Heads up!

Today we’ve got a serious issue with domestic terrorism of the governmental sort — consider this post Need To Know. We have no idea what’s going to happen next, but the astrology gives us indicators that something’s afoot — and we know the votes are in jeopardy, despite effective Lefty diligence on their behalf.

Experience tells me that its never the thing that you worry about that upends you — but that’s even more nerve-wracking; I’ve never gotten used to the nasty surprises this historical period has provided us. If nothing else, these warnings indicate that our right to dissent in this nation is endangered; our civil liberties. Be aware, be pro-active — take a stand for what’s right … and what’s CONSTITUTIONAL!

Note: DO open the Nick Juliano piece to study the map — it will give you a brow-furrowing, heart-jumping shock!

I’m giving you weekend reads early this week; my To-Do List still has more entries than check marks, and I haven’t even dug out the luggage for next weeks flight. I have to throw myself into this project, so I probably won’t be back to you until early next week.

The bonus material comes from a collection I was going to title, “Who the Hell IS he, anyway?” … in answer to the Pubs ridiculous posturing and some of our own hesitations about Barack’s moderate positioning in the last months.

Obama’s pragmatic — we’re idealistic; we want it all now, he wants to turn the machine Left and get it all in increments.

Obama’s enigmatic; I don’t remember the last time we had an actual statesman vie for the presidency — we’re used to wheeling-dealing politicians. We will have to … and ain’t it a fabulous joke on us … take his intent on faith! We will also have to get used to the kind of equitable, nonpartisan skill-set Obama brings to the table; he speaks the language of reconciliation — we can’t be tone deaf to it.

We aren’t used to “cooperating” anymore — we’re battle weary. Every time we tried to find middle ground in the last eight years, we got creamed by the NeoCon smirkers who rolled over us like non-entities. The changes ahead will require us to deal with our galloping case of Bushian PTSD.

The concept of “Yes, we can,” cannot succeed if we come to it screaming, “OH NO you don’t!” We progressives need to flex — and move into the undiscovered territory of peace-making and diplomacy. I’ve pared the list down to the best reads and added a Joe Kline article from today; Mac shouldn’t have thrown Joe off the plane … he’s can be a terrific ally.

Warnings and weekend reads — excellent ones to make you think.

Jude

ACLU highlights ‘Constitution-Free Zone’ 100 miles from border
Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Wednesday October 22, 2008

[open link for map]

This past summer, Craig Johnson joined dozens of other activists in a San Diego-area park to protest the expansion of a fence along the US-Mexico border.

An associate professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, Johnson says he took his two children, aged 8 and 10, to Border Field State Park in Imperial Beach in June. Scores of border patrol agents were on the scene, Johnson said, and some were recording license plate numbers from protesters’ cars parked a more than a mile away from the border.

It seems that Johnson’s participation in the anti-fence demonstration may have landed him on a government watch list that has inhibited his ability to travel freely between the US and Mexico. A professor of Music, Johnson said he traveled to Tijuana about a week after the protest; upon returning to the US, Johnson says he was handcuffed and arrested by customs agents after a listing associated with his name pegged him as armed and dangerous.

“I was thoroughly and aggressively searched. … Every inch and crack and crevice of my body was poked and prodded,” Johnson said. “I was in complete bewilderment of what was going on; I felt violated and frankly was embarrassed.”

Prior to that visit, Johnson said he had traveled regularly between the US and Mexico for a variety of reasons without facing any harassment. After the June visit, Johnson said he did not cross the border again until October, when he decided to go simply to see whether he could re-enter the country easily. He was subjected to the same harassment.

“It took me four months to return to Mexico,” he said. “Not because I’m afraid of traveling outside my own country, but rather because I’m afraid of returning home.”

Johnson spoke Wednesday at a gathering organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is highlighting the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security is expanding the authority it claims at US border crossings to infringe upon Americans rights.

The ACLU says a “Constitution-free zone” exists within 100 miles of the US border, where DHS claims the authority to stop, search and detain anyone for any reason. Nearly two-thirds of the US population lives within 100 miles of the border, according to the ACLU, and the border zone encompasses scores of major metropolitan areas and even entire states. ++

ACLU Demands Information on Military Deployment Within US Borders
Deployment Erodes Longstanding Separation Between Civilian and Military Government
October 21
ACLU Press Release via Common Dreams

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today demanded information from the government about reports that an active military unit has been deployed inside the U.S. to help with “civil unrest” and “crowd control” - matters traditionally handled by civilian authorities. This deployment jeopardizes the longstanding separation between civilian and military government, and the public has a right to know where and why the unit has been deployed, according to an ACLU Freedom of Information request filed today.

“The military’s deployment within U.S. borders raises critical questions that must be answered,” said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “What is the unit’s mission? What functions will it perform? And why was it necessary to deploy the unit rather than rely on civilian agencies and personnel and the National Guard? Given the magnitude of the issues at stake, it is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs.”

According to a report in the Army Times, the Army recently deployed an active military unit inside the United States under Northern Command, which was established in 2002 to assist federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. This deployment marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command.

Civilian authorities, not the military, have historically controlled and directed the internal affairs of the United States. This rule traces its origins to the nation’s founding and has been reaffirmed in landmark statutes including the Posse Comitatus Act, which helps preserve the foundational principles of our Constitution and democracy.

“This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority, and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel and former FBI Agent. “Our Founding Fathers understood the threat that a standing army could pose to American liberty. While future generations recognized the need for a strong military to defend against increasingly capable foreign threats, they also passed statutory protections to ensure that the Army could not be turned against the American people. The erosion of these protections should concern every American.”

In order to assess the implications of the recent deployment, the ACLU requested the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense today to immediately make public all legal opinions, executive orders, presidential directives, memos, policy guidance, and other documents that authorize the deployment of military troops for domestic purposes.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Department of Defense has dramatically expanded its role in domestic law enforcement and intelligence operations, including the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping programs, the Department of Homeland Security’s use of military spy satellites, and the participation of military personnel in state and local intelligence fusion centers. The ACLU has repeatedly expressed concern about these incremental encroachments of the military into domestic affairs, and the assignment of active duty troops to Northern Command only heightens these concerns.

A copy of the ACLU’s information request is available online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/general/37272lgl20081021.html +

Concerns about deployment of military on U.S. soil growing — while mainstream media buries its head in the sand
Naomi Wolf, BuzzFlash
Tue, 10/21/2008

The following is the spin of military spokespeople in response to questions about the deployment of the First Brigade on US soil for the first time in over 200 years.

The Army Times initially reported that the First Brigade would handle domestic crowd control and subduing ‘unruly individuals’ and that they had ‘lethal and nonlethal technologies’ to do so. Then it issued a correction declaring that the ‘nonlethal’ package was not for domestic crowd control. Then after a hue and cry was raised by many citizens, Northern Command (NorthCom) offered a wholesale revision of their mission – and the mainstream media is eating it up. Here is an excerpt from the articled linked to in the previous sentence:

Despite conspiracy theories that this could be a first step toward martial law in the U.S., there won’t be tanks on Main Street or active-duty troops putting down demonstrations. That is barred by federal law banning the military from being used on U.S. soil for domestic law enforcement.

Instead, the soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., have been training to back up civilian authorities in providing medical care and dealing with chemical, biological, high explosive or nuclear attack.

Not only does this entirely contradict the first Army Times reports, it also egregiously misrepresents to readers the status of US law in regards to this deployment. Yes, there are laws against military policing on US streets — they are part of both the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1879’s Posse Comitatus Act — but the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gutted them.

Congress restored some limitations on the President’s ability to deploy troops to engage in military policing in 2008 — but President Bush issued a signing statement declaring he did not feel bound by those limitations. He also can direct these troops — and the National Guard, and Blackwater — to engage in military policing of civilian populations simply by verbally and unilaterally declaring a national emergency of whatever kind he wishes.

Unfortunately, the US Army spokespeople are parsing their words and misleading us. And, whatever the stated mission is today, the fact remains that military up the chain of command report to the Commander in Chief — not to Congress or to you and me, and not to the Governors as most of the National Guard do.

Why do I insist on raising an alarm about this deployment in spite of a great deal of opposition and criticism? (Though I am grateful, too, for a great deal of support.) I insist on raising an alarm because I am aware of world events and not just blinded by American recent history.

In Zimbabwe, a nominal democracy, President Mugabe sent troops to harass, arrest and even kill voters during a closely contested election. Mugabe’s challenger called off his own supporters, telling them they should not risk being killed just in order to vote.

In Sierra Leone, a nation I visited shortly after elections, during a fragile democratic voting process troops and militias were both deployed by the contesting political parties to intimidate, beat and arrest voters. In Azerbaijan, troops were sent to intimidate the opposition during the elections — and now there is no meaningful opposition. Don’t trust me — ask Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Troops are sent by leaders in power, even in weakening democracies, to intimidate voters, arrest and harass opposition leaders in tightly fought elections, all over the damn world.

And nothing, nothing, nothing prevents the First Brigade from being positioned around poll locations, intimidating or silencing or threatening or worse those who challenge their voting outcome or their having been purged from the rolls. This at a time when Prof. Mark Crispin Miller of NYU and Robert Kennedy and many others are documenting MILLIONS of voters being systematically purged from rolls — overwhelmingly by Republican actions — and early voting is already showing machines flipping selections from Democrat to Republican, and voters becoming upset.

I am having a surreal experience with the mainstream media, as well, as I try to raise questions. A source at The Philadelphia Inquirer says that nothing has appeared on the wires about the First Brigade — so they can’t cover it. A source at The New York Times says they are ‘looking into it’ — but no coverage yet. “The Today Show” asked if I was a ‘fear-monger’ and ‘paranoid’ for raising alarms and reproduced NorthCom’s soundbite intact about the First Brigade being here to help with communities affected by weapons of mass destruction — but did no independent reporting of their own. I know from hearing from citizens across party lines that I am not the only American concerned about what information the Army may have about such threats to lead to this deployment now — the first time since the Indian Wars that troops have been sent onto US soil.

If you would like to see how average Americans are responding to the news about the deployment of the First Brigade, check out some of the posts from readers on a military-oriented Web site that posted the recent Colorado Springs Gazette article on the subject:

‘Since 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security has spent billions to prepare civilian law enforcement, local fire departments and civilian agencies to deal with such [crises]. This smells of despicable mission creep for the Armed Forces. In the late 1980’s, I participated in several exercises focused on “counter insurgency” operations that specifically dealt with demonstrators and civil unrest. Backing up law enforcement officials is a end run around Posse Comitatus and this should be exposed for what it is, unconstitutional.’

‘Just why is a combat brigade being tasked for these scenarios and not Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare commands? Medical Commands? Construction Battalions?

‘This seems much too similar to the use of troops to put down the Bonus March of WW I veterans in which Army Troops fired on and killed veterans in DC protesting the government’s failure to pay their promised [bonuses].’

‘This job can AND SHOULD be handled by National Guard troops (domestic issues).’

‘This smells…no, it stinks. Posse Comitatus is in place for very valid reasons. This looks like pre-positioning equipment in preparation for a fight.

‘The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 empowers the president to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

‘The terms “incident” and “public order” are left wide open to interpretation under the Military Commissions Act…’

“Just why is a combat brigade being tasked for these scenarios and not Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare commands? Medical Commands? Construction Battalions?”

‘Back in the late seventies I was apart of a force that had a similar responsibility, except we were trained to handle “civil disturbance”, thank god we were never needed. This is not the first time something like this has happened, the only difference, we were Arty. Every Batt. had to train so many troops, from Inf. to Medical. I enjoyed it, we all did because for the time we were apart of it, we were exempt from all duty. To have the troops on stand-by is not a problem, to deploy the troops to take over civil responsibilities is…’

‘This is quite disturbing. 4000 troops may not be enough to impose martial law on an entire country, but they could do it to a moderately sized city.’

‘There is already a group to do this its called the National Guard Civil Support team. They are all over the country and are more trained than these rotating people will ever be.’

‘As a former member of the 10th Civil Service Detachment/Weapons of Mass Destruction, I do feel a bit insulted. The unit is a full time National Guard unit that was in place for two years before the 9/11 attacks. We were trained to do exactly what this article says this combat brigade is being trained to do. Is this another example of the services not talking to each other, or are these commanders really that ignorant of the world around them?’

‘Reorganize FEMA and keep the Combat Military out of the picture. Our Combat troops are for Combat. SeaBees are Construction Battalions that have the expertise for disaster related occurrences. They understand support missions and are the best in the world when it comes to Can-Do.

If the Combat Military has to become involved, it means Martial Law is a scribble away with the pen.

‘If we actually need this Brigade, take it away from the Combat Army and assign it to the SeaBees.’

‘Did anyone catch the articles in the Army Times in September about this. The first article on 8 Sept. mentioned the Oct 1 deployment was to be prepared for any civil unrest during the election. The Next article I read on line around 26 Sept Changed 3 times in one day. From explaining about the extensive training they have received in IRAQ, the new non lethal weapons for use against (American Citizens) for civil unrest to a final article of they just here to help for emergencies.’

“Despite conspiracy theories that this could be a first step toward martial law in the U.S., there won’t be tanks on Main Street or active-duty troops putting down demonstrations. That is barred by federal law banning the military from being used on U.S. soil for domestic law enforcement.”

‘Did you read the Army Times article? Have you read the Military Commissions Act 2006? Have you read the Military Budget Act of 2007? Have you read the Patriot act?… ‘What they are saying is that the local, state and federal police departments can’t handle a crisis?’

‘If you’re reading these posts, you’ve already read the words “mission creep,” “end-run around Posse Comitatus” and “unconstitutional”‘.

‘I joined the Navy to make sure NO GOVERNMENT WOULD NEVER DEPLOY TROOPS ON OUR SOIL. Why did you join? I believe every Governor should recall all National Guard troops to defend your states…. This detachment must stand down. This is an illegal order.’

So don’t take the warning from me. Take it from many these patriots in military circles. ++

bonus

Why McCain Has Lost Our Vote
CC Goldwater, HuffPo
October 23, 2008

Republicans Voting for Obama: In Their Own Words [YouTube]
Eric Hirshberg, HuffPo
October 22, 2008

The Horror, The Horror Yet To Come
Robert L. Borosage, HuffPo
October 17, 2008

The Wall Street Journal editors peer fearlessly into the increasingly likely terror of an election that produces a Democratic President with larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Disregarding the delicate sensibilities of women and children, the editors expose to all the stark horrors that could ensue:

Voters will be registered. Workers organized. Banks regulated. Health care provided for all. Government investment will drive a green revolution that generates millions of jobs. The wealthy will pay more in taxes. Guantanamo will be shut down; torture will end. Net neutrality will be mandated. Citizens may even be able to sue corporations that negligently do them harm. And that doesn’t even mention ending the war in Iraq.

The horror of it all. Can the Republic survive? The editors hold out one slim hope. Perhaps Democrats will divide. Perhaps the entrenched lobbies, the interest of the corporations and the wealthy will buy enough support to stand in the way of the tumbrels.

And that defines our job pretty clearly: to organize engaged citizens to hold Democrats accountable to the promises that have been made and the agenda the country needs. If we do that well, just maybe we can deepen the Wall Street Journal’s lamentations. Cut the military budget. Forge a national strategy for the global economy. Make college affordable for all. Provide the basics in education, from pre-school to small classes, to lifelong learning. Revive national service. Rebuild trust in government. Launch the unspeakable — a true war on poverty.

The horror, the stark horror of it all. Can Americans — after Iraq, Katrina, bankers run amok, gilded age inequality, Robber Baron corruption — actually have the gall to vote the bums out? Say it ain’t so, Joe the plumber, say it ain’t so. ++

Why Barack Obama is Winning
Joe Klein, TIME Mag
Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008

General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for “maximum flexibility” going forward. Obama had a choice at that moment.

He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views “under advisement.” Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind. “You know, if I were in your shoes, I would be making the exact same argument,” he began. “Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential Commander in Chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security.” Obama talked about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the financial costs of the occupation of Iraq, the stress it was putting on the military.

A “spirited” conversation ensued, one person who was in the room told me. “It wasn’t a perfunctory recitation of talking points. They were arguing their respective positions, in a respectful way.” The other two Senators — Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed — told Petraeus they agreed with Obama. According to both Obama and Petraeus, the meeting — which lasted twice as long as the usual congressional briefing — ended agreeably. Petraeus said he understood that Obama’s perspective was, necessarily, going to be more strategic. Obama said that the timetable obviously would have to be flexible. But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.

Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain’s peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama’s quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public’s choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he’s far more comfortable when he’s able to think things through. “He has learned to trust his gut,” an Obama adviser told me. “He wasn’t so confident in his instincts last year. It’s been the biggest change I’ve seen in him.”

I asked Obama about gut decisions, in an interview on his plane 17 days before the election. It was late on a Saturday night, and he looked pretty tired, riddled with gray hair and not nearly as young as when I’d first met him four years earlier. He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I’d ever seen at a campaign event, and he would be endorsed by Colin Powell the next morning. He seemed as relaxed as ever, though, unfazed by the hoopla or the imminence of the election. Our conversation was informal but intense. He seemed to be thinking in my presence, rather than just reciting talking points, and it took him some time to think through my question about gut decisions. He said the first really big one was how to react when incendiary videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black-nationalist sermons surfaced last spring. “The decision to make it big as opposed to make it small,” Obama said of the landmark speech on race relations he delivered in Philadelphia. “My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like … they were adults and could understand the complexities of race, I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership.”

The speech was followed by a more traditional form of damage control when Wright showed up in Washington still spewing racial nonsense: Obama cut him loose. And while Obama has followed a fairly traditional political path in this campaign, his strongest — and most telling — moments have been those when he followed his natural no-drama instincts. This has been confusing to many of my colleagues and to me, at times, as well: his utter caution in the debates, his decision not to zing McCain or even to challenge him very much, led me to assume — all three times — that he hadn’t done nearly as well as the public ultimately decided he had. McCain was correct when he argued that Obama’s aversion to drama led him to snuggle a bit too close to the Democratic Party’s orthodoxy. But one of the more remarkable spectacles of the 2008 election — unprecedented in my time as a journalist — was the unanimity among Democrats on matters of policy once the personality clash between Obama and Hillary Clinton was set aside. There was no squabbling between old and new Dems, progressives and moderates, over race or war or peace. This was a year for no-drama Democrats, which made Obama as comfortable a fit for them as McCain was awkward for the Republican base.

And at the crucial moment of the campaign — the astonishing onset of the financial crisis — it was Obama’s gut steadiness that won the public’s trust, and quite possibly the election. On the afternoon when McCain suspended his campaign, threatened to scuttle the Sept. 26 debate and hopped a plane back to Washington to try to resolve the crisis, Obama was in Florida doing debate prep with his top advisers. When he was told about McCain’s maneuvers, Obama’s first reaction — according to an aide — was, “You gotta be kidding. I’m going to debate. A President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.” But there was a storm brewing among Obama’s supporters in Congress and the Beltway establishment. “My BlackBerry was exploding,” said an Obama aide. “They were saying we had to suspend. McCain was going to look more like a statesman, above the fray.”

“I didn’t believe it,” Obama told me. “I have to tell you, one of the benefits of running this 22-month gauntlet is that … you start realizing that what seems important or clever or in need of some dramatic moment a lot of times just needs reflection and care. And I think that was an example of where my style at least worked.” Obama realized that he and McCain could be little more than creative bystanders — and one prominent Republican told me that McCain was “the least creative person in the room at the President’s White House meeting. He simply had no ideas. He didn’t even have any good questions.” Obama had questions for the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chairman, but he was under no illusions: he didn’t have the power to influence the final outcome, so it was best to stay calm and not oversell his role. It was an easy call, his natural bias. But, Obama acknowledged, “There are going to be some times where … I won’t have the luxury of thinking through all the angles.”

Which is why the Petraeus moment is so interesting. Obama’s gut reaction was to go against his normal palliative impulse and to challenge the general instead. “I felt it was necessary to make that point … precisely because I respect Petraeus and [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker,” Obama said, after he reluctantly acknowledged that my reporting of the meeting was correct. “Precisely because they’ve been doing a good job … And I want them to understand that I’m taking their arguments seriously.” Obama endorses Petraeus’ new post, as the commanding general at Central Command, with responsibility for overseeing both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “He’s somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don’t think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That’s one of the reasons why I think he’s been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he’s applying that same perspective to what’s happening in Afghanistan.”

Actually, Obama and Petraeus seem to be thinking along similar lines with regard to Afghanistan. I mentioned that Petraeus had recently given a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in which he raised the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. “You know, I think this is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq,” Obama said without hesitation. “The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally,” he said, referring to the Petraeus-led effort to turn the Sunni tribes away from the more radical elements of the insurgency. “Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored,” he said. In fact, senior U.S. military officials have told me that there is a possibility of splitting Pashtun tribes away from the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan. “But we have to do it through the Karzai government,” a senior officer told me, referring to the fact that the Army had acted independently of the Maliki government in creating the Anbar Awakening. “That is one lesson we’ve learned from Iraq.”

Almost exactly two years ago, I had my first formal interview with Barack Obama — and he appeared on this magazine’s cover for the first time. It wasn’t an easy interview. His book The Audacity of Hope had just been published, but his policy proposals didn’t seem very audacious. He actually grew a bit testy when I pushed him on the need for universal health insurance and a more aggressive global-warming policy — neither of which he supported. He has stayed with his less-than-universal health-care plan, and I still find it less than convincing. And his cap-and-trade program to control carbon emissions has taken a backseat to the economic crisis — although Obama insisted that he still favored such a plan, so long as consumers are cushioned with rebates when energy prices rise.

But Obama seems a more certain policymaker now, if not exactly a wonk in the Clintonian sense. He has a clearer handle on the big picture, on how various policy components fit together, and a strong sense of what his top priority would be. He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”

That sort of clarity is new. At the beginning of the year, Donna Brazile said of Obama, “We know he can walk on water — now where are the loaves and fishes?” The inability to describe his priorities, the inability to speak directly to voters in ways they could easily comprehend, plagued Obama through much of the primary season. His tendency to use big rhetoric in front of big crowds led to McCain’s one good spell, after Obama presumptuously spoke to a huge throng in Berlin after his successful Middle East trip. Only a President should make a major address like that overseas. Obama seemed to learn quickly from that mistake; his language during the general-election campaign has been simple, direct and pragmatic. His best moments in the debates came when he explained what he wanted to do as President. His very best moment came in the town-hall debate when he explained how the government bailout would affect average people who were hurting: if companies couldn’t get credit from the banks, they couldn’t make their payrolls and would have to start laying people off. McCain, by contrast, demonstrated why it’s so hard for Senators to succeed as presidential candidates: he talked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the sins of Obama, and never brought the argument home.

But even with his new populist skills, Obama hasn’t been as plain as he could be. If an Apollo project to create a new alternative-energy economy is his highest priority, as he told me, why hasn’t he given a major speech about it during the fall campaign? Why hasn’t he begun to mobilize the nation for this next big mission? In part, I suppose, because campaigns are about firefighting — and this campaign in particular has been about “the fierce urgency of now,” to use one of Obama’s favorite phrases by Martin Luther King Jr., because of the fears raised by the financial crisis and because of the desperate, ferocious attacks launched by his opponent.

If he wins, however, there will be a different challenge. He will have to return, full force, to the inspiration business. The public will have to be mobilized to face the fearsome new economic realities. He will also have to deliver bad news, to transform crises into “teachable moments.” He will have to effect a major change in our political life: to get the public and the media to think about long-term solutions rather than short-term balms. Obama has given some strong indications that he will be able to do this, having remained levelheaded through a season of political insanity. His has been a remarkable campaign, as smoothly run as any I’ve seen in nine presidential cycles. Even more remarkable, Obama has made race — that perennial, gaping American wound — an afterthought. He has done this by introducing a quality to American politics that we haven’t seen in quite some time: maturity. He is undoubtedly as ego-driven as everyone else seeking the highest office — perhaps more so, given his race, his name and his lack of experience. But he has not been childishly egomaniacal, in contrast to our recent baby-boomer Presidents — or petulant, in contrast to his opponent. He does not seem needy. He seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision. ++

When the Gloves Come Off
Jonathan Schell, The Nation
November 3, 2008 edition - October 15, 2008

Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.
~ Peter Viereck, poet and conservative thinker

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
~ W.B. Yeats

“Every tree in the forest will fall,” said James McCord, the Watergate conspirator, as he prepared to blow the lid off the cover-up of the scandal, leading to the forced midterm resignation of President Nixon. The phrase comes to mind as one surveys the condition of the United States today. The country’s military power is evaporating in failing ground wars in two pulverized, impoverished countries, leaving its recent pretensions to global imperial grandeur in ashes. Its economic power is crumbling daily as its banking system collapses and its instruments of credit seize up in what Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has told Congress may be a “heart attack.” (To which Pope Benedict has helpfully added that the world’s financial system is built “on sand,” explaining that “only the word of God is the foundation of all reality.”) Its constitutional foundations have been weakened to the breaking point by a lawless executive branch and a supine Congress. Its moral authority has been compromised by military aggression and the institution of torture. Its ecological underpinnings (which it of course shares with the rest of the world) are being put at risk by global warming and the entire panoply of harms that the overgrown human enterprise is inflicting on the natural order. (On October 6 a study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reported that almost a quarter of mammalian species are now at risk of extinction.) “Change,” indeed!–not the kind “we can believe in” or even the kind we “need” that Barack Obama promises but the kind that bears down upon you like a Category 5 hurricane, whether you believe in it or not. Not change but salvage–and salvation–are the need of the hour: rescue we can believe in.

In combination, these crises form a matrix, a kind of tightening steel net, that will condition and confine all future decision-making. Any one of them could easily prove more than a match for the powers of the next president. Yet there is a choice that overlaps and connects all the others and in a sense stands before them: deciding whether the United States, until now surrounded by a deep fog of illusions, will discipline itself to perceive and deal with the world as it actually is or, taking leave of its collective senses once and for all, will make the final plunge into a world of enticing fantasy. That is the most immediate question placed before the voters in the election that is upon us.

Trust is the lifeblood of a democratic politics, just as faith and credit are the lifeblood of market economics. Each can be sustained in defiance of reality: a people can place its trust in demagogues, investors can bet their money on worthless assets. But only for a while. A day must come when the “pitiless crowbar of events” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) breaks through the wall. That day has arrived. When, as now, the market system comes to the government begging for rescue, economic credit and political trust are fused. Acknowledging reality will not in itself end the wars, put money back in the banks, lower the price of energy, repair the Constitution or restore the damaged web of life, but it is a necessary condition for addressing any of this work.

Little Facts

It may seem a bit strange, as if in the midst of a ferocious political fight we were suddenly invited to turn ourselves into a tribe of philosophers and try to mount a defense of something as vague as “reality” per se; yet the effort seems required in the face of not just a torrent of deceptions but a multiform insurrection, backed by a tremendous machinery of obfuscation against the very facticity of the world. The appeal of systems of illusion is known to every student of totalitarianism. A fictional world can offer temporary emotional and intellectual comforts that the startling, barbed, always unfamiliar texture of real events cannot supply. The United States is not yet enclosed in the phantasmal world of totalitarianism, but it may be knocking at the gates.

The shock troops of deception are certainly Senator John McCain and his campaign. Their willful, incessantly reiterated distractions, contradictions, distortions and gross lies have by now been widely noted; but their variety and form deserve comment. Several kinds of lies must be distinguished. Some are the traditional kind–lies of concealment regarding matters whose truth is at first widely unknown, as when McCain ads claimed that Obama wanted to teach kindergartners “about sex before learning to read.” Others are brazen lies, meaning lies about matters whose truth is already well known, as when McCain’s ads charge Obama with imposing “skyrocketing taxes”–whereas anyone who cares to turn on a television can learn that Obama plans to raise taxes only for those who make more than $250,000 a year. His running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, told a brazen lie when she stated that the recently concluded ethics investigation of her attempts to pressure officials into dismissing her former brother-in-law Michael Wooten from his job as an Alaska State Trooper found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part,” adding, “there was no abuse of authority at all in trying to get Officer Wooten fired.” In actuality, the report states that she violated the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act by trying to get Wooten fired.

Yet other lies, more brazen still, are ones that immediately contradict one’s own statements, as when McCain charged that “Obama…infused unnecessary partisanship into the process” of the economic bailout and then continued to say “now is not the time to fix the blame, it’s time to fix the problem.” A brazen lie is, in one way, more innocent than a lie of concealment–its falsity is immediately visible–but in another way it is more subversive of truth. Whereas in the case of the lie of concealment the truth can still surface to puncture the deception, in the brazen lie the bolt of truth has already been shot, and no remedy from that quarter is available. The logical next step down this path is what the Republican Party proffers: the roundhouse attack on organizations of information in general, now styled “the media filter.” (Even education, another prime source of factual truth, has been cast in disrepute as the province of “the East Coast elite.” So strong is this sentiment that Obama’s biographical video at the Democratic convention omitted his time at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became editor of its Law Review.) To the extent that such efforts succeed, the body of lies is free to grow without check from facts. The political “base,” thus immunized, is free to believe anything it likes for as long as it likes, to make things up as it goes along.

A further and more comprehensive step down the same road is the open defense of deception. Thus, to brazen lying is added the brazen advocacy of lying. Republican strategist John Feehery entered this zone when he said that information damaging to vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was unimportant “because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent.” He crucially added, “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.” Where little facts don’t matter, big lies can prosper. However, most startling–though wholly of a piece with the foregoing–is the open articulation and defense of a mode of campaigning in which not just the facts (true statements about reality) but reality is downgraded in principle, as if not merely reports about what is happening in the world but the world itself–the actuality of people’s experience and lives–can be thrust aside in favor of fantasy. In this category was the famous statement by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, that the campaign would no longer be about the “issues” (people’s jobs, their health, war and peace, etc.) but about “a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That was followed by McCain adviser Greg Strimple’s statement that “We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis and getting back to discussing Mr. Obama’s aggressively liberal record and how he will be too risky for Americans.” Is a global economic crisis a “page” that can simply be “turned”?

It would be a great mistake, though, to imagine that the quarrel between the Democrats and the Republicans is a fight between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Democrats have allowed themselves to be drawn deeply into the shadow world. The choice between the parties is too often a choice between the greater illusion and the lesser. In this fight, as in the fights to preserve the Constitution and the law, the Republicans are the party of usurpation, the Democrats of abdication. (Together they are well matched, and make a deadly pair.) Indeed, the full capture of the political realm by the propaganda arts has been bipartisan. The iron triangle of pollsters, paid political advertisers and consultants has formed an independent realm of images in which, by common agreement, the prime duties of a candidate are such matters as “defining” the opponent before he defines you, seizing “control of the agenda” and framing a “message” or, more grandiose, a “narrative”–all of which are aimed, whether moving through a land of fact or fiction (or some of both), at winning office.

Meanwhile, the pundit class, unsatisfied with a mere reportorial role yet fearful of expressing opinion outright, presides over a vast realm of “analysis,” in which the commentators, sitting behind rows of laptop computers in overdesigned television studios, all too often become so many self-appointed bipartisan advisers to both campaigns–equal-opportunity spin artists. There, the questions asked are likely to be on the order of “Did Sarah Palin beat the low expectations we had set for her in the debate?” or “What must Obama do to pass the ‘commander in chief test’?” or “Will McCain’s attempt to energize his base by choosing Sarah Palin alienate independent voters?” or “How can Barack Obama appeal to lower-class white women who voted for Hillary?” They too rarely ask: “Is the United States really heading for ‘victory’ in the Iraq War?” (as the GOP boldly declares) or “Will the candidates’ plans for bailing out the financial system really work?” or “Is a policy of torture morally acceptable?” The upshot is that in the most widely attended media (mostly television), the plight of the United States and the role of a new president in dealing with it must be discussed largely in technical terms. It’s as if a fire department, arriving at a burning house, instead of rushing in to save the sleeping children and putting out the blaze were restricted, like so many weather forecasters, to analyzing wind currents, wondering when the second floor will burst into flame or when the neighbor’s house will be ignited.

Strong and Wrong

In no area has the Democratic surrender–at once to illusion and the disastrous unleashing of military force–been more abject than in national security policy. The pattern between the two parties was set more than half a century ago, when Republican Senator Joe McCarthy charged that the Democratic administration of Harry Truman had “lost” China and set the stage for the Democrats, fearful of losing another country, to make their catastrophic commitment to the Vietnam War. The keynote of the current round of abdication was certainly the Congressional vote to support the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq. Accused of losing one war, many Democrats felt compelled, some no doubt sincerely but others for a variety of pretexts (”I was voting to take the issue to the UN!”), to sign up for the other one. (Let’s try to imagine for a moment how much better a country the United States would be today if Congress had turned down the Vietnam and Iraq wars.) Such have been the terms of the Democrats’ enduring dilemma in the face of America’s disastrous wars. If they oppose the war, they look weak in the face of the enemy. If, in order to look “tough,” they support the war, they look–and are–weak in the face of the Republicans. Or if, like John Kerry in 2004 in regard to Iraq, they support the war and then oppose it, they look like–and are–flip-floppers. Every which way, they look weak. Chronically accused of “softness” on something or other (in the old days Communism, today terrorism), they really are soft in their failure to stand up to their Republican opponents bent on misbegotten wars.

Bill Clinton articulated the Democrats’ normally unspoken credo when he said, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than someone who is weak and right.” (The difference is that the Democrats are likely to know in their bones that the war is wrong, whereas the Republicans do not.) Barack Obama has not escaped the dilemma, which persists into this sixth year of the Iraq War. From the start of his campaign, he has advocated an increase in the American military of 92,000 additional troops. An opponent of the war in Iraq from the beginning, he now calls for an increase of two brigades in Afghanistan. It’s hard not to believe that the logic here is that if you want to draw down forces in war A (Iraq), you must find a war B (Afghanistan) to step up. Does Obama truly imagine that further militarization of that conflict will lead to its resolution? Isn’t it more likely that the current deterioration of the military effort will continue? And if so, isn’t there a grave risk that Afghanistan will become Obama’s war in the way that Iraq became Bush’s war, and with a similar potential to destroy Obama’s presidency? And wouldn’t it be better to join Afghan’s president, Hamid Karzai, who is trying to enlist Saudi Arabia to start negotiations with the Taliban on a political settlement?

At the same time, Obama has sought to outflank McCain on the tough side by calling for hot pursuit of the Taliban into Pakistan, something George Bush is in fact doing. The practice has already led to an exchange of fire with Pakistani troops and looks like the high road to an expanded war. Nor is Obama’s promise of withdrawal from Iraq by any means ironclad. After sixteen months, he would leave behind a force of unspecified size devoted to attacking terrorists, training Iraqi forces and protecting American installations. But is this three-pronged mission so very different from the current one? And if Iraq begins to slide toward civil war, as seems all too possible, what will Obama do then? And if that prospect is real, shouldn’t he acquaint the public with it now? He has said that he would “reserve the right to pause a withdrawal.” But in that case, will the Iraq war, too, become his war? In short, there is good reason to fear that in his eagerness to avoid the appearance of risking “losing” Afghanistan, Pakistan and/or Iraq, he has laid several traps for himself. If he must one day decide to withdraw even in the face of collapse in any or all of those countries, the Republicans will not fail to remind him of his campaign promises of success, and his presidency will be in danger. They’re already saying he will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. Such is the likely price that this Democrat risks for succumbing to illusion in matters of war and peace and failing to acknowledge the full cost that will probably have to be paid for America’s military misadventures.

Taking the Gloves Off

As the election entered its final month, the McCain campaign, in one of the more sudden twists in its ever shifting strategy, settled on a phrase to describe what it would do next. It would “take the gloves off,” as Governor Palin said to William Kristol of the New York Times. That is, as she put it on the stump, “there is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off, and that time is right now.” Or as she further put it, approvingly quoting a campaign staffer’s comments, “OK, let’s look at it this way, Sarah: the gloves are off, the heels are on. Let’s get to work!” The gloves-off expression has an unmistakable echo in recent history. It was the phrase of choice to describe the Bush administration’s programs of torture and abuse. For example, Cofer Black, director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center until May 2002, stated to a Congressional hearing in September of that year, “All I want to say is that there was ‘before’ 9/11 and ‘after’ 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.” He turned out to be referring to the CIA’s infamous global program for “disappearing” and torturing detainees in a system of secret prisons, some run by the CIA and some by foreign governments. One thing led to another, and the phrase, together with the torture it opaquely declared, turned out to have a life of its own. In Iraq, by August 2003, a captain in military intelligence had made it known that in the cells of the prison at Abu Ghraib “the gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees,” for “Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.” Soon, the photographs of the horrors of Abu Ghraib flooded the world.

The supposed aim of abusing detainees was obtaining information. But the record shows that misinformation thus obtained was far more important for the course of events than was anything actually learned. As recounted in Jane Mayer’s outstanding recent book The Dark Side, in late 2001, Pakistani intelligence captured Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a confederate of Osama bin Laden. Interrogated without abuse by the FBI, he proved an invaluable source of information on Al Qaeda plots but denied knowledge of any connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein or of Iraqi programs of weapons of mass destruction. But at that time there was a keen demand in the highest echelons of the Bush administration to produce just such evidence in order to be able to justify the invasion before world opinion. Al-Libi was taken into CIA custody and sent to Egypt, where the most revolting forms of torture are routinely practiced. “You’re going to Egypt!” a CIA officer, in one of the basest moments of American history, screamed at al-Libi. “And while you’re there, I’m going to find your mother and fuck her!” In Egypt he was imprisoned in a tiny cage for more than eighty hours and viciously beaten. Al-Libi then discovered that Saddam did indeed have ties to Al Qaeda and programs for weapons of mass destruction. According to a report by the Senate Select Committee in 2006, al-Libi “lied…to avoid torture.” Or as he put it to the FBI, “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”

Al-Libi’s new testimony quickly flowed up the chain of command to the White House, where it was piped into the vice president’s office. From there it made its way to no less august a forum than the United Nations Security Council, where Secretary of State Colin Powell cited al-Libi’s torture-induced lies (though without naming him) in his dramatic presentation to the world of the American reasons for invading Iraq. (”A senior terrorist operative,” he said, had told interrogators that Saddam had trained two Al Qaeda members in the use of “chemical and biological weapons.”) Behind Powell at the UN sat CIA director George Tenet. Behind him, invisible in the shadows of the secret prison system, stood the American-sponsored Egyptian torturers with their instruments of agony.

Yeats understood that fantasy brutalizes the heart. The CIA’s torturers demonstrated that the brutalized heart in turn nourishes fantasy. A war was planned. Illusions to justify it were wanted. Torture was one of the chosen means. Here was the destination to which the “strong and wrong” policy finally led. The consequences were of high moment: thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, one country smashed, another dishonored. Now in the last weeks of the presidential campaign “the gloves are off” again, fantasy and brutality are mixing in another context and new streams of lies are being pumped into the public bloodstream from the campaign trail. What will the price be this time? More mistaken wars, with their lawlessness, torture and civilian deaths? More immiseration through voodoo economics? Where will the cross-fertilization of delusion and degradation next lead? What will Sarah Palin do with her high heels and her ungloved hands, and to whom? Already a mood of “anger,” even “rage,” has developed at McCain-Palin rallies, where racial slurs and shouts of “treason” greet mentions of Obama.

The Thin Man

Looking over the wreckage of American policy, it’s possible to suppose that the United States of October 2008 is going through what Russia went through in August 1991, the loss of empire. But a better analogy might be the Suez crisis of 1956, when England and France (with assistance from Israel) sought to reassert their imperial roles by invading Egypt, which had just nationalized the Suez Canal. Suez did not so much destroy the British and French empires as reveal that they were already gone. At the time, President Eisenhower exclaimed to Britain’s Prime Minister Eden, “Anthony, have you gone out of your mind?”–a question that many people would like to put to the United States just about now. But whereas the Soviet Union simply disappeared, Britain and France of course survived as prosperous middle-power nations. The end of empire did not spell the end of the state. The United States seems likely to remain a country of immense strengths–economic, political, even military–that will survive the collapse of its imperial delusions. Above all, its constitutional system, ravaged yet still standing, offers a means of regeneration of a kind that few other countries possess.

Cyril Connolly once said that inside every fat man there is a thin man struggling to get out. Is Barack Obama (the “skinny guy with a funny name,” as he says) that thin man for the United States? Does he stand for the lean, disenthralled, awake America that needs to escape from within the obese, supersized, bewildered giant whose military forces crash through the world, whose ruined credit is dragging down the world economy, whose effluents are choking its own and the world’s atmosphere, whose superannuated nuclear arsenal (together with that of Russia) even today threatens the species with annihilation? Obama is an almost preternaturally gifted political man–a kind of Mozart of politics. He seems to possess many elements of stature, even of greatness. His reputation for decency is unblemished. He appears to be remarkably unideological, a true pragmatist–a quality much to be prized in a time when events outrace foresight. He is intellectually agile. He is a writer and speaker of eloquence and originality. He inhabits a degraded public realm with grace. He is an outstanding judge of people and circumstances, if his memoir Dreams From My Father is any indication. (Note that the word “from” in the title, instead of the expected “of,” turns a cliché phrase into an interesting one.) He is a good manager–his campaign has been a marvel of skillful administration. But still to be proven are the clarity of his vision and the strength–the “audacity,” to use his word–without which his fine qualities will be of little help. Placing himself at the center of the swamp that our political life has become, he has breathed deeply of the narcotic fumes that pervade it. Many of his campaign promises will burden a presidency already destined to have burdens to spare. But his election is a necessity for any decent future for the United States. The fog might begin to lift. It would be a beginning. ++

Why I’m Voting for Obama
Dave Lindorff, Common Dreams
10/16/08

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now, according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14 percent over Republican John McCain-enough to overcome even the most devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform, saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that it was “the wrong war.” Since then, he has backed away even from saying he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the National Security Agency-spying that we now know is massive almost beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists, and almost certainly of Bush administration political “enemies.” By backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about “change.”

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system, which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I lived in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is too close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to do so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and right-wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear people calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the rabid hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it’s more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep thinking that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard Law School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy who has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn’t be heading for an election victory. He wouldn’t even be the Democratic nominee. He’d be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is-holding a seat in Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or mocked by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke (many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political figures like Kucinich, for god’s sake!). Fractured and fractious small groupings have little or no link to the organized labor movement-traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been and keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even less connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to years of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic Party. Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made it into office-people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen-and I stress the word could, not would-if this election were to be won by Obama and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that there will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four years. Some will inevitably replace some of the aging “liberals” on the bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices (Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don’t look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years, and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job. A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and 13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor law has been whittled away and turned to management’s advantage to such an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union election. Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when found guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity can hope, at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back pay after fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a President Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if new pro-labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and local labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see a genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences for workers’ lives, and for the political system that would be far reaching and profound-and that could even pave the way for a resurgence of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be politically opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out-tough McCain on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in Afghanistan after taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like Bush’s, Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s before him, would be dragged down by an endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t see a smart guy-and Obama is a smart guy-getting dragged into another quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin, as vice president, would in all probability end up becoming president during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader of America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It’s not just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth. ++

“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

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