The deep flaws in the Wizards have now been totally revealed by the team's third successive defeat at the hands of LeBron James.
The NBA is a double standard league. There was no reason to kick Songaila out of the game but they did, insuring that Cleveland would win.
But the Wizards have ended their season in ignominy.
Yesterday Israelis commemorated Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Next week is Israel's 60th Independence Day. That Independence Day immediately follows Yom Ha'Shoah is appropriate. Together these two days encapsulate the message: Never Again.
The existence of Israel is in no way compensation for the eradication of Europe's Jewish communities. The Nazis killed six million Jews and destroyed some of the world's most vibrant centers of Jewish life. The existence of Israel does not bring any of that back but, at the same time, it is a guarantee that there will be no second Holocaust. All kinds of bad things can happen to Jews but one thing cannot. Jews will never again be in a position in which they lack the ability to fight back with at least as much force as those attacking them.
The 6 million Jews killed between 1939 and 1945 could not defend themselves, could not protect their children, and could find no refuge.
We have your reader blog archives sitting in a database, but we don't want to start to push them live (which would be a day-long, server heavy process) until we know for sure that it's all in order.
So, we need your help. We asked last week, but still need more folks to email tpmbugs at gmail dot come to beta test the archives out. We need as many folks as possible, so please do jump in.
We want to get these back for you, but need your help to make it happen.
This week's Supreme Court decision allowing election laws that greatly favor the GOP to stand received little attention, considering the considerable and partisan effect it will have on the upcoming election. Because the court dealt only with the law of one state (Indiana), one might assume that whatever damage is to be inflicted on the Democrats would be limited. Actually, 23 other states have already enacted similar laws, and, now that the law has been given the green light by the court, others may well follow.
I have a number of thoughts about Jeff's and Jacob's points about Reagan, but I first want to respond to Ken because it seems to me that he's glossed over a tremendous number of important distinctions in U.S. foreign policy--indeed, perhaps over the very idea that there are distinctions in U.S. foreign policy.
Ken writes that "conservatism as defined by Peter fits pretty squarely into the broad tradition of American foreign policy as practiced by all ideological camps: namely promoting American economic, military and political power overseas under the guise of do-gooding." That suggests that I defined conservatism simply as an ideology that promotes the national interest and that sugarcoats its self-interested behavior. But that's not how I defined conservatism. I defined it as an ideology that sees the world strictly in binary terms: us-versus-them, good-versus-evil. It's true that that view was prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it became far less so during the 20th. Sure, conservative ideology fits into a broad tradition of pursuing the national interest--but so does every foreign policy pursued by every country around the world throughout history. The differences lie in how you define and pursue the national interest. My point is that during the Cold War, U.S. policymakers increasingly agreed that you could not see the world in strictly good-versus-evil terms because we needed to coexist and negotiate with the Soviets--in no small part because nuclear weapons rendered coexistence and negotiation a matter of national survival. Conservatives, because of their fealty to Manichaeism, did not. They defined the national interest very differently.
Since Paul Krugman's column today essentially makes the same argument as my Prospect Online article Wednesday, I'd like to echo back that all Democrats running for office -- not just the presidential candidates -- need to be assertively making the case that the conservative belief system and ideas have been an unqualified failure. The conservative movement's hostility toward government, and its agenda of ideas intended to weaken government, explains why Republicans in power have failed at governing.
So when the question is raised about whether conservatives have good ideas, as it was to Sen. Obama on Fox News, it's a huge opportunity to go on the offensive. The answer can acknowledge that in the past, prudent conservatives suggested some useful correctives in realms like crime, welfare, and taxes where government policy wasn't working. But today, because Republicans have adopted the mindset that assumes government is always the problem rather than part of the solution, their ideas keep failing. Why should Democrats want to emulate that failed approach when the progressive orientation of building on successes and avoiding the repetition of failure has proven to be far more effective at delivering results?
While we were all gabbing about Obama and Wright, just the other day, unsurprisingly but in an uncharacteristic hurry, the Supremes resoundingly sided with the Republican campaign to suppress the vote in the Indiana case. Today, Adam Cohen of the NYT editorial board rightly notes that the Constitution, Article I, Section 4, grants Congress the right to set baseline election standards. (To wit: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.")
Congress, where are you? This means you, Speaker Pelosi, and you, Majority Leader Reid. Among others. Where are you?
Well, as I said in my first post, I have a tendency to be argumentative, so I'll again focus here on a few disagreements with Peter.
Peter ends his most recent post by saying that conservatism at times has been "marked by distaste for humanitarian interventions." and quotes John Bolton, who he calls a "wonderful example of conservatism," as being an enemy of "nation-building and democracy promotion. Last year, Peter writes, Bolton told him "how he would have managed the invasion of Iraq: 'My thought was--and this is exaggerating--we hand 'em a copy of the Federalist Papers, say good luck, and then we're out of there'." Which primarily demonstrates to me that Bolton, whether he is a "wonderful example of conservatism" or not, is first and foremost insane.
John H. McFadden "deconstructs" the guilt by association tactics being used to implicate Obama in his Reverend's radicalism.
Chuck Keller, himself a vet, writes from his own experience on the horrors of PTSD, a stark reminder that our Veterans' care programs are one of the many vital institutions to have suffered under the Bush administration.
Naturally, there's a lot of talk about what's behind our current economic crisis. Reader ThurmanHart thinks that much of it may boil down to "ill-advised and immoral tax cuts for the wealthy."
Jeffrey Lewis complains about Ronald Reagan's joke about outlawing the Soviet Union. But he fails to allude to an important distinction between Reagan and George W. Bush. Note that Reagan said he had "signed legislation" that put an end to the USSR. Bush, by contrast, would claim he didn't need Congress' permission. At least give the Gipper some credit for adhering to the Constitution!
More seriously, I wonder about Peter's doubts concerning Reagan's role in helping to bury the Soviet Union. It's true that conservatives (and neoconservatives) bridled at his outreach to the Kremlin (credit goes to Nancy Reagan and George Shultz for helping push him in that direction). But liberals, including Strobe Talbott, complained, at the outset of Reagan's term, that his policies were bound to create catastrophe. But they didn't. Instead, Reagan's arms buildup surely helped put paid to any lingering Soviet illusions that Moscow could keep up with the U.S. Gorbachev's own advisor Alexander Yakolev said as much after the end of the cold war. John Patrick Diggins gives Reagan a lot of credit as well in his recent biography. Yes, the triumphalism that emerged after the cold war, in which the U.S. was supposedly invincible was off-base. But I continue to think that Reagan deserves some credit for: 1) being genuinely horrified at the prospect of a nuclear war; and 2) reaching out to Mikhail Gorbachev to wind down not only the arms-race, but also the cold war. Such flexibility and caution have been sorely lacking in the current administration. So contra to Peter, I think there is a chasm between Reagan and Bush.
Hillary Clinton is out in Indiana telling workers how hard she will fight to keep their jobs from being outsourced. Yesterday in the Huffington Post, David Sirotta revealed the hypocrisy of Clinton railing against a plant closing that her husband had made possible by approving the Chinese takeover in 1996. But the shamelessness of this pitch to the workers of Indiana goes much further.
In August of 2004, Ron Burkle and his business partner Bill Clinton purchased TDS Logistics. TDS is in the global automobile outsourcing business with plants all over the world and parts warehouses in the US. Thomson financial wrote at the time of the buyout, "Given that outsourcing is gripping the entire automotive industry, TDS and the rest of the logistics space are in position to reap continued profits from that trend." So what does this have to do with Indiana? TDS Logistics' clients in the state included Delphi, Chrysler, Eaton, Johnson Controls And Visteon. all of whom closed plants in Indiana -- leading to almost 2000 job losses.
I have been saying for a while that Bill and Hillary Clinton talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. As long as Bill's private interests and charitable trusts are kept hidden from the voters the gulf between the Clinton's actions and their words will continue to grow. It could be that Fox and CNN will continue to lay down the smokescreen of Jeremiah Wright throughout the weekend so that voters won't notice what's really going on, but then again, maybe the Hoosiers are smarter than that.
I spend a lot of time measuring the costs of the current health care system, mostly in counting the broken families that end up in bankruptcy. For families hit with medical bills they cannot pay, the current health care system magnifies their pain. But even those who have health insurance and can afford to pay are knocked around in a broken system. A friend--with insurance--had some minor surgery a while back. She bounced back quickly, but the pain of trying to pay is still not over:
I guess the Wright story is passe. Daniel Pipes, the one-time academic and now full-time race warrior, is back to proving that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
If only Barack had just said so. If he's a Muslim, he obviously has no serious involvement with a Christian cleric who is, like so many Christians, really into Jesus Christ.
Of course, Pipes -- whose very lucrative business is convincing Jews that all Muslims are out to kill them -- probably hasn't paid any attention to the Wright controversy. Did the White Citizens Council devote attention to, I don't know, Hungarians?
Pipes' business (and I use the word carefully) is libeling Muslims, all Muslims (except those few Uncle Ahmeds he digs up who, for fat fees, go on lecture tours to reveal that all the world's problems are caused by...their fellow Muslims).
It's a nice racket.
Well, I am now through section one. It was an interesting read. In particular, Peter provided a nice summary of the 1970s Team B exercise, which has far too many parallels to the WMD intelligence fiasco that helped the President get us into Iraq. I won't say more about that, other than to recommend Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, by Anne Cahn.
Instead, I really wanted to focus on the chapter about Reagan, who I think exerts a profound influence over contemporary public discourse. I've always wondered about the transition during which a President goes from being a controversial figure, of whom a relatively small segment of the population actually votes for, to being "Great."
After all, in 1864 and 1936, Abraham Lincoln and Frankling Delano Roosevelt each took 55 percent of the votes cast -- a solid win, but not a landslide. In retrospect, of course, it is hard to imagine that a significant fraction of the population would have rather seen George McClellan or Wendell Wilkie in the Oval Office.
McCain is depicted as a man of integrity, as one who commands an inner core of strong values, a man of principles. But, he has veered to the right to gain the GOP nomination; he changed his mind on several key policy issues (e.g. on extending the Bush tax cuts). But all this is not nearly as revealing of the true nature of his political character as his call to lift the tax on gasoline (albeit, for now only for the summer). It is a very revealing move.
Yesterday Arizona Sen. John McCain delivered what his handlers were hyping as a major address on health care. McCain's plan is a dangerous fraud.
He wants voters to think he is going after health care cost inflation. In reality, he wants to dismantle the employer-provided system that now covers over 60 percent (or about 158 million) of non-elderly Americans, forcing millions of us who now get fairly decent health insurance on the job to instead buy whatever they can find on the individual market controlled by unregulated and predatory insurance companies. And he would drive health care costs upward, not downward.
This is truly amazing: McCain and his handlers knew they had to say something about health care.
As I expected, Jacob, Jeff, and Ken have each made excellent points, and I want to thank them for taking the time to write such thoughtful posts. And, although they've made individual arguments (which I'll try to address in more specific posts later), I wanted to first tackle a theme or question that's run through each of their posts (as well as through a number of comments, like Don Bacon's). That is, is "conservatism," as I've defined it, really so different from other traditions in American foreign policy, or is it, in essence, just a recent version of a centuries-old American exceptionalism? The answer, I think, is both: yes, it is a form of American exceptionalism, but, yes, it's also distinct from other ideological camps that have battled over U.S. foreign policy for the last 50 years.
The irrepresible Bibi Netanyahu is now attacking Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for contemplating returning the Golan Heights in exchange for a binding peace with Syria.
Nothing surprising about that except Daniel Levy now has the proof that when Netanyahu was Prime Minister he agreed to a full Golan withdrawal in return for peace. He is now attacking Olmert for contemplating a withdrawal he himself agreed to.
Nice.
It is also interesting that Bibi, who offers himself as an inflexible hawk, is apparently not quite that inflexible. He's kind of Barak in reverse.
Israel's next election will likely be between Bibi (who talks hawkish but is capable of surprising us by moving left), Barak (who will run as Labor but is probably less pragmatic and flexible than Netanyahu) and Olmert (who is the most pragmatic and flexible of the three but does not have the political clout to put over the Israeli-Palestinian peace he desires).
Anyway, read Levy. The sheer hypocrisy of it all!
Stanley Fish wrote a piece for The Times a couple of days ago.
In 1952, when McCarthyism was at its height, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled the investigative techniques of the junior senator from Wisconsin "guilt by association" (Adler v. Board of Education). Douglas added that McCarthyite tactics were "repugnant to our society" because, despite the absence of any overt wrongdoing, the pasts of those attacked were "combed for signs of disloyalty" and for utterances that might be read as "clues to dangerous thoughts."More than a half century later, "McCarthyism" was joined in the lexicon by "Swiftboating," the art of the smear campaign mounted with the intention not of documenting a wrong, but of covering the victim with slime enough to cast doubt on his or her integrity. Now, in 2008, after a primary season increasingly marked by dirty pool and low blows, "McCarthyism" and "Swiftboating" have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form.
But even if he has handled it poorly, what Wright says has nothing to do with Obama's candidacy. It is "Guilt by Association."
UPDATE:The Daily News says an associate of Hillary Clinton arranged the appearance of the Rev. Wright at The National Press Club yesterday. If so, that will go down in the history of dirty tricks in this country.
First up, Joe Pettit sees a much deeper problem lurking beneath all the Reverent Wright talk: "Barack Obama is being judged guilty until proven innocent on issue after issue. . . it is how we judge most every black person in the United States." Joe's piece is well-argued and provocative -- give it a read.
Next, reader NCSteve (for short) takes a look at the numbers on racially polarized voting patterns.
Resident satirist Genghis explains the symptoms of Hillaria.
Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled "race men" like Jeremiah Wright.
Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves - by Johnny Cochran, Hosea Wilson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, Leonard Jeffries, even Derrick Bell, and sometimes Cornel West, and countless other smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried "Racism Forever!" Some of them styled themselves prophets of white doom and black resurrection, reaping an adulation seldom enjoyed by real prophets, who are heard mainly after their time.
These men weren't all bad. More than once, as I recounted here recently concerning Brooklyn's Rev. William Augustus Jones, I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt and stood up for them. And, sometimes, they did not disappoint. On the contrary, their forbearance and fortitude taught me how deeply the world had disappointed them. Yes, I understood "God Damn America!," but not from those who shouted it for the roar of the crowd.
The more I understood the difference between feeling it and shouting it, the more I despised the shouters for massaging downtrodden people's broken hearts on the way to their wallets, and for drawing in still others whose bitterness, more fine-spun, sought relief in rhetoric that came with a simulacrum of erudition. Yes, watching Wright at the NAACP takes me back to the many demonstrations I witnessed of imagined racial solidarity, wallowing in collective self-doom.
Yet I would reserve a special circle in Hell for those who are gloating and smirking over Obama's pastor's self-immolation.
A while back folks asked us to let them know when we schedule book discussions so that they can go buy the book and come prepared. Now that we're scheduling our discussions out in advance (more or less), we decided to do just that with a calendar on the bottom right of the side.
Also, we want your help. What books should we be discussing? The thread is yours.
Thanks for the invitation to participate in the Book Club and first off apologies for being slow to engage in the debate, which is the result of my having to travel unexpectedly for a family matter. I'm returning to Washington tomorrow and hope to be more active after that.
U.S. vs. Them is a provocative read and there's much in it that I agree with. However, since it's always more fun to disagree, my main point of contention with Peter's first post is the sharp distinction he seems to draw between "conservative" foreign policy and American foreign policy more generally, which has been fairly consistent in the post-World War II era whether the president in power is a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat.
Does the Obama campaign have any idea how much damage this preening fool of a minister is doing to this campaign?
Pretty much everyone I know supports Obama, morally and financially. But, to a person, they are beginning to believe that Obama will not be the 44th President, no how, no way.
No, they don't think Hillary will be either. They think, and I'm beginning to think, that McCain is going to be sworn in on 1-20-09.
It is not Wright himself that bothers us. It is that Obama does not utterly and completely repudiate a man who is willfully and with malice aforethought doing him profound and possibly fatal damage.
Until I saw the actual video of Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club, just now, I was of the opinion that Obama should reply simply by taking the offensive, calling out John McCain for seeking out the endorsement of the wack-job Rev. John Hagee.
Wright on video, preening, smirking, reveling in his star turn, has spun my mind around. I found him convincing in this sense: He's convinced me that he's a clear and present danger to Obama's candidacy. The father has turned on the son--it's the Laius complex in action. Sure, sure, Wright offers a heap of clever and not-so-clever self-extenuations for his kind words about Louis Farrakhan, and absurdly claims to speak for the entire black church. But he makes it clear that he believes Obama is simply "a politician," meaning a shifty no-good. He's broken the parental contract.
Obama has to overthrow his surrogate father.
Peter Scoblic's US vs. Them is heck of a good read. I say that based on a single chapter -- I am working my way through the book while I post. It will be interesting to see how reader feedback shapes my reactions to future chapters.
After chapter one, I am excited about where Peter is heading. He tackles something of a cliche that is ubiquitous at Washington cocktail parties. Many of my Republican friends, when asked to defend one or another foreign policy blunder, will disown the Bush Administration with the claim that the policies pursued by the 43rd President are dramatically at odds with those of the 41, The Gipper, Tricky Dick and, above all, Ike.
Now these are normally social circumstances, so one can't really pursue the argument with too much vigor -- that would be ugly.
The hearts of most liberals may well be in the right place; they bleed for the poor, care about the ill, and seek to reign in power. However, they often have a hard time facing up to tragic facts: that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; that simply throwing more and more money at unyielding problems is unlikely to make them budge; that there are severe limits on what even the 'richest nation in the world' can do (especially given the democratic need for majority support for government action).
Peter has done a splendid job of reminding us of the far right's embrace of rolling back communism in the early 1950s. He scores conservatives for offering a simplistic, one dimensional view of foreign policy. He's dead-on about the Bush administration's lamentable record on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
But having read (and immensely enjoyed) his book, I also wonder if he himself hasn't engaged in a little binary thinking himself. Put simply, I think he scants the role of the left and, by extension, the neocons in helping to propagate a view of America as the indispensable nation, setting wrong aright around the globe. What he is objecting to, I suspect, is less conservative foreign policy than the consensus view that America is an indispensable nation and the belief in American exceptionalism--that we are uniquely endowed with the obligation to spread democracy and freedom around the globe.
Hello TPM readers! Thanks for stopping by this discussion of my new book, U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. Let me tell you a little bit about why I wrote U.S. vs. Them--the questions that led me to start the book and the answer I ultimately found--and then we'll throw open the doors to your comments, as well as to posts by the fantastically smart and knowledgeable group of foreign policy experts that have agreed to participate in this Book Club.
U.S. vs. Them is the product of my chief post-9/11 fear and of my confusion about the Bush administration's response to the attacks. After September 11, I made an assumption: I assumed that the president and his advisers understood that their top priority had to be preventing a nuclear 9/11. The United States had survived al Qaeda's attack, but it had changed us. We had lost thousands of lives and billions of dollars; and our politics, our national psychology, and our foreign policy had all suffered. I wondered what would happen after an attack that was 100 or 1,000 times worse. The United States would survive, but would it survive in anything resembling its present form? I didn't think so, and my apprehension was reinforced by further research. For example, I was startled to find these emotional lines in the middle of one government report on homeland security:
The personal loss of loved ones would be immeasurable. The health consequences to the population directly impacted would be severe. The physical damage to the community would be extreme. The costs of the decontamination and rebuilding would be staggering. But these losses do not begin to address the true implications of this type of an incident[.] The detonation of an IND [improvised nuclear device] in a U.S. city would forever change the American psyche, as well as its politics and worldview.That was my fear.
Kishore Mahbubani and G. John Ikenberry may not know it -- but they are squaring off to be the new top tier rival powerhouse intellectual combatants.
They each basically stand at the forefront of rival intellectual movements about the relative relevance of American power in the world -- Mahbubani heading the school that the West is in self-denial about its plummeting significance and Ikenberry heading those who think American power remains palpably larger than any other player and is still the key factor in driving international behavior for all other countries.
Mahbubani, who now serves as Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and was previously Singapore's Ambassador to the United Nations, has authored the new book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.
There are many others engaged in this debate including this blogger -- but on the roster are Michael Lind, Parag Khanna, Fareed Zakaria, Richard Haass, Matthew Yglesias, Steven Weber, Bruce Jentleson, Charles Kupchan, Peter Trubowitz, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Anthony Lake, and a long list of others who either are thinking through the consequences of a "diminished America" and what that means for world affairs -- or a resurgent America who still stands out as the key sculptor of global trends and builder of international arrangements.
John McCain is setting a remarkable record: he is the major party Presidential nominee with the skimpiest policy platform since Warren Harding or perhaps Calvin Coolidge. He's making George Bush's year 2000 policy work look encyclopedic by comparison.
Because it's my area, I've searched his campaign's web site for his view relating to the information and communications technology sector of the economy, about one-sixth of the whole American economy.
On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, conservative commentator George Will can generally be counted on to offer a stoic, offshore perspective of the internecine Democratic battles. Today, he made the point that Barack Obama has not won a single 'major' political contest against Hillary Clinton since Wisconsin on February 19th. He noted what many other observers have: Barack Obama's campaign is losing steam.
All hats off to those who correctly say that 'mathematically', it's very hard to see how Hillary Clinton shifts enough superdelegates to win -- but there is something afoot really trying to make this happen. As Maureen Dowd just said on Stephanopoulos' show, "Hillary Clinton has successfully repainted Obama from being incandescent to ineffectual."
In my own view, Hillary Clinton has run a mostly terrible campaign and has lost a dramatic lead over her opponent, but what is beginning to happen very late in the process is that "gravity" is finally taking hold on the former gravity-defying campaign of Barack Obama.
So Arenas loses another game for Wiz in his normal style: he leaves his man wide open for critical shot and he misses his own critical shot. I'm sure he's injured, but (1) why is he playing? and (2) he does this when he's healthy too. He surely is the dead albatross for this team, and when they re-sign him they condemn themselves to mediocrity for years, at least until he demands a trade.
The Nationals are so player-starved that they are giving baseball in their new, ugly stadium a bad name.
And the Redskins are managed, in terms of people and system, in a way that makes every other team delighted to laugh at. Three receivers for top three draft choices, when they had one spot to fill? It's a farce.
I blame the Administration. It has cast a pall of irrationality across the whole city.
If Martin Amis is the self-styled bad boy of English letters, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the rabbinic scourge of "fine" writers who stray into public intellection. No surprise, then, that in the April 27 New York Times Book Review Wieseltier condemns Amis' The Second Plane, a collection of essays, reviews, and stories about September 11 written across six years and re-published in America now in a slim volume.
What is surprising is that Wieseltier's review is itself so preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack, showing mainly that it takes one to know one. Anyone who's read Amis' book as well as the review will know that Wieseltier isn't as brave or honest as his often-stumbling target. The faults in Amis' book are manifold, but Wieseltier's puzzling envy and not-so puzzling bad faith are borne of bad conscience about his own continuously bad judgment about how to respond to September 11. Amis has gotten under his skin, as bad boys will, because his very badness embarrasses Wieseltier, who actually shares many of his views but loathes and envies Amis' brazenness in flaunting them.
That's what all sports fans say. The top 8 college basketball teams in the tournament are in the Elite Eight.
We want elite doctors to treat us and elite judges to reason clearly and we should want the best of our best to lead our government.
But we don't want our national leaders not to understand us, not to "get" the core of the American Dream: the urge and opportunity to improve one's own life and the lives of the next generation.
I think Obama gets us. Read his words:
It's hard for me to figure that out, given that I was raised with far fewer advantages than any of my two remaining opponents. That my work started off on the streets of Chicago as a community organizer, that my wife, Michelle, grew up in that same neighborhood whose parents never went to college... that we financed all our education on student loans, that I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas where, you know, the dinner table would have been familiar to anyone here in Indiana. A lot of pot roasts and potatoes and jello molds... People know me. People who've worked with me know that the reason I'm in this race is that my life history and my professional history working as a community organizer, as a civil rights lawyer, as a legislator, is to fight so people can take those same ladders of opportunity that I was able to take as a kid, and right now, this country is not providing those same ladders. That's why I'm in this race.
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