There were several unforgettable moments in the Obama campaign—Barack's impassioned speech about race, the DNC finale at Invesco, Madelyn Dunham's death just before her grandson became president-elect—but none meant more to me than a two-minute bit of tape, a simple but monumental exchange between Michelle Obama and CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

In her interview with Michelle, Soledad circled around the issues placed at the center of every discussion about female identity by second-wave feminism. O'Brien wondered how Michelle felt about following a dream that wasn't hers. She asked about leaving a "high-powered and highly compensated" career.

Michelle acknowledged the challenges. She graciously offered that she missed her colleagues and her work. But, she continued, she could always find another career. With only the slightest hint of irony, she said if she had more time, she might bemoan the loss, but she "had a lot on her plate" and what she was doing was "pretty significant."

I thought, "You go, girl!" As if working with the love of her life and the father of her children to become the first family of the United States while radically transforming the world as we know it isn't the most empowering choice a brilliant and self-determining woman could make.

But the real moment came in the next beat, 30 seconds that remain forever etched in my mind as the final blow to an ideology in which women's empowerment is narrowly defined by financial independence, emotional autonomy and professional advancement.

O'Brien went in for the kill, the coup de grâce of second-wave feminism. "But sometimes your career helps to define who you are," she said, probing.

"It doesn't for me," Michelle said immediately. "What I do in my life defines me. A career is one of the many things I do in my life. I am a mother first. Where do I get my joy and my energy first and foremost? From my kids."

As a mother, I understood the second half of what Michelle said. But as a woman, as a human being, it was the first part of her answer that I realized I—and the rest of the world—needed and still need to hear. What I do in my life defines me. Not my career, not money, not awards or accolades, but the whole thing, the sum of all of the parts. My life.

You know, life? The one that includes showing up and embracing all of it: financial pressure and anniversary dinners, security details and ballet recitals, demeaning attacks and uplifting stump speeches, grueling late-night conversations and awesome feats of self-sacrifice, tidal waves of overwhelming satisfaction and grim truths of mistakes made and opportunities lost.

The hungry kids and the empty gas tank, the deadline, the Pilates class, the Apple store, the "Shit, I have got to go get my hair handled, today!" The showing up for the people you love no matter what. The growing confidence in the decisions you made. The wonder at the way your life is unfolding.

In that life, the one that isn't defined by ideology or obligation, openness is the guiding principle. You keep your eye on cherishing your partnership and protecting your family. You keep your mind sharp and your soul deep. And, if you are Michelle Obama, you do it all in a fabulous red dress with your good-looking husband and well-educated children by your side.

Michelle Obama embodies feminist goals, and in her determination to live in sync with a vision larger than her gender and individual ego, she surpasses them. This is no time or place to be paralyzed by dogma. She cannot lie in bed and wonder if her choices are feminist enough or whether they send the correct message to women around the world. She can accept her role at the center of history and rely on her aspiration to be her best self to transcend narrow categories of feminist identity and, in doing so, inspire others to the same.

In other words, Michelle Obama doesn't need a message. She is the message.

But there is even more to this story. For the last 30 years, feminist discourse has struggled to be inclusive of the perspectives of women of color, to honor "the way we do things." At the heart of feminism's slippery promise of diversity lay its white centrism, its monopoly by women over 50, its de facto placement of the rest of us in the margins.

The rise of Michelle Obama challenges that centrism by following in the footsteps of female intellectuals and women of conscience like Anna Julia Cooper, who fought on behalf of women and all those who were oppressed. "The cause of freedom," Cooper wrote, "is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity."

Unlike the leaders for suffrage who abandoned the cause of women of color in order to get the vote, women of color have historically refused to abandon any part of themselves or their community in the name of political expediency. All must be saved or none.

My sense is that Michelle Obama's scope and influence will be equally broad. When she voices her concerns, she mentions "working folks," "a balance of work and family for women" and military families left out in the cold.

Michelle offers a possibility for change, a new kind of female leadership. And this, my friends, is a major turn of events. The wild card, of course, will be the response of those currently at the center of the women's movement, who will no doubt find themselves displaced, pushed more into the margin than ever before. How will second-wave feminism find relevance when a devoted partner, full-time mother and credentialed black powerhouse becomes first lady, and doesn't feel victimized by the job?

That will be for them to wrestle with. Not Michelle.

Cross posted at my blog at The Root.

Where were you standing? is already taken as zeitgeisty question, and How do you feel? is a mite banal, but the spirit of both were too tempting to skip asking Jewcy's inner and outer circles. So we did. Check back here frequently, as we'll be updating this list throughout the rest of the week.

I was in an African restaurant in Fort Greene when CNN called the race for Obama. Almost immediately, the intersection outside the restaurant turned into a giant patriotism party. Bearded hipster types ran through the crowd shouting "USA! USA! USA!" -- unironically, mind you. Everyone belted out the national anthem. In Union Square, apparently, the crowd spontaneously broke into "America the Beautiful." When I called my friends in DC, they reported similar singalongs. All night, I heard the same thing from everyone: "I've never felt more proud to be an American." Of course, after the controversy over Michelle Obama's comment about finally being really proud of her country earlier this year, that's a weighted statement, but think about it: For me and my peers, people who first voted in 2000, the last eight years have been one disaster after another. Finally, we're witnessing a moment in the history of U. S. government where something good happened. It's been a long time coming.
-Former Jewcy Managing Editor Izzy Grinspan

Watching the election results on a giant screen at a rally in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Office Building in Harlem, I heard the man behind me tell his companion, "Obama gonna pay my mortgage." I was touched as the crowd roared in approval of Ohio, which might as well have been where I grew up. The moment the broadcast of the acceptance speech ended, a dixieland brass outfit struck up out of nowhere, and a dance circle thronged around them. We paraded down 125th Street chanting "Oh yes we did!" and singing "Obama" to the trombone. I left the party on the island in the middle of Lenox Avenue. An African-inflected man bounded up to me and asked whether he could get a hug. "Yes we can," I said. At Lexington, none of southbound trains were running, and a light rain began. But it was good night to stay in Harlem..
-Austen Dacey, philosopher and author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in the Public Sphere

I got a call from my Mom at 10:59 last night.

“Dad just got a call from his high school friend that works for NBC. They’re gonna say Obama won the election at 11:00.”

All I could say back was “Oh. Wow,” followed by a quick, “Turn on NBC” to my friends.
“What? What?” they asked.

And then it happened.

It wasn’t long before we heard a roar from below us. Every car in our little Harlem neighborhood was sounding its horns, and we started to see fireworks exploding outside our windows.
Honestly, I’m still waiting for someone to pinch me, or to be informed that someone made a mistake and the whole thing isn’t really over. In the scheme of things, I haven’t been around for many elections, and for the last two of them I had woken up the next morning still not knowing whom our next president was. Being able to call the election before my bedtime just seemed too easy somehow.

But it wasn’t easy, really. I’m not one for getting too sentimental, but I must admit, there was a tear in my eye when I saw those images of Jesse Jackson bawling in Grant Park, and when Bernice King could not even hear her television interviewers over the sounds of rejoicing in the Ebenezer Baptist Church. It’s really something, you know?
-Jessica Miller, Jewcy staff writer

My body was in Brooklyn last night to watch Barack Obama's first speech as the president-elect, but my heart was back home in North Carolina. The Senatorial seat once held by stalwart conservative Jesse Helms now belongs to a Democratic woman, Kay Hagan, who endured absurd and unfounded mudslinging from the incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole. Beverly Purdue became the state's first-ever female Governor. And, as of 3 PM today, there was still no official word on whether North Carolina's electoral votes would go to Barack Obama or to John McCain.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, those fifteen votes won't change the outcome of the election. But if the Tarheel state goes Tarheel blue for the first time in more than 30 years, I will re-cry all the tears of joy I cried last night. The South is changing. I used to be the only Jewish kid in my high school in Raleigh, but looking at the most recent yearbook I see a broad variety of skin colors and last names. A state that no one dreamed would ever be anything but a guaranteed win for a conservative candidate has shown that it will no longer be taken for granted. Even if NC goes to John McCain, the fact that a former Republican stronghold was won by the slimmest of margins is still significant. I'm incredibly proud of where I'm from, but moreso I'm incredibly proud of where we--both my home states, and this whole nation--are going.
-Lilit Marcus, Jewcy editor

The theme of John McCain’s concession speech last night sums up my feelings well. The outcome of the election wasn’t what I hoped for, but it would be foolish to deny the history of the moment. Conservatives love to hold up the idea of a meritocracy, and nothing defines that better than an African-American of modest background rising up to the presidency. As someone weary of the petulant reactions to President Bush’s two White House victories, I have no desire to engage in bitterness or petty name-calling. So, my take is similar to that of some of the good folks at the National Review’s Corner blog last night: I congratulate Barack Obama, and he’s my president. I don’t have any illusions that he is going to be a great healer or an inspiration to us all, as so many on the left believe. (He’s already showing that, by offering the divisive Rahm Emanuel the job of chief of staff.) I fear that if he is the “second coming” of anyone, it’s President Jimmy Carter. But he won fair and square, and now he will have a chance to succeed or fail on his own merits.
-Rachael Larimore, copy chief, Slate magazine

The inverse of 9/11. History taking place, but not tragedy bearing out the worst in others and their ideas. This time it was the best. Nobody knows how good a president Obama will be any more than they knew what kind of president McCain would have been. What we do know is what people meant to express by the choice. It wasn't fear and loathing of anything except fear and loathing; it was an embrace of the better side of our natures. If this sounds like an Obama speech, that's because there was no great disparity between what the man was selling and what people wanted to buy. Detractors called the whole show a scam, and everyone who bought it a sucker. What I felt last night wasn't some massive political Jonestown--I know the signs and my guard was up. Last night America was taking a risk and feeling damn good about it. It was the sight of all the outsiders taking control and re-making their country. It was about race and not about race (and paradoxically there is no paradox in that). I don't know how jilted a fox you had to be to call the grapes of Nov 4th, 2008 sour. One can devote their life to critical inquiry and skepticism, but that does not mean that special moments such as this one must be colored with cynicism. It doesn't require you to remove yourself from the moment. Part of being a skeptic is calling a spade a spade. Now isn't the time for premature defeatism or kneejerk pessimism--if Obama fails, then we can cry foul. But last night, today, and probably for many more days to come, we can just cry. At the exorcism of demons, at the renewal of a great country, at the prospect of what residual returns this extraordinary moment could have not only for us, but for the rest of the world. My reaction to this election? I'm proud to be an American and excited to be alive.
-Josh Strawn, Jewcy contributor, lead singer of Blacklist

As someone who still has plenty of doubts about an Obama administration, but couldn't in good conscience vote for McCain due to his appalling choice of a running mate and his inept conduct during an economic collapse, I wasn't ready for my reaction to last night's returns. Call it a toe-dip into the waters of sentimentalism, but I was unambivalently proud of my country (and not for the first time, I'll have you know), just for electing a black man to the office of the presidency. Just for? No, scratch that. I don't applaud appeals to race or religion or tribe, but only a heartless automaton would fail to see that by this morning we were unofficially inhabiting the post-civil rights era. That Obama has many attractive qualities to match the symbolism of his triumph justifies, in my view, the international celebration that has yet to die down. The scales will begin to fall from the eyes in the months and years to come, even if he governs magnificently. Both Hamas and the Kremlin took the occasion of Obama's election to remind us that the world has not suddenly been rendered benign or safe. John McCain's tragedy, as I've called it, was in how he chose to conclude the climax of his political career. Will Obama's be a failure to make the best of the beginnings of his? Know hope, but know much else besides.
-Michael Weiss, Jewcy editor

We did it. All of us. We worked and phonebanked and volenteered and gave more money than we could afford, and god, we did it. Tonight I walked through the city and saw it reborn. We hugged and danced in the streets. We high fived and set off fireworks and smiled at stangers. Union Square was a mob scene.

We knew triumph and redemption. We got a smarty pants big city guy with a funny name elected president, despite having everything against us. We took our country back.

God bless you President Obama.
-Molly Crabapple, Jewcy contributor, artist of inspired bawdy, author of Dr. Sketchy's Rainy Day Colouring Book

I watched the returns from Luce Hall at Yale University, which was overflowing with graduate students and professors, and a surprising number of children. At the beginning of the night, the atmosphere was optimistic but muted; I imagine that the assembled felt the way I did as a Red Sox fan in 2004, after the Sox beat the Yankees and were up three games to none in the World Series. Sox fans, like Democrats, have experienced the anguish and frustration of repeatedly seeing expected victories vanish before their eyes. When Pennsylvania was called for Obama, I realized that whatever fantasies I had been nurturing about a McCain upset were not going to come true. I downed a glass of wine. The crowd cheered less with enthusiasm than with relief. Soon I packed up my things, headed home, and went to bed. Let these Yalies enjoy the taste of victory; for many of them, what happened last night is evidence that America might not after all be an irredeemably awful country. Hopefully, with catharsis and jubilation out of the way, such people will settle into support for responsible governance. I hope so, but find it hard to imagine.
-Noah Pollak, Jewcy contributor, Commentary/contentions blogger

There's something in the way Democratic brains are wired that makes us always think, given our track record over the last four decades, that we're going to lose an election no matter what. (It's also, I should add, a very Jewish way of thinking.)

So, quite frankly, I didn't care about the fact that almost every poll out there said that Obama was going to win. As I sat on the train last night and headed home I had a lonely, miserable feeling that the Obama candidacy was doomed.

Maybe a lot of those Obama supporters were like the Howard Dean supporters in Iowa -- long on passion, short on numbers. Maybe the people who don't respond to annoying pollsters calling when you're trying to sit down to dinner tilt Republican. Maybe the voters will overlook John McCain's increasingly bizarro behavior and remember the good McCain.

When I got home, my mother called to say that one of her friends had gone to vote in Pittsburgh and had found her polling place practically empty. She added that her friend was the only person she knew voting for Obama.

"Well, thanks for making me feel worse."

But mostly I thought that in the privacy of the voting booth, a fatal number of white voters would find themselves unable to vote for a black guy -- no matter how inspirational and brilliant. No African American had ever appeared on a national ticket -- how it would turn out in the end was a tremendous unknown, and the weight of it was suddenly crashing down. (I should add, it was an argument that I had been through with friends and relatives when I was urging them to vote Obama in the primary. "I think Americans are different now than they were even, say, 15 or 20 years ago," I would tell them. And "I think that the people who were not going to vote for him because he was black were not going to be voting Democratic anyway.")

No, last night I was panicked until Obama won Pennsylvania.

After it was official I uncorked a bottle of champagne and watched the speeches.

I had told my friends that I would probably be weeping either out of joy or sadness (particularly given the amount of emotion I had invested in this election). But I wasn't weeping and I wasn't even jumping up and down after the first few minutes. I was merely sitting quietly.

I was speechless. (My friends will testify how loudly that silence speaks.)

I kept shaking my head and saying, "I don't believe it... I just don't believe it."

Call it awe. Not so much for Obama (as much as I love the guy) -- it was awe for my fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that many players tried to drag this campaign into the mud (not the least of which were the Clintons) America did not rise to the bait. In every part of the country -- even in southern states like Virginia and North Carolina which I had written off a long time ago -- people came out and voted for Barack Obama. When Obama says that his unlikely story is a nearly impossible one anywhere except here, I think he's on to something. There are moments when America will do something so unexpected and wonderful that you are dumbstruck.

That's what I was last night.
-Max Gross, Jewcy book blogger, author of From Schlub to Stud

Obama ran a brilliant campaign which "spoke" to the people in 21st century terms. He fused technology, symbol, and oratory, seamlessly joined television entertainment, internet advertising, celebrity culture, infommercials, with community organizing and private and spectacular levels of fundraising. Some level of thuggery on the part of his supporters has been alleged. Through it all, Obama maintained a manfully stoic composure. He was sometimes amused, sometimes angry, always...distant, always ready for his close-up. All future political campaigns in America will require a similar choreography, a simultaneity of forces.

As I wrote this I realized that only suicide/homicide bombers have perfected the deadly art of simultaneous, choreographed attacks, a kind of anti-life death art. I hope and I pray that President Obama is as effective in preventing such attacks and in outwitting the attackers as he was in running his two year Presidential campaign.

But here's one more thing that troubles me. People really believe that a mere mortal, a mere politician, will Solve it All, deliver on his every promise, perform the impossible, walk on water. No one is realistic.

As we now know, Hamas greeted President Obama's victory by launching a barrage of rockets towards civilian Israel. I wonder how President Obama will deal with Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and all those extremely Bad Guys.
-Phyllis Chesler, Jewcy contributor, psychologist, author of Women and Madness, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, and Women of the Wall, Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site

On the streets of New York you could see two kinds of reactions last night: the drunk variety (wooooooooooooo!) and the reflective, poignant, verge of tears variety. Personally I was too hammered to feel anything but a cathartic sense of joy and relief, but in the morning—as I nursed the best hangover of my life—I watched Barack Obama’s victory speech again, and I felt a lump in my throat the size of Bristol Palin’s unborn child.

After eight years of demagoguery, paranoia, wrath and carnage—which the textbooks will record as one of our darkest hours alongside McCarthyism, Vietnam, and internment camps—the American people have elected a chief executive worthy of the office, a man who values the integrity of our constitution and the unparalleled greatness of its ideals. On January 20th we will no longer have a dictatorial charlatan who masquerades as the president of the United States of America; we will have a president of the United States of America.

Expectations for the Obama Administration are reaching messianic proportions, and he will surely make mistakes, perhaps indefensible ones. Power corrupts; Obama is about to become the most powerful man in the world. He could abuse his office; he could lose our favor in the months and years to come. However, if Obama fulfills the promise of his campaign—if he truly does restore America’s laws and change them for the better—we might have elected a Jefferson-, Lincoln- or FDR-caliber leader in our lifetimes.

This is obviously a huge milestone for African-Americans, but it is also—to a lesser degree—a milestone for my generation. The attacks of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq have defined what should have been the best years of our lives. We learned to distrust our government, resent our fellow citizens and sneer at the words “freedom” and “patriotism,” which were used as weapons against real freedom and real patriotism. It is no small feat that Obama reminded millions of us why we loved this country in our childhoods; in many ways he embodies the speeches we memorized in elementary school, and inspires the same optimism we felt when pledging allegiance to our flag before class started. Young people showed up to the polls in record numbers (reporters are speculating the youth vote gave Obama the victory), not because we were scared of other countries, but because we were proud of our own.

It’s good to remain skeptical of mass movements because they naturally discourage freethinking—and Obama’s cult of personality has its fair share of creepy idolaters—but I no longer envy my parents for living through the 1960s. We now have our own “I was there” moment. We were part of something special, something extraordinary, something American. We are no longer a nation of torture and theocracy. We are no longer a nation which hates the world, and which the world hates in return. We are once again a nation which produced the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation and “I Have a Dream.” We are once again the United States of America, indivisible with the possibility of liberty and justice for all. Let’s hope it sticks this time.

In other words: Wooooooooooooooooooo!
-Marty Beckerman, Jewcy contributor, author of Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and Other American Idiots

I'm struck by how distinctly American I feel. I blog a lot about race, but I haven't felt so patriotic in ages. Maybe since 9/11, which feels like a lifetime ago.

For me, that's one drop in the infinite reservoir of amazing takeaways ... seeing people around the globe respond. Why is America so incredibly important to so many people?

Why are we the Apple to the rest of the world's PC? How is this land of Bush, and Enron, and Cheney, and Spitzer, and Flavor Flav, and TMZ and Fashion Police etc. etc. ad nauseam, also the symbol for that inscrutably-human sense of independent spirit?

Look at the pictures, taken from around the globe. How can one man, one job, one country's chosen leader mean so much?

Iit's so difficult to wrap my aluminum-body macbook around the idea that when the world is spinning its wheels in the, uh, ditch of life or whathaveyou, we're the folks everyone looks to for a plan? What are we, Hancock? The Alcoholic Superpower?

(If you were to ask me about America-as-Guiding-Light when I'm drunk and fantasizing about Sarah Palin, in my apartment, telling Katie Couric that she knows how to save Africa because she can see my balls from where she's sitting; I would be like, "How can you talk about some broad 'America the beautiful' stuff with a scene like this in front of you? THAT'S UNAMERICAN! But I do appreciate the conversation, so hold on a second, I'm just busy at the moment." Then in five minutes I would return and tell you that such a thought [America-as-example-for-the-world] is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.)

But yet, it's true. The throngs of people, the wide-eyed faces, the streaming tears... none of them lie. This country, my country, your country is the worlds guiding light. The world's Encyclopedia Brown. The forger of black steel in the hour of chaos. The nationalized avatar of Nietzsche's will to power? Or maybe you prefer, Manifest Destiny. Just Do It. Yes We Can.

This mandate, this refusal to suck, where does it come from? In the last couple years we have bottomed out and taken it for granted, putting up the most pathetic effort we could in the form of George Bush. Seemingly testing our own karma, only so we could feel the rush of the Tao coming back harder and stronger with Barack, the Anti-Bush.

We started this country with no money, only ideals. Then we sacrificed our ideals to build capital. And now, when capital is no longer worth much, we go back to ideals. Willing ourselves to power, by any means necessary.

Where do we get it from? I want to bottle it and sell it... to myself. At a discount, cause the dollar sucks these days.
-Patrice Evans, a.k.a. The Assimilated Negro, is a Jewcy contributor and author of the upcoming Negropedia.

Last night a friend asked me: “Did you cave at the last minute and realize that it’d be kind of cool to have cast a vote for our first black prez? A college friend Facebooked his status as wondering what the presidential limo was going to look like with spinners. Hilarious. If he wasn’t black, and living in Prague, he’d be dead.”

I’m a rational guy (readers will beg to differ), so I didn’t cave—until it was too late. I don’t mean that I’d change my vote. I mean that watching Barack Obama’s victory celebrations had the unexpected effect of melting that inky lump of frozen swamp water I call a heart. I was shocked to find that the tears of race-baiting demagogue Jesse Jackson almost had my waterworks going.

I’m delighted that Sasha and Malia are getting a new puppy, especially if it means the Obamas are getting rid of their old puppy, the national press.

I expected unendurable gloating last night. What I saw instead was genuine national pride. I could never base my decision on race alone, and I have precious little respect for those who did, but that doesn’t mean I’m not proud to live in an America in which an Obama presidency is possible. I’d rather celebrate in this Obama “tank” we keep hearing so much about than boo with the boors who marred John McCain’s sincere, gracious, and (dare I say it?) hopeful concession speech.

Okay, we can cut the swelling John Williams score, because that’s all the homiletic peroration I’ve got in me. It’s time to stifle the fuzzy feelings and go back to scrutinizing the man who’s promised to part the waters (or at least to stop them from rising) and lead us to a new dawn. (At the moment I’d settle for leading us away from a Red Dawn.) We can show our leader no greater respect than assessing him honestly and often, beginning in the cold light of a January afternoon.
-Stefan Beck, Jewcy contributor, former editor of the New Criterion

Don DeLillo has a good term for what happened last night: "world hum." Even if you think (as I do) that the messianic aura surrounding Barack Obama can only lead to disappointment, you'd have to be an ostrich not to have noticed the global reprecussions of his historic victory. I went to bed at 6, got up at 9, and have been scouring the Internet for the best morning-after items to share with you, dear reader:

1. Best headline. The Onion:

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

 WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

2. Best Photoshop job. Gawker:

3. Best right-wing event horizon. Atlas Shrugs:

PRESIDENT HUSSEIN

Good luck with that Amerikkka!

UPDATE: 12:55 am And so it begins :

[Un-indicted Co-conspirator] CAIR CONGRATULATES PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA
U.S. Muslims offer support for ensuring a safe and free America

“CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil rights and advocacy group, offers its congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama on his historic election to our nation’s highest office. President-elect Obama’s victory sends the unmistakable message that America is a nation that offers equal opportunity to people of all backgrounds.

“We look forward to having the opportunity to work with the Obama administration in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, projecting an accurate image of America in the Muslim world and playing a positive role in securing our nation.”

Obama's victory speech ..... so empty. He was still campaigning. The same stale rhetoric, same vacuous message. He even had the audacity to intimate that his one term would not be enough. He'd need two. He is now campaigning for '12. Now that's audacious!

 

4. Best photo. Huffington Post, featuring Martin Luther King's sister, Christine King Farris, reacting to the called election from a church in Atlanta, Georgia.

5. Most unexpected news story overshadowed by the election. Michael Crichton died.

Crichton died Tuesday at age 66. He had been privately battling cancer, his family said.

6. Biggest reality check/portent of things to come. Russia likey to deploy short-range missiles to the Baltic in response to U.S. calls for an antimissile defense system in Eastern Europe:

In his speech a few hours earlier, Mr. Medvedev spoke of a “new configuration for the military forces of our country” that would include abandoning plans to dismantle some missile regiments and the stationing of missiles in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

I'll let the poets doing the talking:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day- at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

-- Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing"

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

-- Langston Hughes, "I, Too, Sing America" (Can we agree, at least tonight, that Hughes' totalitarian politics doesn't take away from the above?) 

UPDATE:  Okay, so I have a big mouth. Read this piece by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who should never have left the opinion page of the New York Times):

My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can't quite believe it!       

You've got to have ice water in your veins not to be stirred by this stuff, left, right or indifferent.

I feel my critical faculties returning already, but I can't promise I won't be feeding you more of this in the days and weeks to come.  Just to emphasize the difficulties ahead, today, of all days, Israel and Hamas exchanged rocket fire for the first time since June.   

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen an admirable conservative newspaper fold, a favorite writer hang himself, and a presidential candidate I assumed I’d be voting for tomorrow disappoint me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. As to that dead writer…

The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered — voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: "moral authority," that old cliché, much like so many other clichés — "service," "honor," "duty," "patriotism" — that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we've seen, though — arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in '98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-Span, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July '99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings — something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like "service" and "sacrifice" and "honor" might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe.

David Foster Wallace was one of the sincerest members of his generation (which also, by nice coincidence, happens to be Barack Obama's generation), and an encomium like this should not be discounted for its slightly hedged conclusion. Being wary of a person’s honor and selflessness only means you’ve been on the planet long enough to know what to expect. Cynicism can be a snare, but pessimism is the scar on a broken heart. Still, it did once seem, long ago, as if John McCain would rather lose an election than compromise himself by stooping to the level of his opponent, whose “patrician smirk and mangled cant,” as Wallace so aptly put it, was outdone by his base insinuations as to where McCain’s dark-skinned daughter had really come from.

I don’t consider the Vietnam War a great hour for our republic, and I don’t go for flap-flapping nostrums in lieu of moral and intellectual arguments. On foreign policy, I want a president who won’t allow his pragmatism or approval rating to eclipse the necessity of calling a thug a thug and a tyrant a tyrant. On many issues such as capital punishment, gay marriage and the role of religion in the public sphere, I’m to left of the Democratic establishment. I believe the last eight years have been a period of disastrous misrule and demoralization, out of which two unambiguous goods have managed to emerge: the end of Saddam Hussein, and the gasping chance for parliamentary democracy in Iraq.

Conservatism at its best means not being a “maverick,” but taking principled stances when popular opinion is ranged against them, putting yourself in the path of history, which you know is likely to mow you down and your feckless little Stop sign. “I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist.” That’s how Whittaker Chambers, a true patriot of Dostoevskian complexity, explained his choice to become a national pariah rather than allow the dangers of international Communism go unnoticed. If McCain held my attention this year, it wasn’t only because of his Chambers-like willingness to destroy himself for his country in a southeast Asian prison cell long before I was born. It was also because of his willingness to destroy his political career by advocating an unpopular military policy designed to save a country other than his own, one that had been written off as lost to Hobbesian chaos. No revisionism, in light of the squalidness of his general campaign, will alter the fact that, had the surge failed, so too would have McCain in this year’s primaries.  He was at his most presidential in risking his chance to become president. He was also at his most conservative.

It would take a Sophocles or a Shakespeare to map the degeneration of a man who had got a handle on being “post-partisan” before it was fashionable or electorally remunerative. If I had to unearth the whole offence, I would say the trouble began in South Carolina, in 2000, when McCain witnessed just how nasty the game had got to be played, and just how badly he lost by choosing not to play it that way. Christopher Hitchens is wrong to say that McCain’s late turn into a merchant of anything-goes innuendo is the result of creeping “senility.” It’s classical political resentment: in his mind, he’s still losing to George W. Bush, just as Nixon thought he was losing to John F. Kennedy—in 1972.

I’ve defended McCain where I thought he’d been unjustly or hysterically maligned, but there’s no arguing the point that his choice of a running mate has effectively squandered the public trust. What a blunder, and what a wasted opportunity. Does anyone now think the Republican “base,” whose tendency to froth and foam has led to absurd but familiar analogies to fascism, would have voted Democratic this year had it been deprived of a cultural reactionary with a socialite’s wardrobe? Rush Limbaugh would have declared for the man he calls the “Magic Negro”?  Really?  The bloc McCain needed to persuade was that of independents—his natural constituency—who would have found the combination of experience and integrity too alluring to pass up. We needed an Eisenhower with a steady hand, not a Preston Sturges of “right-wing screwball,” as Leon Wieseltier unimprovably phrased it.

Here’s another Greek misfortune of his own making: McCain’s age and questionable health would have been overshadowed by his apparent energy on the stump had his VP been less of a Halloween costume and more of an insurance policy. Instead, these concerns became the stuff of actuarial office bets, and a disturbing aura of death and decrepitude has surrounded him during his final laps around the country.

As for Barack Obama, I'm worried his supporters are too  ecstatic, and not chastened for the challenges he's about to face, which some of them, judging by conversations I've had, can't imagine to be worse than Hillary Clinton. I find his personality winning, and his intellect impressive. For good reason did Weber define charisma as one criterion of authority. I’ve recoiled in horror at the paranoid and sinister accusations leveled against Obama from the fever-swamps of blogland. Isn't it amazing how this charming young man manages to divide his time between battleground states and a cave in Waziristan?

When I hear the word “socialism,” I remember the lonely, prophetic radicals who screamed bloody murder about the Soviet Union before liberals and conservatives stopped referring warmly to Uncle Joe. Until and unless the DNC espouses the belief in the government ownership of the means of production, then the rejoinder belongs to the author of Das Kapital himself, who famously demeaned the non-revolutionary varieties of redistributionism by saying, “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist.”

Actually, some of the most astute observers of this election have been Marxists, or recovering New Leftists. Sol Stern, former editor of Ramparts, has rightly assailed William Ayers as a greater immediate danger to the American education system than he ever was to the Pentagon. Paul Berman, echoing his hero Irving Howe, has reminded us that 60’s left-wing authoritarianism is no alternative to the timeless right-wing brand, and that an unrepentant mad bomber does not need or deserve a burnished reputation or friendship society. In these very pages, Phyllis Chesler has shown how Sarah Palin has brought out the worst in modern feminism, causing cracks in the glass ceiling, and crack-ups in the movement.

Tellingly, however, none of these critics has rushed to denounce Obama as the second coming of Abbie Hoffman or Franz Fanon. Why is that, do you suppose, if he’s as recondite and unreconstructed as some of my inbox material maintains?  I find the graying 68ers more reliable in their judgments of sign-posted ideology than the collective wisdom of the National Review editorial board. In fact, one prominent black detractor, Professor Adolph Reed, has made the most salient case against Obama in the Progressive, arguing that the candidate isn’t anything as glamorous as a secret radical, but rather a standard-issue opportunist who talks out of both sides of his mouth and is always looking to a cut a deal to advance his career. What more could we want from a graduate of the Daley machine of Chicago, that noble city? The Saul to consult to understand Obama’s baptism in picaresque urban realities isn’t Alinsky. It’s Bellow.

Where I have covered Obama’s policy prescriptions – namely for Iraq – I’ve found him improvisational and half-cocked. He doesn’t confuse Sunni and Shia, but as late as May 2008 he thought Iraqis would bow to the constitutional re-drafting authority of the United Nations, the body responsible for a decade of immiserating sanctions, and which has not had a presence in their country since Al Qaeda blew up its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. He also labored under a misapprehension that Iraq’s parliament had not, as of last spring, passed laws for de-Baathification, political amnesty, and provisional elections when in fact it had passed them, and he had made the non-fulfillment of these and other “benchmarks” established by the Bush administration a major talking point of his antiwar rhetoric.

Nevertheless, Obama shows no sign of letting up on Al Qaeda where it still presents a lethal menace to civilization, and it’s unlikely—given the price he’s had to pay for even suggesting it—that he would now meet with the mullahs of Iran without preconditions. Verbal Vesuvius though his own running mate may be, Joe Biden has seen Russia by standing on its soil, not through magic binoculars; he has a proven record of doing something about genocide; and he has kept abreast of the headlines in Iraq enough to recommend a three-state solution that, however misguided in my view, has been endorsed by Peter Galbraith, a scholar and diplomat who ranks as one of the most serious American experts on Iraqi Kurdistan. Given Obama’s likely appointment of Richard Holbrooke, advocate of Kosovo independence, to a high-level position in his cabinet, there is every expectation that muscular interventionism will indeed have a fighting chance in the next four years. My friend Eli Lake, a prominent neoconservative, has written cogently that Obama’s foreign policy, judging by the people crafting it, would more resemble Ronald Reagan’s than it would Jimmy Carter’s. That means escalating dirty wars and black ops, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, we will.

Perhaps most important, given the way Americans are said to vote, Obama has demonstrated an equanimity during the financial calamity that, while not a sufficient condition for keeping the country out of a depression, is surely a necessary one.

Nothing would have pleased me more than to have been able to say that of his rival, under different circumstances.

Jewcy recently asked a select group of foreign writers we admire to state which candidate they'd vote for if they could, and why. David Toube blogs at Harry's Place.

The prospect of Obama in the White House is hugely preferable to an unwell man whose vice president is a Creationist. I am attracted by Obama's determination to extend the prosecution of the fight against jihadism beyond the frontiers of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jewcy recently asked a select group of foreign writers we admire to state which candidate they'd vote for if they could, and why. Nick Cohen's response is the first in a series we will be running from now until Election Day.

Obama for four reasons:

1. Although McCain is an impressive man, he has not had an impressive campaign, and looks too old for the job to me.

2. He's been a maverick on many issues -- except the economy. What with one thing and another, new Republican thinking about economics is needed right now, and his failure to meet the challenge of the Crash by shaking himself out of conservative orthodoxy counts against him.

3. I know this is a despicable argument, I realise you must judge men by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, but a black president is still one hell of a milestone to put behind you. The post-racial society an Obama presidency would inevitably bring, whether he wants it or not, is worth having. Wouldn't it be good if our children didn't have to go through all the speech codes, colour quotas and politics
of competitive grievance which have so numbed the minds and twisted the tongues of our generation?

4. Around the world, liberal opinion has desecended into anti-Americanism and fellow-travelling with totalitarianism. Liberals will find it harder to carry on with their old debased ways if Obama takes charge. Many will, of course, but some will recover their wits and return to honourable politics.

This is not an endorsement. I am a journalist, and I reserve the right to denounce Obama as a scoundrel from the moment he takes office.

One of the most attractive things about the right in recent years has been its indignation toward frivolous moral equivalency. While many on the left were noting that "our terrorism" was as bad--if not worse--than "theirs," conservatives had sense to note that the violence perpetrated by racists and sexists and designed to maximize civilian casualties was not the same as violence designed to minimize of civilian casualties by one of the more successfully liberal and multicultural states in the world. There was something as well to be said for the difference between the end goals: the flourishing of liberal democracy (no matter how "problematized" it had become) or the establishment of Islamist rule. There was always a valid argument to be had about ends and means and "collateral damage" but whatever one wanted to say, those who said it was all the same were rightly discounted from discussion on the grounds that their faculties of judgment were severely impaired.

Sadly, upon surveying the arguments over the rising tide of hate infecting both sides of the 2008 presidential race, it would seem that many of those same discerning voices have joined forces with the party of equivalency. They seem to have forgotten that all-important lesson once taught so well when the subject matter was Islamism, that all hate isn't the same, and that all hate isn't bad hate. After all, those who said hating terrorists was wrong always came off as the kinds of people who didn't understand double negatives in speech; hating bad things is logically a good thing.

Off the top, however, it's notable that some on the left still haven't failed to make the standard Nazi comparison in reference to their Republican foes. The predictable answer here might be to group these people in with those shouting lynch mob obscenities at McCain rallies and then chalk it all up to the "fringe" of either party, thus vindicating the mainstream of each. McCain told the 'Obama's an Arab' lady to sit down and Obama scolded MoveOn.org, so aren't they each in the clear, even if they'll each rack up a great deal of votes from their respective fringes? This is one case where even-handedness is not the answer it might seem to be. In fact, the hate directed at the McCain-Palin campaign from the left is mainstream, not confined to the lunatic fringe, and yet very justifiable. Healthy, even.

The reason, sorry to say, has to do with race. True, presidential campaigning is hard. Everybody plays rough, and everybody toys with the truth, plays with words and associative logic to attack one's opponent. But there is a reason the Ayers issue put the McCain campaign over the edge--a reason that the rallies got uglier when the former Weatherman came up and a reason the anti-Palin crowds became filled with righteous hate. Ayers was designed to change focus from cool-headed vs. hot-headed to whether Obama is who you think he is. The way this was framed? He hangs out with terrorists. "Terrorist" being the singlemost iconic, psychologically freighted word of our era used to evoke our worst of enemies.

By now we've heard the arguments trotted out over what Obama's relationship to Ayers meant. But what was never examined thoroughly enough was, why did the McCain campaign think they could get this label to stick? Whether they knew it or not, they thought it had legs because Obama is not white. The glue that would saddle Obama with the slur of "terrorist" was his skin color. It could even be argued that historical specifics and the real acts of Ayers were secondary to the McCain campaign's prime objective: just as the name Osama registers in the mind with "Terrorist," get the name Obama to do the same. It should be no wonder that early GOP robocalls worried little with Obama's tax or health care plan. They only sought to repeat the two words together and hope that, for enough voters, they'd cling to one another.

Talking about white privilege in America can turn off even the most unprejudiced of people. Plenty of whites are understandably tired of hearing about their "crimes" and the crimes of their forefathers when they themselves haven't ever had a mean or unsavory thought about a person of any color. But to paraphrase the work of H.E. Baber, white privilege, if it means anything today, has to do with the fact that being white is transparent. It is not socially salient. In other words, if you are white--especially if you are a white male--the culture at large will more likely see you as you want to be seen. You are permitted to invent yourself without your race or gender complicating the picture. You can make mistakes without being blamed for the disposition of all white people. You can make choices without feeling chained to a script of your ethnic identity.

Being non-white on the other hand, is socially salient. Your identity is already bound up in being an outsider, in a notion of how you should be or act because of your ethnicity. Self-invention is far more difficult, because your skin color renders expectations and associations, the deviation from which usually carry a heavy price. Because Barack Obama is not a white person, his ability to invent himself beyond the foreignness of his name, beyond the color of his skin, is no different--no easier--than it has been for so many non-white Americans who have attempted the same kind of self-invention on a less presidential scale. But why is this?

Why in the 21st century is being an outsider still a hurdle for non-white Americans? Isn't the narrative of the underdog, the immigrant and the outsider one of America's most cherished? And why, in a presidential campaign like this, is otherness available to the McCain campaign to use as the glue that will stick Obama with the label "Terrorist" in a way that similar tactics could never work with a white man? While electoral demographics, Atwater campaigning, and the technique of Willie Horton-ing your opponent all mater, these factors don't account for as much as some would like. Campaigns may use the weapon, but it's handed to them by liberals. These days, it's called multiculturalism.

It has not been the right that has insisted on the social salience of race in the last 2 or 3 decades, it has decidedly been the left. Emerging from the New Left, the doctrine of multiculturalism, well-intentioned as it might have been, effectively established a regime of political philosophy that chided anyone for wanting to have anything to do with the West. As they saw it, differing ethnicities and cultures were the spice of the life, and their unique ways of seeing were alternatives to the patriarchal imperialism of the West. Nobody who wanted a taste of that liberal dream of identity transparency and self-invention could be anything but duped by the Man. The big, white, imperialist Man.

And so the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement were replaced with a new kind of tyranny--the hard-line directive to always be black, Asian, Muslim--anything so long as it wasn't white. Be proud, don't be ashamed of your culture. In fact, you had better love it or risk being an Uncle Tom in-cahoots with the oppressors. Rather than helping render ethnicity and race more transparent and meaningless, thus allowing people to create their identity and future free of the dictates of genetics, these folks pushed it up front. Now, they'd like to pretend the issues bubbling up in the presidential race are just leftover bigotry from the South, or just some core aspect of being on the right. In reality, this is what the politics of multiculturalism have sown.

Beating McCain should have been easier than it has been for Barack Obama. But Obama has always had a higher hurdle to jump, an otherness to eliminate. As the left seethes with hate toward the campaign that has sought to keep that hurdle high and exploit Obama's outsider quality, this hate can be seen as nothing less than a good hate--the hate of something bad. It is a credit to Joe Six Pack Dems everywhere who don't give a flip about the theory of white privilege and the social salience of ethnicity that they perceive the fulcrum on which McCain hoped (and still seems to hope, by the way) to saddle Obama with the label of "Terrorist." No stock response of "well the left does it too, just see the recent episode of the Family Guy" will do. Not only has the Obama campaign never tried to make a disparaging label stick to McCain using an immutable genetic trait--even if they had wanted to, they never could have. Again, the immutable genetic trait of being white has no glue because it doesn't connote being foreign or an outsider.

To hell with every leftist and Obama supporter that wants to wrangle up Nazi imagery like the lazy analogy it always ends up being. But enough too with pretending like the left wing haters are just the analogue of the off-with-his-treasonous-head fringe at McCain rallies. John McCain and Sarah Palin--or their campaign managers, whomever you prefer to blame--opted to make a central campaign strategy out of capitalizing on the notion of Barack Obama, The Outsider. This trait was made available to them by the left which has obsessed itself with the politics of outsiderism--with writing the scripts of the noble (read: non white) outsider. But when those on the left send the message of rebuke as loudly, angrily, and, yes, hatefully as they have of late, they are doing a good thing.

Multiculturalism, as an ideology that prioritizes ethnicity, culture and identity as a basis for politics, proves at every turn to be a cancer in the body politic--especially for most worthwhile liberal aspirations. But the McCain campaign saw the tumor and decided to pump it full of carcinogens. It's been suggested that this election would be a referendum on Barack Obama. What it looks like more and more is a referendum on what it means to live in a multicultural society. No matter the shortcomings of the Illinois senator, the surge in support for him speaks highly of the American people and where they stand on the matter: against the party that seeks to continue emphasizing difference and separation and in favor of the one trying to explode those ways of seeing and thinking for good.

Here's to hoping that the polls indicating a decisive Obama victory on Nov. 4th reflect the necessary hate for a campaign that elevated poisonous exclusionary thinking to a virtue. But here's to hoping that such a victory, should it come to pass, will also be the final nail in the coffin of multiculturalism as it's been understood until now.

Ben Stiller and Rob Reiner's fathers got together with the DeVito-Pearlman union and produced a series of commercials in support of Barack Obama. Despite the collective's comedy pedigree, the shorts are not humorous. As Reiner the Elder states in one of the ads, "There is time for funny and time for serious, and right now is time for serious." View the videos below:

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy End-of-the-Holidays. I don't know what I'm looking forward to less -- two more weeks of this campaign, or taking down my sukkah. I have to get a better sukkah next year.

Before I get to McCain, let me acknowledge your perspicacity, as Bill O'Reilly would say: One of the things that's been missing from the debate over which candidate is better for Israel is the question, Which candidate will make America stronger? Because a strong America is a necessity for Israel. I think that the Israeli officials you speak with who suggest that Obama might actually strengthen America's standing in the world are on to something.

Your analysis of McCain's weaknesses, from an Israeli perspective, is spot-on, as well. It's abundantly clear that Israelis of all political denominations become quite frightened when their neo-conservative cousins (not that you have to be Jewish to be a neo-conservative, by the way) talk about exporting democracy to the Muslim world. If you don't mind me quoting myself, I'll repeat a story I told in the Atlantic earlier this year. In December of 2006, Natan Sharansky received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush, and the Israeli embassy held a celebration afterward. As Sharansky extolled the virtues of democracy to the assembled crowd, a senior Israeli security official whispered to me, "What a child." He explained: "It's not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan." Afterward, I spoke with Sharansky, and in his charmingly self-deprecating way, he told me the following: "After I came back from Washington once," he said, "I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, 'Mazel tov, Natan. You've convinced President Bush of something that doesn't exist.'"

This is a long way of saying that Israelis, in the main, will be relieved when America stops talking about Arab democracy. That said, I don't think John McCain is quite the neoconservative democracy warrior his enemies make him out to be. He is a more practical man, I think, than George W. Bush. But so, for that matter, is Barack Obama. I've looked for signs of incipient Carterism -- defined here as an overarching belief in the power of the talking cure when it comes to evil dictators -- in Obama's actions and statements and so far, I haven't found them. Which is not to say that might not overvalue negotiations when it comes to Iran; we just don't know. I could go on about McCain's views of the Middle East -- where's he strong and where he's not (I do think that, unlike Obama -- thank you, Joe Biden -- America's enemies might not be so eager to test McCain, in part because they might be under the impression that he's crazy) but, today at least, the McCain campaign has a posthumous feel to it, and so I'm thinking more about Obama.

And so, to address your final point: Is it good for Obama to talk about Israel all the time? Yes. I agree with you, but for a slightly different reason. When I interviewed Obama on this subject, he said that one of the jobs of an American president is to hold up a mirror to Israel to show it where it might do better. This was his very polite way of suggesting that he wants to help Israel find a way out of the territories. The key, of course, is for Israelis to feel that a friend is holding up that mirror, not an enemy. Obama is trying very hard to show himself to be that friend.

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here. Rosner's second letter is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

The news has traveled well beyond the borders of blogland that McCain-Palin rallies might as well carry Wasilla uber alles banners for all the whipped-up participants at these gatherings who have called for the assassination of Barack Obama. Sarah Palin has since been compared to George Wallace for supposedly encouraging the bigots and rednecks and would-be James Earl Rays who hang upon her every word and share in her resentment of East Coast cosmopolitanism. (Can she plead that she was only an infant when Wallace ran for president as a segregationist, or does the fact that he later regretted his wicked behavior complicate her exoneration?) Meanwhile, her running-mate's hoary labeling of Obama's tax plan as "socialism" (a badge to be worn proudly, if you ask me) is evidently code for "beware the dangerous Negro," at least according to one columnist for the Kansas City Star who doesn't know that Paul Robeson was a Stalinist who tried to have real socialists imprisoned under the Smith Act.

Also this week, the New Yorker, ever ready to atone for its ill-received satiric cover of the Obamas, writes that the average GOP campaign stop a mere fortnight before Election Day carries a mood "not so much socialist as national-socialist." Lines like that always put me in mind of the era when the New Yorker was considered a middlebrow publication. It certainly picked a lousy time to invoke fascism, as one visible exponent of the real thing, Jorg Haider, just gave up the ghost in his native Austria in a headline-making car wreck. Surely that qualifies as talk of the town for urbane blue staters with tyrannical demagogues on the brain.

Given Obama's ever expanding lead in the polls, one would think his defenders -- or opponents of his rival, anyway -- would be confident enough to do the lazy intellectual and moral work of not resorting to histrionics and sub-Orwellian political cliches to close the deal.

It would be rather alarming if there was a phalanx of willing executioners marching in lockstep behind the GOP nominee, wouldn't it? The only problem with this well-trafficked conceit is that the reporting it's based on isn't quite true. Here's John Leo at the Huffington Post, remarking on how the mainstream press has been gobbling up one bogus item about a now-notorious Palin rally held the other week in Clearwater, Florida:

[S]omeone shouted "Kill him!" referring to the 60s bomber Bill Ayers, and a man shouted a racial slur at a network sound man (apparently the N-word), adding "sit down, boy."

These two shouts were clearly over the line. But do two extremist shouts from a crowd of 4,500 people establish the rally as a far-right hate fest? Not really. Florida reporters at the Palin speech did not detect a wave of racism and rage. Their coverage was routine, discovering no incipient fascism. William March of the Tampa Tribune, who was there, told me: "They booed Obama and the press, but that just makes it a normal Republican rally."

Two odd things happened at the hands of bloggers and pundits. The "Kill him!" line, directed toward Ayers was presented as a threat to assassinate Obama. And the single racist remark cited by Millbank became one of many racist remarks at the rally. A New York Times editorial made this same mistake, turning one racial comment into many.'

I remember reading somewhere that it was disingenuous to equate the antiwar movement in 2003 with its more colorful caricatures -- the "Bush = Hitler" lot, the ZOG-minded Israel-bashers, and the open backers of Saddam Hussein, who in fact helped organize some of the antiwar rallies under the activist heading of International ANSWER. (This low tactic of smearing an adversary by the fringe company he may unwillingly keep is one of the subjects of Eric Alterman's new book, Why We're Liberals.) But despite the fact that McCain wants nothing to do with the nasty people ready to vote for him, it's suggested or implied that he deliberately galvanizes their worst impulses.

As for the caricature McCain proudly aligns himself with, Palin has stoked the fires of a kulturkampf, it's true. But her rhetoric is in no way extraordinary or out of tune with decades-old movement conservative gripes about the virtues of the small town over the vices of Babylon. I find this talk stupid and tiresome myself, but how far a descent is it into the depths of populism to say that there are really two Americas? Palin is John Edwards run through the Hudson Institute.

Saul Bellow, in his brilliant satire Herzog, called this type of appeal to the folksy and provincial element "low-grade universal potato love." It's why, wrote Herzog in one of his feverish fantasy letters to Adlai Stevenson, Gen. Eisenhower won his election. Fat chance of it helping this time out, so can we cool it with the Nazi talk already?

One has by now seen the footage of McCain telling some old witch "No, ma'am" after she claimed that Obama was an Arab. Good. To this should also be added the following video, showing that there are indeed wingnuts and baleful conspiracists haunting McCain-Palin affairs. However, given the chance to confront them, official campaign spokesmen, and even supporters who do fancy a culture war, unfailingly do.

How nice, by the way, that a Kurdish Muslim gets paid to work for the Republican nominee in these post-racial times of ours.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter can be read here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.]

Dear Jeffrey,

Since I'm on my way back to the east coast, where I'll spend the next two and a half weeks -- watching election returns somewhere in Ohio or Florida -- I'll soon also have an opportunity to de-sharpen those re-sharpened edges. Or maybe the sharper the better?

I guess our discussion can only move forward if we somewhat abandon our initial topic (why Israel should not be mentioned as mach) and try different angles with which to entertain our Jewcy readers. You asked about Israeli government officials, so I'll start with them, and generally speaking, I think these can be divided into three main groups.

A. Those supporting Obama for a while now. They include Democratic-leaning Israeli officials -- most supporting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton's and switching to Obama, few supporting Obama from the start. These officials generally believe that a Democrat will make America stronger - hence, will benefit Israel. Some also believe that Obama will get involved in the Israel-Arab peace process and help advance it in ways that Bush could or would not. The more realistic among them think this is mostly true for the Syria-track. There's a fair number of Israelis unhappy with Bush's tendency to oppose -- or not to encourage -- an Israeli Syrian dialogue. Anyway - these pro-Obama supporters consist the smallest of the three groups I was mentioning.

B. The second group will be the one of late-comers to the Obama cause. These people, I suspect, will grow in number as long as the polls show an apparent Obama victory (if they do). It is the international manifestation of the band-wagon effect: essentially, Israelis understand that Obama is going to win, so they might as well try to see the benefits and advantages of such candidate. Talking to the members of this group is pretty funny because one can easily detect the ways with which they try to rationalize an argument they aren't comfortable with. If polls, or atmosphere somehow changes -- these people will rush back to the group where they originally belong: McCain supporters.

C. This is basically the B group without the pretense, and its rapidly shrinking (Israelis, to they credit, were always very practical in nature). It consists of people who rather have McCain as the American president and are still willing to say it.

Their arguments -- and the argument of most knowledgeable Israelis supporting the experienced battle-tested McCain over Obama -- are quite clear: they want a president who understands the need to use power, and does not entertain the illusion that with charismatic personality one can change the Middle East (related to this topic, I really recommend that people will read your Atlantic piece on McCain and the use of power). In some ways, what they fear in Obama is the repetition of Bush the democracy-promoter. It's true that most Israelis think Bush was a friendly president, but readers should realise that very few of them really bought into the lets-democratize-the-region notion. Too realistic to believe, or too racist (Ariel Sharon famously said "after all, it is Arabs we are talking about here"), or too experienced -- Israelis liked the part of Bush that was supportive of security concerns, and vehement in fighting terror, but didn't as much appreciate his desire to transform the Mideast. Not that they don't want it -- they just don't think it's possible. Not now, not this way.

Surprisingly, what some of them see in Obama is a different kind of the same naivete. How's that for a surprisingly refreshing point of view?

Now back to the original topic of this exchange: does mentioning Israel helps Obama with Israelis? it really does. If one tries to find the positive aspects to this constant attention the country is getting, it is the fact that Israelis do feel now much more comfortable with Obama than they did a year or half a year ago.

I'll leave you the benefit of starting the discussion of McCain and Israel.

Best,
Rosner

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here; Goldberg's reply to it, here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

[Note: This post is part of an ongoing dialogue between Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Shmuel Rosner of Slate on the need for U.S. national candidates to stop invoking the Jewish state every chance they get. Rosner's first letter, to which the following is a reply, can be read here.]

Dear Shmuel,

Happy New Year, first of all. It's nice to read you again; the Ha'aretz site is a barren place without you. And you seem even more blunt than usual; I suppose this has to do with your return to Israel. Your re-aliyah will inevitably re-sharpen your edges.
I'm of two minds about even having this dialogue, because I do tend to think, as you do, that Israel is mentioned far too often in presidential debates. On the other hand, who doesn't like to be the center of attention? We Jews have gotten used to this over the past 3,000 years or so.

Let me wrestle with two of your points. You write of Israelis, "The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence." I think you're a bit too harsh on your countrymen. It's natural, and inevitable, that Israelis would worry about the possibly-shifting feelings of their great benefactor. Jewish history, if nothing else, makes this natural, though I don't think this behavior is unusual at all for any country that is essentially a client state. This insecurity does have unpleasant manifestations, of course – loyalty tests, for one thing, and a weakness for victimology.

The Yad Vashem-to-Sderot Express, which all foreign dignitaries are forced to ride upon their arrival in Israel – "Look what they did to us!" meets "Look what they're doing to us!" – is a particularly unpleasant manifestation of this. Just ask Barack Obama, who would have probably enjoyed a visit to brash, positive modern Israel.
But to your main question: I think that most Jews who oppose the rise of Obama are opposing him for reasons other than Israel.

Yes, there are actual, ideologically-Republican Jews out there; and yes, I suppose there are Jews, primarily in Flatbush, who believe that John McCain will defend the Jewish claim to Greater Jerusalem (which is a terribly important cause when you live in Brooklyn, apparently) with greater fervor than would Barack Obama. But in my own experience, I would have to say that simple racism motivates much of the anti-Obama anxiety in corners of the Jewish community. I don't know what else explains it.

His positions on most matters related to Israel are indistinguishable from those of AIPAC. This anti-Obama feeling is, of course, disappointing, but not altogether astonishing. A black president with a strange name elicits the same fears among Jews in New York and Florida that it does among Protestants in West Virginia. That said, I assume there are fence-sitters out there who are comforted to learn that Obama doesn't actually hate Jews (and is, in fact, very nearly surrounded by Jews) so it does seem useful for Obama, and his surrogates, to remind Jews that he is a something of a Zionist fellow-traveler. In fact, this latest Jesse Jackson episode provides a good opening for the delivery of just such a message.

We'll get to McCain later, I hope. For now, I'm curious to hear you on what Israeli government officials actually think of Obama. Do they really believe that he is in some way hostile to their interests?

Best,
Jeff

To read Shmuel Rosner's first letter, click here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

Rosner's response to this letter will follow shortly.

Both Shmuel Rosner and Jeffrey Goldberg have written recently of the need for American national candidates to stop gibbering on about Israel. "The goal of Zionism is normalcy, Jewish normalcy," Goldberg noted last week on his Atlantic blog. "This, of course, is an oxymoron, but we can still hope. The cause is not helped when presidential candidates, well-meaning though they might be, constantly invoke the existential dangers to Israel when arguing for a) getting out of Iraq; b) staying in Iraq; c) talking to Iran; or d) bombing Iran." For his part, Rosner pointed out in a long-form essay for Slate that in the Palin-Biden debate, Israel was mentioned a total of 17 times, outstripping by far references to more pressing foreign policy concerns for the U.S. (China, Russia, Europe). It's not in either country's interest to overemphasize a relationship that, however "sacrosanct" (to borrow Barack Obama's word for it), is by no means exclusive.

Jewcy invited Goldberg and Rosner to discuss their mutual fantasy of minimal Israel chatter in an ongoing email dialogue. Below is Rosner's opening salvo; Goldberg's reply will be posted later today.

Dear Jeffrey,

I'll start by repeating the core argument I was making in Slate. It was not about the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance, or the reasons such alliance is desirable (for both countries). My complaint was about the frequency with which presidential candidates mention Israel. I think this hurts Israel because it presents is as a country that is more trouble than an asset to America. I also think that it distorts the voters' perception of American foreign policy. Israel is important, and is located in an important region. But mentioning Israel more than Chine, Russia, the European Union and its leaders (Germany, France, Britain) gives the wrong impression about the real interests and the real motives for numerous US policy decisions.

The question for this email exchange, though, is how do we make it interesting for readers. If we both agree that Israel's name should come up in the election with less frequency, the only way for us to have a debate is if we have some disagreements regarding the reasons for which we want it off the radar screen. My argument is fairly straight forward: it hurts Israel. It's not about "normalcy" (as you briefly argue in the blog item you wrote about this topic) -- it's about interests. I don't think the candidates really serve Israel's interest when they talk about it. And since both of they claim -- and I believe it to be right -- to be staunch supporters of Israel, their actions contradict their intentions. As we both know, this is probably happening mainly because of politics. The candidates think that they need to keep saying how much they love Israel in order for people --mostly Jewish -- to feel comfortable with them and to support them.

I find it to be both ignorant and insulting: most American Jews care for Israel but are not one-issue voters. They might not vote for a candidate that is openly hostile to Israel, but will hardly make the nuances of Israel-related policies the definite reason for which to vote or not vote for specific candidates. If there's a litmus test, both McCain and Obama have passed it a very long time ago. This does not mean that their different approaches to Middle East policies have no significance as far as Israel is concerned. It does mean that they can stop using Israel by way of explaining why staying/leaving Iraq is the right way to go, or why talking/bombing Iran will be the appropriate policy for the U.S. to pursue.

As I wrote in my Slate piece, I think Israelis should also grow up and stop drooling whenever a debate is moving in Israel's direction. The constant need for the husband to say how much he loves the bride does not mean the bride is lovable but rather that she lacks self-confidence. In the case of Israel, self-confidence in not just a quality that's more appealing, it is also a matter of national security. If Israelis need this constant approval, it means that they aren't sure about the US' support. If they aren't sure, their enemies might be convinced that it's really something they can further erode by pursuing more aggressive policies.

But let me ask you this Jeffrey: Is it Israel that makes Jewish voters uncomfortable about Barack Obama? you've written a lot about Obama and the Jews (as I did too), and you seem to think that something else is at play here - dare we say racism? and if that's the case, can Obama overcome such weariness by talking more about Israel? And what about McCain: can he really convince Jewish voters to vote for him by convincing them that Obama's policies will endanger Israel - or is he really going to scare Americans voters who might think that he is going to war with Iran because of Israel?

A lot to talk about, and so little time.

Best,
Shmuel

Jeffrey Goldberg's reply can be read here.

Shmuel Rosner's blog is here.

RELATED: Rosner's original piece, "Enough About Israel, Already," for Slate, and Goldberg's post at the Atlantic.

Evidently, it's not so much a political statement (their husbands are buying Obama yarmulkes) as it is a fashion trend. You didn't really care where Jennifer Aniston stood on offshore drilling in '95, did you?

[Via McBrooklyn]

As Michelle Obama continues her "make-over" tour, jumping from an appearance on The View's coffee klatch to the cover of glossy Us Weekly (story title: "Why Barack Loves Her"), it's clear that we haven't really progressed much in the past two decades. Educated, outspoken, potential first-ladies frighten Americans today as much as they did when "scary feminist" Hillary Rodham Clinton first blazed the path from the corner office to the campaign trail.

Voters are suspicious of influential spouses—period (think Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill Clinton during the primaries). Still, every election is different and this one has the special spice of race. Though Barack Obama is the first black candidate on a major party ticket, he has one advantage that his wife does not—he's the bi-racial son of an African immigrant, while she is the daughter of African-American parents descended from slaves. And research demonstrates that white people tend to favor black immigrants over African Americans whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.

Prominent researchers like Nancy Foner, George Fredrickson, and Mary Waters, who study the integration patterns of black immigrants, have observed that white people seem more at ease with black immigrants than they do with other African Americans. Their research notes that black immigrants are usually described as "more polite, less hostile, more solicitous, and easier to get along with." Some of this is likely due to real cultural or socioeconomic differences (for example, Africans who immigrate to the U.S. tend to be highly educated, on average). However, there's no getting around the fact that we live in a country with a profound history of racial turmoil and that prejudice against African Americans persists in contemporary society.

The "preference" for black immigrants over other African Americans is perhaps most pronounced on our nation's prestigious college campuses, where a controversial debate has erupted about the overrepresentation of black students from immigrant backgrounds (as opposed to those whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years). In the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Education, researchers at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania published findings from surveys given to 1,051 black freshmen at 28 selective colleges. They found that 27 percent of African-American students were first or second generation immigrants, which is more than double the national average for all blacks ages 18-19. The percentage of immigrants was even more pronounced at the four Ivy League schools included in this study (Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania), where 41 percent of students were first or second generation immigrants. These numbers do not include international students who identify as black.

Why are black immigrants so overrepresented on selective campuses? While it's true that black immigrants are more likely to have higher grades and test scores (as I noted, their parents tend to be more educated), the authors of the study also conclude that admissions officers may be subconsciously selecting applicants with the "sociable qualities" that they more readily perceive in immigrants over other African-American students. We can't be certain of the degree to which this bias may play a role in college admissions decisions, but it's also hard to ignore previous research that demonstrates that white people find black immigrants more "likeable."

In researching my book, Fat Envelope Frenzy, I followed five different students navigating the selective college admissions process. One of the students was Ethiopian-American, grappling with the implications of his heritage on affirmative action policies. He often talked about how he couldn't relate to the other African-American students at his Memphis high school, but he also emphasized that he didn't think that race was such a big deal. "When was the last time someone was awarded a Nobel Prize because of their race?" he once asked me, rhetorically.

If only it were that simple. It would be nice if science was objective, but the ugly truth is that scientists have contributed to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and every other possible prejudice throughout history. Sure, no one is given a Nobel Prize simply because they are white, black or brown. But that didn't stop James Watson, who won the Nobel for his work on DNA, from claiming that black people are "less intelligent" than white people just last year.

Though Barack Obama has suffered his fair share of background-based biased attacks (He's a Muslim! He hates Jews! He'll let Iran nuke Israel!), until the Jeremiah Wright hullabaloo, he was thought of as "not black" or "not black enough." Even with her two Ivy League degrees and Jackie O hair-do, there was never that kind of debate over Michelle's racial identity. The barely restrained racism directed at her in the press is practically old news, from the covert conspiracy theories of "respectable" writers like Christopher Hitchens—who basically blamed Michelle for the Wright controversy because she wrote her 1985 Princeton undergraduate thesis about "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community"—to the total tackiness of Fox News referring to her as Barack's "baby mama."

With her South Side upbringing and dark complexion, Michelle is "black enough"—unlike her husband—and maybe that's part of the reason that she isn't as popular.

John McCain had better watch his back: There's a late entrant into the race for the Republican nomination, and what he lacks in delegates, he'll make up for in spoken word versions of popular songs:

Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings and The Art of the Possible has joined the conversation on neoconservatism and its future. He's skeptical about my claim that "[t]he neocons are in a decidedly weak position" and risk becoming marginalized in the likely event of a McCain defeat in November. And rightly so; what I should have said is that the neoconservatives are now in a weaker position than at any prior point in the history of their movement, which—to be fair—isn't the equivalent of being on the brink of dissolution. Jim ably outlines the reasons their total demise is not likely, which fall into roughly three groupings:

1. The neoconservatives' ample structural and tactical advantages within the Republican party;
   
2. The woeful disarray of the internal opposition—which seems more interested at the moment in tearing itself to pieces through mutual recriminations and excommunications than in building a coalition to regain control of the GOP;
   
3. The fact that every country has and always will have a nationalist party, and that the neoconservatives have made their beliefs the default American nationalism.

Unless Barack Obama really is the messiah, it stands to reason that regardless of what happens in November, theNot This Time neoconservatives will remain solidly in power in the Republican party for the foreseeable future, and will be poised to return to government in the event of either domestic or foreign misfortune.

To see why that assumption might nevertheless be wrong, let's make some careful discriminations.

First of all, retaining control of a defeated GOP is not equivalent to retaining a position next-in-line to control of government. Suppose that Obama and the Democrats win the presidential election convincingly and reduce the Republican congressional delegation to a rump caucus of the deep south and sun belt. In such a scenario, control of the GOP may be worth nothing or less than nothing.

Two-party systems are less stable than a cursory glance at their history suggests; the reason the same two parties have competed for control of the government for the last 150 years is because a series of distinct and incompatible institutions have succeeded each other in using the names "Democrats" and "Republicans." The Liberal Party of Britain, which under Gladstone was the party of the Empire and of the sun never setting, held a strong national majority just before WWI. The Liberals then committed Britain to a war that destroyed its empire, at the conclusion of which they were virtually wiped out and relegated to a small handful of seats in Parliament, persisting tenuously and irrelevantly in a kind of unlife for decades until they were absorbed by a splinter faction of Labour. So there is precedent for major parties, even major imperialist parties, to go belly up through democratic means. This is not to suggest that the Republican party itself is in danger of going out of business, but rather that it could be reduced to an ineffectual minority for the indefinite future (the demographic dynamics, in addition to everything else, look really bad for them), in which time there would potentially be space for some other party to become the Second Party. Moreover, if the Republican defeat makes the GOP sufficiently small, it could put the neocons on roughly even terms with factions antagonistic to them, and inspire allied factions (the anti-tax crowd, the Evangelicals, etc.) to break their tactical alignment with the neocons, since the downside of the social conservatives, Chamber of Commerce Bolsheviks, and the rest not caring enough about foreign policy to intervene in any way in what the neocons do, is that they have no incentive to maintain any cooperation once they no longer profit from doing so.

Second, let's explore what is meant by 'neoconservatism' and who the 'neocons' are. It's a tricky task, trickier than it has any right to be, not least because neoconservatives rarely use the term, and even then use it more frequently to insinuate that their opponents are conspiratorial anti-semites than to say anything informative about it, and also because neoconservatism is consciously constructed by its adherents to resist straightforward definition. So it's much easier to get a handle on what it is by defining it recursively, to borrow a concept from math.

Try this: Begin with the paradigmatic examples of contemporary neoconservatives— you're looking for surnames like "Kristol," "Kagan," and "Podhoretz" here; take the rank and file scriveners of the movement, like some of the writers at National Review, a larger proportion of Weekly Standard contributors, and virtually everyone who writes for Commentary; and finally use induction to fill in the cluster of beliefs that links the movement's archetypes to its ordinary membership. The first thing to notice is that the cluster of core neoconservative beliefs are quite few in number and consist largely in negations of various liberal norms, e.g.:

• war is only justified under atypical and extreme circumstances when all other options are demonstrably non-viable;
  
• diplomacy is the first tool of foreign policy with adversarial states and is a deliberative process with no predetermined outcome;
  
• rules of ethical conduct are universal and exceptions to them only arise in exceptional circumstances, not out of some individual or country's pretensions to an exceptional identity;
  
• resources are scarce (not uniquely liberal but still an important proposition that neoconservatism, as practiced by neoconservatives, effectively denies).

Those few beliefs, however, trade on thick, idiosyncratic concepts like "national will," which are imported from the philosophical canon but warped in transit and don't actually correspond to anything within it.

Minimal reflection on these points should demonstrate the absurdity of Robert Kagan's identification of neoconservatism with the whole of the internationalist tradition, in turn identified as the entire history of non-isolationist thought on foreign affairs. (Compare: Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes were both capitalists.) Because neoconservatism comprises negations of basic liberal norms, it fundamentally is not compatible with liberal internationalism. Yet neither is it immediately identifiable with just any sort of expansionist illiberal nationalism, because the thickness and idiosyncrasies of its concepts make it a poor fit—ultimately, an impossible fit, because it's a cosmopolitan belief system (albeit in a perverse way), and thus eschews various concepts of blood and soil that belong, in American political history, to the paleo tradition.

In other words, neoconservatism is a very small, idiosyncratic movement; and it is entirely a movement of intellectuals. There is no neoconservative constituency within the body of a democratic polity (nor can there be—as the Converse studies show, "mass publics" cannot, in practice, comprehend ideology at anything approaching the level of sophistication a genuine commitment to neoconservatism requires). This is quite unlike ideologies such as communism, libertarianism, populism, welfare liberalism, social conservatism, even single-issue dogmatic opposition to taxes; i.e., ideologies composed first and foremost of publicly accessible beliefs with immediate mass appeal. Indeed, the neoconservative universe is so small that it excludes individuals who at least at one time were prominently identified with the movement, like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Francis Fukuyama. (What happened? The meaning of 'neoconservatism,' recursively defined by the beliefs of the neoconservatives, changed.)

Even within the movement, there is a detectable two-tiered hierarchy, a division between its theorists and its missionaries (which is true of any ideology). Hence someone like Kagan, Lawrence Kaplan, or even Paul Wolfowitz—informed, reflective thinkers, however one evaluates their thinking—is a different sort of neocon from the crew that blogs for Commentary, whose political philosophy, from what I can glean through my RSS feed, consists entirely in using and misusing words they don't know, alongside occasional sops to evolution denialism and global warming denialism, in the service of making their marginal contribution to destabilizing the globe and instigating wars. Which is to say that the true extension of robust neoconservative thought (i.e., excluding conceptually-confused, true-only-if-Gettierized propaganda) is even smaller than simple recursion suggests.

Neoconservatism is not unique for being an exclusively elite movement with limited membership. The same is true of foreign policy realism, a venerable technocratic system of belief, and there are any number of further examples (at least one for every specialized technical doctrine regarding a policy question or family of policy questions). It's hardly insidious in and of itself that neoconservatism, like realism but unlike communism and social conservatism, is strictly an intellectual movement—which is nothing but an instance of some of the Converse findings. Rather, it's just a fact that neoconservatism cannot, under any practically relevant circumstances, be a mass ideology. (What does distinguish it from other non-mass belief systems is the unusual extent to which, thanks to the Straussian influence, its adherents consciously revel in its public inaccessibility.) So the only way for it to be a successful movement on a large scale is by playing certain functional roles in a genuine mass ideology.

That's how neoconservatism provides the content of contemporary American nationalism. Its rejection of liberal norms, its belligerence, and especially its exceptionalism make it a suitable candidate for performing the function of giving nationalism a concrete platform to adhere to. But it's not the only suitable candidate for that role, and not even necessarily the most natural candidate, since it is at root a cosmopolitan ideology (though David Gelernter is working on fixing that). Hence Jim's point that there will always be nationalism wherever there's a nation is well-taken, but doesn't prejudice things in favor of neoconservatism retaining its dominant position. True blood and soil volkism can play the same role without importing anything from neoconservatism, though the result of that wouldn't exactly be an improvement on present circumstances.

On the other hand, various strains of paleoconservatism—which is much closer to being a mass ideology than neo-ism— especially the 'postmodern conservatism' James Poulos has been cultivating, reject elements of liberalism and provide grounds for national (or regional, or local) exceptionalism that are not bloodthirsty in either intent or effect. Likewise, the reformist conservatism of, say, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam among others (Ramesh Ponnuru comes to mind as well), provides a motivation for grand unifying national projects and for fostering a spirit of special national purpose that has nothing to do with war. Which is to say that there are an array of candidate alternatives to neoconservatism for playing the role neoconservatism presently plays in American nationalism; and if any of them were to supersede neoconservatism as the intellectual movement that fills in the content of ineradicable non-liberal mass ideologies, the world would be a better, less violent place. Not necessarily because any of these alternatives is overwhelmingly compelling (none ultimately compelling to me; I'm a non-conservative cheering them along from the sidelines), but because making the world a better place relative to what neoconservatism has done is a fairly low bar to clear.

All of which is, I hope, an informative way of saying that Jim is right about point 1) that neocons are in a much stronger position structurally, tactically, and temperamentally than their GOP opponents and point 2) that the Republican factions opposed to the neocons are horrendously incompetent at the basic tasks of political organizing and too invested in internecine wars of purity, yet simultaneously too compromised by associations that the public, fairly or not, judges to be electoral non-starters, to mount a credible challenge to the neocons at this moment. Jim's point 3), however—that neoconservatism = American nationalism = the Republican party view writ large—comes apart on close scrutiny of what neoconservatism is. If it's just a catch-all for any illiberal, aggressive, exceptionalist theory of international relations, then it is indeed firmly ensconced not only in the Republican party but in America as a whole; but the perpetuation of neoconservatism so understood is therefore compatible with the fall and marginalization of the actual power players and centers of neoconservatism.

Alternatively, if neoconservatism is the ideology describable by recursion on the beliefs (sincere beliefs, that is, not doublethink or Straussian exoteric deceit) of Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, John Bolton, Norman Podhoretz, Joe Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., then all that prejudices our politics in favor of neoconservatism are the movement's comparative strengths, and the comparative weaknesses of internal opposition to it within the GOP. But the neocons' strengths and their Republican opponents' weaknesses are contingent qualities. The balance of power could easily tilt the other way under different circumstances. That fact provides a rationale, the only rationale I can think of at this late date, for continuing to identify as a Republican and participate in the party's internal debates, namely helping some congenial wing of the paleocons or the burgeoning reformists (I suspect that libertarian desertion of the party is too far advanced at this point for the libertarians to play a meaningful role in such disputes anymore) take control of the party's foreign policy apparatus from the neoconservatives. That would be, as my people say, תיקון עולם.

For these same reasons, ultimately, I don't share Jim's pessimism. Nationalism may be ineradicable without the eradication of the state, but that doesn't mean it's static and impossible to influence. In particular, it doesn't always have to be what it is now; in fact, it's palpably less confident, aggressive, and smothering (though perhaps by the same token more desperate) than it was even four years ago. As Ezra Klein perceptively noted a while back, the shift in the musical backdrop for this election compared to the last one is a telling analogue to the clearer air this year.

In their attempt to maintain a grip on power, the neoconservatives will of course, as Jim writes, deploy a Dolchstoßlegende; but the move isn't guaranteed to work, and in this case, the odds may well be against it, because the targets of the backstabbing allegation wouldn't just be sinister unnamed internal aliens, but the vast majority of Americans. Likewise, Jim lists the neocons' energetic commitment to foreign policy, which far outstrips that of any other GOP factions, as one of their key strengths. Not only that, but the narrowness of their agenda—their sublime indifference, at least in outward expression, to the outcome of key disputes in the party over domestic and social policy (they'd just go with the winning side in the end)—allowed them to leverage a dominant position in the party's foreign policy apparatus. What happens, though, if a monomanical dedication to a narrow foreign policy agenda becomes a political weakness?

In other words, what if—what if?—a new administration ends the war; abruptly puts a stop to its predecessor's crude and badly misplaced Hegelian language of world-historical conflicts (and also its predecessor's war crimes); quietly wages the police campaign that should have begun years ago to put al Qaeda out of business, while delivering free trade, investment in energy development, and international markets to Iran in exchange for liberalizing reforms in the society and curtailment of nuclear research; restores comprehensive arms control and establishes a comprehensive non-proliferation framework; and devotes the bulk of its attention to economic, environmental, good government, and energy supply reforms? What if that new administration comes to power by exclaiming—again and again and again and again—the need to "end the mindset that got us into war"?

What if that new administration comes to power on the strength of a resounding victory over the most prominent and vociferous exponent of neoconservatism in American political life? Without the the leader of the free world and his ministers sternly and ominously preaching Apocalypse from the West Wing every day, without the TV issuing color-coded directives about when to become terrified, with the nation's attention finally turned away from fighting World War ℵ₀, who will be there to listen to or care about the lie that Glorious Triumph was ordained to happen 6 months after t (where t=whatever time it is now)? Who will listen or care, apart from anti-warriors on both the right and left who won't have forgotten what the weasels did to our Constitution, to 4000 of our people, and hundreds of thousands of another country's people?

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but the neocons can be defeated and marginalized, either by internal opponents within the GOP taking control, or else, if they can't be dislodged from their perch in the party, then by marginalizing the party itself. (What would a marginalized neoconservative movement look like? That it would be riven by internecine fighting is a near given, but beyond that the example of the realists is instructive. Like the neocons, the realists had no actual constituency; once the neocons superseded them as the party's technocratic elite, the realists were reduced to a small cohort of living fossils, many of whom are happy to align themselves with the neocons for a whiff of power. The moral is that there is no total redemption, and that crowd in particular is as resilient as zombies. Given enough time, they may rehabilitate themselves. But any period in which they are irrelevant and ignored is reason to cheer.)

The circumstances on the ground after a McCain defeat, especially a convincing McCain defeat, will be unlike anything the neoconservative movement has experienced. The trajectory of their prominence and influence has been uniformly upwards from the foundation of their movement, but not until this administration became a war presidency—not even under Ronald Reagan, whose greatest triumphs were knowing when to cut losses in Lebanon, and peacefully winding down the Cold War through a combination of diplomacy and spending, for which, recall, the neocons thanked him with a little Dolchstoßlegende (of course)—did they get to wield true power and put their theory into practice. We all know the rest.

Had they been less adroit in forming coalitions and accumulating power, had the realists been more alert to the threat to their position, had the neocons not been so fluent in adopting the language of humanitarian interventionism to sweet-talk the liberal hawks who ultimately eviscerated the opposition to the war preemptively (though that's another story); had they, in short, been less successful as a party-building movement, they might never have gotten to hold the reins of power. Now, thanks to their own catastrophic success, to borrow a phrase, we can clean up their toxic influence on our democracy. Maybe we won't succeed, but for the first time in a long time, we can succeed, not just at putting the crooks out of business, but at bankrupting the ideology that fueled the crimes. Yes, we can.

Status update: Carla Sosenko is fascinated by the unwitting political discourse of Facebook status updates.

We’ve had a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate for less than 48 hours, and Anne L. Fritz is not happy. I haven’t seen Anne in months, but I know she’s pissed because her Facebook status update told me so:Facebook: reach out and touch someone

Anne L. Fritz says 16 out of 100 women in the Senate, 76 women out of 435 Members of Congress and 0 women out of 43 presidents is no reason to celebrate.

Bari Cayne isn’t happy either, but for different reasons:

Bari Cayne can't believe the Democrats just lost another eight years in the White House.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. For example:

Alyse Livingston is feeling the change in the air. It's about time.

The Facebook status update has always been a way to clue in your friends (and peripheral friends and frenemies and sometime hookups and exes) to your (arguably) notable comings and going. Usually they’re of the basic variety (Jane Doe is daydreaming), and often they wink at cultural phenomenons in a hipstery (i.e. snarky) way or shamelessly self-promote. But something funny happened on the way to the election: Status updates got serious.

Or at least more civic-minded. Out of my 166 friends (OMG, is that an acceptable amount? Too low? When did admitting your number of Facebook friends start to feel like copping to your number of sexual partners?), five were related to the other night’s election events alone. Add to that a handful of oblique and/or vague update references that *could* be about the election. (I’d need someone smarter than I or the update author to know for sure.) My own status just days ago (even though I used to be a Hillary girl) said, “GObama, go!” (So very clever.)

One of today’s updates was from my friend Joe, who had the luck (or misfortune) of winding up directly below Anne. Looking at the juxtaposed updates made it hard not to think of my friends as sparring:

Joe Tirella thinks today is a great day for America.

As in, “Joe Tirella, unlike Anne L. Fritz, thinks we have plenty of reasons to celebrate.”

Of course, that’s not what he meant. In fact, unless Joe, who is not connected to Anne on Facebook, were scouring my friend list, he wouldn’t even know about Anne’s pro-Hillary leanings, or about Anne’s existence, for that matter.

Meanwhile, Kathy Erich Dowd is shocked (and relieved) the Democratic primary is finally over!

I kind of feel the same. But:

Carla Sosenko would vote for any Democrat over right-wing establishmentarian gasbag McCain any day.

I better go update my profile.

On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton gathered her supporters in a literal concrete bunker several stories beneath the surface of the earth, with walls thick enough to block out all cellular reception and no TV monitors or any other medium of communication with the outside world. There, amid cheers of "Denver! Denver!" she congratulated her friend Senator Obama for having run a sporting race, proclaimed herself the rightful victor, and appealed to Americans young and old to pawn their video games and withdraw from their pension accounts (respectively) in order to keep her historic campaign squarely on track to the White House. Yet by the following evening, her aides announced the suspension of her campaign and her endorsement of Barack Obama.

!Hillary Siempre! ¡Venceremos! What transpired in those fewer-than-24 hours? Only the most audacious squeeze play of Bill and Hillary Clinton's political careers, and --- because of its spectacular failure --- the last.

Clinton's Tuesday night pseudo-victory speech was an attempt to extort concessions from the Obama campaign and the Democratic party, including a right of first refusal to the vice-presidential nomination, a pledge not to put any other woman on the ticket, and an indefinite grace period in which Clinton would keep her campaign formally intact and concede nothing.

The threat, in case her demands were not met, was clear: Clinton might not be able to win, but she could undermine the legitimacy of Obama's nomination, whip her supporters into a frenzy, and ensure John McCain's election. To make clear her assessment of the balance of power in the party and put the screws to Obama and the DNC, she recruited, of all people, Bob Johnson (yes, that Bob Johnson) and Lanny Davis (yes, that Lanny Davis) to attempt to seize control of Obama's vice-presidential selection, and tried to mobilize support on Capitol Hill to bolster that coup.

The Clintons' power play failed because --- like Gorbachev, Honecker, and Ceauşescu before them --- they grossly miscalculated both the breadth and depth of their power. On Wednesday, Ed Rendell, whose machine delivered Pennsylvania to Clinton, told NY1 that "[t]here’s no bargaining...You don't bargain with the Presidential nominee. Even if you're Hillary Clinton and you have 18 million votes, you don't bargain." Maxine Waters flipped her support to Obama, while Charlie Rangel announced that "[u]nless she has some good reasons-- which I can’t think of-- I really think we ought to get on with endorsements [of Obama]." Hilary Rosen, one of Clinton's chief backers among Democratic insiders, switched to Obama and rebuked Clinton in sharp and unequivocal terms: "I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat." That's what happened publicly. Just imagine what her remaining supporters told her in private as they scurried from a sinking ship.

On its own terms, the Clintons' last, failed power play is a fascinating story of cloak-and-dagger politics, but its real importance is what it portends for the campaign going forward. Clinton herself has not yet come to terms with the significance of the dissolution of her core of support; the AP reports that she is "exploring options to retain her delegates." MoDo reports that she "has told some Democrats recently that she wanted Obama to agree to allow a roll call vote...so that the delegates of states she won would cast the first ballot for her at the convention," apparently unaware, as the Economist puts it, that "[t]he convention is supposed to be a coronation, in this case of Mr Obama. It loses some of its impact if nearly half the states stand up and say they proudly support the next president of the United States...Hillary Clinton." In other words, she still thinks she can dictate terms.

If Obama takes the bait --- fortunately, the indications are that he will not --- and centers his strategy on placating the Harriet Christians of the world rather than expanding his appeal to independents and Republicans, he'll hand John McCain his best shot of winning.

How bad was John McCain's speech in New Orleans Tuesday night? Here are some reviews:

(1) [T]his speech is a mash and tough to digest. You have to get through the self-congratulatory praise of independence and commander-in-chief pose....

(2) McCain’s speeches don’t have to sound this bad, and don’t always sound this bad.

(3) McCain's speech was creaky, ungracious, and unnecessary.

(4) [H]is refrain punctuated with a forced smile just isn't working.

(5) McCain's delivery deadens [the speech] somehow.

(6) As a performance, it's a little painful.

(7) Question: Would you rather: a) watch last night's McCain speech? Or b) be waterboarded?

The New McCain Aesthetic: Seasickness Okay, but those are all lefty partisans, right? Actually, it's all from National Review. Rolling Stone's take is pitch-perfect: "It's like watching the out-takes from an Andy Rooney kvetch."

McCain's stilted delivery, unfortunately nasal timbre, and creepy grin are problems beyond his campaign's control, but other problems are entirely unforced. His handlers seem unwilling to restrain their candidates' obvious loathing of his opponent and unable to distinguish between a clear, incisive point and incessant, petty sneering -- the kind that's incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't closely follow political inside baseball. Both these campaign flaws make McCain deeply and viscerally unappealing. (The toxic influence of Michael Goldfarb already taking hold?)

And their choice of visual presentation is simply inexplicable. Matthew Yglesias notes "he's shifted his aesthetic from his old black and white 'fascist' aesthetic [see here] to a new green and white Islamofascist aesthetic [see right]." Okay, that's unfair, but a campaign in 2008 that would deliberately choose anything other than a red, white, and (especially) blue color palette clearly has screws loose.

But the McCain campaign's worst decision of all was to try to have their guy deliver their awful speech awfully in front of a tiny audience, minutes before this happened:

The review of Obama's speech from National Review went like this: "Aesthetically, politically, rhetorically etc, it boiled down to Godzilla versus Bambi. And, amazingly enough, McCain was Bambi." And here's their criticism: "U2's 'Beautiful Day'... is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?" In other words, it's not going to be a close election.

The Republican party seems to think that the crucial swing voter in this election will be Apollo Braun. How else to explain their decision to abandon anything resembling a traditional political strategy --- including their recent instant classics of fearmongering --- in favor of a months-long extended violation of Godwin's Law at once hysterical in its desperation and overreach, and nearly impenetrably byzantine in its content. Apart from a certain minority of ignorant American Jews afraid of their own shadow, it's difficult to imagine any undecided voters who are on the right wavelength to pick up such rarefied dog-whistling.

George W. Bush has been in Israel this week to take part in 60th anniversaryGeorge Bush: "If my opponents are so smart, how come they're like Hitler? Riddle me that, Harvard." celebrations, and had a chance to address the Knesset earlier today. Rather than say anything remotely germane, he decided instead to denounce an unnamed American senator who reacted to the Nazi invasion of Poland by exclaiming, "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." The reference was to Sen. William Borah (R - ID), who left office in January 1940. Bush's press flack, Dana Perino, assured the press that any apparent comparison to another senator from a state starting with "I" is purely coincidental; but John McCain (and his pet soothsayer Joe Lieberman, natch) missed the memo about not unveiling veiled slanders. Hence he piled on:

If Senator Obama wants to sit down across the table from the leader of a country that calls Israel a stinking corpse, and comes to New York and says they're gonna, quote, "wipe Israel off the map," what is it that he wants to talk about? What is it that he wants to talk about with him?

Hmm. That is a real poser of a riddle, but let me take a crack at it. Obama would want to talk to Iranian leaders (not necessarily Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wields very little actual power) about negotiating Iran out of pursuing nuclear weapons, about nuclear non-proliferation generally, the stability of the Iraqi state, a resolution to the Kurdish national question, Lebanese sovereignty, shutting down anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite terrorist networks, opening up the Iranian economy to American goods and vice versa, trade and allocation of petroleum resources, relaxation of infringements of the rights of women and religious minorities, integrating Iran into western political institutions, setting up student exchange programs, and of course, Israeli security.

Part of the reason Obama would talk to Iran about all the foregoing is that George W. Bush --- unlike other American presidents since the fall of the Shah, who found uses for back-channels to Iran other than flipping them off --- has abdicated his responsibility. Bush's grounds for his foreign policy malfeasance is his belief that it's futile at best, Chamberlinian appeasement at worst, to talk to "terrorists and radicals" (note the elision of an important distinction) unless you can "persuade them they have been wrong all along." Which is a nice encapsulation of many of Bush and McCain's strategic blinders. It is possible to talk productively with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or the actual leadership of Iran) --- for example, by negotiating a framework for Iraqi stability --- without convincing him that Israel is not, in fact, a stinking corpse. It's even possible to talk to Iran about curtailing their support of Hezbollah --- say, by offering something in return, perhaps something that could be revoked if the Iranians break the agreement --- without deciding one way or another whether Israel is a stinking corpse. Believe it or not, it's even possible to conduct diplomacy with Iran without giving away the Sudetenland.

Sure, it may sound nuts, or worse, like Chamberlain, to conceive of diplomacy as an exercise in anything other than demanding that other states bow to our will or else, but hey, since that approach hasn't worked out perfectly, maybe we should roll the dice.

Not if McCain has his way. Negotiations with Iran, he claims, entail "enhanc[ing] the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists and is directly responsible for the deaths of brave young Americans"; so arguing for such negotiations demonstrates a lack of "the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation's security."

So at least we know what strategic concept is McCain's top priority --- prestige --- but it's a concept unlike anything recognizable in the history of political or diplomatic history. It has nothing to do with the GDP of Iran, nothing to do with its International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House ratings, nothing to do with the esteem in which anyone on earth holds Iran, nothing to do with its technological capabilities, and nothing to do with its military, political, and economic power. It can't have anything to do with any of them, since talking to Iranian leaders can't enhance any of them.

Still, we should probably trust in John McCain's knowledge, experience, background, and most importantly, his direct access to the Platonic form of prestige. After all, if pre-empting any enhancement of Iran's prestige weren't a matter of existential importance, then John McCain's monomaniacal pursuit of policies guaranteed to augment Iran's actual power and diplomatic clout, let alone his fatuous comparisons of anyone who stands in his way to Neville Chamberlain, would be alarming, inexcusable, and disgraceful, and probably render him unfit for the presidency.

For those who are struck by the dangerously corrosive left-wing secularMike Huckabee: Is this man part of John McCain's "Christian problem"? cosmopolitanism inherent in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim fifth columnist who must be stopped at all costs, Michael Farris offers solace. A former Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and current Chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a private college for Christian home-schoolers (fully accredited as of April 2007!), Farris has a large following among Virginia Evangelicals. And in that community, Bob Novak reports, Farris is promoting "the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency," in rejection of John McCain and the GOP.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to Novak's sources, Mike Huckabee is secretly in league with Farris and other elements of the Christian "bitter end opposition" hoping to sabotage McCain's candidacy. How will they do that? So far, it's unclear. And with just five months and change left until the election, they'd better figure out a plan soon, if they're going to manage to call down the Obama-plague upon the heads of the wicked (it's mentioned in Revelation, somewhere between the fifth and sixth trumpets, IIRC.)

Not to cast any aspersions on Novak's sources, but WTF? As Ross Douthat notes, the idea that Huckabee --- who you may remember from a few months back as not only an amiable sweetheart with an occasional retrograde view, not only a loyal Republican soldier, but also the eager president of the John McCain fan club --- is furtively plotting McCain's demise, doesn't pass the laugh test. But worse than that, does an Evangelical anti-McCain vanguard even make any theological sense? Either McCain is the closet liberal abortion-and-spic-lovin' traitor his enemies on the right make him out to be, or he isn't. Either way, vote for McCain. That provides a hedge just in case he stops what another Republican bitter-ender has called the "genocide [of] the wombs" of American women (at least as effectively as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), and otherwise, McCain offers almost the same presidency-as-biblical-plague value as Obama.

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:

So: Unfortunately I still don't get it. Maybe the McCain line between legitimacy and illegitimacy looks incredible to you, too, perhaps even evidence of a candidate having lost his bearings in pursuit of the presidency, but that just goes to show that you and I need to study the Episcopal School Code of Honor a little harder.

Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the nation and will play an increasingly decisive role in elections for the foreseeable future. George Bush got re-elected in 2004 by pulling off an eighteen point swing in the Latino vote versus 2000. Hence Republicans should get down on their star-spangled knees to give thanks that their party stumbled, with one hilarious pratfall after another, into nominating John McCain. He's not just the only Republican candidate with even an outside shot of winning this year's election. He's the only one not emphatically determined to reduce the GOP to a rump Anglo regional party of the old Confederacy.

Juan McCain's Shocking Plan Revealed: ¡Aztlán o muerte! ¡No a la rendición! So while the eyes of the nation were fixed on the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic primaries, McCain used the occasion of Cinco de Mayo to quietly step up his outreach to Latino voters, launching a Spanish-language version of his website featuring endorsement spots en español (naturalmente) from several prominent Mas Canosistas, and agreeing to speak at the upcoming La Raza conference. That's the right thing to do on the merits, bodes well for McCain administration immigration policy (i.e., being for it), and strikes a blow against racism and xenophobia. Also, it's the smart thing to do politically, not just for this election and for McCain personally, but for the long-term viability of his party.

Naturally, paranoid psychopaths on right alternate between thinking McCain is an unwitting dupe of a nefarious plot to reverse the outcome of the Mexican war, and thinking he's personally scheming to force-teach Wetback speech to every American, the better to understand landscaping and fruit-picking orders from our new greasy mustachioed overlords.

Can I give a word of advice to my Republican friends? The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is quite secure, I promise. If somebody somewhere on the internet says otherwise, this is one of those rare cases where somebody somewhere on the internet is wrong. What's more, however impeccable Michelle Malkin's credentials on the urgent need to deport all Arabs and put the Mexicans in concentration camps (or is that the other way around?), she doesn't have any actual proof that John McCain is the Manchurian candidate of the conspiracy to restore the Aztec empire, just a lot of craziness and projection. As McCain might put it, if we've been occupying Aztlan for a hundred years with no American casualties, why stop now?

Far from being a Mexican secret agent, McCain is the best thing that could have happened to you. True, he may not really care about your domestic agenda one way or the other. But as long as you're willing to keep supporting his vision of an enduring peace built on a character-building Hobbesian war of all against all freedom, he'll give you young, healthy, virile supreme court justices who'll snip whichever rights you don't approve of out of the Constitution (unlike those liberal pussies Scalia and Thomas); he'll mortgage your great-grandchildren's houses to  sustain the Bush administration's explosion of government size and scope; hell, he'll even torture some evil-doers. All you have to put up with is just a little salsa caliente rhythm in the step of strawberry-pickers 2000 miles from your house.

The surprising, spectacular, and deeply encouraging failure of populism to move Democratic primary voters is only part of the story of the long overdue demise of the Clinton dynasty in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday night. Just as decisive, if not moreso, was the near-total collapse of Hillary Clinton's support among African-Americans.

I'm not talking about the familiar collapse of Clinton's black support after Barack Obama proved himself to be a viable mainstream presidential candidate by winning the lily-white Iowa caucuses. A second mass exodus of black voters away from Hillary Clinton made Indiana a statistical push, fattened Obama's margins enough to completely wipe-out Clinton's pyrrhic, pointless victory in Pennsylvania, and broke down the wall of bullshit sustaining the idea that the Democratic primary didn't end in February.

After Obama's win in Iowa, her surrogates' public musings about Obama's possible history of crack dealing, and Bill Clinton's now infamous trashing of the Palmetto State as a consolation prize for the you-know-whats, Hillary Clinton still managed to pull in about one fifth of the black vote in South Carolina. Yet from one Carolina primary to the other, roughly two thirds of Clinton's remaining black support dissolved, only slightly less steep a drop, proportionally, than her fall from this October poll in which she actually led Obama in black support, to the South Carolina exit poll. If she had maintained her South Carolina performance among blacks on Super Tuesday, Potomac Tuesday, Super Tuesday II, and this past tuesday, the net shift would have been more than 500,000 popular votes --- enough to shrink Obama's popular vote lead to near parity, and perhaps take the lead on not terribly extravagant assumptions about non-black liberals who were turned off by the Clinton tactics.

The African-American Vote: Between the CarolinasThe handy chart to the right tells the story graphically. (I've explained my methodology below.) Clinton's share of the black vote declined by about one sixth between South Carolina and Super Tuesday --- a period when national polling showed Obama's support rising across all demographics, and Clinton's falling --- and declined a bit more than another fifth between Super Tuesday and the Potomac primaries at the peak of Obamamania, when (again) all his numbers were improving and hers were going in the other direction. When either economic and demographic factors or Plagiarismgate, Goolsbeegate, and various other pseudo-scandals broke Obama's winning streak in Ohio and Texas, Clinton's black support rose slightly (by about one sixth) --- just like her white and brown support.

Then the Wrightmare struck, a thousand innumerate pundits were launched on a quest to prove that Obama's candidacy was undone before the slightest credible evidence emerged to support their case (they were stunningly wrong, as we now know), and Clinton was only too happy to embrace a wild long-shot electoral strategy of trying to stoke white resentment against a strange, dark, foreign, religiously suspect crypto-Communist who hangs out with sundry terrorists when not spewing elitist contempt for good, decent, ordinary folk. And what happened to Clinton's black support? It plummeted by a catastrophic 44.6 percent between the bookends of the Wrightmare (and nearly a full fifth just between Pennsylvania and Indy/NC), to the point where Hillary Clinton can barely attract half the level of black support of George Allen in his 2006 senate campaign (8.2 percent versus 15). Repeat: barely half the black support of George "Let's welcome 'Macaca' here to the real world of Virginia" Allen. All the while Obama's black support rose.

It's sort of incredible that this needs to be said, but future aspiring presidents, observe the ruins of the House of Clinton and take note: If you want to be the Democratic party's nominee, you will need some black votes, and 0 percent is worse than 5, which is worse than 10, which is worse than 20. So avoid basing your campaign on the argument that your party's most loyal constituents are worthless. They will (eventually) notice.

* * *

How I crunched the numbers: South Carolina is taken as a theoretical starting point, representing the performance among black voters Clinton could have managed even after the emergence of an electable black presidential candidate and her campaign's tactical decision to royally piss off a lot of black people. I track Clinton and Obama's subsequent performance on the four multiple-primary nights since South Carolina --- Super Tuesday, the Potomac Primary, Texas and Ohio, and Indiana and North Carolina --- by calculating the total number of votes cast by African-Americans on each election day and the share of the aggregate African-American vote each candidate received (that way, e.g., Obama's 86 percent in Delaware, 66 percent in Massachusetts, and 61 percent in New York, are weighted to reflected the tiny, medium, and huge populations of each state; for similar reasons as well as the distorting effects of political machines in individual states, I treat single-state primary days as statistical noise and ignore them). Figures are generated from the Real Clear Politics state voting totals and CNN's exit poll estimates of black turnout and vote shares. No caucuses were included since primary and caucus voting pools are incommensurate and too few caucuses had data on black voting to allow for a separate graph of black voting trends in caucus states. Likewise, the New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. primaries had no available data on black voters.

You can download the spreadsheet here and double-check me, or if you're curious and industrious, plug in new values in the C, D, and E columns and track the voting trends of any demographic group.

Our long national Wrightmare is finally over.

With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they've clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve.

Salt Of The Earth: Didn't Woody Guthrie Sing An Ode To Slack-Jawed Idiocy? So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum's laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last month Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million, on top of the at least $5 million she's already lent herself.) Needless to say, this is encouraging news not only for Obama supporters, but all Americans. Here's how it happened.

The Clintonites, whose respect for middle America consists entirely in buying every single crude stereotype about it, simply assumed that the white working class is a) the only part of the electorate that matters and b) monolithically slack-jawed, liver-damaged, unemployed, resentful, paranoid, and gullible. Consequently, they premised their Indiana and North Carolina primary campaigns on the Nigerian 419 gas tax scam, blowing up either OPEC or the moon, the immolation of 72 million innocent Iranians in a nuclear holocaust, leveling the playing field in the housing market by preventing anyone from buying a house for years to come, and generally making sure never to listen to experts just in case they might once in a blue moon be right about their field of expertise. (Under a Hillary Clinton administration, Megan McArdle writes, "no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.")

And sure, the Clinton platform may in reality have been what quote-unquote experts describe as "fucking retarded." But as salt of the earth pundits like Joe Scarborough explained, working-class whites just want a bit of help with their bills and aren't interested in lectures from eggheads. And as spokesmen for the last redoubts of Clinton backers further noted, Obama's skepticism about the appreciation working-class people would show to a rich woman offering them a piddling bribe bespeaks a profound elitism and arrogance sure to turn off blue collar voters.

But then a funny thing happened. In Ohio, Obama won 34 percent of the white vote and 42 percent of voters making under $50,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, those numbers were 37 percent and 46 percent, respectively. And in Indiana, 40 percent and 50 percent. In other words, through two months of relentless and increasingly absurd populist pandering and racebaiting, over three primaries in three bordering, demographically similar rust-belt states which one would intuitively expect to be susceptible to the Clinton tactics, Obama consistently if slowly improved his performance among white voters and working-class voters. The Clinton campaign's descent into surrealist performance art bought them less than nothing.

Meanwhile, Obama's share of the college-educated vote, which dipped slightly in Pennsylvania thanks in part to the strength of the Ed Rendell machine, bounced back with a vengeance last night. It seems people who've studied a bit of economics don't take well to being told that up is down; nor, in all likelihood, are they wild about being being called "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle" while a presidential candidate looks on smilingly.

So apparently, in 2008, having the audacity to hope that Americans --- even white working-class Americans --- aren't drooling simians can pay off in the end.