HEALTH CARE DOWN TO THE WIRE

A while back, I made a prediction, and promised to eat crow publicly [or as publicly as one can on this obscure bog] if I was wrong. The prediction was that a health care reform package would pass, that it would not be everything we on the left hoped for, and that it would not be the end of the story. As we come down to the wire on health care reform, it is time to make this prediction more precuise, and to assess where we are.

I think it is fair to equate a public option with "everything we on the left hoped for." To be sure, many of us would prefer a single-payer national health care system, but this was never a realistic possibility, given the constellation of forces in the United States. A single-payer system could more accurately be described as "everything we on the left dream of." I also dream of an egalitarian society in which everyone acknowledges the truth of evolution and is even willing to grant that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, but there are limits!

So, where are we, now that the Baucus committee has rejected the public option? First of all, it is clear that a bill will pass, and that it will be a major step in the direction of reform. No one anymore doubts that. Pause for a moment to consider what this means. Truman couldn't do it. Nixon couldn't do it. Clinton couldn't do it. But Obama will do it. That is a triumph by itself.

Secondly, the public option is not dead. The Baucus committee was always the most conservative of the five committees struggling with health care, and three of the others have already voted out bills that include a public option,. With the appointment of Paul Kirk, the Democrats are up to sixty, finally, and it remains genuinely uncertain whether they can block a filibuster, the statements of Nelson and others notwithstanding.

So I would say that my prediction is looking good, very good. What about the third part of the prediction? Is this all we are going to get, for at least another generation? That is truly harder to predict. So I will now venture another prediction, one that can be tested relatively soon. I predict that once a health care reform bill is signed into law, Obama will emerge from this struggle dramatically strengthened. He will have shown that against the most violent, concerted, massively funded opposition, he can prevail, and secure the fulfilment of a major campaign pledge. The decks will be cleared for other plans and proposals that have necessarily been put on hold while this health care battle is waged.

One more thing, more a prayerful hope than a prediction: Once health care is passed, Obama will be free to make a major reversal in Afghanistan policy without losing one or two crucial votes in the Senate. I think it is at least possible that we shall see that reversal shortly after health care passes.

Check back with me in a while to see whether my crystal ball is clear or cloudy.

OBAMA'S VIET NAM

Those among you who read this blog faithfully may have noticed that every morning, President Obama checks it for advice, just after kissing his daughters goodby and sending them off to school, and before his daily national security briefing. The time has come, therefore, for me to advise him on this whole Afghanistan thing. Let us be clear: I know next to nothing about the region in which Afghanistan is located. I have, to be sure, read Kipling's great novel, KIM, and I have even seen the movie, several times [I love the part where Kim is being trained for the Great Game, and has to memorize a table full of objects in no time at all.] Needless to say, I do not read, write, speak, or understand any of the languages of the region, and my grasp of the history of the area is sketchy, to put matters as delicately as I can. In short, I am as well prepared to pontificate on the subject of America's Afghan policy as perhaps 432 of the members of the House of Representatives, at least 96 of the senators, and all of the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls. So here goes.

Afghanistan threatens to be Obama's Viet Nam. The reference, of course, is to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, when he ascended to the presidency upon John Kennedy's assassination, had dreams of being a domestic affairs president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kennedy had sent "advisors" to Viet Nam to pick up the slack from the collapsing French Empire, but it was not too late, in 1963-64, to shut the whole escapade down and back off. Tragically, Johnson was intimidated by the Ivy League whiz kids [MacNamara, Bundy, et al.], who suckered him into a bigger commitment that then produced the downfall of his presidency and the death of fifty thousand Americans and several million Viet Namese.

We are way deeper into Afghanistan than we were into Viet Nam in 1963, of course, but the principle is the same. It would perhaps help if Obama had a bit of the Old South in him, and remembered Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

Let us recall that this country essentially created the Taliban during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, arming them with everything up to, and especially including, Stinger ground-to-air missiles with which to shoot down the Russian attack helicopters that were devastating the resistance forces.

Joe Biden. God bless 'im, has apparently weighed in with a strong dissent from the proposal to expand American forces, and even George Will, one of my very least favorite human beings, has called for us to get out.

If Obama pulls put of Afghanistan, he will be beat up on by the Republicans for a while, but the public, which couldn't find the country on the map with a seeing eye dog, will forget about it soon enough. If Obama gets suckered into accepting the myth that just one more troop increase, just one more surge, will do the trick and stabilize the country, then his presidency will be held hostage to the vagaries of internal Afghanistan politics, and all our brave hopes for him will be dashed. What can we do? Not a thing. This is not, unlike health care, an issue on which mobilized public opinion will in the short run make any difference. Right now is the last moment when Obama can back off, treat both wars as a legacy from the previous administration, and cut America's losses. If he buys the troop increase, he buys the war, and from now on it will be Obama's war.

I suspect Obama actually knows all this. But does he have the political courage to take the hit up front? He may well have to temporize until the health care battle is over, but that is now a matter of weeks.

All we can do is wait and see.

After writing and posting the above, I went to Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, and there, under a heading "Obama's JFK Moment?" found essentially the same analysis. I take this as a good sign, not as evidence that I have been "one-upped." What I am most encouraged by in the posting, which is by George Packer, is the statement that the people around Obama are all drawing the analogy and are fully aware of what is at stake. Let us hope so!

IS IT RACISM?

Everyone is getting into the discussion now about whether Joe Wilson's outburst, and the rabid support for it from the right, is an instance of, or evidence of, racism. Jimmy Carter says yes. The White House says no. Today, on the Huffington Post, John A. Bohner posted a comment entitled "The GOP is Too Crazy to be Racist." Here is, as they say in the blogosphere, the money quote: "[T]he color of the President's skin does not matter to the lunatics dictating the direction of the Republican Party. I mean, it matters in that it's icing on the cake -- but they were baking regardless of all that." He concludes by writing: "Are there some racists out among the crowd? Absolutely. Is race an overtone? You bet. But -- and it's a big 'but' -- is "the overwhelming portion" of it based on race as President Carter contends? No."

Bohner is right, in an odd way, even though he misconstrues the role played by race in American economic, political, and public life. His commentg treats what is called racism as a personal attitude, an aversion to people with skin somewhat darker than that of Northern Europeans, a matter of taste, an individual irrationality. But slavery was never about skin color. Jim Crow was never about skin color. Redlining and job discrimination are not about skin color. The Civil War was not about skin color.

My colleague in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass, John Bracey, brought this home to me one day during the very first year of our doctoral program. We were in class with the first group of doctoral students [that first year, crazy as it may sound, all seven members of the graduate faculty attended every one of the twice-a-week seminar meetings required of all seven graduate students -- by the time we got finished arguing with one another, there was scarcely enough oxygen in the room for the poor students to take a deep breath.] I was making some inane remark about the racism of the early slave owners, and John interrupted. "Bob, the English settlers didn't get to Virginia, look around, and say, 'this is a wonderful place. All it is lacking is black people to discriminate against. Let's go get some.'" He didn't need to finish the thought, because I immediately saw what he meant. The settlers, who were out to make a killing in tobacco, took a look around and said, "This is a godawful bug-infested unhealthy place, but if we had some cheap labor to plant and tend tobacco crops, we could make a bundle. Let's go get us some cheap labor."

Race in America has always been about forced labor, cheap labor, labor that can be exploited to make a profit for capital. The liberation of the slaves deprived the planters of their captive labor force, and the Black Codes and Jim Crow legislation that brought an end to the brief period of Reconstruction had as its manifest purpose re-enslaving that labor force in all but name. The ante-bellum slave owners were not phobic about people with black skin. They raped them, had babies by them, gave their infant children to them for suckling, lived cheek by jowl with them, and took them as mistresses when they couldn't have them as slaves. They used them not only as field hands, but also as skilled artisans -- wheelwrights, cartwrights, carpenters, blacksmiths, builders, architects, even factory workers. So long as the owners could control the labor of the slaves, they valued it, paid top dollar for it, depended on it. Once they lost control of that labor, almost overnight the myth grew up that the former slaves were shiftless, lazy, no-account layabouts.

For much of the last century and a half, the well-being of White workers, always in danger, has depended on excluding from the labor force a sizeable fraction of the available workers, so as to maintain a decent level of wages. Starting with the period just after the Civil War, that meant excluding Black workers from all but the most poorly paid jobs. The working class in America has been under siege for decades now, with stagnant wages and vast job losses contributing to persistant unemployment and underemployment. The election of Barack Obama has panicked millions of Americans, who fear that this highly symbolic event means a final and complete loss of the comparative advantage White Americans enjoy so long as they can effectively exclude Black Americans from jobs and some measure of economic security. Not at all surprisingly, the severe recession of the past year has been catastrophic for Black workers.

The recent outbursts are about the fact that there is a black man in the White House, as I said in an earlier post, not because of his skin color, but because of the threat that this legitimating of a dispossessed fraction of the American population poses to those already under attack by a capitalist economy that no longer needs their labor so urgently. The attacks operate at the level of symbolism and hysterical phobia, but the underlying cause is economic through and through. These attacks will grow more stronger, and the public faces of the attacks will become more unhinged. We are in for an ugly time in America. It is only a matter of time before there is an attempt on Obama's life. The Secret Service hasn't lost a president in forty-six years. Let us hope they can run the string out for another seven.

IS MAUREEN DOWD READING MY BLOG?

Maureen Dowd, the resident NY TIMES snark, had a column yesterday suggesting that the real reason for the hysterical reaction to Obama's rather middle of the road health care reform proposals is simply that some people cannot come to terms with the fact that we have a Black president. I refer you to my earlier post. It is nice to know that I am being read. :)

By the way, those of you obsessively following the counter that adds up the number of visits to this blog [I do hope I am not the only one afflicted with this disease] will perhaps have noticed that after the counter proceeded slowly and sedately toward the 2000 mark [many of these are me, of course], suddenly it jumped by 10,000, so that now it is approaching 12,000, not 2000. There are two possible explanations. The first, which I secretly favor but officially doubt, is that overnight I acquired ten thousand new readers. The other is that there is some glitch in the counter. [A third, that someone at Google looked at my pathetic numbers and took pity on me, is touching but unlikely].

By the way, the boeuf bourguignon was spectacular. We shall eat the second half tonight.

DO FOREIGNERS KNOW SOMETHING WE DON'T KNOW?

One of the most familar conceits of a certain kind of American intellectual is the belief that foreigners understand America much better than Americans do. This is a long tradition, of course, going back at least to Tocqueville, and for all I know to General Lafayette. There were probably Seneca and Iroquois who thought that Henry Cabot understood them better than their local shamans did.

I have always been rather doubtful of this particular instance of xenophilia. I certainly never imagined, during my visits to England, that I understood the arcana of British politics better than the journalists who made their living at it. This morning, when I went out to have a coffee and brioche au chocolat at the secondary Keyser bakery up the street from the big one, I picked up today's copy of LIBERATION, the socialist newspaper, to read their big multi-page spread anticipating Obama's speech this evening. I can read French, but it is enough of an effort to encourage me to confuse difficulty with depth. [I might add, as an aside, that I discovered, by reading cover to cover a book of mine that has been translated into French, that everyone sounds like Descartes in French! What I took for Descartes' spare prose is mostly a consequence of the fact that there are many fewer words in French than in English.]

Naturally, LIBERATION included at the bottom of page 2 a little chart showing that America's health system costs 45% more per head than France's, even though France's system is rated first in the world and America's is rated 37th. Fair enough. But the news story, which I dutifully plowed through, read like boiler plate lifted from a NY TIMES article or a TalkingPointsMemo blog post. I have, on occasion, followed American presidential elections in French newspapers, and they NEVER know something that any reasonably alert American news consumer wouldn't know. This is not at all surprising. If you are the LIBERATION stringer in Washington D.C. [I am not sure they can afford an entire news bureau, as LE MONDE undoubtedly can], how will you decide what to write? You will read the TIMES and the WASHINGTON POST, you will surf the blogosphere, and if you are lucky, you will get interviews with second or third string Administration spokespersons. You may also get credentials to attend the daily White House Press briefings, and for some snark, you will watch Olberman and Maddow. Which is to say, you will do what I do, and what several million other American news junkies do.

So there is nothing for it. Either I must stay up until three a.m., and hope my TV set is working, or I must wait until tomorrow morning and see what Arianna Huffington has to say about the speech.

But the food is really better.

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of Paris [my apologies to the Bard.] It was in the eighties today, sunny and lovely, and all Paris was in the streets and the cafes enjoying what may be the last such day before autumn. I decided to show the flag, and wore my Obama T-shirt, which drew approving nods and thumbs up from several passers-by. For those of you who are following this blog, I can report that the quail were a success, along with some delicious sauteed mushrooms. Julia Child was entirely correct in her profound observation that everything tastes better with butter.

And now for another of my Panglossian predictions. [I seem awash in literary allusions today -- a nod to culture.] The tide has turned. The Republican hysteria over Obama's anodyne talk to returning grade schoolers has made them laughing stocks. George Will has broken all precedent by writing the first true words of his entire career, about Afghanistan, no less. And with Congress returned to Washington from their long August encounters with the total crazies of the wingnut right, we are back to serious work on a large, history-making health care reform bill.

Herewith the prediction. A bill will pass. It will be imperfect. It will be a major step forward. And it will not be the last word on the subject.

Unlike the pundits of the mainstream media, I can actually remember what I say. Therefore, if I turn out to be wrong, I will eschew Dorade royale and quail and hazelnut encrusted rabbit and instead, in full view of my vast audience, consume a healthy portion of crow [without the blessings of butter.]

Meanwhile, we are off for dinner at La Rotisserie du Beaujolais -- across the street from Tour d'Argent, just en face the Seine, seated in our favorite window alcove, and -- if all works out well -- visited by the large, fat, lazy cat who graces the restaurant with his presence -- a cat appropriately named Beaujolais. Life truly does not get any better than this.

IS OBAMA IN THE TANK TO THE HEALTH INDUSTRY?

Last evening, Susie and I went to her son's house for his 44th birthday celebration. While there, we watched a bit of Bill Maher's show. He interviewed Bill Moyers, who stated flatly that Rahm Emmanuel's anxiety about raising money from the pharmaceutical companies and other segments of the health care industry was standing in the way of meaningful reform. According to Moyers, Emmanuel has his eye on the 2012 election, to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

This is the sort of cynical insider information that we on the left live and die for. We are endlessly ready to feel betrayed by our false heroes, and happy to be made impotent by large forces outside our control.

But what Moyers said didn't make sense to me, so I spent a few moments on line checking some numbers. By October 19, 2008, three weeks before the election, the Obhama campaign had raised $605 million. So let us suppose that by election day the total was in the neighborhood of $650 million. This includes the enormously expensive primary campaign, of course, but never mind. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, as of September 25, 2008, the "health sector" [which presumably includes Big Pharma, HMOs, doctors, etc etc] had donated $17.7 million. The focus of the NEJM article, by the way, was on the fact that the health sector had donated more to the Democratic campaign than to the Republican campaign, reversing a long trend.

Now think about this for a moment. Health Care Reform is a centerpiece of Obama's presidency, along with energy reform and educational reform. Everyone understands that health care is far and away the biggest, hardest task the Obama White House will undertake. As I have noted before, health care gobbles up 15% of the total national GDP. It is HUGE. Obama's re-election chances depend on three things: First, pulling the economy out of its slump [already happening]; second, winding down the two wars in the Middle East; and third, accomplishing some sort of visibly significant health care reform. If he does these three things, he is a shoo-in. There is no one in the Republican camp who can stop him. If he fails to accomplish the third, he becomes vulnerable to attack.

IS IT PLAUSIBLE, IS IT CONCEIVABLE, THAT HE WOULD JEOPARDIZE HIS RE-ELECTION TO SECURE 2.7% OF THE ENORMOUS WAR CHEST HE WILL RAISE? GOOD GRIEF. HE WOULD LOSE FIFTY TIMES THAT MUCH FROM THE LIBERAL WING OF THE ELECTORATE SITTING ON ITS HANDS! AND HE KNOWS THAT.

There are many reasons why the reform of health care is so difficult, not hte least of which is the role that donations from the health sector play in the decisions of members of Congress. But it is simply not plausible thast the White House is being swayed by that consideration.

THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

August is winding down, and as we approach the resumption of the real world, after Labor Day, the Republican craziness is imploding. After riotous town meetings, death threats against Obama, birther bizarrerie, and even the egregious Michelle Bachman being booed at a constituent meeting, with cretinous creeps like Chuck Grassley fresh out of plausible pontifications [do you ever wonder how some of these people actually got elected?], with Ted Kennedy lying in state, and serious talk of reconciliation now to the fore -- with all of this, it looks as though we will get a health care reform bill that has a good deal, but by no means all, of what we dreamed of and hoped for and voted for. JUST AS I PREDICTED. This is not rocket science or brain surgery, folks, it is Congressional legislating, pretty much as it has always been.

Let us suppose that I am correct. As we approach the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, where will we be? Well, the economy will slowly, painfully, be turning around, having avoided a second Great Depression, but unemployment will still be unacceptably high -- although much of the Stimulus Bill spending will still lie before us. We will finally have significant health care reform, though muich will remain to be done. The first serious attempt at confronting global warming will be law. A Special Prosecutor will be investigating the Bush Justice Department. And the President will be able to ask himself and the country, "What shall we do in my second year?"

I mean, seriously, what more did you really expect? Gay rights remains to be addressed, though the first steps have been taken. Barney Frank will have to find a way to shepherd serious financial reform through Congress. And Obama will have to actually wind down the Iraq war and place realistic limits on the Afghanistan involvement. But Peace Talks will be restarted in the Middle East, and we may even see some sort of major change in Iran, though that is up to the Iranians, not us.

I think back again to the wisdom of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse argued that all of us carry within us repressed infantile fantasies of immediate and effortless gratification -- fantasies to which an enormous amount of libidinous energy is attached, but which are, in their very nature, unrealizable. Combining the deepest ideas of Marx and Freud, Marcuse tells us [this in EROS AND CIVILIZATION] that the realistic goal of any revolution can only be to diminish the quantum of surplus repression imposed on men and women by the demands of capitalism and tyranny. But what fuels revolutionary fervor is the promise of LIBERATION, which is to say the fulfilment of those repressed fantasies. That is why those who have lived through revolutionary times, no matter how dangerous and uncomfortable, look back on them as the most glorious moments of their lives [rather like the way people think about tornados, hurricanes, wars, and floods, and for the same reason.]

Well, the election of Obama was no revolution, but for a moment it felt like one. Now we are seeing that the reduction of surplus repression, so to speak, still leaves us with repressed fantasies of liberation, and so we feel let down. That is normal, understandable, but not really vrey grown up of us, and so we must put away our fantasies and get back to the daily work of making as many incremental improvements in the life of this country as we can.

In an odd way, I think Teddy understood this, but that Jack and Bobby did not. That is why Jack was actually an indifferent President, and Bobby an indifferent Senator, but both were spectacular bearers of our fantasies of instant and infinite gratification.

A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Cognitive dissonance is defined as "an uncomfortable feeling produced by holding two incompatible ideas in the mind at the same time." I think it is time to make a simple but profound observation about the outbreak of increasingly hysterical craziness surfacing on the right at town hall meetings and similar gatherings. Health care reform proposals are compared to naziism. Obama's citizenship is denied. Obama is called a little Hitler. Men show up at public meetings carrying assault weapons, and little old World War II veterans say that they are ready to take a gun to Washington if some others will join them.

What on earth is going on? I think the answer is very simple, so simple that the pundits and commentators just won't look it square in the face and acknowledge it. A BLACK MAN IS IN THE WHITE HOUSE. Scores of millions of Americans simply cannot hold comfortably in their minds the two ideas: Barack Obama is Black and Barack Obama is President. The world of these people has come unhinged. They know in their bones that something huge and deadly serious is out of whack, but they cannot say it, and probably most of them cannot even permit themselves to think it. So they reach for ever more outlandish descriptions of the state of things in an effort to give voice to their terrified awareness that the world they grew up in, the world they learned to negotiate, the social truths ingrained in their beings -- all of these are gone.

Because Obama is suave, supremely well-educated, soft-spoken, and anti-dramatic, because he speaks endlessly about compromise and reaching out to his opponents, pundits who are themselves reasonably comfortable with that kind of Black man in the White House simply cannot grasp how deeply, unacceptably cognitiviely dissonant Obama's presidency is to huge numbers of Americans.

Let me say it again: This hysteria is not about health care reform [of all things!!], it is not about deficit spending, it is not about global warming, it is not about Wall Street bailouts. It is about a Black man in the White House. If we can just stop singing Kumbaya and congratulating ourselves on how evolved we are, and look at this country for what it is, this truth will be obvious.

What is to be done about this? I think the answer is obvious, and Harry Truman understood it half a century ago when he desegregated the Armed Forces. The only reasonable thing to do is to cram this truth down their throats and make them swallow it. They won't like it; they will kick and scream, and yes, sooner or later someone will try to assassinate Obama. But if those whose very being is wrapped up in denying the fact that a Black man is in the White House are forced to accept that fact, then in time we will get past this. They themselves will probably have to die off, like old smokers. There are millions of Americans who will go to their graves unable to acknowledge that a Black man was truly and legitimately elected President.

Oh yes. Tomorrow, I will return to USSAS.

AN ANGRY RANT

This will be a quintessentially typical blog posting. I am going to react to Paul Klugman's op ed column today without having read it! I figure this qualifies me as a true pundit. By the way, before I begin, I hope you caught my son, Tobias, on Lou Dobbs' show, defending gay marriage and talking about the repeal of DOMA. He has guts, going on Dobbs.

So here goes.

I saw but did not read Krugman's column. Look -- it was never in the cards that Obama was going to govern from the left, and the fight he has had getting any sort of reasonable health care reform makes it clear why. I think progressives are being self-indulgent and foolish. If they don't think Obama's policies and actions are liberal enough, they should get off their behinds and put political pressure on their Reps and Senators to move to the left. THEN Obama will, I am quite sure, happliy shift to the left.

Remember, every hour of every day, Emmanuel and the political honchos are counting votes, trying to figure out where they will get a majority that can push through what they want. I for one do not want to see Obama stake out dramatic left wing positions and then fail to get them through Congress. That might feel good for ten minutes, but it would accomplish nothing.

I am really very angry about the passive, pundit-like sit-on-the-sidelines commentariat that is constantly judging whether Obama is left enough, but never creating the on the ground conditions that will make possible meaningful reform.

Remember what I said on my blog. When it is all over, it will be a major victory, but it will not be enough, and we are just going to have to recognize that and move on to the next fight.

An historical reminder: In 1905, after working in the underground for years and years, Stalin and the other Communists finally had their revolution -- and it failed. They didn't give up. They went right back into the underground and worked for twelve more years, not knowing [as we do in hindsight] that they would eventually succeed.

We need something of that commitment and will, if we are to undo what Bush and the Republicans have foisted o this country, and are to make good on the promise of the Obama election. Once again, I remind you what candidate Obama said: We are the change we have been waiting for. That means that it is we who must make the change, and not sit like children waiting for a parent to hand it to us like candy.

So much for radical rage. Tomorrow, I shall go back to the story of USSAS.

THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE TURNS UGLY

The town hall protests organized and inflamed by Republican operatives have taken an ugly turn with the appearance yesterday in New Hampshire, at an Obama rally, of a citizen carrying a loaded revolver. The intensity and irrationality of the protests could quite easily morph into violence. Once Obama looked to have the Democratic nomination wrapped up, more than a year ago, my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts expressed genuine fear that sooner or later he would be shot. Secret Service or no, that remains a serious threat.

Despite the clear hand of cold-eyed opportunistic Republican operatives in these protests, there is very little doubt that the people doing the protesting are genuinely freaked out about something. What might that be?

Listening to them is not a useful way to find out, unfortunately. One of the targets of their rage is the range of proposals now on the table for health care reform. Now, we need to remind ourselves of a few familiar facts. Far and away the largest health care insurance program in the United States is Medicare, a single-payer government operated program. Judging from the pictures I have seen on television, I would guess that a goodly number of the protesters are already on medicare, and the rest have parents whose medical care and prescription drugs come to them courtesy of the same program. Nobody but Ron Paul actually wants to end Medicare.

A second target of their rage is the stimulus package and other deficit spending programs passed with Obama's support and encouragement by the current Congress. These are the same people, let us recall, who expressed no pleasure or approval at all while Clinton ran up impressive budget surpluses and actually started paying down the national debt, and who sat by silently while George W, Bush turned those surpluses into whopping deficits. It is simply not possible to take seriously the content of the shouts and snarls of these protesters.

The common thread in their expressions of outrage is the fear that the America they grew up in and know is being taken away from them. Now, these folks are not entirely rational, but they are not at all stupid, and what their gut tells them is in fact true. The America they have known IS being taken away from them, with a speed that leaves them angry and panicked. There is a Blcak man in the White House. Gay and Lesbian Americans are now openly members of the American community, accepted and recognized, even, in some states, allowed to be married. Spanish-speaking Americans populate countless American cities in increasing numbers. At the same time, these people, like millions of other Americans, are under enormous economic pressure.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with European and American politics of the twentieth century knows that this is a formula for fascism. I am not suggesting that we are about to see an American version of kristallnacht. But I am suggesting that we take what is happening quite seriously. If one of these gun-toting protesters goes over the edge and pulls a trigger, it could produce a very frightening explosion.

The Obama administration is busy organizing counter-moves to the wave of town hall protests. All of us who stand on the side of reform need to do whatever we can to support those efforts. I still think we are going to win this battle, but remember, many, many millions of Americans voted for McCain and Palin. They haven't gone away.

BACK FROM SAN FRANCISCO

I am back from San Francisco, just in time for 100 degree temperature here in Chapel Hill. I had planned to blog for a day or two about my grandchildren, and I may still do that, but there is something more important that needs to be talked about, namely, the status of Obama's health care reform proposals. I am really very angry about the commentary coming from the liberal side of the blogosphere and mainstream media. Let me explain why.

At the moment, all attention is focused on the thuggish efforts to disrupt town hall meetings held by Representatives and Senators, and on the bizarre, hysterical claims emanating from the right about death panels that will order the euthanization of old people. The commentaries are full of bleak projections and dire warnings and gloomy judgments that Obama has lost control of the debate, or has failed to show sufficient courage, or has betrayed his supporters.

All of these commentaries have one central underlying premise in common, and that premise is flat out wrong. The premise is that we are all passive observers, handicappers, prognosticators, that our role in all of this is to stand on the sidelines and give or take away points according to our evaluation of how Obama is doing. We might call this the Paula Abdul or American Idol conception of our role in politics.

Well, folks, that isn't how it is. From the day he declared for the presidency, Obama said as much. Remember that breathtakingly uplifting line, "We are the change that we have been waiting for"? What on earth did you think that meant? If WE are the change that we have been waiting for, then it is WE who must make the change that we want. It is not going to be given to us, done for us. Obama had the good sense to recognize that major changes in American domestic policy would be possible ONLY if vast numbers of Americans worked for those changes -- not merely voted for them on election day, and then went home to wait and see whether they happened, but WORKED for them every day, for as long as it took.

We now have a president who proposes dramatic change and uses the office of the presidency to work for it. That is what we voted for. This means that IF we do the work that is required to force our representatives in Congress to vote for that change, then he will happily sign the bills and implement the changes. It means that Obama will appoint men and women who will manage their agencies and departments so as to advance the changes we voted for.

Obama is doing his part, with greater success than anyone knowing American politics had any right to expect. The question before us now is NOT whether HE will succeed or fail, but whether WE will do our part, and provide him with the political support he needs to enact the changes that he called for and that we voted for.

Anyone who does not understand this simply does not understand how American politics works, or else is too passive, defeated, and depressed to pitch in and make things happen.

So, what to do? I have said it before, but I will say it again. Go to http://www.mybarackobama.com and find SOMETHING on the website to sign up for. if you really cannot figure out what to do, send me an email and I will make some suggestions.

Now let's all stop whining.

WOLFF WEIGHS IN ON THE BIRTHERS

I know, I know, everyone is doing it, even Chris Matthews, who has great fun waving copies of Obama's birth certificate in the faces of the crazies who agree to appear on his show. But I do write a blog, after all, so I feel a certain obligation. This will be a meta-comment [as we used to say in Philosophy, back in the old days.] It will actually be about the power of the internet, not about the controversy.

But first, since my readership is not only very small but also, I suspect rather elite, I had better explain what the controversy is, for those who have somehow managed to avoid it. A number of right wing loonies, terminally freaked out by the accession of Barack Obama to the presidency, have for a while now been claiming that he was not actually born in the United States, and therefore does not meet one of the Constitutional criteria for eligibility. This must not be confused with a quite different claim, which has not yet actually gained much attention, that Obama is not eligible to be President because he was not born in the "lower forty-eight." Those folks, whom I have dubbed "forty-eighters" or "mainlanders," have still not gotten over the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii in the Union. But I digress.

The birther bubble has captured the paranoid fringe that seems now to constitute the mainstream of the Republican Party, with the result that a dozen Republican members of the House of Representatives have actually introduced a bill requiring all future candidates for the Presidency [no retroactivity there] to produce birth certificates.

About three days ago, a document surfaced on the Internet purporting to be a KENYAN birth certificate of Barack Obama. [Once again, I must assure my readers that I am not making this up. I am afraid this would be a difficult political environment for Jonathan Swift. He would be hard pressed, if he were alive today, to produce satires that could be counted on not to be taken seriously by a sizeable segment of his readership.]

The first thing that happened was that a number of knowledgeable private citizens went on line to point out a raft of impossibilities and inconsistencies in the supposed document, among which were the fact that the city in which Obama was said in the document to have been born was not a part of Kenya on the date listed on the document, and so forth.

But just yesterday, someone out there in cyberspace weighed in with an astonishing discovery that pretty well exposed and exploded the whole Kenyan birth certificate scam. Here is the essence of the discovery, as laid out Politijab, from which it was picked up by The Washington Independent, and from there appeared on Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, the site where I encountered it:

One of my friends in the small community of Obama “birther”-debunkers passes on quite the discovery: a 1964 “certified copy of registration of birth” from Australia, easily available on Bomford.net, a genealogy site. There are striking similarities between this document and the one Orly Taitz is passing off as a “Kenyan birth certificate” for Barack Obama.

- The design is identical, down to the seal at the top and the classifications (”Christian name,” etc) used for identifying the baby.

- The “registrar” on the Bomford document is G.F. Lavender. On the Taitz document, it’s E.F. Lavender.

- The “district registrar” on the Bomford document is J.H. Miller. On the Taitz document, it’s M.H. Miller.

- The number of the book is identical on both documents: Book 44B, Page 5733.

What’s more likely — that two Kenyan bureaucrats shared last names with two Australian bureaucrats, and that the numbers on both certificates were identical? Or that someone used this document, available online for anyone who wanted to look, to forge the Obama “certificate?”

Think about it. In less than forty-eight hours, this extraordinarily obscure form is surfaced and shown to be the source of the phony birth certificate! It would have taken an old-fashioned researcher six months to find the Australian document, if indeed it was ever found.

All this put me in mind [for rather obscure reasons] of a book I read four or five years ago. When I thought of the book, I realized that I could not think of either the title or the author. So I went to Google and entered "jellybeans" and "wisdom," which were all I could recall from it. Instantaneously, in the very first position, up popped The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki which was indeed the book. Just to explain: Surowiecki begins with the charming fact that when a group of experts are asked to estimate the number of jellybeans in a very large jar [a favorite contest at State Fairs and such], it turns out that their estimates are much farther from the actual number than the average of all the guesses of ordinary folks who walk by the booth. This leads him to a general discussion of the many cases in which there is a collective wisdom in crowds that is equal to or superior to the expertise of the cognoscenti.

The collective knowledge of the uncounted millions of people who inhabit the web is vast, and the web serves as an extraordinarily efficient device for accessing and disseminating that knowledge.

HERBERT MARCUSE -- WORDS OF SOLACE IN DIFFICULT TIMES

I have been getting more and more depressed by the unwillingness of Democrats to pass meaningful health care reform. I assumed the Republicans would be obstructive, and that there would be some heavy negotiating with so-called Blue Dog Democrats, but the level of resistance has surprised me, even though I come to the political world fully outfitted with Marxist presuppositions and a lifetime of disappointments. For solace and wisdom I turned, as I often do, to the words of my old friend and one-time co-author, Herbert Marcuse, now long departed. In the Preface to his most powerful book, ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN, Herbert apologizes for the abstract character of the analysis, with these words:

“In the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of social change, the critique is thus thrown back to a high level of abstraction. There is no ground on which theory and practice, thought and action meet. Even the most empirical analysis of historical alternatives appears to be unrealistic speculation, and commitment to them a matter of personal (or group) preference.”

He then continues, a paragraph later: “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible. The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.”

The fault, in short, lies not in our President, but in ourselves. Were there sufficient support in the electorate for the necessary and salutary changes he seeks, there would, I have no doubt, be a sufficiency of Representatives and Senators willing to vote for them.

What to do? Well, I spent a few hours yesterday at the Chapel Hill Public Library, collecting signatures on a petition being circulated nationally in support of the principles underlying Obama's health care proposals. As might be expected, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. In ninety minutes, two of us collected seventy signatures. The principal resistance came from a few folks who were holding out for a single payer system. But Chapel Hill is to North Carolina as Berkeley is to Northern California, Madison is to Wisconsin, Hyde Park is to Chicago, and Harvard Square is to Cambridge. Still, the welling up of protest here in the newly Democratic South does seem to have turned Kay Hagen around, and perhaps a comparable outpouring in other swing constituencies will do the trick.

Is it any wonder that I have retreated further into the clouds even than theory, to spend my time spelling out a fantasy of the ideal college?

MORE FOLK WISDOM

Here I am again, with another bit of folk wisdom to pass on to the young. This one is not mine, however. Thirty years ago, or so, when I was still relatively newly arrived at the University of Massachuesetts Amherst, I knew a Professor of Italian named Zina Tillona [she has since gone on to earn a law degree and now practices in Northampton, I believe]. A group of us were sitting around gossiping one day about a mutual acquaintance who had just been tapped for an administrative position despite no prior such experience. "I wonder what sort of Dean he will be," someone said, idly. Zina replied, "Well, most people do most things the way they do most other things."

Ay first, I thought the remark rather trite, almost tautological. But on reflection, I realized that it encapsulated a very deep truth. There are styles in human behavior, and those styles crop up across a wide range of activities, some trivial, some very important. So this man was likely to be a Dean in roughly the way he was a tennis player, a father, a teacher, or a lover. If he was fussy, obsessed with trivia, vindictive in his personal relationships, and perpatually late to parties or his children's teacher conferences, then he would almost certainly be fussy, obsessed with trivia, vindictive, and chronically late to appointments as a Dean.

Erick Ericson says something similar in Childhood and Society [I think.] People have styles in dreaming, he observes. Some always dream in color, others in black and white. Some have barren, simple dreams, others have cluttered dreams. And this is true regardless of the subject matter of the dream.

Why is any of this important, even granting that it is kind of interesting? Because lefties like me have to take seriously the idea that Obama will be the same sort of president that he was a community organizer, a state legislator, a senator, and a campaigner. It is natural for him to seek consensus, to listen to those with whom he disagrees, to look for something on which he can agree with his opponents, and on which he can build. His orientation is progressive, but he is not confrontational or ideological and he is very slow to anger.

We may like these features of his style of personality or not, and I think we can agree that they served him extremely well in the run for the presidency. But it is foolish of us now to want or expect him to channel our inner Dennis Kucinich.

Most people do most things the way they do most other things.

SARAH PALIN, NUCLEAR WEAPONS, AND STUFF

I have returned from a four day weekend trip back to Amherst, MA, which Susie and I left almost exactly one year ago. When we arrived at our motel, I turned on the tv and stumbled on the live feed of Sarah Palin's resignation speech. For the next seventy two hours, when we weren't seeing friends or attending a splendid early music concert in Great Barrington, I was glued to the coverage, both on television and on the web. There are two questions that need answering: Why did she resign?, and Why did she choose to resign in such a hurried, incoherent, bizarre fashion? I don't know the answer to either question, of course, but the only speculation that makes any sense is that something really bad is about to surface that she had to get out in front of immediately. If three or four days pass and nothing surfaces, then we will all be left to meditate on one of the truly strange episodes of recent American politics.

HOWEVER: While we were yet again enjoying a full helping of schadenfreude, something genuinely important happened. Obama and Medvedev [which is to say Putin] agreed to reduce their holdings of nuclear weapons by twenty-five percent. If this agreement is carried out, it will be the most important thing Obama has done with his presidency thus far.

Nuclear arms reduction has been one of Obama's central concerns since he arrived in the Senate, of course, so it is not surprising that he should have pursued this issue in his 'summit' with Medvedev. But it is welcome news, nonetheless. I have been deeply concerned for fifty years about the dangers of accidental nuclear war, and more recently about the promiscuous spread of nuclear weapons. Indeed, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was my introduction to politics. So, while we all enjoy the further disintegration of the Republican Party, let us pause to offer up a silent prayer of thanksgiving for this significant step toward the control of nuclear weapons.

A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

The past weeks have been difficult for those of us on the left who pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the Obama campaign. The series of deeply troubling decisions about trials for the Guantanamo detainees, the brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, the failure to act on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, all have left us with a sickening feeling that what we worked so hard for is slipping away.

This morning, I dropped my wife off at Old Navy for a little shopping, and then waited for her in a nearby Barnes and Noble. After a cinnamon scone and a small coffee [absurdly called a grande by the Starbucks outlet in the bookstore], I decided to buy Richard Wolffe’s new book, Renegade, his account of the Obama campaign. As I read the first chapter, which focuses on election day itself, I found myself quite unexpectedly tearing up.

I think it is useful to take a deep breath and remember what a life-saving moment that day was for so many of us. By that November day, we had been wandering in the wilderness for four decades, starting with the devastating ’68 election of Nixon and relieved only by the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, a profoundly decent man, and the ambiguous interregnum of Bill Clinton, a deeply flawed man. For those of my generation, who were born during the first Roosevelt term, it seemed that mortality would catch up with us before we could again feel anything resembling pride in the America that has been our earthly portion.

Despite his centrist instincts, and the objective constellation of political forces with which, as president, he must contend, Obama remains an inspiring and progressive figure, with whom, and through whom, we can pursue the goals that beckon to us and the ideals that inspire us. The more vigorously we organize in pursuit of those goals, the more clearly and insistently we articulate those ideals, the more positively he and his administration will respond.

We were not wrong to give so completely of ourselves to the cause of his campaign, and we need, all of us, from time to time, to allow those tears to flow yet again.

Glendower, Iran, And The Pointlessness Of It All

Like countless other left-wing news junkies, I spend endless hours surfing the web, checking in with The Huffington Post, TalkingPointsMemo, the Daily Kos, FiveThirty-Eight.com, and – for a bearable taste of the other wing -- Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish. By dint of this obsessive activity, I congratulate myself on being an active participant in the public discourse and a totally clued up public intellectual.

Every so often, Susie and I go on a vacation that disconnects me for days on end from the blogosphere. A case in point is a spectacular Botswana safari we went on several years ago, during which time I was, for ten days and more, completely out of touch. Whenever I return from one of these descents into the black hole of newslessness, I discover to my surprise that the world has got on quite nicely without me, and did not even notice that I was gone.

A case in point is the recent election in Iran. Like many others, I have been following the results avidly, checking in not only with my usual round of websites but also with the most valuable and reliable of all sites for Middle Eastern news, Juan Cole’s Informed Opinion. The range of reaction to the events in Tehran from pundits and bloggers is quite extraordinary. Some view the announced outcome as a defeat for Obama. Others are certain that the election has been stolen. [This is Cole’s take, and as always, his opinion seems to me to carry a great deal of weight.] Thomas Friedman has even taken the uproar surrounding the election and its outcome as evidence that his appalling advocacy of the Iraq war has acquired some sort of delayed justification, thereby rescuing him from the ignominy that has been his fate among intelligent observers for five years now.

But the simple truth is that I do not have a clue about anything that happens in Iran. I do not speak, read, or write Farsi or Arabic. My only visit to the entire region of the Middle East was an extremely unpleasant three-day tourist stop in Israel. Presented with an unlabelled map of the Middle East, I might be able to identify most of the countries correctly, though I wouldn’t want to bet a plane ticket on it.

What is more, nothing I do or say or think can have the slightest measurable effect on what happens in Iran [indeed, that may even be true of Obama, although he undoubtedly has a better shot at making a difference than I.] Were I to stop caring about the Middle East, no one would notice. My relationship to events there is rather like Shirley MacLaine’s relationship to her former incarnations – entirely imaginary. I am reminded of Hotspur’s great comeback in Henry IV, Part I, when Glendower brags that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep.” “Why, so can I” replies Hotspur, “and so can any man, but do they come when you do call to them?”

So, let us go on surfing and obsessing, and even blogging, but let us not imagine that what we do or say makes any sort of difference at all!

AN IDLE THOUGHT

I have long thought that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is, hands down, the dumbest member of the Senate. However, Chuck Grassley's tweet about the Obama's night out in Paris is giving me serious doubts.

LA FONTAINE DE MARS

On their last night in Europe, Barack and Michelle went out on a date -- dinner at a little bistro in the 7th arrondissement called La Fontaine de Mars. Founded in 1908, the restaurant has been owned and run by three couples, most recently by Christiane and Jacques Boudon. As a devoted Parisian, albeit of the 5th arrondissement, I was thrilled that the First Couple had chosen a modest bistro with red and white checked tablecloths, rather than one of the grand, fancy, impossibly expensive three star restaurants, any one of which would have been delighted to put on a culinary extravanganza suitable for a king of the ancien regime.

What might they have had to eat? A look at la carte suggests perhaps les escargots and a terrine de gibier maison et chutney de figues, as entrees, followed by magret de canard and a boudin basque de Christian Parra aux pommes fruits. Washed down with a 2005 pinot noir, to which one might add a bottle of eau gazeuze -- San Pelligrino, perhaps -- and two cafes, and the bill, service compris, would come to 110 Euros. A tad over $150, all in. This is roughly what Susie and I spend for a dinner in Paris, and certainly no more than a comfortably fixed upper middle class couple would spend in New York, Washington, or Chicago. With grandma watching the kids, a quite reasonable tab.

Now, I confess to being partial to the Obamas. I am, after all, writing this post while wearing an Obama T-shirt. But all of this seems to me at one and the same time a more sophisticated and a simpler night out than would have been managed by any other First Couple in the last hundred years, with the possible exception of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter.

Little things like this mean something to me, even though I have no illusions that there is any significance for affairs of state.