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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Iraq McCain Politics The War on Terrorism

Is Joe Lieberman acting as a “stealth Democrat”?

Find out.

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Excerpts from my Journals Politics

More peril than we are willing to admit

Excerpts from My Journals
[Dated Monday, June 16, 2003. ]

Someone needs to remind us that what is special about America is not just its power, unprecedented in the world, but also its principles. The one is secure enough, the other in more peril than we’re willing to admit.

William Raspberry. From the Washington Post, page A23.

Back in 2003 when I read this, just after I had gotten back from college for the summer, I didn’t realize how true it was.  I wrote down the line because it had a certain poetic, and ominous ring – but I remember thinking it was overstated.  Over time, William Raspberry’s column looks better and better.

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Election 2008 Obama Politics

An Historical Change of Course


[Photo courtesy of the excellent Joe Crimmings]

[digg-reddit-me]Updated: After reading the speech and seeing how it is being received, I am updating the tense of the piece to reflect this afternoon’s events.  For the full text or video of the “A More Perfect Union” speech, go here.

There have been many crucial tests and defining moments of this primary, one of the most invigorating in memory and certainly, the most exciting in my lifetime.

There was Hillary’s stumble in Philadelphia; there was Mr. Obama’s Jefferson-Jackson speech in Iowa; there was Iowa itself, gloriously arcane; there was an energy pulsing through the nation in the days after – and then the tears of proud woman and the resurrection of an old man in New Hampshire; there were dirty tricks and subtle slanders and oversensitive bristling; then after a few more rounds of bruising battle, it became a grudge match; Mr. McCain clinched his nomination and took shots at the two Democratic titans as they pummeled one another – one candidate unable to clinch the win; the other unable to allow herself to lose.

There have been many important days in this campaign already – subtle turning points and dramatic victories. But today, March 18, 2008 will prove the most crucial. In Iowa we learned about a man and a movement; and after New Hampshire, we learned that this movement and this man were strong enough to withstand negative attacks and setbacks. Today though is not about the “movement”. It is about Mr. Barack Obama and what he can do.

I subscribe to a variation on what is called the “great individual (or man) theory of history.” It seems clear to me that some men and women at crucial times have been able to alter the course of history. These historical figures were able to do so because their unique combination of gifts and talents matched the opportunity their time gave them. Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War; Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1960s; Mohandas Gandhi before the birth of India; Winston Churchill during World War II; and in a negative sense, Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. These all happened to be men who captured the zeitgeist of their times, who were able to channel events beyond their control to achieve the ends they sought. They achieved great successes because the forces of history – demographics, geography, cultural trends, technology, politics, and most of all chance – conspired to give these individuals an opportunity for which they were uniquely suited.

I – along with most Americans – believe that we, as a nation, are on the wrong path. I can name many specific issues – but the sum total of these specifics is more than the sum of these parts. There is something ineffably rotten in the state, in the nation that is more serious than all the specific maladies. No candidate, no leader will be able to fix all of this – or even much of it. But what is needed – more than anything – is an historical change of course. ((To reverse the trend of expanding executive power; to begin to address global climate change; to take steps to minimize the social effects of globalization; to address growing income inequality; to find solutions to the coming governmental disaster of the entitlement crisis; not to mention defusing the increasing extremism in the Muslim world and creating an effective strategy for the fight against terrorism.))

I believe that Mr. Barack Obama is the only candidate or leader of any sort in America who is capable of initiating this change of course today. I believe that now is the time of opportunity to change course – the first since 1992; and that the opportunity is ripe today for historical change (in part because of Mr. Bush’s astounding incompetence which has – as one Republican congressman put it in the Washington Post, “destroyed the Republican brand” – and in part because of underlying trends; and in a large measure because of Mr. Obama himself – because he has been able to call on many latent forces in American cultural, social, and economic life.

However, throughout the past several weeks, Mr. Obama has been deluged with attacks on his pastor, on his race, on his supposed secret religion. These attacks, designed to attack the core of his appeal, have begun to have an effect.

Today Mr. Obama has responded, and while we are still waiting to see the full effect of this speech on the political environment, he seems to have done everything he set out to. But for him to prove himself as a transformational leader, his response must defuse the attacks and call Americans to a higher purpose.  If he cannot, then he still is likely to beat Ms. Clinton for the nomination; and though weakened, he seems to match up well against Mr. McCain and has a solid chance of prevailing in November. And if elected, I believe he will still be an exceptional president.  Based on what I have seen so far, Mr. Obama has passed this high threshold.

Today we will see if Mr. Obama can re-shape the media environment and the politics to his needs – if he can create a moment that will break the poisonous spell of repeated loops of Reverend Wright saying, “God damn America!”; of a black man dressed in traditional Somali garb; of the constant iterations of black! man!; if he can become one of the “great men of history” able to shape events as well as respond to them.

Mr. Obama has shown he can hit back – and in a vicious news cycle, he wins as often as not against the Clinton press machine – with twenty years of media experience and press relationships. In this traditional politics – Mr. Obama can win. But he cannot win as big as he needs to – and he cannot be the figure we need as a nation at this moment to correct our course.

Today is not the day on which Mr. Obama’s candidacy rests; he is well-positioned regardless. But today we have seen Mr. Obama rise above the fray, the petty attacks and the identity politics – and take the first steps to becoming the transformational leader many of us hope he will be.

N.B. Although in this piece, I have spoken in generalities and of history, I have often been more specific:

Categories
Domestic issues Election 2008 Obama Politics

A More Perfect Union

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but here is the full text (as prepared for delivery) of Mr. Obama’s speech (video here; the stakes at play in this speech from a previous post here):

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk – to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Continued after the jump…

Categories
Election 2008 Libertarianism Obama Politics

God Damn the United States

ka1igu1a over at the Freedom Democrats writes with regret that Mr. Obama will soon take what he refers to as a “loyalty oath” to the United States in response to the Rev. Wright controversy. ka1igu1a believes that the core element of this controversy is the conflux of race and patriotism.

What ka1igu1a would prefer is that Mr. Obama declare that rather than being devoted to the United States, he is devoted to liberty itself as Sam Adams did when he declare, “God damn the King!”  He concludes:

But this Libertarian can’t help but to think, why, yes, God Bless Thomas Jefferson, God Bless the Cause of Liberty, but God Damn the United States.

I appreciate ka1igu1a’s point; and I do believe that principles must be placed over nationalism.  But I do not believe the two are mutually exclusive – and I believe I too love my country – abstract notion that it may be.

It is because I believe in the possibilities of America that I care about ensuring that the principles I support are practiced by our government; it is because I care about the abstraction that is America – not despite it – that I am critical.  Based on Mr. Obama’s comments, this seems to be what he believes as well.

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Excerpts from my Journals Prose

Brevity

Excerpts from My Journals
[Dated Summer 2001. When I was reading Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way.]

Brief is the growing time of joy for mortals and brief the flowers bloom that falls to the earth shaken by grim fate. Things of a day! What are we and what are we not. Man’s a shadows dream.

Vanity of vanities: all is vanity.

The Greek poet Pindar.

Categories
Politics Scandal-mongering

Friday Night Specials

For those of you who might have missed this Star Ledger exclusive, a former aide to New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey is claiming he engaged in threesomes with the Mr. Greevey and Mrs. McGreevey over the course of several years. The couple called the regular encounters “Friday Night Specials.”

Mr. McGreevey of course is famous for having to resign as governor after being outed and having employed his lover – not the aide in question, but another – in national security jobs for the state. This latest revelation is newsworthy because Mrs. McGreevey has filed a divorce action against her husband alleging that he deceived her into marriage and that she did not find out about his proclivities until it was made public in 2004. She is using this alleged deception as her grounds to demand sole custody of the couple’s daughter and $600,000.

Really though, this is only news because it means statements like this make it into print:

Pedersen did not say if he was gay or bisexual and only described having contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts…

And:

…the weekly romps, from 1999 to 2001, …typically began with dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s and ended with a threesome at McGreevey’s condo in Woodbridge.

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Humor Life

Happy St. Patrick’s Day…

To honor the patron saint of Ireland, I offer you this off-color joke that was voted best joke in Ireland in 2006:

John O’Reilly hoisted his beer and said, “Here’s to spending the rest of me life, between the legs of me wife!” That won him the top prize at the pub for the best toast of the night!

He went home and told his wife, Mary, “I won the prize for the Best toast of the night”

She said, “Aye, did ye now. And what was your toast?”

John said, “Here’s to spending the rest of me life, sitting in church beside me wife.”

“Oh, that is very nice indeed, John!” Mary said.

The next day, Mary ran into one of John’s drinking buddies on the street corner.

The man chuckled leeringly and said, “John won the prize the other night at the pub with a toast about you, Mary”.

She said, “Aye, he told me, and I was a bit surprised myself.”

“You know, he’s only been there twice in the last four years. Once he fell asleep, and the other time I had to pull him by the ears to make him come.”

Categories
Excerpts from my Journals Prose

Well-crafted lies

Excerpts from My Journals
[Dated Spring 1999.  The beginning of a short story I never finished.  Perhaps it was supposed to be a novel.]

Life is frivolous. Fear always lurks in the slightly obscured parts of his mind. A fear of an imminent catastrophe that will make his entire life meaningless. An hour from now, the sun will rise, streaking the sky with the tears another day brings, staining the darkness with streams of light. Anyone can write a beautiful sentence, but it is something else to make that beauty mean something. And who can do that? In his mind the question echoes…  The answer seemed all too simple. No one could. Beauty was dead because his soul no longer had a grasp of the subtle emotion. Meaning was just violence inflicted upon a coincidence of happenings and ideas and the churning of lust and fear and desperation. It was the creation of a story out of life, and he knew it was futile. So, he went about his business in denial of his self and his life.

All his thoughts are well-crafted lies meant to deceive their continuous observer. And he falls for them, falls hard, believing in love and faith and all those other meaningless concepts and dedicates the pain that some would call his life to them. Most of all, he dedicates himself to story. Stories cause his eyes to glisten and smiles to creep onto his face and fear to surface from the depths of his being. Stories, simple and complex, all end up being simple. Boy becomes man, girl becomes woman, an adult grows into something better or perhaps worse. He delights in these lies that throw light on the darkness illuminating the inner emptiness of whatever there is. They bring him joy though—or he thinks they do?

The sky is pale with night as he begins to write, typing out his words on a glowing screen in the darkness of a room. Sleep beckons, calls, drags him like the tide pulled him out to sea as a child; trying to drag him under. For whatever reason, some delusion of inspiration, he stays awake, continuing to try to resurrect his soul. Writing will be his resurrection. Writing will be his salvation. Writing makes water wine and wine blood. Writing is his life, or all of it that he cares for. Writing is the wound he hides in when fear beings to creep into his heart.

Categories
Domestic issues Politics Scandal-mongering

The Prosecution of Governor Siegelman

This 60 Minutes piece from a few weeks ago was astounding. I had heard about it because of the temporary station outage at CBS’s Alabama affiliate conveniently lasting the length of the piece. Of course, in its defense, the Alabama affiliate did re-broadcast the piece a week later. Timing it for maximum attention, they broadcast it during prime time on a Sunday.

In an odd turn of events, the re-broadcast of the short segment – as well as the rest of CBS’s lineup had extremely low ratings that night because of the brand-new phenom of February TV, the Superbowl.