Ward Connerly Still At It...

Obama's success fuels affirmative action's foes

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 45 minutes ago

Barack Obama's political success might claim an unintended victim: affirmative action, a much-debated policy that he supports.

Already weakened by several court rulings and state referendums, affirmative action now confronts a challenge to its very reason for existing. If Americans make a black person the leading contender for president, as nationwide polls suggest, how can racial prejudice be so prevalent and potent that it justifies special efforts to place minorities in coveted jobs and schools?

"The primary rationale for affirmative action is that America is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist," said Ward Connerly, the leader of state-by-state efforts to end what he and others consider policies of reverse discrimination. "That rationale is undercut in a major way when you look at the success of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York battled Obama to the end of the Democratic primary process.

Other critics of affirmative action agree. "Obama is further evidence that the great majority of Americans reject discrimination, reject prejudice," said Todd F. Gaziano, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Not so fast, say supporters of affirmative action. Just because Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and other minorities have reached the top of their professions does not mean that ordinary blacks, Latinos or women are free from day-to-day biases that deny them equal access to top schools or jobs, they say.

As affirmative action's power has diminished, minority enrollment has fallen at many prominent colleges, said Gary Orfield, an authority on the subject at UCLA.

"If people get the impression from Obama's success that the racial problems of this country have been solved, that would be very sad," Orfield said. "In some ways we have moved backwards" in recent years, he said.

Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said, "Exceptions don't make the rule."

"By any measure, Obama and Clinton are clearly exceptional individuals," he said. "When you really examine the masses of Americans, especially women and people of color, you still find incredible disparities," which justify the continuation of affirmative action programs.

Obama, who asks voters neither to support nor oppose him on the basis of his race, has dealt gently with affirmative action. He says his two young daughters have enjoyed great advantages, and therefore should not receive special consideration because of their race.

"On the other hand," he said in an April debate, "if there's a young white person who has been working hard, struggling, and has overcome great odds, that's something that should be taken into account" by people such as college admission officers.

"So I still believe in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and potentially current discrimination," Obama said. "But I think that it can't be a quota system and it can't be something that is simply applied without looking at the whole person, whether that person is black, or white, or Hispanic, male or female."

Tucker Bounds, spokesman for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, said McCain's commitment to equal opportunity for all Americans "means aggressively enforcing our nation's anti-discrimination laws."

"It also means rejecting affirmative action plans and quotas that give weight to one group of Americans at the expense of another," Bounds said. "Plans that result in quotas, where such plans have not been judicially created to remedy a specific, proven act of discrimination, only result in more discrimination."

Affirmative action, a term coined in the early 1960s, is a loosely defined set of policies meant to help rectify discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. It quickly proved controversial, especially in the public arena, as some white males alleged they were losing government jobs and public university admissions to less qualified minorities and women.

The Supreme Court ruled 30 years ago that universities could use race as one factor in choosing applicants, but it banned quotas. Subsequent court decisions placed more restrictions on affirmative action, and Connerly and others launched ballot initiatives that virtually crippled it in some states.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, pushed by Connerly. It bars all government institutions from giving preferential treatment to people based on race or gender, and particularly affects college admissions and government contracts. Similar measures passed in Michigan and Washington state, and Connerly hopes to have versions on the ballots this fall in Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona.

The erosion of affirmative action is forcing colleges and other institutions to seek new ways of pursuing diversity, with mixed results.

"What had been a national policy is being dismantled, state by state," University of Washington President Mark A. Emmert wrote in the Christian Science Monitor last year. He said his campus has learned that it still can "ensure diversity and access to higher education, particularly by taking socio-economic factors into account."

While Emmert laments the erosion of affirmative action, others say it is overdue. It's great if Obama's success hastens the process, they say, but previous achievements by blacks in business, government, entertainment and other fields already have undermined the argument that racial discrimination is rampant.

Defenders of affirmative action cite continuing disparities between blacks and whites in areas such as income, education achievement, health care and incarceration rates. These disparities, however, "have roots in problems that are not addressed by affirmative action," said Abigail Thernstrom, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

They are complex, deep-seated factors that put many minority children behind their peers as early as kindergarten, she said. In confronting such challenges, she said, "racial preferences don't solve anything."

To some extent, Obama agrees that affirmative action is poorly suited to address such problems. But it still is needed, he says.

"Affirmative action is an important tool, although a limited tool," Obama told National Public Radio last year.

"I say limited simply because a large portion of our young people right now never even benefit from affirmative action because they're not graduating from high school," he said. "And unless we do a better job with early childhood education, fixing crumbling schools, investing to make sure that we've got an excellent teacher in front of every classroom, and then making college affordable, we're not even going to reach the point where our children can benefit from affirmative action."

June 22, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Now That We’ve ‘Won,’ Let’s Come Home

By FRANK RICH

THE Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.

The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news — it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”

Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.

Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.

The good news for Democrats — and the big opportunity for Barack Obama — is that John McCain and the war’s last cheerleaders don’t recognize that immutable reality. They’re so barricaded in their own Vietnam bunker that they think the country is too. It’s their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the “liberal media” acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq — as indeed it is, substantially — voters will want to press on to “victory” and not “surrender.” And therefore go for Mr. McCain.

One neocon pundit, Charles Krauthammer, summed up this alternative-reality mind-set in a recent column piously commanding Mr. McCain to “make the election about Iraq” because “everything is changed,” and “we are winning on every front.” The war, he wrote, can be “the central winning plank of his campaign.” (Italics his.)

This hyperventilating wasn’t necessary, because this is what Mr. McCain is already trying to do. His first general election ad, boosted by a large media buy in swing states this month, was all about war. It invoked his Vietnam heroism and tried to have it both ways on Iraq by at once presenting Mr. McCain as a stay-the-course warrior and taking a (timid) swipe at President Bush. “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war,” Mr. McCain said in his voice-over. That unnamed fool would be our cowboy president, who in March told American troops how he envied their “in some ways romantic” task of “confronting danger.”

But reminding voters of his identification with Iraq, no matter how he spins it, pays no political dividends to Mr. McCain. People just don’t want to hear about it. Last week, the first polls conducted in Pennsylvania and Ohio since the ad began running there found him well behind in both states.

The G.O.P.’s badgering of Mr. Obama about the war is also backfiring. In sync with Mr. McCain, the Republican National Committee unveiled an online clock — “Track How Long Since Obama Was in Iraq!” — only to have Mr. Obama call the bluff by announcing that he will go to both Afghanistan and Iraq before the election. Unless he takes along his own Lieberman-like Jiminy Cricket to whisper factual corrections into his ear, this trip is likely to enhance his stature as a potential commander in chief.

The other whiny line of G.O.P.-McCain attack is to demand incessantly that Mr. Obama stop refusing to recognize the decline in violence in Iraq, stop calling for a hasty troop withdrawal and stop ignoring commanders on the ground in assessing his exit strategy. Here, too, Mr. Obama is calling their bluff, though not nearly as loudly as he will, I suspect, in the debates.

The fact is that Mr. Obama frequently recognizes “the reduction of violence in Iraq” (his words) and has said he is “encouraged” by it. He has never said that he would refuse to consult with commanders on the ground, and he has never called for a precipitous withdrawal. His mantra on Iraq, to the point of tedium, has always been that “we must be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” His roughly 16-month timetable isn’t hasty and isn’t “retreat.” As The Economist, a supporter of the war, recently put it, a safer Iraq does not necessarily validate Mr. McCain’s “insistence on America staying indefinitely” and might make Mr. Obama’s 16-month framework “more feasible.”

After all, the point of the surge, as laid out by Mr. Bush, was to buy time for political reconciliation among the Iraqis. The results have been at best spotty, and even the crucial de-Baathification law celebrated by Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in January remains inoperative. Mr. Obama’s timetable is at least an effort to use any remaining American leverage to concentrate the Iraqi leaders’ thinking. Mr. McCain offers only the status quo: a blank check holding America hostage to fate and ceding the president’s civilian authority over war policy to Gen. David Petraeus and his successors.

Should voters tune in, they’ll also discover that the McCain policy is nonsensical on its face. If “we are winning” and the surge is a “success,” then what is the rationale for keeping American forces bogged down there while the Taliban regroups ominously in Afghanistan? Why, if this is victory, does Mr. McCain keep threatening that “chaos and genocide” will follow our departure? And why should we take the word of a prophet who failed to anticipate the chaos and ethnic cleansing that would greet our occupation?

And exactly how, as Mr. McCain keeps claiming, is an indefinite American occupation akin to our long-term military role in South Korea? The diminution of violence notwithstanding, Iraq is an active war zone. And unlike South Korea, it isn’t asking America to remain to protect it from a threatening neighbor. Iraq’s most malevolent neighbor, Iran, is arguably Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s closest ally. In the most recent survey, in February, only 27 percent of Iraqis said the American presence is improving their country’s security. Far from begging us to stay, some Iraqi politicians, including Mr. Maliki, have been pandering to their own election-year voters by threatening to throw the Yankees out.

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

But as Lara Logan asked, who’s paying attention to any of this Iraq stuff anyway? That Mr. McCain makes an unpopular and half-forgotten war the centerpiece of his campaign may simply be a default posture — the legacy of his Vietnam service and a recognition that any war, good or bad, is still a stronger suit for him than delving into the details of health care, education, tax policy or the mortgage crisis.

Even so, it leaves him trapped in a Catch-22. If violence continues to subside in Iraq — if, as Mr. McCain has it, we keep “winning” — it will only call more attention to the internal contradictions of a policy that says success in Iraq should be punished by forcing American troops to stay there indefinitely. And if Iraq reignites, well, so much for “winning.”

Not that the Obama policy is foolproof either. As everyone knows, there are no good options in Iraq. Our best hope for a bipartisan resolution of this disaster may be for a President Obama to appoint Mr. McCain as a special envoy to Baghdad, where he can stay for as long as he needs to administer our withdrawal or 100 years, whichever comes first.

June 20, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Two Obamas

By DAVID BROOKS

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Maureen Dowd on Michelle

June 11, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Mincing Up Michelle

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Hillary and Bill are busy updating their enemies lists. And Obama is racking his brain trying to figure out where to stash his erstwhile rival.

If a President Obama put her on the Supreme Court, of course, we would have the infinite fun of hearing Bill rant about how Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts were dissing Hillary.

It’s good news for Obama that Hillary’s out of the race. But it’s also bad news. Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of “Kill the witch.”

There are some who think it will be harder for America to accept a black first lady — the national hostess who serenely presides over the White House Christmas festivities and the Easter egg roll — than a black president.

There are creepy Web sites, like TheObamaFile.com, dedicated to painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing “Mrs. Grievance” depicted on the cover of National Review.

On that site and others around the Internet, the seamy rumors still slither that there’s a tape of Michelle denouncing “whitey,” a rumor that Barack Obama disdained last week as “scurrilous.”

E.D. Hill, the Fox anchor who said that the celebrated fist pump between Michelle and her husband the night he snagged the nomination could be called a “terrorist fist jab,” apologized Tuesday.

In their narrative of how Hillary lost in The Times on Sunday, Jim Rutenberg and Peter Baker said that Mark Penn argued that Hillary should subtly stress Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

That’s a good preview of how Republicans will attack Michelle, suggesting that she does not share American values, mining a subtext of race.

She’s a devoted daughter, wife and mother who has lived the American dream, from the humble South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School. Hey, isn’t it totally unAmerican to complain that being a black woman in the ’80s at a class-conscious, white-bread college, Princeton, was somewhat uncomfortable?

Just as Bill and Hillary did the “Pssst! He’s black!” thing on Barry, now the Republicans will use the same tactic on the strong and opinionated Michelle.

Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant, Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well. She has spent more time dwelling on the ways in which society can pull down the less privileged and refers a lot to a callous but unnamed “They.”

“Michelle,” as one political observer puts it, “is a target-rich environment.”

Team Obama is hoping for the best. When she’s on her game, after all, Michelle is a knockout. And as one Obama booster enthuses: “Michelle’s story is a lot more mainstream American than Cindy McCain inheriting a brewery.”

But the campaign is preparing for the worst, planning to shore up Michelle with her own slick and quick war room staffed by top operatives from previous campaigns.

David Axelrod thinks “there’s a real recoil potential” if the Republicans go after Michelle. “I don’t think she’s projecting herself into the fray in a way that would justify that,” he said, adding that her charming and polite daughters, Malia and Sasha, are walking testimony to Michelle’s “loving parenting.”

Mike Murphy, the G.O.P. strategist who worked for John McCain in 2000, but not yet this year, said Michelle is heading into her “big moment in the sun.”

“She’ll have the opportunity to do pretty well and the opportunity to really screw up.” he said. “What I glimpse of her from far away makes me think there could be trouble, but anytime you have that size microphone, she will have some control over how she handles the pressure.”

She’s going to take her big microphone on “The View” as a co-host next week, when she will no doubt try to put her remark about her belated pride in her country in context. And she clearly scored a pre-emptive hit both with her chic style — Vogue’s André Leon Talley declared in The Times the dawn of “a black Camelot” — and with her playful fist pump that now has older white guys, like North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, awkwardly trying to do it with Obama.

The dap or pound, as it’s also called, was a natural and beguiling moment that showed the country that, even though she started out as her husband’s boss and has a résumé that matches his, she likes him and is rooting for him, and is not engaged in a dreaded Clintonesque competition with him. (On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, Bill was eagerly checking to see who had swayed more voters — him or Hillary.)

“She isn’t sitting with a fixed, adoring gaze,” Axelrod said. “But she obviously loves him deeply and believes in him, and more than that, she believes in this. And that motivates him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11dowd.html?th&emc=th

Friedman On Barack the Muslim World

June 11, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Obama on the Nile

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Cairo

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that’s not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.

I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats’ nominee for president of the United States.

While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father’s family was of Muslim heritage. They don’t really understand Obama’s family tree, but what they do know is that if America — despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 — were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name “Hussein,” it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: “Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?” (It’s always “let him win” not just “win.”)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president — and we’ve got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America’s revolutionary “brand” overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.

I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: “Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?” And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, “no.” It couldn’t happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.

These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama’s nomination because it might mean that being labeled a “pro-American” reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama’s demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.

My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times’s bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo’s famed Blue Mosque: “Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: ‘Hillary-Obama tied?’ in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn’t have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. ‘For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,’ he said. ‘We all like what he is saying.’ ”

Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the “idea of America” — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

In his history of 19th-century America, “What Hath God Wrought,” Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that “America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”

That’s the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it’s the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn’t, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We’ve surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11friedman.html?th&emc=th

The Guardian on "The Real McCain"

The Real McCain

Sunday 22 June 2008

by: Paul Harris, The Observer / Guardian UK

John McCain. (Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP)

To his fans he's a lovable patriot with a maverick streak. But to his critics he's an anti-abortion Creationist who surrounds himself with religious extremists. Paul Harris uncovers the dark side of John McCain.

It is a vintage John McCain performance. Standing in a light-filled atrium at the University of Denver, McCain is espousing his vision for America's future relations with the world. He hits all the right notes, citing liberal icon John F Kennedy and conservative hero Ronald Reagan.
He strikes a muscular tone against America's enemies, yet tempers it with restraint. He speaks of a 'common vision' among nations. 'I want us to rise to the challenges of our time, as generations before us rose to theirs,' he says. He addresses the audience as 'my friends' and promises a safer, more reasonable world. 'It still remains within our power to make in our time another, better world than we inherited,' he concludes. As the crowd applaud, McCain plunges into the throng to pump hands and sign autographs.

Welcome to the John McCain show 2008. It's powerful stuff, portraying McCain as the decent patriot of the middle ground and a steady hand for difficult times. For a lot of Americans - including many Democrats - it is a beguiling vision. They see a war hero whose courage was forged in a North Vietnamese POW camp. They see a maverick who spoke against the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They see a reformer who acts against lobbyists and political favours. They see a politician who has spent a lifetime serving his country and won a place in the hearts of the nation.

Now McCain is also trying to win the White House. He has taken his campaign to places far from the projected Republican road map to victory. He has spoken in the 'black belt' of rural Alabama. He has toured Appalachian coal country to talk about poverty. He has gone to the hippy enclave of Oregon to lecture on global warming. In short, he is a Republican that even liberals can love. And many do. McCain's appeal to America's vital middle ground could easily propel him to the Oval Office.

But there is another, very different side to John McCain. Away from the headlines and the stirring speeches, a less familiar figure lurks. It is a McCain who plans to fight on in Iraq for years to come and who might launch military action against Iran. This is the McCain whose campaign and career has been riddled with lobbyists and special interests. It is a McCain who has sided with religious and political extremists who believe Islam is evil and gays are immoral. It is a McCain who wants to appoint extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court and see abortion banned. This McCain has a notoriously volatile temper that has scared some senior members of his own party. If McCain becomes the most powerful man in the world it would be wise to know what lies behind his public mask, to look at the dark side of John McCain.

John McCain is an American hero in an age of war and terrorism. As young Americans return in bodybags from Iraq and Iranian mullahs cook up uranium, an old soldier like McCain seems a natural choice in a dangerous world. He is the son and grandson of warriors. Both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals. He was even born on a military base, on 29 August 1936, in Panama. And his life story reads like a movie script. The young, rascally McCain, nicknamed 'McNasty' by his classmates, attended the elite West Point military academy. He became a navy pilot, long before Tom Cruise made 'Top Guns' famous, and began his first combat duty in Vietnam in 1966, carrying out countless missions. Then came disaster. He was shot down and held prisoner for five years by brutal North Vietnamese captors. In his stiff gait and damaged arms, he still bears the scars of their tortures. His CV for the White House is written in his suffering as much as in his career as a senator.

That military legacy has made John McCain a legend. But it has not turned him into a peacemaker, at a time when most Americans desperately want the war to end. Anyone hoping for a new president who will quickly bring America's troops home from Iraq had better look elsewhere. McCain has always supported the invasion of Iraq and he wants to support it until at least 2013, or perhaps for many years beyond. He believes withdrawal would be a surrender to terrorists.

That warlike spirit was on full display in Denver when McCain's speech was interrupted repeatedly by anti-war protesters. They stood up, unfurling banners and shouting for a withdrawal from Iraq. When it happened a third time, McCain had had enough. In a voice suddenly filled with steely resolve, McCain broke from his carefully scripted speech and gripped the lectern. He looked out at the audience and spoke slowly. 'I will never surrender in Iraq,' he rasped. 'Our American troops will come home with victory and with honour.' The crowd cheered and chanted: 'John McCain! John McCain!' It was a perfect moment for unrepentant supporters of the Iraq invasion and a McCain who still smarts from defeat in Vietnam. No retreat. No surrender. This time America will win.

McCain believes in projecting American military power abroad. So it is no wonder that the neoconservatives who pushed for war in Iraq have now regrouped around him. McCain's main foreign policy adviser is Randy Scheunemann, who was executive director of the shadowy Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Other leading neocons on board include John Bolton, America's belligerent former UN ambassador, Bill Kristol, editor of the Neocon bible the Weekly Standard, and Max Boot, who has pushed for a US version of the old British Colonial Office. Another close McCain adviser is former CIA director James Woolsey, who has openly advocated bombing Syria.

Such a group of warlike counsellors has raised fears that McCain may strike Iran to stop its suspected quest for a nuclear weapon, triggering a fresh war in the Middle East. The Republican candidate has openly joked about bombing Tehran. It was just over a year ago, in the tiny borough of Murrells Inlet in South Carolina, and McCain faced a small crowd in one of his characteristic town hall meetings. As McCain stood on the stage, one man asked him about the 'real problem' in the Middle East. 'When are we going to send an airmail message to Tehran?' the man pleaded. McCain laughed and - to the tune of the Beach Boys' classic 'Barbara Ann' - began to sing: 'Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.' But some think McCain's joke may well become policy. 'I think a McCain presidency would be very likely to strike Iran,' says Cliff Schecter, author of a new book, The Real McCain

McCain is still most at home with soldiers. Earlier this year I watched him on the stump in Charleston, South Carolina. He chose to speak at the Citadel, an elite military college, where old tanks and retired rockets dotted the lawns and squads of young recruits jogged around its quads. At the small rally McCain was relaxed and at home and the crowd loved him: here was their war hero made flesh. Here was a man unafraid to strike first.

John McCain's second bid for the presidency has been a long time coming. After being beaten by Bush in 2000, the Senator from Arizona has returned to the fray more determined than ever. And central to his success has been his media strategy.

Three years ago I followed McCain to a fund-raising dinner in Hartford, Connecticut, a wealthy city of insurers and bankers. McCain spoke at a private club downtown, giving an early version of his stump speech and already being introduced as the next president of the United States. He gave an impromptu press conference, bantering gamely with reporters. When that was done, aides tried to drag him away, but McCain raced across the room and sought out a local reporter to clarify an answer he had given. The journalist, unused to such personal attention from a potential president, looked like a spellbound deer in the headlights as McCain spoke to him for a further 10 minutes. The fact is, McCain loves journalists and they love him back. That is how the myth of the moderate maverick - the most powerful tool in his political armoury - has come to be.

Nothing has changed since that moment in Hartford. McCain's campaign bus - dubbed the Straight Talk Express, just as it was in 2000 - is filled with journalists who travel at the back with McCain, relaxing on a U-shaped couch. McCain recently hosted a barbecue for journalists at his Arizona ranch. As TV anchors and newspaper reporters sipped beer and cocktails under a desert sun, McCain stood at the grill and literally served up their daily nourishment. He is someone you could have a beer with, in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who keeps his press entourage firmly at arm's length. Yet McCain's riskier strategy has worked like a dream. Reporters often overlook McCain's errors and flaps - especially in national security - clinging instead to the narrative of an unconventional patriot. 'The media love him, especially his war record. He is the GI Joe doll they played with as kids,' says Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside.

There is also a little-reported back-up plan for reporters who do not toe the line: sheer aggression. A recent Washington Post piece on a land deal by one of McCain's allies prompted a brutal response from the McCain campaign. Without disproving facts, they labelled the story 'shameful' and a 'smear job'. When Newsweek ran a story on the Obama camp's perception of McCain's weak spots, McCain's team struck again. This time the story was 'offensive' and 'scurrilous'. The campaign is willing to strike out abroad, recently persuading one European newspaper editor to scrap a review of Schecter's book. For the fact is, McCain's benevolent public image is no accident. It has been carefully crafted and is forcefully policed. 'This has gone on for years. This is an image he has worked very hard to maintain,' says Professor Seth Masket of the University of Denver. John McCain has not always had his own way. His current reformist image was born from a career-threatening scandal that almost saw his political ambitions strangled at birth. It was 1987, and John McCain was a promising newcomer in the Republican party, still finding his feet in a world very different from his military life. Charlie Keating, a wealthy businessman, was a long-time friend and financial contributor to McCain's campaigns. When Keating was caught up in the disastrous collapse of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, he turned to his political friends, asking them to talk to federal regulators. McCain, along with four others, made the mistake of doing just that. When a massive government bailout of Lincoln followed, so too did public outrage. It almost destroyed McCain's career. Yet the Keating Five scandal also gave birth to a new John McCain: the reformer. In an astonishing transformation he now became the arch-champion of campaign finance reform.

Yet much of the dark side of John McCain lies behind the closed doors of K Street, a Washington DC boulevard lined with glitzy buildings and home to the capital's booming lobbyist industry. A close examination of McCain's campaign workers, political allies and backers reveals a dense world of dubious loyalties, uber-lobbyists and powerful corporate interests. McCain is very much at home with K Street's sharp-suited denizens, their wealthy clients and their art of influence-peddling.

Take one of McCain's closest aides and senior counsel, Charlie Black. For decades he worked as one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington DC. His firm represented some of the most unpleasant dictators in modern history, among them the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire's kleptomaniac president Joseph Mobutu. Then there's Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, the man leading the effort to capture the White House. Davis, too, has been a top lobbyist. His firm's clients ranged from Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov to telecoms giants such as Comsat and Verizon.

But Black and Davis are far from alone. McCain's staff was so riddled with lobbyists that at least four have resigned because of their contacts and businesses. They included Doug Goodyear, McCain's convention chairman, whose company was paid to improve the image of Burma's brutal dictatorship.

The make-up of McCain's team has set alarm bells ringing among Washington's campaign watchdogs. 'We need to know who is advising the candidates and why,' says Josh Israel, a lobbyist investigator at the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI). 'Rather than advising them based on what is good for the candidate or the country, are they instead looking for their other interests?' McCain's campaign has even had to bring in special rules to cut down on the number of lobbyists on his team.

Nor is it just campaign workers who have extensive links to the lobbying industry. McCain's financial backers do, too. A recent survey of 106 elite fundraisers for McCain revealed that one in six were lobbyists. Watchdog groups such as the CPI believe McCain has a long history of helping people who also happen to be his wealthy backers, including several large landowners in Arizona, Nevada and California who have profited from McCain-linked property deals. 'McCain has a long way to go to line up his reformist image with the actual reality,' Israel says. Sceptics might conclude that McCain's post-Keating career represents a cosmetic makeover, not a true conversion.

John McCain is level with Barack Obama in the polls in a year when Democrats should be a certainty. He is even winning in key swing states like Florida. His appeal to America's middle ground remains strong. These are people like self-confessed moderate Keith Gregory, 24, who filed out of the Denver auditorium as a convert. The young student, dressed in a freshly pressed suit and tie, had been deeply impressed by McCain's speech. 'I like him more than before,' Gregory said. 'He talked very sensibly and openly about the issues.' This is McCain's great strength and also one of his greatest myths. Few see McCain as an ideological warrior in America's culture wars. Unlike Bush, he is not a born-again Christian. In McCain's inner circle - unlike Bush's - there are no group prayer meetings. Yet the reality is that McCain is a social conservative who has actively sought out the far right of his party and forged alliances with Christian extremists.

Just look at McCain's 'pastor problems'. He has enthusiastically sought the political blessing of some of the most conservative religious figures in the country. McCain gave the 2006 commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University, a college that has taught creationism alongside science. McCain also courted and won the endorsement of Texan preacher John Hagee, despite Hagee blaming Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans's liberal attitude towards gays. Hagee believes the disaster was God's judgement on the sinful city. Another McCain-backer, Ohio preacher Rod Parsley, has spouted hate about Muslims. Parsley, whom McCain called a 'spiritual guide', believes America was founded partly in order to destroy Islam. He has called Mohammed a 'mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil' and has supported prosecuting people who commit adultery. Though McCain later repudiated the endorsements of Parsley and Hagee, he did so only after bad headlines threatened his moderate image. Most of Hagee's and Parsley's views were widely known from public speeches or books. It was not their bigotry that caught the campaign out, it was the reporting of it. 'McCain has had links with these religious figures who are just way, way out of the mainstream,' says Cliff Schecter.

There are other nasties, too. McCain is friends with G Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate burglars. Liddy, who once plotted to kill a left-wing journalist, has hosted a fundraiser with McCain in his own home. McCain also endorsed and campaigned for Alabama politician George Wallace Jr in 2005, despite Wallace's links to racist groups. Wallace has praised and spoken at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-power group that opposes inter-racial marriage and promotes white racial purity. If a moderate voter were seeking to judge a politician by the company he keeps, then McCain keeps some very odd company indeed.

But it is not really that strange. McCain himself holds deeply conservative views, including proposing teaching the creationist idea of Intelligent Design in schools alongside evolution. McCain has also always been anti-abortion. He believes the landmark Roe vs Wade ruling that legalised abortion was a bad decision. McCain has vowed to continue the Bush policy of appointing extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court and many fear a McCain presidency will see Roe vs Wade overturned. 'McCain is neither moderate nor a maverick when it comes to a woman's right to choose. He's just plain wrong,' said Nancy Keenan, president of abortion rights group Naral.

On the environment, too, McCain is not the green warrior some might think. He has voted against tightening fuel efficiency standards for American cars. The League of Conservation Voters gives McCain an environmental rating of 24 per cent; Obama gets 86 per cent. 'His rhetoric does not match his voting record on this issue,' says David Sandretti, a director of the League. 'McCain is better than Bush, but that's not much of a yardstick, because the current president is abysmal.'

But it is not just McCain's politics that are disturbing. It is his personality, too. For McCain has a secret reputation as a man with a ferocious, unpredictable temper. He is a man who has a knack for pursuing vendettas against those he thinks have slighted him, even if they are lowly aides.

The list of worrying incidents is long. In 1995 he ended up almost physically scuffling with aged Senator Strom Thurmond on the Senate floor. And, according to some accounts, in 2006 he had a fight with Arizona congressman Rick Renzi, throwing blows in a scrap whose details have only recently been detailed in Schecter's book. Schecter unearthed another unpleasant incident from 1992 in which McCain, tired after a long day's campaign, reacted badly to his wife Cindy teasing him about his baldness. 'At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you cunt,' McCain snapped in front of eyewitnesses. Schecter says he has three sources for the story. McCain's campaign have denied it.

Such public outbursts, and many other private ones, have concerned people even in his own party. Former New Hampshire Republican Senator Robert Smith publicly voiced his concerns, once saying McCain's temper ' ... would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger'. That sentiment was echoed by Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who told a Boston newspaper: 'The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.'

Yet McCain is still campaigning successfully as the lovable, maverick patriot. It is a strategy his staff believe will win the White House. So the tricks and stunts keep on coming.

A few weeks ago a letter was delivered to Barack Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters. It was from McCain and in gracious language it offered to hold weekly 'town hall' meetings across America where he and Obama would appear side by side. It would be a far cry from the rancorous circus of televised debates. The audience would be neutral independents. The questions would be random. It would summon back a golden age of gentlemanly politics. 'I also suggest we fly together to the first town hall meeting as a symbolically important act embracing the politics of civility,' McCain wrote.

Like the Denver speech, it was a vintage McCain ploy: superbly geared to his everyman image of decency. But the true McCain is far different. His dark side is real and Democrats will need to expose it if America is to avoid a third successive term of extreme conservative government. Now Democrat activists are pushing out their argument that McCain is a conservative wolf in a moderate sheep's clothing. They are highlighting the temper, the pro-war ideology and the links to lobbyists. 'We think he just means four more years of Bush,' says Karen Finney, a director at the Democratic National Committee. Finney's job is to convince Americans they have got McCain wrong, that they have been fooled. She and her fellow activists have less than four months to succeed. But for now, as America gears up to one of the most important elections in its history, McCain's dark side remains largely hidden behind closed doors.

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Correction: The author of this article states that John McCain attended West Point Military Academy. This is an error. John McCain attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. TO/vh

http://www.truthout.org/article/the-real-mccain

Muslim insult

June 24, 2008

Muslim Voters Detect a Snub From Obama

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

As Senator Barack Obama courted voters in Iowa last December, Representative Keith Ellison, the country’s first Muslim congressman, stepped forward eagerly to help.

Mr. Ellison believed that Mr. Obama’s message of unity resonated deeply with American Muslims. He volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama’s behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, one of the nation’s oldest Muslim enclaves. But before the rally could take place, aides to Mr. Obama asked Mr. Ellison to cancel the trip because it might stir controversy. Another aide appeared at Mr. Ellison’s Washington office to explain.

“I will never forget the quote,” Mr. Ellison said, leaning forward in his chair as he recalled the aide’s words. “He said, ‘We have a very tightly wrapped message.’ ”

When Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign, Muslim Americans from California to Virginia responded with enthusiasm, seeing him as a long-awaited champion of civil liberties, religious tolerance and diplomacy in foreign affairs. But more than a year later, many say, he has not returned their embrace.

While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored. Last week, two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred by campaign volunteers from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit.

In interviews, Muslim political and civic leaders said they understood that their support for Mr. Obama could be a problem for him at a time when some Americans are deeply suspicious of Muslims. Yet those leaders nonetheless expressed disappointment and even anger at the distance that Mr. Obama has kept from them.

“This is the ‘hope campaign,’ this is the ‘change campaign,’ ” said Mr. Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota. Muslims are frustrated, he added, that “they have not been fully engaged in it.”

Aides to Mr. Obama denied that he had kept his Muslim supporters at arm’s length. They cited statements in which he had spoken inclusively about American Islam and a radio advertisement he recorded for the recent campaign of Representative Andre Carson, Democrat of Indiana, who this spring became the second Muslim elected to Congress.

In May, Mr. Obama also had a brief, private meeting with the leader of a mosque in Dearborn, Mich., home to the country’s largest concentration of Arab-Americans. And this month, a senior campaign aide met with Arab-American leaders in Dearborn, most of whom are Muslim. (Mr. Obama did not campaign in Michigan before the primary in January because of a party dispute over the calendar.)

“Our campaign has made every attempt to bring together Americans of all races, religions and backgrounds to take on our common challenges,” Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. LaBolt added that with religious groups, the campaign had largely taken “an interfaith approach, one that may not have reached every group that wishes to participate but has reached many Muslim Americans.”

The strained relationship between Muslims and Mr. Obama reflects one of the central challenges facing the senator: how to maintain a broad electoral appeal without alienating any of the numerous constituencies he needs to win in November.

After the episode in Detroit last week, Mr. Obama telephoned the two Muslim women to apologize. “I take deepest offense to and will continue to fight against discrimination against people of any religious group or background,” he said in a statement.

Such gestures have fallen short in the eyes of many Muslim leaders, who say the Detroit incident and others illustrate a disconnect between Mr. Obama’s message of unity and his campaign strategy.

“The community feels betrayed,” said Safiya Ghori, the government relations director in the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Even some of Mr. Obama’s strongest Muslim supporters say they are uncomfortable with the forceful denials he has made in response to rumors that he is secretly a Muslim. (Ten percent of registered voters believe the rumor, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.)

In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Obama said the rumors were offensive to American Muslims because they played into “fearmongering.” But on a new section of his Web site, he classifies the claim that he is Muslim as a “smear.”

“A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way,” Mr. Ellison said.

Mr. Ellison, a first-term congressman, remains arguably the senator’s most important Muslim supporter. He has attended Obama rallies in Minnesota and appears on the campaign’s Web site. But Mr. Ellison said he was also forced to cancel plans to campaign for Mr. Obama in North Carolina after an emissary for the senator told him the state was “too conservative.” Mr. Ellison said he blamed Mr. Obama’s aides — not the candidate himself — for his campaign’s standoffishness.

Despite the complications of wooing Muslim voters, Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, may find it risky to ignore this constituency. There are sizable Muslim populations in closely fought states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

In those states and others, American Muslims have experienced a political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose communities account for a majority of the nation’s Muslims. (Another 20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35 million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and political action committees started tracking registered Muslim voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to change.

“We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors, lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots operatives,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in Washington. “We went back to the base.”

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.

The committee’s president, Mukit Hossain, said Muslims in Virginia were drawn to Mr. Obama because of his support for civil liberties and his more diplomatic approach to the Middle East. Mr. Hossain and others said his multicultural image also appealed to immigrant voters.

“This is the son of an immigrant; this is someone with a funny name,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who is a Christian who has campaigned for Mr. Obama at mosques and Arab churches. “There is this excitement that if he can win, they can win, too.”

Yet some Muslim and Arab-American political organizers worry that the campaign’s reluctance to reach out to voters in those communities will eventually turn them off. “If they think that they are voting for a campaign that is trying to distance itself from them, my big fear is that Muslims will sit it out,” Mr. Hossain said.

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation’s leading Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said. (No one from the McCain campaign showed up.)

Frustrations with Mr. Obama deepened the day after he claimed the nomination when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel. (Mr. Obama later clarified his statement, saying Jerusalem’s status would need to be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.)

Osama Siblani, the editor and publisher of the weekly Arab American News in Dearborn, said Mr. Obama had “pandered” to the Israeli lobby, while neglecting to meet formally with Arab-American and Muslim leaders. “They’re trying to take the votes without the liabilities,” said Mr. Siblani, who is also president of the Arab American Political Action Committee.

Some Muslim supporters of Mr. Obama seem to ricochet between dejection and optimism. Minha Husaini, a public health consultant in her 30s who is working for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia, lights up like a swooning teenager when she talks about his promise for change.

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

For Ms. Ghori and other Muslims, Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach is not surprising in a political climate they feel is marred by frequent attacks on their faith.

Among the incidents they cite are a statement by Mr. McCain, in a 2007 interview with Beliefnet.com, that he would prefer a Christian president to a Muslim one; a comment by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mr. Obama was not Muslim “as far as I know”; and a remark by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to The Associated Press in March that an Obama victory would be celebrated by terrorists, who would see him as a “savior.”

“All you have to say is Barack Hussein Obama,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Islamica Magazine. “You don’t even have to say ‘Muslim.’ ”

As a consequence, many Muslims have kept their support for Mr. Obama quiet. Any visible show of allegiance could be used by his opponents to incite fear, further the false rumors about his faith and “bin-Laden him,” Mr. Bray said.

“The joke within the national Muslim organizations,” Ms. Ghori said, “is that we should endorse the person we don’t want to win.”

Obama to focus on economy in Flint stop

This and other recent visits to Michigan by Obama are great, but a bit anti-climatic. Recall, there was no campaigning in Michigan because the State Party violated the rules by moving up its primary. That there was no campaigning means that many Obama supporters and the rest of the state have not seen him up close and personal. Many of his supporters did travel to states far and wide to campaign for him. But, he is meeting the state and they him. One such stop was the home of the first-down strike, Flint Michigan. This collective action began a recognition of the democratic rights of workers. Here he gave a talk on the economy. Mentioned in the article and giving Barack a fist bump is Dan Kildee whom I had the pleasure of having had in a class. RGN

The road to the White House doesn't necessarily run through Flint, but it's a natural side trip for any Democrat who preaches economic recovery for the middle class.

Barack Obama will take that side trip on the way to a large rally at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit later today. He'll hold a small rally at 11:45 this morning at Flint's Kettering University, a top-rated engineering school (formerly General Motors Institute) that churns out brainpower amid the city's industrial decline.

Obama's message surely will focus on economic issues, said Genesee County Democratic Party Chairman Dan Kildee. The number of Flint-area automotive workers fell from 79,000 in 1976 to around 12,000 now, he said.

"Access to higher education in the knowledge economy is part of Obama's message," Kildee said. "You have a city that's part of the old economy and needs to reposition itself for the next generation of jobs.

"There's a lot of hope that with Obama, we can have an industrial policy that embraces the new economy."

Politically, Kildee said, Flint is a Democratic hub of the so-called I-75 corridor from Detroit to Bay City. That makes it important for a Democratic presidential candidate, though nominee John Kerry didn't visit Flint in the 2004 presidential race.

Flint gained international notoriety in filmmaker and Flint-area native Michael Moore's 1989 documentary "Roger and Me," which cast Flint as an emblem of industrial decline.

Kettering spokeswoman Patricia Mroczek said the Obama campaign's choice of Kettering turned on more mundane issues: The university's recreation center has adequate size, power and air-conditioning for an event that will probably hold fewer than 2,000 supporters. Tickets were given out Friday and all of them went in 90 minutes.

Mroczek said Obama's appearance is an opportunity to promote Flint as a college town. Besides Kettering, there is the University of Michigan-Flint, Baker College and Mott Community College.

"We have more than 25,000 students who come to Flint on a daily basis," Mroczek said. "It represents a new and different and engaging future for our city."

Mroczek said Kettering also is deeply involved in alternative energy research, such as fuel cells.

Kildee said Obama's pending visit has energized local Democrats.

"I've got a lot of old friends I haven't heard from in a long time who want me to get them tickets," he said.

Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff@freepress.com.

Michelle: The Future First Lady Anew?

June 18, 2008

After Attacks, Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction

By MICHAEL POWELL and JODI KANTOR

Correction Appended

Michelle Obama’s eyes flicker tentatively even as she offers a trained smile. As her campaign plane arcs over the Flathead Range in Montana, she is asked to consider her complicated public image.

Conservative columnists accuse her of being unpatriotic and say she simmers with undigested racial anger. A blogger who supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton circulates unfounded claims that Mrs. Obama gave an accusatory speech in her church about the sins of “whitey.” Mrs. Obama shakes her head.

“You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she says in an interview. Referring to a character in a 1970s sitcom, she adds: “I mean, ‘whitey’? That’s something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me.”

Now her husband’s presidential campaign is giving her image a subtle makeover, with a new speech in the works to emphasize her humble roots and a tough new chief of staff. On Wednesday, Mrs. Obama will do a guest turn on “The View,” the daytime talk show on ABC, with an eye toward softening her reputation.

Her problems seemed hard to imagine last fall and winter. Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, appeared so at ease with the tactile business of campaigning and drew praise for humanizing, often with humor, a husband who could seem elusive.

Then came some rhetorical stumbles. In Madison, Wis., in February, she told voters that hope was sweeping America, adding, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” Cable news programs replayed those 15 words in an endless loop of outrage.

Barack Obama often blurs identity lines; much of his candidacy has seemed almost post-racial. Mrs. Obama’s identity is less mutable. She is a descendant of slaves and a product of Chicago’s historically black South Side. She burns hot where he banks cool, and that too can make her an inviting proxy for attack.

Fox News called her “Obama’s baby mama,” a derogatory term for an unwed mother. Christopher Hitchens, a Slate columnist, claimed — with scant evidence — that her college thesis proved she was once influenced by black separatism. National Review presented her as a scowling “Mrs. Grievance.”

The caricatures of Mrs. Obama as the Angry Black Woman confound her, friends say. Her own family crosses racial boundaries — her mother-in-law and a sister-in-law are white — and she has spent much of her adult life trying to address racial resentment.

In her freshman year at Princeton, a white roommate’s mother agitated for her daughter to swap rooms. Mrs. Obama was among a handful of blacks at a prestigious Chicago law firm. As a hospital executive, she navigated the often tense line between a predominantly white-run institution and a suspicious black community.

But the 44-year-old woman known even to friends as The Taskmaster sometimes speaks with a passion unusual for a potential first lady. She tells voters that “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual — uninvolved, uninformed.”

She says she intends to evoke a John F. Kennedy-like idealism and highlight her own journey, but in her commanding cadences, some people — and not just conservatives — hear a lecture.

Before her husband announced his candidacy, Mrs. Obama confided in friends: Barack and I will cut an unfamiliar figure to most of America.

“It’s such uncharted waters,” said Verna Williams, a Harvard classmate and friend. “In a sound-bite era, where you have to come with a quick and dirty take, she doesn’t fit what it means to be an African-American woman.”

Early Questions on Race

Michelle Robinson grew up in the black half of a divided Chicago. She and her brother, Craig, lived with their parents on the second floor of a bungalow. “Two bedrooms, if you want to be generous,” she says.

Her father, Frasier Robinson, was a pump operator for Chicago’s water department and a precinct captain in the Democratic machine. Her mother, Marian, brought workbooks home to keep her children ahead of their classes. The working-class neighborhood was filled with uncles and grandparents, block associations and oak trees. “We knew the gang-bangers — my brother played basketball in the park,” Mrs. Obama says. “Home never feels dangerous.”

In 1981, she left for Princeton, an overwhelmingly white institution that cherished its genteel traditions. She was one of 94 black freshmen in a class of over 1,100. Catherine Donnelly, a white student from New Orleans, was a roommate. Her mother spent months pleading with Princeton officials to give her daughter a white roommate instead. “Mom just blew a gasket when I described Michelle,” Ms. Donnelly recalled. “It was my secret shame.”

Mrs. Obama shrugs now. Some classmates resented blacks; some resented affirmative action. “Diversity can’t be taken care of with 10 kids,” she says. “There is an isolation that comes with that.”

Her brother, two years older, was a star basketball player at Princeton, but he felt similarly. “If you’re young and black and from the South Side, there are always going to be people who feel you should not be there,” Craig Robinson said. “You build up a thick skin.”

Black and white students rarely socialized. When Crystal Nix Hines became the first black editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, some black students wondered why she wanted to run a “white” newspaper. Mrs. Obama, however, was thrilled that a historic barrier had fallen.

That did not stop her, however, from confronting Ms. Hines, a friend, over an article that contained what Mrs. Obama took to be inappropriate characterizations of a black politician. “ ‘You need to make sure that a story like that doesn’t run again,’ ” Ms. Hines recalls her friend saying with utter calm.

Sociology became her lens to examine her anxieties about race. Mrs. Obama spent hours in the office of Professor Marvin Bressler. “She was troubled by the questions that troubled every student in that situation,” he said. “They all walk around saying, ‘Who am I?’ ”

In her senior thesis, she asked: Does immersion in an elite white institution draw blacks away from their community? She surveyed black Princeton alumni, finding their ties weakened after graduation.

“The path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton,” Mrs. Obama wrote in the introduction, “will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant.”

Mitchell Duneier, a sociology professor at Princeton who reviews undergraduate theses, noted that Mrs. Obama rejected some of her own theories. “Her senior thesis is being misread as if it is a polemical essay about her alienation,” Professor Duneier said.

Epiphany Leads to Home

Michelle Obama recalls gazing out the window of her plush 47th-floor office in downtown Chicago and realizing that she could barely see, literally or metaphorically, her beloved South Side.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, Mrs. Obama took a job at what is now Sidley Austin, a corporate law firm. She had a handsome salary and the prospect of better to come.

Then a close friend from college died. So did her father, who had long suffered from multiple sclerosis; Michelle so adored him that she would curl up in his lap even as an adult.

“I looked out at my neighborhood and sort of had an epiphany that I had to bring my skills to bear in the place that made me,” she says in the interview. “I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money.”

Eventually, she started the Chicago chapter of a training program called Public Allies. One day, looking for young leaders, she might knock on doors at Cabrini-Green, a public housing project so violent and neglected it would later be mostly demolished. Another day, she discovered Jose A. Rico, a young Mexican so alienated that he insisted on remaining an illegal immigrant rather than pursue citizenship. What is your goal? he recalled her asking.

To open a high school for Latinos, he replied. Mrs. Obama nodded: Good, tell me exactly how you would do it.

“Michelle was tough, man; she let nothing slide,” said Mr. Rico, now principal of Multicultural Arts High School in Chicago, which he helped start.

She preached the gospel of the second and third chance, insisting that the white youth from Swarthmore work alongside the former gang member.

Every Friday, the young people would sprawl around Mrs. Obama’s office, swapping frustrations. When a white college student complained that Mr. Rico took forever to write a simple memorandum, Mr. Rico recalls responding, Who are you to speak, when you babble in pidgin Spanish and act arrogant?

Blacks accused whites of being clueless. Whites said blacks masked insecurity with anger. Mrs. Obama probed carefully, sometimes dialing up the heat before turning it down.

“I hate diversity workshops,” she says. “Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.”

Mr. Rico is intrigued to see her on television now. “Her style is still to say: ‘Hey! I’m going to tell you where I stand, and you figure out where you stand,’ ” he said.

By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were.

Hospital brass had gathered to break ground for a children’s building when African-American protesters broke in with bullhorns, drowning out the proceedings with demands that the hospital award more contracts to minority firms.

The executives froze. Mrs. Obama strolled over and offered to meet later, if only the protestors would pipe down. She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards.

In the mostly black neighborhoods around the hospital, Mrs. Obama became the voice of a historically white institution. Behind closed doors, she tried to assuage their frustrations about a place that could seem forbidding.

Like many urban hospitals, the medical center’s emergency room becomes clogged with people who need primary care. So Mrs. Obama trained counselors, mostly local blacks, to hand out referrals to health clinics lest black patients felt they were being shooed away.

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

New Role, New Script

Rather than pulling Mrs. Obama behind a curtain, her husband’s campaign is pushing her farther out on stage. She remains a charismatic presence, and when she gives her husband a fist dap or talks of him as a father, she is telling voters, this is a regular guy. This South Side woman anchors him in her reality.

In coming weeks, Mrs. Obama will visit the spouses of military personnel and talk of the patriotic duty to provide these families with care and services. And the campaign has hired Stephanie Cutter, a veteran strategist, as her chief of staff, who will seek to deflect attacks.

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, a close ally of the Obama campaign, says Mrs. Obama must stop sounding like a lawyer trying to win an argument. The trick, she said, is “not pushing so hard to persuade people that Barack is the right one.”

“All she has to do is be likable,” Mrs. McCaskill said.

Mrs. Obama has already had to check her brutally honest approach to talking about race. Now she co-stars in a campaign that would as soon mute most discussion of race.

As her plane descends into a northern Montana valley, she sounds like a woman who wishes she could sit voters down for a long talk. “You know, if someone sat in a room with me for five minutes after hearing these rumors, they’d go ‘huh?’ ” she says. “They’d realize it doesn’t make sense.”

She extends her long arms, her voice plaintive. “I will walk anyone through my life,” she says. “Come on, let’s go.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2008
A picture credit on Wednesday with the continuation of a front-page article about a subtle image makeover for Michelle Obama misspelled part of the name of the agency that provided the photograph. The picture of Mrs. Obama at the University of Chicago Medical Center was from Heidi Zeiger Photography, not Zeigler.

Gregory on Krugman and Racisn in America

Paul Krugman, below, notes the extent to which Obama's success thus far shows how racism has been removed from U.S. politics. He would have been on sounder ground if he had added that racism is still deeply embedded in the functioning of basic U.S. institutions and in arrangements in space which determine differential access racially to opportunities impacting the quality of life. Consider for example the spatial distribution of quality schools, tax bases for financing public services, environmental hazards, persons being insured for numerous risks at reasonable availbility and costs, school drop-outs, hunger, homelesness, neighborhood blight, job opportunities, conditions breeding crime, etc. The progress Krugman notes is in an important but very limited area.

Krugman also gives Bill Clinton too much credit. He does not note that Clinton, while president, appointed a committee to examine the state of race relations and to make recommendations. The recommendations by the distinguished committee, headed by the eminent historian, John Hope Franklin, author of the classic, "From Slavery To Freedom," was then squashed by the President and never saw the light of day.

See the op-ed below.

Karl D. Gregory, Ph. D., Distinguished Professor Emeritus and KDG & Associates, Management & Economic
Consulting, 248.569.7387.

June 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
It’s a Different Country
By Paul Krugman

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.
Take, for example, that old standby of conservatives: denouncing Big Government. Last week John McCain’s economic spokesman claimed that Barack Obama is President Bush’s true fiscal heir, because he’s “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything.”
Now, the truth is that the Bush administration’s big-spending impulses have been largely limited to defense contractors. But more to the point, the McCain campaign is deluding itself if it thinks this issue will resonate with the public.

For Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?
Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.

Another large factor has been the decline in urban violence.

As the historian Rick Perlstein documents in his terrific new book “Nixonland,” America’s hard right turn really began in 1966, when the Democrats suffered a severe setback in Congress — and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

The cause of that right turn, as Mr. Perlstein shows, was white fear of urban disorder — and the associated fear that fair housing laws would let dangerous blacks move into white neighborhoods. “Law and order” became the rallying cry of right-wing politicians, above all Richard Nixon, who rode that fear right into the White House.

But during the Clinton years, for reasons nobody fully understands, the wave of urban violence receded, and with it the ability of politicians to exploit Americans’ fear.

It’s true that 9/11 gave the fear factor a second wind: Karl Rove accusing liberals of being soft on terrorism sounded just like Spiro Agnew accusing liberals of being soft on crime. But the G.O.P.’s credibility as America’s defender has leaked away into the sands of Iraq.

Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Unfortunately, the campaign against misogyny hasn’t been equally successful.

By the way, it was during the heyday of the baby boom generation that crude racism became unacceptable. Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

Anyway, none of this guarantees an Obama victory in November. Racial division has lost much of its sting, but not all: you can be sure that we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and all that. Moreover, despite Hillary Clinton’s gracious, eloquent concession speech, some of her supporters may yet refuse to support the Democratic nominee.

But if Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.