Even when I'm wrong, I'm right

I am far less pessimistic about the Obama administration than many of my friends. Some have thrown up their hands and gone home. Betrayed by Obama's false start closing Gitmo, delays in improved transparency and ending the role of lobbyists in policy-making, and his baby steps taking on equal rights for gays and lesbians. Some of these folks believed that Obama had a pocket full of magic pixie dust and were convinced we'd all be living in a green-powered, multi-racial, gay-positive utopia by now. We aren't and this group is sitting in their neighborhood Starbucks now moping about it. Others are just pissed at him, annoyed by his timidity and his search for bi-partisanship with an opposition that openly admits its only goal is to see him fail. The thing I can't shake: Why can't he understand that anti-gay policies are a civil-rights problem? Violence committed against gays and lesbians is now considered a hate crime. That's a nice step forward. But why do queer Americans have to die to get federal protection?

Yet, in general, I still think the Obama administration has its heart in the right place and is playing a (perhaps overly-) safe political game that promises the achievement of many dearly hoped-for policy objectives down the road. I think it might be time to replace Rahm Emanuel, maybe after getting health insurance reform passed. Emanuel has a reputation for being a bully and an arm-twister. Good qualities in politics. But I don't think he is aspirational, to use a new-agey term. He'd be a better fit in a Hillary Clinton-led White House, where the only thing that would matter is accummulating wins, and actually accomplishing social change would be a secondary concern. We need someone who can twist arms and wants to change the world.

I still profoundly believe some things I said in my series of now discredited, overly euphoric post-election postings:

I see people turning away from a party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems.

And:

Americans have rejected the idea that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money. We can’t sit by while a major American city disappears under flood waters we knew were coming. Government should facilitate scientific research, not suppress it. It should hold our soldiers back, until all efforts to avoid conflict have failed, and never throw them into a slow-motion massacre in pursuit of oil or to establish the validity of a new strategic blueprint.

I still think these comments are right on target. The challenge is beating back (or ignoring) nonsensical bull-shit like this week's tea-bagger march on Washington. 4,500 angry white people who got rides to D.C. on buses paid for by Republican and industry-funded astro-turf organizations does not constitute a "revolution," nor is it anything to "fear," despite what Michele Bachmann says. The overwhelming evidence - from polling and from last year's election results - is that people want responsive government.

The challenge, of course, is engaging public opinion and taking command of the debate (or debates, since we are are talking about several policy areas, from cap and trade to health insurance reform). My number one question: what good was it to build a fifty state strategy in 2008, if we are just going to let the machinery sit idle now? And related: why bring all those teenagers and college kids into the process, and mobilize unions and the poor, and then send them home after you win? I know it's bad strategy in American politics to draw your main examples from Fidel Castro's Cuba, but here goes. In 1961 Cuba mobilized a quarter of a million young people and asked them to eradicate illiteracy across the island. In one year they taught nearly a million Cubans how to read. The Cuban government (and, okay, the Communist Party) didn't ignore those young people after the literacy campaign, sending them home to get back to the business of playing Guitar Hero (or whatever the equivalent was in Kennedy-era Cuba). In fact, efforts were made to preserve their enthusiasm, to channel it, to organize the students, to turn them lose on the nation's problems. Those young literacy workers became the backbone of the revolutionary movement, and became doctors and teachers and engineers and helped transform Cuba.

Now if anyone in the Obama administration says out loud, in public, "We should be more like Castro's Cuba!", it's all over. But - pssst, Obama team - no one can hear you if you just think it, and then act accordingly. People influence people. Take the people who were energized by the Obama campaign and do something with them. So far, the Obama White House's efforts to do so are pathetic.

Republicans Resurgent?

Tuesday's election results were discouraging. But not for the reasons the Republican Party, or Fox News, or indeed most media outlets want you to believe. The results don't demonstrate the resurgence of the Republican Party. In fact, the special election to fill the vacant seat for the U.S. House of Representatives held in New York's 23rd congressional district showed how bad things are in the Republican Party. The teabagger candidate, Doug Hoffman, backed by Sarah Palin and the right-wing of her party, lost to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, who will be the first Democrat to occupy the seat since 1993. The Hoffman-Owens match-up was set up when Hoffman drove the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. What happened in New York's 23rd district will happen again and again in the next few years - extreme right-wing ideologues will run in primaries, or as third party candidates, driving Republican politicians from the political process and turning off independents. The Republican party has become a species that eats its own kind. Characteristically, according to science, animals that eat their young tend to be lower order beasties. When mammals engage in cannibalism, it is usual because they are in great distress, pushed into eating their own because of scarcity or other environmental stresses. That's the case here. My last posting compared Bushies to reptiles. The rest of the party may not have descended as far down the de-evolutionary ladder, but Republicans are clearly in trouble.

What can we learn from Republican wins in the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the defeat of a same-sex marriage measure in Maine? Simple: If we don't turn out, Democrats lose. We saw a remarkable number of voters turn out a year ago to elect Barack Obama. I was part of that, participating in get out the vote efforts in Indiana - Indiana! - a state Obama just won. This year, all of these voters stayed home. In New Jersey on Tuesday, for example, fewer voters than ever turned out, and the Democratic incumbent, John Corzine, just lost. Corzine had a lot going against him - his state had to cut many services, raise some taxes, and he's a Wall Street big shot in a year Wall Street big shots aren't especially loved. But it's not like he's a black first-term Senator named Barack Hussein Obama. I mean, geez.

I admit, I was inappropriately euphoric after Obama won last year, imagining a transformed political map where Republicans, much like dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic, were left huddled in a few remaining niches, waiting for the glaciers to roll in and their kind to be eradicated forever. But Democrats aren't as relentless as ice ages. We're more like Spring in Chicago. You can't quite be sure we're here.

What happened? I think we forgot the number one lesson from Obama's victory: people influence people. And as I argued a year ago, Democrats need to build a machine that gives the professionals some work to do - both in government and elections - and then asks us to pitch in, influencing those around us and building momentum for change. Instead, what we see from all over is whining. "Obama didn't campaign for us," Democrats in New York cried. Democratic voters reported apathy because Obama hasn't transformed America with his magic. Hey folks: transformative work is done with our hands, not through magic. The difference, I think, is between the Jewish understanding that the world is saved by and through our efforts, and the hopes of messianic religions, that hope for a deity who will arrive and bring about heaven on Earth. My mother-in-law is right: we didn't elect a messiah. GET TO WORK PEOPLE! Show up at the polls. Volunteer for candidates. Donate to elections and political causes you care about. In other words: do everything you did in 2008.

The Yankees won the World Series yesterday. Yeaaaa! I lived in New York for 5 years. I love the Yankees (maybe not as much as the Indians and the White Sox, but a lot). I have friends who hate the Yankees. They despise the fact that the Yankees reload with talent every year. They complain about all the money the team has to spend. Here's what I think is going on: as Democrats, they just don't understand a team that wants to win every year, and is willing to do what is necessary to do it.

Not the Beatles Afterall

My mother-in-law has always thought I believed Obama was a savior of some sort. That's not true. We use language in flexible ways sometimes. You know how you might say to someone, "Oh! You're my savior!", when all they've done is stop to help you fix a flat tire and get your car out of a ditch, when your kids are in the back seat miserable and hungry, and it's getting dark? Obama's that kind of savior, helping us pull the nation out of the ditch the Bush administration steered us into.

The recent reissue of the Beatles albums, vividly remastered for the digital age, has opened up a window to help me describe what I believed about Obama, and what, as his Presidency unfolds over the first year, seems to be a more accurate picture.

What it boils down to is this: Obama is not the Beatles. He's the Kinks. But, although I have friends and nieces and acquaintances who will shout and throw things at me: the Kinks just missed being as great as the Beatles. I just heard a voice in Morningside Heights yell: "What!?" I know others out there are asking: "Are you gosh-darn-it CRAZY!"

Don't come at me with your outraged sensibilities until you walk away, take a deep breath, and listen to the string of albums the Kinks put out between 1966 and 1969: Face to Face, Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Genius. And most of the weight of composing these albums rested on Ray Davies. His brother Dave wrote a few great songs along the way (Death of a Clown, for example), but the best way to understand the situation is this: it would be like John Lennon carrying the songwriting duties of the Beatles without Paul McCartney. George Harrison contributed his share, much like Dave did. I Want to Tell You and Taxman help make Revolver a great album. But strip McCartney's Eleanor Rigby, Good Day Sunshine, and Got to Get You Into My Life from Revolver and the distance between it and Something Else by the Kinks is a matter of taste, not a difference in talent. Quit your belly-aching. It's true. Here's what I am talking about:



Aside from Paul McCartney, and the resources they could command because they were a cultural and commercial phenomenon, the difference between the Beatles and the Kinks was George Martin. Obama's problem is that he hasn't found his George Martin. Who could that be? My candidate: Donna Brazile. I know she has been cast off into the Democratic wilderness, forced to spend time with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings, because she presided over the embarrassment that was the Al Gore campaign. But she is smart, strategically attuned, and commanding. Make her Chief of Staff, and suddenly Shangri-La starts to sound like A Day in the Life.

1967 is commonly understood to be the year the Beatles left their British Invasion rivals in the dust, and in the process redefined what rock and roll musicians were capable of achieving. That was the year they recorded and released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But I would claim, the next year was as important for my argument. Out of all their albums, Sgt. Pepper's was most clearly a product of the Beatles' artistic collaboration with George Martin. The strings, the depth of the recording, with layers upon layers of instrumentation and vocals, the quirky effects that were new to the recording studio: all of these were George Martin's contribution. Sgt. Pepper's, and later Abbey Road, are the albums that give my argument plausibility. Without George Martin, those albums would have never been the albums we cherish. Surely, they would have been remarkable albums, full of thoughtful and thought-provoking songs, but they wouldn't be Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road.

In 1968 the Beatles released the White Album, and the Kinks released The Village Green Preservation Society. The White Album was a double album which, famously, was a sprawling, all-over-the-map grab-bag. Noisy here and there, melancholy in places, outright weird in others. Ray Davies wanted Village Green to be a double album too, but his record company refused. Which tells us something else about why the Beatles were the Beatles: their prominence and commercial clout gave them the chance to do what they wanted.

Obama is more like the Kinks in this way too. He might have been a rock star on the campaign trail, but it has become clear that he is not universally loved, and the opposition party has carefully employed devices to call forth our uncertainties, our fears and our prejudices. Even more certain, he doesn't have the financial or operational resources to do the things he wants. The Bush years left our economy in shambles, the government deeply in debt, and our armed forces bogged down in two unwinnable wars. I made the argument once that Obama offered the promise of a new type of politics, setting aside incremental step-by-step gains for transformational, paradigm-shifting change. That may have been enthusiastic hyperbole on my part. Or I may have been right, but it is now impossible for Obama to move that quickly, since his administration must wade through Bush's wreckage in everything it does. Obama might want to produce the equivalent of a transformative double album, but circumstances will only allow him to slowly grind out more modest policy achievements that, while more limited in their scope, are indispensable and if passed into law will change the lives of those the policies touch.

Neocons everywhere

Just the other day I wrote a hastily tossed off defense of Obama's Peace Prize, where I argued that Obama was an inspired choice, because by turning away from the inherently destabilizing Bush-era foreign policy, which was built on the premise of U.S. dominance in a world lacking any comparable power, Obama has begun to map out a more fluid, engaged, responsive, and - yes, I'll say it - diplomatic strategy. My argument, perhaps not articulated with rhetorical or scholarly precision, was (and is) that we should never aspire to dominate the international system. We can't - the system resists the imposition of order - and we shouldn't - because other actors in the system always seek to discipline any state or actor that seeks to impose its will on the system.

In the last day or two, though, I feel like the neocons, who should have slinked away to hide under the porch after the debacles they have engineered, have taken center stage. John Bolton recently gave a high-profile talk on my campus, and now Charles Krauthammer has published a venomous and deeply misguided new essay in The Weekly Standard.

Let me point out the things that I find inexcusable in the essay, then I'll take on his claims. Krauthammer surrenders any chance he might have had to be taken on simply on the basis of his ideas by carrying forward three parallel efforts that the GOP has been marketing since last summer. By describing Obama's recent overseas visit as a hajj, Krauthammer advances the detestable narrative that Obama is (wink wink) secretly but inescapably a Muslim. Then he reaches all the way back to Obama's speech on race in March of 2008 to re-reposition Obama as an angry black man, and then uses that as a jumping off point to question Obama's patriotism and love for the country he leads. This is political work, not commentary. And it aims to inject more poison into our already venomous national conversation about our way forward out of the mess George Bush left us.

Let's focus on Krauthammer's themes. His core argument is that Obama is choosing to facilitate, even deliberately propel, America's "decline". We stand at a moment in history where, according to Krauthammer, we can choose to retain our influence and authority, or we can surrender our global dominance - and for Krauthammer this also means surrendering our power and security. In Krauthammer's view, Obama is a doing all of this, walking away from our role as the greatest power in the world, giving up our strategic gains, surrendering in the war on terror, abandoning us to harmful forces that seek to destroy our civilization.

Krauthammer argues that the U.S. has a "moral" justification to dominate global affairs. In his view, we guard the door from the wolves who will tear apart civilization. He argues that our global dominance has been benevolent, and a historical accident, resulting from two events, the destruction of the European powers in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This view that our global dominance can be justified on moral grounds links Krauthammer's neocon ambitions to some awful historical precedents - a similar view carried the crusaders to the holy lands 900 years ago, accompanied the colonialization of Africa and the New World, and motivated the Holocaust. Further, any moral claim we might have had we surrendered long ago. After World War II we played the role of a hegemon, supporting the construction of institutions and systems that laid the groundwork for a new system of global monetary policy, trade, and cooperation. All of this work served our own interests, but it also carried the promise of rebuilding a world that had collapsed under two decades of economic chaos and global conflict. But, when confronted with the rising threat of the Soviet Union, we chose to side with dictators around the world, suppressing through our own intervention (in Vietnam most disastrously) or through proxies the genuine aspirations of local populations to build more representative and just systems of government. After the fall of the Soviet Union we had a chance to adopt a braver, more principled foreign policy. But we didn't, walking away from genocides, failing to use our leverage to build sustainable peace in the Middle East, or protect Africans from a slide into dark, dark years, filled with war, famine, disease and misery. Krauthammer's belief is that Obama is walking away from our moral claim to dominate world affairs. The reality is that choice was made long ago.

My argument would be that morality is a peripheral concern in international affairs. Power is what matters. I would love to see the United States use its power to lift up those in poverty, to defend those who are persecuted because they are minorities, to make peace where aggressors make war. I don't want to see America decline, I don't want to see it become less powerful. And neither does Obama. The question isn't: Should we renounce our power in the global system? It is: How should we use that power? And: What is the best way to preserve it? Here is where Krauthammer and his neocon friends are wrong: America's decline will be guaranteed if we continue with the destabilizing foreign policy he advocates. Krauthammer seems to recognize that the geopolitical system has always risen up to punish powers that attempt to dominate. He tries this preposterous bit of sleight of hand:

There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance--as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom. And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.

Well, I don't think I have a shovel big enough to take on that steaming pile of elephant droppings. But I'll try. First of all, what was the Cold War but a historic example in counter-hegemonic confrontation? I'm not picking sides here. I'm not saying the Soviet bloc rose up to oppose our diabolical plans for the world; I think, in fact, our immediate plans after the war aimed at institution building, not wide-scale aggression. My point is there is a triggering mechanism in the system - states with enormous power are viewed with fear and suspicion and counter-hegemonic alliances emerge, formed by the states that bristle at living in the shadow of the hegemon. Secondly, what Krauthammer does here borders on defilement: he disingenuously links Bush-era preventive war unilateralism with the post-World War II "benign" institution-building hegemony that produced the U.N., the IMF and the World Bank. That earlier era of unilateral action was beneficent and widely supported by the major powers. Bush's aggressive and intimidating cowboy foreign policy has been widely opposed. There isn't a thread of continuity joining these two eras, these two fundamentally different efforts to exercise American dominance. To propose this is all part of a single beneficial impulse is laughable.

Finally, his claim that we are a "welcome" "balancer of power" and guarantor of freedom in the Middle East, the Pacific, and Latin America can only be true if you imagine that the grateful royal family in Saudi Arabia somehow reflects the mood of the Islamic world, or ignore the emergence of terrorist networks in Indonesia, or forget about the standing of Hugo Chavez in Latin America. No one salutes Chavez because he is effective - he isn't, for an effective leader Latin Americans look to Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - but powerless countries in South America applaud him for giving the U.S. the finger. America is not, as Krauthammer will want you to believe, well-loved. I suspect the reason there hasn't been a more widespread counter-hegemonic movement is because coordination of such a movement has been extremely difficult. And although it is an unwelcome truth: the radical Islamic movement that engineered 9/11 and much of the chaos and harm that came before and continued after is a counter-hegemonic response. They don't fear our freedom, as George Bush would have had you believe, nor do they aim at destroying our civilization, as Krauthammer argues, they oppose our dominance and our support of reform-resistant dictators throughout the Middle East.

Krauthammer's hysterical fears that Obama is making us less safe have no support in the available evidence. When pressed to produce evidence that Obama's foreign policy has failed, he can't point to a single strategic threat that is more relevant now than before Obama took office. In the end, all he can point to as a meaningful Obama failure is the IOC vote to send the Olympics to Brazil rather than Chicago.

Baffled by Obama's foreign policy, Krauthammer proposes that Obama has been duped into believing an "illusion that human nature has changed;" so we no longer need to be vigilant, we no longer need to protect our borders, we no longer need to invest in defenses. Wherever this Obama doctrine was published, I missed it. In fact, it doesn't exist. It is a fantasy.

Finally, near the end of his essay, Krauthammer gets something right:

The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power.

But he fundamentally misunderstands the implications of this for the U.S. at this point in history. If John McCain had been elected president, and continued Bush's reckless, destabilizing foreign policy, aimed at global dominance, we would been disciplined by a concert of nations, and a patchwork association of non-state actors. Our efforts to dominate the world would have over-extended our forces, drained our resources, and exhausted our resolve. In the Hobbesian world of global politics, our vulnerabilities would have been continuously challenged. Defeat and decline in this McCain-led era, while not inevitable, would, in my opinion, be very likely. No one in the Obama administration is asking us to renounce power, only reshape how we use it. We have a chance to retain our power and influence if we stop trying to rule the world and find ways to use our power intelligently and strategically.

Why do Republicans hate peace?

I learned that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize as I drove my kids to school this morning. The one or two of you who have read more than one or two of my postings might recall that I watched Obama's inaugural address at my son's school. Ellie, my soon to be two-year-old, started at the same school this Fall. I love their school - it is a perfect little glimpse of America's diversity.

I got back to my office and learned that conservative Republicans were already hurling ridicule and scorn at the news. Or worse. Rush Limbaugh, evidently viewing the U.S. as a huge, drooling dog - not really an unfair suggestion - characterized the award as a prize for Obama's efforts to "neuter" America. Michael Steele moaned and whined. Bizarrely, even, the New York Times declared the award "a potential political liability."

This reaction just seemed crazy to me. What kind of country views the awarding of a Peace Prize as a liability? Our country, it turns out. Or at least pockets of it. It seems pretty clear that part of this is politics. The same impulse that encouraged the right to applaud Chicago's Olympic loss, merely because Obama backed it, shaped this response. But there is more here too. This is another reaction by the right to a dim recognition that their world has been snatched from them. The age of America as the playground bully is over. It ended on 9/11, although the Bush administration, and the right, and indeed a large part of the country, didn't see it. Non-state actors, armed with nothing more than box cutters, can commandeer aircraft and turn them into cruise missles. This doesn't mean, as conservatives would have it, that we have a choice between fighting or fading away.

We need a smarter foreign policy, one that is engaged, assertive yet responsive, principled, and realist in a whole new way. In truth, American foreign policy hasn't been realist since the end of the Cold War. Bush's neo-con foreign policy was merely the last phase in an evolution of thought that led us away from realism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have been deluded by the idea that we can remake the world according to our wishes. Realists - best exemplified by Kenneth Waltz - believe that states interact in an environment best described as anarchic. That is, there is no overarching authority, no preexisting hierarchy, no defining orderliness. I haven't been dipping into the pool of readings on the topic lately, but my impression is that realist theory is still working to map out the implications of a post-Soviet world, where America is the stumbling, drunken giant in a world filled with a wide variety of beasts, some faithfully domesticated and others snarling pit-bulls ready to bite into our leg. That image, in my mind, is just about perfect. Let me, in my own misguided way, flesh this out a little.

Classic IR theory might situate the drama of international relations in a weight room. Every guy there - and don't imagine for a minute that the gym has any women around; IR theory is very guy-centric - is trying to bulk up. Some guys are massive, muscle-bound specimens, intimidating in their size, capable of bench-pressing small island nations. Others are 97 pound weaklings, hoping some work on the barbells will yield some results. But the truth is, the big guys are probably going to remain big, and the small guys won't get much bigger.

But the world we live in now is very different. It's as if someone has turned a bestiary loose in the gym. All kinds of beasts are running around. A variety of non-state actors - transnational terrorist groups and warlords - are important now, and we trip over them as we move around. If anything, the environment is more anarchic. But our policy makers haven't fully acknowledged this. To stick with my admittedly awful metaphor, scanning the gym, full of steroids and Red Bull, and seeing the weaklings all around us, we imagined we were the alphas in the room, and guessed that we could have anything we wanted. But we weren't paying attention to the snarling hounds nipping at our ankles.

This is where my metaphor falls apart, but that's OK. I'm sure we were all tired of it. My point is that the international system is still resistant to hierarchy - we can't impose order on it, just design strategies to move through it. The Bushies thought they could march into Iraq - as a first stop on a campaign of global domination - and subordinate its interests - and the interests of its people - to our own. We failed. And the very idea of commanding the world in this way failed too. An Obama foreign policy needs to be realist in the sense that it returns to the idea that international affairs mainly consists of actors with competing interests interacting in a venue where no one sets the rules. And an important part of the game is joining with others - in alliances and less formal agreements - to balance against destabilizing actors. The age of cowboy diplomacy is gone.

And Republicans regret seeing it go. Even though it never achieved anything. It appealed to a certain nostalgia they had for John Wayne's America. And, more importantly, in their view, it promised to guarantee our access to the things we wanted - oil, wealth, power - without compromise. The cowboys John Wayne played didn't trade with the Indians. Think of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. He massacred them and took what he wanted. That was Bush's foreign policy. But - and this is an important fact - that type of behavior is destabilizing. And one essential truth about global politics is that destabilizing actors are disciplined. Actors ally and seek to balance or in some cases punish the destabilizing state. Republicans were foolish to think their foreign policy made sense, and we were more foolish to believe them.

Republicans hate peace because they imagine it means compromise. And, of course, it does. What the Nobel committee did was offer applause for the promise of an American foreign policy that is less destabilizing, less reckless, less blind to the realities and, it's true, more open to compromise. But Republicans like Limbaugh won't understand that, they are too reckless, too blind, too uncompromising to understand why the world was happy to see George Bush exit and Obama take the stage.

Honoring Kennedy, while sabotaging his key public policy ambition

A new theme among Republicans dedicated to sabotaging health care reform seems especially perverse right now. John McCain and Orrin Hatch, among others, have begun a new rhetorical strategy, designed to wring reform-killing concessions out of Democrats in, disturbingly, Kennedy's memory. As McCain phrased it on ABC's "This Week," just prior to Kennedy's death, "he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions." The implication being that Barack Obama is too inexperienced, too radical, too unwilling to bend, and if health care reform fails it will be, according to this talking point, Obama's fault. If he were a little bit more like Ted Kennedy - or if congressional Democrats can find their way to be a little bit more like Ted Kennedy - Republicans, being reasonable public servants interested in fashioning valid compromises, would easily agree to a package of health care reforms.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. We've seen Democrats rip the guts out of reform and the Republicans still won't budge. This isn't about compromise, it's about killing reform. The insurance industry has a lot to lose if health care reform is adopted, and they are dedicated to stopping reform. Lots of politicians - Max Baucus, blue-dog Democrats in the House, as well as Republicans - are putting their efforts behind the industry's goal and are undermining progress toward real reform. But this recent effort to suggest Republicans would go along if Kennedy were at the table is especially upsetting.

Nina Totenberg on NPR offered a key observation: "If politics is the art of compromise, it is also, on some occasions, the willingness to fight in the face of overwhelming odds." And, as Totenberg points out, no one understood this better than Ted Kennedy. The example she brings forth, as others have, is Kennedy's effective demolishing of Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. To understand that moment in history - Reagan's immense popularity, the skittishness of Democrats at the time, who were abandoning their commitment to the least privileged to become a more centrist party, and the general rightward drift of the nation - is to understand how exceptional Kennedy's forceful, and at first lonely, opposition to Bork was. But for Kennedy it was clear: ''Bork's rigid ideology" would have tipped "the scales of justice against the kind of country America is and ought to be.'' Kennedy did more than just make a strong statement in opposition to Bork. From the Totenberg report:

"Tactically, the speech was intended to, in essence, freeze the debate, to alert people in the country that this was going to be a matter of huge controversy, and to give senators a reason to think twice before saying something favorable to Judge Bork," says Jeff Blattner, a former member of Kennedy's Judiciary Committee staff. In the weeks that followed, Kennedy would use that pause he created to mobilize grass-roots activists, Democratic contributors and everyone from African-American ministers to labor leaders.

That, it seems to me, is what the Democrats who want reform need to do right now. They need to Bork their Republican opponents (instead of being Borked, which is what the industry lobbyists and Republicans have been succeeding at with their townhall shennanigans). Democrats need to stand up and forcefully speak the truth: in the anti-reformists' America children will die if they don't have health insurance. There are forms of treatment that working Americans without health insurance - and many with poor insurance - can't afford. In America, with our immense wealth and our supposed compassion, should anyone be forced to abandon life-sustaining treatment - for themselves but especially for their children - simply because they can't afford it? Kennedy forcefully said "that kind of choice for any parent in this country is unacceptable."

A lot of ink has been wasted on the Republican efforts to position the fear of Obama's "death panels" in the public mind. Republicans are employing other tricks to shape the debate, and these go largely unchallenged - like deflating the estimated number of uninsured Americans (set at 45.7 million by the Congressional Budget Office), by stripping out people we could conceivably leave to die, like illegal immigrants. Democrats need to stand up and challenge all of this, not by a point-by-point refutation, but by asking the bigger question: do Americans have a right to affordable health care. In the anti-reformers' America they do not. Make the debate about that question, as Ted Kennedy always did. And if the answer to that question for most Americans is yes - as it assuredly is - then don't be afraid of the implication: there is a role for government in guaranteeing this outcome. Ted Kennedy wouldn't have been afraid of this truth, why should the rest of the Democratic Party be?

By the way, the picture at the top of this post is a shout out to my friend Andrea, inexplicably a Red Sox fan. For the moment let me say: any team Ted Kennedy could get behind is OK with me. At least until the post-season.

Update 8/31: Interesting follow-up here to a claim related to my recent posting. Some have been arguing that Kennedy would take a compromise now on health reform, because he regretted not doing so way back when Richard Nixon was President. This posting makes a valid point: if there is evidence of this deep regret, produce it. Otherwise, shut-up and assume, as the available record seems to argue, that Kennedy would want the millions of uninsured covered.

Resistance to Gay Marriage gasps its last gasps

Everyone I know is celebrating the decision by the Iowa Supreme Court declaring gay marriage bans unconstitutional. That tells you something about my friends. But my friends are not on the fringes. Despite the setback represented by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, it seems clear that we have taken steps toward the day this discriminatory policy is swept away and gay couples can marry everywhere. Nate Silver did some analysis that shows every state permitting gay marriage by 2024. And, more encouragingly, anyplace you might want to live will accept it by 2014 - just 5 years from now. If you're gay and want to marry in the states of the old confederacy, you'll need to wait it out.

Is this overly optimistic? Not by my reasoning. I've written on this topic before, and previously compared the ban on gay marriage to the ban on interracial marriage. In 1964, in McLaughlin v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that morality laws that punished interracial couples who committed adultery more severely than same race couples were unconstitutional. It was only a short three years before the Supreme Court swept away all miscegenation laws in the Loving v. Virginia ruling. I don't envision a sweeping Court ruling like this on the gay marriage question, at least not in the next three years. But what Nate picks up on is the gradual crumbling of these biases and the elevation of younger voters who are more tolerant into the majority. The change will come state-by-state until, I think, we see a Court decision, after much of the dismantling has occurred, that will sweep away the last opposition. We won't have to wait until 2024 for Mississippi to allow gay marriage. The Court will end laws banning gay marriage before then. Between now and then expect vocal support for gay marriage bans from the right-wing and religious fringe, just as the Klan loudly opposed the extension of civil rights to blacks.

Update 4/9: Came across a great Op-ed from the NY Times that captures a nice circular narrative that places Iowa, unexpectedly, at the leading edge of social change.

Gazing through Kristol's cracked crystal ball

At this point, picking a fight with Bill Kristol is a little like wrestling a dead tuna. He may be bigger than me, but he's easy to pin.

In his most recent column, and one of his last, Kristol argues that the future of "Liberalism" rests on the "shoulders" of Barack Obama. It's a vivid expression of the type of denialist dementia that much of the conservative camp has churned out since Obama's win. In their view, Obama's failure will clear the way for a reappraisal of conservative policies, and open the door for what Kristol calls "new conservative alternatives." He doesn't name these, or even hint at them, and we can be pretty certain these "new" alternatives will look a lot like the old ideas that, after all, in his opinion, "have on the whole worked." His sweeping claim is that conservative principles were tested and surpassed mamby-pamby liberal policies on the "most important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family." So why have American voters rudely closed the book on the conservative era? Kristol can't seem to offer a guess. Keep in mind, this is the guy that bet everything he had on Sarah Palin because she charmed him during a port call in the middle of a Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise. So he doesn't always think things through thoroughly.

His argument about the failure of liberal thought is really more an attack on our manhood. It's not that our ideas are wrong, or our compassion for the poor misplaced, or our sense that government should work naive, it's that we are "limp" and "feckless" and "trembling."

Shortly after the election, I made the argument that Americans had rejected conservative thought sweepingly, with gains for Democrats across the map. What I said then was that Americans had risen up to overturn the idea "that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money." I believe this is true. Americans have realized that an ideology (and a party devoted to that ideology) that promises them nothing when they are struggling, that assumes poverty and misery are merely byproducts of the business cycle and must be endured so a few folks at the top can party is morally indefensible. If you can come up with a body of conservative thought that discards this tendency to dismiss suffering and reject the role of government in its alleviation, then maybe you're on to something. But I don't think it can be done.

I don't want to take time to pick off the ways Kristol is mistaken one by one. Well, okay, I do. But it really shouldn't be neccesary. It's a little like pointing out what was wrong with medieval medicine. Physicians in the Middle Ages used treacle the way conservatives use tax cuts. Neither cures anything.

Pause to reflect on the things Kristol believes conservatives got "right more often than not." Communism? Jeez, talk about an oldy but goody. OK, I'll admit it: no one got that one right, so he can at least claim Republicans were no worse than Democrats. To maintain the global balance of power against our communist adversaries, we supported despots, fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada, armed proxies in El Salvador and Afghanistan, and built a nuclear arsenal that was at once more powerful than any force ever imagined by man, and utterly useless. Jihadism? I won't fold on that one. It is the utter refusal of conservatives to allow government to map out a fossil-fuel-free future that, among all other causes, most clearly makes us targets of muslim extremists. Our addiction to oil - and the profits it brings to many segments of the economy- requires us to opt for "stability" in the part of the world that spews out our sweet, black narcotic. That means supporting regimes that can keep the oil flowing, even if these regimes oppress their people, or bankroll extremists as part of a dysfunctional bargain to stay in power. No, Bill, you don't have the right answers there.

And why does he link "crime and welfare" when he is assembling the list of conservative successes? And how in the world does he imagine conservatives have either of those things figured out? Heckabagosh. We imprison more of our adults than any other nation in the world. One in every one hundred American adults is in prison. I guess if your friends are in the business of building prisons, or operating them for profit, then, hell, that's a great thing. But in any other universe, or by any other measure, that is a failure. And what about welfare? 13 million children in the U.S. live in poverty - that's nearly 20% of all children. By what measure is that a win for the conservative side? His last claim - that conservatives are right on issues related to "education and family" - is equally laughable. Children in poverty consistently perform less well in school, so if you push kids into poverty you also undermine their ability to succeed in the classroom. Bush policies have undermined creativity and innovation in the classroom, and conservatives continue to campaign to drive science from schools, in their efforts to replace biology with the Bible. And the party of family values has repeatedly tried to prevent loving non-traditional couples from sharing the enjoyment of family life. Americans are working more and spending less time at home. We can't afford medical insurance to protect the health of our kids and loved ones. How is that family friendly?

As Kristol rides off into the sunset, I can only hope his New York Times colleagues resist throwing him a good-bye party. Let the guy slip away without fanfare, then change the locks on the doors so he can never, ever come back.

Repudiating Bush, celebrating the historical meaning of Obama's inauguration

Like everyone else, I imagine, I have a story about how I watched Barack Obama's swearing in. I don't share this because I feel like my story has more meaning than yours, or even any great significance beyond the emotional resonance the experience carried for me. I share it in the hope that we will find, at some point, through an accumulation of these accounts, a kind of oral history of the moment and its significance across the wide landscape of the nation.

I watched Obama's swearing in sitting on the floor of the gym of my son's school. He goes to a Jewish dayschool on the southside of Chicago. And his teachers - the entire administrative and instructional staff of this school - made the decision that he, and his classroom full of 3-year-olds and all the other kids in the school, should watch the inaugural ceremony. And the remarkable thing was how clearly he and his 3-year-old classmates understood that this was important. They all seemed to know who Barack Obama was. This election has been going on so long, and our household has been supportive of Obama throughout, so my son has been surrounded by cheerleading for Obama for most of his life. Shortly after he learned to talk, he learned to say Barack Obama. He could recognize his picture on TV, or on a book's dust jacket, early on. I imagine this was true for many of the other kids in his class. My son's school is a remarkable place. The preschool and kindergarten programs are recognized for their excellence - the teachers are creative and compassionate and engaged - and my son's class is diverse: African-American kids, Japanese and Korean kids, Latino kids, and, in many, many cases, kids from mixed families, where mommy is from one race or ethnicity or religion, and daddy is from another. In some cases, the kids in the school have two mommies, in a few cases they may have two daddies.

I got there to pick up my son, at the normal time I would, shortly before Obama took the oath of office, and I sat down cross-legged on the floor behind my son, and he scooted back and sat on my lap. Sitting there, among kids and parents from all backgrounds, in a school my wife went to, where my son now goes, in the neighborhood where Obama lived and taught, a neighborhood that sits surrounded by poverty, but gathers together people from all over the world, I wept. Not openly. I was embarrassed to weep too openly. Which was stupid, because others in the room were weeping.

Obama's speech acknowledged the need to celebrate the milestone we were witnessing and served as a repudiation of eight years of Bush folly and failure. Obama promised that we would restore our commitment to science, and end the Bush administration's efforts to discredit science, and ignore scientific consensuses that were at odds with the interests of their allies in industry and the beliefs of those in the evangelical community. He promised to end governmental, tax, and regulatory policies that favored "only the prosperous" and served to protect and supplement the wealth of the wealthiest. He promised openness where the Bush administration favored secrecy. He rejected the idea that our liberties and our privacy and our constitution could be pushed aside in the interest of security. He embraced diplomacy and negotiation and multilateralism and rejected Bush's preference for unilateralism and preemption and saber-rattling. He celebrated America's diversity, markedly different from the Republican party's efforts to portray immigrants as unwelcome guests, Muslims as untrustworthy, gays as sinners. It was a tough speech, beginning with a polite acknowledgement of Bush's "service" to the nation, but then going about the business of identifying the variety of ways Bush failed America.

There's a line in Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail where he says: "Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." I've always marvelled at the ambition and the sweep of that statement. If you accept it, it means that everyone - even those we haven't yet fully embraced, like illegal immigrants, gays, felons - should expect to be protected fully by all of our laws. No one should be jailed without due process, everyone should be allowed to marry, each of us should be able to vote. Obama's inauguration, a day after the celebration of Martin Luther King Day, and unfolding on the same mall that hosted King's 1963 I Have a Dream speech, inevitably draws our attention back to the work of the generation that fought for and achieved civil rights for African Americans. Sitting there in my son's school, I felt like we had gone a long way toward the day when all of America's children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, could sit down together. King's words didn't map out the full diversity of today's America, but every journey begins with initial steps. One of the other great achievements of my lifetime was the conquest of the moon. Perhaps the famous words spoken then make sense here too. This is a giant leap.

Lord Feinstein

I've been bothered by the reaction of a whole generation of supposedly progressive (or at least big "D" Democratic) politicians to Obama's presidency. As he picks his team, and rolls out some hints about policy directions, all sorts of old-timers are voicing "hurumps." The worst might be Dianne Feinstein. We have her public complaints about Leon Panetta, as well as her sweeping aside efforts by Harry Reid and Obama to keep Roland Burris at arm's length. What's going on here? I think it is a case of advanced Senatoritis. Members of the U.S. Senate seem to acquire increasingly inflated egos the longer they serve and grow to expect deference and kowtowing from everyone they encounter. They are America's House of Lords. And like the House of Lords, they do almost nothing that threatens to shake up the establishment. One should never expect the Senate to lead us anywhere. The best we can hope for is that the Senate doesn't get in the way when, as might happen now and then, a president shows up and elects to map out a new direction. Such was our luck when FDR constructed the New Deal legislation, although at times Alben Barkley, Senate Majority Leader, would rise up to assert the Senate's independence.

Steve Conn over at Rustbelt Intellectual has some perhaps parallel observations about Arlen Specter. Specter's recent threats to block or complicate the confirmation of Attorney General nominee Eric Holder can be seen, like Feinstein's hurumphing, as an expression of Specter's exaggerated view of his importance. As a member of the Senate, it seems he believes, he is owed the courtesy of being heard.

The reality is, I think, that we can expect years of foot-dragging by the Senate. Their rules, which reward committee assignments through senority, mean that any new members, elected to carry forward change, won't get their feet in the stirrups for years. When they get into positions of influence, years from now, I hope Al Franken, Kay Hagan, and Jeff Merkley don't come down with the same condition afflicting Feinstein. Maybe there is a way to inoculate them.

New Year

In my last post, in fact in many essays on this blog, I focus on my philosophy of governance. I never describe my comments as such - I never wave my hands around and say: here's my philosophy. But if you piece it all together, you should get the picture. Government should be an instrument for advancing the needs of the wider population, and, in particular, for constructing solutions for our most vulnerable.

What is wrong with the Bush administration is their complete contempt for the idea that government serves any public end. Depending on who you sat down with, you might find that Bushies believe government is primarily a waste of money, or a detestable instrument to overturn the justifiable accumulation of wealth controlled by the captains of industry, or, as Dick Chaney seems to believe, a set of institutions that can be repurposed to deliver benefits to friends and political allies. It's like a candy machine, and the trick is to move the machine into a secure room, and only allow your narrow circle of friends to have the access code. The thing that ties Bush to Blagojevich is that Blagojevich also scoffs at the idea that government serves the wider community. He sees it as his own personal ATM.

In a column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman takes on the same topic. Here is the key passage:

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

This is a view I have held for years. This is why I steamed while the press was constructing hagiographies for Reagan when he passed away. Reagan justified our widespread distrust of government - which arguably is part of our political DNA - and set the stage for George Bush, and the abandonment of any expectation that government should be people-focused and competent and solution-oriented. The failure of the Bush administration to appoint qualified people - the idea that Michael Brown could run FEMA or Harriet Miers could be a Supreme Court justice - flows from this contempt for government. If you are looking for a reason for why we are so screwed right now, you should start your search with Reagan. Not just because he created a mind-set that has guided the Republican party ever since, but because he so effectively sold his idea to the American people.

Then cretins like Blagojevich come along and make the Republicans' work easier. Corruption and ineffectiveness by Democratic politicians like Blagojevich and William Jefferson and a generation of leaders in Ohio only serve to convince voters that Reagan was right - you can't trust government.

The stakes are high for the Obama administration. Not just because he is our first African American president. Not just because we find ourselves at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. But also because we need to rebuild trust in government. We need to remind Americans that government can solve problems, and assure our safety and security from narrow-visioned manufacturers who poison us and spoil our environment, and map out possible futures by providing start-up capital to new technologies, and help lift-up the poor and educate our children. The Obama administration needs to be bold and skillful and successful. And it needs to begin right away, and demonstrate results in the first 100 days.