Dahlia Lithwick, by far, my favorite Slate columnist, wrote this piece today about Michael Mukasey’s supposed “independence” as proved by his understanding of what torture is. It all depends on what the meaning of the word is is.
Category: Politics
Categories
The Real Obama
There have been a few profiles in the past few days of Senator Obama, timed perhaps to coincide with the beginning of the sprint for the Democratic nomination. I already posted some excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s excellent piece and the candidate himself seems to have picked up on the meme himself. The theme of Sullivan’s piece was that no other candidate had the promise or the potential of Obama and that Obama and Obama alone could truly respond to this unique moment in American history, both culturally within our country and as our representative abroad. James Traub has a piece that is somewhat more critical in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend. Traub reports that Obama is supported by most of the Democratic foreign policy elite, aside from a few of President Clinton’s top aides, who support Hillary. However, among many voters, Traub sees the problem as this:
Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.
Traub concludes:
Obama concedes that he has a problem. “We have not fully made our case yet,” he admits. “I think the American people know in their gut that we need significant change, and I think they’d like to believe what I’m saying is possible.” But they need, says this former law-school professor, “a permission structure.” They need to know that they’ll be safe with Barack Obama. Or unsafe with Hillary Clinton.
Two months before the presidential primaries begin, it still looks like a hard sell.
From the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett reaches a similar conclusion while analyzing Barack Obama’s charisma and personal appeal. He explains how he researched Obama’s past trying to find some dirt from his years at Harvard Law, but that oddly enough he could not find anyone who disliked Obama. Barnett finds this extraordinary – for a top student at a top school who won every honor and excelled, graduating magna cum laude would not have aroused significant jealousies and other petty remembrances.
The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates’ politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate…
The people that Obama so thoroughly charmed generally weren’t the charm-prone types. I say the following as a well known Republican partisan–the fact that his classmates so universally held him in the highest regard suggests that Barack Obama may truly be a special person.
Working for the Weekly Standard however, Barnett is forced to conclude:
There’s still time for the man that I’ve heard is the real Obama to emerge. If he does, he’ll be formidable. But time is growing short.
Both Barnett and Traub reach similar conclusions: they both believe that Obama has greater potential than any of the other Democratic candidates; that he is “special”, and extremely intelligent; and that he’s not quite ready.
You might recall I concluded the same thing after hearing him speak at Washington Square Park this September:
What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.
He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be.
[digg-reddit-me]Last Wednesday, Leonard Lopate had Cathy Wilkerson on his show on WYNC Public Radio. Wilkerson was a member of the Weathermen, a radical organization that had splintered off from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969 in order to undertake more extreme actions such as bombings and other terrorist attacks on U.S. government facilities. The Weatherman’s goal was to effect the overthrow of the American government. At the very end of the interview, Lopate asked Wilkerson about why today’s antiwar movement was weaker than the antiwar movement Wilkerson was part of in the 1960s.
Lopate: There are many different theories for why we don’t have as strong of an anti-war movement today as we did in the 60s and 70s. The draft is given as one of the reasons. Do you think the excesses of groups like SDS may also have played a role?
Wilkerson: Quite to the contrary, I think actually more people are active today and that young people are far more sophisticated about world issues today than we were [in the 1960s].
Lopate: Well we’re not seeing the marches, that we saw the same kind of activ… people throwing themselves at the Pentagon…
Wilkerson: There’s plenty of local marches and plenty of local action which doesn’t get in the press necessarily other than the local press. There’s far more activism now than there was then. What’s lacking is that sense of engagement with power. We had that in the 60s because we had come out of the civil rights movement which was the foundation of everything we did and they had won and changed the conversation in this country, so we had the sense that young people could really change something, in a way that young people today have never had that experience. And so there isn’t the public sense of engaging with power. [italics added]
Geraldine Ferraro, former vice presidential candidate in 1984, spoke to the New York Times attempting to defend Hillary against accusations that Hillary’s campaign was “playing the gender card” in responding to the quote politics of pile-on unquote. Judge for yourself how well she did:
“We can’t let them do this in a presidential race,” [Ferraro] said. “They say we’re playing the gender card. We are not. We are not. We have got to stand up. It’s discrimination against her as a candidate because she is a woman.”
Giuliani decided to echo Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama last Friday, saying that Obama’s decision to engage in aggressive diplomacy with Iran was “naive” and “irresponsible”. The Obama camp responded thus:
While Rudy Giuliani may embrace Hillary Clinton’s policy of not talking and saber rattling towards Iran, Barack Obama knows that policy is not working. It’s time for tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, not lectures from a Mayor who skipped out on the Iraq Study Group to give paid speeches, and who was naive and irresponsible enough to recommend someone with ties to convicted felons for Secretary of Homeland Security.
This is what I like to see, and the statement is on par with the Obama camp’s response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign when they started to attack Hillary defector David Geffen.
Categories
Quote of the Day
“I played basketball and I’m skinny but the people I play with will tell you I don’t mind going down low and throwing elbows.”
From ABC News last week. I just hope it’s true.
Now this is a bit too good to be true:
[digg-reddit-me]I have been anticipating this piece for a while now – Andrew Sullivan’s cover piece from The Atlantic on Barack Obama, his argument for Obama’s candidacy. His argument is not the same as mine, although we share a number of common themes and particular positions.
Some choice excerpts from this very good piece which I recommend everyone read:
On Hillary Clinton and Political Fear
Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.
Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness…He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.
On the Essential Struggle of Our Time
This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots, the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam, the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place.
You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps
Quoting Obama on His Religious Conversion
One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.
On the Necessity of an Obama Presidency
In dangerous times, popular majorities often seek the conservative option, broadly understood.
The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.
But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.
From the Huffington Post, describing an Iowa meeting at which Giuliani was asked by a participant:
“Can you name one thing that happened on September 12?”
Mr. Giuliani seemed taken aback by the question, clearing his throat and drinking from a glass of water as if to buy time before responding.
“That’s a good question,” Mr. Giuliani said. “September 12 happened one day after September 11 — and we must never forget the lessons of September 11.”
Priceless. And shameless.
From Kathleen Parker in the San Francisco Chronicle:
When you’re leading the Democratic presidential race, as Sen. Hillary Clinton is, you might expect other candidates to focus their sharpest criticism your way.
Yet the spin coming out of the Clinton campaign is that the men were ganging up on Hillary. Sorry, but when girls insist on playing hardball with the boys, they don’t get to cry foul – or change the game to dodge ball – when they get bruised…
Hillary can handle the men just fine. What’s giving her problems is Hillary.
Amen.
[digg-reddit-me]Behind the debates, votes, and bureaucratic battles of the past few years over civil liberties, torture, Guantanamo, terrorist tribunals, the Patriot Act, and domestic wiretapping, are two different views of how to respond to the threat of terrorism. Republicans and liberals each frame the question differently, asking two basic questions that lead them to diverging answers about the same issues.
A. Republicans
- Question: What rights should we give to terrorists?
- Answer: It doesn’t really matter. We need to do what is necessary to keep people safe. You shouldn’t care what we do unless you are a terrorist. (See footnote.)
B. Liberals
- Question: How can we best reduce the risk of terrorism while preserving a free society?
- Answer: There is no simple answer. It’s a complicated process necessitating many trade-offs and compromises and the process needs to be as transparent as possible.
While Republicans have often deflected Question B by answering Question A, their response to Question A indicates that they do not believe the two questions are related. I don’t know how many times I have been told in debates on the issues that I shouldn’t worry about them unless I am a terrorist. To consider the effect of our government’s actions gets you called a “fellow traveler” with the jihadists or more charitably is labeled “pre-9/11 thinking”. This is the essential idea of the books published by Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, of countless columns in the National Review and Wall Street Journal, and of a large part of the Republican’s electoral success in the 2002 and 2004 elections.
Politically, Question A confers great advantages. It offers easy answers. It comforts us – “If I’m not a terrorist, what do I care?” It seems a tougher approach. Most important though, it emotionally charges the issue. “Why should we confer the rights our society guarantees on those who have no respect for these rights and who will exploit them?” It separates them from us. Question B leads to a rational, reflective discussion and no easy answers. It’s a much harder sell and has been portrayed as a sign of weakness.
Despite the political rhetoric, both questions are merely different ways of phrasing the same problem. In fact, the disagreement between Republicans and liberals centers around a single point of controversy:
Do terrorists have rights?
- Republicans have resoundingly answered “NO!” They have even gone so far as to indicate that even if you are only suspected of being a terrorist, you have lost many if not all rights.
- Liberals believe terrorists do have rights, although many liberals do acknowledge that terrorism presents such a challenge to our way of life that we must make some changes to our system to deal with the issue effectively.
Within the Republican framing of the issue is a single, absolutely frightening idea that undermines the very basis of our nation and freedoms: that the government confers rights upon people rather than that rights being inherent in each individual. This is a profoundly unconservative idea – a radical one more generally associated with Communism than with any American ideology. You can see this idea at work listening to the chief prosecutor for Guantanamo defend his treatment of prisoners there, in Cheney’s defense of the terrorist tribunals, in Rudy’s defense of “enhanced interrogation”, in Bush’s defense of domestic wiretapping.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
The problem with the Republican position is that it denies the very basis for American government, one of the cornerstones of our Constitution. If you believe in the ideals encapsulated in the first collective document produced by the American nation, in the reason for the revolution that created our country, in the ideals that animated the Founders in creating the Constitution, then terrorists have rights, inherent, inalienable, and God-given. If you reject this idea and believe instead that the government grants us rights which we can then exercise – to a fair and speedy trial, to a jury of peers, to not be tortured, to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, to free speech, to freedom of assembly, to an expectation of privacy – then you have negated the very basis of our founding. This is self-evident.
What then is the rationale for the Republican position?
Simply, the Republican position is this: the terrorists have won. The terrorists’ ideas and actions make America’s liberal democracy irrelevant. We must take what steps are necessary to protect the public safety; civil liberties are only for those who deserve them. Although the President took an oath to defend the Constitution, he now must defend American lives at the expense of this old document.
Clearly all Republicans do not believe this; and many who have mouthed these lines are merely reacting emotionally and have not thought through the clear consequences of their rhetoric. This is why I believe there is still hope for this country. There are many details liberals and conservatives can work out about the balance between protecting the public and protecting each individual, between liberty and safety. But to frame the issue as the Republicans have is truly radical, and it should be recognized as such. And to act as the Bush administration has done, based on the assumption that rights are granted rather than inherent, has clearly undermined everything America stands for.