Folks, I'd love to keep my voice in this TPM discussion (if only to defend my honor!), but I've been off line since yesterday morning and I'm just online here briefly, and now gone and not back in Web World until Monday afternoon. Sorry! Thanks to Chris for getting the ball rolling with his "exceedingly fair" look at "Move On @ 10", and thanks for TPM Cafe for hosting the discussion on line. I've been disappointed that a rock star like Eli hasn't lived up to advance billing and jumped in early and often, but thanks to other MoveOn staffers for the discussion.

For my final post, I would like to thank Joe O'Neill and Lila Shapiro for inviting me to participate in TPM Book Cafe's initial discussion of a fictional work. Joe's Netherland was a great choice and the other panelists' and readers' posts made me think of all of the ways in which I admire and appreciate the novel (I love it, really; the postings made me want to read it for the third time, and soon). Dale's post and his discussion of Melville's Moby Dick and Twain's Huckleberry Finn has kept me thinking about these wandering writers, their circuitous routes and journeys, tinkerings and borrowings.

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Thanks again to everybody for talking an interest this last week, and for the generosity of judgment shown not only to my novel, but also to my rather airy speculations. Finally, anybody interested in a watching a game of New York cricket might want to consider Progressive CC v Staten Island CC at Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, tomorrow, 2 pm. All being well, I'll be there.

Glenn Greenwald's Salon piece is a must-read. The 2001 anthrax attacks were hugely important in stoking up a War-of-the-Worlds panic. The envelopes of white powder inflamed the sense that They're Everywhere--Lake Worth, FL; Washington; a mailbox in Princeton. Without doubt, the anthrax panic muddled brains, promoted an atmosphere of Bush-knows-best, and was easily convertible to war fever--in Iraq or, goddammit, somewhere .

I'm not convinced by Greenwald's belief that ABC News was instrumental in spreading the specific association between anthrax and Iraq and thus a phantom dot-connection between bin Laden and Saddam. Still, insofar as ABC News promoted the possibility of an Iraq-anthrax link--evidently when the White House was officially not signing on, according ot Greenwald--it contributed to the crazy uproar of that panicky fall, and owes us a straightforward explanation and not the mealy-mouthed stuff it's delivered to date.

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I see a terrible problem here and I don't see the solution.

Throughout the primaries and now the general, the only way Obama's opponents have scored against him was by (I'm going to be polite) reminding voters that Obama is "not like us"

In the primaries it was the Rev. Wright thing, the Muslim libel, the e-mails to the Jewish community, the "elitist" brouhaha, etc. And now it's the "One" and the rest of that meme. Not one of these charges, not one, would have been launched if Obama was white.

Team McCain is not stupid. It studied what worked against Obama in the primaries and sees that the "uppity negro" thing is a winner.

So far it has been.

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Thanks to Chris for pulling the conversation back to the future, if you will. It's super important.

Chris is quite right about the looming sea-change in context. And let's not forget our role in a member-driven organization: If we want the MoveOn model to succeed, we members cannot just sit back and hope the staff will figure it out for us.

I'll start by agreeing or even extending the challenging premise of Chris's question. Let's say Obama is elected. What then? Well, if the only thing we know how to do is link arms and oppose urgent threats, we may be screwed. The endless fountain of red-alert moments that was Washington in the Gingrich-Bush-Rove era will, thank merciful heaven, have dried up.

Not that there won't be urgent threats! Harry and Louise will look like Barney and Big Bird compared to what the right is going throw at any serious plan for universal health care or carbon reduction. But we know how to deal with that - it probably won't look very different than what we do now.

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I'm Justin Ruben, MoveOn's organizing director. The fact that there's a conversation happening here about MoveOn's organizing model is pretty damn exciting. I imagine it's kind of like the moment three Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans first encountered each other on the internet--"You mean, there are OTHER people who want to discuss this thing I spend 24hrs a day thinking about?!"

Certainly, for MoveOn, it's a very important discussion.

Put simply, people working together, in the real world, can be powerful.

The purely online actions MoveOn members do together--signing petitions, doing phone calls, raising money to run ads--are great. But they work better when they're paired with things that are harder--organizing a rally, running a voter turnout drive in your neighborhood, meeting with an editorial board, etc. Few people will do these things just because MoveOn asks them to via email.

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I don't have a whole lot more to add to the discussions about what "real organizing" is and how or why the MoveOn model does or does not fall short of it. As a closing thought, though I wonder about the future of the non-shouters that MoveOn has managed to connect to the political process. Ask anyone who's ever had to write a political fundraising letter (or email) what gets people to give money, and they'll give you a simple answer: outrage. At a panel with Ben at Netroots, he described the rhetorical mode of this kind of organizing: "Oh no you don't!"

Anger, frustration, outrage: they're all powerful motivating forces in politics, and in the face of corruption, criminality, and cruelty, they are justified and necessary.

But let's say Obama wins in November. How does MoveOn in particular and the progressive movement in general sustain the energy that has driven it for these last eight years? Obviously activists will remain engaged, bloggers will keep writing, organizers will keep organizing. But will the non-shouters stay engaged without the steady stream of daily outrages? (There'll be outrages under a Democratic president, lots of 'em. But they'll at least be fewer and farther between). At the Nation, I expect that we'll see a plateauing, even a decline in subscriptions. I wouldn't be suprised if MoveOn experienced the same with its list.

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I, too, would like to join Kurt in congratulating Joe on being long-listed for the Booker price and being made the early favourite. American writers may be disempowered domestically but their stock is possibly higher internationally. Certainly this is the case with Philip Roth who, if the Booker Prize were open to Americans, would have won it two, three or four times in the last dozen years.

Meanwhile, and more immediately, there are two fantastic Test matches in play at the moment. In Sri Lanka there is a finely balanced match in which the hosts may defeat India thanks to a new bewitching 'mystery spinner' called Mendis. And in Birmingham England and South Africa are engaged in the tightest of struggles.

Editor's Note: This is a googly.

"Of course fiscal rectitude was on the table," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who was at the meeting. "But the key word with Barack Obama is 'balance.' " -- The Washington Post

Let's stipulate that Barack Obama has to talk a lot of rubbish to win the votes of our noodle-brained citizenry. Hence his well-intentioned, highly intelligent spokespersons must also serve up campaign twaddle. And we wish them great success. They seem to be doing it well. We have no political advice to offer, much less the political expertise to support it.

But who will tell the people? Somebody has to say what the country really needs, and what it doesn't need. This statement is a noteworthy effort, in contrast to this sort of mush. We offer here some unsolicited elaboration of the economics of The Nation.

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Interesting: what Joe says about growing up in Europe, entranced by Bellow and other mid-century American novelists, is precisely the same thing Ian McEwan said not long ago when I asked about his influences as he was deciding to become a writer. And even more interesting, maybe, is that at that very same moment the American novelist was becoming disempowered domestically. That is, Bellow, Mailer, Updike and Roth were culturally central in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s and 70s in a way that no novelist has been since.

"How to meet this challenge?" asks Joe of the withering of America's global cultural hegemony. Well, one way for a lot of writers, inevitably, will be to embrace one's Homie-ness, and write well about America for Americans. As 95% of writers in 95% of the countries on earth do. And imperial twilight can be a great subject, as Forster proved.

Speaking (as Mia did) of "who and what makes an American writer or a British one" and "upcoming Irish writers of note," let me offer a (virtual) toast to that Irish-born, British-educated, American-resident writer Joe O'Neill, who made the Man Booker Prize longlist the other day.

I want to throw one last volley into the "what the MoveOn model is and isn't" conversation. (I'll write another post today to try and steer us back to the original questions Chris posed about the future, which I think are really vital as well.)

In his post, Marshall raises an important challenge, essentially arguing that the MoveOn model is great, but falls short of authentic organizing. My counter contention: While there's plenty of room for improvement, MoveOn is absolutely a vehicle for real organizing, and for real movement building.

The organizing methods are often different than those employed by pre-internet groups, but correspondence through email sure looks a lot different than correspondence with quill and parchment -- yet correspondence it is. In fact, that's precisely why this particular conversation is so worth having -it's actually about what traditional organizing principles can or cannot look like when applied in a modern, high tech context. And that questions is at the heart of building progressive power in the 21st century.

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Matt wants some measurement of organizing?

Here's a simple measure.  Are people who were not previously privileged with the advantages of professional status, wealth or other social capital taking leadership?

While the blogs and Moveon have undoubtedly done a good job of allowing educated, tech-savvy folks who were not active politically to gain important information to take action, those involved in the netroots are overwhelmingly those who were personally empowered in many ways and were mostly looking for coordinated channels to focus their energy-- which Moveon and the blogs provided, which was a good thing.

But what organizing does is move beyond that strata to folks who, for many personal as well as political reasons, have not previously had such socially-advantaged positions and where leadership is an acquired skill.   I had an exchange with Zach Exley a while back on this issue, so I'll cite a few points from there:

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Israel's PM Ehud Olmert announced last night that he would be standing down and not running for the leadership of the Kadima party. In that speech, Olmert reiterated his commitment to the peace processes he has launched, on all tracks, explained why they are in the Israeli interest, and gave an all around dignified performance--which was even lauded by many in the punditocracy who have hounded him for the last two years. The circumstances of his departure are unfortunate to say the least. But Olmert the politician (the wheeler-dealer--not so much) is considered to be highly effective and is clearly well liked--great interpersonal skills and human management, effective coalition maintenance, the veritable unmensch mensch. But what does his resignation announcement mean for what happens next? I will look briefly at five areas: the politics--both inside the party and in general, the Palestinian situation, the Syrian talks, and the Iran file.

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Here's Marshall Ganz on real organizing.

Across the country, the Obama campaign is doing the work most progressive advocacy organizations gave up on years ago: organizing.

And what is organizing?

Organizing is based on the development of leadership; i.e., people who accept responsibility for engaging others in collective action of behalf of common purposes in the face of uncertainty. They bring people together, build new relationships among them, and create new understanding, especially of common interests. This constituency can then commit the resources to act on these interests. Organizing, then is as much about discerning what needs to be done - and why - as it is about doing it; it is about motivating the unmotivated, as well as deploying resources of the motivated; it is about commitment to horizontal relationships, especially across differences, as it is about commitment of an individual resource of a signature, a dollar, an email, or a phone call.

And how do you measure organizing?

Here's what Ganz says.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. The most he says is that Moveon should commit to the organizing "the Obama campaign has begun to do." Ok, sure. But what does that mean? What kinds of real tangible goals should Moveon commit to? Ganz is a smart guy, and he's had thirty years to think about this problem. So has John Stauber.

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Life long Republican and granddaughter of Ike, Susan Eisenhower, said today on an Obama campaign conference call featuring campaign manager David Plouffe and herself that while she truly regrets it, the direction John McCain has been pressured to go is showing that "the Republican Party is running out of ideas."

She also said that "The world is watching. This is a unique opportunity to restore confidence in the country."

She's right -- and what really interests me is what Eisenhower is calling for is reasonableness, common sense, and leadership -- instead of arrogance, demeaning name calling, attacks on patriotism, and the like.

There is a crowd of frustrated, increasingly dissident Republicans that Obama can easily harvest if he simply reaches out to them and demonstrates that he will be serious about problem solving and achieving common sense results.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Consumer and safety groups are rightly applauding an agreement by House and Senate lawmakers to move forward a bill which bans lead and most phthalates -- plastic chemicals that can cause developmental disorders -- in most children's products.  The bill, already approved by the U.S. House, will also increase funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, strengthen testing standards, and enhance public access to product safety information.

There is little question that the proliferation of state laws that passed this year banning toxic toys played a key role in industry leaders deciding to make concessions over the bill.   Unfortunately, one key concession that industry demanded, and got, in the negotiations is preemption of new state laws protecting consumer safety.  As industry spokespeople emphasized in their support for the bill:

A single set of national standards was "the framework we were looking for," said Carter Keithley, president of the Toy Industry Association ... E.R. Anderson, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman in Washington, called the legislation "a good bill, in our estimation." She added, "We are very pleased that this bill acknowledges that 50 separate state standards is unworkable and inefficient."

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I just got back from giving a speech this morning at the Center for American Progress where I tried to lay down a baseline about how you actually win the struggle against radical extremism and terrorism -- and the new mindset required to do it. I wanted to continue the conversation, and TPM graciously agreed to host it here.

Here's the deal -- we don't need a rebranding -- this isn't a semantics game -- we need a wholesale rethinking. Instead of a military-dominated "war on terror," we should be fighting the global counterinsurgency campaign it always should have been. We need to fold our military efforts to capture and kill today's terrorists into a larger "information war" designed to prevent tomorrow's from ever being recruited.

I start from the premise that our current strategy is not working. Five years ago, Donald Rumsfeld famously asked: "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" So where are we today? Attacks -- historic highs; Al Qaeda -- reconstituted along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Taliban -- resurgent. Hamas -- tightening its grip on Gaza. Hezbollah -- running a state within a state in Lebanon. The answer to Rumsfeld's question, I'm afraid, is no -- not by a longshot.

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Jane Mayer's important book, The Dark Side, should be read together with two other significant books, Ben Wittes' Law and the Long War and Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent. The reason these books are best studied in tandem is that Mayer convinces the reader that the Bush Administration, especially Cheney and associates, shredded the Constitution and utterly unhinged the check and balance system, all in order to allow an unprecedented, abusive concentration of power in the hands of the president. However, she leaves it to the other two books to answer this question: given that the United States does face a new kind of threat, how should the next administration deal with terrorists within the framework of the Constitution and a well balanced democracy?

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In response to McCain charge that Obama is playing the race card, KEEP IT SHORT!:

"McCain is playing the Desperation Card again and again. They will say anything they can to keep the focus off the bad economy, the real struggles of America's families, and their lack of ideas to make things better. Barack Obama is going to keep talking about his plans to revive the American Dream for all of us."

Say this every day, to every distracting accusation. And run some ads about McCain/Bush's bad economic ideas.

Theda S.

Dan Schnur, who was John McCain's communications director in 2000 is not much impressed by either Obama's or McCain's choices for VP.

I don't much care who the Republicans pick. Obviously, I prefer the weakest possible candidate and Romney just may fit the bill.

But what about Schnur's point about Kaine. He does lack national security credentials. Would we be better off with some general or at least Jim Webb (who, sadly, took his name out).

I like Kaine alot. He's a good governor, a progressive, a Catholic, and he speaks Spanish fluently. He is also wicked smart. But is he the best we have?

I think the Obama folks need to hear from us BEFORE they make this critical choice. No point grousing after Obama makes the pick. They read TPM. We should mouth off now.

This is a hell of a good season for audacity. If you haven't tuned in to Joe Klein's fight with the smarmy bullies of the Jewish Right, here's what you've been missing. Last month, Joe Klein posted in his Time blog as follows:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Whereupon Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League promptly accused Klein of perpetrating an "outrageous assertion...reminiscent of age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."

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Being trained as a literature specialist and receiving a Ph.D. in English Literature forces one to make geographical decisions about specialization (Comparative Literature folks have more geographical and linguistic flexibility). For me, that choice was wrenching to make and I still try to work around these divisions, rather than within them. In general, one chooses to specialize as an Americanist or British literature scholar. Sub-specialties give one the flexibility to move a bit beyond the borders of the Big Two--which are already multiple, really. Nowadays more exciting Americanist scholars work on The Americas--North (including Canada, of course, that land of many great writers--Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry just to name a few), South, and Central America. British scholars also work on more than English Literature; British can mean that one works on Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and what used to be called Commonwealth Literatures--the literature written in English from former colonial territories. Postcolonial is used now, but that, too, is one of those troubling and unfeasible, but current terms.

Both of these more recent, trans-regional approaches have been historically and ideologically influenced; looking at the larger Americas, enables one to look at the political, historical, and ideological currents that have underwritten the story of The Americas: for example, Manifest Destiny and they ways in which that myth unfolds (a too gentle term), differently, upon the continents peoples; Pax Americana (national 'peace' built upon commercial expansionism and military might) borrowed from British models of expansionism (Pax Brittanica), and its continuing relevance even in George Bush's America. The ways in which literatures are studied and taught changes with the times and I think that we will see the Big Two model--British and American--continue to mutate, as will our ideas about who and what makes and American writer or a British one. But more and more writers will have mixed affiliations and national and cultural inheritances--that seems a 21st century certainty.

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Across the country, the Obama campaign is doing the work most progressive advocacy organizations gave up on years ago: organizing. Yet it was by organizing that we built the civic infrastructure that fueled the great social movements that have shaped our politics. When Sam Adams' Sons of Liberty launched its "Solemn League and Covenant" pledge drive to commit individuals to a boycott of British goods, its real impact was not on the Brits, but on building a powerful organizational infrastructure that sustained a virtually non-violent revolution across New England. In other words, organizing not only mobilizes individual resources to solve a problem, it creates a collective capacity to shift the power asymmetries responsible for the problem in the first place.

Organizing is based on the development of leadership; i.e., people who accept responsibility for engaging others in collective action on behalf of common purposes in the face of uncertainty. They bring people together, build new relationships among them, and create new understanding, especially of common interests. This constituency can then commit the resources to act on these interests. Organizing, then is as much about discerning what needs to be done - and why - as it is about doing it; it is about motivating the unmotivated, as well as deploying resources of the motivated; it is about commitment to horizontal relationships, especially across differences, as it is about commitment of an individual resource of a signature, a dollar, an email, or a phone call.

In its early years, the founders of MoveOn recognized that in the absence of organizing, a communications vacuum had emerged that left motivated individuals with no strategic way to contribute. Using the Internet, one could contribute their money or their voice to a targeted collective effort on behalf of a particular issue. People self-recruited, MoveOn staff decided strategy, and if "members" didn't like the direction, they could vote with their "feet" (or their mouse). By aggregating individual voices, MoveOn could both enhance their impact and achieve results.

So what was missing?

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A Public Citizen report* released this week shows that Chamber of Commerce-sponsored "studies" purporting to show that pre-dispute mandatory binding arbitration agreements are fair to consumers are about as credible as "studies" showing global warming isn't real.

The report offers a needed check on sham research that threatens to distort an important policy debate. And it comes at a key time, with one bill that would curb some binding arbitration agreements having passed a House Committee yesterday, and the more comprehensive Arbitration Fairness Act poised to come up for a Committee vote soon.

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Yes!

China's official newspaper reports that within roughly one week of the Shenyang Wal-Mart LLC signing a collective contract with the union, the other nineteen Wal-Mart locations all signed such contracts as well. Many companies in China have been signing such contracts for years--but they often just memorialize the minimum standards required by law and management-beholden unions do not even hold them to that. Will these be any different?

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John Stauber raises a number of criticisms of MoveOn that he raised in my interviews with him, and before responding directly to them, I'm curious to see what Eli or Ben or others within or associated with MoveOn have to say.

That said, I want to just stress a few points:

1) Probably because my father was an organizer and my brother is one now and many of my friends work in the trenches, I am, as a writer and observer, a bit circumspect in criticizing people doing the very difficult work of organizing. (Or, "exceedingly fair" as John aptly put it) That's not to say there's no room for what in the olden days used to be called "principled critique," but it does mean that it's a whole lot easier to write a few grafs about the shortcomings of this or that organizing model than it is to actually organize. I try to keep that in perspective.

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Thanks to Chris for the excellent article and for kicking off this discussion, and to Matt for his thoughtful contributions.

Originally I wanted to focus on the future-focused questions Chris kicked us off with (and hope I can still get a chance to do so before the week is up).

But Mr. Stauber's post raised some important challenges that cut to the heart of what MoveOn is and does and I think they need to be addressed. These questions concern me not just as former MoveOn Advocacy Director, (I left in 2007) but also because I've since worked with various manifestations of the MoveOn model in Australia (getup.org.au) globally (Avaaz.org) and seen the power it holds to empower progressive action at the state, national, and international level - a power that has only begun to be tapped. So I think it's quite important to address the serious misconceptions in John's argument about how this model of collective action actually functions.

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Partly out of sheer awe at my fellow contributors and their brains, let me tilt this discussion in a slightly more homespun direction.

Power clearly has a literary consequence: when the British ruled the world, the nuances of provincial bourgeois life in, say, Leicestershire exerted (and continue to exert) a worldwide fascination. Growing up in 1970/80s Europe, as I did, nothing seemed more relevant than the spaces inhabited by Bellow or Ellison or Updike's characters: never mind that I had zero knowledge of, or much intrinsic interest in, American Jewish intellectual life or the plight of black Americans or what a WASP was. As the global economic and cultural domination of the United States is replaced, to a significant degree, by the domination of transnational capital and whatever cultural stuff sticks to it (surely we can agree on the existence of this phenomenon?), is it not inevitable that the privileges hitherto enjoyed by American fiction will follow the money and drift elsewhere? This is exactly what's happened in cricket, as Will points out, where Indians now control (and transform) a sport that was previously the fiefdom of the English. And the Chinese art market is another obvious case in point.

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In recent posts, Marshall and Gitlin are pointing to the increasing use of racial innuendo by the McCain campaign. This is their only route to victory, and there is little question that they have figured out how to do it well with minimally expensive ad buys that get the 24-hour media folks blabbering: presumptuousness, uncaring to troops, images of black candidate near beautiful young white women. McCain also, not incidentially, took a move last week to get lots of "McCain rejects affirmative action" headlines before the low-attention public. He is successfully playing on white fears of a black candidate, no doubt.

BUT -- here is the point -- McCain will ALSO succeed brilliantly if bloggers and pundits and media heads start blabbering about racism right now. That will bring race front and center to the campagin, exactly what Rove-McCain want! In addition, McCain benefits a lot from the whining responses of Axelrod and the Obama campaign. They keep saying "this is not the John McCain we know," not the "honorable John McCain." That is a very weak response and all it does is validate that, underneath, McCain supposedly IS honorable. This approach will allow McCain to take the low road this summer - smearing his opponent in August, just like they did with Kerry four years ago -- and then "rediscover" his basically honorable self for the closing phases of the campaign after Labor Day, when of course there will be a foreign policy crisis manufactured to play to his supposed strengths.

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Everybody predicted that TIME's Joe Klein would have to publish a major mea culpa after writing that the neocons played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war.

But he's not doing it. He is not allowing ridiculous charges of anti-semitism to stop him from saying what everybody knows: that although the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd led the charge for war, they were supported and buttressed by neocons in the administration, on the Hill and the media.

This is a narrative some very powerful people do not like. They claim to fear that, because most of the neocons are Jews, Americans will conclude that the war on Iraq was pushed by the Jewish community.

Of course, that is not so. Although most neocons are Jews, few Jews are neocons. Every poll taken of Jewish opinion shows that, after African-Americans and non-Cuban Latinos, Jews have been the segment of the population most strongly opposed to military action against Iraq and Iran. This is no big surprise considering that 80% of Jews are Democrats, and the same percentages supported Gore, Kerry and will, no doubt, support Obama.

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I am weak on globalization, and can't help you much with post national theory, but I have watched cricket for a while. And the role cricket plays in Netherland, and Joe's descriptions of the game, are two of the many joys of the book.

Cricket, once the most traditional of sports, is fast becoming the most modern of games. In its original Test match format it was a contest that fostered complexity and subtlety. Watching cricket provided a satisfying way to keep time in abeyance. You could happily sit for seven or eight hours and something significant might happen, or it might not. After five days the game would, more often than not, end in a draw.

Yet the lack of a trite result did not prevent many narratives being played out. It is no coincidence that cricket, rather than unthinking, brand heavy, football, is the preferred sport of nearly all of Britain's pre-eminent playwrights (Pinter, Stoppard, Hare, Gray...). In 'The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games' Ashis Nandy writes 'cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English'. It possessed a fatalism which was once suited to the Indian temperament.

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Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

That's Dana Milbank in this morning's WP. Imagine! Obama holds meetings with enthusiastic supporters from his own party "pep rallies"! He gets motorcades! He plans a presidential transition! (Everyone knows it's far better to wait till November.)

The "presumptuous" meme is swooping virally through the media. Nexis picks up 23 mentions in major newspapers in less than three weeks--about one a day. Why do I think what they really mean is "uppity"?

Thanks to Matt Yglesias for ringing the bell on the vile, even crazy part of Milbank's stuff, his interpretation of Obama's talk to House Democrats. I can't put this any better than Matt:

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I thought blogging was all about writing short. Dale has just posted almost 2,000 words. And his arguments are smart and subtle to boot. Allow me to ignore the absurdly high bar he has set.

The very idea of the national character of works of fiction is a slippery thing. Try the thought experiment of removing or altering the geographic and cultural particulars of this or that great novel, and a lot of those books - maybe most - cease seeming so "American" or "English" or "Russian." This first occurred to me not long after I graduated college, freshly filled with the notion of national literatures as virtually scientific categories, when I read A Confederacy of Dunces. That book, for all of its balls-out, funny-tragic artifacts of "Americanism," reminded me of Don Quixote...and I got to thinking how Confederacy of Dunces could work just as well if it were set in, say, Malaga instead of New Orleans...which in turn got me to thinking that Don Quixote is, well, a very American story, a serious comedy about falsehood versus reality and nobility of character and a picaresque journey-cum-dreamquest that Mark Twain didn't happen to write.

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Rooters, July 30- Senator John McCain (R.- Ariz.), the political maverick and 2000 Presidential candidate, today refused to endorse the candidacy of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, citing "stark differences" between their views.

"My friends, I don't even recognize this man," said McCain, speaking to a group of reporters on his famed "Straight Talk Express." "He's proposing more of the disastrous Bush tax cuts, he's opposing affirmative action, he's caving to the lunatic wing of his party on immigration and abortion. Honestly, it boggles the mind. He's even done a complete 180 and come out in support of torture- now tell me, seriously, does that sound like something I'd do? Not to speak of his dangerous new 'cut and run' policy in Iraq. I'm telling you, my friends, this man is not to be trusted anywhere near the Presidency."

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One of the main themes of The Cost of Empire is that we are usually designing our military to fight the last war. A new report from the Rand Corporation says that the only way we will be able to fight Al Qaeda is to end "the war on terrorism."

A recent RAND research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By analyzing a comprehensive roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory.

Rand suggests we drop the phrase Global War on Terror and simple refer to the police operations as counter-terrorism.

Calling the efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations -- both in the United States and elsewhere -- that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists' view that they are conducting a jihad (holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived as criminals, not holy warriors.

Since the US government probably paid for this report, what are the chances that anyone in the Pentagon or White House will read it?

At the risk of sounding deliberately obtuse (or maybe just looking stupid), let me start by saying that I've never really understood what globalization is, or why it's a bad thing. Or a good thing I suppose, if you happen to be one of those people who're fans of the phenomenon. Whatever it is. Is globalization a kind of undue, unfair influence on hundreds of national economies by a few, largely Western nations (which seems to me a colonial rather than contemporary model), or is it the interdependence of the world's economies based on financial markets, extraterritorial ownership, regional specialization, and the ever-increasing ease and speed of shipping? Is it the domination (or decimation) of the world's immense variety of cultural expression by a hegemonic American materialism, which has as much to do with Disney as it does (or did, once upon a time) with Detroit, or is it the cross-pollenization of the world's cultures, which gives rise to any number of hybrid identities and ever-fewer pure species of being? Is it, in other words, a calculated restructuring of the comforting divisions between us and them (civilized and barbaric, white and colored, Western and non-) in service to the most sanctified binary of all, rich and poor, or is it an anarchic, unstable relationality based on mutable, permeable systems rather than fixed positions? As far as I can tell, it's all of these things, which makes globalization a bit like the island in the fairy tale that turns out to be a whale--a fact you discover only when it dives beneath the ocean, leaving you stranded in the water.

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I'm very glad that Chris Hayes wrote this exceedingly fair cover story for the Nation because it gives all of us an opportunity to examine an important organization that is tremendously successful as a fundraiser, cheerleader and marketer for liberal Democratic causes, MoveOn. I have praise for MoveOn in what they have accomplished, but their limitations are becoming more and more glaring and in the case of the continued Democratic funding of the war in Iraq, problematic.

I criticize MoveOn for what they are not doing, and that is empowering a bottom-up, democratic, progressive movement for fundamental social and political change. I am certainly not trying to reform MoveOn, that would be impossible because they are a tightly controlled organization and there is no access from the outside to change their modus operandi. Rather, I think we all should learn from MoveOn and focus on how we can use the MoveOn style, which has now been copied by thousands of groups and candidates, to actually empower a movement.

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The extract of Netherland's Hans looking at Chuck's cricket field from the satellite-enabled perspective of Google Maps with which Joseph O'Neill initiated this conversation is a vivid representation of the some of the contemporary and complex ways in which individuals connect with places, myriad connected and distinct patches of earth across memory, time, and space. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), the anthropologist and cultural critic Arjun Appadurai identifies these border-crossing (post-national?--a term I resist) technological, economic, linguistic, communal, and cultural sites of disconnection and re-connection as a series of interlocking dimensions, as dynamic, shifting, evolving, unfolding processes.

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As I said in a post earlier today, it's an exciting, unusually hectic week at Cafe, and I hope you'll take time to check out everything that's going on. Click on the Book Club (Netherland By Joseph O'Neill) and Special Feature (Chris Hayes leads a discussion on MoveOn.org) banners to the right to keep track. And enjoy!

Joseph O'Neill poses an important question about the American narrative point of view. When I read Netherland about a month ago, I had the distinctive sense that all of the characters were both desperate for a sense of home and yet condemned to be world citizen's. Hans and his wife struggle with living in post 9/11 New York. The wife abandons the struggle and Hans, left alone in the Chelsea Hotel, is a man without a country. As for Chuck, the Carribean Immigrant, full of American Dreams of expanding Cricket--he feels like a later day version of The Great Gatsby, but without the mansion.

Speaking of Gatsby, it does seem to me the both Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrestled with this sense of being a global expatriate in the 1920's. Societies are often cruel to their artists, because the artists job is to say no to the prevailing cultural/consumption wisdom. The wonderful characters that populate Netherland are just looking for a way to hold their heads up in a world of myriad compromises. It's not an easy task.

I really enjoyed Chris Hayes and his article about Moveon. It's useful to think about where that group - which really has seeded nearly all progressive non-blogging internet activism - is going and what lessons their strategy has in store. In general, I see Moveon as one emergent piece in an ecosystem of activism on the 'Open' Left, which is distinguished from the New Left world by its embrace of open systems as organizing vehicles. As such, it's a mistake to see the group as a single issue group that can execute a strategy with a big swinging email list. Moveon is constrained, fundamentally, by what their members click on, and by the demands of relative transparency. It is also constrained by a legacy situation known as 'America'.

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First of all, I'd like to thank Lila and TPM for instigating this discussion of Netherland. Thanks also to my fellow bloggers for agreeing to take part.

Let's start with a short extract from close to the end of Netherland. The London-based narrator, Hans, travels by Google Maps to New York in search of a cricket field which he and his deceased friend, Chuck, once tried to build together in Brooklyn:

I track the shore. Gravesend and Gerritsen slide by, and there is Floyd Bennett Field's geometric sprawl of runways. I fall again, as low as I can. There's Chuck's field. It is brown--the grass has burned--but it is still there. There's no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I'm just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touchpad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all--have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human's movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the so-called work of man. The U.S.A. as such is nowhere to be seen.

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I'm grateful to TPM for hosting this discussion, and it seems the timing is fortuitous. As is so often the case, MoveOn is in the news this week, first for co-sponsporing, along with Color of Change and the rapper Nas, a protest of Fox News' coverage. And later, for Bill O'Reilly's deranged comment that, "It is not a stretch to say MoveOn is the new Klan."

Whoa.

As I note in my cover-story in the Nation, this kind of crazy, over-heated rhetoric is par for the course. Heck, John McCain even said MoveOn "ought to be thrown out of this country." But understanding MoveOn as some kind of radical vangaurd -- as both the right-wing and MSM generally do -- gets the organization exactly wrong. MoveOn's success (and its limitations) lie in its ability to organize vast swaths of people who aren't radical or even that inclined towards ostentatious acts of protest. Their constituency is, by and large, what Richard Nixon once referred to, in a different context, as "the non shouters"

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Today's NYT Business section has an excellent piece by Michael M. Grynbaum on the hyping of rumors, estimates, and other financial froth in public. Amid some interesting stats on the routine errors of "stock analysts" and other frequently quoted pseudo-experts, this paragraph arrives:

"These are volatile times. There's a lot of moving parts here, and nobody can quite figure out how they all mesh," said the investment strategist Edward Yardeni. "You're hearing a lot of catastrophic predictions."

You certainly are. And my mind rolled back to the late '90s, when a goodly share of catastrophic predictions emanated from the then chief economist and global investment strategist at Deutsche Bank Securities, a fellow named--you guessed it--Edward Yardeni.

From 1997 through the late fall of 1999, Yardeni was among the most-quoted alarmists warning that Y2K was going to bring the sky crashing down because computers would misread 2000 as 1900. A Nexis search will readily turn up hundreds of citations from Mr. Yardeni around the world, especially in the countdown year of 1999. "Many thought of him as chief alarmist," wrote Guy Dixon of Toronoto's Globe and Mail on Nov. 30, 1999:

As early as September, 1997, he warned that potential Y2K computer problems, if left unchecked, would be a "serious threat to the global economy."

By November, 1997, when most people had yet to figure out that "Y2K" stood for "year 2000," he was warning the U.S. Congress of "worst-case disruption scenarios," causing "a global recession, possibly one of the longest and deepest on record."

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Happy Monday Cafe-ers!

As you may have noticed by glancing at the banners on the right side of TPMCafe, we've got some exciting new things happening this week. Novelist Joseph O'Neill is joining us for a Book Club discussion on his new book Netherland. I'm particularly excited about this because it's the first TPMCafe discussion on a novel (!) and because I found the book particularly beautiful, politically relevant and worthy of further discussion. Joining him will be novelist and critic Dale Peck, New York Magazine writer Kurt Andersen, Mia Carter professor of English at University of Texas at Austin and Will Buckley of The Guardian. Joe's first post will be up in an hour or so, and I'll let him introduce the argument.

Also at Cafe all week, Chris Hayes will be joining us for a discussion on his recent Nation article, "MoveOn at Ten." Discussing with him will be Eli Pariser, director of MoveOn.org, Ben Brandzel, founder of MoveOn Student Action, Matt Stoller, a political consultant and blogger, John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and Marshall Ganz, public policy lecturer at Harvard University.

We're going to be digging in to some meaty stuff, and I think that both conversations have a real timely relevance as we move towards the election, and think about the direction that American politics, and American communities, are heading in. And the work that needs to be done. Join us!

I grant you this is not high on the next President's priority list; however, if he cannot ground NASA, he will never be able to rein in the much more powerful Pentagon. NASA has a very effective propaganda machine. Its most recent PR move is to tell Congress and the public that it is out to find "life" on Mars and other planets. When many people hear references to life, images of Martians spin through their heads; some even envision civilizations that we could ally ourselves with, maybe against China, at least against some other aliens in some other galaxy. Actually, what the multi-billion dollar agency is looking for is some organic material, the size of amoebas or--even less. It would be nice to know, I grant you; however, given other priorities, it hardly belongs at the top of the list of what ought to be studied. Indeed, even if one insists that these funds are to be used for exploration--and not, say, finding better ways to fight disease or poverty--much more promising targets are near by, right here on Earth, in the oceans.

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Bill Kristol, neoconservatism's intellectual powerhouse, is suffering. Driving around the Washington suburbs this weekend, he saw a few Obama bumper stickers.

"As I drove around the Washington suburbs, I saw not one but two cars -- rather nice cars, as it happens -- festooned with the Obama campaign bumper sticker 'got hope?' And I relapsed into moroseness. Got hope? Are my own neighbors' lives so bleak that they place their hopes in Barack Obama?"

The reference to the "rather nice cars" sums Kristol up. What a silly and superficial man!

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The New York Times ran an excellent story this week showing how the Obama campaign is promising that 2+1 can equal 4.

Obama's plan for universal health care relies on two sources of funding: reversing some Bush tax cuts and improving the system's efficiency (through such measures as producing electronic records and reducing administrative costs). The essential problem seems to be that, while the plan would produce savings, they would accrue over a decade or longer, not fast enough to cover the massive up-front costs.

On the one hand, I applaud how the campaign is emphasizing that a universal system will actually be cheaper. But Obama is telling Americans that W. was right all along: new taxes, even on the wealthy, aren't necessary for us to have an amazing social benefit (think national security or Medicare Part D). Obama's plan also resembles Republican efforts to privatize Social Security. Both camps fudge the arithmetic to advance an ideological goal. (I happen to like Obama's agenda and despise Bush's.) To be fair, Obama's math seems unrealistically optimistic, whereas Bush was outright lying. But that's largely beside the point.

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Last week, the Bush Administration announced that the "fundamentals" of our nation's economy are "very strong," revealing yet again a lack of appreciation for the struggles middle class families are now facing. And McCain said almost exactly the same thing last month.

Even though inflation may be down, unemployment "relatively low," and corporate profits "healthy," middle class families are not having an easier time making ends meet. Professor Warren highlighted the economic realities confronting families in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee this week. Her numbers powerfully show that our economy's "strong fundamentals" have not translated into increased standards of living for working Americans.

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