8 posts tagged “obama”
The Shack is the Philly and Flogging Molly bar on Wilshire and 26th, the setting of a distant blog involving dubious companionship, a talking dog movie, and the Iraq war. Last night, as then, I found myself under the swinging Elvis hips clock in discourse with Doc. Doc is about 63. He knows a lot about veteran’s affairs, let’s just leave it at that. He had missed the debate. I told him I thought it was a draw until McCain closed with this soliloquy to veterans. McCain was almost filling up, I told Doc. Throughout the debate he tapped into a narrative of noble military patriotism extending from Normandy Beach, to Fallujah, to himelf and the presidency. “It was Reaganesque.” I said, as a compliment. Sort of, maybe. I wasn’t sure. “Then there was a vet on MSNBC saying McCain’s record on Veteran’s legislation isn’t so good, ” I added. Doc barely looked up from his White Russian. “McCain voted against the new G.I bill, a hospital bill, increased medical care, other stuff, “ he said, matter of factly. Then we were distracted as a dozen frisky young ‘uns across the room, draft age all of them, joined in the a great karaoke moment of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” “You know, in my line I’ve known a few Medal of Honor winners,” Doc said. “And not using it to bring glory to yourself is a big part of it. A big part of it.” And that’s all Doc said about it. So, I just looked it up. Senator John McCain, the man who tenderly said: “I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I'll take care of them . . .And I love them. And I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them. And that's going to be my job. But, also, I have the ability, and the knowledge, and the background to make the right judgments, to keep this country safe and secure,” also, just last May, ”did not support new GI bill legislation because he thought it was too generous and would result in soldiers choosing to go to school instead of reenlisting. This bill passed 75-22 and McCain was one of three Senators who didn't show up to vote.” John McCain, in fact, had a 20 percent rating from the Disabled American Veterans (DAV). I’m ashamed that, just hours ago, I fell for it. As it turns out John McCain, caring friend of veterans, wanted to make sure kids who served and survived in Iraq, reenlisted for Iraq, so he tried to keep a college education back home out of their reach. There isn’t even a curse for that.
Overall, McCain was better than I thought he'd be. He certainly connected better, especially at the end, on an emotional level, a la Reagan. Ethos and pathos missing, for the third Presidential election in a row, from the Democrat.
The Wall Street meltdown and bail-out have taken wind out of Obama's sails. Hard to communicate hope and optimism when people feel we might be going to hell in a wheelbarrow.
McCain's "freeze spending" sounded pretty strong. (it was a solid answer in the context of ten minutes of mush).
It will be interesting to see what sound bites get replayed over the next few days. Obama's "you were wrong . . .you were wrong . . . was the nicest rhetorical flourish of the debate, but was too brief.
The fact-checking will matter, and benefit Obama slightly.
I wondered during the Democratic convention where Obama put his appeal to young people. Still wondering.
Boxing metaphor: a draw, Obama sure-footed, but fought not to lose. Even scoring on two cards, McCain gets extra point on third card from old Jewish lady in Fort Lauderdale on the Iran exchange and experience. (Old Jewish ladies in Fort Lauderdale are much more important than they should be in these election things.)
Both candidates are unsure of what to say about the economy. Election begs a plan.
Football: at the beginning of the fourth quarter, McCain is back to within a field goal, out of time outs.
Two more debates. Lots of commercials. And Palin. McCain still has a ways to go.
Richard Reeves spoke at UCLA a couple of times a few years ago and I got to know him a bit, in the way of walking him from building to building and making small talk. I'd done some homework, read his biographies of Reagan and Kennedy. Enjoyed both; Reeves takes a detached, respectful, and sometimes surprising middle road as a biographer/historian and doesn't feel a need to connect everything, which is good because everything doesn't connect. Events happen. His point on a recent blog.
After Obama's convention speech, Reeves wrote:
"We need a president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past."
That is not a particularly graceful or articulate line, but it is the most important fact about being president. The toughest job in the world is essentially reactive. The president does not run the country and is not paid by the hour. He is there to respond to events unanticipated: bizarre attacks on New York City, the blockade of a European city occupied by American troops, the rising of young black men and women against legal segregation, civil wars and genocides in places we never knew existed, the shelling of an American fort off South Carolina by other Americans.
Reeves goes on to tell a haunting anecdote about an afternoon in August, 1963 when John F. Kennedy made, without fanfare or even notice in the moment, two singular decisions that would alter American history, one tragically in Vietnam, the other fruitfully in civil rights. No one predicted these decisions in the 1960 campaign, and no one fully predicted their consequences.
But in retrospect, Kennedy was a good man to have in the moment. He had matured in the office. He was intelligent and politically astute. He understood himself and the country. He had good advisors and a good system of learning and communicating. Nixon, from what we know of him now, would likely have gotten both decisions wrong, not just one. There are no guarantees.
What we need and seek in a president is the right person for the decisive moment, one with intelligence; the ability to store and accurately recall a lot of information and to be able to synthesize it rationally and independently from a group; honesty with self and others; an independent sense of history; experience in policy questions domestic and international; confidence that comes from being at the top of one's game; openness and curiosity; a calm and steady temperament; physical and intellectual stamina. And did I say honesty?
The next President has a very difficult job. The country has not been as divided in its political beliefs since Lincoln slipped into Washington alone in the night to take up his presidency. The next president, like Honest Abe (imagine such a nickname today) has to preserve the union, bring us closer together in a common, higher, purpose.
It is my prayer (to Jesus, or through Bahá’u’lláh, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster--it's none of your g.d. business) that people at some point push aside the pigs and the commercials and the polls and just consider the qualities of mind and spirit, the intellect we need at the helm (and backing up the helm) in times of terribly difficult decisions, and then vote accordingly. Anything less would be unpatriotic.
1. Barack Obama now has history in his hands with the speech in Germany. The Europeans are yearning for an end to American military adventures, for us to have a more pacifist policy toward the world, and for Obama to lead us there. Obama has said he thinks it is necessary to escalate in Afghanistan and he has made some commitment to continuing a "war on terrorism." That's not what the Tiergarten gathered hopeful want to hear. It has to be a speech of principles. Can he possibly, and with credidibility, espouse principles that serve both? It's been done before; by John F. Kennedy most convicingly, and Kennedy had great, loyal allies in his craft. No doubt Obama and his allies, including, I hope, Samantha Power, have been working on this one for some time. They wouldn't have booked this gig if they weren't ready to play the room. I hope.
2. Little item from the LA Times yesterday:
"The top two floors of a Century City residential tower still under construction have been sold for a record $47 million to Candy Spelling, the widow of TV mogul Aaron Spelling.
"A $47-million price tag may seem like an enormous sum, but this is all about downshifting in the fast lane.After all, the 62-year-old heiress with a reputation for embracing opulence will be moving out of Los Angeles County's largest home -- a 123-room, 56,500-square-foot mansion on six acres in the Holmby Hills neighborhood off Sunset Boulevard.
"Her new home will be less than a third the size of the old one -- just 16,500 square feet -- but with a killer 360-degree view spanning the horizon from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island. The condominium building called the Century is going up next door to the Century Plaza Hotel on Avenue of the Stars and will be completed in late 2009.
And another from Boston.com today:
"TAUNTON -- The housing crunch has caused anguish and anxiety for millions of Americans. For Carlene Balderrama, a 53-year-old wife and mother, the pressure was apparently too much to bear.
"Police say that Balderrama shot herself Tuesday afternoon 90 minutes before her foreclosed home on Duffy Drive was scheduled to be sold at auction. Chief Raymond O'Berg said that Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company at 2:30 p.m., telling them that "by the time they foreclosed on the house today she'd be dead."
"The mortgage company notified police, who found her body at 3:30 p.m. The auction had been scheduled to start at 5 p.m. Balderrama used her husband's high-powered rifle, O'Berg said.
"She left a note for her family saying they should "take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house," O'Berg said.
"Neighbors on this forested side street said Balderrama had lived in the two-story, brown-shingled, raised ranch for about four years with her husband, John, who is a plumber, and their 24-year-old son.
If you believe that we have a responsibility to figure out how to share a small world, this shit connects.
And finally, 3. I have no idea how I overlooked this song in my life. It came on Pandora, the John Prine station. Dublin Blues by Guy Clark. It's a perfect song.
"I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack . . . I'm probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you. We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie; you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant and you can't sit out there with everyone else; there's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office; here's where you sit on the bus. And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment and you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."
- Mike Huckabee
"America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from
Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40
million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.
Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.
Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.
Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?"
-Pat Buchanan
Ain't that America . . ..maybe Barack Obama should have closed last week's speech: "We've come to the end of our time. Perhaps we can continue this conversation next week where we left off."
One of the most interesting things to me about a Barack Obama presidency is that he would bring with him, as an African American, an internalized awareness of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s indignation and anger. It’s real stuff. It is shared in some measure by many if not most African Americans for good, historical reasons. And having a little of it in the White House would be good for the country.
There’s no reason to believe that Rev. Wright’s indignation is central to Obama’s politics or that it would guide his policies in a profound way. But Obama is, after all, African American. Historical anger is part of the intellectual, religious and political waters in which he learned to swim, and it is a part of the American story that has never before been directly represented in the White House.
Among generally tolerant and sensible people, many feminists I know have been known to enjoy a sip of bell hooks or Andrea Dworkin. Most environmentalists have a soft spot for Greenpeace pirates, tree sitters, and SUV burners. I have heard moderate Jewish friends come to the defense of Meir Kahane in debates, as I, an Irish Catholic, have gone out of my way to hear what Gerry Adams had to say. Whenever I see a picture of Fidel Castro, whom I know to be a tyrant, I can't help humming a wry chorus of Elton John's "I'm Still Standing." It’s the way we are. Radical sympathies aren’t a bad thing. Like a classical cellist who listens to gangsta on the bus, isn’t there a little radical voice in all of us, a Henry David Thoreau who calls us on our mundane, compromised existences and says “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty,” and shakes us up a little bit?
It seems to me that’s the jolt Barack Obama got in church from Jeremiah Wright. Good politicians are very absorbent. They listen all the time and pick up on people’s hopes and fears, loves and angers. I am reading a biography of the legendary California politician, Jesse Unruh, by former newsman Bill Boyarski. Of Unruh, Boyarski writes, “He had the curiosity of a good reporter plus an economist’s belief in data. He also listened to political gossip and solicited advice from many people. On some Sundays he’d drop in on his nephew Paul, by then a blue-collar aerospace worker, and talk politics. He made his judgments based on such information, interpreted through his won experiences in life.” Among those experiences, he carried with him the resentment that comes with the humiliation of having been raised in poverty. Unruh was a moderate, who was capable of outrageously boorish behavior against women, but inside he was still a kid who once got into a fight with his friends when they threw a Black kid into a privy. When he got his chance, he carried California's early, landmark Fair Housing Law through the state legislature.
And had Unruh been Black, he would have gone to the church of his folks as well and absorbed the railing anger and urban legends of the Black political pulpit along with the music and the spirit. Without it, he would have been lacking something in the representation game.
I think that Barack Obama has been writing the speech he gave today for thirty years. At some point in the campaign he knew he’d have to deliver it. Better during the Democratic primary because he knows the Republicans most likely have some ugly Willie Horton via Rev. Wright waiting for him--with a nastiness that even Mark Penn is incapable of. But now, he’s disarmed them. He put Wright and race in perspective and he can move on. He has a spotlight now for his views on the economic mess and Iraq. And he’ll use it with a chorus of teachers and writers inside of him, Harvard Law professors, Saul Alinsky disciples, Rev. Wright and Ralph Ellison, radicals and moderates, daring and tentative, left and right, people he's met and listened to along the way--a chorus I tell ya.
“These people are a part of me,” he said today. “And they are part of America, this country that I love.”
And they might all be headed for the White House.
Happy St. Paddy's Day, O'bama
My old friend Marshall Ganz used the occasion of the recent civil rights “flare-up” as he calls it, to opine on leadership in the TPM café. Ganz is an Obama partisan. He also knows a hell of a lot about political leadership. The key concept is "mobilizing." His observations are sharp and important. “The recent flare-up between Senators Obama and Clinton over Martin Luther King, Jr., LBJ, and civil rights tells us less about race than it does about a different understanding of leadership and how to make enduring political change. Clinton has for months tried to frame Obama as someone who “hopes for change” while she can “make change”. Despite all the noisy charges and countercharges these past few days, that was her point about Dr. King’s “dream” of change—that it couldn’t become “real” without a President able to “make change.” But she misunderstands the history. The civil rights revolution represented a major mobilization of the public, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, (itself encouraged by Brown v. Board of Education the year before)--and was then built by the courage, sacrifice and “good organizing” of thousands of leaders, many of whom were young people. The most outstanding of them was Dr. King. When he raised his voice, however, it was not so much to speak “for” others as to stir others to raise their own voices to speak – and to act -- for themselves, their families, their communities, and their country. A decade later, following JFK’s assassination, LBJ rose to the challenge King and the millions who supported civil rights had created. But the occasion was not of his own making--and his action only came in response to an organized, creative, and purposeful movement that insisted. Clinton’s idea of leadership is very different. Her effort to reform health care shortly after her husband took office was notable in that no one mobilized the public. Her team took polls, conducted focus groups, and engaged interest groups. But they never mobilized the public. And although an outsider at the time, she tried to play the insider game. But in the insider’s game, only the insider’s reality counts. So she lost – and so did the millions of us who never had an opportunity to help make the health care “changes” we needed and wanted and deserved. Now Clinton wants us to hear what she will do “for” us, what “she” will deliver – much as a lawyer, drawing strength not from her client but from her expertise, argues a case. Obama, on the other hand, urges people to join with him in acting for themselves and each other. A former community organizer, he learned that changing ourselves and changing the world go together, and that without mobilizing the strength of people who want change, it won’t happen. America doesn’t just need “change”—it needs the kind of change that mobilizes those who want and need it, rather than relying on those who resist and fear it. Clinton made her key mistakes on health care in 1994; fourteen years later, what the imbroglio about Martin Luther King and LBJ shows is not racial insensitivity but that she’s never learned the real lesson about how to make change that matters and lasts. Although they both became lawyers, Clinton wrote a senior thesis about community organizing; Obama practiced it. I'd also like to point out a thoughtful post about Obama and Clinton in Mark Kleiman's Reality-based community from January 21. I tried to paste it in here, but as Mark had painstaikingly linked thoughout it made the VOX tansfer explode.
This past summer, 25 students in a class I teach on Leadership in the Public Interest at UCLA examined the current crop of presidential candidates against the prevailing models, theories, and traits of leadership they covered in the class. Their observations and reflections were surprising, both to themselves and to me.
The assignment was simple. I asked them to put aside their own preferences and politics and to research the candidates freshly through official websites, MySpace pages, televised and YouTube-available
speeches, and see what resonated for them through the lens of what they understood about effective leadership from the class.
The result was a bit like a two-week intensive focus group by a very diverse group of young (three were over 30 years-old), very bright, and focused (there was part of a grade at stake) students on the upcoming election. The class consisted of undergraduates and graduates. A number of them were leaders of campus organizations, fraternities, and sororities, one was a union organizer, another was a combined law and public policy master’s candidate. There were also a couple of athletes, young parents, summer students from other universities, one young woman who recently moved from Nigeria and another from Iran, a graduate student in nursing, a 40-year-old special operations Army captain, and a few younger students who recently entered UCLA as junior transfers from California community colleges.
The question they focused on was: your personal politics aside, which candidates come across as truly having the capacity to lead the country in difficult times. They weren’t looking to identify a “winning’ candidate, but to evaluate a number of candidates on their leadership strengths and weaknesses, as they portray themselves online and appear on television. It was, by design, a look at the surface; the students weren’t out to examine the truth behind the candidates’ or opponents’ claims, but to look at the candidates images of themselves, what their records revealed, and see what signals about leadership capacity emerge. The students had to wrestle a bit with themselves and others in the class to keep their own political views out of the picture. They also had to carefully review websites and clips about candidates they would have most likely paid scant personal attention in the course of the election.
Starting with the vocabulary of leadership studies, the students opened with a bias in the upcoming election for a candidate with “transformational” qualities; one who, in the words of James McGregor Burns in his seminal work Leadership, “raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both the leader and the led, having a transforming effect on both.” The students were attracted to candidates who showed an awareness that the country’s most difficult problems—the environment, health care, threats of terrorism, and immigration—require what Ronald Heifetz in Leadership Without Easy Answers calls “adaptive” solutions, by which a president has to mobilize and educate the country “to tackle tough problems” that will require people “to change their attitudes, beliefs and behaviors” to make progress.
The grist for this transformational mill was, through websites and speeches, a recognition of the difficulty of the problems faced by the country and the expression of a philosophy and vision that seems up to the task. On the Republican side, the students were drawn to Mitt Romney’s “three-legged stool” of a “strong military, strong economy, and strong families.” The Romney campaign, they said, depicted “high moral and ethical standards.” It illustrated a proven willingness, displayed as a governor, to tackle health care and environmental problems, giving credibility to Romney’s statement, (in which they overlooked the non-sequitur) that, “we’re facing many challenges, but America has always overcome these challenges in the past, and I am confident that we can do so again.”
On the Democratic side, in terms of transformative leadership, they were drawn to
Barack Obama, and the way his websites and speeches stress that “the solutions to a nation’s problems require collective responsibility, action, and political will.” The students noted that Obama “invokes the idea that the new threats we face require a new vision of leadership.”
Along the same lines, the students also looked at the candidates in terms of how they invoke moral leadership, the uplifting quality that reflects the wants, needs, aspirations of followers. On this scale, two candidates stood out: John Edwards on the Democratic side for his commitment to mobilizing the country to fight poverty, and Rudolph Giuliani on the Republican side for his commitment to public safety and national security.
Next, the students looked at the candidates in term of the traits that we all look for in leaders, consciously or not. They took as their starting point the traits and characteristics identified by James Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, which identified, as the result of a 70,000 person survey, the most outstanding traits of a leader (mainly in the corporate sector) to be: honest, forward-looking, competent, inspiring, intelligent, fair-minded, broad minded, supportive, straightforward, and dependable. This analysis tended to expose the yin-yang of the candidates. John McCain won high marks for being straightforward, and low marks for being forward-looking, with websites and rhetoric that appeared “stuck in the past.” On the other hand, Giuliani got high marks for being forward-looking, with his enumeration of 12 commitments to the American people, but low marks for being supportive, with his tendency toward “divisive” and “scaring” comments. Best “supportive” role went to John Edwards for his family dedication and story as well as for his poverty tour. But Edwards fell short in the category of broad-mindedness, with little sense displayed of how he would actually tackle major issues. The leading candidate for expressing a sense of being broad-minded was Hillary Clinton, whose websites address a wide variety of issues and tout the support of a huge spectrum of organizations and people. But Clinton’s Achilles heal seemed to be honesty, both coming from her contradictory statements on Iraq and the small cottage industry of anti-Hillary Clinton websites built on inconsistencies in her speeches and interviews.
Reaching back to the roots of democracy, the students also looked at the candidates in terms of Aristotle’s observation that political persuasion rests on appealing to people’s minds (logos), trust (ethos), and hearts (pathos). The students lamented that a strong appeal to intelligence, logos, the trait for which Al Gore was both praised and scorned, seems largely missing in the present campaign. The candidates, they noted, following a long trend in presidential politics, have “moved from speeches to sound-bites. Argument has been replaced by assertion, and there has been a shift from political discourse to emotional appeal.” In terms of ethos, however, a claim to strength through character and personal authority, Rudolph Giuliani stood out. And in terms of pathos, the ability to connect emotionally with an audience, Fred Thompson’s “witty, wry sense of humor” and projection of intelligence seemed to separate him from the pack.
Perhaps because of our location in Los Angeles, the students also paid close attention to the “theater” of politics, the staged and spontaneous moments that create the all-important visceral responses in campaigns. They focused on such events as John Edwards evoking Bobby Kennedy with his poverty tour, which drew positive marks, and Hillary Clinton’s participation in the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Selma march, which drew a more ambiguous grade. After Clinton delivered the lines of an old hymn in southern, Black cadences, she won rounds of applause and amens among African Americans in the room, but subsequent ridicule nationally on YouTube and Fox News. But the winner of the Alexander the Great- Henry V Band of Brothers Award for mastery of theatrics went to Rudy Giuliani. His visceral, sincere, and personal 9-11 story resonated deeply with the class for whom the collapse of the World Trade center towers is as seminal an event as Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination were for previous generations.
Finally, couple of the more quantitative-minded students in the class imaginatively analyzed leadership capacity in terms of the candidates’ claim to authority by expressing a commitment to meet a wide range of public needs. They took as their starting point Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which starts with physiological needs of air, water, sleep, and moves up through safety needs, love and friendship, on to esteem needs, and, finally, self-actualization—bringing oneself to a Gandhi level of political being. They applied policy and programs to each stage in the hierarchy; for instance, health care, social security, water and air quality for the physiological needs; public safety and homeland security for safety; family-building and senior citizens programs for love and friendship; education programs for esteem, and so on. They then gave points for degrees of action in each program or policy and started combing through the websites and records. The winner of the “who has shown to have done the most, to support the most, be the most comprehensive well-rounded candidate” by this methodology? Yes, I am sure you guessed it, Dennis Kucinich. Two factors, the students realized, helped explain the result. First, it makes sense that the most leftward-oriented Democrat would advocate the most active role for government in solving the widest range of public problems (an insight that shed more interesting light on the other candidate’s scores), as well as the fact that Kucinich seemed to include every letter he ever wrote and every public comment he has ever made on his websites.
For me as the detached instructor, three surprising points stood out in the exercise. First, given the demographic, I feared in the beginning that the exercise would turn in to a Hillary-Barack love fest, that the small minority of conservative students in the class would be put off, and the effectiveness of the lesson might be lost. The students not only disciplined themselves to prevent this, but on closer examination in terms of capacity for leadership, Clinton’s and Obama’s stars faded somewhat under closer examination.
Second, I was surprised (as were a number of the students) at the consistency with which Rudolph Giuliani would rise to the top of the pile. This is due in large part, I think, to his charisma and rhetorical skills, but what stood more is the way he identifies himself with 9-11; not terrorism and security per se, but the day itself, like Franklin Roosevelt and the Day of Infamy or Ronald Reagan and the day of the Challenger explosion. It’s his. A candidate wanting to reach this generation would do well to tell his or her personal 9-11 story, passionately, early in the conversation. Barack Obama certainly has demonstrated the skills and the range to capture, move, and lead with words, but Giuliani has the greater story in which younger listeners feel they are characters and he is a hero.
And third, when a candidate’s potential for leadership is viewed though the current media of websites and video clips – the way many younger people will construct their own, personal to them and random to others, documentary narrative of the election — it is stunning, with so much information available, how little needs to be revealed and how much can be concealed to make indelible impressions.
