How to Beat Obama (Maybe)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Miller (Huffington Post)

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

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

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

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

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

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