A Racist Turn in the McCain Campaign?

The Controversy. Last week, as part of the more intensified attacks that the McCain campaign has launched since Obama's wildly successful overseas trip, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis accused Obama of "playing the race card."

"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," said Rick Davis, in a statement issued from the McCain campaign. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

What happened was that Obama made a routine reference to the likelihood of GOP racial smears, and warned an audience in Missouri that "what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me . . . You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." In fact, the Republicans had been known for engaging in racial smear tactics going back to the Willie Horton ads during the 1988 presidential campaigns and continuing through the Jesse Helms "black hands" ads of 1990, and the Republican Party's portrayal of a white woman cooing for (African-American candidate) Harold Ford during the Tennessee Senate race in 2006.

It isn't like GOP smear artists have been inactive for the 2008 campaign either.

The most active of the Republican Party's smear artists has been Karl Rove who has pictured Obama in terms of being "lazy," "trash-talking," and playing "basketball at Harvard Yard." The only item in that list that is not a racial stereotype is Harvard Yard. GOP spokespeople also have sought to portray Obama as an "angry black nationalist" and have spread rumors about Michelle Obama being a "white hater." Moreover, white and African-American bloggers both believe that the attempt by Republicans to characterize Obama as presumptuous is an attempt to stereotype him in traditional terms as an "uppity" black man. Commentators on the left also view the clips of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in McCain's "Celeb" ad as playing on white anxieties about black men and white women.

Thus, the Obama campaign, liberal and African-American bloggers, and several figures in the mainstream media believe that McCain is the one "playing the race card" here. Time magazine columnist and former McCain admirer Joe Klein was disgusted enough with McCain that he obliquely referred to McCain and the Republicans as "scum" in a blog posting today. Editors for the New York Times were less pungent, but made the same point when they referred to Davis' comments as "contemptible."

Has the McCain Campaign Taken a Racist Turn? White racism has always been much more complex than racial hostility or a belief that whites are "superior" to African-Americans. Racist statements contain three kinds of componens:

1. A Stereotype of African-Americans as ugly, lazy, irrational, over-sensitive, etc.;
2. An Expression of Contempt for an African-American or African-Americans based on racial stereotypes;
3. An Argument for the Domination of African-Americans by white people that, at least in principle, can extend back to justifying slavery.

Purposefulness. In this sense, a person making a statement would have to purposefully employ all three of these elements for the statement to be racist. Rick Davis' original statement about Obama was definitely purposeful. Obama had been talking about himself as a black person "not looking like" other presidential candidates or presidents for weeks if not months. Given that the McCain camp would have been aware of those statements, the decision to spring their complaint about Obama was purposeful in that they decided to attack Obama for "playing the race card" on Thursday as opposed to all the other days Obama had made similar statements. Bob Herbert observed that the McCain camp complained "with great glee bursting through their feigned outrage." Obama's statement gave them an opportunity they had been looking for.

Racial Stereotyping. But has the McCain campaign been relying on racial stereotypes? That appears to be the case. When Davis referred to Obama "playing the race card," David himself was playing on the white stereotype of African-Americans as "too sensitive" about race, "complaining all the time" about racial profiling or discrimination, and being unable to "take a joke." Like other racial sterotypes, the stereotype about African-Americans being "too sensitive" portrays African-Americans as not really "fitting in," not being "one of us," or as being strange or foreign. The African-American feminist bell hooks tells a story in "Killing Rage" about a white flight attendant who addressed one of her black friends as though the African-American woman didn't know English. Going along with that is the idea among whites (an idea I hear frequently from my students) that African-Americans need to "get over it" in relation to racism but aren't doing so.

The other racial stereotypes that the McCain camp has been relying on are black men having a special sexual interest in white women and Obama as an "uppity" black man. The stereotype of black men/white women appeared in the Celebrity ad which flashes pictures of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as it criticizes Obama for being a vapid celebrity. Bob Herbert asks:

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Calling Obama "presumptuous" is more complex, but relies on racial stereotyping as well. In many ways, Republican criticisms of Obama for being presumptuous have the "Heads I Win/Tails You Lose quality that is common to Republican attacks. The GOP criticized Obama for being "presumptuous" because he did his overseas trip in such a big way--having successful meetings with a long succession of foreign leaders, sinking a three-point shot with troops, and holding a huge rally in Berlin. But if Obama had not made much of a mark, the same observers would have been just as happy to criticize him for "not being ready for prime time" or "not meeting the commander-in-chief test."

The point is to criticize Obama whatever he does.

But, as David Gergen observed yesterday on ABC's This Week, McCain's "Moses" ad lampooning Obama as "The One" and GOP attacks on Obama for being "presumptuous" all assert that Obama is an "uppity" black man who "doesn't know his place."

"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about."

In this sense, McCain's messages have a surface message of saying that Obama is not ready to lead the country but a subtext that Obama is aiming for something that is not appropriate for a black man and that Obama doesn't know that his "place" as a black man in American society should be marginalized, at the bottom, in a band, or in jail. When the McCain campaign makes fun of Obama for being "presumptuous" or being a "celebrity," they're also saying that he's acting in ways that are inappropriate for a black man in American society.

The McCain campaign and Republican media figures like Karl Rove are relying on several kinds of racial stereotypes to make their criticisms of Barack Obama. Such reliance on stereotypes gives a powerful dimension of racism to the McCain campaign.

A Broad Circle of Contempt. In addition, Davis' statement expresses contempt for Obama. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong" is very much an expression of contempt. Given that Davis' contempt is articulated in relation to the stereotype of African-Americans as "complaining too much" or "being too sensitive," it is not unreasonable to conclude that Davis is also implying that other African-Americans who "play the race card" by "unfairly" complaining about racism are also "divisive, negative, shameful, and wrong." Because he is relying on a stereotype of Obama as an African-American, Rick Davis is also tarring African-Americans as a group. The New York Times also notices that Davis' formulation concerning dealing the race card "from the bottom of the deck" was also used in relation to the O. J. Simpson trial which is still a hot-button issue among whites.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs up another loaded racial image. The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

In fact, all of the stereotypes employed by the McCain campaign and Republicans express contempt for black people in general, especially for black men. For example, the McCain campaign's juxtaposing of Obama against images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton relies on the stereotypical idea of black sexual interest in white women as "unnatural" because black men are "less than fully human." In this context, the element of contempt is in the assumption that black men aren't really human.

When McCain and the Republicans who criticize Obama for being "presumptuous"or "uppity," they are expressing a similar kind of contempt. The stereotypical criticism of blacks as "uppity" relies on the assumption that blacks should "naturally" be at the bottom of society however one characterizes "the bottom." Indeed, like most stereotypes, the idea of blacks as "uppity" is ultimately goes back to slavery and is rooted in the conviction that blacks should really be slaves. In that context, it would be "arrogant," "presumptuous," or otherwise "unnatural" for a black person like Obama to assume that he could be president--i. e., be the man.

In this sense, the racial stereotypes employed by the McCain campaign are racist because they express enormous contempt for African-Americans as human beings.

Domination. Finally, the McCain campaign wants to dominate the Obama campaign in that they are seeking to silence the Obama campaign on issues of race. What McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt has to say is interesting in this regard:

"McCain aides say their goal is to pre-empt what they believe is Obama's effort to paint any conventional campaign attacks as race-based. Obama’s aim, in the view of the McCain camp: ‘to delegitimize any line of attack against him,’ said McCain aide Steve Schmidt… ‘I don't [care] whether it helps or hurts us,’ Schmidt said. ‘A lie unresponded to becomes the truth.’

If taken at face value, this is a ridiculous statement. The Obama camp hasn't criticized any of McCain's attacks as being racially motivated even though the McCain campaign has launched a dizzying array of attacks on Obama's Iraq policy proposals, inexperience, flip-flopping, rigidity, celebrity status, "presumptuousness," and supposed willingness to "lose the war to win the election. Nor has the Obama camp shown any inclination to criticize McCain on racial or other ground. In fact, most Obama ads don't even mention McCain.

So what is the McCain camp worried about?

The key word is "pre-empt." The leaders of the McCain campaign does not want the Obama to be able to criticize McCain attacks as "racially-tinged" in the future. So they're attacking Obama for playing the "race card" now with the expectation that the "controversy" will scare off Obama from criticizing the "racially-tinged" attacks that the McCain people expect to make.

Here, however, there is reason to question whether the McCain campaign and Republicans are trying to establish any form of "racial domination" over the Obama campaign. Republican presidential campaigns have been known for hitting Democratic presidential candidates with a barrage of innuendo, stereotyping, and ridicule since 1988 and the objective has always been for the Republican presidential candidate to keep the Democratic presidential candidate on the defensive. In other words, the Republican presidential campaign organizations can be seen as striving to dominate the Obama campaign in the same way they sought to dominate the Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry campaigns.

However, it is also possible to see the efforts of the McCain campaign and Republicans to attach racial stereotypes to Obama as raising the specter of a non-white, racial "outsider" like Obama taking over the summit of American society as something "unnatural," "unseemly," and "wrong" because it inverts the "natural order" of American society. In this sense, the McCain campaign's use of racial stereotyping could be seen as an appeal to whites to maintain the "natural" racial order of white domination.

At this point, I believe that the former option is more correct. Despite the McCain/Republican use of racial stereotypes, I have yet to see any evidence that the Republicans have directly or indirectly introduced "maintaining the natural racial order" as a campaign theme. Until they do so, it is impossible to view them in terms of pursuing racial domination.

Conclusion. Recent McCain ads and McCain strategist Rick Davis' comments have been racist because they employed racial stereotypes in a way that conveyed contempt for Barack Obama as an African-American. But they do not appear (at least at present) as seeking to establish or protect a relationship of racial domination. Thus, the racism has limits and I wouldn't claim that recent Republican attacks have been racist in the full sense of the word.

Does that make Rick Davis or John McCain a racist? Not necessarily. They may be worse. White racism is bad enough but there are many cases in which a person becomes a racist out of ignorance, family socialization, or some sort of cultural imperative. Such people are not exactly innocent, but they are not nearly as bad as those who seek to manipulate the racism in American society for financial or political gain. Given that the McCain campaign has embarked on an effort to manipulate the racism in American society for their political benefit, they strike me as being significantly more immoral than most racists.

And that's why it was appropriate for the New York Times to refer to what the McCain campaign is doing as "contemptible."

The Obama Bump is Really Over

Today, the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls have Obama and McCain tied and Obama up by 1 respectively.

That means that the Obama overseas bump from last weekend is officially over.

But it also means something else.

Given that the tracking polls are three night surveys, the fact that Obama and McCain are tied today means that McCain pulled ahead in Gallup for at least one night and the same might be the case for Rasmussen.

McCain hasn't been ahead in the tracking pollls for sometime. If he moves ahead tomorrow and stays ahead, that could shake up the expectation that Obama is going to win the election.

Interesting.

The Ship of Race Has Landed

It appears that the Ship of Race has landed in the 2008 presidential campaign. The McCain campaign came out with both guns blazing as it accused Obama of playing "the race card" when he mentioned that the Republicans would try to make (white) people afraid of voting for someone who looked like him.

As if Obama wasn't speaking the most obvious truth in the world.

Given that we'll probably be staring race in the face for the rest of the campaign, I'll save my own comments for later. Here I'll just quote from one of the African-American blogs--The Field Negro--about the Republicans. After all, I'm pretty sure that conservative Shelby Steele will be the only African-American allowed to participate in the upcoming debate:

And another thing . . . [k]eep trying to paint his "O" ness as an uppity Negro. Here in A-merry-ca there is nothing we hate more than uppity Negroes. If you are going to be an uppity Negro you had better not be running for political office. You better have your own business and you damn sure better not depend on folks in the majority to keep your business afloat. A-merry-cans did not like the "O" man's European Vacation (boy what the hell do you mean you are a "world citizen"? You are an A-merry-can damn it, start acting like one) and the polls show that. Hell, even so called respected reporters over at the Washington Post are starting to cast the "O" man as an egomaniacal uppity Negro. (They took the quote out of context to fit their story, but that's a whole different issue) So keep playing on that, and watch how the polls tighten.

The Barefoot/Pregnant Regulation

The Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a new regulation that would treat birth control pills as abortion devices.

A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying "the life of a human being."

Maybe the Bush Administration and their supporters on the religious right should just call this the "Barefoot/Pregnant" regulation.

Because that's the way they want to keep American women.

The McCain Campaign--A Typical Scooby Villain

As the father of a typical American "tween," I've watched more episodes of Scooby Doo than any one person should be allowed to see. I've been with Scooby Doo in Egypt, Scooby Doo in cyber-space, Scooby Doo on mystery cruises, and Scooby Doo at Ghoul School. I've viewed so much Scooby Doo that I find myself craving Scooby Snacks at the weirdest times. I see the Scooby gang more often than I see my own brothers and sisters. Scooby Doo is a friend of mine and "Senator McCain, you're no Scooby Doo."

Oops, mixing metaphors there.

Anyway, I know better than most people that the monsters chasing Scooby and the gang almost always turn out to be all-too-human villains in "monster suits."

That's what I see in the John McCain campaign right now--a typical Scooby villain.

Over the last two weeks, McCain has unveiled not one, not two, not three, but four--count 'em, four--attack lines on Obama. McCain himself launched the idea that Obama was willing to "lose the war in order to win the election." The McCain campaign also came out with video ads about Obama supposedly canceling a visit with wounded American troops in order to "play basketball," and being a "celebrity" like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. Just as they put out the "celebrity" ad, the McCain campaign also sent out surrogates yesterday to talk about Obama's "presumptuousness."

All of this is supposed to come out of the "very scary" Karl Rove playbook of attacking opponents at their strongest point. In this case, the strongest points are Obama's charismatic presence and his opposition to the unpopular war. By going "negative" in this way, the McCain campaign is trying to "define" Barack Obama as someone who is too unprincipled, too strange, and too popular to be president. He hopes to drive up Obama's negatives and prevent Obama from getting above 50%.

And if the McCain campaign really were a scary monster, all of this would be working. But Shaggy is the only one who looks scared and Shaggy's always scared.

In the final analysis, McCain's campaign manager and Rove protege Steve Schmidt is much more of a "guy in monster suit" than a "scary monster." The McCain campaign is splattering attacks right and left, but every time they take up a new line of attack, they undercut their previous attacks. How can any of these attack lines have much impact if they're only pursued exclusively for two or three days at most and McCain is cluttering up the airwaves with other kinds of attacks? The assault on Obama's presumptuousness on the same day they released the "celebrity" ad was dumb in the extreme. I'm not sure the McCain people even knew which line of attack they wanted the media to feature?

Harvard sociologist and TPM blogger Theda Skocpol suggests that Obama create ads of ordinary people sitting at a table talking about the weaknesses of McCain's proposals on cutting corporate taxes, social security, contraception, and other domestic issues.

That's a great idea and much of the reason why it's a great idea is because it would provide such a strong contrast to the ineffectiveness of McCain's bumbling attempts to be a scary attack monster.

Is Dog Whistling Just for Racists?

Popular liberal blogger Digby suspects that a lot of the recent McCain talk about Obama being presumptuous or ads portraying Obama with young white women like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is a form of "dog whistling" to white racists.

This is what Digby means by dog whistling.

I think we need to have a little discussion of what "racist dogwhistle" means. It is a word or phrase that conjures up certain subliminal images in those who are predisposed to see things in racial terms. It doesn't mean that everyone who hears the word as a criticism sees it in that way --- only those who get "the code." So, when Karl Rove sends out McCain's minions to spread the word "presumptuous" all over the place, the idea is to signal to the racists among us that Obama is "uppity." It doesn't mean that if you think Obama is presumptuous that you are a racist. You might just think, "yeah, he's acting like it's in the bag already." But racists hear that Obama is an uppity black man. See, it works on two levels. That's why it's called a dogwhistle --- only the racists can hear the racism in it.

Digby writes that she gets complaints from liberals about focusing too much on racism. But the thing that strikes me about the idea of racial dogwhistling is that it's overly optimistic. I can see where talking about Obama being presumptuous would be more easily translated into Obama being "uppity" by an overt racist than the average moderate or independent voter. So, dogwhistling there is.

But I think that the main racial effect of these kinds of dogwhistling manuevers would be to raise the anxiety level of moderate and independent whites concerning Obama as a black man. There may be less hard core, overt, racism in the United States than there was in the seventies, but American society is saturated with racial stereotyping of black people and one of those stereotypes is about the "arrogance" and "conceit" of black athletes like Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys vs the ideal of humility to which all athletes are expected to subscribe. The same kinds of stereotypes apply to black musicians, actors, and celebrities as well.

Thus, the efforts of the McCain campaign to portray Obama as "presumptuous" seek to induce racial anxieties about Obama by associating him with "T.O," Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals, or a variety of hip hop artists that I'm too uncool to be aware of. The idea isn't to stimulate racial hostility but to make white moderates nervous and uncertain enough about Obama that they would be susceptible to other forms of negative advertising.

The other non-dogwhistling aspect of McCain's tactics is that white moderates and independent are subject to cross-currents that hard-core racists ignore. White moderates may become nervous about Obama but they also might find Obama's positions, image, and advertising appealing in ways that counter-act their racial anxieties. In this sense, pushing the "presumptuous" meme either introduces or reinforces racial anxieties as an element that is "in play" for this election. But the working of the "presumptuous" theme on moderate voters would be much more fluid than racial dogwhistling is with hardcore racists.

Pushing Obama's "presumptuousness" does have a racist effect but it's more a matter of raising anxieties in moderate whites than dogwhistling the determined attitudes of marginal racists.

Joe Klein and Conservative Loyalties

Joe Klein of Time poses the possibility that Jewish neo-conservatives have divided loyalties between the United States and Israel.

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Klein is implying that Jewish neo-conservatives might be trying to employ American power to benefit Israel because they're Jewish.

This strikes me as completely wrong.

Klein's comments would be more to the point if Jewish neo-conservatives were different from non-Jewish neo-conservatives. But I didn't detect any difference between the neo-conservatism of William Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, and Joe Lieberman over Iraq. They all wanted to establish American military hegemony in the Arab world and viewed that hegemony just as much in terms of eliminating Israel's enemies as advancing American interests.

Likewise, conservative blogs like RedState, Powerline, and Confederate Yankee all seem more concerned with Israeli security issues than American.

In other words, it's American conservatism and neo-conservatism in general rather than "Jewish neo-conservatism" in particular that has divided loyalties. The right loves Israel because they've viewed Israel as a "model imperialist" since the raid on Entebbe way back in the 70's. The right idolizes Israel's imperial aggressiveness--Isreal's willingness to maintain military occupation over the Palestinians for so long, the expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the targeted assasination of Palestianian leaders, and so on. For the American right, Israel is the proper model of how the United States should conduct itself as a military power and supporting Israel is a matter of supporting the kind of country they would like America to be.

In other words, conservatives have divided loyalties between Israel and the United States because they think more highly of Israel than they think of America. If Israel was a bigger fish in the world pond, I don't doubt that a number of American conservatives would have moved there in the same way that Canadian conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and David Frum moved to the U. S.

Actually conservative loyalties toward Israel are narrowly gauged as well. They would be completely unconcerned if the Israeli Labor Party, leftists, and anti-war activists were driven into the sea. Just as they identify with conservative America rather than the whole of the country, the American right identifies with the Netanyahu faction of the Likud party, the settler movement, and the ultra-orthodox parties rather than the whole of Israel.

In other words, the American right is loyal to the Israeli right because they admire the militant imperialism of the Israeli right. That doesn't have anything to do with the Jewishness of the Israeli right or the Jewishness of some Jewish neo-cons.

The American right's romance with Israel is all about the ideal of an "aggressively imperialist state." It just happens that Israel is an aggressively imperialist Jewish state. If Australia were an aggressively imperialist state, American conservatives would admire them just as much.

Facing Up to a Friend's Death

Bed at one, awake at six--it's not a good idea if I want to get stuff done, be able to think, or stay health.

But because I have so much dread for today that I just couldn't sleep much.

Today is Nancy Peterson's memorial service (first Baptist Church of Morehead) and I know I'm going to have to face up to something I've been avoiding for the last five days--the fact that Nancy's gone and she's not coming back.

Visitations, funerals, memorial services, and other kinds of death-related events are about many things. They're about warm memories, sharing one's grief with friends and acquaintances, helping the family, thinking about the many ways the deceased person made a difference, and the many ways they're going to live on as well.

But death-related events are also about accepting the fact that relatives, friends, loved ones, colleagues, and acquaintances are really gone. It's about accepting or beginning to accept that we're never going to hear their voice, feel the warmth of their physical presence, react to their touch or think about what they're going to be doing next year again. It's about really knowing the grief and loss even if it's the last thing in the world you want to do.

I don't want to face up to Nancy's death. It's hard and I'm miserable. But I know I have to start doing it today as I think about going to her memorial service.

Who's Going to Back Into the Presidency

There are 100 days to go to the election and neither Barack Obama nor John McCain are gaining any kind of decisive poll advantage in the current "phony war" phase of the presidential campaign.


Barack Obama got a boost when Prime Minister al-Maliki of Iraq agreed with his timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. He also looked effective in dealing with foreign leaders. But the fact that Obama only got a "little noodge" of 3% and 8% in the daily tracking polls revived questions about his ability to "close the deal." Novak suggests that McCain might be able to "back his way into the presidency" without doing anything to inspire enthusiasm among voters.

But Obama could "back into" the presidency as well.

Obama would still win if he stayed at 48-49% of the vote, John McCain got 47%, and the rest was split among Bob Barr, Ralph Nader, and the really minor candidates. It may be that all Obama has to do is continue to pursue successful campaign initiatives like his overseas trip, defend himself against McCain's attacks, and protect his lead. That's essentially what happened during the Democratic primaries. Obama never had a big lead after the Iowa caucuses but he made sure that his small lead over Hillary Clinton was decisive.

The conventional wisdom is that McCain might be able to back into the presidency if he runs a harshly negative campaign that depresses Obama's support.

But that hasn't worked so far.

McCain's campaign has been so unorganized, dispirited, and tone deaf that Republicans are just about ready to wave the white flag of surrender. Here's conservative writer Ben Stein:

"Mr. McCain is running the absolute most pathetic campaign I have ever seen in my whole life . . . His campaign is just heartbreakingly pathetic. He is a very impressive guy. He is a brave guy, but he is running the most lackluster campaign I have ever seen in my entire life. I would have thought Bob Dole's campaign would have set a record for poor campaigns, but this one is even worse. I mean it is shocking."

McCain's team was particularly inept while Obama was overseas and produced visuals of McCain riding in a golf cart with George Bush sr. and fumbling over spilled groceries while Obama was effectively posing as a world leader. Moreover, it often seems like McCain and his surrogates are competing with each other to see who can make the most damaging gaffes.

Obama still has to deal with the various questions that the media is raising about his relative youth, inexperience, appearance of arrogance, flip-flopping, and rigidity. The fact that Obama is questioned for both flip-flopping and rigidity is an indication of the self-contradictory character of many media criticisms.

But McCain is still behind. If he stays behind, McCain's going to have to provide reasons for undecided voters and weak Obama supporters to want John McCain to be president. He hasn't succeeded in doing so to date.

The Call of the Wild

Since we moved to the edge of the woods, I've seen possums, raccoons, turkeys, copperheads, foxes, and owls. Of course, deer are everywhere. We also caught a skunk in an trap meant for feral cats and have survived a monumental skunk attack on our house.

Now, I can add coyotes to my list of backyard wildlife. One of the critters appeared at the edge of the woods at about 1:00 this afternoon. It was relatively long-legged and rangy looking with gray and yellow fur and a Red Riding Hood snout. The coyote looked bigger than my 50 pound dog, but coyotes are supposed to have a thin bone structure that makes them weigh less than they look.

When the coyote saw me, it trotted off without looking particularly scared of human beings. But maybe it was just me.

I imagine it was looking for an easy lunchtime treat. One of our neighbors said that a coyote was carrying a pet cat in its mouth before it was forced to drop it.

Personally, I think the possums look better this time of year.

The Visiting Schizophrenic

I remember seeing a cartoon in The New Yorker where a family saw a tweedy man sitting at their dining room table who described himself as "the visiting professor."

I used to think that was very funny.

But not anymore.

That's because a former colleague of mine who's been diagnosed with "schizo affective disorder" has started frequenting our house. Just like a "visiting professor," he likes to use the phone, hook up to the internet, and work on notes for his "book." One time, he was sitting in a chair working over his notes in a way that reminded me of the old New Yorker cartoon.

Oh, I forgot to mention something. He keeps asking if I'm an alien.

My old colleague, I'll call him Josh, characterizes his condition as "schizo affective disorder" which is a "mild form of schizophrenia." Basically, he believes he's become a medium for the aliens who want to communicate with the earth.

Josh has been in and out of mental hospitals for the last four or five years as the condition has gotten worse.

One time, he was institutionalized after walking naked into the surf off Santa Cruz and trying to part the waters like Moses. More recently, Josh was hospitalized after collapsing into Tourette's-type symptoms while I was driving him to a house where he was staying.

I've always been "friendly" with Josh but have never been one of his close friends. But after years of severe mental illness, he's gradually worn out his welcome with all his close friends in Morehead. As a result, Josh decided to make the RSI house his first option after his most recent stay in a mental hospital.

Let me tell you, one of the things you don't want to have in your home is a "visiting schizophrenic."

Red Sox: Back to Also-Rans?

My local high school, Rowan County High School, traditionally has a weak football team. But 8 or 9 years ago, a coach got the guys into winning territory behind a high-quality running back and took them to the Kentucky playoffs.

Then the coach was fired for some non-football related reason. I forget what. The coaches response: "I guess they want to go back to 2-7."

Actually, the team went way way back to 0-10 and got so bad that they were booted out of the local district.

This brings us to the Boston Red Sox. Before the arrival of Manny Ramirez, the Red Sox had been bridesmaids to the New York Yankees for more than eighty years. Bill Buckner let one World Series dribble between his legs. Ted Williams couldn't get them over the hump. Neither could Roger Clemens.

But Manny Ramirez helped them win championships with his big bat on the field and anxiety-free attitude in the clubhouse.

So much for the Curse of the Bambino.

The problem is that Ramirez is very tough on management. Manny has a habit of making public demands to be traded that he doesn't really mean. He also takes games off for no apparent reason and recently shoved the Red Sox traveling secretary.

Now, it looks like pressure's building up (again) for a trade. Sportswriters like Ken Rosenthal are demanding that Red Sox executives trade Ramirez for a couple of spare parts while Sox GM Theo Epstein claims that "we'd be open to (a trade) . . . We've called around. We've been open to it for 5 1/2 years now."

Of course, the Red Sox have won two World Series in those 5 1/2 years and Ramirez is a major reason why they can call themselves "The World Champion Boston Red Sox."

But I guess the Sox want to go back to being "The Tragic, Suffering, Also-Ran Red Sox."

Choose Your Poison: The Landstuhl Pseudo-Controversy

Apparently, the Obama campaign did not realize that its scheduled visit to Landstuhl Air Force Base to see wounded soldiers was going to be the stuff of new political pseudo-controversy.

But they should have seen it coming.

Nobody knows all the facts yet. But the issue boils down to this. The pro-Obama story is that "Pentagon officials" derailed Obama's visit because they didn't want Obama using stories of his "visit with wounded troops" as campaign fodder. The anti-Obama story is that the visit got scuttled in a petty dispute over whether Obama could bring in a couple of campaign aides.

In other words, the Obama visiting the troops story is a typical political "pseudo-controversy" in which McCain was able to get out an attack ad and there has been plenty of media blather about an "issue" of no consequence.

This was a "heads I win, tails you lose" moment for the McCain campaign and the conservative blogs. Either way, Obama was going to look bad. Either Obama was going to fall into Trap A and look like a "typical politician" eager to use wounded American troops as a prop for his presidential campaign or Trap B and look like a "cynical politician" who decided not to visit wounded American troops when he couldn't use them as a prop for his campaign.

What should Obama have done? Actually, he should have fallen into Trap A and let himself be accused of using the soldiers as props. That's because a visit to Landstuhl Air Force Base would uld have been a positive thing for the wounded soldiers. Obama and his campaign staff should have had enough of a sense of the soldiers' enthusiasm for Sen. Obama that they would have known that the wounded soldiers would have really wanted to meet him. A visit from a celebrity candidate like Obama would have been a big deal. It would have been a welcome break in the routines of convalescence and it would have been something soldiers could have bragged about to their families.

Sometimes politicians just have to choose which artificial "pseudo-controversy" they're going to be embroiled in. In this case, Obama should have visited the wounded troops.

No Three Strikes on Marriage

Matthew Yglesias asks whether it would be better to ban fourth marriages rather than gay marriage if we want to protect the sanctity of marriage.

Marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples leads naturally enough to gay divorce. Along those lines, I was thinking recently that if you really wanted to do something to shore up the sanctity of marriage then rather than ban gay marriages you ought to ban, say, fourth marriages. It's one thing to say that people who make a mistake ought to get a second chance, but serial nuptuals really do make a mockery of the institution's basic premises in a way that same-sex couples don't. Maybe some people just need to admit to themselves that they have no business making promises of life-long commitment.

But he's very mistaken here.

A lot of people who get married aren't ready for marriage. Hell, some folks who get married aren't ready for a decent hook up yet. But, they show their "commitment to marriage as an institution" by continuing to try until it works.

I have an aunt in her late 70's who was working on her fifth marriage when she was 48 and husband no. 5 had just moved out of the house in San Diego the day before I pulled for a visit. My poor aunt was just as blown away by no. 5's departure as Snow White would have been if Prince Charming left her. But, she hung in there, No. 5 eventually back and she's still married to the guy 29 years later. What would she have done if Matt's silly "three strikes" idea was in effect? More to the point, how would Matt's idea have helped her given that either she or her third husband weren't ready for marriage (at least to each other).

My aunt's story is one of the reasons why legalizing gay marriage is important. People all over the country put an incredibly high value on marriage and are willing to go through any number of traumas to make their marriages work--even their fifth.

The fact that gay people are largely banned from marriage is an extremely harmful form of discrimination that excludes gay men and women from one of the satisfying and significant dramas of human life. Marriage is something that my aunt was willing to go through five times before she got it right. It is something that everybody, straight or gay, should be allowed to experience, work through, struggle with, and succeed or fail in if they wish.

The Cause of All Mankind

In the introduction to Common Sense, written in 1776, Thomas Paine states that:

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested.

In today's Berlin speech, Barack Obama completed the circle that Paine began drawing in one of the fundamental documents in American political history.

For Obama, the cause of America is still universal, but the cause of all mankind is also America's.

Although Obama emphasizes that Americans are citizens of the United States, he also stresses that we are citizens of the world who stand equally with the global citizens of other countries.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

Obama portrayed the Berlin Airlift of 1949 as creating a bond between the United States and Germany that foreshadows the need for even wider and stronger bonds today. He believes that the problems of Afghanistan, terrorism, climate change, and genocide in Darfur call for a global cooperation that requires even stronger bonds between the United States and Germany, the United States and Europe, and the United States and the rest of the world in general.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations – and all nations – must summon that spirit anew.

The idea of a shared bond between peoples is something that escapes conservatives. The right has a difficult enough time sharing our society with liberals, urban dwellers, gay people, immigrants, and other people who aren't like them. The idea of "shared bonds" with people in other countries is almost entirely outside the range of their imaginations.

President Bush was a true conservative in viewing himself as above the rest of the world. Bush could teach, threaten, bully, and discipline other countries and he took special pleasure in holding the rest of the world "accountable." But he could never bring himself to view himself or the U. S. as "sharing" any kind of bond with anyone. That was just too much equality for President Bush's hierarchical sensibilities--trained in the privileged, pampered milieu of a rich white guy growing up in segregationist Midland, Texas--to bear.

What makes Barack Obama different from Bush is that he views American global leadership as being built on the equality of shared efforts to solve common problems. Obama's assumption is that other governments will be more willing to accept American leadership if the United States views itself as the "first among equals" rather than the dominant party in a hierarchical relationship. Obama's global popularity is a sign that that the rest of the world is eager for a new model of leadership from the United States.

But there is a question about whether America is tolerant enough of equality to lead in a way that the rest of the world finds acceptable.

And that's one of the many questions will be decided by this election.

Death of Nancy Peterson

It saddens me to report that Nancy Peterson died this morning. Nancy was a longtime friend and colleague of mine at Morehead State University. She was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer six years ago and fought it with everything she and modern medicine had. Nancy had an outsized personality and she fought her cancer in an outsized way, gathering all the information possible, getting herself into experimental treatments, and undergoing round after round of radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery. It was all emotionally exhausting to contemplate, but Nancy was never emotionally exhausted. She was very tough and determined even after she was told her time was limited.

Nancy and her husband Glen also had tremendous support from a group of very close friends who will go unnamed here but deserve an enormous amount of credit for their loyalty and steadfast love.

But, finally, her body just gave out. It's my understanding that her kidneys stopped functioning and that her liver was also having problems. After being in the hospital for most of the week, she finally slipped into a coma and passed away.

The Fly on Novak's Windshield

Right-wing journalist Bob Novak was so engrossed in NPR's "Morning Edition" this morning that he didn't notice the fly on the windshield of his Corvette convertible. But oops! That fly turned out to be a 66 year old guy who was "splayed" across Novak's window.

It turned out that Novak had turned illegally, hit a man who was crossing the street according to the light, and then drove away. Novak would have left the scene of the crime entirely except that he was chased down by a lawyer on a bicycle.

Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias refers to Novak as a "sociopath" and "criminal." But to consider conservative involvement in crime, it's necessary to think about what Novak has in common with liberals like Yglesias. In fact, I bet that most conservative media figures in New York and Washington start out their day by obsessing over NPR's "Morning Edition." They also lead largely secular lives. Ann Coulter is one of the few big-league conservatives one will ever hear talking about her own religion or speaking at churces. Media titans like Novak, Sean Hannity, and Rich Lowry of the National Review talk a lot about traditional values, non-college educated constituencies and and guys in Wheeling, West Virginia. But they have just as little in common with the guys in the Wheeling or Winchester, VA pool halls as Al Gore and should be considered just as much a part of the political elite as Al Gore or Barack Obama.

So what do conservatives mean when they pose themselves as fighting against "liberal elites." Basically, they're fighting against liberals in order to improve their own position within the elite political culture they share with liberal politicians and media figures.

This is where the question of crime comes up.

In many ways the Bush administration criminalized politics as a strategy in their competition with liberal political elites. Bush, Cheney, Rove, and their allies viewed their illegal warrantless wiretapping, torture of suspected terrorists, involvement of civil servants in Republican campaigns, perjured testimony to Congress, and politicization of the Justice Department primarily in terms of gaining and maintaining the upper hand in the competition between conservative and liberal factions of the national political elite. The idea was to openly flout the relevant statutes, brag about it, and then let Congress, the courts, and liberal media elites enforce the laws if they dared.

To date, Congress and liberal political elites largely avoided the showdowns associated with confronting the Bush administration about their behavior.

Conservative media figures like Novak, Hannity, and Ann Coulter weren't committing these kinds of crimes, but they have been implicated in the Bush administration's criminality to the extent that they are 1000 percent behind the Bush administration's criminal endeavors. Bob Novak himself gleefully participated in the "outing" of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame as a way to get revenge on her husband for criticizing the Bush administration.

What gives Bob Novak his "criminal" mindset isn't his absent-minded driving. I have lots of liberal friends who are lucky they don't run people over while they're absorbed in listening to National Public Radion. What involves Novak in the criminal world is his decision to defend Bush administration to the hilt. Not unlike a mob lawyer, Novak and other conservative media figures devote their considerable talents and energies to defending, rationalizing, obfuscating, and diverting attention from the crimes of their allies in the Bush administration. In Rush Limbaugh's words, conservative media figures like Novak are "carrying the water" for the criminal enterprise even if they aren't committing the main crimes.

As a result, they deserve just as little respect as the Bush administration.

The Depth of Republican Pessimism

One of the dimensions of the presidential campaign that doesn't receive enough comment is the depth of the pessimism among Republican elites concerning John McCain's chances. There are times when it appears that liberal bloggers are the only political commentators who think McCain has a chance to win. It seems that Republicans see Democratic advantage everywhere they look. Insider worries about the incoherence of McCain's campaign induced McCain to replace his senior leadership. When that didn't help, conservative journalists like Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru started writing articles on how McCain could "turn it around before it's too late" even though McCain's barely behind in the daily Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls. Other reasons for McCain to lose include the economic tailspin, climbing gas prices, the unpopularity of the war, the even greater unpopularity of the Bush administration, and the Democratic fund-raising advantage.

And Republicans keep seeing new clouds over the horizon.

Today, Newt Gingrich came out with a statement on McCain's VP choice in which he argued that the Obama campaign will have so much energy in the fall that McCain can't afford to nominate another "boring white guy" for vice-president.

“What I’m afraid of is that if Sen. McCain picks one more relatively boring, normal, mainstream Republican white guy … he just makes the ticket seem boring compared to the level of energy and drive and excitement that Obama has . . . And this is not a comment on any of my many friends who are competent people . . . It’s a comment on the objective reality that this fall, there is going to be a lot of energy surrounding the Obama campaign.”

Obama's "fall energy surge"--yet another reason for Republicans to be pessimistic.

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Reflecting on al-Maliki's endorsement of Obama's timetable for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman claims the election is over:

There's nowhere left for McCain to go here. Either he endorses a timetable for withdrawal, which he has consistently said would be a disaster, and cedes his only big issue to Obama -- and more importantly, concedes that Obama's judgment is sound -- or he deliberately ignores the concerted, expressed wishes of the Iraqi government in order to prolong an unpopular war.

But the mainstream media have already formulated a new "gotcha question" for Obama. The question which Nightline asked him tonight is "If you had to do it over again, . . . would you support the surge?" It's a clever question because it focuses Obama's immediate attention on whether the Bush administration was correct in launching the surge rather than whether it's now appropriate to withdraw American troops. However, if Obama acknowledged that the surge was a good idea, he would leave open the possibility that the Bush administration might be right about not withdrawing at all.

Obama's answer was that "these kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult." That's not very good and he'll probably have to come up with a better answer the next time he's asked. Maliki's endorsement of the idea of getting American troops out of Iraq in 2010 could be a big boost for Obama. But Obama has a long way to go before he nails that big boost down.

And there will be more "gotcha questions" coming Obama's way.

Contrary to Spencer Ackerman, "it ain't over till it's over."

McCaining the Media

The massive coverage of Barack Obama's overseas trip has led the McCain campaign and various voices on the right to complain of media favoritism toward Obama.

According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Obama has been featured in 77% of the stories done between the end of the Democratic primaries and early July. There are far fewer stories on McCain.

Rush Limbaugh sees an effort to tilt the playing field toward Obama:

"My prediction is that the coverage of Obama on this trip will be oriented toward countering the notion he has no idea what he is talking about on foreign policy and defense issues and instead will prop him up as a qualified statesman . . . McCain, on the other hand, is a known quantity on these issues and his position does not excite nor fit the mainstream media's narrative on Iraq and Afghanistan, so they simply ignore it and him."

Unlike most observers on the left, I view Limbaugh as an extremely perceptive observer of the media and Democratic Party politics.

But Limbaugh's mistaken here.

Before Obama got into the air, the basic media narrative of his overseas trip was that Obama was playing defense in the face of criticism from the McCain campaign. McCain had been taking the initiative by challenging Obama to travel with him to Iraq and hold as many as ten townhall meetings. McCain was also aggressive in calling for overturning bans on offshore drilling for oil and attacking Obama's ideas on negotiating with Iran and withdrawing from Iraq as naive and ideological.

In the context of McCain's aggressive criticism, the media has been portraying Obama as "on the defensive," "dogged by criticism" and "boxed in" by McCain on Iraq and other issues. For example, the Kansas City Star framed one of their stories on Obama's patriotism by emphasizing the extent to which he was "dogged by criticism" for not wearing a flag pin in his lapel. Likewise, an ABC story by Jake Tapper was headlined "The Success of the Surge Seemingly Puts Obama on the Defensive." The same was the case with Dick Morris and Eileen McGann column for the New York Post which was headlined "The Way to Box in Barack on Iraq."

Contrary to Rush Limbaugh, the basic media narrative has been that McCain on offense/Obama on defense.

That doesn't mean that all the puff stories from the network talking heads aren't going to help Obama. But the question is not whether the current success of Obama's trip is going to confirm media bias toward Obama, but whether the trip is going to change the media narrative in Obama's favor.

The Miracle of What?

Salon has an interesting interview with James Carse, a historian of religion and the author of a new book entitled The Religious Case Against Belief. For Carse, being religious is connected with a question of existence:

Are you religious yourself? I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

For Carse, the world has a "miraculous glow" because something was created out of nothing. But that doesn't strike me as quite right. I believe it would be more accurate to say that the world has a miraculous glow because "something" is always being created that didn't exist before. The earth is a tremendously fertile place where all creatures great and small, plant and animal, are continuously and miraculously bringing new things into life. Thus, the world isn't miraculous because an original "first" thing came out an original "nothing" as Carse suggests. Instead, the world is miraculous because of the constant cascade of newness around us. It isn't the first creation that should fascinate us, it's the continuous roar of creativity within us and around us.

Carse also has a comment on the popular atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens:

To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Of course, it's as easy to misfire on atheism as it is to misfire on anything else and the new atheists strike me as being superficial. It strikes me that atheism is more a matter of separating one's most profound questions from any kind of understanding of "God" and divinity. I'm fascinated by miraculous things like the green-ness of my environment after it rains, but I fail to see how that interest of mine connects to a concept of god at all.

Where Carse sees a religion of the miraculous, I have an atheism for a miraculous world.

When Will the Maliki Bomb Go Off?

MALIKI'S TIMETABLE BOMB. On Saturday, Maliki certainly dropped a bomb when he told Der Spiegel that he agreed with Obama's plans to withdraw American troops from Iraq within 16 months. Here's the key passages from the interview

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq.

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes . . .

Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.

FALLING INTO THE CLUTTER ZONE. As I noted in an earlier post, Maliki's agreement to any kind of timetable severely undercuts John McCain's presidential candidacy. McCain has banked most of his argument for being elected on his greater foreign policy wisdom. If Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months becomes widely accepted, McCain's going to lose most of the justification for electing him president.

As a result, McCain is lucky that the Maliki's announced agreement with Obama's particular timetable did not go off with the big bang that might have been expected. The liberal blogs caught on quickly and fully recognized al-Maliki's statement as a "game-changer." But the significance of Maliki's statement ended up being lost in the mainstream media "clutter." After the McCain campaign issued a counter-statement and Bush administration leaned on the al-Maliki government to take the statement back, the mainstream media began reporting on the various sides of the "controversy" rather than focus on the significance of what al-Maliki originally said.

MSNBC's report was typical in its "he said/she said" effort to appear objective:

The Illinois senator, challenged at every turn on the Iraq issue by Republicans, including presidential rival Sen. John McCain, was expected to arrive in the country amid the controversy over comments by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that were supportive of Obama's 16-month timetable.

The Iraqi leader's aides have said his remarks, published in a German magazine, were misunderstood and that he was not taking sides in the U.S. election.

Other media sources buried al-Maliki's statement in their reporting about Obama's trip to Afghanistan. Following the conservative blogs, some media figures are warning against Obama becoming over-confident or appearing immodest. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Trudy Rubin framed her comment in terms of Obama's need to stay "humble" despite his positions in favor of negotiations with Iran, troop increases in Afghanistan, and troop withdrawals from Iraq all being validated within the last week.

Given the various forms of media clutter that have obscured the significance of al-Maliki's endorsement of Obama's position, it's possible to wonder whether al-Maliki's bombshell will eventually explode to Obama's benefit.

THE ULTIMATE ANSWER. It's likely that al-Maliki's statement is going to help Obama a great deal over the long run. There are several ways in which it will be helpful. The most immediate effect will be that day to day campaigning is going to be easier for Obama. Barack Obama and his surrogates can use the day to day jousting to remind voters that the Iraqi prime minister and Iraqi people agree with Obama's position and that McCain hasn't adjusted to the realities on the ground. Obama will also be able to quote al-Maliki to great effect during the campaign debates. Obama can also al-Maliki's statement to great effect in his campaign advertising. Although the al-Maliki bombshell on troop withdrawals isn't going to greatly help Obama on a short-term basis, it will be a gift that keeps on giving to the Obama campaign.

The Wind at Obama's Back

Barack Obama touched down in Afghanistan on Saturday after a brief visit to Kuwait. Soon it will be onto Iraq for meetings with the Iraqi leadership, Gen. Petraeus, and the U. S. senior staff.

If anybody has ever had a fair wind behind them as they traveled, it's been Barack Obama.

Courtesy of McCain's demands for Obama to travel to Iraq, Obama's trip to the Middle East is now his "much anticipated" trip. In fact, Obama's trip is so highly anticipated that all three of the major network television anchors are traveling with him. That means plenty of puff pieces about Obama that will probably improve his poll numbers. Obama is a celebrity presidential candidate and puffing celebrities is one of the major ways that Brian Williams, Charles Gibson, and Katie Courie "earn" their millions of dollars.

So puffing there will be.

And Obama will take it.

Because Obama's trip to the Middle East has been so highly anticipated, Obama also had an opportunity to give a major speech on Iraq in which he pivoted nicely on his justification for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Before the surge, Obama advocated withdrawing American troops in sixteen months because the troops weren't helping the Iraqis stabilize their country.
But last Tuesday, Obama argued that the progress brought about the surge provides even more justification for troop withdrawals. Building on Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's suggestion that a timetable for withdrawal would be appropriate, Obama argued that Iraq is stable enough that American troops can be withdrawn within 16 months and switched to Afghanistan with little danger to Iraq.

It was a sweet manuever. To top it off, Obama also looked determined and presidential while making the speech. The same can't be said for McCain and President Bush's responses. Boxed in by the fact that the Iraqis were supporting a withdrawal timetable, McCain was reduced to the carping complaint that Obama had announced policy before seeing conditions on the ground. The Bush administration didn't do any better in announcing that they had accepted the idea of "a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. That had the appearance of being a concession to the strength of the Maliki/Obama position. However, a "general time horizon" and "aspirational goals" are so vague that they appear transparently dishonest and made the Bush administration look they're lying more than anything else.

Indeed, one could argue that "ineffective dishonesty" has become one of the defining traits of the Bush administration.

Today, Obama got the best news yet. Just as news of Obama's arrival in the Middle East started filtering through the media, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq endorsed Obama's plan for withdrawing American troops by May 2010.

Malike stated that “U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” al-Maliki told Der Spiegel. He said he wants U.S. troops to leave “as soon as possible.”

Al-Maliki not only specifically supported Obama's plan and named Obama, he was also specific about undercutting John McCain's rationale that setting a timetable for withdrawal is tantamount to "surrender." Quoting al-Maliki:

"The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But that isn't the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.""

How good can it get for Obama? Obama has the Prime Minister of Iraq announcing support for his policy at precisely the very moment that the American media is most focused on Obama's trip to Iraq. Obama could not have hoped to have a better set of circumstances for making him look like an effective foreign policy leader.

It's a fair wind indeed.

Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela

Last week, I saw a notice where Karl Rove expressed amazement that the United States kept turning out people like Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who was killed in Afghanistan.

Personally, I would like to see the U. S. start turning out some people like Nelson Mandela as well. Certainly, we could use that kind of greatness of spirit and human generosity.

Mandela turns 90 today. Happy birthday!

Thinking a little bit about Mandela's remarkable efforts to reconcile white and black populations in South Africa, I won't use his birthday as an occasion to trash George Bush.

Obama and the Expectations Game

The Obama campaign was unhappy about the New York Times story on the divide between African-American and white opinion on racial issues.

But they had reason to be happy about the survey from which the story was written.

One of the most important things Obama should be happy about is that they're far ahead in the expectations game.

According to the New York Times/CBS News survey, a big majority of those polled believe that Obama is going to win in November. Overall, 54% believe Obama will win and only 30% see McCain winning. Among whites, it's Obama 50%-32% and among blacks 72%-16%. The fact that most people expect Obama to win is one of those"fundamentals" that make life tough for the McCain campaign. When people expect a candidate to win, they're more willing to raise money, volunteer for the candidate, attend events, and vote. Losing the "expectations game" doesn't kill a candidacy but it does make everything more difficult and costly.

The fact that Obama's ahead in the "expectations game" is also a big change from 2004. I can't remember any of my friends or colleagues thinking that John Kerry was going to win and I believe that ingrained pessimism was one of the reasons Kerry lost. If Obama wins, part of the reason will be that he was expected to win.

Obviously, political candidates can turn expectations around. Until the last couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses, most commentators (including this one) expected Hillary to win the Democratic nomination. But that was all changed by Obama's victory in Iowa.

Perhaps John McCain will figure out away to change expectations in his favor; perhaps Barack Obama will blow it. But right now, the expectations are breaking in Obama's favor.










much harder for John McCain to raise money, recruit volunteers, This is a real change from 2004 when none of the Democrats I knew saw John Kerry as winning the election.

And We Also Need to Pay Them . . .

Classisist Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute wants America to de-emphasize the sedentary, bureaucratic arts before the United States goes the way of other previously great nations.

American universities bragged that they were teaching the world how to design and engineer -- as our own kids gravitated to law and management schools. We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn't do rather than turn to our best and brightest private citizens to show us what we could.

Alas, no successful civilization in history -- Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on -- ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers.

Instead, Hanson wants America to re-emphasize manual labor.

A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.

It's time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit.

Except for the drilling, I'm all for that. I went the grad school/professor route myself but it's an injustice that manual labor of all kinds is so devalued in American society. It's also wrong that so many students are in college who don't want to be because of the lack of well-paid manual labor positions.

The best way to change things around is to create incentives for factory work, mining, building, farming, and other kinds of manual labor. All of these kinds of jobs would be more attractive and valued more highly if they had more job security, paid better, and had more effective health plans.

But where are the resources for increasing the welfare of manual workers going to be found?

How about creating disincentives for overpaid CEO's, Wall Street financial manipulations, high end trial lawyering, rainmaking lobbyists, and other occupations that tend to detract from the welfare of American society.

The policy prescriptions for more appropriately distributing wealth are well-known.

The United States could raise taxes on the wealthy to European levels, deny federal contracts to companies that overpay CEO's, socialize health care, and rely on government agencies rather than lawsuits to curb business abuses.

As Victor Davis Hanson would say, "the fate of Western Civilization is at stake."

Carrying Obama's Water

In a recent post on Talking Points Memo, the eminent Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol argues that progressives need to unify and get behind Obama. What especially bothers Skocpol is the feminists who are so angry over Hillary losing that they're willing to support McCain. But she's also dissatisfied with the liberal bloggers who won't let FISA go, single-issue people, "blustering egotists" like James Carville, and Jesse Jackson.


I'm with Skocpol. Progressives should be "carrying Obama's water" (to use a Limbaugh phrase) and pounding McCain morning, noon, and way into the wee hours for the pajamas media.


But it's not happening and it's especially strange that it's not happening in the major liberal blogs.


Skocpol mentions that "the supposedly progressive blogs are full . . . of diversions." Actually, the liberal blogs are so full of diversions that it's ridiculous. Obama gave a major speech on foreign policy yesterday and laid down his markers on withdrawing troops from Iraq. Nevertheless, "general news" blogs like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post didn't devote much more space to Obama's Iraq position than they did to the New Yorker cover of Barack Obama as a Muslim terrorist. In fact, Obama's speech on Iraq is now far down on TPM's front page while their report on McCain's criticism of Obama as "rigid and ideological" is fairly close to the top. In a certain way, TPM is (unknowingly) disseminating McCain's positions.


Much of the problem with Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post is that they view themselves as political news organizations. Feeling obligated to report all the news that's "fit to blog," these blogs end up peddling the diversions much more than they promote Obama or attack McCain.


Another problem with the liberal blogs is the rigidity of their approach to criticizing McCain when they do attack him. Contrary to the conservative blogs which continually experiment with new ways to attack Obama, the major liberal blogs stays consistently on two themes--that a McCain administration will be the third term for Bush and that McCain is doing an enormous amount of flip-flopping. McCain's certainly doing the flip-flopping but there are a number of other things that should disqualify him from the presidency as well.

A final point is that progressive bloggers tend to distract themselves with their criticism of how the mainstream media is covering McCain. The fact that the mainstream media is formulating a number of the campaign narratives in ways that favor McCain drives progressive bloggers to distraction and they devote a disproportionate amount of blog space to deconstructing the mainstream media. If the progressive blogs were doing a better job of creating their own narrative for electing Obama and defeating McCain, they might actually push the mainstream media to change their tune.

The only exception I see to Skocpol's argument is Daily Kos which pushes pretty hard against McCain.

Progressives really need to unite around Obama while the progressive blogs need to cut through their own clutter to promote Obama's candidacy.

No Diarrhrea on Mars

It appears from the pictures sent back by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that at least half of Mars had water more than three billion years ago.

The key is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered extensive outcroping of phyllosilicate rocks "which include clays rich in iron, magnesium or aluminum, mica and kaolinite."

These kinds of clays are formed through contact with water.

Despite the confirmation that Mars used to be a wet planet, there is still no evidence that there was life on Mars.

But if there was life, the creatures probably didn't have diarrhea. "Kaolinite" is one of the ingredients in Kaopectate.

Obama and McCain's Brass Tacks on Iraq

On July 15, Barack Obama and John McCain gave dueling speeches on Iraq that greatly clarified the issue of the war for the election.

The argument between Obama and McCain boils down to a simple choice concerning what's the most important thing to consider. For Obama, it's "what should we do in Iraq in the future;" and for McCain, "who was right about the surge."

Whoever wins the debate on "what's important" will win the debate on Iraq and more likely than not win the election.

In my opinion, Obama has a much better argument. But that doesn't mean he'll win the debate. In fact, McCain has certain advantages that will make the argument hard for Obama to win.

John McCain's view doesn't make sense at first. Why does he insist in talking about the surge rather than what he would do as president? McCain wants to frame the issue in terms of "the surge" because he was an early advocate of increasing American troops by 30,000 in Iraq and because the surge has been a relative success. In this context, McCain claims that he can be trusted to be right about everything connected with Iraq because he was right about the surge. For his part, Obama opposed the surge and predicted its failure (bias alert: I didn't think the surge would succeed either). Thus, McCain has a real advantage if he can convince voters to accept the idea that "who was right on the surge" is the most important issue.

There's also a subtext here. McCain also wants us to focus on the surge is because he's reluctant to say exactly what he wants to accomplish in Iraq. The only way to coherently think about McCain's ultimate goals for Iraq is to think of him as a neo-conservative and he certainly has agreed with the neo-conservatives about the war. What defines the neo-conservative position have been the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, establishing Iraq as a "stable democracy," and making Iraq into an ally in the war on terror. What is meant by Iraq being an ally in the war on terror is that Iraq would be a client state of the United States and that Iraq would (gladly) allow American troops to be stationed on its soil for the purpose of intimidating other Arab nations, supporting Israel, and maintaining a permanent state of confrontation with Iran.

Given the steadfast opposition of the Iraqi government and population to this kind of permanent American occupation, the whole neo-conservative idea is a pipe dream. It's difficult to tell how much McCain shares in that pipe dream, but he wants a large-scale American military presence in Iraq at a time when the Iraqi government is more stable. One can only assume that he wants the U. S. military to pursue "other American interests" as conservatives define those interests. This is what Obama thinks McCain is angling at as well when Obama rejects the idea of "permanent American bases in Iraq."

However, McCain has a good chance of selling his emphasis on the surge enough to make it an advantage for him. He has at several advantages. Most importantly, one can view "support for the surge" as the most important issue in Iraq without independently evaluating the competing claims and complexities of military and political conditions there. Thus, accepting McCain's argument makes decision-making easier and more efficient. Likewise, the whole conservative media establishment and 20-25% of the electorate was enthusiastic in their support of the surge. McCain's emphasis on the surge has the advantage of building on the enthusiasm of a passionate part of the American political scene. Finally, McCain's a relatively popular and trusted figure even among Democrats. That makes the argument easier for undecided voters to empathize with or accept, even for those who have mildly opposed the war.

Ironically, accepting Obama's argument might be a bigger leap of faith for undecided voters even though it's a simpler argument that coheres well with the facts. Obama's argument is that the relative success of the surge has made it possible for the U. S. to withdraw most of its troops within 16 months after his inauguration. It's simple, elegant, and conforms to accepted facts about the progress of the surge. However, Obama has a problem in that accepting Obama's argument about the future requires undecided voters to make their own judgements about future conditions in Iraq and thus puts more of a burden on voters.

The state of public opinion is a disadvantage for Obama in other ways. A large percentage of the moderate and independent vote is opposed to the war, but much of that opinion is fairly soft, uncertain, and uninformed. All McCain has to do is make undecided voters uncertain about their opposition to continued occupation for him to succeed. Obama has the more difficult task of convincing those same voters that withdrawing troops actually will work.

Finally, Obama is not nearly as familiar to the public as McCain and constant questioning and criticism has chipped away at Obama's veneer of charisma. As a result, Obama's not as automatically believable as McCain even when McCain is dissembling or hiding his opinions.

As a result, Obama has to be much more effective at promoting his ideas than John McCain if Obama hopes to win the debate on Iraq and probably if he hopes to win the election at all.

That's the hand Obama's been dealt. Now he has to play it.

Obama Recognizes Obvious--Needs To Sell It

It was only a matter of time before the Obama campaign saw the obvious on Iraq and Obama came out with the needed update in a New York Times op-ed just today.

There are two points that are obvious.

The first point is that the Bush surge has resulted in a solidification of the Malik government and general progress. Perhaps more surprising is the second point that the progress of the surge also makes the argument for withdrawing from Iraq stronger than ever.

The Bush administration and the pro-war faction had imagined that progress for the surge would justify a long-continued occupation of Iraq. However, it turned out that the significance of the surge was to remove the main obstacle to withdrawal. The greatest weakness of the anti-war argument had been that a U. S. withdrawal would leave Iraq in a Hobbesian nightmare of a war of all against all. The situation in Iraq was so bad at the end of 2006 that withdrawing could have been legitimately seen as abdicating our responsibility for fixing problems that we ourselves caused by our invasion.

The success of the surge solved that problem. The Maliki government has established a commanding position in relation to the Shiite militias. Sunnis have stopped revolting and al-Qaida is no longer a dynamic factor. Moreover, Iraq is awash in cash as a result of rising oil prices. Now, the United States can now withdraw its military forces without the specter of abject failure hanging over the mission. We can withdraw with no fear of Iraq falling into a Somalia-type collapse, no fear of a general genocide of the Sunni population, and no fear of an al-Qaeda take-over.

In other words, we can withdraw with some of our dignity intact. Not all of our dignity. After all more than one hundred thousand Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and two million more have been driven into exile. But the U. S. has managed to achieve some stability.

Even more to the point, the Iraqis want us out. According to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a
timetable on their withdrawal,” al-Maliki said, according to a statement released by his office. “In all cases, the basis for any agreement will be respect for the full sovereignty of Iraq.”

Last week, talks on a continued Status of Forces Agreement broke down. In a typical over-reach, the Bush administration wanted control of Iraqi air space, full control over U. S. combat missions, and immunity from prosecution for American troops AND private contractors. As a result, the Iraqi government not only rejected the U. S. proposal, they started to insist that the Bush administration accept a deadline for withdrawal and agree for Americans to leave the Green Zone compound that had come to serve as a symbol of U. S. arrogance.

"A senior Iraqi government official said this weekend the enclave should revert to Iraqi control by the end of the year. “We think that by the end of 2008 all the zones in Baghdad should be integrated into the city,” said Ali Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman."

Liberal blogs have been noticing for some time that progress for the surge strengthened the argument for withdrawal. It became obvious that Barack Obama would have to pounce when the Maliki government announced that they wanted a timeline for withdrawal as well. And Obama did pounce.

"The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States. . .

"As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

That's a plan for withdrawal that can be defended. Now Obama has McCain campaign in a box. If McCain keeps arguing for a permanent American presence in Iraq, he can be accused of trying to override the sovereignty of the Iraqi government. If McCain agrees to an expedited withdrawal, he's basically agreeing that Obama is right and has been right all along. If the Obama campaign is smart, they'll pound away at the Obama/Maliki convergence with all the energy and money they have.

It's interesting to think about the counter-arguments from the Bush administration and the right. The McCain campaign calls Obama's new arguments for withdrawal a "losing proposition" in the sense that they imply the failure of the American mission. They won't be using that theme for long because Obama is talking about getting out while we're ahead instead of while we're behind.

There's also a great deal of rage in Commentary over Obama's failure to give the Bush administration any credit. But why should Obama give Bush credit? The war was a bad idea and the Bush administration floundered around for almost five years, wasting 4,000 American lives, and let the country sink into the abyss before finally righting themselves.

I've also seen some commentary to the effect that we shouldn't take the Maliki government's call for a deadline seriously because they're just pandering to popular Iraqi hostility to the occupation. But shouldn't the Maliki government be taking popular opinion in Iraq seriously if it's a democracy.

The Obama campaign now has a workable angle on Iraq. They should push it as hard as they can.

Does Obama Have a Big Enough Ego?

One of the prerequisites for a serious run at the presidency is a huge ego. Everything about the American presidency--the White House, Oval Office, West Wing, Lincoln bedroom, and nuclear football, as well as moments like the Gettysburg Address, Kennedy Inaugural, and Roosevelt's fireside chats--as been given iconic, semi-religious status in American society. To be an American president means that someone has to rise so far above the idolizing of presidents that they can see "the Oval Office" as a place to get work done, meeting foreign dignitaries as "part of my job," and dealing with earth-shattering events like the war in Iraq or Katrina in the mundane terms of "solving problems," "seeking political advantage," or "responding to opponents." In other words, part of being president is being a man or woman apart from the cultural and political apparatus for idolizing the presidency.

All of that takes an enormous sense of self-confidence, personal mission, and a large vision of a person's place in history. In other words, it takes an extraordinary amount of ego.

That has especially been the case for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. As the first serious African-American and female contenders for the office, Obama and Clinton have had to see themselves in even more monumental terms than white male candidates. In many ways, Obama's and Clinton's candidacies have been culminations of the long histories of black struggle and the women's movement in the United States. The efforts of literally millions of men and women over the entire history of the United States went into putting Obama and Clinton into a position to run such powerful campaigns. It must have taken an extraordinary amount of self-confidence for both Obama and Clinton to carry thos legacies while also focusing on mundane things like meeting with reviewing speeches, local dignitaries, choosing New Hampshire diners for breakfast, getting hair done, and locating the right tie.

Now that Clinton has been eliminated, one question for Obama's candidacy is whether he really has a big enough ego to not only be president but to preside over a unprecedented and unavoidably monumental kind of presidency.

In this light, Jonah Goldberg's complaints about Obama's ego in the New York Post seem strangely off-key.

Goldberg writes in the New York Post:

Perhaps [Obama's] an adulation junkie . . . That would account for why a man who thinks striving for popularity is a character flaw has nonetheless decided to give his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat football stadium. Or it might tell us why a candidate who hasn't even been nominated yet wants to re-enact some of the most famous scenes from both Reagan and JFK's highlight reels by holding a rally at Germany's Brandenburg Gate . . .

To the contrary, doing things "big" like this is a strong sign that Barack Obama is someone who's up to the job. Two of the logical questions associated with managing a political convention are "how do we make my nomination special?" and "what can we do to stand out?" Obama's answer shows exactly what a high level of imagination, confidence, and guts he and his staff have. The idea of giving the acceptance speech in the football stadium stands out in a huge way, makes the speech an even bigger event than it would have been otherwise, and grabs the attention of people in the important swing state of Colorado. Even more important than that, the idea of giving the acceptance speech in the stadium speaks volumes about Obama's confidence in his own ability and the ability of his staff to make an signal success of the event. Obama is assuming that his camp can nail down the mundane details of ticketing, lighting, seating arrangements, writing the speech, and delivering the speech so well that they can produce a "happening."

The fact that Obama has this kind of matter of fact confidence is a good sign that he thinks on a grand enough scale to be a successful president.

Obama's stadium gambit is also politically astute because it puts pressure on McCain in areas where McCain is weak like staging events and writing and delivering speeches. McCain and his people aren't big on preparation and this is a chance to really show them up.

The same thing is true of holding a rally at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin where JFK and Ronald Reagan created a lot of their own legacies. In discussing the event, Obama is assuming that he can make a mark on history just as well as Kennedy or Reagan. Given that Obama is running for president, he should be taking it for granted that he will make an impact on American society and indeed the world at large that rivals or surpasses the significant presidents of the past.

Otherwise, Obama shouldn't have run at all.

The irony of Obama's trip to Germany and Iraq is that he might not have been making the overseas trip at all if John McCain hadn't challenged him to travel to Iraq. If Obama ends up speaking at Brandenburg Gate and the speech is a big success, the whole trip might be a huge plus for his campaign.

But that's a lot of being president is about--dealing with challenges in imaginative and successful ways. And it appears that Barack Obama has enough skill and confidence--and a big enough ego--to get it done.