Pearls Before Swine … and other matters

The GOP has spent the last eight years at war with Americans who stood in the way of their profit — now they’re at war with her government and its hope to save her from falling into a bottomless pit of misery.

The House just passed the stimulus bill … AGAIN … without Pub votes.

Republicans are encouraged by their ‘victory’ in whittling down the populism, amping up the tax cuts and controlling the conversation, with the approval of our scruffy, dim-witted Blue Dogs — so listen to ‘em bark … barf, barf, barf.

Boehner and his Boyz are whining that they were edged out of the discussions, left out of the loop — NOT. Here’s Rep. Louise Slaughter with the goods on that matter. Rush says that the three who broke ranks are RINO’s — and that the Pub obstruction is a clear victory for the party; they should be kissing those RINO’s ass, then, because we seriously modified our hopes to give them what they wanted.

I s’pose you heard that Republican Judd Gregg doesn’t want to be the Commerce Secretary now; couldn’t stand the heat, got out of the kitchen. The shit-storm swirling around him on both sides of the political spectrum was probably too much; in fact, he’s decided not to run for reelection. The Pubs have it that he couldn’t ‘compromise his principals.’ Gregg says that there was never going to be Pub support for anything Blue, anyhow. Pffft!

The only thing that’s clear in this discussion is that going on 9 years of suffering, sorrow and loss comes to us … with Bush or without him … at the hands of the outdated and anachronistic Grand Old Party. And this may be a heads-up on what the Senate does next; wouldn’t it be a kick in the head if we couldn’t get this thing off the ground, and the Pubs had to own all this pain and anguish? That might be a hell of a ‘teachable’ moment.

Also of note today, the dreadful air crash in New York took one of the 9/11 widows that testified in Congress and recently met with Obama — here’s the Youtube featured by MoveOn that is a moving tribute to love, appropriate for Valentine’s Day — and Bill Maher’s back tonight on HBO.

A short collection of iinteresting reads for your weekend from Ted Rall on revolution, and David Sirota on the marijuana war, follow; bonus is a collection, including a blog-contribution from a reader who had acquaintance with Obama’s parents, attempting to open the lid into the sensibilities of our different dancer of a president.

As regards the war on drugs, I see that the Pubs sought to eliminate state money in the recovery, as well as funding for local police departments, who are cutting personnel; so now California is poised on letting out some 40% of its prisoners, because it can’t provide for them any more. I’d like to think some of the drug-convicted would be released before the murderers and rapists, but who knows — our leadership can’t seem to see differences in the magnitude of these crimes.

Look at the set-up there: we can’t afford to confine inmates, so we loose them on a population already in desperate straits due to lack of work … which can only prompt more petty theft and disorder as the released attempt to survive. Then, in 2010, the Republicans will run on a “tough on crime” platform. There’s my second Pffffft! for the day.

As for revolution, my friend the retired Union man, Fishin’ Jim, sez that when you’re organizing and/or organized, you’re forced to crack some heads; historically, power-sharing had to be wrestled away from the moneyed with billy-clubs and bare knuckles. What do we do when someone impedes our progress? Whack ‘em or move around ‘em? Depends on our options, I’d suppose. Ours are dwindling; the harder circumstances become, the more they narrow down to head-cracking to get what we need.

Obama’s attempt at civility — post-partisanship — is fairly battered at the moment, although it’s exposing the Republicans true colors; I doubt that will stop Barack [because that's his own signature energy] but the reality he’s facing should move him to be more creative in his attempts to reach out to the stonewallers; Obama’s not taking the partisan bait, but the bait is what’s stinkin’ up the place. Begs the old transcendent question: “What if you gave a war, and nobody came?”

But the GOP war is about hindering the common good — so we’ll come, all right, battered and limping, demanding the end of tired solutions and looking for REAL change. Main street, that’s where the revolutions brewing; too slowly, of course — Americans aren’t configured to think government is here to help them, anyhow; our demands are still in the “pleading” stage. We put Obama in charge; isn’t that enough?

Of course not, but the pressure cooker is jiggling; I wrote about the process in the weekly, here. The longer this goes on, the more radical the solutions will have to be; and I suspect that’s the Big Picture we’re moving toward.

Although we haven’t heard the president say this quite so forcefully of late, I suspect Obama’s getting closer by the hour to a “make me!” moment:

“The political debate is now so skewed, so limited, so distorted… What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions,”

~ Barack Obama, 1995.

It’s always — ever and always — in our own hands. On days like these, when I think about all our problems its hard not to notice that we do this to ourselves, over and over, ad infinitum. Same old insanity, different day.

Without humans to foul the nest, the world would be spinning in pristine beauty … but then, who would notice how lovely she is? It’s all an experiment in consciousness. And frankly, we can do better.

Jude

Addicted to fake outrage
David Sirota, San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, February 13, 2009

I’m not sure if it’s because we’re strung out on “Lost” episodes, or if it’s because we’re still suffering from a post-9/11 stress disorder that makes us crave “breaking news” alerts, or if it’s because the economy has turned us into distraction junkies. But one thing is painfully obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal” erupted last week: Our society is addicted to fake outrage - and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.

If you haven’t heard (and I’m guessing you have), the Olympic gold medalist was recently photographed taking a toke of weed. The moment the picture hit the Internet, the media blew the story up, pumping out at least 1,200 dispatches about the “controversy,” according to my LexisNexis search. Phelps’ sponsors subsequently threatened to pull their endorsement deals, and USA Swimming suspended him for “disappointing so many people.”

America is a place where you can destroy millions of lives as a Wall Street executive and still get invited for photo-ops at the White House; a land where the everyman icon - Joe Sixpack - is named for his love of shotgunning two quarts of beer at holiday gatherings; a “shining city on a hill” where presidential candidates’ previous abuse of alcohol and cocaine is portrayed as positive proof of grittiness and character. And yet, somehow, Phelps is the evildoer of the hour because he went to a party and took a hit off someone’s bong.

As with most explosions of fake outrage, the Phelps affair asks us to feign anger at something we know is commonplace. A nation of tabloid readers is apoplectic that Brad and Jen divorced, even though one out of every two American marriages ends the same way. A country fetishizing “family values” goes ballistic over the immorality of Paris Hilton’s sex tape … and then keeps spending billions on pornography. And now we’re expected to be indignant about a 23-year-old kid smoking weed, even though studies show that roughly half of us have done the same thing; most of us think pot should be legal in some form; and many of us regularly devour far more toxic substances than marijuana (nicotine, alcohol, reality TV, etc.).

So, in the interest of a little taboo candor, I’m just going to throw editorial caution to the wind and write what lots of us thought - but were afraid to say - when we heard about Phelps. Ready? Here goes: America’s drug policy is idiotic.

Doctors can hand out morphine to anyone for anything beyond a headache, but they can’t prescribe marijuana to terminal cancer patients. Madison Avenue encourages a population plagued by heart disease to choke down as many artery-clogging Big Macs and Dunkin’ Donuts as it can, but it’s illegal to consume cannabis, “a weed that has been known to kill approximately no one,” as even the archconservative Colorado Springs Gazette admitted in its editorial slamming Phelps. Indeed, it would be perfectly acceptable - even artistically admirable in some quarters - if I told you that I drank myself into a blind stupor while writing this column, but it would be considered “outrageous” if I told you I was instead smoking a joint (FYI - I wasn’t doing either).

That said, what’s even more inane than our irrational reefer madness is our addiction to the same high that every pothead craves: the high of escapism. Nerves fried from orange terror warnings, Drudge Report sirens and disaster capitalism’s roller-coaster economics, our narcotic of choice is fake outrage - and it packs a punch. It gets us to turn on the television, tune in to the latest manufactured drama, and drop out of the real battle for the republic’s future. ++

IT COULDN’T HAPPEN HERE
Ted Rall, Yahoo
2/12/09

Could It?

PARIS–Most Americans don’t care what happens in France. But the oldest country in “Old Europe” remains the Western world’s intellectual capital and one of its primary originators of political trends. (Google “May+1968+Sorbonne.”)

The French are reacting to a situation almost identical to ours–economic collapse, government impotence, corporate corruption–by turning hard left. National strikes and massive demonstrations are occurring every few weeks. How far left? This far: the late president François Mitterand’s Socialist Party, the rough equivalent of America’s Greens, is considered too conservative to solve the economic crisis.

A new poll by the Parisian daily Libération finds 53 percent of French voters (68 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds) favoring “radical social change.” Fifty-seven percent want France to insulate itself from the global economic system. Does this mean revolution? It’s certainly possible. Or maybe counter-revolution: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s nativist (some would say neofascist) National Front is also picking up points.

One thing is certain: French politics are even more volatile than the financial markets these days. In yet another indication of How Far Left?, the Communist-aligned CGT labor union is on the defensive for not being militant enough. “We’re not going to put out the blazing fires [of the economic crisis],” the CGT’s secretary general said, trying to seize the initiative by calling for another strike on February 18th. “We’re going to fan them.”

Two new entities, a Left Party (PG) umbrella organization trying to unify opposition to the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy (who’d be to the left of Obama in the U.S.) and the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA), have seized the popular imagination. The NPA claims to have registered more than 9000 “militants” willing to use violent force to overthrow the government if given the word.

“Only combat pays,” read a banner at the NPA’s first convention.

Communism is dead, most pundits–the mainstream, stupid ones anyway–have been telling us since the USSR shut down in 1991. As it turns out, the libertarians were wrong. Half-right, anyway: Human nature may be inherently individualistic, as free market capitalists claim, but it’s also inherently social. When economies boom, most people are sufficiently satisfied to leave well enough alone. Who cares if my boss gets paid 100 times more than I do? I’m doing OK. As resources become scarce, however, we huddle together for protection. The sight of a small rich elite hoarding all the goodies violates our primal sense of fairness.

“In Soviet times,” a man in present-day Tajikistan told me, “we lived worse than we do today. But we were all the same. Now we live a bit better, but we have to watch rich assholes pass us in their Benzes.” Which would he choose? No hesitation: “Soviet times.”

In America, a French cliché goes, people are afraid of the government. In France, the government is afraid of the people. With good reason, too: the French have overthrown their governments dozens of times since the Revolution of 1789. The French are hard wired with class consciousness. Strikes, demonstrations and general hell-raising are festive occasions. Only when things spin totally out of control–as when Muslim youths rioted in the suburbs of Paris and other cities–are conservatives like Sarkozy able to make headway.

Riots over police brutality by disenfranchised minorities make the French nervous. But contempt for American-style “harsh capitalism,” where citizens pay $800 a month for healthcare and write nary a letter to their local newspaper to complain, is 100 percent mainstream. The French don’t think they should have to suffer just because some greedy bankers went on a looting spree.

Even Sarkozy is getting the message. “We don’t want a European May ‘68 in the middle of Christmas,” he warned his ministers in December. He shelved proposals to loosen regulation of business. Arnaud Lagardère, CEO of the Lagardère Group, told the financial daily Les Echos: “We’re seeing, in renewed form, the most debatable aspects of Anglo-Saxon capitalism called into question.”

The French and Americans face similar problems. But their temperamental differences lead them to different conclusions. An average working-class Frenchman possesses a deeper understanding of economics, politics, history and economics than most college professors in the U.S. Go to a bar or café, and sports will be on the television–but not on people’s lips. They’re talking politics and how to force their leaders to protect their quality of life.

Americans, on the other hand, don’t expect direct help from their government. They’re giving Barack Obama time to see whether his economic recovery program will work. It won’t, of course; economists say so. But indolent hopefulness is less work than chucking Molotov cocktails.

Back in France, the NPA sets off rhetorical bombs Americans wouldn’t dream of. “We’re not a boutique party out to get votes, or an institutional mainstream party, but a party of militants,” says the NPA’s leader to the Le Monde newspaper. “We’re real leftists, not official leftists.” The NPA is currently negotiating a temporary alliance of convenience with the Communists.

A communist revolution in western Europe would be greeted by curiosity and derision in the U.S. state-controlled media. But if such a social upheaval were to protect French living standards from a global Depression spinning out of control, it might also prove inspiring to increasingly desperate Americans. ++

bonus

The Presider
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish
28 Jan 2009

One impression from Obama’s interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you’d get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush’s indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush’s presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush’s authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, aas opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It’s fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it. ++

Obama Isn’t Who I Didn’t Think He Was. But He Might Be.
John V. Santore [Obama campaign organizer, frmr congressional speechwriter], HuffPo
February 8, 2009

Recently, I’ve been forced to deal with my own rank hypocrisy concerning the Obama administration. I find myself flying off the handle in all directions, attacking the new team in Washington one minute and defending it the next, praising its critics and then assaulting them for being unreasonable and expecting too much, too soon. The end result is that I’m far more confused about the future of Barack Obama’s presidency than I was with Bush’s. When George was in office, it was clear that things were bad and going to get worse. It was simply matter of holding on for dear life until the wretched, dark days were over. But with Obama, I find myself hopefully disappointed, waiting for Barack to prove to me that he isn’t the man I didn’t think he was during the campaign, but now think he might be (maybe).

Today provided a perfect forum for the muddled analysis that such a frame of mind produces. Frank Rich, who I believe to be the most eyes-wide-open political commentator around, had this to say about the Tom Daschle fiasco:

In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

I ended up agreeing with Rich’s point and then immediately attacking him. “I don’t know why everyone is acting surprised,” I said. “We all knew who Obama was before he took office.” I was, in essence, mad at Rich for writing an article I agreed with because it criticized an aspect of the President I thought everybody should be familiar with, even though Obama did whatever he could to present an opposing image during the campaign. It’s always an interesting feeling to recognize the degree to which your current sentence is contradicting your last one even before you finish saying it. It’s rather unnerving, to say the least.

While I was on the campaign, I basically held two opposing visions of who Barack Obama was. When talking to a voter, I argued using the same language I now put forth - we know who this guy really is - but to opposite effect: he’s with us. I argued that because I believed it. And I believed it for two reasons. The first was that there were indeed some genuine differences between what Obama’s policies called for and what other candidates had put forth. The Iraq war was the major one, with Obama being the only candidate who could honestly say that he had opposed the war from the start. I thought that was reflective of a different world view at a time when a new vision of US foreign policy was critical.

There was also an entire component of Obama’s “power-to-the-people” message, an idea perpetually heard from both Democratic and Republican candidates alike, that simply appeared more honest. On that score, he seemed to be the first mainstream American politician who was systematically linking rhetoric with infrastructure. His campaign was holding training sessions led by actual community organizers - people far too blunt to be political professionals - that featured lessons that nearly knocked me out of my chair. I remember sitting in a Chicago classroom in September of 2007 at “Camp Obama” while life-long organizer Mike Kruglic, who had known the then-candidate decades before he was a blip on the radar screen, spoke about how mad it made him when the poor and bedraggled masses passively accepted their fate, unable to even imagine taking action to change their lives for the better. “Power is good,” he said as if speaking to these men and women alone. “Powerlessness is evil.”

I was shocked. I had gotten behind Obama because I thought he was the most likely candidate to promote progressive policies from the top down. But now, I thought something else entirely was at work. “So that’s what this campaign is about,” I remember saying to myself. I don’t write this flippantly. It was a paradigm-shifting moment that stuck with me every day I was on the campaign, and which always quelled any emerging fears that Obama was a wolf in the people’s clothing.

But ultimately, my true faith was in the man himself. He is different, I thought. He’s had a unique upbringing. He’s worldly and uncharacteristically educated. And I simply could not imagine that a black man in America would ever be able to fall in line with the same old group of people and policies. His personal experiences would be too different to allow that to happen. In its own way, that was a prejudiced viewpoint to have - Alan Keyes and Michael Steele don’t seem to mind the status quo club at all - but it’s what I thought.

At the same time, I felt as though Obama was basically pushing the same mainstream Democratic platform that I agreed with sometimes - making universal healthcare coverage a priority, for example - and disagreed with at other times - unquestioning military and political support for Israel being one such issue. My concerns were confirmed at different times on the campaign trail. At that same September 2007 meeting, I asked a visiting foreign policy staffer if Obama would rethink the idea of using the “war on terrorism” language and intellectual framework that equated terrorists groups with monolithic armies massing at the border. “Well, we are at war,” he said. When Obama had spoken earlier that year about the suffering of the Palestinian people - an objective reality that any honest person should be able to admit without being accused of bias against Israel - he was criticized, and quickly blamed Hamas for that suffering. In the fall, I listened to him justify not supporting a single-payer healthcare system because it wouldn’t be practical to implement right now, and heard him say that calling for an elimination of coal power plants would be a “fight that we would loose politically.” He supported increasing the size of the military, not shrinking it. He wouldn’t support gay marriage, arguing for civil unions instead.

But through it all, I didn’t have any doubts that the country needed him. The fundamental issue in my mind was that he himself was a different kind of politician, and as a result, his policies couldn’t help but produce real change, which was what the campaign was supposed to be all about. If he wasn’t always pushing the envelope, it was because he was savvy, not spineless. He had a plan to get us to the mountaintop. We just needed to believe, both in ourselves and in our leader.

Matt Taibbi is a journalist for Rolling Stone. His obscenity-laced, vitriolic language has always had the sad effect of marginalizing both him and his insights. But it has also freed him from the confines of conventional publications, and hence conventional thought. Covering Obama’s campaign, he found himself unimpressed by the message, but having a hard time not believing the messenger. Here is what he wrote about Obama in July of 2008:

We’ve become trained to look for the man behind the mask…But I’m not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn’t-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather’s sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn’t, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.

Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it’s the same thing — but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story — putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now…

… When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.

What’s confusing about Obama is that he’s so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery… that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it’s confusing is that we’ve grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don’t even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents? As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I’m listening to the Same Old [Stuff], delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don’t care. It’s not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It’s that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.

Now, here is Taibbi again writing just over two months ago, reacting to the nomination of Tom Daschle to head HHS and get right what the Clintons tried to do 16 years ago, before anybody knew about the tax problem and the chauffeured limousine:

But in picking Daschle — who as an adviser to the K Street law firm Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets with the nation’s fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests — Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry. And I know that lots of public policy people are hailing this pick, saying Daschle is perfect for the job (”His new leadership position confirms that the incoming Obama administration has made health care reform a top and early priority for action in 2009,” Ron Pollack, the director of Families USA, told reporters), but when they say that I think they mean the following: “Out of all the bought-off Washington whores who could have been given this job, Daschle is the best one. His fake reform will go the farthest in its approximation of actual action than the fake reform of any other possible whore-candidate.” Actually that probably sums up the ideological profile of Obama quite well generally — but that’s another story.

Here was my reaction to that pick: silence. I knew absolutely nothing about Daschle, except for two unrelated pieces of information. The first was that he was a Senate Majority Leader who lost his seat. This seemed to indicate a lack of fortitude. On the other hand, I had watched him at a campaign stop talking to some local Obama supporters, and he seemed to be a really nice guy. He’s probably too nice for Congress, I thought to myself. Honestly. That was what I thought.

It turns out that I was 180 degrees off. Tom Daschle loved Congress, and Congress loved him back - or at least, the business of Congress did. Was Taibbi being too hard on him? Perhaps. Would Daschle he have promoted healthcare legislation that was better for America than what George Bush would give us? Almost certainly. Would it have fixed the problem from the bottom up? Well, on second thought, probably not.

But why was I so angry at Frank Rich this morning? I was accusing him of being behind the story, of writing about Daschle’s problems - and what they said about Obama’s inner circle - months after Daschle’s nomination had been announced. I was essentially blaming Rich for failing to inform me sooner that this was a bad pick, even though I could have easily found that out for myself. In retrospect, it was probably because I didn’t want to look.

Which makes me feel like my real motivation was an attempt to hide my own embarrassment about the decision to pick Daschle to begin with. I tell friends these days that I’ll never be angry at Obama, only disappointed. The difference between him and Bush is that Bush never even knew enough to make good decisions. But Obama does. And so when he makes bad ones, it isn’t because he’s ignorant. It’s because he’s failing to do the one intangible yet crucial thing he said he could do better than Hillary Clinton: lead. In a political wasteland dominated by false choices and deliberately deceptive paradigms, Obama held the potential to reshape the debate both in Washington and in people’s minds. His campaign might have spent a lot of time talking up the ability of the American people to bring change to Washington, but, while sincere, it’s also a long-term goal. For right now, Obama’s message is clear. He said it himself when criticized during the transition for surrounding himself with so many old Washington hands: “The change comes from me.”

So when the change doesn’t come from him, it’s disappointing and embarrassing, especially to those of us who promised exactly that for so long: that the change would come from him. When Obama makes a good decision, I use it to justify that narrative. And when he makes a bad one, I try to give myself an out by saying, “Well, we knew who he really was all along.” But perhaps that was always the point: we didn’t know who he was. We knew who we wanted him to be. And faced with choosing between a group of known-quantity candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards whose potential seemed acceptable but limited, we were willing to take the chance that this guy would blow through the rafters and, to quaintly co-opt a phrase from the campaign, “change the world.”Such a hope sustained us through the campaign, and through other questionable transition appointments as well. (”Hillary’s going to answer to Obama at State, not the other way around.”)

“The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead,” Rich wrote today. “There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.”

The fundamental concern expresed by sentences like these - that you can’t take the tiller of the ship of state without consigning yourself to the course being charted, regardless of how much we need a change of course - is being heard around the world. The New York Times also published an Egyptian editorial today which had this to say:

We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of…justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza. Even before he officially took office, we expected him to take a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza. We still hope that he will condemn, if only with simple words, this massacre that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians…But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out… Have Egyptians irreversibly gone off Mr. Obama? No. Egyptians still think that this one-of-a-kind American president can do great things. Young Egyptians’ admiration for America is offset by frustration with American foreign policy. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this came from one Egyptian blogger: “I love America. It’s the country of dreams … but I wonder if I will ever be able someday to declare my love.”

It’s amazing to recognize the same feeling in my own mind: a desperate desire to, as Michelle Obama meant to say, be proud of my country again, proud not just of its professed ideals but of the way its government works and the politicies and actions that work produces.

It is as if the world over, people believe in Obama. And just like anyone who believes in anyone else, when they let us down, we jump through hoops to explain why our faith is still justified.

And yet, even understanding this, I still have that faith, and that hope. ++

Inauguration 2009
Diana, Seniors Dealing With Life
Monday, January 19, 2009

Tomorrow the US inaugurates a new president. Much is hoped from him because so much is needed, but whether he can deliver us from ourselves remains to be seen. We got ourselves into the mess by voting in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It will take someone wielding a very sharp knife to cut away the excess, the unwise, the arrogant, and the corrupt. It will need to be someone who owes nothing to anyone. I think Barack Obama is such a man, and I think that at least four groups may be disappointed by the calm rationality with which he will conduct his presidency.

Among those groups disappointed may well be Hawaii, which has been claiming Obama as one of its own. Yes and no. The Hawaiian Islands were taken illegally from the Hawaiian monarchy by a group of businessmen who overthrew the monarchy. The US government was appealed to but chose not to return the Islands because of their strategic position. This created a permanent underclass of Hawaiians in their own lands. Today, the Hawaiians—those that remain—are at the bottom of every list that is good and at the top of every list that is bad. The intermarried population of the modern islands is called “local” rather than Hawaiian.

Local culture is a mixed bag of values and attitudes derived from the Asian and Pacific peoples who met and blended there. As an outpost of the US, a far flung state five hours flying at least from the mainland, Hawaii is not and never has been a cultural outpost of the US. In fact, local people tend to disapprove of brash Caucasian mainlanders whom they call “haoles.” Obama probably escaped much of the opprobrium of being half-haole since he had an admixture of race, much as the local population does, but he was set apart in another way. He earned a scholarship to the premier, expensive, exclusive Punahou School, for which parents plot ways to get infants in line for attendance and plan to mortgage their houses if their child is offered a place. Graduates of Punahou and the other highly respected private schools in the Islands are an elite.

Then there is the group who might want him to rattle the American sabre and throw American weight around. In fact, he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia and his father’s family is African. This sets him apart because it indicates that he understands that not everyone speaks English and that people exist in other countries who do not necessarily subscribe to the American corporate way. How unique to have a president aware of a foreign language. I don’t expect him to have the xenophobic my country right or wrong, because he has some sense that people exist outside the US.

Another group who may wish to claim him and may be disappointed are the Civil Rights leaders from the Old School. These are the Southern leadership, many ministers, who held rallies and led marches, and called for justice and equality. He is the new generation and not from the South. He represents the successful entrepreneurial spirit of success that was predicated by the emotional appeals of his predecessors but is not dependent on them. He speaks in his own rational voice and will be a consummate pragmatist rather than an advocate for any particular group or religion.

The final group will be, I believe, the Democratic Party. I don’t anticipate Obama allowing his policies to be dictated by the traditions of the party, He has been completely candid about the fact that partisan politics is a danger when the country faces economic ruin. Obama has to play the hand he’s been dealt and he doesn’t know yet exactly what he will be faced with. This is not the time to apply predetermined solutions. He will have to be flexible and see what will work.

I, for one, find refreshing what I believe will be his cool objectivity and eye to what’s needed rather than to group self-interest and to maintaining a guilty status quo. It’s cheering that he managed his way through the corruption of Chicago politics and managed not only to make a difference but emerge unscathed. As he takes on the monumental failures he must now address, I hope that he maintains his perspective, sets aside the unworkable ideologies and self-delusion that have marked the past administration, and gets us all back on track. He’s about the only one tough and detached enough who can do it. ++

“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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