Hope

February 24th, 2009

Obama will have a word with Congress in a few hours, and we’ll peek in — it’s touted as a mini-State of the Nation speech. Talking heads are signaling that they think it will be Reagan-esque — i.e., somber but inspiring us forward.

Which got me thinking about Ron — what always comes up in my brain is a collage of the 70s … Muskrat Love and all that … interspersed with movie credits. Ron was an actor, first and foremost; he sited Kings Row, a depressing 1942 offering in which he emoted more than usual, as his favorite role; the critics weren’t impressed. Ron was a passable actor, but he was a calculated personality; knew how to use PR for his own benefit better than anybody.

St. Ronnie was an Aquarian — cool is understating; my relative, who was his attaché as governor, and Pentagon liaison during his presidency, says that in all those years he never called him by his name. Ron had the detachment thing going for him, and the PR skills to push his personality and agenda.

I also can’t think of Ron without noting that moment in which he broke the back of unions with his replacement of the air traffic controllers — and began the steady drip-drip-drip of deregulation that got us in this pitiful mess. Ask Sully, our Hero of the Hudson, how that’s played for him; he testified to Congress that experienced pilots need to find other work … and are doing so in droves. Thank Ron, if you happen to catch him on late night TV — B- actor, and Father of our current economy.

Our new Prez has the Aquarian thing going for him too [Jupiter in the 12th and Rising;] but his presidency is not so calculated … IMHO … as organic. There have been some before him like that … the ones who approach politics as a function of their own spirit … and you can’t dodge the glamour of their names: Lincoln, FDR [Aquarians, both.]

I’ll confess I get miffed with the Lefty’s regarding their drumbeat of cynicism over these first few weeks and what he’s left out — look, we’re talking about politicians, here. How many of the politicians we see on TV on a daily basis are in the pocket of the Illuminati [for lack of a better term; you define it] and being pushed forward with marching orders, Dem OR Pub? If you were taking that on … not one of them, but aware of them … how would you proceed?

I suppose that’s the question of the day — and only you have the answer. Is he one of them … or one of us?

Unless we can get a heart response on that one, we will play the old “us/them” tapes ad infinitum, and deliver ourselves into the hands of those Big Guns mentioned above, who thrill at distraction and in-fighting.

I’m content to wait and see how this shakes out before blasting Obama on what he isn’t doing — while we wait, here are some reads that tell you what he IS doing … and your Progressive hearts will be pleased.

I don’t know what the Prez will say tonight, but it will be worth hearing; as well, every piece below is worth a quick scan and/or careful read.

Organic. Give it time.

Jude

Obama And Michelle Ask Progressive Groups For Help Driving White House Agenda
Greg Sargent, WhoRunsGov

US Troops To Leave Iraq By August 2010: Officials
PAMELA HESS and ANNE GEARAN, AP
February 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — The United States plans to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by August 2010, 19 months after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, according to administration officials. The withdrawal plan would fulfill one of Obama’s central campaign pledges, albeit a little more slowly than he promised. He said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, roughly one brigade a month from the time of his inauguration.

The officials said they expect Obama to make the announcement this week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public.

The U.S. military will leave behind a residual force, between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, to continue advising and training Iraqi security forces, the two officials said. Also staying beyond the 19 months will be intelligence and surveillance specialists and their equipment, including unmanned aircraft, they said.

A further withdrawal will take place before December 2011, the period by which the U.S. agreed with Iraq to remove all American troops.

A senior White House official said Tuesday that Obama is at least a day away from making a final decision. He further said an announcement on Wednesday was unlikely, but he said that Obama could discuss Iraq during a trip to North Carolina on Friday.

About 142,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, roughly 14 brigades, about 11,000 above the total in Iraq when President George W. Bush announced in January 2007 that he would “surge” the force to put down the insurgency. He sent an additional 21,000 combat troops to Baghdad and Anbar province.

Although the number of combat brigades has dropped from 20 to 14, the U.S. has increased the number of logistical and other support troops. A brigade is usually about 3,000 to 5,000 troops.

Obama’s campaign promise to withdraw troops in 16 months was based on a military estimate on what would be an orderly pace of removing troops, given the logistical difficulties of removing so many people and tons of equipment, a U.S. military official said.

The 19-month strategy is a compromise between commanders and advisers who are worried that security gains could backslide in Iraq and those who think the bulk of U.S. combat work is long since done.

The White House considered at least two other options to withdraw combat forces _ one that followed Obama’s 16-month timeline and one that stretched withdrawal over 23 months, the AP reported earlier this month.

Some U.S. commanders have spoken more optimistically in recent months about prospects for reducing the force. Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, who commands U.S. forces in central and southern Iraq, told reporters earlier this month that he believed the gains in stability in that area were now irreversible.

According to officials, Obama had requested a range of options from his top military advisers, including one that would have withdrawn troops in 16 months. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had recently forwarded withdrawal alternatives to the White House for Obama’s consideration.

In addition to the U.S. troops to be withdrawn, there is a sizable cadre of contractors who provide services to them who would pack their bags as well. There were 148,050 defense contractor personnel working in Iraq as of December, 39,262 of them U.S. citizens.

There are more than 200 U.S. military installations in Iraq. According to Army officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office, it can take up to two months to shut down small outposts that hold up to 300 troops. Larger entrenched facilities, like Balad Air Base, could take up to 18 months to close, according to the GAO.

As of Monday, at least 4,250 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. More than 31,000 have been injured.

Congress has approved more than $657 billion so far for the Iraq war, according to a report last year from the Congressional Research Service. ++

Associated Press writers Robert Burns, Lolita C. Baldor, Steven Hurst, Anne Flaherty, Richard Lardner and Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report.

OBAMA’S HEALTH CARE PLAN EXPECTS AN INDIVIDUAL MANDATE
Ezra Klein, American Prospect
2/14/09

I’ve now been able to confirm with multiple senior administration sources that the health care proposal in Obama’s budget will have a mandate. Sort of.

Here’s how it will work, according to the officials I’ve spoken to. The budget’s health care section is not a detailed plan. Rather, it offers financing — though not all — and principles meant to guide the plan that Congress will author. The details will be decided by Congress in consultation with the administration.

One of those details is “universal” health care coverage.

That word is important: The Obama campaign’s health care plan was not a universal health care plan. It was close to it. It subsidized coverage for millions of Americans and strengthened the employer-based system. The goal, as Obama described it, was to make coverage “affordable” and “available” to all Americans.

But it did not make coverage universal. Affordability can be achieved through subsidies. But without a mandate for individuals to purchase coverage or for the government to give it to them, there was no mechanism for universal coverage. It could get close, but estimates were that around 15 million Americans would remain uninsured. As Jon Cohn wrote at the time, “without a mandate, a substantial portion of Americans [will] remain uninsured.”

The budget — and I was cautioned that the wording “is changing hourly” — will direct Congress to “aim for universality.” That is a bolder goal than simple affordability, which can be achieved, at least in theory, through subsidies.

Universality means everyone has coverage, not just the ability to access it. And that requires a mechanism to ensure that they seek it.

Administration officials have been very clear on what the inclusion of “universality” is meant to communicate to Congress. As one senior member of the health team said to me, “[The plan] will cover everybody. And I don’t see how you cover everybody without an individual mandate.” That language almost precisely echoes what Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus said in an interview last summer. “I don’t see how you can get meaningful universal coverage without a mandate,” he told me. Last fall, he included an individual mandate in the first draft of his health care plan.

The administration’s strategy brings them into alignment with senators like Max Baucus. Though they’re not proposing an individual mandate in the budget, they are asking Congress to fulfill an objective that they expect will result in Congress proposing an individual mandate. And despite the controversy over the individual mandate in the campaign, they will support it. That, after all, is how you cover everybody.

The reliance on Congress also helps the administration overcome the hangover from the campaign. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton attacked Obama’s health care plan for lacking a mandate and, thus, not covering every American. “If you don’t start with the goal of covering everybody,” Clinton said, “you’ll never get there.” In reply, the Obama team struck back with charges that Clinton would “force people to get health insurance” and require “harsh, stiff penalties on those who don’t purchase it.”

But even in the heat of the campaign, Obama’s advisers sought to quietly signal their candidate’s openness to an individual mandate. “The fact is,” said David Cutler, the Harvard health economist who served as one of Obama’s key health care advisers, “the policy differences on the mandate issue aren’t that large at all.

Senator Obama believes they’re an option down the road, if other approaches don’t work.” And administration insiders then and now emphasized that the Obama campaign didn’t start the mandate fight: They felt blindsided by the attacks and compelled to respond in kind. But it was a question of politics, not of principle. In principle, they were open to a mandate if they could be convinced that it was superior policy and superior politics.

Evidently, they’re convinced. ++

Harvard expert nominated for key Pentagon post
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe
February 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama late this afternoon nominated Harvard
professor Ashton B. Carter, a leading authority on arms control, to take on a surprising new role, according to top administration officials — as the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.

The choice of Carter to run the office that oversees hundreds of billions of dollars for new weapons and research — and the focus of intense lobbying by defense firms, retired generals, and members of Congress — has been rumored for weeks. And word of his pending nomination has already sparked concern within the defense industry and some of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

But that may be exactly what Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates want.

Unlike most of his predecessors selected to be under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, Carter has no professional ties to America’s arms makers or manufacturing industry, nor has he spent his career in government procurement. Instead, from his perch at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Carter has been criticizing the Pentagon for buying too many armaments it doesn’t need, decrying what he calls a lack of discipline and “failure to take account of cost growth in weapons systems and defense services.”

A trained scientist with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a degree in Medieval history, Carter’s advocates say the long-time Harvard professor and national security specialist is being chosen because his combination of technical expertise and knowledge of defense strategy will be needed to make what Gates calls “difficult choices” about which weapons programs to invest in and which ones to terminate.

“He is not being brought in to help the defense industry thrive,” said Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank. “He is being brought in to decide what we need and what we can do without.”

At a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House today, Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee last year, highlighted serious cost overruns in the Pentagon budget as part of cutting the federal deficit, and said “tough decisions” on procurement need to be made as the country also pays for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“This is going to be one of our highest priorities,” Obama replied.

Almost immediately after rumors surfaced that Carter was being considered for the high-profile job, Pentagon contractors and military procurement officials began waging a whisper campaign to raise doubts about the choice.

Some of them contend that Carter requires a special waiver from Obama in order to hold the post, citing an obscure law that asserts the candidate should have acquisition experience. (By contrast, the White House had to grant an ethics waiver to allow William Lynn III to become Gates’s deputy because he was so close to the industry, having been a lobbyist for Waltham-based Raytheon.)

One former Pentagon acquisition chief and industry executive said he
believes such experience is crucial to doing an effective job. “Having been in a factory and understanding the development process is what we were looking for,” said the former official, who asked not to be identified because he was criticizing a presidential appointee.

But former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who drew up the original
qualifications for the post as a member of the so-called Packard Commission in the 1980s, believes the language is being misused by those opposed to Carter’s nomination and who fear he will buck the status quo.

The intent, he said, was to ensure the job wasn’t filled by a political ally
of the president with little or no experience in military matters, said
Perry, who hired Carter for a top Pentagon policy position in the 1990s.
“Having held that job and supervised two different people who had that job I think I am pretty qualified to say who is qualified,” Perry said in an
interview. “My judgment is that a waiver is not required for Ash.”

His mini-biography, provided by the White House, is below:

Dr. Ashton Carter, Nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Department of Defense

Carter, a physicist and current Chair of the International & Global Affairs
faculty at the Kennedy School, served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1993 to 1996. He directed military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; was instrumental in removing all nuclear weapons from the territories of Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Belarus; directed the establishment of defense and intelligence relationships with the countries of the former Soviet Union when the Cold War ended; and participated in the negotiations that led to the deployment of Russian troops as part of the Bosnia Peace Plan Implementation Force. Dr. Carter managed the multi-billion dollar Cooperative Threat Reduction (Nunn-Lugar) program to support elimination of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of the former Soviet Union, including the secret removal of 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Kazakstan in the operation code-named Project Sapphire. Dr. Carter also directed the Nuclear Posture Review and oversaw the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) Counterproliferation Initiative. He directed the reform of DOD’s national security export controls. In 1997 Dr. Carter co-chaired the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group with former CIA Director John M. Deutch, which urged greater attention to terrorism. From 1998 to 2000, he was deputy to William J. Perry in the North Korea Policy Review and traveled with him to Pyongyang. In 2001-2002, he served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism and advised on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Carter was twice awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award given by the Department. In addition to his current position at the Kennedy School, Carter is Co-Director (with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry) of the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration of Harvard and Stanford Universities.

++

Will Obama Cross The ‘Reefer Rubicon’?
Froma Harrop, via Cagle Post
2/17/2009

The War on Drugs is ridiculous, behold the storm over Michael Phelps’
partaking of marijuana, an illegal substance that at least two presidents
have used. It is tragic, witness the raging gang violence along the Mexican border. Whether the Obama administration will downgrade the War on Drugs - or even better, call it off - remains to be seen.

But Obama’s evident plan to make Gil Kerlikowske his “drug czar” (director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy) offers hope for more enlightened policy. As Seattle’s police chief, Kerlikowske presided over a city that had virtually decriminalized small-scale possession of marijuana.

The War on Drugs is obscenely expensive. It enriches criminals and
terrorists. And it messes up our foreign policy. Meanwhile, drugs grow ever cheaper and more potent.

While ending the war draws support from many political quarters, the broader public is hesitant to join in, especially when it comes to hard drugs. But polls show Americans more accepting of marijuana (perhaps because nearly half over the age of 12 say they’ve tried it). So easing up on marijuana would be the best place to start.

Kerlikowske has never revealed his inner thoughts on the subject, notes Norm Stamper, who preceded him as Seattle’s police chief and now backs legalizing all drugs. But Seattle’s casual attitude toward marijuana, verging on open embrace, is world famous, and on this score, Kerlikowske has gone with the flow.

A high point of Seattle’s social calendar is Hempfest. The marijuana
celebration draws over 150,000 attendees in August. The hundreds of police who cover Hempfest pay no mind to the pot consumption, which is open and heavy.

“The officers would much rather police Hempfest than (Seattle’s) Mardi
Gras,” Stamper told me. Hempfest is a peaceful gathering, while the Mardi Gras activities can turn ugly from alcohol-fueled aggression.

In 2003, Seattle voters approved a measure that makes arrests for possessing small amounts of marijuana the lowest police priority - lower than jaywalking. Washington State approved medical marijuana 10 years ago.

Is there a more absurd development than Mexican drug lords’ decision to
start growing pot in the United States, so as to avoid the hassle at the
border? Marijuana is now the biggest cash crop in 12 states.

What does Obama think of all this? In 2004, he backed federal
decriminalization of pot before an audience at Northwestern University.

But the closer Obama moved toward the White House, the more he fudged his views. In 2007, MSNBC moderator Tim Russert asked Democratic primary candidates whether they supported decriminalizing marijuana. No one raised a hand except Obama, who did so halfway, then pulled his hand down.

Days after the inauguration, federal agents raided several medical marijuana dispensaries in California, which legalized doctor-prescribed pot in 1996.

The administration’s out-of-the-gate response was, “The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws.”

Given the economic crisis, few expect Obama to spend political capital
crossing “the Reefer Rubicon,” as Allen St. Pierre, head of NORML, puts it. NORML advocates for legalizing marijuana.

Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is loath to hand talking points to
Republican cultural warriors. And though House Speaker Nance Pelosi hails from pot-friendly San Francisco, she too is staying away from the issue.

“Even best friends like (Massachusetts Rep.) Barney Frank say, ‘Cool your jets,’” St. Pierre told me.

Nonetheless, Obama’s choice of Kerlikowske as drug czar is seen as
encouraging. “There really is a massive real-world difference between this man and Walters,” St. Pierre said, referring to John Walters, Bush’s
enthusiastic Drug War general.

Will Obama cross the Reefer Rubicon? Not anytime soon. But he will almost certainly move America closer to the shoreline. ++

Nations to Write Treaty Cutting Mercury Emissions
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
Saturday, February 21, 2009

More than 140 countries have agreed to negotiate a legally binding treaty aimed at slashing the use of the metal mercury, with the goal of reducing people’s exposure to a toxin that hampers brain development among infants and young children worldwide.

The agreement, announced at a high-level United Nations meeting of environmental ministers in Nairobi yesterday came after Obama administration officials reversed U.S. policy and embraced the idea of joining in a binding pact. Once the administration said it was reversing the course set by President George W. Bush, China, India and other nations also agreed to endorse the goal of a mandatory treaty.

The Bush administration had said it preferred to push for voluntary reductions in mercury emissions because the process of negotiating a treaty would be long and cumbersome.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environmental Program, said yesterday’s announcement marks the culmination of a seven-year effort to address a significant environmental and public health problem.

“Only a few weeks ago, nations remained divided on how to deal with this major public health threat which touches everyone in every country of the world,” Steiner said. “Today, the world’s environment ministers, armed with the full facts and full choices, decided the time for talking was over — the time for action on this pollution is now.”

Formal negotiations will begin late this year, and U.N. officials hope to conclude the talks by 2013. The White House issued a statement saying a future treaty would use “a combination of legally binding and voluntary commitments” to cut mercury emissions from industrial processes as well as coal-fired power plants and small-scale mining.

“The United States will play a leading role in working with other nations to craft a global, legally binding agreement that will prevent the spread of mercury into the environment and improve the health of workers, pregnant women and children throughout the world,” said Nancy Sutley, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in the statement.

A range of industrial activities, including the production of chlorine and the burning of coal, release mercury, which then falls to the earth and the sea in precipitation. The neurotoxin accumulates in fish and marine mammals in the form of methylmercury, which poses a threat to humans when consumed.

While the majority of mercury exposure in the United States stems from non-domestic emissions, all 50 states have issued mercury contamination advisories for fish in their waters. Marine mammals eaten by native Arctic peoples, such as pilot and beluga whales, have mercury concentrations that exceed recommended levels.

Environmentalist Susan Egan Keane, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council who attended the Nairobi session, called the agreement “an amazing and astonishing turn of events.”

“For six or seven years, the Bush administration had absolutely blocked any attempt to create a legally binding instrument,” Keane said. “The Obama administration, within three or four weeks of inauguration, was able to put that into reverse.”

Jeff Holmstead, who formerly worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and now represents U.S. utilities and refineries as the head of Bracewell & Giuliani’s environmental strategies group, praised the decision even as he warned that some nations may balk at making the kind of reductions from power plants that America has already achieved.

“Although it may take time to negotiate a workable international treaty, it is clear that mercury is a global issue that will require meaningful and enforceable commitments from developing and developed nations alike — much like efforts to deal with climate change,” Holmstead said.

In an interview earlier this month, Steiner said the agreement “will be a major, confidence-building boost for not only the chemicals and health agenda but right across the environmental challenges of our time, from biodiversity loss to climate change.” ++

Clooney: W.H. to appoint Darfur envoy
CAROL E. LEE, Politico
2/23/09

Actor George Clooney emerged from an Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama Monday night to say the White House will appoint an envoy to Darfur, the Sudanese region ravaged by war and famine.

“They said they would appoint a full-time, high-level envoy that would report directly to the White House,” Clooney told reporters. “This would be a huge policy step.”

Of the Obama administration’s commitment to Darfur, Clooney said, “It’s good to hear because there was some concern that this could fall off the radar.”

The White House didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment on Clooney’s remarks — which amounted to a highly unconventional, and seemingly ad-hoc way of revealing Obama’s thinking about such a key foreign policy decision.

Clooney, who has traveled to the region repeatedly, said the administration “assured me that Darfur is one of a small handful of foreign policy reviews being taken at the senior-most level.”

In separate meetings with Obama, then Vice President Joe Biden, Clooney asked them to make Darfur one of their top priorities and to appoint an envoy. “They assured me and wanted me to assure the rest of whoever it is that is listening that this is high on their agenda,” Clooney said.

The actor said his visit to the White House came as the International Criminal Court is expected to indict Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir. “You have to make it known that the actions of this government are not acceptable,” he said.

Clooney, who recently visited the region with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, said of the trip, “It was enlightening in a lot of ways.”

He said a U.S. envoy is a pivotal step toward turning around the situation in Darfur, but added, “It’s a difficult situation. It’s not going to get much better for a long time.”

Asked if he discussed any other foreign policy issues with the president or vice president, Clooney laughed. “No, I’m not there as some policy nut,” he said. “I was just there to tell them what I saw and hope that there was some way that I could amplify anything that they were doing.” ++

America’s New Shrink
Chin up, everyone. This president is well poised to bring us back from the brink.
Jonathan Alter, NEWSWEEK issue dated Mar 2, 2009

If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”

For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while. Every day seems to bring bad news, with more on the way. Will commercial real estate crash next? Is General Motors toast? Dow 5,000, anyone?

When President Obama was sworn in, the stock market dropped. When he signed the largest economic recovery package in American history last week, the Dow plunged nearly 300 points. His widely panned bank rescue plan and even his better-received housing rescue plan both laid eggs on the Street.

Obama says he doesn’t worry too much about short-term market swoons, and he’s right not to. Who elected greedy gamblers to represent us? But the market is now based less on assessments of specific companies than on reaction to the federal government. And that reaction, cascading down to Main Street, is a fair reflection of the nation’s pessimistic mood. The new president is popular and refreshing, but still well short of transformative. For all of the legislative achievements of his first month in office, Americans have not yet had their faith in the future restored.

What’s a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he’ll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that’s true.

Conservatives smell blood. The Republican National Committee issued a press release saying Obama’s first month was all about “wasteful spending, failed bipartisanship and questionable ethics.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise. The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

But that still doesn’t make anyone feel any better. The price of lowered expectations is heightened anxiety. Invoking a potential “catastrophe” if his recovery bill wasn’t adopted may have been savvy short-term politics, and even accurate Keynesian economics, but it didn’t do much for our nerves. Nor did the efforts of Republicans to reduce the size of the stimulus to the point where most economists say it won’t be a strong-enough jolt.

We all know that nothing will improve until the arteries of credit are unclogged, but both the old and new Treasury secretaries botched their first attempts at the procedure. Worse, Tim Geithner is pooh-poohing temporary federal takeovers of some banks, arguing that “governments are terrible managers of bad assets.”

This attitude ignores history and delays the inevitable. During the 1980s, the federal Resolution Trust Corporation did a fine job selling off the diseased assets of the savings-and-loan industry. Now Geithner and Obama should be preparing the financial world for something similar with banks. Nationalization? Perish the word, not the thought. When Franklin Roosevelt closed the banks in 1933, he festively called it a “bank holiday,” and the bank receivers assigned to shutter some and take over others were dubbed “conservers.” Obama and his message mavens still haven’t found the language to frame their plans and lift our sights.

So why do I still think Barack Obama has a good chance of restoring confidence and pulling us back from the brink? Why do I figure Joe Biden had it about right when he said in his inimitably indiscreet way that their chances of failure were about 30 percent, which leaves a healthy 70 percent chance of success?

Because my take on Obama, based on conversations with him and his team stretching back more than four years and extending into the White House, is that he has a firm grasp of the psychological and substantive challenges of the presidency. Equally important, his 2008 campaign proved that he possesses a superior sense of timing. He knows that now is not the moment to cheerlead, not when the financial players are lying dazed on the field. There will be time for that, when the banks have been “restructured” (see, that sounds better than “nationalized”) and the credit starts flowing again.

The psychodynamics of the recession aren’t hard to fathom. The people need a vision. They need to see that the president is on their side (which is why he now spends a day a week on the road). And like seriously ill patients, they need a clear yet flexible action plan that takes them beyond blind optimism to well-founded hope.

The critical element, of course, is confidence. Leadership in war is mostly about concrete tactical and strategic decisions. Leadership in a peacetime crisis also involves making the right calls on policy—but at bottom, it’s dependent on a subtle understanding of how to make people feel better so that they invest in the future.

Too much confidence makes people and nations hubristic, while those on the receiving end feel conned. Too little confidence breeds timidity and uncertainty, which can be fatal. It doesn’t take a shrink to know that finding the right balance is the key to a rounded life, private or public.

For years the country has lacked that balance. Financial and governing elites, of both parties, were too confident for too long in the unerring genius of markets. American consumers somehow came to believe that plastic is a convertible currency and that there’s nothing wrong with buying a half-million-dollar house when you only make $40,000 a year.

When the Reckoning came, nearly everyone started moving too far to the other extreme: no borrowing, just burrowing. Hunker down with a DVD and some comfort food, if you can afford it. This is rational enough; consumers can’t spend money they no longer have and won’t have any time soon. But the effect is a vicious blow to our sense of self.

We know that confidence can be wonderfully contagious. But it has to be merited and genuine. After the excruciatingly close 2000 election, President Bush pretended that he had won a big mandate. This was understandable politically, but artificial. The cocky Texas affect was a cover for deep familial insecurity, but it worked until Americans ran into trouble. When Bush said things were going well (”Heck of a job, Brownie”) and the public knew objectively that they weren’t, he was done.

It’s early yet and much can change, but the new president is showing signs of carrying himself in a more naturally confident way, with the right blend of traits. He’s bold enough to add a couple of zeroes to the conversation about spending, but humble enough to utter those three most unpresidential words: “I screwed up.”

Obama’s confidence is the product of an unusual combination of good early parenting by his mother and grandmother and his own search for racial identity. “The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment,” he writes in “Dreams From My Father” of a moment of painful clarity when he was in high school. His white relatives, he now realized, could never understand him. “I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.”

After this confusing period, raising himself—and learning who he was—became an enormous source of self-confidence. Faced with fitting in nowhere, he learned to fit in everywhere, or at least make an attempt to understand whatever new context presented itself. One critical inheritance was his mother’s anthropological eye (she studied Indonesian culture). This open and nonjudgmental frame of reference—and his own writerly detachment—give him a rare mental buffer zone that is a great asset in the hurly-burly of the presidency.

From the time I first met Obama nearly a decade ago, all his people have said essentially the same thing about him: the boss doesn’t overreact or underreact. He’s the Goldilocks man—not too hot, not too cold. When Tom Daschle’s cabinet nomination blew up, sending Washington into a tizzy, he stayed calm and blamed himself instead of lashing out. But he also vowed to travel incessantly and escape what he considers to be the trivial intrigues of the capital.

Obama gets annoyed a little more than his staff would like to admit, especially when his sense of control is threatened by self-promoters or people talking out of school. But the public image of an unflappable and even-tempered president is not at odds with the private Obama.

All this offers the president the chance to redefine the classic political confidence man, the fast-talking professor Harold Hill (from “The Music Man”) who trades on people’s faith for his own benefit. Obama is playing a higher-order confidence game that’s more akin to the one played by Joe Mantegna in “House of Games” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” by Chicago-born playwright David Mamet. Whether selling real estate or anything else, Mantegna insists that he is offering his trust and confidence in the potential buyer, instead of asking the buyer to trust him.
Similarly, Obama wants voters to judge his performance in office instead of asking them to just trust him. Of course to start the performance, ahem, he needs the money upfront.

At a stop in Florida in mid-February, Obama said publicly what he has confided to aides since early in the 2008 campaign: he could be a one-term president. “I’m not going to make any excuses,” he told the crowd. “If stuff doesn’t work out and people don’t feel like I’ve led the country in the right direction, then you’ll have a new president.”

This is an inspired psychological game because it doesn’t sound like a game. It sounds like real accountability for results. But Obama is slyly defining downward the standards of judging him, so that if 3.5 million jobs are created or “saved” (whatever that means) and the economy stops its free fall, he can look successful even as hard times continue.

The secret is to stay always in motion, dealing the cards instead of having them dealt to you. During the transition, Obama developed a day-by-day plan for his debut, and he’s executing it well. In his first month, the list of achievements is impressive: universal health insurance for children; more pay equity for women; higher fuel-economy standards for autos; the first major investment in inter-urban trains; electronic medical records; hundreds of new charter schools; new money for college loans; help to homeowners facing foreclosures, to mention only a few.

The GOP did a good job trivializing the stimulus, but Obama may have the last laugh. The package is so big, and stretches across so many states, that it provides him at least four years of photo ops as Daddy O on tour, bringing home the jobs right in your local media market. It was hardly a coincidence that video of bridge repair in Missouri began airing only moments after the president signed the bill.

Obama is betting on two things: first, that people are so tired of being bamboozled that a little straight talk about their woes will make them feel more in control, the prerequisite for genuine confidence. And second, that he’ll get props for trying, that the very effort of riding events instead of letting them ride him will at least offer the illusion of mastery. Once these mental pieces are fastened in place and we’re fully “in recovery,” to use therapy lingo, the enduring problems won’t seem so terrifying anymore.

Obama knew last fall that he would have to move swiftly and pragmatically to confront the crisis. Abraham Lincoln is his favorite president, but his model right now is FDR, whose New Deal was based on his faith in “bold, persistent experimentation.”

“Here’s the bottom line,” Obama told a group of columnists on the day his recovery program was approved. “We will do what works. It is going to take time to lay out every aspect of this plan, and there are going to be certain aspects of any plan which will require re-evaluation and then have some experimentation— if that doesn’t work, then you do something else.”

Obama has the chops to sell that approach, starting with his already-proven ability to be the nation’s teacher in chief. This was FDR’s secret weapon on the radio, and it can be Obama’s on TV and the Web. He’s the smart, cool instructor, trusted by the class to explain something important even if a little complicated. All that’s lacking is a bit more humor and a few catchphrases to simplify the message.

Obama is rightly allergic to canned sound bites, which he finds phony. But as Ronald Reagan showed (”Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), the right one-liners and vivid metaphors can help communicate complex ideas. They also generate confidence-building “razzle-dazzle,” as Billy Flynn, the character played by Richard Gere, puts it in the musical named for Obama’s hometown. The Windy City president could use a little less University of Chicago and a little more “Chicago.”

Even without razzle-dazzle, Obama will need all of his theatrical skills. He must be like one of those performers who balances a dozen spinning plates at once. If he steps too abruptly toward one plate, another might crash. Nearly every decision can shatter on impact.

Inside the White House, the central tension so far is between speed and thought. Rahm Emanuel coauthored a book in 2006 that divided Washington into hacks and wonks. The hacks want speed—get something done ASAP. They figure any problems can be fixed later. The wonks (who recently showed up to a White House meeting wearing beanies after Obama dubbed them “propeller heads”) want policy implications carefully weighed from the outset.

Confidence depends on the right balance between the two camps. If the wonks keep the hacks from moving quickly, political victories (and renewed confidence) will be delayed. But if hasty action leads to sloppy, half-baked solutions (as in the initial Geithner bank-bailout plan), confidence will erode.

Witness the speed with which the recovery package was pushed through by Obama aides who had just found out where the bathrooms were located. This raises the odds that some of the money will be spent poorly. We’ll know soon if the White House’s special auditor teams and new crowdsourced accountability system (run through Recovery.gov) can really work, and if Obama will be praised for identifying waste in his program, or crucified for it.

That, in turn, depends partly on how the follow-the-money story plays out on cable TV, a major Washington player nowadays that poses its own trade-offs for the White House. If the president and his people pay too much attention to the Beltway chatter, they’ll get dragged into the same old partisan battles they hope to transcend. But ignoring all the capital noise can leave them flat-footed, as they were for a few days during the stimulus debate. The same thing happened a year ago during the Reverend Wright imbroglio.

So far, the hacks still set the pace. For all the talk of failed bipartisanship, the president has close to complete control of Congress and plans to press the advantage. The longer the recession lasts, the more points Obama will put on the board, because doing nothing amid adversity is not an option, at least not to Democrats. Just as President Eisenhower got education funding and the interstate highway system approved as “national defense,” so Obama will likely package and sell health-care reform, a new energy policy and even national service as “recovery and reinvestment.”

President Obama’s first month in office was bracketed by plane crashes. It’s tempting to ask whether he’ll land our plane safely in the Hudson or crash it into a house in Buffalo. Probably neither. Obama, like most successful presidents, will likely end as he is beginning, with some wins, some losses and some sense that he helped us fly through the turbulence with our heads held high. ++

The Seven Intellecutal Underpinnings of the Obama Code
George Lakoff, BuzzFlash
02/24/2009

Berkeley, CA. - As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?

The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America—a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.

What they miss is the Obama Code. For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious.” Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans—both conservatives and progressives—don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about. The word “code” can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.

1. Values Over Programs

The first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent. Every policy has a material aspect—the nuts and bolts of how it works— plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as “progressive” or “conservative” all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.

The potential pushback will come not just from conservatives who do not share his values, but just as much from progressives who make the mistake of thinking that programs are values and that progressivism is defined by a list of programs. When some of those programs are cut as economically secondary or as unessential, their defenders will inevitably see this as a conservative move rather than a move within an overall moral vision they share with the President.

This separation between values and programs lies behind the president’s pledge to cut programs that don’t serve those values and support those that do — no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President’s idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? — not what political interests?

2. Progressive Values are American Values

President Obama’s second intellectual move concerns what the fundamental American values are. In Moral Politics, I described what I found to be the implicit, often unconscious, value systems behind progressive and conservative thought.

Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy—putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better—what Obama has called an “ethic of excellence” toward creating “a more perfect union” politically.

Historian Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, has shown that those values, beginning with empathy, lie historically behind the human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Obama, in various interviews and speeches, has provided the logical link. Empathy is not mere sympathy.

Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be “our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper”—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world.

The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality — for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: “the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child…”

Responsibility to ourselves and others: “We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world.” The ethic of excellence: “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task.” They define our democracy: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed.”

The same values apply to foreign policy: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” And to religion as well: By quoting language like “our brother’s keeper,” he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better is required.

3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship

The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values—at least on certain issues. Most “conservatives” are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called “partial progressives” sharing Obama’s American values on many issues. Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly I believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values.

Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama’s views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his “courting” of Republican members of Congress. The idea is not to accept conservative moral views, but to find those issues where individual Republicans already share what he sees as fundamentally American values. He has “reached across the aisle” to Richard Luger on nuclear proliferation, but not on economics.

Biconceptualism is central to Obama’s attempts to achieve unity —a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work.

I think Obama is correct about biconceptualism of this sort — at least where the overwhelming proportion of Americans is concerned. When the President spoke at the Lincoln Day dinner recently about sensible Midwestern Republicans, he meant biconceptual Republicans, who are progressive and/or pragmatic on many issues.

But hardcore movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less biconceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hardcore movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks. They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Rush Limbaugh even greater power.

Biconceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure biconceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through biconceptualism.

4. Protection and Empowerment

The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the President’s understanding of government—”not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This depends on what “works” means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation.

The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors.

Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about: it includes education and other forms of infrastructure—roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package. Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn’t been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation’s productivity for many years.

This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties, and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That’s what “works” means—”whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral—and economic—values is fallacious. Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.

With systemic causation goes systemic risk. The old rational actor model taught in economics and political science ignored systemic risk. Risk was seen as local and governed by direct causation, that is, buy short-term individual decisions. The investment banks acted on their own short-term risk, based on short-term assumptions, for example, that housing prices would continue to rise or that bundles of mortgages once secure for the short term would continue to be “secure” and could be traded as “securities.”

The systemic nature of ecological and economic causation and risk have resulted in the twin disasters of global warming and global economic breakdown. Both must be dealt with on a systematic, global, long-term basis. Regulating risk is global and long-term, and so what are required are world-wide institutions that carry out that regulation in a systematic way and that monitor causation and risk systemically, not just locally.

President Obama understands this, though much of the country does not. Part of his challenge will be to formulate policies that carry out these ideas and to communicate these ideas as well as possible to the public.

7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is “contested.” Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other.

I’ve written a whole book, Whose Freedom?, on the word “freedom” as used by conservatives and progressives. In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

For forty years, from the late 1960’s through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

All this is what “change” means. In his policy proposals the President is trying to align his administration’s policies with the fundamental values of the Framers of our Constitution. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic policy, he is realigning our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

It’s Us, Not Just Him

The president is the best political communicator of our age. He has the bully pulpit. He gets media attention from the press. His website is running a permanent campaign, Organizing for Obama, run by his campaign manager David Plouffe. It seeks issue-by-issue support from his huge mailing list. There are plenty of progressive blogs. MoveOn.org now has over five million members. And yet that is nowhere near enough.

The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. The conservative leadership institutes are continuing to turn out thousands of trained conservative spokespeople every year. The conservative apparatus for language creation is still functioning. Conservative talking points are still going out to their network of spokespeople, who still being booked on tv and radio around the country.

About 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever. There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by Right’s enormous megaphone. Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and home states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President’s stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day.

Such national, day-by-day media competition is necessary. Democrats need to build it. Democratic think tanks are strong on policy and programs, but weak on values and vision. Without the moral arguments based on the Obama values and vision, the policymakers will most likely be unable to regularly address both independent voters and the Limbaugh-FoxNews audiences in conservative Republican strongholds.

The president and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources. It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on. If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity. That will make the president’s vision that much harder to carry out.

Summary

The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

The president hasn’t fooled the radical ideological conservatives in Congress. They know progressive values when they see them — and they see them in their own colleagues and constituents too often for comfort. The radical conservatives are aware that this economic crisis threatens not only their political support, but the very underpinnings of conservative ideology itself. Nonetheless, their brains have not been changed by facts. Movement conservatives are not fading away. They think their conservative values are the real American values. They still have their message machine and they are going to make the most of it. The ratings for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are rising. Without a countervailing communications system on the Democratic side, they can create a lot of trouble, not just for the president, not just for the nation, but on a global scale, for the environmental and economic future of the world. ++

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant!

“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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