The Strategic Price of Israel's Gaza Assault
By Tony Karon TIME
At hot war in Gaza was not how Israel was supposed to appear on the strategic agenda of Barack Obama when he takes office in January. Its leaders had hoped to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back burner of the new Administration, which Israel hopes will make Iran's nuclear program its overriding priority in the Middle East. Instead, the deadliest attacks since Israel occupied the territory in 1967 — casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an urgent crisis demanding a response from Washington. It also highlights the failure of the Bush Administration's and Israel's policies on Hamas in Gaza.
The air strikes that began Saturday, in which Palestinians claim at least 280 people have been killed, marked a dramatic escalation of the high-stakes poker game between Israel and Hamas. Over the past seven weeks, each side has calculated the odds of outbidding the other. Hamas — and the civilian population it represents — paid a heavy price in human casualties over the weekend, but it may nonetheless retain a strategic advantage. The radical Palestinian movement that governs Gaza appears to have underestimated Israel's readiness to launch a military campaign in response to an escalation of Palestinian rocket fire onto Israel's southern towns and cities. This is, however, an Israeli election season in which polls show voters moving so quickly to the right that even the hawkish front runner, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, is losing support to parties more extreme than his own. Still, the issues that restrained Israel, and the likelihood of an escalation in the confrontation in the days and weeks ahead — and the negative regional backlash it may promote — will probably mark a diplomatic setback for Israel.
Israel launched Saturday's strike knowing that Hamas would respond with a fusillade of rockets, possibly using some of the longer-range weapons smuggled into Gaza over the past year to strike Israeli towns such as Ashdod and Ashkelon. Hamas may even activate suicide-bomber cells in East Jerusalem or the West Bank. Israel had prepared for the first possibility by deploying additional air-raid protection in towns as far as 25 miles (40 km) from the Gaza border. And it will probably follow up the air strikes with ground attacks aimed at neutralizing as much as it can of Hamas' military capability. But Hamas has good reason to expect that Israel's military campaign will be limited, and it believes it can come out ahead in the strategic equation despite the heavy cost in blood that will be paid by its own leaders and militants, as well as by Palestinian civilians.
The rocket barrage by Hamas that preceded Israel's air strikes began with the unraveling of a cease-fire, brokered by Egypt, that had been in place since June. Although Hamas said the truce expired on Dec. 19, it began firing rockets earlier, in response to an Israeli raid on Nov. 5 aimed at stopping Palestinians from tunneling under the boundary fence. Hamas needed a truce, but one on more favorable terms than what had applied in the preceding six months. During that time, Israel had largely stopped military attacks in Gaza but kept in place a crippling economic siege as part of a Bush Administration–backed campaign to pressure the Palestinian civilian population to overthrow the Hamas government it had elected in 2006.
The cease-fire proved to be untenable. "Calm for calm" — as Israelis call the agreement to simply refrain from military strikes and rocket fire — didn't work for Hamas, since it was unable to deliver economic relief to the long-suffering Palestinian civilian population. Indeed, the renewed campaign of rocket fire by Hamas was widely interpreted as a bargaining tactic aimed at securing more favorable truce terms, particularly lifting the economic siege. Israel, in the meantime, suffered from confusion in its goals. On the one hand, it wanted to destroy the Hamas government; on the other hand, it sought to coexist with the movement in order to ensure security along Israel's southern flank — hence the combination of "calm for calm" and the unrelenting economic siege. But even "calm for calm" represented what Israel saw as an unacceptable humiliation, as Hamas continued to hold the kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit as a hostage — for more than two years now — to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel's current offensive underscores the strategic quandary it faces in Gaza. By striking Gaza now, Israel has pushed the conflict with the Palestinians back to the top of the priorities facing the Obama Administration. Israel's offensive in Gaza will provoke an upsurge in hostility on the streets toward the U.S. and Israel from Lebanon to Pakistan, making life difficult for those inclined to cooperate with Washington (foremost among them, the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas) while offering an opportunity to U.S. foes to improve their own standing in Arab and Muslim public opinion. President Obama will take office with the Israeli-Palestinian issue once again clearly functioning as a driver of regional instability, demanding action — and, perhaps, new thinking — from the incoming Administration.
There are other strategic downsides to Israel's launching a military offensive in Gaza at this time. Israel has acted in response to pressures to protect its citizenry from rocket attacks, but it is probable that such attacks will continue and possibly intensify as a result. That will draw Israeli ground troops into Gaza, where they, too, will suffer casualties at the hands of Palestinian gunmen. The Palestinian civilian death toll will be far higher, which will, in turn, isolate Israel on the diplomatic front — even those Arab regimes that would have been discreetly pleased to see Hamas dealt a harsh blow (because they fear the Islamist movement is becoming a model for those challenging their own governments) will be forced to distance themselves.
The air strikes will also give President Abbas no choice but to break off peace talks with Israel, although neither the Israelis nor most Palestinians treated them as any kind of serious peace process. Still, the Israeli offensive is likely to boost Palestinian political support for Hamas and to further weaken Abbas. In the weeks preceding the strikes, Israeli security officials warned that there is no end game, because a limited campaign would be unlikely to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, and a full-blown ground invasion would find Israel forced to reoccupy the territory on a long-term basis.
Hamas knows that Israel's military intervention is unlikely to be a ground war to the finish. It will hope that, like Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006, simply surviving an Israeli onslaught will help it emerge politically victorious. Israel will hope to sufficiently bloody the movement to put it on the defensive and make its leaders prioritize their own physical survival over pressing Israel to ease the siege. And hundreds more people could die in the weeks ahead as the two sides look to win the battle of wills. The renewed confrontation is likely to strengthen the far-right forces in Israeli politics and end the largely symbolic Bush Administration–orchestrated peace talks between Israel and President Abbas.
So, when he sits down at his desk in the Oval Office in January, President Barack Obama will be confronted with compelling evidence of the failure of the Bush Administration's and Israel's policy on Hamas rule in Gaza — with an urgency to bring fresh ideas to the table.

Russia’s rapid economic decline is triggering a violent backlash

including gruesome killings by a group modeled on Hitler’s Third Reich.
Recently, workers removing garbage from a refuse bin behind a nondescript gray apartment building on Moscow’s western fringe made a horrific discovery: a plastic bag with a head in it. It took the police some time to link the head with the victim’s body, which turned up some twelve miles away, with six stab wounds. But the identity of the murderers and their motive is no mystery: they were quick to claim credit in emails sent to human rights organizations, and they attached photographic evidence of the execution style beheading.
The murderers call themselves “The Militant Group of Russian Nationalists” and borrow their imagery straight from Hitler’s Third Reich. Their agenda is simple enough: ridding the country of non-ethnic Russians, who count for more than 20 percent of the population, not taking resident foreigners into account. The photos revealed that the victim, Salekh Azizov, was one of two captives. A police probe concluded that he had been attacked by a gang of about ten youths firing pellet guns as he walked home with one of his fellow workers from a warehouse; the colleague freed himself and escaped, but Azizov was not so fortunate.
The brutal decapitation offers a glimpse into one of the grimmer aspects of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which until the recent financial crisis was awash in petro dollars but is now in severe decline. Prosperity created a situation familiar to Americans and Northern Europeans: some jobs became too menial for Russians. That includes low-paying construction jobs, housecleaning and apartment building maintenance, sanitation work—and even in the Moscow transit system. Zhana Zayonchkovskaya, the preeminent Russian scholar on labor migration, told me in a Moscow interview that between 80-90 percent of the transit system’s workforce are now “labor migrants.” “Russians don’t want these jobs,” she said. More than three million “labor migrants” now live and work in Russia, the great bulk of them from three Central Asian nations where times are hard: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
In the surreally warm December of 2008, however, Moscovite anxiety has been rising too. With the sudden, dramatic collapse in oil prices that started in the late summer, Russians recognize they are in for a rough ride. Economic fear is being fully exploited on Russia’s political stage, and not just by fringe groups like those involved in the gory decapitation.
Vladimir Putin has turned the reins of the presidency to a handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, but he has stayed on as prime minister, and the focus of politics in Russia has moved to that office. While it is fashionable in the West to portray Putin as a monochrome relic of the KGB, intent on reviving an old style of autocratic rule and perhaps even a cold war, that perspective is simplistic. “On the migration issue, Putin is a liberal reformer,” says Zayonchkovskaya. “He humanized the system serving the needs of Russian entrepreneurs for cheap labor, and by legalizing the immigrants, he improved their lot and provided them at least a measure of protection against exploitation. His approach was a success.”
Zayonchkovskaya’s analysis was echoed in interviews with human rights groups, a labor union and officials at the Tajik embassy. All had plenty of concerns about the treatment of Tajiks in an increasingly menacing environment, and all were quick to see Putin as a natural ally in efforts to cope with a xenophobic backlash. But Human Rights Watch’s Rachel Denber, who has directed a soon-to-be-released study of the Russian labor migration issue, zeroed in on the most serious complaint. “Even in the best of economic times, migrant laborers in the construction sector were subjected to unconscionable exploitation--cheated on wages on a massive scale, unprotected from abusive and unsafe labor conditions. They had nowhere to go for redress.”
But the politically attuned Putin recognizes his exposure on the issue. He has pulled back, halving the quota he previously introduced for migrants. Putin’s domestic political adversaries see an opening. In a scene remarkably reminiscent of domestic U.S. politics, reactionary forces are moving to portray Putin as a figure whose laxity on immigration issues has flooded the country with cheap labor from states on Russia’s Muslim southern periphery. As employment fears rise, so does the charge that these immigrants are taking jobs from able-bodied Russians.
The ambitious mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, is carefully positioning himself as a critic of the Putin record on labor migration. Luzhkov is one of the few figures in Russian politics who has challenged Putin and survived. In the waning days of the Yeltsin presidency, he was widely thought to be leading an effort to succeed him—though Putin quickly crushed his aspirations. But as the mayor of Russia’s center of commerce and politics, Luzhkov has a sturdy platform. (Indeed, Yeltsin himself rose to the presidency from the Moscow city hall.) Luzhkov has now put forward an initiative designed to drive millions of immigrants into an illegal twilight zone by imposing stiff new registration requirements, many of which reflect xenophobic concerns that the immigrants are a source of disease and criminality.
In this season of murder and dread, the New Year and Orthodox Christmas are descending upon Moscow. By tradition, it is a time to remember the neediest. It’s been the warmest December that Muscovites have ever experienced. Broadcasts on government controlled media outlets blame “the Americans” for the strange weather as well as the onset of economic hard times. And the sentiment against “the Americans” can be heard commonly on the street. But “the Americans” are a distant scapegoat.
This year, it seems, the winds of persecution and hatred, the dangers in periods of economic and political despair, are blowing hard.
Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national security affairs for Harper's Magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Gaza is more than a simplistic morality play
The Zionist dream of reclaiming the biblical lands is over. But Israel will still lash out when it feels threatened
Mick Hume (Times of London)
Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I'm an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinians, he replied: “I am a health worker, not a politician. I hope for peace in the end.” Many of his neighbours have welcomed the military response to rocket attacks that increased to almost 200 in the week since Hamas formally ended its ceasefire with Israel.
In Sderot, where they get a 15-second warning of an attack, the streets are lined with bomb shelters and schools are covered by concrete arches. Behind the police station the twisted remains of rockets are on show - mostly crudely made from lampposts, with some more sophisticated Iranian devices. Many observers object that the airstrikes are disproportionate: the weekend body count was one Israeli killed, more than 290 reported dead in Gaza. The Israelis will counter that those who start a war on civilians are in no position to demand restraint.
To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”
There is a tendency to reduce the Middle East to a simplistic morality play where Good battles Evil, projecting our own victim politics on to other people's complex conflicts.
The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. These attacks seem very different from 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza and other territories after the Six-Day War. The Zionist dream of Israel reclaiming the biblical lands is over. Most Israelis seem prepared to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and abandon Gaza (as they did in 2005) and most of the West Bank while bunkering down behind the big new security barriers that snake across the countryside. An insecure Israel will still lash out when it feels threatened, as it did in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza now, even though such military spasms are likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive.
Israel's initial response to rocket attacks in this year's ceasefire was to lock the door by closing the border with Gaza. When we visited the deserted Erez crossing, little food or fuel was getting through, and most of what Gazans survived on was smuggled through tunnels on the Egyptian side. At the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) base, the major commanding the shockingly young men and women soldiers admitted that it was hard “to balance the civilian needs of the Palestinian population” with the security demands of Israelis. “But we will take all steps to protect our soldiers. We just want peace and quiet. If they stop firing at us, more food will go inside.”
His PowerPoint presentation made clear that “the main aim for the IDF” was not to stop the rockets, but to rescue Gilad Schalit, a soldier held in Gaza since June 2006. That seemed a remarkably defensive priority for an army of occupation.
Peering through binoculars over the security fence at the concrete blocks of Gaza, the only sign of life was grazing sheep. Inside, more than 1.5million Palestinians live in grim conditions, governed by the Islamic movement Hamas, which won the 2006 election and last year drove out the last of its opponents in Fatah.
There is talk now of the need to uphold the integrity of the Gaza Strip as Palestinian territory. Yet Gaza is little more than a glorified refugee camp, propped up by 300 international bodies. Is this really for what the Palestinians have been fighting for so long? The other Palestinian territory is the West Bank, where Fatah remains the big movement and the Palestinian Authority sits amid the rubble in Ramallah, while the IDF watches warily from security barriers. How, one might ask, are these two stunted pseudo-statelets at the edges of Israel supposed to be united as a sovereign Palestine? There is futuristic talk of ceding a strip of territory for a tunnel or an elevated roadway to join them.
Back in the real Israel of today, all the big parties in the forthcoming elections agree on the eventual need for a two-state solution. Yet perhaps the Cold War-style stand-off around Gaza, now going through a hot phase, shows that a divisive “two-state solution” is already taking shape on the ground and in hearts and minds: a new partition where ghettoised Palestinians vent their fury at bunkered Israelis who sporadically lash out. When I was there, all sides talked not of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas but of “the lull”.
There is much debate about what impact President-elect Obama might have. Yet the history of the Middle East suggests that outside interference offers no solution. I felt like a tourist taking snapshots of somebody else's life-and-death issues, a conflict that the peoples themselves ultimately have to resolve.
Back in Sderot, Mr Avraham, the paramedic spoke of his future hopes: “I am left-wing, I believe in peace, we don't have a choice. I hope to live here side by side one day.”
Just so long, many might sadly say today, as those sides have a security barrier between them.

Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense
By BENEDICT CAREY NY Times
The man, a doctor left blind by two successive strokes, refused to take part in the experiment. He could not see anything, he said, and had no interest in navigating an obstacle course — a cluttered hallway — for the benefit of science. Why bother?
When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.
“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. A video is online at www.beatricedegelder.com/books.html.
The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.
Scientists have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes — one in each hemisphere, under the skull at the back of the head — were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice.
“It’s a very rigorously done report and the first demonstration of this in someone with apparent total absence of a striate cortex, the visual processing region,” said Dr. Richard Held, an emeritus professor of cognitive and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who with Ernst Pöppel and Douglas Frost wrote the first published account of blindsight in a person, in 1973.
The man in the new study, an African living in Switzerland at the time, suffered the two strokes in his 50s, weeks apart, and was profoundly blind by any of the usual measures. Unlike people suffering from eye injuries, or congenital blindness in which the visual system develops abnormally, his brain was otherwise healthy, as were his eyes, so he had the necessary tools to process subconscious vision. What he lacked were the circuits that cobble together a clear, conscious picture.
The research team took brain scans and magnetic resonance images to see the damage, finding no evidence of visual activity in the cortex. They also found no evidence that the patient was navigating by echolocation, the way that bats do. Both the patient, T. N., and the researcher shadowing him walked the course in silence.
The man himself was as dumbfounded as anyone that he was able to navigate the obstacle course.
“The more educated people are,” Dr. de Gelder said, “in my experience, the less likely they are to believe they have these resources that they are not aware of to avoid obstacles. And this was a very educated person.”
Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina project not only to the visual cortex — the destroyed regions in this man — but also to subcortical areas, which in T. N. were intact. These include the superior colliculus, which is crucial in eye movements and may have other sensory functions; and, probably, circuits running through the amygdala, which registers emotion.
In an earlier experiment, one of the authors of the new paper, Dr. Alan Pegna of Geneva University Hospitals, found that the same African doctor had emotional blindsight. When presented with images of fearful faces, he cringed subconsciously in the same way that almost everyone does, even though he could not consciously see the faces. The subcortical, primitive visual system apparently registers not only solid objects but also strong social signals.
Dr. Held, the M.I.T. neuroscientist, said that in lower mammals these midbrain systems appeared to play a much larger role in perception. In a study of rats published in the journal Science last Friday, researchers demonstrated that cells deep in the brain were in fact specialized to register certain qualities of the environment.
They include place cells, which fire when an animal passes a certain landmark, and head-direction cells, which track which way the face is pointing. But the new study also found strong evidence of what the scientists, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, called “border cells,” which fire when an animal is close to a wall or boundary of some kind.
All of these types of neurons, which exist in some form in humans, may too have assisted T. N. in his navigation of the obstacle course.
In time, and with practice, people with brain injuries may learn to lean more heavily on such subconscious or semiconscious systems, and perhaps even begin to construct some conscious vision from them.
“It’s not clear how sharp it would be,” Dr. Held said. “Probably a vague, low-resolution spatial sense. But it might allow them to move around more independently.”

An Election In History

(HNN)

By Morton Keller
Mr. Keller is Spector Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is the author of America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (Oxford, 2007). This article is based on his “An Election in History,” The American Interest (January/February 2009).
There is universal agreement that Obama’s victory was “historic.” But the significance of the 2008 election goes beyond the towering fact that America has elected its first African-American president. It should also be viewed in the context of a political culture that dates not from George Bush and the early 2000s, or Bill Clinton and the 1990s, but from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1930s.
Before then, American politics was defined by a century-old system dominated by boss-and-machine-run parties, supported by consistently loyal ethnic and regional voting blocs, and fueled by patronage and business contributions. This venerable party regime was gradually transformed by the great events of modern times: the Depression of the 1930s, World War Two and the Cold War, the economic, cultural, and technological changes of the second half of the twentieth century. A new political culture is now in its full maturity. Political scientist Theodore Lowi observed in 1985, “What we now have is an entirely new regime, which deserves to be called the Second Republic of the United States.”
This new regime is populist, in the sense that it is defined by a babble of voices--“public opinion” as filtered through the media, advocacy groups, and the public policy establishment; a burgeoning administrative state of bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges--that have an often contentious relationship to the two-party system. Politicians today are much more autonomous than their predecessors, less beholden to their parties when it comes to raising money and conducting campaigns. These new facts of political life contribute to the insistently ideological tone of modern American politics. Many of the participants profit more from polar confrontation than from the give-and-take of traditional party politics.
The two-party system, inescapable in a winner-take-all system that requires the largest and most durable possible coalitions, has been engaged for decades in the task of coming to terms with this populist political culture. What place does the election of 2008 occupy in this larger context?
Party leaders no longer have much voice in candidate selection. If the pros had had their way, Hilary Clinton most likely would have been the Democratic nominee. And John McCain, the bête noire of the GOP regulars, would not have been the Republican nominee.
Nor did party-defined issues dominate the election.
Early expectations were that the 2008 election would focus on Bush’s Iraq War and the terrorist threat, McCain’s age, Obama’s race and his radical past, and immigration, energy, and the environment. None of this turned out to be the case.
Instead, the red-blue cultural divide turned out to be the most persistent source of issues. It became clear that Obama could not rely on his three-legged coalition of blacks, the college young, and elite liberals. He would have to connect more effectively with the mass of voters who were not black, or young, or liberal.
McCain had the opposite problem: convincing the conservative-evangelical GOP base that he was one of (or at least with) them. His major attempt to do so was the selection of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. This produced the first (and last) outburst of real enthusiasm for his candidacy from GOP conservatives.
It cannot be said that Obama won great enthusiasm (though he got sufficient support) from Middle America. But he brilliantly reassured Hillary Democrats and Independents that he had the stature and judgment to be President. McCain, on the other hand, never managed to bridge the gulf between his conservative-evangelical Republican base and his old maverick-independent appeal. And then the financial meltdown put paid to what remained of his chances.
Money, as every schoolchild once knew, is the mother’s milk of politics. That is all the more so in the age of the populist regime, when the costs of campaigning by telephone and television, and of reaching 150 million and more voters, add enormously to outlays: an estimated $2.5 billion in the 2008 presidential campaign.
A measure of the speed with which the mechanics of fundraising is changing was the decline in 2008 of what four years before appeared to be the coming new thing in American politics: richly endowed PACs and 527s, advocacy groups not subject to McCain-Feingold contribution limits. But the money raised by 527s in the 2008 presidential election was about half their 2004 total. And although there was much talk of massive campaign spending by labor unions and advocacy groups, their totals paled into insignificance when set against the billion-plus raised by the parties’ national and congressional committees and the candidates themselves. The massive Internet-bundling operation of the Obama campaign, and Obama’s backing out of his pledge to accept federal funding, were the new new things of 2008.
As PACs and 527s declined in importance in 2008, attention shifted to the role of the mainstream media of newspapers, news magazines, and television, the entertainment/celebrity culture of Oprah and Saturday Night Live, the late-night network talk shows, and especially the Blogosphere and its cloud of bloggers and political and social web sites. It was said that in 2008 the netroots era replaced the network era, much as in the second half of the twentieth century Boss Tube (TV) replaced Boss Tweed (the party machines).
Media bias became a conspicuous issue in the campaign. Both Hillary Clinton and McCain made it a major talking point. It reached a crescendo with the gloves-off media assault on Sarah Palin, in sharp contrast to the gloves-on treatment of John Edwards’s sexual mishaps and Joe Biden’s gaffe-rigged candidacy. In good post-modernist fashion, the media had become its own story.
No doubt Obama benefited from the strong bias in his favor in the mainstream media, the Hollywood-TV entertainment industry, and the Blogosphere. But how greatly? It is doubtful that a more even-handed atmosphere would have significantly lessened his personal and message appeal, the national desire for change, and the impact of the financial meltdown. It was Obama’s organization, and not Blogosphere wannabes, who controlled the campaign. His has been called the “first true 21st century campaign” in terms of its organization, fundraising, and voter mobilization.
Obama can be expected to build upon the enthusiasm that his election unleashed among blacks and Hispanics, the college young, and the professional classes. The spontaneous demonstrations in Times Square and elsewhere after his election testify to the fact that he has a personal draw not seen since JFK.
His coalition-building may well reach beyond his core to the large, growing population in the suburbs and exurbs, especially in the South and West. Bush in 2004 won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties. Obama in 2008 won 15 of them. There is far to go; and there is much to reap. If he takes this path, it argues against the turn to the Left that his ideologically minded supporters hope for. The new voting frontier is a large, growing, diverse constituency, reminiscent of but economically and culturally different from the industrial workers and ethnic-religious minorities that FDR’s New Deal so effectively tapped.
At this point the course of events, and Obama’s response, can only be conjectured. But whether he crafts a New Deal-like political coalition with real staying power, or runs aground trying to govern from the Left in a moderate-conservative country, the fact that he is where he is assures that 2008, in its own special way, will remain an election in history.

The Real Great Depression
The depression of 1929 is the wrong model for the current economic crisis
By SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON
As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.
When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.
In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.
The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.
But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.
As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.
The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.
As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, "economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval." Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms "tramp" and "bum," both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York's Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the "Coal and Iron Police," a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.
In Central and Eastern Europe, times were even harder. Many political analysts blamed the crisis on a combination of foreign banks and Jews. Nationalistic political leaders (or agents of the Russian czar) embraced a new, sophisticated brand of anti-Semitism that proved appealing to thousands who had lost their livelihoods in the panic. Anti-Jewish pogroms followed in the 1880s, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Heartland communities large and small had found a scapegoat: aliens in their own midst.
The echoes of the past in the current problems with residential mortgages trouble me. Loans after about 2001 were issued to first-time homebuyers who signed up for adjustablerate mortgages they could likely never pay off, even in the best of times. Real-estate speculators, hoping to flip properties, overextended themselves, assuming that home prices would keep climbing. Those debts were wrapped in complex securities that mortgage companies and other entrepreneurial banks then sold to other banks; concerned about the stability of those securities, banks then bought a kind of insurance policy called a credit-derivative swap, which risk managers imagined would protect their investments. More than two million foreclosure filings — default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions — were reported in 2007. By then trillions of dollars were already invested in this credit-derivative market. Were those new financial instruments resilient enough to cover all the risk? (Answer: no.) As in 1873, a complex financial pyramid rested on a pinhead. Banks are hoarding cash. Banks that hoard cash do not make short-term loans. Businesses large and small now face a potential dearth of short-term credit to buy raw materials, ship their products, and keep goods on shelves.
If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)
The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.
In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.
Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. Among his books is Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American legend (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Making Congress Moot
By George F. Will

Washington Post
A new Capitol Visitor Center recently opened, just in time for the transformation of the Capitol building into a tomb for the antiquated idea that the legislative branch matters. The center is supposed to enhance the experience of visitors to Congress, although why there are visitors is a mystery.
Congress's marginalization was brutally underscored when, after lawmakers did not authorize $14 billion for General Motors and Chrysler, the executive branch said, in effect: Congress's opinions are mildly interesting, so we will listen very nicely -- then go out and do precisely what we want.
On Friday the president gave the two automakers access to money Congress explicitly did not authorize. More money -- up to $17.4 billion -- than had been debated, thereby calling to mind Winston Churchill on naval appropriations: "The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four: and we finally compromised on eight."
The president is dispensing money from the $700 billion Congress provided for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The unfounded assertion of a right to do this is notably brazen, given the indisputable fact that if Congress had known that TARP -- supposedly a measure for scouring "toxic" assets from financial institutions -- was to become an instrument for unconstrained industrial policy, it would not have been passed.
If TARP funds can be put to any use the executive branch fancies because TARP actually is a blank check for that branch, then the only reason no rules are being broken is that there are no rules. This lawlessness tarted up as law explains the charade of Vice President Cheney warning Republican senators that if they did not authorize the $14 billion, the GOP would again be regarded as the party of Herbert Hoover. Surely Cheney, a disparager of Congress and advocate of extravagant executive prerogatives, knew that the president considered the Senate's consent irrelevant.
Evidence that casualness about legality is inherent in big government is found in H.W. Brands's new biography "Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." FDR became president on Saturday, March 4, 1933. Banks were closed that day and the next, temporarily preventing panicked depositors from withdrawing their money. At 1 a.m. Monday, FDR ordered all banks closed for four days, hoping that the fever would break. His act may have been prudent. But was it legal? Brands writes:
"He cited a section of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act as justification. The act had never been formally repealed, but a body of legal theory held that the law, along with other wartime legislation, had expired upon the signing of the peace treaty with Germany in 1921."
FDR had asked the opinion of his as-yet-unconfirmed attorney general, Montana Sen. Thomas Walsh, who gave the answer FDR wanted. Walsh never had to defend this: He died March 2 en route to the inauguration.
The expansion of government entails an increasingly swollen executive branch and the steady enlargement of executive discretion. This inevitably means the eclipse of Congress and attenuation of the rule of law.
For decades, imperatives of wars hot and cold, and the sprawl of the regulatory state, have enlarged the executive branch at the expense of the legislative. For eight years, the Bush administration's "presidentialists" have aggressively wielded the concept of the "unitary executive" -- the theory that where the Constitution vests power in the executive, especially power over foreign affairs and war, the president is immune to legislative abridgements of his autonomy.
The administration has not, however, confined its aggrandizement of executive power to national security matters. According to former representative Mickey Edwards in his book "Reclaiming Conservatism," the president has issued "signing statements" designating 1,100 provisions of new laws -- more designations than have been made by all prior presidents combined -- that he did not consider binding on him or any other executive branch official.
Still, most of the administration's executive truculence has pertained to national security, where the case for broad prerogatives, although not as powerful as the administration supposes, is at least arguable. With the automakers, however, executive branch overreaching now extends to the essence of domestic policy -- spending -- and traduces a core constitutional principle, the separation of powers.
Most members of the House and Senate want the automakers to get the money, so they probably are pleased that the administration has disregarded Congress's institutional dignity. History, however, teaches that it is difficult for Congress to be only intermittently invertebrate.

fighting words
'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous
The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas.

By Christopher Hitchens
I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:
Money's scarce Times are hardHere's your f******Xmas card
I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?
The late Art Buchwald made himself additionally famous by reprinting a spoof Thanksgiving column that ran unchanged for many decades after its first appearance in the Herald Tribune, setting a high threshold of reader tolerance. My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.
As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events. Originally Christian, this devotional set-aside can now be joined by any other sectarian group with a plausible claim—Hanukkah or Kwanzaa—to a holy day that occurs near enough to the pagan winter solstice.
I have just flung aside my copy of the Weekly Standard, a magazine with a generally hardheaded and humorous approach to matters. It contains two seasonal articles that would probably not have made print were it not for the proximity to the said solstice. (To be fair, the same can be said of the article that you are reading, but I claim exemption under the terms of the "to hell with all that" amendment.) In the first example, the gifted Joseph Bottum complains that it's hard to write a new Christmas carol lyric because—well, because the existing model is composed of songs of such illiterate banality! But he presses on heroically with an attempt to compose a fresh carol, while fully admitting that the recently invented tradition of such songs creates an almost oppressive weight of kitsch. (He also complains of the doggerel-like mystifications of carols like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" while not daring to state the case at its most damning—as in ridiculous and nasty lines such as "This holy tide of Christmas all others doth deface." Believe me when I say that I know my stuff here and have paid my dues.)
The second essay is a review by Mark Tooley of a terrible-sounding book called Jesus for President by a terrible-sounding person named Shane Claiborne. You know the sort of thing very well: Jesus would have been a "human shield" in Baghdad in 2003; the United States is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire. It's the usual "liberation theology" drivel, whereby everybody except the inhabitants of the democratic West is supposed to abjure violence. (To the question of whether the plan to kill Hitler was moral or not, Claiborne cites no less an authority than the Führer's own secretary to claim that "all hopes for peace were lost" after the 1944 attempt. That, as should be obvious even to the most flickering intelligence, was chiefly because the attempt was a failure. What an idiot!)
But why is a magazine of the intelligentsia doing this to us, and to itself, this month? Tooley wants to prove that the legendary Jesus would have been more judicious and perhaps more neoconservative on these points. How can he hope to know that, or even to guess at it? Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?
Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished. (The same obviously would apply to Muslims who couldn't bear the shock of finding that their prophet was fictional or fraudulent.) But I invite you to consider things more lucidly. If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating. It takes a totalitarian mind-set to claim that only one Bronze Age Palestinian revelation or prophecy or text can be our guide through this labyrinth. If the totalitarians cannot bear to abandon their adoration of their various Dear Leaders, can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private? Either that or give up the tax-exempt status that must remind them so painfully of the things of this material world.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

fighting words (SLATE)
Inconvenient Truths The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.

By Christopher Hitchens
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

A Gay Marriage Surge
Public support grows, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll.
Arian Campo-Flores
Newsweek Web Exclusive
When voters in California, Florida and Arizona approved measures banning same-sex marriage last month, opponents lamented that the country appeared to be turning increasingly intolerant toward gay and lesbian rights. But the latest NEWSWEEK Poll finds growing public support for gay marriage and civil unions—and strong backing for the granting of certain rights associated with marriage, to same-sex couples. (Click here to see the full poll.)
Americans continue to find civil unions for gays and lesbians more palatable than full-fledged marriage. Fifty-five percent of respondents favored legally sanctioned unions or partnerships, while only 39 percent supported marriage rights. Both figures are notably higher than in 2004, when 40 percent backed the former and 33 percent approved of the latter. When it comes to according legal rights in specific areas to gays, the public is even more supportive. Seventy-four percent back inheritance rights for gay domestic partners (compared to 60 percent in 2004), 73 percent approve of extending health insurance and other employee benefits to them (compared to 60 percent in 2004), 67 percent favor granting them Social Security benefits (compared to 55 percent in 2004) and 86 percent support hospital visitation rights (a question that wasn't asked four years ago). In other areas, too, respondents appeared increasingly tolerant. Fifty-three percent favor gay adoption rights (8 points more than in 2004), and 66 percent believe gays should be able to serve openly in the military (6 points more than in 2004).
Despite the recently approved state measures, public opinion nationally has shifted against a federal ban on same-sex marriage. In 2004, people were evenly divided on the question, with 47 percent favoring a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage and 45 percent opposing one. In the latest poll, however, 52 percent oppose a ban and only 43 percent favor one. When respondents were asked about state measures, the numbers were closer: 45 percent said they'd vote in favor of an amendment outlawing gay marriage in their states, while 49 percent said they'd oppose such a measure.
A number of factors seem to play a role in swaying people one way or the other. For instance, 62 percent of Americans say religious beliefs play an important role in shaping their views on gay marriage. According to the survey, two-thirds of those who see marriage as primarily a legal matter support gay marriage. On the other hand, two-thirds of those who see it as mostly a religious matter (or equal parts religious and legal) oppose gay marriage. Moreover, the poll found significant differences across generational lines. Essentially, the younger you are, the more likely you are to support same-sex marriage. About half of those aged 18 to 34 back marriage rights, compared to roughly four in 10 among those aged 35 to 64 and only about two in 10 among those 65 and older. The survey also detected a gender gap, with women more likely to support gay marriage than men, 44 percent to 34 percent. Differences by race appear less noteworthy: 40 percent of whites approve of gay marriage, compared to 37 percent of non-whites.
One reason that tolerance for gay marriage and civil unions may be on the rise is that a growing number of Americans say they know someone who's gay. While in 1994, a NEWSWEEK Poll found that only 53 percent of those questioned knew a gay or lesbian person, that figure today is 78 percent. Drilling down a bit more, 38 percent of adults work with someone gay, 33 percent have a gay family member and 66 percent have a gay friend or acquaintance.
On another note, the NEWSWEEK Poll surveyed attitudes toward President-elect Barack Obama. Consistent with other recent surveys, it found broad public approval of his transition (72 percent) and of his cabinet picks (also 72 percent). In fact, Obama is outperforming his two immediate predecessors during similar periods after their elections. In early January 2001, a NEWSWEEK Poll found that 59 percent of respondents favored President George W. Bush's performance, and in late 1992, 62 percent approved of Bill Clinton's handling of the transition.
Americans seem very satisfied with Obama's cabinet choices. Sixty-eight percent approve of his choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of State, 73 percent support Robert Gates as defense secretary, 63 percent back Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary and 62 percent favor Eric Holder as attorney general. For all the chatter about whether Obama picked too many Washington insiders for his administration, the public doesn't seem all that concerned. Only 23 percent of those surveyed think he should have turned to more Washington outsiders, and only 27 percent say he selected too many veterans of the Clinton administration. An even smaller proportion, 15 percent, say Obama should have chosen more Republicans.
All of which makes for high expectations for the incoming Obama administration. Three-quarters of respondents are hopeful that the president-elect will make progress on the issue that most concerns them: the economy. In addition, solid majorities think Obama will make at least some headway on reducing taxes for the middle class (61 percent), improving conditions for the poor (74 percent) and making health care more affordable and accessible (70 percent). The public is also confident that he'll make strides toward energy independence (77 percent) and a cleaner environment (67 percent). In terms of foreign affairs, 69 percent believe Obama will make progress in bringing U.S. troops back from Iraq without seriously destabilizing that country. A notably smaller group, 53 percent, think he'll make gains in defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
As for the outgoing president, the public remains as sour on him as ever. Sixty-one percent believe that history will judge Bush a below-average president, up from 53 percent in January 2007.

From The Times of London
Arrogant and joyless: Obama's take on Britain?
The President-elect's writings seem to be coloured by his grandfather's brutal treatment at the hands of the colonists
Ben Macintyre
More than half a century ago an African was arrested by Kenya's colonial police; he was imprisoned, tortured, and finally released two years later, a broken man. Such episodes were grimly common during the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule in Kenya, yet this sharp little shard of history has now poked above the surface again, as the story of Barack Obama's grandfather.
This is more than simply another fascinating element in Mr Obama's already colourful story. No president of modern times is so steeped in history, both America's history and his own family narrative. The past, and where he came from - Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Chicago - is how Mr Obama has chosen to define himself to the American electorate.
But the story of his grandfather's treatment at the hands of the British illustrates how little we, as a country, yet know about Mr Obama's view of Britain, and the extent to which those attitudes are likely to be filtered through the prism of the past.
Recent presidents have come to office wearing the special relationship on their sleeves. George W. Bush's Anglophilia was of a familiar Republican sort, based on the belief, inherited from a father who had fought alongside the British in the war, that when the chips are down only one ally can be firmly relied on. Churchill's bust stared out from the corner of the Oval Office. When I interviewed Mr Bush, he spoke for ten, eloquent minutes about the beauty of the Scottish landscape.
Bill Clinton's affection for Britain was equally profound, though less emotional, reinforced by his time as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. He could speak the language of Third Way Blairism without a trace of an accent. When Ronald Reagan told Parliament in 1982 that he felt “a moment of kinship and homecoming in these hallowed halls”, he spoke for most postwar presidents, and most Americans.
Mr Obama's relationship with Britain will also be special, but perhaps not in the ways we have come to expect. “We've been through two world wars together,” he said, on his brief visit to Britain last July - the required historical mantra. That heritage, however, may be less personally relevant than another war fought in the jungles of Kenya, in which Britain was not an ally of Mr Obama's family, but an enemy.
The experience of a grandfather he never knew, long before he was born, will not provoke some knee-jerk anti-British attitude on the part of the new president. Mr Obama is too supple a politician for that. Yet international relationships are based on emotions as well as politics, and the set of preconceptions about Britain that Mr Obama brings to the White House will be far removed from those we have become used to over the Past half-century.
Mr Obama's diplomatic remarks about Britain have been pallid and tactful; it is the more unguarded corners of his writing that offer revealing flickers of another attitude. In his memoir Dreams from My Father Obama devotes just six words to describing his first visit to Britain: “I took tea by the Thames.” The British passengers on the plane wear “ill-fitting blazers”; the one sitting next to him, an acne-ridden Mancunian, he finds aggravatingly superior, referring to the “Godforsaken countries” of Africa.
On safari in Kenya, he talks to an English doctor with “pasty blond hair” who has quit Britain to live in Africa. “England seems terribly cramped,” the man says. “The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy it less.”
These are small indications, but together they begin to form a caricature: Britain ill-dressed, pasty-faced and racially arrogant, cramped, spotty and joyless. In one of the most revealing passages, Mr Obama describes how travelling in Europe makes him feel “edgy, defensive, hesitant”. “It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful,” he writes. “It just wasn't mine.” So far from coming home to Britain, like Reagan, Mr Obama has described just how far from home he feels here.
Later, in Kenya, riding the imperial-era railway, he imagines “some nameless British officer”, puffed with colonial hubris: “Would he have felt a sense of triumph, a confidence that the guiding light of Western civilisation had finally penetrated the African darkness?” He squirms at the African waiters' cringing attitude towards whites in the Nairobi hotels, and mocks the tourists pretending to be characters in some imagined re-creation of Out of Africa.
The discovery that Mr Obama's grandfather was active in opposing colonial rule, and brutally treated as a consequence, will only increase the future president's cachet among black Americans. One of the few criticisms of Mr Obama in the black community was, that as an African American, as distinct from an African-American, he did not share the same racial historical scars. Yet here is evidence that his ancestor fought for racial justice, and bore the scars for the rest of his life.
Mr Obama's different historical legacy will not mean a change of foreign policy, but it may well presage a change of tone - on Guantánamo as well as Britain. For British diplomats, reading President Obama will require a new vocabulary, and understanding a different sort of history. Not the glory of shared victory over evil in the Second World War, but the more complicated history of decolonisation, in which Britain's role was sometimes less than glorious and both sides committed horrific atrocities.
Mr Obama has written movingly about how his African past has defined him; that past, still emerging, may also help to define the future of the Anglo-American relationship.
When he hears an English accent, I suspect, the new president will not automatically think of Churchill, Benny Hill or Princess Diana, but rather of some nameless British colonial officer, gazing out on an Africa he believed he owned: for that is where Obama is coming from.

Obama Won Without Voter-Turnout Surge Experts Had Predicted
By Heidi Przybyla
(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama bet on an unprecedented surge of new voters to carry him to victory last month. He won without the record turnout.
About 130 million Americans voted, up from 122 million four years ago. Still, turnout fell short of the 140 million voters many experts had forecast. With a little more than 61 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, the 2008 results also didn’t match the record 63.8 percent turnout rate that helped propel President John F. Kennedy to victory in 1960.
“I was very surprised on election night as I was seeing the totals as they were mounting,” said Rhodes Cook, a turnout and voting-behavior expert in Virginia.
Experts attribute the shortfall to a combination of reasons: Many disaffected Republicans stayed home. Young voters, particularly those without college degrees, didn’t turn out in the numbers that the Obama campaign projected. In states where the presidential race wasn’t in doubt -- such as Obama strongholds in California and New York, or reliably Republican outposts such as Oklahoma and Utah -- turnout was lower than in 2004.
An exception was fiercely contested Ohio, where turnout fell from 2004 even after the state was targeted as a top priority by both parties.
Obama, 47, did benefit from unprecedented support among black voters and from increased turnout in demographic groups that backed the Democrat, exit polls show. Seven of the eight states with the biggest increases in turnout have large African- American populations. That dynamic probably helped Obama win in North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana, according to experts.
Increased Support
Compared with the 2004 Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Obama increased support by 14 percentage points among Latinos, by 3 points with suburban residents, and by 17 points from voters earning $200,000 a year or more.
Among various age groups, only voters 65 and older favored the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain.
McCain, 72, and Obama only fully competed in about a third of the states, where both sides expended enormous resources. In most of them, turnout soared, jumping 12 percent in Virginia, 18 percent in North Carolina, and 10 percent in Indiana, according to data compiled by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University in Washington.
In contrast, there was a 3 percent decline from 2004 in California and a 6 percent drop-off in New York. There also were declines in heavily Republican states such as Utah.
Fewer Republicans
A depressed Republican vote probably accounts for a large measure of the smaller-than-forecast turnout numbers.
In 2004, both parties “did a great job” in turning out their voters, Cook said. This time, Democrats mobilized 9 million more voters than in the previous election, while the Republican support dropped by 3 million votes.
“The Democrats did their job in terms of voter turnout, but the Republicans did not do their job,” Cook said.
That particularly may have helped Obama in Ohio. McCain received 275,000 fewer votes than President George W. Bush did in 2004, while Obama topped Kerry’s total by 43,000 votes.
A chart compiled by Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, shows that Ohio’s turnout fell by more than 4 percent from 2004. In Republican precincts across Franklin County, which includes Columbus, there was a fairly uniform 6-to-7 percent decline in turnout.
TV Advertising
Nationally, the McCain campaign diverted funds from its get- out-the-vote effort for a television advertising blitz in the final week of the presidential campaign in battlegrounds such as Virginia and North Carolina.
Participation by young voters, who showed enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy during the campaign, rose by only 1 percent from 2004.
National exit polls showed Obama winning 66 percent of voters under age 30, a larger share than President Ronald Reagan garnered in 1984. Among those between the ages of 30 and 44, 52 percent voted for Obama.
Gans attributes the smaller-than-expected turnout to a disparity in participation between college-educated young people and those who didn’t attend college.
“If you limit young people to the college-educated, turnout was quite high,” he said.
Getting Out the Vote
A major contribution to Obama’s victory was an effective get-out-the-vote operation.
Given Obama’s across-the-board gains and the depressed Republican vote, many experts say the election probably doesn’t signal a major realignment of voter loyalties. It will take another four years to determine whether Obama can redraw the political map and cement his party’s gains in former Republican states such as Virginia and North Carolina.
“In four years do we look back and say, ‘It’s morning again in America,’ in which Obama is a Reagan for the 21st century?” said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and co-developer of the Pollster.com Web site. “Or do we look back and say, ‘another Jimmy Carter -- full of promise but no delivery.’”
To contact the reporter on this story: Heidi Przybyla at hprzybyla@bloomberg.net

Obama’s first problem is US war crimes
The president-elect has to take a stand on Bush’s dark legacy
Andrew Sullivan (London Times)
Asmall and largely unnoticed spat among the transition planners for the president-elect, Barack Obama, broke out last week. It was the first genuinely passionate debate among the Obamaites and it centres on a terribly difficult and terribly important decision that will be among the first that Obama has to make.
How does he deal with the legacy of criminal actions of his predecessor’s administration when it comes to detention, interrogation, abuse and torture of terror suspects? That has long hovered in the back of the minds of those of us who supported Obama, in large part because he alone had the moral authority to draw a line underneath the criminality of the George Bush-Dick Cheney years and restore credibility and hon-our to America’s antiterror policies.
And so when it emerged Obama was planning to appoint one John Brennan as CIA director, alarm bells went off. Brennan had been close to George Tenet at the time Tenet devised what he called “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Brennan, a CIA company man who had left the agency for private employment, had made statements in the past couple of years suggesting some sympathy for the Bush-Cheney policy. “When it comes to individuals who are determined to destroy our nation, though, we have to make sure that we take every possible measure,” he said elliptically. Including torture?
When pressed, he kept emphasising the need for a “debate” without tipping his own hand about what he personally believed. Take this Brennan statement looking forward to a change in administration from Bush: “I’m hoping there will be a number of professionals coming in who have an understanding of the evolution of the capabilities in the community over the past six years, because there is a method to how things have changed and adapted.”
This plea for understanding for the Bush-Cheney era did not go down well with the Obamasphere – the network of bloggers who helped build momentum for Obama’s victory. The influential blogger Glenn Greenwald exploded in anger; the centrist Democratic blogger Scott Horton urged Brennan to clarify, and then urged Obama to reject him.
On my own blog The Daily Dish, I wrote that if Brennan were picked, Obama supporters “will, in fact, have to go to war with Obama before he even takes office. And if Obama doubts our seriousness, I have three words for him. Yes we can”.
Brennan, facing more protests, withdrew his name from consideration last week. In the first skirmish over the issue in the Obama era, the antitorture forces won.
But the question remains: what is to be done? It is not Obama’s style to launch into a prosecutorial investigation of intelligence officials or to open new partisan wounds by subjecting Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld and others to war crime charges. He is intent on unifying the country, not further dividing it. He needs the professionals running the antiterror effort and, after eight years of Bush-Cheney, it is hard to find people not tainted by torture.
There is also the possibility that Bush himself might make a preemptive strike and, upon his departure from Washington, issue a blanket pardon for all his aides and underlings who aided and abetted war crimes in the past seven years. Leaving those pardons in place while prosecuting low-level officials or CIA agents would be deeply unfair.
That was the rationale behind the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which gave retroactive immunity for war crimes to civilians in the administration, but not to the military grunts who enforced the policy, and which carved out a continuing exception for torture to CIA agents.
So perhaps the sanest way forward is a truth commission, modelled on those in Chile and South Africa that maintained governmental continuity for a while but set up a process that allowed for a maximal gathering of the relevant facts and names. The president could appoint a powerful and respected prosecutor to begin the process. The commission would focus not just on the military and CIA but also on the Bush justice department and Office of Legal Counsel, and the abuse of the law and its interpretation that gave Bush and Cheney transparently phoney legal cover for war crimes.
At the end of the second world war, US officials prosecuted Nazi lawyers and civilians who tortured no one themselves but came up with legal flimflam to turn war crimes into legal policy. Why not apply the same logic to Bush’s legal architects – the men who declared the president was bound by no law and no treaty in subjecting prisoners to torture up to the very edge of death?
The commission would need strong subpoena powers and the full backing of the president. Only once the commission has reported, the decision on whether to prosecute or not could be made, with much wider public awareness, and much deeper examination of the facts and documents now hidden. There is much, after all, we still do not know – and that information may make the war crimes seem less or more defensible.
There are some limits on transparency, of course, because of the sensitive intelligence matters that are involved. But when war crimes are at issue, it is more important for a democracy to seek transparency from its highest officials than to engage in anything but the most pressing concealment of the most vital secrets. In international law, there are no pardons for war crimes. And if America is going to regain moral authority in the world, it has to demonstrate it lives by the same standards it expects from everyone else.
Bush has even signalled that he will pardon no one because he does not believe they have committed any crimes. But the transparent way in which laughably sourced legal “cover” was provided by Bush’s own legal counsel proves the Bush administration knew full well it was breaking the law, and was willing to force the justice department to put its imprimatur on such illegality.
And the evidence we now have, undisputed evidence, proves already that war crimes were indeed committed – by the president and vice-president on down. I mean: why else Guantanamo Bay and secret black sites if the president believed he was obeying domestic American law?
There is, in the end, a simple and sobering truth: these people have to be brought to justice if the rule of law is to survive in America. In his constitutional soul, Obama knows this. He also knows, however, the political exigencies of taking over a national security apparatus where continuity and lawful vigilance against terrorism remain vital.
How he bridges the demands of the law with the pressures of politics will tell us much about him. And because every act performed by the CIA will soon become his responsibility as much as President Bush’s, he has no time to dither.
The constitutional crisis is in some ways deeper than the financial one. We will find out soon enough if this really is change we can believe in rather than merely hope for.