Around a year ago, when I was first struck by Barack Obama's oratory, I decided to use the Dish to record his speeches in full as they occurred. I did it because they are rare among contemporary political speeches in being readable and literary. But also because I had the sense I was witnessing history. Here are some links to those posts - and the full text of various speeches - for those of you who would like to hear Obama in less frenzied times over the last twelve months, as he laid out his concrete proposals and general ideas and approach to politics.
Here he is at DePaul, the moment when he reignited his fall campaign. And here's his address at Howard in the wake of the Jena 6 controversy. Here's a commencement address from last summer. Here he is on foreign policy. And here on poverty. There is a meme beginning to go around that he is vague and empty. If you do not know what Obama is proposing in many areas, it's only because you don't know how to use Google. If you want to know more, click the links. One section of his June Hampton University address resonates with JFK echoes:
The truth is, one man cannot make a movement. No single law can erase the prejudice in the heart of a child who hangs a noose on a tree. Or in the callousness of a prosecutor who bypasses justice in the pursuit of vengeance. No one leader, no matter how shrewd, or experienced, or inspirational, can prevent teenagers from killing other teenagers in the streets of our cities, or free our neighborhoods from the grip of homelessness, or make real the promise of opportunity and equality for every citizen.
Only a country can do those things. Only this country can do those things. That's why if you give me the chance to serve this nation, the most important thing I will do as your President is to ask you to serve this country, too. The most important thing I'll do is to call on you every day to take a risk, and do your part to carry this movement forward. Against deep odds and great cynicism I will ask you to believe that we can right the wrong we see in America. I say this particularly to the young people who are listening today. ...
US presidential candidate John McCain is hugged by a supporter after an address in Peterborough, New Hampshire, 05 January 2008. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.
For what it's worth, Huckabee was by far the most effective in responding to the question of how to go up against Obama. And he was also smart to be generous. The rest reverted to the ancient right-left playbook. I don't think that works so well against Obama.
I've been watching this GOP debate and need to get a life. It's 8 pm on a Saturday night. Some rough impressions after an hour: Huckabee is easily the most coherent and intelligible Republican. McCain seems very tired, which is understandable. I like the quietness of the format. When Romney stops pandering and starts explaining policy, he's much better. He's obviously a capable guy. He was a decent governor. But the ability to mortgage every part of his soul and past to the exigencies of the present really undermines him. I think of the Romney campaign that might have been. But in the end, character counts, I guess.
I've been campaigning for Obama in California. Today (Saturday) I went to a training session for Precinct Captains. When I signed up on Tuesday, there were 12 people registered to attend. On Friday, after Iowa, there were 137.
Beyond being agents of change, there is one obvious similarity between Obama and Huckbee. They both represent large voting blocks in their respective parties that are expected to get out the vote, then shut-up. It's fun watching these folks that have taken blacks and evangelicals for granted for years squirm.
The preternaturally jolly McAuliffe is a good man to have spinning for you in a pinch. But his good cheer dimmed when I asked him about Bill Richardson, who appears to have made an 11th-hour deal to throw his supporters to Obama.
“How many times did [Clinton] appoint him?” McAuliffe marveled. “Two? U.N. Ambassador and Energy Secretary?” He looked at me, half-glaring, awaiting confirmation. “I don’t know,” I joked, “but who’s counting?”
“I am,” McAuliffe said firmly.
The Clintons used every lever, every intimidating tactic, every legitimate threat to bully Democratic office-holders to back them ... or else. Many caved. But for others, the politics of fear and parsing and petty polling are over.
It's Rasmussen, as was the Obama 10-point lead, and I've learned to be a little wary of them. But the latest NH data for the GOP is McCain 31, Romney 26 and Paul with 14 percent, ahead of Huckabee.
How can Fox News have a televised New Hampshire debate and exclude the guy in third place? We know why, of course: they're afraid. They should be. But his exclusion is an outrage.
The country, these past seven years in particular, has seemed built upon a foundation of arrogant exceptionalism. We're the damned best country in the world and we know it and it's going to be shoved in everyone else's face. Unilateralism. And the left has responded that we are most certainly NOT the best damned country in the world, look at this problem and that problem and everything's wrong.
Paul says, we may be the best damned country in the world but that doesn't mean we are morally required to export this excellence, and at what cost to us if we attempt it? And Obama says, we may be the best country in the world, but let's be thankful for that, let our nation's public face be one of humilty and magnanimity.
Both represent a restoration of faith, a clean break - though there's a danger in investing too much faith in the idea that politicians can bring about this kind of sea change in the national outlook. I think, rather, that they exemplify the change that has already taken place in many people's heads and hearts.
Today, New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Fergus Cullen released the following statement regarding Sunday’s Republican forum on FOX:
“The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary serves a national purpose by giving all candidates an equal opportunity on a level playing field. Only in New Hampshire do lesser known, lesser funded underdogs have a fighting chance to establish themselves as national figures. Consistent with that tradition, we believe all recognized major candidates should have an equal opportunity to participate in pre-primary debates and forums.
“This principle applies to tonight’s debates on ABC as well as Sunday’s planned forum on FOX. The New Hampshire Republican Party believes Congressmen Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter should be included in the FOX forum on Sunday evening. Our mutual efforts to resolve this difference have failed.”
“While we understand that FOX News continues to move forward it is with regret, the New Hampshire Republican Party hereby withdraws as a partner in this forum.”
Why should grass roots Republicans be yanked around by Hannity and O'Reilly's establishment agenda?
And in New Hampshire, that's grim news for Clinton:
In New Hampshire, Obama leads Clinton by five points among Democrats and by sixteen points among Independents. The survey indicates that 40% of the voters will be Independents.
Clinton's own website has a page showing how better Obama fares against most of the Republicans than she would. I guess: kudos for transparency. (Re-posted with fixed link).
Time for a post that's total self-parody. Check this out:
I have seen the Paul campaign in action, and I can confirm that there are beards. Lots of them. Middle-aged electrician beards, gravitas-adding beards on thirtysomethings, thin hipper-than-thou beards on the youngest volunteers. Massachusetts grad student John Notley wears a massive, red Nordic mane that earns him the nickname Thor. It's reminiscent of a semi-famous photo from the 1972 presidential race, of a waddling businessman handing out Nixon literature right next to a skinny hippie handing out McGovern fliers. The difference is that the nameless McGovern flunky was campaigning for acid, amnesty, and abortion, while Paul's crew wants to bring back the paleoconservative sobriety of Sen. Robert Taft.
Scientific American has a very informative piece up about new research into the uses of LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs for mental illness:
Much remains unclear about the precise neural mechanisms governing how these drugs produce their mind-bending results, but they often produce somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential therapeutic tools. Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off.
I am American and my partner is Dutch. We have been living in the Netherlands for 12 years because it is nearly impossible to move to the US even though it would be better for my career since my employer is headquartered in the US. My partner is a full time stay-at-home father to our 16 month old son who we ironically adopted from the US. Due to current immigration policies, my partner could not get a visa to live in the US.
I could move back to the US (since I am a US citizen) and take our son with me (as he is a US citizen). I could even take our Golden Retriever (who was born and bred in the Netherlands) without any problems. But my son's other father (we are both recognized as legal parents under US law) is not welcome. There simply are no provisions in US law to deal with our family's situation.
Because, according to the US government, your family does not exist.
As a further response to Bainbridge's questions, a reader reminds me of this passage in Larissa MacFarquhar's excellent profile of the guy earlier last year:
In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good.
And such a man, when he pushes for felt change, has more credibility and more of a chance to succeed. His candidacy is, to put it in Oakeshottian terms, an intimation to be pursued.
The Iowa caucus reminded me of America Idol. Just like in the TV show, regardless of what the judges say, it's the public who gets to decide. Who knows: maybe over the past six years or so Simon Cowell, Ryan Seacrest and company have been spreading democratic impulses into the national psyche, which have now come to fruition.
Or maybe when voters look at the pundit class, they see Simon, Randy and Paula. And when they look to a represtentative for America, they find a young, racially ambiguous super-talent. I'm surprised we haven't yet seen a column on the Jordin Sparks-Barack Obama parallels.
What specific changes in law, society, or polity, if any, that Obama supports do you also support?
Spending and borrow is also something that you have brought up in the past. Obama is the man who created this web site, with the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, so we the people can know where our tax money is going. Its not perfect but its a step towards transparency that no one else in the race has even begun to match.
I hate the government, as a good Ron Paul supporting classical liberal should, but if we must have one I at least want to keep a close eye on it, and this helps me do just that.
PS: Obama worked with Tom Coburn, far from an ideological equal, and pushed it over the 'secret hold' placed by Stevens and Byrd.
Bass players everywhere finally find their candidate, and you're going to deny us this? We knew Sid Vicious and Sting were foreign-born, and that Dee Dee Ramone was unelectable; Geddy Lee was terrible on the stump and Krist Novoselic was a one-issue pony on Bosnia.
But with Huckabee, finally an electable bass player. You and the MSM are conspiring to get this wrong and rob us of our time.
According to the exit polls used by major news networks, a majority of voters who described themselves as “evangelical” or “born again” Christians actually voted against Huckabee –with 54% splitting their support among Romney, McCain, Thompson and Ron Paul. Yes, Huckabee’s 46% of Evangelicals was a strong showing, but it was directly comparable to his commanding 40% of women, or 40% of all voters under the age of 30, or 41% of those earning less than $30,000 a year. His powerful appeal to females, the young and the poor make him a different kind of Republican, who connects with voting blocs the GOP needs to win back. He’s hardly the one-dimensional religious candidate of media caricature.
In general, we noticed the Doctor is more likely to overthrow the
government on alien planets, or in the distant future. When he visits
present-day Earth or our history, he's an arch-conservative. (He ousts
Harriet Jones as prime minister of England in "The Christmas Invasion,"
but that's not the same as destroying the whole government.) Also, the
Doctor acted out way more during the Thatcher era than any other
period. During the Blair/Gordon Brown eras, he's been quite
well-behaved.
They simply misjudged the mood. By focusing on the Penn-trees, they missed the Obama-forest:
Another adviser said Mr. Penn and Mr. Clinton were consumed with polling data for so long, they did not fully grasp the personality deficit that Mrs. Clinton had with voters.
Obama's victory over Clinton in Iowa reminds me ever-so-slightly of how Bill Clinton once beat George H. W. Bush. And that's got to hurt.
She has a very perilous path ahead. A reader writes:
I have been having some email exchanges with friends of mine about what happens next after Obama's win in Iowa. We are all 30-something, educated, professional, black men and the consensus seems to be that Obama is going to be smeared big time via surrogates and whisper campaigns in order to put Hillary Clinton back on top. I am not so sure, but everyone else believes it to be a forgone conclusion. But here is the kicker, if that does happen and it works, we have all said that Hillary can forget getting our vote in November. None of us are going to vote Republican. We'll all vote in our local, state, and congressional races, But the vote for president will either be left blank, third party, or better yet, we are talking about writing in Obama
It isn't just Obama who is winning this campaign. It is the infectious conviction of his supporters:
Barack Obama's campaign won the organization battle at the 100 Club. They got signs into his supporters' hands, and must have issued instructions to not save the sign-waving for his speech. So visibility through the night was theirs. But the swell and crackle of energy in the room when he spoke? That was organic, and it was overwhelming. Every time Obama started to lose me with a line I've heard one time too many this long campaign season, the crowd would bring me back in.
There's a great piece in the NYT today on it. It's what Obama himself predicted privately and publicly in the fall: that his mixed showing among black voters was a function of their disbelief that white voters would ever back a black man for president. Now they see that this bkack man can do it, and you can feel the emotions well up:
“People across America, even in Iowa of all places, can look across the color line and see the person,” said Mr. Brown, 35, who was working at the reception desk at DK’s Hair Design near Ladera Heights, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb.
Describing himself as a “huge, huge supporter,” of Mr. Obama, Mr. Brown added: “So many times, our young people only have sports stars or musicians to look up to. But now, when we tell them to go to school, to aim high in life, they have a face to put with the ambition.”
Iowa was, as Obama saw ahead of time, the perfect catalyst for this dynamic. He was very candid about the ethnic make-up of Iowa and how it could prove what no words could argue. But what's really ground-breaking, it seems to me, is how many African-Americans, especially the next generation, are in favor of Obama for far more than racial reasons. Here's one typical email:
I'm a thirty-something African American voter here in South Carolina. Up until last night, reading and watching commentary from the MSM and pundit class talk about everything they knew nothing always sent me into a further depression. It is distressing to see so many supposedly intelligent people be totally clueless as to why Obama has succeeded the way he has.
A large percentage of the Americans just don't buy the 51/49% narrative that has been shoved down our throat throughout the Bush/Clinton years. Everyone is "shocked", except for the millions of voters who have simply been waiting for the leader willing to put his weapons down in the name of the common good.
I’m a moderate-to-liberal Democrat who is no Mike Huckabee fan, but for what it’s worth, he wasn’t educated at a “Bible college”. Ouachita Baptist University is a Baptist institution in the same way that, say, Catholic University in Washington is a Catholic institution. The denominational footprint is undoubtedly heavier at the former than at the latter, but OBU’s curriculum isn’t all about careers in ministry or even about molding warriors for Jesus. There are a lot of similar schools in the heartland – Gordon College in Wenham also fits the bill – that, like Huckabee himself, wear their conservative denominational (or non-denominational Christian) heart on their sleeve but also seem a bit more at ease with the modern world than bubble-world schools like Bob Jones University or Oral Roberts. I suspect that they may provide a window into what his core support is all about.
Conservatism and liberalism have little meaning in today’s politics. As has been pointed out so many times by you and others, the Republican party is a party held together by extremists, right wing Christianists, no-tax absolutists, royalists, xenophobes and others fearful of minorities, to name a few. This is a coalition spawned in the Reagan Administration but exposed in the Bush Administration. Independents cannot tolerate it. The extremists are at one another throats. The party is in chaos. Unless Hillary is elected or we experience another threat from the outside, the Republican Party is in an almost impossible situation. Perhaps we will see the creation of a third party. But today the struggle is between realism and extremism, not conservatism and liberalism.
If you didn't take the time to listen to Obama's Jefferson-Jackson speech in Iowa - the one that, I believe, changed the campaign - here it is. Warning: he's persuasive:
With all necessary caveats against reductionism and misappropriation, we can ask: should human societies conceive of themselves in terms of group-level selection? Have we already developed aspects of eusociality? And -- just to make matters really interesting -- could non-reproducing humans, such as (most) gays and lesbians, as well as heterosexuals who choose not to have kids, actually be a manifestation of this emergent eusociality?
It's enough to make even a Clinton-phobe like me want to look away:
The first time [she was booed] was when she said she has always and will continue to work for "change for you." The audience, particularly from Obama supporters (they were waving Obama signs) let out a noise that sounded like a thousand people collectively groaning.
You just realized this? I swear, the giddy suburban cheerleader quality of the Fox girls has been an ongoing cause of vitriol in my household. They just seem to confirm that peculiarly misogynistic, "who's yah daddy?" sleaze exuded by all those pasty, wrinkled geezers. I've always imagined there must be some ingenious contraption hidden below the camera's gaze, a 'giggle prod" of sorts, that gives these teases' bottoms a good squeeze every time the pruned-dude shows those bedroom eyes.
Another adds:
The women anchors do not look like Barbie dolls. They look like ex-porn stars. I think it’s the look they’re cultivating.
While the strong reaction against the stolen election was not so surprising, the extremity of the violence has been shocking. Although Kibaki seems to be effectively utilizing the security forces to maintain a modicum of order in Nairobi, the situation upcountry is more questionable and the main trade route between Kenya and Uganda appears still to be blocked (prices of imported goods in Uganda are skyrocketing accordingly). This may indicate that Kibaki's hold on power is more tenuous outside of Nairobi. One particularly troubling development is that many members of Kenya's Asian popluation (which constitutes a sort of "merchant class" in Kenya and much of East Africa) have been fleeing to Uganda. The Asians tend to be pretty tapped into the local situation, and if they're making a run for it, there may be worse yet to come.
December 30, 2007 - January 5, 2008
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