The votes against Obama’s stimulus package came from a Southern confederacy of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Their message to America? Drop dead.

Michael Lind (Daily Beast)
On Wednesday, January 28, 2009, President Barack Obama’s $819 billion stimulus plan passed the House of Representatives, despite the solid opposition of the Confederates.
By the Confederates I mean the Republican Party and their allies among Southern conservative Democrats. The battle in Washington is not between liberals and conservatives; it is between the Union and the South.
The Republican Party that voted unanimously against the stimulus bill is, in essence, the party of the former Confederacy. In the House of Representatives, there is not a single Republican representative from New England. In the U.S. Senate, there is not a single Republican from the Pacific Coast.
The battle in Washington is not between liberals and conservatives; it is between the Union and the South.
The Republican congressional delegation is disproportionately Southern. Half of the four congressional leaders of the Republican Party are Southerners: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Virginia). (Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl is from Arizona and House Minority Leader John Boehner is a relic of the dying Midwestern wing of the GOP). The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mike Duncan, is from Kentucky. Half of the candidates for the RNC chairmanship are Southerners: Duncan himself, Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, and Chip Saltsman, former chairman of the Republican Party of Tennessee. (The other three are Michael Steele of Maryland, Ken Blackwell of Ohio and, Saul Anuzis of Michigan.) If you think most GOP spokesmen on TV seem to speak with a drawl, you’re not imagining things.
In addition, a majority of the 11 House Democrats who voted against the stimulus bill are Southerners or from states that border the South: Bobby Bright and Parker Griffith, both of Alabama; Gene Taylor, of Mississippi; Heath Shuler, of North Carolina; Jim Cooper, of Tennessee; Allen Boyd, Jr., of Florida; Frank M. Kratovil, of Maryland; and Brad Ellsworth, of Indiana. (The other three are Walt Minnick of Idaho, John Peterson and Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania.) Congressman Boyd, a prominent Blue Dog Democrat, was the only Democrat to support President Bush’s bill to partly privatize Social Security, which he co-sponsored. Appropriately, his 2nd Congressional District in the Florida Panhandle near Georgia and Alabama includes Dixie and Calhoun counties.
Do you see a pattern here?
The vote about the stimulus package was not about economics. It was about nullification. It was the bipartisan Confederacy sending a message to the rest of America, stricken by the greatest crisis since the Depression. That message? DROP DEAD.
Those who think that the Democrats could have won over more Republicans by making more concessions do not understand the neo-Confederate/Dixiecrat mentality. There was no one to bargain with on the other side. The Republiconfederate “alternative”—a joke of a bill consisting almost entirely of tax cuts—would not be taken seriously by any mainstream conservative economist. It was pure provocation.
The rest of the country needs to understand. This is not the nation-minded Republican Party of Lincoln and McKinley, Eisenhower and Dole. Nor is it the party of Herbert Hoover who, if he were alive, would be denounced by the Southern Right as the flawed but public-spirited Progressive he was. No, this is the party that was hijacked after the civil-rights revolution by former Democrats on the Southern far right. Its spiritual ancestors are the old states’ rights Southern conservative Democrats, like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis and Strom Thurmond and Orval Faubus. The slogan of the segregationist Democrats—“massive resistance”—characterizes today’s Southern conservative resistance to necessary federal economic action, just as it inspired yesterday’s Southern conservative resistance to equal rights for black Americans.
The new Republican Party is a strange version of the old Democratic Party. It's the Dixiecrat wing without any other wings. The morphing of the Grand Old Party into a Southern-dominated faction goes back half a century to the so-called Southern Strategy to win a slice of the Southern vote in the Electoral College. Under George W. Bush, it would have seemed that this strategy reached its climax. But after the utter repudiation of Bush's presidency and the experiment with conservative Republican Party rule, the congressional Republicans left in the rubble are turning even more to the right—and the South.
Next time a Southern Republican or Blue Dog Democrat frets about big government, remind him or her of the Confederate Constitution, a bizarre document that sheds light on the mentality of today’s Southern conservatives. Southern opposition to capable national government is nothing new. In the Confederate Constitution, provisions modeled on those of the US Constitution that empowered the federal government of the Confederate States of America were followed by clauses frantically limiting the very powers that had just been bestowed.
According to Section 8 of the Confederate Constitution, the Confederate Constitution shall have power:To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises for revenue, necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and carry on the Government of the Confederate States; but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry; and all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the Confederate States.
This is the only constitution in history, to my knowledge, which banned the government from promoting and fostering branches of national industry. But it gets better. Here’s Section 8 (3), giving the Confederate Congress the power:(3) To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes; but neither this, nor any other clause contained in the Constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce; except for the purpose of furnishing lights, beacons, and buoys, and other aids to navigation upon the coasts, and the improvement of harbors and the removing of obstructions in river navigation; in all which cases such duties shall be laid on the navigation facilitated thereby as may be necessary to pay the costs and expenses thereof.
Imagine that. The Confederates, in their constitution, tried to ban all government infrastructure spending to facilitate commerce, but then had second thoughts and included lights, beacons, buoys, and harbors—but nothing else, really, we mean it! The political descendants of these people are the ones who today want to bind the Confederate—excuse me, I mean the US Congress to rigid and inflexible “pay-go” rules no matter what the circumstances and, like the Confederates, want to make transportation rely on user fees like tolls on interstate highways rather than pay for public goods out of taxes.
It is because I am a Southerner and the descendant of Southerners that I recognize the suicidal nature of this pathological regional political culture. I like Southern manners, food, music, and literature—but I hate the reactionary strain of my native region’s politics (there is an enlightened, minority strain in Southern politics, from the Kentuckians Clay and Lincoln to LBJ, the Gores and Bill Clinton). The greatest victims of Southern conservatism have always been the majority of Southerners of all races.
The Republican/Blue Dog approach to political economy was tried in my part of the country for generations, and the result was economic backwardness and military defeat. The antebellum South was hostile to government promotion of industry and investment in public transportation—and, ultimately, the Union, relying on the factories and railroads of the North, crushed it. Unable to compete on the basis of public investment and public education, the South in the 21st century, like a broken-down banana republic, now uses anti-union laws and low taxes to lure corporate investment in low-wage factories.
So let’s be clear. The battle over the stimulus is not a gentle debate among thoughtful libertarians and well-intentioned progressives, with reasonable points made on both sides. It is nullification. It is sabotage. It is the latest episode in the Southern conservative strategy of massive resistance to necessary government and national progress. It will not be the last.
UPDATE: This article originally misstated the Republican congressional delegation as the Southern congressional delegation.
Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.

California teeters on the edge of the worst drought in the state's history,

SF CHRONICLE

Officials said Thursday after reporting that the Sierra Nevada snowpack - the backbone of the state's water supply - is only 61 percent of normal.
January usually douses California with about 20 percent of the state's annual precipitation, but instead it delivered a string of dry, sunny days this year, almost certainly pushing the state into a third year of drought.
The arid weather is occurring as the state's water system is under pressure from a growing population, an aging infrastructure and court-ordered reductions in water pumped through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - problems that didn't exist or were less severe during similar dry spells in the late 1970s and late 1980s.
"We're definitely in really bad shape," said Elissa Lynn, chief meteorologist with the state Department of Water Resources. "People can expect to pay higher prices for produce ... and more agencies may be rationing ... some raising fees. We just don't have enough water."
In Sonoma County, water managers are expected to take a bold step Monday - telling residents to prepare for severe rationing within weeks.
"We have entered uncharted territory," said Pam Jeane, deputy chief engineer of operations at the Sonoma County Water Agency. "A 30 percent mandatory rationing order is just the beginning. Further decline in reservoir levels could necessitate 50 percent cutbacks."
After two consecutive dry years and with a third on the way, Lake Mendocino, one of two main reservoirs that supply 750,000 residents in Marin and Sonoma counties, contains only 32,000 acre-feet of water - about one-third of its capacity of 90,000 acre-feet. (One acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre at a depth of one foot, enough to meet the needs of one to two families each year).
The picture is similar around the state. Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is at 31 percent of its capacity, down from 74 percent in 2007.
By now, water planners had hoped a series of strong storms would fill up reservoirs and make further rationing unnecessary. But a high-pressure system parked over Northern California has kept skies clear and warm through most of the winter.
Thursday's snow survey by the Department of Water Resources found that the snow's water content - the snowpack - across the Sierra Nevada was 61 percent of normal for this time of year. Last year at this time, the snowpack was 111 percent of normal, but the driest spring on record led to a drought.
The saturation level of snow, or the snow's water content, is the most important factor affecting the crucial spring runoff levels, which help water planners determine water supplies for their districts each season.
If Sonoma County institutes 50 percent rationing, it would be the Bay Area's most drastic measure so far to address the drought. Last spring, the East Bay Municipal Utility District announced 15 percent rationing and added extra drought fees.
Many other districts are relying on voluntary cutbacks. San Francisco has asked users to trim water use by 10 percent. But the city and others could move to rationing this spring, potentially barring customers from filling pools, washing cars or watering lawns.
No customers would suffer more than agricultural districts in Central Valley, where farmers expect they will receive no water from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for their alfalfa, corn, pears and almonds. Critics charge farmers with wasting water by flooding fields and growing low-value crops. But growers insist they are increasing efficiency at the same time they supply the nation with critical food supplies.
Wine is not a critical food supply, but the economies of Napa and Sonoma counties stand to lose tens of millions of dollars if the drought squeezes this year's grape harvest. Already, there are signs that vines are sprouting early - exposing grapes to frost for a longer period of time.
Like commercial farmers in the Central Valley, grape growers might be forced to water some plots and not others.
"If you have limited water, and you don't have the irrigation to keep it going ... it's not going to be a bumper crop," said Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used Thursday's snow survey to pitch his answer to California's water crisis - a $9 billion-plus water bond that would funnel money toward new dams, reservoirs, water recycling programs and conservation efforts. The governor also supports building a giant pipeline, called a peripheral canal, around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to reduce pressure on the ailing water system.
In 2007, a federal judge said operators of the giant export pumps near Tracy must curtail pumping in order to save the endangered delta smelt, a tiny fish.
to maintain moisture in soil.
E-mail Kelly Zito at kzito@sfchronicle.com

culturebox (Slate)
Dear John :What I'll miss about John Updike.

By John Irving

Like most men my age—I am a decade younger than John Updike—I began reading him because of the sex. I was still in prep school when I first read Rabbit, Run, in college when I read The Centaur. I had finished with the Iowa Writers' Workshop and had my first teaching job when I read Couples, which was published around the time I published my first novel, Setting Free the Bears. People were always critical of what Updike wrote about; I always defended him because he wrote so well. He was one of those writers who taught me: You're a writer because you can write well, not because of your "subject."
Like Margaret Atwood, Updike was unafraid—he didn't write the same novel over and over again. OK, there were the Rabbit novels, and the Bech stories; and after the marvelous witches (of Eastwick), they came back, most recently, as widows. What made the sex different was that it was elegant, refined—yet no less inappropriate, or nasty, when Updike wanted it to be. Kurt Vonnegut said there are writers who, if it hadn't worked out for them to be writers, would be in jail. There were writers who simply couldn't have made a living for themselves if the writing hadn't worked out; that meant Vonnegut, and that meant me. But Updike always gave me the impression that he could have/would have been successful at anything. He was smart; not all writers are intellectuals. I'm not. He was, but he was good-humored about it; he never flaunted it.
He was also a quick study. His novel Terrorist was criticized by the sudden abundance of terror experts; Updike didn't get this right, or he didn't correctly understand this element, or—whatever. I thought the novel was an amazingly quick study, and an insightful one. I cared about the characters—something many intellectuals who write fiction don't get at all.
We weren't friends. We knew each other socially for the brief period of time when I lived in Massachusetts—in Cambridge—and he was in Beverly Farms. We had dinner together a few times. We had a polite but not frequent correspondence, too. For a period of time—no longer—fans used to confuse the two of us. How could this have happened? Because we were both "John"? It was baffling, but I got numerous fan letters that were meant for him, and he got fan letters that were meant for me, and this gave us the occasion to write to each other—and send the misdirected fan mail to each other. This has stopped; it hasn't happened in five or six years. Maybe this was mail from a single demented village or the same deranged family; maybe it was generational, and they've died out—those idiots who thought I was John Updike and John Updike was me.
The letters would begin "Dear John Irving," and I would read for a while before I realized that the letter-writer was talking about an Updike novel; it was the same for him. I admit that I miss this craziness; it will probably never happen again.
Look at all he did! The novels, the short stories, the poems, the essays, and criticism; he was productive, and envied. I read him because I always knew I would be entertained. His writing was lively; there was a constant energy in the language, and a mirth—a great good humor.
Once, when he came to dinner, my middle son, Brendan, was in a phase of dressing up—disguises, voices with accents, bizarre enactments. Updike and I were having dinner when Brendan appeared in a kimono; he was holding a lit candle, and something that looked like (or was) a microphone. "Good evening," Brendan said. "This is the news in Japanese." And then he went into an incomprehensible imitation of Japanese news; it was pretty convincing. (I think Brendan must have been 8 or 10 at the time.)
That was all. Brendan left, with a bow, and we went back to our dinner. Updike had never met Brendan before.
When we were saying good night, Updike asked: "The news, in Japanese—is it a regular event?"
"No, just for us," I said; I couldn't think of what else to say. Brendan had never done it before, nor would he ever do it again.
"Well, that was … special," Updike said.
I shall miss him, and his fan mail.John Irving is a novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Soft-spoken line from Washington may terrify Tehran

The Guardian
Ahmadinejad's ferocity underlines the potency of the new policy of seeking to influence rather than oust the ayatollahs
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The letter to Iran being drafted in Washington represents a determined break from past US policy but officials said yesterday there was still considerable debate on how and when to engage Tehran in talks.
Details have yet to be decided. At what level should talks take place? Should they grow organically from the existing six-nation negotiating group or open up a new track? When should negotiations start and, in particular, should they be postponed until Iran's presidential elections in June, for fear of helping Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election campaign, which was formally launched yesterday?
There is one thing everyone agrees on – it is impossible to do any kind of business with the current Iranian president. Ahmadinejad's speech in Kermanshah yesterday, demanding complete US withdrawal from all overseas deployments, clearly illustrated that.
"Those who say they want to make change, this is the change they should make: they should apologise to the Iran­ian nation and try to make up for their dark background and the crimes they have committed against the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said. He specifically mentioned the toppling of the government in 1953, the support for the shah and for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, and the downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988.
He fulminated against what he said were efforts to block Tehran's supposedly peaceful nuclear power programme and hinder Iran's development since the 1979 revolution, the event which along with the US embassy hostage crisis served to define bilateral relations for a generation.
And he had harsh words for George Bush, who he said "has gone into the trash can of history with a very black and shameful file full of treachery and killings. He left and, God willing, he will go to hell."
It was never clear whether the Bush administration was seeking to bring about regime change in Tehran or simply trying to persuade Iran's theocratic rulers to change policy on uranium enrichment.
The ambiguity was inevitable. The administration itself never quite made up its mind, and different strategies rose to the top of the White House agenda at different times, depending on who was winning the battle for the president's ear.
While mixed messages emanated from the Bush administration, only one was clearly received in Tehran – that Iran was next on the Axis of Evil list after Iraq.
The lesson of the Iraq invasion for the Iranian leadership was that Saddam lost his job and then his life not because he might have had weapons of mass destruction but because he had none. North Korea, the third member the axis, which had nuclear bombs, was treated with much greater respect. The hard task ahead for the Obama team is how to correct those perverse incentives.
Obama is intent on pursuing a very different approach. US policy is focused now on influencing the ayatollahs' behaviour and perceptions, not driving them out. The new president this week repeated his inaugural line, "we will extend our hand if you will unclench your fist", and explicitly addressed it to Tehran. The ferocity of Ahmadinejad's response does make one thing clear: the Tehran hardliners are more terrified of a moderate and charismatic new voice from Washington than all the sabres rattled by the Bush administration.
Obama does not trigger the same Persian-nationalist response that used to rally Iranians around Ahmadinejad's government at the prospect of American bombs. Perhaps more importantly, given the nature of Iranian elections, the arrival of a soft-talking administration may change the mind of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sort of president he wants to see elected.
The more radical thinkers now installed at their desks in Washington argue there is no need to wait until the June presidential elections. The Iranian presidency does not decide nuclear policy, even if it influences the political mood and sets limits on what is negotiable.
That wing argues there are ways of sending messages and making contacts that will not benefit Ahmadinejad. The opening of an American-staffed US interests section in Tehran, considered then rejected by the Bush administration, is on the table as a first step in a possible progression towards a normal relationship.
The administration radicals believe it is time to invert what they see as another fundamental flaw in Bush policy – tying US interests to reactionary Sunni regimes in the Arab world as a bulwark against Shia militancy. Tehran is militant, the new thinkers argue, but it is at least a rational state actor, with defined goals and interests, and therefore ultimately more amenable to cool discussion and engagement.
The more cautious wing warns against hasty interference in an opaque political system with all the unintended consequences that might entail.

John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT (NY TIMES)
John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.
The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike had died at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers.
Of Mr. Updike’s many novels and stories, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public more than his precisely observed tales about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings.
His best-known protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the funny, restless and questing life of this middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.
“My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”
From his earliest short stories, he found his subject in the everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce, setting them most often in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he described as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid.” He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.
Here he is in “A Sense of Shelter,” an early short story:
“Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”
The detail of his writing was so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction: those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that it was more style than content.
The latter position was defined by James Wood in the 1999 essay “John Updike’s Complacent God.”
“He is a prose writer of great beauty,” Mr. Wood wrote, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.”
Astonishingly industrious and prolific, Mr. Updike turned out three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism or verse, proving the maxim that several pages a day was at least a book a year — or more. Mr. Updike published 60 books in his lifetime; his final one, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is to be published in June.
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
His vast output of poetry, which tended toward light verse, and his wide-ranging essays and criticism filled volume after volume. Among them are “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf” (1996), “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989), “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) and “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989). One famous article was on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.
As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s novels sometimes became more exotic and experimental in form, locale and subject matter. “The Coup” (1978) was set in an imaginary African country. “Brazil” (1994) was a venture in magic realism. “Toward the End of Time” (1997) was set in 2020, after a war between the United States and China. “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000) was about Hamlet’s mother and uncle. And “The Terrorist” (2006) was a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.
Mr. Updike never abandoned short stories, of which he turned out several hundred, most of them first appearing in The New Yorker. It was here that he exercised his exquisitely sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic routine and the conflicts that animated it for him — between present satisfaction and future possibility, between sex and spirituality, and between the beauty of creation and the looming threat of death, which he summed up famously in the concluding sentence of “Pigeon Feathers,” the title story of his second collection (1962).
The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”
Philip Roth, one of Mr. Updike’s literary peers, said Tuesday: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
Growing Up
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington. He was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher of Dutch descent, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who later also published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere. His was a solitary childhood made more so by his family’s move when he was 13 to his mother’s birthplace, on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, Pa. From there both he and his father commuted 11 miles to school in town, but the isolation fired the boy’s imagination as well as his desire to take flight from aloneness.
Sustained by hours of reading in the local library and by his mother’s encouragement to write, he aspired first to be either an animator for Walt Disney or a magazine cartoonist. But a sense of narrative was implanted early, perhaps nurtured by summer work as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, for which he wrote several feature articles.
After graduating from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president, Mr. Updike attended Harvard College on a scholarship. Although he majored in English and wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon, he continued his cartooning. In 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.
Graduating from Harvard in 1954 summa cum laude, he won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. In June of that year, his short story “Friends From Philadelphia” was accepted, along with a poem, by The New Yorker. It was an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”
Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth, the couple returned to America, and Mr. Updike went to work writing Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker.
Two years later, with the arrival of a second child, David, the couple, needing more space, moved to Ipswich, Mass., an hour north of Boston, where Mr. Updike kept his ties to The New Yorker but concentrated on his poetry and fiction. In 1959, a third child, Michael, was born, followed the next year by a fourth, Miranda.
Early Works
The move to Ipswich proved creatively invigorating. By 1959 Mr. Updike had completed three books — a volume of poetry, “The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures,” a novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” and a collection of stories, “The Same Door” — and placed them with Alfred A. Knopf, which remained his publisher throughout his career. From 1954 to 1959, he also published more than a hundred essays, articles, poems and short stories in The New Yorker.
The move to a small town also seemed to stimulate his memories of Shillington and his creation of its fictional counterpart, Olinger. All his early stories were set there or in a neighboring city modeled on Reading, as were his first four novels, “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur,” “Of the Farm” and “Rabbit, Run.” “The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), avoiding the usual coming-of-age tale of most beginners, established Mr. Updike’s reputation as an important novelist. Based on an old people’s home near Shillington, the novel explores the homogenization of society among members of the author’s grandfather’s generation.
“The Centaur” (1963), more autobiographical, welds the Greek myth of Chiron, the wounded centaur who gives up his immortality for the release of Prometheus, to the story of a mocked Olinger high-school science teacher who sacrifices himself for his son. It won the 1964 National Book Award for fiction.
“Of the Farm” (1965), set not far from Olinger, focuses on the mother of a farm family who fears she will die before her son, gone into advertising in New York, will fulfill her dream of his becoming a poet.
With “Couples” (1968), his fifth novel, Mr. Updike moved his setting away from Pennsylvania to the fictional Tarbox, Mass. There he explores sexual coupling and uncoupling in a community of young married couples who, as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “wanted to get away from the staleness of Old America and the vulgarity of the new; who wanted to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in renovated houses in absolutely authentic rural centers.” “Couples,” which became a best seller, was for its time remarkably frank about sex and became well known for its lengthy detail and often lyrical descriptions of sexual acts.
With the Rabbit quartet, Mr. Updike cast his keen eye on a still wider world. Where “Rabbit, Run” plays out its present-tense narrative in domestic squalor, its three sequels, published in 10-year intervals, encompass the later 20th century American experience: “Rabbit Redux” (1971) the cultural turmoil of the 1960s; “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) the boom years of the 1970s, the oil crisis and inflation; and “Rabbit at Rest” (1991), set in the time of what Rabbit calls “Reagan’s reign,” with its trade war with Japan, its AIDS epidemic and the terror bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Rabbit lies dying in a hospital at the end of the last volume, overweight, worn-out, felled by a coronary infarction during a one-on-one basketball game. With his life over, many critics judged that Rabbit had entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, joining Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like.
“Rabbit Redux” was considered the weakest of the set, but “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” both won Pulitzer Prizes and other awards. Reissued as a set in 1995, “Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy” was pronounced by some to be a contender for the crown of great American novel.
As a small-town businessman of limited scope, Rabbit is obviously very different from his creator. Yet the two of them share a middle-American view of the world, with the difference that Mr. Updike was exquisitely self-conscious. Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life.
He took up golf, which he played with passionate enthusiasm and also a writer’s eye, noting the grace notes in others’ swings and tiny variations in the landscape. He was a tall, handsome man with a prominent nose and a head of hair that Tom Wolfe once compared to “monkish thatch.” It eventually turned white, as did his bushy eyebrows, giving him a senatorial appearance. And though as a youth he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis, he became a person of immense charm, unfailingly polite and gracious in public.
As a citizen of Ipswich, he participated in local affairs, serving on the Congregational Church building committee and the Democratic town committee and writing a pageant for the town’s 17th-Century Day. For a while he worked downtown, in an office above a restaurant. Although politically liberal, he was virtually alone among American writers to declare himself in support of the Vietnam War.
In 1974 he separated from Mary and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. In 1976 the Updikes were divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Mass., and then in 1984 in Beverly Farms, both towns in the same corner of the state as Ipswich.
In addition to his wife, Martha, he is survived by his sons David, of Cambridge, Mass., and Michael, of Newburyport, Mass.; his daughters Miranda, of Ipswich, and Elizabeth, of Maynard, Mass.; three stepsons, John Bernhard, of Lexington, Mass., Jason Bernhard, of Brooklyn, and Frederic Bernhard, of New Canaan, Conn.; seven grandchildren, and seven step-grandchildren.
A Book a Year
With the storehouse of his youthful experience emptying and his material circumstances enriched — the bestselling “Couples” put its author’s face on the cover of Time magazine — he nevertheless determined to keep publishing a book a year.
“Writing’s gotten to be a habit,” he told Michiko Kakutani in an interview with The Times in 1982, a year after “Rabbit Is Rich” was published. “Sometimes the books do seem kind of silly and very papery, but there are moments when a sentence or a series of sentences clicks.”
Among the dozen or more novels he brought out in the next quarter century, some clicked, like “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984), celebrated by some as an exuberant sexual comedy and a satirical view of women’s liberation. It was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.
He returned to the witches in another novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” published in October, portraying them as widows revisiting the town. No longer preying on men as they once did, they are now “ordinary women,” Ms. Kakutani wrote in her review, “haunted by the sins of their youth, frightened of the looming prospect of the grave and trying their best to get by, day by day by day.”
Other later Updike novels seemed schematic, like the author’s three takes on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”: “Roger’s Version” (1986), “S” (1988) and “A Month of Sundays” (1975). “Memories of the Ford Administration” (1992), linking personal guilt to history; “Seek My Face” (2002), an improvisation on the life of Jackson Pollock; and “Villages” (2004), about small-town adultery, also found lukewarm receptions.
Some readers complained about his portrayal of women. In an interview with The Times in 1988, Mr. Updike acknowledged the criticism that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” His “only defense,” he said, “would be that it’s in the domesticity, the family, the sexual relations, that women interest me. I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen.”
Yet in trying to address this criticism by creating what he called “active and dynamic” women in “The Witches of Eastwick” and “S,” he may have made things worse. Some reviewers detected behind the author’s apparent respect for these female dynamos more ambivalence than anything else.
Meanwhile, the essays, book reviews, art criticism, reminiscences, introductions, forewords, prefaces, speeches, travel notes, film commentary, prose sketches, ruminations and other occasional jottings poured forth inexhaustibly, as if the experiences of his five senses only became real once recorded on paper.
The novelist Martin Amis sketched Mr. Updike plausibly in a 1991 review of a collection for The Times Book Review: “Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favorite color. No problem — but can they hang on? Mr. Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.”
Nonfiction Works
Over the decades, the assorted nonfiction filled six thick volumes, “Assorted Prose” (1965), “Picked-Up Pieces” (1975), “Hugging the Shore” (1983), “Odd Jobs” (1991), “More Matter” (1999) and “Due Considerations” (2007). The impression they left most indelibly was their author’s vast range in time, space and discipline as a reader, and his deep capacity to understand, appreciate, discriminate, explain and guide. As he once said: “I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight, let alone to sort out one’s honest responses.”
And whatever his flaws as a novelist, his mastery of the short-story form at least for a time continued to grow. Reviewing Mr. Updike’s sixth collection of stories, “Museums and Women and Other Stories” (1972), Anatole Broyard wrote in The Times, “His former preciousness has toughened into precision.” He concluded, “His language, which was once like a cat licking its fur, now stays closer to its subject, has become a means instead of an end in itself.”
Not incidentally, it was in a story collection — his fifth, “Bech: A Book” (1970) — that Mr. Updike created a counter-self living a counter-life in the character Henry Bech. Bech is an unmarried, urban, blocked Jewish writer immersed in the swim of literary celebrity — “a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times,” as Bech himself put it in the third volume devoted to him, “Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel” (1998), which followed “Bech Is Back” (1982).
As Mr. Updike’s opposite, Henry Bech not only entertained his readers in a voice very different from his creator’s — world-weary, full of schmerz and a touch of schmalz — he also undertook certain tasks that Mr. Updike avoided, like attending literary dinners, tsk-tsking over a younger generation’s minimalist prose and maximal tendency to write memoirs, working off grudges, murdering critics and interviewing John Updike for The New York Times Book Review.
Bech even wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that Mr. Updike never did, to the consternation of many Western writers and critics.
By contrasting so sharply with his creator, Henry Bech also defined Mr. Updike more distinctly, particularly his determination to stick to the essentials of his craft. As Mr. Updike told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight:
“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Rabbit at Rest
The best of Updike, the worst of Updike, and why the two are connected.

By Troy Patterson (SLATE)
What superlatives shall we settle on in memorializing John Updike, dead today of lung cancer at age 76? It is possibly true that he was the best Talk of the Town writer The New Yorker will ever have, though saying that feels like a heresy against James Thurber. Was he the dominant novelist-critic of his generation? That's even truer, though Cynthia Ozick turns out dense and mind-expanding essays, whereas Updike was foremost a reviewer with exceptional antennae. To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you'd be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.
Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms. Even his bad writing—and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there's no shortage of it—sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering.
The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes." Nicholson Baker, another scintillating miniaturist, embarked on the memoir/homage U and I despite not having read even half of Updike's books. Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?
It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known. David Foster Wallace, in a review of Toward the End of Time that sized up Updike as a "phallocrat," counted 10 and half pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts about his penis, and that cannot be a record. Anyone with the stamina to get through Brazil, a beachy retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, will discover at least as much space fruitlessly expended on the hero's "yam." Last month, Updike justly earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. He clinched it with a passage in the new Widows of Eastwick that includes—avert your eyes, children—the following sentence: "Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea."
This is a very rare kind of dreck, the sort that can be secreted only by a brilliant professor of desire, and it cannot be separated from the masterly understanding of lust and physical love Updike displays everywhere from Couples to "A&P" to a review of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect. One of this magician's very best tricks was to address this problem in the stories gathered in The Complete Henry Bech. There, in a collection starring a priapic novelist who was Updike's counter-ego, the author's exquisite mind reconciles itself with the farce of the flesh. The voice is not quite like anything else in Updike's expansive oeuvre, and the reader feels himself safe in the hands of the funniest writer never to make a career of comedy.Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

From The Sunday Times
Our best hope is that Barack Obama can resist the rabble-rousers
Minette Marrin
Life is blighted by the tyranny of the urgent over the important, as someone said. That is why, at the time of Barack Obama’s global triumph in Washington, I wasn’t watching the proceedings live on television but dealing with some urgent minor errands. It was very annoying, particularly when someone asked me why I wasn’t sitting enraptured in front of a television somewhere. Without thinking I replied that it wasn’t really important anyway: I was sick and tired of all the hoopla. Then I realised I wasn’t just being irritable: I really meant it.
I don’t mean that I am sick and tired of Obama. On the day when he was elected as the future president – more than 11 weeks ago now – I felt just as much joy as many millions of other people. The happiness of that moment hasn’t faded, nor has the reminder that politics can occasionally throw up someone who appears to be truly inspiring.
What has changed is that the public good feeling has, one way and another, been whipped up, day after day, into an excess of feeling. Excessive emotion, particularly the inflated emotion of the crowd, is something that should always be distrusted, especially in politics; there are plenty of sombre historical reasons for such misgivings.
By the time Obama’s inauguration day had finally arrived, these feelings had in many places reached a pitch that was almost hysterical. Quite apart from the razzmatazz all over the United States, people in this country had been behaving for days as if we were about to witness the second coming.
The hysteria was particularly marked among journalists and commentators, who were gripped by Obama mania. Those who couldn’t actually persuade their bosses to send them to Washington wrote think pieces in the tones of humble acolytes in a sect.
Those who did get to America seemed to think the British public really needed to be exposed to hour upon hour of excited, repeated, boring, trivial detail; it was almost pathological. And squillions watched. At the same time as losing their hearts to Obama, masses of people seemed to be losing their heads. The media have played an enormous part in this; it is dangerous.
It is true that some people have publicly and privately pointed out that Obama, however remarkable, cannot walk on water and it is a mistake to encourage any expectation that he can. But that hasn’t stopped the hyperinflation of mass expectation and mass feeling, both over there and over here. There seems to be in the darker recesses of the human pysche a constant yearning for hero worship.
No ordinary mortal, however exceptional, can meet the requirements that mass adulation makes of a hero, and when he hesitates or fails, the risk is that the masses will turn to equally irrational extremes of anger and disappointment. Such worship is likely to turn a person’s head, too, and tempt him to imagine that perhaps he might walk on water and should be treated accordingly.
If anyone can resist – and perhaps restrain – such mass adulation, it is probably Obama. No blame attaches to him, I believe. His inauguration speech struck me as a heroic model of self-restraint. Although Obama can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and has given speeches of heart-stopping, almost classical rhetoric on the campaign trail, he chose not to use his power. At such a tempting moment for a great orator, he chose not to stir up the passionate feelings that it needed only a touch of his honeyed voice to arouse. Instead he spoke gravely of the power that lies in humility and restraint. In the context it was positively un-American and it was wholly admirable. It was exactly the corrective tone of voice that was needed, which a lesser man might not have been selfless enough to use.
Imagine, to suggest a ridiculous comparison, what a man like Tony Blair would have made of such a moment. He would have taken off into the ether on the wings of mindless poesy. I’ve always thought that what went wrong with Blair was his seduction by American presidential glamour, by the machismo of the motorcade, the great power of all that mass attention. I think that as soon as he got to Bill Clinton’s Washington, the unsophisticated boy from Islington was corrupted by the thrill of outriders, snipers and surround-sound imperial razzle-dazzle on a world stage; it turned his head, with results that we now know.
There is a great tradition in British thought, to which Obama is heir, just as he is heir to the disciplined classical rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, of not saying more than you mean. One of the most famous expressions of this restraint was given by Shakespeare to Cordelia in King Lear. When her vainglorious father demands to know how much she loves him, she will say no more than is strictly true: she will not exaggerate to advance her own interests.
“According to my bond, no more no less,” she says. Her sisters make overblown protestations, but betray him. Cordelia remains quietly loyal. This is the honourable tradition to which Obama seems to belong.
The opposite tradition, which informs so much of the media and politics, is excess – an excess of exclaiming, promising, demanding, mythologising, misunderstanding, mindless gabby ignorance and general emotional incontinence. Look on the blogosphere – Obama has been subjected to all this in unprecedented volume.
The new president faces problems at home and abroad that may well be insoluble. He is very inexperienced and most of us know little about him. Historically speaking, few individuals make a difference for the better, yet individuals in power can and do constantly make terrible mistakes for the worse. Whatever Obama’s virtues, the truth is that no president could possibly be sure what to do about the global financial crisis.
Even the wisdom of Solomon could not decide what Washington could or should do about Gaza, or Afghanistan, or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, or North Korea’s, or world poverty, or domestic debt, or drugs, or the American poor. And even if anyone knew what should be done, it might still be impossible to do very much. The almost religious expectations laid upon Obama will necessarily be disappointed.
That is why the hysterical hoopla that has built them up is indeed important, because it is dangerous. We’ve had the circuses, the masses will soon say. Now we want the bread. And what will happen to the emperor who cannot provide it?
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Obama pricks America's bubble of denial
Refreshingly, the new President is the first in a long time to address his fellow citizens as adults
Naomi Wolf London Times
Amazingly Barack Obama spoke to us in his first moments as President as if both he and we were adults. His speech stated clearly that we were in a crisis - a deep and serious one - that we had to face it and that, in some ways, had brought it upon ourselves.
Why should this be so surprising and refreshing? Because Mr Obama is piercing a bubble. Since the Reagan years, US presidents have spoken to the nation in “denial-ese”: it's morning in America, we are the light unto the nations, bring it on. For 30 years, we Americans have not only become used to this drug-like rhetoric that blurs our perceptions, we have become addicted to the worldview it represents.
Reinforced by a stream of images of cheery models engaged in consumption and leisure, we shuttle from workstation to mall, increasingly insulated by a media consensus that leaves out the rest of the world and plenty of tough reality inside our borders. We have had a land of denial built around ourselves: all is well in the US, the best of all possible worlds.
This language costs us the capacity to self-correct. If we can't see ourselves as anything but 300 million Gary Coopers and Doris Days, we can't possibly notice the burnt bodies of children in Gaza, dead from our own foreign policies. If our intentions are always honourable, everyone who hates America must be a fanatical raghead. If our individual pluck and ingenuity will just, gosh, win the day, it is difficult to address crises such as the death of our manufacturing base.
This delusional self-image is finally catching up with us. If reality breaks through, painful though it may be, a good deal of benefit may come.
Mr Obama's sober realism was striking because of the extent to which Americans are in denial. In London two weeks ago I was amazed to hear of mainstream TV shows that addressed Americans who had lost their jobs and homes. Such shows are not made in the US. Yes, there is abstract analysis of unemployment and foreclosures, but it is devoid of emotional content. You almost never see a US news story following the tens and now hundreds of thousands who have slid, through no fault of their own, from middle-income lives to near-destitution.
We know a grave recession is on: but it is treated as a “how to consume more creatively” story - a New York Times feature on people asking their concierges to arrange catered dinners for 20 at home, rather than setting them up at high-end restaurants - or the crisis is individualised as a manifestation of personal failure: Dr Phil telling a couple losing their home that it was the fault of their own budgeting.
The American mythology that anyone can do anything, given hard work and personal qualities, means that we can be optimistic and open at our best, with more social mobility than Europe. But it also presupposes that there is no such thing as a system outside the individual, one that can collapse. So when collapse happens, we understand it only in terms of emotional cues: “greedy bankers”, “careless spenders”.
The bubble of denial blocks out foreign policy reality too. Reading the US papers, one would have the sense that the Gaza conflict was an even-handed struggle. We saw images of bodies from afar, but not an actual bloodied child. In England I found, on every cover of almost every news publication, close-up images of wounded children- just as we never see a graphic image of a US soldier wounded or dead in Afghanistan or Iraq. Just as we don't see body bags.
And a single sentence in The New York Times mentioned “protests in Europe” about Gaza. Not until I surfaced in the UK did I have any idea that there were hundreds of thousands of citizens on the streets throughout Europe. Back home, I asked well-informed friends if the knew that thousands had been protesting about Gaza in Europe,
Blank looks all around, followed by a flash of fear. We are starting to realise that we are the kid who is been kept in the dark about some important development that most people know about. One can feel the culture, conversation itself, growing thin from this screening-out of reality. Mr Obama was telling us to snap out of it. And we are, for the most part, relieved. It is like when you know something is terribly wrong but refuse to see a doctor and finally someone drags you to an appointment. It is tough, but salutary.
Mr Obama has studied history carefully. He knows that the great Americans did not coddle their fellow citizens, or flatter them. The great Americans told their fellow citizens to get a grip and look in the mirror.
Mr Obama cites Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, an incredible piece of rhetoric. At the peak of a bloody civil war, Lincoln did not say the equivalent of “mission accomplished”. He said that we were in the middle of a bloody civil war. That there was more suffering ahead. That soldiers were dying. And then he said that America had brought the conflict upon herself through the spiritual violation represented by the enslavement of fellow Americans - and that not a drop of blood or an ounce of treasure would be spared until it was expiated.
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy also called on Americans to confront where they had strayed from their national mandate to be a “light unto the nations”. American histories tend to misrepresent the dark language these leaders used, as if our now-saccharine consciousness can't bear the truth of the past, let alone of the present. Can you imagine a US president speaking like that today? Well, you just heard one, gently enough, begin to do so.
The relief that many Americans feel after just one dose of reality means that not only can we bear it - many of us sense it is long overdue. Our hearts will no doubt be broken by this very President many times over. But for now he has done us a great favour: let in a bit of the real darkness of what we face. It is up to us to be willing to step out of the bubble.
Naomi Wolf is co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign. Her books include The End of America and Give Me Liberty

"This Winter of Our Hardship"
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land—a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America— they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions—that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions—who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them—that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account—to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day—because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control—and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort—even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West—know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment—a moment that will define a generation—it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence—the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed—why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

From The Sunday Times
Can Barack Obama fix it? Yes he can
In two days’ time, Barack Obama will be president of the United States. His election promises a break with the failures of the Bush years but what does he really stand for? Andrew Sullivan examines his likely domestic and foreign policies and weighs their chances of success
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Magnanimity in victory: that was Churchill’s advice. And since his precocious victory last November, Barack Obama has walked that Churchillian walk. It is not common in politics, especially after a meteoric rise past every prejudice, every smear and every Clinton, but Obama has an old soul’s perspective and an intellectually secure man’s confidence. Perhaps he has too much confidence — except that every time his friends feared that in the campaign, he proved them wrong.
From the shallow brittleness of George W Bush to the supple strength of Obama is a revolution in temperament and style not seen since Jimmy Carter gave way to Ronald Reagan 28 years ago. It signals the kind of administration that now looms before us: a conciliatory, inclusive, pragmatic form of liberalism. It’s a liberalism eager to learn from the insights of conservatives, and it is pioneered by a president-elect shrewd enough to know that generosity of spirit means more leverage and influence, not less.
The goal, it now seems clear, is what some deduced many months ago: Obama wants to become the leader of an American version of the national governments that Britain relied on in the depths of the last Great Depression.
We cannot know whether he will succeed, whether partisanship and America’s culture war will slowly eat him up, or whether in government, as he makes decisions with winners and losers, his aura will evaporate. But what we can say is that, so far, he shows every sign of meaning what he said about leaving that divisive, destructive froth behind. Just reading the papers every morning, we see every sign that the gravity of the crisis his predecessor bequeaths him makes this necessary.
The Washington establishment still doesn’t know quite what to make of him. For almost two decades the town has been divided ideologically and culturally — red and blue, neoliberal and neoconservative — shying and plunging in mood swings and feuding. For 16 years, under the guidance of political hatchet men such as Bill Clinton’s Dick Morris and Bush’s Karl Rove, these divisions have been seen as ways to wedge your way to short-term political advantage, to exploit American difference for electoral or PR gain.
The press learnt that cynicism was the only reliable guide to understanding politics and that world-weariness was the same as wisdom. That fear of seeming naive was what inhibited many in the press from greater scepticism about Saddam’s alleged arsenal in the run-up to the Iraq war.
It was an emotionally familiar and comfortable rut. The baby-boomer generation, reared and suckled on post-Vietnam divides, staged their battles like bitter spouses after years of a failed marriage who never really planned on divorce. Now, with this first post-boomer politician, the children who witnessed their parents’ endless fighting have taken over. And it’s the children who seem like adults.
Take a few largely symbolic things that Obama has done since November 4. He gave his chief rival and fierce competitor, Hillary Clinton, the biggest job in his government. He reached out to John McCain, his opponent in the autumn campaign, and will hold a dinner in McCain’s honour soon. He asked a powerful evangelical voice, Rick Warren, to give the inaugural invocation.
Last week he dined with a group of Republican columnists who endorsed his opponent. The dinner was at the home of George Will, the closest America gets to a Tory mind. He did this before he talked to any journalists who had actually supported him. At the Pentagon, Obama has asked Bush’s appointee, Robert Gates, to stay on. He asked Mark Dybul, Bush’s only openly gay appointee, to remain as global Aids co-ordinator. This is not Karl Rove’s America. In so many ways, it symbolises its undoing.
Obama acts like a kind of antacid to the American stomach. He has walked through the churn of racial and cultural and religious polarisation and somehow calmed everyone down.
Last spring he faced his biggest crisis — the exploitation by the Republican right of his incendiary former pastor Jeremiah Wright, a man whose penchant for polarisation was pathological. At a moment of extreme emotion and political peril, Obama found a way to give a speech that remains the greatest of recent times, to remind Americans of their complex and painful racial past, and not to condescend or cavil. The intellectual achievement of the speech was impressive enough — sufficient to provoke Garry Wills, the Lincoln scholar, to compare it to the Gettysburg address. That Obama wrote and delivered it as he heard in his ears every racial stereotype that had pummelled his psyche for his entire life bespoke an emotional maturity that still shocks.
He even managed — and this was a real achievement — to suck the drama out of the Clintons, to defeat them by quietly and methodically reducing their oxygen supply until they had no option but to surrender. Then he gave them their own night at the convention, a concession that many viewed as weakness but that only strengthened him. In the autumn he never took the Sarah Palin bait, treating her as one might handle the proverbial nutter on the bus even as she accused him of being a terrorist-loving socialist and whipped up largely white, southern crowds with paranoid fervour.
Maybe it’s Michelle Obama who vents everything privately that her husband seems to absorb publicly. Or maybe he just came that way. But there is something real about this quality that is not simply a projection of so many hopes. At several points in the gut-wrenching emotional rollercoaster of last year he simply disappeared alone into a hotel room for a few minutes to gather his thoughts and restrain his feelings. It was this emotional balance and temperamental maturity that led many to see him as a president long before it ever became feasible or even imaginable.
He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to his humour, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league. But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp of policy.
What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.
He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart enough to say yes.
He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party.
He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.
This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come, as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually more than just a marketing device for a campaign.
Take the economy. Obama’s immediate and most pressing crisis is a global economy teetering on the edge. It is also a resilient banking crisis in the US that has yet to resolve itself and a collapse in demand that threatens to turn a recession into something much darker. Worse, the current budget outlook would make even Bush Republicans blanch — trillions in deficits as far as the eye can see and a record national debt (outside the second world war).
The sheer extent of the damage that the outgoing president has done to American and global financial balance is hard to overstate. He spent like a trust-fund baby who would never have to balance the books or earn a living. He made the entitlement crisis worse by adding a massive new healthcare programme for the elderly in a naked attempt to win Florida for ever. Because of an ideological insistence on partial privatisation, desperately needed reform of social security ended in miserable failure. Trillions of dollars were poured into a war against Iraq waged on the basis of a WMD threat that didn’t exist.
Obama’s response has been to turn not to ideologues but to the smartest economic team he could find. His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, was integral to the Bush administration’s response to the crisis; no one doubts that Larry Summers, incoming head of the National Economic Council, is one of the sharpest economic minds on the planet.
The policy, or what we are beginning to glimpse of it, is just as bipartisan. There will be a big increase in infrastructure projects, aimed at maximal impact on growth. But there will also be tax cuts for the middle class and a bevy of Republican-friendly business tax breaks to maximise the boost to demand. The tax hikes for the very wealthy — the only real economic difference between Obama and McCain last autumn — will not happen. No one wants to suck any money out of the spending economy right now for any reason.
The most striking news of the past week is a strong indication that Obama will unveil a very tough spending budget, will tackle new financial regulations early and will put real reform of the entitlement state on the table. In some ways, he has no choice. Given America’s current level of public and private debt, the president-elect cannot borrow another few trillion in a few years without reassuring global markets that there is a long-term prospect for American fiscal balance.
Obama knows that defence, healthcare and retirement benefits are where the money is. His proposed fiscal responsibility summit may drift into the usual irrelevance, but perhaps the depth of the long-term problems could provide an opening to address the longer-term insolvency of the American state. So grapple with that: a black urban Democrat is pledging to be far more fiscally responsible than a Texas Republican.
In foreign policy, the same pragmatism abounds. Although withdrawal of troops from Iraq will occur, Obama knows all too well that the current lull in sectarian violence is extremely fragile and that the power vacuum left by withdrawal could spark a new civil or regional war. So expect some foot-dragging.
On Afghanistan, the president-elect is too shrewd to raise the kind of utopian expectations of democracy invoked so glibly by Bush. He plans to increase troop levels there but is reconciled to the fact that the best that can be hoped for is prevention or eradication of terrorist training camps that could directly hurt Americans.
On detention, interrogation and rendition, Obama has also been hemmed in by the Bush legacy. On torture, Obama is clear enough. The appointment of a heavyweight enemy of torture, Leon Panetta, to the CIA, and of a civil libertarian, Dawn Johnsen, in the critical role as head of the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel, is as blunt a signal as any new president could send that the days of Bush and Dick Cheney are over. Among Obama’s first moves will be an executive order closing the torture and detention camp at Guantanamo.
However, returning to the community of civilised nations in interrogation techniques does not and cannot resolve the intractable legal problems created by Cheney. Obama will simply have to tackle these on a case-by-case basis, with unavoidably unsatisfying results.
Many Guantanamo detainees can be repatriated — the Yemenis alone cut the numbers in half. Many others have already been released for lack of evidence. But there will be scores of prisoners who are doubtless dangerous and yet were tortured for so long and so unequivocally by the US that all the evidence against them would be thrown out in any non-kangaroo courts (which excludes Bush’s rigged “military commissions”).
Last week Bush’s own appointee as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo conceded that torture had made prosecutions of many prisoners impossible. And this, of course, is the real fruit of the Cheney madness: the worst of the worst will either get off free or will remain a public relations black eye to the US for ever.
Obama also understands that restoring America’s moral standing on the torture question could actually give the US government a little more leeway on detention and rendition. If the world knows that maltreatment won’t happen, some sane, constitutional and legal provisions for detention without charge could be constructed on the British model. The rationale is not torturing for “intelligence” but protecting the public while evidence is searched for and doubt remains. Equally, some kind of rendition programme that follows the lines of Bill Clinton and the first President Bush — and that eschews any co-operation with regimes that torture — is a reasonable tool in the war against jihadist terror. It’s the Bush-Cheney innovation of “extraordinary renditions” and disappearances that has to end.
Will there be prosecutions for war crimes? Obama will not embrace that as a programme. But he is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and a teacher of constitutional law. If evidence of war crimes emerges, he will not prevent his attorney-general from prosecuting, as he must. The law grinds on — and as the Bush torture era recedes, my bet is that it will grind rather relentlessly.
What concerns Obama most of all is the Bush assertion of inherent constitutional powers to designate any human being — citizen or non-citizen, in America or anywhere else — as an “enemy combatant” and to detain them indefinitely without trial and torture them at will. This, the president-elect fully understands, is in effect the abolition of the constitution. He will take an oath on Tuesday to protect that constitution, not eviscerate it in the tradition of his predecessor.
On Israel, perhaps, we will see the biggest shift. Obama has so far been preternaturally silent on the Gaza bombardment, in deference to the “one president at a time” mantra and because he knows full well that if he were not about to become president, the Israelis would not have launched their attack.
Obama does not want to get into a war of words with Israel before he even takes office, but he shows every sign of tackling the Middle East the way he has defused America’s culture wars. He will try to prick the passion and lay out a rational solution.
We all know the contours of the deal that the Israelis and the Palestinians are too politically divided and weak to agree to: a two-state compromise, a roll-back of settlements, an international force on the border with the West Bank, a cessation of terrorism, and financial compensation for displaced Palestinians seeking a right of return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
My sense is that Clinton, the secretary of state, shares Obama’s views and that her reflexively neoconservative approach to Israel will moderate once she is no longer a senator from New York. My sense is also that Obama intends to use Clinton in ways not seen in a secretary of state for a very long time. And my guess is that she would not have taken the job if she were not convinced that she has a chance to go down in history as an architect of a breakthrough Middle East peace agreement.
Still, if any fight could remain totally immune to Obama’s moderation, it is surely the Israeli-Palestinian death match. Does this product of Hawaiian hippiedom really think he can get through to Hamas? Or Benjamin Netanyahu?
I don’t think Obama has many illusions on this score, but he will almost certainly try to change the game with a very public and early appeal to the world’s Muslims. He will take the oath of office using his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and will likely give a big speech soon that may give his domestic advisers heartburn. His face remains one of America’s most potent weapons in the war of ideas that is integral to winning the fight against jihadist terrorism. What he is looking for is a grand bargain in the Middle East just as surely as he is seeking a grand bargain in domestic fiscal matters. Both bargains would be made possible by grave and growing crises that help to scramble the recent past, by an overarching rhetorical appeal to the masses behind the political leaders and by a bit of good luck and planning.
Be assured that Obama is more of a strategist than a tactician. He knows that all the regional conflicts are interlocked and is often a few steps ahead of his enemies (just ask Clinton or McCain). To move Israel forward, he needs to engage Syria. To deal with Gaza, he has to test the waters with Iran. To achieve minimalist goals in Afghanistan, he needs Pakistan.
When you listen to him rattle off all the dimensions of the broader conflict, you are aware that this is a president who does not see the world in black and white or in with-us-or-against-us terms. He sees it as a series of interconnected conflicts that can be managed by pragmatic solutions, combined with a little rhetorical fairy dust and willingness to offer respect where Bush provided merely contempt. This is not a panacea. But it is not nothing either.
Obama almost certainly believes, for example, that no one is enjoying the Gaza disaster more than Iran’s government, and that Tehran’s more radical mullahs fear nothing more than fighting an election at home while Obama appeals to the Iranian people over their heads. It is perfectly reasonable to be confident that Obama threatens President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in ways that Bush never managed. I can hope, at least.
If you close your eyes and imagine what this combination of fiscal and foreign policy realism portends, you will come to a pretty obvious conclusion. This Democratic liberal is actually, when it comes down to it, a man almost entirely within the mainstream spectrum of the European centre right. Imagine a Cameron-style Tory becoming president of the United States and try to come up with something he would do differently.
This blend of pragmatism and realism reminds me in the American context of Eisenhower more than any other recent president. Obama has the unerring instincts of a conciliator and a moderate Tory. But he has the rhetorical skills of a Kennedy or a Churchill. That’s a potent combination.
It may be, of course, that the relief at the end of the Bush era is colouring our hopes. It may also be that events conspire to derail the man, or that the habits of the past two decades in Washington will return with a vengeance and do to Obama what was done to Clinton, another centrist Democrat who came to office on a tide of goodwill. But I don’t think that, given the immense crises we all face, it is unreasonable to hope for more.
There is something about Obama’s willingness to give others credit, to approach so many issues with such dispassionate pragmatism, and to shift by symbols and speeches the mood and tenor of an entire country that gives one a modest form of optimism. Even now, as the outlook seems so dark, and as the inheritance seems so insuperable, three words linger in the mind.
Yes, he can.
And two words echo back at me.
Can we?