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Domestic issues Morality Politics The War on Terrorism

“Openly opposing torture”

At least two actors who openly oppose torture have accepted parts on the [the television show 24].

From Rebecca Dana of the Wall Street Journal‘s story entitled “Reinventing 24” in yesterday’s paper.

The sentence jumped out at me as I read the piece. The sentence suggested a kind of furtiveness to opposition to torture – suggesting those who “openly promote the homosexual agenda“, who “openly embrace socialist medicine”, who “openly promote apostate Catholicism“, “openly promote keyword spamming“, “openly promote intolerance“, “openly promote cigarettes to minors” “openly embrace prejudice“, who “openly oppose a living wage“, “openly oppose any talks with Iran that might resolve the nuclear issue“, who “openly oppose what built this Nation“, and those who “openly embrace the hysterical homophobia mouthed by Christian fundamentalist groups from all over the country“.  ((I acknowledge these are not exact quotes – I have changed the tenses and in some sentences deleted phrases in order to conform all of them to the structure I set up; but I have attempted to maintain the original meaning of each.))

In almost every usage I was able to find, adding the adverb “openly” to describe a political act indicates a kind of shame associated with that act.  The openness is supposed to shock – “Not only does this candidate seem to accept x view, they openly promote it!”

I don’t blame Ms. Dana for using the phrase – but it was shocking to find it associated with opposing torture.  Have we really come that far as a nation that opposing torture is now somewhat embarrassing?  I don’t think so.  But enough mainstream conservatives have defended torture as to make it an acceptable point of view in the press.

There is shame in that.

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Life

Some mythical, white-faced, blank-featured creature of the night

Opossum
Image courtesy of Peggy Hughes.

A brief non-political comment for the blog: a few nights ago, I was coming home from work, and while walking up the pathway to the front door, I saw an opossum. Ghostly white face; long nose; empty black eyes. The animal was staring at me – and I just stopped and started back. It took me a few moments to realize it was an opossum instead of some mythical, white-faced, blank-featured creature of the night.

The opossum didn’t move – and neither did I. Then, thinking I might be able to shoo the animal away, I made a sudden move, as if to move towards it. Still nothing. It’s empty eyes never blinked or focused on anything but me. I walked past it into the house, put down my bag, and went back outside to see if it had moved. It had vanished without a trace – though I didn’t look all that hard.

My point is this: that opossums are pretty freaky looking, and can, in the right light, be pretty scary.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

Yes. We. Can.

Obama’s latest stump speech set to music with appearances by celebrities.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

Senator, you always do us right. This time, you did us proud.

The LA Weekly profiled two of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, a gay Los Angeles power couple.  The article’s conclusion is especially moving, as the author, Patrick McDonald, after profiling the many disappointments the Clintons and other public officials have caused the gay and lesbian community – by raising their money and their hopes in private, but publicly distancing themselves – describes this scene:

These days, Bernard and Gifford have realized the race has become very personal. “Usually you like to keep some distance in case your candidate loses,” says Gifford, “but this one has been different.”

They started to feel a true fondness for the candidate back in August, when he appeared at a gay forum televised on the LOGO cable network. After the show, Bernard and Gifford organized a gay fund-raiser at Area, a nightclub on La Cienega Boulevard. In just a few hours, they raised more than $100,000 from 400 gays and lesbians, and Obama gave a speech that some saw as exceptional…

Just before Obama vanished into his motorcade that warm evening last summer, he draped his arms around Bernard and Gifford and asked them if he did them right. Bernard looked at him, “Senator, you always do us right. This time, you did us proud.”

Gifford, the urban sophisticate, started to choke up. Not only did he realize he was finally doing something that would matter, but he seemed to be getting results. On that August night, he thought, possibly the next president of the United States was standing there for all to see, literally embracing him and his lover.

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Domestic issues Politics The War on Terrorism

A collective failure

Glenn Greenwald with some hard truths:

I long ago stopped blaming the Bush administration – at least exclusively – for what has happened to our political system. They were responsible in the first instance, but the rest of the country’s institutions – its media, its Congress, the “opposition” party, even the courts – all allowed it to happen, choosing to do nothing – or to endorse it – once it all began to be disclosed. It wouldn’t have surprised the Founders that we would have corrupt and lawbreaking political leaders, including in the White House. The idea was that there would be numerous checks on that corruption. But when those other institutions fail, or are complicit, the fault is collective.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics The Clintons

The next time…

Kevin Drum lays out the argument Obama should make against Hillary:

The last time a U.S. president faced an unexpected crisis, he panicked and pushed us into a disastrous and unneeded war. Senator Clinton went along with him. We can’t afford for that to happen again. The next time terrorism tests a president, we need someone in the White House who won’t panic, someone who has the confidence and judgment to keep from being pushed into bluster and bombs as their first option…

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

The Visionary Minimalist

Responding to Floria again:

I’m not one for big change though, because I think it can be damaging at the outset. I believe if one is to attempt to change the entire process of our government, then there would be several unforeseen consequences at the outset.

I agree with you that “slow and steady” change is more lasting and more desirable than sudden or forced change.  That is actually one of the major things that attracted me to Barack Obama’s candidacy and that convinced me of the danger of a Hillary presidency.  When Obama first announced, I doubted he was ready, and I tentatively supported Hillary because I wanted a Democrat to win and I believed she would be ruthless in making sure she won.  But gradually, little by little, I came to embrace Obama’s candidacy.

There were two key factors – and I think I wrote about this previously in slightly different terms.  The first was that I came to believe that America was in a worse condition than I had previously thought – that Bush had fundamentally altered the balance of power in Washington and severely diminished the legislative and judicial branches of government; that partisan polarization was a major problem because it fostered a “team” mentality, in which no matter what the underlying consensus was on the issue, each party sought electoral gain by playing to the extremes.  (For me, the Republican advocacy of torture and skepticism of climate change made this clear.)  The second factor was that as I began to learn more about Obama and his thought, the more I came to admire him.  Specifically, this New Yorker piece called “The Conciliator” (which is long, but well worth it) first introduced me to the aspect of Obama that I admire most, what Cass Sunstein calls in a recent New Republic piece, “visionary minimalism.”  What Sunstein describes is the paradox of Barack Obama’s thought (as opposed to the paradox of his campaign).  Sunstein describes two differing approaches to the world: minimalist and visionary.  As he describes it, “minimalists are fearful of those who are gripped by abstractions, simple ideologies, and large-scale theories” and “visionaries have a large-scale understanding of where the nation should be heading…[and] call for wholesale rejection of the views of “the other side.”  Sunstein sees Obama bridging these two conflicting tendencies:

“Visionary minimalist” may sound like an oxymoron, but in fact–and this is the key point–Obama’s promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism. He is unifying, and therefore able to think ambitiously, because he insists that Americans are not different “types” who should see each other as adversaries engaged in some kind of culture war. Above all, Obama rejects identity politics. He participates in, and helps create, anti-identity politics. He does so by emphasizing that most people have diverse roles, loyalties, positions, and concerns, and that the familiar divisions are hopelessly inadequate ways of capturing people’s self-understandings, or their hopes for their nation. Insisting that ordinary Americans “don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal,” Obama asks politicians “to catch up with them.” Many independents and Republicans have shown a keen interest in him precisely because he always sees, almost always respects, and not infrequently accepts their deepest commitments.

To the extent that Obama is able to call simultaneously for change and reconciliation, it is in significant part for this reason. And to the extent that Obama’s candidacy is producing a kind of national exhilaration not seen in many decades, his practice of anti-identity politics is a key factor. For him, reconciliation is change, and it is also what makes change possible. Recall that minimalists are willing to endorse large shifts from the status quo–after diverse people have been heard, learned from, and brought on board.

Obama’s minimalism thus has a clear pragmatic purpose. The challenges of health care reform, Iraq, economic growth, climate change, and energy independence cannot possibly be met well, and perhaps cannot be met at all, without cross-cutting coalitions. Real transformations require a degree of consensus. Obama’s point also has intrinsic and not merely instrumental importance, and for one simple reason: It says something deeply true, and long neglected, about how Americans actually understand themselves. If Obama’s visionary minimalism turns out to have enduring power, it will be for that reason.

It is well worth reading Sunstein’s entire article.  Sunstein is an informal adviser to Obama – which makes his analysis both more interesting, and forces you to think about the issue skeptically.  Several months earlier, Larissa MacFarquhar writing a profile for the New Yorker though wrote something very similar:

In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem.”

By focusing on the ends, and using every means at her disposal to achieve those ends, Hillary Clinton both ensures maximal polarization and maximal resistance.  The amount of change she will be able to bring about will be determined by what she is able to force through.  By focusing on improving the processes – without attempting a radical overhaul, and while bringing in all stakeholders – Obama minimizes polarization, minimizes resistance, and maximizes change over the long-term.  In other words – if you believe America is facing serious strategic challenges and that our polity is not in shape to tackle them – Obama is the only candidate which a chance of tackling them.  If you are wary of dramatic change, Hillary’s current approach to achieving change may very well prevent her from achieving much.  But her focus on ends rather than means would bring about more sudden and drastic change – the kind you presumably fear.

It was these two “realizations” on my part that lead me to embrace Barack Obama’s candidacy: one, seeing the moment we are in; two, understanding more about the Hillary’s and Barack’s thought.  This is why I was a fan of Obama before he seemed like he had a chance.  This is why I thought he was the best person for the job of president even when Hillary was considered inevitable.  The paradox of Obama’s campaign is that even if you believe Obama should be president, many still need to be convinced that he can be elected.  Obama as a head of government, a head of state would be a visionary minimalist; but he will only become a great president if a movement is able to coalesce that pushes for meaningful change.  Obama, being a minimalist, would then have to channel it, focus it, hold it back where prudent.  This dynamic could make Obama one of our greatest presidents.  But even as the situation now stands, without such a movement, I still believe he is the best choice.

Postscript: Regarding Obama’s tendency to over-dramatize: I don’t know anything of the example you gave.  But in general, I have found that Obama plays down dramatic moments; that in his speeches, he avoids applause lines, preferring to build a gradual narrative.  And Obama is the only candidate to have lived in a Third World country for any extended period of time – Indonesia in his youth.   If you read Dreams of My Father, he writes about the exact difference in attitude you describe – between living in the midst of a country, and living out of a hotel.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

The process of change and changing the process

This is a response to the thoughtful and reflective comments written by the Floria on my posts about Hillary Clinton here and here.

I will try to respond in general to her criticisms and to specific allegations she makes.  This is written as a specific response to Floria’s comments:

I…do not blame Hillary for pointing out that Obama has been inconsistent with his past positions. Edwards goes on to say that this is not a time to be discussing those things, but with Obama’s perfectly PC nature and almost messiah-like campaign, we are obliged to hearing the both sides, beyond the glittering facade he and the media portray of himself.

First, I don’t agree with your characterization of what Hillary was doing. She was not pointing out that Obama was inconsistent – she was telling a lie, or at best, distorting the truth, in order to attack one of his strengths: the fact that he has been remarkably consistent. On health care, Obama has said he would be in favor of a single-payer health care system if he was designing it from scratch, but that he realizes that this isn’t feasible at the current time, and so he proposed a system which Hillary largely copied when she put out her plan. ((I do not mean to suggest she directly copied from Obama – more that their plans are both based on the policy work of the same groups of Democrats.)) On the Patriot Act, although Obama said he would oppose it’s reauthorization, he supported the compromise that introduced some measures of accountability into the bill. I do not believe Senator Obama ever campaigned on a promise to block the Patriot Act  – rather he voiced concerns over the bill; he still had concerns when he signed it, but he believed the compromise was an improvement, and so begrudgingly, supported it.

Hillary was distorting Senator Obama’s statements and record to suggest that he had been inconsistent – because she knows that his consistency is part of his appeal, and one that stands in stark contrast to her entire persona.

Second: turbo-charged phrases like “Obama’s perfectly PC nature and almost messiah-like campaign” and “the glittering facade he and the media portray of himself” are difficult to respond to specifically because they reflect feelings rather than substance – this is not to denigrate them, but to place them in a context; I’m certainly guilty of expressing my feelings on political subjects as well. I’ll try to in the last few paragraphs, but let me say that I agree that it is important to hear both sides – but that each of us must be ready to acknowledge that one side might just be entirely, or mainly, wrong.

I think it takes an even bigger and more compassionate person to be able to dedicate yourself to helping others simply out of feeling of responsibility and empathy. Hillary dedicated her life to helping children and the less fortunate, but she didn’t need a touching story about rising out of poverty or whatnot, to drive her to do so or to attract more attention to it.

I agree that it takes a very compassionate person to dedicate themselves to helping others out of a feeling of responsibility and empathy. (Although I do not see how explaining what lead one to become compassionate, to understand particular problems, undermines it.)

But I don’t see how this applies to Hillary Clinton. Yes, she was on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund and the Arkansas Children’s Hospital (but she was also on the board of Wal-Mart and The Country’s Best Yogurt Company). In her professional career, she did focus on helping children after the health care debacle forced her to take a more traditional role in her husband’s administration – but it wasn’t what she set out to do.  And what First Lady hasn’t devoted significant amounts of time to helping children?

I’m not sure what in her record indicates that Hillary has “dedicated her life” to helping children or the less fortunate – other than the fact that she is a liberal, and that liberal policies tend to favor both groups. I am not saying Obama has selflessly dedicated himself to doing good in the world – but from his career, and his speeches, and his memoirs, I am left with the sense that the primary impetus behind his political career is the desire to create a movement to renew American democracy – whether as a community organizer, constitutional law professor, state legislator, senator, or presidential candidate – this has been his message.

Senator Clinton’s record indicates something different – as a presidential candidate, she has seen fit to use voter suppression tactics and other methods and messages that will hurt the Democratic party’s chances in November; in 1995, after the Republicans took back the Congress, she advised her husband to bring in the sleazy Dick Morris who advised the Clintons to co-opt the Republican agenda in order to maintain their own power, and Hillary supported this decision; in 2002, Hillary Clinton decided to vote to authorize military force against Iraq, and though her motives are impossible to determine, political calculation certainly played a role.  Throughout her career, Hillary Clinton has been willing to embrace tactics and policies that hurt the poor and the middle class and Americans in general if she thought it would further her career.

Clinton doesn’t have the cleanest campaign strategy – I can see that. But I am cynical and I don’t appreciate Obama’s strategy that is seemingly taking advantage of the young, liberal, less-informed, idealistic voters by alluding to “changing the status quo”, “not giving in to special interests”, and getting out of Iraq with little to no flexibility in timeline and approach.

I think I responded to the point about Clinton’s campaign strategy above to some degree. To reply to your point about Iraq: Senator Obama has repeatedly said that we must be “as careful getting out as we were careless getting in”. Senator Clinton actually made headlines this January by taking a more aggressive stand on getting troops out of Iraq by suggesting she will begin withdrawing troops within 60 days of her taking office. ((Her actual quote actually gives her more room to hedge though.)) In fact, Obama and Clinton have virtually the same positions on withdrawing from Iraq – including virtually the same language, as you can see if you compare Barack Obama’s position on “Bringing the Troops Home” and Hillary Clinton’s position.  To say that Obama plans on “getting out of Iraq with little to no flexibility in timeline and approach” is to demonstrate an ignorance of the actual positions each candidate has taken on the issue.

Finally, I think it is exceedingly cynical to suggest that Obama is trying to take advantage of “younger, less informed, idealistic voters”. Do you think Ted Kennedy has been hoodwinked by Obama as well? John Kerry? Janet Napolitiano? Tim Kaine?

I think I described the issue you are sensing in this post on “The Paradox of Barack Obama”.  To take that post a bit further: the heart of Obama’s campaign is not his policy positions.  Edwards, Clinton, and Obama all have similar policy positions, and though the minor differences reveal a great deal about how each candidate is positioning him or herself, and a little about each candidate’s approach to governance, the real contrast is in temperament and in the potential.

Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have are both policy-oriented.  Each of them has particular goals they want to achieve as president, and they discuss how they will try to achieve this goals mainly to prove their seriousness.  Barack Obama, on the other hand, sees the particular policy goals as secondary.

  • He believes that the problems America is facing today are the result of deep-seated problems in the processes of government, in the processes of innovation, in our politics;
  • He believes in making the government more accountable to the people (with ethics reform, with databases of federal funding, and by opening up as much of every government agency’s deliberations as possible to the public);
  • He believes that a large part of the reason that so many Americans are apathetic about politics is because they do not feel engaged with power and they are tired of the mudslinging (which is why he has refrained from egregious smears, despite great provocation);
  • He believes that partisanship is the cause of political gridlock – and that more partisanship will not solve the major problems we face (and if you think that sounds like common sense read Paul Krugman or look at some of Hillary Clinton’s aides);

The core Obama belief – the one which sells me on his potential – is that he believes that the integrity of the process matters as much as the end result of the process.  You can see this principle in every position he takes, in his entire public career, and in his campaign.  Hillary Clinton believes that the ends justify the means – or else she could not reconcile many of the actions she has taken publicly with her professed beliefs.

A president who believes that the ends justify the means – the thought frightens me.  After George W. Bush has enlarged the powers of the presidency beyond recognition, it frightens me even more.  Having Democrats defend the precedents Bush has established because a President Hillary believes she needs to take advantage of them in order to pass some bill frightens me.  ((And there would be a kind of poetic harmony to this – as Hillary’s actions in the first Clinton administration were used by Cheney and Bush to expand executive power further.))

I believe we need a president who will focus on fixing the processes that keep our society, our environment, and our polity healthy.  The problems we face as a nation will not be fixed with the marginal improvements that would be the goals of a Hillary Clinton presidency, as helpful as those improvements might be.  They might not be fixed even with greater transparency, consensus, and innovation.  But at least with that approach, we might have a chance.  Global climate change; terrorism; the turmoil of globalization; immigration; failing educational and health care systems.  A polarized polity will not be able to begin to fix these problems; as a nation today, we are incapable of fixing these problems because the processes of our government and our politics are broken.

Barack Obama is not a messiah.  But he sees the problem; and unlike Clinton, he sees the beginning of a solution.  Clinton is campaigning on the promise of competent management; ((Which is quite debatable when you look at her record; the two biggest initiatives she has run so far have been mismanaged – health care reform in the 1990s and her campaign today.)) she is campaigning on her goals and policies; she is campaigning on the idea that she will be able to get change done.  But look at Obama.  He is running on the theory that he can spark a movement; and that the people, being moved, will change; and that if many, many people are motivated and empowered, real change – and real improvement – will be inevitable.  As Grace Lee Boggs said, Obama will only become a great president if we become a great people.  While Clinton sees change as top-down, imposed by Washington; Obama sees change coming from the bottom-up, from a motivated citizenry.

It might sound like bullshit.  But it’s something real.

In essence, Obama is betting his candidacy on the ideals that America was founded upon, on the possibility of a democracy and a republic that works, on an informed and active citizenry, on hope in a better tomorrow.  It might be a sucker’s bet.  But something are worth losing over.

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History Politics

An Historical Footnote: Eisenhower’s Baptism

Eisenhower

[digg-reddit-me]During the 1952 campaign for the presidency, word leaked that Dwight D. Eisenhower had never been baptized. Though he considered himself a Christian, he had never been inducted into a faith. He responded at the time by saying he would be baptized when he was able to get around to it – probably after his election. And so, on February 1, 1953, twelve days after his Inauguration, President Eisenhower was baptized, the only president to be baptized in office, and formally “staked down” his faith at the National Presbyterian Church on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue.

It apparently was an age in which religion was taken seriously – but not in the dogmatic way it is today. After all, Eisenhower, of “Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer” fame, was able to be judged not on his private religious acts, but on his public record.

It might be nice to reintroduce that as the standard again.

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Election 2008 Politics The Clintons

Dawn in South Carolina

From Bob Moser of The Nation magazine:

[T]he Clintons have come to embody, for many middle Americans, the moral and intellectual emptiness they seen in liberalism–feel-good, stand-for-nothing, make-no-difference power players cloaking their lust for control in “feel-your-pain” platitudes.

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