An electorate living high off the entitlement hog.
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, November 8, 2008
‘Give me liberty or give me death!”
“Live free or die!”
What's that? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just trying out slogans for the 2012 campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs.
My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn't vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: Obama's a star and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn't mean they're suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.
Up to a point. Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go left.” Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (ie, the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Now who does that remind you of?
Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: he briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.
If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H G Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida to vote for Obama because “I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.”
While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the west, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama's promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why shouldn't Peggy Joseph?
I don't need Barack Obama's help to “spread the wealth around.” I spread my wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread. As far as I know, only one bloated plutocrat declines to spread his wealth around, and that's Scrooge McDuck, whose principal activity in Disney cartoons was getting into his little bulldozer and plowing back and forth over a mountain of warehoused gold and silver coins. Don't know where he is these days. On the board at Halliburton, no doubt. But most of the beleaguered band of American capitalists do not warehouse their wealth in McDuck fashion. It's not a choice between hoarding and spreading, but a choice between who spreads it best: an individual free to make his own decisions about investment and spending, or Barney Frank. I don't find that a difficult question to answer. More to the point, put Barney & Co in charge of the spreading, and there'll be a lot less to spread.
I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or four years' time. The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state. That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?
At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty — for economic dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. In Forbes this week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free — or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of nanny-state sirens.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Media Defeats McCain?
Brent Bozell III
Friday, November 07, 2008
The election of Barack Obama was certainly historic, and the great attraction of that historic moment led to more history: an Obama-smitten news media that completely avoided their responsibility to test the nominee with hard questions. It made the gooey 1992 Clinton campaign look like a fistfight by comparison.
Obama faced none of the withering scrutiny applied to even the Republican vice presidential candidate. Instead, he was treated to a nearly constant string of encomiums and tributes to his transformational candidacy, while nearly every possible pitfall of political embarrassment or inconvenience has been omitted or dismissed.
The investigative resources of the networks -- who combed over Wasilla, Alaska, looking for earmarks and pregnancy tests -- showed a complete disinterest in traveling to Hawaii or the South Side of Chicago to cast a skeptical eye on any part of Obama's own preferred campaign narrative.
The big question now: If the media couldn't scrutinize the man before he was elected, why would they feel the drive to do so afterward? They won't. They worked for his election. They will now work for his administration. Past is prologue.
Take the last few Obama fawn-a-thons before the election as examples of things to come. Just one week after NBC's Brian Williams put up his dukes with John McCain and Sarah Palin, demanding to know if they would keep the pledge to avoid the anti-American harangues of Obama's longtime minister Jeremiah Wright, he had Obama on the set. The contrast was crystal clear as he asked Obama about how the poor man can't walk down the street in Honolulu mourning the approaching death of his grandmother.
"According to the press pool traveling with you, you asked to just take a walk and be alone," he oozed sympathetically. "Guess it's part of the contract you make when you run in such an extended campaign, but, the human in you, and the husband and father and grandson, must want to just bust out sometimes, or disappear, if you can't go for a walk like that?"
CBS anchor Katie Couric, last seen ripping into Palin, also used her last pre-election interview to ask about Obama's personal feelings, about whether he was a "nervous wreck" about the vote, and "If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation's first African-American president, what will that mean to you personally?"
Couric was tough during that interview -- but on the Republicans. She focused Obama on Republicans daring to press the Reverend Wright issue: "The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, 'God damn America.' Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?"
Even in the last days of this race, saying "God damn America" was far less reprehensible to the media than replaying it.
Both anchors thought they were being tough by asking the drape-measuring question regarding how Democrats might overreach if they hold all the levers of power in Washington, but both phrased it in a tone which said, "Please reassure voters that this is not a real cause for concern." Williams asked for "assurance" for the American people, and Couric wanted Obama to "assuage" public fears.
The burden of scrutinizing and questioning the new Democratic ruling machine in Washington is already being shrugged off by the Obama press. Once again, it's going to fall on Fox News Channel and alternative media outlets from radio to the Internet to try and hold Obama accountable. No wonder the Democrats are making noise about crushing anti-Obama dissent on the airwaves with a revised version of the old "Fairness Doctrine."
In the primary elections, it became clear when it was over that Obama's win of just one-tenth of a percentage point of the 35 million votes cast that the media's pro-Obama bias created that narrow margin of victory. The general election result wasn't that close, and the punishing circumstances of vigorous Bush hatred and the collapse of economic confidence possibly were just too much for the GOP nominee to overcome.
But try and imagine how different this campaign would have looked if the media's momentum manufacturers favored McCain with all the unashamed ardor and aggression that they brought in support of Obama. Deep down, the media agree with Evan Thomas that their bias can add five or 10 points to a Democrat's vote total, and they eagerly demonstrated that they were ready to shred their own credibility as allegedly objective referees to achieve that victorious result.
Friday, November 07, 2008
The election of Barack Obama was certainly historic, and the great attraction of that historic moment led to more history: an Obama-smitten news media that completely avoided their responsibility to test the nominee with hard questions. It made the gooey 1992 Clinton campaign look like a fistfight by comparison.
Obama faced none of the withering scrutiny applied to even the Republican vice presidential candidate. Instead, he was treated to a nearly constant string of encomiums and tributes to his transformational candidacy, while nearly every possible pitfall of political embarrassment or inconvenience has been omitted or dismissed.
The investigative resources of the networks -- who combed over Wasilla, Alaska, looking for earmarks and pregnancy tests -- showed a complete disinterest in traveling to Hawaii or the South Side of Chicago to cast a skeptical eye on any part of Obama's own preferred campaign narrative.
The big question now: If the media couldn't scrutinize the man before he was elected, why would they feel the drive to do so afterward? They won't. They worked for his election. They will now work for his administration. Past is prologue.
Take the last few Obama fawn-a-thons before the election as examples of things to come. Just one week after NBC's Brian Williams put up his dukes with John McCain and Sarah Palin, demanding to know if they would keep the pledge to avoid the anti-American harangues of Obama's longtime minister Jeremiah Wright, he had Obama on the set. The contrast was crystal clear as he asked Obama about how the poor man can't walk down the street in Honolulu mourning the approaching death of his grandmother.
"According to the press pool traveling with you, you asked to just take a walk and be alone," he oozed sympathetically. "Guess it's part of the contract you make when you run in such an extended campaign, but, the human in you, and the husband and father and grandson, must want to just bust out sometimes, or disappear, if you can't go for a walk like that?"
CBS anchor Katie Couric, last seen ripping into Palin, also used her last pre-election interview to ask about Obama's personal feelings, about whether he was a "nervous wreck" about the vote, and "If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation's first African-American president, what will that mean to you personally?"
Couric was tough during that interview -- but on the Republicans. She focused Obama on Republicans daring to press the Reverend Wright issue: "The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, 'God damn America.' Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?"
Even in the last days of this race, saying "God damn America" was far less reprehensible to the media than replaying it.
Both anchors thought they were being tough by asking the drape-measuring question regarding how Democrats might overreach if they hold all the levers of power in Washington, but both phrased it in a tone which said, "Please reassure voters that this is not a real cause for concern." Williams asked for "assurance" for the American people, and Couric wanted Obama to "assuage" public fears.
The burden of scrutinizing and questioning the new Democratic ruling machine in Washington is already being shrugged off by the Obama press. Once again, it's going to fall on Fox News Channel and alternative media outlets from radio to the Internet to try and hold Obama accountable. No wonder the Democrats are making noise about crushing anti-Obama dissent on the airwaves with a revised version of the old "Fairness Doctrine."
In the primary elections, it became clear when it was over that Obama's win of just one-tenth of a percentage point of the 35 million votes cast that the media's pro-Obama bias created that narrow margin of victory. The general election result wasn't that close, and the punishing circumstances of vigorous Bush hatred and the collapse of economic confidence possibly were just too much for the GOP nominee to overcome.
But try and imagine how different this campaign would have looked if the media's momentum manufacturers favored McCain with all the unashamed ardor and aggression that they brought in support of Obama. Deep down, the media agree with Evan Thomas that their bias can add five or 10 points to a Democrat's vote total, and they eagerly demonstrated that they were ready to shred their own credibility as allegedly objective referees to achieve that victorious result.
How to Survive Media Bias
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Friday, November 07, 2008
Candidates cannot live by the Internet alone, but there was something clever about former Tennessee Republican senator Fred Thompson's media approach to running for president. The former star of "Law and Order" could have flooded every frequency there is. Instead, he went straight to his core audience.
Thompson favored Internet videos and talk radio, generally refusing to bend over backward for hostile media, such as the evening news shows and papers of record. Some would call that lazy. I'd call it smart.
Michelle Bachmann learned her lesson the hard way. The Minnesota mother of five, foster mom of 23 and tax lawyer serves as a member of the House of Representatives. But she almost lost her bid for re-election, and the reason is MSNBC, a network that's become a playground of the rabid left.
Bachmann made the mistake of appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball" in mid-October. Host Chris Matthews berated her for daring to suggest that the mainstream media do its job and report on some of the radical anti-American associations of the man who has now been elected president of the United States. Congresswoman gone wild? Hardly.
But Matthews was a softie compared to left-wing radio talk-show host Mike Malloy, who outrageously said of Bachmann: "She's a hatemonger. She's the type of person that would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death camps. She's the type of person who would have had no problem sending typhoid-smeared blankets to Native American families awaiting deportation to reservations. ... This is an evil bitch from hell. I mean, just an absolute evil woman."
What exactly did Bachmann do to deserve this?
She said to Matthews, when asked about domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who has played more than a cameo role in President-elect Barack Obama's life and career: "This is an unrepentant terrorist who says he wishes he would have bombed more people. Remember, this is a man who bombed the Pentagon and was happy to be bombing Americans, as well. This is not a person that the president of the United States would want to be associated with."
She continued to insist that, had former Republican presidential nominee John McCain been hanging out with Ayers, "It would have been a nightly story. It would have been everywhere."
Bachmann and others were right to push the issue, which, sadly, didn't have enough of an impact. Obama's links with Ayers, much like his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaks directly about his judgment. Bachmann knows this and tried to point it out, calmly and with reason. And for doing so, she was pilloried, held up to widespread ridicule and nearly deprived of her role as a public servant.
I've spent a little time with Bachmann and know her at least well enough to be able to combat this "hatemonger" nonsense. Death camps?! She and her husband care for as many disadvantaged children as they possibly can.
As she recently told my friend, radio talk-show host Mark Levin, it's amazing that any "normal American" would want to have anything to do with politics after the "public flogging" Bachmann endured in the final weeks of her re-election campaign. Her story of overcoming the megaphone of the mainstream media -- an entity that proved a tremendous fundraising boon for her opponent -- and speaking directly to the voters via talk radio and old-fashioned campaigning should serve as an inspiration to good Americans who want to serve -- and have their voices heard over the noise.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Candidates cannot live by the Internet alone, but there was something clever about former Tennessee Republican senator Fred Thompson's media approach to running for president. The former star of "Law and Order" could have flooded every frequency there is. Instead, he went straight to his core audience.
Thompson favored Internet videos and talk radio, generally refusing to bend over backward for hostile media, such as the evening news shows and papers of record. Some would call that lazy. I'd call it smart.
Michelle Bachmann learned her lesson the hard way. The Minnesota mother of five, foster mom of 23 and tax lawyer serves as a member of the House of Representatives. But she almost lost her bid for re-election, and the reason is MSNBC, a network that's become a playground of the rabid left.
Bachmann made the mistake of appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball" in mid-October. Host Chris Matthews berated her for daring to suggest that the mainstream media do its job and report on some of the radical anti-American associations of the man who has now been elected president of the United States. Congresswoman gone wild? Hardly.
But Matthews was a softie compared to left-wing radio talk-show host Mike Malloy, who outrageously said of Bachmann: "She's a hatemonger. She's the type of person that would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death camps. She's the type of person who would have had no problem sending typhoid-smeared blankets to Native American families awaiting deportation to reservations. ... This is an evil bitch from hell. I mean, just an absolute evil woman."
What exactly did Bachmann do to deserve this?
She said to Matthews, when asked about domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who has played more than a cameo role in President-elect Barack Obama's life and career: "This is an unrepentant terrorist who says he wishes he would have bombed more people. Remember, this is a man who bombed the Pentagon and was happy to be bombing Americans, as well. This is not a person that the president of the United States would want to be associated with."
She continued to insist that, had former Republican presidential nominee John McCain been hanging out with Ayers, "It would have been a nightly story. It would have been everywhere."
Bachmann and others were right to push the issue, which, sadly, didn't have enough of an impact. Obama's links with Ayers, much like his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaks directly about his judgment. Bachmann knows this and tried to point it out, calmly and with reason. And for doing so, she was pilloried, held up to widespread ridicule and nearly deprived of her role as a public servant.
I've spent a little time with Bachmann and know her at least well enough to be able to combat this "hatemonger" nonsense. Death camps?! She and her husband care for as many disadvantaged children as they possibly can.
As she recently told my friend, radio talk-show host Mark Levin, it's amazing that any "normal American" would want to have anything to do with politics after the "public flogging" Bachmann endured in the final weeks of her re-election campaign. Her story of overcoming the megaphone of the mainstream media -- an entity that proved a tremendous fundraising boon for her opponent -- and speaking directly to the voters via talk radio and old-fashioned campaigning should serve as an inspiration to good Americans who want to serve -- and have their voices heard over the noise.
The Deceny of George W. Bush
Michael Gerson
Friday, November 07, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Election Day 2008 must have been filled with rueful paradoxes for the sitting president. Iraq -- the issue that dominated George W. Bush's presidency for five and a half bitter, controversial years -- is on the verge of a miraculous peace. And yet this accomplishment did little to revive Bush's political standing -- or to prevent his party from relegating him to a silent role.
The achievement is historic. In 2006, Iraq had descended into a sectarian killing spree that only seemed likely to stop when the supply of victims was exhausted. Showing Truman-like stubbornness, Bush pushed to escalate a war that most Americans -- and some at the Pentagon -- had already mentally abandoned.
The result? A Sunni tribal revolt against their al-Qaeda oppressors, an effective campaign against Shiite militias in Baghdad and Basra, and the flight of jihadists from Iraq to less deadly battlefields. In a more stable atmosphere, Iraq's politicians have made dramatic political progress. Iraqi military and police forces have grown in size and effectiveness and now fully control 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces. And in the month before Election Day, American combat deaths matched the lowest of the entire war.
For years, critics of the Iraq War asked the mocking question: "What would victory look like?" If progress continues, it might look something like what we've seen.
But Air Force One -- normally seen swooping into battleground states for rallies during presidential elections -- was mainly parked during this campaign. President Bush appeared with John McCain in public a total of three times -- and appeared in McCain's rhetoric as a foil far more often than that.
This seems to be Bush's current fate: Even success brings no praise. And the reasons probably concern Iraq. The absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the war was a massive blow. The early conduct of the Iraq occupation was terribly ineffective. And hopes that the war had turned a corner -- repeatedly raised by Iraqis voting with purple fingers and approving a constitution -- were dashed too many times, until many Americans became unwilling to believe anymore.
Initial failures in Iraq acted like a solar eclipse, blocking the light on every other achievement. But those achievements, with the eclipse finally passing, are considerable by the measure of any presidency. Because of the passage of Medicare Part D, nearly 10 million low-income seniors are receiving prescription drugs at little or no cost. No Child Left Behind education reform has helped raise the average reading scores of fourth graders to their highest level in 15 years, and narrowed the achievement gap between white and African-American children. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has helped provide treatment for more than 1.7 million people and compassionate care for at least 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children. And the decision to pursue the surge in Iraq will be studied as a model of presidential leadership.
These achievements, it is true, have limited constituencies to praise them. Many conservatives view Medicare, education reform and foreign assistance as heresies. Many liberals refuse to concede Bush's humanity, much less his achievements.
But that humanity is precisely what I will remember. I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency -- a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.
Before the G-8 summit in 2005, the White House senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology -- a measure designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women's advocate. It is one reason I will never be cynical about government -- or about President Bush.
For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush.
Friday, November 07, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Election Day 2008 must have been filled with rueful paradoxes for the sitting president. Iraq -- the issue that dominated George W. Bush's presidency for five and a half bitter, controversial years -- is on the verge of a miraculous peace. And yet this accomplishment did little to revive Bush's political standing -- or to prevent his party from relegating him to a silent role.
The achievement is historic. In 2006, Iraq had descended into a sectarian killing spree that only seemed likely to stop when the supply of victims was exhausted. Showing Truman-like stubbornness, Bush pushed to escalate a war that most Americans -- and some at the Pentagon -- had already mentally abandoned.
The result? A Sunni tribal revolt against their al-Qaeda oppressors, an effective campaign against Shiite militias in Baghdad and Basra, and the flight of jihadists from Iraq to less deadly battlefields. In a more stable atmosphere, Iraq's politicians have made dramatic political progress. Iraqi military and police forces have grown in size and effectiveness and now fully control 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces. And in the month before Election Day, American combat deaths matched the lowest of the entire war.
For years, critics of the Iraq War asked the mocking question: "What would victory look like?" If progress continues, it might look something like what we've seen.
But Air Force One -- normally seen swooping into battleground states for rallies during presidential elections -- was mainly parked during this campaign. President Bush appeared with John McCain in public a total of three times -- and appeared in McCain's rhetoric as a foil far more often than that.
This seems to be Bush's current fate: Even success brings no praise. And the reasons probably concern Iraq. The absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of the war was a massive blow. The early conduct of the Iraq occupation was terribly ineffective. And hopes that the war had turned a corner -- repeatedly raised by Iraqis voting with purple fingers and approving a constitution -- were dashed too many times, until many Americans became unwilling to believe anymore.
Initial failures in Iraq acted like a solar eclipse, blocking the light on every other achievement. But those achievements, with the eclipse finally passing, are considerable by the measure of any presidency. Because of the passage of Medicare Part D, nearly 10 million low-income seniors are receiving prescription drugs at little or no cost. No Child Left Behind education reform has helped raise the average reading scores of fourth graders to their highest level in 15 years, and narrowed the achievement gap between white and African-American children. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has helped provide treatment for more than 1.7 million people and compassionate care for at least 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children. And the decision to pursue the surge in Iraq will be studied as a model of presidential leadership.
These achievements, it is true, have limited constituencies to praise them. Many conservatives view Medicare, education reform and foreign assistance as heresies. Many liberals refuse to concede Bush's humanity, much less his achievements.
But that humanity is precisely what I will remember. I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency -- a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.
Before the G-8 summit in 2005, the White House senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology -- a measure designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women's advocate. It is one reason I will never be cynical about government -- or about President Bush.
For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush.
The Cowardly Character Assassination of Sarah Palin
Michelle Malkin
Friday, November 07, 2008
Sunken ships loosen bitter lips. The failed McCain campaign, for all its high-minded talk of honor, duty and courage, is now teeming with unscrupulous gossipmongers. Seems the dishy staffers forgot to crack open their copies of Sen. McCain's bestseller, "Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember."
Rest assured: Their cowardly character assassination of Sarah Palin won't be forgotten.
The finks turned to Newsweek and Fox News to spread petty rumors about Palin's intellect and character. The magazine peddled anecdotes from sources horrified that Palin greeted top advisers at her hotel room -- gasp! -- "wearing nothing but a towel" and "wet hair." Fox News reporter Carl Cameron breathlessly reported that his unnamed McCain sources told him Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate" because, they claimed, she didn't know which countries were parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement and "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."
Let's assume for a moment that the McCain rumormongers are telling the truth about Palin (and I don't believe they are). Who would it damn more: Palin, or McCain and his vetters, who greenlighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don't need a fancy Ivy League degree to figure that one out.
In introducing her to America, McCain praised her independence and backbone: She "stands up for what's right, and she doesn't let anyone tell her to sit down." The inside snipers are now roasting her for that very attribute -- redefined as "going rogue" -- because she had the nerve to try to schedule media interviews on her own. The nerve of her!
Palin's response to the campaign fragging? At a late Wednesday night airport press conference in Anchorage, immediately upon landing home after the election defeat, she smiled cheerfully. The Alaska governor shrugged off the "foolish things" said by the McCain saboteurs, and simply said, "It's politics. … It's rough and tumble and you've got to have a thick skin just like I've got."
Hollywood savaged Palin. Journalists mocked her. Liberal blogs slimed her. Opponents cursed her, Photoshopped her, hacked her e-mail, hanged her in effigy, called her bigot, Bible-thumper and bimbo, and attacked her husband and children. But nothing Palin endured during the election season compares to the treatment she's receiving from these backstabbing blabbermouths who worked on the same campaign she poured herself into over the last three months.
Sarah Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out when they would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn't agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But she vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy. And she did it all with a tirelessness and an infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.
Liberty needs a virtuous people to survive; self-governance requires virtuous leaders. "Knowledgeability" is a necessary trait in political life, but it is not sufficient. The elitist critics of Palin, so blindly enamored of Barack Obama's ability to hold forth for hours on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, ignored the Founding Fathers' counsel: Character counts. In times of adversity and crisis, it counts more than IQ points, instant trivia recall and bloviation skills.
"The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book," John McCain wrote in "Character Is Destiny," "is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have risked it for some selfish reason."
John McCain not only failed to make that message stick with the electorate, he apparently couldn't persuade his own staff to heed his advice and practice what he preached.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Sunken ships loosen bitter lips. The failed McCain campaign, for all its high-minded talk of honor, duty and courage, is now teeming with unscrupulous gossipmongers. Seems the dishy staffers forgot to crack open their copies of Sen. McCain's bestseller, "Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember."
Rest assured: Their cowardly character assassination of Sarah Palin won't be forgotten.
The finks turned to Newsweek and Fox News to spread petty rumors about Palin's intellect and character. The magazine peddled anecdotes from sources horrified that Palin greeted top advisers at her hotel room -- gasp! -- "wearing nothing but a towel" and "wet hair." Fox News reporter Carl Cameron breathlessly reported that his unnamed McCain sources told him Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate" because, they claimed, she didn't know which countries were parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement and "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."
Let's assume for a moment that the McCain rumormongers are telling the truth about Palin (and I don't believe they are). Who would it damn more: Palin, or McCain and his vetters, who greenlighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don't need a fancy Ivy League degree to figure that one out.
In introducing her to America, McCain praised her independence and backbone: She "stands up for what's right, and she doesn't let anyone tell her to sit down." The inside snipers are now roasting her for that very attribute -- redefined as "going rogue" -- because she had the nerve to try to schedule media interviews on her own. The nerve of her!
Palin's response to the campaign fragging? At a late Wednesday night airport press conference in Anchorage, immediately upon landing home after the election defeat, she smiled cheerfully. The Alaska governor shrugged off the "foolish things" said by the McCain saboteurs, and simply said, "It's politics. … It's rough and tumble and you've got to have a thick skin just like I've got."
Hollywood savaged Palin. Journalists mocked her. Liberal blogs slimed her. Opponents cursed her, Photoshopped her, hacked her e-mail, hanged her in effigy, called her bigot, Bible-thumper and bimbo, and attacked her husband and children. But nothing Palin endured during the election season compares to the treatment she's receiving from these backstabbing blabbermouths who worked on the same campaign she poured herself into over the last three months.
Sarah Palin worked her heart out. She energized tens of thousands to come out when they would have otherwise stayed home. She touched countless families. I didn't agree with everything she said on the campaign trail. But she vigorously defended the Second Amendment and the sanctity of life more eloquently in practice than any of the educated conservative aristocracy. And she did it all with a tirelessness and an infectious optimism that defied the shameless, bottomless attempts by elites in both parties to bring her and her family down.
Liberty needs a virtuous people to survive; self-governance requires virtuous leaders. "Knowledgeability" is a necessary trait in political life, but it is not sufficient. The elitist critics of Palin, so blindly enamored of Barack Obama's ability to hold forth for hours on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, ignored the Founding Fathers' counsel: Character counts. In times of adversity and crisis, it counts more than IQ points, instant trivia recall and bloviation skills.
"The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book," John McCain wrote in "Character Is Destiny," "is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have risked it for some selfish reason."
John McCain not only failed to make that message stick with the electorate, he apparently couldn't persuade his own staff to heed his advice and practice what he preached.
Preventing National Suicide
Tips on conserving and protecting from across the pond.
By Melanie Phillips
Thursday, November 6, 2008
In Britain, there is a collective swoon over the election of Barack Obama. Media superlatives have exhausted the lexicon of cliches. Journalists wept with joy over his acceptance speech. Even members of the Conservative shadow cabinet are firmly in the fan club. There’s been nothing like it since... well, I was going to say Dianamania, but actually the person who most comes to mind at this moment is Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair.
Like Obama, Blair took the country by storm when he won the first of his three general elections in 1997and threw the Conservative party completely off balance (indeed, it still hasn’t recovered). Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change.
Blair was widely considered to be a conservative cuckoo in the Labour nest. Indeed, he came to power because he symbolically trashed the party’s commitment to state-control socialism, thus establishing his credentials as a centrist. What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.
Accordingly, his government either directly promoted or did nothing to stop the long march through Britain’s institutions — the systematic undermining of the country’s fundamental values and traditions, in line with the cultural Marxism strategy of the philosopher Antonin Gramsci. It tore up Britain’s (unwritten) constitution, devolving power to Scotland and changing the composition of the upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, destroying the delicate equilibrium of the balance of power.
It also set about changing the identity of the country. Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration. In the state-controlled schools, teachers no longer saw their role as the transmission of Britain’s historic culture, which was “racist”; accordingly, children were not taught the history of their country, but instead a concept of ‘citizenship’ which was all about changing the values of the country. It undermined marriage, promoting instead “lifestyle choice” by incentivising lone parenthood (official forms no longer refer to husband and wives, merely “partners”). It discouraged prison sentences because criminals were said to be victims of life and jail would make them worse.
Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.
As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.
All this constitutes a profoundly illiberal culture in which no dissent is permitted, group is set against group and intimidation is the order of the day. And this also happens to be the culture of ACORN, of the radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, and the ‘educational’ or criminal justice ideas of William Ayers, endorsed by Barack Obama.
Just as Britain thinks the “powerless” can do no wrong at home, so it thinks the third world can do no wrong abroad — and even when they fly planes into American buildings, the blame therefore lies with America for behaving badly in the first place. It is hard to exaggerate the virulent hatred of America that has been coursing through Britain these past eight years. The reason was that America had dared to defend itself by use of force, riding roughshod over the U.N., and thus, it was said, putting the rest of the world at risk; and that it wanted to export its values to countries which did not live under democracy and the rule of law because it thought that these values were superior to their own. Britain thought this was an imperialism which had cost thousands of lives — and that America was to blame for Islamic violence in the first place because it supported Israel.
Now, however, the refrain in Britain is that “now we can all love America again.” Britain is ecstatic that America has elected an apparently antiwar president in a time of war. Some might think this is a form of national suicide. But Britain recognizes Obama as one of its own. That is because Britain’s intelligentsia and political class is signed up to “transnational progressivism” which holds that the nation is the source of all the ills in the world because it is inherently racist.
Obama believes America has to expiate its sins: both its original, Founding sins of slavery and racism, and its latter-day sins against the world of Islam. Britain likes the sound of that. It wants America to be humbled. Nations, it thinks, cause wars. Arrogant, hubristic, imperial nations like Bush’s America cause big and horrible wars. By contrast transnational institutions — such as the sacred UN or EU — promote civilised “engagement” with the enemy to discuss grievances and reach compromises. So it is thrilled that Obama will get out of Iraq and talk to Iran and may even force wretched Israel (which Britain blames for Everything Bad in the World) to give away the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem to the Arabs.
The fact that such actions would leave Iraq in chaos, empower Iran still further, destroy Israel’s security and imperil the free world doesn’t trouble it at all. And if Obama, under the responsibility of office, should change from an appeaser to a war leader in America’s national interest, then Britain’s new found love for America would revert once again into rage and disdain.
Of course, transnational progressivism, multiculturalism, victim culture, pacifism. and all the rest of it do amount to a national suicide note. The reason Britain has embraced them is because, for the past several decades, it has lost belief in itself as a nation and so has been systematically hollowing out its values and its defences.
The result is a cultural vacuum which is steadily being filled by radical Islamism. Paralyzed by its “universal” value system of multiculturalism and minority rights, Britain is failing to assert its own civilisational principles against the cultural onslaught being mounted by Islamists. Accordingly, it is permitting the spread of Muslim enclaves governed by a parallel jurisdiction of sharia law — the steady creation of a “state within a state” — encouraging the development of sharia finance, and permitting Saudi money to fund British universities and other institutions.
Millions of Britons are appalled by the implosion of British culture, identity, and values. But they find themselves politically disenfranchized, because the Conservative party does not understand that British values are under attack. And Republicans should take careful note of this in order to recognize a similar danger and dilemma facing them following their defeat.
The British Conservatives think that, to regain power, they have to show they have broken with cultural conservatism and go instead with the way society has changed — gay rights, green politics, anti-racism. What they have failed to grasp is that such change has turned values such as right and wrong, good and bad on their heads and has produced a sentimentalised, cruel, oppressive and perverse society — one where burglars go scot-free but householders are prosecuted for putting the wrong kind of garbage in the trash can, and where people are too frightened to protest at the erosion of British, Christian, or Western values because of the opprobrium that will follow.
The Conservatives don’t realize that by embracing such “change” they are endorsing a kind of enslavement. They don’t realize that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve that which is precious and protect it against attack. The result is that millions feel betrayed and abandoned by the absence of conservatism, and yet more still think the Conservative party is just a bunch of opportunists who don’t have any principles. Why vote for the progressive wannabes, after all, when you can have the real thing?
The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.
By Melanie Phillips
Thursday, November 6, 2008
In Britain, there is a collective swoon over the election of Barack Obama. Media superlatives have exhausted the lexicon of cliches. Journalists wept with joy over his acceptance speech. Even members of the Conservative shadow cabinet are firmly in the fan club. There’s been nothing like it since... well, I was going to say Dianamania, but actually the person who most comes to mind at this moment is Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair.
Like Obama, Blair took the country by storm when he won the first of his three general elections in 1997and threw the Conservative party completely off balance (indeed, it still hasn’t recovered). Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change.
Blair was widely considered to be a conservative cuckoo in the Labour nest. Indeed, he came to power because he symbolically trashed the party’s commitment to state-control socialism, thus establishing his credentials as a centrist. What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.
Accordingly, his government either directly promoted or did nothing to stop the long march through Britain’s institutions — the systematic undermining of the country’s fundamental values and traditions, in line with the cultural Marxism strategy of the philosopher Antonin Gramsci. It tore up Britain’s (unwritten) constitution, devolving power to Scotland and changing the composition of the upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, destroying the delicate equilibrium of the balance of power.
It also set about changing the identity of the country. Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration. In the state-controlled schools, teachers no longer saw their role as the transmission of Britain’s historic culture, which was “racist”; accordingly, children were not taught the history of their country, but instead a concept of ‘citizenship’ which was all about changing the values of the country. It undermined marriage, promoting instead “lifestyle choice” by incentivising lone parenthood (official forms no longer refer to husband and wives, merely “partners”). It discouraged prison sentences because criminals were said to be victims of life and jail would make them worse.
Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.
As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.
All this constitutes a profoundly illiberal culture in which no dissent is permitted, group is set against group and intimidation is the order of the day. And this also happens to be the culture of ACORN, of the radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, and the ‘educational’ or criminal justice ideas of William Ayers, endorsed by Barack Obama.
Just as Britain thinks the “powerless” can do no wrong at home, so it thinks the third world can do no wrong abroad — and even when they fly planes into American buildings, the blame therefore lies with America for behaving badly in the first place. It is hard to exaggerate the virulent hatred of America that has been coursing through Britain these past eight years. The reason was that America had dared to defend itself by use of force, riding roughshod over the U.N., and thus, it was said, putting the rest of the world at risk; and that it wanted to export its values to countries which did not live under democracy and the rule of law because it thought that these values were superior to their own. Britain thought this was an imperialism which had cost thousands of lives — and that America was to blame for Islamic violence in the first place because it supported Israel.
Now, however, the refrain in Britain is that “now we can all love America again.” Britain is ecstatic that America has elected an apparently antiwar president in a time of war. Some might think this is a form of national suicide. But Britain recognizes Obama as one of its own. That is because Britain’s intelligentsia and political class is signed up to “transnational progressivism” which holds that the nation is the source of all the ills in the world because it is inherently racist.
Obama believes America has to expiate its sins: both its original, Founding sins of slavery and racism, and its latter-day sins against the world of Islam. Britain likes the sound of that. It wants America to be humbled. Nations, it thinks, cause wars. Arrogant, hubristic, imperial nations like Bush’s America cause big and horrible wars. By contrast transnational institutions — such as the sacred UN or EU — promote civilised “engagement” with the enemy to discuss grievances and reach compromises. So it is thrilled that Obama will get out of Iraq and talk to Iran and may even force wretched Israel (which Britain blames for Everything Bad in the World) to give away the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem to the Arabs.
The fact that such actions would leave Iraq in chaos, empower Iran still further, destroy Israel’s security and imperil the free world doesn’t trouble it at all. And if Obama, under the responsibility of office, should change from an appeaser to a war leader in America’s national interest, then Britain’s new found love for America would revert once again into rage and disdain.
Of course, transnational progressivism, multiculturalism, victim culture, pacifism. and all the rest of it do amount to a national suicide note. The reason Britain has embraced them is because, for the past several decades, it has lost belief in itself as a nation and so has been systematically hollowing out its values and its defences.
The result is a cultural vacuum which is steadily being filled by radical Islamism. Paralyzed by its “universal” value system of multiculturalism and minority rights, Britain is failing to assert its own civilisational principles against the cultural onslaught being mounted by Islamists. Accordingly, it is permitting the spread of Muslim enclaves governed by a parallel jurisdiction of sharia law — the steady creation of a “state within a state” — encouraging the development of sharia finance, and permitting Saudi money to fund British universities and other institutions.
Millions of Britons are appalled by the implosion of British culture, identity, and values. But they find themselves politically disenfranchized, because the Conservative party does not understand that British values are under attack. And Republicans should take careful note of this in order to recognize a similar danger and dilemma facing them following their defeat.
The British Conservatives think that, to regain power, they have to show they have broken with cultural conservatism and go instead with the way society has changed — gay rights, green politics, anti-racism. What they have failed to grasp is that such change has turned values such as right and wrong, good and bad on their heads and has produced a sentimentalised, cruel, oppressive and perverse society — one where burglars go scot-free but householders are prosecuted for putting the wrong kind of garbage in the trash can, and where people are too frightened to protest at the erosion of British, Christian, or Western values because of the opprobrium that will follow.
The Conservatives don’t realize that by embracing such “change” they are endorsing a kind of enslavement. They don’t realize that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve that which is precious and protect it against attack. The result is that millions feel betrayed and abandoned by the absence of conservatism, and yet more still think the Conservative party is just a bunch of opportunists who don’t have any principles. Why vote for the progressive wannabes, after all, when you can have the real thing?
The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.
Friday, November 7, 2008
You Elected a Man, Not a Moral Judgment
Diana West
Thursday, November 06, 2008
If we really inhabited a "post-racial" world, the news of the week would be that a Democrat has won the White House. But since we don't inhabit such a world, there is much more to the news, even more than that an African-American, far-left Democrat has won the White House.
The New York Times' Thomas Friedman clued us in the morning after, waxing rhapsodic (or something): "And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States. A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Va., on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state."
As befitting a Pulitzer-Prize winner, Friedman was only just warming up ("For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America's Civil War than the fact that" blah blah...). But there were others taking up a similar battle cry. Madeleine M. Kunin, former governor of Vermont (and, as she also bills herself, eternal "first woman governor" of Vermont) declared at the online Huffington Post that the election of Barack Obama "is, in a sense, the culmination of Lincoln's quest -- a more perfect union."
And, well, so it came to pass that in those earliest hours of the new era that Spike Lee went on MSNBC to tell us will heretofore be known as AB (After Barack, natch, with all past millennia relegated to BB, Before Barack), the Civil War ended, and Lincoln's "more perfect union" was achieved. What next -- or, perhaps, why bother? That is, who could ask for anything more?
One answer is Menachem Rosensaft, who, elsewhere on Huffpo, pushed the election results into a somewhat different cosmic direction. "On Nov. 4, 2008, at 11 pm," he wrote, "Robert Kennedy finally won."
I rubbed my eyes but Rosensaft continued: "Forty years after his assassination shattered dreams and brought his quest to change America to a sudden, brutal halt, Robert Kennedy reached the goal that had been denied him in life."
Now I was starting to get it. Candidate Obama, whom the media permitted to remain a political cipher behind the flowing messiah robes, is now President-Elect Obama, magic mirror of historical redress.
No doubt this would present where's-the-beef style problems for the average president, but Obama isn't destined to be the average president -- or so we have been led to believe. Or, rather, so we have led ourselves to believe.
In a particularly trenchant post-election column, author Shelby Steele explained how it was that a candidate he describes as "quite unremarkable" regarding public policy (an amalgam of "old-fashioned Keynesianism" and "recycled Great Society") was able, first, "to project an idealized vision of post-racial America," and then "have that vision define political decency." Once these visions were set, Steele writes, "a failure to support Obama politically became a failure of decency."
In this way, the white voters who became Obama's political base were vested in the success of Obama's vision -- or, rather, in the vision of Obama's success. Longing to "escape the stigma of racism," as Steele calls it, white voters became "enchanted" with Obama because their support for him provided evidence and certification of their own now self-evident state of "post-racial" enlightenment.
But, as Steele further explains, there's an inherent contradiction to this unusual, if not historically unique, relationship. "When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society ... seduces whites with a vision of the racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist ... would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally."
Bingo. Here Steel demystifies the great and perplexing divide between those who care supremely about documenting and displaying their own "racial innocence" -- and I would put the mainstream media, Obama voters and most politicians including John McCain into that category -- and those who don't. These latter "real post-racialists" see Obama as a man, not an icon, as a politician who emerged from a hotbed of anti-American radicalism, not a sacred totem of enlightenment better suited to a glass case at the Smithsonian than the boisterous tussle of the political arena.
For almost two years, Obama has been, in Steele's words, evaluated culturally. This has resulted in reverential media non-coverage and now post-election judgments and metaphors that are already beginning to defy satire. Of course, Barack Obama didn't end the Civil War, isn't the reincarnation of RFK, and benefits from, but didn't bring about, the long-entrenched social changes that facilitated his political rise. As he now heads to the White House, it's crucial that he finally be regarded as a politician, not a messiah, and as a man, not a moral judgment. Otherwise, the cultural juggernaut he seems likely to unleash will be unstoppable.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
If we really inhabited a "post-racial" world, the news of the week would be that a Democrat has won the White House. But since we don't inhabit such a world, there is much more to the news, even more than that an African-American, far-left Democrat has won the White House.
The New York Times' Thomas Friedman clued us in the morning after, waxing rhapsodic (or something): "And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States. A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Va., on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state."
As befitting a Pulitzer-Prize winner, Friedman was only just warming up ("For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America's Civil War than the fact that" blah blah...). But there were others taking up a similar battle cry. Madeleine M. Kunin, former governor of Vermont (and, as she also bills herself, eternal "first woman governor" of Vermont) declared at the online Huffington Post that the election of Barack Obama "is, in a sense, the culmination of Lincoln's quest -- a more perfect union."
And, well, so it came to pass that in those earliest hours of the new era that Spike Lee went on MSNBC to tell us will heretofore be known as AB (After Barack, natch, with all past millennia relegated to BB, Before Barack), the Civil War ended, and Lincoln's "more perfect union" was achieved. What next -- or, perhaps, why bother? That is, who could ask for anything more?
One answer is Menachem Rosensaft, who, elsewhere on Huffpo, pushed the election results into a somewhat different cosmic direction. "On Nov. 4, 2008, at 11 pm," he wrote, "Robert Kennedy finally won."
I rubbed my eyes but Rosensaft continued: "Forty years after his assassination shattered dreams and brought his quest to change America to a sudden, brutal halt, Robert Kennedy reached the goal that had been denied him in life."
Now I was starting to get it. Candidate Obama, whom the media permitted to remain a political cipher behind the flowing messiah robes, is now President-Elect Obama, magic mirror of historical redress.
No doubt this would present where's-the-beef style problems for the average president, but Obama isn't destined to be the average president -- or so we have been led to believe. Or, rather, so we have led ourselves to believe.
In a particularly trenchant post-election column, author Shelby Steele explained how it was that a candidate he describes as "quite unremarkable" regarding public policy (an amalgam of "old-fashioned Keynesianism" and "recycled Great Society") was able, first, "to project an idealized vision of post-racial America," and then "have that vision define political decency." Once these visions were set, Steele writes, "a failure to support Obama politically became a failure of decency."
In this way, the white voters who became Obama's political base were vested in the success of Obama's vision -- or, rather, in the vision of Obama's success. Longing to "escape the stigma of racism," as Steele calls it, white voters became "enchanted" with Obama because their support for him provided evidence and certification of their own now self-evident state of "post-racial" enlightenment.
But, as Steele further explains, there's an inherent contradiction to this unusual, if not historically unique, relationship. "When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society ... seduces whites with a vision of the racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist ... would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally."
Bingo. Here Steel demystifies the great and perplexing divide between those who care supremely about documenting and displaying their own "racial innocence" -- and I would put the mainstream media, Obama voters and most politicians including John McCain into that category -- and those who don't. These latter "real post-racialists" see Obama as a man, not an icon, as a politician who emerged from a hotbed of anti-American radicalism, not a sacred totem of enlightenment better suited to a glass case at the Smithsonian than the boisterous tussle of the political arena.
For almost two years, Obama has been, in Steele's words, evaluated culturally. This has resulted in reverential media non-coverage and now post-election judgments and metaphors that are already beginning to defy satire. Of course, Barack Obama didn't end the Civil War, isn't the reincarnation of RFK, and benefits from, but didn't bring about, the long-entrenched social changes that facilitated his political rise. As he now heads to the White House, it's crucial that he finally be regarded as a politician, not a messiah, and as a man, not a moral judgment. Otherwise, the cultural juggernaut he seems likely to unleash will be unstoppable.
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