A recent post over at The Economist's Democracy in America blog says the Syria showdown at the UN between the US, Russia, and China demonstrates a crucial yet underappreciated success of Obama foreign policy:

Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling.

Yes, President Obama has shown a remarkable ability to forge a united international front on issue after issue. The quantum increase in support for US positions and initiatives is a much bigger deal than media assessments have acknowledged. As other nations have become more welcoming toward the United States' global role, the president can make a strong claim to have rehabilitated American leadership.

Actually if I'd fault the Economist writer for anything, it's that s/he lacks the courage of her own optimism.

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For the past month or so there has been a series of coordinated attacks on me, my employer Media Matters and the Center for American Progress for labeling those who place the interests of Israel over the United States "Israel Firsters." This piece by Spencer Ackerman was accompanied by an illustration of Hitler (natch) inventing the term.

Some right-wing pseudo-researchers actually investigated the provenance of the phrase and announced that it originated with fascist anti-Semites in the 1980's. Therefore anyone who used it today was an anti-Semite. Including Jews!

It was the usual blah-blah from the usual suspects: Israel Firsters all.

I was not bothered by the attacks (they always come from the same crowd) but I did want to go on record as to why I consider the term important, which I did here. The bottom line is that it is the Israel First crowd (pretty much identical with the neocons who played such a sterling role in the run-up to the Iraq war) are the people working around the clock to get the United States either to go to war with Iran or to support an Israeli attack on Iran. You know, the John Bolton/Jeff Goldberg/Commentary crowd and, above all, AIPAC.

These people want the term Israel Firster banned because, once war begins, they do not want anyone even considering that they might have engineered it to benefit Binyamin Netanyahu. Hence, call the term anti-Semitic. (Even though the term refers not to Jews in general who overwhelmingly oppose war with Iran but to a tiny subset of neocon outliers and non-Jewish allies).

In any case, their game ended yesterday.

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Although this column is about how Yale handled its star quarterback Patrick Witt's pass on a Rhodes Scholarship interview, it's really about what the business-corporatization of old American colleges has done to republican leadership training. It's about what former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis calls Education Without a Soul.

Only two weeks ago Witt's decision of Nov. 13 to decline a Rhodes scholarship interview so that he could lead his team against Harvard on Nov. 19, the only day Rhodes was willing to interview him, seemed the result of his straightforward reckoning with a real dilemma.

But it wasn't so real. In a years-long quest for gridiron glory Witt had transferred among several high schools and from the University of Nebraska to Yale, which made his Rhodes decision seem over-determined. It seemed even more so when The New York Times reported on Jan. 27 and more fully on Feb. 4 that "The Rhodes Trust had informed Yale on Nov. 1 that it was suspending Witt's candidacy" because of a complaint of sexual assault against him by a female fellow student and that it had informed Witt directly on Nov. 4.

"Suspended" is "a very reasonable characterization of what happened," Rhodes official Eliot F. Gerson told the Times, exploding Witt's insistence that the paper's account was wrong. Only if Yale had re-endorsed Witt would the interview have remained an option. There was no chance of that. Yale had just weathered the embarrassment of having to fire his own Yale coach and mentor, Tom Williams, for claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he, too, had once chosen a football game over a Rhodes interview.

And when we consider that the sexual-misconduct complaint had been lodged against Witt in September, before the deadline for Yale to submit his Rhodes application, we do have to wonder how all this has been handled.

But what really troubles some of us who teach at Yale and other old colleges is that Witt's and Yale's bumbling reflect what has happened to certain qualities of character -- can we still call them virtues? -- that those colleges once cultivated more reliably than many now want to recall. Believe it or not, Yale did that even in how it invented and played American football, as I'll show in a minute.

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There are delicious ironies in "How to Win Female Votes: What Obama Can Learn From Elizabeth Warren," a terrific piece just posted by Paul Starobin in The New Republic. Starobin reflects on Warren's message in her U.S. Senate campaign against Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, who took the late Ted Kennedy's seat in an upset two years ago.

Starobin reminds Obama of Warren's communitarian message (I'd call it "civic-republican," but no matter), which went viral in a video of her speaking in someone's home early in the campaign:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But... you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate..."

Words you haven't heard from Fareed Zakaria!

One irony here is that Starobin is, of all things, a veteran Russia correspondent, Business Week's Moscow bureau chief in the first years of the last decade, and has written about Russia ever since. On Feb. 21, he'll visit Yale as a Poynter Journalism Fellow, to talk about Russia in the eye of the global media at Calhoun College and the Yale International Relations Association. Yet Starobin, Massachusetts born and bred and back in his home state at the moment, finds Warren's race too good to miss, as do all of us who recall her frequent posts right here in TPMCafe.

A second irony is that if Obama takes Starobin's advice, he'll be learning from the woman Republicans shunted aside as his first nominee to head her brainchild, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Poetic justice, for sure.

But the richest irony is one I'm pleased to deliver in my capacity as conscience of The New Republic. Compare Warren's message with these words by the British social historian R.H. Tawney, published under the title "Puritanism and Capitalism," in 1926, in .... (drum roll...) The New Republic:

"Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert....

"The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration, roaring after its meat and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause."

Words to remember -- especially now, and especially if you're scribbling in Washington.

I certainly set off a firestorm with my use of the term "Israel Firster." Other people use it too but I was the guy who popularized it recently and who used it hundreds of times. The others who utilize the term did so occasionally, often citing me.  So I am the main "miscreant" on this score.

And I am proud that I created the controversy because it is an important one. It is important because the underlying issue is not whether the term is polite (it isn't, merely accurate) but whether or not America is going to end up at war with Iran.

First, Andrew Sullivan's short definition of an Israel Firster. In a piece called, "A Plainly True Idea," Sullivan says "When an American sides with a foreign government against his own president in a foreign country, what does one call that? Apart, that is, from disgusting."

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Presentation by Reed Hundt, January 31, 2012, Capitol Hill

About the spectrum bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications and technology: I'm here not to praise it but to hope that you bury it on this side of the Hill. I don't think it would pass on a clear up or down vote in the United States Senate.

But there is a danger that the House leadership would link the bill to something that the Senate really wants to pass into law. There's a danger that in the fog of compromise on other issues it would somehow become law, and then the FCC's long history of extraordinary successes in auctioning spectrum would be brought to an ignominious close.

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It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr's remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs's tortured quip that Democrats who've denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation "ought to be drug-tested." Nobody with a sense of history--that is, nobody who reads Starr's book--could doubt how sensible and brave was the president's effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama--and without all the condescending qualifications that "independents," who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.

Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic; but one needn't be a wonk to benefit from the tutorial or detect an occasional sigh between the lines. Literary scholars speak of a pathetic fallacy, the idea that inanimate objects have intentions and feelings. Starr makes clear that various political commentators have been susceptible to a somewhat different fallacy, pathetic in its own way, that America's desires can be fathomed through polling and that the president must somehow be at fault if a desire is not fulfilled, as though flawed legislative institutions, entrenched political forces, conflicting popular incentives, regional rivalries and sheer corruption do not shape political outcomes.

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons' plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn't come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership--you know, that he didn't use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the "public option"--is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama's actions were cannier than Clinton's, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a "negative personal impact," but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, "Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks." Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

Starr's great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether "Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies." Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform's best--and last--shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama's, for that matter. It's past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of "a fighter" in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.

Read on at the Nation's website. Or download a pdf.

In his State of the Union address two years ago, in 2010, President Obama kept alive faltering hopes for our fraudulent and now broken political system by appealing to Republicans for bipartisanship and civility. As Ryan Lizza reminds us in a New Yorker article that "everyone" is discussing, Obama had made such appeals even before his inauguration by meeting with George Will and a gaggle of Reaganite pundits.

But even in 2010 Obama was addressing a Congress -- including its Democratic-controlled House, which had been elected with him -- that was stuffed to its gills with frauds, as I put it here in "Pearls Before Swine," because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the banking, real-estate, insurance, oil, and myriad other corporate interests that have nearly ruined the country.

Congress still is stuffed that way, this year's State of the Union address had the slightly edgy, at times faintly desperate tone of a man who knows it better than he did in 2010. "Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars," I wrote two years ago, "nothing Obama called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above. " Here's why I wouldn't change a word now:

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The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

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Two days ago Dissent magazine ran my warning that critics of racism in Republican presidential campaigns should beware of compounding that scourge by reinforcing the Republicans' social-conservative claim on "whiteness." But that's what a January 15 New York Times essay by Lee Siegel does, intentionally or otherwise.

As long ago as 1999 I pegged Siegel for a tummler -- the Yiddish word for a character, familiar in that culture, who cavorts through the marketplace turning cartwheels and overturning pushcarts, mainly to call attention to himself -- in Siegel's case as a scourge of conventional wisdom. That appeals to punch-drunk editors staggering around in search of lampposts to light up their ratings.

Siegel works hard to elevate his antics to Dostoyevskyan brilliance. And sometimes he succeeds! But this time wasn't one of them, and somebodyhaddasayit, for this time there are serious consequences. So I've said it, and although the Dissent site doesn't take comments, responses I've gotten to it encourage me to share my warning right here.

in response to the Atrios post here

I'm a big admirer of Atrios (Duncan) and hope he doesn't think I'm being picky. But he doesn't have it quite right as to the past; yes as to the future.

As to the history, the way it was was this way: The entrenched interests were not interested enough or entrenched enough in the Internet space (old usage) to fight hard enough to have their way with the Internet. But all along we (yes, including very much Al Gore, but also Grove, Gates, Yang, Cerf, Schmidt, Magaziner, and many others) focused very hard on making sure that it was deemed to be very good sense not to stop the Internet.

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As the internet's avatar Google uses its huge billboard -- the search screen -- to protest the proposed legislation aimed at enhancing intellectual property rights (or censoring the Net, depending on your point of view), some say this is the first time Netizens have used their prowess to lobby.

That's not accurate.

In my term as FCC chair, AOL mounted a massive user-based email campaign to defend my decision to bar narrowband internet access providers (telephone companies) from charging end users for using a telephone line to reach the internet, instead of just making a voice phone call. This was a seminal moment in the development of the internet, and the first exercise of the medium itself to defend the "free" culture of the new common medium.

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Depending on how you look at it, tensions with Iran are mounting to: an accidental war, an intentional war, a recession-causing oil price spike, a dizzying sequence of moves / countermoves / signals, an escalating cycle of assassinations, renewed negotiations, or a combination thereof. At any rate, they're mounting.

Even before all the drama of last week, looming sanctions against the Iranian central bank sparked a debate on whether such harsh economic measures are the functional equivalent of seeking regime change. I argue that the international pressure forged by the Obama administration has been consistent in its aim: opening Iran's nuclear program to the kind of scrutiny that will prove its civilian character. The administration has had to ratchet up the pressure because of Iranian leaders' intransigence. As I said in my post last Monday, it's vital to distinguish this policy-change goal from regime-change because "the only way Iranian leaders would cooperate in proving Iran's non-weapon status is if that would make them less, rather than more, vulnerable."

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Many people have written over the past couple of years--including faithful (and valued) commentators here in response to my last post--that President Obama blew it pretty much from the start by failing to adopt a more "populist" line. This is code for other code: populist means more committed to fighting for the "economic interests of lower-income people," which in recent days has come to mean, rather misleadingly, the other 99%.

Sure, Republicans and Democrats from red states blocked him on almost everything he tried, from climate change to immigration to infrastructure spending. But Obama after (or is it before?) the healthcare reform "failed to make the case" that the federal government could be a lever to redress the grotesque inequalities that have grown up over the past generation.  It was the economy, Stupid. Okay, not Stupid, Timid.

The background premise is that "class" trumps (or, with the right leadership, could be made to trump) other divisions. Many progressive Democrats of a certain age (me, too) acquired this premise reading socialist classics in the 1960s, and it's circulated like an antibody ever since, reinforced, oddly, by the sincerity (or vanity) of professional economists of all kinds.

If you appeal to citizens' "bread-and-butter" interests, presumably, you've got them. Obama's task was to rally "ordinary working people" to confront those whose income is 10 or 20 times theirs. Obama "failed to connect" with "lunch-pail Democrats" because he allowed himself to be identified rather with Robert Rubin's acolytes. (Obama's "they-cling-to-guns-or-religion-or-antipathy-to-people-who-aren't-like-them" remark didn't help, though it was a window onto his understandable apprehensions.)

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