After the Caudillo

President Michelle Bachelet of Chile danced in front of the presidential palace in Santiago last month as part of independence anniversary celebrations.













After the Caudillo (November 18, 2007)


At first, breaking the gender barrier in South America did not go smoothly for Michelle Bachelet.

In 2006, she had just captured the world’s attention, becoming the first woman to be elected president of this deeply conservative country. And she had done it alone, without the famous husbands that had propelled other female presidents in Latin America.

But one month after taking office, Ms. Bachelet faced huge student demonstrations across the country. Her support fell further when a new public transportation system turned chaotic, leading critics to lampoon her with an image of her riding atop a city bus toward the edge of a cliff.

But with only five months until she leaves office, Ms. Bachelet is increasingly likely to be remembered as one of her country’s most popular leaders. Polls this month show her public approval to be above 70 percent, and in recent weeks she has recorded the highest levels since Chile went from dictatorship to democracy in 1990.

Analysts and pollsters attribute her stunning turnaround to her handling of the economy during the global financial crisis and to her decision to save billions of dollars in revenues from copper sales during the last commodity boom. That aggressive saving gave the country money to spend on pension reform and Ms. Bachelet’s ambitious program of social protections for women and children, despite the financial crisis.

Ms. Bachelet resisted the cries of politicians to use revenues from copper sales to try to close Chile’s inequality gap, one of the world’s worst. Instead, during her first three years in office, her government set aside $35 billion in revenue from the boom. When the global financial crisis hit, the value of Chile’s exports sank by more than 30 percent. But by then Chile had nearly $20 billion invested in overseas sovereign wealth funds alone.

Ms. Bachelet, a pediatrician, said, “I believe that if you want to fight inequality you have to do it starting at infancy.”

Opposition politicians who once criticized her social-protection efforts as a retreat to an era of big government are now saying they will try to expand her programs to the middle class.

If it works, it becomes popular. In the US it has happened with Social Security and Medicare.

a Twist of Candor

Yuri Gripas/Reuters - KID TALK Michelle Obama during a visit with third graders at Ferebee-Hope Elementary School in Washington.






THE perilous question came from an earnest schoolboy, who posed this doozy of a query to the new first lady: “Do you like cooking for your family, even though you have cooks and all of that?”

In the rarefied world of presidential spouses, this has long been treacherous territory. Other first ladies have parsed their comments carefully to avoid suggesting that they had cheerfully relinquished kitchen duty. (Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush both touted their homemade cookies at times though neither cooked much at all in the White House.)

But Michelle Obama did not mince words.

“I don’t miss cooking,” Mrs. Obama said, laughing, as she took questions from students visiting the White House. “I’m just fine with other people cooking. Their food is really good.”

For generations, first ladies have doled out details of their personal and family lives to humanize themselves and their husbands. But historians and political analysts say Mrs. Obama is offering a new twist by discussing the everyday realities she faces as a professional woman who is raising young children and nurturing a marriage while juggling an active schedule.

In doing so, they say, she is fashioning a more intimate rapport with the public, particularly with a modern generation of working mothers, who often recognize themselves in her reflections about the struggle to balance work and family life.

Mrs. Obama’s approach may also carry political benefits, political observers say. It softens the image of a first lady who is an Ivy-League-educated former hospital executive. It may also appeal to married women, a coveted group of swing voters that went Republican in the last two presidential elections. (In April, 67 percent of Republican women viewed Mrs. Obama favorably, up from 46 percent in January, the Pew Research Center said.)

Always a consideration.

Still, emphasizing the domestic side subverts the notion that family focus is Republican terrain, said Nancy Beck Young of the University of Houston, a historian of first ladies.

Exactly. Democrats and liberals are family people, too, and should not cede that to Republicans.


Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library - OPEN Betty Ford got personal, talking about her battle with breast cancer.

Obama Hails Judge as ‘Inspiring’

President Obama with Judge Sonia Sotomayor and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the White House on Tuesday














More Photos >

Slideshow

Milestones

Sonia, before Judge

Related

Text: Obama’s Remarks on His Choice of Sotomayor (May 26, 2009)

Text: The White House Background on Sotomayor (May 26, 2009)

(May 27, 2009)

News Analysis: Sotomayor’s Rulings Are Exhaustive but Often Narrow (May 27, 2009)

For Hispanics, Court Pick Sets Off Pride, and Some Concerns (May 27, 2009)

Was a Hispanic Justice on the Court in the ’30s? (May 27, 2009)

Health Spotlight Is on Diabetes, Its Control and Its Complications (May 27, 2009)

May 27, 2009
Obama Hails Judge as ‘Inspiring’
By PETER BAKER and JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced Tuesday that he would nominate Sonia Sotomayor, a federal appeals judge in New York, to the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents who was raised in a Bronx public housing project to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

In making his first pick for the court, Mr. Obama emphasized Judge Sotomayor’s “extraordinary journey” from modest beginnings to the Ivy League and now the pinnacle of the judicial system. Casting her as the embodiment of the American dream, he touched off a confirmation battle that he hopes to wage over biography more than ideology.

Judge Sotomayor’s past comments about how her sex and ethnicity shaped her decisions, and the role of appeals courts in making policy, generated instant conservative complaints that she is a judicial activist. Senate Republicans vowed to scrutinize her record. But with Democrats in reach of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, the White House appeared eager to dare Republicans to stand against a history-making nomination at a time when both parties are courting the growing Hispanic vote.

“When Sonia Sotomayor ascends those marble steps to assume her seat on the highest court of the land,” Mr. Obama said as he introduced her in the East Room of the White House, “America will have taken another important step towards realizing the ideal that is etched above its entrance: Equal justice under the law.”

Ms. Sotomayor, 54, a graduate of Princeton and Yale who served as a prosecutor, corporate litigator and federal district judge before joining the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, a decade ago, would become the nation’s 111th justice.

She would be the third woman to hold a seat on the court and the sixth person on the current nine-member panel with a Roman Catholic background.

If confirmed to succeed Justice David H. Souter, a mainstay of the liberal wing who is retiring, Judge Sotomayor would probably not change the court’s broad philosophical balance. But her views on same-sex marriage, gun rights, financial and environmental regulation, executive power and other polarizing issues could help shape judicial rulings for years, if not decades, to come.

At the heart of the fight over her nomination will be a debate over the role that a judge’s experience should play in rendering decisions. Although Mr. Obama said on Tuesday that “a judge’s job is to interpret, not make law,” his emphasis on a nominee with “empathy” has generated criticism from Republicans, who saw that as code for legislating personal views from the bench.

Judge Sotomayor has said that “our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.” In a lecture in 2001 on the role her background played in her jurisprudence, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She also said at a conference in 2005 that a “court of appeals is where policy is made,” a statement she seemed to understand at the time would be controversial, because she added, “I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don’t make law.” The White House said she meant that appeals courts play a greater role in interpreting laws than district courts, but Republicans pointed to the comment as another sign that she would try to impose her values in rendering decisions.

“Judge Sotomayor is a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, a conservative group. “She thinks that judges should dictate policy and that one’s sex, race and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”

Other conservatives said they would focus on her ruling in a New Haven affirmative action case or on how she might rule on same-sex marriage. “Abortion is in some sense a stale issue that has been fought over many times, but gay marriage is very much up for grabs,” said Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, a legal group. “Gay marriage will be bigger than abortion.”

As she was nominated on Tuesday, Judge Sotomayor did not retreat from her view that judges ought to look at the impact of their rulings. “I strive never to forget the real-world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government,” she said.

While conservative groups took aim, Republican senators responded more cautiously, weighing how aggressively they want to fight her confirmation. Twenty-nine Senate Republicans voted against her confirmation to the appellate bench in 1998, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the party’s Senate leader, while 25 voted for her. Of those still in the Senate, 11 voted against her and 9 for her.

Mr. McConnell said on Tuesday that the Senate would not be a “rubber stamp” and promised that Republicans would “examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences.”

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told Fox News that he was “uneasy with” Judge Sotomayor’s approach and expressed concern that if Mr. Obama appointed two or three more justices like her it would shape the court “in a way that would be different from our heritage so far.”

Rather than recruiting an elder statesman to lead the confirmation effort, as past presidents have, Mr. Obama has decided to enlist Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. The White House worked quickly to build support by organizing conference calls and sending tailored information to potential allies.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an evangelical group courted by Democrats and Republicans, said the administration sent him information emphasizing evidence of moderation in Judge Sotomayor’s record, including a ruling against an abortion-rights group.

In that 2002 case, Judge Sotomayor ruled that the group did not have grounds to try to overturn the Bush administration’s ban on aid to overseas family planning organizations that performed or promoted abortions.

“She went against the abortion lobby,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “The spin was that Obama did not reach into the far left, and that is great for me and it is great for my constituents.”

Mr. Obama selected Judge Sotomayor from a field dominated by women as he sought to add a second female justice to the court. Advisers culled through writings of 40 candidates before narrowing the list to nine who were actually contacted, officials said. From there, Mr. Obama chose four finalists, who were spirited into the White House to meet with him secretly last week.

The president conducted one-on-one interviews with Diane P. Wood, a federal appeals judge, and Elena Kagan, his solicitor general, last Tuesday, and then Judge Sotomayor and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, two days later. Each session in the Oval Office lasted an hour, officials said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. also interviewed the four, and his chief of staff, Ronald A. Klain, and counsel, Cynthia Hogan, ran the selection process.

To dispense with any health concerns about Judge Sotomayor, officials said the White House contacted her doctor and independent experts to determine whether diabetes, which she learned she had at 8 years old, might be problematic and concluded it would not. The Obama team also interviewed colleagues on the Second Circuit to check out reports that she was difficult to get along with, and was reassured it was not true.

Judge Sotomayor was the only finalist Mr. Obama had never met before last week. She spent seven hours in the White House last Thursday, and by Friday the president told advisers he was leaning toward her but wanted to think about it over the weekend, officials said.

At 8 p.m. Monday, he told aides he had made his decision, and at 9 p.m. he called Judge Sotomayor from the White House residence. He then called the runners-up. Judge Sotomayor was rushed to Washington that night, driven by a friend in time to attend Tuesday’s announcement.

Her mother, Celina Sotomayor, who moved to New York from Puerto Rico during World War II, wiped away tears as the president announced the nomination.

Judge Sotomayor recalled visiting the White House when President Bill Clinton nominated her for the appeals court. “It was an overwhelming experience for a kid from the South Bronx,” she said. “Never in my wildest childhood imaginings did I ever envision that moment, let alone did I ever dream that I would live this moment.”

Mayor trades job for Romance

A twist on a tale.

Gov. Rick Perry, left, talks with Antonio Pontes, CEO of Martifer Energy Systems, center, and San Angelo Mayor J.W. Lown in September 2008 at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.

J.W. Lown, the mayor of San Angelo in West Texas, recently narrated a video touting his town as a great place to live. Then he left to pursue another passion.

Follow your passion, it is said.

Mr. Lown resigned this week -- less than a month after winning a fourth two-year term in a landslide -- saying he was leaving to carry on a relationship with a Mexican man who had been living illegally in the U.S.
So the mayor did.

With his partner unable to legally remain in the U.S., the mayor said he realized around election day -- May 9 -- that he faced a choice: betray his duty to abide by the law by helping the man hide from immigration authorities; end the relationship, or join him in Mexico. He chose Mexico.

A, Mejico.

Mr. Lown's colleagues and constituents have rallied around him. Some said they hadn't known he was gay. Others were surprised he got involved with an illegal immigrant. Neither issue drew widespread censure or disapproval.

Neither issue?

"In this neck of the woods," said Councilman Johnny Silvas, "people are accepting."

Accepting? Have things changed.

San Angelo, with a population of about 90,000, is northwest of Austin, not close to the U.S.-Mexico border. But all across Texas, residents have business and personal relationships with Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal. Mr. Lown's family has roots in Mexico, and he has holds dual nationality.

It's about 130 miles southeast of Odessa, and a couple of hundred miles from Austin. Del Rio, right on the border, is about 156 miles, almost directly due south.

His constituents want him back. Councilwoman Charlotte Farmer said she had been besieged by voters asking her to urge the mayor to resume his duties if he can resolve his partner's immigration status. "They love our mayor," Ms. Farmer said. "Quite frankly, so do I."

a Transition for the Record Books

Ursula Burns will become the next chief executive of Xerox

















Anne Mulcahy














In 2007, Ursula M. Burns accepted a National Medal of Technology for Xerox from President Bush at the White House.













After eight years of hard work turning around a company in disarray, Anne M. Mulcahy has managed to make her departure as chief executive of Xerox look effortless.

During a shareholders’ meeting on Thursday, Ms. Mulcahy revealed that she would retire as chief executive in July but remain chairwoman. Her handpicked successor is Ursula M. Burns, the president of the company. The management change had been predicted for years, making it one of the least tumultuous power changes in Xerox’s recent history.

According to Xerox, this is the first time a female chief executive has replaced another female chief executive at a Fortune 500 company. In addition, Ms. Burns is the first African-American woman to run a company this large. Xerox reported revenue of $17.6 billion in 2008.

Xerox declined to make either executive available for interviews.

Streetlamps go green

Raley's supermarket in West Sacramento, Calif., recently had LED lights installed with funding from the Department of Energy.



Streetlights were the first big users of electricity. Now, they are being re-engineered to improve efficiency, but at a cost that today's municipalities might have a tough time covering.

Raley's supermarket in West Sacramento, Calif., recently had LED lights installed with funding from the Department of Energy.

But the cost savings will take time to materialize. Street and highway lights use about 2% of the nation's electricity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Many cities have LED traffic signals, but because of the high cost of producing white light with LED, local governments have been reluctant to install them in streetlights. The effort is further complicated not only by strapped municipal coffers, but resistance from star-gazers and others who object to LEDs brighter glare.

One of my pet peeves is seeing municipal lights on during the day; often, in the parks.

LED, or light-emitting diodes, are electronic lights based on semiconductor technology. They use less energy and last longer than the sodium vapor-powered lights typically used in urban street lighting.

Unlike regular streetlamps, LED lights can be programmed to respond to specific commands. For example, a city could dim the lighting on commercial strips after business hours, or turn up the lights after bars close, says Jim Helmer, director of San Jose's transportation department. Streets around Little League baseball diamonds could be made brighter as people walk to their cars, and then turned down afterward.

Sign of the times

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, a waste of eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

A new day clearly requires new rules. Can cellphones be excluded?

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret.

Supposed to; honor and integrity are key ingredients.

Judges have long amended their habitual warning about seeking outside information during trials to include Internet searches. But with the Internet now as close as a juror’s pocket, the risk has grown more immediate — and instinctual. Attorneys have begun to check the blogs and Web sites of prospective jurors.

Aside from the voir dire, blog searches.

But the rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, are there to ensure that the facts that go before a jury have been subjected to scrutiny and challenge from both sides, said Olin Guy Wellborn III, a law professor at the University of Texas.

Great name: Olin Guy Wellborn III.

Some courts are beginning to restrict the use of cellphones by jurors within the courthouse, even confiscating them during the day, but a majority do not, Mr. Keene said. And computer use at home, of course, is not restricted unless a jury is sequestered.

A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas

It is a happy day in America once again. The ghost of the Gipper has been purged.

Copies of the president’s budget, “A New Era of Responsibility.”

The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

And two weeks ago some of us were worrying that President Obama was being bested by Mitch McConnell. Nah!

After Mr. Obama spent much of his first five weeks in office responding to the financial crisis, his budget effectively tried to reclaim momentum for the priorities on which he campaigned.

Paul Krugman was quite complimentary.

His efforts would add to a budget deficit already swollen by Mr. Bush’s policies and the recession, creating the largest deficit, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II. Erasing that deficit will require some tough choices — about further spending cuts and tax increases — that Mr. Obama avoided this week. But he nonetheless made choices.

That agenda starts with taxes. Over the last three decades, the pretax incomes of the wealthiest households have risen far more than they have for other households, while the tax rates for top earners have fallen more than they have for others, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“The tax code will become more progressive, with relatively higher rates on the rich and relatively lower rates on the middle class and poor,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “This is reversing the effects of the Bush policies,” he added, and then going even further.

Mr. Obama would try to lift the incomes of the middle class and poor through two main channels, administration officials said. The first is an overhaul of health care, meant to reduce the insurance premiums now taking a large bite out of many families’ paychecks.

The other channel is education. Over the last three decades, the pay of college graduates has risen significantly faster than the pay of less-educated workers. Mr. Obama aims to move workers into the first category by increasing federal financial aid and simplifying the myriad of aid programs. In recent years, the United States has lost its standing as the country in which the largest share of young adults graduates from college.

We as a nation simply accepted these trends, out of self-interest, or resignation. Now we have a President who is showing leadership in trying to balance things a bit better for those who are not wealthy and influential.

Ex-G.M. Workers Try to Reboot Their Lives

Robert Phelps, right, in a culinary class. He worked at Lear, an auto supplier, in Janesville for 13 years before being laid off.










JANESVILLE, Wis.— Kevin Corkhill grew up in a time and place where manufacturing was king. But ever since he was laid off from the gargantuan General Motors plant here, Mr. Corkhill seems bewildered by what the future holds.




He still has not decided whether to try to transfer to another G.M. plant, change occupations or return to school. Visiting the local United Automobile Workers hall recently, Mr. Corkhill stopped by a musty display case to show his 8-year-old son a black-and-white photograph inside — it was Mr. Corkhill’s grandfather carrying an artillery shell made at the plant during World War II.

“My grandfather worked here, and my father worked here,” he said. “The one thing my father told me is you work hard to make things better for the next generation, but now I worry we won’t be able to do that anymore.”

He turned his head to hide his tears from his son.

In this city, the loss of the 90-year-old G.M. plant and its 2,500 jobs has created a swirling mixture of anger, confusion, worry and hurt, underscoring how the recession is raising anxiety among workers nationwide. Combined with the shuttering of several nearby suppliers, the G.M. closing meant a loss of 4,000 jobs in this city of 64,000.

Their union contract has given these workers more relief than many.

With few local employers hiring, more than 1,000 of those laid off have returned to school, seeking to reboot their lives by studying welding, nursing, cooking and other fields, thanks, in part, to the contract’s tuition assistance.

The contract also provides a substantial financial cushion: 48 weeks of unemployment benefits at three-quarters pay, and health insurance. But when that runs out, it will be hard for them to find jobs paying close to the $28 an hour they averaged assembling Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans and GMC Yukons.

“We found that 76 percent of the laid-off people we’ve worked with made $20 or more an hour,” said Robert T. Borremans, executive director of the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board, which helps retrain and find jobs for laid-off workers. “There aren’t many $20-an-hour jobs in the area. If people need that much to maintain their lifestyle, they’ll need to look elsewhere.”

The hope is that things will be better a year from now. “What surprises me is how resilient and optimistic a lot of people have been,” said Mr. Borremans, whose agency nearly fills a shuttered Kmart. “They’re willing to work and rebuild.”

Many are moving on. Kimberly Pope, after 30 years at G.M., where she worked as an electrician, has applied to train as a radiology technician. Bill Truman, a laid-off truck driver for a G.M. supplier, is planning to study logistics and warehouse management. Diane Kudrna, one of 800 workers at the recently shuttered Lear factory here that made S.U.V. seats, has become a $12.50-an-hour veterinarian’s assistant.

And Robert Phelps, after 13 years at Lear, has plunged into a two-year culinary program at Blackhawk Technical College, eager to pursue his long-deferred dream of opening his own restaurant or catering service. Returning to school became financially possible, he said, only because his wife recently landed a job as a secretary for the school district.

“Things happen for a reason,” Mr. Phelps said. “I strongly feel there was some intervention here. The plant shutdown opened up a lot of doors for me.”

Blackhawk Tech’s enrollment has jumped by 1,800 over last year, a 23 percent increase.

“One-third to one-half of the people laid off will come our way,” said Eric Larson, the school’s president. “They’re looking for short-term education that will lead to high-wage jobs. My concern is, ‘Will the jobs be there once we get them retrained?’ ”

John Beckord’s job is to help make sure there are jobs. As the president of Forward Janesville, an economic development agency, he is optimistic, boasting that Janesville is centrally located between Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis and has a hard-working, well-educated work force. Janesville just spent $72 million renovating its two high schools, and there are three state colleges within 10 miles.

“You have an eager local government that is willing to roll out the red carpet for companies, not the red tape,” Mr. Beckord said.

That may not be enough to attract business in a downturn. For that reason, many workers with 20 or more years at G.M. are trying to transfer to other G.M. plants and reach 30 years, which would entitle them to a full pension of $36,000 a year. Problem is, beleaguered G.M. is hiring few transfers.

Workers fear their generous safety net will prove inadequate if the recession is long and deep. What will happen to their families if they cannot find new jobs before their benefits run out?

Some pray that before their 48 weeks of unemployment benefits run out, G.M. will reopen the plant, enabling them to return to their jobs.

Others call that a pipe dream; Mr. Borremans termed it “reality avoidance.”

Mr. Corkhill, the grandson of the World War II veteran, had hoped to transfer to another plant, but has become pessimistic about his chances. To make ends meet, he has eliminated his telephone landline and cut back on premium cable television.

“I’m very angry about the whole economic picture,” he said.

The mood was far different last February when a candidate named Barack Obama campaigned at the plant, trumpeting a $150 billion jobs plan and saying that with some retooling and federal aid, “this plant will be here for another 100 years.”

But soon oil prices soared, the economy swooned and a 40 percent drop in S.U.V. sales sealed the plant’s fate.

Ms. Pope, the former G.M. electrician — proud that she sent her two children to Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin — worries now that “there won’t be opportunities for people like myself to make a middle-class income because the industrial base is so eroded. The jobs that pay $25, $30 an hour where you can afford to help your kids through college and not worry about money, those jobs are becoming more and more scarce. G.M. gave me a wonderful opportunity and my kids a wonderful opportunity, and I don’t see those opportunities around anymore.”

That is why Andy Richardson, president of the U.A.W. local here, and a 24-year G.M. man, hopes to transfer to another plant. He plans to move without his family — his wife has a good job at a credit union, his two daughters are star athletes, and he thinks selling their house would be impossible.

“I want to be able to come back on weekends or every other weekend,” he said. “I’ll miss my family.”

He hopes to transfer no more than five hours away, perhaps to Fort Wayne, Ind., or to Lansing, Mich. He, too, tried to hide his tears.

An About-Face on Gay Troops

This is a fascinating essay that deserves being posted in full.

February 9, 2009 - Op-Ed Contributor
An About-Face on Gay Troops
By OWEN WEST

GENERALS are scolded for preparing to fight “the last war,” but if President Obama intends to keep his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, he would do well to study President Bill Clinton’s attempt of 16 years ago.

The Clinton argument, based largely on protecting the civil rights of gay troops, was systematically dissected by senior officers and legislators, who focused on how the presence of homosexuals could affect combat readiness. Generals circulated videos made by conservative groups depicting “gay agendas.” Senators brought television crews into cramped berthings. Congress reached a bizarre compromise: a law rendering homosexuality incompatible with military service, but allowing gays to serve under a closet-friendly “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The lesson for President Obama is that this fight is not about rights, but about combat readiness. This is a propitious moment for seeking change: a nation at war needs all its most talented troops. Last year the principal architects of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” former Gen. Colin Powell and former Senator Sam Nunn, said it was time to “review” the policy.

That’s a polite way of saying they’ve changed their minds. So have many of us who wore the uniform in 1993 and supported a policy that forced some of our fellow troops to live a lie and rejected thousands who told the truth.

There are other aspects of history that may be helpful as well. The armed forces initially resisted President Harry Truman’s 1948 order to integrate the ranks. But the Korean War forced trials by fire — in fact, the units with the highest casualty rates in Korea integrated the swiftest — and the Pentagon ultimately acknowledged that recruiting from across America’s socio-economic spectrum produced the best force. After that, the military swiftly set the standard for race relations.

Servicemen continue to be fierce believers in the idea that diversity equals strength, yet during the Clinton effort on gay troops most of us rejected analogies to racial integration. The homosexual threat to good order and discipline was behavioral, we argued, not physiological, and therefore unrelated.

It was a flawed argument. The underlying fears were the same as with integration: homosexuals jeopardized unit cohesion not because of their own conduct — after all, military law and command discretion encompass behavioral breaches — but because of the perceived reaction of those xenophobic troops who didn’t want to cohabitate with people different from themselves. Today, this sounds like one of the “worn-out dogmas” President Obama identified in his inaugural speech. And it does a disservice to the ranks.

Maintaining “don’t ask, don’t tell” ignores a vast social shift since 1993. Only 26 percent of Americans supported Truman’s order, so it was little wonder that desegregation stalled. When President Clinton announced his initiative, 44 percent of Americans were in favor of homosexuals serving openly, which perhaps explains the split decision of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

But today nearly 80 percent of Americans feel that way. As our troops tend to reflect the values of our society, lifting the homosexual ban will be easier now.

In addition, six years of war have clarified priorities. The battlefield has its own values, starting with courage. Sexual orientation falls somewhere below musical taste. What a person chooses to do back stateside, off-duty, in his own apartment is irrelevant in a fight. For months I lived with 12 other American advisers on an Iraqi outpost. There was a single pipe shower next to a hole that masqueraded as a sewer. But the reality of combat dominated personality quirks — nobody wondered about sexual orientation.

Most military jobs are office-based and provide sufficient individual privacy. Even in Iraq many of our fighting forces are comfortably housed with compartmentalized showers.

A 2006 poll of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans showed that 72 percent were personally comfortable interacting with gays. Bonnie Moradi, a University of Florida psychologist, and Laura Miller, a sociologist at the Rand Corporation, summarized the study this way: “The data indicated no associations between knowing a lesbian or gay unit member and ratings of perceived unit cohesion or readiness. Instead, findings pointed to the importance of leadership and instrumental quality in shaping perceptions of unit cohesion and readiness.”

The other readiness argument concerns recruiting. To fill its swelling ranks, the military now grants one in five recruits waivers for disqualifications that run the gamut from attention-deficit disorder to obesity to armed robbery convictions. In a press conference last fall, Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, the head of Army recruiting, said the relevant question in considering such applicants was, “Does that person deserve an opportunity to serve their country?” That’s exactly right. And to choose a felon over a combat-proven veteran on the basis of sexuality is defeatist. Ask any squad leader.

In the end, however, there is one factor that outweighs public opinion, troop morale and recruiting combined. The military is a dictatorship, not a republic. It is built to win in combat. Its strict codes of conduct ensure good order and discipline.

If “don’t ask, don’t tell” is rescinded, military leaders will ensure smooth compliance, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has said. Cohesion depends on leadership. Our troops will follow the lead of our combat-tested professionals who base their opinions on what a soldier brings to the fight, and little else.

Owen West, a commodities trader, served two tours in Iraq with the Marines.

Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System, dies at 91

Helen Suzman with Nelson Mandela at his Soweto home in February, 1990.

Quite a striking picture. Mandela was released from Robben Island prison in February 1990.

The Johannesburg Times has a video of her talking of meeting Mandela.

Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died in Johannesburg early on Thursday, a family member said. She was 91.

For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party’s lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, a period when many of apartheid’s most repressive features were being devised, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of protest were harshly suppressed.
Surely it took courage to be a lone voice against apartheid.

While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who were supportive of economic sanctions to press the country’s white rulers toward reform, saying sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.

Again, a lone, courageous, voice. It became orthodoxy to support sanctions against South Africa, and to have opposed them would have earned one shunning.

To Mrs. Suzman’s frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid. This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted — that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.

It did require outside pressure and black activism, but her lonely voice had some importance, without a doubt.

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid’s repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid’s leading “bullies,” who in turn dismissed her as a “dangerous subversive” and a “sickly humanist.”

Sickly humanist; quite a badge of honor.

Shouts of “Go back to Moscow!” greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, “Go back to Israel!” — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her “pretty little pink hands” against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

Always the Jewish angle is available to anti-Semites who need a line of attack.

When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an ear-splitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

She did have spunk, clearly.

But perhaps because of her parliamentary immunity, a feature of their showpiece democracy that apartheid leaders guarded with care, she was never detained or subjected to one of the stifling “banning orders” that apartheid leaders used to curb dissent by prohibiting people from attending political meetings, speaking in public or even leaving their homes.

And she kept getting elected to parliament.

Her opposition to economic sanctions made her a contentious figure among some apartheid opponents, including protesters on American college campuses, like Brandeis and Harvard, where she received honorary degrees. “I understand the moral abhorrence and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will ensure a more stable and just society.”

We can be so smug in our self-righteousness.

She rarely faced such criticism from South Africa’s best-known black leaders. Mr. Mandela spoke with affection of her visits to the Robben Island prison in the chilly Atlantic waters off Cape Town, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964 and where he remained until he was moved to a mainland prison nearly 20 years later. Using her parliamentary visiting rights, she made her first trip in 1967 and returned frequently. “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard,” Mr. Mandela recalled in an interview when he was released in 1990 after serving 27 years. “She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

Amazing.

But while no longer in Parliament in her final years, she remained an acerbic critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing, now by the country’s new black rulers. Only recently, she joined other prominent South Africans in demanding a fresh inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s, some involving the president of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma.

Consistent.

She ran for Parliament in Johannesburg’s upscale Houghton district and remained the district’s legislator from 1953 to 1989. She began as a member of the United Party, which had been usurped in 1949, after decades as South Africa’s governing party, by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. It was the Nationalists, under Mr. Verwoerd, who codified and extended the existing racial laws, creating apartheid.








Helen Suzman in 1975.

A cheap cynicism has brought us to disaster. Let's try a little audacity

The Wall Street Journal's token liberal columnist, Thomas Frank writes powerfully.

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I and the beginning of our own time.

Modern times.

What has always fascinated me about World War I was the fundamental change that this titanic futility worked in the way English-speaking people thought. It exploded the moral certainties that had propped up the middle-class order. Leaders couldn't lead; oppositions didn't oppose; and patriotism itself seemed only to point to the yawning graveyards of Ypres and Verdun.

"It reversed the Idea of Progress," writes the literary historian Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory," the single best account of the war's cultural impact. No longer could people understand history as a reliable flow of improvement upon improvement. No longer would authority -- civic, religious or familial -- enjoy unquestioned its place in the great chain of being.

As we pass through our own, far smaller catastrophes today -- as our political and business leaders are again exposed for their martial incompetence and their suicidal gluttony, those colossal blunders of 90 years ago come once again into sharp focus.

Martial incompetence and their suicidal gluttony; well put.

In our own time, a cheap cynicism has been so fully assimilated by the governing class that the disenchantment is already there, incorporated into the orthodoxy itself. What distinguished the late conservative era, after all, was its caustic attitude toward the state and its loud expressions of disgust with the media.

The government was supposed to be the problem (as Reagan said 30 years ago, and Palin contended just this election season), and the media and the elites are causes of many of the problems society faces.

The treason-dreams of the Great War era have likewise changed their tone. During World War I, suspicion fell on those on the bottom of society -- recent immigrants, socialists and radical labor unions. Today, though, it is the elites who are said to pose the greatest threat: the multicultural college professors and the goo-goo liberals who always seem to want to read terrorists their rights.

Cynicism of this kind is something you can get out of any comic book, and now it has brought us to disaster. Disillusionment is something very different, and potentially very productive. The nation today stands disillusioned with its own cynicism and ready to try a little audacity.

After U.S. Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror

From afar, Europeans and others are hailing Obama's election.

In the general European euphoria over the election of Barack Obama, there is the beginning of self-reflection about Europe’s own troubles with racial integration. Many are asking if there could be a French, British, German or Italian Obama, and everyone knows the answer is no, not anytime soon.

Europeans will no longer be able to lecture America on its failings with its own blacks. No one will be able to do it any longer.

“They always said, ‘You think race relations are bad here in France, check out the U.S.,’ ” said Mohamed Hamidi, former editor of the Bondy Blog, founded after the 2005 riots in the heavily immigrant suburbs of Paris.

No more. “But that argument can no longer stand,” he said.

For many immigrants to Europe, Mr. Obama’s victory is “a small revolution” toward better overall treatment of minorities, said Nadia Azieze, 31, an Algerian-born nurse who grew up here. “It will never be the same,” she said, over a meal of rice and lamb in the racially mixed Paris neighborhood of Barbès-Rochechouart. Her sister, Cherine, 29, is a computer engineer. Mr. Obama “really represents the dream of America — if you work, you can make it,” she said. “It’s a hope for the entire world.”

In a suburb of Paris, people watched election returns from the United States last week



In Rome, a poster from the Italian Democratic Party said, “The World Changes.” The only black member of the Italian Parliament saw the Obama victory as a “provocation” to Europeans

Talk of Change

This is change personified. Literally. Stu Rasmussen’s been the mayor of this town before. But never before in a skirt and 2-inch heels.

In Silverton, the sleepy Salem, Oregon suburb 40 minutes outside of Portland best known for its lush Oregon Garden and quaint antique shops, the small town’s new mayor-elect is poised to get some major attention in the days and weeks ahead as people come around to realize we’ve got another Oregon first on our hands: the recently elected Rasmussen is likely the first openly gender fluid, transgender-identified mayor of any American city.

I wonder how the troglodytes in the Republican right wing would react. I think I might know.

Rasmussen is a 60-year-old native Silvertonian who’s been a small business owner for most of his adult life, and a public servant in his beloved hometown for going on two decades. He served two consecutive terms as Silverton’s mayor, in 1988 and 1990, when he still dressed exclusively as a male.

He lost a race in 1996 to a now-notorious anti-gay legislator Marylin Shannon. But then Stu discovered the Northwest Gender Alliance, and he gradually became more comfortable with expressing his feminine identity. As reported in this 2004 article in Just Out, Rasmussen realized then that he could express his fluid gender identity with confidence and still be accepted in small-town Silverton. He underwent reconstructive “top surgery” in 2000 on his chest, including breast implants. Rasmussen says the surgery was transformational for him.

Stu in a 1996 Oregon Senate race ad photo.

He “got bit by the public service bug again” and ran for Silverton City Council in 2004. “And I got elected,” Stu says by phone from Silverton, recounting his rise again only hours after learning of his successful mayoral bid. “Boobs and all. I tell people this country has a long and proud history of electing boobs to public office.” (And that’s Stu now, in a 2006 file photo from the Secretary of State’s office.)

What can one say? Only in America? Only in the West? Amazing.

Black Power

Now that Obama is president, some of his friends are in a position to exert influence at the highest levels of American society.

For more than a decade, Mr. Obama has cultivated ties with a growing circle of black power brokers who are poised – and eager – to wield greater national influence. Some of these insiders stand to gain new status in an Obama administration, and many more in law firms, big corporations and on Wall Street. They believe that their proximity to the president-elect will burnish their reputations, much in the way that white elites always have leveraged connections in business and politics.

Emphasis added to make this point: same game, new players.

Many are now eyeing Washington – for jobs and less-formal resumé-boosting roles. "These black executives see a window of opportunity for themselves," says Peniel Joseph, a black professor of political science at Brandeis University. "Obama being elected president shatters the last glass ceiling."

It is a new age. Yet some things won't change too much. People want in, to get power and influence.

Of those hoping for access and government stints, some may be disappointed. Loyalties aside, Mr. Obama, according to people familiar with his thinking, may be constrained in the number of blacks he appoints to avoid any charges of favoring African-Americans.

Constrained? It seems way early to speculate, though that is not stopping anyone from doing it. Still, look at his campaign to see how he thinks, how he operates.

Other blacks, meanwhile, complain that they have been shut out altogether. Absent from the senator's advisory circle, for instance, are the civil-rights leaders and ministers who figured prominently in the candidacies of an older generation of black politicians such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. "There is no one who represents the black inner city, who is rooted in the black community," says the Rev. Eugene Rivers, an influential black Boston minister. "It's the whole black Brahmin thing: Vote for us because we're better than you."

Jealousy rears its head. Obama is of a new generation. He might not be from the ghetto, but to say he is not of the black community seems ridiculous.

Obama supporters point out that the senator himself worked as a community organizer in a black Chicago neighborhood. "There are a lot of ways other than being from the street to be tough and have wisdom," says Martin Nesbitt, a Chicago real-estate developer and close friend.

... the spotlight has shifted to a new cadre of African-Americans in their 40s and 50s. Their growing visibility is already changing the tone of Washington and creating new power matrixes. For example, Eric Holder – who helped conduct Mr. Obama's search for a vice president and is considered by people close to the campaign as a candidate for attorney general – met Mr. Obama two years ago at a Washington dinner party organized by Ann Walker Marchant. Ms. Marchant is a black former Clinton administration official who is also the niece of Mr. Jordan and a cousin of Ms. Jarrett.

Intricate ties. Again, same game, new players.

Judith Byrd, 52, a graduate of Georgetown Law School, first met Mr. Obama during his early career days, in the 1980s. Back then, he was a community organizer and she was a city official. At a meeting where he was leading local opposition to landfills, Ms. Byrd recalls "my head whipping around as he spoke because of the conviction and clarity with which he was making his case."

Not the first one to say the same thing.

In 2004 she introduced Mr. Obama to her husband, Ron Blaylock, 48, an African-American veteran of Citigroup and UBS who now runs a private-equity fund. Backing their friend's political efforts, the couple quickly ramped up their social network for fund-raising events. One gathering, held this spring, was at the Park Avenue home of a friend. The invitation list consisted of friends and clients as well as colleagues from the predominantly white, A-list nonprofit boards on which they've served: Georgetown and New York Universities, Carnegie Hall, the American Ballet Theater. The event raised $370,000. "That's our existing network," says Mr. Blaylock. "Our friends and the people we associate with every day are mixed, of all races. It's not all black."

All the same circle.

Chicago provides the oldest and closest circle of black business executives around Mr. Obama. Many have benefited from the historically strong black business community and the 1983 election of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington, who appointed many African-Americans to city posts.

Interesting. No such thing seem obvious in New York.

Harvard Law School is another nexus of influence, having played a key role in expanding the African-American power base. Since it began accepting blacks in large numbers in 1968, Harvard has typically admitted 30 to 40 black law students a year, according to David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who has tracked the numbers. In 2000, Mr. Wilkins organized a reunion of black graduates and found there were 1,400 black alumni – more black law-school graduates than any other law school except historically black Howard University.

Fascinating.

"Harvard Law School has always produced an influential network....Now blacks are part of that network," says Rep. Artur Davis (D., Ala.), who attended law school with Mr. Obama.

Same game, different players.

Some blacks believe that a larger ripple effect is under way – that Mr. Obama's ascendancy is affecting, for instance, things like the number of black commentators appearing on cable-TV news shows. Says Ms. Butts: "You will see changes in Washington, D.C., where people are making decisions about who is running a news bureau, who is heading up a lobbying shop," bringing in more blacks to top positions.

This election "isn't going to change everything," says Harvard's Mr. Wilkins. "But it is going to change the way people understand power. It changes the view of who could be an important person."

A sign of the times

Times are indeed changing. Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy: the Christian Science Monitor will stop printing a daily paper, will only print a weekend edition, and In 2009, the Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website; the 100 year-old news organization will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions.

4,800 Books and 10 Legs

In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon. Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

In a country that has suffered so much violence in the last half century plus, this is a heart-warming story of a man and books, a triumph of the human spirit that is not a cliché.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro. After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.

He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them. Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.

And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.

“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.

Luis Soriano, a teacher from La Gloria, Colombia, traveled to the village of El Brasil with his Biblioburro on Oct. 11. The donkeys are named Alfa and Beto.



Slide show

What role race in race?

Will whites for for a black candidate? Are poll respondents not telling the truth when asked?

Political strategists once assumed that polls might well overstate support for black candidates, since white voters might be reluctant to admit racially tinged sentiments to a pollster. Newer research has cast doubt on that assumption. Either way, the situation is confounding aides on both sides, who like everyone else are waiting to see what role race will play in the privacy of the voting booth.
It's often called the Bradley effect, named after Tom Bradley, mayor of LA, who lost the governor's race in California; polls showed him being comfortably in th elead.

“If he were white, this would be a blowout,” Mr. Ickes said. “I think the country has come a long, long, long way since the 1960s. I think everybody would agree with that. But if you talk to people in certain states, they will say there are impulses that do not benefit Barack Obama because of the color of his skin.”

If he were white he might not even be ahead; Obama's lead is because of who he is. And because of the economy's shape.

Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, said he had become accustomed to whispered asides from voters suggesting they would not vote for Mr. Obama because he is black. “We honestly don’t know how big an issue it is,” Mr. Anuzis said. But Representative Artur Davis, an African-American Democrat of Alabama, said race was no longer the automatic barrier to the White House that it once was.

America sure has come a long way in 20, let alone 40 years. Yet some things, and some people have not changed. Some old ideas remain in place; even youngsters share old prejudices.

Throughout this campaign season, many commentators and politicians have proclaimed today’s youth to be a colorblind generation in which racial prejudice has receded and diversity is embraced.

To make blanket generalizations is nonsense. The 1960s was supposed to be an age of young people embracing equality and dropping racial prejudice; that was simply not true.

But in two days of interviews here and north of the Ohio River in Cincinnati, most young people acknowledged — or even insisted — that race was still a powerful if subtle factor among their peers.

Prejudice is learned, at home.

At the University of Cincinnati, Anthony Galarza, a graduate student in urban planning, said he had heard off-color jokes about an Obama presidency that suggested the White House would become “more ghetto” with “barbecues on the front lawn.”

“I would think on a college campus we would be a little more liberal,” said Mr. Galarza, 29. “To hear it so openly talked about, it’s disturbing — it really is. I don’t think anyone who is colorblind would make a comment like that.”

Adam French, a 21-year-old white senior and supporter of Mr. McCain, said: “It would be interesting to consider if Barack Obama had the same credentials but was John Smith, a white guy from Texas, that he would be in the same position to run. I don’t think anyone with his credentials could come anywhere close to being on a presidential ticket” without being black.

Of all the students quoted in this article in the Times, this one jumps out at me: it misses the very point that being who he is makes Obama such an inspirational leader.

And then there are the yahoos that spout absolutely pure nonsense, the same sort of nonsense that was spouted 40 years ago, even if in slightly less offensive terms.

The McCain campaign’s depiction of Barack Obama as a mysterious “other” with an impenetrable background may not be resonating in the national polls, but it has found a receptive audience with many white Southern voters.

Not just in the South: here in New York there is plenty of opposition, which I consider to be racial prejudice, though the reasons expressed are indirect: lack of experience, not sure of his support for Israel, and so on.

Being the son of a white mother and a black father has come to symbolize Mr. Obama’s larger mysteries for many voters. When asked about his background, a substantial number of people interviewed said they believed his racial heritage was unclear, giving them another reason to vote against him.

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Say what? Can this bozo visualize, or understand, the mixing of the races throughout American history? Doubtful; it ain't in the Bible.

“I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds, 74, a retired textile worker in Martinsville, Va., and a former supervisor at a Goodyear plant. “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.”

Clearly not just the young have such ridiculous ideas. I wonder what Master Reynolds thinks about Thomas Jefferson.

“He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in the Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental cleanup business. “I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”

Some people don't bother with ambiguities. He only failed to use the word nigger, this jerk.

“He doesn’t come from the African-American perspective — he’s not of that tradition,” said Kimi Oaks, a prominent community volunteer in the Mobile area, with apparent approval. Ms. Oaks, along with about 15 others, had gathered after Sunday services at Mobile’s leading Methodist church to discuss the presidential campaign. “He’s not a product of any ghetto,” Ms. Oaks added.

Yet even some of those who support Obama can't see past their own prejudices: does Miss Kimi really believe that all US blacks come from a ghetto?

At the same time, however, she vigorously rejected the idea that race would be important in the election, a question met with general head-shaking from those assembled; Ms. Oaks said she was “terribly offended,” as a Southerner, at even being asked about this.

And then some have the issue become personal: Bud Rowell, a retired oil field worker interviewed at a Baptist church in Citronelle, Ala., north of Mobile, said he was uncertain about Mr. Obama’s racial identity, and was critical of him for being equivocal and indecisive. But Mr. Rowell also said that personal experience had made him more sympathetic to biracial people. “I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

At least he thinks his grandchildren are people; nice of him.



“I would think on a college campus we would be a little more liberal. To hear it so openly talked about, it’s disturbing — it really is. I don’t think anyone who is colorblind would make a comment like that.” ANTHONY GALARZA, in Cincinnati, speaking of off-color jokes about an Obama presidency.





“He’s neither-nor. He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.” RICKY THOMPSON, in Mobile, Ala., speaking about Barack Obama

Happy Labor Day. Drop Dead.

The latest Republican target is the "card check" system for unionization.

There is an enomous backlash against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bit of union-backed legislation that might allow labor to start reversing decades of decline. Almost wherever there is a close race for a Senate seat, you can see TV commercials assailing the initiative in the most strident terms.

But it's more than the hypocrisy that should concern us, and it's even more than the ongoing violation of people's rights, human or civil. The destruction of the labor movement by tactics like these is a big part of the reason why wage-earners no longer rise as the economy grows, and why some day soon we will speak of the great middle-class nation in the past tense.

Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama

This guy is a conservative, I think. Mr. Steele is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win"

He has interesting things to say. If I have often criticized Mr. Jackson, I have also, reservedly, admired him. I wonder why reservedly.

Now, this caricature: Jesse Jackson is in Barack Obama's shadow, as is the real case: Jackson's time is past, Obama's is beginning. But Jackson is made to look pathetic: pigeon-toed, his body contorted, as if he is either holding something in, or pleading. Obama has a power green tie, and his expression is of humbly deflecting all the attention and praise given him.

Mr. Jackson was always a challenger. He confronted American institutions (especially wealthy corporations) with the shame of America's racist past and demanded redress. He could have taken up the mantle of the early Martin Luther King (he famously smeared himself with the great man's blood after King was shot), and argued for equality out of a faith in the imagination and drive of his own people. Instead – and tragically – he and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.

Seems valid. Some people criticized that as extortion. I remember feeling uncomfortable, on one level, that he was getting contributions made to his foundation and programs, working on guilt, yet I also felt that he was confronting the primary institutions of American society and forcing the issue of past racism and of redress. A lot of blacks adored him. He preached a message of hope, of black empowerment.

Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites "on the hook" the most sacred article of the post-'60s black identity. They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently – that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality – took whites "off the hook" and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group's bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Again, valid. Considered in the proper historical context: after Martin Luther King was killed there was a vacuum in the black community. Jesse Jackson stepped in and took a lead role in getting the civil rights movement back on track. The next step, after protest marches, after legislation, was made to be empowerment, and if the government wasn't going to provide funding then Jesse got funding elsewhere, namely corporations. To state that the choice was between black development (which is left undefined) and extortionism seems oversimplification. In 1969 Nixon was in office, and he'd gotten there by playing to the South, by emphasizing law-and-order and by cynically manipulating the military involvement in Viet Nam. I don't remember there being anyone else other than Jesse Jackson agitating for social change.

Yet Mr. Steele makes valid and important points: to not do as Jesse was doing was to be exiled and reviled. Yet, that is so often the case: the dissident is reviled.

Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

An interesting analysis, and, of course, also valid. It make some sense. Yet it again seems to be an oversimplification. Gratitude seems a cynical twist on Obama's candidacy and strategy.

Normally, "black responsibility" is a forbidden phrase for a black leader – not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites. When Mr. Obama uses this language, whites of course are thankful. Black leaders seethe.

Perhaps even cynical, yet spot on. Still, only one way to look at it. I'd love to know what Henry Louis Gates would say. I don't think that every black leader plays the guilt card, shaming whites into holding back criticism or giving support to black causes in order to not be called racist.

Until Mr. Obama, any black with a message of black responsibility would be called a "black conservative" and thereby marginalized. After Obama's NAACP speech, blacks flooded into the hotel lobby thanking him for "reminding" them of their responsibility.

Well, yes: there are those such as Cornel West that keep playing the old revolutionary tune

Blacks, Mr. Steele writes, are willing to openly embrace the truth of responsibility because Mr. Obama potentially offers them something far more profound than mere moral leverage. If only symbolically, he offers nothing less than an end to black inferiority. This has been an insidious spiritual torment for blacks because reality itself keeps mockingly proving the original lie. Barack Obama in the Oval Office – a black man governing a largely white nation – would offer blacks an undreamed-of spiritual solace far more meaningful than the petty self-importance to be gained from moral leverage.

Imagine a black president. A young black president, at that. And imagine a black first lady. A young black first lady. A black first lady who dresses in similar ways to how Jackie Kennedy dressed: with style, with a pizazz, an attractive and exciting style.

White Americans, Mr. Steele continues, have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.

I don't feel tormented as morally inferior. I do not feel I am a racist. O, I am not pure of heart, devoid of racism. But I struggle, work to be good-hearted, to treat all with dignity and respect. And yet I am not tormented by feelings of moral inferiority. Still, I grant the point: to have a black president would make me feel good. I would consider such an election a giant step forward in tolerance. But I would not feel we'd reached nirvana. No, progress is made in incremental steps, and electing Obama would be quite a step forward.

It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.

That line about American principles loses me; perhaps he means something such as all are created equal.

This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by "change." He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.

He did say that the Sixties children, the Boomers, have to get over it, and end the polemics.

But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama's political invisibility – a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions – may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Mr. Steele then writes of Obama flip-flopping on various issues. Well, he is a politician running for office, not a candidate for messiah or prophet.

Mr. Obama has already won a cultural mandate to the American presidency. And politically, he is now essentially in a contest with himself. His challenge is not Mr. McCain; it is the establishment of his own patriotism, trustworthiness and gravitas. He has to channel a little Colin Powell, and he no doubt hopes his trip to the Middle East and Europe will reflect him back to America with something of Mr. Powell's stature. He wants even Middle America to feel comfortable as the mantle they bestow on him settles upon his shoulders.

Well, so the presidency is won; all he has to do is prove to be patriotic, look good with other world leaders, and exude gravitas: look dignified, formal in bearing and appearance; that is, get some Colin Powell polish.

Well, Colin Powell ...