Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, American Jewry has been privy to many (perhaps too many) sociological surveys taking its collective pulse. Surveys have covered everything from attitudes toward intermarriage, Jewish education, politics, literacy, beliefs, and practice. Recently another survey has appeared written by the pre-eminent Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen in conjunction with his younger colleague, Ari Y. Kelman, entitled Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel. The study offers a provocative quantitative analysis regarding young American Jews' attitudes toward Israel.

Cohen and Kelman's study shows the first signs of erosion in unflinching American Jewish support of Israel. It's a trend that may have started in the aftermath of the first Lebanon War in the mid-1980s and is, in many ways, predictable, perhaps inevitable.

The generation of Jews who experienced the establishment of the Jewish State is now over the age of sixty-five. Those with memories of the war in 1967 are approaching fifty. Jews under the age of forty only know Israel as a much more complicated, and compromised, country: an occupying power engaged in a bloody struggle with a largely disempowered and stateless population. Such a battle, while intense and dangerous, is quite different from the more straight-forward struggle of fending off invading Arab armies. Whatever one may think of the present dilemma, or even whether "occupation" is an accurate description of what Israelis call "the situation" (ha-mazav), the experience of Israel for American Jews under the age of forty is, and should be, categorically different from their parents.

The reality of this change can be illustrated in various ways. When I show my students Otto Preminger's 1960 film version of Leon Uris' Exodus I am made conscious of how different Israel is for them than it is, and was, for me. Not only do they find the film horribly propagandistic (it surely is), overly sentimental (no doubt), boring (a matter of opinion), and unrealistic (uh...yes); it does not seem to evoke in them any feelings of sympathy toward the 1948 generation. Few, if any, are drawn to tears, as are many in my generation, by the music or the beautiful panorama of the Israeli landscape. Few get choked up by the scenes of young orphans dancing the hora on a kibbutz.

Exodus is not really a film about Zionism and surely not about Israeli Zionism. It is about the construction of the Jewish State in the American Jewish imagination, propaganda for a Jewish community comfortable but not yet secure in its new-found freedom. For my students, present day Israel is simply too complex (and too middle class) for them to make a connection between the romantic vision they see on the wide-screen and what they read daily on their computer screens.

Which Birthright?

This change in how Israel is viewed by the under-forty set has sparked programs such as Taglit: Birthright Israel and Israel advocacy movements on American campuses such as The David Project in an attempt to bandage depleting American Jewish support for Israel.

Birthright Israel is an innovative initiative to enable young American Jews to take a free trip to Israel. On the face of it, Birthright appears clearly to have a Zionist agenda. Yet, the Birthright mission explicitly aims "to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people," and for many of the young people who experience these trips, those connections are decidedly Diasporic.

While Cohen and Kelman's study indeed shows that young Jewish men and women who visit Israel (either on Birthright or some other way) are less alienated from Israel than those in a similar age-group who have never been to Israel, they are still more alienated than those over sixty-five who have never visited Israel. In other words, visiting Israel is productive toward curbing alienation from Israel but cannot close the generational gap.

What the study does not document, but what in fact may be more significant (we have no hard evidence yet as to the long-term impact of Birthright on American Jews) is the extent to which Birthright may be succeeding in its Diasporic agenda, that is, creating conditions for Jewish identity in America where attachment to, alienation from, or ambivalence about Israel may be a marginal part of a much larger and complex formulation of American Jewish identity.

What are the implications if, in fact, this Diasporic agenda proves to be more successful than its Zionist agenda where Birthright contributes to a more robust Diaspora not necessarily built on the foundations of Zionism? Does this tell us that Israel serves American Jews largely as their spiritual theme-park where they go to get a large does of "Jewishness" that makes them more Jewishly identified at home? That is, where homeland serves as simply a vehicle for home? Is Israel a means to a Diasporic end? And if so, is this good or bad for the Jews?

A Different Diaspora

For American Jews living in a free society, the age-old Judenfrage has internalized into a kind of Israelfrage--what do, and should, American Jews think about Israel? I summon the spector of the "Jewish Question" not as it was used against Jews from Augustine to Hitler, but as it was used by Theodore Herzl and the early Zionists to present Zionism as a solution to the European Judenfrage. Just as nineteenth-century American Jews debated Zionism or the Zionismusfrage, contemporary American Jews are confronted with "the question of Israel."

Israel as a Jewish State exists; this is, at present, undeniable. However, what role that state should play in American Jewish identity has been an issue since the first idea of a Jewish state sprang into being in the mid-nineteenth-century, and has only become a more complex matter.

In the mid-1800s, many American Reform rabbis sermonized vociferously against Zionism. By the 1920s, the American Zionism we know today emerged through the work of such charismatic figures as cultural theorist Horace Kallen, Rabbi Judah Magnus, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. While that Zionism took some twists and turns over the next half-century (particularly a hard-right turn in the 1960s under the influence of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League), the actual birth of the State of Israel and its valiant David vs. Goliath battle during the Six-Day War in 1967 erased any remaining ambivalence that may have remained among American Jews towards Israel. By the 1970s, Norman Podhoretz was probably correct when he wrote of American Jews "we are all Zionists."

That American Zionism is now weakening, as demonstrated by Cohen and Kelman's study, may not necessarily be due to a growing ideology against Zionism (although there is a developing Diasporism in certain academic circles and on the far left). The situation on the ground has changed dramatically. Whatever one may think about the Palestinians or even Hamas, they are surely no Goliath to Israel's David. Younger American Jews may see less need to protect Israel and less willing to unequivocally defend it.

Just as significant, however, if not more so, is the possibility that young American Jews may not need Zionism or Israel the way their parents did. Throughout the history of Zionism, the dichotomous poles of Jerusalem and Babylonia often have served to frame the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the title of the little known but significant work by Simon Rawidowicz (written in Hebrew in America) entitled Bavel ve Yerushalayim (1958) or the contemporary educational project Bavli ve Yerushalmi that has two adult learning communities, one in Israel and one in the United States, studying the same Talmudic texts and gathering a few times a year in Israel or America. While the comparison is easy, since it mirrors the two different versions of the Talmud, I suggest it is not apt.

Instead, the contemporary American Diaspora is closer to the situation of Jews in Alexandria than Babylonia. During the Second Commonwealth there was a thriving and creative Jewish Diaspora in Alexandria that was not a product of forced exile, like Babylonia, but rather a community that chose the Diaspora over Erez Israel. American Jewry, like Alexandrian Jewry of old, is a volitional Diaspora; there are few impediments preventing Jews in the United States from immigrating to Israel; the law of return (whatever one may think of it) makes all Diaspora Jews "virtual citizens" of the Jewish State. This volitional rather than forced Diasporic framework, coupled with the fact that Jews in America are free to practice (or not practice) Judaism in whatever form they choose, creates a different dynamic between home and homeland than the one that existed between Babylonia and Jerusalem. In the twenty-first century Diaspora Jews, whatever their stance on Zionism, choose home over homeland.

Reframing Jewish Identity

For the over-fifty generation, Israel and Zionism were both viewed as pillars of Jewish identity after 1948 and thus the highest levels of attachment to Israel in Cohen and Kelman's study are those in the over sixty-five age group, even those who have never been to Israel. This may have had less to do with Israel per se and more to do with the resonance of Jewish feelings of marginality in the wake of identity politics and the continued perception that, as Jews, they were not fully a part of the American mainstream. For some, it is driven by memories of the Holocaust (and America's less than firm commitment to prevent it), for others love of Israel may derive from the distant yet perceptible echoes of being immigrants or children of immigrants.

Russian Jew at Ellis Island: Photographed by Lewis W. Hine,1905. As a young child living in New York (and almost part of the fifty and older age-group), having my immigrant grandmother take me to Ellis Island where she arrived in the United States from Russia around 1920 was one of my most formative childhood memories of Jewish identity. That is, to a previous generation, Zionism was to some extent an expression of, or a response to, a protracted sense of insecurity in America. Moreover, for my generation, Zionism was always "statist" Zionism; it was always about the Jewish State and not about a renaissance of Jewish culture.

As a result, support of the "state" of Israel became the civil religion of many secular American Jews and a fourteenth article of faith (in addition to Maimonides' previous thirteen) for religious Jews. The state alone became the end, and not the means, of Jewish identity. This was surely not the case in pre-state Zionism but a combination of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel swallowed up the more interesting, and robust, debates about Jewish collectivity of which statist Zionism was only one voice among many.

Most Jews in America under the age of thirty-five are third and fourth generation Americans. They live in a society where alienation from the mainstream is less than in previous generations. They live in a world where the intermarriage rate for Jews has hovered around 50 percent for a few decades. Among other things, this has increasingly changed the very way in which many American Jews view intermarriage and their host culture more generally. In 2000, the American Jewish Committee's Survey of Jewish Opinion cited about half of its respondents saying that "it is racist to oppose Jewish -gentile marriages." Most young American Jews today have non-Jewish relatives and most have close friends who are not Jewish. Exogamy and Amercian pluralism have all but erased the age-old ethnic myth of Jewish separateness.

Cross-Over Judaism

Moreover, Judaism has become fashionable in America, from Kabbalah to Klezmer to John Zorn and Zaddik records (Zorn won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship last year), to Andy Statman, the Moshav Band, and Mattisyahu (who, as one of the first real cross-over musicians who play "Jewish" music, last year signed with a major record label). This is quite different from the Jewish musicians (Gershwin, Irving Berlin Leonard Bernstein et al) and comedians (from Al Jolson to Milton Berle, Alan King, and Buddy Hacket) who made it into the American mainstream in a previous generation. The older generation of Jewish entertainers did not carry with them an overt Jewishness (after all, Berlin wrote "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"). Even Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, and Jerry Seinfeld, all geniuses in their craft, offered nothing particularly Jewish other than Jewish male neurosis.

Similarly, in the political sphere, Jews as Jews are actively involved in movements such as Darfur, world hunger and poverty relief in third-world countries, the anti-Iraq war movement and AIDS outreach. In Los Angeles, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, soon to become a national organization, is working with the LA district courts in an initiative called The Jewish Community Justice Project founded on the principles of Jewish restorative justice devoted to criminal/victim mediation according to talmudic sources and values. While one could argue Jews were also deeply involved in the 1960s Civil Rights movement, they often were not organized around Jewish initiatives but functioned heroically as individuals within the more diffuse American counter-culture.

Even Judaism as a religion has gained a new following from outside the fold. Many non-Jewish college students are aware of Chabad Houses on campus, some attend services with friends, and Artscroll books are read by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Christians are converting to Judaism in increasing numbers and the maverick Rabbi Harold Shulweis in Southern California has advocated actively proselytizing to unchurched Christians--with much success. In short, American Jewry, broadly defined, (and not simply American Jews) is solidly part of mainstream American culture, popular, political, and intellectual.

Given the way young Jewish Americans in increasing numbers have chosen to express their Jewish/American identity around national and global concerns, it is no surprise that Israel is becoming more marginal in the lives of many young American Jews. The "negation of the Diaspora" ideology of Zionism, even in its new form espoused by the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, has no real teeth for many in this generation. Their regional, national, and global activism lived as an expression of their Jewishness illustrates the empirical vacuity of Yehoshua's claim.

A Mixed Blessing

While in the old paradigm, attachment to Israel was viewed as an anchor of Jewish identity in a less-than-fully-stable and confident Jewish community in America, this new paradigm sketched above suggests that the "distancing" Cohen and Kelman's study documents may be a mixed blessing. That is, if it is true that this distancing from Israel is coupled with a new sense of identity not wed to the ethnic attachment to a Jewish State, Jewish identity in American may be healthier than imagined. On the one hand, it may be showing us that the doctrine claiming Zionism is the glue that can hold non-Orthodox American Jewry together is becoming obsolete and that, in fact, what we may be witnessing is the beginning of a new Jewish secularism in America that hasn't existed since the demise of the socialist and Yiddishist movements in the early twentieth century.

One sign of this may be seen in the changing nature of the intermarried Jew. While in a previous generation the assumption was that the Jew who "married out" was basically lost to the Jewish community, at present many intermarried Jews are bringing their non-Jewish spouse to the synagogue and other Jewish communal activities. That is, today an increasing numbers of intermarried Jews (admittedly still the minority) do not view their choice to marry a gentile as severing them from the Jewish collective. In some cases, it is even the gentile spouse who encourages his or her Jewish partner to become more "Jewish."

One recent product of this new tendency can be seen in a pamphlet published by a group of Conservative rabbis entitled, A Place in the Tent: Intermarriage and Conservative Judaism. (2005). This booklet serves as a guide for rabbis, in halakhic and non-halakhic matters, of how to integrate the non-Jewish spouse into synagogue life. There is also a support group in Atlanta connected with the Jewish Outreach Institute run by Rabbi Kerrey Olitsky that serves gentile women married to Jewish men who want to bring their children up Jewish (according to Reform Judaism one Jewish parent is sufficient to consider a child Jewish) . The literature of this group contains interviews with some of these non-Jewish women about why they choose not to convert to Judaism yet want their children to be raised as Jews. Viewed in the context of Jewish history, the fact that a non-Jewish woman would choose not to convert to Judaism (many of these women feel deeply connected to their familial roots) yet choose to raise her children Jewish is quite remarkable.

In short, in conjunction with American Jews re-envisioning their markers of identity, there may be paradigm shift in America's attitudes toward Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. I think the Cohen and Kelman study, viewed as part of a much larger shift in American Jewry, yields a complex picture that is not, by definition, "bad for the Jews."

In 1966 Gerson Cohen, then a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who later became its chancellor, gave a commencement address at Hebrew Teachers College in Boston that was later published as an essay entitled "The Blessing of Assimilation." (collected in Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny New York: JTS, 1997, 145-156). In this essay Cohen argued that it is both inaccurate and historically short-sighted to view assimilation as, by definition, "bad for the Jews." He writes, "A frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only has a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impeded Jewish continuity and creativity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source of renewed vitality. To a considerable degree, the Jews survived as a vital group and as a pulsating culture because they changed their names, their language, their clothing, and their patterns of thought and expression."

Twenty-first century America has thus far offered Jews many new avenues of expressing their identity as ethnic or post-ethnic Jews. Statist Zionism remains one avenue among them. To conclude that since this road is now less traveled we are witnessing a diminishing identification with the complex and transitional thing we call "Jewishness" in America is, in my opinion, a myopic view of the changing world around us.

This essay is dedicated to GZG, in friendship.

 

Art Credits: Lead image is a t-shirt design from www.jewtee.com.

Young adults today aren't satisfied with a status quo existence. We want to find our true calling, and hopefully wealth and stability along the way. Unfortunately, real life isn't always conducive to finding the answers we seek.

Immersed in this post-college struggle to find a meaningful and productive life, I found myself with a diverse group of other twenty-somethings on an Israel Experts Birthright trip. Some of us came simply for the free vacation; others hoped to trace their roots and culture to help them find what is "true" and "real." What we didn't expect was to find ourselves in a charged atmosphere of questioning minds, as fertile-and at times illuminating-as the desert that was made to bloom.

As it turned out, all of us were "seekers," which is a nice way of saying that we were a little bit lost. I called myself a writer, although writing barely supported my coffee addiction. Before we even checked baggage, I met a girl who had just lost her fashion job along with her boyfriend (who also happened to be her boss), an insurance adjuster who hated his work, and a medical student who was taking a year off to work on a farm in Florida.

Most of us had danced around the idea of a Birthright trip before, but avoided it for various reasons. Some thought it would be too much like propaganda. Others had never felt entirely comfortable in Jewish groups. Still others (or their parents) were afraid of ending up on the evening news. The fact that we were finally able to sign on to Birthright (and actually board the plane) was a testament to our development as individuals; we felt sure we could walk away with our authentic selves intact no matter what the trip threw at us.

Luckily, the trip didn't require us to exude a happy-go-lucky attitude. "All we want is for you to ask questions," Joe Perlov, our tour organizer said, the morning we arrived in Israel, exhausted. "I don't care if someone is miserable the whole time. In fact I hope someone is miserable the whole time."

Jumping Off Haystacks

Our trip began with a visit to Kinneret Cemetery, the final resting place of the settlers of the first aliyah. Many found this the most inspiring part of the trip, largely due to our docent, Joel Goldman, who told us that his one wish for our group was not to give our kids bar mitzvahs or to marry another Jew. "I want each one of you to find that thing in life that makes you jump off your haystack in the morning," he said.

At a visit to Kibbutz Degania, I finally felt I understood what had made the settlers jump off their haystack. Having grown up in a Philadelphia suburb that was only two percent Jewish, I was deeply impressed by a place where Judaism united people, instead of being an indicator of difference. This was the Jewish community I had heard about, but never actually seen, and perhaps didn't even believe was actually possible until that moment. Not only did I see it actualized at Kibbutz Degania--and perhaps from the idealized perspective of an outsider--I watched our bus turn into its own close-knit Jewish community.

One girl who was half Jewish on her father's side, and who had hardly ever stepped foot in a synagogue, wrote to me last summer: "I tend to go through life feeling constantly judged by others and feeling that I need approval from them. On the trip, I always felt accepted. I got to escape into a surreal life that was the most memorable trip of my life."

Believing the Dream

In our liberal circles, we are often deprived of the opportunity to believe in anything whole-heartedly. My liberal arts education taught me that any distinct concept or idea will crumble under the scrutiny of too many questions. Birthright set an example where it was okay and even honorable to believe in the state of Israel, to adopt, so to speak, the settler's original dream.

When I returned home, I gave myself permission to act on my new love for Israel and other dreams I had lacked the bravery to carry through. I signed up for the WUJS Institute in Arad arts program, and soon was spending five more months in Israel, learning Hebrew and focusing on my passion, writing.

Of course, not everyone joined me on the plane back to Israel. One participant, Elizabeth, found that "being in Israel just makes me more certain that I want to live in New York." Birthright heightened our self-awareness and focus--but not according to an outside agenda. We each listened foremost to our own inner voice, whether we were being introduced to a holy site or discovering the person sitting next to us on the bus.

Perhaps, on a basic psychological level, my attraction to Israel is not so different from that of the original settlers. I recently found a quote by Chana Senesh, words she wrote shortly after her aliyah at age seventeen, describing how Zionism functioned in her life: "One needs something to believe in, something for which one has whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world. Zionism fulfills that for me."

In Israel I found a source of pride that I can carry for the rest of my life--no matter what I end up doing.

  ***

 

Art Credit: Image of girl on haystack courtesy of Renee Blodgett, whose blog, Down the Avenue, chronicles her extensive travels.

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Barack Obama this past weekend. Surprising no one who has spent time studying the senator's career and writings, Obama showed himself to have a deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience than any previous presidential aspirants. (By the way, that includes Joe Lieberman, who is becoming a sadder and sadder self-parody with every passing day.) Some highlights:

I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate...[snip]...

I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea...[snip]...

I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions. Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives.

The rest is here.

Your weekend was incomplete if you didn't catch Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's brilliant cameo at The American Scene arguing persuasively for the complete abolition of minimum voting age requirements. The argument works as a pincers, first by lowering resistance to the thought of toddlers lining up to fill out ballots they can't comprehend --- children are much more perspicuous than adults like to give them credit for --- and then shutting the door by pointing out the execrable qualifications and performance of adults as voters.

Our New Overlords: Aren't they adorable? Gobry places his emphasis on the first point. It's worth taking some time to flesh out the second. The standard objection to the idea of doing away with voting age requirements is that before a certain stage in development, people have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Drawing the line at 18 years may be arbitrary, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. So the thought goes.

But to state the standard objection to child-voting is to refute it. The overwhelming majority of adults have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. In his classic study "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," Philip Converse found that for 90 percent of the public, voting is simply an act of tribal affiliation, having nothing to do with competing political ideologies, less still with inferring voting preferences from facts, logic, and background political beliefs. (The Converse study is from the 50s, but subsequent studies have simply reinforced his findings.) In other words, if you're like 98 percent of the public, and you buy the standard objection to letting kids vote, you ought to believe you shouldn't have the right to vote either.

Besides all that, if you're ahead of the curve, you already know that voting is a sucker's game in the first place. If you were truly rational, you'd never do it. So it makes no sense to insist that voters be able to make rational, informed decisions, because no matter what you're capable of, voting is neither rational nor informed --- and irrational, uninformed people of all ages will tend to do equally well at it. (So would trained chimps.)

Still unconvinced? Then let me ratchet up the case rhetorically. Minimum voting age requirements are very much like Communism, and suffer from many similar fatal blind spots. The voting decisions an electorate makes today quite obviously not only affect today's voters, but also those of the future. By restricting the franchise to those above a certain age, we effectively socialize the preferences of everyone below that age, leaving it up to a cadre of elders to make what we hope will be enlightened decisions on behalf of everyone else. But of course, those elders don't make enlightened decisions. They make selfish, short-sighted, myopic decisions: In concrete terms, pensioners and boomers, thinking of themselves first, second, and third, are leaving as their lasting contribution to this country mind-boggling generational deficits, which Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kotlikoff estimate at $45 trillion, or four and half times the size of the entire US economy.

Will younger voters behave any more altruistically? Of course not. If you're the average American, anyone my age who has taken a look at these figures has nothing but bottomless resentment for the debt you're leaving us (or at least should); but rest assured, we'll have our revenge. In the meantime, there's nothing to fear from abolishing the voting age: Infants (and dogs) couldn't squander what has been risibly called "our most precious freedom" any worse than most of the people who will read this already have.

Related: Babies might love Barack Obama even more than Jewcy does. Check out this hard-hitting report from CNN, below:

A few days before Christmas last year, I penned a piece for Jewcy outlining the similarities between the Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, and the new British PM, Gordon Brown. The analysis was sound enough, but I trust you didn't put any money on the outcome. Hillary is dead and now merely awaiting burial, and Brown --- well, more on him in a moment. The focus has now shifted squarely onto the men who will lead the opposition into the next elections, Barack Obama and the British Tories' David Cameron.

David Cameron And BoJo: The Tory leader with the new Mayor of London: "Yes we can" elect toffs from the Bullingdon Club, Britons say Despite the real difficulty in reading across from one political system to another, commentators can't resist looking across the Atlantic and trying to divine trends that might be replicated in their own backyards. Making comparisons is usually a mugs game but, watching the progress of the two young pretenders, it's hard to avoid the similarities between them. (And keep in mind, despite the notions that the Democrats are the "left" party and Conservatives the "right" party in their respective countries, that the Tories are well to the left of the Democrats on a range of issues.) Young, charismatic and photogenic, both have turned their relative inexperience --- Cameron only entered the House of Commons in 2001 --- into positive strengths by running as outsiders against the system, a common trick in the US, where "I'll go and clean up Washington politics" is a cry as old as the hills, but more innovative over here. (David Cameron, in his own small way, is fighting against prejudice, too; doubts persist as to whether 21^st century Britain is really ready to elect a true upper-class toff as Prime Minister.)

In this regard, moreover, they have been fortunate in their enemies. After the best part of a decade as sidekicks to the men in the top jobs, both Hillary and Gordon have found it expedient to play up their experience when it suits them, and claim to have been mowing the lawn when it doesn't. So Brown built Britain's economic success, not Blair, but was careful to distance himself from the Iraq war; Hillary played a vital but unsung role in the Northern Ireland peace process, but behind the scenes she was fighting NAFTA tooth and nail, and so on. This is a fine balancing act, but the message has been spelled out time and again with shattering unsubtlety: We've been round the block more times than we care to remember, but our experience could make the difference in a time of economic crisis or national security emergency. These guys, by contrast, are just empty suits.

Both, however, have found the electorate less gullible than they had imagined. "The experience to deliver change" may have sounded cute in a strategy meeting, but voters have a reasonably cultivated nose for bullshit and saw right through it. Obama put it best when he said that "there are some in this race who actually make the argument that the more time you spend immersed in the broken politics of Washington, the more likely you are to change it. I always find this a little amusing." Cameron, too, talks incessantly of "broken politics", and of rebuilding the trust between government and governed.

Again, these are hardly the most original of tropes, but both Cameron and Obama find it much easier to talk this sort of language than their opponents, not just because they are untainted by the failures of previous generations of politicians to change the way politics works, but because they are naturals in a way that Tony and Bill were before them and that Gordon and Hillary clearly are not. Trying to attack them for lacking substance, as their enemies constantly do, is almost to miss the point. The same charge was levelled at Clinton I, Blair, Reagan and Kennedy. But all of those men had the force of personality to shape the political narrative around them and, crucially, all were running against opponents who were selling experience at a time when voters actually wanted to buy change. So when Conservative critics try to belittle David Cameron by scoffing that he is merely Tony Blair mark two, Labour fear that he might be exactly that.

Some Labour politicians are beginning to come to the view that the only way to defeat Cameron's Conservatives is to ditch the current incumbent and pick a new face unsullied by association with the past. Republicans have gone down a different route, but while their guy is hardly fresh, neither is he a standard establishment figure who represents business as usual. Whether Barack Obama's somewhat woolly charm will work against an unpredictable figure like McCain is anyone's guess, particularly given both candidates' appeal among independents. This time I'm making no predictions and keeping my money in my pocket.

Political analysts like to talk about "change elections"; 1980 and 1992 in the US, 1979 and 1997 in Britain. Both November 2008 and our own British election, whenever it comes, will be "change elections," all right. But in reality, every election is a balance between those who want change and those who do not; the laws of political entropy dictate that eventually the former will outweigh the latter. It is the joint misfortune of Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown to be cast as establishment candidates in a time when anti-establishment feeling is running high, and that's why he will probably join her on the scrapheap before too long.

From: David Samuels
To: Shmuel Rosner

Dear Shmuel,

Thank you for your provocative and insightful response to The Runner.

I am not a conventional journalist, in the sense that I don't see my job as advancing the big picture group-think narratives embedded in front-page news stories. I believe that the surface cleverness and sense of assurance and stability conveyed by most third-person news stories is misleading and largely unearned. Reality is always darker and more unstable.

For example: Maybe the State of Israel should be shut down over the next decade or so and its Jewish inhabitants shipped off to a reservation in Wyoming in order to ensure the future viability of the Jewish spiritual legacy for mankind, and to prevent a future nuclear holocaust that will kill tens of millions of people in Israel and Iran. Or maybe the Palestinian national cause is bankrupt and needs to be uprooted once and for all, beginning with the forced military depopulation of large areas of the West Bank and the Stalinist-style "liquidation" of tens of thousands of Hamas foot-soldiers in Gaza.

The Meritocracy Fairy Tale: Elite universities maintain a bizarre hierarchy of preferences As horrifying as both of these alternate narratives might seem, they have more in common with the common run of the historical experience of Jews and Arabs alike than the underlying expectation of an eventual peaceful accommodation between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Islamists that drives nearly all Western news coverage, which can best understood as a kind of wishful group-think fairy tale.

Contrariwise, I don't see Barack Obama as the devilish tool of his addle-brained pastor or as the latte-skinned Messiah worshipped by legions of yuppie Democrats. I see him as a representative American --- a self-made man, part con artist, part performer, living in an imaginary future that will make him and his audience whole. His faults are mine, too, and it is hard for me to see him or anyone else I think or write about from any other angle, which is why I make a point of acknowledging the fact that my responses to the people I write about are deeply shaped by the demands of the narratives I choose, which are shaped in turn by my own personal history and prejudices.

Writing is indeed an extremely powerful and specific form of manipulation that imposes an unavoidable moral burden on the writer at the same time as it serves as a source of pleasure and income. I enjoy manipulating you, and it pays my rent. At the same time, I feel a powerful sense of responsibility to rewire your brain in ways that will have a beneficial effect on your inner life and your personal sense of connection to other people and to some larger whole that you and me and my atheist friend Sam Harris might all agree upon as a useful premise for thought and action.

The questions and sympathies that emerge from your encounter with my text are the direct and considered results of what I wrote and the way I wrote it. This is true of the work of every moderately skilled and self-aware writer who is working in the area of literature rather than news. So congratulations on having been successfully manipulated into the illusion of having a free and independent response to my work.

Master of manipulation: James Hogue's mug shot Personally, I don't like James Hogue very much, and I feel some sympathy with the bicycle maker Dave Tesch, whose tools Hogue stole. Now, if I simply instructed you to feel sympathy with Tesch, the way an editorialist might, you would probably bridle at my instructions, in the same way that you would probably feel annoyed at Princeton University if I tried to justify their decision to expel Hogue. At the same time, I see James Hogue as a representative America who embodied the abstract logic of self-invention and being born-again, and took those ideas to an uncomfortable extreme. One purpose of my text is to create sympathy for Hogue's victims without denying Hogue his actual achievements or reducing his personal autonomy and the strangeness of his choices to a bunch of symptoms for which Prozac or some newfangled anti-psychotic pill might be usefully prescribed.

I deliberately fractured the narrative and told the story backwards to escape the easy romantic narrative about Hogue as a misunderstood heroic loner who made himself up from scratch --- a combination of Holden Caulfield and Jay Gatsby. To soothe my own demons, perhaps, I also want to show how Hogue's fraud is matched by the larger fraud practiced on an ongoing basis by Princeton and other elite universities that craft fairy tale stories about meritocracy in order to disguise their own bizarre hierarchies of preferences whose larger purpose is to keep the universities at the center of the fluid and ever-changing American class structure. The purpose of a text-machine like The Runner is to embed this very exact if somewhat confusing constellation of ideas in the gentle reader's brain by inducing "thoughts" and "feelings" that sometimes appear to mirror my own sympathies and opinions and sometimes oppose them.

I am not the narrator of my work. I am the creator of work that includes a character named "I" to a greater or lesser extent depending on the story that the author David Samuels is telling. My chosen method of writing nonfiction is to write about other people's lives and experiences as seen by through the eyes of a narrator who is very present in the text but about whom very little is generally revealed in the way of overt prejudices or biographical detail. The choice to include a shadowy first-personal narrator present in the text is a conscious choice that I make in order to create a certain climate whose apparent subjectivity has the paradoxical effect of heightening the sense of transparent reality for the kind of reader I am trying to reach. In The Runner, I expand that voice somewhat in order to establish myself as a double for James Hogue, in the sense that all Americans are doubles for James Hogue in one way or another, at the same time as we protest that he is an unpleasant person and that we have nothing in common with him whatsoever.

I think that the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance for me as an American Jewish writer. If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews. While I don't think that the American and the Jewish identity principles are always necessarily opposed, I do think that keeping both ideas in one's head at one time can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension.

It is also inherently deceptive, in the sense that one is quite often signaling to others that one has agreed to dissolve one's particular heritage and historically bound point of view into a common Christian-inflected, highly individualistic and alienating, yet incredibly productive future-oriented social whole that most American Jews view with a high degree of distance and skepticism. The only real parallel for the ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea is the experience and behavior of blacks --- whose situation is radically different because of the overt and inescapable historically-bound prejudice directed at the color of their skin. Blacks can't dissolve themselves in the American melting pot, and so they often see the American idea as a open lie at the same time as they taste its sweet honey.

Jews have many more opportunities to lie to themselves and to others about the degree of distance they feel from mainstream American narratives that do not include them. But the distance is still there, in the minds of Jews and in the minds of those who are aware of how Jews relate to the society around them - some of whom are friendly to us, and increasing numbers of whom see Jews - in some religio-political-national formation - to be aliens or enemies. The secret inner man of questionable moral convictions who animates my work is the Jew who presents himself to the world as an American.

Yours,

d.

For many people, publishing even one book can be a lifelong dream. David Samuels, a prolific contributor to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and many other magazines, managed to publish two books just in the last month. The Runner is the story of James Hogue, one of the great con men in recent American history. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a collection of the kind of literary adventures, ranging from Woodstock '99 to a $2000-a-plate Bush-Cheney fund-raiser, that have led the National Magazine Award committee to name Samuels as a finalist.

Shmuel Rosner recently interviewed Samuels about his projects, and tried to see if there were any common threads uniting them.

To: David Samuels
From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

I spent the last couple of days reading the two books that you simultaneously published, and can now officially claim to be suffering from Samuels-fatigue. But it was enjoyable and sometimes challenging, and it made me think about the strange ways journalism can present one with surprising moral dilemmas.

This is especially true for The Runner, your wonderfully crafted story of a con man who was smart enough and able enough to get into Princeton University using a fake name and identity. It is a well-known story that you managed to bring to life again. And it is intriguing and troubling in the way such stories often are: the reader --- at least this reader (and the writer, no doubt) --- finds himself identifying with, admiring, the con man, hoping for his vindication, finding fault with the people exposing him, arresting him, expelling him, erasing him from their biography.

The Ivy Club: Princeton's most prestigious and exclusive eating club didn't admit women until 1991, but did admit James HogueThe Runner is the story of James Hogue, also known to his high school mates as Jay Mitchell Huntsman, also known to his Princeton mates as Alexi Indris Santana. He is an impostor, a thief, a liar. And yet you make us like him for exposing what you seem to think is the hypocrisy and the pettiness of the academic establishment. Yes, he was lying his way into Princeton, but once there he was a straight-A student. Yes, he stole, but his were not major-league crimes. Yes, he lied about his past and present conditions, but his stories were so much more interesting than the usual "I was born rich, went to private school, got into Ivy League university, ended up on Wall Street" stories.

You seem to be fascinated with him for some mysterious personal reasons, and to identify with his cause for ideological reasons. Princeton, you bother to mention, did not even considered keeping him as a student after he was exposed for who he really is --- or officially is, because we will never actually know who he really is. (The way he was exposed also makes for a great story, but here is where I will urge people to get off their butts and go purchase the book if they want to know more). And you bombard the reader with statistics proving that the business of Ivy League attendance is marred by inconsistencies and favoritism and superficiality.

You seem to be writing this story burdened with guilt: You graduated from such universities, coming from not-quite-the-right-background. But even more so, yours is a writer's guilt. "The question of how writers come to appropriate the lives of the people they write about," you confess, "is a tricky one." And then you go on to say this:

While it is facile to equate journalism with lying, it is also true that both actions share in common an unpleasantly instrumental approach to people and to language that diminishes the common store of trust. The subject has no power to alter a reporter's approach to his or her subject, or to take back a single word that they said.

All these are known qualities of your profession --- and mine --- but not the only ones to be considered in this context. Manipulation is part of writer-subject relations, but it also taints writer-reader relations. And reading your book can provide for a perfect example for that, as it is sheer manipulation with which you take the reader on this ride of con man admiration. Finishing the book, I was scratching my head: Was I just convinced that lying is good, that stealing is not-so-bad, and that universities are evil (I have my own complicated relations with the academic world that I never attended --- but let's leave that aside for now)?

I was trying to think about this story differently: To identify with the bicycle craftsman whose product was stolen. To understand the anger and the puzzlement of an institution going out of its way to accommodate someone they believed was a "barefoot runner from Nevada," a college-age, self-taught orphan, only to discover that it was hosting a college-educated convicted felon. Could they really cut him some slack the way you seem to expect them to do? Could they admire him, worship his genius and originality the way I did as I was reading this story?

I don't think it is reasonable to expect them to do such things. And even more, I don't really think it would have mattered. The sad truth, learned and relearned from experience, is that people like Hogue very rarely change their habits. If Princeton were to keep him as a student, I suspect he would have ended the same way he did anyway: in prison. Don't you agree? And if you do, where's the lesson?

I'm sure you'll have plenty of answers to these questions of mine. Let me add just one more. Concluding this first letter, I'm going back to this quote about journalism, while also thinking about the other book you've just published, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of your magazine stories. "The false humility that so many writers show in the face of the lived experience of their subjects", you write in The Runner, "is belied by the act of writing, which always involves a head-on collision between someone else's actual lives and the writer's inner life".

Here is how I read your two books: In order to avoid this "head-on collision" you don't even try to portray the "actual lives" of other people. All you do, both in your articles and in The Runner, is tellyour own story. With The Runner the result is fascinating, and troubling. It might reveal the questionable moral convictions of your inner man.

Best,
Rosner

Recently, a group of Evangelical Christian leaders let loose an Evangelical Manifesto upon the world (short summary here). By attempting to save Evangelical Christianity from the political and religious excesses that threaten believers and non-believers alike, the authors point to possible way forward for Muslims living in western countries, attempting to be good liberal democratic citizens and maintain their faith at the same time.

"Insistently moderate" as Alan Jacobs calls it, the Manifesto abjures a sound-biteAmerican Muslims: American, as well as Muslim discussion of Christianity and criticizes the whole spectrum of the Evangelical movement from right to left, including its own authors. And it extends beyond its own tribe, asking secular humanists and new atheists and liberals of all stripes if they are satisfied with the relationship that society and religion currently have, and taking a pox-on-both-thy-houses approach to "French style secularism" as well as "Islamist violence."

Evangelicals must not, the authors contend, become "useful idiots" to any political party --- no doubt a reference to Republican operatives like Karl who call Evangelicals "loons" behind their backs --- and they must not try to coerce or force other people to believe in their way. They must not try and depict themselves as the apex of truth. They must not be fundamentalist (yes, the manifesto uses the f-word), must help the poor, the under-trodden and needy. Over and again, the document condemns the "dangerous" alliance between church and state, denying that Christianity deserves special treatment because it's the majority faith, contending instead that "no one faith should be normative."

What's more the emotional and argumentative crux of the Manifesto --- the claim that "Contrary to widespread misunderstanding today, we Evangelicals should be defined theologically, and not politically, socially, or culturally" --- draws a necessary and important distinction between religious and other kinds of identities that should be instructive to people of all faiths, and to western Muslims in particular.

Is there such a thing as a "Muslim vote" or "Muslim politics"? And if there isn't should Muslims try and vote as "bloc"? Or should there be Muslims for Ron Paul, Muslims for Obama, Muslims for George Galloway, Muslims for Ken Livingstone, and Muslims for Joe Lieberman? Should mosques endorse candidates? Should our national organizations pander to politicians? Should there be "Muslim" PACs or "Muslim" foreign policy initiatives?

The Manifesto says "no," loudly. Muslims should define themselves theologically and not politically, socially, or culturally. They should see that their primary relationship to Islam isn't utilitarian but salvific, and that "Muslim" identity isn't a fulcrum with which to advance certain ends in the public sphere, but simply a pact with God, whose rewards are identity reaped in the next life.

Many Muslims will be quick to retort that given the current climate --- where they are under attack not just from fundamentalists among them but Islamophobes of every stripe --- taking such an apolitical approach to being Muslim is virtually impossible. Every day, Muslims are asked to condemn bombings, and address beheadings, and talk about foreign wars against their co-religionists. How, then, can anyone suggest that when Muslims talk about Islam, they should focus on the afterlife? Even if we wanted to, Muslims will say, other people wouldn't let us!

The Evangelical Manifesto has an ingenious response to this problem, interpreting it as a "cost of discipleship":

Unlike some other religious believers, we do not see insults and attacks on our faith as offensive and blasphemous in a manner to be defended by law, but as part of the cost of our discipleship that we are to bear without complaint or victim-playing.

In other words, when Muslims are put in a position where others are speaking for them --- and putting them into political and social and cultural categories --- it will be up to them to resist the temptation of accepting these categories. They, as the Manifesto suggests for Evangelicals, will have to say:

[W]e insist that we ourselves, and not scholars, the press, or public opinion, have the right to say who we understand ourselves to be. We are who we say we are, and we resist all attempts to explain us in terms of our --- true motives and our --- real agenda.

By taking this approach to political debates, even debates about Islam, Muslims could at last enter the debate not as Muslims, but as Americans. Or, say, as Philadelphians. Or as lawyers.

Perhaps precisely because Evangelicals have had the experience of acquiring massive political power and squandering it, they are singularly qualified to provide a lesson to American Muslims, who have virtually no power as a religious community. When religion becomes inextricably tied to partisan politics, it can be bought and sold like stocks, simultaneously cheapening the faith and corrupting the secular principles of liberal government. Addressed to every faith community in the US, the Evangelical Manifesto is a warning American Muslims should heed. To be accepted as full members of a liberal polity, they have to be prepared to accept that their profession of faith is just one feature of their identities among many, and not the one that should dictate their engagement with politics.

Playing farce in the history of the Cinco de Mayo Week '08 to the tragedy of the possible conquest of Lebanon by Iran Hezbollah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting off allegations that he accepted bribes from American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky to help fund his wife's art career, and unlike previous Olmert scandals, this one credibly threatens both Olmert's political career and the viability of his Kadima party.

Toni O'Loughlin: "The scandal threatens to demolish the already shaky coalition government and raises questions about whether a general election would be required if Olmert resigns. It also risks overshadowing next week's visit by the US president, George Bush, who has scheduled the trip to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary and to shore up the faltering peace talks with the Palestinians."

Avi Green: "I see that Ehud Barak is still stalling and biding for time...All he's doing is stalling out of his apparently being more interested in a government seat than in true responsibility. I suggest he start to rethink his position, because his colleagues are getting very restless."

Nathan Guttman: "The [Talansky] case is being described in the Israeli press as the most serious of three investigations currently being conducted into Olmert’s affairs...Talansky and Olmert first crossed paths when the Long Island businessman directed the American fundraising operation for Shaare Tzedek Hospital and the then-mayor was a guest at events organized by the group in the United States."

Amir Oren: "The investigation into Olmert's relationship with the man dubbed 'Mr. T' has once again proven two ancient truths about the media. One is that 'the medium is the message,' as Marshall McLuhan averred in his classic work, entitled Understanding Media. The other is that the presence of the observer alters the outcome of the experiment he is there to observe. The proof can be found in the surprising twists that the press has woven into the story's plot by reporting on it. The media midwifed the affair, kept it from dying and has turned itself into the arena for the coming rounds."

Bernard Avishai: "Indeed, the best scenario is not unlikely --- not if the Bush administration supports it actively, and helps keep restless ministers (like former Likud defense minister Shaul Mofaz) bailing water instead of abandoning ship. It is that Livni and Barak will govern together for a year or so, and reconstitute the Israeli center, while putting the taint of corruption behind them. Only this will deny Netanyahu his second act. Something must."

 

The eastern world seems to be exploding this week. After the US-backed Future Movement government in Lebanon declared Hezbollah's private telecommunications network illegal, the Iran- and Syria-backed militia responded by attacking Beirut and seizing control of much the city.

Jeffrey Goldberg: "Hezbollah has been doing a bang-up job this week undermining Lebanon's future on behalf of its sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence. It is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We've heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on. It's been a tough year already for Hezbollah's apologists...."

Nicholas Noe: "The open question then, as it has been for the last 30 years, now seems to be whether the Israelis might be the ones to intervene if March 14 steadily loses its capacity to cling on to its remaining levers of power - or whether Israel might be content to sit back and watch its bitter enemy fight its own countrymen. Nasrallah certainly thinks the former might be the case, saying yesterday that Hizbullah is well equipped to fight on two fronts. Either way, having reached a point where the spectre of yet another Israeli invasion and/or another civil war is being seriously discussed as imminent...."

The Beirut Spring: "Unleashing the sectarian monster can seem like a good idea to Islamists allied with the Future Movement and to the Saudis, but they had better think twice before letting that genie out of the bottle. All parties, including the Future movement should actively portray this as a security and political situation, not a sectarian one."

Abu Muqawama: "Hizbollah may very well get the government to back down...But the fact is, if civil war does break out, Hizbollah is going to get the blame from basically everyone but Syria, Iran, and other Shia worldwide. This is not 2006 and this is not Israel that Hizbollah is staring down. This is 2008 and these are other Lebanese --- Sunni and Druze and Christian. Hizbollah can't count on the support from anyone but a few pariah states."

Michael Young: "Now the party's true intentions are out there for everyone to see. Hizbullah can no longer hide behind its 'resistance,' a fictitious 'national opposition' or imaginary social protests. It is confirming on a daily basis that its minimal goal is to keep alive a Hizbullah state within the state and to force most Lebanese to accept this, even as the party infiltrates the government bureaucracy and has free rein in the airport and ports."

Charles Malik: "Hezbollah's militant takeover of Beirut and its systematic destruction of the authority of the state and freedom of the press suggests a sophisticated and planned campaign to take power."

Christopher Albritton: "When I entered Lebanon on July 13, 2006 to get to the war, an Iranian man came in at the same time — I saw his passport. We exchanged glances and went our separate ways. Friends in Hamra and nearby ‘hoods report that Hezbollah gunmen have taken the streets and are telling people to stay indoors. They’re also taking pro-government people from their homes. One friend near Sporting Club reported a Shi’ite man in her (mixed) neighborhood was taken by gunmen as he was screaming, 'I’m from the Dahiyeh!'"

Lee Smith: "A Shia-Sunni conflict in Lebanon might well damage Iran's own efforts to jump the sectarian divide. What level of control does Tehran have over Hezbollah at this stage while the Party may well be in an existential fight over its role not just as an armed militia, but as a Lebanese party? Further, and perhaps most importantly to Washington, what will Hezbollah's actions, and Tehran's decisions, say about Iran's war against the US-backed order throughout the rest of the region – from Gaza (Hamas vs. Israel and Egypt), through the Arab Gulf states, and most especially Iraq?"

Two weeks before Cindy McCain swore to NBC's Ann Curry that her "husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all," Commentary's Jennifer Rubin spoke to John McCain on a conference call and baited him into describing Barack Obama as --- simultaneously --- the stealth candidate of Hamas, the Sandinistas, and the Weather Underground. Obama responded yesterday on CNN, saying that McCain was "losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination."

How would the campaign Abe Greenwald assures us is the veritable Platonic form ofSenator Tamburlaine the Great: McCain's Potemkin stroll through a Baghdad market in April 2007 allowed terrorists to set up an ambush that killed 21 people...and provided his campaign with a fitting metaphor maturity and masculine wisdom react? Why, with a near-instantaneous hysterical shriek from senior aide Mark Salter, of course. Salter, who seems to have earned his seniority as the campaign's point-man on hysterical shrieking, wants to make it clear just how offensive was Obama's "not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue" --- presumably at least slightly more offensive than when Salter called Arianna Huffington "a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva" for telling the truth about Salter's boss.

But Salter's real point is to make sure the journalists on his mass-mailing list clearly understand the difference between "legitimate" and illegitimate campaigning. For example, calling your opponent an enemy of the state is a totally "legitimate question...about his judgment and preparedness." However, for Obama to respond to that charge with the charitable interpretation that it's an example of the toll running for president can take on someone's mind (rather than, say, an asshole being true to his nature) is an illegitimate attempt "to delegitimize" the legitimate question of whether Obama is an enemy of the state.

Now, I confess that I can't quite see the conceptual distinction the McCain camp is trying to draw, but then, I didn't learn virtue from a segregationist who taught me to put aside any "reservations about my destiny" of dying an honorable death in battle and going to Valhalla, so I'll have to defer to the expert. Here goes:

Legitimate	Illegitimate
Offering voters bribes in exchange for their vote and their commitment to pollute the environment	Being the sort of liberal in a "chauffeured limo" who turns down McCain's bribe
Holding up a bill providing education benefits to veterans because GIs might not sign up for new terms of duty if they have decent alternatives	Accurately describing what McCain was doing, as one decorated marine veteran did
Proposing to occupy Iraq for 100 years	Quoting McCain saying that 100 years in Iraq are "fine" with him without appending the footnote that he's only fine with staying in Iraq if no Americans are dying there and the country has become like Germany or South Korea
Proposing to continue fighting in Iraq unconditionally at absolutely any cost in blood and treasure for as long as it takes (100, 1,000, 10,000 years, etc.) to transform the country into Germany on the Euphrates so that we can then preside over a peaceful 100 year occupation	Choosing to run 30 second ads quoting McCain's approval of a 100-year occupation rather than spending exponentially more money on ads demonstrating that the "100 years" line is even more revealing in its full context -- revealing, that is, of McCain's profound ignorance of the nature of the Iraqi conflict and callous willingness to send unlimited numbers of Americans to their death to satisfy his honor code
Proposing to occupy a completely pacified Iraq for 100 years utterly oblivious of what offering such a proposal in any context says about one's hold on reality	Citing McCain's full quote about Iraq to demonstrate his total break with reality
Promoting the idea --- and apparently believing it --- that Germany and Korea provide useful optics through which to view Iraq	Explaining what McCain's belief that Germany and Korea can be informatively compared to Iraq says about his competence in foreign affairs
Planning to destroy the international system and instigate a new cold war for its character-building qualities	Pointing out McCain's plan to destroy the international system and start a new cold war without also dwelling extensively on the free trade agreements he backs, or explicitly conceding that McCain does not in fact literally believe Russia is an arm of al-Qaeda
Claiming that Hamas endorsing your opponent calls into question his judgment and preparedness (see above)	Observing that McCain proposes continuing the war in Iraq because, according to Osama bin Laden, it's "the central battleground in the battle against al Qaeda"
Claiming an ability to abhor war "as only a man who has experienced its horrors can do" after going more than a decade without encountering a foreign policy problem that shouldn't be solved by war	Noting the contradiction
Admitting to three separate newspaper editorial boards that you don't understand economics, then lying about having said so when asked	Asking McCain if it's a problem for his campaign that the economy is the top issue for voters, given that, by his admission, he doesn't understand economics
Lying about having discussed legislative favors for her clients with lobbyist Vicky Iseman after admitting to it in a deposition	Asking McCain follow-up questions about said lies
Attacking your opponent for reneging on a pledge to accept public financing	Reminding McCain that he accepted public matching funds for the primary, thereby binding himself legally to the public finance system, then used certification of the public funds as collateral on a loan in possible violation of campaign finance law, then attempted to wriggle out of public financing and its spending limits despite being bound to them, then spent months effectively refusing to comply with the FEC and accepting the Bush administration's helping hand of sacking a FEC commissioner who was troublesome to McCain, and has flip-flopped at least four times on public financing since 2002.
Trying to bolster the credibility of your support for the Iraq war today by claiming to have been "the greatest critic of the initial four years" of the war who "knew it was probably going to be long and hard and tough," as opposed to those who "thought that somehow it was going to be some kind of an easy task" and therefore "didn’t know what they were voting for"	Noting that in September 2002, McCain proclaimed that "success [in Iraq] will be fairly easy" and denied that the war would involve "house-to-house fighting in Baghdad" or "a bloodletting of trading Iraqi bodies for American bodies"; that in January 2003 he predicted "we will win [the war] easily"; that he predicted in March 2003 that "the Iraqi people w