Wily Obama beats McCain on strategy
Andrew Sullivan
There are two core aspects to fighting wars and winning campaigns: tactics and strategy. Tactics allow you to seize opportunities or maximise your underlying strengths. But strategy matters more for the long haul; without it, you can be brilliantly successful from day to day and yet lose your direction and focus as time goes by.
So far, in the short time that we have had a real general election campaign in the United States, one team has shown some brilliant and daring, if occasionally crude, tactical skills. The other has shown a willingness to forgo sudden decisions or short-term strikes in favour of long-term goals. John McCain has been the tactician and Barack Obama the strategist. McCain has been the risk-taker, Obama the cool conservative.
Last week revealed this contrast again. Obama’s strategic skills have been obvious for quite a while. He is perfectly prepared to hang back in a campaign, to allow attacks to pummel him and to lose news cycles or primaries to a media-centric opponent. Last autumn he refused to shift his message, even as Hillary Clinton’s massive double-digit lead did not budge for months. He focused on a plan based on delegates and caucuses, conceding that the Clintons controlled much of the rest. He took several blows – the Wright flap, the Texas and Ohio primaries, “bitter-gate” – but stuck to his game plan, which had always predicted a very narrow delegate win. And he won, slowly, carefully but unmistakably.
Over the past six weeks, against a Republican opponent this time, the pattern has repeated itself. In my view, Obama lost most of the weeks during July and August after his Berlin speech and before his convention. He allowed McCain to portray him as an inexperienced, celebrity narcissist, constructing a cult of personality on a welter of insubstantial rhetoric. The attacks worked, as they often do. They reached fever pitch last week as rumours of a “Greek temple” hosting the Obama godhead at Denver’s Invesco stadium were leaked to the press.
However, when you take the long view, you see cunning and method in Obama’s restraint and discipline. His biggest problem after the primaries was the Clinton hangover. That dynasty dominated the party he was leading and demanded respect and deference, but not too much deference, in case they seemed to overwhelm him.
Handling that was an extremely tricky task – but the convention showed how attuned Obama’s emotional intelligence is. He gave the Clintons all they could have ever wanted. In the face of deep bitterness under the surface, especially among older female voters, Obama gave Hillary a night to shine and preen and gave Bill a podium to remind the world how good he still is.
When Hillary personally suspended the roll call and called for Obama’s nomination to be approved by acclamation, she threw the weight of the party behind her rival. When Bill personally vouched for Obama’s readiness for office that night, the deal was sealed. Somehow, Obama had brought the Clintons fully on board even while passing over Hillary for the vice-presidency. He made it look much easier than it might have been. Anyone who can handle the Clintons that deftly is a very smooth operator.
Then the best speech of the week: Michelle Obama’s. Her job was to remind people that Obama is actually from a modest background, as she is. Her task was to dispel the aura of otherness hovering like a cloud of alienation over his candidacy. It was a masterful speech, conversational, patriotic, uplifting – the opposite of the angry woman the far right had tried to demonise.
Joe Biden’s speech – not the attack that was expected – was also oddly effective. Biden oozed classic Democratic culture: Irish-Catholic ethnics in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan. He was the white uncle of the promising young black guy, reassuring the punters in the pub that the kid was all right. And he is a foreign policy heavyweight, a pick which suggested that Obama was more concerned with getting the best advice in office than the most headline-grabbing vice-presidential pick for the campaign.
Then the finale: Obama’s oration to 84,000 people in a football stadium. And again: a strategic decision. After allowing the McCain campaign to portray him as an airy rhetorician, an aloof and insubstantial political version of Britney Spears, Obama gave a detailed, economically focused, traditional Democratic tub-thumper, with aggression and steel and great seriousness. Yes, it was rhetoric of a high order. But it was concrete, it appealed to middle-class Americans on liberal, Democratic grounds and showed a feistiness and aggression that some had not known was part of him. No, he is not Jimmy Carter or Adlai Stevenson. He’s from Chicago. It showed.
From day to day the convention went up and down. It had poor moments and strong ones. But when it was over and you took its full measure, you realised how shrewd it was. The Clintons? Not just defused but energised. Race? Embraced but also transcended. Experience? Biden. Celebrity? Michelle’s life story. Every box was checked. Even the danger of the Invesco stadium speech was deflated by the event itself. It did not look like a Greek temple. And the images of the people in the stands, far from making Obama look like a rock star, drew visual attention to the unconventionally apolitical aspect of Obama’s following. The people in that crowd were not just the party die-hards. They made the process seem less exclusive.
Throughout all this, the McCain campaign remained hyperactive, almost succumbing at times to attention deficit disorder. They kept making somewhat crude appeals to the Clinton camp; they kept threatening to announce the vice-presidential pick before Obama’s speech; they went overboard on the Greek temple foofaraw. And then they unveiled their counterstroke: Sarah Palin as vice-president, a woman whose educational experience is limited to a journalism degree at the University of Idaho, who has no experience or even interest in foreign policy, and who has less than two years of experience as the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, a state with a mere 700,000 residents.
It was a brilliant, attention-grabbing move. It dominated the news cycle in the wake of Obama’s well received speech on Thursday night; it appealed to women and to the Hillary voters; it rallied the pro-life base, as Palin is firmly against abortion rights and has just given birth to a Down’s syndrome child; it offered a fresh face to rail against corruption in Washington; it helped McCain’s maverick image; and it enabled McCain to present himself as the candidate of change, rather than following the Clinton strategy against Obama of representing experience.
It was another tactic – guerrilla-style, clever, nimble, deft. But, one senses, also a little desperate, a little too risky, a little unserious. America is at war with lethal enemies, its economy is teetering, its people are unsettled. And McCain gave us a 44-year-old former beauty queen as the person who could be asked to take over the White House in an emergency if anything happened to the oldest first-term president in American history. Tactically: daring. Strategically: potentially disastrous.
Game on. And, advantage: Obama.

Sen. Barack Obama's Acceptance Speech
To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation;
With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States..Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest - a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours -- Hillary Rodham Clinton. To President Clinton, who last night made the case for change as only he can make it; to Ted Kennedy, who embodies the spirit of service; and to the next Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, I thank you. I am grateful to finish this journey with one of the finest statesmen of our time, a man at ease with everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still takes home every night.
To the love of my life, our next First Lady, Michelle Obama, and to Sasha and Malia - I love you so much, and I'm so proud of all of you.
Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story - of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.
It is that promise that has always set this country apart - that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.
That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive.
We meet at one of those defining moments - a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.
Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit card bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.
These challenges are not all of government's making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.
America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.
This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.
This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.
We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.
Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land - enough! This moment - this election - is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough."
Now let there be no doubt. The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect. And next week, we'll also hear about those occasions when he's broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.
But the record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.
The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives - on health care and education and the economy - Senator McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made "great progress" under this President. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisors - the man who wrote his economic plan - was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a "mental recession," and that we've become, and I quote, "a nation of whiners."
A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.
Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?
It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.
For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America.
You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.
We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President - when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.
We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.
The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great - a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.
Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton's Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.
In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.
When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.
And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She's the one who taught me about hard work. She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she's watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.
I don't know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.
What is that promise?
It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.
That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.
That's the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now. So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am President..Change means a tax code that doesn't reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.
Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.
I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.
I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.
And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Washington's been talking about our oil addiction for the last thirty years, and John McCain has been there for twenty-six of them. In that time, he's said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Senator McCain took office.
Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.
As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy - wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced.
America, now is not the time for small plans.
Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don't have that chance. I'll invest in early childhood education. I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American - if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.
Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.
Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.
Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.
And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.
Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime - by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less - because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.
And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our "intellectual and moral strength." Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents; that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.
Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility - that's the essence of America's promise.
And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America's promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.
For while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face. When John McCain said we could just "muddle through" in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won't even go to the cave where he lives.
And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we're wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.
That's not the judgment we need. That won't keep America safe. We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.
You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice - but it is not the change we need.
We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans -- Democrats and Republicans - have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.
As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.
I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.
These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.
But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.
So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.
America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can't just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose - our sense of higher purpose. And that's what we have to restore.
We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This too is part of America's promise - the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.
I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
You make a big election about small things.
And you know what - it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.
I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree, and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington.
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.
For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.
America, this is one of those moments.
I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I've seen it. Because I've lived it. I've seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I've seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.
And I've seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they'd pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.
This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.
Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.
That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours - a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.
And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.
The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.
But what the people heard instead - people of every creed and color, from every walk of life - is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.
"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."
America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise - that American promise - and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.
Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

Adlai Stevenson's Acceptance Speech, 1952
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Convention, My Fellow Citizens.
I accept your nomination and your program.
I should have preferred to hear those words uttered by a stronger, a wiser, a better man than myself. But, after listening to the President's speech, I even feel better about myself. None of you, my friends, can wholly appreciate what is in my heart. I can only hope that you understand my words. They will be few.
I have not sought the honor you have done me. I could not seek it, because I aspired to another office, which was the full measure of my ambition, and one does not treat the highest office within the gift of the people of Illinois as an alternative or as a consolation prize.
I would not seek your nomination for the Presidency, because the burdens of that office stagger the imagination. Its potential for good or evil, now and in the years of our lives, smothers exultation and converts vanity to prayer.
I have asked the Merciful Father -- the Father of us all -- to let this cup pass from me, but from such dreaded responsibility one does not shrink in fear, in self-interest, or in false humility. So, "If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done."
That my heart has been troubled, that I have not sought this nomination, that I could not seek it in good conscience, that I would not seek it in honest self-appraisal, is not to say that I value it the less. Rather, it is that I revere the office of the Presidency of the United States. And now, my friends, that you have made your decision, I will fight to win that office with -- with all my heart and my soul. And, with your help, I have no doubt that we will win.
You have summoned me to the highest mission within the gift of any people. I could not be more proud. Better men than I were at hand for this mighty task, and I owe to you and to them every resource of mind and of strength that I possess to make your deed today a good one for our country and for our party. I am confident too, that your selection for -- of a candidate for Vice President will strengthen me and our party immeasurably in the hard, the implacable work that lies ahead of all of us.
I know you join me in gratitude and respect for the great Democrats and the leaders of our generation whose names you have considered here in this convention, whose vigor, whose character, whose devotion to the Republic we love so well have won the respect of countless Americans and have enriched our party. I shall need them; we shall need them, because I have not changed in any respect since yesterday.
Your nomination, awesome as I find it, has not enlarged my capacities, so I am profoundly grateful and emboldened by their comradeship and their fealty, and I have been deeply moved by their expressions of good will and of support. And I cannot, my friends, resist the urge to take the one opportunity that has been afforded me to pay my humble respects to a very great and good American, whom I am proud to call my kinsman, Alben Barkely of Kentucky.
Let me say, too, that I have been heartened by the conduct of this convention. You have argued and disagreed, because as Democrats you care and you cared deeply. But you have disagreed and argued without calling each other liars and thieves, without despoiling our best traditions --you have not spoiled our best traditions in any naked struggles for power.
And you have written a platform that neither equivocates, contradicts, nor evades. You have restated our party's record, its principles and its purposes, in language that none can mistake, and with a firm confidence in justice, freedom, and peace on earth that will raise the hearts and the hopes of mankind for that distant day when no one rattles a saber and no one drags a chain.
For all things I am grateful to you. But I feel no exultation, no sense of triumph. Our troubles are all ahead of us. Some will call us appeasers; others will say that we are the war party. Some will say we are reactionary; others will say that we stand for socialism. There will be inevitable -- the inevitable cries of "throw the rascals out," "it's time for a change," and so on and so on.
We'll hear all those things and many more besides. But we will hear nothing that we have not heard before. I'm not too much concerned with partisan denunciation, with epithets and abuse, because the workingman, the farmer, the thoughtful businessman, all know that they are better off than ever before, and they all know the Great Depression under the hammer blows of the Democratic party.
Nor am I afraid that the precious two-party system is in danger. Certainly the Republican party looked brutally alive a couple of weeks ago -- and I mean both Republican parties. Nor am I afraid the Democratic party is old and fat and indolent. After a hundred and fifty years, it has been old for a long time, and it will never be indolent, as long as it looks forward and not back, as long as it commands the allegiance of the young and the hopeful who dream the dreams and see the visions of a better America and a better world.
You will hear many sincere and thoughtful people express concern about the continuation of one party in power for twenty years. I don't belittle this attitude. But change for the sake of change has no absolute merit in itself. If our greatest hazard is preservation of the values of Western civilization, in our self-interest alone, if you please, it is the part -- is it the part of wisdom to change for the sake of change to a party with a split personality, to a leader, whom we all respect, but who has been called upon to minister to a hopeless case of political schizophrenia?
If the fear is corruption in official position, do you believe with Charles Evans Hughes that guild is personal and knows no party? Do you doubt the power of any political leader, if he has the will too do so, to set his own house in order without his neighbors having to burn it down?
What does concern me, in common with thinking partisans of both parties, is not just winning this election but how it is won, how well we can take advantage of this great quadrennial opportunity to debate issues sensibly and soberly. I hope and pray that we Democrats, win or lose, can campaign not as a crusade to exterminate the opposing party, as our opponents seem to prefer, but as a great opportunity to educated and elevate a people whose destiny is leadership, not alone of a rich and prosperous, contented country, as in the past, but of a world in ferment.
And, my friends even more important than winning the election is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party, the acid, final test. When the tumult and the shouting die, when the bands are gone and the lights are dimmed, there is the stark reality of responsibility in an hour of history haunted with those gaunt, grim specters of strife, dissension, and materialism at home and ruthless, inscrutable, and hostile power abroad.
The ordeal of the twentieth century, the bloodiest, most turbulent era of the whole Christian age, is far from over. Sacrifice, patience, understanding, and implacable purpose may be our lot of years to come. Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that there -- that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man -- war, poverty, and tyranny -- and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.
Let's tell them that the victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity, for it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and of mistrust which do not fall before the trumpets' blast or the politicians' imprecations or even a general's baton. The are, they are, my friends, walls that must be directly stormed by the hosts of courage, of morality, and of vision, standing shoulder to shoulder, unafraid of ugly truth, contemptuous of lies, half truths, circuses, and demagoguery.
The people are wise, wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic party is the people's party -- not the labor party, not the farmers' party, not the employers' party -- it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.
That, that, I -- I think, is our ancient mission. Where we have deserted it, we have failed. With your help, there will be no desertion now. Better we lose the election than mislead the people, and better we lose than misgovern the people. Help me to do the job in these years of darkness, of doubt, and of crisis which stretch beyond the horizon of tonight's happy vision, and we will justify our glorious past and the loyalty of silent millions who look to us for compassion, for understanding, and for honest purpose, Thus we will serve our great tradition greatly.
I ask of you all you have. I will give you all I have, even as he who came here tonight and honored me, as he has honored you, the Democratic party, by a lifetime of service and bravery that will find him an imperishable page in the history of the Republic and of the Democratic party -- President Harry S. Truman.
And finally, my friends, in this staggering task you have assigned me, I shall always try "to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God."

From The Times August 28, 2008
Americans must give the Republicans a good kicking on November 4
Anatole Kaletsky
To judge by Barack Obama's disappointing performance so far in the opinion polls, reflected in the surprisingly subdued atmosphere at the Denver convention, Democrats are suffering a bad case of “buyer's remorse”.
This distressing psychological syndrome, precipitated by the purchase of a superficially attractive, but unaffordably expensive or inadequately researched consumer item, could only have been intensified by the impressive performances of Hillary and Bill Clinton, which dominated all other events in Denver this week.
It is still possible, of course, that a virtuoso rhetorical display tonight by Senator Obama will galvanise not only his 70,000 adoring fans at the Denver Invesco Stadium, but the US electorate. It is just as likely, however, that any displays of mass hysteria tonight will put off large numbers of voters and feed Republican mockery about “Obamamania”.
If this week's convention fails to achieve the widely predicted take-off in Mr Obama's ratings, does this mean that the presidential election is all but over before it started and that the world must prepare for another four years of Republican rule? The answer is an emphatic “no”.
The Democrats' Byzantine nominating procedures and their introverted ideas about electoral “fairness” have led them to choose the less electable of their two main candidates. As a result, they have blown the chance of turning the disaster of the Bush presidency into a Roosevelt-style electoral landslide. It is tempting to conclude that the Democrats have again thrown away an easily winnable election. Tempting, but not yet right.
It is too early to write off the Democrats, despite the poor start to their campaigning, because as polling day approaches, voters will realise that this election is not about the Democrats or Mr Obama or his relationship with the Clintons. It is about the Republicans and John McCain and his relationship with George Bush.
The maxim that “oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them” is not just a journalistic cliché. It is a profound statement about democracy. Since nobody can predict the future, it is impossible for voters to base their judgments on whether a future government will be successful or an untested candidate will make a good president.
Manifestos are rarely worth the paper they are written on. This is not just because politicians are dishonest but because unexpected events intervene. Dealing with the unexpected is a much more important function of government than implementing manifestos. Some politicians who seem well prepared and have clear policy objectives, such as Gordon Brown or Richard Nixon, turn out to be hopeless leaders, while others with little experience and few policy positions, such as Ronald Reagan or Tony Blair, end up being successful. Democracy is largely a gamble about who might govern best; and the right to vote is little more than a right to roll the dice.
Why then, do millions of people the world over fight for this right? Because the most important function of democracy is not to choose good governments but to throw out bad ones. It is the right to eject bad governments that prevents tyranny, makes government serve the people, discourages corruption and keeps most democratic nations at peace most of the time.
The corollary of this observation is that politicians must always live in fear of punishment by the voters. But if voters repeatedly fail to punish incompetence or corruption or gross misjudgment, then the fear of defeat is lifted and democracy loses its disciplining power. And a country in which the dominant parties can afford to scoff at the discipline of the ballot box, is the point when democracy starts to slide into self-perpetuating oligarchy.
If the Republicans can get their candidate re-elected to the White House after all their failures of the past eight years - after the military misadventures, the geopolitical blunders, the economic mishaps and the mismanagement of natural disasters - America will be perilously close to the point when democracy ceases to perform its most essential function of disciplining political power.
It may be objected, of course, that the incompetence and misdeeds of George W. Bush should have no bearing on whether John McCain should become president. This, indeed, seems to be the basis of Senator McCain's strategy, which has emphasised his disagreements with President Bush. But even if it were not for the many similarities between the Bush and McCain platforms - aggressive militarism, contempt for international opinion, social conservatism, tax cuts for the richest voters, dogmatic faith in market forces even when, as in energy or housing, they have obviously failed - a Republican win in November would be an affront to American democracy for a deeper reason.
Whether or not Mr McCain would continue the policies of President Bush (and much of the evidence suggests that his would be a Bush presidency on steroids), he would keep in power the coalition of interests that the Republican Party represents: the energy and military-industrial lobbies, the religious conservatives, the anti-environment interests and the neoconservative think-tanks. These groups - which have gained enormous influence, both financially and intellectually, under President Bush - are as responsible for the blunders of the Bush Administration as Mr Bush himself, arguably more so, given the President's notorious lack of interest in the details of any of his own policies.
If a Republican is again elected president, these same centres of power will continue to dominate Washington. However many wars they encouraged, however high the price of oil rose, however many tax dollars were redistributed in their favour, the neoconservatives and Pentagon contractors and religious fundamentalists and oil and Wall Street lobbies would conclude that there would be no political price to pay for failure. They would be justified in concluding that there is no longer any democratic check on their ambitions.
It is only by ejecting the Republicans from the White House that American voters can send the message that they are still in charge of their country and that gross government incompetence will not go unpunished. Accountability - not personality or rhetoric or colour or age or gender - should be the overriding issue in this election. The Democrats - with their naively high-minded focus on Mr Obama's alleged achievements instead of the Bush Administration's manifest blunders - do not yet seem to have understood this. But with luck, American voters will prove less naive than the Democratic high command.

Walter Laqueur: Why Russia acted
Source: Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH blog) (8-17-08)

History News Network
Some have said that the Kremlin is unpredictable. I always found the Soviet (Russian) leadership more predictable than the White House.According to Vladimir Putin, the breakdown of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster of the 20th century. If so, one ought to undo (or reduce) the damage, and Moscow is now in a position to do so.In his view, this does not necessarily mean physical occupation. The Central Asian governments need Russian political and economic help in facing many internal problems; they have every interest to keep close relations with the Kremlin. The same is true with regard to Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Baltic republics on the other hand are weak but indigestible; military occupation is ruled out, the game is not worth the candle. Ukraine and Moldova will be more careful not to antagonize Russia following the events in Georgia.What of the “near abroad,” the former East European satellites? They too will understand, with a little applied pressure such as military threats, that they belong to the Russian sphere of influence and that it was a mistake to join NATO, which won’t be of any help to them. What of Western Europe? It would perhaps be too much to say that it does not exist, but it certainly does not amount to much. In the absence of a common European foreign and defense policy and above all a common energy policy (which could make them less dependent on Russian oil and gas supplies), one need not bother about the E.U. Their dependence on Russian energy supplies will grow as the North Sea resources will be exhausted in the not-too-distant future.What does Russian domination mean? Not the imposition of the Soviet model as in the Cold War. The present Soviet example (the petrostate) hardly lends itself for export. But the Kremlin will certainly insist on control of the foreign policy of the states in its sphere of influence, as well as (for instance) censorship and some other measures of control.Ideally, the restoration of the Russian sphere of domination (or at least influence) should proceed gradually, even slowly. It was Stalin’s mistake after World War Two that he proceeded hastily, which generated resistance, including the emergence of NATO.But Russia is under time pressure for at least three reasons. First, there is the emotional factor. The temptation to show that Russia has returned to a position of strength is very great. Which Russian leader does not want to enter history as another Peter the Great—not to mention some more recent leaders? Second, Russia’s strength rests almost entirely on its position as the world’s leading oil and gas supplier. But this will not last forever. Nor will it be possible to prevent technological progress forever—alternative sources of energy will be found.Above all, there is Russia’s demographic weakness. Its population is constantly shrinking (and becoming de-Russified). The duration of military service had to be halved because there are not enough recruits. Every fourth recruit is at present of Muslim background; in a few years it will be every third. The density of population in Asian Russia is 2.5 per square kilometer—and declining. There is no possible way to stop or reverse this process, and depopulation means inevitably the loss of wide territories—not to the Americans.In these circumstances there is a strong urge not to wait but to act now.What will be the impact of these trends on the Middle East? Ideally, it would be wise to wait with any major action in the area until Russian domination in its closer neighborhood is established. But if opportunities for a Russian return to the Middle East arise, they should [will?] be used.There are no illusions about finding allies in the region. As one of the last Tsars (Alexander III) said (and as Putin repeated after him), Russia has only two reliable allies: its army and artillery. Among the police and army ideologues there has been of late the idea to give up Panslav dreams, since the Slav brothers can be trusted even less than the rest, and to consider instead a strategic alliance with Turkic peoples. But these are largely fantasies.The main aim will be to weaken America’s position in the Middle East. In this respect, there are differences of opinion in the Kremlin. Some ex-generals have come on record to the effect that a war with America is inevitable in a perspective of 10-15 years. The influence of these radical military men should not be overrated. But it is certainly true that the belief that America is Russia’s worst and most dangerous enemy is quite common (see for instance the recent Russkaia Doktrina). The downfall of the Soviet empire is thought to be mainly if not entirely America’s fault; Washington, it is believed, is trying to hurt Russia all the time in every possible way. This paranoiac attitude is deeply rooted (in contrast to China) and it will be an uphill struggle in the years to come to persuade the Russian leadership that this is not the case.Moscow has threatened to supply greater help to Iran and Syria, which would certainly annoy America and perhaps hurt it. But Russia does not want to do this at the price of creating political and military problems for itself in the years to come. Russian distrust does not stop at its southern borders.The attack on South Ossetia provided Russia with an unique opportunity; it was motivated by a militant Georgian nationalism which failed to understand that small and weak countries, unlike big and powerful ones, are not in a position to keep separatist regions indefinitely under their control. Such opportunities will not frequently return, and other opportunities will have to be created by the Kremlin—probably by exploiting existing conflicts such as those in the Middle East. This could open the door to serious miscalculations.

High noon in duel for White House

Andrew Sullivan

London Times
The phoney war is over as the US presidential candidates square up for the most compelling contest in a generation
The eagerly anticipated text message arrived on millions of mobile phones yesterday at 3am. With it, many Americans who had registered to be updated with details of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign will have been woken to the news that Joe Biden, the Delaware senator, will be his running mate on the Democratic party’s ticket.
Many of them will have got the joke. In the brutal primaries, Hillary Clinton’s most effective ad showed a phone ringing at 3 am - and asked who Americans would trust to answer it in the Oval Office. In picking Biden at 3am, Obama was telling the world that he had chosen a No 2 able to take over in a crisis.
The announcement was merely the latest dramatic act in what has already been a draining, historic, exhilarating nine months of frantic campaigning. Yet the most important thing dawning on observers of the election, even those who have been examining it under a microscope for months, is that the real campaign starts now - and no one has a clue what is going to happen.
Stop analysing the polls of the past month indicating a surge by John McCain, the Republican nominee. If you looked at the polls at this point in the last two election cycles, you would see they were poised for real movement only now. This, after all, is when the mass of American voters tune in.
Already there are signs that the intensity of the campaigning has increased over the summer. Obama made his first move against McCain six weeks ago with his trip to the Middle East and Europe. It cemented his commander-in-chief potential, especially as the Iraqi government used the opportunity to endorse a US timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, Obama’s long-held position.
Obama’s hugely successful speech in Berlin, however, gave the McCain camp an opening for a barrage of negative adverts featuring Paris Hilton, among others, that lampooned Obama as an empty celebrity.
Then came lucky pay dirt: while Obama was on holiday, Russia invaded Georgia and McCain hogged the airwaves, reacting as if he were a hyperactive but knowledgeable president. His numbers jumped.
But the wheel turned again as he made a hilarious gaffe last week. When asked how many homes he owned, McCain stammered that he could not remember. The Democrats had a field day - it turns out that he has at least seven - and Obama showed the glint of steel that makes him a more lethal candidate than John Kerry, who stood against George W Bush four years ago.
Television adverts cascaded on top of YouTube videos, mocking McCain for being that rich and property-careless in an economy where hundreds of thousands of Americans are faced with the loss of their homes. Obama, meanwhile, kept the country on tenter-hooks by withholding until the last minute his choice of Biden as his running mate.
The campaigning has been more intense, and dirtier, than at this point in previous elections. And the sense of drama will only increase.
How do you predict the reaction to Thursday night when the first black nominee for president from a leading party gives his acceptance speech in front of nearly 75,000 people in a Den-ver sports stadium, 45 years to the day since Martin Luther King’s historic “I have a dream” speech? Does the pugnacious McCain, the former Vietnam prisoner of war, have a plan to counteract the spectacle?
This is not like most British elections, where party loyalties and messages have been honed for years and their leaders are well established. McCain has led the Republicans for just three months (and was the equivalent of a cranky back-bencher and failed leadership challenger before that). Obama has been the Democratic leader for a mere two months and was elected to the Senate only four years ago.
This is about two very different men and the American people’s relationship with each. The final run-off, especially after the gruelling primaries, has yet to take shape in people’s minds and the contrast between the candidates is still fresh. Now is when it gets really interesting.
WHEN you take a good, long, as-fresh-as-you-can look at the two men on stage, it is not that huge a mystery why the race has been within a few percentage points since Obama finally wrested the nomination from the Clinton dynasty. McCain and Obama are two evenly matched, larger-than-life figures with riveting biographies, charisma and a capacity to appeal beyond the members of their own parties. Of course the public is evenly divided about them.
In this face-off - between perhaps the most talented duo to joust for the title since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 - America sees parts of itself, past and future, and finds it understandably difficult to make a choice just yet.
Obama’s advantages are no secret. After a long period of Republican-dominated governance, the public is ready for change. Few dispute that his party will expand its majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (in that sense, a large part of this election has already been decided – America is headed left). The economy is stuttering. Large numbers of homeowners have seen the value of their properties slide, while the price of petrol and food has soared. In this climate the incumbent president’s party tends to suffer.
The degree to which Obama breaks the mould of candidates is hard to overstate, however. No black man has ever made it this far in American history, or even close. In the year Obama was born, his parents’ interracial marriage would have been illegal in many states. Obama comes from Hawaii, whence no previous president has hailed. He is a first-term senator whose entire candidacy rests on opposition to a war that has recently gone from worse to bad. He has the funniest name of any presidential candidate in history. And yet he can bring 200,000 Germans onto the streets of Berlin before he has even become president - and he was able to take on and outwit the biggest machine in American party politics, the Clintons.
Whatever else he is, he is not a familiar trope. It is no surprise that Americans have taken their time to get his measure - and many still have not.
Obama’s Americanness, however, is deep, for all the aspersions of otherness thrown at him. His DNA combines two of the more indelible American identities: heartland grit and immigrant dreams. Half his family has roots in Kansas, the heart of the heartland. His largely absent father came from a distant place, Kenya, and Obama grew up in, among other places, Indonesia. These two identities place him at the centre of a churning, yet traditionally immigrant country.
His eclectic Americanness reveals itself elsewhere as well.
He is at home in the rabble-rousing church of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and yet he is also in his element at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He plays basketball and can write like a professional novelist. He is a product of modern Chicago and premodern Indonesia - and able to note similarities in each.
It is hard to think of a man with this story existing in any other country, let alone being in a position, in his mid-forties, to become the president of it. In the context of America, though, the strangeness of Obama is not so strange. It is imbued with the possibility of self-reinvention. Nothing is more American than that. THE raw appeal of McCain as a candidate, on the other hand, is rooted in another form of Americanness. It is an older form but just as potent. McCain draws on the Scots-Irish belligerence and sense of honour that have fuelled America for centuries. A military man through and through, his uniformed pedigree goes back generations to the war of independence. McCain represents tradition in this sense, a man whose instinctive solidarity with Britain, for example, is second nature to him.
Psychologically, he is both a passionate servant of what he regards as national honour - and yet he is also an indefatigable rebel. He has rarely met an institution that he does not want to both uphold and to undercut. He broke every rule in the Naval Academy and yet it would be hard to express the love the man obviously has for the US armed services. He is a revered senator and shrewd legislator, but almost all his Senate colleagues have been at the wrong end of a barrage of expletives at one time or other.
His Vietnam war career was undistinguished. He was involved in a dreadful accident on an aircraft carrier and then got shot down early in combat. But when he was in the worst position imaginable - captured, tortured, held for years in a hellish prison - his sense of duty never wavered.
His father, by that time, was the commander of all US forces in the Vietnam theatre and McCain could have secured early release. The single, unimpeachable act of heroism that set him apart from every other PoW was his refusal to be freed ahead of his fellow soldiers. He was all-too-human in every other way: cracking under torture, giving false confessions to serve Vietnamese propaganda and attempting suicide because of the shame he felt for submitting. But beneath his incompetence and insolence there was a character and sense of duty worth not just taking seriously, but honouring.
McCain is a far more mercurial, emotional and volatile character than Obama. Despite being a generation older - he will be 72 on Friday - he is temperamentally much younger than his rival. There is a lot of Churchill in McCain: the melodrama and the sanctimony, the mawkishness and the sincerity, the big heart and sometimes faulty judgment.
In the days and weeks after 9/11, McCain was always on television, rallying the nation, almost relishing the chance to prove his staying power as others peeled away. When you hear him today talking of the great sacrifice of the surge and the genius of General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and the need to stay there indefinitely and to launch a surge in Afghanistan, you see him where he wants to be: alone, prescient, courageous.
Now recall Obama’s response to 9/11. He supported the war in Afghanistan but opposed the Iraq war. He opposed it on cerebral grounds and poured oil on choppy waters. While McCain was already in the hyperventilating vanguard of the neoconservative project (and I was right there with him), Obama was delivering the following measured caveats: “I don’t oppose all wars . . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war . . . I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world.”
Obama is politically liberal and temperamentally conservative; McCain is temperamentally liberal and politically unpredictable. Obama is cerebral; McCain is emotional. Obama is reserved, sometimes aloof; McCain is a social gadfly and seemingly terrified of being left alone and silent. Obama wins press adoration but is not close to journalists; McCain is personal friends with hacks of all sorts. Obama makes plans and executes them with sometimes chilling discipline; McCain veers from one passion to another, winging it - and somehow pulling it off.
Obama hates to lose but is happy to hang back in a fight, allowing his oppo-nent to overreach himself; McCain is just as competitive, but if he has ever pulled a rhetorical or political punch, it’s news to me.
Obama is a master of the rhetorical set-piece; McCain is happiest yakking it up at informal town hall meetings, telling corny jokes. Obama has a traditional family life, a solid marriage, two seemingly poised young daughters and, until recently, regularly attended church (something that seems to elude Republican presidents, for all their public religiosity). McCain dumped his first wife after she was disfigured in a car accident and married a pretty heiress. He has children from both marriages and an adopted child from a Bangladeshi orphanage.
Yes, Obama dabbled in drugs as a young man; but McCain was marinated in booze. McCain, in other words, has a good deal of George W Bush’s adolescence in him, without the born-again experience. Obama, for all his affect of cool, is actually quite nerdy. IT IS possible, of course, to admire both men, to like them in their very different ways and yet remain torn about which one would be best to lead America, and the world, for the next four or eight years. The difficult question Americans have to ask themselves is not who is the right man – it is who is right for now. After 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, as Russia reasserts itself, as Iran closes in on a nuclear bomb, as Pakistan threatens to crack apart and as the US economy teeters on crisis, which of these two men has the qualities needed to succeed?
If you believe the problem with America’s war on terror is that it has not been ambitious enough, or tough enough, or monumental enough, McCain is your man. If you think the United States needs to be feared more than it needs to be loved, McCain is your man. And if you think that the economic policies of the past eight years - specifically Bush’s low tax rates - are necessary for growth, McCain is the obvious choice.
In some ways he is the last hope for the Republicans that their conservative movement is rescuable. McCain reassures them that the Bush era was not a total miscalculation but merely a good idea poorly executed.
Obama represents something more radical: a return of the multilateral, international umbrella of traditional American diplomacy and alliance-building. He represents this even as America is at war with deeply destructive forces in the asymmetrical global battlefield and even as partners such as Russia and China seem uninterested in keeping the international system as a model of rational discourse. He is less likely to see a struggle between good and evil in the world than a dark but promising place where the American national interest and the elevation of human dignity in the developing world are compatible.
At home he offers a return to Clinton-era economics, with tax rates hiked on the wealthy and marginally cut for the middle class. Unlike McCain, who likes the imperial presidency put on steroids by Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-presi-dent, Obama would root the presidency more firmly within historical norms, deferring to Congress and the courts at times, determined to restore what he believes is a more traditional relationship between the executive branch and the rule of law.
Were it not for the surge’s minor rehabilitation of the Iraq war, it would be hard to see how McCain would stand a chance. The glimmers of success in Mesopotamia have fanned the dying embers of neo-conservatism - and Vladimir Putin’s Cheney-like attitude to asserting Russia’s interests has made McCain’s otherwise slightly retro 1980s combativeness seem less irrational.
For the moment McCain has leveraged understandable hesitation about Obama among those who do not yet know him well and kept himself in the race. This week Obama will be forced to redraw the narrative, redescribe this moment in history and persuade Americans that he really is the one most suited to take the country and the world forward.
He has his work cut out for him. And so does McCain. This is a Nadal-Federer, Borg-McEnroe affair. I predict five sets. And a great match.

Sen Obama's speeach introducing Senator Biden

Nineteen months ago, on a cold February day right here on the steps of the Old State Capitol, I stood before you to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America.
We started this journey with a simple belief: that the American people were better than their government in Washington - a government that has fallen prey to special interests and policies that have left working people behind. As I've travelled to towns and cities, farms and factories, front porches and fairgrounds in almost all fifty states - that belief has been strengthened. Because at this defining moment in our history - with our nation at war, and our economy in recession - we know that the American people cannot afford four more years of the same failed policies and the same old politics in Washington. We know that the time for change has come.
For months, I've searched for a leader to finish this journey alongside me, and to join in me in making Washington work for the American people. I searched for a leader who understands the rising costs confronting working people, and who will always put their dreams first. A leader who sees clearly the challenges facing America in a changing world, with our security and standing set back by eight years of a failed foreign policy. A leader who shares my vision of an open government that calls all citizens - Democrats, Republicans and Independents - to a common purpose. Above all, I searched for a leader who is ready to step in and be President.
Today, I have come back to Springfield to tell you that I've found that leader - a man with a distinguished record and a fundamental decency - Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is that rare mix - for decades, he has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn't changed him. He's an expert on foreign policy whose heart and values are rooted firmly in the middle class. He has stared down dictators and spoken out for America's cops and firefighters. He is uniquely suited to be my partner as we work to put our country back on track.
Now I could stand here and recite a list of Senator Biden's achievements, because he is one of the finest public servants of our time. But first I want to talk to you about the character of the man standing next to me.
Joe Biden's many triumphs have only come after great trial.
He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His family didn't have much money. Joe Sr. worked different jobs, from cleaning boilers to selling cars, sometimes moving in with the in-laws or working weekends to make ends meet. But he raised his family with a strong commitment to work and to family; to the Catholic faith and to the belief that in America, you can make it if you try. Those are the core values that Joe Biden has carried with him to this day. And even though Joe Sr. is not with us, I know that he is proud of Joe today.
It might be hard to believe when you hear him talk now, but as a child he had a terrible stutter. They called him "Bu-bu-Biden." But he picked himself up, worked harder than the other guy, and got elected to the Senate - a young man with a family and a seemingly limitless future.
Then tragedy struck. Joe's wife Neilia and their little girl Naomi were killed in a car accident, and their two boys were badly hurt. When Joe was sworn in as a Senator, there was no ceremony in the Capitol - instead, he was standing by his sons in the hospital room where they were recovering. He was 30 years old.
Tragedy tests us - it tests our fortitude and it tests our faith. Here's how Joe Biden responded. He never moved to Washington. Instead, night after night, week after week, year after year, he returned home to Wilmington on a lonely Amtrak train when his Senate business was done. He raised his boys - first as a single dad, then alongside his wonderful wife Jill, who works as a teacher. He had a beautiful daughter. Now his children are grown and Joe is blessed with 5grandchildren. He instilled in them such a sense of public service that his son, Beau, who is now Delaware's Attorney General, is getting ready to deploy to Iraq. And he still takes that train back to Wilmington every night. Out of the heartbreak of that unspeakable accident, he did more than become a Senator - he raised a family. That is the measure of the man standing next to me. That is the character of Joe Biden.
Years later, Senator Biden would face another brush with death when he had a brain aneurysm. On the way to the hospital, they didn't think he was going to make it. They gave him slim odds to recover. But he did. He beat it. And he came back stronger than before.
Maybe it's this resilience - this insistence on overcoming adversity - that accounts for Joe Biden's work in the Senate. Time and again, he has made a difference for the people across this country who work long hours and face long odds. This working class kid from Scranton and Wilmington has always been a friend to the underdog, and all who seek a safer and more prosperous America to live their dreams and raise their families.
Fifteen years ago, too many American communities were plagued by violence and insecurity. So Joe Biden brought Democrats and Republicans together to pass the 1994 Crime Bill, putting 100,000 cops on the streets, and starting an eight year drop in crime across the country.
For far too long, millions of women suffered abuse in the shadows. So Joe Biden wrote the Violence Against Women Act, so every woman would have a place to turn for support. The rate of domestic violence went down dramatically, and countless women got a second chance at life.
Year after year, he has been at the forefront of the fight for judges who respect the fundamental rights and liberties of the American people; college tuition that is affordable for all; equal pay for women and a rising minimum wage for all; and family leave policies that value work and family. Those are the priorities of a man whose work reflects his life and his values.
That same strength of character is at the core of his rise to become one of America's leading voices on national security.
He looked Slobodan Milosevic in the eye and called him a war criminal, and then helped shape policies that would end the killing in the Balkans and bring him to justice. He passed laws to lock down chemical weapons, and led the push to bring Europe's newest democracies into NATO. Over the last eight years, he has been a powerful critic of the catastrophic Bush-McCain foreign policy, and a voice for a new direction that takes the fight to the terrorists and ends the war in Iraq responsibly. He recently went to Georgia, where he met quietly with the President and came back with a call for aid and a tough message for Russia.
Joe Biden is what so many others pretend to be - a statesman with sound judgment who doesn't have to hide behind bluster to keep America strong.
Joe won't just make a good Vice President - he will make a great one. After decades of steady work across the aisle, I know he'll be able to help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people. And instead of secret task energy task forces stacked with Big Oil and a Vice President that twists the facts and shuts the American people out, I know that Joe Biden will give us some real straight talk.
I have seen this man work. I have sat with him as he chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and been by his side on the campaign trail. And I can tell you that Joe Biden gets it. He's that unique public servant who is at home in a bar in Cedar Rapids and the corridors of the Capitol; in the VFW hall in Concord, and at the center of an international crisis.
That's because he is still that scrappy kid from Scranton who beat the odds; the dedicated family man and committed Catholic who knows every conductor on that Amtrak train to Wilmington. That's the kind of fighter who I want by my side in the months and years to come.
That's what it's going to take to win the fight for good jobs that let people live their dreams, a tax code that rewards work instead of wealth, and health care that is affordable and accessible for every American family. That's what it's going to take to forge a new energy policy that frees us from our dependence on foreign oil and $4 gasoline at the pump, while creating new jobs and new industry. That's what it's going to take to put an end to a failed foreign policy that's based on bluster and bad judgment, so that we renew America's security and standing in the world.
We know what we're going to get from the other side. Four more years of the same out-of-touch policies that created an economic disaster at home, and a disastrous foreign policy abroad. Four more years of the same divisive politics that is all about tearing people down instead of lifting this country up.
We can't afford more of the same. I am running for President because that's a future that I don't accept for my daughters and I don't accept it for your children. It's time for the change that the American people need.
Now, with Joe Biden at my side, I am confident that we can take this country in a new direction; that we are ready to overcome the adversity of the last eight years; that we won't just win this election in November, we'll restore that fair shot at your dreams that is at the core of who Joe Biden and I are as people, and what America is as a nation. So let me introduce you to the next Vice President of the United States of America...

the big idea; If Obama Loses
Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him.

By Jacob Weisberg
What with the Bush legacy of reckless war and economic mismanagement, 2008 is a year that favors the generic Democratic candidate over the generic Republican one. Yet Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?
If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama's missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let's be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn't ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.
Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election. That warning is written all over last month's CBS/New York Times poll, which is worth examining in detail if you want a quick grasp of white America's curious sense of racial grievance. In the poll, 26 percent of whites say they have been victims of discrimination. Twenty-seven percent say too much has been made of the problems facing black people. Twenty-four percent say the country isn't ready to elect a black president. Five percent of white voters acknowledge that they, personally, would not vote for a black candidate.
Five percent surely understates the reality. In the Pennsylvania primary, one in six white voters told exit pollsters race was a factor in his or her decision. Seventy-five percent of those people voted for Clinton. You can do the math: 12 percent of the Pennsylvania primary electorate acknowledged that it didn't vote for Barack Obama in part because he is African-American. And that's what Democrats in a Northeastern(ish) state admit openly. The responses in Ohio and even New Jersey were dispiritingly similar.
Such prejudice usually comes coded in distortions about Obama and his background. To the willfully ignorant, he is a secret Muslim married to a black-power radical. Or—thank you, Geraldine Ferraro—he only got where he is because of the special treatment accorded those lucky enough to be born with African blood. Some Jews assume Obama is insufficiently supportive of Israel in the way they assume other black politicians to be. To some white voters (14 percent in the CBS/New York Times poll), Obama is someone who, as president, would favor blacks over whites. Or he is an "elitist" who cannot understand ordinary (read: white) people because he isn't one of them. Or he is charged with playing the race card, or of accusing his opponents of racism, when he has strenuously avoided doing anything of the sort. We're just not comfortable with, you know, a Hawaiian.
Then there's the overt stuff. In May, Pat Buchanan, who writes books about the European-Americans losing control of their country, ranted on MSNBC in defense of white West Virginians voting on the basis of racial solidarity. The No. 1 best-seller in America, Obama Nation by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., leeringly notes that Obama's white mother always preferred that her "mate" be "a man of color." John McCain has yet to get around to denouncing this vile book.
Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.
Choosing John McCain, in particular, would herald the construction of a bridge to the 20th century—and not necessarily the last part of it, either. McCain represents a Cold War style of nationalism that doesn't get the shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics, the centrality of soft power in a multipolar world, or the transformative nature of digital technology. This is a matter of attitude as much as age. A lot of 71-year-olds are still learning and evolving. But in 2008, being flummoxed by that newfangled doodad, the personal computer, seems like a deal-breaker. At this hinge moment in human history, McCain's approach to our gravest problems is hawkish denial. I like and respect the man, but the maverick has become an ostrich: He wants to deal with the global energy crisis by drilling and our debt crisis by cutting taxes, and he responds to security challenges from Georgia to Iran with Bush-like belligerence and pique.
You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change. To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn't just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation's historical decline.

Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.

McCain takes lead over Obama: poll
By John Whitesides (Reuters)

In a sharp turnaround, Republican John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential race and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.
McCain leads Obama among likely U.S. voters by 46 percent to 41 percent, wiping out Obama's solid 7-point advantage in July and taking his first lead in the monthly Reuters/Zogby poll.
The reversal follows a month of attacks by McCain, who has questioned Obama's experience, criticized his opposition to most new offshore oil drilling and mocked his overseas trip.
The poll was taken Thursday through Saturday as Obama wrapped up a weeklong vacation in Hawaii that ceded the political spotlight to McCain, who seized on Russia's invasion of Georgia to emphasize his foreign policy views.
"There is no doubt the campaign to discredit Obama is paying off for McCain right now," pollster John Zogby said. "This is a significant ebb for Obama."
McCain now has a 9-point edge, 49 percent to 40 percent, over Obama on the critical question of who would be the best manager of the economy -- an issue nearly half of voters said was their top concern in the November 4 presidential election.
That margin reversed Obama's 4-point edge last month on the economy over McCain, an Arizona senator and former Vietnam prisoner of war who has admitted a lack of economic expertise and shows far greater interest in foreign and military policy.
McCain has been on the offensive against Obama during the last month over energy concerns, with polls showing strong majorities supporting his call for an expansion of offshore oil drilling as gasoline prices hover near $4 a gallon.
Obama had opposed new offshore drilling, but said recently he would support a limited expansion as part of a comprehensive energy program.
That was one of several recent policy shifts for Obama, as he positions himself for the general election battle. But Zogby said the changes could be taking a toll on Obama's support, particularly among Democrats and self-described liberals.
"That hairline difference between nuance and what appears to be flip-flopping is hurting him with liberal voters," Zogby said.
Obama's support among Democrats fell 9 percentage points this month to 74 percent, while McCain has the backing of 81 percent of Republicans. Support for Obama, an Illinois senator, fell 12 percentage points among liberals, with 10 percent of liberals still undecided compared to 9 percent of conservatives.
OBAMA NEEDS TO WORK ON BASE
"Conservatives were supposed to be the bigger problem for McCain," Zogby said. "Obama still has work to do on his base. At this point McCain seems to be doing a better job with his."
The dip in support for Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, cut across demographic and ideological lines. He slipped among Catholics, born-again Christians, women, independents and younger voters. He retained the support of more than 90 percent of black voters.
"There were no wild swings, there isn't one group that is radically different than last month or even two months ago. It was just a steady decline for Obama across the board," Zogby said.
Obama's support among voters between the ages of 18 and 29, which had been one of his strengths, slipped 12 percentage points to 52 percent. McCain, who will turn 72 next week, was winning 40 percent of younger voters.
"Those are not the numbers Obama needs to win," Zogby said about Americans under 30. The 47-year-old is counting on a strong turnout among young voters, a key bloc of support during his primary battle with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.
It made little difference when independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, who are both trying to add their names to state ballots.
McCain still held a 5-point edge over Obama, 44 percent to 39 percent, when all four names were included. Barr earned 3 percent and Nader 2 percent.
Most national polls have given Obama a narrow lead over McCain throughout the summer. In the Reuters/Zogby poll, Obama had a 5-point lead in June, shortly after he clinched the Democratic nomination, and an 8-point lead on McCain in May.
The telephone poll of 1,089 likely voters had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
The poll was taken as both candidates head into their nominating conventions and the announcements of their choices of vice presidential picks. The Democratic convention begins on Monday in Denver, with the Republican convention opening the next Monday, September 1, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
(Editing by Patricia Wilson and Patricia Zengerle)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited.

After the Big Think; What Barack Obama learned on his vacation.

By John Dickerson
During Barack Obama's vacation, we got a chance to see him eat shave ice with his daughters, play golf and body surf. But did he get a chance to think? Did he reacquaint himself with the "big picture" he worried he'd lost on the campaign trail? In short, did he heed this wise advice?
The short answer is, I don't know—especially to that last question. But I have discovered a few things about what he appears to have learned while on vacation.
1. Keep it big: According to aides, Obama returned from Hawaii resolved to put even more emphasis on an earlier theme: This is a turning-point election. Big issues are at stake. By stressing the enormity of the problems the nation faces, Obama hopes to show Americans that he understands how unhappy they are with the country's direction. But he also hopes to rebuild an appetite for change, the strongest element of his brand. Only through a wholesale rethinking of the current political system—a rethinking that Obama has promised—can such large problems be solved. One of the campaign's main messages has always been "change vs. more of the same." Now we're going to hear it even more.
2. Show them how you feel: Speaking in Albuquerque, N.M., Monday about equal pay for women, Obama said that he didn't want his daughters "to ever confront a situation where they are disadvantaged because of their gender. The thought of it makes my blood boil." Really? Perhaps he watched Jack Cafferty while on vacation, because that's not the way the senator usually speaks, and you won't find that kind of language on his Web site. When he's spoken about pay equity before, he's mentioned his daughters, but he hasn't reached even a simmer.
This little rhetorical flash of passion connected with something I've been hearing from Obama aides lately. One of the challenges for the Obama campaign is showing that a man of his unusual background shares the values and concerns of "regular Americans." (Mark Penn focused on this difficulty in his famous strategy memo that argued Obama wasn't "fundamentally American.") The campaign has tried various ways to show Obama's core. They've used ads in which he's said the word "values" a lot, and they've highlighted his biography.
But talking about the temperature of his blood is a whole new way for Obama to connect with voters. He's showing that he can get emotional about the same things everybody gets emotional about. He's not just saying he's going to solve their problems, he's showing voters he's as impatient with them as they are. "The values argument is best conveyed by showing people what he'll fight for," says a senior Obama aide. If the strategy sounds familiar, that's because Hillary used it, too.
3. Stay in McCain's face: Obama has been going after John McCain since before he won the Democratic nomination. It was, for a time, part of the compulsory primary exercises to show that he was tough enough to handle the Democratic nomination. Before he left for vacation, he was hitting McCain on energy policy and, more pointedly, suggesting that McCain was trying to use his race against him.
But in the last few days he's made his attacks even sharper, emphasizing the link between McCain and Bush and portraying McCain as a poll-driven Washington insider out of touch with regular people. In perhaps the most aggressive attack on his opponent's values, he raised questions about McCain's honor. "I have never suggested, and never will, that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition," he said. "I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America's national interest. Now, it's time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same."
Barack Obama probably won't get another chance to have a big think until his next vacation. Then he'll either be resigning himself to a few more years as a book-writing senator or puzzling over how to set the course for the most powerful nation on the planet.John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent

Boundry Issues

David Remnick (The New Yorker)
On a bright September day in 1993, not long before he ended his two decades in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a rare public address in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein. Although Solzhenitsyn was energetic at the lectern, he was all but finished with his epic work as the chronicler of Soviet cruelty. With “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “Cancer Ward,” “The First Circle,” and, above all, “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn had not only exposed the secrets of Soviet oppression and ruin; he had also presaged the collapse of Communist ideology and Moscow’s empire.
But, in Vaduz, Solzhenitsyn, a principled conservative, could not join in the West’s euphoria. He was deeply aware that the costs of ideology, violence, and empire had not been paid in full. While American triumphalists were still indulging in clichés of how Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn anticipated the persistence of the old and unrepentant élites, the former Communist Party chiefs and K.G.B. officials who so easily transformed themselves into “democrats” and “businessmen”:We were recently entertained by a naïve fable of the happy arrival at the “end of history,” of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss; the ultimate global arrangement had supposedly been attained. But we all see and sense that something very different is coming, something new, and perhaps quite stern. No, tranquility does not promise to descend on our planet, and will not be granted us so easily.
Solzhenitsyn died on August 3rd, and he was buried near Turgenev in the graveyard of the Donskoi Monastery. Vladimir Putin, the former K.G.B. operative and Russia’s de-facto President, unabashed by irony, paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s service to “the ideals of freedom, justice, and humanism.” Later that week, while attending the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Putin discussed with his seatmates and fellow heads of state a non-sporting matter: he had ordered his tanks and troop trucks into South Ossetia, in the Caucasus. His Army also attacked Georgia proper, most forcefully the city of Gori, the birthplace of Iosef Dzhugashvili—better known as Stalin, who in his day helped redraw the volatile mosaic of the Caucasus.
Part of the “naïve fable” was that the collapse of the Soviet Union would peaceably defy historical precedent. Empires, blinded by hauteur and ambition, don’t often stoop to understand the complexities of their human and territorial acquisitions, and care even less about the disfigurements and time bombs they eventually leave behind. The record is long: after the Ottoman decline came the slaughter of Armenians and the drawing of senseless boundaries in the Middle East; imperial Britain left in its wake the wars in Ireland, Palestine, Nigeria, and the Indian subcontinent; the French provided a legacy of imminent violence from Algeria to Indochina.
Nor was the Soviet breakup the result of precision engineering; its dangers, similarly, were only briefly concealed. In December, 1991, at a vodka-soaked confab in a hunting lodge near the Polish border, the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine dissolved the union formed by the Bolsheviks and their tsarist predecessors, instantly depriving Mikhail Gorbachev of employment. “I well remember how a sensation of freedom and lightness suddenly came over me,” Yeltsin wrote of the event. Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, who spent the perestroika years seething with resentment as an intelligence officer in East Germany, saw it differently. Burning secret documents as the Berlin Wall fell, Putin felt abandoned by the Party and by the empire he had been brought up to protect; he later called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.”
Promises of a voluntary and effective commonwealth of liberated nations soon became a rueful memory. With the lonely exception of the Baltic states (particularly Estonia), democratic development came slowly and fitfully to the former republics, when it came at all. The Central Asian republics—the “stans”—ranged in political shape from a North Korean model in Turkmenistan to an oil autocracy in Kazakhstan run by a dynast from the Communist era. Belarus is run by a petty dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who informed a German newspaper that “not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad.” In Azerbaijan, the patriarch Heydar Aliyev, a K.G.B. general in his salad days, bequeathed the nation’s throne to his son, Ilham. And so on. The levels of autocracy, criminality, tin-pot cronyism, and resurgent nationalisms emerged on such a heroic and ruinous scale that the historian Stephen Kotkin has referred to the less fortunate republics of the former Soviet Union as “Trashcanistans.”
Moscow did not engage in large-scale violence in the post-Soviet realm until 1994, but, not surprisingly, when it did it centered on the Caucasus—for centuries a cauldron of ethnic emotion and battle. By levelling the Chechen capital, Grozny, Yeltsin reënacted the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, a politician whose early liberal intentions were overwhelmed by his commitment to a senseless and unwinnable war. Vladimir Putin has none of Yeltsin’s democratic pretensions. His focus is Russian power and its reëstablishment. And, even as the world rightly condemns his ruthless invasion of Georgia, imagining the world as he sees it is a worthwhile exercise.
Taken individually, the West’s actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union—from the inclusion of the Baltic and the Central European states in NATO to the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state—can be rationalized on strategic and moral grounds. But taken together these actions were bound to engender deep-seated feelings of national resentment among Russians, especially as, through the nineteen-nineties, they suffered an unprecedentedly rapid downward spiral. Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West, particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long history of foreign intervention, overt and covert—politics by other means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington? That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.
There is little doubt that the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, provided Putin with his long-awaited casus belli when he ordered the shelling of South Ossetia, on August 7th. But Putin’s war, of course, is not about the splendors of South Ossetia, a duchy run by the Russian secret service and criminal gangs. It is a war of demonstration. Putin is demonstrating that he is willing to use force; that he is unwilling to let Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO without exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as hypocritical, overextended, distracted, and reluctant to make good on its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia.
Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War.
Only one with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the spectacle of the leaders of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states standing by Saakashvili last week at a rally in Tbilisi. But Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners. ♦

From Andrew Sullivan

AFTER THE COLD WAR

I've made this point before, but a reader puts it more succinctly:
You should not be surprised by the reactions you report to the Russia-Georgia conflict. I still think a part of you believes (or hopes) that the many of the people you write about are conservatives in any recognizable sense of that hallowed word. But they are not what Burke or Santayana or Oakeshott would recognize as fellows. They are brute nationalists and defenders of their own power positions.
That position is augmented by a Manichean sense of the world that is underpinned by a crude and mistaken version of Christianity. What is truly sad is that so many highly educated people are willing to cast a veil over their naked aggression and self interest and call it a coherent philosophy. I know, from your writings, that you realize this; however, there seems to be a part of you that is still stunned by the last 10 years.
No shit, Sherlock. One of the good things about having a blog that has published almost daily for almost a decade is that one's own evolution and zig-zags through a period of history are exposed to the glare of day. It isn't pretty at times - especially when one is not fixed to a set ideology which allows you to plug the events of any given day into a pre-existing template. And especially when you're as passionate as I can be on any given day after a strong cup of coffee.
And so my support for what looked like a reasonable, moderate, inclusive, tax-cutting, realist in 2000 became moot on 9/11. At first the decision to take out the Taliban and to squeeze Saddam to prevent WMDs getting to Jihadists seemed exactly right. Defending the West from theocratic mass murderers with terrifying technology was vital - as long as we understood we were defending the West's core values: freedom of speech and religion, self-determination, secular government and human dignity (which would require an absolute prohibition on torture). Trusting the administration on WMDs, I supported a US-UN effort to force Saddam's disarmament, and if that failed, was perfectly prepared to see the West go to war to forestall a threat and remove a dictator. The rest is archives. I'm still thrilled that the Taliban were knocked for six and that Saddam is deposed and dead. Thrilled beyond belief. But not beyond reason. And two lessons were learned, one of which bears directly on this Russia-Georgia conflict.
The first was that the Bush administration's public stance and their actual one were different. The case for WMDs was much weaker than they let on in public, and at the very best was insufficient to base an invasion on. The claim that their goal was not revenge against a symbol of Arab contempt was belied by the lack of any preparation for a post-invasion phase, the allowance of chaos and mass looting in the wake of the invasion, the use of the war as a partisan bludgeon in domestic politics, and the institution of torture as the central weapon in the war. By the time of Abu Ghraib, the founding myths of the war had been brutally exposed, and many of us were reeling. These were not forgivable errors of the kind that happen in any war; they were evidence of bad faith in going to war, criminal negligence in conducting it, and betrayal of core values in conceiving of it. We saw with our own eyes the actual nature of the torture policy and the extent of the chaos. Since then, we've been trying to rescue the invasion, botched in practical terms and undermined in moral ones. Thanks to Iraqis' own natural power-balancing, the stabilization of the country by mass ethnic cleansing, brutal over-reach by al Qaeda, miscalculations by the Sadrite opposition, and brilliant counter-insurgency tactics by Petraeus, we have somehow been able to craft an opening to extricate ourselves from there without too much damage going forward. That's a huge achievement, and Petraeus deserves all the praise he has received. So do Gates and even Bush after 2006, even though so much had been squandered by then.
So we can leave, right? Now the other shoe drops. No, we don't want to leave. If we can turn Iraq into a pliant, non-despotic state, we should be able to keep troops there indefinitely, and use Iraq as a critical base in the Middle East to control oil, allegedly protect Israel, and pressure Iran. We can add more troops to Afghanistan, turning that vast region into a zone for American and allied soldiers in another counter-insurgency operation in an ungovernable region. And now, we have a border dispute in the Caucasus, with Russia flexing its muscles against a young democracy with an impetuous leader, and, again, in the eyes of McCain and Bush and Lieberman, it requires even more American commitment. Put all these things together and you can see that, for some, the end of the Cold War was not a golden opportunity to set up an international security structure that helped channel and constrain the hyper-power in ways that advance our interests while avoiding classic counter-balancing from emerging powers.
The end of the Cold War was an opportunity to create a new one. For some, we now realize, the Cold War was not about democratic values versus totalitarianism, in the Kirkpatrick formulation. It was about American hegemony against any rival power, totalitarian or not, globally expansionist or not. The end of Communism was, for some, a problem. It removed a key rationale for military power. China was the first object of demonization, in the first months of the Bush administration; then - defensibly - Islamism; then Iran, Iraq and NoKo; now, Russia. Islamism may well be seen as a rival to Communism in ideological terms, and worthy of a new Cold War of sorts. But we also learned fast enough that its asymmetrical dispersal across the world made traditional warfare, as in the Cold War, irrelevant, even counter-productive. But we still put a militarist template on it in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it remains an over-arching defense of more traditional hegemonic actions - largely centered on oil supplies - in the Middle East. You can absolutely understand and defend a military state-centered response to 9/11 at the time. But we have surely learned the limits of its potential - indeed the further damage it can do.
McCain is very, very comfortable in this situation. It speaks his language. A thoroughly twentieth-century figure, he lives and breathes war and conflict as a state of being. For him, it is always 1938 somewhere; America's duty is to control, occupy or intervene wherever any rival seeks influence and any group does not share our alleged values. And so American power must be brought to bear in Georgia and Iraq and Iran and Burma and Darfur and Bosnia and anyplace else where American interests are threatened or democratic allies seek help. And for militarist American exceptionalists, this all makes sense. This is the higher purpose McCain lives for: the glory of liberation, the thrill of conquest, the adoration of the soldier, the defeat of evil.
But for conservatives whose goal is peace, not war; who are quite comfortable balancing global power with other great powers such as Russia, China, India and Europe rather than demanding an expanding American hegemony; who believe that defense means defense, not a proactive preference for war; who see war and control of other countries as something distasteful if it goes beyond pragmatic self-interest; those conservatives do not agree. For me, for example, the 1990s were a golden age. I missed none of the infirm glories of the end of Communism. It was fantastic not to have the West rallying to fight or living with existential threat or on the edge of ideological conflict. 9/11 indeed changed that - but the threat, we have discovered, is not something Cold War tactics can blunt. It does require police work, and strong alliances, and much better human intelligence, and better surveillance and smarter border control. Compared with these, the invasion of Iraq remains at best a wash in the terror war. We created terrorists that we subsequently had to fight, putting us in the awful position of recreating the dynamics of the war on drugs in the war in terror.
Where does thus leave us? If the reaction to the last week is any indicator, Americans are still viscerally committed to the kind of Cold War dynamics we once had a chance to leave behind. The Republican party especially thrives on such conflict, enabling it to dominate domestic politics with appeals to bravado and patriotism and empire. Meanwhile, America's fiscal standing continues to slide down and down; its military consumes more and more resources; dependence on foreign oil does not prompt us to find alternative energy resources as an urgent national security matter, but to face off against Petro-powers, demonize oil companies, offer gas tax gimmicks, and occupy dysfunctional regions in far away countries because our addiction to a substance that is wrecking the planet is too great to resist.
This is the way great powers fall. And this election presents us with a very rare chance to move in a different and more rational direction. Turning this around will be a monumental task because so many forces now conspire to push this country further and further along on this declinist, neo-imperial path. But it can be done over a generation.
Or to put it more bluntly: yes, we can. And yes, we must.

Another battle in the 1,000-year Russia-Georgia grudge match
Retaking Ossetia is just one part of Russia's campaign to reassert dominance over the Caucasus - and defy America
Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Russian tank columns rumbling into Georgia reveal the anger of a tiger finally swatting the mouse that has teased it for years. South Ossetia may seem as distant, trivial and complicated as the 19th-century Schleswig-Holstein question but Russia's fury is about much more than the Ossetians. The Caucasus matters greatly to the Russians for all sorts of reasons, none greater than the fact that it now also matters to us.
The troubles in Georgia are not the equivalent of an assassinated archduke in Sarajevo. But historians may well point to this little war, beside the spectacular Olympic launch of resurgent China, as the start of the twilight of America's sole world hegemony. If the new Great Game is for the oil of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the West may be in the process of losing it.
I've been visiting Georgia since the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991. I've known all three Georgian presidents since independence, and witnessed the wars and revolutions of the Caucasian tinderbox. In 1991 the chief of the Georgian partisans in the first Ossetian war, a dentist turned warlord, drove me up to villages around Tskhinvali, highlands of lusciously green beauty, where a vicious war between Georgian and Ossetian farmers was being waged with the ferocity of intimate neighbours, using comically armoured tractors instead of tanks.
My Georgian hosts leant their guns against a tree and took me to an open-air feast at a table stacked with delicacies in honour of a local boy killed that day. During the long drunken banquet I asked where the boy was buried. “He hasn't been buried,” replied my host, “he's under your feet.” Paling, I looked and there he lay, stretched out under the table, cradled with bouquets of flowers.
Central cause of the conflict is that Southern Ossetes want to unite with their counterparts in the
To understand this week's events, we must travel back a thousand years: long before Russia existed, Georgia was a Christian-warrior kingdom. The Caucasus was the natural borderland of the three great empires of the Near East: the battlefield between Orthodox Russia, the Islamic Ottomans and Persians. In 1783 the embattled King Eralke II was forced to claim the protection of Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great's partner-in-power. Between 1801 and 1810 Russia swallowed the last Georgian principalities. In 1918 Georgia enjoyed independence for three years before Stalin seized it back for Moscow.
No one understood its ethnic complexity and strategic significance like Stalin, that Georgian romantic turned Russian imperialist, who had been born in Gori, the town that has been overrun by Russian forces and where a marble temple now stands over the hut where he was born. The Ossetians who straddled the border had early sought Russian alliance, earning Georgian disdain. Hence Stalin was accused by his enemies of being an Ossetian: his father was of Ossetian descent, though long since Georgianised. Stalin drew the borders of the Soviet republics to ensure Georgia contained autonomous ethnic entities, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adzharia, through which Moscow could keep Georgia in order.
When that proud, cocky bantam, Georgia, became independent in 1991, the Russian double-headed eagle was humiliated. Ever since, Russian interference and skulduggery has bedevilled Georgia. Russia encouraged southern Ossetia to establish a statelet within Georgia, whose inept, insane first President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, had inflamed ethnic tensions. As Ossetians fought Georgians who themselves rebelled against Gamsakhurdia, I sat in his office: he was a Shakespearean scholar and quoted King Lear to me.
Gamsakhurdia was either murdered or committed suicide. In 1993, his successor Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Foreign Minister and Politburo member, lost Abkhazia in another bloody Russian-orchestrated war. But Shevardnadze won the peace. Georgia, which had longed to be part of Europe, embraced Western democracy and US friendship. Yet Shevardnadze recognised the limits of Georgian defiance, once telling me as we flew in 1993 in his plane to make peace with the Kremlin: “The destiny of Russia is reflected in the Caucasus like the rays of the sun are reflected in a drop of water.”
Old, autocratic Shevardnadze was toppled in the Rose Revolution of 2003 by an energetic and decent if impulsive US-educated lawyer, Mikhail Saakashvili, who hoped to escape Moscow for ever by joining the EU and Nato - as did Russia's huge neighbour, Ukraine. This prospect of encirclement by triumphant America infuriated Russia. Imagine if newly independent Wales cockily joined the Warsaw Pact.
Russia is no longer the spineless giant of the Nineties: Vladimir Putin's musclebound, oil-fuelled authoritarian regime has aggressively reinvigorated Russia. He had already shown his ruthless determination to master the Caucasus by crushing Chechnya. Nato in Georgia would have made that meaningless. The Kremlin has used its clients, Abkhazia and Ossetia, as Trojan Horses to ruin Tbilisi's independence - recently raising the tension by offering Russian passports to all Ossetians and testing Georgian resolve with cross-border skirmishing: the trap of a practised imperial power.
Georgia is not guiltless: most Georgians I know care little about Ossetia even though it is part of sovereign Georgia. But in order to join Nato, President Saakashvili wanted to settle Georgia's instability by reclaiming Ossetia and Abkhazia. By seizing Tskhinvali, he took one hell of a gamble that Russia wouldn't intervene. Georgia is paying a high price for this. To finish this vicious circle, Russian attacks show how badly Georgia needs EU/Nato protection, yet Georgia will never get it while embroiled in fighting.
The retaking of Ossetia is a minor part of the Russian campaign. More significant is the attack on Georgia proper, which reasserts Russia's hegemony over the Caucasus, assuages the humiliations of the past 20 years, subverts Georgian democracy - and defies and defangs American superpowerdom. The swaggering arrival of Vladimir Putin, now the Prime Minister, across the border, macho in his tight jeans and white leather jacket, shows he, not President Medvedev, remains Russia's paramount leader.
This war is really a celebration of ferocious force in the realm of international power, a dangerous precedent. The West must protest with unified resolve; Russia both despises Western hypocrisy and craves Western approval. Georgian democracy and sovereignty matter. So do our oil supplies: the West built a pipeline to bring oil from Azerbaijan and Central Asian across Georgia to Turkey, free of Russian interference.
Russia's clumsy ferocity could ignite a Caucasian tinderbox that even Moscow cannot extinguish. But faced with Western outrage, the Kremlin might toss Stalin's words back at President Bush: “How many divisions has the Pope?” None: Washington and London are not sending the 101st Airborne or the SAS.
Russia, which appears to be pushing its tanks into Georgia to overthrow its democratically elected president, has demonstrated gleefully the limits of US power and Moscow's historic destiny as regional hegemon and restored 21st-century superpower. The Empire has struck back and shaken the order of the world.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Young Stalin. His latest book is a novel, Sashenka

Obama stalls in public polling
David Paul Kuhn (Politico)
In the two months since Barack Obama captured the Democratic nomination, he has hit a ceiling in public opinion polling, proving unable to make significant gains with any segment of the national electorate.
While Obama still leads in most matchups with John McCain, the Illinois senator’s apparent stall in the polls is a sobering reminder to Democrats intoxicated with his campaign’s promises to expand the electoral map beyond the boundaries that have constrained other recent party nominees.
That gap between expectations and reality comes as Democrats enjoy the most favorable political winds since at least 1976. At least eight in ten Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track. The Republican president is historically unpopular. From stunning Democratic gains in party registration to the high levels of economic anxiety, Obama should have a healthy lead by almost every measure. Yet, in poll after poll, Obama conspicuously fails to cross the 50-percent threshold.
ABC News Polling Director Gary Langer asked, “If everything is so good for Barack Obama, why isn’t everything so good for Barack Obama?”
Obama remains ahead, depending on the national poll, by low to high single digits. The Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, which randomly interviews at least 1,000 voters each day, has recently found that Obama leads by 3 to 4 percentage points.
In the first full week of the general election, June 9-15, Obama led by between 2 and 7 percentage points. Just short of two months later, registered voters have not significantly shifted their views, as Gallup finds public opinion still fluctuating between roughly the same margins.
“What’s remarkable this summer is the stability of this race,” Gallup’s director Frank Newport said. “In a broad sense, it is similar to previous elections.”
In Gallup’s last national poll prior to the 2004 party conventions, for example, John F. Kerry led President George W. Bush 47 percent to 43 percent. In 2000, also in Gallup’s last national poll prior to the party conventions, Bush led former Vice President Al Gore 46 percent to 41 percent.
Three demographic groups have generally kept Obama ahead in the past two months: African-Americans, youth and Hispanics. But a lead based on those groups is a tenuous one. The youth vote, notorious for not meeting expectations, must turn out in significantly higher numbers than in past elections. Obama must continue to win the black vote nearly unanimously and still turn out new African-American voters. McCain must continue to underperform with Hispanics by about 10 percentage points compared to Bush in the summer of 2004.
McCain might also be said to have hit a ceiling himself. At best, he has statistically tied Obama for fleeting periods this summer.
Yet in this Democratic year, the subject that dominates chatter among pollsters is Obama’s stubbornly slim lead.
If there is a primary explanation as to why the race has remained close this summer, it is that Obama has failed to make gains overall with white voters, who still cast about three in four ballots on Election Day.
As Gore did in 2000, Obama nearly splits white women and loses white men by a large margin, according to an aggregate of polling in June and July 2008, and 2000 polling by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
Depending upon the week in June or July, by Gallup’s measure, Obama has roughly fluctuated between splitting or, at worst, trailing by about five percent with white women. In that same period, Obama has only won between 34 percent and 37 percent of white men.
In general — and with men in particular — Pew's data shows that Obama's gains with young whites compared to Gore in 2000 are offset by a weakness with older whites.
Obama also seems to have hit a ceiling with Hispanics. Latino support fluctuates between 57 percent, by the latest weekly measure, to 68 percent the week before — roughly the margin of Hispanic support that has marked the entire summer, by Gallup's measure.
What all this suggests is a general election that is much tighter than many analysts predicted and defined by far more stubborn levels of support.
As it stands, on Aug. 3 the Real Clear Politics average of national polling had 46.6 percent of the public supporting Obama, putting him narrowly ahead of McCain. Exactly two months before, on June 3, that same average had Obama at the exact same level of support — 46.6 percent.
Copyright © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC.

fighting words
The Man Who Kept On Writing
Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived as if there were such a thing as human dignity.

By Christopher Hitchens
Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.
Two words will always be indissolubly connected to the name of Alexander Isayevich: the acronym GULAG (for the initials of the Stalinist system of penitentiary camps that dotted the Soviet landscape like a pattern of hellish islands) and the terse, harsh word Zek, to describe the starved and overworked inhabitants of this archipelago of the new serfdom. In an especially vivid chapter of his anatomy of that ghastly system, Solzhenitsyn parodied Marxist-Leninist theories of self-determination to argue that the Zeks were indeed a nation unto themselves. In his electrifying first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he did in a way delineate the borders and customs of an undiscovered country with a doomed and unknown citizenry. He became an anthropologist of the totalitarian in a way not understood since David Rousset's L'Univers Concentrationnaire. If you are interested in historical irony, you might care to notice that any one chapter of Ivan Denisovich, published in Novy Mir during the Khrushchev de-Stalinization, easily surpassed in its impact any number of books and tracts that had taken "Socialist Realism" as their watchword. The whole point about "realism"—real realism—is that it needs no identifying prefix. Solzhenitsyn's work demonstrates this for all time.
To have fought his way into Hitler's East Prussia as a proud Red Army soldier in the harshest war on record, to have been arrested and incarcerated for a chance indiscretion, to have served a full sentence of servitude and been released on the very day that Stalin died, and then to have developed cancer and known the whole rigor and misery of a Soviet-era isolation hospital—what could you fear after that? The bullying of Leonid Brezhnev's KGB and the hate campaigns of the hack-ridden Soviet press must have seemed like contemptible fleabites by comparison. But it seems that Solzhenitsyn did have a worry or a dread, not that he himself would be harmed but that none of his work would ever see print. Nonetheless—and this is the point to which I call your attention—he kept on writing. The Communist Party's goons could have torn it up or confiscated or burned it—as they did sometimes—but he continued putting it down on paper and keeping a bottom drawer filled for posterity. This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived "as if." Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on "as if" he were a free citizen, "as if" he had the right to study his own country's history, "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity.
And, once he succeeded in getting The Gulag Archipelago into print, even in pirate editions overseas, it became obvious that something terminal had happened to the edifice of Soviet power.
Of course, one cannot have everything. Nelson Mandela has been soft on Daniel arap Moi, Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi, and Robert Mugabe, and soft on them even when he doesn't need them anymore as temporary allies in a difficult struggle. When Solzhenitsyn came to the United States, he was turned away from the White House, on Henry Kissinger's advice, by President Gerald Ford. But, rather than denounce this Republican collusion with Brezhnev, he emptied the vials of his wrath over Americans who liked rock music. The ayatollahlike tones of his notorious Harvard lecture (as I called them at the time) turned out not to be misleading. As time went by, he metamorphosed more and more into a classic Russian Orthodox chauvinist, whose work became more wordy and propagandistic and—shall we be polite?—idiosyncratic with every passing year.
His most recent book, Two Hundred Years Together, purported to be a candid examination of the fraught condition of Russian-Jewish relations—a theme that he had found it difficult to repress in some of his earlier work. He denied that this inquiry had anything in common with the ancient Russian-nationalist dislike of the cosmopolitan (and sometimes Bolshevik-inclined) Jew, and one must give him the benefit of any doubt here. However, when taken together with his partisanship for Slobodan Milosevic and the holy Serb cause, his exaltation of the reborn (and newly state-sponsored) Russian Orthodox Church, and his late-blooming admiration of the cold-eyed Vladimir Putin, the resulting mixture of attitudes and prejudices puts one in mind more of Dostoyevsky than of Tolstoy. Having denounced "cruel" NATO behavior in the Balkans, without ever saying one word about the behavior of Russian soldiers in Chechnya, Solzhenitsyn spent some of his final days in wasteful diatribes against those Ukrainian nationalists who were, rightly or wrongly, attempting to have their own Soviet-era horrors classified as "genocide."
Dostoyevsky even at his most chauvinistic was worth a hundred Mikhail Sholokhovs or Maxim Gorkys, and Solzhenitsyn set a new standard for the courage by which a Russian author could confront the permafrost of the Russian system. "A great writer," as he put it in The First Circle, "is, so to speak, a secret government in his country." The echo of Shelley's remark about poets being the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" may or may not be deliberate. But it serves to remind us that writers, however much they may disown the idea, are nonetheless ultimately responsible for the political influence that they do choose to exert. Therein lies the germ of tragedy.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Black Sites
Book Review By ALAN BRINKLEY NY Times 3 August 2008
THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
By Jane Mayer.
Illustrated. 392 pp. Doubleday. $27.50.
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command of the national security operations of the federal government. Quickly and instinctively, he began to act in response to two longstanding beliefs: that the great dangers facing the United States justified almost any response, whether or not legal; and that the presidency needed vastly to enhance its authority, which had been unjustifiably and dangerously weakened in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years. George Bush was an eager enabler, but not often an active architect, of the government’s response to terror. His instinct was to be tough and aggressive in response to challenges, and Cheney’s belligerence fit comfortably with the president’s own inclinations.
In fairness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, who could not have imagined the worst and contemplated extraordinary efforts to prevent it? But as Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear in “The Dark Side,” a powerful, brilliantly researched and deeply unsettling book, what almost immediately came to be called the “war on terror” led quickly and inexorably to some of the most harrowing tactics ever contemplated by the United States government. The war in Iraq is the most obvious and familiar result of the heedless “toughness” of the new administration. But Mayer recounts a different, if at least equally chilling, story: the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the battle against terrorism; and the fierce, stubborn defense of torture against powerful opposition from within the administration and beyond. It is the story of how a small group of determined men and women thwarted international and American law; fought off powerful challenges from colleagues within the Justice Department, the State Department, the National Security Council and the C.I.A.; ignored or circumvented Supreme Court rulings and Congressional resolutions; and blithely dismissed a growing clamor of outrage and contempt from much of the world — all in the service of preserving their ability to use extreme forms of torture in the search for usable intelligence.
Occasional lurid revelations of abuse — most prominent among them the appalling photographs of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, made public in 2004 — have been widely denounced throughout the world. The president has expressed outrage and has insisted that the degradation was the work of a few bad apples who would be appropriately punished. But it was only the pictures that made Abu Ghraib an aberration. The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. The detainees in these scattered sites — many of them innocent — have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families and often without respite from torture for weeks and months at a time. The Bush administration’s response to the Abu Ghraib scandal was not to stop the behavior, but to try to hide it more effectively.
No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls “extraordinary rendition,” the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.
This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled — including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information. That many of the interrogations were conducted by American servicemen and -women with scant training made the likelihood of success even lower. (Some of the interrogators had no qualms about what they were doing and welcomed being unconstrained by any laws or rules. “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” one officer later told a journalist. “We didn’t have to mess with others and it was fun.” Others were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result.)
The architects of this network of secret prisons and secret torture were a small but powerful group within the Bush administration. Dick Cheney stood at the center of the effort but delegated many of its operations to others. The vice president’s counsel (and later chief of staff), David Addington, was a ruthless, bullying enforcer of the strategy, effectively derailing all challenges by claiming that everything had been mandated by the president and by dismissing all legal and moral challenges as naïve and weak. John Yoo, a law professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted an infamous memo giving legal cover to torture by simply redefining what torture was — virtually anything short of deliberate killing. George Tenet, the eager-to-please C.I.A. director; William Haynes, the militant general counsel to the Pentagon; Alberto Gonzales, the weak and pliable White House counsel who later became attorney general: all played vital roles in the creation and protection of these covert strategies. At the urging of Cheney — or his surrogate Addington — President Bush nullified the Geneva Conventions and, without publicly stating it, suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects, thus removing two important impediments to torture. Others worked to undermine the 1984 international Convention Against Torture, which, under American leadership, had provided the first explicit definition of what torture was.
Mayer provides a particularly ghoulish description of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist, who introduced the C.I.A. to a secret military program that had been designed in the 1950s to teach high-risk personnel to withstand torture. Known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), it rested on the belief that inflicting a controlled level of pain and humiliation on those who might face it in combat would help them survive the real thing if they were captured. For the C.I.A. after 2001, SERE became not a tool for resisting torture, but a template for inflicting it — a template soon adopted by interrogators in the far-flung “black sites” where detainees were imprisoned. Mitchell dismissed the arguments of F.B.I. agents that his tactics were ineffective and that he had no experience with the Middle East or Islamic terrorism. “Science is science,” he said. At one point, the F.B.I. agents collaborating with the C.I.A. on interrogation plans were so alarmed by what they were hearing that they urged their superiors to arrest Mitchell. Soon after that, they withdrew from the program altogether. “We don’t do that,” one of the F.B.I. agents said. “It’s what our enemies do!”
From the very beginning, there was strong resistance to the regime of torture. Those who challenged it included journalists like The New York Times’s James Risen and Scott Shane, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Ron Suskind (the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”), The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and Mayer herself (who scrupulously credits the work of her many colleagues). Other opponents were officials in the State Department, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., members of Congress of both parties and many career military officers, including former chiefs of staff. But as Mayer notes, few of them “had the temerity to confront Cheney, who clearly was the true source of these policies.” Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration — conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies. Waxman summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers and Defense Department officials (including the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force), all of whom supported the restoration of Geneva Convention protections. Waxman was quickly hauled up before Addington and told that his efforts constituted “an abomination.” All of these lawyers, and others, soon left the government after being deceived, bullied, thwarted and marginalized by the Cheney loyalists.
By the end of 2005, those defending the regime of torture were no longer seeking primarily to protect the search for valuable intelligence. They were fighting for its survival, in the face of considerable evidence of the failure of SERE and other programs, because they feared being prosecuted should the program be halted and exposed. Even releasing detainees whom they knew to be entirely innocent was dangerous, since once released they could talk. “People will ask where they’ve been and ‘What have you been doing with them?’” Cheney said in a White House meeting. “They’ll all get lawyers.”
There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.
The Bush administration is not, of course, the first or only regime to violate civil liberties. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all authorized or tolerated terrible violations of civil and human rights, all of them in response to great national and global crises. In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.