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Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Volume 7, No. 7
4 Articles
3. Honouring The 'Unbreakable Promise'
BY
ELIZABETH DREW
The Democrats didn’t expect so much pain. The assumption was that out of a patch of good candidates one would emerge to take on an inevitably weak Republican-the field was seen as lacking and George Bush as a drag on the party-and defeat him in what everyone knew was a Democratic year. But this has been the year of the unexpected. Now, anguished Democratic Party leaders fear that the increasingly bloody struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will continue until the end of the primaries or, worse, play out further at their convention in late August-which could only benefit the Republicans’ putative, and unexpected, nominee, John McCain.
The Democrats’ contest has changed from simply a fierce fight for “pledged delegates,” who are elected in the primaries and caucuses, which Obama is winning, into a battle to convince the as-yet-uncommitted superdelegates which candidate would be stronger in the general election-regardless of who has won the most pledged delegates. This is an issue injected into the contest by the Clinton campaign. Mathematically, there now appears to be no way for Clinton to catch up to Obama in pledged delegates; the final decision will be made by the superdelegates, who are under extreme pressure from both sides.
In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it’s adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that’s a very small deal-such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton’s strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride. Clinton’s approach resembles her tactics in the White House, in which her inclination was to attack (which caused a number of problems, and was one of the reasons her health care bill was defeated). The Obama camp has sometimes been slow, and even reluctant, to respond, because if he attacks her personally (which the Clinton campaign would like him to do), he’s not Barack Obama anymore. Moreover, Obama takes care not to come across as the “angry black”-a stereotype he does not fit, but that could be imposed upon him by others.
While it’s true that the two remaining Democratic candidates have few substantive differences, they have very different approaches to campaigning, which give us clues about the differences in how they would govern-and that, after all, is what this whole thing is, or should be, about. It’s useful to try to imagine these people in the White House, and, from their campaigning, to try to figure what they will be like there: how they will use power; how well they would sustain their appeal over a considerable period of time.
It’s been long said among politicians that “the Clintons will do anything to win.” Unfortunately, they are increasingly proving the point. As the primaries in Texas and Ohio approached, the Clinton campaign, which has a tendency to announce its next steps, said that it would use a “kitchen sink” strategy against Obama-and so it did: with the famous and apparently effective “red phone” ad questioning his fitness to be commander in chief; and in frequent and heavy-handed conference calls to reporters (an innovation), in which Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson makes charges against Obama, raises questions about him, or moves “goal posts” designating what Obama has to do to win. (Obama “has to win Pennsylvania,” which few think is likely.) This propaganda makes its way onto cable and other news outlets. But where does, or should, a “kitchen sink” strategy belong in a presidency?
Hillary Clinton is employing conventional politics, while Obama is trying to create a new kind of politics. Similarly, as they respond to the country’s desire for change, they have very different concepts of what “change” means: briefly, for Obama it means changing the very zeitgeist of Washington, creating a new way to get things done by building coalitions that transcend longstanding political divisions. For Clinton it means passing bills-though sometimes she has suggested that it means electing a woman president. (”I embody change,” she said in a debate in New Hampshire.)
That Obama’s style didn’t work so well in Ohio and Texas, on March 4, is not surprising, although he is likely to end up with more delegates in Texas, thanks to the caucuses that followed the traditional primary voting. (The Clinton campaign is now challenging the outcome of the caucus voting.) Ohio in particular was not a welcome place for him. It’s a meat-and-potatoes state (I grew up there) whose voters demand practical solutions and are not given to the romance or the leap of imagination that Obama’s campaign involves.
The demographics there were not in his favor: it’s older and whiter than most other states, and has a higher population of women (to whom Clinton played heavily) than any other state the two candidates had contested. A declining rust-belt state, it also has a larger number of discontented blue-collar workers than any other state in which the two candidates had campaigned before. And unlike, say, Iowa, it has a higher percentage of blacks and a history of racial conflict. Obama had had a streak of eleven straight victories, but there was always a question of how he would fare when he hit the industrial states.
Obama’s victories in Maryland and Virginia on February 12, and then Wisconsin a week later, showed him gaining voters among Clinton’s constituency of women, white men, and blue-collar workers, which suggested a major reshaping of the race; but that trend stopped in Ohio and in Texas-where Bill Clinton warned the voters that they had to keep his wife in the race. Obama did poorly with Hispanics, gaining only 30 percent of their vote in Texas to Clinton’s 63 percent. If Obama could not win the votes of blue-collar workers and Hispanics in the general election-and this is not to say that he couldn’t-that could seriously damage his chances.
That the presumed neophyte Obama has stood toe-to-toe with the Clintons (for all of Hillary Clinton’s complaints about being “ganged up on,” Obama has had to face both Clintons every day), has beaten them more often than not, and still might prevail is in itself remarkable. But in one important way his campaigning has fallen short. A great many people who follow politics closely simply don’t “get” Obama, and can become quite angry about him. (This election is dividing friends and families like no other I’ve seen.) They see him as offering empty rhetoric, as simply building a movement, even a cult; the huge crowds he has drawn, his rock-star appeal, have only reinforced these suspicions. Actually, Obama is a serious student of policy-even, in the words of one adviser, a “geek”-and highly informed as a result. In Wisconsin, in some frustration-as Clinton was calling him “a talker, not a doer”-Obama said:
Everybody has got a ten-point plan on everything. You go to Senator Clinton’s Web site, my Web site, they look identical…. The problem is not the lack of proposals. The question is, who can bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans into a working majority to bring about change. That’s what we’re doing in this campaign. This is what a working majority looks like. That’s how we’re going to move the country forward. That’s what I offer that she can’t do.
Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington and to get some of those ten-point programs through, and to reduce the power of the lobbies and “special interests,” he must first build a large coalition-Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever-to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he’s talking about if he has to fight for 51-49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he’s trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the “old bulls,” according to a campaign aide, “will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change.” Thus, Obama talks about working “from the bottom up” to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it’s not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he’s building.
To understand Obama, one has to recognize the importance to him of his days as a community organizer in Chicago: he worked with churches, and “in the streets,” to organize people to take on the powers-that-be in order to improve their living conditions and get jobs. An Obama adviser told me, “His being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign.” Thus, Obama has a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern. The inspiring speeches have a far-sighted and pragmatic goal.
Being an organizer at heart-though he also practiced law in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years-in the first quarter of his campaign Obama focused on setting up campaign organizations in many states and raising money, mainly through small contributions via the Internet. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, raised money from the top, so that many contributors “maxed out” early.
Obama’s ability to inspire people, to draw tremendous crowds, has carried him a long way, but even though he began to season his speeches with talk about programs, he failed, in Ohio in particular, to clearly connect what he was saying to individual people’s lives. He didn’t bring the rhetoric down to earth, translate it into something real that voters could understand. And I think this is one reason he lost. Clinton, by contrast, got across that she was “a fighter” (her new self-description) who would produce “results for America” (her new theme) and would improve the lives of many Ohioans; she talked in specifics about what she would do, and made it all seem real. Since then, Obama has been dealing much more in specifics.
Obama’s wonkish side led him early on to steep himself in position papers on numerous issues, from defense policy to health care to climate change, and from April to December of 2007 he gave speeches describing in detail how he would approach various issues. It was at this time that the press was describing him as “flat.” And then he lit up the political world by giving an extraordinary speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 10, 2007. The last to speak, he roused the audience, and made some subtle digs at Clinton:
This party-the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy-has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction; when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose-a higher purpose. And I run for the Presidency of the United States of America because that’s the party America needs us to be right now.
Obama has been accused of being all flash, and of not having done much in the Senate. His record in the three and a half years he has been there suggests someone serious about the job: he worked on a nuclear nonproliferation bill that passed and backed a number of policy changes to help veterans, including more medical care for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, assistance for homeless veterans, and the extension of tax credits for military families. He pushed through the Senate a major bill on ethics reform; and introduced legislation in January 2007 to stop, or if that failed, limit funds for the surge. He also worked with the conservative Republican Tom Coburn in a successful effort to get Congress to impose transparency on government expenditures so that anyone can look them up. The criticism that he hasn’t done more also overlooks the fact that during his first two years in the Senate, he was ninety-ninth in seniority and in the minority party. Already a celebrity when he reached Washington, he was in fact careful to be humble, and to seek the advice of his elders. (Just as Hillary Clinton did when she got to the Senate.)
As for Obama’s often-questioned record as an eight-year Illinois state senator, James Warren, a managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, says,
The caricature of him as a neophyte legislator with a modest record is unfair. He was very hard-working and effective, often against significant political opposition and amid scant media attention. Through forging coalitions, he got bona fide, important legislation through on taping of police interrogations, racial profiling, ethics reform, and the earned income tax credit.
The Clinton campaign’s false assumption-based on a 350-page, state-by-state study in the summer of 2007 by key strategist Mark Penn-that Clinton’s victory was “inevitable” led to a series of mistakes: (1) presenting herself as the “inevitable” nominee; (2) prematurely running a general election campaign; (3) assuming that the race would be over on February 5-Super Tuesday; and (4) believing that a number of small states that held caucuses could be skipped. And if Penn’s strategy didn’t work there was no Plan B. It’s never a good idea to have a pollster in an important policy position in a campaign, since he or she can design the polling to get the answers he or she wants, as some believed Penn had done in the Clinton White House. (Hillary Clinton brought him in after the electoral disaster of 1994.) The Clinton campaign has been divided and sometimes almost paralyzed by internal feuding among outsized egos. By contrast, this hasn’t happened in the Obama campaign: Obama deliberately picked congenial people and instructed his staff that he wanted “no drama.”
In early March, Clinton went from, in a debate, “I’m honored…to be here with Barack Obama…absolutely honored” to, a day and a half later, angrily, shouting, “Shame on you, Barack Obama.” In that instance, she was engaging in molehill politics: a flyer on trade that the Obama campaign had sent out quoted her as saying that the North American Free Trade Agreement had been a “boon” to the United States’ economy. The use of the word “boon,” an accidental error, was taken from Newsday, which put in quotes the gist of her remarks.[1] Obama replied calmly. “Senator Clinton has…constantly sent out negative attacks on us, email, robo-calls, flyers, television ads, radio calls, and we haven’t whined about it because I understand that is the nature of these campaigns.”
Clinton’s frequent switching of tactics and personas raises the question of who she is and why she’s so changeable: employing a Southern accent in a Selma, Alabama, church; dropping her g’s while touring in Appalachia; sounding something like a cowboy in Wyoming (”concerns that keep ya up at night”), and then back to a Southern accent in Mississippi. Clinton’s variability does not mean that she lacks her own core belief about the need to help improve people’s lives. But it suggests that she is not a natural politician and is willing to try almost anything, while her feuding staff gives her conflicting advice. As a result, her campaign has had no overall message, and her themes have shifted almost by the week. The disorder within her own campaign team raises questions about how she would govern.
Clinton believes that the issue of health care-in which there is one substantive difference between them-works to her advantage. She brings it up often and even harped on it in the last debate, in Cleveland, on February 26, where she came across as the dinner guest who just won’t drop a subject. She argues that for health care to be universal, people must be required to participate in the plan. Obama argues that if the cost of the new insurance is low enough, people will participate. But the great debate on this issue is phony, for Clinton has refused to say how she would enforce her plan (and states that have tried enforcement programs have failed); moreover, everyone knows that campaign plans change once they reach the White House, and political compromises are made.
In debating NAFTA, the other big issue in the Ohio campaign, both candidates pandered to hard-up workers, whom the labor left has convinced that the treaty is the cause of their woes. Both pledged to renegotiate the treaty, which could cause large problems with numerous other countries, and may not even be possible. Clinton tried to disavow the treaty, despite her several past comments praising it-it had been one of her husband’s major triumphs-while Obama chided her for being selective about which of her husband’s achievements she wants to take credit for. But then the Clinton campaign was blessed by a report on Canadian television that one of Obama’s advisers had met with a Canadian official and told him, in effect, not to worry about the heated rhetoric that Obama was using about NAFTA. Exactly what happened in this meeting-many foreign governments get in touch with campaigns to find out what’s going on-remains unclear (though if the adviser did say this he was probably speaking the truth). But the Obama campaign mishandled the affair by denying for a few days that there had been a meeting. Meanwhile, Clinton pounded away, to her great benefit.
Hillary Clinton’s ten-point victory in Ohio was a testament to her exceptional resilience (she sometimes went on only three hours of sleep, yet most of the time managed to look fresh and enthusiastic) and her determination when her back is to the wall. She seemed a more confident campaigner, and it helped her, as it had in New Hampshire, that before the voting there was much press babble to the effect that if she didn’t win in Ohio and Texas she’d have to get out of the race. Such talk serves to bring out her followers, especially women, to rescue her. Also, race had a part in the Ohio results. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that race mattered more in Ohio than in any other primary thus far.
From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has suggested-first in whispers by Clinton aides and then, starting earlier this year, heading into the Iowa caucuses, aloud by Clinton herself, and it continues-that Obama hasn’t been “vetted.” This smear is intended to suggest that there are “things there” in Obama’s past (left unspecified) that could cause him real problems. Yet despite their own efforts-every campaign has “oppo” (for opposition) research-thus far the Clinton campaign has turned up nothing new about Obama. Warren, the Tribune editor, says, “His life has been very rigorously inspected by the Chicago papers, and they’ve been pretty tough on him. The idea that he needs to be vetted a lot more by a heretofore compliant press is baloney.”
In fact the Tribune had already revealed in November 2006 something that the Clinton campaign makes much of: that Obama made arrangements in 2005 with Tony Rezko, a Chicago businessman, which yielded the Obamas extra yard space for a house they were buying-an action that Obama has numerous times described as “a mistake,” and “bone-headed.” At the time of the Obamas’ purchase, Rezko was under grand jury investigation, and Obama has admitted it showed poor judgment on his part to do business with him because Rezko was a contributor and Obama himself was in politics. Obama recently told the Tribune that Rezko had raised more money for his earlier races than he had previously disclosed: about $250,000 in all. Rezko has not contributed to Obama’s presidential campaign; but unfortunately for Obama, Rezko’s trial began on the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries. Wolfson had a field day with this in his conference calls, and the press showed a renewed interest in Obama’s dealings with Rezko.
On 60 Minutes the Sunday before the March 4 primaries, Clinton said that Obama was not a Muslim, “as far as I know.” And on the morning after the Ohio and Texas primaries, Clinton said, icily, that now there were “new questions” about Obama, which the superdelegates should know or should have known about. She did not specify which questions she had in mind.
Shortly after that, the issue of race, which had emerged only around the margins of the Democratic contest, exploded. Some reporters felt the Clintons were making sure that Obama, who is of mixed race, was known as the black candidate. Hillary Clinton commented in a debate, “isn’t it wonderful” to have a woman and an African-American in the race. (Obama could only smile gamely.) She has made similar remarks elsewhere. And there had been Bill Clinton’s comments in South Carolina, such as his saying, after Obama won by a huge margin, that Jesse Jackson had won the state, too. Also noticeable was the series of Clinton allies making what could most kindly be put as racially insensitive remarks-among them Bill Shaheen, husband of the former governor of New Hampshire and co-chair of Clinton’s campaign (he stepped down); BET founder Bob Johnson; and Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.
And then, along came Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, saying that Obama was “lucky” to be black, because that’s how he’d gotten where he had. With Obama not running as the “black candidate,” and not belonging to the civil rights generation, many people, perhaps naively, had thought that the issue of race could be avoided. But now this most painful subject in American life was squarely before the country.
Clinton, who had at first given a tepid response to Ferraro’s comment, saying, “Well, I do not agree with that,” and tried to equate both campaigns in “veering off” into the personal, had to go further. At a meeting on March 12 with a group of black publishers, someone brought up Bill Clinton’s South Carolina remark and asked her how she could regain the trust of the African-American community. Mrs. Clinton replied that she was “sorry if anyone was offended,” and then added, “We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama.”
Right on top of the Ferraro episode came-not coincidentally, some observers think-the release on television of some particularly inflammatory statements by Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright-”No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America.” Such preaching is not uncommon in black churches and Wright’s is milder than some others. That Obama attended Wright’s church-the biggest and most influential black church in Chicago, a church that had done a lot of civic good-does not at all signify that he shared these particular pastoral views. Obama has had no part in the angry-black world. The controversy over Wright was not a new issue, and Obama had dropped him from giving the convocation speech at his announcement that he was running for president.
But, as always, pictures made the difference, as did the reality of what Wright had been saying. Obama’s speech on race, in Philadelphia on March 18, was both a necessity and an opportunity. His description of his background as Kansas white and Kenya black, of being raised by white grandparents, and his frank and searing description of the anger of both blacks and whites over the subject of race enabled him to define himself as not simply the “black” candidate, and to forcefully restate his position as the candidate of unity. His explanation that he found some of Wright’s fiery sermons “not only wrong but divisive,” while he refused to “disown” him, made both moral and political sense. “This time,” he said repeatedly, the country must grapple with the issues that set the two races apart. He took on a big burden.
Many Clinton people feel that it was a disastrous mistake to skip so many caucuses, which allowed Obama to rack up delegates-this was in part a result of Penn’s planning; in part it reflected the fact that Obama’s campaign is better at organizing than Clinton’s; and in part it was because Clinton herself, since her big loss in Iowa, has made it clear she dislikes caucuses, even portraying them as somewhat illegitimate. So, out of necessity, she and her husband campaigned hard for the Wyoming caucus on Saturday, March 8, and Obama beat her 59-40.
Particularly shameless after all their attacks on Obama, including the charge that he was unfit to be commander in chief, were the unsubtle hints by the Clintons, just before the Mississippi primary on March 11, that Hillary Clinton might put Obama-the front-runner-on her ticket. Their remark was demeaning to Obama, but also meant to suggest to Mississippi blacks and others that they could have it both ways. Obama made fun of their ploy, and sought to make it clear that this was a no-go.
In any event, Obama won 90 percent of the black vote in perhaps the most racially divided state in the country. Seeking not to undermine Obama’s claim to be a new kind of politician, his campaign has so far been cautious in its response to kitchen-sink politics. His campaign leaders have called for the release of Clinton’s tax returns and her White House records, but there is plenty of other material that could be telling, including Bill Clinton’s pardons (the National Archives says that he is holding up the release of papers about them) and the contributors to his library and his foundation. There are also questions of Bill Clinton’s curious business deals since he left office.[2] (So much for having been “vetted.”)
Members of the Obama team have also been raising questions about Hillary Clinton’s assertions of her “experience,” particularly in foreign policy. They point out that she didn’t have security clearance in the White House, and could not attend National Security Council meetings. They have also been taking apart her claims of specific foreign policy successes, for example her assertion that “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” a claim that even Northern Ireland officials debunked recently. Or her claim that “I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo.” Of this Greg Craig, an Obama adviser and former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning in the Clinton administration, who is now for Obama, has said that the borders were opened the day before Hillary Clinton arrived in Macedonia where she would have conducted such negotiations.
In her efforts to paint Obama as unfit to be the commander in chief, Clinton has recklessly gone so far as to argue that she and McCain are readier than Obama is: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience…I will bring a lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002.” Thus she dismisses Obama’s claim that he had shown better judgment in 2002 by opposing the Iraq war. She has never come up with a plausible explanation of her vote to authorize the war because there isn’t one. It won’t do to say, as she has, that “if I would have known then what I know now,” because there was ample reason to know then. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew enough to strongly urge his colleagues to vote against the resolution; and he was one of twenty-two Democratic senators to do so. It was widely understood that Bush was intent on going to war. Clinton is known to have wavered on how to vote, and, like other Democrats, was advised by Democratic consultants to play it safe-to not cast a vote that might damage her political future. The irony is, of course, that she did just that.
Clinton took other steps, such as joining the Armed Services Committee, to protect herself from the sexist notion that a woman might be soft on national security. Early this year, Maureen Dowd reported that Clinton’s aides were telling people that she would be a tougher leader than her husband, and “less skittish about using military power.” A number of people, including former Clinton White House aides, worry that if elected Hillary Clinton might turn out to be a “Warrior Queen.”
As of this writing, the Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do about the renegade voting in Michigan and Florida. A solution is complicated by Clinton’s insistence on breaking Democratic Party rules by seating the delegates in those states, particularly in Florida. When I asked a close Clinton ally and adviser about this matter recently, he replied, “Rules? Rules? The rules are what people say they are. This isn’t law. This isn’t the Supreme Court.”
At this point, Obama has about 150 more pledged delegates than Clinton, and the election expert Tad Devine says that even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania, on April 22-as she is expected to-and whatever happens in Florida and Michigan, when all the voting is done, in June, Obama will probably still have at least one hundred more pledged delegates. (Michigan is closer to settling the matter; several strategists are suggesting that Florida delegates be given a half vote, netting Clinton nineteen delegates rather than none-instead of having a civil war.)
Clinton leads in the superdelegates-having an estimated 248 to Obama’s 212 (several of Clinton’s signed on when she was “inevitable”); but she still lags behind Obama overall. A consensus is forming among leading Democrats that the nomination should be decided on the basis of who has the most pledged delegates; their main concern is that the outcome appear fair. If Clinton has won the popular vote, which is a possibility but difficult (at this point Obama is ahead by 700,000 votes), or most of the big states (including, presumably, Florida and Michigan), the Clinton campaign will argue, those factors should prevail. The Obama people argue that most of the “big states”-New York, Massachusetts, California-will vote Democratic in the general election anyway, and that Obama has won some important “swing states,” such as Iowa, Missouri, and Virginia, as well as more states overall.
Most of the leading Democrats want to avoid a situation in which Clinton somehow wrests the nomination from Obama while he is ahead in delegates. This would leave the hundreds of thousands of people whom he has brought into the political system for the first time disillusioned-and an uproar could ensue. On March 16, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will chair the convention, said firmly, “It’s a delegate race.” According to Pelosi, “The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee.” This translates into a preference, shared with many House Democrats, for Obama to head the party ticket. Pelosi was clearly unfazed by the recent storm over race.
The superdelegates, especially the elected politicians, are worrying that the party might be cleaved in two. A large number of them favored Obama early on, and still do. A senior House Democrat told me that support for Obama is based on three things: concern that the animosity of Republicans toward Hillary Clinton would motivate them to go out and vote against the Democrats; that Obama attracts independents, which the national ticket will need; and that Obama gets the votes of blacks in overwhelming numbers, which can help in many districts as well as nationally.
Being politicians, the Capitol Hill Democrats who hadn’t already committed themselves waited to see what would happen on Super Tuesday; then they waited to see what would happen in Ohio and Texas on March 4; now they are waiting to see what will happen in Pennsylvania, and also Michigan and Florida. They are hoping that the delegate race will somehow resolve itself so that they won’t have to deal with a messy situation.
2. WALL COMES TUMBLING DOWN
(The inspiring breakout of Palestinians from their imprisonment in Gaza is a timely reminder that this is a people who cannot be caged or wished away)
BY
SEUMAS MILNE
Anyone with a sense of human solidarity must surely celebrate the demolition of the wall on the Gaza-Egyptian border on Wednesday and the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians starved of basic supplies of food, fuel and medicine by Israel's flagrantly illegal act of collective punishment. There was a further breakout today, when a bulldozer pulled down a new section of the barrier.
It has been first and foremost a human triumph. An occupied and imprisoned people has taken its fate into its own hands and broken a shameful blockade, enforced jointly by Israel and Egypt with the support of the Bush administration and the connivance of the US and Israeli-backed rump Palestinian authority in Ramallah.
But it is also a political defeat for the cruelly-enforced attempt to isolate and crush the elected Hamas leadership in Gaza. By tearing down the walls that held 1.5 million people in the world's largest open air prison, Gazans have broken the siege that had become the main weapon to bring the Palestinians to heel and impose a pliant leadership and an occupier's settlement.
Egyptian forces have been struggling to reseal the Rafah border crossing. It was closed last summer in agreement with Israel when Hamas took control of the Gaza strip (see the piece by Yaakov Katz, Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post of January 3 2008 on Israel's reaction to the recent more modest breach for Hajj pilgrims). Israel had meanwhile been sharply intensifying the squeeze on supplies through its own closed border crossings since it declared Gaza a "hostile territory" in September, with predictably grim consequences, as UN official Karen Koning AbuZayd spelled out in the Guardian on Wednesday.
But the point has now been clearly demonstrated that it can be re-opened at will. Hamas has been strengthened and the US-Israeli strategy of isolating the Palestinians' most recently elected leaders is in ruins. And the spectacle of Gazans holding candles in Israeli-enforced darkness this week - echoing Yasser Arafat's siege in Ramallah in 2002 - has returned the Palestinian cause to the centre stage of Arab politics.
There was some speculation today - for example, by the commentator Talal 'Awkal in the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam - that Israel appeared to be hoping for a reversion to Gaza's pre-67 status when it was controlled by Egypt, perhaps as a precursor to bringing the West Bank back into the Jordanian orbit. That followed the remarks by Israel's deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai on Thursday that the opening of the Rafah border could pave the way for Israel permanently to hand over all responsibility for supplying Gaza to Egypt.
Neither is a serious option. The Palestinian national genie cannot be put back in the bottle, despite current divisions. And Israel remains the fully responsible occupying power in Gaza, controlling its land access, sea and air space and conducting regular military operations in the territory at will.
Those "incursions" are supposedly carried out to end rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. If so, they are hopelessly ineffective. Benjamin Pogrund asked this week: what can Israel do to stop the rockets, which spread fear and demoralisation in towns like Sderot, even if - unlike Israeli attacks on Gaza - they rarely kill? The obvious answer is to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the refugees, ethnically cleansed nearly 60 years ago, (who, with their families, make up a majority of the Gaza Strip's population).
All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation, whether they choose to exercise it or not. The dominant Palestinian view - though not that of PA president Mahmoud Abbas - has long been that negotiation without some element of armed pressure is, as was once said in a rather different British context, to go naked into the conference chamber.
Even significant figures on the Israeli right - including Sharon's former security adviser Giora Eiland, former Mossad boss Efraim Halevi and ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz – are coming to recognise that the refusal to talk or deal with Hamas is going nowhere. And the argument (made, for example, by senior British ministers) that talks with Hamas will have to wait until the organisation has been politically weakened looks increasingly threadbare.
The same goes for the PA leadership. Waiting for Hamas to go away won't work. Only negotiations without preconditions for Palestinian political reconciliation can both restore national dignity and allow the Palestinians out of the dead end they have been forced into by relentless Israeli and US pressure. The magnificent display of popular power this week has shown that there are other ways ahead.
3. HONOURING THE 'UNBREAKABLE PROMISE'
BY
JOHN PILGER
Almost fourteen years after South Africa's first democratic elections and the fall of racial apartheid, John Pilger describes, in an address at Rhodes University, the dream and reality of the new South Africa and the responsibility of its new elite.
On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. Indeed, I always find it thrilling to behold. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious 'hippos', as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun.
The fine chronicler of apartheid, Paul Weinberg, took that photograph. He described crouching in a ditch at the roadside as the hippos entered Soweto. People were being shot with rubber bullets and real bullets. "I looked around," he said, "and there in the ditch next to me was this bird-like woman, who suddenly pulled out a bottle of gin, took a swig, then went over the top and marched straight into the moving line of vehicles. It was the one of the bravest things I've seen."
Paul's photograph brings to mind one of my favourite quotations. "The struggle of people against power," wrote Milan Kundera, " is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Moments such as that woman's bravery ought to be unforgettable, for they symbolise all the great movements of resistance to oppression: in South Africa, the Freedom Charter, Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial, the heroism of Steve Biko, the women who somehow kept their children alive on freezing hillsides in places like Dimbaza where they had been removed and declared redundant, and beyond, the Jews who rose against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Palestinians who just the other day smashed down the walls of their prison in Gaza.
Unforgettable? For some, yes. But there are those who prefer we celebrate a system of organised forgetting: of unbridled freedom for the few and obedience for the many; of socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor. They prefer that the demonstrable power of ordinary people is committed to what George Orwell called the memory hole. You may ask how we can possibly forget when we live in an information age?
The answer to that is another question: Who are "we"? Unlike you and me, most human beings have never used a computer and never owned a telephone. And those of us who are technologically blessed often confuse information with media, and corporate training with knowledge. These are probably the most powerful illusions of our times. We even have a new vocabulary, in which noble concepts have been corporatised and given deceptive, perverse, even opposite meanings.
"Democracy" is now the free market – a concept itself bereft of freedom. "Reform" is now the denial of reform. "Economics" is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line. Alternative models that relate to the needs of the majority of humanity end up in the memory hole. And "governance" – so fashionable these days - means an economic system approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos. "Foreign policy" is service to the dominant power. Conquest is "humanitarian intervention". Invasion is "nation-building".
Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do. Take the "war on terror". This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror. Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation.
In fact, the opposite is true. The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states. Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years ago have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this "nation-building". Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a "good war". Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond.
We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America's perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news.
The difference between the two tragedies is that the people who died in the Twin Towers in New York were worthy victims, and the thousands of children who die every day are unworthy victims. That is how many of us are programmed to perceive the world. Or so the programmers hope. In the information age, these children are expendable. In South Africa, they are the children of the evicted and dispossessed, children carrying water home from a contaminated dam. They are not the children in the gated estates with names like Tuscany. They are not covered by the theories of GEAR or NEPAD or any of the other acronyms of power given respectability by journalism and scholarship.
It seems to me vital that young people today equip themselves with an understanding of how this often subliminal propaganda works in modern societies – liberal societies: societies with proud constitutions and freedom of speech, like South Africa. For it says that freedom from poverty - the essence of true democracy - is a freedom too far.
In South Africa, new graduates have, it seems to me, both a special obligation and an advantage. The advantage they have is that the past is still vividly present. Only last month, the National Institute for Occupational Health revealed that in the last six years deadly silicosis had almost doubled among South Africa's gold miners. There are huge profits in this industry. Many of the miners are abandoned and die in their 40s – their families too poor to afford a burial.
Why is there still no proper prevention and compensation? And although Desmond Tutu pleaded with them, not one company boss in any of the apartheid-propping industries ever sought an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They were that confident that for things to change on the surface, things would remain the same.
For young graduates these days, there is a temptation to set themselves apart from the conditions I have described and from the world some have come from. As members of a new privileged elite, they have an obligation, I believe, to forge the vital link with the genius of everyday life and the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary people. This will allow them, in whatever way you choose, to finish the job begun by Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko and the brave woman in the photograph. In a nutshell, it means standing by one's compatriots in order to bring true freedom to South Africa.
Those who led the struggle against racial apartheid often said no. They dissented. They caused trouble. They took risks. They put people first. And they were the best that people can be. Above all, they had a social and political imagination that unaccountable power always fears. And they had courage. It is this imagination and courage that opens up real debate with real information and allows ordinary people to reclaim their confidence to demand their human and democratic rights.
Oscar Wilde wrote: "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". I read the other day that the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in just two years to more than 10,000 every year. That may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. That's something to be proud of - just as the Freedom Charter remains something to be proud of. Let me remind you how it begins: "We, the people of South Africa, declare that our country belongs to everyone...". And that, as Nelson Mandela once said, was the "unbreakable promise". Isn't it time the promise was kept?
BY
RALPH NADER
For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate American dream is eight more years. Yet how do you think they would react to having dozens of partisans at their rallies sporting large signs calling for EIGHT MORE YEARS, EIGHT MORE YEARS?
Don’t you have the feeling that they would cringe at such public displays of their fervent ambition which the New York Times described as a “truly two-for-the-price-of-one” presidential race? It might remind voters to remember or examine the real Clinton record in that peaceful decade of missed opportunities and not be swayed by the sugarcoating version that the glib former president emits at many campaign stops.
The 1990’s were the first decade without the specter of the Soviet Union. There was supposed to be a “peace dividend” that would reduce the vast, bloated military budget and redirect public funds to repair or expand our public works or infrastructure.
Inaugurated in January 1993, with a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton sent a small job-creating proposal to upgrade public facilities. He also made some motions for campaign finance reform which he promised during his campaign when running against incumbent George H.W. Bush and candidate Ross Perot.
A double withdrawal followed when the Congressional Republicans started roaring about big spending Democrats and after House Speaker Tom Foley and Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, told Clinton at a White House meeting to forget about legislation to diminish the power of organized money in elections.
That set the stage for how Washington politicians sized up Clinton. He was seen as devoid of modest political courage, a blurrer of differences with the Republican opposition party and anything but the decisive transforming leader he promised to be was he to win the election.
He proceeded, instead, to take credit for developments with which he had very little to do such as the economic growth propelled by the huge technology dot.com boom.
Bragging about millions of jobs his Administration created, he neglected to note that incomes stagnated for 80% of the workers in the country and ended in 2000, under the level of 1973, adjusted for inflation.
A brainy White House assistant to Mr. Clinton told me in 1997 that the only real achievement his boss could take credit for was passage of legislation allowing 12 weeks family leave, without pay.
There are changes both the Clinton Administration actively championed that further entrenched corporate power over our economy and government during the decade. He pushed through Congress the NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements that represented the greatest surrender in our history of local, state and national sovereignty to an autocratic, secretive system of transnational governance. This system subordinated workers, consumers and the environment to the supremacy of globalized commerce.
That was just for starters. Between 1996 and 2000, he drove legislation through Congress that concentrated more power in the hands of giant agribusiness, large telecommunications companies and the biggest jackpot-opening the doors to gigantic mergers in the financial industry. The latter so-called “financial modernization law” sowed the permissive seeds for taking vast financial risks with other peoples’ money (i.e. pensioners and investors) that is now shaking the economy to recession.
The man who pulled off this demolition of regulatory experience from the lessons of the Great Depression was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who went to work for Citigroup-the main pusher of this oligopolistic coup-just before the bill passed and made himself $40 million for a few months of consulting in that same year.
Bill Clinton’s presidential resume was full of favors for the rich and powerful. Corporate welfare subsidies, handouts and giveaways flourished, including subsidizing the Big Three Auto companies for a phony research partnership while indicating there would be no new fuel efficiency regulations while he was President.
His regulatory agencies were anesthetized. The veteran watchdog for Public Citizen of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, said that safety was the worst under Clinton in his twenty nine years of oversight.
The auto safety agency (NHTSA) abandoned its regulatory oath of office and became a consulting firm to the auto industry. Other agencies were similarly asleep-in job safety (OSHA) railroads, household product safety, antitrust, and corporate crime law enforcement.
By reappointing avid Republican Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Clinton assured no attention would be paid to the visible precursors of what is now the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Mr. Greenspan, declined to use his regulatory authority and repeatedly showed that he almost never saw a risky financial instrument he couldn’t justify.
Mr. Clinton was so fearful of taking on Orrin Hatch, the Republican Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that he cleared most judicial appointments with the Utah Senator. He even failed to put forth the nomination of sub-cabinet level official, Peter Edelman, whose credentials were superb to the federal appeals court.
Mr. Edelman resigned on September 12th, 1996. In a memo to his staff, he said, “I have devoted the last 30-plus years to doing whatever I could to help in reducing poverty in America. I believe the recently enacted welfare bill goes in the opposite direction.”
Excoriated by the noted author and columnist, Anthony Lewis, for his dismal record on civil liberties, the man from Hope set the stage for the Bush demolition of this pillar of our democracy.
To justify his invasion of Iraq, Bush regularly referred in 2002-2003 to Clinton’s bombing of Iraq and making “regime change” explicit U.S. policy.
But it was Clinton’s insistence on UN-backed economic sanctions in contrast to just military embargos, against Iraq, during his term in office. These sanctions on civilians, a task force of leading American physicians estimated, took half a million Iraqi children’s lives.
Who can forget CBS’s Sixty Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl’s tour through Baghdad’s denuded hospitals filled with crying, dying children? She then interviewed Mr. Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright and asked whether these sanctions were worth it. Secretary Albright answered in the affirmative.
Bill Clinton is generally viewed as one smart politician, having been twice elected the President, helped by lackluster Robert Dole, having survived the Lewinsky sex scandal, lying under oath about sex, and impeachment. When is it all about himself, he is cunningly smart.
But during his two-term triangulating Presidency, he wasn’t smart enough to avoid losing his Party’s control over Congress, or many state legislatures and Governorships.
It has always been all about him, Now he sees another admission ticket to the White House through his wife, Hillary Clinton. EIGHT MORE YEARS without a mobilized, demanding participating citizenry is just that-EIGHT MORE YEARS. It’s small wonder that the editors of Fortune Magazine headlined an article last June with the title, “Who Business is Betting On?” Their answer, of course, was Hillary Clinton.
