear Stearns, a third, having already sunk in March). Meanwhile, the UK's largest mortgage lender, Halifax Bank of Scotland, was taken over by Lloyds TSP to prevent its collapse.

    Stock markets have plunged. In the USA and UK, and in other European countries, banks and building societies have accumulated unknown amounts of 'toxic debt', deriving from subprime mortgage deals. So far they have written off some $500 billion of debt, and they are still counting. As a result they are reluctant to lend money to one another or to potential house-buyers, since they can no longer be sure who can pay back whom and when. They even find it difficult to realise the assets in their portfolios, since selling them drives down the price and degrades those assets. House prices decline, and with them owners' confidence in their own wealth, and their ability to raise loans quoting their homes as collateral. Builders, retailers and manufacturers are all facing tighter markets and laying off some of their employees.

    Much of this was foreseen in a book published six months before 'black September'. In The New Paradigm for Financial Markets George Soros asserted that what has happened is the bursting of a 'super-bubble', climax of the successive booms and busts that have disrupted financial markets at various junctures in the last quarter of a century: Latin American debt after 1982, the Savings and Loan Association crash in 1986, the Asian and Russian crises of 1997-8 and the dotcom bubble of 2000. In each case except the last the IMF and/or national central banks have had to step in to restore a stability that the market was incapable of recreating unaided. Soros argued that under the influence of market fundamentalism - the misguided belief that markets should be given free rein because they are self-correcting and tend towards equilibrium - credit had expanded to the point where it was dangerously unsustainable. He believed the time had come for the super-bubble to burst, provoking a crash which would be as serious as the slump of the early 1930s, though it would take different forms and would be tackled in different ways.

    Soros explained the fallibility of the market through what he called 'reflexivity'. Participants in any activity, including finance, cannot simply stand back and study their situation with entire rationality and with full information at their disposal; they are bound up in the process, and they have to use what information they have before them - inevitably always inadequate and imperfect - to take decisions. They are therefore bound to make mistakes, and in finance those mistakes will tend towards self-reinforcing over-optimism about what credit can achieve. Furthermore, their actions change the reality they are assessing. Selling the shares of a poorly-performing company is not only a rational response to reality; it also changes that reality by helping to drive the price yet further down. Self-reinforcement thus works in both directions.

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    The importance of trust
    I believe Soros is right, but has not fully identified the force driving financial markets, which is trust. Trust is one of the most pervasive, but also least noticed, features of social life. We all exercise it unthinkingly every day. For forty-one years I have been trustingly paying substantial sums each month into a pension scheme, without getting a penny in return. Fortunately my trust was justified: when I retired a few months ago, I started to see the benefit.

    Life is full of these more or less routine exercises of trust. As Soros remarked, seldom if ever can we obtain all the information we would need in order to take decisions in a fully rational manner. Even when we ponder decisions carefully, at a certain point we have to stop seeking further information, say 'enough is enough' and take a decision based on what we know and how we feel. The way in which we do this is strongly influenced by the society in which we live, its customs and its culture. Furthermore, trust has its own dynamic: it is usually self-reinforcing. We go on trusting beyond the point at which evidence suggests distrust would be more appropriate. Trust is not infinitely elastic, though: eventually counter-evidence has its effect and we turn to distrust, which is equally cumulative and self-reinforcing. This is exactly what has been happening in financial markets.

    The paramount symbol of trust in modern society is money. It enables us in normal times to obtain goods and services from people we do not know, have no other grounds for trusting, and are never likely to meet again. Anyone who lived through German hyperinflation in the 1920s or Russian hyperinflation in the 1990s can tell you what absurd and cumbersome devices people have to adopt, if money cannot be trusted, to obtain daily requirements that we take for granted.

    But money is complex and many-layered. Much of the money most of us possess takes the form of an entry in electronic account records. Behind that is paper money, which many people think of as 'real money', even though no bank keeps enough of it to satisfy its customers, should they all turn up together to withdraw their funds. But that money is not really 'real' either. Each note bears a statement that the Bank of England 'Promises to pay on demand the sum of' - ten pounds, let us say. That promise refers to reserves of gold that the Bank of England holds - except that the Bank does not hold anything like enough of it to cover all the banknotes in circulation, and anyway it long ago cancelled its obligation to offer gold in return for notes. Even if it still did, what can you do with gold? You can't eat it, or wear it, or warm yourself with it. So money is not a real 'good' or benefit, just a symbol of entitlement to a benefit, a symbol which society trusts, even though it is at least one stage removed from that benefit. The current voracious demand for gold shows that in uncertain times we feel safer descending several storeys in what begins to look like a rickety structure....

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Victor Davis Hanson: Make Haste Slowly, President Obama

    Source: Real Clear Politics (11-6-08)

    [Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]

    Festina lente. Make haste slowly. That was the motto of the revolutionary minded young Augustus who soon grasped that he needed to build upon Rome's past, rather than dismantle it.

    Amid the celebration of the historic victory of Barack Obama, the country should now quit the bickering, appreciate a fair and peaceful transference of power, and unite behind its new commander-in-chief.

    But in turn our new President Obama would do well to heed that ancient Roman wisdom, appreciating that the real world after Nov. 4 is not exactly the same as its frequent caricature during the hard-fought campaign.

    John McCain promised to cut taxes on all. Sen. Obama promised to raise them on some. But neither plan fully appreciated that we are now buried deep under trillions of dollars of debt -- and need both more revenue and less expenditure.

    An Obama administration, like it or not, must cede to the laws of physics: America will have to pay down debt while not raising taxes too high at a time of recession. That balancing act will make it hard to borrow additional billions for more promised federal spending.

    "Hope and change" may have implied an easy transition to our clean, cool solar and wind future. But for a while longer, America's envisioned new electric cars will still require old-fashioned natural gas, coal and nuclear power to generate electricity to charge them.

    Economic slowdown, conservation and public promises to drill more oil and natural gas have already helped to collapse world oil prices and saved us billions. And before we talk of ending the coal industry, we should thank our lucky stars that America has the world's most plentiful supply of coal to transition us to alternate sources of energy.

    We need more regulation of both Wall Street and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which all went feral and turned on us during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Yet European leaders are faced with far worse financial meltdowns than we are -- and their problems have nothing to do with American excess or George Bush.

    The dollar is climbing against the Euro because market analysts realize that for all our sins, American financial institutions are still far less exposed than those elsewhere in the world, and our free-market system far more flexible to recover from excess and grow the economy....

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Stanley Kutler: Bless Bush

    Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (11-6-08)

    [Stanley Kutler is the author of The Wars of Watergate, and other writings.]

    Just after midnight on election day the good folks in Dixville Notch, NH gave 15 votes for Barack Obama, while John McCain garnered only 6. Their first-in-the-nation vote told us what we needed to know and offered a portent for shifts across the country. George W. Bush won there decisively in 2004. Indeed, for the first time since 1968 - when they rejected Nixon (perhaps they really knew something) - the good townsfolk voted Democratic. Dixville Notch had a statement to make, one which the nation endorsed. George Bush and his policies had to be repudiated.

    To do so, Obama had to re-shape "blue" and "red" America. Four years earlier, he called upon us to reject that dreary, paralyzing division. Obama's campaign doggedly ventured deep into formidable "red "territory, and cracked it wide open. Lacking the Bush-Rove well-practiced manipulation of the politics of fear, the lines could not hold.

    Let us make no mistake: Barack Obama is an exceptionally inspired, articulate, intelligent candidate - the likes of which has been unseen far too long. He assembled a formidable force of campaign foot soldiers that demonstrated the ongoing utility of retail politics. In a truly exceptional way, again as few before him - and never in the day of mass media - he commanded the respect and admiration of a global audience.

    But the election was all about the sitting president, bless him. He was the focal point for Obama's message for more than a year that we must change from his ruinous policies, in both foreign and domestic matters. We recognized that we must rid ourselves of a man who had conned us since 2000. Of course, the 22nd Amendment assured us that Bush would go, but the electoral expression of rejection was a bonus.

    "I am a unifier, not a divider," Bush said then, with apparent sincerity. "I am not a nation-builder," he added in a rare statement of specificity. Maybe for some he offered an alternative to the sordid political spectacles of the Clinton years. He became President only after the Supreme Court selected him. Bush eventually found, as Mark Twain said, that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. His father fell from grace following Gulf War in 1991; so, too, the son whose approval ratings dropped precipitously in his second term.

    So, change the nation wanted. But give the electorate its due - it wanted more than a new president. Obama's election signifies nothing less than a clear repudiation of George W. Bush's failures.

    Change? We know we must repudiate a war fraudulently imposed upon us; we know we must not torture our suspected enemies, after all we are not the Gestapo; we know we do not want preemptive wars we once condemned as "sneak attacks"; we know we do not want such Supreme Court Justices as Scalia, Thomas, Alioto, and Roberts; we know we must reject the excesses of an Administration that irresponsibility pursued the chimera of deregulation, squandering the benefits of necessary components to an economy that brought decades of steady prosperity; we know we do not want the President to wage war against the Constitution and impair our liberties and freedoms, all in the name of a so-called War on Terror; we know we must have a President who knows his constitutional law and will respect the actions of separate, coordinate branches of government; we know we do not need a Co-President, with an utter lack of accountability; we know we need a Congress with the will to exercise its proper authority to check and balance executive misconduct; and we know that we do not have a unitary executive, a presumptive theory articulated in a deservedly obscure doctoral dissertation, and nowhere supported in either our Constitution or our history.

    Unlike the Ancient Mariner who rid himself of an albatross by shooting an arrow through it, and bringing down bad luck on his ship, we, more mindful of our history, chose our traditional, peaceful path to change. Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking on the sixth anniversary of his first inaugural, probably said it best about our elections: "With the . . . free choosing of public servants by a free electorate, the Constitution has proved that this type of government cannot long remain in the hands of those who seek personal aggrandizement for selfish ends. . . . [O]ur elections are positive in their mandate, rather than passive in their acquiescence."

    We have said we wanted "to change" - but to what lies in our unknown future. But we wisely have chosen to face the unknown rather than be hobbled with a past, crippling of our energy, ability, and above all, our spirit.

    FDR recognized that "all our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified." Twenty-three days after our new president takes office, he will inaugurate the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial. How appropriate! There are many connections between the two, none more obvious than emancipation and its fruits. But both also have spoken so eloquently on the meaning of America; both have been eloquent messengers for hope - and change.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Edward J. Blum: Neither Christ Nor Antichrist ... A Reflection on the Election of Barack Obama

    Source: http://www.religiondispatches.org (11-6-08)

    [Edward J. Blum is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and co-editor of Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. For these works, Blum was awarded the Peter Seaborg Award in Civil War Studies, the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, and was nominated for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Bancroft Prize. He has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities.]

    Millions of Americans believe they have found a savior. President-Elect Obama and Democrats in Congress will rally the economy; they will end wars; they will set the captives free. But what happens when messiahs fail? What happens when promises of hope are met by realities of despair? What happens if prosperity eludes us? What happens if violence and terrorism abound? What happens if change results in more of the same in Washington and the world? Americans must be ready for this. Otherwise, we may be preparing ourselves for a fall of edenic proportions.

    After the election was called for Senator Obama (thank goodness it didn’t go into the next day or weeks), it felt like the biblical “day of Jubilee” was upon us. Pro-Obama crowds were euphoric as the revolution was seemingly televised. There was dancing and singing. Tears flowed. Everyone commented on the “historic” moment. Senator McCain sought to wash the historic story as one for African Americans, but he was only partly right. The entire campaign—for both Democrats and Republicans—was an historic event. It was an emblem of how far the United States has changed, and we should all be proud of that. One hundred years ago, an African American man was lynched in the United States every five days. National votes for women were still a dozen years away. One hundred years ago W. E. B. Du Bois had to defend the “souls” of black folks against claims that African Americans were soulless beasts. One hundred years ago, divorce laws made it next-to-impossible for women to divorce their husbands.

    Without downplaying these historical changes, we should be wary. In many ways, Senator Obama has been transformed into a symbol. He has become a totem, representing hope, change, and even salvation. During my interview with NPR, one caller exulted as he referred to Obama as a “sublime mystery.” The caller was right. Mysteries can be wonderful. They can be exciting. They can be comforting. “The body and the blood” of Christ have led billions to feel connected to God and to other Christians; Our Lady of Guadalupe inspired (and continues to inspire) Christian faith for so many. The narrative of the deathless state of Guatama Buddha has led countless to seek enlightenment. I do not believe President-Elect Obama is a mystery, but I am certainly frightened by those who do and those who want a mystery to have control over the United States army and have access to nuclear weapons.

    Mysteries can be dangerous and days of Jubilee do not always end with eras of sublimity. In the United States, there have been alleged days of Jubilee before. On January 1, 1863, African Americans throughout the nation and many northern whites celebrated the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. Nighttime vigils were held as southern blacks celebrated the day of the coming of the Lord. African Americans in South Carolina sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and talked about how it was the first time they felt proud to be Americans (recall that Frederick Douglass had lectured in the 1850s that the Fourth of July was a day for whites and not for blacks).

    Let’s ignore for a moment that the Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves. Let’s ignore Harry Stout’s argument in Upon the Altar of the Nation that the proclamation provided a moral rationale for immoral total war. Let’s look forward thirty-five years from 1865 and be struck with a sobering thought. Within one generation, hope had turned to despair. Since the 1950s, African American scholars have referred to the 1890s and early twentieth century as “the nadir.” Thirty-five years after the day of jubilee, women and men of color now experienced a low point defined by segregation, lynching, and fear.

    Obama is neither the Antichrist, nor a new Christ. I cannot write this as a prophet or theologian, for I am neither of those. I cannot write it as a historian for the tools of my trade provide no evidence for either. Instead, I write it as a citizen of this nation and the world. To attack Obama as the end of the world seems silly, but to vest in him the hopes for a national and world transformation seem equally troubling.
    Perhaps these days we would be better off considering the “solemnity of this day.” One hundred years ago, another African American graduate of Harvard and Senate-candidate W. E. B. Du Bois prayed with his students at Atlanta University:

    “Give us this night, O God, Peace in our land and the long silence that comes after strain and upheaval. Let us sense the solemnity of this day – its mighty meaning, its deep duty. Save this government. Cherish its great ideals – give strength and honesty and unbending courage to him whom the people today have named Chief Magistrate of these United States and make our country in truth a land where all men are free and equal in the pursuit of happiness. Amen.”

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Ruth Rosen: Dancing in the streets

    Source: TPM (Liberal blog) (11-6-08)

    [Ruth Rosen is Professor Emerita of History, U.C. Davis, and Visiting Professor of History, U.C. Berkeley.]

    The last time Americans danced and cheered in the streets was in 1945, when the nation finally defeated its enemies in the Second World War. I have no memories of those exuberant days. But I'm an historian and I've seen plenty of pictures and read many descriptions of the joy and happiness that swept over the country.

    Obama's stunning victory is the first time in 63 years that Americans once again danced and cheered in the street. Here on the Left Coast, thousands of Berkeley students danced in the city, wildly cheering his victory. In Oakland's Jack London Square and in San Francisco's Castro District, tens of thousands more gathered for joyous street parties, dancing in the street. It was a bittersweet victory because of the success of those who sought to ban same-sex marriage. That day, too, will come. Of this I'm sure.

    Elsewhere, people also danced in the streets. In Chicago, a friend describes the thousands of young people who poured out of trains to join the tens of thousands already celebrating in Grant Park. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the largely African American and Caribbean population celebrated in the streets, dancing and setting off fireworks.

    All across America, in these blue enclaves, celebration and joy was in the air. The morning after the election, I received emails from friends all over the world who described how the election would transform not just the United States, but the rest of the world. On the Berkeley campus, colleagues, as well as strangers, hugged each other. Smiles sprouted on students' faces. It was as though everyone were awakening from an eight year low-grade depression.

    At an election night party with people of my 60s generation, a mixed-race crowd couldn't believe what we saw on television--and on our computers. As we listened to John Lewis, tears poured down our faces. None of us thought we'd lived to see this historic election. All of our adult lives we have protested racial and sexual discrimination, unnecessary wars, and fought for social and economic justice. None of us could remember wanting to dance in the streets. To feel joy, to feel pride in our new leader,and those who elected him, was a new experience.

    All my life I've heard the phrase "dancing in the streets" but I've never witnessed it after a political event. May the future give us more historic reasons to rejoice and dance in the streets.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: Monsters on Television

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-6-08)

    Paul Krugman, among my favorite political commentators, has spoken forthrightly of how during the past few years we have had "monsters" in office, naming Tom Delay, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. He complains that until recently, if an observer simply called them what they are, he or she was termed "shrill." (h/t Daily Kos).

    I could not agree more. But I'd like to take this discussion out of the realm of commentary and into that of action.

    It is unacceptable that television news brings Tom Delay and Karl Rove on as bona fide political commentators, when both are criminals. The same thing goes for Oliver North. Delay has been indicted on corruption charges and had to step down from his seat in Congress. Rove led a campaign to have the press out a covert CIA operative who was attempting to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation, essentially blowing her cover and that of her contacts to Tehran (i.e. he is a traitor).

    There was a time when individuals so tainted with crime made themselves unacceptable in polite society, including on television.

    Instead, these monsters are being given air time. CNN brought Delay on to accuse Barack Obama of being a "Marxist." To have that shameless embezzler given a platform to smear an honorable man just made my blood boil.

    Folks, we need an organization that can blanket the corporate media with emails of complaint every time they bring on a criminal and parade him as a legitimate commentator. If they blow us off, it would be time to get up some advertiser boycotts.

    This rehabilitation-by-media of criminals is one way the country keeps being shifted to the right every time the people find their voice. The Right gives a comfy perch on television to looney embezzlers and burglars and then wages campaigns with big money behind them to discredit even centrist leaders not in their back pockets.

    I do not advocate criminalizing politics. I am not saying anything glib, such that all Bush administration figures are ipso facto criminals and should be denied a public voice. The United States government is a large bureaucracy and lots of civil servants and military have to serve whatever administration the public votes in. There are and were people on Bush's National Security Council, e.g., who are honorable and trying to do their best by the United States.

    All that I am saying is that where someone has to resign in disgrace and is actually indicted on serious corruption charges, like Delay, that should make that individual poison to television news! The Rove case is a little trickier, since he has not been indicted. But the Fitzgerald investigation showed that he tried to do something that was technically illegal. Presidential pardons also muddy these waters. Elliot Abrams lied to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair, but was pardoned by Bush senior and then actually let onto the National Security Council by W.! But a responsible citizen watchdog group could surely come up with a fair gauge of gross criminal or ethics violations that should put the individual out of the business of commenting on daily politics to millions of viewers.

    Note that corporate media is much more careful about sexual scandal than it is about other kinds of crime. A politician or public figure so much as accused of sexual impropriety is often considered off limits (CNN's Aaron Brown once sidelined Scott Ritter that way, over a date gone bad). Presumably this caution derives in part from fear of the emails they would get, and threats of advertiser boycotts, from the relgious Right.

    Liberals have let themselves be walked all over by the Right, which is mostly much better funded and organized than the American Left, for too long. In part, it is because we are tolerant of a wide range of speech in a way that the Right is not. But I am not arguing for restricting the range of speech. People with Delay's or Rove's views deserve a hearing in the public sphere. It is just that we have no obligation to give a soapbox to monsters and criminals.

    So the next time you see CNN or ABC, e.g., interview Tom Delay with a straight face, send a protest email and scream bloody murder and notice which corporation paid for Delay to be on the public airwaves. But better yet, can't we form a facebook page for this with alerts, and get organized about it?

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Timothy Garton Ash: I saw Americans dance with history, chanting 'Yes we can!' But can they?

    Source: Guardian (UK) (11-6-08)

    [Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]

    To join that ebullient crowd in front of the White House shortly after midnight on Tuesday November 4 2008 was to dance with history. "Bush out now!" and "Goodbye, na na na na", they chanted, to the sound of drums. "Obama! Obama!" Car horns honked. A saxophone blared from the passenger window of a bright red pick-up truck. A young man beat a saucepan with a metal spoon. "This is the biggest housewarming party I've ever been to," an African-American woman with a stars-and-stripes headscarf dreamily confided, as she shimmied across 16th Street. And, this being our time, everyone both yapped and photo-snapped on their mobile phones.

    Most of all, though, these mainly young revellers chanted the slogan that Obama had just made the leitmotif of his acceptance speech in Chicago: "Yes We Can! Yes We Can!" Even the car horns took up the three-stroke rhythm: beep-beep-beep. When I went to bed, well after two in the morning, I could still hear the chants reverberating up to my hotel window. Yes-We-Can! Yes-We-Can!

    But can they? Can he? Can we?

    To say that he is the first black president in American history is more to write the last lines of the last chapter than the start of a new one. That chapter of pain is both remarkably ancient and shockingly recent. I observed people voting in a downtown polling station located in a church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which, a sign records, was established to protest against segregated worship in 1787. Across the Anacostia river, in a poor neighbourhood where mine was almost the only white face, an election supervisor - a Baptist preacher in everyday life - told me how African-Americans, often voting for the first time, had brought their children to witness the moment of which Dr King had dreamed. Only by listening to their voices can you fully appreciate what will be the impact of the mere sight of a black family occupying that white house.

    But Obama is much more than just black American. Like a growing number of citizens of our mixed-up world he is, as the columnist Michael Kinsley nicely puts it, "a one-man ethnic stew". This qualifies him to represent all those Americans, of every hue and mix, that I saw in the long queues of people waiting to vote in downtown Washington, and in that crowd before the White House. "Where are you from?" I asked a man who I guessed might be of North African origin. He stopped dancing for a moment, looked at me and said: "From my mother." A wonderful answer, also a rebuke, and minted for the age of Obama.

    For Obama is simultaneously the first post-ethnic president. To reduce this story to the black-white dichotomy is as useful as a black and white photograph of a colourful scene. John McCain may have singled out Joe the plumber to represent an old-fashioned, putative "silent majority" of white working-class Americans, but actually they now constitute a (not so) silent minority. And José the plumber voted for Obama. In fact, Obama's vote benefited from almost every aspect of America's growing demographic diversity. Introducing him in Florida during the campaign, Bill Clinton highlighted this new diversity, saying that both Florida and Obama represent "the world's present and America's future". That seems to me the wrong way round: it's America's present and the world's future. Where once America lagged, it now leads...

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    David Greenberg: McCain Ran the Sleaziest Campaign in History?

    Source: Slate (11-5-08)

    [David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.]

    In the weeks before Election Day, we heard regularly that John McCain was running the sleaziest campaign in a generation, if not in American history. That claim might strike some as another case of journalistic weakness for hyperbole. After all, we've also heard claims that this was the most important election of our lifetimes (as if the outcome of the 2000 race hadn't altered history), assertions that the Internet changed everything this year (though Obama surely would have won without it), and effusions about young people's unprecedented engagement (an echo of 1992, when youth turnout actually spiked—as it did not this year).

    But unlike those exaggerations, the line about McCain threatens to stain a man's name for history. And when viewed without partisan blinders or presentist lenses, the charge doesn't hold up. Indeed, it says more about today's political culture, which has grown unusually high-minded, and the emotions that Americans invest in presidential elections, which are unfailingly intense, than it does about McCain himself.

    A cursory familiarity with 19th-century history dispels any illusions that today's campaigns, or candidates, are nastier than they used to be. As historian Gil Troy wrote in See How They Ran, the first presidential races—those of 1796 and 1800, which pitted John Adams against Thomas Jefferson—generated slanders on both sides worse than we hear today. Jefferson's surrogates painted Adams as a monarchist, warning that he was going to create a dynasty by marrying his son to King George's daughter. Adams's advocates called the author of the Declaration of Independence a traitor and agent of the French Revolution, and accused him of raping his slave mistress. (Jefferson's liaisons with Sally Hemings have since been accepted by most historians). Abigail Adams despaired that all the "abuse and scandal" would "ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world."

    During the age of democracy in the 1830s, politics got only uglier. Newspapers, making no secret of their partisan allegiances, happily vilified the opposition in personal terms. Rivals branded Andrew Jackson an adulterer, his wife a bigamist, and his mother a prostitute. The most infamous contest of the century might have been the mud fight of 1884, when a well-known minister, sharing a stage with Republican nominee James Blaine, labeled the Democrats the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion"—a slur on immigrants, Catholics, and Southerners that Democrats forced Blaine to repudiate. The Republicans also attacked the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, for fathering an illegitimate child—a charge immortalized in the taunt, "Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!"

    The push for Blaine to disavow his supporter's well-publicized slur bespoke a growing concern with cleaning up politics. Late in the 19th century, middle-class reformers tried to purge democracy of its seamy underside, introducing voting reforms like the secret ballot and striving to elevate the tone of campaigns. "To elect their own rulers is, indeed, a great privilege," wrote the New York Evening Post in 1872. "But the principles and methods by which they have come to select them for election are execrable."

    The political reformers of the Progressive Era muted the crude personal invective that had once been commonplace, to say nothing of the formerly widespread practice of buying and stealing votes. But politics and human nature being what they are, no one devised a way to eliminate meanness. The 20th century saw plenty of below-the-belt campaigning, including many races much uglier than this year's. A quick rundown of the lowlights would have to include the Republicans' 1928 slurs against Al Smith, the first Catholic major-party nominee, pilloried as an agent of the pope; the Democrats' 1964 campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, to whom neo-Nazi ties were imputed; Jimmy Carter's 1980 insinuations that Ronald Reagan was a reckless warmonger; George Bush Sr.'s use of the Pledge of Allegiance and prison-furlough issues against Michael Dukakis in 1988; Bush's claims in 1992 that Bill Clinton committed near-traitorous acts by protesting the Vietnam War while in England; and—how soon we forget—the Swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004.

    If those examples don't put McCain's in perspective, consider that they were all rhetorical attacks. Even worse were Nixon's dirty tricks-filled efforts of 1968 and 1972 and George W. Bush's resort to mob violence to stop the 2000 Florida recount. Indeed, McCain's campaign probably wasn't even the dirtiest of 2008—a prize that belongs, arguably, to Obama himself for ascribing racism to Bill and Hillary Clinton in the days between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.

    Compared with the foregoing, McCain's slaps at Obama seemed more pathetic and desperate than vicious. His atavistic broadsides against "socialism" rang hollow. Ads about Obama's loose links to a Palestinian-American scholar and to a domestic terrorist whose name few Americans knew fell flat. Cheeky digs at Obama's celebrity status provoked more mirth than ire. McCain's ugliest tactic was to revive an old slur that Obama backed sex education for kindergarteners, but it met with such ferocious rebuke that it was rapidly withdrawn and forgotten. Against these negative themes, too, must be counterbalanced McCain's admirable stands, as when he fired staffers who stoked racism or anti-Muslim sentiments and rebuked his own hate-spewing supporters at rallies.

    The claims about McCain's supposedly unprecedented negativity, then, don't signify any deep truth about his character. Rather, they reveal important aspects of American politics today. The efforts to purify politics at the turn of the last century may not have succeeded in eliminating negativity, but they did erect new norms that stigmatized ungentlemanly campaign tactics—norms that remain powerful. When candidates go negative, they almost always draw scorn from the news media and often hurt their own campaigns more than they help. When McCain went after his opponent, this powerful disdain for negative campaigning kicked in, bringing out all our censoriousness.

    The scorn for going negative, moreover, has been especially acute among reformist high-minded liberals in the tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Eugene McCarthy to Obama—men whose successes rested on their supporters' wish for a politics free of the compromises and rough-and-tumble inherent in democracy. By introducing his campaign in a Stevensonian vein, Obama fashioned an image as one who would never initiate attacks. Remarkably, and much to his credit, Obama sustained that image throughout the campaign, even during those moments in August when, flagging in the polls, he acceded to his supporters' calls to hit harder against McCain or, the previous fall, against Hillary Clinton.

    The hyperbole about McCain's tone also stems from the human tendency to try to explain away electoral losses. In any election, the defeated are naturally loath to concede that the other side's platform or candidate was more appealing. Instead, we tend to ascribe to the other side an extreme skill in black arts—whether dangerously persuasive rhetoric, election stealing, or the evil genius of a Lee Atwater or a Karl Rove. Although Obama was in little danger of losing the election following the mid-September financial meltdown, his supporters, having seen two presidential victories slip through their grasp, couldn't quite shake the notion that the Democrats were vulnerable, and they grabbed onto these time-honored rationalizations.

    Finally, the protectiveness that Obama elicited from others also explains why McCain's fall campaigning was reviewed so harshly. Throughout the year, Obama was often spared the task of defending himself because others with prominent media platforms did it for him. As the campaign progressed, a whole slate of possible criticisms—including legitimate concerns about his record or his foreign-policy chops—were deemed, as if by cultural consensus, beyond the pale. Indeed, it's worth recalling that October's hyperbolic claims about McCain's negativity echo similar (and similarly unfounded) claims about Clinton's campaigning back in the spring. Does Obama somehow invite historically unprecedented negativity? Or are his enthusiasts just unusually quick to perceive it? In any event, Obama benefited more from labeling his rivals as uniquely sleazy than he suffered from whatever sleaziness they displayed.

    Obama fully deserved to defeat McCain on Tuesday. But he deserved to win because his party and his program presented the better hope for a better America, and not because he is purer of heart than other politicians—or any less able to throw a punch when his political future demands it. Like all good politicians, Obama appears to understand this important distinction. The rest of us should, too.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 1:15 AM | Comments (2) | Top

    Gil Troy: Echoes of the ’60s and ’70s in yesterday’s choice of Obama

    Source: Montreal Gazette (11-5-08)

    [Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal and a Visiting Scholar affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.]

    A voter fills out ballot at poll in Columbus, Ohio yesterday: The campaign might seem like a cakewalk compared with governing.

    Campaigns are social stress tests. U.S. presidential campaigns are regularly scheduled exercises highlighting the country’s social, cultural and political strengths and weaknesses. This year’s campaign - to the world’s sorrow - also demonstrated devastating economic weaknesses. Still, campaigns also breed optimism, as candidates invite their fellow citizens to remember the past and assess the present, then invest one mortal with the future dreams of 300 million people.

    For all the foolishness and frustrations of the two-year, $4.3-billion presidential quest, Americans should enter the 21/2-month transition to Inauguration Day proud of the peaceful, thorough, and open process that selected their next president.

    In this campaign, tens of millions participated and shaped the historic outcome. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain coasted to their respective party’s nomination and the lead during the general campaign switched at least three times.

    From the “invisible primary” seeing who could raise the most money that began after the 2006 mid-term congressional campaigns through the first votes cast in the Iowa caucus in January, 2008, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed liked the Democrats’ inevitable choice. Simultaneously, John McCain’s quest for the Republican nomination faltered. Only once the voting started did Barack Obama soar. Only after he won the caucuses of the overwhelmingly white state of Iowa did most people start believing that this young, first-term senator, who often described himself as the skinny guy with the funny name, just might win it all.

    In this rollicking, gruelling, unpredictable 2008 campaign marathon, America’s voters - and politicians - found themselves particularly shaped by the 1960s’ revolution as they judged, but also partially tried to replicate, the 1980s revolution.

    Both nominees embody America’s tremendous progress since the 1960s. John McCain represents the sea-change in attitudes toward Vietnam veterans which he helped trigger. During the war, many returning soldiers felt neglected and rejected by the country they had served. McCain’s iconic role in U.S. culture, symbolizing patriotism, selflessness and sacrifice, helped heal many of that war’s national wounds.

    Obama, who spent much of the campaign emphasizing how young he was during the 1960s, is a child of that decade, born in 1961. The civil-rights movement made his candidacy possible. Standing on the shoulders of the movement’s giants, Obama has gone farther and faster than most dared to hope. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s audacity was in dreaming that his children would be treated as equals by whites; even he did not believe Americans would consider a black president so soon. And despite Hillary Clinton’s loss, her campaign - along with Sarah Palin’s - advanced the women’s revolution of the 1960s to the upper reaches of national politics.

    As the 1960s cast its shadow, the 1980s’ Reagan Revolution loomed large, too. When John McCain was not channeling Theodore Roosevelt, he invoked Ronald Reagan. Both Roosevelt and Reagan offered the muscular, nationalist, patriotic leadership that McCain admires.

    Obama admires that leadership style, too. Interviewed in Nevada in January, Obama said Reagan had “changed the trajectory of America in a way that … Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Responding to the inevitable Democratic - and Clintonesque - onslaught, Obama explained he was not embracing Reagan’s policies, just admiring Reagan as a “transformative leader.”

    At his most powerful campaigning moments, Obama demonstrated a similar ambition and potential. Obama did not run to be a caretaker. Having matured during the Reagan Revolution, Obama wants to redefine liberalism as more community-oriented and more sensitive to tradition than the liberalism the 1960s produced; balancing rights and responsibilities, government power and individual prerogative.

    Of course, the financial meltdown directly challenged the 1980s’ legacy. During the summer, the Soviet invasion of Georgia and the continuing worries about Iran and Iraq made pundits predict 2008 would be a foreign policy-oriented election. That assumption explains Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as a running mate. That hedge - and so many others - diminished in value with the stock market’s collapse.

    Alas, despite the leadership opportunity the financial crisis provided for the candidates, neither rose to the occasion. Both remained cautious, simplistic demagogic on economic issues. That is what tends to happen during campaigns.

    Today, America’s new president-elect has to start preparing to govern. The 11-week transition to Jan. 20 is a gift, an opportunity for a healing honeymoon but also a test. And come Inauguration Day, the economy must be revived, the Iraq mess must be fixed, the challenges of a potentially nuclear Iran must be faced, the continuing threat of Islamic terror must be countered. Perhaps most important, the U.S. people need reassuring and reuniting after the anger and alienation of the George W. Bush years.

    This campaign showed that Americans hunger for change and inspiration. Inspiring while making hard decisions that might entail sacrifice is an Herculean task. In the inevitably rough days ahead, the new president might start yearning for the clarity and simplicity of the campaign trail, where oratory could substitute for policy and soundbites could trump substance, even if the accommodations were less plush than those the White House offers.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Shiben Krishen Raina: Terrorism in Kashmir ... Origin and Growth

    Source: Special to HNN (11-5-08)

    [Dr. Shiben Krishen Raina, formerly Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla, India.]

    Broadly speaking, when justice and right are denied to a person over a long period of time, the person is left with two options: bear the situation patiently, or the reaction is anguish, and that reaction, in the process can culminate in terrorism. Besides other things, spreading of communal hatred, religious frenzy, separatist tendency etc. are the tools which terrorists generally use. Guns too are used to achieve the so-called specified mission. Fanaticism, extremism, radicalism, separatism, militancy, activism etc. are its other names or manifestations. This is one side of the picture of terrorism. (Terrorists fighting for a genuine cause i.e. liberating themselves, their society/country from the oppressor/ perpetrator.)

    Another side of the picture is disgusting and questionable.  Over the years terrorism has emerged as a systematic use or threatened use of violence to intimidate a population, community or government and thereby effect political, religious or ideological change just to achieve personal gains. Modern terrorism has resorted to another option of intimidation, i.e.  influence the mass media, in an effort to amplify and broadcast feelings of intense fear and anger among the people. Needless to mention here that acts of terror are carried out by people who are indoctrinated to the extent of following a strategy of dying to kill. They are the ones who have become pawns in the hands of their masters who direct their paths, sitting in the comforts of far off places with all the facilities available to them. Masters have their vested political interests while as pawns seemingly have nothing to gain except suffer for a cause about which they themselves don’t know or know very little.

    Terrorism in Kashmir is almost 18 years old now and has likeness to the second side of the picture. It has a history long enough  to be traced from the date when partition was forced resulting in the emergence of two nations- India and Pakistan- after the sub-continent freed itself  from the colonial rule of the British Empire. It may not be out of context here to probe into the consequences in detail that gave rise to terrorism in Kashmir. But again, before that, giving a brief introduction of this widely known beautiful valley would be too apt.

    Kashmir-Paradise on Earth (the Switzerland of Asia) Nature’s grand finale of beauty is a masterpiece of earth’s creation of charm and loveliness. Famous for its beauty and natural scenery throughout the world and for its high snow-clad mountains, scenic spots, beautiful valleys, rivers with ice-cold water, attractive lakes and springs and ever-green fields, dense forests and beautiful health resorts, enhance its grandeur and are a source of great attraction for tourists. It is also widely known for its different kinds of agricultural products, fruit, vegetables, saffron, herbs, and minerals, precious stones handicrafts like woollen carpets, shawls and the finest kind of embroidery on clothes. During summer, one can enjoy the beauty of nature, trout fishing, big and small game hunting etc.; during winter climbing mountain peaks and sports like skating and skiing on snow slopes are commonly enjoyed. In addition to the above, Pilgrimage to famous religious shrines of the Hindus and the Muslims make Kashmir a great tourist attraction. About Kashmir Sheikh Sadie a great Persian poet is believed to have said, “If there is any heaven on earth, it is here in Kashmir, in Kashmir in Kashmir only.”

    Apart from natural beauty, Jammu and Kashmir has a unique cultural blend which makes it different from the rest of the country (India). It is not only distinct in cultural forms and heritage, but in geographical, demographical, ethnical, social entities, forming a distinct spectrum of diversity. The people of Kashmir, Jammu and Ladakh, all follow diverse religions, languages and cultures. Its different cultural forms in art and architecture, fair and festivals, rites and rituals, seers and sagas, languages and literatures, embedded in ageless period of history, speak of endless unity and diversity with unparalleled cultural cohesion and amicability. Kashmir has been a great center of learning. A treasure of rich Sanskrit literature is to be found here. Early Indo-Aryanic civilization has originated and flourished in this land. It has also been influenced by Islam, bringing its traditions of Persian civilization, tolerance, brotherhood and sacrifice.

    After the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and India and Pakistan emerged as two separate countries, princely states were given an option to choose the country they wanted to stay on. Obviously, the states falling geographically within had no other option but to merge with the country they were situated. Border states like Kashmir, Jodhpur etc. took time to come out with their firm decisions probably because they wanted to enjoy the status of an independent statehood. In the case of Kashmir, where Maharaja (King) Hari Singh was the ruler, the situation worsened considerably.  Territorial disputes over Kashmir had already started brewing, Pakistan claiming that Kashmir should go to its side since Muslims were in majority there.

    Apprehending that Maharaja might opt for an accession to India, Pakistan prepared for aggression in a bid to capture the state forcibly hoping that masses, mainly Muslims, would support its mission. That didn’t happen. Secular forces headed by the then popular mass leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah fondly known as Sher-i-Kashmir motivated the Kashmiri people (Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) to rise to the occasion and stand united to counter and frustrate the evil designs of the enemy who was marching to the capital city Srinagar indulging in bloodshed and mayhem. A new slogan echoed the entire valley: “Hamlavar khabardaar, hum Kashmiri hai tayaar---Hindu Muslim Sikh Ithaad, Naya Kashmir Zindabaad---“Beware you attackers! We Kashmiris are ready to counter you—Long live the Unity of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs-!!"  At Hazuri Bagh, Srinagar before a large crowd on October 1, 1947, Sher-i-Kashmir proclaimed : "Till the last drop of my blood, I will not believe in two-nation theory." It was a rebuff to Mr. Jinnah-father of the nation of Pakistan, who was watching the developments so closely from his country's side. Finding their designs on Kashmir not fructifying, Pakistan rulers launched an armed attack on Jammu and Kashmir to annex it. Tribes in thousands along with Pak regular troops entered the state on October 22, 1947 from several points and indulged in looting, arson, rape, bloodshed and mayhem. Bowing before the wishes of the people and seeing his own regular army being out-numbered, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession in favor of India on October 26, 1947 on the prescribed terms and conditions. This was accepted by the Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten the next day. The Instrument of Accession executed by Maharaja Hari Singh was the same which was signed by other rulers of the other princely states. Similarly, the acceptance of the Instrument of Accession by the Governor General was also identical in respect of all such instruments.

    With J&K becoming legal and constitutional part of Union of India, Indian army rushed to the State to push back the invaders and vacate aggression from the territory of the state. The first batch of Indian Army troops arrived at Srinagar airport immediately after the Accession was signed. On October 30, 1947 an Emergency Government was formed in the State with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as its head. The Army fought a sustained battle with the tribals/Kabayilies and after several sacrifices pushed them out of the Valley and other areas in the Jammu region. (Earlier Brigadier Rajendra Singh Chief of State Forces with a small number of soldiers at his disposal fought valiantly with the enemy and laid down his life in the process.)

    Meanwhile, the people of Kashmir under the towering leadership of Sher-I-Kashmir were mobilized and they resisted the marching columns of the enemy. Till the arrival of India  troops, it was mainly the Muslim volunteers under the command of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who braved death. While the army pushed back the invaders, there were several instances where people put up a gallant resistance and stopped the advancing troops. The most conspicuous examples of people’s resistance were the martyrdom of Mohammad Maqbool Sherwani and Master Abdul Aziz,  both  staunch followers of Sher-i-Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah. Sherwani  did not oblige the invaders when they inquired from him the route to Srinagar. Instead, he put them on a wrong track gaining time for troops to reach Srinagar from New Delhi. Somehow the tribesmen came to know about his tactics and nailed him at a Baramulla crossing and asked him to raise pro-Pakistan slogans. He did raise slogans but these were different. These were pro-Hindu-Muslim unity and in favour of Sher-i-Kashmir. Enraged by this, the ruthless tribesmen emptied their guns on him. The sacrifice of Master Abdul Aziz too was exemplary. The invaders who raped the nuns and wanted other non-Muslim women to be  handed over to them, Master Abdul Aziz, a tailor by profession, held the holy Quran in his hand and said that they can touch the women only after they pass over his dead body and the holy Quran. The brutal killers did not spare him either.

    On January 1, 1948 India took up the issue of Pak aggression in Jammu and Kashmir to the UN under Article 35 of its Charter. The government of India in its letter to the Security Council said: “…Such a situation now exists between India and Pakistan owing to the aid which invaders, consisting of nationals of Pakistan and tribesmen… are drawing from Pakistan for operations against Jammu and Kashmir, a State which has acceded legally to the Dominion of India and is part of India. The Government of India requests the Security Council to call upon Pakistan to put an end immediately to the giving of such assistance which is an act of aggression against India. If Pakistan does not do so, the Government of India may be compelled, in self defense, to enter into Pakistan territory to take military action against the invaders.” After long debates, a cease-fire was established at midnight on January 1, 1949. Eventually, India filed a complaint with the UN Security Council, which established the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP). Pakistan was accused of invading the region, and was asked to withdraw its forces from Jammu & Kashmir. The UNCIP also passed a resolution stating: “The question of accession of the state of Jammu & Kashmir to India or Pakistan will be decided through the democratic method of free and impartial plebiscite.” However, this could not take place because Pakistan did not comply with the UN resolution and refused to withdraw from the state. The international community failed to play a decisive role in the matter saying that Jammu & Kashmir is a “disputed territory.” In 1949, with the intervention of the United Nations, India and Pakistan defined a ceasefire line (“Line of Control”) that divided the two countries. This has left Kashmir a divided and disturbed territory up till now.

    In September 1951, free and fair elections, as per the Constitutional modalities, were held in Jammu & Kashmir, and National Conference party under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah came into power. With the advent of the Constituent Assembly of the State of Jammu & Kashmir representing the aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the regions became an integral  part of India constitutionally. After Sheikh Abdullah; Bakshi Gulam Mohamad, G.M.Sadiq, Mir Qasim, Gul Shah, Mufti Sayed and Dr.Farooq Abdullah ruled as Chief Ministers. Mr. Gulam Nabi Azad is the current Chief Minister of the J&K state.

    Though the governments ran smoothly over the years, continued  instigations and arousing religious frenzy by Pakistan did not stop. The year 1965 saw a war between India and Pakistan claiming many lives on both sides. A cease-fire was established and the two countries signed an agreement at Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 1966, pledging to end the dispute by peaceful means. Five years later, the two again went to war, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. Another accord was signed in 1972 between the two Prime Ministers — Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto — in Simla. After Bhutto was executed in 1979, the Kashmir issue once again flared up.

    During the 1980s, massive infiltrations from Pakistan were detected in the region, and India has since then maintained a strong military presence in Jammu & Kashmir to check these movements along the cease-fire line. India says that Pakistan has been stirring up violence in its part of Kashmir by training and funding “Islamic guerrillas” that have waged a separatist war since 1989 killing tens of thousands of people. Pakistan has always denied the charge, calling it an indigenous “freedom struggle.”

    In 1999, intense fighting ensued between the infiltrators and the Indian army in the Kargil area of the western part of the state, which lasted for more than two months. The battle ended with India managing to reclaim most of the area on its side that had been seized by the infiltrators.

    In 2001, Pakistan-backed terrorists waged violent attacks on the Kashmir Assembly and the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. This resulted in a war-like situation between the two countries, with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf asking his army to be “fully prepared and capable of defeating all challenges,” and the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee saying, “We don’t want war but war is being thrust upon us, and we will have to face it.”

    Plight of Pandits (Hindus)

    The Pandits, who are the Hindu community of Kashmir and have  an ancient and a proud culture, have been amongst the most afflicted victims of the Pakistani-supported campaign of terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. Their roots in the Kashmir Valley run very deep. They are the original inhabitants of this beautiful valley. Their number being small and peace-loving by nature, they have been the soft targets of terrorists.  Virtually the entire population of 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits have been forced to leave their ancestral homes and property. Threatened with violence and intimidation by Muslim fundamentalists, they have been turned into refugees in their own country leaving behind their shops, farms, cattle and age-old memories. As a matter of fact, Jammu and Kashmir has become a  target of Pakistan, sponsored by religion-based terrorism. The persecution by Muslim extremists of the Hindu minority and the systematic religion-based extremism of terrorist elements has resulted in the exodus of these Hindu/Pandits and other minorities from the Kashmir Valley to other parts of India. Fundamentalists and terrorists have also targeted and assassinated Muslim intellectuals and liberal Muslim leaders too, who spoke of Hindu-Muslim unity and brotherhood. Terrorist acts by Kashmiri  militant groups have also taken place outside Jammu and Kashmir.

    India claims most of the separatist militant groups are based in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir (also known as Azad Kashmir). Some like the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), demand an independent Kashmir. Other groups such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed favor a Pakistani-Kashmir. Of the larger militant groups, the Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant organization, is  based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Sources report that Al-Qaeda too has a base in Pakistani Kashmir and is helping to forment terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

    India is unwilling to lose even one additional inch of this land. New Delhi is also concerned that Kashmiri autonomy would set a precedent for breakaway movements in other Indian states (e.g., Punjab or Assam). To Pakistan, Kashmir is symbolic of its national ethos and commitment to protect Muslim interests against Indian encroachment. It believes that the creation of a separate, strongly sectarian nation is incomplete without contiguous Kashmir. In brief, Kashmir is a target of externally sponsored religion-based terrorism. The aim is to divide people on the basis of sectarian affiliation and undermine the secular fabric and territorial integrity of India.

    However, as and now with the passage of time, the passion of the Jehad/movement which once had mass public support has started declining since  it has turned out to be a movement run by those who are more interested in their own personal gains. Confusion within the separatist groups too has weakened the movement. The hard liners led by Jamat-e-Islami advocate total merger of Jammu and Kashmir, with Pakistan whereas the soft liners led by J.K.L.F (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) stands for total independence of J&K. This has given rise to a totally confusing and conflicting situation resulting in disillusionment, disarray and disinterest of the common man in Kashmir who has  suffered a lot for the past 20 years and is not prepared to suffer any more.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:34 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: Will Obama be able to deliver on his promises?

    Source: CNN (11-5-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    Many Americans are expecting big things from President Barack Obama.

    The president-elect ran as the candidate of change, promising to transform the status quo in Washington and to empower citizens to take back their government.

    During his speeches in the final week of the campaign, Obama said to his supporters that together, "we will change this country. We will change the world."

    Those are some pretty big promises. Unfortunately for Obama, most presidents since WWII have suffered from the freshmen blues in their first year in the White House.

    Expectations are usually high and the ability of a president to deliver much of what he promised on the campaign trail is rather low. Without a national crisis like 9/11, presidents have struggled in their first year with a general decline in approval ratings.

    The reasons are not difficult to understand. International and domestic crises force the White House to focus on unexpected issues, many of which are not in their best political interest. The bitter partisan and intra-party tensions that had caused gridlock for the previous administration remain. Budgetary limits constrain how much tax-cutting or spending increases can take place.

    When a president takes office with expectations as high as those for Obama, the chances for avoiding a post-election letdown are virtually nil.

    Under these conditions, the challenge for the new president is to somehow keep the factions of his winning coalition in the tent even as he can't accomplish much of what he promised to do.

    While some presidents, such as Harry Truman or Jimmy Carter, never really recovered from the post-election letdown and watched as their coalitions crumbled, other presidents have figured out ways to retain the loyalty of their supporters....

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Tom Engelhardt: Obama and "the Elecular"

    Source: TomDispatch.com (11-5-08)

    [Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.]

    The following email came in from my friend Wendy, very early Tuesday morning: "At 6:22, I am standing in a block long line on w. 65th. In 33 years I have never stood behind more than ten people for a prez election…"

    Keep in mind that we're talking about New York City, where the election result was never in doubt. At about the same time, at our neighborhood polling place, my wife found a more than hour-long line winding around the block, and my son, on his way to work, had a similar traffic-jam experience. For a friend downtown, it was two-and-a-half hours. Again, this wasn't contested Ohio, it was New York City.

    So don't think I wasn't excited -- even thrilled, even filled with hope -- when, at 11:30 that morning I hit my polling place and still found a sizeable, if swiftly moving, line of voters of every age, size, and color, and in the sunniest of moods. Normally, on voting day, I just waltz in. But it was a pleasure to wait and imagine. Even then I knew, as Jonathan Freedland wrote recently of Tom Friedman's new book, that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." But believe me, that didn't stop me from thinking about what the turnout might be like in states where it mattered, or what that might mean. And it didn't stop me from remembering another moment, more than four years earlier.

    It was the summer of 2004 and I was walking the floor of a packed Democratic Convention in Boston, interviewing dutiful delegates. They were intent on nominating John Kerry as the Party's candidate because they were convinced he was the man who could "win." Despite no less dutiful cheering as speakers rattled on, there was a low hum of conversation, a sense of distraction in the air -- until, that is, a politician I had never heard of, a young man from Illinois named Barack Obama, was introduced as the keynote speaker.

    All I can say is that I've never been in a crowd so electrified. It was visceral, as if the auditorium itself had suddenly come alive. I felt it as a pure shot of energy coursing through my body. Like others in that vast arena, I simply didn't know what hit me. When it was over -- and it took a long time for that surging din to ebb -- when I could finally shout into a cell phone, I called my daughter, who, by an odd coincidence, was in the nosebleed section of the same arena with a camera crew. What I said to her (and then repeated to a friend in another call soon after) was: "I know this is going to sound ridiculous but I think I just heard a future president of the United States." (And then, in my report from the convention, I actually wrote it down: "He was a knock-out. Call me starry-eyed, or simply punchy as a day inside the Fleet Center ended, but there's always something about genuine enthusiasts that just does get to you. I thought to myself when Obama was finished and the place was truly rocking, maybe, just maybe, I listened to a speech by a future president of the United States.")

    Soon after, a friend commented that people had said the same thing of Julian Bond back in the 1960s. And I promptly forgot all about it until my daughter reminded me of it this spring.

    Last night, that electric moment came to mind again -- as a journey of unbelievable improbability reached its provisional, slightly miraculous endpoint. And, while the results poured in, I had another visit from the past. I remembered a day in 1950. I was six and my mother had taken me to one of those magnificent old movie palaces then still on Broadway in New York City to see a cowboy flick. At its climax, with the hero and villain locked in primordial struggle on a mountainside, the bad guy went over the cliff. As it happened, my father had mentioned this dramatic plot development the previous evening and so, as the villain dropped into the void, I yelled out into that darkened theater in sheer delight at being in the know, "My Dad told me it was going to happen this way!"

    It's one of those typical kid stories -- embarrassing and yet with a certain charm -- that families tend to hang onto. And 58 years later, it came to mind as Barack Obama and the Democrats were storming through the electoral landscape. With various friends gathered at my house for a party meant to wipe out the misery and memory of a similar party four years earlier, I had the same primordial if irrational urge to shout out: "My friend Steve told me it was going to happen this way!"

    I'm talking about Steve Fraser, my partner at our book publishing enterprise, the American Empire Project. Back in February 2007 at TomDispatch, he explored the possibility that this would be a "turning-point election," and not so long after became convinced that it would be. Maybe it was that 2004 electoral "hangover," but I couldn't convince myself of the same and so, increasingly, obsessionally, began checking out daily polling information on the campaign and trolling the Internet for endless commentary on the same.

    When I'd call Steve to discuss the odds of a turning-point election actually happening, though, he would have none of it. Such a result was, for him, a given, and he had better things to do. He never wavered.

    Addicted

    I can't claim the same. These last few months, I developed the Internet equivalent of a series of physical tics. The Daily Kos poll at 7:30; Rasmussen at 9:30; Gallup after 1; those repeated visits to Nate Silver's superb FiveThirtyEight.com, to TPM Election Central, to RealClearPolitics.com, and, of course, to Pollster.com to stare, and then stare again, at the prospective electoral map, to run the cursor over state polling averages that often changed not a whit from week to week. If this wasn't addiction, what was?

    And so this morning, I woke up to a unique headline in my hometown paper -- just OBAMA in inch-high letters -- to genuine relief, but also to a kind of weird emptiness. It was over and it was, I realized, several things at once, including, of course, the Bush era, which should have ended in 2004 (or never begun), and which has been the nightmare of my adult life. Of course, you need to add in, as well, the end of a nearly thirty-year cycle of triumphant Republicanism (with that sorry Clintonista interlude) that left the country flat on its proverbial back.

    It was also Barack Obama's remarkable victory, the turning-point election of all time -- at least in the sense of ending what Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and Abraham Lincoln began, what could not have happened without a great and brave movement in the 1950s and 1960s that demanded of America what its founding documents, its most basic ideology, insisted should already be so.

    A black president of the United States. A black first lady. In my younger days, no one could have convinced me this would happen in my lifetime. A massive movement of millions of young people on the ground, committed to, not alienated from, a future government – yes, that, too, was something we hadn't seen in quite a while, except perhaps on the evangelical right.

    Today, it's clear enough that Obama's electoral juggernaut has swept a landscape already devastated and devalued by the Bush administration -- and that's no small thing. But there was another it as well, one that's harder to put a name to, another kind of juggernaut that managed to make its way under my skin and into my life -- into the lives, I suspect, of so many Americans over the last two years, and that I hold responsible both for those tics and that emptiness. It's what left me asking this morning: What hit me? What in the world was that?

    And, really, what was it? We persist in calling it an "election," or an "electoral campaign." But you could catch something of what else it was in the journalistic bravado, combined with awe (or, perhaps, if such a word existed, I mean "self-awe"), as the TV news people made their Monday-night pitches for election eve viewers. They spoke with a kind of pride of "the longest campaign in U.S. history," "the most exciting presidential election in our lifetime," "the most closely followed election campaign in recent years,""the most expensive election in…," and so on, while my hometown paper front-paged it Monday as: "A Sea Change for Politics as We Know It."

    A sea change. A tsunami of entertainment, or was it distraction? An eternal election campaign. Two years of the most everything -- the most money, the most small contributors, the most large contributors, the most ads, the most polls, the most lobbyists, the most extensive ground game, the most places (Internet, email, YouTube, Facebook, bloggers, text messaging, cell phones), the most jokes, the most appearances by candidates on late-night talk shows or TV satirical programs involving themselves, and, of course, the most talking (or babbling) heads and media pundits, always predicting, assessing, sizing-up, telling us what the candidates "must" do, and do, and do, 24/7. Whole programs, whole cable stations, whole news cycles, whole websites devoted to nothing but the constant discussion of… well, what? More spinners, bloviators, and pundits than previously existed on the face of the Earth. The most, the most… but only, naturally, until the next time when, you can be sure -- as Howard Dean's Internet fund-raising experiment was to Barack Obama's -- the most of 2008 will prove but a baseline for future mosts.

    So let me just ask again: What was that? What just happened? I don't mean Barack Obama entering the Oval Office on January 20, 2009. I mean to me. I mean to us. I mean, what were all those talking heads on MSNBC, and CNN, and FOX doing? What were those bizarre feedback loops and YouTube videos of "events" you've already long forgotten? What were the gazillion ads and the gazillion discussions of them, and really, what were all those polls, hundreds and hundreds of polls, more polls than humanity has probably ever seen? What were they all about?

    Whatever it was, it was supersized, a Big Maclection. It glued eyes to TV sets and the Internet, and, above all else, it -- what we kept insistently calling an "election" -- was bloated beyond belief. Like, say, the Pentagon. It was, in short, imperial.

    And it never ended. In fact, we hadn't made it anywhere near November 4, 2008 before you could feel the next round, the next "election," revving up. 2012 was already on the drawing board. Would it be Sara Palin v. Hillary Clinton? Was Mitt Romney still in the race? Would the Republicans roar back, or would they be a rump white party in the wilderness of the deep South and deep West for a generation to come? Think of it as the eternal election.

    Millions of people devoted themselves to this election. Knocked on doors. Made phone calls. And yet it -- the thing I'm talking about -- was the very opposite of individual.

    The vote last night was surely a crude and belated American judgment on the misrule of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, on the economic catastrophe they had such a hand in bringing down on us, and even on the Iraq War and the President's woebegone Global War on Terror, but despite the commitment of millions, this was not simply an election, not in the old-fashioned sense anyway. Even though perhaps 130 million people ended up in voting booths, following about a trillion "serial elections" that we call "opinion polls," it wasn't primarily for or about us. It was for and about them. It was, above all, an event for, and geared to, the media itself, which fed it, stoked it, and lived off it. All those tics of mine were surely secondary symptoms of a process they controlled (but undoubtedly understood little better than we do).

    To me, there's something distinctly human, and small scale, about an election. A single individual casts a single vote. That vote theoretically matters. It helps determine your fate. You are, to use our President's phrase, "the decider." And yes, Americans did finally decide something last night. Yet, when I look at these last two bizarre years of "campaigning," nobody can convince me that we were, in any but the vaguest sense, the deciders in this election, or that, underneath what was indeed human and thrilling, there wasn't something deeper, larger, colder, quite monstrous, and still growing.

    The Elecular of 2012

    Sometimes, reality simply outruns the words meant to describe it. Historically, when a new Chinese dynasty came to power, the emperor performed a ceremony called "the rectification of names" -- on the theory that the previous dynasty had fallen, in part, because reality and the names for it had gone so out of whack, because words no longer described the world they were meant for.

    After the Bush years, we desperately need such a rectification. And perhaps we need a new word -- maybe a whole new vocabulary -- as well for the "election season" that never ends, that seems now something like a grim, eternal American Idol contest. Just to start the discussion, I offer a modest one, "elecular," a combination of "election" and "spectacular," or maybe "electacle." Or using "campaign," "camptacular" or "spectaculaign." None of which catches the darker side of this strange, overwhelming gauntlet through which "democracy" must pass.

    Do I understand this? No. Like the rest of us, like the very talking heads on FOX News or CNN or Charlie Rose, or… well, you name it… I'm immersed in what Todd Gitlin once termed "the torrent," which is our televisual civilization, of which this last campaign was such a part.

    I can't help but think, despite the quality of the man who somehow ended up atop our world, that this was indeed an imperial election, far too supersized for any real democracy. Yes, Americans crudely expressed the displeasure of a people who had had enough, and thank heavens for that, but… our will? The People's Will. I doubt greatly that the People's Will is going to make it to Washington with Barack Obama.

    On this small, noisy, endangered planet of ours with its almost 7 billion high-end omnivores -- that's us, in case you didn't know -- something historically quite out of the ordinary and wonderful just happened, and something historically quite out of the ordinary and disturbing happened as well. One man changed history. One juggernaut ran over us all.

    It's worth keeping in mind that Barack Obama is but a man. One man, living these last years like the rest of us at the heart of a juggernaut -- and I don't mean his campaign -- that none of us really understands.

    In the meantime, if things get worse, there's always the elecular of 2012 to look forward to.

    Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: A Victory for America, and the World

    Source: Washington Post (11-5-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press).]

    There will be jubilation in the streets of London and Berlin this morning. Likewise in Lagos and Bamako, Lahore and Bangkok, Lima and Bogota.

    Wherever you look, it would seem, the world is celebrating Barack Obama's landslide win in Tuesday's US presidential election. To people around the globe, Obama's victory signals a new American willingness to converse with the world instead of imposing our will upon it.

    At the same time, though, Obama also represents a new kind of American pre-eminence. Say it loud, my fellow Americans, and say it proud: we just became the first majority-white democracy on this planet to anoint a black person as national leader.

    That's right: the first. For much of our past, the United States lagged behind the world's racial-equality curve. This week, for once, we're ahead of it. So Americans should be celebrating, too, no matter whom they supported on Tuesday.

    Consider that the United States did not abolish slavery until 1865. The British Empire beat us by a half-century, outlawing the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834. Pick a world power that practiced slavery, and it's likely that they ended it before we did. France? 1794. Spain? 1811. Denmark? 1848.

    Ditto for other newly independent nations in the New World. Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia all abolished slavery in 1821. Mexico did the same in 1829, sparking a revolt by slave-owning ranchers in Texas. Nine years later, America's annexation of the Texan republic--as a slave state, of course--would set the stage for the Mexican-American War.

    But the United States did not end slavery for another twenty years after that. And it took a bloody civil war, of course, costing at least 600,000 lives--more than the total number of Americans killed in all of our other wars, combined.

    Then, let's remember, the United States established the world's most onerous and slave-like system of segregation for African-Americans. Following a brief flurry of freedom during the Reconstruction era, America denied black people basic human rights--to vote, to protest, to travel, and more--for nearly a century.

    Only the apartheid regime in South Africa rivaled American segregation in its pure malice, cruelty, and pettiness. And, not surprisingly, apartheid found some of its most vocal international defenders right here in the United States.

    In the Senate, especially, segregationist politicians like the recently deceased Jesse Helms praised apartheid and mocked Americans who condemned it. "Who are we to be so pious about the efforts of the South African government to stop the riots, the looting, the shooting and the mayhem that's going on over there?" Helms asked.

    Well after other democracies had imposed a host of sanctions on South Africa, indeed, Helms and his fellow apologists blocked any such action by the United States. Only in 1986, amid nationwide demonstrations, would Congress override President Ronald Reagan's veto and approve economic sanctions against the apartheid regime.

    So let's pause to savor this historic moment, before we forget how historic it really is. The majority-white nation with the world's worst track record on race just won the race for electing a black leader. During the presidency of George W. Bush, America was vilified for its smug arrogance and duplicity: by invading Iraq, especially, we lost our moral stewardship over a fractured and unstable globe. In choosing Barack Obama, however, the United States proved that it can still can serve as an exemplar for the rest of the world. That's a victory all of us can cheer, whether we voted for Obama or not.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: John McCain's chaotic operation may well rank among recent history's least successful efforts

    Source: Newsweek (11-5-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-secu rity politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.]

    The GOP presidential campaign of 2008 will certainly be one that historians discuss for years to come. But not in the way that some Republicans had hoped for when they selected an experienced maverick, loved by the media, to face off against an inexperienced African-American who had trouble vanquishing his opponent in the primaries.

    To be fair, the odds were stacked against any Republican. The economy has suffered while the incumbent president was phenomenally unpopular. Democrats were well organized and well financed. They found, in Barack Obama, an exceedingly charismatic and dynamic candidate.

    But nothing is inevitable in American politics. A strong campaign, combined with the issue of race and fears about Obama's inexperience, could have produced a different outcome.

    History is filled with examples of campaigns marked by bad decisions and poor performances that undermined their chances of victory. In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater made statements that allowed President Lyndon Johnson to depict him as a candidate too far out of the American mainstream. Eight years later, Richard Nixon returned the favor to Democratic Sen. George McGovern, who had put together a campaign that appealed to the New Left and other activists inspired by 1960s activism but failed to bring in traditional Democratic constituencies such as organized labor. In 1988, Democrat Michael Dukakis was the proverbial deer in the headlights when Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush and his team redefined the technocratic Massachusetts Democrat into an extreme card-carrying ACLU liberal who let out murderers on weekend furloughs. Bush then stumbled in 1992 with his tin ear about the economic recession. In 1996, Republican Robert Dole ran a lethargic campaign that emphasized nostalgia and suspicion while President Bill Clinton ran around the country boasting about peace and prosperity. During the last election, Sen. John Kerry didn't adequately defend himself against "Swift-Boat" attacks.

    But Team McCain ran a campaign that ranks on the bottom of this list. This was an aimless and chaotic operation made worse by poor choices at key moments. Their first mistake was picking Gov. Sarah Palin. Though in the first week following her selection, Palin energized the conservative base of the GOP, she became a serious drag on the ticket. This turned into one of the worst picks since McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton, a Missouri senator who withdrew after revealing that he had gone through electroshock therapy and suffered from "nervous exhaustion." By picking Palin, McCain simultaneously eliminated his own best argument against Senator Obama—the limited experience of his opponent—while compounding his own most negative image, that of someone who was erratic and out of control. The pick also fueled the feeling that grew throughout September and October that the Republican candidate was willing to take any step necessary to win the campaign. The Palin pick made every decision that followed seem purely political....

    Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 12:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Joseph Lane: Memo to President-Elect Obama ... Remake the Democratic Party for the Long Term, Now

    Source: Britannica Blog (11-5-08)

    [Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.]

    In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Barack Obama revealed an ambitious plan that has always been implicit in his campaign but now stands both openly avowed and suddenly plausible:

    he plans to remake the Democratic party.

    He made it clear that he wants to find common ground with some Republicans and that he thinks it is possible to transcend the labels that have limited our policy options. If he is sincere about that aspiration (and I think he is), he needs to accept at least two important pieces of advice for the first few days in the White House.

    1. Face-off with Congress, the sooner the better.

    First, he needs to find a textbook liberal piece of legislation passed by the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate, and he needs to veto it and have the veto upheld - the more prototypical the legislation and the sooner the better. He may even have to write the piece of legislation for the exercise to ensure that the point is unmistakable. He must demonstrate that although he wants to work with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he won’t let them dictate the terms of the cooperation. This will come at some risk - ask Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter - but this is not 1993 or 1977.

    Barack Obama will have the troops on the back-benches that will support him, and thanks to two consecutive successful congressional elections, the Democrats now have a good number of Representatives and Senators from moderate to conservative districts and states. Many of them will feel that they owe him their seats in the national legislature and will be willing to stake their careers on working with the president on moderate projects. The transformations in the Virginia congressional delegation in the last three years - Senators Webb and Warner and now Representatives Nye, Perriello as well as Obama’s old ally Boucher - illustrates the point nicely.

    2. Build a pragmatic, center-left coalition, even with McCain.

    President Obama needs to invite Sue Collins, Arlen Specter, Mark Warner, Rick Boucher, Jim Webb, Heath Shuler, and even John McCain, as well moderates and pragmatists from both parties over immediately and say, “OK, we want a health care plan that covers more Americans and lowers costs, an energy plan that gets Americans to work making clean and renewable electricity and that lowers our dependence on foreign oil, and a national security plan that uses American force only where it can accomplish demonstrable benefits for our security without alienating our allies and the rest of the world. And I want all three plans to be ones that all of you in this room can vote for.” If he does that, he could build a center-left coalition party that would be immensely powerful for a generation (and might even attract some conservatives who are rediscovering their own progressive tendencies). If he starts with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on a liberal wish list, he will get some things passed and may win two terms, but he will ultimately narrow the Democrats’ hold in the House and Senate (starting in 2010) and risk losing power after eight years like Clinton did.

    Barack Obama has a remarkable opportunity to transform the Democratic party, and he needs to do it. It is not only good for policy, but it is also good politics. There will be a nearly irresistible desire among the Palin rump of the Republican party to continue resisting and running against him on the basis of the hackneyed attacks on the presumably “socialist” (or at least paleo-liberal) character of any Democratic administration. Barack Obama can defuse that attack at the outset. It may not be silenced, but it will appear off-target and anachronistic if the new president chooses to chart a new path toward a more pragmatic liberalism.

    He should waste no time getting started.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 12:35 PM | Comments (2) | Top

    Mary L. Dudziak: Obama and the Image of America

    Source: http://balkin.blogspot.com (11-5-08)

    [Ms. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science, University of Southern California. Her newest book is Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).]

    "Just wanted to share my joy across the Atlantic," wrote a friend from Paris this morning, as the world celebrated Barack Obama’s victory. "It would be hard to overstate how fervently vast stretches of the globe wanted the election to turn out as it did to repudiate the Bush administration and its policies," writes Ethan Bronner for the New York Times. But this is not the only reason that Obama’s election is particularly important to the world.

    For decades, American race relations have been a central feature of the way peoples of other nations regarded the United States. Discrimination against peoples of color led other nations to argue that the United States must correct its own imperfections before criticizing human rights violations by others. How could the United States argue that its system of government was a model for the world when within its own borders American citizens were segregated and disenfranchised?
    In 1944 Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal argued that race discrimination was especially problematic in the United States because it was at odds with the principles of American democracy. During World War II, American racism "acquired tremendous international implication," he suggested. "America for its international prestige, power and future security needs to demonstrate to the world that American Negroes can be satisfactorily integrated into its democracy."

    During the Cold War years, the international impact of American race relations escalated. Lynching, disenfranchisement and segregation harmed U.S. international prestige. This gave the Soviet Union an effective propaganda tool. As a columnist in Ceylon wrote in 1948: "the colour bar is the greatest propaganda gift any country could give the Kremlin in its persistent bid for the affections of the coloured races of the world."

    "We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics," President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights wrote in 1947. American diplomats warned of the devastating impact of racism on U.S. prestige around the world, and American leaders came to understand that in order to lead the world the nation needed to live up to its principles. Spinning the story of race in America was not enough. Instead some level of social change was needed to turn around the impact of racism on the nation’s standing in the world. In this context, the U.S. Justice Department drew upon letter from Secretary of State Dean Acheson in its brief in Brown v. Board of Education (filed in 1952). Acheson noted that "the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater....The view is pressed more and more vocally that the United States is hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country." (This argument is developed much more fully here, here, here and here.)

    One lesson of the Cold War years is that living up to the nation’s principles, including protecting individual rights, strengthens the nation around the world. It also enables the United States to be a more forceful voice for human rights. But what Myrdal and others called at the time "the Negro problem" was the central problem for the American international image for many years. The status of African Americans was the Achilles heel as the nation became a world leader. For that reason, an African American President speaks directly to the generations of criticism that a nation that enslaved and then disenfranchised and brutalized its own citizens undermined its ability to be a moral leader of the world.

    "I’m so proud of America!" wrote my friend from Paris. Discrimination endures, of course, in spite of the symbolism of Obama’s victory. But Obama now embodies the image of America. Because of this, a generations-long narrative has, for a moment at least, been put aside.

    Posted on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 12:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: The Ghoul's Glossary ... the 2008 Election

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (11-4-08)

    Alaska: The only one of the 50 states where secessionists are considered American patriots rather than traitors.

    Catholic working class: Synonym for "feminist."

    Communist: 1. A believer in a graduated income tax ("Communists" include Adam Smith and 81% of professional American economists). 2. When modified by 'Chinese' : A supplier of retail goods to Walmart.

    Friends: Persons whom John McCain does not know and does not actually like very much, but whom he wishes to persuade to vote for him by grimacing at them while gesturing as though he is measuring their waists for new pants.

    Georgia: A country that can do no wrong. (Antonym of: Russia, Iran).

    Green energy: 1. Nonpolluting, renewable, energy sources such as wind and solar. 2. Pennsylvania coal.

    Iran: A largely Shiite country that would attack the United States and impose Sunni Bin Laden rule on us if only they had Bin Laden or any weapons.

    Iraq: A largely Shiite country that would attack the United States and impose Sunni Bin Laden rule on us if only they had Bin Laden or any weapons.

    Masochist: See "Pakistan."

    Maverick: Someone who votes for the status quo 90 percent of the time.

    Muslim: A Christian from Kansas who has lived in both Hawaii and Illinois.

    Neoconservatism: The theory that Muslims would be grateful if only the United States would invade and militarily occupy them without provocation.

    Pakistan: A largely Sunni country that does have Bin Laden and nuclear weapons, but which declares itself an ally of America in the war on terror and allows itself to be routinely attacked by the United States.

    Palestinians: Dispossessed, displaced and stateless persons who are ungrateful for their condition and therefore vaguely dangerous.

    Victory: (This word has been left undefined.)

    Withdrawal: A way to avoid the worst consequences of a moment of pleasurable conquest, which, however, often comes too late to avoid years of support payments.

    Youth vote: The expectation that 21-year-olds will save the nation from the folly of their elders, in preference to gulping shots from the navels of hot barmaids during a Tuesday happy hour.

    Zionism: The theory that because Nazis hated Jews, the latter would be much better off all gathered together on disputed land in the midst of 300 million Arabs and Iranians.

    Posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 12:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Simon Schama: A Farewell to Dubya, All-Time Loser in Presidential History

    Source: Guardian (UK) (11-3-08)

    "Forgotten but not gone" was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that the most impassioned moment in John McCain's performance in the final debate was when he declared: "I am not George Bush."

    Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.

    Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself "the decider" has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush's own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.

    Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners - and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.

    If Bush himself has been largely kept out of sight, his baleful legacy has been visible in the McCain campaign. McCain has made much of his credentials for independence of mind, a claim which once was credible given his support for immigration reform and opposition to Bush's tax cuts. But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, all of this became less important than the lessons of the Reagan-Bush-Rove political playbook which, with the exception of the Clinton election of 1992, seemed to have a track record of unbroken success.

    McCain knew this from bitter personal experience, having been on the receiving end of Bush lowball politics in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Coming out of a convincing win against George Bush in New Hampshire he was stopped in his tracks by a smear campaign conducted through push-poll phone calls in which people were asked whether they knew that the daughter McCain had adopted from Sri Lanka was in fact the illegitimate child of an affair with a woman of colour. Now you would think McCain could never reconcile himself to a politician capable of those kinds of tactics. But there he was in the campaign of 2004, stumping the country for the incumbent, ingratiating himself with the conservative base he knew he would need, even as his old Vietnam buddy, John Kerry, was being coated in slime by the Swift Boaters.

    Whatever misgivings McCain might have had about adopting the hardball tactics of his 2000 adversary have long since disappeared before the blandishments of classic Bush-style operatives like Rick Davis and Stephen Schmidt. "Do you want to be pure, or do you want to win"? they must have asked right after the nomination. Ditching Joe Lieberman as a running mate and unleashing pitbull Palin was his answer.

    So even while George Bush is kept at arm's length from the campaign, his campaign style lives on as Obama is stigmatised as a terrorist-friendly stealth-socialist, too deeply unAmerican to be let anywhere near the Oval Office. "He just doesn't see America as we do" says Sarah Palin trying to wink her way into Dick Cheney's seat. McCain is betting the house that this way of doing politics has at least one more hurrah left in it, and we will find out on in the early hours of Wednesday morning whether he is right.

    The Bush presidency is the spectre haunting the feast in more than tactics. Although every conservative administration since Ronald Reagan has promised to deliver, through supply-side stimulation, economic growth without bloated deficits, they have never been vindicated in their blind faith in what Bush senior once rashly called "voodoo economics". Consistently, they have brought the US Wall Street crashes and recessions along with massive deficits; and yet somehow, the stake that history attempts to drive through the heart of their economic theology never puts the ghoul away.

    No weight of evidence to the contrary has ever shaken the totemic belief that tax cuts can grow the economy robustly enough to compensate for drastic shortfalls in revenue. George W Bush clung to this belief even as the Clinton budget surplus was converted into a mountainous deficit, and John McCain continues to parrot the same belief with the shining face of a true believer.

    Not even Gibbon could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a barmitzvah.

    If you look at this saga as the history of a dynasty; it's come full circle. For, believe it or not, there once was a time when Bush politics was about centrist moderation. Dubya's revered granddad, Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of an Ohio railroad executive and senator for Connecticut from 1952 to 1963, was punished in the Catholic towns of industrial Connecticut for his connection with Planned Parenthood. Not only that, but he was a trustee of the United Negro College Fund, the kind of institution that made the eventual career of Barack Obama conceivable.

    But the Bushes have always been selective about idealism. And even at the height of the Kennedy-Johnson apogee, Prescott and George Herbert Walker Bush were turning the pages of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. They could smell the wind direction changing. The future of Republican money and Republican power lay elsewhere; with Texas oil. Hence the migration to Midland Texas of George Herbert Walker Bush and his makeover into a Texan who knew the ways of the corporate world; and how to bring about the Great Cosiness between government and business that seemed like the perfect feedback loop: money to power, power to money; tax breaks for the corporations; donations to those who might command the heights.

    This is the politics George W Bush inherited, and he has been its faithful disciple; to the point of purging it of any remaining traces of pragmatism. It is astounding to hear rightwing talkshow bloviators rant about the predicament of the Bush administration being caused by its failure to carry out the true conservative agenda. For there never has been and never will be a more doctrinally faithful instrument of the creed. Never mind the hanging chads of 2000, the Cheney-Bush administration seized the moment to bring on the Goldwater-Reagan Rapture in which government was once and for all got out of the way of business....

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 9:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    John Patrick Diggins: America needs integrity and humility in the Oval Office

    Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (11-7-08)

    [John Patrick Diggins is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His recent books include Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (W.W. Norton, 2007), Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and the forthcoming "God Is Dead! Long Live Religion."]

    Is ethical leadership possible in the politics of our era? Had the question no specific time frame, the answer might be yes, or at least yes and no. But in the 21st century, the idea that we can expect ethical leadership in American politics is to believe that hope triumphs over experience. The purpose of politics is no longer to do what is right for the sake of the public good but to do what is expedient for the sake of the self and its desire for power and fame. Electoral victory is the only game in town, and candidates will do whatever it takes to win.

    Historically, ethics was the domain of religion. But in America, in our times, religion follows politics rather than leading it. Consider the devout Christians who believe in premarital chastity defending the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's teenage daughter for the sake of the presidential election. Organized religion can no more serve an ethical calling than a prostitute can regain her virginity. The recent rash of public scandals — Alaska Senator Ted Stevens's home makeover courtesy of an oil-services firm, former presidential contender John Edwards's cheating on his wife, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's patronage of a prostitution ring — has taken place as the American people declare themselves to be religious, firm believers in the existence of God. The more their representatives sin, the more constituents pray.

    Ethics is supposed to be about ideals that stand above the scrimmage of struggle and success. A little background in history and ethics will demonstrate how we have come to our current state. Ethics, rooted in religion, animated the first settlers to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th century, but politics quickly left its religious roots behind. When we look at John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630) and compare it with The Federalist Papers (1787-88), we see precisely the abandonment of high moral principles in order to settle for the pursuit of worldly matters.

    God, according to Winthrop, deliberately created human beings unequal so that each and every member of society should have need of the others. The Puritan covenant called upon the colonial settlers to walk toward each other in "justice and mercy" and to subordinate individual desires to the good of the larger community. By the time of the drafting of the Constitution, however, God had disappeared from political discourse, and society's members were asked to accept a government of external controls precisely because they had lost the capacity to control themselves. No longer would the American people be assured, in the classical sense, that if they knew what was right, they would naturally do what was good. No longer would they be assured, in the Christian sense, that if they abided by the Commandments, their conduct would be good, virtuous, and just. In that progression, we see the eclipse of ethics in American history, the erosion of conscience, and the conviction of judgment and duty. The Federalists were secularists who thought scientifically, and thus the Constitution they helped devise was concerned not with teaching people what they ought to do, but predicting what they would do — "vex and oppress" one another if not subject to external restraints....

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 7:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Larry Bartels: How smart is the American voter?

    Source: LAT (11-3-08)

    [Larry M. Bartels directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. A longer version of this article appears in the current Wilson Quarterly.]

    One of the bestselling books of the 2008 election season has been "Just How Stupid Are We?" by popular historian Rick Shenkman. It presents a familiar collection of bleak results from opinion surveys documenting the many things most Americans don't know about politics, government and history. "Public ignorance," Shenkman concludes, is "the most obvious cause" of "the foolishness that marks so much of American politics."

    But is that really true? Does it matter whether voters can name the secretary of Defense or whether they know how long a U.S. Senate term is? The important question is not whether voters are ignorant but whether they make sensible choices despite being hazy about the details. (OK, really hazy.) If they do, that's not stupid -- it's efficient.

    Political scientists have been studying this subject for years, and they've found plenty of grounds for pessimism about voters' rationality.

    In the early 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University concluded that electoral choices "are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation" and "characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences." For example, voters consistently misperceived where candidates stood on important issues.

    In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan described "the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate." Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work found that things haven't changed much.

    The intervening decades have seen a variety of concerted attempts to overturn or evade the findings of the classic Columbia and Michigan studies, but without much success.

    In the 1990s, political scientists took a different tack, acknowledging that, yes, voters were generally uninformed, but denying that the quality of their political decisions suffered much as a result. Voters, they argued, used "information shortcuts" to make rational electoral choices. These shortcuts included inferences from personal narratives, partisan stereotypes and endorsements.

    In one of the most colorful examples of an information shortcut, political scientist Samuel Popkin suggested that Mexican American voters had good reason to be suspicious of President Ford in 1976 because he didn't know how to eat a tamale -- a shortcoming revealed when he made the mistake of trying to down one without first removing its cornhusk wrapper. According to Popkin, "Showing familiarity with a voter's culture is an obvious and easy test of ability to relate to the problems and sensibilities of the ethnic group."

    Obvious and easy, yes -- but was this a reliable test? Would Mexican American voters have been correct to infer that Ford was less sensitive to their concerns than his primary opponent, Ronald Reagan? I have no idea, and neither does Popkin.

    In "Uninformed Votes," a 1996 study examining presidential elections from 1972 to 1992, I took another approach, assessing how closely voters' actual choices matched those they would have made had they been "fully informed." I found that the actual choices fell about halfway between what they would have been if voters had been fully informed and what they would have been if made on the basis of a coin flip.

    The ideal of rational voting behavior is further undermined by accumulating evidence that voters can be powerfully swayed by television ads just before an election. A major study of the 2000 presidential election suggested that George W. Bush's razor-thin victory hinged on the fact that he had more money to spend on television ads in battleground states in the final weeks of the campaign. ...

    Does all of this make voters stupid? No, just human. And thus -- to borrow the title of another popular book by behavioral economist Dan Ariely -- "predictably irrational." That may be bad enough.

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 6:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Mark Naison: To My Republican Friends- A Vote For Obama Is a Vote to Rescue the GOP From Bigotry

    Source: Special to HNN (11-3-08)

    [Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]

    One of the things I've learned, through long experience, is that it can be as difficult to change a person's political affiliation as it is to change their religion. People are attached to political parties through
    tradition and sentiment as well as ideology, and to try to get people to change parties is usually futile and often counterproductive.Some of my favorite former students are Republicans, and while I never attempt to hide my political views from them, I would never presume to try to change how they vote.

    Except in this Presidential election.

    Although I like John McCain and admire many things he has done, in choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, he has unleashed a level of bigotry and xenophobia among a sizable portion of the Republican faithful that decent members of that Party need to deal with both now and in the future.

    I am not talking about a small number of individuals using the N word to abuse Black journalists, holding up monkeys as Obama effigies, or snidely whispering that Obama's name is really Osama.
    Those are isolated incidents, ugly though they are, and the atmosphere of an entire campaign cannot be judged by them alone

    But when thousands of people, at Palin rallies in Pennsylvania and Ohio, start chanting "vote McCain, not Hussein," then you have a glimpse of the Faustian bargain that John McCain made with the Republican Right when he chose Sarah Palin..

    Here are thousands of angry people, every single one of them white, spewing hatred of Muslims during a major presidential event, while the candidate they have come to see, is doing nothing to stop them. Forget how this looks to American Muslims, or to billions of Islam's followers around the world, how does it look to anyone who is non white, non Christian, or of immigrant ancestry?

    Is this the face the Republican Party wants to show the nation, or the world? Do you want an all white Party filled with angry people afraid of anyone who doesn't look like them or share their religious beliefs?

    I can assure you that if John McCain chose Joe Lieberman, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee as his running mate, this behavior would not have been tolerated.

    But Sarah Palin has no such scruples. She is willing to stir up the ugliest emotions, and the most hysterical fears,to advance her own political career, not only in this election, but in the future

    John McCain can't control her, my Republican friends, but you can!

    By voting for Barack Obama in this election, and contributing to a decisive Obama victory, you can help retire Sarah Palin, and her bigoted, mean spirited supporters, to the obscurity they deserve, and rebuild a Republican Party you can be proud of again!

    For this one election, please put morals above ideology and tradition.

    Your children, and their children, will be proud of you for standing up for the best of America rather than the worst.

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 4:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Daniel Pipes: Obama's Connection to Sirhan Sirhan

    Source: Daniel Pipes Blog (11-2-08)

    From the perspective of a Middle East & Islam specialist, the just-concluding U.S. presidential election is extraordinary for the outsized role of one's subject area. Consider some of the topics:

    • Barack Obama's birth and youth as a Muslim, a fact that he completely denies ("I've always been a Christian," "I have never been a Muslim").
    • Obama's networking with extremist Islamic groups, including the Nation of Islam and such organizations as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the North American Islamic Trust, the Muslim Alliance in North America, and the Muslim American Society.
    • Obama's indirect connection to Saddam Hussein via two corrupt Middle East businessmen living in the West, Nadhmi Auchi and Antoin S. "Tony" Rezko.
    • Obama's ties to Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian extremist who praised Obama as "progressive, intelligent and charismatic" and as someone who "used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation." But, Abunimah bemoaned the fact that his once-state senator, on aspiring to higher office, cynically "learned to love Israel."
    • Michelle Obama's Internet "friend" relationship with Hatem El-Hady, former chairman of "Kindhearts," an Islamic so-called charity shuttered for funding terrorism.
    • Obama's friendship with Rashid Khalidi, the PLO official now teaching at Columbia University, as well as Obama's apparently vicious anti-Israel remarks at Khalidi's Chicago farewell party in 2003.

    The cover of "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism," co-authored by William Ayers and dedicated to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan.
    In this context, yet another connection, documented at zombietime.com, may not come as a great surprise, but it nonetheless remains shocking: William Ayers, Obama's close associate at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, dedicated the 1974 terrorist manifesto he co-authored, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, to (among others) Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy's Jordanian assassin.

    Comment: Other than Obama's lies about his childhood religion, which cast doubt about his character, all the other connections establish the radical circles he frequented during his Chicago years, associations he is trying hard – and with apparent success - to keep from the attention of just enough voters until after election day. (November 2, 2008)

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 3:31 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    John Steele Gordon: Speculators, Politicians, and Financial Disasters

    Source: Commentary (11-1-08)

    Fueled by easy credit, the real-estate market had been rising swiftly for some years. Members of Congress were determined to assure the continuation of that easy credit. Suddenly, the party came to a devastating halt. Defaults multiplied, banks began to fail. Soon the economic troubles spread beyond real estate. Depression stalked the land.

    The year was 1836.

    The nexus of excess speculation, political mischief, and financial disaster—the same tangle that led to our present economic crisis—has been long and deep. Its nature has changed over the years as Americans have endeavored, with varying success, to learn from the mistakes of the past. But it has always been there, and the commonalities from era to era are stark and stunning. Given the recurrence of these themes over the course of three centuries, there is every reason to believe that similar calamities will beset the system as long as human nature and human action play a role in the workings of markets.

    _____________



    Let us begin our account of the catastrophic effects of speculative bubbles and political gamesmanship with the collapse of 1836. Thanks to a growing population, prosperity, and the advancing frontier, poorly regulated state banks had been multiplying throughout the 1830’s. In those days, chartered banks issued paper money, called banknotes, backed by their reserves. From 1828 to 1836, the amount in circulation had tripled, from $48 million to $149 million. Bank loans, meanwhile, had almost quadrupled to $525 million. Many of the loans went to finance speculation in real estate.

    Much of this easy-credit-induced speculation had been caused, as it happens, by President Andrew Jackson. This was a terrific irony, since Jackson, who served as President from 1829 until 1837, hated speculation, paper money, and banks. His crusade to destroy the Second Bank of the United States, an obsession that led him to withdraw all federal funds from its coffers in 1833, removed the primary source of bank discipline in the United States. Jackson had transferred those federal funds to state banks, thereby enabling their outstanding loans to swell.

    The real-estate component of the crisis began to take shape in 1832, when sales by the government of land on the frontier were running about $2.5 million a year. Some of the buyers were prospective settlers, but most were speculators hoping to turn a profit by borrowing most of the money needed and waiting for swiftly-rising values to put them in the black. By 1836, annual land sales totaled $25 million; in the summer of that year, they were running at the astonishing rate of $5 million a month.

    While Jackson, who was not economically sophisticated, did not grasp how his own actions had fueled the speculation, he understood perfectly well what was happening. With characteristic if ill-advised decisiveness, he moved to stop it. Since members both of Congress and of his cabinet were personally involved in the speculation, he faced fierce opposition. But in July, as soon as Congress adjourned for the year, Jackson issued an executive order known as the “specie circular.” This forbade the Land Office to accept anything but gold and silver (i.e., specie) in payment for land. Jackson hoped that the move would dampen the speculation, and it did. Unfortunately, it did far more: people began to exchange their banknotes for gold and silver. As the demand for specie soared, the banks called in loans in order to stay liquid.

    The result was a credit crunch....

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 2:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Joseph Palermo: Chicagoans Studs Terkel and Barack Obama (and the Election of 2008)

    Source: Special to HNN (11-3-08)

    John Steinbeck's widow asked Studs Terkel to write an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Grapes of Wrath. And while he was working on it Robert F. Kennedy's eldest son, then Congressman Joe Kennedy, called Terkel to come to Iowa and see for himself the plight of American farmers. "Here it is the 1980s," Terkel wrote in his memoir, Touch and Go, "and you've got farmers who are starving. You saw the Depression in the Iowa countryside; the topsoil worn out, dust, towns with FOR SALE signs everywhere. . . . But never once did you hear the word 'Reaganville' in the eighties as you heard 'Hooverville' in the thirties." (p. 133) No one described life in America better than Studs Terkel because he let the people who lived it speak for themselves, and because he always knew which side he was on.

    The Barack Obama campaign logo looks to me like a rising sun meant to connote rebirth, national renewal, and hope. And I believe Obama's fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel's sense of social justice, basic human decency, and compassion for the least fortunate among us is long overdue for its own rebirth and renewal. "I felt hopeful with the New Deal," Terkel writes. "During the Great Depression there was a feeling of despair. The people we had chosen to lead us out, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor, and the colleagues they chose, advocated governmental intervention as the free market fell on its ass. That gave me hope." (p. 129) Terkel, one of America's greatest story tellers and oral historians, spent most of his 96 years fighting for the rights of ordinary people to participate in their nation's politics. He was a leader of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, defended friends like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger against anti-Communist mudslinging, and fought against racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and against racial discrimination in the rest of the country, especially in Chicago. He was a tireless advocate for peace and social justice, and a vociferous opponent of American imperial hubris.

    In the spirit of Studs Terkel I believe Obama has started something rolling in this country. Far from just "rhetoric" or "campaign promises," Obama has inspired a sizeable chunk of the electorate with a message of hope, renewal and social justice that is consistent with how this nation has responded to past crises.

    But it is worrisome what the Bush Administration has wrought in the spirit of the American electorate: A people so traumatized and demoralized from past abuses that millions of our fellow citizens no longer believe that a free and fair national election in the United States is even possible anymore. One major difference between pre-Bush America and post-Bush America is that in the pre-Bush era people used to take for granted that our national elections were not rigged. Not anymore.

    And for good reason.

    In 2006, Bush's Justice Department was deeply involved in voter suppression activities and staged phony legal challenges and "investigations" aimed at punishing Democratic candidates and hiding Republican malfeasance.

    Bush's State Department also engaged in "oppo" research on Obama delving deeply into his Passport records in search of anything that could be used against him.

    Bush's Federal Bureau of Investigation "leaked" to the press that it was "investigating" the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to determine if "voter registration fraud," a current favorite of the Far Right, has been committed in Obama's behalf.

    Most recently, Bush's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) leaked to the press that Obama's aunt from Kenya, Zeituni Onyango, is living in Boston without having filed the proper asylum papers; the leak was unethical and clearly politically motivated.

    And why didn't Bush's Justice Department bring federal charges against the three white supremacists in Colorado who plotted to assassinate Obama at the Denver convention? Apparently, Colorado's U.S. attorney Troy Eid, who was appointed by Bush in 2006 at the urging of Karl Rove, bucked the federal statute covering threats against presidential candidates. Whatever his motive, Mr. Eid, who was once a good friend of Jack Abramoff, sent a terrible signal to would-be assassins: Plot all you like and don't worry about the feds. (I think it might be safe to conclude that Mr. Eid, along with the Republican Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, are going to try to rig the Colorado election so it goes McCain's way on Tuesday.)

    It looks like a pattern: Could it be that the Bush Justice Department under Attorney General Michael Mukasey is trying to help John McCain win the election? And if so, how far are the "Loyal Bushies" willing to go?

    I wouldn't put anything past these guys because they have a proven track record: They led the country into war on false pretenses; approved torture and illegal surveillance; held prisoners without due process; issued unconstitutional "signing statements"; planted phony news stories in the press; lost a major American city to a natural disaster; and collapsed the world's financial system by turning the regulatory agencies over to a bunch of white collar criminals. With members of the Bush Administration we always seem to find out later that they were involved in actions that are far, far worse than anything we originally believed.

    My guess is that the Bush people are so fearful that the extent of their criminality over the past eight years will be exposed if they lose the election they are willing to do anything to keep "friendlies" in power.

    That's why we need more than just "hope" this time around. We need to fight them tooth and nail and reject the stories, blandly accepted by the corporate media, that all of the opinion polls and exit polls "got it wrong," and we're seeing "normal" voting irregularities, and it's the "Bradley Effect," and let's call in the Supreme Court, and all of the other mumbo jumbo like we heard in 2000 and 2004.

    Tomorrow night we should know early on who the real winner of this election will be.

    And if it's not settled by late tomorrow night?

    Well, then, we should tie this country up in knots and shut down the whole goddamned thing until we sort it out with a fair and just conclusion!

    Not This Time!

    With hope, the election of 2008 will not be rigged, and President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress can seize the moment to enact legislation relating broadly to <em>Reform</em> (re-regulating the laissez-faire economy), <em>Relief</em> (helping those most in need) and <em>Recovery</em> (jump starting the economy before deflationary pressures build). It took FDR two terms to institutionalize his New Deal programs. Facing a similar economic meltdown today, the new government will need at least one presidential term to begin to fix this mess (if it can be fixed) and then another to institutionalize a "New New Deal."

    After what we've been through these past eight years we are in dire need of a new social compact in this country. We need to dig deeper into our history and our culture and find what is good and charitable in the American spirit -- That same good and charitable spirit that Studs Terkel dedicated his long life to passing on to the next generation.

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 1:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Joseph Lane: Is it 1856 or 1860? (The Past as Political Prologue)

    Source: Britannica Blog (11-3-08)

    [Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.]

    Peter Lawler wrote a fascinating analysis here at the Britannica Blog of eight recent elections that might help us understand this one, and I would like to offer another perspective on the question of historical antecedents and what we might learn from them.

    Is this 1856 or 1860?

    I may seem to be going further afield than Lawler’s post-1932 suggestions, but I think there is a real sense in which the 1850s might be instructive.

    In 1993 Stephen Skowronek of Yale published The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. This book won a number of major prizes, including the Neustadt Award for the best book published on the American presidency, and it is widely credited with defining the emerging subfield of “American Political Development.”

    Skowronek tried to place American presidencies in “political time,” arguing that the rise and fall of “political regimes,” defined by the ascendancy of ruling coalitions, often dictates what presidents can and cannot accomplish. “Reconstructive” presidents who forge new ruling coalitions at crucial junctures in American history have been able to construct new working coalitions and to dictate the basic terms of political debate for generations to come. “Affiliated” presidents work within the coalitions that predecessors have defined for them. “Late Regime Affiliates” generally preside over “Disjunctive Presidencies” in which the various elements of established ruling coalitions unravel, defect, or turn against themselves under the pressure of new issues that do not map well onto the principles or programs that gave birth to the coalition in the first place.

    Writing in 1993, Skowronek argued that the “New Deal” regime ended with Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980. He declined to speculate about the character or likely lifespan of the new regime that took its place, but many suspect that we are watching its death throes today. And, in fact, John McCain appears to have many points in common with the Late Regime Affiliates who Skowronek describes as coming to the fore in the last days of declining coalitions.

    In writing about the disjunction of the New Deal Democratic coalition during the Carter presidency, Skowronek notes that Late Regime Affiliates rely heavily on the “reification of technique.” Electoral victory requires that they confront the obvious problems that the ruling coalition, now long-established, could not resolve, but in doing so, they face real difficulties because there are limits to how much they can reject the substantive commitments of the party that they hope to lead.

    These late regime candidates promise that if only the government were administered more honestly and earnestly, the problems would disappear. In this regard, John McCain is almost a textbook example. He is forced, by the dictates of party orthodoxy, to hew to the position that he shares a “basic economic ideology” with even the most unpopular of incumbents. His insistence that if only the lobbyists are banned from the halls of power and all earmarks are vetoed, his tax relief and deregulation platform will produce very different results than the Bush tax relief and deregulation platform has generated in the last eight years. There is a decided echo between McCain’s campaign in 2008 and Carter’s run for the Democratic nomination promising “comprehensive reform” and a “thorough housecleaning.”

    But, like many Late Regime Affiliates, John McCain’s relationship with his party is tension-filled and problematic. As ruling coalitions age, the willingness of their individual factions to relinquish control over any presidential nomination decreases. They are used to having their way, and nomination battles often devolve into bitter contests between discordant factions that can only be resolved by choosing a candidate that belongs to none of them. In many respects, Carter rose, quite unexpectedly, to the Democratic nomination by being belatedly tolerated by all factions and loved by none, but once in office, his less than perfectly orthodox policy preferences angered no one more than those very factions who were forced to support him as a candidate. One could easily imagine, that if McCain somehow wins, the party faithful may find that they did not really want “an original maverick” and that a hero of the right (his own VP?) may challenge him for renomination in the name of greater party orthodoxy, an old drama enacted when Stephen Douglas challenged first Pierce in 1856 and then Buchanan in 1860 as well as when Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in 1980.

    So why the 1856 or 1860 question? In 1856, there were many signs that the Democratic party was disintegrating during the term of Franklin Pierce, but it managed to (barely) eke out one last victory with James Buchanan. Buchanan’s 1856 campaign largely avoided direct discussion of the issues that had demonstrated the incapacity of the previous Democratic administration; relied heavily on promises that increased “probity” and “rededication” of an experienced hand would set things aright; relied heavily on the repetition of old party bromides in contexts where they seemed dated and inexact; and ruthlessly attacked the character and credibility of an inexperienced Republican rival. Sound familiar?

    Of course, Buchanan’s “victory” ultimately did the Democratic party more harm than good as its hopelessly moribund coalition splintered under the pressure of dealing with terrible crises that they had helped to create. It is, perhaps, possible that John McCain can manage to win this election, but it is less clear that his “reification of technique,” the promise of a more virtuous and more rigorous application of the same principles that characterized the disintegration of the Republican party under the Bush administration, will solve today’s problems or reunite the fraying strands of the old coalition. Like Buchanan in 1856 or Carter in 1976, McCain might win a victory (although that seems unlikely) that promises to give an old coalition a new lease on life but that in fact only stretches out the slow motion train crash now in progress.

    Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 1:28 PM | Comments (2) | Top

    Tom Engelhardt: The End of a Subprime Administration

    Source: TomDispatch.com (11-2-08)

    [Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast in which he discusses Bush's record abroad, click here. ]

    They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

    When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

    Indeed.

    From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing "new product."

    And don't forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs.

    Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase "shock and awe" that went with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official language and (together with "mission accomplished") into the annals of irony. Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad -- to fabulous visual effect in that other "theater" of war, television -- the phrase was constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change.

    Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the U.S. military and its array of "precision" weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy "regime" could now be taken out -- quite literally and with surgical precision, in its bedrooms, conference rooms, and offices, thanks to those precision weapons delivered long-distance from ship or plane -- without taking out a country. Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was termed, "decapitated." Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively small numbers of American troops as liberators.

    It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a demonstration, a guaranteed "cakewalk" -- as, say, in Iraq -- who would ever dare stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission or quickly dispatched in their own right.

    In reality (ah, "reality" -- what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his "spiderhole" so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed.

    Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration's seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.

    The Theater of War

    In remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration's soaring imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course, George W. and crew promised Americans the global equivalent -- and Republicans the domestic equivalent -- of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality.

    Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the U.S. Armed Forces, or, as George W. Bush once so breathlessly put it, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known," they could dominate the planet without significant help from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of the U.S. military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia? China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean… come on!

    As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase "power politics" real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn't everyone -- at least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the editorial page of the Washington Post -- saying no less?

    I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole command of the globe's only "hyperpower," the only sheriff on planet Earth, the New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you wanted, those hands were on those reins right after "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century," when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that anything-goes seemed a reasonable response?

    It might have gone to anyone's head in imperial Washington at that moment, but it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs was a plan -- labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine -- of global domination conceptually so un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi, or Soviet on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right out of their heads and off their tongues -- and they were proud of it.

    Here's a question for 2009 you don't have to answer: What should the former "new Rome" be called now? That will, of course, be someone else's problem.

    The Cast of Characters

    And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

    They headed a government that couldn't shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" -- or "homeland security" as it came to be called in their years -- above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south.

    As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way -- making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon build-up, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency.

    No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official" -- often assumed to be Karl Rove -- to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:

    "He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

    "We create our own reality… We're history's actors."

    It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the President himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn't fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through.

    Of course, the President had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life -- and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father's boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a c-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn't (or rather who his relations were).

    Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad's friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted, encouraged, and finally -- to use an omnipresent word of our moment -- bailed out. The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not voting for the guy you'd most like to "have a beer with," this was it.

    On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in his hands and various rescuers shouting, "USA! USA!" he genuinely found his "calling" as the country's cheerleader-in-chief (as he had evidently found his religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the "theater" of war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein in that "spiderhole" later presented him with the dictator's pistol. ("'He really liked showing it off,' says a... visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. 'He was really proud of it.'") He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in 2007, to meet the American pilot "whose plane's missiles killed Iraq's Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and "returned to Washington in a buoyant mood."

    While transforming himself into the national cheerleader-in-chief, he even kept "his own personal scorecard for the war" in a desk drawer in the Oval Office -- photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured. He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with "George W. Bush, Commander In Chief" hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted (various officials), and so became "the decider," a willing figurehead (as he had been, for instance, when he was an "owner" of the Texas Rangers), manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure.

    As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above all, reality was unimpressed with history's self-proclaimed "actors," working so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even George Bush's handlers and his fervent neocon followers couldn't suspend.

    Exit Stage Right

    The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of George W. Bush was bound to be burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies, and bait-and-switch tactics, it was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages and the result, unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration.

    Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property -- the USA -- is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust.

    Nonetheless, let's remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don't imagine for a second that the equivalent isn't about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won't suffer.

    He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute" at Southern Methodist University; and then there's always that 20% of America -- they know who they are -- who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,"'I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.' With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, 'I don't know what my dad gets -- it's more than 50-75' thousand dollars a speech, and 'Clinton's making a lot of money.'"

    This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off.

    The same can't be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy."

    Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there's ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables.

    Posted on Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 6:48 PM | Comments (3) | Top

    Stanley Kutler: Closing Guantanamo ... Bush leaves another big decision to his successor

    Source: TruthDig.com (10-31-08)

    The U.S. government’s failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center for alleged terrorists continues to haunt and color our standing in the world. Barack Obama and John McCain both endorsed closing the facility. Even President George W. Bush has been known to utter such a heretical idea, and some of his top aides have expressed similar sentiments. In 2006, Bush said, “I’d like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we’re holding some people that are darn dangerous, and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts.” As the old Kentucky political prescription says, watch the way he acts, not the way he talks.

    Whatever he meant, Bush now clearly has reversed himself and has chosen to do nothing. Guantanamo prison will not close on his watch; there are no plans “to deal” with the detainees “in our courts.”

    As to his “war on terror,” Bush concedes nothing. Some brave or disgusted soul somewhere in the bureaucratic maze has leaked the fact that the president ignored numerous options for closing the prison. On Oct. 17, 2008, the Financial Times reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pushed the idea, but the Justice Department reportedly opposed moving the prisoners to American bases or prisons. You would have to be on another planet to be unaware of the not-so-subtle hands of Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff in all this. According to The New York Times, Cheney and his staff successfully argued that maintaining Guantanamo’s active status is necessary to validate the administration’s policy on terrorists.

    In any event, the effect is to maintain the status quo—in this case, maintaining a facility that has earned us only international enmity.

    Criticism from “Old Europe” is to be expected, but now that Tony Blair is gone, our British allies have rejected “the Guantanamo model.” Stella Rimington, the former director general of England’s domestic intelligence agency, voiced hope that the next American president would ratchet down the talk of a “war on terror,” even expressing the sacrilegious notion that there has been a huge overreaction to 9/11. One official who has prosecuted terrorism trials for several years rejected any notion of a “British Guantanamo” where defendants’ rights would be totally absent. Imagine—our British cousins maintain their faith in the Magna Carta.

    The Justice Department (and Cheney) wants us to believe that the prisoners cannot be moved for fear they would require a different set of rights once on American soil. The Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008 that the Guantanamo prisoners had a right to habeas corpus, but the government mainly has ignored the decision, which has had no discernible impact. A number of members of Congress have opposed moving the prisoners to bases or prisons in their districts.

    After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, we demonstrated that our legal system could proceed properly under existing laws and constitutional practice. Four conspirators were convicted a year later, and two more followed in 1997. Ramzi Mohammed Yousef, the alleged ringleader, and the others received life sentences, with no chance for parole. The system worked. Why has there been such resistance for the Guantanamo detainees? Does the military have a vested interest in conducting military trials?

    The loathsome tales of torture, abuse, sodomy and murder that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 resulted in convictions of low-level Army guards. Those who ordered or condoned such policies never have been charged. In the case of Guantanamo, the president, his chief Cabinet officers and their underlings, and the military, from the Joint Chiefs to the actual warders on the ground, unquestionably bear responsibility for the abuse—the physical and mental abuse of prisoners and the abuse against our constitutional system. The Bush administration and the military initiated the situation, and they willingly, even enthusiastically, provided ideas and machinery that continue to keep the prison running. Reports of Guantanamo’s conditions have circulated widely on the Internet; again, we are informed with little thanks to the “mainstream” media. Our supposedly ever-vigilant media simply have allowed the news to fade into the mists of history.

    Bureaucratic drift and inertia grip the problem of resolving Guantanamo’s status. According to The New York Times, the perennial anonymous “senior administration official” (Gates or Rice?) could see little if any prospect of closing the prison. He/she said that the victorious presidential candidate would find it hard to fulfill his campaign promise to close the base. “This may not be the ideal answer, but what we are trying to do is work with the system we’ve got,” the official said. Passivity with a vengeance, it seems.

    George W. Bush is apparently confident that history will vindicate him. He will be gone in three months, and he has decided to pass the buck in time-honored fashion and saddle his successor with cleaning up his mess. He will not retreat, and he obviously will not make any decisions that might correct his policies or support criticism of them. His inaction on Guantanamo is emblematic. He fiddles while the global banking system cries for vigorous governmental action and an end to free-market nonsense. He fiddles while our international prestige—not to mention our reputation—goes up in smoke.

    Posted on Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 3:48 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Jim Sleeper: Treat, or Trick? Elections Officials, Beware!

    Source: TPM (Liberal blog) (10-31-08)

    In honor of Halloween, here's one more frisson about election tricks perverse enough to block the treat of a victory.

    One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty "checking" voter registration cards from the recent primary election.

    The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again.

    Beatty's minions -- the young Rev. Al Sharpton among them -- were actually fabricating "evidence" of voter fraud in Beatty's recent defeat in his bid to succeed Shirley Chisholm, who was retiring from Congress.

    They were forging thousands of signatures on voter-registration cards to create enough fraud to invalidate the 54-46% victory of his opponent, State Senator Major R. Owens, in the historic Bedford Stuyvesant district, one of the first created under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    Beatty would submit the Saturday morning forgeries to a county court as evidence that Owens had rigged the election!

    I hadn't simply stumbled upon this scam. A political operative close to the Brooklyn Democratic machine had tipped me off. Had I not rushed down to the board that Saturday knowing what to look for, Beatty would likely have won his suit, and Owens, a redoubtable reformer, a graduate of the famed black Morehouse College, a librarian by training and a long-time progressive activist, would have been smeared.

    So a lot was at stake in my Village Voice story that week on Beatty's outrageous gambit: "Look at it this way," said my tipster; "The man is either going to Congress or he's going to jail." (The pdf of these old stories is very slow, but worth the wait if you're interested. Read the second story, "Vander Batty's Desperate Gamble.")

    If Beatty went to Congress, black politics in the district would take an emblematically disastrous turn, for he was a classic povertycrat, long indulged by clubhouse Democrats and a timid white liberal elite. (He'd been endorsed in the primary by the New York Times,. whose editorial arbiter of the race, the neoconservative Roger Starr, fell for the well-connected Beatty and lightly dismissed Owens' progressive politics.)

    The Brooklyn judiciary that received Beatty's suit to overturn the election was notoriously full of party-clubhouse hacks just like those who ran the Board of Elections. To keep up appearances in this case, it imported a judge from the neighboring Queens machine, Eugene Berkowitz. Berkowitz ruled for Beatty, anyway, as did Brooklyn's appellate division.

    Yes, let me tell you, as I watched the pious face of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certifying the vote in 2000, I saw the face of Eugene Berkowitz all over again..

    Fortunately, owing to my scoop and the controversy that ensued thanks to the Times' dissident op-ed page columnist Sydney Schanberg's picking up the story, the state's highest court overturned the lower ones just in time for the general election. Owens, who said he'd felt as if he'd been in the Mississippi of the 1950s throughout the ordeal, served honorably in Congress for 24 years, retiring in 2006.

    Beatty was later convicted of vote fraud, of racketeering (for looting an anti-poverty program), and of tax evasion. After serving time, he was assassinated in 1990 by a former friend.

    I never did prove that Board of Elections officials -- all appointed by Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, a diehard foe of Owens -- actively assisted Beatty's attempted scam, other than by opening their archives "to the public" early on a Saturday and then failing to supervise the visitors.

    But my baptism in investigative journalism showed me that even real scoops may not interest the rest of the world if they come from the wrong side of the tracks and their implications aren't clear.To prevail, citizen-reformers and journalists must be willing to buck conventional wisdom and habits of deference. Sometimes only a committed, seasoned activist -- conservative or liberal -- can do that long enough to make others take a look.

    But I also learned then that persistence fails if an activist or writer hasn't the historical memory and judgment to extract the real story from a deluge of contradictory claims and impressions. Selling my account of the Beatty scam even after it had been published meant shaking up both white liberals' and clubhouse hacks' complacency about long-standing inner-city corruption.

    The sad truth is that most people resist acknowledging even incontrovertible evidence if it goes against the grain of what they believe. We need witnesses credible enough to connect the dots as well as break "news."

    And that means that we need some officials who are honest enough (or angry enough, for whatever reason) to do what that political insider did by calling me early that Saturday morning.The technology may be changing, but not the corruption.

    According to organizations like Common Cause and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, there is already evidence of election-destabilizing activity in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia. A nationwide 866-OURVOTE hotline has been set up to report voting problems.

    I hope that the right officials in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida are listening, and that they know who to tip off.

    Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 4:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Mark Naison: Our Goal on Election Day ... A Mandate to Bring Relief to the Nation's Suffering

    Source: Special to HNN (11-1-08)

    [Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]

    As election day approaches, and the nation's economic problems grow severe, our goal for November 4 should not be just to assure an Obama victory, but to give him a mandate that will allow him to take immediate action to funnell aid to the millions of Americans on the verge of losing their hones and their jobs

    To prevent suffering on a massive scale, we need a dramatic program of relief that rivals the New Deal's "One Hundred Days" and for that we need a sweeping Obama victory and huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress

    The stakes are very high

    So far, not one cent of the 700 million bailout package the Bush administration has created has gone directly to middle class and working class Americans to help keep them in their homes or shore up their shrinking incomes. Instead, it has been funnelled into the powerful financial institutions whose speculatative practices created the current crisis- and whose executives profited mightily from these excesses, without any guarantees that they use those funds to help small businesses or ordinary Americans.

    That will change if we give a strong mandate for Barack Obama on November 4 and make sure he has a Congress that will pass his relief measures

    This is what the American people can expect from an Obama presidency in the way of immediate relief for their economic problems

    1. A six month moratorium on home foreclosures to allow owners and financial institutions to renegotiate the terms of those mortgages so that people can stay in their homes and financial institutions get income rather than unsaleable properties

    2. A thirteen week extension of unemployment benefits expire so the millions of new jobless will be able to feed themselves and their families when their regular benefits expire.

    3. A fiscal stimulus program featuring a nation wide program of public works featuring infrastructure repairs which concentrate on.bridges, highways, rail systems and power lines.

    4. Strict controls on those banks getting infusions of capital from the federal government, requiring them to make loans to qualified small and medium sized businesses rather than hoarding their funds or using them to fund executive bonuses.

    5. A new federal initiative to develop alternative energy resources, hiring the nation's best scientific and engineering talent, and creating new projects with federal funding that will created tens of thousands of new jobs.

    These programs, all of which can be implemented immediately, will send a powerful message to the American people that there is a finally a president in the White House who cares more about them and their families than about the wealthy and the powerful, and who believes that in an economic crisis, there must be true equality of sacrifice

    Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 1:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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    Just How Stupid Are We? By Rick Shenkman

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