30 MINUTES OF OBAMA

What's on your mind?

Selections that I found to be revealing from 4 articles on Obama:

“The Phenomenon”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19651

…the main reason for his success surely has to do with the central theme of his rhetoric. In the convention speech, as in all his major speeches, Obama aimed far higher than the usual uninspiring Democratic laundry list of health care, good jobs, devotion to Roe v. Wade, and the rest. His subject is our shared civic culture, which he sees as under threat—mostly from the right but also from the left. He believes our red-versus-blue politics of today is positively toxic, and he thinks that our only hope is to rise above it. The theme of The Audacity of Hope is not how the Democrats can win more elections, or how a certain liberal policy goal can be attained; it is, he writes in the book's early pages, "how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life." He wants a political culture that is, to be sure, liberal in its outlook but does the difficult work of trying to speak to people who don't share liberalism's assumptions (without being accommodationist to conservatives in power; Obama is no Joe Lieberman).

…After being sworn in to the Senate he listens to a stirring speech of welcome by Senator Robert Byrd, who warns of the "dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the Senate's precious independence."

"Listening to Senator Byrd," he reflects,

I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.

I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain.

… Obama confesses his "curious relationship" to the 1960s, and acknowledges that "as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980...I understood his appeal."

It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes.

He admits that "there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward [a] zealotry" similar to that of the Republicans, and he observes of both sides: "It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off politics." It's easy, he writes,

to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

In his "Politics" chapter, Obama writes with a considerable amount of candor (for a sitting senator) about his Senate campaign and the things one has to endure to become, and be, a senator. He can poke fun at himself and see his own shortcomings. But these passages, too, are chiefly about his deep frustration with how politics works today. He didn't like raising money,[3] and he seems to dislike powerful interest groups—particularly the single-issue advocacy organizations that vet candidates, dangling their endorsements in front of them—even more. "I've never been entirely comfortable with the term 'special interest' which lumps together the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids," he writes. "I must have filled out at least fifty questionnaires" in 2004, he continues. "None of them were subtle."

Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that might actually endorse me...so I could usually answer "yes" to most questions without any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that gave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should be repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation's top priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achieve that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.

Already in his young Senate career, Obama has disappointed some who thought they saw in him, in July 2004 in Boston, a political warrior. His voting record is generally quite liberal, almost conventionally so: his composite liberal score, according to the National Journal, is 83, meaning that his votes were more liberal on economic, social, and foreign policy issues than those of 83 percent of his colleagues.[4] But for the most part, he has not been a bold advocate. Aware that his celebrity is a likely source of resentment for more senior colleagues, he has moved slowly, seeking the spotlight rarely. He stepped into it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when he made his first appearance on a Sunday morning talk show—after turning down such invitations for months. His remarks to ABC's George Stephanopoulos were mostly quite measured ("there seemed to be a sense that this other America was somehow not on people's radar screen"). Around the same time, he offered his first major bill, which would give federal assistance to auto companies with retiree health care costs in exchange for greater fuel efficiency.

More recently, he has sought to call attention to the Darfur genocide. He visited a camp for the region's refugees in Chad in late August of this year; his interest surely owed something to Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the Rwandan genocide A Problem from Hell, who took a year's leave from her post at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to work for Obama. He assembled a staff with strong Washington and Capitol Hill connections.[5] He visited nuclear stockpiles in the former Soviet Union with the moderate and agreeable Indiana Republican Richard Lugar; and, with the ultraconservative Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, he coauthored legislation—which in late September became the first law he's passed—requiring the publication on the Internet of the cost of all federal contracts, grants, and congressional "earmarks," the pork barrel appropriations that have drawn much criticism in the past year.

… the biggest surprise of Obama's first year was his vote for the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2005, the Republican bill, endorsed by the White House and signed enthusiastically by President Bush, to limit class action lawsuits. Obama's was one of eighteen Democratic votes in favor of the legislation, but the votes of the other seventeen were mostly expected (they were Democrats from red states or members of the party's "moderate" contingent like Connecticut's Joe Lieberman and California's Dianne Feinstein). A fair amount of speculation arose about Obama's vote. And it continues: in the November 2006 Harper's Magazine, Ken Silverstein, in a lengthy piece of reporting that inquires into the less uplifting aspects of Obama's Senate service, reports that the bill "was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama's second biggest single bloc of donors."[7] The financial companies hate class action suits, which can, at one stroke, impose huge burdens on industries in which they have invested.

One can't dismiss the possibility that such lobbying may have affected Obama's vote. But I think—from the evidence of his books and other writings—that a more likely explanation is this: he wanted, even if only to prove to himself that he could do it, to show at least one Democratic interest group that he could say no, and he chose the trial lawyers. They are less threatening than the advocates of organized labor and abortion rights. I feel certain that he just wanted to see how it felt.

“ The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.”

“Where is Barack Obama coming from?”
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1

…Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back.

When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.

So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound.

The victory of freedom over history is not just, of course, an American story about individuals but also a story that America tells about itself. Obama rejects this story even in one of its most persuasive incarnations, the civil-rights movement. He calls the “spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness” a “useful fiction, one that haunts me . . . evoking as it does some lost Eden.” When it seems that history has been defeated, that is only an illusion produced by charisma and rhetoric.

It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake. This was American innocence at its most destructive, freedom at its most deceptive, universalism at its most naïve. “There was a dangerous innocence to thinking that we would be greeted as liberators, or that with a little bit of economic assistance and democratic training you’d have a Jeffersonian democracy blooming in the desert,” he says now. “There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”

“By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275

Obama said that the “blogger community,” which by now is shorthand for liberal Democrats, gets frustrated with him because they think he’s too willing to compromise with Republicans. “My argument,” he says, “is that a polarized electorate plays to the advantage of those who want to dismantle government. Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They’re not trying to reform health care. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals.”

I recall a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: “People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant.” In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota’s George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses.

Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate. Campaigns have grown increasingly costly; in 2004 it took an average of more than $7 million to run for a Senate seat. As Carl Wagner, a Democratic political strategist who first came to Washington in 1970, remarked to me, the Senate today is a fundamentally different institution than it was then. “Senators were creatures of their states and reflected the cultures of their states,” he said. “Today they are creatures of the people who pay for their multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Representative democracy has largely been taken off the table. It’s reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s, when senators were chosen by state legislatures who were owned by the railroads and the banks.” Accordingly, as corporate money has grown increasingly important to candidates, we have seen the rise of the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it—not just lobbyists themselves but an entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public-relations agencies, pollsters, and media strategists.

All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”

“How the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman.” The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1

…Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”

He was a black child, by American lights, but his mother and his grandparents—the only family he knew—were “white folks,” and his confusion was acute. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes how, as a teen-ager, he tried marijuana and cocaine. (“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” he told me. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”) He went to Columbia University, and liked New York, but he found the city’s racial tension inescapable. It “flowed freely,” he wrote in his memoir—“not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed.”

Fired with political idealism, he decided to become a community organizer. He wrote to organizations all over the United States, and finally got one reply, from Chicago. He moved there, going to work for a tiny, church-based group that was trying to help residents of poor South Side neighborhoods cope with a wave of plant closings. It was a humbling, exhausting, and only rarely edifying job; Obama stuck with it for three years. “Chicago” is the longest section of his memoir, and in many ways the bleakest, for it tunnels deep into the bedrock of inner-city despair and inadequate politics and black selfdestruction. It is also an unsentimental celebration of the city, which has a rich lode of brash, bluesy charm, of course, but also was a place for a serious, talented, too cosmopolitan young African-American to sink some roots.

“Teaching [at U of Chicago Law School] keeps you sharp,” Obama said. “The great thing about teaching constitutional law”—his subject—“is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.”

Americans aren’t simply too tired to think about politics, he said; they’re being deliberately turned off. “If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.”

…few who heard a speech that he gave at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago in the fall of 2002—months before he announced for the Senate—forgot it. “It was the best antiwar speech I have ever heard, bar none,” a lifelong Democratic activist, now in her late sixties, told me.

I asked Obama about that speech.

“I noticed that a lot of people at that rally were wearing buttons saying, ‘War Is Not an Option,’ ” he said. “And I thought, I don’t agree with that. Sometimes war is an option. The Civil War was worth fighting. World War Two. So I got up and said that, among other things.” What he said, among other things, was “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Invading and occupying Iraq, he said, would be “a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

In Springfield, Obama led a campaign for death-penalty reforms that resulted in unprecedented legislation, requiring the police to videotape all interrogations in cases involving capital crimes. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democratic congresswoman who represents Evanston and parts of north Chicago, told me that she thought the reforms were terrific but that, statewide, such things would never be popular, and that Obama was doing himself no favors politically by championing them. Similarly, Obama recently co-sponsored landmark legislation to curb racial profiling—not a popular issue outside minority communities, and not, therefore, a smart move for a man running for the U.S. Senate.

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’