The election of Barack Obama had the effect of prying open a window in a stale room. You can breathe again.
Not everybody, of course. The neoconservatives are in shock. Suddenly they have no administration in Washington. The White House is enemy territory, soon to be staffed by people who do not see the world in black and white.
Like Rahm Emanuel, I went to Sarah Lawrence College, but while he was studying ballet, I was writing poetry. Now, he's slated to become among the most powerful political players in the world. One can assume that he's maintained his love for the arts in informing daily decision-making and no doubt, he'll need to be dancing swiftly through many a political firestorm, especially regarding the pointed issue of Israel and Israel-Palestinian peace.
As a public service--and also since much of his record has been distorted in the press, Lara Friedman, the able staffer who covers the Hill for Americans for Peace Now (of which I am an officer) has prepared a very useful document on Emanuel's history re Israel-Palestine. He is the son of an Israeli, and someone who knows the country intimately. The lens has been on him already. Here, however, is a clear picture:
The news the other day that American Express is reorganizing itself as a bank holding company so it can access federal bailout funds was the last straw.
"What about us?", my wife and I complained. Why should we hold our breath and hope that some of the hundreds of billions allocated for the big institutions that helped get us into this mess in the first place will somehow trickle down to us?
So, we've decided to reorganize ourselves as a bank holding company, the better to access federal bailout funds.
I've died and gone to heaven. The chief-of-staff of America's next President has apologized for something his father -- not him, mind you -- said about Arabs.
""From the fullness of my heart, I personally apologize on behalf of my family and me. These are not the values upon which I was raised or those of my family," Rahm said.
So some folks will say, hey labor law sounds good, but don't the business lobbies have a point that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) proposed by labor and its supporters will undermine democracy by eliminating the secret ballot. I'll have a post soon about how the secret ballot will be fine and more used in workplaces if EFCA passes, but let's take the basic corporate argument headon. Under EFCA, instead of holding an election with a secret ballot, workers can also choose a union alternatively by a majority of workers signing cards asking to have their union recognized.
Horrors, the business lobby cries, weeping for the lost democratic voice of their workers (as they threaten to fire anyone who supports the union during the election), but here's the thing-- an NLRB election recognizes the union if a majority of THOSE VOTING support the union, while the card check option requires support from a majority of ALL WORKERS IN THAT COMPANY OR VOTING UNIT. So the latter option is harder and actually is more guaranteed to reflect the will of the workers. Follow below the fold to imagine how this would play out in a federal Presidential election.
Note: this item is cross-posted from The Democratic Strategist.
For those Democrats who were settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch an orgy of ideological strife among Republicans, it's beginning to become apparent that the war may be over before it began. Sure, there's plenty of finger-pointing and personal recriminations over tactics and strategy, some of it focused on the McCain-Palin campaign, and some looking back to the errors of the Bush administration. There's clearly no consensus on who might lead Republicans in 2010 or 2012. But on the ideological front, for all the talk about "movement conservatives" or "traditionalists" at odds with "reformers," it's a pretty one-sided fight. And one prominent "reformer," the columnist David Brooks, pretty much declared defeat yesterday:
The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
In Washington D.C. it is said that personnel is policy. Personnel are being selected by the Obama Administration as we speak. Policy is being made, right now. It is not too early to discuss Obama's policies. I'm getting daily emails from the new model Obama Democrats, asking for more old-fashioned money. I'd like to see some changes at the top, rather than a cavalcade of Ye Olde Tyme Democratic Hacks.
If President O wants to keep the base fired up, he needs to elevate some new people. The incoming crowd we've seen thus far is going to wilt enthusiasm faster than Harry Reems contemplating Ann Coulter.
It will be left to the Obama administration to sort out whether, or in what way, the government might advance new billions to GM and Ford. As Tom Friedman writes this morning, past failings of management at these companies are well known: they failed to support healthcare reform in the early 1990s, and they are now choking on health management costs; much more important, they decided to profit from SUVs, that is, from truck bodies and cheap oil, and foul the atmosphere. The smug attitudes of GM executives in particular--so I thought during my days editing at the Harvard Business Review--gave you some idea of why the Reds shot Kulaks.
Nevertheless, a couple of million jobs are at stake, at least until other global auto makers can take over some of this plant capacity. Should new public money believe in, as Secretary Paulson put it this morning, the sustainability of American car companies? I can see the macroeconomic arguments in favor, and I don't need Michael Moore to imagine the misery of new shut-downs. But before we spend more on this management, we should see that their worst failure is actually recent, not in some fading past. I mean their failure to remain competitive on the most basic principles of design and manufacturing, using global, peer-to-peer information platforms; principles Volkswagen Group, Toyota, and Nissan-Renault, have exploited, and GM and Ford have half-exploited, even as profits mounted from SUVs and endogenous quality improved.
According to Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, the excitement around the world about the election of Barack Obama has reached the point of "mass hysteria." In a piece in today's Washington Post, she says the following:
"Things could get worse, too: Mass hysteria can inspire the world's crazed assassins, as the RFK analogy shows. This subject is borderline taboo, but I don't think I was the only one momentarily gripped by terror when Obama walked on to that stage in Chicago: What if something awful was about to happen? In some of the weirder realms of the Internet, you can already find verses from Nostradamus allegedly predicting that Obama's election heralds the end of the world, and someone out there probably believes them."
I fear that I might have bought into the story that Israelis favored the other guy
It turns out that the Israelis who preferred McCain were Americans who emigrated to Israel. They speak decent English so they get interviewed a lot.
But they are as representative of Israel as Israelis in Los Angeles are of America. The newspaper headlines depicted here are from Israel's largest circulation newspapers last Wednesday. I love the headlines "Obama: The Hope, "He Has a Dream." Etc.
"Larry Summers has weathered the storm. He will be president of Harvard for a very long time," a celebrity professor who runs a major center there told me in 2005, as the Harvard Corporation upheld Summers against faculty outraged by his ham-handedness.
Even after new revelations forced Summers' resignation, his defenders insisted he'd been martyred on the altar of political correctness by professorial mandarins who'd hyped up his gross manners, his dressing-down of the African-American scholar Cornel West, and his suggestion that some kind of bell curve favors men over women in the sciences.
But Summers endangered more than political correctness (some of which deserved what he gave it). Dean Baker has explained here better than I ever can how republics falter under Summers' kind of hyper-neo-liberalism. But let me say a bit more about what Barack Obama should know of Summers' civic liabilities before he considers making him Treasury Secretary, a post he held briefly under Bill Clinton.
Those following the meeting of Barack Obama's economic advisory committee could not have been very reassured by the presence of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both former Treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration. Along with former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin and Summers compose the high priesthood of the bubble economy. Their policy of one-sided financial deregulation is responsible for the current economic catastrophe.
It is important to separate Clinton-era mythology from the real economic record. In the mythology, Clinton's decision to raise taxes and cut spending led to an investment boom. This boom led to a surge in productivity growth. Soaring productivity growth led to the low unemployment of the late 1990s and wage gains for workers at all points along the wage distribution.
If progressives want to lock in and expand the progressive victories we had last Tuesday, everyone should be joining hands to push through labor law reform as the most important priority. Yes, we want to use our victory to deliver on needed priorities, from health care to green jobs to civil rights, and governing well to solve real problems will help at reelection time.
But from a cold, pragmatic level, the demographics of the election are clear-- progressives get the overwhelming support of blacks, Jews, gays and young people, but we can't create more of those (well not for eighteen years in the case of more young people). We can expand the latino and new immigrant vote through immigration reform legalization of undocumented immigrants, which should be more of a progressive priority for that reason, but in the larger electorate, there is nothing that will expand progressive power more than increasing unionization.
In Jay Winik's magnificent history of the end of the American Civil War, April 1865, he contemplates the major decision that Robert E. Lee chose not to take, thus assuring the survival of America as a single country. The Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, driven from his capital in Richmond by Grant's Army, urges Lee to follow the example of John Mosby's Raiders, breaking his Army of Northern Virginia into small guerrilla bands of "bushwhackers" and retreat to the secure territory of Alabama and the Ozark Mountains. From there they could fight a continuous war of attrition and harassment of the Union occupation force, eventually forcing Lincoln to sue for peace and separation. Lee understood the potential for such a strategy, but it was not a vision for a country he wanted to live in, much less lead. And so he surrendered his army at Appomattox.
What has the power to shut down part of JFK Airport, the Number 7 Subway Train, and one of the busiest intersections in New York City?
A bold new campaign to support veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
I've told you before about the isolation many troops feel when they come home from Iraq. It's a shock to realize you've been fighting a war while for the average American, life has gone on basically unchanged. For many veterans returning from war, it can be hard to reconnect with friends, family and community.
It's well known by now that Barack Obama learns from his mistakes and tries hard not to make them twice. So should those of us who supported him. Even here, on what we fancy is the right side of history, we can look at our own mistakes candidly in order to learn from them, painful though that may be.
My "we" is purely rhetorical and imperial, since my own performance as a commentator was flawless. But, seriously, folks: Obama has a lot to teach about managing anger and about how to subordinate righteous moralism to strategic generosity in order to win truly moral gains.
The general confusion about just what socialism is and isn't seems pervasive. In the mouths of the dumb Right it has become a political cuss-word.
The ordinary meaning is when the Gov takes ownership of the "commanding heights" of industry. (Not my preference, by the way.) That's the definition children should be learning in the schools. Obviously that is not the Obama program. To the contrary, one of his missions will be to unwind the Bushists' embrace of the financial system, where just who is f**king whom is an abrasive topic of debate.
It's Veterans Day and I'm not thinking about the relatives who died in WW2 or served In Vietnam. I'm letting one young Vermonter, who I never met, stand in for the more than 4000 who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He wasn't from my family. Just everybody's.
Tomorrow, Israelis go to the polls for municipal elections. The choices for mayor of Jerusalem are terrifying, considering that city's iconic role in the country, the region and the world. One candidate-Nir Barkat--has refashioned himself as a hard-core nationalist rightwinger and the other, Porash, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew whose community awaits the Messiah to recognize the secular legitimacy of the state of Israel. The Palestinian population-over 200,000 strong--is either disenfranchised from voting (some voting machines reportedly not even set up in Arab neighborhoods)or have disenfranchised themselves from voting as a matter of principle.
New revelations about Georgia's August war with Russia should send a warning to president-elect Barack Obama about how a commander-in-chief can be manipulated into war.
It now appears that the same neo-conservatives who manipulated the US into the Iraq war on false evidence were directly involved in backing Georgia's ill-fated operation on August 7-8, which eyewitness military observers have described as indiscriminate attacks by Georgia on Russian and civilian positions. The observers reports, first made in August and then October to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, were disclosed in the New York Times three days after the presidential election. [NYT, Nov. 7]
They had a long run. Rush and Malkin and Lucianne and Drudge and Free Republic and those Littlle Green Footballs.
But it's over. The Obama Presidency will produce untold millions for these guys because frustration and hate is something you can take to the bank -- but with no branch of government under their control, they have been rendered powerless. Who will pay attention when some irrelevant rightist hack like Eric Cantor (R-VA) or Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) rushes to the House floor to cite a Michael Savage diatribe? Nobody.
In the wake of a momentous victory, Barack Obama, the Democrats, and the nation are at a watershed. Transformations that complement and deepen one another can happen in four momentous areas -- in race relations, in the economy and social contract, in America's place in the world, in our civic democracy and partisan balance. Much of the punditry we hear deals in false opposites and fails to grasp the propitiousness of this moment. Let's look at each part of Obama's challenge to see why he can accomplish complementary enduring and major changes in all these spheres.
For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted.
Well, this time they did, and there is no doubt that women were a decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama.
To listen to the pundits, however, you'd think that only youth (bless them!) and minorities turned out in overwhelming numbers to stand on endless lines to elect the first African American and liberal and brilliant president.
This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but nor is it turning out to be merely a bad recession of the kind we've experienced periodically over the last half century. Call it a Mini Depression. The employment report last Friday shows job losses accelerating, along with the number of Americans working part time who'd rather be and need to be working full time. Retail sales have fallen off a cliff. Stock prices continue to drop. General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy. The rate of home foreclosures is mounting.
When Barack Obama takes office in January, he will inherit a mess. What to do? (Because I'm an informal economic adviser, I should warn anyone who reads this that it reflects only my thoughts and therefore should not be attributed to him or to anyone else advising him.)
In theory I should not be posting a tribute to J Street's Election Day triumph. I work for Israel Policy Forum and, on paper, J Street is the competition.
But only on paper. Israel Policy Forum works to change US Middle East policy through our publications and advocacy work. (My IPF Friday, for instance, is the most widely circulated English language publication on the Middle East in the world). Click to subscribe for FREE). We regularly meet with Senators, House Members and White House and State Department officials to inform them about what is really happening in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. In private, I'd say 90-95% of legislators agree with us. Our goal is to turn private support (and resentment of the lobby's unrelenting pressure) into public support and major policy change.
Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama."
During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, you'd have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.
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