Obama's Patriotic Call

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008; A13

If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on.

Ever since Barack Obama took off his flag pin, Democrats and liberals have had a queasy feeling that talk of patriotism would be a covert way to raise the matter of Obama's race; to cast him as some sort of alien figure ("You know what his middle name is?"); and to paint him as an effete intellectual out of touch with true American values.

I have no doubt that these things will happen. Moreover, John McCain's sacrifice for his country will be a central theme of the Republican campaign. And why not? Yes, many Republicans refused to honor John Kerry's service during the campaign four years ago, but McCain wasn't part of that, and his service deserves the praise it gets.

Yet Obama cannot simply cede the terrain of patriotism to McCain, and progressives should not assume that patriotism is somehow a bad thing, akin to jingoism or nationalism.

The reaction of too many progressives to patriotism is "automatic, allergic recoil," say two young Seattle writers, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, in their important book "The True Patriot."

Instead of recoil, they offer rigorous standards for what patriotism should be. "True patriots," they write, "believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice; freedom from tolerance is prejudice; freedom from stewardship is exploitation; and freedom from compassion is cruelty."

Their new progressive patriotism bears some resemblance to the old progressive patriotism of Theodore Roosevelt. "We cannot meet the future," Roosevelt said in a 1916 Memorial Day speech, "either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all, we cannot meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by silly sentimentalism in words."

For good measure, the trust-buster also declared that "the big business man" must "recognize the fact that his business activities, while beneficial to himself and his associates, must also justify themselves by being beneficial to the men who work for him and to the public which he serves."

As Liu and Hanauer and and Roosevelt suggest, anyone who enters into a serious discussion of patriotism is required to offer more than bromides about love of flag and of country. Patriotism has to involve definitions, commitments and actions.

Obama already has the template for moving the debate in this direction. In December, he gave one of his best, and least noticed, speeches: a call to national service. The policies he proposed include a doubling of the Peace Corps and an expansion of the AmeriCorps program from 75,000 to 250,000 slots. (President Bush, by the way, deserves credit for saving AmeriCorps from the hostility of some in his own party.) Obama would link his $4,000 tuition tax credit to a service requirement.

He also suggests ideas that conservatives should embrace, including a Social Investment Fund Network and a Social Entrepreneur Agency that would encourage the innovations of the private, not-for-profit sector.

But Obama's speech was about more than programs. It was suffused with the rhetoric of a reformer's patriotism. "I have no doubt that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it," he said. "Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July; loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it."

Obama's is just one approach to patriotism and service. Sen. Jim Webb's new GI Bill of Rights is an essential step toward honoring those who have sacrificed in Iraq, and Sen. Chris Dodd has proposed important interim steps toward expanding AmeriCorps by bringing its rewards to those who perform service more closely in line with current college costs.

Dodd says he always explains his decision to join President John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps by saying, "The president asked me." He wins nods from youthful audiences when he says, "Let me tell you what it was like to be young, to be an American and to be asked."

Dodd was campaigning for Obama in South Dakota last Friday when he spoke with me, and he seems to have gotten this message to his candidate. Pinch-hitting for Ted Kennedy as the commencement speaker at Wesleyan University on Sunday, Obama revisited the themes of his December speech and explicitly renewed JFK's call, promising that "service to a greater good" would be "a cause of my presidency."

A competition between Obama and McCain over who can issue the most compelling summons to service would serve the country far better than an empty rhetorical skirmish over which of these candidates is the true patriot. And, yes, it's a good thing that Obama has been seen wearing the flag pin again.

postchat@aol.com

Clinton's Grim Scenario

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, May 27, 2008; A13

If this campaign goes on much longer, what will be left of Hillary Clinton?

A woman uniformly described by her close friends as genuine, principled and sane has been reduced to citing the timing of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination as a reason to stay in the race -- an argument that is ungenuine, unprincipled and insane. She vows to keep pushing, perhaps all the way to the convention in August. What manner of disintegration is yet to come?

For anyone who missed it, Clinton was pleading her cause before the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader on Friday. Rejecting calls to drop out because her chances of winning have become so slight, she said the following: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it."

The point isn't whether you take Clinton at her word that she didn't actually mean to suggest that someone -- guess who? -- might be assassinated. The point is: Whoa, where did that come from?

Setting aside for the moment the ugliness of Clinton's remark, just try to make it hold together. Clinton's basic argument is that attempts to push her out of the race are hasty and premature, since the nomination sometimes isn't decided until June. She cites two election years, 1968 and 1992, as evidence -- but neither is relevant to 2008 because the campaign calendar has been changed.

In 1968, the Democratic race kicked off with the New Hampshire primary on March 12; when Robert Kennedy was killed, the campaign was not quite three months old. In 1992, the first contest was the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 10; by the beginning of June, candidates had been battling for about 3 1/2 months -- and it was clear that Bill Clinton would be the nominee, though he hadn't technically wrapped it up.

This year, the Iowa caucuses were held on Jan. 3, the earliest date ever. Other states scrambled to move their contests up in the calendar as well. When June arrives, the candidates will have been slogging through primaries and caucuses for five full months -- a good deal longer than in those earlier campaign cycles.

So Clinton's disturbing remark wasn't wishful thinking -- as far as I know (to quote Clinton herself, when asked earlier this year about false rumors that her opponent Barack Obama is a Muslim). Clearly, it wasn't logical thinking. It can only have been magical thinking, albeit not the happy-magic kind.

Clinton has always claimed to be the cold-eyed realist in the race, and at one point maybe she was. Increasingly, though, her words and actions reflect the kind of thinking that animates myths and fairy tales: Maybe a sudden and powerful storm will scatter my enemy's ships. Maybe a strapping woodsman will come along and save the day.

Clinton has poured more than $11 million of her own money into the campaign, with no guarantee of ever getting it back. She has changed slogans and themes the way Obama changes his ties. She has been the first major-party presidential candidate in memory to tout her appeal to white voters. She has abandoned any pretense of consistency, inventing new rationales for continuing her candidacy and new yardsticks for measuring its success whenever the old rationales and yardsticks begin to favor Obama.

It could be that any presidential campaign requires a measure of blind faith. But there's a difference between having faith in a dream and being lost in a delusion. The former suggests inner strength; the latter, an inner meltdown.

What Clinton's evocation of RFK suggests isn't that she had some tactical reason for speaking the unspeakable but that she and her closest advisers can't stop running and rerunning through their minds the most far-fetched scenarios, no matter how absurd or even obscene. She gives the impression of having spent long nights convincing herself that the stars really might still align for her -- that something can still happen to make the Democratic Party realize how foolish it has been.

Clinton campaigns as if she knows she will leave some Democrats with bad feelings. That's the Clinton way: Ask forgiveness, not permission. But every day, as more superdelegates trickle to Obama's side, it becomes a surer bet that she will not win. She and her family enjoy good health and fabulous wealth. They'll be fine -- unless, while losing this race for the nomination, Hillary Clinton also loses her soul.

The writer will answer questions at 1 p.m. today athttp://www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address iseugenerobinson@washpost.com.

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Montana's huge black population gives Obama the edge

by kos

Sun May 25, 2008 at 12:29:02 PM PDT

Census numbers:

Black Persons, 2006: 0.4%
White Persons, 2006: 90.8%

The rest are either Latino (2.5%) or Native American (6.4%).

Montana is also the nation's fifth poorest state. It's poor, it's white, and has no African Americans to speak of. Therefore, if what the Clinton campaign and its apologists say is correct, if what the political news media tell me is accurate, Clinton should have another 30-point blowout in store. Right?

Mason-Dixon for Lee Newspapers. 5/19-21. Likely Democratic primary voters. MoE 5% (12/17-19 results)

Obama 52 (17)
Clinton 35 (29)

I expect the Clinton campaign to spin bullshit. It's been the entirety of their campaign now for several months. But it's shocking to me how difficult it has been for the political media to distinguish from Obama's Appalachian problem and his non-existent problems with white voters at large.

Then again we can always ju jitsu this and ask, "Why is Clinton suddenly having a hard time with working class whites? Are they now abandoning her?" Such a question would be bullshit, of course. Obama has always done very well west of the Mississippi, and Clinton poorly outside of the Latino vote in the southwest. But if they want to deal in bullshit, we can always oblige.

M-D also polled general election matchups, and this state, which Kerry lost by 20 points, is a single-digit affair for Obama.

Mason-Dixon for Lee Newspapers. 5/19-21. Likely Democratic primary voters. MoE 4% (No trend lines)

Total Men Wom Rep Dem Ind
McCain (R) 47 50 44 85 12 39
Obama (D) 39 37 41 4 77 41

McCain (R) 51 48 48 91 7 50
Clinton (D) 40 38 42 2 88 33

There's an obvious typo there -- McCain can't be winning both women and men with 48 percent of the vote, and overall 51-40. Regardless, once Obama brings home Democrats to Clinton-like levels, it'll tighten Montana that much more. With his lead among independents and the larger number of undecided Republicans willing to give him a shot, Montana is definitely going to be in play.

And favorability ratings:

McCain: 46 favorable, 35 unfavorable, 19 neutral
Obama: 41 favorable, 38 unfavorable, 21 neutral
Clinton: 29 favorable, 50 unfavorable, 21 neutral

It'll be nice heading into this general election without having to deal with Clinton's sky-high negatives.

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Tags: Barack Obama, president, 2008, Hillary Clinton, John McCain (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

The Obama Connection

May 26, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

By ROGER COHEN

It’s the networks, stupid.

More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.

That’s not surprising. Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. MAC — mutually assured connectivity — has replaced the MAD — mutually assured destruction — of cold-war days.

For Clinton, born in 1947, that ratio is different. Her mental paradigm is division. When her husband last ran for president in 1996, the Internet was marginal. The thinking and people from that campaign have proved unable to fast-forward a dozen years. They’ve been left like deer blinded by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut.

This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.

Green notes, “Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.

Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.

He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world — the one beyond war without end — is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.

I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection.

It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding.

Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”

Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”

The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies — from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions — but felt powerless to influence them.

The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace.

Obama’s people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool’s errand: that’s a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it’s because he knows he must speak to a 21st-century world.

Grewal writes: “Politics is the only effective countervailing power that we have with which to refashion the structures that emerge through sociability.” Accumulated personal choices expressed through networks fashion sociability. Short of global governance, only sovereignty can channel that will.

In concrete terms, you won’t make globalization more equable in its distribution of income without politics. But first you must see sociability for what it is: a form of 21st-century personal sovereignty that rivals national sovereignty.

Clinton never saw this. McCain, whose Internet fund-raising has been negligible, also shows little grasp of MAC.

Of course, connection is no panacea, or guarantee against violent threats: Al Qaeda uses the Web effectively. But without understanding connectivity, you can no more beat terrorism than win an election.

It’s the networks, stupid, and the generations that go with them.

Blog: www.iht.com/passages

Aide Sees Obama Clinching Nomination in June

May 26, 2008

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama’s chief strategist said Sunday that he believed Mr. Obama would by the first week of June reach the absolute number of Democratic delegates needed to clinch the party’s presidential nomination.

The strategist, David Axelrod, was asked on the ABC News program “This Week” whether Mr. Obama might “go over the top” after Puerto Rico votes on June 1, and Montana and South Dakota hold the final primaries two days later, presumably bringing new superdelegates to him. “I believe that we will,” he said.

“By any calculation, we’re within striking distance of getting the absolute number that we need,” he said, “and I’m confident — I’m confident that we will.”

Mr. Obama has already attained a majority in the pledged delegates, but remains short of the overall majority — including superdelegates — needed for nomination. A count by The New York Times shows the Illinois senator leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York by 1,965.5 delegates to 1,775, with 2,026 delegates needed for nomination.

Spokesmen for Mrs. Clinton, for their part, took to the Sunday morning news programs to try to stem the criticism of her for her remark on Friday that she was staying in the race because earlier nominating races had remained unresolved into June — including in 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, appeared irritated at the way the remark had taken on life. “She was referring to the timeline, how these events had gone into June,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He said a “hyped-up press” had twisted Clinton’s words, and he noted that Robert Kennedy Jr., the son of Senator Kennedy, had said he had taken no offense.

Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, made a similar point on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” asserting that both the news media and the Obama campaign had been fanning the flames in this controversy. Mrs. Clinton and her aides have insisted that she was merely making a point about the length of past campaigns.

Mr. Axelrod, on ABC, reiterated that the Obama campaign wanted to move on. “We take her at her word, and we’re beyond that issue now,” he said.

Mr. McAuliffe declined Sunday to say whether Mrs. Clinton might battle on to the Democratic convention in August, but said he expected the nominating process to “be over shortly.”

He also said that reports that Bill Clinton wanted his wife to be Mr. Obama’s running mate if he wins the nomination were “100 percent not true” and that no talks had been held to discuss such a ticket.

Both candidates campaigned in Puerto Rico over the weekend, although on Sunday Mr. Obama returned to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., to deliver a commencement address. Standing in for Senator Edward Kennedy, who was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, he urged the young graduates to look past material gains and work for the country’s “collective salvation.”

The Clinton campaign is hoping for a favorable decision when the Democratic Party’s rules committee meets Saturday to decide whether to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan at the nominating convention, although the states broke party rules by scheduling early primaries. Mr. McAuliffe was asked whether the senator might ignore an unfavorable ruling and fight on.

“I’m not saying that today,” he said. “We’ll see where we are.”

The Clinton campaign is quickly running out of time to make its argument that Mrs. Clinton is the Democrat best qualified to take on Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.

A new survey by Newsweek, however, gave her campaign some comfort. It found that Mrs. Clinton would do substantially better among white voters, in a matchup against Mr. McCain, than Mr. Obama would do. Both Democrats trailed Mr. McCain among white voters, but Mrs. Clinton lagged by 4 percentage points and Mr. Obama by 12 points. Among voters over all, Mr. Obama tied Mr. McCain, 46 percent to 46 percent.