How to Beat Obama (Maybe)

By Tony Blankley
Republicans owe Hillary our gratitude. She has road-tested several versions of attacks on Obama that don't work. Obviously, and first, don't come out against change and hope -- the perennial themes of successful election campaigns. In 1984, even my old boss Ronald Reagan campaigned for re-election in response to the claim that America needed to change, on the words: "We ARE the change," as well as on the hopeful theme of "morning in America."
If a candidate is not for change, he is not for us. It has been almost two centuries since Prince von Metternich gained the first ministry of the Hapsburg's Austrian empire by assuring the emperor that his administration consciously would avoid any "innovation."
Nor will Americans ever vote for presidential candidates based on what the candidates have done for us already. In American politics, gratitude is always the lively expectation of benefits yet to come. The question is always, What will you do for us tomorrow? Americans will not give Sen. McCain the White House because we are grateful for his heroism 40 years ago at the Hanoi Hilton. We are grateful, and he was heroic. Americans might gladly vote for him to receive a medal, or even an opulent retirement home, but not the presidency.
Beyond these obvious points, Republicans should learn from Hillary's campaign that Obama is remarkably adept at ridiculing the old style of campaigning. He cheerfully and in a cool, understated tone will slice and dice overly broad charges, such as Hillary's "inexperience" taunt or her ill-considered "words vs. action" charge. (And by the way, after seven years of Bush's verbal infelicity, there is a hunger for eloquence. Moreover, eloquence is good. Consider Lincoln, FDR, Churchill, Reagan -- even Bill Clinton in a cheesy, insincere way.) Obama must have been tempted to use that old Humphrey Bogart line, when Bogart asked of someone who couldn't keep up with him: "What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?")
Overly broad charges against him are dangerous. Republicans will make a mistake if they take to calling him "too liberal for America." He is too liberal, but they need to make the charge specific point by specific point. If they try to pigeonhole him as a liberal, he will refuse to perch in such a hole. He is a golden falcon, not a fat pigeon. He will swoop down verbally on his accuser and point out how he is not liberal at all on that point -- but his accuser's record is.
For instance, if he is accused of being in bed with the teachers union, he will point out (even while still in his pajamas after a motel night with the union, metaphorically speaking) that he once told a Milwaukee newspaper he was open to considering vouchers -- even though he is against them -- if it would be good for the kids. Make no mistake, this guy isn't only good with inspirational rhetoric; when it comes to policy slipperiness, he makes Bill Clinton look slow-witted and honest.
The overall lesson to take away from the Democratic primary season so far is that big charges against Obama backfire on the accuser. Beware of Hillary's ill-fated decision to play Sonny Liston to Obama's Cassius Clay. (Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali after the first Liston fight.) In that fight, Sonny Liston threw slow, heavy roundhouse punches, which Clay easily slipped while delivering a flurry of combinations at the off-balance Liston. Sound familiar?
When Liston refused to respond to the seventh-round bell (claiming a sore shoulder), Clay stood up, shouting, "I am the greatest! I shook up the world!" Whether Hillary refuses to compete after the March 4 bell (perhaps on the claim of a sore head), we don't know yet. But we can be sure that Obama is too disciplined to scream to the world that he is "the greatest." Although it would not surprise any of us if he thinks to himself as he looks into the mirror while shaving: "Am I good or what!"
If Obama can be defeated, it will not be with a meat cleaver but with a surgeon's scalpel. This is difficult in a national campaign in which the public, almost of necessity, must be communicated with by slogans. But Obama is the master responding to blustery charges with wry, dry irony.
The Republicans must systematically make a hundred tightly argued, irrefutable critiques of very specific examples of Obama's policy being wrong for at least 60 percent of America.
America may be going through one of our episodic style shifts. In 1932, FDR's conversational style trumped Hoover's old oratory. In 1960, JFK's coolness and wit caught the emerging post-World War II sophistication of our culture. Twenty years later America, tired of sophisticated cynicism, was ready to return to Reagan's old-fashioned sentiments and values.
Obama is tapping into a curious alchemy of youthful idealism tempered by Internet edginess. Republicans must communicate their values and policies through that prism, or they will not communicate at all.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.
Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Mr. Buckley said.
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National Review.”
He also found time to write at least 55 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and to edit five more. His political novel “The Rake” was published last August, and a book looking back at the National Review’s history in November; a personal memoir of Barry Goldwater is due to be publication in April, and Mr. Buckley was working on a similar book about Ronald Reagan for release in the fall.
The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.
“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
Mr. Buckley weaved the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, free market economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. But the persuasiveness of his argument hinged not on these perhaps arcane sources, but on his own tightly argued case for a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.
His most receptive audience became young conservatives first energized by Barry Goldwater’s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in Sept., 1960, at Mr. Buckley’s Connecticut estate to form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.
Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan administration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley’s example.” He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives” could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other reforms.
Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.”
Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political themes, names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he attracted controversy like a magnet. Even conservatives — from members of the John Birch Society to disciples of conservative author Ayn Rand to George Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.
Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely hosting an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982.
Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,” but he could not help admiring his stage presence.
“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967.
Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him “pleonastic” (use of more words than necessary).
And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”
William Francis Buckley Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley Jr. (John B. Judis relates in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint Of the Conservative,” that he was christened with the middle name Francis instead of Frank, according to his sister, Patricia, because there was no saint named Frank. Later, in “Who’s Who” entries and elsewhere, he used Frank.)
The elder Mr. Buckley made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico, and educated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France.
Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At 6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his country’s war debt. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state line from Sharon.
In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.
He did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited to a faculty meeting to complain about a teacher abridging his right to free speech and ardently opposing United States’ involvement in World War II. His father wrote him to suggest he “learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views.”
He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.
“I think the army experience did something to Bill,” his sister, Patricia, told Mr. Judis. “He got to understand people more.”
Mr. Buckley then entered Yale where he studied political science, economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of the Yale Daily News, and joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious secret society.
As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after the university’s administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it.
Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’” charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty members who advocated values not in accord with those that the institution should be upholding — which was to say, his own.
Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in Atlantic by McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”
But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review viewed the book as “a necessary counterbalance.”
After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to win celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after spotting anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.
Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and lecturer, and wrote a second book with L. Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law. Published in 1954, “McCarthy and His Enemies” was a sturdy defense of the senator from Wisconsin who was then in the throes of his campaign against communists, liberals and the Democratic Party.
In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” with a $100,000 gift from his father. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.
Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans, starting with Eisenhower’s campaign for re-election in 1956. National Review’s tepid endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”
Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 at the time of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, and leveled off to around 100,000 in 1980. It is now 155,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations.
Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers, including Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment and go their leftward ways.
National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating cranks from Mr. Buckley’s chosen mainstream.
“Bill was responsible or rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer of Ezra Pound and a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”
Mr. Buckley’s personal visibility was magnified by his “Firing Line” program which ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on the Public Broadcasting Service, it became the longest running show hosted by a single host — beating out Johnny Carson by three years. He led the conservative team in 1,504 debates on topics like “Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.”
There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas; feminism with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.
To New York City politician Mark Green, he purred, “You’ve been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet.”
But Harold Macmillan, former prime minister of Britain, flummoxed the master. “Isn’t this show over yet?” he asked.
At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the Queen of England in the first book.
Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant character, another starring Fidel Castro, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, and journals that more than succeeded dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own. For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he liked to eat.
“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.
Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”
Unlike his brother James who served as a United States senator from New York, Mr. Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve from 1969 to 1972 as a presidential appointee to the National Advisory Commission on Information, and as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.
The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his brand of candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he wrote for The New York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic: “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals,” he wrote.
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.
But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the “bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.
On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.”
He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington, D.C.; his sisters Priscilla L. Buckley, of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell, of Washington, D.C., and Carol Buckley, of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers James L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C., a granddaughter and a grandson
In the end it was Mr. Buckley’s graceful, often self-deprecating wit that endeared him to others. In his spy novel “Who’s on First,” he described the possible impact of his National Review through his character Boris Bolgin.
“ ‘Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?’ asks Boris Bolgin, the chief of KGB counter intelligence for Western Europe, ‘it is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.’ ”
An earlier version of this article included an outdated reference to books Mr. Buckley published in 2007 and to the total number of books he wrote.

Would You Like a Hair Sandwich? The life and times of America's greatest hoaxer.

By Joe Keohane
Like all good stories, this one begins with a bull humping a cow in the middle of the road. In 1957, Alan Abel, a lecturer and jazz drummer who occasionally went by the name "Professor Paradiddle," was on his way to a performance in Denton, Texas, when he found himself caught in a traffic jam caused by the aforementioned beasts. "My father sat there studying the appalled expressions on the faces of the other motorists," recalls Abel's daughter Jenny. "He suddenly had an idea."
The idea was to write a satire about a group called "The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals," or SINA, which would call for animals to be clothed for the sake of decency. Abel submitted his story to the Saturday Evening Post, but when the editors missed the joke and angrily rejected it, he got an even better idea and founded SINA for real in 1959. The agenda: to get Bermuda shorts on horses, dogs, and any animal taller than 4 inches or longer than 6. The battle cry: "A nude horse is a rude horse!"
Thus was launched the career of America's greatest living hoaxer. Abel's story is chronicled in Abel Raises Cain, a documentary directed by Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett and now available on DVD. The filmmakers have been tirelessly promoting the film along the festival circuit and recently inked a deal with a Canadian distributor. They're still self-distributing in the United States.
If Abel Raises Cain is a little thin at points—we never learn exactly how Abel was able to make a living for so long as a not-for-profit hoaxer, nor where the funding for his more elaborate ruses came from—it's also an invigorating and often hysterical look at a gifted comic and the nation of dupes he continues to use as his medium.
The SINA hoax would never have worked were it not for Abel's timing, media savvy, and performer's instincts—assets that would prove indispensable over his long career. Eisenhower-era moralists were forever squalling about the filth corrupting the nation's children, and the media, then as now, loved stories about weird individuals that encapsulated the larger weirdness of their time. Abel, together with accomplice Buck Henry (who went on to write screenplays for The Graduate and Catch 22), played the role to the hilt, portraying a pair of stern, if slightly demented, moral majoritarians. SINA (they had a dedicated phone line, staff, and stationery) quickly drew attention from national media—including Walter Cronkite, who covered the crusade. A few CBS staffers recognized Henry after the Cronkite segment aired and blew the whistle, but by then the damage had been done.
SINA worked because it seemed plausible to a substantial number of Americans that their more pious peers believed a child's morals could be completely unspooled by the merest glimpse of horse cock. As it happened, some Americans actually did agree with Abel. According to the film, independent SINA chapters formed across the country, a SINA float turned up in a parade in the Midwest, and one lady even sent in a check for 40 grand so that SINA could continue God's work. (Abel appreciated the gesture, but says he never cashed the check.)
With SINA, Abel had found his vocation. He came to regard his hoaxes as performance art, a form of moral commentary, and a way to inject a bit of fun into what he saw as an irritatingly self-serious national scene. While his hoaxes varied in scale and message, the quality of execution was always sterling. When a broke and crime-ridden New York City teetered on the verge of collapse in the 1970s, Abel launched "Omar's School for Beggars," which supposedly taught unemployed professionals tactics for successful panhandling. When the uproar surrounding Dr. Kevorkian was reaching fever pitch in the '90s, Abel created a fake company that specialized in "euthanasia cruises." A ship with a greased deck would venture a few hundred miles offshore and then tip slightly, dumping its disconsolate human cargo into the ocean.
The list goes on. Abel planted three people in a 1985 taping of Donahue and instructed them to faint one by one, forcing the producers to evacuate the studio. (Swept up in the moment, other guests had begun dropping as well, Abel says.) He went on TV (Midday Live With Bill Boggs) as "Dr. Herbert Strauss," claiming he raised his young daughter Jenny on a diet of nothing but human hair. In one of Abel Raises Cain's funniest clips, he turns to his daughter, holding a grotesque hamburger bun stuffed with black hair, and asks sweetly: "Jenny, would you like a hair sandwich?" Abel produced two fake lottery winners, one fake wedding (Idi Amin and a WASP from Long Island, N.Y., so the former Ugandan strongman could get U.S. citizenship), and one fake death—his own—in 1980, forcing the New York Times to retract a lengthy obituary two days later.
Abel has tended to launch his pranks during slow news periods, when reporters, editors, and producers are hard up for good material. He knows what they look for in a story. He's latched on to issues that tend to make people hysterical—pornography, euthanasia, child welfare, Richard Nixon—because they're also the issues that make people hopelessly gullible. If you're already convinced that the world has gone batshit by allowing a doctor to help people kill themselves, you're more likely to believe that some shameless cruise line operator would want in on some of that action, too.
Abel's keen sense of the zeitgeist remains undiminished today, making hoaxes like his recent crusade against breast-feeding eerily believable. "I've interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of breast-feeding mothers," he tells a couple of radio hosts in the film, "who after two hours of interrogation have admitted that they had erotic feelings with their babies, which is incestuous. It's a violation of their baby's civil rights, just as we feel circumcision probably is, too."
On its most basic level, Abel Raises Cain is a comedy, and a very funny one. But for all the good-natured hilarity ("I have no antagonism," says Abel, "I have no hateful attitude toward anyone"), there's a disturbing undercurrent to the film that's hard to ignore. As Jenny Abel puts it, the hoaxes are a form of entertainment, but they're also a warning. "The next time around," she says, "their hoaxer may be truly diabolical and rob them of things far more important and meaningful."
That may sound a bit ominous, given the tone of the film, but she's got a point. We can laugh at the suckers who thought dogs needed pants back in the '50s, but is 2008 really any less fertile ground for hoaxers, benign or otherwise? A squirrel-cooking creationist made a nearly credible bid for the White House. CNN employs an anchor who told viewers that illegal immigrants have caused a leprosy epidemic in the United States. And a couple of weeks ago, the Mississippi state legislators proposed a bill barring restaurants from serving meals to fat people—a push more than a little reminiscent of Abel's 2006 fat tax hoax, which he perpetrated with the help of Esquire.
In a national climate like this, it's hard to imagine Abel has pulled his last prank. But even if he never strikes again, Abel Raises Cain attests to a body of work that won't soon be forgotten. As with any art form, the truly great hoaxes long outlive their perpetrators. This month, car manufacturer Kia ran an ad for their President's Day sale in which a pitchman pays tribute to Millard Fillmore for being the first U.S. president to install a running-water bathtub in the White House. Unfortunately, that interesting bit of trivia is bogus, a hoax perpetrated by that other great scourge of rubes, H.L. Mencken, in 1917—a deft little marriage of absurdity and plausibility that, despite the author's frequent admissions of fraudulence, took on a life of its own, and lives on today as a reminder of the American public's unique knack for getting played for suckers.Joe Keohane is a staff writer at Boston magazine.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

The Clintons' Last Stand
From Andrew Sullivan
Watching senator Clinton attempt to regain some lift as she paraglides into history is almost enough to evoke pity. Almost. The Clintons come with their own boundless reserves of self-pity so further reinforcements seem unnecessary to me. And I suppose they could somehow still find a brutal, soul-grinding path to the nomination. But we've learned something important these past couple of weeks.
Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn. Her only genuine skill is pivoting off the Limbaugh machine (which is now as played out as its enemies). Her new weapon is apparently bursting into tears. I mean: really.
It's staggering to me that she blew through so much money for close to nothing (apart from the donuts). Without that media meltdown in New Hampshire, she would have been forced to bow out much earlier. She didn't plan for contests after Super Tuesday. She barely planned for any before that. She was out-organized in Iowa and South Carolina, and engaged in the pettiest form of politics in Florida and Michigan. Her fundraising operation was very pre-Internet. She has no message that isn't about her and the Republicans. Her trump card - Bill - managed to foment a 27 point loss in South Carolina. The Clintons, we can now safely say, got lazy. Or rather their old and now forgotten lackadaisical attitude toward governing returned like a persistent flu to campaigning. We tend to forget that their entire governing agenda after 1994 was essentially finessing Gingrich and battling impeachment. (Their entire agenda before 1994 was successful Eisenhower economics, and disastrous Hillarycare). It's been fifteen years since the Clintons actually stood for a coherent message, and it turns out they had forgotten that you kind of need that for a presidential run.
How did they come this close to losing this? They had all the money, all the contacts, all the machine levers, the entire establishment, the biggest Democratic name in decades, and they've been forced into a humiliating death-match by a first-term black liberal with a funny name. It seems obvious to me that the Clintons blew this because they never for a second imagined they could. So they never planned to fight it. Once put in a fair contest, they turned out to be terrible campaigners, terrible politicians, bad managers, useless executives, wooden public speakers. If you're a Democrat, that's good to know, isn't it? All that bullshit about Day One and experience? In retrospect: laughable.
Whatever happens in this campaign, if it finally puts the Clintons in our rear-view mirror, it will have been worth a great deal. We're not quite there yet, and the moment you feel any sympathy for a Clinton, they will use it to their own ends. But I'm enjoying the backward glance, however long it lasts. We're nearly free of them. Nearly.

Neurostimulation
Is it a good idea to drill holes in people's heads to treat them for depression?

by Sarah E. Richards (From Slate 25 Feb 2008)
Doctors long have struggled over what to do with severely depressed patients who don't respond to treatment. Give them more medications that haven't worked so far? Recommend more talk therapy or another round of shock treatment?
Here's a new idea: open up a depressed head, find the brain parts that aren't working, and fix them with electricity. It's not all that far-fetched. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration gave a medical device manufacturer the green light to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial of an electrode implanted deep inside the brain to alleviate severe depression. As invasive and Frankenstein-ish as it may seem, deep brain stimulation, as the method is called, may offer real hope for the 20 percent of depressed Americans whom Prozac can't help.
Anti-depressant drugs carpet-bomb the entire body. Electroconvulsive therapy jolts the whole brain. Deep brain stimulation aims to pinpoint the malady. Neurosurgeons drill through a patient's skull, place the DBS electrode's eight contact points directly on the trouble spots and connect them to an electrical current from a pacemaker embedded in the chest. This allows doctors to rev up sluggish areas or calm overactive regions.
DBS has been used for a decade to control symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Using it to treat depression poses a different challenge. While neurologists may have found the region of the brain that controls tremors, they haven't yet confirmed where those magic buttons are for mental illness. How do you isolate something as all-consuming as depression—the grief, irritability, self-defeating thoughts, and irregular interest in food, sex, and sleep—in a few millimeters of gray tissue?
Despite the obstacles, the results of small studies testing DBS on depressed patients are promising. For example, researchers are honing in on the region known as the subgenual cingulated, which scans show is overactive in the brains of depressed patients and subsides when they undergo ECT or take antidepressants. (The same area lights up when nondepressed people experience extreme sadness.) Critics caution that highlighted areas on a scan don't necessarily correspond to the loci of depression, yet early research shows that depressed patients feel better when the area is continually stimulated. One such study of brain implants, by Emory psychiatric neurologist Helen Mayberg, found striking and sustained improvement in four of six patients. They reported feeling suddenly calm, aware, and interested in social activities. Some talked more spontaneously, louder, and with more emotion. Others said the colors in the room became brighter and details were more vivid.
Another research team is targeting a different but nearby part of the brain—the network of nodes in the frontal lobe and base of the thalamus and basal ganglia, where emotion, attention, and anxiety are believed to converge. In a recent study for another device manufacturer, researchers from Brown University and Cleveland Clinic found that five of 10 patients treated with DBS between 2003 and 2006 showed a 50 percent reduction in the severity of their depression one year later. Patients said they had less anxiety, more energy, and felt more connected with themselves and people around them. One said simply, "The fog has lifted." The researchers are waiting for approval to start enrolling patients in a bigger trial later this year.
Despite this early encouragement, there are reasons to be cautious. Parkinson's researchers were able to induce and treat tremors in animals before embarking on DBS in humans. But animal research on depression doesn't really work, because we don't know how to measure animals' mental states. That means human trials from the outset. The two major ones proceeding so far are being sponsored by companies—St. Jude Medical and Medtronic—that make the implants and so have a vested interest in the results. The legacy of psychosurgery is not exactly reassuring, either. DBS may be a far cry from the days when lobotomies robbed patients of the ability to feel emotions like love and compassion. But not long ago, patients receiving ECT suffered serious memory loss.
It's also unsettling that scientists can't account for why the patients in the small initial studies felt better—or why some showed dramatic changes and others improved only slightly or not at all (although no one got worse). Theories abound about whether the DBS voltage changes the firing pattern in the brain or affects a larger depression "circuit" that other treatments can't reach. There are no data on the long-term risks of continuous stimulation, and it's uncertain if the results could be replicated on a larger scale. "This is certainly not yet ready for prime time," says Mayberg, who has enrolled 20 more people in her study. DBS also carries a 1 percent to 2 percent risk of intracranial hemorrhage and a 5 percent to 10 percent risk of infection or a malfunctioning pacemaker. At the highest voltage, some patients temporarily felt lightheaded or mentally slow. Also, there's the potential for brain damage from gliosis (the brain's version of scar tissue), which can develop around the contact points.
At the same time, autopsies of Parkinson's patients who received DBS implants revealed no significant changes in the areas around the electrode contacts, according to Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon Dr. Ali Rezai. He also points out that his depressed subjects tested the same in terms of cognitive functioning before and after getting implants. In some cases, the current even improved their memories. (Again, scientists don't know why.)
On balance, the FDA is right to move forward with this precarious research. The history of antidepressant drugs is full of examples of treatments that scientists didn't—and still don't—precisely understand and that nonetheless have brought relief to millions of people. And unlike other neurostimulation therapies for depression on the market or in development, the brain pacemaker has a track record. Some 40,000 people worldwide have undergone DBS, mostly for Parkinson's and other movement disorders. Researchers testing it for mental illness say they follow strict protocols by admitting only subjects who have tried and failed to respond to numerous rounds of drugs, psychotherapy, and ECT. In other words, like a lot of people willing to try experimental treatments, these patients have less to lose.
None of this means, however, that DBS is likely to be used to treat depression on a wide scale. Researchers currently are looking for brain markers that might flag which patients would respond best to it. The treatment also isn't a cure-all, and patients may need to supplement it with more traditional talk therapy. Meanwhile, neurologists are exploring the use of brain pacemakers to treat drug addiction, anorexia, obesity, Tourette's syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We have to simultaneously become more comfortable with poking around in people's brains without letting ourselves forget just how mysterious and delicate this all is.

Ralph Nader To Run For President
WASHINGTON — Ralph Nader on Sunday announced a fresh bid for the White House, criticizing the top contenders as too close to big business and dismissing the possibility that his third-party candidacy could tip the election to Republicans.
The longtime consumer advocate is still loathed by many Democrats who accuse him of costing Al Gore the 2000 election.
Nader said most people are disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties due to a prolonged Iraq war and a shaky economy. He also blamed tax and other corporate-friendly policies under the Bush administration that he said have left many lower- and middle-class people in debt.
"You take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut out, marginalized, disrespected," he said. "You go from Iraq, to Palestine/Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bungling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts."
Nader, who turns 74 later this week, announced his candidacy on NBC's "Meet the Press."
In a later interview with The Associated Press, he rejected the notion of himself as a spoiler candidate, saying the electorate will not vote for a "pro-war John McCain." He also predicted his campaign would do better than in 2004, when he won just 0.3 percent of the vote as an independent.
"This time we're ready for them," said Nader of the Democratic Party lawsuits that kept him off the ballot in some states.
Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton quickly sought to portray Nader's announcement as having little impact.
"Obviously, it's not helpful to whomever our Democratic nominee is. But it's a free country," said Clinton, who called Nader's announcement a "passing fancy."
Obama dismissed Nader as a perennial presidential campaigner. "He thought that there was no difference between Al Gore and George Bush and eight years later I think people realize that Ralph did not know what he was talking about," Obama added.
Republican Mike Huckabee welcomed Nader into the race.
"I think it always would probably pull votes away from the Democrats, not the Republicans," the former Arkansas governor said on CNN.
Nader said Obama's and Clinton's lukewarm response was not surprising given that both political parties typically treat third-party candidates as "second-class citizens." Nader said he will decide in the coming days whether to run as an independent, Green Party candidate or in some other third party.
Pointing a finger at Republicans, he described McCain as a candidate for "perpetual war" and said he welcomed the support of Republican conservatives "who don't like the war in Iraq, who don't like taxpayer dollars wasted, and who don't like the Patriot Act and who treasure their rights of privacy."
"If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up," Nader added.
Associated Press writers Beth Fouhy in Providence, R.I., and David Espo in Lorain, Ohio, contributed to this report.

Spending by Clinton Campaign Worries Supporters
By MICHAEL LUO, JO BECKER and PATRICK HEALY
This article was reported by Michael Luo, Jo Becker and Patrick Healy and was written by Mr. Healy.
Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. “So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.”
The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.
The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.
Howard Wolfson, the communications director and a senior member of the advertising team, earned nearly $267,000 in January. His total, including the campaign’s debt to him, tops $730,000.
The advertising firm owned by Mandy Grunwald, the longtime media strategist for both Mrs. Clinton and Bill Clinton, the former president, has collected $2.3 million in fees and expenses, and is still owed another $240,000.
“Fees and payments are in line with industry standards,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Spending priorities have been consistent with overall strategic goals.”
But some Democrats are now asking if the money spent on a campaign that appears to be sputtering — $106 million so far — was worth it.
“It’s easy to be critical, but had she won Iowa, none of this would have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered what she spent because money would have come pouring in,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant and a veteran of Mr. Clinton’s successful 1996 re-election bid. “But the fact that she did not has made everyone focus on where the dollars went — and where they think the money should’ve gone.”
Mrs. Clinton came into January with a cash advantage over Mr. Obama, with about $19 million available for the primary, compared with about $13 million for him. She wound up spending at roughly the same rate as Mr. Obama, about a million dollars a day, but because she performed dismally compared to him in raising money, she ended the month essentially in the red and was forced to lend her campaign $5 million, while he had $19 million for the coming contests.
Over all, Mrs. Clinton has spent more than $35 million on media, polling and consulting. A comparison with Mr. Obama’s spending is difficult because of the ways the campaigns labeled expenses, but it appears he spent about $40 million in those areas.
In other notable expenditures during the lean month of January, Mrs. Clinton paid $275,000 to Sunrise Communications, a South Carolina firm that was supposed to turn out black voters for her and collected nearly $800,000 in total. She lost that state to Mr. Obama by a wide margin. Even small expenses piled up in January: the campaign spent more than $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts runs.
Mr. Penn, the chief strategist, said in an interview that, since 2001, he no longer owned any of the political consulting firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. He said the firm’s fees were capped at $20,000 a month and that the “great bulk” of the payments went for direct mail.
Joe Trippi, who was a senior adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign, said he believed that the Clinton team had made two fundamental errors.
First, he argued, Mrs. Clinton built a top-down fund-raising operation that relied on a core group of donors to write checks early on for the maximum amount, $4,600 for the primary and the general election, which left few of them to go back to when money became tight. Mr. Obama, by contrast, focused on building a network of small donors whose continued ability to give has been essential to his success this winter.
And second, Mr. Trippi said, the Clinton campaign spent money as though the race were going to be over after a handful of states had voted and was not prepared for a contest that would stretch for months.
“The problem is she ran a campaign like they were staying at the Ritz-Carlton,” Mr. Trippi said. “Everything was the best. The most expensive draping at events. The biggest charter. It was like, ‘We’re going to show you how presidential we are by making our events look presidential.’ ”
For instance, during the week before the Jan. 19 caucuses in Nevada, the Clinton campaign spent more than $25,000 for rooms at the Bellagio in Las Vegas; nearly $5,000 was spent at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas that week. Some staff members also stayed at Planet Hollywood nearby.
From the start of the campaign, some donors had concerns about the Clinton team’s ability to manage money.
Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign manager until she was replaced on Feb. 10, also ran her Senate re-election bid in 2006. That campaign spent about $30 million even though Mrs. Clinton faced only token Democratic and Republican opposition.
“The Senate race spending in 2006 was an omen for a lot of us inside the campaign, but Hillary assured us that her presidential bid would be the best run in history,” said one major Clinton fund-raiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations within the campaign.
Yet the Clinton campaign at times found itself spending money on items that were not ultimately helpful. As part of their get-out-the-vote effort in Iowa, the campaign came up with a plan to have a local supermarket deliver sandwich platters to pre-caucus parties. It spent more than $95,384 on Jan. 1 at Hy-Vee Inc., a local grocery chain in West Des Moines, Iowa, in addition to buying loads of snow shovels to clear the walks for caucusgoers. Mrs. Clinton came in third in the Jan. 3 caucus. It did not snow.
Mr. Obama’s fund-raising surged after his Iowa victory. In January, he brought in more than $2.50 for every $1 she was given, and from Jan. 5 to Feb. 5, Mr. Obama spent nearly $16 million on political advertisements — more than $4 million more than Mrs. Clinton, according to a survey by the Campaign Media Analysis Group at TNS Media Intelligence. Mr. Obama broadcast 3,000 more advertisements than she did, and he was able to air those ads not only in the states that were immediately up for grabs but also in contests on Feb. 5 and beyond.
For instance, Mr. Obama spent nearly $480,000 on 1,331 spots in Missouri; he won the state’s primary, a closely fought contest and a national political bellwether, by one percentage point.
Mr. Obama’s campaign is not without highly paid consultants. His top media strategist is David Axelrod, whose firm received $175,000 in January and has collected $1.2 million over all. Mr. Obama’s polling is spread between four firms that have received $2.8 million collectively.
“Obviously, some campaigns are more careful and wise with their money than others,” Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant who ran John Kerry’s presidential campaign until November 2003. “But these budgetary post-mortems tend to follow a familiar pattern; winners are by definition smart, and losers are dumb and wasteful. In truth, campaign budgeting is hard and complicated and three-dimensional and just impossible to understand without the full time-and-place context of the whole race.”

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night? What Good Night?

Larry Miller (Huffington Post)

I'm sure you've all heard the old saying, "It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." It's one of those classics whose wisdom we've all accepted for a long time. You know, that it's better to take action, even a small action, than to get mad and do nothing. That it's better to move forward a few steps, or one step, or a tiny step, or even a good lean, than to be rooted and not move at all. That it's better to chop through the underbrush with a machete, inch by inch, vine by vine, than to give up and wrench them impotently and sit down and cry.

That it's better to set a goal, fix your eyes on it, feel it right in the center of your soul, imagine it, know it, feel it, than to get lost in desire. That it's better to pull yourself and the world forward, yard by impossible yard, than to get mired in angry mud and spin your wheels, that it's better to carve out precious chunks of the day and not waste time, that it's better to stand foursquare and tall, unafraid, than to slump and curl and wither, that it's better to shout with pride than to spray self-righteous saliva all over the place and childishly stamp your feet.
In other words... "It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."
Then it dawned on me: But I like cursing the darkness. I often find it very satisfying. Don't you? There's almost nothing I can do directly to attack and eradicate the seemingly infinite number of injustices around us every day, but I can certainly (and easily) sit on my couch and talk back to the TV; or pace around the bedroom muttering, or stand frozen in a fugue state of imagination, spiraling down into the fantasy chance to upbraid and chasten some particularly hated, but prominent, peacock.
Talking back to the TV works best, though, I find. "Oh, shut up. You're just an idiot anyway, so why don't you just shut up. Honey, I'm sorry, but don't look at me like I'm the one that's crazy. This guy's a rat and a jerk, and you know it. I'm sure even he knows it. Oh, there he goes again. Hey, how can you say that with a straight face? You don't even believe it yourself. Yes, you. I'm talking to you."
I've done it alone, too, if the last paragraph isn't nuts enough for you. I think most of you have, too, or at least that's what I hope. If you haven't, try it out right now. Pick whomever you hate (You all knew it was correct to use "whom" there, didn't you? Come on, now; object of the verb), and get your hands wet.
There's nothing to it. Pick someone in the public sphere, locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, interplanetary, universally... (That would be a kick and a new wrinkle, wouldn't it? "Honey, quick, get in here! That jerk from Rajal 12 is speaking to the Federation of Planets again. They still haven't owned up to causing that dimensional rift that sucked in your Uncle Lou. Ooh, look at him. He's such a liar, this guy. I can always tell when he shrugs his gills.")
The beauty of this is that it works for the left, right and everywhere in between. Maybe this is the kind of unity Senator Obama is talking about. If not, it's certainly the kind I'm talking about, the chance for all Americans to find common ground in the pleasure of hating someone we think is an idiot.
To paraphrase Dr. King, I have a dream, too. That one day there will be storefronts all over the country dedicated to nothing but cursing the darkness. Sort of like Fight Club, except that the first rule is not that you never talk about it, but that you always talk about it. Admittedly, there'll be enough chubby people so that it might be closer to Sam's Club, but let's not quibble before we've even begun.
There would be a tiny stage and you'd sign up and everyone would get five minutes. (Good Lord, so far it sounds like a comedy club, doesn't it? Is it possible that's how they started? I should know this, shouldn't I? Anyway, it's not a comedy club. The last thing this is about is laughs.) And then each person would let if fly. Obviously a certain amount of salty language would be expected, so this is not for the faint of heart. And then the purge-partner/confessor would say the name of the one he particularly hates that day and why, and go to it. Have at it. When he or she is done -- this is going to be the hard part, by the way -- the rest of the crowd (you, too; all of you; me, you, everyone) would have to embrace and congratulate the guy no matter whom he cursed. (Whom again. I know, it's starting to annoy me, too.)
Maybe you'd agree with the purge-partner, and maybe you wouldn't, but the point is not what you think until you get your turn. The last guy might hate someone you love, or love someone you hate, but you have to love him for hating who he wants for that five minutes. You have to love being there with him and with everyone else. You have to let him vent. You have to let him curse the darkness.
Look, if you really hate what someone just said, and he hates what you just said, you can always go next door to a bar and yell at each other the civilized way, over a drink. The same people could own both places. Then, if the drink doesn't work, it's still early enough for the two of you to go out back for Fight Club.
I GUESS IT WAS just one of those weeks for me, where the news is unremittingly shattering. The great cop with a great family, who starts charities with his own money, who gives and gives and gives his whole life, and then gets killed trying to rescue someone from a maniac who turns rotten (or a rotten guy who turns maniac). A massacre in Mexico in 1968 that goes uninvestigated again and again and again despite pledges from every president, including Vincente Fox, and finally gets some attention from an art exhibit in Mexico City (Yay, art!) and turns out to be far worse than anyone thought.
By the way, what is it about presidents and pledges? Or senators or governors, or council members or mayors, for that matter. Whenever they purse their lips and nod gravely and say, "I give you my word, we will get to the bottom of this," does that just, by definition, immediately mean, "As soon as you all leave here I will never think about this again"?
And then that guy at Northern Illinois State steps out from behind a scrim in a lecture hall with a shotgun and a Glock, and starts doing what guys who step out from behind scrims with shotguns usually do.
Have you noticed that, as crazy as these guys are once they're off their meds, they're always sane enough to dress in the "uniform": the black shirt, black pants, black shoes and black trenchcoat? How crazy can it be to have a color scheme? He never dressed like that before. Isn't that telling in some weird way? Are they drooling and snarling and hallucinating and glazed, and then suddenly snap out of it and say, "Ooh, wait a minute. What am I going to wear?" Do they wear the black clothes into the gun store, or do they make sure to have a crew neck sweater and khakis and blazer? Would it matter?
And then rapes in West Africa in several countries are brought to light as a horrifying commonplace, far worse than anyone could imagine, but the U.N. is already there, whatever in the world that means, and the young "soldiers" who do the raping and beating and killing chat and smile with reporters, and shrug and say, "Well, you know, it's a war, and what the heck, and I'll stop when it's over. Probably."
And then... and then...
Come to think of it, it's just like any other week, isn't it?
Light a candle? Thanks but no thanks. Not right away, anyway. I've got a little cursing to do first. Why don't we change that saying a little bit?
How about, "It's better to curse the darkness a couple of times and then light a candle." I know it doesn't solve anything, but a little primal screaming never hurt anyone, right?
Hey, how about this one: "Okay, curse the darkness, have a little fun, then go vote for someone you like, the one you really believe will make a difference. Then, the first time he or she steps up to the podium, purses his lips and nods gravely and says, 'I give you my word, we will get to the bottom of this,' throw a magazine at the TV, turn it off, go get a drink, and start cursing again."
Yeah, I think that's the one. After all, that's the way it's worked for regular people for ten thousand years. Why end a good thing now?

Clintonites Need to Realize the Left Won the Debates of the 1960s
By James Livingston (History News Network)
Last time out on this limb, I ended by saying that the Obama campaign performs a political sensibility—an attitude toward history—that adjourns the culture wars by assuming the Left won the struggles conducted in, or inherited from, the 1960s. This campaign assumes, in other words, that the New Left has become the mainstream of American politics. It assumes accordingly that the New Right has always been a marginal, insurgent movement destined to fail with an electorate that has increasingly insisted on—or rather just acted out—equality across lines of race, gender, sexual preference, and national origin.
As the culture at large moved rapidly left after 1965, the New Right chose political means to slow or stop the process. And once in a while, for example in 1994, it succeeded, although its intellectual purchase on the culture kept slipping, and its political toehold was always insecure at best—as witness the elections of 1998 and 2000, when Democrats won decisively.
Yes, George W. Bush was named the president by a radical junta convened at the Supreme Court. But his domestic agenda was “No Child Left Behind,” which, regardless of its bureaucratic intricacies, was, and is, a measure fully consistent with the welfare state—his Senatorial comrade in arms, remember, was Teddy Kennedy.
It was only in late 2001, after 9/11, that the zealots of the New Right were able to seize the time, in a kind of coup d’etat that featured all the hysterical symptoms of 20th-century fascist movements (and I use the adjective advisedly, based on my reading of Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism). Their instant magnification of executive power was designed to destroy any balance between the branches of government, and to refit the White House as a bunker from which to launch two wars in two years, each in the name of “an end to evil.” As late as the summer of 2007, they were planning to bomb Iran and happily acknowledged their insane intentions. War was, in principle, the health of the state they imagined.
But they failed. The “war on terror” has become a joke, except when journalists or politicians equate Al Qaeda in Iraq with the real thing. The zealots of the New Right—Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Addington, Perle, Frum, et al.—and their idiot enablers in the executive branch—Bush, Yoo, Gonzalez, Libby, Rice, Powell, et al.—are now in jail or in exile or in disgrace or in denial. The American people would not legitimate their attempted coup.
The people have made it plain, by this refusal, that they want a return to the rule of law, not of men. They’ve also made it plain that they favor Democrats on issues, from health care to the economy to the Iraq war, but also on values, including a woman’s right to choose and gay rights. Don’t take my word for it, consult the National Opinion Research Center or USA Today or the Pew Center polls. Everywhere you look, the results are the same: the New Right can no longer use political means to contain the consequences of the 1960s.
In short, the American people, young and old, have made it plain that they’re increasingly liberal. That liberal trend stopped the New Right in its tracks, just when it thought it finally had a grip on power in Washington.
Now these people typically don’t call themselves liberals. They don’t call themselves feminists or socialists, either. Nonetheless, liberalism, feminism, and socialism are constituent elements of our culture, our politics, and our society. That is why, when polled, most so-called conservatives say they want more government spending on health and education. That is why, when asked, men and women who refuse the label of “feminist” always insist they favor equal opportunity for males and females, and, when pressed, usually acknowledge that gender differences are mostly matters of historically determined cultural conventions.
And that is why, when prompted, even the hapless Bush administration is pushing a fiscal stimulus package to address the subprime mortgage mess, as meanwhile the Federal Reserve frantically drives real interest rates toward zero: everyone, from Left to Right, assumes that market forces are economic means to social and political ends—they are supposed to be manipulated in the name of the general welfare—not anonymous externalities beyond the intellectual grasp and social control of human beings.
Look at it another way. The transformation of liberalism in the late-20th century made it an approximation of what we used to call social democracy. And that interesting transformation makes sense of the New Right’s fear of liberalism—that is, its ferocious, yet mostly inarticulate conflation of liberalism and socialism.
Irving Kristol, the founding father, by all accounts, of neo-conservatism, explained this political process in 1978: “To begin with, the institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e., institutions which maximize personal liberty vis a vis a state, a church, or an official ideology. On the other hand, the severest critics of these institutions—those who wish to enlarge the scope of government authority indefinitely, so as to achieve ever greater equality at the expense of liberty—are today commonly called ‘liberals.’ It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were called, with greater propriety and accuracy, ‘socialists’ or ‘neo-socialists.”
This was, once upon a time, a complaint. What if we read it as a prophecy? What if Henry Kaufman, the Wall Street guru of the 1970s, was right in 1980 when he announced that the majority of the American people was committed to “an unaffordable egalitarian sharing of production,” that is, to some kind of unspoken socialism?
One way to answer the question is to notice the dizzying range of regulatory agencies, federal statutes, and executive orders, which, then as now, limit the reach of market forces in the name of purposes that have no prices. A laundry list of such agencies, statutes, and orders would merely begin with . . . FRS, FDA, FTC, SEC, FDIC, FCC, FAA, OSHA, EPA, EEOC, NWS, FEMA, NIH, CDC, NSF, NEA, NEH. . . And so on, unto acronymical infinity.
To this incomplete laundry list we should add the post-Vietnam armed services—the “all-volunteer army” that now serves as a job-training program and a portal to higher education for working-class kids of every color. These armed services are a social program that still lives up to the egalitarian ideals of the 1960s, in part because it addresses the problem of race and the promise of diversity with the attitudes of affirmative action.
Another, more prosaic way to answer the question about an unspoken socialism passing for politics as usual is to measure the growth of transfer payments in the late-20th century, when the liberal/welfare state was supposedly collapsing.
Transfer payments represent income received by households and individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods and services has been required. By supply-side standards, they are immoral at best and criminal at worst because they represent reward without effort, income without work. But they were the fastest growing component of income in the late-20th century, amounting, by 1999, to 20% of all labor income.
From 1959 to 1999, transfer payments grew by 10% annually, more than any other source of labor income, including wages and salaries. By the end of the 20th century, one of every eight dollars earned by those who were contributing to the production of goods and service was transferred to others who were not making any such contribution.
The detachment of income from work—the essence of socialism—abides, then, just as unobtrusively, but just as steadfastly, as The Dude, who unwittingly foiled the venal designs of that outspoken neo-conservative, the Big Lebowski.
Why, then, does the academic left keep crying wolf? Why do lefties keep portraying themselves as losers in the culture wars and in the larger political battles we’re fighting today? Why do they keep bemoaning “the collapse of the liberal state” or keep defending a welfare state that shows no sign of impending expiration? Why can’t they see that we won?
Why, in sum, does the Left agree with right-wing blockheads like Ross Douthat? He’s the guy who concludes his Sunday New York Times (2/10/08) op-ed as follows: “Precisely because the right has won so many battles—on taxes, welfare, crime and the cold war—in the decades since it squared off against Gerald Ford and Jacob Javits, the greatest danger facing the contemporary Republican party is ideological sclerosis, rather than insufficient orthodoxy.”
Hello? The supply-siders themselves have admitted, over and over, that the Reagan Revolution was a bust—because he couldn’t cut federal spending, and indeed increased it significantly in the 1980s. He also raised taxes, fled Lebanon after a terrorist attack on US Marines, sold illegal arms to Iran, and negotiated with the leader of the “evil empire” then resident in the Soviet Union.
An avowed liberal ended welfare as we knew it, and in doing so he permitted greater labor force participation by women. Violent crime rates have plummeted because the proportion of young single males in the general population has fallen—not because we’ve jailed more drug users and dealers. And the Cold War was fought (and “won,” if that is the right word) by a cross-class, bipartisan coalition that included many avowed Marxists, socialists, and liberals.
But the consensus across the Left/Right intellectual divide says that Douthat is correct—that the conservatives have been winning all along, or at least since the sainted Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Both sides believe that the electorate bought into supply-side economics, the Contract for America, the values of the religious right, and the “war on terror.” Both sides are wrong.
The Left is more wrong, however, because its pose as a marginalized movement with no real voice in the political debates of our time reenacts and reinforces a passivity that is at the very least a mistake. This pose enables abstention, not action. It makes us mere spectators on the history of our time; it depicts us as beautiful souls who can’t bear the corrupting burdens of the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be. It promotes purity.
As a case in point that will draw us back to Obamarama, I offer in evidence the incendiary essay by the esteemed feminist Robin Morgan, who, like Paulie (“the Hitman”) Krugman, sees nothing but “celebrity,” “hero worship,” and a “cult of personality” in the unreasonable and quite possibly misogynistic attitudes of Barack’s deluded supporters (see Krugman’s column of 2/11/08 in the NYT).
Morgan is nothing if not reasonable, so she is a true believer in the false consciousness of those who disagree with her. Unqualified and uneducated voters here worship at the shrine of “celebrity-culture mania” erected by Obama supporters. Among them are “young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists”—presumably by favoring Obama. She quotes Harriet Tubman to equate such women with slaves who did not even know they were enslaved: “When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African-Americans during [sic] the Civil War, she replied bitterly, ‘I could have saved thousands –if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.’”
I get it. If only we were able to convince Obama’s female supporters that they’re, uh, slaves to male supremacy, we could save them from their false consciousness and deliver them unto Hillary. Because of course “She’s better qualified” than Obama. It is self-evident. You can tell because this dubious statement about the candidates’ qualifications is followed by Homeric diction: “(D’uh.)”
But the pivot of the piece is the rhetorical series of questions through which Morgan announces the return of the repressed 1960s: “How dare anyone unilaterally decide to turn the page on history [that would be the 1960s], papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies [these would be the insignia of our benighted present], in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?”
So Morgan wants us to believe that us Obama supporters are practically misogynists because we assume that the boomers of the Left won the battles begun in the 1960s and don’t want to fight them all over again. Like the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, who also raises the rhetorical stakes by asking “How dare he?”, Morgan wants us to believe that in making this crucial assumption—by acting as if the culture wars are over—we blind themselves to the inequities and suffering that, now as then, and always already, disfigure our country. Like Voltaire’s Pangloss, we have begun to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. In our happy ignorance, we forget the atrocities of the past and begin to believe, stupidly, in a better future.
To which there can be only one response: we need a usable past if we are to shape a better future. We need to know that this is our country. If our ethical principles do not reside in and flow from the historical circumstances we study—if our most cherished values do not somehow intersect with the dreary facts of our everyday lives and the disheartening facts of our country’s past—we have no choice except to retreat from the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, and then curse it as the obvious cause of our righteous anger.
Here is how John Dewey explained the dilemma of those who would act as if their principles can never be derived from, or embodied in, historical circumstances, including the political movements and institutions of the present: “An ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.”
Yes, it is a mere pious wish, a waking dream that will keep you pure, and only pure—undefiled by compromise and engagement with the world as it exists, a world full of illiberal Democrats and surly Republicans, plus many other unruly political species at home and abroad. That wish, that dream, will let you believe that false consciousness is the affliction of all those others who have misinterpreted their own interests—you already know what is right for them, and you mean to do it, no matter what they might say. Or you know that they’ll never get it, so you congratulate yourself as you say “Goodbye.”
To shed our piety, to wake from our dream of purity, we must “turn the page” on the “boomer generation” of the 1960s without forgetting or repudiating it, just as Obama asks us to. That means we take its achievements for granted. We assume we won, and get on with the changes we can still believe in.

Is It Too Late for Hillary?
By Karen Tumulty (Time)
T.S. Eliot may have thought that April was the cruelest month, but as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, it's got nothing on February As Barack Obama was racking up his sixth, seventh and eighth consecutive wins in the week that had passed since Super Tuesday — trouncing her in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and moving into the lead in the delegate count — Clinton was doing her best to turn the page of the calendar in search of an early sign of spring. She spent primary day in her campaign headquarters in downtown Arlington, Va., doing interviews by satellite with radio and television stations in Ohio and Texas, states that don't vote until March 4. By the time the ballots were being counted in the Potomac primaries, Clinton had landed in El Paso, Texas, where she declared, "We're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks."
This is not the race that Clinton thought she would be running. Her campaign was built on inevitability, a haughty operation so confident it would have the nomination wrapped up by now that it didn't even put a field organization in place for the states that were to come after the megaprimary on Feb. 5.
Clinton's positions, most notably her support for the Iraq invasion and her refusal to recant that vote, were geared more to battling a Republican in the general election than to winning over an angry Democratic base clamoring for change. Not until last fall did she seem to acknowledge that she faced opposition in the Democratic primaries, so focused was her message on George W. Bush and the G.O.P.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory podium at the Democratic National Convention. While Clinton was busy running as a pseudo-incumbent, Obama donned the mantle of change and built a fund-raising and ground operation that has proved superior to hers by almost every measure. As a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns who is not affiliated with any candidate this time around puts it, the Clinton forces "get to every state later. They spend less. They don't get the best people."
And now Obama is making inroads with every Democratic constituency, including the ones that Clinton counted as hers. In deeply Democratic Maryland, for instance, Obama won rural voters, union households, white men, independents, African Americans and young people, and held his own among Hispanics — the makings of a broad and tough-to-overcome coalition. Obama's campaign now claims a 136-vote lead among pledged delegates, those elected through primaries and caucuses. "We believe that it's next to impossible for Senator Clinton to close the delegate count," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters the morning after the Potomac primaries.
Much of the blame, from both within and outside the campaign, has been aimed at Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn. "He never adjusted," says a prominent Democrat. "I don't think he knows how to do primaries. He doesn't know how to do what is essentially a family fight." But that explanation misses a larger possibility: that Bill and Hillary Clinton, who came of age in politics a generation ago, no longer have the touch for the electorate they once did.
Now, having blown through more than $120 million, Clinton's campaign is struggling to build a campaign from scratch in Ohio and Texas, with political observers in near agreement that a failure to win both could be fatal.
Clinton has shaken up a campaign team whose top rung often seemed to function like the permanent membership of the U.N. Insecurity Council, with each of its often feuding members holding veto power over any move that diverged from his or her plan. Gone is campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, the former scheduler whose primary qualification seemed to be her long history with the candidate. Some of Clinton's closest advisers had argued against putting Doyle in such a high-wire role, but it was a characteristic move for a candidate who, like Bush, is known to value personal trust and loyalty above all other virtues.
The installation of Doyle as campaign manager was also a reflection of the Clintons' confidence in their political instincts, say those who have worked with them. So convinced were they of their superiority at charting a course to November that they were looking, first and foremost, for subalterns who would carry it out without question or challenge.
Doyle has now been replaced by another loyalist, Maggie Williams, who served as Hillary Clinton's chief of staff in the White House. Williams is someone to whom Clinton has turned in her moments of greatest peril. Former White House aides recall how in 1994 Williams planned and executed — without telling the press office — the famous soft-focus pink-sweater news conference, in which the First Lady talked about Whitewater and her cattle-futures trading for 66 min. Williams left the White House at the start of Bill Clinton's second term, saddled with more than $300,000 in legal bills, after having been called to testify before the Senate Banking Committee about her role in the Whitewater damage-control effort. On the night of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's suicide, Williams and counsel Bernie Nussbaum combed Foster's office for personal papers, and she was later criticized for allegedly removing a sheaf of documents that were locked away before eventually turning them over to attorneys.
Williams' takeover of the campaign was greeted with almost universal jubilation by fund raisers, outside advisers and congressional allies — many of whom had been complaining for months that they couldn't get their calls returned. Williams is considered far less likely to tolerate turf fights and insularity. Aides are hoping for more clarity in decision making and information-sharing. In each of her first two days on the job, Williams held meetings for the entire headquarters staff — a simple enough move but one that was considered a dramatic change for an operation in which, as a campaign strategist put it, "nobody knew what was going on."
The campaign's inner circle has finally begun to expand. Austin, Texas, advertising man Roy Spence (who helped come up with the state's "Don't mess with Texas" slogan) will aid in shaping the candidate's message. Campaign deputy manager Mike Henry followed Doyle out the door, and his role is being given to field director Guy Cecil. Adviser Harold Ickes, who for months has been urging the Clintons to focus on ground-game vulnerabilities, is also ascendant, thanks in part to his close relationship with Williams. Moaned a top official: "The work on the ground was never done. We have been consistently outhustled in the field." And while chief strategist Penn's position appears secure, campaign insiders believe he will not be able to operate with as much unquestioned autonomy as he used to have.
One of the continuing challenges for the Clinton campaign in the lead-up to the March 4 primaries could be money. Political veterans say Clinton will need a minimum of $3 million to $5 million to compete in Ohio, and even more in Texas. Both states are large: Ohio has seven major media markets; Texas nearly three times as many.
Clinton's fund raising has picked up considerably since the day after Super Tuesday, when the campaign revealed she had been forced to loan herself $5 million to make it through January. "People know she really needs the money," says national finance co-chairman Alan Patricof. But her fund raising is still no match for Obama's Internet-fueled money machine, which has been bringing in about $1 million a day. On the invitation to a luncheon meeting on Feb. 13 in New York City, top Clinton fund raisers were "encouraged to bring at least one prospective Finance Committee member" and "asked to commit to raising a minimum of $25,000 for Hillary Clinton for President."
And the campaign's most effective fund raiser of all will be picking up the pace. Bill Clinton has scheduled more than a dozen fund raisers before Texas and Ohio. That included one on the night of the luncheon, at the Clintons' residence in Washington. The alert went out to money men: "We have a handful of slots available tomorrow evening for cocktails with President Bill Clinton at Whitehaven, the Clintons' home. Do you know of one person who would be interested in attending and contributing $1,000?" That, in politics, is what passes for hand-to-hand combat. The battle has been joined; the question for the Clintons, however, is whether it is already too late.
With reporting by Michael Duffy and Michael Weisskopf/Washington

fighting words
To Hell With the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' dangerous claptrap about "plural jurisdiction."By Christopher Hitchens (SLATE)

In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to prosecute another Jew, at least in a breach-of-trust case like this, without first submitting it to the arbitration court."
You might think that such relics of the medieval ghetto, and of the rabbinical control that was part of ghetto life, had more or less disappeared in England in the 21st century. And you would largely be right. There exists a "Beth Din," or religious court, in the prosperous North London suburb of Finchley to which the ultra-Orthodox submit some of their more arcane disputes. (This little world is very amusingly described by Naomi Alderman in her lovely novel Disobedience.) But to speak in general, Jews in Britain consider themselves, and are considered, to be answerable to the same laws as everybody else. Should I mention any of the numerous reasons why it would be extremely nerve-racking if this were not true?
But now the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called "plural jurisdiction" in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing "blasphemy," originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don't have any blasphemy laws and let religious people's feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn't occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.
A BBC interview with Williams had him saying that the opening to sharia would "help maintain social cohesion." If that phrase is even intended to mean anything, it can only imply that a concession of this kind would lessen the propensity to violence among Muslims. But such abjectness is not the only definition of social cohesion that we have. By a nice coincidence, a London think tank called the Center for Social Cohesion issued a report just days before the leader of the world's Anglicans and Episcopalians capitulated to Islamic demands. Titled "Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK," and written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, it set out a shocking account of the rapid spread of theocratic crime. The main headings were murder and beating of women, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and vigilante methods employed against those who complained. It could well be—since we are becoming every day more familiar with the first three—that the fourth is the one that should concern us most.
Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, "I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced." But what she will often be told is, "Your problem is better handled within the community." And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country's official spiritual authority.
You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts. And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric throws away the work of centuries of civilization:
[A]n approach to law which simply said "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts"—I think that's a bit of a danger.
In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement—"There's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said"—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don't yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough? For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

A sincere statement that lights a fire!

Archbishop's Lecture - Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective
Thursday 07 February 2008
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams gave the foundation lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice
The title of this series of lectures signals the existence of what is very widely felt to be a growing challenge in our society – that is, the presence of communities which, while no less 'law-abiding' than the rest of the population, relate to something other than the British legal system alone. But, as I hope to suggest, the issues that arise around what level of public or legal recognition, if any, might be allowed to the legal provisions of a religious group, are not peculiar to Islam: we might recall that, while the law of the Church of England is the law of the land, its daily operation is in the hands of authorities to whom considerable independence is granted. And beyond the specific issues that arise in relation to the practicalities of recognition or delegation, there are large questions in the background about what we understand by and expect from the law, questions that are more sharply focused than ever in a largely secular social environment. I shall therefore be concentrating on certain issues around Islamic law to begin with, in order to open up some of these wider matters.
Among the manifold anxieties that haunt the discussion of the place of Muslims in British society, one of the strongest, reinforced from time to time by the sensational reporting of opinion polls, is that Muslim communities in this country seek the freedom to live under sharia law. And what most people think they know of sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments; just a few days ago, it was reported that a 'forced marriage' involving a young woman with learning difficulties had been 'sanctioned under sharia law' – the kind of story that, in its assumption that we all 'really' know what is involved in the practice of sharia, powerfully reinforces the image of – at best – a pre-modern system in which human rights have no role. The problem is freely admitted by Muslim scholars. 'In the West', writes Tariq Ramadan in his groundbreaking Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 'the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam...It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word' (p.31). Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes. As such, this is not only an issue about Islam but about other faith groups, including Orthodox Judaism; and indeed it spills over into some of the questions which have surfaced sharply in the last twelve months about the right of religious believers in general to opt out of certain legal provisions – as in the problems around Roman Catholic adoption agencies which emerged in relation to the Sexual Orientation Regulations last spring.
This lecture will not attempt a detailed discussion of the nature of sharia, which would be far beyond my competence; my aim is only, as I have said, to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, with a few thought about what might be entailed in crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom. But it is important to begin by dispelling one or two myths about sharia; so far from being a monolithic system of detailed enactments, sharia designates primarily – to quote Ramadan again – 'the expression of the universal principles of Islam [and] the framework and the thinking that makes for their actualization in human history' (32). Universal principles: as any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be 'actualized', not a ready-made system. If shar' designates the essence of the revealed Law, sharia is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur'an and Sunna and in the hadith recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as 'the' sharia. And when certain states impose what they refer to as sharia or when certain Muslim activists demand its recognition alongside secular jurisdictions, they are usually referring not to a universal and fixed code established once for all but to some particular concretisation of it at the hands of a tradition of jurists. In the hands of contemporary legal traditionalists, this means simply that the application of sharia must be governed by the judgements of representatives of the classical schools of legal interpretation. But there are a good many voices arguing for an extension of the liberty of ijtihad – basically reasoning from first principles rather than simply the collation of traditional judgements (see for example Louis Gardet, 'Un prealable aux questions soulevees par les droits de l'homme: l'actualisation de la Loi religieuse musulmane aujourd'hui', Islamochristiana 9, 1983, 1-12, and Abdullah Saeed, 'Trends in Contemporary Islam: a Preliminary Attempt at a Classification', The Muslim World, 97:3, 2007, 395-404, esp. 401-2).
Thus, in contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law. On the one hand, sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God; on the other, it is to some extent unfinished business so far as codified and precise provisions are concerned. To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system. In a discussion based on a paper from Mona Siddiqui at a conference last year at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, the point was made by one or two Muslim scholars that an excessively narrow understanding sharia as simply codified rules can have the effect of actually undermining the universal claims of the Qur'an.
But while such universal claims are not open for renegotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the ummaSharia is not, in that sense, intrinsically to do with any demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims. Both historically and in the contemporary context, Muslim states have acknowledged that membership of the umma is not coterminous with membership in a particular political society: in modern times, the clearest articulation of this was in the foundation of the Pakistani state under Jinnah; but other examples (Morocco, Jordan) could be cited of societies where there is a concept of citizenship that is not identical with belonging to the umma. Such societies, while not compromising or weakening the possibility of unqualified belief in the authority and universality of sharia, or even the privileged status of Islam in a nation, recognise that there can be no guarantee that the state is religiously homogeneous and that the relationships in which the individual stands and which define him or her are not exclusively with other Muslims. There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be. And this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.
It is true that this account would be hotly contested by some committed Islamic primitivists, by followers of Sayyid Qutb and similar polemicists; but it is fair to say that the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise this degree of political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity. In this sense, while (as I have said) we are not talking about two rival systems on the same level, there is some community of understanding between Islamic social thinking and the categories we might turn to in the non-Muslim world for the understanding of law in the most general context. There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a 'covenant' between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity. There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice. As I have maintained in several other contexts, this is a very unsatisfactory account of political reality in modern societies; but it is also a problematic basis for thinking of the legal category of citizenship and the nature of human interdependence. Maleiha Malik, following Alasdair MacIntyre, argues in an essay on 'Faith and the State of Jurisprudence' (Faith in Law: Essays in Legal Theory, ed. Peter Oliver, Sionaidh Douglas Scott and Victor Tadros, 2000, pp.129-49) that there is a risk of assuming that 'mainstreram' jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in. If that is the assumption, 'the appropriate temporal unit for analysis tends to be the basic action. Instead of concentrating on the history of the individual or the origins of the social practice which provides the context within which the act is performed, conduct tends to be studied as an isolated and one-off act' (139-40). And another essay in the same collection, Anthony Bradney's 'Faced by Faith' (89-105) offers some examples of legal rulings which have disregarded the account offered by religious believers of the motives for their own decisions, on the grounds that the court alone is competent to assess the coherence or even sincerity of their claims. And when courts attempt to do this on the grounds of what is 'generally acceptable' behaviour in a society, they are open, Bradney claims (102-3) to the accusation of undermining the principle of liberal pluralism by denying someone the right to speak in their own voice. The distinguished ecclesiastical lawyer, Chancellor Mark Hill, has also underlined in a number of recent papers the degree of confusion that has bedevilled recent essays in adjudicating disputes with a religious element, stressing the need for better definition of the kind of protection for religious conscience that the law intends (see particularly his essay with Russell Sandberg, 'Is Nothing Sacred? Clashing Symbols in a Secular World', Public Law 3, 2007, pp.488-506).
I have argued recently in a discussion of the moral background to legislation about incitement to religious hatred that any crime involving religious offence has to be thought about in terms of its tendency to create or reinforce a position in which a religious person or group could be gravely disadvantaged in regard to access to speaking in public in their own right: offence needs to be connected to issues of power and status, so that a powerful individual or group making derogatory or defamatory statements about a disadvantaged minority might be thought to be increasing that disadvantage. The point I am making here is similar. If the law of the land takes no account of what might be for certain agents a proper rationale for behaviour – for protest against certain unforeseen professional requirements, for instance, which would compromise religious discipline or belief – it fails in a significant way to communicate with someone involved in the legal process (or indeed to receive their communication), and so, on at least one kind of legal theory (expounded recently, for example, by R.A. Duff), fails in one of its purposes.
The implications are twofold. There is a plain procedural question – and neither Bradney nor Malik goes much beyond this – about how existing courts function and what weight is properly give to the issues we have been discussing. But there is a larger theoretical and practical issue about what it is to live under more than one jurisdiction., which takes us back to the question we began with – the role of sharia (or indeed Orthodox Jewish practice) in relation to the routine jurisdiction of the British courts. In general, when there is a robust affirmation that the law of the land should protect individuals on the grounds of their corporate religious identity and secure their freedom to fulfil religious duties, a number of queries are regularly raised. I want to look at three such difficulties briefly. They relate both to the question of whether there should be a higher level of attention to religious identity and communal rights in the practice of the law, and to the larger issue I mentioned of something like a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice.
The first objection to a higher level of public legal regard being paid to communal identity is that it leaves legal process (including ordinary disciplinary process within organisations) at the mercy of what might be called vexatious appeals to religious scruple. A recent example might be the reported refusal of a Muslim woman employed by Marks and Spencer to handle a book of Bible stories. Or we might think of the rather more serious cluster of questions around forced marriages, where again it is crucial to distinguish between cultural and strictly religious dimensions. While Bradney rightly cautions against the simple dismissal of alleged scruple by judicial authorities who have made no attempt to understand its workings in the construction of people's social identities, it should be clear also that any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription. There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group: there is already, of course, an Islamic Shari'a Council, much in demand for rulings on marital questions in the UK; and if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that 'vexatious' claims could be summarily dealt with. The secular lawyer needs to know where the potential conflict is real, legally and religiously serious, and where it is grounded in either nuisance or ignorance. There can be no blank cheques given to unexamined scruples.
The second issue, a very serious one, is that recognition of 'supplementary jurisdiction' in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women. The 'forced marriage' question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue. It is argued that the provision for the inheritance of widows under a strict application of sharia has the effect of disadvantaging them in what the majority community might regard as unacceptable ways. A legal (in fact Qur'anic) provision which in its time served very clearly to secure a widow's position at a time when this was practically unknown in the culture becomes, if taken absolutely literally, a generator of relative insecurity in a new context (see, for example, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights. Tradition and Politics, 1999, p.111). The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.
To put the question like that is already to see where an answer might lie, though it is not an answer that will remove the possibility of some conflict. If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights. This is in effect to mirror what a minority might themselves be requesting – that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land, to the common benefits of secular citizenship – or, better, to recognise that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal belonging but involving them all.
But this does not guarantee an absence of conflict. In the particular case we have mentioned, the inheritance rights of widows, it is already true that some Islamic societies have themselves proved flexible (Malaysia is a case in point). But let us take a more neuralgic matter still: what about the historic Islamic prohibition against apostasy, and the draconian penalties entailed? In a society where freedom of religion is secured by law, it is obviously impossible for any group to claim that conversion to another faith is simply disallowed or to claim the right to inflict punishment on a convert. We touch here on one of the most sensitive areas not only in thinking about legal practice but also in interfaith relations. A significant number of contemporary Islamic jurists and scholars would say that the Qur'anic pronouncements on apostasy which have been regarded as the ground for extreme penalties reflect a situation in which abandoning Islam was equivalent to adopting an active stance of violent hostility to the community, so that extreme penalties could be compared to provisions in other jurisdictions for punishing spies or traitors in wartime; but that this cannot be regarded as bearing on the conditions now existing in the world. Of course such a reading is wholly unacceptable to 'primitivists' in Islam, for whom this would be an example of a rationalising strategy, a style of interpretation (ijtihad) uncontrolled by proper traditional norms. But, to use again the terminology suggested a moment ago, as soon as it is granted that – even in a dominantly Islamic society – citizens have more than one set of defining relationships under the law of the state, it becomes hard to justify enactments that take it for granted that the only mode of contact between these sets of relationships is open enmity; in which case, the appropriateness of extreme penalties for conversion is not obvious even within a fairly strict Muslim frame of reference. Conversely, where the dominant legal culture is non-Islamic, but there is a level of serious recognition of the corporate reality and rights of the umma, there can be no assumption that outside the umma the goal of any other jurisdiction is its destruction. Once again, there has to be a recognition that difference of conviction is not automatically a lethal threat.
As I have said, this is a delicate and complex matter involving what is mostly a fairly muted but nonetheless real debate among Muslim scholars in various contexts. I mention it partly because of its gravity as an issue in interfaith relations and in discussions of human rights and the treatment of minorities, partly to illustrate how the recognition of what I have been calling membership in different but overlapping sets of social relationship (what others have called 'multiple affiliations') can provide a framework for thinking about these neuralgic questions of the status of women and converts. Recognising a supplementary jurisdiction cannot mean recognising a liberty to exert a sort of local monopoly in some areas. The Jewish legal theorist Ayelet Shachar, in a highly original and significant monograph on Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (2001), explores the risks of any model that ends up 'franchising' a non-state jurisdiction so as to reinforce its most problematic features and further disadvantage its weakest members: 'we must be alert', she writes, 'to the potentially injurious effects of well-meaning external protections upon different categories of group members here – effects which may unwittingly exacerbate preexisting internal power hierarchies' (113). She argues that if we are serious in trying to move away from a model that treats one jurisdiction as having a monopoly of socially defining roles and relations, we do not solve any problems by a purely uncritical endorsement of a communal legal structure which can only be avoided by deciding to leave the community altogether. We need, according to Shachar, to 'work to overcome the ultimatum of "either your culture or your rights"' (114).
So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between jurisdictions, making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction. Once again, there are no blank cheques. I shall return to some of the details of Shachar's positive proposal; but I want to move on to the third objection, which grows precisely out of the complexities of clarifying the relations between jurisdictions. Is it not both theoretically and practically mistaken to qualify our commitment to legal monopoly? So much of our thinking in the modern world, dominated by European assumptions about universal rights, rests, surely, on the basis that the law is the law; that everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so that recognition of corporate identities or, more seriously, of supplementary jurisdictions is simply incoherent if we want to preserve the great political and social advances of Western legality.
There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics. The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe. The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process. In this respect, it was in fact largely the foregrounding and confirming of what was already encoded in longstanding legal tradition, Roman and mediaeval, which had consistently affirmed the universality and primacy of law (even over the person of the monarch). But this set of considerations alone is not adequate to deal with the realities of complex societies: it is not enough to say that citizenship as an abstract form of equal access and equal accountability is either the basis or the entirety of social identity and personal motivation. Where this has been enforced, it has proved a weak vehicle for the life of a society and has often brought violent injustice in its wake (think of the various attempts to reduce citizenship to rational equality in the France of the 1790's or the China of the 1970's). Societies that are in fact ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse are societies in which identity is formed, as we have noted by different modes and contexts of belonging, 'multiple affiliation'. The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.
But this means that we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities. Perhaps it helps to see the universalist vision of law as guaranteeing equal accountability and access primarily in a negative rather than a positive sense – that is, to see it as a mechanism whereby any human participant in a society is protected against the loss of certain elementary liberties of self-determination and guaranteed the freedom to demand reasons for any actions on the part of others for actions and policies that infringe self-determination. This is a slightly more gentle or tactful way of expressing what some legal theorists will describe as the 'monopoly of legitimate violence' by the law of a state, the absolute restriction of powers of forcible restraint to those who administer statutory law. This is not to reduce society itself primarily to an uneasy alliance of self-determining individuals arguing about the degree to which their freedom is limited by one another and needing forcible restraint in a war of all against all – though that is increasingly the model which a narrowly rights-based culture fosters, producing a manically litigious atmosphere and a conviction of the inadequacy of customary ethical restraints and traditions – of what was once called 'civility'. The picture will not be unfamiliar, and there is a modern legal culture which loves to have it so. But the point of defining legal universalism as a negative thing is that it allows us to assume, as I think we should, that the important springs of moral vision in a society will be in those areas which a systematic abstract universalism regards as 'private' – in religion above all, but also in custom and habit. The role of 'secular' law is not the dissolution of these things in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.
The rule of law is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of social existence but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to human dignity as such, independent of membership in any specific human community or tradition, so that when specific communities or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity - and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of 'human dignity as such' – a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a human group. It is not to claim that specific community understandings are 'superseded' by this universal principle, rather to claim that they all need to be undergirded by it. The rule of law is – and this may sound rather counterintuitive – a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the human constitution never exists without those other determinations. Our need, as Raymond Plant has well expressed it, is for the construction of 'a moral framework which could expand outside the boundaries of particular narratives while, at the same time, respecting the narratives as the cultural contexts in which the language [of common dignity and mutually intelligible commitments to work for certain common moral priorities] is learned and taught' (Politics, Theology and History, 2001, pp.357-8).
I'd add in passing that this is arguably a place where more reflection is needed about the theology of law; if my analysis is right, the sort of foundation I have sketched for a universal principle of legal right requires both a certain valuation of the human as such and a conviction that the human subject is always endowed with some degree of freedom over against any and every actual system of human social life; both of these things are historically rooted in Christian theology, even when they have acquired a life of their own in isolation from that theology. It never does any harm to be reminded that without certain themes consistently and strongly emphasised by the 'Abrahamic' faiths, themes to do with the unconditional possibility for every human subject to live in conscious relation with God and in free and constructive collaboration with others, there is no guarantee that a 'universalist' account of human dignity would ever have seemed plausible or even emerged with clarity. Slave societies and assumptions about innate racial superiority are as widespread a feature as any in human history (and they have persistently infected even Abrahamic communities, which is perhaps why the Enlightenment was a necessary wake-up call to religion...).
But to return to our main theme: I have been arguing that a defence of an unqualified secular legal monopoly in terms of the need for a universalist doctrine of human right or dignity is to misunderstand the circumstances in which that doctrine emerged, and that the essential liberating (and religiously informed) vision it represents is not imperilled by a loosening of the monopolistic framework. At the moment, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, one of the most frequently noted problems in the law in this area is the reluctance of a dominant rights-based philosophy to acknowledge the liberty of conscientious opting-out from collaboration in procedures or practices that are in tension with the demands of particular religious groups: the assumption, in rather misleading shorthand, that if a right or liberty is granted there is a corresponding duty upon every individual to 'activate' this whenever called upon. Earlier on, I proposed that the criterion for recognising and collaborating with communal religious discipline should be connected with whether a communal jurisdiction actively interfered with liberties guaranteed by the wider society in such a way as definitively to block access to the exercise of those liberties; clearly the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right. The point has been granted in respect of medical professionals who may be asked to perform or co-operate in performing abortions – a perfectly reasonable example of the law doing what I earlier defined as its job, securing space for those aspects of human motivation and behaviour that cannot be finally determined by any corporate or social system. It is difficult to see quite why the principle cannot be extended in other areas. But it is undeniable that there is pressure from some quarters to insist that conscientious disagreement should always be overruled by a monopolistic understanding of jurisdiction.
I labour the point because what at first seems to be a somewhat narrow point about how Islamic law and Islamic identity should or might be regarded in our legal system in fact opens up a very wide range of current issues, and requires some general thinking about the character of law. It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law's function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society. Certainly, no-one is likely to suppose that a scheme allowing for supplementary jurisdiction will be simple, and the history of experiments in this direction amply illustrates the problems. But if one approaches it along the lines sketched by Shachar in the monograph quoted earlier, it might be possible to think in terms of what she calls 'transformative accommodation': a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that 'power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents' (122). This may include aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution – the main areas that have been in question where supplementary jurisdictions have been tried, with native American communities in Canada as well as with religious groups like Islamic minority communities in certain contexts. In such schemes, both jurisdictional stakeholders may need to examine the way they operate; a communal/religious nomos, to borrow Shachar's vocabulary, has to think through the risks of alienating its people by inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law, and a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity. Hence 'transformative accommodation': both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies.
It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a 'market' element, a competition for loyalty as Shachar admits. But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable. In other settings, I have spoken about the idea of 'interactive pluralism' as a political desideratum; this seems to be one manifestation of such an ideal, comparable to the arrangements that allow for shared responsibility in education: the best argument for faith schools from the point of view of any aspiration towards social harmony and understanding is that they bring communal loyalties into direct relation with the wider society and inevitably lead to mutual questioning and sometimes mutual influence towards change, without compromising the distinctiveness of the essential elements of those communal loyalties.
In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism; and what I have called legal universalism, when divorced from a serious theoretical (and, I would argue, religious) underpinning, can turn into a positivism as sterile as any other variety. If the paradoxical idea which I have sketched is true – that universal law and universal right are a way of recognising what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject – theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you can imagine, I am not going to complain about that.
© Rowan Williams 2008

Roy Scheider, Actor in ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 75
By DAVE KEHR
Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Seimer, said.
Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.
Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like “Klute” (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fonda’s New York call girl; and in William Friedkin’s “French Connection” (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackman’s marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.
Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Mr. Scheider earned his distinctive broken nose in the New Jersey Diamond Gloves Competition. He studied at Rutgers and at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where he graduated as a history major with the intention of going to law school. He served three years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. When he was discharged, he returned to Franklin and Marshall to star in a production of “Richard III.”
His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Romeo and Juliet.” While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in “The Curse of the Living Corpse” (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. “He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut,” recalled Ms. Seimer, a documentary filmmaker. “He loved to demonstrate that.”
In 1977 Mr. Scheider worked with Mr. Friedkin again in “Sorcerer,” a big-budget remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French thriller, “The Wages of Fear,” about transporting a dangerous load of nitroglycerine in South America.
Offered a leading role in “The Deer Hunter” (1979), Mr. Scheider had to turn it down in order to fulfill his contract with Universal for a sequel to “Jaws.” (The part went to Robert De Niro.)
“Jaws 2” failed to recapture the appeal of the first film, but Mr. Scheider bounced back, accepting the principal role in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical phantasmagoria of 1979, “All That Jazz.” Equipped with Mr. Fosse’s Mephistophelean beard and manic drive, Mr. Scheider’s character, Joe Gideon, gobbled amphetamines in an attempt to stage a new Broadway show while completing the editing of a film (and pursuing a parade of alluring young women) — a monumental act of self-abuse that leads to open-heart surgery. This won Mr. Scheider an Academy Award nomination in the best actor category. (Dustin Hoffman won that year, for “Kramer vs. Kramer.”)
In 1980, Mr. Scheider returned to his first love, the stage, where his performance in a production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opposite Blythe Danner and Raul Julia earned him the Drama League of New York award for distinguished performance. Although he continued to be active in films, notably in Robert Benton’s “Still of the Night” (1982) and John Badham’s action spectacular “Blue Thunder” (1983), he moved from leading men to character roles, including an American spy in Fred Schepisi’s “Russia House” (1990) and a calculating Mafia don in “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993).
One of the most memorable performances of his late career was as the sinister, wisecracking Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” (1991).
Living in Sag Harbor, Mr. Scheider continued to appear in films and lend his voice to documentaries, becoming, Ms. Seimer said, increasingly politically active. With the poet Kathy Engle, he helped to found the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, dedicated to creating an innovative, culturally diverse learning environment for local children. At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.
Besides his wife, his survivors include three children, Christian Verrier Scheider and Molly Mae Scheider, with Ms. Seimer, and Maximillia Connelly Lord, from an earlier marriage, to Cynthia Bebout; a brother, Glenn Scheider of Summit, N.J.; and two grandchildren.

From the depths of the Bush Darkness
I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older. After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.
So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver.
There was excitement, there was hope, and there were specifics. Talk of new ways to use our old industrial centers, dead and forgotten by the establishment. Talk of help with college tuition. Talk of thinking about our children and grandchildren first. He then spent time talking to and shaking hands with the crowd before going in.
I could not believe this was happening. No crowd control, no checking of bags, Barack in a potentially dangerous setting with no way for Secret Service to cover him. And he did it without hesitation. Anyone who will do this in a state with a population likely to vote for Hillary, a tiny, white, poor, lost in the back woods near Canada population, and for those foolish enough to show up "late", is someone who clearly gives a damn. He was comfortable with a chaotic situation, worked it to his advantage on the fly, and did it with grace and aplomb. Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She's right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff. Barack is the guy you follow into battle, ready to do what needs to be done to save a country in danger. This life-long Independent is ready to sign on to the Democratic party, participate in today's caucus, and follow this leader all the way to November and beyond. I exhort everyone else here to consider the same.

Miscalculations Dogged Romney From the Start
By MICHAEL LUO NY TIMES
With Mitt Romney’s campaign for president nearly in tatters, he huddled with his senior advisers on Wednesday morning, jotting notes with pen and paper, to go over his options.
By the time the meeting ended, he seemed to want to stay in the race. His campaign went ahead with voter-turnout calls in Kansas and Washington for caucuses on Saturday, and priced out what it would take to compete in primaries next week in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
His son Tagg, a senior campaign adviser, urged him to continue, but by evening, Mr. Romney had decided to pull out. He then phoned each of his sons individually to break the news.
Another son, Matt Romney, said: “I just couldn’t be anything but absolutely proud of him. I’m so proud of his fight.”
If Mr. Romney’s campaign were condensed to one of his trademark PowerPoint presentations, it would have had all the bullet points foretelling success: a multimillionaire candidate willing to relinquish his fortune to run, an unsettled Republican field and a candidate whose championing of conservative positions could motivate the party’s base.
Yet Mr. Romney’s advisers acknowledged Thursday an array of tactical missteps and miscalculations. Perhaps most significantly, they conceded that they had failed to overcome doubts about Mr. Romney’s authenticity as they sought to position him as the most electable conservative in the race, a jarring contrast to his more moderate record as governor of Massachusetts. And during the January nominating contests, as his opponents attacked his shifting on issues, polls showed his favorability ratings plummeting.
Mr. Romney spent more than $35 million of his own money trying to get himself elected, but his campaign faced challenges from the start, some from obstacles beyond his control.
Suspicions about Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith consumed his campaign early on, only to seem to fade from view. But his advisers and outside experts agree that the unease ultimately helped pave the way for Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor, to emerge from the backbench of the Republican field to win the Iowa caucuses, a central, costly goal of Mr. Romney’s strategy. Then Mr. Romney’s aides failed to anticipate the collapse of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s candidacy, leaving no one to halt Senator John McCain’s resurgence among moderate Republicans and independents.
“You had a Rudy Giuliani who wound up not being really competitive, and you had a candidate who emerged on the right,” said Carl Forti, the Romney campaign’s political director. “When a candidate emerged on the right and with no one to check McCain on the left, it gave him more room to grow, and we were in the middle.”
But in an election cycle in which authenticity is an overriding concern among voters, the perception of Mr. Romney remaking himself into a Reagan-like figure through his positioning on issues like abortion rights and gun control exposed him to biting, often mocking attacks from his rivals, who were almost universal in their scorn of him. His fellow Republicans used the flip-flopping accusations to reframe everything he did. Even in the final hours of Mr. Romney’s candidacy, Mr. McCain was running advertising suggesting Mr. Romney had shifted radically in his view of Ronald Reagan.
The authenticity issue was a problem his advisers recognized early on. As Mr. Romney was laying the groundwork for his run back in 2006, Alex Castellanos, one of the campaign’s chief media strategists, put together a 77-slide PowerPoint presentation, first reported by The Boston Globe, which listed some of Mr. Romney’s vulnerabilities, including the perception of him as an ideological panderer, as well as his Mormonism and his inexperience in military affairs.
But his advisers perceived there was a gap in the field for an electable conservative and pounced on that opportunity in recasting Mr. Romney’s image. They believed that he could overcome the more moderate views he had espoused in the past as governor of Massachusetts and while running for the Senate in 1994 against Edward M. Kennedy by being up front about his most obvious change on abortion. They also spotlighted Mr. Romney’s family, arguing he lived his values and that examining his beliefs up close would reveal that his inner convictions were conservative.
“Ultimately, we thought if we put everything into the crucible, people would say, ‘Wait, this guy is conservative, and he’s honest and straightforward,’ ” said Alex Gage, Mr. Romney’s director of strategy.
But Mr. Gage acknowledged that in Mr. Romney’s rush to beat back the attacks questioning his conservative credentials, he may have swung too far in the other direction, ultimately taking some of the most-pronounced stands against illegal immigration and social issues.
“Maybe we overcompensated,” Mr. Gage said.
Competing against far better-known candidates, the campaign’s strategy from the beginning was to “win early and often,” backed by an unprecedented early advertising strategy that resulted in the campaign spending more than $30 million on television commercials.
One of the campaign’s fears all along was that someone would outflank them on the right. Some called this imaginary candidate, “Huckafred,” a reference to Mr. Huckabee and former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee, who many perceived would be a savior to conservatives.
Mr. Huckabee’s sudden emergence in November still caught many of his advisers by surprise, although Gentry Collins, Mr. Romney’s Iowa state director, had sounded an early alarm about him.
There had been some divisions within the campaign in the fall about whether to run negative commercials or even mailings against opponents. But Mr. Romney’s advisers ultimately came to a consensus that they needed to go after Mr. Huckabee directly. The result was a blitz of “contrast” advertisements that attacked him on a range of issues.
Yet even with a textbook turnout operation in Iowa, in which the campaign exceeded its targets for getting its supporters to the polls, Mr. Huckabee beat Mr. Romney handily as evangelicals turned out to vote in record-breaking numbers.
It was at a meeting at a hotel conference room in Portsmouth, N.H., the following day, in which the campaign sought to rebound, that Mr. Romney blurted out the slogan the campaign would adopt for the rest of his run, that “Washington is broken.” He even began jotting down a “to-do” list of items that needed to get done in Washington.
The campaign seized on the utterance, and scrambled to get banners made up for the next day. When Mr. Romney showed up at an Ask Mitt Anything forum at a school in Derry, N.H., he was flanked by the “Washington is Broken” sign that would become a staple at his events.
Meanwhile, the campaign was also attacking Mr. McCain over the airwaves, something some of Mr. Romney’s advisers said afterward may not have been such a good idea, given Mr. McCain’s high favorability ratings across the board in New Hampshire.
The attack advertisements paved the way for a devastating counterattack from the McCain campaign, and what many of Mr. Romney’s advisers believe was the most effective commercial of the election cycle, a negative advertisement that cited quotes from newspaper editorials to make the case that Mr. Romney was a fake.
In the end, even though Mr. Romney’s aides contended he found his voice in New Hampshire, he wound up losing the state as well.
Brewing behind the scenes was a rancorous dispute over advertising strategy, pitting Mr. Castellanos, who had been the quarterback of Mr. Romney’s ad team, against Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, advertising men who joined the campaign in the fall from Mr. McCain’s campaign after it stalled.
Mr. Romney had always relished vigorous disagreement during meetings to ensure opposing views were heard, but after New Hampshire it was Mr. Stevens and Mr. Schriefer who won out, with Mr. Castellanos largely sidelined.
Mr. Romney rebounded with a convincing victory in Michigan, aided by the growing economic jitters gripping the country, which played nicely into his business background. He was also able to emphasize his personal roots in Michigan, where he was born and raised and his father, George, was a popular governor.
Florida would become the site of a pivotal showdown with Mr. McCain. Mr. Romney’s advisers contend he was winning the state until Mr. McCain scored the last-minute endorsements of Senator Mel Martinez and Gov. Charlie Crist.
Mr. Romney tried to shift gears again heading into the crush of states voting last Tuesday, portraying his battle with Mr. McCain as a fight for the future of the Republican Party.
The campaign chose to make its stand in California, spending $1.7 million in advertising there, as well as a host of states holding caucuses or conventions, and hoped to pick off other primary states, like Georgia or Missouri.
After Mr. Romney’s advisers retreated to their Boston headquarters on Tuesday night to watch the returns, the news got progressively worse as the evening wore on.
Nevertheless, Mr. Romney was his usual buoyant self the next day when he showed up with his wife, Ann. He huddled with his senior advisers in a conference room, where they laid out the reality that he faced almost insurmountable odds.
“We had very kind of frank discussion,” Mr. Schriefer said. “His magic number was very high, and McCain’s was very low.
But there was discussion about how Mr. Romney might be able to prevent Mr. McCain from reaching the requisite number of delegates as well and take the fight all the way to the convention.
Afterward, Mr. Romney delivered a rousing pep talk to his campaign staff on the first floor and left to mull over his decision.
That evening, Tagg Romney, who lives on the same street as his parents, came over and the elder Romney told his son he had decided to pull out, citing the importance of uniting the party around a candidate with the nation at war.
“Most of us wanted to keep battling,” Tagg Romney said.
Adam Nagourney contributed reporting.

If ever there was a deluded candidate Romney is it! He wasted 35 million on a fools quest! DAF

Candidates making Super Tuesday push
By DAVID ESPO, AP

Sen. John McCain barnstormed through a skeptical South on Saturday, campaigning for a Super Tuesday knockout in the Republican presidential race. Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton worked the West on the final weekend before primaries and caucuses in more than 20 states.
"I assume that I will get the nomination of the party," McCain told reporters, the front-runner so confident that he decided to challenge rival Mitt Romney in his home state of Massachusetts.
Romney, on the other hand, celebrated a caucus victory in Maine and told reporters he plans to do well Tuesday, "planning on getting the kind of delegates and support that shows that my effort is succeeding, and taking that across the nation. ... I am encouraged by the support which I'm seeing grow for me."
Clinton stressed pocketbook issues, the home mortgage crisis in a discussion with voters in a working class neighborhood, and health care at a noisy rally in California attended by former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Earvin "Magic" Johnson. "This is a cause that is the central passion of my public life," she said, and jabbed at Obama on the issue.
"My opponent will not commit to universal health care. I do not believe we should nominate any Democrat who will not stand here proudly today and commit to universal health care," she said in the continuation of a monthslong debate over which candidate's plan would result in wider coverage among the millions who now lack it.
Obama stopped in Idaho, where caucuses offer a mere 18 delegates on Tuesday, and he worked to reassure Westerners on two fronts.
"I've been going to the same church for more than 20 years, praising Jesus," he told an audience in Boise, warning his listeners not to believe e-mails that falsely say he is a Muslim.
In a region of the country where hunting is a way of life, he also said he has "no intention of taking away folks' guns." The Illinois senator did not mention his support for gun control legislation.
The two remaining Democratic rivals compete in primaries in 15 states as well as caucuses in seven more plus American Samoa on Tuesday, the busiest day of this or any other nominating campaign. A total of 1,681 delegates is at stake, including 370 in California alone, and the two campaigns have said they do not expect either side to emerge with a lock on the nomination.
Both have already begun turning their attention to Feb. 12 primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.
Obama told reporters on a flight from Boise to Minneapolis that he thinks the race for votes on Tuesday is getting tighter, even though the schedule seems to favor the more well-known Clinton. "I don't think that there is any doubt that we've made some progress. I don't think that there's any doubt that Senator Clinton — she's still the favorite," he said on the way to a rally that drew 20,000 people to the Target Center.
The Republican political landscape is different for McCain, Romney, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, with nine of the 21 contests on the ballot awarding delegates winner-take-all to the top vote-getter.
At a stop in Minnesota, Romney called his caucus victory Saturday in Maine, where he took little over 50 percent of a presidential preference vote, "a people's victory," noting that it came despite McCain endorsement by the state's two U.S. senators.
"It is, in my view, also an indication that conservative change is something that the American people want to see. I think you're going to see a growing movement across this country to get behind my candidacy and to propel this candidacy forward," Romney said. "I think it's a harbinger of what you're going to see on Tuesday."
Without mentioning him by name, Romney also took a jab at McCain, telling an audience in Edina: "I don't think we win the White House by getting as close to Hillary Clinton as we can be without being Hillary Clinton."
Clinton, Obama, Huckabee and Paul participated via satellite in a televised youth forum during the evening. The event was sponsored by MTV, The Associated Press and MySpace.
Each appearing separately, the Democrats pitched their college aid proposals; Huckabee, his theory of "vertical" leadership that breaks through the "horizontal" politics of left and right; and Paul, his belief that government is best when it gets out of people's way.
Clinton, noting Democrats are choosing between a female and a black candidate, said: "Whichever of us gets the nomination, we are making history," and asserted she is the best equipped to lead. Equally mindful of history, Obama said the contest is not about the race or the sex of the candidates.
If it were just about his race, he said, "I wouldn't have to answer questions. I could just show up."
McCain's rivals have essentially conceded him New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Arizona, five winner-take-all states with 251 delegates combined.
That left McCain free to spend Saturday in Huckabee's probable area of strength, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. All three are home to large numbers of evangelical voters who have been slow to swing behind the Arizona senator on his march through the early primaries and caucuses.
He worked to reassure conservatives, telling them he had a 24-year record in the Senate of "fighting for the rights of the unborn" and boasting he never asked for a single earmark or pork barrel project for his home state of Arizona.
As for the slowing economy, he said the Senate must "stop fooling around and pass the president's stimulus package .... and restore some confidence."
McCain made no mention of Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is his closest pursuer in the race, or of Huckabee, the Baptist preacher-turned-politician.
In Tennessee, McCain made a pitch for the supporters of campaign dropout Fred Thompson, a former Tennessee senator. "He is a fine man. I had the distinct pleasure and honor of sitting next, my desk right next to Fred Thompson for eight years in the United States Senate," he said. Thompson has not endorsed any of the remaining candidates.
Before campaigning in Minnesota, Romney attended the funeral of Mormon Church President Gordon B. Hinckley in Salt Lake City. Romney would be the first Mormon to sit in the White House if he wins the presidency.
Huckabee campaigned across Alabama, taking thinly veiled swipes at McCain and Romney.
"You really would like to get a president to agree with himself on some issues," he said in a reference to Romney, who has switched positions on key issues since he ran against Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts in 1994. As for McCain and the need to control federal spending, he said, "It doesn't make sense that someone would be sent to the White House who has a Washington address."
McCain emerged as the front-runner in the Republican race with a victory in the winner-take-all primary in Florida last Tuesday. In the days since, he has begun collecting endorsements from establishment figures ranging from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to former Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma.
But a significant number of conservatives remain vocally opposed to him, and Romney hopes to take advantage of their unwillingness to swing behind a longtime party maverick.
"It's going to destroy the Republican Party," radio show host Rush Limbaugh has said of a McCain nomination. Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator, has said she would prefer Clinton in the White House over McCain, adding, "I will campaign for her."
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Associated Press writers Mike Glover in California and Arizona, Glen Johnson in Utah and Minnesota, Nedra Pickler in Idaho, Philip Rawls in Alabama, Liz Sidoti in Tennessee and Philip Elliott in New York contributed to this report.