Sentence Of The Day

Obama praised W's love and support of the troops in his recent speech.   Rick Hertzberg responds:

That was kind—and not untrue, as far as it went: there is no reason to doubt that the personal motivations of the second President Bush in launching the invasion and occupation of Iraq included the fine sentiments that his successor now attributes to him, even if these were mixed with others less fine, such as a desire to avenge his father and outdo him in a single bold stroke of Oedipal filial piety.

The Death Penalty Kinda Sucks: Updated

Never Say Die

Another botched execution, this one in Ohio. They tried for two hours to find a vein and finally gave up. They want to try again next week. The man’s lawyers argue that this would be “cruel and unusual punishment” and is therefore unconstitutional.

Cruel, certainly. Unusual? Well, this was the first time since “lethal injection” became the norm that executioners failed to kill a condemned person during the course of a single execution session, however lengthy. But there was nothing unusual about the cruelty.

In our country, if a death sentence were pronounced honestly, it would sound like this:

You are hereby sentenced to death. Before you are killed, you will be taken a maximum security prison, there to be held in isolation for twenty-three hours of every day in conditions of solitary confinement. The length of this imprisonment is indeterminate but unlikely to be less than ten years. Though it may be as few as two or three years, it is more likely to be twenty or more. At intervals you will be told that you will be put to death on a certain date. Neither you nor your jailers nor anyone else will know which of these dates will prove to be the correct one. You will suffer depression, extreme anxiety, and, most probably, severe mental deterioration. On one of these dates, you will be strapped to a gurney and poisoned by intravenous injection of lethal chemicals. Your execution may take an hour or more. Your death is likely to be accompanied by unbearable pain, though this will not be apparent to witnesses because one of the chemicals will have paralyzed you, preventing you from crying out or moving.

For the Ohio prisoner, a fifty-three-year-old man who committed his crime a quarter-century ago, there is an added fillip: he has been subjected to an elaborate mock execution, to be followed in due course by a “successful” one.

Update:  The title of this post was an attempt at understatement. I posted Hertzberg's piece because it illustrates just how horrible the death penalty is. As a friend put it: "The death penalty doesn't kind of suck, it is absolutely wrong."  I couldn't agree more.

Gandhian Hardball

Partisanship, by the Bye
by Hendrik Hertzberg

Throughout the fortnight-long Battle of the Stimulus Package—the Capitol Hill confrontation that culminates this week in a signing ceremony for a historically unprecedented piece of legislation that will inject more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars’ worth of adrenaline into America’s fluttering economic heart—one question preoccupied commentators and observers, especially those desperate for relief from the daunting substance of the matter: was President Obama being “bipartisan” enough?

Some discussed the question calmly, others less so; but there was something like a consensus that if non-trivial numbers of Republican legislators failed to support the stimulus bill the fault, and the obloquy, would be Obama’s. “The bill will be judged a political success not simply if it becomes law, but if it’s deemed ‘bi-partisan,’ ” ABC’s “The Note” Web site warned. The Los Angeles Times, while calling the bill’s quick passage in the House of Representatives a “big legislative victory” for Obama, cautioned that “it was clear that his efforts so far had not delivered the post-partisan era that he called for in his inauguration address.” (The man had been in office for eight days—a tight schedule for era-delivering.) On the Senate floor, the remarks of Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, provided evidence that an age of perpetual political peace had not yet dawned. “This bill stinks!” Senator Graham exclaimed. And:

The process that’s led to this bill stinks! . . . There is no negotiation going on here! Nobody is negotiating! We’re making this up as we go! The polling numbers are scaring the hell out of everybody, and they’re in a panic! They’re running from one corner of the Capitol to the other to try to cobble votes together to lower the cost of the bill to say we solved the problem! This is not the way you spend a trillion dollars!

The “process,” admittedly, was a hurried one; it had to be, what with the banking system frighteningly close to collapse, the economy in its deepest crisis since the nineteen-thirties, and job losses, which approached three million last year, accelerating to more than a half million a month. Still, the President found time for cordiality, inviting Republicans from both Houses of Congress to join him for cocktails, a Super Bowl party, and more cocktails. Nor was his “outreach” purely social. “This was not a drive-by P.R. stunt, and I actually thought it might be,” Zach Wamp, of Tennessee, told the Times after he and his Republican House colleagues finished a long session with the President. “It was a substantive, in-depth discussion with our conference.” More to the point, the bill they were discussing had already been tailored to soothe Republican sensibilities. It included tax cuts as well as direct spending, and its size, however huge by normal standards, was not even half the output—two trillion dollars—that the recession is expected to drain from the economy in the next two years.

After the Senate passed the stimulus, which Sean Hannity, on Fox News, denounced as “the European Socialist Act of 2009,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, pronounced it “a dramatic move in the direction of indeed turning America into Western Europe.” Whether or not greater income equality, better health, and fewer prisons would really be a dystopian nightmare, McConnell’s vision of “the Europeanization of America” has already come true in a way that bears directly on the question of “bipartisanship”: what might be called America’s parliamentary parties have come to resemble their disciplined European counterparts. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, for reasons of history and origins, the Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates, and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship feasible. The post-civil-rights, post-Vietnam realignment, along with the gerrymandered creation of safe districts, has given us—on Capitol Hill, at least—an almost uniformly rightist G.O.P. and a somewhat less uniformly progressive array of Democrats.

In 1981, President Reagan’s tax cuts passed with the help of forty-eight cross-party votes in the House and thirty-seven in the Senate. Obama’s stimulus got zero and three, respectively. (Getting those three—a practical necessity, thanks to the scandalous routinization of the filibuster—precipitated the vote-cobbling scramble that Senator Graham was hyperventilating about.) Last week’s sudden withdrawal, under Party pressure, of Judd Gregg, a conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire, as Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce was another signal that Hill Republicans have opted for total war. But this does not mean that Obama’s hopes for bipartisanship have been entirely in vain. A Gallup poll taken last week found twenty-eight per cent of Republican voters (and fifty-six per cent of independents) backing the stimulus. It had the support not only of the labor federations but also of the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce. And four Republican governors—California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Connecticut’s Jodi Rell, Florida’s Charlie Crist, and Vermont’s Jim Douglas—joined fifteen of their Democratic colleagues in signing a letter calling for its enactment. A Republican governor, you might say, is sort of like a Republican congressman—except with actual responsibilities.

At the President’s first full-scale news conference last week, two of the thirteen questions were about bipartisanship. As usual, Obama took the long view. The American people, he said, “understand that there have been a lot of bad habits built up here in Washington, and it’s going to take time to break down some of those bad habits.” His overtures to Republicans “were not designed simply to get some short-term votes. They were designed to try to build up some trust over time.” At the same time, he was firm about his “bottom line,” which,

when it comes to the recovery package, is: send me a bill that creates or saves four million jobs, because everybody has to be possessed with a sense of urgency about putting people back to work, making sure that folks are staying in their homes, that they can send their kids to college. That doesn’t negate the continuing efforts that I’m going to make to listen and engage with my Republican colleagues. And, hopefully, the tone that I’ve taken, which has been consistently civil and respectful, will pay some dividends over the long term.

Asked what he had learned from the stimulus tussle, Obama said again that “old habits are hard to break,” and added:

Now, just in terms of the historic record here, the Republicans were brought in early and were consulted. And you’ll remember that, when we initially introduced our framework, they were pleasantly surprised and complimentary about the tax cuts that were presented in that framework. Those tax cuts are still in there. I mean, I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some, and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that’s the lesson I learned. But there was consultation. There will continue to be consultation.

Fifty years ago, the civil-rights movement understood that nonviolence can be an effective weapon even if—or especially if—the other side refuses to follow suit. Obama has a similarly tough-minded understanding of the political uses of bipartisanship, which, even if it fails as a tactic for compromise, can succeed as a tonal strategy: once the other side makes itself appear intransigently, destructively partisan, the game is half won. Obama is learning to throw the ball harder. But it’s not Rovian hardball he’s playing. More like Gandhian hardball.

Hertzberg On Chris Matthews

Speech writers gotta stick together, I guess. I think Rick is basically right here; Matthews is no right-wingnut, and to lump him in with them is wrong. I liked Matthews when he was writing for the Chronicle, and I liked Hardball, until Olbermann and Maddow came along. I find myself liking Matthews again, especially after his evisceration of Bush's farewell.

Foul Tip

I recently labeled a couple of items “Strike One” (an apologia for Obama’s playing Inaugural footsie with Rick Warren) and “Strike Two” (a kind-of endorsement of Caroline Kennedy for senator from New York). “Strike Three” was going to be another senatorial endorsement: Chris Matthews for senator from Pennsylvania. He’s been a dear friend of mine for thirty years, and, as someone who knows him now and knew him when, I was going to vouch for him. He’d have made a great senator—brave, imaginative, funny, fiery, and inquisitive. And, yes, liberal.

Speaking of which, a few liberal bloggers have lumped Chris in with thugs like O’Reilly, Hannity, and Beck, which is absurd. Most of the hostility, I’m convinced, is left over from the Lewinsky era, when even I thought that Chris had temporarily misplaced his bearings. Some of it is owing to his less than totally efficient internal censor, and some to his puppyish habit of saying things like “You’re a great American!” to people like Tom DeLay. C’mon, people, he says that stuff to everybody. Media Matters, one of the most useful sites on the Web, has been weirdly, mercilessly one-sided when it comes to monitoring Matthews. Chris talks almost nonstop on TV for five and a half hours a week. He sprays first-draft opinions like a dropped firehose. It’s easy to cherry-pick silly or ill-considered or factually flawed things he’s said.

But no one on television has been a tougher critic of the Iraq war or a tougher questioner of the war’s backers. No one made more finely minced mincemeat of Republican spinners during the Presidential campaign. The new, watchable, liberal MSNBC lineup, with Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, was built around Chris. He was there first. He’s the leadoff man.

Over the holidays, Chris decided he’s sticking to television. Bad news for those who, like me, think he’d be a tonic for the Senate. But good news for those who, also like me, can’t get enough of “Hardball.” It’s comfort food for the politically ravenous.

Hertzberg On Obama/Warren

Rick Hertzberg is a favorite of mine. I almost always agree with him (being a liberal atheist and all), and I have posted many pieces by Rick here on TFT. I post this one because, even though I agree with it, I disagree. "Pastor"(scare quotes!)Warren should not have been invited.

Three Strikes (Strike Two: Pastor Rick)

Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration has produced anger and/or hurt feelings in many liberal and/or gay precincts. It’s hard to say this without sounding condescending, but I understand these feelings and sympathize with them.

Warren turns out to be somewhat worse than I thought he was back when, a few months ago, I rashly likened him to Henry Ward Beecher. I hadn’t fully appreciated that he contends Jews and atheists are automatically hellbound, for example. Or that he has declared assassination admissible when used against “evildoers,” such as the president of Iran. Or that, while he says gays are welcome to attend services at his Saddleback megachurch, he doesn’t let them (closet cases excepted, presumably) become members. (He doesn’t let heterosexuals who are living together in “sin” join, either.)

Nevertheless, the invitation to Warren looks to me like another of Obama’s brilliant chess moves.[emphasis mine; this is the part I agree with]

Warren, first of all, is much, much less of a jerk than, say, Pat Robertson or James Dodson. He is polite and civil to people who are polite and civil to him, even people who (like Obama) disagree with him on subjects like whether or not abortion and same-sex marriage should be illegal. He recognizes that global warming, environmental degradation, gross economic inequality, and poverty are actual problems, not just excuses for godless liberals to impose big government programs. He does not go on television to fleece the faithful with “prayer requests.”

The President-elect is doing what he has said he would do from the beginning: he is reaching across lines of identity and ideology. Remember those wonderful lines from the 2004 keynote? “We worship an awesome God in the blue states… and, yes, we have some gay friends in the red states.” (I don’t worship any gods, whether awesome or lame, but when Obama said this I didn’t feel in the least slighted.) In the case of the Warren invitation, the reaching across is neither more nor less than an expression of inclusion and respect in the context of a ritual of the American civic religion. It is not an offer to surrender or compromise some principle. It is not a preemptive concession in some arcane negotiation. If anything, it suggests that when and if he does negotiate with the Christianist right, he will negotiate from strength, not weakness.

The Warren invitation should make it politically easier for Obama to change federal policies in an equal-rights direction where gays and lesbians are concerned, much as retaining Robert Gates at the Pentagon will make it politically easier for him to manage a withdrawal from Iraq. What the Warren invitation does is to show evangelicals that when (and if, but let’s hope there won’t be any ifs) Obama scraps “don’t ask, don’t tell,” starts providing federal support for contraception, and undoes the international “gag rule” on abortion counseling, he’s doing these things out of his sense of the general good, not lobbing ordnance in a culture war.

Warren supported Proposition 8, the California anti-same-sex-marriage initiative. Worse, he likens same-sex marriage to marriage between siblings, marriage between an adult and a child, and polygamy. But, according to beliefnet.com, he also says that he regards divorce as a much bigger threat than gay marriage—“a no-brainer,” he says. Also, he appears to be open to, maybe even supportive of, civil unions—something that Obama, and organized gaydom, ought to put to the test.

Warren has said that he has lots of gay friends. That’s easy to make fun of, but it’s not meaningless. In Gus Van Sant’s terrific film “Milk,” Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk helps defeat a 1978 anti-gay California proposition by rallying large numbers of gays to come out of the closet and make themselves known to friends, family, and co-workers. People who have gay friends have a hard time hating gay people. Eventually they have a hard time hating gayness itself.

Although Obama did a little better among evangelicals than did the last couple of Democratic nominees, the organized evangelical movement is never going to support him. But either it can oppose him passionately, contemptuously, and across the board, or it can oppose him respectfully, selectively, and without zeal, cooperating with him in some areas. Obama’s Warren gesture should nudge some non-negligible number of evangelicals in the second direction. It might even help cool their social-issue fervor.

I’m especially inclined to see this as a real possibility after my very interesting and enjoyable recent visit to Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, just across the Tennessee border from Chattanooga. Covenant is no Bob Jones University—dancing is permitted, the dress code is relaxed, and check out the school Drama Association’s latest production!—but it is a stronghold of evangelical Christianity. (Motto: “In All Things Christ Pre-Eminent”.) Judging from a show of hands I asked for, the people who came to my talk all pretty much unanimously believe in a personal God who has opinions about which human sexual practices are naughty, and which are nice. Be that as it may, I liked them all—students, faculty, and the college president, Niel Nielson—very much. They were polite, serious, gracious, and un-self-righteous. I don’t know how typical the students I talked with were, but they were eager to discuss every question from “Is there a God?” to “At what point does the moral value of a human fetus exceed that of a live chimpanzee?” I got the impression that many of them are embarrassed by the likes of Dobson, Robertson, and Sarah Palin, and have no wish to be lumped in with them. Several volunteered to me that they had voted for Obama. Many more seemed fascinated by him and glad that he views them as citizens of the same country that he is going to be President of. When we discussed gay issues, it seemed clear to me that they were earnestly struggling with the contradiction between, on the one hand, the Bible’s supposed anti-gay fulminations and, on the other hand, their own increasingly inescapable knowledge that (a) being gay is not a “lifestyle choice” and (b) there is no danger of gays “recruiting” straights, let alone recruiting so many that the human race dwindles into nonexistence.

These students live in a bubble, and they know it. But then, people like me live in a bubble, too, and, on the whole, we don’t know it. From my angle, of course, our bubble looks bigger and better. Theirs: a constricted, six-thousand-year-old world ruled by an incorrigibly small-minded God, the secrets of which are to be found in a black-bound anthology of unreliably translated old tribal stories, poems, directives, and tracts. Ours: an unimaginably immense, unimaginably ancient universe ruled by no one, the wonders and beauties of which are continually being revealed to us through our senses and our minds. The more frank and friendly conversation there is between the two bubbles, the better. (Don’t take my word for it— take Melissa Etheridge’s.)

Being the opening act at Obama’s Inauguration will give Warren a boost within the evangelical world, at the expense of the real baddies (or the real worsies). It will have a calming effect on evangelicals. The rest of us—liberals, gays, secularists, unorthodox Jews, non-Christianist Christians—ought to stay calm, too. We can settle for the rest of the ceremony, including Obama’s address and Joseph Lowery’s benediction. To say nothing of the substantive changes the Obama Administration will bring.

Hertzberg On Education

As usual, Hertzberg gives us the straight dope:

Size Matters

In the Times this morning, David Brooks writes:

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

I have to go with the teachers’ unions (boo!) and the Ed School establishment (hiss!) on this one.

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.

Moreover, class size is incredibly easy to measure. By contrast, measuring things like which teachers are good is extremely problematic. How do you measure which are the good teachers, short of placing a philosopher of education (or a senior fellow from the Heritage Foundation) in every schoolroom to take notes? Well, you can do it “subjectively,” by having principals or other authority figures make the evaluations, or you can do it “objectively,” by having kids take tests and comparing the results to I’m not sure what—last year’s results? how other, similarly situated kids are doing?

Either way, you’ve got problems. The subjective approach opens the door to favoritism, cronyism, and brownnosing. The objective approach means having lots of tests and teaching “to” them, with the inevitable accompanying distortions and creativity-crushing. “Accountability” may weed out very bad teachers, but it’ll also weed out very good ones, who’ll find lines of work that give their talents freer rein.

I’m not against merit pay or charter schools or accountability. Let a hundred flowers bloom. But the tools of national policy are imprecise. Making classes smaller is a totally clear goal, a totally measurable goal, and, conceptually, a totally achievable goal. The same cannot be said of fuzzier concepts like merit and accountability.

Of course, the problem with the class-size approach is that, as Brooks suggests, it costs money. You have to build more classrooms and hire more teachers. Still, at a time of crumbling infrastructure, rising unemployment, and universal demands for more public spending, what’s wrong with that?

Hertzberg hits on the important point--imprecision! I have talked about imprecision before regarding academic language that ought to be used in elementary school, but is not in favor of things like Lucy Calkins and Everyday Math, programs that rename things we already have names for (check my labels for Lucy Calkins or Everyday math for more).

Of course Hertzberg is talking about something else when he talks about the imprecision of the tools of national policy; but the 2 notions abut. Imprecision is problematic, and the more we teach, or make policy without precision the wider the gaps (especially the achievement one) will gape.

Obama coined the phrase "silly season" and I think we ought to begin using it more. The Rhees and Kleins of the "reform movement" lack precision, and therefore target the fish in the barrel--the teachers. That just seems like silly season!

Listen to Rick, and me, and start thinking about how, precisely, you would like our youth to grow up: taught to take a test, or taught to understand and learn. Those are your stark choices. Be precise!

Hertzberg On Clinton

Hertzberg worked for Carter, and TNR. He is smart. Now that it's official that Hillary will be SOS, here is Hertzberg's take on the decision.

Unlike many progressives, I am not at all worried about Obama's seemingly centrist cabinet picks. Obama will be in charge, and these center folks work for him, and his agenda is as progressive as can be expected considering he also has to save the world!

People Who Need People

No question about it: asking Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State is a bold and brave move on the part of President-elect Obama. A risky move, too—but if it weren’t risky it wouldn’t be bold and brave, now, would it?

But that doesn’t change the fact that the current fad for stories (and/or lamentations) to the effect that “Obama is surrounding himself with Clinton people” (with the implication that “this isn’t the change we voted for”) constitutes an unusually bogus “narrative.”

What is a “Clinton person”? Apparently, it’s any Democrat under about fifty or fifty-five years of age who has had work experience in the executive branch of the federal government.

The theory seems to be that a “Clinton person” would be inclined, at best, to reproduce the policies and actions of the Clinton Administration, including the accompanying mistakes, or, at worst, to serve the interests of “the Clintons” should they prove divergent from those of the Obama Administration and the nation.

This is the sort of reasoning that led to needless unhappiness the last two times Democrats were in power. Jimmy Carter’s circle regarded Johnson, who mired the nation in Vietnam and then handed the White House to Nixon, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any “Johnson people” in their White House. Clinton’s circle regarded Carter, who allowed himself to be paralyzed by a few hundred Iranian “students” and then handed the White House to Reagan, as a failure. They weren’t about to have any “Carter people” in their White House.

It didn’t seem to occur to either crowd, Carter’s or Clinton’s, that old hands, far from being eager to repeat the errors of the Administrations of which they had been a part, would be especially keen to avoid them. Also, they would know in detail what those errors were.

The Carter people made several stupid mistakes right at the beginning of their tenure. One was to cut the White House staff by one-third. This resulted in a couple of days of fairly good press. A fresh breeze was blowing, Nixon’s imperial presidency was being cut down to size, “cabinet government” would restore the rightful order of things—that sort of thing. Another mistake, related to the first, was to cut the White House budget for “frills” such as newspaper subscriptions and television sets. A third mistake was to sell off the Sequoia, the Presidential yacht—another gesture of populist humility, yielding in another day or two of positive press.

If Carter had put a “Johnson person” in a top White House job—if, for example, Joseph Califano had been named White House Chief of Staff instead of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare—then that person would have been able to tell the newbies (a) that you need a big White House staff to have any hope of controlling the departments and agencies, (b) that getting rid of newspapers and TV sets is like wearing earplugs and dark glasses to work, and (c) that a Presidential yacht is one of the most cost-effective items in the federal budget, because it can be used to flatter and persuade impressionable, luxury-loving, bourbon-drinking Congressmen to give their support to worthy measures, support that might otherwise have to be purchased with bridges to nowhere and the like.

A yacht is a lot harder, politically, to acquire than to dispose of, even (or especially) if you’re a Republican, so when Clinton came to town he didn’t have the option of getting rid of one. However, not having any “Carter people” around to warn him off, he repeated Carter’s mistake of splashily cutting the White House staff, this time by one quarter. Naturally, the positions eliminated were not those of big shots—special assistants to the President and whatnot—but of grunt workers. Mid-level big shots ended up doing their own Xeroxing, typing, filing, and so on. Results: unreturned phone calls, exhaustion, impaired judgment. Eventually, interns were recruited to take over these clerical tasks. We all know how well that turned out.

The Clinton Administration was not an obvious failure; on the contrary, it was rather successful, overall. Nevertheless, it had its problems, and Senator Obama ran against its first couple. So President-elect Obama deserves credit for choosing Rahm Emanuel—who not only served in the White House under Clinton but was a senior staffer whose West Wing office was a ten-second walk from the Oval—to be his White House chief of staff.

Hertzberg On Palin's Choice (Pro!)

Perfect, unless you are a right-wingnut-crusader type:

A Choice and an Echo

Via Andrew, here is Kathryn Jean (K-Lo) Lopez, head honcha of National Review Online, explaining why Governor Palin is her leader:

What is it about Sarah?

For many folks on the Right, she represented an influx of social conservatism in the campaign. All she had to do was arrive at the scene with her son Trig to demonstrate her pro-life bona fides. Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.

I detect some assumptions here. (1) Palin’s carrying Trig to term was a choice. (2) The choice was hers and her husband’s to make, not God’s or the government’s. (3) She deserves praise for having chosen the choice she chose.

But if Palin (and Lopez) were truly “pro-life”—if they truly believed that abortion, especially elective abortion in the first trimester, is murder or at least unjustifiable homicide—then having Trig was not a choice. It was a simple matter of obedience to God’s law, which is infinitely more sacrosanct than man’s law. Palin no more deserves praise for it than I deserve praise for not having lately gunned down any friends, colleagues, or strangers.

What this demonstrates is that even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice. And, again implicitly, the choice that Sarah Palin had every right to make. In both directions.

This is why, even if Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned, it will always be legal to get an abortion somewhere in the United States of America.

Hertzberg's Like, No Way!

OMG ;)

Sarah Palin on Fox News last night, asked about 2012:

Faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands—this is what I always do. I’m like, O.K., God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in ‘12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.

So God’s like, whatever.

Hey, Joe. Why Such A Putz?

Rick Hertzberg thinks Lieberman is a bit of a putz. He's right, of course. And he explains why in his post. Here is the best demonstration of hypocrisy yet leveled at Lieberman:

Admittedly, I have strongly disliked Lieberman ever since he cemented his bogus reputation for “integrity” by denouncing Bill Clinton’s supposed lack of family values during the Lewinsky fiasco. I thought the denunciation was—what’s the word?—inappropriate, coming from a man who not only divorced his first wife while their children were at highly vulnerable ages (just past puberty) but also had the gall to attribute the divorce to the insufficient piety of his wife. In other words, he was too good for her.

Read the whole thing...

Joe the Senator

Now it’s John McCain’s turn to discover what sort of “friend” Joe Lieberman is. Via Andrew, Mark Pazniokas reports in today’s Hartford Courant:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, one of John McCain’s closest political allies, said Friday he does not believe that Barack Obama is unprepared to be president.

“I’m saying he is less prepared than McCain,” Lieberman said.

But what about Sarah Palin?

Is she ready?

“If, God forbid, an accident occurs or something of that kind?” Lieberman said. “Um, she’ll be ready. You know, she’s had executive experience. She’s smart and she will have had on-the-job training.”…

“[McCain] is ready to be our president at this very difficult time,” Lieberman said. “And Sen. Obama is not as ready. It’s as direct as that.”

Not as ready. Sweet.

That little word—“as”—is supposed to be Lieberman’s life jacket, I guess, now that the SS McCain looks like it’s going glug glug glug and may not, after all, be seaworthy enough to deliver its chaplain to that big corner office in the Pentagon. Google “lieberman obama ‘not ready’” if you need a few thousand samples of the unqualified way Joe talked about Barack’s before the ship hit the iceberg.

Admittedly, I have strongly disliked Lieberman ever since he cemented his bogus reputation for “integrity” by denouncing Bill Clinton’s supposed lack of family values during the Lewinsky fiasco. I thought the denunciation was—what’s the word?—inappropriate, coming from a man who not only divorced his first wife while their children were at highly vulnerable ages (just past puberty) but also had the gall to attribute the divorce to the insufficient piety of his wife. In other words, he was too good for her.

That was just garden-variety hypocrisy. He did far worse when he was Gore’s running mate, as I explained two years ago.

Lieberman’s embrace of the neoconservative position on the Iraq war is evidently sincere. If he really believes that the nation’s survival depends on “victory” in Iraq, that is sufficient reason for him to endorse McCain. But it doesn’t explain his willingness to debase himself by promulgating Hannity-type talking points.

Colombia, Colombia!!

Hertzberg on McCain's Columbia fetish...

As you may remember, this is not a new obsession for McCain. Puzzlingly, the first thing he did after he clinched the Republican nomination, at the beginning of July, was to get on a plane and go to…Colombia. That’s where he chose to spend the Glorious Fourth. Or maybe not so puzzlingly. In the second paragraph of the New York Times story previewing the trip, Larry Rohter wrote:

Since 1998, the lobbying firm headed until recently by Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s closest confidants, has earned more than $1.8 million representing the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, the leading foreign producer of gas and oil in Colombia. The lobbying firm, BKSH & Associates, has also represented Colombian textile and apparel manufacturers and a former foreign minister and presidential candidate who is also a prominent businesswoman.

Read it below...

Hail, Hail Colombia

Barack Obama may have gone to Colombia, but John McCain went to Colombia. Therein lies a tale.

One of the most curious, and little-remarked, features of this week’s Presidential debate was that the only foreign country to get more than cursory treatment was Columbia, known to most television-watching, non-García Márquez-reading North Americans as a land of rich drug lords, leftist guerrillas, rightist death squads, and ubiquitous coca plantations.

It was McCain who brought the subject up, after he and Obama had traded barbs about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement:

McCAIN: let me give you another example of a free trade agreement that Senator Obama opposes. Right now, because of previous agreements, some made by President Clinton, the goods and products that we send to Colombia, which is our largest agricultural importer of our products, is—there’s a billion dollars that we—our businesses have paid so far in order to get our goods in there.

Because of previous agreements, their goods and products come into our country for free. So Senator Obama, who has never traveled south of our border, opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The same country that’s helping us try to stop the flow of drugs into our country that’s killing young Americans….

Free trade with Colombia is something that’s a no-brainer. But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better.

OBAMA: Let me respond. Actually, I understand it pretty well. The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions.

And what I have said, because the free trade—the trade agreement itself does have labor and environmental protections, but we have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn’t being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights, which is why, for example, I supported the Peruvian Free Trade Agreement which was a well-structured agreement.

But I think that the important point is we’ve got to have a President who understands the benefits of free trade but also is going to enforce unfair trade agreements and is going to stand up to other countries.

Obama then talked for several minutes about the need to strengthen the U.S. automobile industry and induce it to build fuel-efficient cars. But McCain still wanted to talk about Colombia. As soon as he got the floor back, he returned to his strange preoccupation:

McCAIN: Well, let me just said that that this is—he—Senator Obama doesn’t want a free trade agreement with our best ally in the region but wants to sit down across the table without precondition to—with Hugo Chavez, the guy who has been helping FARC, the terrorist organization.

Free trade between ourselves and Colombia: I just recited to you the benefits of concluding that agreement, a billion dollars of American dollars that could have gone to creating jobs and businesses in the United States, opening up those markets.

As you may remember, this is not a new obsession for McCain. Puzzlingly, the first thing he did after he clinched the Republican nomination, at the beginning of July, was to get on a plane and go to…Colombia. That’s where he chose to spend the Glorious Fourth. Or maybe not so puzzlingly. In the second paragraph of the New York Times story previewing the trip, Larry Rohter wrote:

Since 1998, the lobbying firm headed until recently by Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s closest confidants, has earned more than $1.8 million representing the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, the leading foreign producer of gas and oil in Colombia. The lobbying firm, BKSH & Associates, has also represented Colombian textile and apparel manufacturers and a former foreign minister and presidential candidate who is also a prominent businesswoman.

The Times went on to note that human rights groups have accused Occidental of complicity in the killing of peasants and labor leaders believed (erroneously, in the case of the labor leaders) to be affiliated with guerrilla groups.

The week before McCain left for Colombia, Carl H. Linder, Jr., who made billions as the C.E.O. of Chiquita Brands International, hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his home in Cincinnati, Ohio. It raised $2 million—a lot of money, though not much compared to the $25 million fine Chiquita paid for paying, under Linder’s leadership, more millions to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a bloodthirsty paramilitary group which the State Department officially classified as a terrorist organization. But, as Nico Pitney pointed out at the time in a well-documented report at the Huffington Post, Chiquita was an equal-opportunity terror funder in Colombia: it also made payments to leftist guerrilla groups, including the notorious FARC. Nothing to do with ideology, of course. Just a routine business expense.

Besides Black, at least four other McCain staffers or major fundraisers, including the campaign’s finance director and a former national finance chairman, have earned tidy sums lobbying for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

But John McCain is an honorable man. Therefore, it is inconceivable that any of these “associations,” to use one of his favorite words, had anything to do with the Republican nominee’s extraordinary solicitude for the Colombia trade pact, let alone the way he rolled his eyes when Obama spoke of the murder of Colombian labor leaders.

Voter Fraud & ACORN: Sounds Suspicious

Just in case you still want to claim ACORN is involved in perpetrating voter fraud, Hertzberg has something to tell you. For example:

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

The McCain lies and misrepresentations aren't working....

Voter-Fraud Fraud

The idea that Democrats try to win elections by arranging for hordes of nonexistent people with improbable names to vote for them has long been a favorite theme of Rove-era Republicans. Now it’s become a desperate obsession.

Consider today’s fund-raising e-mail from Robert M. (Mike) Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Some snippets:

Every election, it’s the same old song and dance from the Democrats and their liberal allies when it comes to donor and vote fraud.

They will soon be trying to pad their totals at ballot boxes across the country with votes from voters that do not exist. From Ohio and Florida to Wisconsin and Nevada, there are reports of fraudulent voter registration forms being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a liberal group that is dedicating its resources to electing the Obama-Biden Democrats.

The e-mail climaxes with this pledge, which one hopes is delivered with a Sarah Palin wink: “We will not stand for the stealing of the election—the tainting of our democracy—by those who wish to subvert the rule of law.”

ACORN has become the 24/7 story on Fox News, too, on account of reports that it has submitted several thousand phony registration forms to local boards of elections. These reports appear to be true. Nevertheless, the “scandal,” as Fox calls it, is itself on its face as phony as Mickey Mouse’s social security number.

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

Sounds suspicious—until you reflect that the motivation of the misbehaving registration workers is almost always to look like they’ve been doing more work than they really have, and that the victim of the “fraud” is actually the organization they’re working for.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot. This will make it tough for Mickey Mouse, even if registered, to vote, no matter how big, round, or black his ears. Likewise, members of the Duck family (Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) who turn up at the polling place will have a hard time getting into the voting booth. (Uncle Scrooge might be able to bribe his way in, but he’s voting Republican anyway.)

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that despite all the hysteria, from 2002 to 2005, only twenty people in the entire United States of America were found guilty of voting while ineligible and only five of voting more than once. By contrast, consider the lede on this story, published a week ago today:

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

And take it from Sarah Palin: the Times is “hardly ever wrong.”

Hertzberg On Palin's Debate Performance

Rick is funny. Really funny in fact. Like this from his latest:

Most of the commentators, again, seemed to get it wrong, mainly because they were grading on a curve. Palin did “better than expected.” On the other hand, she had been expected to do so poorly that she could hardly fail to do better than expected, i.e., she was expected to do better than expected, which means that she did about as well as expected. But according to the insta-polls, the electorate, as opposed to what I once called the expectorate, seems to have concluded fairly clearly that Biden “won,” possibly because what the electorate was expecting was a debate between two candidates for Vice-President, not the raw materials for some arcane calculation of who exceeded whose expectations. Biden succeeded in making a case for the Obama-Biden ticket. Palin succeeded mainly in making a case that she, Palin, is a person of near-normal intelligence and great superior adorability.

Read the whole thing after expansion...

October 3, 2008
Nudge Nudge Wink Wink

Well, if what we want is a perky President (actuarial probabilities being what they are), the choice is clear: go whalin’ with Palin! No doubt about it, she’s as cute as a Goldwater button. And if by some chance she doesn’t put McCain over the top, her next career move is obvious: co-hosting the perennially last-place CBS morning program. She could ace the cooking and celebrity segments, and by the time this campaign is over she’ll even know enough about legislation and foreign policy and stuff like that to banter with Jeff Greenfield and handle serious interviews with people like Richard Holbrooke and Michael Beschloss. “The Early Show,” with Harry Smith and Sarah Palin.

Did she “win” last night? In a way. She stanched the bleeding. If her activities for the next month can be limited to charming the “base” at rallies, chatting with right-wing talk-radio and Fox News hosts, and granting interviews to dim, carefully vetted “Eyewitness News” local anchors, she probably will do no further damage to the Republican ticket. Given the disasters of the last couple of weeks, that counts as victory. Maybe not Trafalgar-type victory, but Iraq-type. The surge has succeeded.

The choppy format, which discouraged follow-ups, saved her, along with Gwen Ifill’s tendency to ask questions (Does the financial crisis show the best of Washington or the worst of Washington? What’s scarier, a nuclear Iran or an unstable Afghanistan?) that could be answered with the word “both.” Beyond the “Animal Farm” certainties—taxes bad, victory good—and the hockey-mom patter, Palin had nothing to say, but she said it without too much of the usual syntactical chaos. The talking points and the buzzwords (maverick, the people’s side) got her through.

Most of the commentators, again, seemed to get it wrong, mainly because they were grading on a curve. Palin did “better than expected.” On the other hand, she had been expected to do so poorly that she could hardly fail to do better than expected, i.e., she was expected to do better than expected, which means that she did about as well as expected. But according to the insta-polls, the electorate, as opposed to what I once called the expectorate, seems to have concluded fairly clearly that Biden “won,” possibly because what the electorate was expecting was a debate between two candidates for Vice-President, not the raw materials for some arcane calculation of who exceeded whose expectations. Biden succeeded in making a case for the Obama-Biden ticket. Palin succeeded mainly in making a case that she, Palin, is a person of near-normal intelligence and great superior adorability.

Hertzberg On Palin's Use Of Language

Read a real wordsmith. Hendrick Hertzburg does a nice evisceration of Palin's Couric interview....

Foreign Countries

The second installment of Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin aired last night. The topic was the great wide world. One exchange deserves special study. From the transcript provided by CBS:

COURIC: You’ve cited Alaska’s proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundary that we have with Canada. It’s funny that a comment like that was kinda made to…I don’t know, you know…reporters.

COURIC: Mocked?

PALIN: Mocked, yeah I guess that’s the word, mocked.

COURIC: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

COURIC: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.

This seems to be a case of incoherence of thought leading to incoherence of syntax. Pronouns wander in search of antecedents like Arctic explorers in a blinding snowstorm. Homophones confuse the transcriber. For example, one of the Governor’s answers could as sensibly, or insensibly, be rendered as

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And they’re…

In the “Putin rears his head” answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. “We send those”—those? those what?—”out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia.” Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.

For a seventy-two-year-old cancer survivor to have placed this person directly behind himself in line for the Presidency was an act of almost incomprehensible cynicism and irresponsibility. It makes a cruel—what’s the word?—mockery of his slogan. “Country First” indeed.

P.S. In the Seattle Times, Hal Bernton reports that Governor Palin has “balked” at opportunities to visit Russia on any of those “trade missions” she boasted of. Bernton writes:

Opportunities abound for Alaska governors to engage in Russian diplomacy, with the state host to several organizations focusing on Arctic issues. Anchorage is the seat of the Northern Forum, an 18-year-old organization that represents the leaders of regional governments in Russia, as well as Finland, Iceland and Canada, Japan, China and South Korea.

Yet under Palin, the state government—without consultation—reduced its annual financial support to the Northern Forum to $15,000 from $75,000, according to Priscilla Wohl, the group’s executive director. That forced the Forum’s Anchorage office to go without pay for two months.

On the other hand, she has met Henry Kissinger and the president of Afghanistan.

Hendrick's Busy Day

I love Rick Hertzberg because of stuff like this:

A Busy Day

What a contrast yesterday. First, out comes McCain, looking drawn, jittery, and (to my admittedly jaundiced eye) guilty, with his announcement that he doesn’t want to debate on Friday because the financial crisis is too awful for a thing like politics to occur. He reads his statement and exits quickly. A couple of hours later, Obama appears. He looks and sounds like a President of the United States. He is preternaturally calm. He explains the chronology of the day: he called McCain at 8:30, the call was returned at 2:30, they discussed the idea of putting out a joint statement about the crisis. He says not a word about postponing the debate.

Then, unlike McCain, Obama takes questions. It becomes a full-fledged press conference. He eventually mentions the postponement. He says that during their phone call McCain had said it was something that ought to be looked at, and he had replied that they should get their joint statement out first. He makes it clear, in an offhand way, that McCain had blindsided him, but he does it without rancor. Perhaps there was a miscommunication, he suggests generously. He stresses his agreement with McCain that the crisis is neither Republican nor Democratic but American. He outlines some conditions he would like to see attached to the bailout bill but adds that both parties should refrain from loading it up with extraneous desiderata. He mentions a couple of specific examples of Democratic pet causes, including bankruptcy protection, that he doesn’t think should be in the bill. His manner with respect to the crisis is grave and businesslike, but he treats McCain’s debate-postponement demand as a minor matter that need not be taken too seriously. He notes dryly that both candidates have big airplanes with their names emblazoned and can easily travel to Oxford, Mississippi. He suggests that a potential President ought to be able to cope with more than one problem at a time.

Obama handled the situation perfectly. He didn’t have to point out that McCain’s cheap gambit was a cheap gambit. Surrogates, supporters, and, perhaps, the press would do that for him. And by treating the debate-postponement ploy as a detail, he slipped the trap McCain had set for him: either be bullied into obeying McCain’s order or be seen as putting politics above country. That’s how I saw it, anyhow. I have no idea if “the American people” will agree. Dick Morris doesn’t think so. On Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, Morris was bubbling over with glee at the brilliance of it all. McCain’s maneuver, Morris said, was so clever it might have been orchestrated by Karl Rove himself. Maybe Morris is right. At the very least, McCain managed to prevent the cable chatterers from focusing on the news that his campaign manager had been on the Fannie Mae take right up to the moment last month when Fannie fell on her fanny.

A couple of hours later, Katie Couric, whose evening news program on CBS is reliably reported to have become the best of the big three, shows a few minutes of the interview she had taped that morning with Sarah Palin. Couric is both pleasanter and tougher than Charlie Gibson had been during the only other non-Fox interview the lady has condescended to give. For Palin, the interview excerpt begins badly. Couric asks about the campaign manager and the Fannie Mae payroll. Palin gives her answer, something about how her “understanding” is that the campaign manager had “recused himself.” Couric rephrases the question. Palin gives her answer again. It is nearly word for word the same as the first time. Chilling. The interview excerpt ends badly, too. Couric asks what, besides suggesting two years ago that there ought to be more oversight of the mortgage giants, McCain has ever done in his twenty-six years in Congress to change the way Wall Street does business. Palin points to McCain’s call for more oversight of the mortgage giants. Couric asks again. Palin says fondly that McCain is a maverick. Politely, a third time, Couric asks for specific examples. Pertly, Palin says, “I’ll try to find some and I’ll bring ‘em to ya.”

In other news, President Bush gave a nationally televised speech.

Saddleback: Who Cares? (Hertzberg Does)

I love Hertzberg. He is smart as hell, and a great writer, and sees things others do not. He is concerned about how poorly Obama did in his Warren interview. I personally don't give a shit, because pandering to the religious makes me sick. Hertzberg wrote about his reactions to the Saddleback thing here. Here is the good part:

Today’s evangelical Christianity may be thriving on TV and at the megachurch collection plate, but it has yet to find a cause worthy of its fervor. Its crusade on behalf of the unborn and unquickened—which, if successful, would make criminals out of actually existing women and doctors while doing less than nothing to relieve actual human suffering—is a sad waste. A century and a half ago, the great evangelical blockbuster was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Beecher’s sister Harriet. Now it’s Warren’s self-help manuals and the “Left Behind” series. This is a progression that offers meager evidence either for evolution or for intelligent design.

Saddle Sore

I had hoped for a more fluid, energetic performance from Barack Obama at Saturday night’s Saddleback Church forum—something along these lines:










Alas, it was not to be. Obama didn’t seem to know how to go with the flow and make a real emotional connection with his audience, both in the room and beyond. He seemed a little out of sorts—tentative and wan and much too careful, introducing too many of his comments with a choked “y’know” and keeping his eyes downcast instead of locked on Warren’s. He was wilted, not crisp. Or so he seemed to me.

I was especially disappointed by his answer on same-sex marriage. He said what he has often said before: that he sees marriage as a union of a man and a woman; that he supports civil unions that extend rights and obligations to same-sex couples; that under the Constitution marriage is a matter for the states and should remain so. It felt chilly and legalistic—not quite Dukakis on capital punishment for wife-murderers, but perilously close. He missed a chance to challenge his evangelical audience and connect with it by pointing out the human contradiction between sectarian doctrine and Christian compassion. Christian denominations take all manner of views of homosexuality, but it’s hard to find a Christian these days who insists that simply being homosexual—having a gay or lesbian orientation—is sinful in and of itself. If two people love each other and wish to commit themselves to each other and are eager to take on the responsibilities and joys of family life, including the raising of children (biological or adopted) in a loving home, isn’t that a good thing, not just for them and the children they give a home to, but for all of us? Obama said, “I think my faith is strong enough and my marriage is strong enough that I can afford those civil rights to others, even if I have a different perspective or a different view.” But how helpful is it to imply that other people—people whose faith and/or marriages aren’t so strong—are in danger of abandoning their faith or their marriage because gay people are permitted to get married?

There are observers I respect—Andrew Sullivan, for one*, and members of my family with whom I watched the program, for two more—who saw thoughtfulness and humility where I saw hesitation and eggshell-walking and, watching McCain, saw pandering and bloviating where I saw shrewdness and confidence. If they’re right, and I hope they are, I still wish that the thoughtfulness and humility had been accompanied by a bit more passion and force.

Everyone, me included, seems to agree that Rick Warren was the undisputed winner of the night. Granted, he isn’t a particularly probing questioner. But at least he was polite, and he didn’t commit any of the sins James Fallows enumerates in the current Atlantic. With his genial personality, his emphasis on happiness over hellfire, and his instinct for (relative) moderation, he reminds me a little of the young Henry Ward Beecher, a fascinating biography of whom I happen to be reading at the moment. Not that they’re in quite the same league, of course. Warren’s willingness to admit the reality of global warming and his admonitions to his fellow evangelical heavies to quit demonizing Democrats are most welcome, but he’s still got a ways to go before he can match the content or courage of Beecher’s stirring antislavery sermons.

Today’s evangelical Christianity may be thriving on TV and at the megachurch collection plate, but it has yet to find a cause worthy of its fervor. Its crusade on behalf of the unborn and unquickened—which, if successful, would make criminals out of actually existing women and doctors while doing less than nothing to relieve actual human suffering—is a sad waste. A century and a half ago, the great evangelical blockbuster was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Beecher’s sister Harriet. Now it’s Warren’s self-help manuals and the “Left Behind” series. This is a progression that offers meager evidence either for evolution or for intelligent design.

*See also Andrew’s superb series of posts yesterday on the questionable provenance of McCain’s “cross in the dirt” anecdote.
(Photograph: Alex Brandon)

Frustrated at Hertzberg

Hertzberg mouths off about gender- vs. race-discrimination

I like what I've read from Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, and I like what I've seen of his blog, on the magazine's website, as well. But his comment about gender discrimination in the June 23 issue (yes, I'm behind on my reading...) really pissed me off.

Hertzberg was writing about the end of Clinton's primary campaign (ancient history, I know). In the last half of the article, however, after noting that "[c]ompetitions among grievances do not ennoble," he nonetheless engages in just such a competition. He argues that, compared to "the oppressions of gender," "the oppressions of race have cut deeper." His examples:

1. "[T]here is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction," or the 250 years of slavery that preceded it. Slavery as such, no. But women certainly (as Hertzberg acknowledges) were disenfranchised; they also were denied the right to own property, they have been and continue to be paid wages substantially below those paid to men and they all too routinely are subject to brutal violence (domestic violence, rape) at the hands of men. Remember Tailhook, anyone? Have we passed the Equal Rights Amendment yet? States -- and a presidential candidate? -- are pushing laws that would force a woman to keep in her body a fetus that was the result of rape or incest or that threatened her health. Health insurance pays for men's Viagra but not women's birth control. Pretty nightmarish to me.

2. "Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X." Have there been any feminist leaders of this caliber in the last 50 or 75 years? Who? Gloria Steinem? Oprah? My city has official holidays celebrating two of these guys (Dr. King and Malcolm X); how many holidays are there celebrating women? (Hint: zero.)

3. Hertzberg then suggests that African-Americans are underrepresented in government, compared to women, by noting the number of women and African-Americans who currently are serving as governor or United States senator (16 women senators vs. one African-American senator; 8 women governors vs. 2 African-American governors). These numbers look less dramatic, however, when you compare them to the percentage of women vs. African-Americans in the United States population (50.8% women, 12.4% African-American according to 2006 census data). [Hertzberg addresses this point, raised by someone who commented on his original article, on his New Yorker blog.] Nor is there any acknowledgment of the potential distortion/dilution of African-American votes through racial redistricting/gerrymandering -- a trick that obviously doesn't work against women. I just can't be thrilled, or find some kind of political equality, in 50+% of the population being represented by 16% of the senators or governors. And how about the comparative representations on the Supreme Court?

As with so many (all?) of the other topics discussed on this blog, this is not just a one-dimensional (in this case, political) problem. Gender inequality lives in the workplace, in sports, in advertising and in the way we raise our kids. It lives in our language, which too often embodies our assumptions about the roles we should play. One example that struck me (and not just me): Supreme Court decisions in the past year or two, instead of using a gender-neutral term to refer to a generic lower-court judge, now invariably use "he." Just a little thing, in isolation, but it gets to me.

Hertzberg agrees with Clinton that "from now on it will be 'unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States.'" I wish I could agree.

Yes, things have improved, and I hope -- maybe even trust -- that they will continue to improve. I'm thrilled that my daughters got to see a woman running, seriously, for president. I hope that no one will tell them, as I was told when I was a kid, that a woman will never be president. But I won't believe that a woman can, in fact, be elected president of this country unless and until I see her swearing the oath of office. And even then, it will seem remarkable.

All right, tft; I've had my say. You can boot me off to Shakesville now....

Obama: Flip-Flopper. Not!

As usual, Hendrik Hertzberg susses it out for us. All the talk about Obama moving to the right, flip-flopping, and becoming Bush2 is just a bunch of MSM mainlining. Here's Hendrik:

One of the World Wide Web’s most distinguished organs of fake news, the Borowitz Report, leads its current issue with this flash:

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Except that sometimes it’s hard to tell fake from real. These sentiments, for example, are from actual blogs:

If Obama believes the BS he said about the FISA Capitulation bill, then he is not fit to be President.

He is turning on every major issue and I am not going to vote for him. From here on out, the netroots should refuse to donate to any Democratic nominee, including Barack Obama.

Obama, it turns out, is a politician. In this respect, he resembles the forty-three Presidents he hopes to succeed, from the Father of His Country to the wayward son, Alpha George to Omega George. Winning a Presidential election doesn’t require being all things to all of the people all of the time, but it does require being some things to most of the people some of the time. It doesn’t require saying one thing and also saying its opposite, but it does require saying more or less the same thing in ways that are understood in different ways. They’re all politicians, yes—very much including Obama, as Ryan Lizza shows elsewhere in this issue. But that doesn’t mean they’re all the same.

It was inevitable that the boggier reaches of the blogosphere would eventually smell betrayal. In contrast, what bloggers call the MSM—the mainstream media—seldom trades in the currency of moral indignation. Although the better newspapers have regular features devoted to evaluating the candidates’ proposals for workability, the MSM generally eschews value judgments about the merits. The MSM—especially the cable-news intravenous drip—prefers flip-flops.

Obama has been providing plenty of plastic for the flip-flop factories with the adjustments he’s been making as he retools his campaign for the general election. Under headlines like “IN CAMPAIGN, ONE MAN’S PRAGMATISM IS ANOTHER’S FLIP-FLOPPING,” the big papers have been assembling quite a list of matters on which the candidate has “changed his position,” including Iraq, abortion rights, federal aid to faith-based social services, capital punishment, gun control, public financing of campaigns, and wiretapping. Most of them are mere shifts of emphasis, some are marginal tweaks, and a few are either substantive or nonexistent. Let’s do a quick tour d’horizon.

On July 3rd, Obama remarked to reporters, vis-à-vis his projected visit to Iraq, that he will “continue to refine” his policies in light of what he learns there. The flip-flop frenzy exploded so quickly that Obama called a second press conference that same day in an effort to tamp it down, saying that while he “would be a poor commander-in-chief” if he “didn’t take facts on the ground into account,” his intention to withdraw American combat troops from Iraq within sixteen months of his Inauguration—which is to say less than two years from now—remains unchanged. Flip-flop category: marginal tweak.

The same week, Obama said he didn’t think that “mental distress” alone was sufficient justification for a late-term abortion, prompting the president of the National Organization for Women to rebuke him for feeding the perception that women seek abortions because they’re “having a bad-hair day.” In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama had written that:

the willingness of even the most ardent prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions on late-term abortion marks a recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and that society has some interest in its development.

The leading reproductive-rights group, NARal Pro-Choice America, defended him, pointing out that his views are fully consistent with Roe v. Wade. Flip-flop category: nonexistent.

Obama also wrote that “certain faith-based programs” could offer “a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and hence merit carefully tailored support.” Yet his recent call for an expansion of President Bush’s program came as a shock to some, including the Times, which called the program a violation of the separation of church and state. If it is, it’s a minor one, like grants to religiously affiliated colleges; in any event, this isn’t a new position for Obama. Flip-flop category: shift of emphasis.

For twenty years, nominal support for the death penalty and its partner in crime, “gun rights,” has apparently been mandatory for any Democrat wishing to have a serious chance to be elected President. Without enthusiasm, Obama has endorsed capital punishment throughout his political career. In his book, he wrote that “the rape and murder of a child” is “so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.” But in demurring from last month’s Supreme Court decision banning executions for child rape alone, he went further: “and” is not “or.” As for the Court’s radical decision conferring upon an individual the right to possess guns separate from service in a “well regulated militia,” he did not, as reported, “embrace” it. But he did commend it for providing “much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions”—a distinctly Panglossian spin. Still, if Obama becomes President the practical effect of these panders will be minimal. It’s hard to imagine an Obama appointee to the Supreme Court voting with Justices Scalia and Thomas on issues like these. Flip-flop category: substantive tweak.

As for the last two items on the flip-flop list—well, it’s a fair cop, as the Brits say. Obama’s decision to refuse public funds for the general-election campaign was political hardball, a spikes-high slide at third base. He still favors public financing in principle, and he says he’ll work to modernize it in practice. In a sense, his utterly unexpected success in raising tens of millions from small, no-strings contributors has created a kind of unofficial public-finance system. But that success is a one-off, and the big contributors are still contributing big, with all that entails. He didn’t change his “position,” but he did break a promise.

Obama’s U-turn on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last week was not so trivial. He had promised to filibuster it if it retained the provision immunizing telecom companies from lawsuits arising from the companies’ compliance with Administration requests—orders, really—to coöperate in patently illegal activity. The bill did retain that provision, and Obama voted not only for the bill but against the filibuster. Opinion is divided on the seriousness of the bill’s threat to civil liberties. In the Times last week, the Open Society Institute’s Morton H. Halperin, whose devotion to civil liberties is rivalled only by his knowledge of national-security matters, called the bill “our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties.” Other civil libertarians see it as the death knell for the Fourth Amendment. But there can be little doubt that Obama’s vote—which could not have affected the outcome—was influenced by worry about being branded as soft on terrorism. Unlike FISA, the Iraq war can’t be repealed. But perhaps Obama will now take a more compassionate view of Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize it.

Meanwhile, McCain has been busily reversing his views in highly consequential ways. He opposed the Bush tax cuts because they favored the rich; now he supports their eternal extension. He was against offshore oil drilling as not being worth the environmental damage it brings; now he’s for it, and damn the costs. He was against torture, period; now he’s against it unless the C.I.A. does it. He keeps flipping to the wrong flops. But he and Obama can both take comfort in what they’re avoiding. If they were clinging to every past position, the flip-flop police would be busting them for stubbornness and rigidity in the face of changing circumstances. Bush all over again! Flip-flops are preferable to cement shoes, especially in summertime.