MONDAY
hello all, im on it, clocked about 30 pages this weekend, but the 1st 3rd of
novel is always easiest, i need some cushion for when it gets rough
let me see, i got a 300 page manuscript and approx 57 days to nov 30th, counting
a day off per week lets say 50 days x 5 pages a day equals 250, it is not enough,
i got to do 6 a day - so be it
some schoolhouse holiday next week, i got W T F S S maybe M
time enuf to withdraw from the world and get some real pages done
i have since last i spoke to you received shortstory manuscripts from 5 students
and 2 essays from my nephew, still got 2 full book manuscripts owed out
it never ends - also some palf obligations i need to fulfill
what i dont get done next two days will have to wait
W T F S S maybe M belong to me
i ran up on a new news site that show potential, real clear politics - seem t
o be nonpartisan w/a lot of good stuff, will have to dig in a little deeper
let you know what i think, one thing i found eas this newyorker editorial
the most succinct case for obama ive seen in awhile, kinda long though
let me see if a full post will work, if not i will tighten it up
im outta here, got to get on down to the courthouse and
absentee vote, i want my decks cleared for nov 4th in
case i volunteer for phone banks or whatever
in case some emergency come up, whatever
election this important
i take no chances
all my love:
rdoc
-----------------------------------
THE CHOICE New Yorker Editorial - Oct 14, 2008
Never in living memory has an election been more
critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché,
as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever
felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense
that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and
integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent
Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of
George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no
mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the
executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and
the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to
defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the
Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in
support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee,
John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be
regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the
essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The
Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account
whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue
the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes,
the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush
Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion
dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to
run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the
seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when
Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth
of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen
into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has
grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled.
Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush
Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from
the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts
are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom
fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if
the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up
preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and
our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the
same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and
thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement
about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific
regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush
Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into
this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect.
The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred
billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand
Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of
thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million
men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been
fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is
there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage
of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in
particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to
foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of
prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a
public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment,
the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new
sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde,
wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically
and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American
capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China,
Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded,
each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need
not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of
the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran
came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the
American era.”
The election of 2008 is the
first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or
Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party,
and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against
the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George
W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in
2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such
viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s
Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he
flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under
John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,”
governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term,
McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick”
willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations
with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He
co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of
rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John
Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards
and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions.
He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling
for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election,
however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the
Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers
of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out
against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly
denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a
ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself
once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians
employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the
Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized
language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing,
rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his
opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic
call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming
crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax
cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes
for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go
disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for
pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he
will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the
abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive
speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government
regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest
in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to
say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a
melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the
first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was
ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By
contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the
history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of
stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable
for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for
pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude
towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put
short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to
reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the
protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not
partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and
more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a
National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the
decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create
millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On
energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He
supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions
by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that
many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide
is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities,
would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon
dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those
which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline.
Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would
provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing
alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green
technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and
to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from
renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the
most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential
candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There
was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible
debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first
Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide,
and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade
program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as
polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain
apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He
took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil
drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up
America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline
prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect,
according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be
“insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a
campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby,
drill!”
The contrast between the candidates
is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense
equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court,
where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate
liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome
of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own
prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces
even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will
be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans
on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he
said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise
“wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape
and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But
scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit
abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the
ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued,
it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely
be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power,
which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist,
would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall;
executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all
with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next
President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against
confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified
lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support
of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against
convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to
continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the
Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention,
Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all
U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in
his care.
In the shorthand of political
commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even.
Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a
costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism
around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More
recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the
proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war
that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country,
had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither
candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as
McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his
country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment
and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars
and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the
dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power.
McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the
unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus
refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy,
open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare
occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be
transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of
counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first
Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than
interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no
political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater
security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of
deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a
considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both
Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal
politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars
where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful
personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of
honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything,
and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the
lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very
clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you
to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must
have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not
only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience,
judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s
strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to
know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract
some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is
also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of
American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will
require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to
international institutions that can address global warming, the
dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis,
disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more
traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for
engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the
generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these
compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered
by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President
must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo,
banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible
will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a
vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant
audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because
he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no
less—and likely more—overseas.
What most
distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary
to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not
long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election
is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what
people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is
about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability.
Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to
the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made
“change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually
provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering
his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define
his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A
contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the
stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory,
he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that
defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing
revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the
former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state
for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In
the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had
difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic
issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram
for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is
funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision
of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business
being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is
seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed
an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s
choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes
runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night
comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience
in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an
assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the
campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have
reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is
impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive
risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a
“maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By
contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of
pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his
character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to
overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous
advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both
on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown
Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is
determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not
necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him,
his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for
some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein
seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and
not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and
for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss
his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference
are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness
or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays,
almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges
to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The
Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely
structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States
Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that
genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is
Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and
Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind
and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early
thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore
Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of
power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit
before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A
Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect
a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s
first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental
attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an
illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly
American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a
formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance,
and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of
people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other
senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military
service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of
tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his
preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate
to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional
national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he
had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience
relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s
immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow,
Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class
Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among
the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in
public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And
his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and
breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly,
sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at
least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and
steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has
made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative
proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.)
But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning,
discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic
astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively
impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the
cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the
divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign,
he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that
not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for
the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a
man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential
place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence
is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single
term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national
renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and
foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its
success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to
govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve
every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say,
is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire
hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate
demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament
to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.
The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in
the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century
America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and
refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a
symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the
nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that
preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even
exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and
inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it
proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity,
international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale,
America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It
needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned
to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack
Obama.
Recent Comments