Imperfect vessel

May 13th, 2008

Tornado’s on the ground in Missouri today, wildfires in Florida — China and Myanmar statistics worsen by the hour. The purge is on.

Light and Peace to us all.

We’ll look at the candidates again today — some of the emerging wrinkles that are coming into view; fascinating stuff. I approach life with the philosophy that if something appears on your plate, it’s for you to chew on. The upside of this long and winding road to a nomination is our opportunity to achieve a real sense of not only the character of the participants, but our own, while discovering the unmentionable territory of our bias and prejudice. It would be snarky to add our intelligence to the list as that’s one of those black/white comments, arrogant and snotty, and we’ve got enough of that — but with Hillary projected to get 80% of West Virginia today, not even her supporters can avoid the implication, which she herself embraced, that the white folk are in rebellion. Saturday Night Live put a pin in that one.

So when she wins big, does that mean we’re a racist nation … or that West Virginia is a racist state … or that some of us [those voting for the woman not because she speaks for them, but because she isn't black] just aren’t ready for the 21st century? Indeed, an anachronistic word came out of this particular leg of the race that startled me: half-breed. Lord help us!

The Obama campaign has suffered under-reported, by design, incidents of racism; the NY Times put out an op/ed yesterday by a wing-nut that labeled him a “Muslim apostate” because his father was a “radical Muslim” [??] and all those born into a Muslim bloodline are forevermore … Muslim [like those born with a drop of negro blood are black, I guess. I'm thinking one of those historical DNA tests to identify the racial makeup of our forebear's would do EVERYBODY in this country a favor, even if we had to suffer a huge, inevitable wave of identity crisis.] I’d think his detractors have not bothered to hear the Christian code that peppers his speeches, part of his ‘prophetic voice’ that surfaces from time to time … his use of the term “imperfect vessel” is a bit of biblical poetry.

We’ve gone poll crazy, now — but the numbers are revealing; it’s interpretation that’s wonky. Hillary is still riding high on her PA win, getting lift on her ‘white’ vote, but the numbers tell another story — as the votes came straggling in, it turns out she won the state by less than a percent, a bit more than 11,000 votes. But the me-me is out there, now — Obama has problems with the blue-collar’s without college education [as do ALL Dem's, it should be noted.] That doesn’t read ’stupid’ to me … that reads inexperienced and under-educated. The people who ‘wouldn’t vote for one’ don’t know any … haven’t connected with the hearts of their brothers due to isolation, fear and lack of opportunity. College ain’t all that — but it DOES take us into a larger pond, expose us to diversity and push us forward mentally and emotionally.

Hil has found her populist voice but it rides on a wave of fear and resentment; while she gets the numbers for the older gen, she’s also impressed about 60% of the public as not trustworthy … she’s even gained status as one of those who have been ‘verbed’ [think being Kerry'd for swift boated ... Rather'd for tarred and feathered without having a day in court.] “Pulling a Hillary” is the new term for voicing a bogus complaint.

Meanwhile, Obama slapped on a flag pin to work within the Red-state crucible yesterday, and I don’t blame him — I just wish it had one of those little chips that played the Star Spangled Banner so he could push it, mid-speech, and see how many jumped to their feet with their hand over their heart; those in wheel chairs, over 90 and under 3 would get a pass, all others who didn’t do the deed would be reported to Homeland Security. OK — that was snarky. I’m an imperfect vessel, and so is everyone else….

… except the Republican candidate — John McRib is a CRACKED vessel; he’s not holding water, that one. With “flip flop” terminology in the past, evidently, it’s still hard to view this guy as anything but the original fish out of water, flopping everywhere. Jeff Toobin, author of The Nine, and others have speculated that Mr. Maverick would get Roe overturned within a year or so. He’s running on the George Bush playbook, the same man he called “dumb as a stump” a few years ago. Here’s a good read on John’s [flippin'] dilemma.

Yesterday the Old Coot [60% say age is an issue] droned on and on about stewardship of the planet, fussing up the corporate’s and some of the base [which is split nicely, with Ron Paul and Bob Barr ready to cut into his numbers, Libertarian spoilers in an already shaky Pub landscape. Remember that, already the presumptive, Mac STILL lost huge chunks of the base in Illinois and Carolina to candidates long retired.] Just makes me want to spit that the press gives him time and space without pointing out how many lies he tells. Yes, he’s ‘green’ alright — and he missed every critical environmental vote in Congress this year. Flip flop!

See, here’s the thing — you know that I would prefer a new breed of president, one not connected to the Establishment parties. Even John Edwards, bless him, played in their ballpark so he didn’t have all of my heart. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and the one with the best potential to shift Left and be responsive to the public gets my vote — that’s Obama, if he can nail it down. I watched the PBS offering on FDR’s life last night, and clearly there’s a hint in that president’s evolvement; there are politicians that can rise to power and influence, and there are rare politicians that can rise above their skill-set to become statesmen. The FDR that produced the New Deal was not the FDR that took the White House; the times and the need of the people convinced him to change direction.

In the spiritual community there’s a word for this — it’s called being “teachable.” That indicates a willingness to venture out into the unknown, take risk, learn. Of the three, I think Obama is the one that is capable of that, he’s got the flex and the willingness to try something and scrap it if it doesn’t work, try again — you can read that between the lines of the Times article about him, below.

At the moment, we have three skillful, high-flying politicians competing — one polished in the Chicago machine, one claiming legacy to the Clintonian political model and one deeply entrenched in the Republican system — only time will tell if they can be more.

GOSH, these are interesting reads [I read that Hil said "gosh," and they called her phony; I protest ... we're contemporaries and have a wide range of generational expressions, even if we aren't bff.]

Some are ‘think pieces’ about gender issues … the Feminist’s that are taking Hillary’s decline so hard seem like dry drunks, to me — before you call for my head, let me explain. Feminism is a movement, and all movements start as cartoons, drawn large and quickly stereotyped — they require passion that can become obsession. Those who would take ANY woman over ANY man, seems to me, have lost their objectivity. The 12 Steps are critical to overcoming dependencies … but the 13th, and most critical in my mind, is to step away into a new understanding of life and self-definition … no longer a reformed user, but a healed human. Yes, breaking the glass ceiling is critical to our becoming … but if we do this by out-butching the guys, do we not do our own energetic signal and inclination a disservice?

There’s a piece by Hil’s spiritual mentor [not religious] below, and another by a psychologist. As we strive to come to gender balance within ourselves … each of us … surely we must come to recognize the authentic versus the inauthentic along the way. For me, anyhow, Hil has done me a service — she’s taught me how not to do it. And, win or not, she’s shattered the ceiling anyhow; who is not convinced that can and will happen now? If she wins this time, by muscling her way through, Feminism will have sent a clear message but females everywhere will get the wrong one, and send us into battle stance with males for another round of karmic mis-step.

This is that rare time when we can leap, if we will; if we won’t, we can play it out in linear terms and teach ourselves slowly and painfully.

I enjoyed collecting these today — there’s a link to a fun bit on the candidates handwriting below; a Bob Herbert piece on the Millennials … the generation that’s most comfortable with change; we could also argue the one’s with the least to lose [and the most to gain.] The last piece, while written as a vehicle for Hillary commentary, applies to all the candidates — and illustrates why we must START with one of these people, pushing them forward relentlessly; for all the marbles, don’cha know.

Jude

Hillary Clinton failed to master the female approach, former mentor says
Scholar and philosopher Jean Houston reflects on where the first viable woman presidential candidate may have gone wrong.
By Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times
May 12, 2008

ASHLAND, ORE. — Recently, as New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigned in Eugene, her onetime friend and mentor Jean Houston was at home in her double geodesic dome, a style that is not out of place here in this town of theater lovers and spiritual seekers.

“I could have probably gone down to see her, and she would have hugged me and it would have been nice,” said Houston, as she sat on a sofa surrounded by art from Bali and Greece in her circular living room. “I could have been very useful to her. But there would have been cameras, and they would have said, ‘Oh, now, Hillary’s so desperate, she’s gone to the spiritualist.’ ”

Houston was not Clinton’s spiritualist, but when Clinton was at her lowest — after the 1994 defeat of her healthcare initiative, the Republican takeover of Congress, seemingly interminable investigations and intense vilification — Houston, a pioneer of the human potential movement, was something of a secret emotional life raft for the first lady.

The friendship ended after Bob Woodward revealed in a 1996 book that Houston had helped guide a devastated Hillary Clinton in imaginary conversations with her hero Eleanor Roosevelt.

Houston rarely speaks about her relationship with Clinton. As Clinton’s nomination seemed on the verge of hitting the skids, Houston reflected on Clinton’s style of politics and where the country’s first viable female presidential candidate may have gone wrong.

Houston is a scholar and philosopher who travels the world giving seminars on human potential and what she calls “social artistry,” applying myth, history and spirituality to help effect social, political or personal change.

During President Bill Clinton’s first term, Houston and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, a friend of Houston, helped Hillary Clinton arrive at a new understanding of the symbolic power of her office and tutored her in what would become her most successful ventures as first lady — a trip to South Asia, her first book, and a speech in Beijing about human rights that many would consider her finest moment.

Houston is a prolific author whose associates have included Margaret Mead (Bateson’s mother) and mythology professor Joseph Campbell. She got to know Eleanor Roosevelt as a high school student in New York.

Houston sees the presidential race through a mythic lens.

“The current election is a look at archetypal structures,” said Houston, a handsome 71-year-old with a broad smile. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has “a shamanic personality, of course,” she said. Clinton is “the classical wise woman or priestess, if you will.” The presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, she added, is “the warrior.”

The ‘rising feminine’

Houston believes Obama is on the verge of winning the nomination partly because he has promoted himself as the embodiment of a new kind of politics, and partly because Clinton has had trouble portraying her authentic self.

“She is funny, hilarious, generous, warm, given to acts of kindness that are extraordinary,” Houston said. “She is a deep woman, not just a very bright woman. But she is part of a dying breed, an archaic sensibility.”

The biggest change in human history over the last 5,000 years, Houston said, “is the rise of the feminine . . . slowly, but surely, to full partnership with men over the whole domain of human affairs. This is shifting everything.” This was what Houston and Bateson tried to convey to Clinton in 1995 when they helped her understand why, quite apart from political strife, she was the object of so much loathing.

“It’s the fear of the ‘rising feminine,’ ” Houston said.

Ironically, Clinton’s problem today, Houston said, may be that Obama has given better voice to that new pattern of possibility — that he embodies a more female, inclusive approach to problem-solving, while Clinton has become mired in proving herself capable of emulating the male model, which requires combat and the demonization of enemies.

Houston got to know the Clintons at the end of 1994, when they invited a small group of bestselling self-help authors — Marianne Williamson, Anthony Robbins and Stephen R. Covey — to Camp David over New Year’s Eve. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton were reeling from their defeats and searching for a way to get back on track.

It was a time, as Woodward noted in “The Choice,” when Hillary Clinton seemed “jerked around by the muddled role of first lady, as she swung between New Age feminist and national housewife.”

In her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” Clinton seemed to agree: “As much as I loved my husband and my country, adjusting to being a full-time surrogate was difficult for me. Mary Catherine and Jean helped me better understand that the role of first lady is deeply symbolic and that I had better figure out how to make the best of it.”

Woodward wrote that Houston tried to steer Clinton away from her “warrior mode” and “the need to have enemies who could symbolically be singled out to embody the opposition.”

“It’s a shame the warfare model is still there,” Houston said. “If she could have moved to the next level, she would be the next president.”

Houston and Bateson also helped Clinton prepare for her first solo trip as first lady, a visit to Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh in March 1995 that helped soften Clinton’s image, particularly when she was photographed riding an elephant with daughter Chelsea.

Clinton later enlisted Houston and Bateson to help craft her first book, “It Takes a Village,” which became a bestseller.

Clinton has invoked her trips to South Asia and Beijing — where she stood up for the rights of women and children — as examples of foreign policy experience. (As for her misrepresentation of landing under sniper fire in Bosnia, Houston said, “Well, for goodness’ sakes! The woman’s been under sniper fire for 20 years, so I can see how that would happen.”)

Stung by ‘Wackygate’

Clinton herself had often remarked in speeches that she had imaginary conversations with Roosevelt, but Woodward’s detailed account of the hourlong session with Houston and Bateson, which had been taped, insinuated something stranger at play. Clinton handled the affair with humor, but her critics pounced, dubbing the episode “Wackygate.”

Houston was besieged by reporters. She gave a few interviews, including one to Larry King in which she humorously guided him in a conversation with his hero, Arthur Godfrey. The White House, she said, asked her to stop talking.

Houston found herself tarred as a “New Age queen” who had conducted “seances” with the first lady. She felt she suffered a tremendous blow to her professional reputation.

Co-founder with her husband, Robert Masters, of the Foundation for Mind Research, which studied human development and states of consciousness (she was among the few sanctioned LSD researchers in the ’60s), she said she lost income, grants and an opportunity to serve on the board of a Laurance Rockefeller foundation.

The Clintons did not exactly abandon her, Houston said, but there was not much support. “They were living in a kind of war zone all the time, so I could not feel badly for myself under the circumstances,” she said.

“The whole episode was the single biggest trauma of my life,” Houston said. “Many people know my work has affected a great many lives around the world, but I stay quiet about it and I stay out of the press.”

On Thursday, Clinton attended a fundraiser in Ashland. Houston could have gone but opted to stay home. ++

Hillary’s Gift to Women
Barbara Ehrenreich, HuffPo
May 12, 2008

In Friday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary Clinton’s destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral superiority, hailing Clinton’s “no-holds-barred pugnacity” and her media reputation as “nasty” and “ruthless.” Future female presidential candidates will owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, “when Hillary Clinton broke through the glass floor and got down with the boys.”

I share Faludi’s glee — up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn’t just break through the “glass floor,” she set a new low for floors in general, and would, if she could have got within arm’s reach, have rubbed the broken glass into Obama’s face.

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, “rooted in biology.” The counter-example of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that “biology is not destiny.”
But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran — along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out — was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them — or I’ll rip you a new one.

There’s a reason why it’s been so easy for men to overlook women’s capacity for aggression. As every student of Women’s Studies 101 knows, what’s called aggression in men is usually trivialized as “bitchiness” in women: Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She’s been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can’t all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless aggression? Any illusions I had about the innate moral superiority of women ended four years ago with Abu Ghraib. Recall that three out of the five prison guards prosecuted for the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners were women. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski, and the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. Not to mention that the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq at the time was Condoleezza Rice.

Whatever violent and evil things men can do, women can do too, and if the capacity for cruelty is a criterion for leadership, as Fukuyama suggested, then Lynndie England should consider following up her stint in the brig with a run for the Senate.

It’s important — even kind of exhilarating — for women to embrace their inner bitch, but the point should be to expand our sense of human possibility, not to enshrine aggression as a virtue. Women can behave like the warrior queen Boadicea, credited with slaughtering 70,000, many of them civilians, or like Margaret Thatcher, who attempted to dismantle the British welfare state. Men, for their part, are free to take as their role models the pacifist leaders Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way — by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn’t really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren’t wimps.

As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female — such as compassion and an aversion to violence — can be found in either sex, and sometimes it’s a man who best upholds them. ++

Hillary and the Unfeminine Mystique
Joan Z. Shore, HuffPo
May 13, 2008

I would have loved to vote for America’s first woman president. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Hillary Clinton, the woman who could have made history, simply let me down.

She let me down five years ago when she voted for the war in Iraq. And she let me down all these years since, by never repudiating her vote or apologizing for her mistake.

She let me down — and lost my respect — by continually using the pronoun “I”. “I’ll be ready the first day in office.” “I’ll be the one to answer the phone at 3 a.m.” Like some egomaniac, she seemed to forget that there are 300 million other people in this country.

Barack Obama didn’t forget this. His most-used pronoun is “we”. While Clinton billed herself as a one-woman act, Obama focused on the ensemble, on plurality, unity and cooperation, That’s not showmanship — that’s statesmanship.

And Clinton’s favorite verb? “Fight.” Thanks, babe — that’s what they’re doing over in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon, and in too many places around the globe. I don’t want a fighter in the White House; I want a peacemaker.

As an active feminist all my life, I see exactly where Clinton went wrong. She was using the old paradigm: To beat them (the men) you’ve got to be like them.

Tough, aggressive, pragmatic. But what a difference it would have made if her campaign had employed some “feminine” qualities: compassion, conciliation, generosity.

She must have taken Margaret Thatcher as her role model. She should have copied Golda Meir instead, who was known to greet foreign dignitaries in her housedress, and brew them a cup of tea in her kitchen.

I do, of course, sympathize with Hillary’s marital predicament. As many wives discover, a husband can be both a help and a hindrance, an embellishment or an embarrassment. I think she would have been a lot wiser to leave hubby home, tending the lawn in Chappaqua.

Most likely, Hillary herself will not be willing to return home next year and take up domestic chores. Nor should she. She will make a fine elder stateswoman.

Chastened by this campaign, she may yet become a mellow voice of reason, of tolerance, of understanding, of moral rectitude and responsibility.

She is finished running with the wolves. Now it’s time to lick her wounds and be a woman again. ++

Revenge of the Wimp Factor: The Ironies of Proving Manhood in the Democratic Primary
Stephen Ducat, Ph.D., HuffPo
May 12, 2008

Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton. But tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hill-Rod. This election is starting to feel a lot like “King of the Ring.” The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman. — Hillary Rodham Clinton, from her opening monologue prior to a World Wrestling Entertainment “joke” match between Clinton and Obama look-alikes.

What has become disturbingly evident in the last few months of the primary campaign is that Hillary Clinton is not merely carrying the torch of the “old politics.” She is also the ironic bearer of the old masculinity, a knuckle-dragging version of manhood that is defined in terms of domination. In this view, “the man” is whoever can stick it to the other. It is the one who can eviscerate his or her enemy most savagely and with the least remorse. It is the one on top in a zero-sum world. In this curious mutation of patriarchy, anatomy is not destiny. But being a dick is.

Much is made of the penis. We talk about how to keep it hard, how to make it bigger, and who envies it. The public secret we keep from ourselves — but at a deep level understand — is that it is not the penis that matters most. That modest organ is, after all, vulnerable and easily deflated. The phallus is what most men and even some women in a male dominant culture covet, envy, think they possess, fear losing, or try to get back (usually, each of these at different times).

In our still patriarchal world, this symbol, in blatant or subtle forms, shows up in our dreams, editorial cartoons, commercials, and political ads. It is often used to represent absolute domination, insensate hardness, omnipotence, unlimited wealth, invulnerability, untrammeled growth, or freedom from all dependency - and sometimes all of these unattainable qualities.

The problem, of course, is that this ancient archetypal monolith of manhood is an illusion. Nobody has one; it only exists if someone sees it. In spite of being an evanescent hallucination, political consultants spend much of their time trying to paint a phallus on their candidate. A line from the Tom Waits song “Step Right Up” could be read as a concise description of what a successful campaign does: “It gives you an erection. It wins the election.”

In most electoral contests, the question is often “who’s the man?” And the manner in which political manhood gets displayed is tiresomely predictable: macho chest beating, posing with the fetish objects of anxious masculinity (trucks, big machines, and even bigger weapons), humiliating your opponent with castrating insults, calling into question his or her ability to be tough, ruthless, and merciless with the designated enemy of the moment — in short, phallic strutting. These are the bread and butter performances that keep the 24-hour cable infotainment channels in business, and frequently eclipse the issues of the day.

There is an astonishing irony in Senator Clinton flashing her “Hill-Rod,” and striking poses that, in the admiring words of North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, make “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.” During her career as First Lady, Mrs. Clinton was widely reviled by her conservative detractors as a gender outlaw. Being smart, outspoken, a savvy investor, a policy wonk, and a woman who insisted on an egalitarian relationship with her husband, she was seen as a profound threat, a wife who did not know her proper (i.e., subordinate) place.

These sentiments got represented in numerous editorial cartoons that depicted her in male drag, using a men’s urinal, and as a riding-crop-wielding dominatrix. Slick Times, a right wing humor magazine, featured jokes about her preferred method of birth control (vasectomy) and the reason she doesn’t wear miniskirts (”so her balls won’t show”). The cover of the October 1995 issue of Spy Magazine even retouched a photo of her to depict a discernible penile bulge under her clothing.

This image accompanied an investigative article on her “dubious investments” that “performed extremely well.” The headline, “Hillary’s Big Secret,” in equating the penis with money, revealed the phallic meaning her powerful financial dealings had for the authors, as well as for many of her conservative male critics.

During this same period images abounded of Bill Clinton as castrated, cross-dressing, feminized, and physically dominated and abused by his powerful wife. Interestingly, once the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, things reversed. He was portrayed in cartoons and late night TV comedy monologues as studly, powerful, and potent. Hillary, now the wounded women standing by her man, was widely depicted in sympathic and stereotypically feminine terms. What may surprise many is that the approval ratings for both the President and the First Lady soared following the scandal. Many citizens, especially men, seemed relieved to see the gender order restored, and the phallus returned to our male leader. But if, unlike the lowly but attached penis, the phallus has a tendency to move around, this can open up opportunities for female politicians to overcome the still lingering impediments of misogynist bigotry. Gender, our cultural experiences tell us, is really only loosely associated with bodies, not tethered to them.

What could not be tolerated in Hillary the political wife turns out to be a significant advantage for Hillary the politician, or so her campaign managers seem to believe. In fact, Senator Clinton appears to have been positioning herself early on to wield the political phallus. Her vote for the Iraq war resolution seems less a mistake based on inaccurate information — the data was readily available to her antiwar peers in the Senate, not to mention many national security scholars, as well as millions of ordinary Americans — than a political calculation. She wanted to show her “testicular fortitude,” as a supportive labor leader recently gushed at a campaign rally. It’s the same reason “fight” has become her favorite verb. Last week she autographed a pair of red boxing gloves at a rally. Perhaps the most disturbing gesture of macho posturing has been her repeated threat to “obliterate” Iran if that nation’s leaders attack Israel. Given that the Iranian people are unable to really make their leaders accountable, her threat is not only a genocidal one, but, were she to act on it, would constitute collective punishment.

Hillary Clinton seems not only willing to annihilate Iranians for political gain. She also appears happy to depopulate the Democratic Party in order to ensure her nomination. As I write this, news outlets are revealing her plans for what Thomas Edsall is calling the “nuclear option.” In other words, she intends to use her influence on the members of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to force the votes that were gathered in the “outlaw” primaries of Florida and Michigan to be counted.

Some may ask a very reasonable feminist question that could challenge this argument: why must toughness, Machiavellianism, combativeness, or even swaggering bellicosity be viewed as masculine? They certainly needn’t. But it is, as we have seen, Hillary Clinton herself, along with her surrogates, who have explicitly gendered those traits in the campaign. As the oleaginous Clinton loyalist, James Carville, has said, if Mrs. Clinton gave Obama one of her testicles, “they’d both have two.”

What is so interesting and illuminating is that Hillary Clinton is not just engaging in a performance of martial hypermasculinity as a way of shoring up both her phallic and national security credentials. She is also donning the mantel of working class hero, aping every conceivable stereotype of white blue-collar manhood — from beer swilling to gun toting to preening pugilism — and, where possible, doing so from the back of a pickup truck. It must be said, however, unlike the many multimillionaire Republican men in power, such as George W. Bush and John McCain, she plays the good ole boy with convincing if increasingly unhinged gusto. Perhaps this is because men in politics so often make the worst male impersonators.

But beyond that, Hillary Clinton has long revealed an intuitive talent for masquerade, an ability to lose herself in whatever role a situation required. Her instincts as a protean politician enabled her to seamlessly shift from feminist intellectual and powerhouse lawyer deriding stay-at-home cookie bakers, to the betrayed housewife still loyal to her man, and beaming with pride over her cookie recipe. She can play the verklempt victim of male critics one moment, and a macho political predator the next. On a dime Senator Clinton can morph from a well informed authority on the nuances of economic policy to a we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-economists anti-intellectualism in response to the near unanimity of expert opinion criticizing her bogus gas tax “holiday” scheme.

Her double masquerade of gender and class has been so compelling to some working class male voters because it taps into a deep vein in the American collective political unconscious that dates from the founding of our nation, and one that Republicans have understood and effectively exploited for decades. In the 1840 presidential campaign, Martin Van Buren said his opponent, William Henry Harrison, was “a man who wore corsets, put cologne on his whiskers, slept on French beds, rode in a British coach, and ate with golden spoons from silver plates.” Here in this example of early negative campaigning we have a clear illustration of the link American men have always made between effeminacy and aristocratic manners and privilege. It was, after all, George H. W. Bush’s patrician patois and upper class mannerisms that led Newsweek in 1988 to suggest his greatest political vulnerability was “the wimp factor,” and thereby coin a term that would become a permanent part of our political lexicon. Not only did this feminine attribution haunt the public career of Bush 41, Bush 43, as many have observed, has struggled to defend against and compensate for this legacy.

More recently, we have the example of Barack Obama, the black candidate raised by a poor single mother, being called an “elitist” because of his grace, equanimity, intellect, dismal bowling performance, and reluctance to completely inhale his Philly cheese-steak. This, along with his willingness to negotiate with enemies, we are told, should lead us to question whether he’s man enough to be commander in chief. The Clinton crew, along with their chief ally, John McCain, have made strenuous efforts to define Obama as a cosseted and effeminate toff, whose pretty words only confirm his deficient manhood, and thereby his unfitness to lead the nation. When you think about it, Clinton’s complaint against her opponent — “you always want to talk” — sounds oddly like the familiar kvetch that so many emotionally constricted sexist husbands direct at their more relational spouses.

In applying the GOP approach to feminizing male opponents, and directing class resentment away from the real elites, Hillary Clinton has gone beyond her more familiar adoption of the ruthless, sociopathic say-anything, dirty tricks politics of her erstwhile Rovian right wing enemies. She is reinforcing the conservative attempt to equate manhood with belligerence and predation. In addition, she is trotting out the well worn but still effective propaganda technique employed by this country’s actual ruling oligarchy of wealth — reducing class to personal style, taste, or the specific products people consume (brie versus Velveeta). Those who actually own or wield control over our shared resources are rendered invisible in this rhetorical sleight of hand.

Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Clinton campaign. His guiding political ethos has always been one of bridging but not overlooking divisions, while privileging dialogue, debate, and negotiation over conquest. This is not only a new politics. It is a new masculinity, one that is inclusive of those panhuman qualities previously disowned and projected onto women. It remains to be seen if Hillary Clinton, with her Hobbesian hard-on, will succeed in turning the Denver convention into a war of all against all. If so, the life span of the Democratic Party may be nasty, brutish, and short. ++

Stephen J. Ducat, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and has published widely on the psychology of politics. His most recent book is The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity.

Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side
JO BECKER and CHRISTOPHER DREW, New York Times
May 11, 2008

In August 1999, Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians.

Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr. Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race — branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.

But by 2006, Mr. Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr. Obama was its grand marshal.

The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.

He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.

To broaden his appeal to African-Americans, Mr. Obama had to assiduously court older black leaders entrenched in Chicago’s ward politics while selling himself as a young, multicultural bridge to the wider political world.

“There are some people who say he’s not strong enough on this or that, that he’s wishy-washy, that he’s trying to have it both ways,” said Abner J. Mikva, a former congressman and mentor to Mr. Obama. “But he’s not looking for how to exclude the people who don’t agree with him. He’s looking for ways to make the tent as large as possible.”

Mr. Obama’s ability to replicate the eclectic coalition he built in Chicago and expand it to the national stage has allowed the one-term senator to match the Clintons at their signature game: collecting influential friends and supporters.

An untraditional politician who at times uses traditional political tactics, Mr. Obama, 46, was portrayed in dozens of interviews with political leaders and longtime associates in Chicago as the ultimate pragmatist, a deliberate thinker who fashions carefully nuanced positions that manage to win him support from people with divergent views.

“Most Americans are getting a small glimmer into the rough and tumble world of the South Side of Chicago politics, which is very, very difficult to navigate,” said Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and ally of Mr. Obama’s. But Mr. Obama did it with skill: “It’s very unusual to have various factions agreeing with you and your politics,” Mr. Jackson added.

Others see his deft movements as a politician’s shifting of positions and alliances for strategic advantage, leaving some disappointed and baffled about where he really stands.

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.

Even moments that supporters see as his boldest are tempered by his political caution. The forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion — a speech that has helped define him nationally — was threaded with an unusual mantra for a 1960s-style antiwar rally: “I’m not opposed to all wars.” It was a refrain Mr. Obama had tested on his political advisers, and it was a display of his ability to speak to the audience before him while keeping in mind the broader audience to come.

Perfect for Hyde Park

When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr. Miner thought he was recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr. Obama recruited him.

Mr. Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. Mr. Miner, who had helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr. Washington and served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.

The confident younger man “cross-examined” Mr. Miner about how Mr. Washington had managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he “got along with all these different types of folks,” Mr. Miner recalled.

Mr. Obama, who had spent time in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s and already knew he wanted to run for office, openly weighed the pros and cons of working for the law firm. On the one hand it was beloved by many of the city’s liberals and black leaders for its work on issues like voting rights and housing equality. On the other, the firm had clashed with Chicago’s powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley, who presided then and now over the city’s sprawling Democratic organization.

“During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared this with me — he was amused,” Mr. Miner said, laughing. “This isn’t where you land if you want to curry favor with the Democratic power structure.”

It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run for office from Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the city’s legendary Democratic machine. Mr. Obama chose to put down roots in the neighborhood after graduating law school and marrying Michelle Robinson, a Chicago native and fellow lawyer.

A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is otherwise one of the nation’s most segregated cities. Mayor Washington had called it home, as did whites who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wealthy black entrepreneurs a generation removed from the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

At its heart is the University of Chicago; at its borders are poor, predominately black neighborhoods blighted by rundown buildings and vacant lots. For Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii to a white Kansan mother and an African father and who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, it was a perfect fit.

“He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park,” said Martha Minow, his former law professor and a mentor. “It’s a place where you don’t have to wear a label on your forehead. You can go to a bookstore and there’s the homeless person and there’s the professor.”

Mr. Obama quickly grounded himself in the community. He led a successful drive that registered nearly 150,000 black voters for the 1992 campaign. He became a part-time professor at the University of Chicago Law School. And, in 1993, he finally decided to join the law offices of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

The choice sent a signal that Mr. Obama was “allying himself with the independents, which is what you have to be if you’re going to be elected from the Hyde Park area,” said Don Rose, a longtime Democratic political consultant.

Making Connections

The decision to accept Mr. Miner’s job offer quickly paid off. By the time Mr. Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois Senate in 1995 — at the very Hyde Park hotel where Mr. Washington had kicked off his mayoral campaign — he had cultivated a network of influential supporters.

Mr. Miner was “enormously helpful” in introducing Mr. Obama to the liberal coalition of blacks and whites that had helped elect Mr. Washington, said Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend and close adviser. “It brought in a whole new circle of people.”

Mr. Obama cultivated clients like Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, the influential pastor of an 18,000-member black church and founding president of the Woodlawn Organization, which focuses on improving conditions for blacks in a neighborhood adjacent to Hyde Park. The two men began talking politics over tennis games at Chicago’s elite East Bank Club, Mr. Brazier recalled.

Mr. Obama also worked on housing redevelopment projects involving Antoin Rezko, who became one of Mr. Obama’s most generous donors. Mr. Rezko is currently on trial for corruption charges unrelated to Mr. Obama.

It was through the law firm that Mr. Obama met Marilyn Katz, who gave him entry into another activist network: the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s.

As a leader of Students for a Democratic Society then, Ms. Katz organized Vietnam War protests, throwing nails in the street to thwart the police. But like many from that era, Ms. Katz had gone on to become a politically active member of the Chicago establishment, playing in a regular poker game with Mr. Miner while working as a consultant to his nemesis, Mayor Daley.

“For better or worse, this is Chicago,” said Ms. Katz, who has held fund-raisers for Mr. Obama at her home. “Everyone is connected to everyone.”

Mr. Obama was comfortable attending performances of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with city scions like Newton N. Minow, the father of Martha Minow. Mr. Minow, who had served in the Kennedy administration and managed the white-shoe law firm of Sidley Austin when Mr. Obama worked there after his first year of law school, began introducing him to Chicago’s business titans.

Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park’s fringes, among university faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home, aides said.

Now, along with Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Ayers has become a prime exhibit in the effort by Mr. Obama’s presidential rivals to highlight what could be politically radioactive associations. In 2001, Mr. Ayers said he did not regret the Weatherman bombings. Even so, in Hyde Park, he and his wife were viewed favorably for their work in addressing city problems. Mr. Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Mr. Obama said recently.

The two men were involved in efforts to reform the city’s education system. They appeared together on academic panels, including one organized by Michelle Obama to discuss the juvenile justice system, an area of mutual concern. Mr. Ayers’s book on the subject won a rave review in The Chicago Tribune by Mr. Obama, who called it “a searing and timely account.”

Running and Winning

Mr. Obama further expanded his list of allies by joining the boards of two well-known charities: the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation.

These memberships have allowed him to help direct tens of millions of dollars in grants over the years to groups that championed the environment, campaign finance reform, gun control and other causes supported by the liberal network he was cultivating. Mr. Brazier’s group, the Woodlawn Organization, received money, for instance, as did antipoverty groups with ties to organized labor like Chicago Acorn, whose endorsement Mr. Obama sought and won in his State Senate race.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama hewed closely to liberal orthodoxy, positions that have become controversial in the presidential race. A candidate questionnaire from one liberal group, for instance, detailed his views on hot-button issues like the death penalty (opposed) and a ban on handguns (in favor).

Today, Mr. Obama espouses more centrist views and says a campaign aide had incorrectly characterized his views on those issues — a shift that does not sit well with some in the group, the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization.

“We certainly thought those were his positions,” said David Igasaki, the group’s chairman, who noted Mr. Obama had also interviewed with the group. “We understand that people change their views. But it sort of bothers me that he doesn’t acknowledge that. He tries to say that was never his view.”

In any event, the group endorsed Mr. Obama, and he was easily elected to the State Senate in 1996.

In the state Capitol in Springfield, Mr. Obama was guided through the political thicket by powerful mentors. It was not long into Mr. Obama’s first term when Mr. Mikva recalled getting a telephone call from Paul Simon, the recently retired United States senator. Mr. Mikva had become friends with Mr. Obama after returning from a stint as White House counsel for President Bill Clinton to teach law at the university.

Mr. Simon suggested Mr. Mikva play matchmaker between Mr. Obama and Emil Jones Jr., the powerful Democratic leader of the State Senate. For the better part of a quarter century, Mr. Mikva had played in a golfing foursome that included Mr. Jones.

” ‘Say, our friend Barack Obama has a chance to push this campaign finance bill through,’ ” Mr. Mikva recalled Mr. Simon’s telling him. ” ‘Why don’t you call your friend Emil Jones and tell him how good he is.’ ”

Mr. Mikva obliged, and in 1998, Mr. Obama passed one of his signature achievements in the Illinois Senate: sweeping legislation that banned most gifts from lobbyists and the personal use of campaign money by state lawmakers. His Hyde Park base applauded, but Mr. Obama would soon learn the limits of his appeal.

Learning His Lessons

The next year, Mr. Obama called Mr. Minow, his former boss, asking to see him. Mr. Obama was eyeing the Hyde Park Congressional seat held by Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther leader. “Are you nuts?” Mr. Minow recalled telling the younger man. “Barack, I think this is a mistake.”

Mr. Minow flipped through his Rolodex, calling black businesspeople and asking them if they would help finance Mr. Obama’s bid. He said he received a uniform answer: “No — let him wait his turn.” Nevertheless, the impatient Mr. Obama jumped into the race.

Brimming with confidence, he equated Mr. Rush with “a politics that is rooted in the past” and cast himself as someone who could reach beyond the racial divide to get things done. But it quickly became clear that while he had solidified his support among Hyde Park’s denizens, he had not built enough bridges to the surrounding black communities.

That failure was apparent on the summer day in 1999 when he walked through the South Side during the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic. Other politicians rode on colorful floats, trailed by throngs. But Mr. Obama was on foot as he made his way through the cheering paradegoers who had shown up to celebrate black pride.

“People were asking, who is he?” said Mr. Kindle, who served as one of his emissaries to the black community. “You could see how humbling it was in his face.”

The campaign, as Mr. Mikva put it, was “a disaster from beginning to end.” Yet in ultimately losing, Mr. Obama learned that he needed to expand his base to be able to bounce back onto a larger stage, according to Mr. Mikva and others. “The beauty of Obama,” Mr. Kindle said, “is that he was willing to be taken to the woodshed” and “allow himself to grow.”

Mr. Obama, who had a reputation in Springfield as standoffish (”He socialized, but he did not hang out,” Mr. Kindle said), began making courtesy calls to black politicians and members of the clergy. He assured them that he had nothing against Mr. Rush and that “it was all cool,” said Ron Lester, who was Mr. Obama’s pollster during the race.

Mr. Jones, the State Senate president who by then had become Mr. Obama’s political benefactor, stepped up to help as well. The two were an unlikely pair: the Harvard-educated lawyer and the former sewer inspector who had risen through the ranks of Chicago ward politics. Mr. Jones let Mr. Obama take center stage on legislation important to the black community, like forcing the police to tape interrogations.

His willingness to negotiate — the interrogation law ended up with a host of exceptions — gained him a reputation as a pragmatist who could sell compromise as a victory to all sides, said Peter Baroni, then the legal counsel to the Republican caucus.

“He took what came into the fray as a very leftist bill, a very leftist proposal, a very non-law-enforcement bill,” Mr. Baroni said, “and he appeased law enforcement and brought everyone around to support it.”

Before his loss to Mr. Rush, Mr. Obama’s typical response for requests for state money would be a lecture, recalled Dan Shomon, a former Obama aide. “He would say something like: ‘You know what, you’re not going to get your money, and you know why? Let me explain the state budget,’ ” Mr. Shomon said. “Then he’d give a 20-minute treatise on how the Republicans wouldn’t raise taxes, so there wasn’t any money to do what they wanted to do.”

Now, Mr. Obama more eagerly met the demands for spending earmarks for churches and community groups in his district, said State Senator Donne E. Trotter, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I know this firsthand, because the community groups in his district stopped coming to me,” Mr. Trotter said.

Typical of Mr. Obama’s earmarks was a $100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against Mr. Rush.

Father Pfleger has long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce crime and improve the community. But he has drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and inviting him to speak at his church. Father Pfleger, who did not return calls for comment, is one of the religious leaders whose “faith testimonials” Mr. Obama has posted on his presidential campaign Web site.

David Axelrod, the chief strategist for the Obama presidential campaign, said that Father Pfleger was “remaking the face” of Chicago’s South Side and that all of Mr. Obama’s earmarks went to worthy programs like his.

With his black base more secure, Mr. Obama began in 2002 to contemplate a run for the United States Senate.

“I had lunch with him at the Quadrangle Club, and we were discussing the different bases he had to touch. I said, ‘You have to talk to the Jackson boys first,’ ” Mr. Mikva recalled, referring to Representative Jackson and his father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Because Jesse Jackson Jr. had his eye on that seat. He said, ‘I know. I’m working on that.’ ”

Mr. Obama soon sat down with the younger Mr. Jackson at the 312 Chicago restaurant. Michelle Obama had attended high school with Mr. Jackson’s sister and been close to the family for years, and the congressman had attended the Obamas’ wedding. “He said, ‘Jesse, if you’re running for the U.S. Senate I’m not going to run,’ ” Mr. Jackson recalled.

But Mr. Jackson had already decided against it, and he gave Mr. Obama his blessing.

A Pivotal Moment

Betty Lu Saltzman, a Democratic doyenne from Chicago’s lakefront liberal crowd, convened a small group of activists, including Ms. Katz, in her living room to organize a rally to protest the United States’ impending invasion of Iraq. It was late September 2002, and Mr. Obama was on the top of Ms. Saltzman’s list of desired speakers.

She first met him when he ran the black voter registration drive in the 1992 election, and was so impressed that she immediately took him under her wing, introducing him to wealthy donors and talking him up to friends like Mr. Axelrod. But with just a few days to go before the rally, Ms. Saltzman was having trouble reaching Mr. Obama. Finally, she said she left word with his wife.

But before Mr. Obama called her back, he dialed up some advice.

With his possible run for the United States Senate, he wanted to speak with Mr. Axelrod and others about the ramifications of broadcasting his reservations about a war the public was fast getting behind. An antiwar speech would play to his Chicago liberal base, and could help him in what was expected to be a hotly contested primary, they told him, but it also could hurt him in the general election.

“This was a call to assess just how risky was this,” said Pete Giangreco, who along with Mr. Axelrod described the conversation. When Mr. Obama tossed out the idea of calling it a “dumb war,” Mr. Giangreco said he cringed. “I remember thinking, ‘this puts us in the weak defense category, doesn’t it?’ ”

The rally was held on Oct. 2, 2002, in Federal Plaza before nearly 2,000 people. On the podium before speaking, Mr. Obama joked about the dated nature of crowd-pleasing protest songs like “Give Peace a Chance.” ” ‘Can’t they play something else?’ ” Ms. Saltzman recalled his saying.

The speech, friends say, was vintage Obama, a bold but nuanced message that has become the touchstone of his presidential campaign: While he said the Iraq war would lead to “an occupation of undetermined length with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences,” he was also careful to emphasize that there were times when military intervention was necessary.

“What’s fascinating about Barack is what he’s trying to do is reframe and change the discourse so you build support for liberal alternatives within the electorate,” said Will Burns, a former aide whom Mr. Obama also consulted on the speech. “He has an ability to frame stuff so it’s not an all or nothing proposition.”

Still, Mr. Obama’s refrain about supporting some wars perplexed some in the crowd.

An event organizer, Carl Davidson, recalled that a friend “nudged me and said, ‘Who does he think this speech is for? It’s not for this crowd.’ I thought, ‘This guy’s got bigger fish to fry.’ At the time, though, I was only thinking about the U.S. Senate.”

Straddling Two Worlds

As Mr. Obama moved closer to running, he paid a visit to James S. Crown and his father, Lester, billionaire investors who presided over a sprawling Chicago business dynasty and prominent leaders in the Jewish community.

As the meeting ended, the younger Mr. Crown said, his father — who is “fairly hawkish” about Israel’s security — was noncommittal about Mr. Obama. But, James Crown said, “I pulled him down to my office, and I said, ‘Hey, look, I think you should run, and I want you to win.’ ”

In courting families like the Crowns, Mr. Obama was gaining entree into the upper echelon of the city’s corporate boardrooms, a ripe source of campaign money. But he was also seeking to broaden his appeal to Jewish voters, and he was wading more deeply into one of the touchiest issues in American politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

Still, Mr. Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

A.J. Wolf, a Hyde Park rabbi who is a friend of Mr. Obama’s and has often invited Mr. Khalidi to speak at his synagogue, said Mr. Obama had disappointed him by not being more assertive about the need for both Israel and the Palestinians to move toward peace. “He’s played all those notes right for the Israel lobby,” said Mr. Wolf, who is sometimes critical of Israel.

During the Senate campaign, Mr. Obama joined in a “Walk for Israel” rally along Lake Michigan on Israel Solidarity Day. The Crowns and other Jewish leaders raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for him. Several days before the primary in 2004, some of his Jewish supporters took offense that Mr. Obama had not taken the opportunity on a campaign questionnaire to denounce Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or to strongly support Israel’s building of a security fence.

But in a sign of how far Mr. Obama had come in his coalition-building, friends from the American Israel Political Action Committee, the national pro-Israel lobbying group, helped him rush out a response to smooth over the flap.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that “none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.” Mr. Abunimah has written of running into the candidate around that time and has said that Mr. Obama told him: “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping that when things calm down I can be more upfront.”

The Obama camp has denied Mr. Abunimah’s account. Mr. Khalidi, who is now the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, said, “I’m unhappy about the positions he’s taken, but I can’t say I’m terribly disappointed.” He added: “People think he’s a saint. He’s not. He’s a politician.”

Mr. Crown, for his part, could not be more pleased. Since Mr. Obama was elected to the Senate Mr. Crown said that even his father had been won over, helping to arrange meetings for Mr. Obama in a visit to Israel. James Crown said he had “never had even the slightest glimmer of concern that Barack wasn’t terrific” on Israel — a view that Mr. Obama jokingly reinforced at a meeting last year in Mr. Crown’s office.

As Mr. Mikva recounted it, after discussing a lukewarm response by more conservative Jews to some of Mr. Obama’s comments, “I turned to Barack and said, ‘Your name could be Chaim Weizmann, the founder of the Jewish state, and some of these Jewish Republicans wouldn’t vote for you.’ ” And, Mr. Mikva said, “He joked, ‘Well, you know my name is “Baruch” Obama.’ ”

But for all of Mr. Obama’s attentiveness to Jewish concerns about Israel, Republican Party officials have made it clear that they think this is an area of vulnerability. Though Mr. Obama has condemned Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, as a terrorist organization, just last week Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested that the group wanted to see Mr. Obama in the White House. Mr. Obama denounced that suggestion as a “smear.”

Embracing the Machine

When Mr. Obama delivered a now-famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that catapulted him onto the national stage, sitting in the audience was Mayor Daley of Chicago.

As Mr. Obama spoke, Mr. Daley and other Illinois officials “were just as wide-eyed as the thousands of conventiongoers,” said James A. DeLeo, a Democratic leader in the Illinois Senate.

The mayor and the senator had some ties, but they had never had a close relationship. Mr. Obama’s friend Ms. Jarrett had worked for Mr. Daley, and had hired Michelle Obama into the administration in the early 1990s. Yet Mr. Obama had run multiple times as a candidate without the mayor’s help.

Now, as Mr. Obama ascended to the larger stage, he also took the final step in his evolution from Hyde Park independent to mainstream Chicago politician, establishing an overt alliance with Mr. Daley. “Over the years, Senator Obama and I have been like-minded in most of the issues facing Chicago,” the mayor said in a statement.

His former chief of staff, Gary Chico, said the mayor’s alliance with the senator was “based on mutual interest and what the mayor saw in the man. They’re both pragmatic.”

But Mr. Obama’s closer relationship with the mayor, coupled with some of his endorsements of Democrats who championed the kind of patronage politics Mr. Obama had once denounced, left some supporters feeling as though he was straying from his roots in the reform movement.

Last year, Mr. Mikva said he took Mr. Obama aside to complain about his endorsement of an alderwoman who had supported Mr. Obama in his United States Senate run and was the focus of newspaper reports about questionable spending on a $19.5 million cultural center. Mr. Mikva said Mr. Obama’s response was simple: “Sometimes you pay your debts.” Early last year, Mr. Obama endorsed Mr. Daley in his re-election bid, asserting that Chicago had blossomed during his tenure.

Mr. Miner, the mentor who had brought Mr. Obama into his law firm in the early 1990s, said he remained an enthusiastic Obama supporter. But, when it comes to some of Mr. Obama’s endorsements, “I don’t know who he’s listening to,” Mr. Miner said.

“I’ve thought sometimes that I should have picked up the phone and called him,” Mr. Miner said. “Why did he think he needed to do this?”

Just before Mr. Obama complimented Mr. Daley, the mayor did something unusual, as well. He broke with his tradition of remaining neutral in Democratic primaries and threw his support behind Mr. Obama’s presidential bid. ++

Handwriting of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama May Speak Volumes
Experts see telltale markings of personality in penmanship samples from the presidential candidates.
Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 13, 2008

Here Come the Millennials
BOB HERBERT, NYT
May 13, 2008

An important aspect of the presidential race so far has been the generational divide, with Barack Obama doing very well with younger voters and Hillary Clinton drawing strong support from those who are older. A similar split can be expected in a general election race between Senator Obama and John McCain.

However the election ultimately turns out, the Obama campaign has tapped into a constituency that holds powerful implications for the future of American politics. The youngest of these voters, those ranging in age from roughly the late teens to the early 30s, are part of the so-called millennial generation.

This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.

A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.

We know that the generation immediately preceding the Millennials is struggling. Men who are now in their 30s, the prime age for raising a family, earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age. In 1974, the median income for men in their 30s (using today’s inflation-adjusted dollars) was about $40,000. The figure for men in their 30s now is $35,000.

It’s not hard to understand why surveys show that overwhelming percentages of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The American dream is on life support. Polls show that dwindling numbers of Americans (in some cases as few as a third of all respondents) believe their children will end up better off than they are.

The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.

According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”

The Demos study pointed to the very difficult employment environment confronting young adults. Fewer jobs offer the benefits of paid vacations, health coverage or pensions. And moving up the employment ladder is much harder.

As the study noted, “The well-paying middle-management jobs that characterized the work force up to the late-1970s have been eviscerated.”

The longer-term outlook is depressing.

Except for the expected continuing demand for registered nurses, the occupations projected to add the most jobs over the next several years do not offer much in the way of pay, benefits or career advancement. Demos listed the top five occupations in terms of anticipated job growth: registered nurses, retail sales, customer service reps, food preparers and office clerks.

Often saddled with debt, and with their job prospects gloomy, young Americans feel their government ought to be doing more to enhance their prospects. They want increased investments in education, health care and initiatives aimed at expanding the economy and fostering the growth of good jobs.

The American Progress study found that Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any other age group over the past 30 years. By huge percentages, they want improvements in health coverage and support for education, even if it means increases in taxes.

The landscape is changing before our eyes. Younger voters struggling with the enormous costs of a college education, or trying to raise families in a bleak employment environment, or using their credit cards to cover everyday expenses like food or energy costs are not much interested in hearing that the government to which they pay taxes can do little or nothing to help them.

Whether young Americans can shift the balance of the presidential election is an open question. But there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power. ++

Humbly Submitted: A New Stump Speech for Hillary Clinton
Peggy Drexler, HuffPo
May 9, 2008

Dear Senator Clinton:

When I heard that you have now spent about $12 million of your own money on what is looking increasingly like a mathematical impossibility, I had a thought.

Since you’re paying for this anyway, and the odds of winning are about the same as W and Michael Moore going out for a beer after an afternoon of brush cutting, why not say exactly what you feel?

Think about it: simple truth as a campaign strategy. What do you have to lose?

I’ve taken the liberty of putting together a new stump speech.

It’s great to be here in (place).

I can’t believe I’m standing in the back of a pick up truck. Never owned one - probably never will.

But what am I going to do here in the heartland — stand on the hood of a Volvo?

As you may have noticed, even with a world-class IQ, and an Ivy League law degree, I’m all of a sudden dropping my g’s: workin’ hard, talkin’ to folks, doin’ all I can for America.

I’m not sure how I get away with that. You know I don’t talk like this on the Senate floor, right?

I need to set some things straight today.

First is our security.

There are still people out there who would like to kill us.

There aren’t a lot of them. But they want to get us so badly that they’re OK with killing themselves in the process.

We’ve had a pretty good run since 9-11.

I really don’t know if we have Al Qaeda’s home office stuck in caves, or if they are just lying low and enjoying our agony in Iraq.

I don’t know how many genuine close calls we’ve had, or how many were morons who thought they could bring down the Golden Gate Bridge with bolt cutters.

Sooner or later, somebody is going to try to hurt us again.

I hope I can stop them. It doesn’t matter what time the call comes in. I’ll do the best I can.

What kills me is that I know I contributed to the threat.

I voted to invade Iraq. And I still feel terrible about that.

As it turns out, this is either the dumbest administration in American history, or the most cynically dishonest. Maybe both.

Who knew?

The Secretary of State went to the UN and said he had evidence that a certified lunatic was trying to build a nuclear bomb.

I thought I should vote not to let that happen.

Now: if you elect me, I have a terrible choice.

We can leave.

But the Iraqi Army is a joke. They are never going to shoot at guys from the neighborhood. And they won’t attack anything unless we bomb the b’jesus out of it first.

If I pull the troops, the Sunnis and Shiites are going to fight like two mean dogs that have hated each other for years - and just found a hole in the fence.

We’ll watch it start from the windows of the last plane out.

Or:

I can keep troops there, and more Americans will die.

This isn’t going to be like Korea, where we call a 50-year time out and leave behind thousands of soldiers to play cards.

This time, it’s not ideology. It’s oil.

As long as the oil is up for grabs, this fight will never stop. For the next 50 years, we’ll just be referees with guns.

As for the price of oil, I know I talked about taking on OPEC and the oil companies. But that isn’t really going to happen.

First, OPEC no longer cares what a U.S. president says.

Of the 13 members, nine countries tolerate us and four hate us. The president of one of them told the UN that our current leader is the devil and smells like sulfur.

OPEC used to have to deal with us because we were the only super-economy in town. If we went south, so did crude prices.

Now that China and India are talking about putting billions of people in cars, OPEC can sell to us, without listening to us.

It’s an all-time seller’s market.

Blaming the oil companies makes great sound bites.

I love using my tough-girl voice to say things like: “I’m going to take on the oil companies that are getting rich on the backs of honest, hardworking Americans.”

That’s great stuff.

But if they were doing anything wrong, we would have caught them by now. They’re just in the right place at the right time.

We’ll call them into Senate hearings and slap them around some for the cameras. They’ll stick to their talking points. And then we’ll all go back to work.

It’s one of the longest-running shows in politics.

I knew I was going to take a lot of abuse for suggesting they pay for a gas-tax holiday.

The economists say it’s useless. The opposition says it’s pandering.

I prefer to think of it as a nice gesture.

If you don’t want the $35.00 - fine.

I also said I would take on the oil traders.

I really can’t do that either.

Oil is now a volatile, global, tradable asset.

And when you have big-money volatility, you have speculators.

These are very smart people who figure out how to beat the market and crush innocent bystanders.

Like the dot coms, Enron and drive-through mortgages, we’re probably going to find out something shady was going on.

But by the time we figure it out and pass our next rounds of too-late legislation, other very smart people will be working on something new.

That, my friends, is never going to change.

There is a reason why these people make hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and the people we depend on to watch them are working for government pay.

Windmills and solar panels aren’t going to get us out of this. It’s all about the consumption.

The only thing that will do enough, fast enough to change our oil dependence is to make huge changes in how we live.

And you hate that.

I’m talking about outlawing the manufacture of any car that doesn’t get more than 50 miles a gallon.

I’m talking about slower cars and smaller houses.

I’m talking about a national crash program to build nuclear plants - in spite of those who are afraid of them and in places you don’t want them.

I’m talking about sacrificing things that we’ve been telling you all your lives are yours just because you’re American.

Other countries want those same things. And now they can afford them.

We’re going to have to learn to share.

And you’re not crazy about that either.

A few other things.

I feel terrible about those of you who have lost jobs.

I know I told you I can save them. But I can’t.

The global economy isn’t going to go away, and the jobs aren’t coming back. In fact, we’re going lose more.

We don’t run the world like we used to. It’s not that we’re getting weaker. Others are getting stronger.

And that’s good. People who do business with each other tend not to shoot at each other.

Unless we have trade agreements with Brazil, Russia, India, China and comers like Indonesia and Ireland, we’re going to be on the outside looking in.

Besides, trade agreements are just one factor in lost jobs.

Technology is a much bigger one. For decades now, it’s been helping us to do more things with fewer people.

What do you want me to do about that? Sanction Microsoft?

The only thing you can do is figure out a way to be where the demand is.

I’ll try to help you with that.

But I’m not going to dismantle NAFTA. And you know it.

For the record, I don’t like guns.

I see no reason why we should allow anyone to make and sell weapons that have no other purpose than to kill people.

I see even less reason why anybody should be allowed to sell assault weapons that have no other purpose than to kill a lot of people at the same time.

And I really don’t think you hunters in Pennsylvania and Ohio believe that if we take assault rifles off the street, we’ll be coming after your deer rifles next.

But I’m scared to death of the NRA. These are tough people. They’re organized. And they have money.

They beat Al Gore in the state where he grew up.

As long as they have a say in whether or not I win this state, I’ll keep telling you how my father taught me to shoot.

But seriously: when do you think was the last time I touched a gun?

I don’t hunt. And I have Secret Service protection. Those guys do have the guns.

Actually, there were times in my marriage when having a gun handy would not have been such a good thing.

(Pause for laughter)

On that score …

I really appreciate that neither the media nor my opponent has dwelled on the fact that my co-campaigner had repeated sex with an unpaid 22 year old Intern in the house where we used to live.

So far, you let me get away with putting my daughter out front to say it’s a private matter. That actually worked better than we thought it would.

But I’m worried about the Republicans.

The 527 groups live for this kind of thing.

If they can turn a war hero into someone soft on terrorism, while their own guy can’t prove he showed up for National Guard service, think what they can do to us.

So:

I just thought I’d take a shot here, and tell you the truth.

What the hell - it’s my money.

There is not much I can promise that I’m sure I can actually deliver.

This job is not nearly as powerful as we like to say it is.

So how about this?

If you elect me, I’ll have good intentions, be as honest as the job allows, try to keep you safe, and maybe make things a little better.

Until then, I’ll just keep workin’, fightin’ and doin’ the best I can.

God bless you. And God bless America.

Now get me off this truck. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves