Mayhill Fowler2013-05-18T07:25:41-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=mayhill-fowlerCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Mayhill FowlerGood old fashioned elbow grease.Hot Dogs and Beans: Obama and the American Dreamtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7361752010-09-23T12:58:04-04:002011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
The implications beggar imagination, much less policy. Lest we shred our shared sense of national identity -- and this well could happen to a body politic already weakened and riven -- we must shape a new social compact. Shaping is a process and a journey. It takes place through trial and error, through engagement by families and communities and through great leadership. This is what Barack Obama by the end of the presidential election meant by "change." My observation is that Obama, when he decided to run, knew he was a man who could effect enormous change, which he (and we) knew the country needed; however, he couldn't divine exactly what that change might look like, although he (and we) knew the ingredients for it: better education, new immigration and energy policies, health care reform, entitlement reform. We can deduce that his sense of his mission was inchoate because during the campaigns he immensely complicated his (and our) political and financial future by insisting, as he need not have done, that the United States had to win in Afghanistan.
So it's not surprising that Obama has had his own struggles with "the vision thing" even as he spoke eloquently and passionately about change. Ironically, it was this very eloquence that deafened supporters to his specific policy prescriptions (to which he has adhered for the most part, with the exception of Guantanamo, the closing of which I always took to be aspirational). It was this very eloquence that encouraged supporters to interpret Obama's change as the change THEY wanted. This is partly why "professionals on the left" assumed that Obama was one of them. This is why -- personal aside here -- I did not go to Washington for Obama's Inauguration, much less The Huffington Post Inaugural Ball. I figured it would be really alienating and depressing to be surrounded by people who had never really listened to Obama and who, I just knew, would be disillusioned within the year.
For the first time, not quite two years into the Obama presidency, we have a sense of what this great change is going to be. Today, as the first new health insurance regulations become law, what will likely be a half-century of American health care reform begins. Yesterday we were told that the recession has ended. What out of the rubble remains? Americans' net worth has fallen. Housing construction and sales are at an all-time low. The administration's efforts to end foreclosures have failed. Fourteen percent of us live in poverty -- the highest rate in fifteen years. Education, which used to be a way out and up, no longer guarantees a job. And joblessness, as epidemic and intractable as the new bedbug invasion, lives with us now.
Here is the bedrock of change. We Americans are less wealthy. But for the foreseeable future we are going to spend more (like on health care) of that less we have in order to be comfortable sharing the same boat. We are taking this course counterintuitively, but in the reasonable hope that in the more distant future we will be spending less while having more. This is the beginning of our new social compact. This is the new American Dream. It acknowledges the reality of a deeply interconnected world. It is no longer, as it has been for most Americans throughout our history, about having our own space. It acknowledges the reality of global competition, which has set the bar higher for education and for performance. This is going to have a huge effect on the course of our lives: more deferred gratification, different patterns and sequences for acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills interwoven with new styles of family living.
Whether or not individuals, be they Democrats or Republicans, want this change does not matter, to some extent. We cannot correct past mistakes overnight. We cannot immediately be richer. Our young people cannot instantly acquire the depth of science and engineering and math skills we have untended for decades. The Tea Party movement springs, in part, from a looming apprehension of the enormity of this change, and a fear of it -- justified in the sense that they and their children and grandchildren, like other ordinary Americans and theirs, will be making whatever sacrifices change requires. For emerging now is a new elite unlike any we have seen since the pre-Reformation Catholic Church and before that the Roman Empire: well-educated, well-to-do, well-traveled professionals from many nations who identify more readily with each other than with their countries of birth. Indeed many move back and forth from place to place and across cultural divides. More to the point, this very thin top layer of global society will not have to make sacrifices.
Here you will find American elites in their twenties and thirties. This is my daughters' generation, and they are so well-traveled that their struggle is not with racism or sexism but with calibrating a sense of national identity or indeed deciding to have one at all. Again this a place where the Tea Party movement has got the future first. Beyond a fear of the inroads, against the individualism that has so long circumscribed us, the Tea Party is galvanized by patriotism, a sense that what defines us as Americans could be slipping away and an anger that the powerful don't care about that anymore. This is the Tea motivation, at heart, for quoting the Founding Fathers and reading aloud the Constitution. From what I've seen, however, most (if certainly not every one) of our young globalists are finding their American roots, after all.
So what will define us in the twenty-first century? Other than a reconsidered patriotism? What is the new American Dream? What will make this new social compact worth keeping? Although I have been thinking about these things for a long time, I decided to write after President Obama said (or didn't say) a number of things about change and the dream at a town hall discussion on jobs, broadcast and moderated by CNBC, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., three days ago. First of all, as I've suggested before, Obama takes the long view.
"I think the challenge right now is that I'm thinking about the next generation, and there are a lot of folks out there who are thinking about the next election."
One of Obama's current political problems, however, is that Americans in a pinch are not taking the long view. Here is how one woman put it to Obama at the Newseum:
I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people, and I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting. I don't feel it yet. And I thought, while it wouldn't be in great measure, I would feel it in some small measure.
I have two children in private school. And the financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family. My husband and I joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives.
But quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again. And quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly, is this my new reality?
Obama does not answer her question -- any more than he answers the question of the law school graduate with hefty student loans who cannot get a job and asks, "Is the American Dream dead for me?" As a master of the art of controlling the interview, Obama responds with his own talking points. He says the things he wants to get out there before the American public. In answer to the woman with two children in private school and soon off to college, he talks about the overhaul of the student-loan program. He touts the new credit card regulations (the woman does not have a credit card) and health-insurance reform. To the law-school grad, Obama mentions the new student loan repayment caps (relevant) and tax breaks for small businesses (not so much).
But along the way, waxing prolix and enjoying himself, President Obama, undoubtedly without knowing it at that moment, redefines what it means to be middle class in America.
And if we are able to keep our eye on our long-term goal -- which is making sure that every family out there, if they're middle class, that they can pay their bills, have the security of health insurance, retire with dignity and respect, send their kids to college; if they're not yet in the middle class, that there are ladders there to get into the middle class, if people work hard and get an education to apply themselves -- that's our goal. That's the America we believe in. And I think that we are on track to be able to do that.
No mention of job security. Or owning a house. In a certain neighborhood or suburb. With a two-car garage. And a motor boat in the driveway. This is not a middle class defined by either job (blue collar, white collar) or consumerism, but how they live their lives: honoring their personal responsibilities (paying debts), relying upon the community (shared cost of health care and retirement), applying themselves, educating themselves and their children. For the last half century, middle-class America has been driven both by the acquisition of things and the working harder and harder to pay for them. As a baby boomer, I was born into a middle class America that had not bought anything for ten years; as I grow older, I see just how much my parents' and grandparents' experience of the Depression shaped my own childhood. So I can envision "the middle class without stuff" that is being reborn, for it seems clear (at least to me) that Americans are not going to be either willing or able to spend us to prosperity.
Prosperity redefined is part of the new American dream. It's the wealth of the mind and the shared community, continuing education at the neighborhood or downtown school instead of shopping at the mall. This is a lot easier to write, of course, than to live. Such a cultural shift will have consequences better not to know about now. And regardless of what happens, millions of our fellow Americans will not find good jobs again, and among those millions many will not be able to adapt. It is a terrible price to pay for a transformation brought upon us both by the inexorable turning of historical forces and by ourselves. And all of us -- our military excepted -- have grown soft and unused to sacrifice and are going to have some adjustment issues with hot dogs and beans.
]]>Burning Jesus: Religion in the Shadow of American Societytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7118542010-09-10T10:19:32-04:002011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/has been averted (hopefully) only now, long past the point when a tiny congregation, through the combustion of ignorance and righteousness, has roiled the world.
Media has inundated us with stories about the proposed book burning, but always within legal and political frameworks: the constitutional protections for both freedom of speech and freedom of religious practice; the uproar in the Muslim world; the fallout for our troops and other Americans abroad. The heart of the matter, however, is religious belief: what the pastor and many other Americans of all persuasions think about the Bible and the Quran. Significantly, it has taken a dialogue between religious leaders, the pastor and Imam Feisal of the proposed New York Islamic Center, to defuse the situation. Why did the media, with all its coverage, fail to do the same thing first? What happened to the powerful effect of shining the light of knowledge?
The problem here is that religious belief, even though it is a prime mover of humanity, has become an area of knowledge and experience where media fears to tread. What exactly was the Christian pastor's objection to the Quran? Was it something about the book itself, or was his action meant only as a reminder of the men who created 9/11? The consumers of the recent book stories have had to work this out for themselves. Perhaps, however, this situation would never have arisen if American Christians were familiar with the Quran -- if men like the Florida pastor knew that much of the Quran is a retelling of the Bible, of the stories of Abraham, Moses, Mary and Jesus. "When Jesus came with Clear Signs, he said: 'Now I have come to you with Wisdom, and in order to make clear to you some of what you dispute. Therefore, fear God and obey me. God, He is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him.'" So says the Quran 43. If the Florida pastor had burned the book, he would have been burning Jesus. Did anyone in media confront him here?
Through its pusillanimity, the media has similarly failed us on the subject of Barack Obama's religious beliefs. Only feebly have news outlets shone the light of knowledge. And so the delusion that Obama is a Muslim persists. There has been no vigorous conversation about the nuances and possibilities for faith in a man raised in a nonreligious household, with a Muslim heritage and childhood experiences, who chose as an adult to be a Christian. Purely as a point of inquiry, for example, can a person be both a Muslim and a Christian at the same time? We are more likely to find in our daily paper or online articles about the intricacies of sexual practice than explorations of religious consciousness.
The sources of knowledge upon which we as a society have long depended--and here I include with media our education system, which I will explore in turn -- have let us down. For religious topics, there are, of course, silo media: internet sites like Sojourners and Beliefnet, magazines such as First Things. As the Obama myth and the other Muslim stories show, however, we need a larger place in the public discourse for religious belief. One of the roles of popular, widely-shared media is contextualizing experience. To use again the example of sex, over time the media (from TV sitcoms to documentaries to health articles to investigative reporting) has helped Americans to understand, and some to grow comfortable with and to accept, homosexuality. Media has done this in part by bringing the specifics of sexual practice into the national conversation. In a way, media has given Americans permission to seek questions and answers in an area of experience foreign to most of us and has provided the context in which to do so.
What could have been the platform for facts and thoughtfulness on the collisions of the Florida pastor, 9/11, the Bible and the Quran? What could be even now for reportage of the president's religious practice? There is none -- not on the major cable news channels, not in big metropolitan dailies, not on the trafficked internet news sites. This has not always been true, however. Likely it will surprise many to learn that until the middle of the last century the New York Times regularly covered what was happening at the big Catholic and Protestant churches (and occasionally Jewish synagogues) in the five boroughs (if mostly Manhattan). This was quotidian reportage: church fairs, holiday events, outreach and volunteer efforts, the social doings of society pastors. However, the Times also published every Saturday weekly sermon excerpts from local church leaders. And the opinions of bishops and divines were regularly sought and printed on subjects of local and national interest. Reading the back issues of the Times from the 1920s and 1930s is a window (if a narrow one) on religious practice in New York and the ways it threaded itself through the rest of public life.
How does the New York Times cover religious life today? With a short Saturday column called "Beliefs," which, since it moves from place to place in each weekly print edition, a reader must be determined to read in order to find. This is more than just the ghetto-ization of religion. It is the use of a lens filter for the subject, since the columnist presents via the various strategies of academic discourse, book review, whimsy, humor. The column for September 4, for example, reported on the Onion-like conservative-Christian-parody website ChristWire.
By contrast, I give you the Houston Chronicle, and its weekly (Friday) "Belief" section, twelve pages of articles, color photos and church/religious event announcements. For August 27, "Belief" included stories on the Boy Scouts ("Faith-based organizations see a natural affinity between their beliefs and the core values of the Boy Scouts"), celebrating Krishna's birthday in Houston, Evangelicals in the workplace, volunteerism and layoffs, Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes and his movie "Jumping the Broom," the choices faced by infertile Muslim parents, the Christian rock group Children 18:3 and the woman now leading the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California ("After public family feud, another Schuller steps in").
Every day of the week, furthermore, the Chronicle prints three verses, chosen from among the holy texts of the world's major religions, that echo one another, sometimes in provocative ways.
All told, this is not the kind of reportage that is going to win Pulitzer prizes. This is the laying down of the historical record of the humdrum in religious life; the articles are usually less eye-catching than the obituaries. I dare say most Chronicle readers skim the "Belief" section, if they pick it up at all. But here is the important thing: it is always there. By its very presence, "Belief" gives Houstonians a sense of the religious diversity of their city. No Christian Houstonian is going to wake up some day and freak out: "OH MY GOD there is a Hindu temple going up in the Woodlands!" In fact, two of the largest Hindu congregations in America are located in the Houston suburbs, and the Chronicle chronicles them regularly. After New York, Houston is the most multi-cultural city in the United States. The media coverage (including video from local TV) helps Houstonians to place the religious goings-on of their neighbors in the context of daily life.
We can but wonder if the New York Times regularly recorded the quotidian life of the city's mosques, the way the Chronicle does in Houston, if New Yorkers (and other Americans by extension), since they long would have been aware of the Muslim congregations in Lower Manhattan, would have been more accepting of the new center. The contrast between the Times and the Chronicle shows that what is needed for a platform is not a high board, the better to jump right into the thorniest of religious debates, but day-by-day, week-by-week, small event reportage, for it is through these encounters that people come to accept difference and variety in religious practice.
Since big media has not provided context for and incremental reportage of religious life, we Americans have given ourselves permission to glean and winnow for it. Given the state of our education system (and not just in the public schools, for elite universities are struggling with teaching students the meaning of "fact" and the use of source material), it is not surprising that many of us are looking for information in all the wrong places. Why are schools remiss in teaching deductive and inductive reasoning? the difference between fact and interpretation? One answer lies in the very concept of "answer." Sometimes one answer is clearly right; another is clearly wrong. Right and wrong. For the last half century, however, American pedagogy has emphasized growing the self-esteem of the student over mastering the tools of reason, a process that involves learning, by fits and starts, through failure and difficult choices, after storing, often through the tediousness of memorization, enough material in the mind upon which to work and experiment. The nurture of the wonderfulness of the individual over the hard exercise of the brain, however, has brought us to the point where we feel entitled to own our own facts. Praise School, as I call it, has led to the anatomization of what used to be a body of knowledge, enriched as much by argument and debate over it as by passing it on to the next generation.
This sorry state of affairs is the substratum of the "Obama is a Muslim" delusion. My Southern friends feel entitled to their own facts about the president. Moreover, they do not know how to judge the quality of information. What they read in viral emails carries as much weight as an article in the newspaper. For good reasons, however, they have lost faith in mainstream media. When members of the Tea Party movement, for example, read that they are not only racists but also unwitting tools of powerful Republican interests -- both sweeping untruths -- they do not trust the established and powerful news outlets. They are no longer persuadable by what they see there. And the dysfunction is circular and self-sustaining. The media report poorly on the Tea Party movement precisely because so many journalists and commentators are not accustomed to including religious life in reportage and do so, at best, awkwardly. (I rest my case here with the journalism on the Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial.)
Perhaps more important is the underlying relationship between press and people. Although there are exceptions, of course, the dynamic is condescension. Tea Partiers could not possibly be organizing on their own -- they must be unwitting tools. White Southerners are conservatives because they are at heart bigots -- they are no more complicated than that. Coping strategies for the condescended-to include passive-aggressiveness and inarticulateness. Here are the bulwarks for the "Obama is a Muslim" delusion. Persisting in the belief is a form of resistance against more powerful forces (media elites, Washington government). Naming "Muslim" is a summing up of a complicated array of perceptions; laying them out in public would require exposing the self to these hostile forces. Better to retreat into the inarticulateness of "he is a Muslim."
What can be done here? Will the "Obama is a Muslim" delusion die out? Probably not as long as he is president. For all the reasons I have laid out over the past two days, the myth has a powerful hold on many of our fellow Americans. But the delusion should be a wake-up call: social studies and history classes need to be rigorous; more media should be devoted to covering what is an increasingly important part of American life. To continue to tiptoe around religious faith puts not only marginalizes journalism but also puts all of us at risk.
There is always a time and a place for new beginnings. Next week the New York Times and the Carter Journalism Institute at New York University together will launch a hyperlocal news site (internet-only) for the East Village in Manhattan. The Times already has such a site in Brooklyn; recently it closed its hyperlocal experiment in New Jersey. I am very much looking forward to the LEV, as it will be called. However, even as an occasional visitor, I feel like I know where to eat and to shop in the East Village. How about a regular religion beat? Even better, how about a hyperlocal Times site for the meld of world religions that is called Queens?
As for Barack Obama, the media could do a much better job of chronicling how faith shapes his world and ours. Several months ago, for example, the president made a few remarks at a post-Easter prayer breakfast, largely unexamined, which offer a series of insights about our enigmatic president. On the Tuesday after Easter, Obama shared these thoughts:
"Of all the stories passed down through the gospels, this one in particular speaks to me during this season. And I think of hanging -- watching Christ hang from the cross, ending the final seconds of His passion. He summoned what remained of His strength to utter a few last words before He breathed His last breath. 'Father,' He said, 'into your hands I commit my spirit.' Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. These words were spoken by our Lord and Savior, but they can just as truly be spoken by every one of us here today."
This confessional nugget is both astonishing and slightly disturbing. At a time, the days from Easter Sunday on, when most Christians are for a week or so feeling just about the most joy and elation of the religious year and looking forward to Pentecost, Barack Obama is still back at the Cross. Death and suffering, the dwelling upon hanging ("hanging" -- "hang"), the personal identification with Christ and martyrdom and above all the evocation of loneliness -- here is a private glimpse of the man and the leader. Obama's comments open a door to a realm of possibilities for the hows and whys of his executive decision-making. As for his Christianity, they tell us all we really need to know.
Tomorrow join me at my website www.mayhillfowler.com in order to share in reminiscences on the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
]]>He Is Not One of Ustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7103612010-09-09T09:32:52-04:002011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/this particular bit of misinformation thrives in our public discourse, increasingly knitted together by information technology -- or is access itself part of the problem?
Perplexed, pundits have of late posited various explanations, assigning the Muslim delusion to Islamophobia, racism, anger at the economy and big government. The wellspring for the Muslim delusion is not politics, however; we must resist the temptation to connect large issues of faith with specific politics too quickly. The fact that some commentators have done so contributes, ironically, to the feeding rather than the deconstruction of the delusion. Moreover, this particular urban myth had taken hold long before ancillary forces gathered prominence in the ongoing presidential narrative.
In September 2007 a Google employee, standing in line for an Obama rally in San Francisco, asked me if Barack Obama was a Muslim. Intrigued by the prospect, he was disappointed when I disabused him of the notion. He was not the first "Obama inquirer" I had met who wondered about the man's religion -- so much so that I emailed Debbie Mesloh, Obama's communications director in California at the time, to warn her that I had been hearing "Obama is a Muslim" a lot. And this was California, where the possibility that a presidential candidate might be other than a Christian was not necessarily a reason for distrust. Back in the South, where I was also following the presidential primaries, the Muslim myth took on an entirely different character. Here, more than in any other region, you are likely to find churches whose membership believe that the current war on terrorism is at its heart a fundamentalist battle between Christianity and Islam. This is the impetus for a Gainesville, Florida church to burn copies of the Quran on Saturday, in commemoration of 9/11.
I grew up in a somnolent Southern Presbyterian congregation that has become such a militant, if not so publicly demonstrative, institution. I always visit my former church when I go home; but I learned -- not too long after 9/11 -- that its core fundamentalist conviction can not be dislodged. Nevertheless, I was sure that old friends and acquaintances would heed my testimony that Obama is not a Muslim. You might suppose that over time my words carried some weight. Not so. Here were people -- all well-educated and well-traveled -- who could not be disabused of the notion. Listening politely when I came to town, nevertheless by my next trip old friends were sharing the same outlandish stories with me all over again. Stubborn as crabgrass, the Muslim meme lives among us even now. Why? Since 2007 I have given this question much thought. Over several days, and at some length, I will share with you the answers I have found.
Who Are His People? A common observation in the American heartland (and in many other cultures) goes like this: "I don't know him personally. But he comes from good people." Among the interesting assumptions about identity here is the primacy of family and clan over individualism. In the most urban parts of the United States, except among immigrant communities, this point of view has lost the power it once had; elsewhere, however, it still shapes perception. It is significant, therefore, that Barack Obama has no American clan, no living blood relatives, through which, upon his entry upon the national stage, citizens could have tentatively placed him. With no parents, no grandparents (his maternal grandmother died shortly before the election), Obama has in the United States only a half-sister, an enigmatic and retiring woman who campaigned for him only sporadically and seldom appears in the news. Think, by contrast, not only of the Bush and Kennedy families of recent memory but also of the brothers who helped us, through character juxtaposition, to assess Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
A downside to the meteoric rise to power that Obama experienced is that he has no political clan either. Canny, he managed during his Chicago sojourn to avoid the taint, for the most part, of the local machine. As attempts to link him to such characters as Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich show, Obama never fit easily anywhere in the world of Illinois politics. In the U.S. Senate, he did not have time to forge legislation before ascending the presidency. Unlike Johnson, as well as Nixon and Reagan, Obama never spent the years in power with their concomitant successes and failures and alliances by which we might, from the beginning, have known him.
During the race for the presidency, the Obama campaign fashioned a compelling backstory for a candidate few Americans knew. The choices the O-team made seemed at the time brilliant. But the half-truths and lacunae are now playing themselves out with unintended consequences. Presenting himself as a doctrinal Christian, Obama himself set up this essential truth for evisceration by not speaking more candidly about his complicated relationships with his agnostic mother, Muslim step-father and Muslim relatives in Kenya. Such reticence was not contrived but came naturally to him. Likely he thought that writing a book about his search for identity was "enough said." As any serious writer will tell you, the autobiographical impulse arises from a desire to control the narrative. His campaign, also, shaped the story: mother from the Kansas heartland (really she grew up in Seattle), father an immigrant (actually he came here on a student visa first to the University of Hawaii and then briefly to Harvard). Personalities, upon becoming public, always escape descriptive boundaries, however. The first conjecture that Obama is a Muslim, which arose in 2006, shows the speed and power of this phenomenon.
In retrospect, in consideration of Obama's atypical American upbringing, I marvel at the O-team's former confidence that the public would be satisfied with their candidate's sparse remarks in public about his parents. Although Obama confined himself mostly to mentioning his mother's struggle with health insurance issues while dying of cancer, she was a much larger and more interesting human being than this oft-told chestnut would suggest. Indeed she was utterly fascinating--a truth upon which the American public fastened and then hastened to fill in the blanks. This dynamic has been as consequential with regards to the father Obama never knew.
Think about this for a minute: Obama is our first president whose father was a foreigner. Obama, Sr. was not an American: he was not born here; he did not settle here. The fact that neither Obama nor his associates has ever confronted this singularity merely serves to magnify its importance for many. The resonance of "foreigner" resists easy articulation; paradoxically the inarticulateness strengthens resistance. This is why, in part, my Southern friends cling to their beliefs about our president. Andrew Jackson, whose Scots-Irish father emigrated from Ireland to the colonies and died two years later in the Carolinas, before his son Andrew was born, is the only other president with a paternal narrative close to Barack Obama's. It is not a coincidence that Obama has joined Jackson as two of our presidents most vilified and least understood by their contemporaries. Childhood loss, a primal experience that can never be fully assuaged, drives ambition and desire in ways that we perceive but can not plumb and therefore fear, especially in powerful men whose people we do not know.
Obama himself fed the perception of his essential foreignness by granting his first interview as president to Al Arabiya, by giving his first big speech abroad in Turkey, by making the early Cairo journey to appeal to the Muslim world. These actions must have seemed natural to him; after all, he spent several childhood years in largely-Muslim Indonesia. More importantly, it was clear that here, like with the new START Treaty and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, was something the new president really wanted to do. This eagerness is something Obama brought right away to his Muslim outreach in a way he never has to matters of financial regulation and the domestic economy. We voters recognize that spark of interest when we see it. For his part, Obama's huge mistake was in not preparing the American public for this outreach and explaining often and in detail why he was so desirous of it. Because many political commentators follow foreign affairs closely and find the presidential approach to Muslims abroad perfectly natural and understandable, it is only now that the enormity of the consequences are clear.
In this light, is it surprising that many Americans believe that Barack Obama at heart is a Muslim? Or that they identify him with the Obama clan they read about, his paternal relatives in Kenya? The ironies here are manifold. To touch upon one only, Obama himself is not close to his Kenyan family. Since he never talks about these relatives (except for the "grandmother" to whom he is not related, for she is not the paternal grandfather's wife from whom he is descended), we have been free to extrapolate. Reductively, in ignorance of African tribal societies, latching onto isolated bits of Islamic law for guidance, some Americans have insisted that because Obama, Sr. was Muslim, culturally if not in religious practice, ergo the son is as well. It has been pointless for Obama's supporters to try to walk back the cat here: to assert that Obama, Sr. was not an observant Muslim--more, an agnostic. The trajectory of life, which we appreciate most as we grow older, suggests the futility for such men as Obama, Sr. of denying familial heritage, perhaps especially in matters of faith.
In 2007 I contacted Janet Soskice, a professor of theology at Jesus College, Cambridge and a respected scholar on the three Abrahamic faiths. I wanted an expert opinion on the matter of paternal religion passing on to the son, from the point of view of Islam. Soskice replied with a keeper of an email: "According to the Quran, as descendants of Adam and Eve we are all Muslims." Her response is priceless because it reads two ways, at one and the same time contradictory and co-eternal: Islam is the one true religion and therefore nonbelievers are apostates; we are all equally the children of God.
Faith Without Works Is Dead. Barack Obama's favorite Bible verse would seem to be Genesis 4:9. "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain asks. If the answer implied is not enough, the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament makes it clear once and for all. "I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper," Obama frequently says. At Obama's assertion, however, many American Christians hear not a central tenet of our faith (the Second Commandment, repeated by Jesus in his commandment to his followers to "love one another as I have loved you") but an assertion of the social gospel stripped of Christianity itself. What the President professes sounds to many of our fellow Americans like good works divorced from divinity and married to European-style socialism. James 2:20 is a foundational absolute for Christians: faith without works is dead. Barack Obama believes this. I believe this. All Christians so believe. So how is it that many Americans suppose that our president does not mean what they mean even as they quote the same Scripture?
Broadly speaking, American Christianity has taken two different roads since World War Two. Inspired both by careful attention to biblical scholarship and by an ecumenical spirit, a desire to find harmony among all the world's great religions, some Christians have emphasized Jesus' teachings over his putative divinity. In the end, Christianity is all about helping one's fellow man. What does it mean to be a Christian? Doing good works. Without the most careful attention to Obama's statements and asides, the kind of scrutiny that only obsessed journalists like me and not ordinary Americans bring to the matter, one well might conclude that Barack Obama is such a Christian.
This is a reasonable, comfortable, harmonious Christianity. It is also in decline. To begin to explain why, let me proffer a piece of my own experience. In 1993 my family and I went to Easter services at the National Cathedral in Washington, which is Episcopalian. The rector began his sermon with this observation: Jesus may or may not have risen from the dead. This is a peripheral issue, the rector said. "If so, why am I sitting here, listening to a third-rate mind like yours?" I immediately asked myself.
The reverse of the Episcopalian's remark is one I heard recently at City Church in San Francisco, "planted," as evangelists now say, in 1996 by Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New York City. Today more than a thousand Bay Area folk worship at City Church each Sunday. The congregation is very young; on the Sunday of my visit, I was one of the oldest in the crowded pews. After his sermon and before communion, the minister said, "I know that some of you here today are inquirers, and you are thinking that this gathering is worth your while if you get a little something out of it to help you in your life. But really it is a waste of your time unless you believe that what we are about to do, celebrating the sacrament of communion, is partaking of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ."
This is not the Presbyterian church of my youth: where baptism as an infant, vague familiarity with the Bible, occasional church attendance and good intentions made one a Christian. In the 1970s American Christianity experienced a Great Awakening comparable to the one in the early 1800s that gave us the abolitionists. The impetus for this new religious revival was two-fold: the civil rights movement and the pagan but mystical, profane but earnest hippie subculture. At heart, the hippie lifestyle was a call to the quest for the authentic, through a spiritual journey, the better to live an examined life. As the energy of the Obama grassroots would inspire a conservative movement and be re-imagined in the Tea Party, so yearning for the Age of Aquarius, as no hippie could have foreseen, seeded a surge of Christianity. Our popular culture has never been able to capture this shift. Our secular media has never understood it, focusing on the part--the rise of the evangelical political right--rather than the whole.
To be a new Christian -- what many call an Evangelical, although I dislike that term since by definition all Christians, having been called by Jesus, on Pentecost, to go out into the world and tell his story, are Evangelists -- is a mighty commitment. The "works" in faith without works is dead encompass more than helping our brothers and sisters. It is honoring (if not always keeping) the commandments, participating in a community of believers, reading the Bible every day, establishing a discipline of prayer, ministering to the poor, volunteering in the community, giving a substantial portion of one's wealth away and spreading the Gospel abroad.
Barack Obama is more old-school in his Christianity than new. He does not regularly attend church. He does not have the deep familiarity with the Bible of the late Robert Byrd -- not to mention new Christians. He has "spiritual advisors," but we never see or hear them at their appointed task. Most Americans do not know their names and must take them on faith. Apparently, Joshua DuBois, the 27-year-old Pentecostal minister who runs the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, is Obama's "pastor-in-chief," emailing him a daily devotion. Americans don't need to know DuBois to grasp the lack of gravitas here. Obama's customary reticence about his faith, moreover, makes him a Christian many of his fellow believers no longer recognize, much less trust.
Most importantly, Obama, for all his faults of spirit -- arrogance, aloofness -- does not look like a sinner. This may sound counterintuitive, but in the end Christians know one another as sinners. George W. Bush was an alcoholic who came to Jesus. Bill Clinton was a philanderer and penny ante liar. Jimmy Carter "lusted in his heart." But they are all Christians recognized by other Christians. In a curious way, Obama is too good to be a Christian. He never acts like a man who needs saving. This persona, married to the particularities of his faith practice, coupled with his Muslim heritage and Muslim outreach, have made Barack Obama the Invisible Christian to many Americans.
Tomorrow: Part Two of "He Is Not One of Us." How the failures of American education and the mainstream media have allowed the Muslim delusion to thrive.
]]>Obama, the Middle Class and Pundit Myopiatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6966212010-08-27T04:17:32-04:002011-05-25T17:30:22-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
Barack Obama, his administration and Congress have passed legislation that will bring big change for health care, some change for the banking and financial investment industry, and small but significant change for student loans. The Recovery Act has given money to the states to save the jobs of teachers and police. Stiff competition among states for federal education dollars shows the initial success of Race to the Top, which likely is just the beginning of what the President and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan have in mind, if they can find the money, for a second term. On illegal immigration, whether or not Congress ever takes up the issue, the Obama administration has already moved to beef up border security and to target businesses that hire illegal workers. The administration is funneling money into science, for projects ranging from biotech to space exploration. The Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit has been so popular that it was oversubscribed 3-to-1. Here in the realm of hands-on innovation, rather than in the labyrinths of legislation, our clean energy future has already begun.
Of course, many of these beginnings, which President Obama has likened to planting seeds, will not see fruition until long past Obama's presidency, even if he serves a second term. Therefore, it's not surprising that some middle class Americans think that Obama is not doing enough even as others fear a future so shaped by government. It's not surprising that small businesses are none too happy with the President; they are for now paralyzed, not moving to hire or to invest, understandably, since they don't know going forward what the rules, not yet written, on health care and financial regulation will be. None of this uncertainty and animus is surprising.
What is surprising, however, is that the mainstream media has not grabbed hold of the larger picture, connected the dots among elements and tried to figure out where the lines of connection might lead. It is the sort of fascinating and complex story that should interest pundits particularly, since they usually don't have to work on the tight deadlines of the White House press corps. Instead liberal publications of late have tempted readers with come-on headlines, cooked-up conflict and premature, if deliciously wildly dramatic and provocative, conclusions.
Here at The Huffington Post last week we had Arianna Huffington's "Memo to America's Middle Class: Obama Is Just Not That Into You." Actually, Arianna Huffington is not talking about the middle class; she is speaking of progressives: "Progressives, for your own good, it's my duty to point something out to you: the president's just not that into you." The title is further misleading because not all progressives are middle class (they include mega-wealthy George Soros and the blue-collar worker who pickets for SEIU), just as all middle class folks are not progressives. Over at The New Republic, John B. Judis proffered "The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama," a come-on that proved so irresistible that he followed up with "Obama Really Is in Trouble -- and so Is the Country."
No question the country's got trouble. But can a president who dragged many of his fellow citizens kicking and screaming and muling and puking into health care reform, accompanied most of the way by legislators and pundits who doubted he could do it, fairly be said, as Arianna Huffington does, to be a man who "just doesn't have the fire in the belly that many activists thought he had?" Can a leader, who after enacting sweeping reform that the public has yet to embrace nevertheless who still has a 48% approval rating (not unusual at this point in a presidency), be said to have "fallen?" Isn't this conclusion a bit -- premature? Stepping into his argument, John Judis falls prey to one of the commonest traps for otherwise intelligent coastal elites: expounding on something of which he has little or no experience. "He [Obama] has failed to convey to the greater public that he is fighting for them," Judis writes. Has this pundit ever met the greater public? Seemingly not, for he goes on to pronounce that Obama "pretty much dropped the jobs issue" [in 2009] and "didn't just fail to develop a consistent narrative about the economy; he didn't really try."
The facts belie both Arianna Huffington and John Judis. Initially, I planned to present here a detailed timeline of quotes from the President's meetings with "the greater public," in the context of everything else happening at the same time, for the first eight months of 2010. But Obama is such an active president, with so many plans going forward dependent on and interdependent with other projects, that such a presentation would have been uber-tedious. Aiming for mere tediousness, I chose at random the month of April, opening its folder of clippings and speeches, itineraries and press pool reports, not quite remembering what I would find.
On Wednesday, April 28, 2010, the "White House to Main Street Tour," the middle part of the tour according to Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, brought President Obama to Macon, Missouri and Quincy, Illinois. With a special thanks to the pooler for that day, Helene Cooper of the New York Times, let's jump right into the life of the leader "not into the middle class."
Unannounced stop numero uno:
Potus just stopped at Peggy Sue's Cafe in Monroe City, Missouri. Its a gorgeous spring day and there are lots of folks out here on North Main Street.
"How's everybody doing today?" Potus asked after walking into Peggy Sue's. There were about 10 diners seated at two tables there when he arrived.
A totally unfazed waitress, who said her name was Jodie, handed him a menu.
Potus: "I don't think you just have cheeseburgers?"
Jodie: "Yes we do."
Potus ordered a cheeseburger and fries to go, with lettuce, tomato and mustard.
Potus: "let me get that to take out."
Potus sat at a table and asked some diners about themselves. Pool couldn't hear the conversation.
A reporter asked Jodie what's it like taking the president's order.
Jodie: "I take orders every day. He ordered like a normal person."
Pool was ushered out after five minutes. Bill Burton reports that after the pool left, Potus discussed biofuels and health insurance, education and farming with the diners, and that Secretary Vilsack pulled chairs over and the other diners joined the group at the table. Afterwards Potus took photos with the group and paid for everybody's lunch, Mr. Burton said.
After leaving Peggy Sue's, Potus, no jacket, white shirt, walked across the
street, stopping at LaRue Insurance Agency where he got into an extensive
conversation with workers in the doorway. Pool couldn't hear, but Potus looked animated. Mr. Burton says that convo was about health insurance and pre-existing conditions.
Then he worked a rope line of about 100 people next door in front of City Hall,and posed for a photo with the ubuiquitous babies, who seemed as unfazed as Jodie. Their parents, though, appeared super excited. A lot of groaning from townsfolk on the rope line when Potus moved away from the line and back to his motorcade.
At 11:50 we are rolling again.
Several hours later, after speaking with workers at POET Biorefining in Macon, POTUS made another unannounced stop.
Potus just stopped at the family farm belonging to Lowell Schachtsiek, around eight miles outside of Palmyra, Missouri. The family farms pigs, cattle and corn on 1000 acres here.
Potus was greeted at the farm by a three-legged dog named Sprinkles.
Potus and Mr. Schachtsiek toured about the farm by foot for a few minutes,
peering into bags of feed and talking about oil prices, wheat, cattle, and the bible.
Mr. Schachtsiek said something your pooler couldn't catch about a tree on his
property that had some connection to the bible. Potus replied that "its a good thing you're reading the scriptures."
Then the two went into the house, where they were joined around the kitchen
table by the whole Schachtsiek family, including Mr. Schachtsiek's son who also works on the farm. There followed a discussion about the benefits of the new healthcare legislation for farmers (with Potus doing most of the talking there.)
Pool was ushered out after 5 minutes.
Next stop: Quincy! Unless there's another unannounced stop!
From there Obama did go on to Quincy, where he had helped fill sandbags during the flood of 2008, and gave a speech on the need for Wall Street reform. With a pinch of hyperbole, Obama said that the bill would include "the strongest consumer financial protections in history." The previous day, at the same time the Fiscal Commission was holding its first meeting in D.C. ("everything must be on the table," as Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson called the chopping block), Obama, on the first leg of this latest tour, had spoken at Siemens Energy in Fort Madison, Iowa, stopped in Mount Pleasant and held a town hall meeting in Ottumwa before spending the night in Des Moines at a Hampton Inn (not in the top tier of local hotels). Somewhere along the way he found the time aboard Baby Air Force One to talk with Chancellor Merkel of Germany about the financial meltdown in Greece and sanctions against Iran.
Not long ago I heard former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at a gathering in which (Berkeley) Californians were discussing the Obama presidency, temper some of the criticism in the context of his experience in the West Wing. "Being the president," Reich said, "is like standing in front of an open fire hose. Every day there's this torrent of information coming at you -- and it keeps coming and coming." Scrolling through the April 2010 folder for the Obama presidency provides, through a recounting of the public side of the Obama presidency, a glimpse of the torrent.
April 1. Obama talked small business tax credits in Portland, ME, appeared at two Boston fundraisers and called President Hu of China in preparation for the Nuclear Security Summit. April 2. In Charlotte, NC, talking jobs and the economy at the Celgard battery plant. April 5. Easter Egg Roll Monday at the White House. An explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in WVA kills 29 men. April 6. Easter Prayer Breakfast with, among other clergy, three mega-church pastors: Bill Hybels, Joel Osteen and Kirbyjon Caldwell (who gave the prayer at George W. Bush's Inauguration). Obama asked his guests to pray for the souls of the victims. April 7-8. In Prague to sign the new START Treaty. Conferred with Medvedev about sanctions on Iran and the unrest in Kyrgyzstan. April 9. Arriving home from Prague, he speaks in Rose Garden about the mine disaster and the retirement of Justice Stevens. Race to the Top high school commencement finalists are announced -- Obama to give the graduation address at the winning school. April 10. Polish leaders die in a plane crash on their way to a commemoration of the Katyn Massacre.
April 11-13. Obama hosts the Nuclear Security Summit in D.C. He holds several bilateral meetings at Blair House. He rolls out "a strategy to build New Orleans back up stronger and smarter and better" than before Katrina. He plans to go to Poland for the funerals but the volcanic ash over Europe prevents him. April 14. Holds a White House meeting on Wall Street reform. April 15. In Florida. Appears at Cape Canaveral with Buzz Aldrin. Gives one of two important April speeches--this one on space exploration, for which he pledges to increase the NASA budget for projects that "improve understanding of the climate." Announces the extension of jobless benefits. Attends two DNC events, one at Gloria Estefan's mansion. Says he is amused by the Tea Party rallies against taxes.
April 16. Weekly radio address. On Wall Street reform. April 19. Nominates Donald Berwick as Medicare/Medicaid administrator. (In August Berwick, to the ire of Republicans, will be a recess appointment.) Speaking at one of two fundraisers in Los Angeles for embattled Senator Barbara Boxer, Obama is heckled by a gay rights protestor. April 20. Flying back from LA, Obama phones Senator Scott Brown about immigration and financial reform. The press corps on AF1 are most interested in former White House Counsel Greg Craig taking a job at Goldman Sachs and the rumor that Rahm Emanuel will run for mayor of Chicago. No one asks about the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
April 21. Continues the months-long process of judicial nominations and administration appointments. April 22. Commemorates Earth Day in the Rose Garden. In New York, gives his second important April speech, his second Cooper Union speech on financial regulation. April 23. Speaks at a naturalization ceremony for members of the armed services. Flies to Asheville, NC for some R & R. April 24. Talks about the promising news out of the auto industry. Counters with the caution that Wall Street reform needed. Plays golf (a regular pastime). April 25. Visits with Billy Graham and his son Franklin at the Graham NC house. Delivers a eulogy in Beckley, WVA for the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Visits with each family individually. April 26-27. Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in D.C. Muslim leaders in business and NGOs from 50 countries come for dialogue with their American counterparts. This is a fulfillment of a promise Obama made in Cairo, as he reminds our guests in his speech. This is also one of the small beginnings of a new foreign policy, right now finding its sea legs under the radar. Obama talks to Governor Haley Barbour about the Alabama tornado. The oil rig explosion is second on the agenda.
April 29. Obama pushes the Disclose Act to counter the Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The import of the BP oil spill begins to sink in. Obama begins his day with an update on the spill, calls the governors of the four states threatened and delivers BP remarks in the Rose Garden. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, flanked by administration officials, presides over a lengthy BP presser. At the National Cathedral, at the funeral service for civil rights matriarch Dorothy Height, Obama delivers a eulogy in which he mentions Height's visit to the White House on the occasion of his hanging a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in the Oval Office. At night, Obama attends a fundraiser in DC.
May 1. American Faisal Shahzad, having studied with the Pakistan Taliban, tried to set off a bomb in Times Square.
The dramatic irony is all in the foreshadowing. In retrospect, we can see clearly how slowly Obama and his administration (and really everybody except people who know the Gulf and drilling) awakened to the scope and import of the gusher. Not until May 26, when James Carville yelled, "We're about to die down here!" would Obama turn the full force of executive power against the disaster. The April calendar is shot through with portents of what would turn out to be one of the worst presidential summers, at least in my recollection. The explosions in the mine and in the Gulf, not to mention the volcanic eruption in Iceland and the earthquake in Haiti pre-April, would be but harbingers of the millennial floods in August in Pakistan.
The tea party rallies, which Obama found amusing in the spring, would lead inexorably to the Shirley Sherrod debacle. The Times Square bomber, and the recent spectacle of other Americans venturing forth into jihad, has brought us in part to the summer's mosque controversy, in which Americans of good will on both sides of the debate demonize one another. Obama does not help the situation when, with a two-step, he proffers a nuanced view. Inflection points of the season: Wikileaks, the firing of General McChrystal, Arizona's taking the problem of illegal immigration into its own hands, the Republican Party rising like a phoenix from the ashes of 2008, born aloft on the updraft of voter anger and fear. What a terrible summer for Barack Obama. (From superstition, I couldn't even write this piece until the summer was almost over.)
Throughout April, at his talks with middle class Americans, Obama was upbeat about the economy. "Lately, we've seen some welcome news after a hard two years," Obama told the workers at POET Biorefining in Missouri. "Our economy is growing, our markets are climbing, and our businesses are beginning to create jobs again. But when you get out to this neck of the woods and others like it, you see that the recovery hasn't reached everyone just yet. Times are tough out here. In some places, they have been for a long time." But here it is now the end of August, and bad economic news, like a torrent, keeps coming and coming. On April 30, Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, announced that our real GDP for the first quarter of 2010 rose 3.2%. It fell 6.4% in the same quarter of 2009. Many if not most of the American people are just not feeling it.
What is President Obama doing about this? Exactly what he did in April. Talking with everyday Americans over and over and over again. Doing that nuance two-step. Welcome news; Times are tough. He doesn't appear to be "fired up" because he has his eye on the far horizon, where all the efforts that now seem scattershot converge. This is the long arc of policy, aiming and holding true for the time when all the fledgling programs and fitful starts (20 jobs here, 200 there) and long term investments in education and research and new energy technology begin to pay off.
Obama is pacing himself for the long haul. Meanwhile he's out in the heartland doing one of the things a leader does the way a modern leader does it: tramping through barns and factories and sitting at kitchen tables, listening, encouraging, defending. But in the end the decisions are his. He wanted health care reform in his first year, and he got it. He overruled hesitations and opposition from the American people because he had his eye on that far distance at a healthy economic horizon. It was what he deemed, within the parameters of compromise, to be right. He has always said, "I will have the biggest seat at the table." In this light, it is hard to see how Arianna Huffington can make the case that Obama is "pleading powerlessness" on the economy, or how John Judis can convincingly argue that Obama "has a strange aversion to confrontational politics." This is not to say that the President has not made mistakes. The run-down of the April calendar shows clearly that he has.
In "Obama Is Just Not That Into You," Arianna Huffington asserts that "real change will only come when enough people outside Washington demand it." History would seem to say otherwise -- I conclude -- or I would be worried, because the Tea Party is the ascendant populist movement, and however good some Tea Partiers' intentions, they are naïve about the necessary levers of governing in a country that is a world power. The people, or one group of the people, calling the shots is not the antidote to presidential error. The role of a leader is to take people where sometimes they do not want to go. This was the arc of the Lincoln presidency and therefore one of the reasons Obama identifies so with Lincoln.
In his Cooper Union speech on April 22, Obama concluded much as he had there in 2008.
This is the central lesson not only of this [financial] crisis but of our history. It's what I said when I spoke here two years ago. Ultimately, there is no dividing line between Main Street and Wall Street. We rise or we fall together as one nation.
It is not happenstance that Obama has given speeches at Cooper Union. The second speech, in April, underlines the intention of the first, to establish a historical connection with Lincoln, who gave a career-making speech there in 1860, asserting that his party advanced the interests of the country and not just the North. One nation. This was Lincoln's idea. It is Obama's focus, too. This is why, in large view, progressives and "professional liberals" feel that Obama has let them down. He is not that into them, any more than he is into African-Americans (some of whom have also expressed disappointment) -- this is true -- where "into" means at the expense of other Americans.
"We've got to keep the long view," Obama said in Portland, ME on April 1. "That's our task. " A paradox of human society is that the people who have the least expect less and those who have the most expect more. So it is the well-educated and comfortably well-off who are impatient with the President and squawking that the sky is falling. Since most of the reportage and almost all the opinion pieces in mainstream media now spring from the assumptions of a sliver of our society, the American upper middle class, at a time when shaping a news story around conflict and revelation has usurped the place of laying down the historical record, the depiction of Barack Obama and his presidency has grown increasingly skewed.
Obama himself does not see what the pundits see. At a presser aboard AF1 on the way back to DC from Quincy, Illinois, when asked how he thought the (White House to Main Street) trip went, Obama said,
It was a reminder that sometimes there's a mismatch between the way politics are portrayed in Washington and how people are feeling. I think it's a less toxic atmosphere, where people are genuinely concerned about jobs, or they've got serious questions about how the new health care bill is going to work or what's happening with immigration or other issues. But generally I think what people are looking for is that their elected officials think about them first and foremost and are working hard. And they realize that some of these problems are hard, that they're not going to be solved overnight. They just want to make sure that we're working on their behalf and not on behalf of some ideological agenda or some special interest in Washington. So I really enjoyed it.
This is the president who supposedly is not in touch.
]]>That Hopey, Changey Thing Comes to the California Republican Partytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6909792010-08-23T10:49:13-04:002011-05-25T17:25:21-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
This is no longer -- quite -- the party of my husband's Aunt Margaret, one of those formidable women with vinegar in her veins who live to be a hundred. Born rich, whip smart and accomplished (one of the first women to graduate from law school at USC), Aunt Margaret was part of the Republican Party in Southern California for decades, and as such she set herself athwart the large social movements of the last century. Yes, there were Aunt Margarets in San Diego, and yes, the state party is still out-of-sync with California's increasingly diverse demographics. In short, the party membership is still very white, if no longer so old. But the Republican face is changing, as the party moves with new currents, carrying it away (if on a note of wistfulness) from the Age of Reagan, bobbing, lurching, evolving, treading, if not boldly, nevertheless inexorably forward.
"The best slate of candidates we have ever had." In one sense, Ron Nehring, party chairman, is correct here. The top of the state ticket has the flavor of inclusiveness that Americans like in their politics now: three women (Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Mimi Walters), an African-American (Damon Dunn) and a Hispanic (Abel Maldonado). Diversity was on display in San Diego. To name a few of the out and about: Grace Hu and Lily Kuo, both in Cerritos politics, Luis Alvarado and Bob Pacheco, both working on the Whitman campaign, African-American political consultant Vernon Van and Telly Lovelace, the campaign manager for Star Parker. Ms. Parker, the African-American running against incumbent Laura Richardson in California's 37th congressional district, and Vietnamese-American Van Tran, running in the 47th, are the faces of this new California Republicanism.
Star Parker herself was a featured speaker, if, like Iranian-American Farrah Douglas, running for the Carlsbad city council, she was relegated to prayers and invocations. Walt Allen, the former mayor of Corvina, in his introduction of Steve Cooley, running for Attorney General against Kamala Harris, joked about his Fu Manchu mustache and Afro when he worked undercover for state narcotics and first met Cooley. It was clear that Allen and Cooley have long been tight, and it was good to see, in a summer when we Americans have regressed, that still there are bonds that transcend race.
Striking is the cognitive dissonance between the growing diversity of California Republicans and their obsession over illegal immigration. Until the party can reconcile the two, the proffer of an inclusive slate invites the suspicion of window-dressing, even where clearly it is not. For now, in the knowledge that California Republicans have potential winners this season, if they don't screw up as they have in the past, the best that the state party can do (and do it did in San Diego) is squelch the resurgent furor among party faithful over immigration. Some in the party remember 1994, and Republican sponsorship of proposition 187, designed to deny health services and education to illegal immigrants, but which instead subsequently denied Republicans statewide office until the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"Like the smoker who can't give up cigarettes until he coughs up blood, the Republicans have had that cough-up blood moment." John Gizzi, the White House correspondent for Human Events, was one of several conservatives who engaged in introspection over the weekend about the error of Republican ways. "The mistakes made on the ethical and spending front -- that will not happen again," he said.
At the Saturday night dinner, before a surprisingly sparse crowd, representative of the California 49th but better known as "Obama's Annoyer-in-Chief" Darrell Issa said, "We have to be willing to tear down the Republican Party as we know it." Issa himself was on a tear. "We have to say to the Tea Party, 'Get out of our way, you're not going far enough.'" (One of the curiosities of the convention was the ignorance of Tea Partiers, as if the state Republican Party was the fort, not quite able to read the Tea smoke in the distance.) In his own moment of introspection, Issa said, "We should have been the party that produced the Sunlight Foundation."
The acknowledgment that mistakes had been made, particularly the out-of-control spending during the Bush years, kept the San Diego convention in a sober mood. The idée fixe of less government/more frugality, held with the fervor only the reformed can muster, has brought into unlikely proximity such different personalities as the earnest Abel Maldonado, currently California Lt. Governor and running against Gavin Newsom to keep his office, and that Inspector Javert of the U.S. Congress, Darrell Issa.
Adding to the sobriety, leavened by the amiable sense of surprise that Republicans in California could do very well this election year, was a determination not to blow it. Therefore, the food fight over immigration about which the state press had been salivating never materialized. The California Republican Assembly and its anti-immigration resolution were banished to Siberia: The group was not provided a conference room, and its resolution was killed before it could make it out of committee. At her brief presser, Carly Fiorina stayed resolutely on-new-message in the face of repeated questions about whether or not California and its Republicans should support Arizona's immigration law. "We ought to put all our energies on forcing the federal government to do its job," she demurred. While expressing sympathy for Arizona, Fiorina has shifted focus to the less-problematic stance (for she, as much as Whitman, needs Hispanic votes) of blaming the feds.
On Sunday, after a bit of a ruckus on the floor over merging the two state groups of Young Republicans, the issue was tabled for future consideration. Again, the squelch. Afterwards, one young man tried to bring round his friend. "We don't have the luxury of a split. We can't afford it. If you have to eat crow on bullshit, do it."
That advice about sums up the California Republican strategy this season. As a result, whatever their private views, party members have rallied around Meg Whitman. I could not find a single conventioneer who said he or she would not go out to vote for her in November.
"If we cannot use a shovel, we will use a spoon to dig ourselves out." Damon Dunn, who is running for Secretary of State against Democratic incumbent Debra Bowen, in his speech on the opening night of the convention perfectly captured the determination of his fellow candidates -- at least for the moment when words come easy -- to fix the fiscal and larger economic mess in which California is mired.
Not surprisingly, the economy -- jobs first, then fiscal frugality -- was the crux of remarks from both gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina, although both women, given that it is fast approaching Labor Day, engaged in opponent-bashing. Fiorina has got the stump speech down. Clear enunciation, words ringing like bell chimes, a feeling for pause and emphasis placement, an instinct for the pacing of criticism, the deft, light touch of sarcasm -- actors study years to master these skills for which Fiorina has a natural gift. And did I mention that she spoke without script or teleprompter? Whitman, on the other hand, read much of her dinner speech and stumbled through quite a bit of it. She was less forced and more convincing when I saw her months ago in Lafayette.
Perhaps more important than style (or perhaps not), Whitman has changed her tune since Lafayette, where I saw her speak last spring. At that time, she was forthright that the state cannot afford to cut taxes right now. By San Diego, she was on the "cut taxes" bandwagon, although I suspect she was trying to have it both ways, meaning "cut small business fees," which she did promise in the spring, while allowing her late summer audience to assume she means cut taxes generally. "While Jerry Brown's job is politics," Whitman said, "mine is creating good, new jobs for California." She has big plans, particularly for infrastructure, like highway improvements (much needed) and broadband. On the other hand, Whitman says, "We have to acknowledge we have a government we can no longer afford." How she would bring these promises into alignment is anybody's guess. Naturally, Whitman wants to bring Silicon Valley to Sacramento. She's not going to get many voter complaints there. In San Diego, however, when she said, "We are going to put in great tech systems to root out fraud and abuse," she couldn't have known that only hours later a panel of Republican doctors (engaged in introspection on where Republicans went wrong on health care) would explain in great detail why electronic medical records do no such thing.
"This is an all-star team. Gonna send the other team to the showers in November." When Carly Fiorina launched her luncheon speech Saturday with this metaphor, she was echoing the hope if not quite the conviction in San Diego. Only Darrell Issa, when speaking with that small group of reporters (not many showed up for Saturday night), seemed dead sure that Meg Whitman will win in November. Elsewhere in the California Republican Party, caution rules. "Let's not take anything for granted" is the strategy. The only assumption that I found questionable is rising from what Ron Nehring calls Meg Whitman's "commitment to the entire Republican team." In short, unlike Jerry Brown, she has been helping out (time and money) the down-ballot candidates. This action on her part has encouraged Republicans to believe that Whitman can carry the rest of the ballot with her to victory.
With so many Independents and "Decline to State" in California, sweeping the ballot is unlikely. Particularly in an unsettled economic climate like this one, citizens are apt to hedge their bets with a "checks and balances" kind of vote -- or so it seems to me. The chatty Darrell Issa sees another difficulty for the Republican ticket: the greater name recognition of some of their opponents. Congressman Issa is not sanguine about the chances of Abel Maldonado simply because Gavin Newsom is so much better known. This fact of political life strikes me as particularly ironic in the case of Maldonado, for he was the one Republican candidate in San Diego who could point to achievements, if only spoon-sized, in both cutting spending and providing jobs. As Lt. Governor, he has renegotiated state leases and worked with California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo to bring together students and the largest mozzarella maker in the state to enlarge the dairy industry and create jobs.
Unlike Abel Maldonado, untried Whitman and Fiorina are making large jobs promises that voters know are going to be hard to deliver. Beyond the promises, which Democrats Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer are making, too, the Republicans will have to square what constituents need with what they as Republican leaders want to spend and tax. Unless Republicans can work through this cognitive dissonance, they will be out of power in California as quickly as in.
The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan graced the San Diego harbor during the Republican Convention. The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier had come to town the previous week for a change of command and the accompanying ceremony. It was an appropriate image for the Party of Reagan and its own change.
]]>Tea Party Talk: Racism, Palin, and the Hostile Takeover of the Republican Partytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6507952010-07-19T08:22:57-04:002011-05-25T17:05:23-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/"letter" from "Coloreds" to Abraham Lincoln. (But then if you are reading HuffPost, you probably already know about that.) And so instead of gettin' down together in Vegas the the National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams and Tea Party Express.
On Friday, Mark Skoda, one of the founders of the National Tea Party Federation, wrote on Facebook: "After reading the entirety of the [Williams] blog, I have come to the conclusion that a call for rebuke and removal is necessary. This is not the first time that Mark Williams has taken this approach. And while I can appreciate sarcasm, this "letter" is beyond the pale and reignites an issue that we were winning. I have already issued a press release from the Memphis TEA Party calling for his removal. As a leader he can either lead, or as an entertainer, entertain but he should not do both. This matter is too serious to let lie in such an incendiary environment."
Over the weekend, the federation held a conference call and decided to boot Williams and Tea Party Express.
Oh, the ironies here. First of all, this was to have been the weekend that showcased Sharron Angle for the Tea Party-at-large. But now it is difficult not to conclude that, as the Tea Party Express candidate, she has been crippled instead. In an email yesterday, Mark Skoda assured me, "I don't think this will hurt Angle, however, she won't want to associate herself with TPE after the controversy. At least that's what I would divine from the status of things. Reid has done a good job of beating her up while she has been raising money. This will be a race to watch!"
I agree with Mark Skoda that Angle v. Reid is prime time, but I am much less sanguine about her prospects now.
A further irony -- sort of a double twist -- is that the Tea Party was starting to become yesterday's news until last week in Kansas City when NAACP convention delegates, at play in the field of unintended consequences, gave the movement a boost with their resolution condemning the Tea Party for harboring "racist elements." A war of words spread as fast as a Kansas prairie fire. Mark Williams to the NAACP: You "make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever." Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), also to the NAACP: "All those who wore sheets a long time ago have now lifted them off and started wearing clothing with a name, say, I am part of the tea party."
Let me say straight off that I love Sheila Jackson Lee, although I do think that meeting her up close and personal is a requirement for appreciating her style, which is an acquired taste. I followed her around for a bit when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton and learned to laugh off her larger flamboyances. Clearly, Mark Williams had not my advantage when he penned his penny-dreadful blog post. And now he and his TPE are pariahs.
But the larger Tea Party is back in the news. Even starchy George Will is defending the Teas against charges of racism. There was no need to gather in Las Vegas for renewed commitment, after all. And here's the irony. The Las Vegas convention was canceled because not enough people had signed up to go. Mark Skoda told me, "It's a long drive for a lot of people." I did not find that to be a completely satisfactory explanation. The hard slog for candidates had set in, and the sunshine patriots had fallen by the wayside. Among those who remained, who had the time or the money or the desire to trek to Las Vegas? So thank you, NAACP, for bringing us back together again, the Teas are saying.
Three weeks ago, I sat down in Memphis with Mark Skoda, who in addition to being a founder of the National Tea Party Federation is a local radio talk show host and multilingual businessman, to talk about a variety of tea party issues, including racism. Mark and I became acquainted last February when I convinced him in Nashville to grant me a press pass for the Tea Party Convention there. It did not take me (or any other reporter) long to figure out that Memphian Mark Skoda and not Nashville attorney Judson Phillips (the convention was his baby) was running things. Also, for a reasoned conversation about the Tea Party movement and politics, Mark is your guy. And so I sought him out for a second, longer conversation. Given Mark Skoda's role in the expulsion of Mark Williams and the Tea Party Express from the national federation, and given Skoda's comments to me about racism and the party, this is a timely moment to share some of that interview. Coincidentally, I began where the current NAACP Tea Party troubles began: in a disagreement over what happened when a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus walked through a Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C. last March:
Mark, if I understood some of your emails correctly, you were at the health care protest in D.C. at the end of March where John Lewis claims that he was dissed by Tea Partiers.
Yes, that's right. In fact I was one of the organizers of the Code Red Rally during the week and also took the town halls to Washington and of course joined in the major rally, which was held on the Capitol Steps--actually was there when they [members of the Congressional Black Caucus] sort of walked the walk--and observed that. Was a bit confounded by it, because clearly it was an attempt to create a situation. I had been to the National Capitol Building often times from the House; and obviously you always do that underground, with a high level of security. So there was a clear sense there that there was an attempt to create an event. Yeah.
So exactly what happened?
As you probably know, I'm also one of the co-founders of the National Tea Party Federation. And we actually did some investigation, along with BigGovernment.com. And Andrew Breitbart's organization produced a number of videos, which refute not only the allegations but call into question the veracity of the charges being made. Not by Congressman Lewis per se, although I think he was sort of used, in particular. We subsequently sent a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus calling for any evidentiary documents and or videos.
I saw that letter.
And what we got was, as the Christian Science Monitorreported and actually called the Congressional Black Caucus. What they found is not only were they [the Caucus] angered by the letter and their inability to produce any documentation but also they [the Monitor] began to question some of the videos. And as it subsequently came out, there was no evidence of any--
You mean the Christian Science Monitor questioned the veracity of the videos--
Correct. Yes. The videos of the charges. Because they also saw the videos, and it was also clear that there was at least two political staff who were actually filming during the entirety of that event, walking in line with Congressman Lewis actually. And so it was clear that it simply did not happen.
And they never released those videos that the staff made.
No. They did not.
We understood very clearly what was attempted there. And as was presented by a number of videos, on [the] BigGovernment site and other Breitbart sites in particular, which had been submitted not only by people who were there but [from] numerous angles and [with] very good audio and in one case high-def video--there was simply no indication of any altercations whatsoever. And particularly of any suggestion that anyone used the N-word.
So that brings me to racism in the Tea Party in general. I notice at the convention in Las Vegas there is going to be a session on how to deal with charges of racism.
You know I think -- I would tell you that there is an attempt -- I mean, after the Washington event there was a whole flurry of activity by various people including our own [TN] District 9 Congressman Steve Cohen to raise the racism charge, and to raise, quote unquote, the militia charge. But the racism charge is particularly problematic because there was no objective evidence of that, and I think there was an attempt, albeit now feebly, to project that. I think the truth of the matter is that when you look at what's happened, the only racial hate crime that's occurred was with SEIU representatives who beat a black conservative in the St. Louis rally that took place earlier this year.
So my sense right now is that, to be sure, there were voice mails that we heard and suggestions that, quote unquote, people made these allegations and used slanderous terms for various nationalities, ethnicities -- but I think the ability to associate those to the Tea Party people just wasn't obvious to me. One of the things we've done, and particularly in formation of the National Tea Party Federation, was specifically to require that for membership the various groups have to refute any racism and any acts of violence, any charges of birtherism and or truthers, because quite frankly this is a responsible, patriotic movement.
Can we eradicate anybody who has any feelings perhaps against a particular culture or ethnicity? No. But the truth of the matter is America is bound by its racial diversity and is also encumbered by that racial diversity, inasmuch as people's differences sometimes are inappropriately associated with various hate crimes and/or simply derogatory comments. Which frankly have no place in my view in the public dialogue. We have been very clear about this.
You bring up the birthers. And I notice that Joseph Farah's coming to Las Vegas.
That's right. And he's going to speak strictly on the issue of unity. I think Judson Phillips [organizer of the Nashville Tea Party convention] has done a good job in talking to him about that. We don't really want to have any discussions around the legitimacy of this birthright [sic], etc. Frankly it's irrelevant to the discussion. He's our President. I can find plenty to disagree with him on, on his administrative actions and his policies--
You're talking about President Obama.
That's correct. Which obviously -- look, one has to get beyond that at this point, to have a serious dialogue. There is so much to challenge in this administration's policies that we really don't need to go back to that question.
I was surprised that Joseph Farah is coming to the Tea Party Convention in Las Vegas, because I remember that you in particular were dismayed by his birther comments at the convention in Nashville.
Yeah. I made my voice known to Judson. He's actually a friend of Judson's, and Judson Phillips, who is the organizer, has made his point to Joseph Farah, as well. I think, practically speaking, you're going to hear a very reasoned dialogue from Joseph Farah.
Okay. We'll see how that works out.
Indeed.
So changing the topic a little bit, how do you square--there was a New York Times poll in April that got a huge amount of secondary press showing that members of the Tea Party are wealthier and more educated than average Americans.
It's interesting -- when you look at the Tea Party demographics 55% are women, and as we know there is a great deal of wealth in the female population of America. I think that the sort of cartoonish association of Tea Partiers as being old white males, Southern, illiterate--
Which you still read--
Which we still read, is simply untrue first of all. I think the obvious nature of the activism in such a short period of time speaks to, I think, the organizational skills of the Tea Party movement and the leadership and indeed the ability to embrace technology, to embrace organization, which are obviously skills that don't come out of lack of education, lack of intelligence. The reality is that the Tea Party is making a major change. We are seeing that in election after election -- not a hundred percent -- but as Reagan said, "If you are with me 80% of the time, I'm with you."
And I think that -- the experience I've had certainly -- is that there are people that are involved in this movement [who] came out of -- not what I call a disaffected population but a group of people who heretofore worked every day, paid their taxes, sent their kids to school, went to church and did it all over again the next week. And now they recognize that it's no longer sufficient to expect their legislative representatives to act on their behalf. In fact, they are antagonistic to them. So as a result, they are now in the streets, if you will, organized and making a difference on a local level, statewide and then nationally.
Why do you think in the press, even this week, you still read most Tea Party members are male?
Yeah, I think it's again, the narrative doesn't fit the reality. Right? And if you want to have an antagonistic approach, you cannot have it against women, right? It's the idea you don't hit a woman. And the reality is that the Tea Party movement is so overwhelmingly led by women, and so positioned as a majority by women that if they recognized that, then all these antagonistic and derogatory comments are essentially focused on those women. And it will in fact diminish their own credibility. They cannot admit the truth--this is the problem with so many liberal policies -- if you look at the facts, and the facts don't align with your narrative, then you simply ignore the facts. And -- look -- the Tea Party doesn't commission these studies -- we don't commission the fact that 13% of the Tea Party is Democratic, roughly 37% are independents, the rest are Republicans. That fact also doesn't get out in the news. And 55% of them are women doesn't get out in the news. And the fact that they're wealthier and smarter on average, more educated I should say, on average doesn't get out in the news, 'cause it doesn't fit with the narrative of the derogatory, dumb Southern hick mentality racist -- which is essential to their [liberals] ability to disparage the movement, and diminish its effectiveness -- which is obviously not happening because we're seeing too many successes. . . .
You mentioned "Reagan and the 80%." About the fact that the Tea Party is losing supporters that the Tea Party has had, as there has been a recent Washington Postpoll showing .
That's a very cheap poll. Actually, I worked with Michael Leahy on analyzing that poll, and it was disproportionately Democrat sampling. I forget the exact number, but it was almost 60% Democrat sampling. So you had a skewing of the data once again, and the Washington Post, which has been no friend of the Tea Party I believe, was not clear about that skewing. I think, I've read other polls which still see a very strong support. I think what is happening, it will agree, is that those who are typically independent perhaps may see -- may see -- that the non-partisan nature of the Tea Party, which frankly is a conservative movement, is trending Republican largely because you're not going to vote for a third party. This is not a third party movement. So as that evidence becomes apparent, those who were perhaps left-of-center leaning may feel that way. But in general I think it is frankly a testament to the use of statistics, as I say, "figures lie and liars figure. . . ."
In a strange way that brings me around to another question. The relationship of Sarah Palin to the Tea Party movement.
It's interesting, I had a long interview with AP on this very issue. AP Alaska was talking to me, and I think that when we look at Sarah Palin, she's sorta been called the Queen of the Tea Party, I think that Sarah Palin is a good voice which resonates with the Tea Party. I don't think that she is a representative politician of the Tea Party. I think that at the end of the day she is a practical conservative. She's pragmatic. She has judiciously used her skills to endorse certain candidates --
Not all Tea Party candidates -- not in California, not in Texas --
That is correct. Which is perfectly fine. Again, I actually believe in democracy. A democratic republic. Therefore, 80% with me is with me. So I think that what she does -- the interesting thing about Sarah Palin now I think, with Haley, is that we're beginning to see some extraordinary conservative women. I mean Meg Whitman, of course. And Carly Fiorina. And Sharron Angle. And we're seeing these extraordinary conservative women -- what I'm excited about -- and quite frankly incensed that the MEN in our Senate and Congress have shown little to no leadership skills--save for perhaps a Jim DeMint. And yet these conservative women are coming forward, who are extraordinary, who are charismatic, who have their skills and their background. And interestingly, they are coming forward at a time when the Tea Party itself is maturing, in terms of its political clout, to a degree. And one almost sees that this 55% number that I spoke about earlier is being reflected in the general election demographic as well, because women are seeing the necessity to step up and to lead where they have gotten tired of men who have longed played the "old boy" game.
So I must say that's what I find encouraging. And Sarah Palin, to a large degree I believe, broke that barrier, and created that opportunity for conservative women to step forward. That's where I think she has been a true change agent in the political environment.
So you would say she had the moment, the charisma that, say, a longtime politico like Kay Bailey Hutchison didn't.
It was Grandma versus the girl next door. That's right. She is the next generation. I think, having been able to sit with her at the convention, --
Palin --
There was this great -- as I observed her -- there was this great sense of fragility in her demeanor. She is so, how do I want to say this, seems so vulnerable, but yet she is so very strong. And she has a spiritual element about her -- her conviction is evident -- and when she gets up, she is extraordinary in her absolute certainty about who and what she believes. And therefore, I think that, as we said, the moment of her selection, her having campaigned and what I think now is a continuing crafting of her skills which we're seeing, not as far as she needs to go, but she's got plenty of time if she wants to run for president. But she's crafting those skills and getting better at sort of addressing the issues. Her experience on a national level is improving. I think it's a very positive result. But that is why I believe it has opened the door for so many people to run in this particular cycle -- so many women I should say.
One of the things I thought was interesting at the Tea Party convention in Nashville was--I observed a nuanced relationship between the conventioneers who were there and Sarah Palin. So many of the conventioneers left before the night she appeared and spoke. Partly for financial reasons -- not everybody wanted to spend the money. But also when I interviewed people, not everybody who came to the convention and wanted to learn better ways of running their local tea party -- not all of them were huge Palin supporters.
I even pointed out to the AP interviewer, I said, you know, from my own view I would like to see Sarah Palin get into the secondary and the tertiary levels of discussion. She tends to run a risk of becoming too cliched. She's on these what I call "quick hits" -- whether it 's a pundit on Fox or her interviews. I would like to see her more on a "Meet the Press." I would like to see her get into those secondary and tertiary levels of discussion on policies, whether it's the Gulf oil spill, which she should have great insights into, given her relationship with the oil industry, and be able to discuss what was problematic. Not that Obama screwed up, but here is what I would have done had I been president. You know, those are the things I think that if she is to be a credible presidential candidate, she is not by any stretch of the imagination a lightweight intellectual, but she is in my opinion put in positions that do not allow her to generate the kind of, what I call, weighty analysis --
Gravitas--
Gravitas, yes. I think that's so important for the next president, because we are not going to trust hopey and changey things anymore. We're gonna ask for the bona fides. And you better be able to back it up.
Well, if you see Sarah Palin again, Mark, you can tell her that Jake Tapper wants her on his Sunday morning talk show. He tweeted her supporters to ask her to come be on. Just for that reason. . . .
But seriously at the end of the day, the Tea Party holds people like [TN Senator] Corker and [TN Governor] Alexander accountable for their actions. And so in that sense I think what we're saying is that the movement says, 'Look, Republican Party, we have no illusions about trying to create a third party. That is basically a stupid idea. On the other hand, we're not going to take over the Democratic Party because it's too ingrained in this liberalism. In fact, it's been co-opted by the Marxists, okay? And the far left progressives. So, if we look at the Republican Party, it is, as I referred to, the infrastructure and the associated power positions to help that and to support, to promote various candidates.
So you might as well do a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, by getting people into these seats. Utah did it. Where a large majority of the Utah Republican Party representatives are now Tea Party members. We are beginning to do that here in Tennessee. You are going to see more and more of that, where the Tea Party people are coming in to contend for these seats. So that we can vet candidates, support candidates that are more aligned with those three key goals that we have as a movement.
You can say I'm aligned with the Republicans. I agree. The Tea Party movement must be aligned with the party in order to win -- that's how you win elections. So are you gonna align with the Republicans or with the Democrats? Nothing over there in the Democrat Party that I embrace, so I'm gonna align with the Republicans. But it's gonna be aligned with responsible Republican leadership that actually insures it is responsive to the people which we have not seen thus far, on either side of the House, and the Senate. And it's gonna be aligned with core values: smaller government, less taxation, less spending, free markets.
When we see people like Corker and others, even Richard Shelby, trying to figure out compromise on this financial re-regulation, which we know is going to be detrimental. Which we see the kinds of efforts that are being undertaken with respect to accommodating through cap and trade as South Carolina Senator, um --
Lindsey Graham--
Lindsey Graham. I mean these people! Right now this party should not have been the "Party of No," it should have been the "Party of Hell, No!" In fact, pass nothing until after 2010 elections, and then let's see where we're at. Let's see what the ballots look like and then begin to work a compromise. Because today there is no compromise in the House and Senate. There is no compromise from the Left. This is the most partisan White House and administration ever. They do not include the Republicans in any form or fashion of governance. In that sense, you have to object to everything then, hold your ground, let the cavalry come in and then figure out what you have to have a more balanced compromise possible. Compromise takes both sides. Right now the Left sees this as their progressive nirvana. My view is it's build a firewall and hold them off. . . .
The truth of the matter is it wouldn't change my attitudes about what I'm trying to do. There's a conviction, I can make the case. I'm not going to attack you as a person. That was why I was so against the "birther" notion. I'm not attacking Obama as a human being. On my radio show, I'll do sarcastic commentary, you know, but that's sort of entertainment. But I will not attack him in terms of my role as a Tea Party leader. I will attack his policies, because I think they're wrong for America. And they are wrong because they increase debt. And they restrict my freedoms. Or they err, in my view at least up until the Supreme Court reviews [them as] constitutional. And I think things like abrogating bondholder and shareholder rights in the takeover of Chrysler and General Motors was problematic. . . .
We have to get people who listen and are willing to work to take the hard decisions. That's a challenge. That's a multi-election-cycle effort, to be sure. It's not gonna happen in 2010, or 2012. But we have to start. If we were to throw up our hands and say "reform is dead, walk away," then we would be foolish. . . .
It's this whole issue -- when I looked at how the Los Angeles school district was penalizing Arizona -- supposedly, right? I found it amusing because at the end of the day California gets so much of its energy from the state of Arizona. . . .
This is the problem whenever you try to balkanize relationships -- this is why I'm anti-boycott. You have to realize you have a pile of dollars, and they are not your dollars, federal and state government, they are our dollars. And I agree we have to pay a certain level of taxation because we are enabled by federal and state and local agencies to have good quality libraries and schools and public infrastructure and all. I don't disagree that those are things that are necessary and desirable. But I also believe when that is dealt with in a reasonable fashion, those same governmental agencies have to recognize "there is no more. . . ."
Just one final question. What would be a scenario where you think -- you talk about the need to get around balkanization -- a Tea Party group of leaders could come together and talk with a group of Daily Kos or MoveOn? Is that too pie in the sky?
I think that right now we're trying to fix the conservative movement, right? What I have found from my own experience is, when I was discussing things with the New York Times and several other more liberal papers -- one thing I was very clear about, and I felt I was treated very fairly in the interviews, the reflection of my comments in those interviews. One thing I didn't do was attack them or their institutions. I didn't have to, I didn't want to. I can disagree with you, but I can disagree graciously. And what I found was, in that opening, which I was very clear about in any interviews I took, is that people respected me for that -- I think. At least, were willing to have the dialogue. And reflect fairly my comments without making me to look like a cartoonish figure.
I believe that ultimately that is something that needs to happen. I think we are so polarized right now, it's going to have to happen later. It's going to have to happen under a different president. Because this president has very effectively balkanized this nation. Very effectively. In a way I don't think we've ever seen a more divisive figure. To go from what was "hope and change" with a lot of folks voting for him, 62 million folks voting for him, to where he stands today. Without having simply misled that group of people. And when you have imbued that level of emotion, and that level of expectation in an individual and that individual fails you, you -- I know a lot of people that were of that ilk -- they are hurt, they are unwilling to talk about it, they are unwilling to admit the problem. And until you get to that point, it is hard to have those dialogues. I would love to have a chance to talk, but just not right now. I think it would be good to have that dialogue -- not on the record, but to have that dialogue.
We talk about it here -- you and I had lunch in this city -- we have a very demographically bifurcated -- a very large African-American population here, and in South Memphis, and a very white population in the suburbs, although a number of suburbs like Cordova and Bartlett are not. It takes an effort to make those connections, to work together. It's something that we do on a local basis, that I do on a local basis. And so why wouldn't I want to do it on a political basis? But right now I have so much work to do in my quote unquote own party and the efforts I am undertaking, I don't know if I have enough energy or time for that today.
We are in a battle of hearts and minds, and I would like to say that the battle can be had in a way that is respectful but tough, very tough -- and we'll see how it turns out in 2010.
Three days after my talk with Mark Skoda, the Tea Party Convention in Las Vegas was officially canceled -- or rather, postponed until October. But I will be surprised if it takes place. For some reason, most of the media bought the official explanation that it was determined to be too hot in Las Vegas in July for a convention. (Tell that to Netroots Nation.) I have yet to figure this out.
The full interview will be online later today at mayhillfowler.com. Mark Skoda holds forth on Sarah Palin's future, Sharron Angle, Angela McGlowan's defeat in Mississippi, the Memphis races, Glenn Beck, California and (surprise) the need to raise the Social Security tax to the level of all earned income. ]]>Taking the Me From Social Mediatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6426702010-07-12T12:26:06-04:002011-05-25T17:00:24-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
In the last month, a prominent journalist, Octavia Nasr of CNN, and two State Department spokesmen, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, have fallen afoul of the tweet. Cohen and Ross merely suffered public reprimands, but Nasr was fired. Similarly, Dave Weigel lost his job at the Washington Post over a few ill-considered emails. The fates of these four are now for me a constant reminder of the perils of social media, whether I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla or a blog commenter thread (and I keep telling myself to forget chatroulette).
Social media had already been flashing multiple danger signs this year, as schools and parents struggled to deal with hate speech on Facebook and hazing through texting, as we all grew increasingly aware that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have mastered digital outreach just as well as Organizing for America ever did. But the heady sensation of connectedness induced by social media whisks the user quickly past contemplation of the sands upon which these Internet relationships are built.
The speed of the back-and-forth, sometimes near instantaneous, and the collapse of space and time encourage a false intimacy. Indeed there is something about the feeling of disassociation that accompanies an encounter in virtual space that breaks down inhibition. Paradoxically, I am at one and the same time exhilarated by the possibilities inherent in the essential anonymity of the web as I am impelled to share more than I would ever consider doing in person, in real social situations. Virtual space is a version of outer space, where the weightlessness is a freedom from consequences, as well as from the demands of actual relationships.
This illusion is amplified on Twitter, where the relationship is particularly skewed. I know few of my followers on Twitter. They are like imaginary friends. Even as I am tweeting, I am constructing in my mind responses. Occasionally, like a message from a distant satellite, I get a DM (direct message) or retweet in reply. But the interchanges tend to be brief and fragmentary. The significance of this one-sidedness is that it fosters the expansion of self via imagination to fill the other half of the relationship. This phenomenon is also a potential pitfall for Google groups, like the one Dave Weigel had joined (400 journalists, apparently) and the one to which I belong. A pleasantly expansive feeling buoys the writing of emails to a group of people to whom you are "connected" by knowing only some. And the sneaky concomitant to that feeling is the urge to fill the unknown with bits of self.
This is the best explanation that I can come up with for the risky social media choices that four media-savvy professionals made in the last few weeks.
Succumbing to the siren call of social media had particularly harsh consequences for Octavia Nasr. Here is a woman, an Arab Christian, born and educated in Lebanon, who spent most of her adult life straddling the cultural divides all immigrants experience, and who in her work as a Middle East correspondent for an Atlanta-based news network, had to walk many fine lines in reporting on a riven world. Although most of Beirut turned out for the funeral of the Shiite cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, this spectacle was of little interest in the United States, even though the revered leader had supported suicide bombing and verbally attacked the United States. Nasr tweeted that she was "sad" to hear of his passing, because, as she belatedly explained, he had been a complicated man who also defended women's rights in a misogynistic world. But Twitter is not the medium for biographical nuance. Nor is CNN a go-to news source for the kind of lengthy reportage that supports nuance. Although CNN is now a worldwide enterprise, its persona is American homeland and homegrown, sketched in broad strokes.
If the Washington Post had been able to look past the Dave Weigel emails, in which Weigel trash talked conservative icons and movements, like the Tea Party, about which he reported for the Post, it would have been entertaining for us readers, as well as instructive, not to mention revelatory of conservatives, to watch Weigel, who in one email blasted "'real American' views, no matter how fucking moronic," re-establish himself with the subjects of his inquiry. But the persona of the Post, like that of CNN, is American public virtue, chiseled with a straightforward aspect (none of that two-faced Old World decadence here), with all it implies.
The missteps of Cohen and Ross are subtle. What could be problematic about these tweets? Cohen: "strong words from US techdel to Syria on intellectual property." Cohen: "charged 5000 Syrian pounds at an ATM and only get 500 out." Ross: "the government and older generation are in a very, very, very different place than Syria's youth." Ross: "With @jaredcohen in Aleppo, half looking out for the Syrian intel officer who interrogated him when he was here in 2005."
These tweets, from a State-sponsored trip dedicated to rapprochement, are implicitly critical of Syria. Another tweet, praising the local coffee drinks ("I'm not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappacino [sic] ever"), reminds us how often Americans continue to be Innocents Abroad. Are tweeters Cohen & Ross characters out of Mark Twain or Henry James? Does it matter? In the coffee tweet, the message is surprise. The State Department tweeter does not seem to recognize the centrality of coffee, long ago established, in parts of what used to be the Ottoman Empire. Or maybe he does. That's the problem with Twitter that cost Octavia Nasr her job. Only the best writers can wield the 140-character format for complicated thought. If Nasr had written, instead, a long blog post about the contradictory nature of the late Fadlallah, would she have lost her job?
Like Nasr and Weigel, Cohen and Ross ran smack into a larger problem: The tenor of their social media communications was counterproductive for the larger message and goals to which their employers were dedicated. State Department foreign diplomacy for the most part continues to be formal and hieratic in style. More importantly, Secretary Clinton's visits abroad always begin with accenting the positive. In every port of call, she lavishes praise, publicly, upon her hosts. Cohen and Ross, however, were tweeting in a manner completely at odds with the Secretary's tactics. The bits of us that Twitter draws forth -- the arch, the musing -- are not skill sets that best serve foreign affairs.
Social media itself is merely a tool. But the addition of the human component makes it much more than that. It takes on characteristics of a force of nature, and like any such, it is neither good nor bad. It is what it is. Wielding this force, four otherwise knowledgeable communicators have shown us how difficult it can be to control. They made the same mistake: filling in with bits of self space that seemed to be free but a corner of which was already occupied by their employers. The implicit and tacit part of a certain kind of relationship, this shadow presence goes everywhere, on and off the Internet, with professionals who have jobs in the public sphere.
You might suppose that in a time when Americans are focused on jobs above all else that people lucky enough to have them would always have in their sights the nexus of power in the employee-employer relationship and therefore keep in mind an employer's concerns. This does not mean that CNN, the State Department and the Washington Post were right (in fact, many pundits have criticized the decision-making) -- just that, in the end, the employer, fairly or not, calls the shots.
These mishaps are cautionary exemplars for a society that has traveled far, for better or worse, from the mindset of my parents' generation, men and women growing up in the Depression, losing their youth to World War II, and finally, perhaps not surprisingly, settling down into jobs at companies with which they more readily identified than workers do today. Really there is no need to expatiate upon the change, except to point out that social media by its very nature engages this cultural shift. If, despite all its positive uses, social media at the same time exposes the inherent weaknesses of individualism -- not to mention the sense of self-worth and (unintended consequences) of entitlement and overconfidence that my generation has instilled in our children -- what is it doing in other cultures? Easy prediction: We are going to find out.
]]>Seduction and Betrayal: McChrystal and the Misapprehension of Journalismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6252712010-06-25T08:40:44-04:002011-05-25T16:55:19-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/Rolling Stone. Hastings: why so much push-back from my peers on this story? McChrystal: we trusted him, a guy who knew all the darkness of war--his girlfriend was blown to bits in Baghdad, for Christ's sake. But if journalism is an act of seduction, inherent to that seduction is betrayal. And journalism, in the end, is always an act of betrayal.
Betrayer and Betrayed. These are experiences that I understand viscerally because in the maelstrom following hard upon my reporting that Barack Obama had described small-town Pennsylvanians "clinging to guns and religion," I was both the actor and the acted-upon. Just as I betrayed the trust of the Obama supporters who had granted me access in the assumption that I would never write anything that might harm their candidate, so I experienced betrayal myself upon reading what other reporters hastened to opine after interviewing me. And so the unfolding of the Hastings-McChrystal relationship, in which a freelance reporter captured the general and his staff disrespecting the president and his--has for me a particular resonance. More to the point here, this big story of the last three days raises all sorts of questions to which I've given much thought since that night in San Francisco when our current president went on a little too long about some of our fellow Americans.
The implosion of the career of General Stanley McChrystal over as riveting a forty hours as we've seen lately in the public sphere, culminating Wednesday morning in President Obama's acceptance of his general's resignation as commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, has lit up the commentariat on the question, among others, of the proper stance for journalists in reporting news and the people who create news.
Much of the talk has centered on the difference--one that, as speculation goes, perhaps McChrystal's staff did not appreciate--between a beat reporter and a freelancer like Hastings. Jamie McIntyre, for many years the Pentagon correspondent for CNN, and therefore writing early Wednesday from experience, has had the best take on what in the world could McChrystal have been thinking when he allowed Michael Hastings, who was personally unknown to the general and his staff, to follow them around in order to write an article for Rolling Stone.
"The dirty little secret among beat reporters who routinely travel with top military officials is that there's a unwritten code, a general understanding, that off-color jokes, irreverent banter, and casual conversations are generally off-the-record, or on the deepest of background, unless otherwise agreed upon.
"Usually this is an informal understanding, especially when a group of reporters is traveling with an official, but sometimes it's part of official ground rules, like for instance on the Defense Secretary's official plane. All conversations are off-the-record, and if you want something on the record, you have to ask, and get permission. This is to allow the Secretary and his top lieutenants to let their hair down and relax. It also gives the reporters a chance to get to know the officials and have unguarded conversations with them, information that can be very useful in providing context down the road. It makes the plane a welcome sanctuary at the end of what is often a grueling day. The plane policy began as an informal understanding, until one reporter blogged a first-person account of what it's like traveling on the plane, and mentioned that the flight surgeon handed out sleeping pills to anyone who felt they needed them. This angered then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and the result was a formal policy."
As Jamie observes, there is a code, as often implicit as explicit--what I have long called "the code of the road." One part of the code that Jamie does not get into: not only do reporters not detail the tick-tock of the back story and the back chat between politicians and generals and their staffs, reporters also turn a blind eye to each other. No matter that some reporters are now more famous and of more interest to an influential niche of readers (like the Gawker crowd) than the people they cover. Discovering the code of the road was a fascinating revelation of the 2008 campaign trail.
Months before I recorded and wrote about Obama's comments at the San Francisco fundraiser, I had observed, figured out and begun to subscribe to the code, which had at first struck me as damned odd. Why did I fall in line? I was the newbie, I was insecure, I wanted to fit in. I wanted to do the right thing. Therefore, I never wrote about the coziness I witnessed on the campaign trail among a few well-known journalists and campaign staffers, conversations I overheard that belied the nonpartisan stance the journalists adopted in public--behavior that I found inappropriate, no matter the trade-off in access (although at the time I could not have said why my instincts warned me against this). Of course, as a neophyte I had little access; therefore, it was easy for me to judge, perhaps. The salient fact is that I was so unsure what (in the hell) I was doing that I would never have called these luminaries out. On the other hand, I don't know that I would do differently today. I do believe, as Jamie McIntyre vividly sets the scene, that no one of us, even reporters and pols and generals, should have to be "on camera" 24/7.
The reality is that reporters and politicians, reporters and soldiers, together inhabit a small space--in physical proximity, in the brevity of an historic moment. Everybody has the sense, no matter how excruciatingly mind numbingly repetitive or stressful any one day, that they are participating in something greater than themselves. There is an appreciation of a common humanity. This sense of a shared, larger purpose, grounded in the fact that they all--reporters, politicians, generals, soldiers, staffers alike--are creating history, may flicker and dim in the course of a particularly sordid stretch of investigative journalism, but it is always there, and it lies at the heart of the code of the road.
But the code has its darker purposes, for the relationship between power and the press, at least in the political sphere that I know, is a profoundly dysfunctional relationship. Seduction and betrayal tune a pavanne that both sides dance. My first exposure to this stormy marriage at the national level was on a bright, snowy Sunday Iowa afternoon when David Axelrod, who became for me that day the Barry White of spin, strode cheerily into the press compound and began to utter the most patently untrue remarks I had heard in my admittedly few months on the trail. I stood, agape, in a crush of lower level reporters furiously scribbling the Ax blather, a few (this was only 2007, after all) aiming recorders at his mustache. It's not that the other reporters didn't know Axelrod was feeding them a line--an impotent and therefore all-the-more poisonous fury emanated from them like heat--but they were trapped. They had jobs to do; they had to report what was said and done that day, no matter what.
Many if not most of these beat reporters did not have the luxury I had, as an unpaid blogger, of turning around and walking away. Some, probably the majority, resented the campaign (and the other campaigns I covered were exactly the same) for the pablum, even as the staffers did not respect the journalists for eating it. Meanwhile, as I've indicated, this was not an equal opportunity environment. The reporters who favored the candidate naturally got more access; they were fed special tidbits now and then. In such an environment, the code is necessary on some level just to keep reporters and staffers from each other's throats.
Although this reminiscence may seem to detour from the saga of the runaway general, really it goes to the crux. The spectacle I witnessed that afternoon in Iowa helped to settle into the back of my brain something that had begun merely as a niggle: an inner warning that I should be wary about getting too close to a politician or staffers, that I should not socialize with them, because no matter how much we might share a common patriotism and a common humanity, in the middle ground we have very different goals. This was the beginning of a slow understanding of what "committing an act of journalism" can sometimes entail.
Sometimes, often abruptly, an assignment becomes more than doing the job. It's suddenly a really big story, more important than the reporter and the sources put together. Did Michael Hastings know that by publishing the McChrystal & staff comments he was going to get them in a shit load of trouble? Surely, he did. And he knew this, and did it anyway, probably liking a lot of the guys very much. But the back chat was and is such a warning sign of a war out-of-control, even if disrespect is how good and talented men handle that impossible situation, that Michael Hastings had to publish. (Interestingly, the Obama administration seems not to have read on to the larger point of the article.) I'm sure Hastings thought about what he was doing, thought long and hard.
Likely only a tenth of the salaciousness Hastings saw and heard made it into his piece. I estimate based on how much of what I see and hear makes it into mine. Journalists every single day make decisions on what to put in, what to leave out, for a panoply of reasons practical, stylistic and rhetorical. And always, always the mental wheels of moral calibration are turning. This is a novel situation--what should I do here? Am I making the right choice? Here is where sources--like the Obama California grassroots organizers with whom I finally learned the lesson about getting too close--like the McChrystal staffers in Paris--get themselves in trouble. They don't understand that for reporters stories are always evolving; they don't grasp the implications for themselves. Even as they are stepping forward in the dance of seduction--the better to be presented to readers as they see themselves--they trust. I have been that partner in the dance, I have trusted; I know just how easy it is to fall into the delusion--why? because people think they will enjoy being observed and written up. Sometimes all it takes is the establishment of bona fides to get past initial caution. The bona fides I trusted, again and again, was the name of the news organization a reporter interviewing me was writing for. If I admired the outlet, how could the reporter not write something I would admire about me? I'm still not sure I've learned that lesson.
For the Obama grassroots organizers whose trust I betrayed, my bona fides was money. I had donated to the Obama Campaign; therefore, it was inconceivable that I would ever write anything that might damage that campaign. For the McChrystal staffers, Hastings's bona fides likely was the death of his sweetheart in the Iraq War. Surely, every staffer (if not McChrystal himself) knew Hastings's history. Somebody had googled him, if nothing else. This was a tragedy none of them, battle-hardened as they were, had experienced in war. Hastings had. Therefore, it was inconceivable that he would betray them. In some of Hastings's anecdotes, I get the sense, ever so slightly, that these staffers, ironically, sadly, in their talk are trying to prove to the reporter that they are as tough as he is. The best war reporting is always shot through with reticence (think Dexter Filkins at the New York Times). And here, paradoxically, is Hastings at his best, in not giving us everything that he could have.
In the end, it's not a matter of beat reporters versus freelancers, of breaking the code and losing access. Any reporter worth his or her salt would have reported exactly as Hastings and I did. Sometimes the story trumps every other consideration. Over time, I've come to see that every little bit of reportage, no matter how quotidian, is a small act of betrayal. The mere chronicling of an event, in the act of choosing words, in the fixing of the camera lens, affects it. Anybody who has ever been part of something and later seen it in the press has experienced that moment of disassociation, the knowledge that the reportage, no matter how good and accurate, has not captured quite what was seen and felt, and now that the event has been chronicled, has changed it. In this way, journalism is rather like quantum physics.
But I try not to get too philosophical and epistemological about what I do. Every single day that I head out to cover a story now I always recognize that small knot in the pit of my stomach that signifies the possibility for betrayal even as my spirits lift for I so enjoy the seductive dance itself. And maybe because I'm a journalist, both the knot of unease and the juxtaposed anticipation seem to me to be very good things. ]]>Personal Democracy Forum 2010: Losing Faith in Obama and Big Governmenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6026772010-06-07T09:21:33-04:002011-05-25T16:40:24-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/2010 Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York was the way attendees engaged with John Perry Barlow and began to build upon his suggestion that the renaissance of the city-state may be the saving of American democracy. I discover in reviewing my PdF tweets that I was piqued by Barlow's idea, too. What could I have been thinking, for a tweet-second? As someone who closely follows the Afghanistan story, I know what happens to a network of city-states with a weak central government.
Closer to home, we PdFers had before us the ongoing saga of the oil spill in the Gulf -- an event that would be a mortal blow to a city-state. Imagine for a minute that the North American continent was indeed a collection of city-states. Imagine an affiliation of powers known as Gulfia. What would be the fate of Gulfia? Right now the neighboring state of Texas would be poaching its resources. City-states to the north would also be moving in for the kill, picking off territory and trading partners.
It's not hard to tease out the implications of turning America into a geography of city-states. So why did some of the speakers and attendees at one of the most prestigious yearly internet/government/organizing/media gatherings take the possibility seriously? On the left (PdF is known, if not quite accurately, as an enclave of liberals) as well as on the right (the Tea Party Movement), disenchantment with big government has set in. In this loss of faith, in their disappointment with President Obama specifically and the idea that government can effect change generally, some of the country's best-known liberal voices rang the notes that created the anxious zeitgeist of dDF 2010 and led to a consideration by otherwise intelligent people of a city-states of America.
Both Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and Huff Post's own Arianna Huffington personified this new weariness with the political process. Hamsher talked about "the Progressive crisis of faith." For Huffington, "Government right now is so broken." "I get really depressed about what's happening." The conference confirmed the consensus we have seen building in Leftist country at-large: The current administration personifies business-as-usual. Our government still sleeps with big corporations. Cronyism continues. Everybody and everything without access to "the fix" is screwed. Barlow, perhaps because he is not a classic liberal, put this view best: "There is a circle of fat around the Beltway that is unbelievably thick." He observed that most of the 89 billion the federal government targeted for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina "turned around for" D.C. (Watch all the PDF sessions here.)
Ever-incisive Clay Shirky summed up the dominant opinion at PdF of Barack Obama. Shirky's rhetorical: "Is he going to govern like he campaigned?" Shirky did not have to answer his own question. Earlier the legendary Daniel Ellsberg excoriated Obama. "He lied in his State of the Union." (About leaving Iraq and Afghanistan.) Ellsberg and PdF co-founder Micah Sifry were speaking via Skype with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who called out "the free speech puppet of the United States" and who, according to Sifry, was only virtually present because he had been afraid that if he left Australia for New York he would be arrested. And so the Assange-Ellsberg-Sifry opening keynote set the dark tone for the conference.
Two years ago, I was a panelist at the more-spirited, indeed ebullient, PdF 2008, and in my remarks about the conference for Huff Post I predicted the left's disenchantment with Barack Obama. And so the day has come. I find no pleasure in it -- not even a kind of grim satisfaction, since I took a lot of heat for my view in June 2008. To hear Sifry at PdF '10 sums up the Obama style of grassroots organizing -- "it gives people the illusion of decision-making" -- merely made me sad. Why? Because even as our country needs skeptic chroniclers like me (PDF speaker Howard Rheingold memorably described teaching journalism as "a class in crap detection 101"), we need believer activists like Sifry and Hamsher who put themselves out there for change. The PdF theme this year: "Can the Internet Fix Politics?" The early consensus: No. Sifry held one of the best conversations with Evgeny Morozov, asking him to delve into the possibility that organizations like PdF had been indulging in "cyber-utopian hype." This was not the same Sifry who spoke happily about "the wisdom of the crowd" in 2008.
If there is one thing I have learned about think-meets, it is that panel discussions are largely a waste of time. Given only an hour to engage, at best five speakers can each get in only a few words. A conference panel never moves beyond a roundelay of blurb-speak. The plenary panel that closed PdF 2010 was the exception that proves the rule. Saul Anuzis, Nick Bilton, Cory Booker, Arianna Huffington, Tim O'Reilly and PdF co-founder Andrew Rasiej as moderator drilled down to confrontation level. Is there hope for change through the tools of government? Republican tech guru Anuzis (yes-and-no), media entrepreneur Huffington (doubting), internet entrepreneur O'Reilly (can-do), Newark Mayor Booker (believing), New York Times journalist Bilton (crap-detector). The dialogue wove together the best and the worst of our current political dialogue. Inexplicably, Anuzis tried to top a comment about the birther delusion: "Do you have the birth certificate?" He was roundly booed -- and let me ask straight out: Why have so many Republicans in our time unleashed themselves from norms of taste and propriety?
Because Anuzis's lame joke is representative of what passes for political dialogue now, I mention it. But to do so is a misrepresentation of the conversation, which was thoughtful and rigorous. O'Reilly argued that change comes incrementally; he pushed back against the belief that the federal government is broken. Within it, he has found here and there "an intense passion among people trying to make change." He asserted that change is coming not just from individuals and outside groups using the tools of social media, but from inside government itself. Huffington was skeptical. She asked O'Reilly to give an example. And he came up with one: The Department of Health and Human Services, "building a smarter health system" through better utilization of Medicare data.
If there was a quiet confidence and clarity charging O'Reilly's remarks, Cory Booker's were a symphony of optimism. Building on O'Reilly's example for Huffington, Booker praised the policemen and teachers in his city of Newark. "There are so many powerful government workers." He described the way Newark has dramatically lowered the recidivism rate for parolees. He sees his job as solving problems every day, in ways that " are not left or right, but forward or back." He mentioned his gift from New York City Mayor Bloomberg: a clock that counts down the time. Terms are brief, Booker said; his team and he knew they had only so much time to see "how best we can change the world." On the other hand, he was realistic. "We won't be called to storm the beaches of Normandy." For our generation it is a call to a series of small actions. "My only fear," he said, "is that people won't engage, use the power they have."
"I am a prisoner of hope," Booker said.
The paradoxical twist to this year's Personal Democracy Forum is that for all the talk of losing faith in big government as a locus for change, for all the considerations of re-locating change in smaller city-states or in even smaller units powered by the tools of social media, the full expression of everything PdF is about rested in Booker. The mood in the large hall, near wonder, was palpable, as many attendees were seeing this man in the flesh for the first time. The Twitter feed is threaded with observations like this: "One day Cory Booker will be President of the United States."
The obvious parallels with Obama lead to this observation: There is something in our nature that craves leadership on a grand scale. And that scale requires a large platform. And sometimes that large platform is big government.
For more on PDF 2010 and a bit of the tick-tock, go to my blog at mayhillfowler.com]]>A Citizen Journalist Covers an Obama State Dinner [PHOTOS]tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5834332010-05-20T12:07:51-04:002011-05-25T16:30:24-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
I haven't been to the White House since a school trip in eighth grade. And I've been intensely curious about what it's like as a reporter to cover the White House, so when I received a White House press advisory (like thousands of scribblers, I'm on the email list), I applied for a credential, as a blogger for The Huffington Post, to cover the state visit of Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico, and his wife Margarita Zavala. And now here I am, uploading photos in the very room Press Secretary Robert Gibbs launches witty rejoinders and stonewalls most every day. It's gratifying, mostly because first and foremost I am an American citizen who has made it past the door of the People's House. I am not a professional journalist. I have never been paid for my work. In fact, I am among the 12% unemployed of Alameda County, California.
Behind me, the audio tech crews are struggling with the channels for translation feeds. "Two, is that Spanish?" "No, one." "One doesn't work. Must be two." "One." Around me perched on the uncomfortable chairs (how does Helen Thomas sleep here?), wedged in with battery packs and backpacks spilling BlackBerries and spiral notebooks, are a few of the visiting press conversing desultorily in Spanish. As significant spaces often are, the press briefing room is unassuming, lowly even, battered and worn like a grade school classroom. Truants smoke in the narrow truck delivery drive outside the open door. But really this is a very busy place. Beyond the briefing room unspools a thin ribbon of corridor and a rabbit warren of tiny desks and glass-enclosed cells where reporters from Reuters et al. can be seen but not heard in intense engagement with back-lit screens. Like a barometer picking up a storm system, I feel the pressure, deadlines palpable as backwash, when I squeeze, on a random thought about fire code violations, past the feet and the hunched shoulders and into the small, nondescript, high-walled courtyard where more press mill, waiting for entrée to the South Lawn of the White House.
A door opens. An Obama aide blocks it. She begins to speak. Loudly. Slowly. She seems way too young to have mastered the tone of one whose patience is often sorely tried. "Don't go on the press riser unless you have a camera. A camera. If you are print, there is a pen for you right next. The riser is for camera people only. Camera only. Don't go beyond the rope. Do. Not. Go. Beyond the rope." It's the affect of the quotidian presidential aide. As if he or she is a hall monitor and we reporters are unruly schoolchildren.
Shoo-shooed along, we hurry through the Palm Room (a remnant of the old Conservatory?) and down the curved drive on the south front of the White House and into the wet, unmown grass of the South Lawn where the press riser awaits; the white rope we are not to touch jumps up and down on its own accord. Behind us (there are maybe 100 press), beyond another rope that bounds a lesser view, stand a clutch of "real people," as another young Obama aide describes them when we enquire. Before us, up the sloping lawn, are a small pen of special guests (can just make out Al Sharpton and wish for binoculars) and a straggle of schoolchildren along the drive.
Even I know that the presentation of foreign dignitaries is usually a yawner, stretched out long on the struts of awkward choreography and sonorous rhetoric. But we are about to get a double treat. This is a military arrival ceremony, the first of the Obama administration, I gather--complete with Ruffles and Flourishes, a 21-gun salute, a lengthy procession of flags and a presidential review of the troops, which includes an eighteenth-century drum and fife corps. Nobody among the press seems to know exactly why we have kept such a bewigged tradition, or "where they disappear to" afterwards.
But the real treat--the surprise--is that the Welcoming of President Calderon turns out to be a newsworthy event. When President Obama says, presumably to President Calderon, "We can ensure that our common border is secure," the real people behind the press pen applaud. The moment turns out to be significant when President Calderon rings a darker note on the edge of diplo-speak when he calls the experience of migrant workers in Arizona "discrimination." He is more than exercised, if not quite angry. The edge of this relationship between the two countries has been set in a way that no 28-ingredient mole from guest chef Rick Bayless will coat.
Now it's two hours later, and we print people wait in our dark suits like neat lines of crows, on party chairs for the Rose Garden presser. Behind us looms the ubiquitious press riser, and behind that the larger of the magnolia trees that Andrew Jackson planted, supposedly in memory of his late wife. The two living presidents are late. The sun comes out, and we grow hot in the suits. When two airplanes swing low over the Eisenhower Office Building next door, there is a moment in the small garden, bordered with lacecap hydrangeas, caladiums, begonias and boxwood, to appreciate the special genius of the place, the unique way in which the White House is both urban and pastoral. "We're being punished," an impatient reporter says. The moment passes.
A year-plus into his presidency, Barack Obama does not enjoy a good relationship with the White House press corps. Why? His staff are Masters of the Universe of Control. And he seldom gives a press conference. Alas, today is no exception. Calderon and Obama each deliver prepared remarks (the translation channel turns out to be one). Immigration,clearly, has been the topic of their private conversation. Now Obama says, "We acknowledge both our countries have responsibilities." He talks about accountability, from the federal government, from immigrants. He refers to what he calls "a mis-directed effort in Arizona." "My administration is taking a very close look at the Arizona law," he says. Twice he announces that the U.S. for our part is now screening southbound rail cargo "one hundred percent." But for President Calderon "mis-direction" is "discrimination." American immigration law and enforcement must "adjust itself in a realistic way to the needs of both our economies," he warns. "We firmly reject efforts to criminalize immigration."
What is the road ahead? Each president takes one question and then repeats earlier statements. "Every nation has the right to secure its borders," President Obama says. "We are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants." And, of course, that's always been the issue, finding a balance between the two. I would have loved to have been a little bird in the room during the hour-plus conversation from which the presidents have just emerged. But wouldn't we all--perched there now in the Rose Garden? So the frustration that this is not a real press conference but a staged event is all the greater. As the men walk away from their twin podiums, a reporter calls out, "Any plans for a real press conference?"
President Obama frequently laces his speeches with little put-downs of the press, especially pundits. Although I get a lot about the man, here is one thing that I do not. The men and women around me are for the most part just trying to do their jobs. JOBS. Isn't that the mantra now in this White House? And the President doesn't need to fly to Youngstown, Ohio, as he did the day before the Calderon state visit, to meet with a group of working class stiffs. They are a wing away in the White House, almost but not quite living here, rather like squatters, lashed to the wheel of the ever-churning news cycle. This is one of the difficulties of the president-press relationship, for the White House is small, considering its purpose and use, and the President, any president, must sometimes feel the presence of the noisy, untidy and frequently discontent press as if reporters and burly cameramen are massed and looming over the West Wing from the trees outside rather than crammed into the low-ceilinged basement-like quarters to which they usually are restricted.
So I get, too, the mutual frustrations with the arrangements. But everything about the White House is a living history in which the reporter's role, perhaps uniquely there, is dual: participant and chronicler. At the end of the morning, I've participated; but I haven't seen much of substance to chronicle. It's more than frustrating because I have readers, people I've met and whose circumstances I've come to know, who live in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and who are involved in the immigration debate--a border rancher in Arizona, a community of the Old Spanish in Southern New Mexico, hard-working, honest (but illegal) immigrants in Houston. What can I give them from the state visit of Felipe Calderon to the White House?
Luckily, there is the State Dinner. And so at 4:30 PM, having been granted access to the preview for the dinner arrangements, I traipse with my small group up to the North entrance to the White House. A carpenter barks, "Don't step on my red carpet!" We maneuver around the plush, red and bordered in gold, new-laid for the guests who will be arriving in one hour. Past the gilded harp and the bamboo chairs awaiting arrangement, we march upstairs to the East Room, where the patina of history (these are the famous portraits of George and Martha Washington, these are the iconic nineteenth-century chandeliers) has been freshened for the evening with flowers for the tables and arrangements of cacti for the mantles, with the Clinton china and vermeil flatware and tiny gilded eagle place card holders sans cards. (When I inquire about the absence of cards, I am told that the White House does not want the press photographing a particular guest's place setting.)
And then a sprint to the lawn tent where a second group of guests, invited for dessert and entertainment, will be feted. Since I've seen many a party tent in my day, I'm not prepared for the beauty of this one. Felipe Calderon may be angry about the treatment of migrant Mexicans but surely he will be pleased by the magic of this dusky and yet twinkling orange and gold faux butterfly habitat, a tribute to his birthplace of Michoacan, where the Monarch butterfly migrates every spring.
Quickly, quickly, we are herded to Booksellers, the corner of a White House passageway where traditionally the press can photograph the guests as they pass through on their way to the East Room. Again it's hurry up and wait, as we stand for an hour, poring frantically over the guest list, which has just been released, researching on BlackBerries unfamiliar names, grasping for some sense of the choices made--more politicians than athletes and artists, no one from the Grands of American media (no Tom Brokaw, for example) although the presidents of Univision and Telemundo are there.
Eva Longoria, Gayle King and Whoopi Goldberg are the guests whose pictures and gowns will be scrutinized tomorrow. But the presence of Hollywood can give a false impression of the guests, who are mostly staid and composed (more than a few portly), assured in the dignity conferred upon them by their accomplishments. Pressed against the wall, I can crane my neck up to Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge, looking down with seeming benediction upon the slow procession. I don't mean to be snarky, because there is something moving, because quintessentially American, about the guests en masse, the way in which they personify our dreams of achievement.
My favorite moment belongs to Dolores Huerta, gracious with her time to a Mexican reporter and to me. I had last seen her grimy and disheveled, having worn the same clothes several days in a row, on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton. Stately in her Oaxacan ensemble, she unclips her turquoise and silver earring to show us the butterfly design--a curious coincidence, given the Monarch theme of the lawn tent.
No one has forgotten the party crashers of last November. Every time a beautifully-gowned young woman passes by Booksellers without stopping, and no one, not even the White House aide standing next to me, knows quite who she is, we are all thinking the same thing: Salahi. We inquire about the security from the guests who come over to speak to us. Maria Elena Salinas, of Univision, says that she had gone through a lot. "Even body searches." I have a sudden vision of a Secret Service agent peeking under the large sash and bow at the back of her gown.
The very tight security for the state dinner has provoked some irritation among my compatriots. For the November dinner, the guest list, the menu and other goodies had been given out in advance. But not until an hour-and-a-half before tonight's soiree do we know much. In retrospect, I realize that I could have "scooped" everybody by a couple of hours with the news that Beyonce would be leading the evening's entertainment because around noon I had been sitting next to a young reporter talking about how she had just flown in for this one evening at the White House because Beyonce is her beat. That's the kind of scoop one can be reduced to around here.
At 7 PM Booksellers closes up shop. The guests have moved on to their herb green ceviche of Hawaiian Opah and Oregon Wagyu Beef in Oaxacan Black Mole. I can't help but think how displeased my locavore daughters would be, and really their entire generation who have gone "green," at the carbon trail left by that Opah as it flew from Hawaii to D.C. But that's the thing about policy, isn't it? Easy to pronounce, harder to implement.
I'm thinking about the Opah as I depart, a lone figure daring a shortcut down the North drive to the security entrance for press. Most everybody else has trudged back to the press quarters to continue working. When I had come in earlier in the day, moving ahead of the Foreign Nationals among the press waiting for their American escorts to enter the grounds, I had had a Peter Rabbit moment--suddenly I was beyond the fence, before me a vast expanse of lawn and nobody near. I wondered if I could just wander about as I pleased, although quickly I figured (correctly) not. Or, at least, not supposed to. As I leave, the guards are in their little house and talking sports, not paying much attention as I return my press badge. Closing the iron gate behind me, I realize that it has not latched, and it takes me ten seconds or so to lock it.
]]>Is Jerry Brown the California John McCain?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5438742010-04-20T01:30:52-04:002011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/called for a series of debates with Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, trailing behind Whitman nearly 50 points in recent polls. Some reporters snapped, some merely sniffed--but really did anybody take Brown's gambit seriously? From the get-go, Meg Whitman was no more joining a three-way debate than Barack Obama did town hall meetings with John McCain two summers ago. A slight whiff of desperation undercut McCain's otherwise rather civic-minded suggestion, every time he trotted it out. I caught that same air in the Los Angeles Convention Center hall where Jerry Brown spoke on Saturday. And this was not the first time in Brown's 11-minute speech that he reminded me of McCain.
Brown's jabs at the millions of dollars Whitman has spent on her gubernatorial bid (and I'm assuming here, if not in the serendipitous course of daily life, that she will be the Republican nominee) reminded me of McCain's swipes at the size of the Obama kitty. Standing on the mountaintop of monetary righteousness (suddenly a popular geography), Brown belted out what was simultaneously the best rhetorical moment in his speech and the most ridiculous. "Democracy is not about buying hundreds of millions of dollars of thirty-second TV ads. We live in a democracy. We're not consumers of advertising, we're agents of democratic choice. We're actors in historical drama."
Brown's comment took me back to Obama v. Clinton in the Texas primary, when local radio station owners were astounded by the fact that the Obama campaign had more money to spend on radio ads than there was space to sell. Took me back to Obama's reneging on a general promise to wage the general election using public financing only. John McCain did not take that well--remember? But of course Obama and his campaign made the right decision. In a political campaign, just as in any warfare, a candidate wields his or her strengths. Whitman has three Obamic strengths: an enormous war chest; decision-making acumen all the more formidable because underestimated; a very controlling campaign team that so far has made only a few mistakes.
The Brown tactic should be to ignore (publicly) the Whitman money, because railing futilely against an opponent shows weakness, while at the same time implementing a strategy to counter it. And surely by the fall Jerry Brown will do this. But it is ominous that in his debut campaign speech before his fellow state Democrats Brown only fitfully demonstrated his strength: the depth of his knowledge of and experience with government. Furthermore, Brown and Whitman both know that past attempts at spending to a California victory have failed. (Speaking of "historical drama," the best dramatic irony of the convention was the Saturday luncheon address from Arianna Huffington, who campaigned in 1994 for her then-husband Michael Huffington when he spent 28 million against Dianne Feinstein in a fierce race for the US Senate. At the time, this was the most money ever spent on a non-presidential American election campaign.)
More than fitful, Brown's speech was erratic. (Not to mention his longer press conference that followed, which you can read about richly-detailed here.) These qualities, too, are reminiscent of John McCain, who also once upon a time waxed long and large to the press. For the first time, I have considered that age (Brown is 72) might come into play. Here is Brown Saturday on a topic about which he should be able to speak cogently:
"We gotta promote some jobs, we gotta promote green jobs, jobs of the future. How do you do that? One thing--why, some--how do you get at it? We want to build solar and wind and geothermal with desert. You gotta get it to where all the people are. . . . [We need someone] who knows what politics is all about, because there's a lot of regulatory underbrush, some of it good, some of it not so good, and we have to get it out of the way."
Aside from the fact that "green jobs" is the latest mantra from state to state, Brown here sounds like a geezer who couldn't find the desert much less prioritize its use. His thrust is that he has the "red tape" know-how to reduce the building of green power transmission lines from 9 years to "2 or 3." But the disjointedness of his language sabotages his assertion. And more to the point, Californians want jobs in the here-and-now. Brown is unable to ground "green jobs" outside Utopia.
Meg Whitman has released a plan for California. It outlines a strategy. It presents a few specifics. It is a 48-page document. It was released March 16 via PDF and in mobile device formats. It will not cost Jerry Brown millions to counter with his own plan. If he does not do that, furthermore, Whitman will have claimed that high ground for her own, no matter the quality of the plan itself.
Like McCain, Brown has the disconcerting habit of dwelling in the past. "I hear about this job creation machine at one of those companies--well, that compares not at all to the 1.9 million jobs created when I was governor." Which was when--1975? Americans are not good students of history--that's just the way it is. And what company is his stalking horse? eBay?
"You talk about things and knowing how to do stuff--hey--uh--California--I started the--uh--energy efficiency standards, first ones in the country."
"By the way--jobs? How about the California Conservation Corps. I started that in 1976."
Brown is right. He is commendable. These accomplishments should be on his epitaph. But the sloppiness of his references are troubling. The ellipses are troubling. The most priceless was an incoherent comment on Whitman and Poizner TV ads: "I'm not [?] behind those women in poppy fields, beautiful car crashes over the mountain, let's have some honest debates." And then there was the weird: "Obama is on the ballot." (I replayed my tape several times to make sure that Brown's tone was not metaphorical. It was not, although surely he meant the comment as such.)
All these disconnections speak to the most salient problem for Jerry Brown come November. He's been there; he's seen that. Is he really going to be willing to do what has to be done to win? To work the grassroots, to speak in one small venue after another, to shake a thousand hands, to listen with seeming attention to stories and complaints from voters, to pose for pictures with all the patience in the world, to explain lucidly his vision for the state and an incremental plan to achieve it?
Brown sounds like a man rushing past the humbler parts of campaigning. This is understandable. After all, he has run for the Presidency and was a serious candidate. But he wears the aura of a sage who finds it tedious to explain himself. This is not a winning strategy for reclaiming the California governorship.
Of course, Jerry Brown is highly intelligent and knowledgeable. I hesitate to conclude that he has become an iconoclast whose mind has stuffed itself to the satiety of incoherence. I do think, at least for now, that he is merely afflicted with the impatience of the egoistic polymath. Even at 72, and certainly as a former Jesuit, he should be able to muster the inner discipline to overcome this. On the campaign trail, at least. But his message must cohere better than his debut speech at the convention. Once again here was Jerry on jobs: "We want to invest in the people, just like the federal government invested in AIG, in the banks, in Citicorp, Bank of America." The audience was confused because he had just excoriated the federal government for its relationship with big finance.
History shows that a candidate does not have to be the most intelligent or the most qualified to win an election. But he or she must make sense. More than participating, the voters first must understand the "historical drama" that the candidate and his or her campaign has asked them to join. Brown and his campaign are still working on the first act. Even as Brown was slamming Whitman's money and ingenuously challenging her to a "three-way," he declared, "This is gonna be mano y mano, one camp against the other."
Get it together, Jerry Brown. California needs a ferocious debate.
]]>Afghan Women Talk About Obama and Plan Btag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5348662010-04-13T10:00:00-04:002011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
Suddenly everybody wanted to speak. Voices that had been soft and hesitant climbed in consternation. I had suggested that American forces might not stay in their country more than a few years longer. I reminded them that many Americans want us out. If we can run the Taliban from Kandahar--as surely we will--for the near future, then the President might grab that victory as cover for a face-saving withdrawal.
"One of the main points of Obama's strategy," Fawzia Habib explained to me, "is to make sure the civility [sic] of Afghanistan comes from the Afghan people themselves. And also from my understanding of Obama's strategy, it is that it is not a complete withdrawal in 2011, so the majority of the American soldiers might withdraw from their remote areas and villages and come to the cities and give over [the countryside] to the hands of the Afghan Army. And the Afghan government would like to continue with the building of the country. So this would be like a gradual pull-out, and it's not a complete withdrawal because Obama mentioned that he would be there to help Afghanistan in the longer term."
Really goodness knows what Ms. Habib, Afghan woman diplomat from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in answer to my question. She was speaking Dari, as were her colleagues. The oldest woman among the six--the sternest, the one with an iron grasp of anodyne diplo-speak--was translating. But all the women spoke at least a few words of English, and it was clear from those phrases, from their eagerness to speak to my question and from their urgent tone that they did not want any part of my skepticism.
If the future of Afghanistan is unclear, nevertheless one point on which everyone is agreed is that the establishment of governance and civil society, supported by capable, responsible military and police forces, will take many years. As Ms. Habib's colleague Munira Faizzad said, "We are realistic. We cannot change overnight, things. But we have hopes, we have dreams, we have expectations, we are optimistic for our future."
The room at the Washington, D.C. Homewood Suites reverberated with this sentiment. All the women--Fawzia Habib, Munira Faizzad, Monireh Kazemzadeh, Madina Qasimi, as well as Sohaila Noori and Nazifa Haqpall, whom I had spoken with earlier--agreed. They seemed to be in earnest. This was not what I had expected. I had been prepared for a certain level of cynicism.
They were sure that President Obama would not let them down.
And why would they think otherwise? After all, they were here as guests of the State Department for a four-day intensive training program at the Foreign Service Institute and for meetings with their American peers. "Afghan Women Diplomats Visit Washington." The invitation itself was a confirmation that President Obama would not renege on his promise to "still help our country," as Ms. Faizzad said.
Interviewing the women last Wednesday, shortly before their return to Kabul, quickly I realized that they are not diplomats as we usually define the office. When I asked if any of them had any decision-making power, the younger women laughed and shook their heads. The droll Madina Qasimi rolled her eyes and mimed, "No!" Their jobs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not rise far above the level of administrative assistants. Indeed the intensive training they received at the NFATC campus in Arlington was in "consular issues, how to proceed with visas and passports," as well as "counter-terrorism." (The translator said "counter-tourism," but surely that was not what she meant.)
"Capacity building" is a popular Af-Pak catch phrase right now. (Is there a better illustration of the gulf between our military and civilian worlds than the way acronyms, buzz words and catch phrases inspire enthusiasm in one and doubt in the other?) And so several of the women, no matter how rudimentary their English, picked up the phrase "capacity building" while working with USAID in Arlington. "How they will involve the women." Nazifa Haqpall said, "USAID has a small grant for investment and capacity building. For the economic enhancement of women. In order to empower the women. The business woman."
The Afghan women diplomats themselves are examples of capacity building, for they are the seeds of a meritocracy for Afghanistan. Each seems to have followed the same path to government as Sohaila Nouri. "After the fall of Taliban, there was a big demand for women in different government offices and organizations and especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I took part in the entrance exam and after passing the entrance exam, I was accepted as a candidate for diplomat. I also passed interviews before I was assigned." (Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai's chief opponent in the last election, was head of the ministry at the time.)
"We promised [USAID] that we will continue our linkage, our coordination," Ms. Haqpall's colleague Sohaila Noori said, speaking about their work at the ministry.
Promises made. Promises beginning to be implemented. Building. Linking. Coordinating.
"And also we are optimistic because President Obama suggested, also he proposed--military is not the solution to the war--in addition to that what he said he is trying to work for in the long term in Afghanistan is to build the infrastructure of Afghan society," Ms. Kazemzadeh said.
I asked about various long-term solutions, such as a power-sharing agreement or negotiated settlement between the government in Kabul and the insurgencies. "Could you live with that in Kabul?"
Madina Qasimi was now agitated. "Actually, I want to speak in English . . . . If the situation becomes worse, like the past, like the Taliban, it is very difficult for the old people of Afghanistan, mostly, who have nothing at all, people living in Afghanistan, it is very terrible, in reality it is very difficult. It is my individual idea or opinion, as a person, personally, opinion, if the situation becomes worse, like the Taliban, living in Afghanistan is very dangerous for the people, extremely for the women.
"But we hope that it's a big concern for the people of America and mostly when I talk with people in Afghanistan, when we talk [about] U.S. troops and international troops leave Afghanistan, what will be done? What will be done? It is a big concern for our people. We do not want to experience it one times more. In terms of human rights, minority rights, women's rights, we don't want to lose it."
"This is all our individual--" The translator broke in. Several women nodded.
"That's what I was asking," I said.
"Our individual ideas--"
"Do you have a Plan B?"
"Most of the people of Afghanistan are very poor, so--"
"You're not poor," I pointed out. It seemed logical to me that a woman who was stepping forward on behalf of the promise of women's rights in Afghanistan would have a personal Plan B.
The translator interrupted, with some fierceness. "No, we do not have any specific plan, because we hope"--her voice rising--"we are optimistic, something won't be done like this [an American withdrawal]. We don't want, we are afraid, we don't want to experience one times more." Her tone said PERIOD. "Thank. You."
She did not have to tell me to move on to a different topic.
Yesterday here at The Huffington Post Robert Greenwald lent his name to a
BraveNewFoundation argument for our pull-out from Afghanistan. On Sunday Arianna Huffington argued the same on ABC's "This Week." Recently, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jim McGovern have suggested power-sharing agreements in Afghanistan as a way to facilitate a timetable for our withdrawal.
For more on the Afghan women diplomats, including photos, go to my blog at www.mayhillfowler.com.
]]>The Canaries of SXSWtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5006272010-03-16T12:25:46-04:002011-05-25T15:50:25-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/
Middle-aged outliers (for me that would be along the edge of media) flocked to Austin this year. We rang a warning note in a minor key. SXSW Interactive is no longer a young-and-hip confab -- no matter how much some continue to play it that way. As SXSW oldtimers grumble-tweeted in the days running up to launch, SXSW has morphed way large and mainstream. There was chatter about next year breaking away and shrinking down. Likely trendsetters will replant. They always do. But in some form SXSW Interactive will remain because the internet is an ecosystem now, feeding web designers, appsters, graphic artists, public relations gurus, systems engineers, freelance writers, charitable NGOS, consultant-philosophers and hucksters. Basically, everybody was either looking for work or networking to keep working. In that way SXSW was no different than any other large sales convention I have seen.
David Cohn (founder of Spot.us, funded by the Knight Foundation to help freelance reporters fund stories) called this SXSW "internet spring break." So maybe the parties were great. But my sense was different. The daily parade of business cards squeezed under the brass trim of the Hilton Hotel elevators suggested a different story. Almost every stranger with whom I spoke was an entrepreneur hoping to garner business. Under the genuinely lovely confab spirit that Austin generates coiled a whiff of the unease that blows more strongly in other parts of the American economy now. I was surprised to find that SXSW was much like the Tea Party Convention in Nashville a month earlier: the same high sociability and enthusiasm cross-pollinated by fear. Yes, the angst was stronger in Nashville, because the typical Tea Partier has fewer financial resources on which to fall back than the better-educated cadres who swarmed downtown Austin, Texas during SXSW Interactive.
For a gathering with such a digital pedigree, SXSW was surprisingly weak in technological infrastructure. Like a traveling carnival down at heels but convinced of its glory, SXSW creaked and wheezed and stuttered along, in zany mimicry of our larger nationwide infrastructure, crumbling and increasingly outmoded. AT&T boosted wireless capacity for the festival but internet connectivity was sometimes a no-go. Fortunates like me had Verizon broadband for backup. Audio for panels and speakers came and went, crackled and popped. Audiences could not hear speakers; panelists could not hear each other. Video feeds to auxiliary rooms wiggled and wobbled. Little thought was given to sightlines. The Austin Convention Center itself is outmoded, its vast spaces strung with tight rows of chairs suited to an earlier era when audiences were passive consumers. Today conventioneers need a place to rest and plug laptops and netbooks while listening to presentations.
I thought often of the international media conference NewsXchange that I attended in Valencia -- with its seamless video-conferencing among speakers in China and New York with panelists in Spain, with its state-of-the-art audio, with lighting schemes both complicated and subtle, with beautifully-crafted short films instead of the lame and tiresome Power Point slides punctuating SXSW talks. How could an American media-and-technology conference be so behind -- and SXSW of all places! That, too, was a canary.
In counterpoint to this reality was the SXSW technological meme du jour. "Location, location, location." Twitter rolled out its new @anywhere application, tagging along with the merry Gowalla API and location providers like foursquare so that friends and (and the salient word) can know via our digital appendages where we are at any instant. Maybe because I've had a pitchforks n' torches moment or two, this does not sound to me like a particularly fine app. This sounds like the beginning of a dark folk tale, "Once upon a time ten foolish virgins traded their garments to the Jolly Giant in exchange for magic tricks. . . ." SXSW Interactive attracted flocks of these folks, who in their lemming-like rush to embrace the latest new thing dramatized the sad but comical truth that a fine education alas is not the same as wisdom.
The SXSW Foolish Virgins were canaries singing the digital age. Several keynoters -- Doug Rushkoff, Danah Boyd, Clay Shirky and Jaron Lanier--had been hearing canaries for awhile; at SXSW they tried to warn their audiences. For such different individuals, remarkably they have made similar journeys, from a vaunted (and undoubtedly justified) pride in building something that seemed at first to have such utopian possibilities to a realization of the consequences and price of the gift of Internet. For Rushkoff, it is the belated realization that the structure of programming shapes the meaning of content. For Boyd and Lanier, it is the loss of privacy and the ways in which we, especially the younger crowd, unwittingly squander it online. For Shirky, it is the plummeting value of work product in the new Internet world of abundance.
The reaction of the Southwesters to the keynoters dramatized the ongoing struggle to relinquish the idea that such a wonderful and beloved object as the Internet is both a tool to be handled with care and a portal to be crossed at risk. How many attendees heard the cautionary notes? Even as the latest gadgets and widgets catch our eye and we easily abandon the old for the new, our minds resist change and challenge. The canary here was more the dog that did not bark. There was an intimation of real news at SXSW Interactive on Friday, when Kaiser Kuo said (essentially--not an exact quote) that Google would stay in China when pigs began to fly. He proffered this observation as an inexorable consequence to Google's misapprehension of Chinese culture and the Chinese government's determination that society change slowly, implementing that determination by "using quiescence to control action." Kuo put forward a Chinese view of the balance between free speech and censorship that his audience had trouble wrapping their minds around -- apparently -- because Kuo's warning seems never to have made its way out of Austin Convention Center Exhibit Hall D.
Probably I caught the SXSW Interactive at its peak: brigades of Brits testified to that. And I had a lot of fun. But I couldn't help but wonder how soon the new Austin will be planted in Bahia or Bangalore. The creak of infrastructure and the assumptions we bring to technology that are culturally embedded in us but not in Internet itself sang to me. Oh, canaries!
Sometimes it's terrible to be not only middle-aged but also a curmudgeon.
Three days after Kaiser Kuo spoke, the Wall Street Journalrevealed "Google Is Poised to Close China Site." And I can sometimes be quite funny on Twitter.
]]>Will Meg Whitman Win?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4856912010-03-04T14:04:55-05:002011-05-25T15:45:22-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/trails her in the polls. Her hurdle is the urban state press, as well as the gray-beards among the political pundocracy, who have set their minds against her. Am I the only writer with some connection to journalism who judges that the former CEO of eBay is likely to be the next governor of California? (And not just because Whitman and recently-declared Democratic candidate Jerry Brown are running neck-and-neck in the latest Rasmussen poll.)
The scrutiny that Whitman has received here in California has led to some misleading articles. Immediately following a campaign appearance in Walnut Creek last week, for example, Whitman granted an interview to the San Jose Mercury News, which the paper headlined as "Meg Whitman holds forth on guns, gays and government." At that event, however, Meg Whitman made it clear to me and to everyone else in attendance that divisive social issues such as "guns and gays" are completely peripheral to what she wants to do in California.
How does Meg Whitman see the task in Sacramento? "In life and in business you can do only a small number of things really well." She would concentrate on jobs, government spending and education. As she said again and again in Walnut Creek, everything else in this time of state crisis is peripheral.
On what besides the old g & g do the state pols and press fixate? The tick-tock of campaigning. Who Meg Whitman's advisor Mike Murphy knows, elbows, strong-arms. What Tom Campbell was or was not promised in exchange for switching from the Republican gubernatorial to the senate primary. (Now Campbell is contesting Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore for the right to go one-on-one with Democrat Barbara Boxer.) As if any of this "inside-baseball" natter interests the stressed California voter. An iota.
Want to know what the San Francisco Chronicle thinks of Meg Whitman? Look no further than its headline of February 17: "Whitman denies crowning herself governor." Isn't this like asking when you stopped beating your wife? What kind of reportage is this? The press and the pundits have complained that Meg Whitman has avoided hard questions about solving the state's problems -- why not ask her some? In Walnut Creek last week Whitman lingered after the event to answer questions from the attendees who thronged her, until everyone had departed. This would have been a good time for one of those hard questions.
Not until after meeting Meg Whitman did I realize the extent to which I had accepted the conventional pund-o-vue that she is a neophyte, unlettered in the minutiae of governing, andawkward as a speaker. In Walnut Creek, she was assured in her delivery; she was a mistress of the detail. It's looking like it may not have been such a good strategy on the part of Jerry Brown to keep mum while Meg Whitman crisscrossed the state for a year, finding her equilibrium, gaining experience and expertise and most of all learning from mistakes. It's beginning to look as if the Whitman campaign, like the Obama campaign before it, hews to the long arc, pacing everything from campaign rhythm to press access according to a master plan.
Now that Jerry Brown has finally thrown his hat in the ring for the governorship, via a video on his web site, it seems that Brown and Whitman have exactly the same prescription for fixing California.
"Downsize state government from Sacramento" (Brown video). "The appointments process. The governor makes 3,000 appointments. Do you know how many the President has? 3,800. Can we do with 1,500? . . . We do not need 395 boards and commissions [in the state]" (Whitman, Walnut Creek).
"Return decisions and authority to the cities and the counties and the schools" (Brown). "We need to decentralize the control of education. . . . Let local school districts decide how to spend their money" (Whitman).
Nix-nix to taxes -- although here there is some revealing nuance. "In this time of recession, the people are financially strapped, and there will be no new taxes unless you the people vote for them" (Brown). "California has the highest personal income tax rate and business tax and sales tax [in the country]. I want to reduce taxes, but it's going to be hard to do that in the near term, facing a 20 billion budget deficit" (Whitman). In Walnut Creek, she was clear that she would not reduce taxes because dealing with the deficit is the priority.
If Whitman and Brown are approaching California's fiscal mess similarly, what's the difference to the average fed-up California voter? At this point, a candidate from the Polka-Dot Party who has some new ideas about fixing the state could win the governorship. People don't care about party. Don't care about social issues like guns and gays. They care about money. That being said, both Whitman and Brown have hurdles in the "convince me" sweepstakes. Whoever wins will have dramatized the more compelling story for wanting the job, and both stories are problematic. Brown looks like a career politician who can't bear to get out of the game, at a time when he should be an eminence grise at a think tank. His age gives his candidacy a tinge of either embarrassment or pathos -- I can't decide which. (Some day soon the seventies are going to be "the new fifties," and we will be comfortable with septuagenarian leaders. But we are not quite there yet.)
Whitman has the perfect temperament and centrist approach to problems to be a university president. So why politics? Why in the world would a retired CEO with a quarter billion of eBay stock join the fray? She could be setting up her own charitable trust to ameliorate something in the third world. So just like Brown, but for a different reason, Whitman is going to have to work to get voters to picture her in Sacramento.
Here is what Whitman has going for her. She is a worker. This could be, in the end, enough said. Voters like leaders who have toiled the 9 to 5. In Walnut Creek, Whitman recalled the Safeway grocery store down the road from her days as a Proctor & Gamble sales rep "from Vacaville to Gilroy." "I remember building shampoo displays in this store," she said. How many shampoo displays up and down the state did she build? That could be some powerful persuasion. Moreover, she is a tireless worker. She has spent the last year mastering the wonkish details. "I dove into the financials of the state of California," she said in Walnut Creek. She has learned to talk the numbers. Reporters, generally speaking, do not credit the intelligence of business leaders. And so the California press is underestimating Meg Whitman. She has been speaking with the governors of the other 49, picking their brains, soliciting advice, "looking outside for solutions that we can learn from."
She is a centrist. She is a pragmatist. Talking about California's latest contentious water issue, one pitting environmentalists and wine-making counties against farmers in the central part of the state, Whitman says, "I'm a supporter of this water bond. It's not a perfect bill. It has pork in it, but we can't keep kicking the problem down the road." She has that focused, cut-to-the-chase mindset of good leaders. She prioritizes. "If you put ten different reforms in front of the teachers' union, you will not get there [to education reform]," she says. She makes a case for bringing a few tactics from running a business to government. "I'm a big believer in the 80/20. The 20% of reform that will get you 80% of the way home."
Whitman envisions bringing "a healthy dose of Silicon Valley to help in Sacramento." Will voters like her business approach to turning around California? "We have a government we can no longer afford," she says. "Let's get after this. Let's run things a bit more like a business. It will never be a business. And it shouldn't. But some business fundamentals around technology and fighting fraud and delivering more for less and shrinking programs that no longer work. We don't have a choice anymore. Because we can't raise taxes on people anymore -- or we won't have a state."
Let's get after this. Meg Whitman sounds like a worker about to roll up her sleeves. She does not look like royalty. (Having inspected her up-close-and-personal, I can report that she cares nothing for clothes and jewelry.) But she has a huge war chest, which she is going to need in order to go around the state press who are set against her. Can she win, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans a million-plus? I am betting she can. Before you write me off, please recall that in June, 2007 I knew that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency. If I am wrong this time around, well, I have until November to figure out how to pay the bet.
At my web site mayhillfowler.com: a video of Meg Whitman talking to U.C. Berkeley students about rolling back tuition. A list of Whitman's specific policy proposals.
]]>Bill Clinton's Mistress: The Story That Never Wastag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4193072010-01-12T08:34:00-05:002011-05-25T15:10:21-04:00Mayhill Fowlerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/Game Change, Mark Halperin's and John Heilemann's salacious new book about the 2008 presidential race, which will be released tomorrow, because they apparently rush in where I feared to tread. "After some discreet fact-finding, the [Hillary campaign staff] concluded that [the rumors] were true: that Bill was indeed having an affair," H & H write. "For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment." That moment could have occurred during the Texas primary.
Here is an excerpt from my book Notes from a Clueless Journalist: Media, Bias and the Great Election of 2008, where I discuss my decision not to write the story. In part, Clueless is an account of the painful and arduous method of learning journalism by doing it. As a neophyte, I had presumed to think I could cover the presidential election with no bias or partisan agenda. But Texas taught me that any reporter, like the snail carrying her house, always brings to storytelling a certain amount of personal baggage. As an unpaid citizen journalist, on the other hand, I could make choices about which other reporters could only dream. In Texas, I discovered that this enormous power was a Faustian gift.
*****
Sometimes I thought that years of travel had taught me only one thing: to distinguish between observation and conclusion. I know what I'm looking at, but what am I really seeing? Driving back to Houston from Victoria that evening, I knew I had witnessed something significant--but did not know what. Not until the week before the Pennsylvania primary, at a midnight rally with Bill Clinton in Puerto Rican Philadelphia, did I realize that what I had seen two months before in Texas had been the specific problem Bill posed, not Hillary's campaign itself. Managing former President Clinton must have been like trying to herd a rogue elephant. Huma Abedin, Hillary's long-suffering and loyal aide, looked frazzled as she walked through downtown Victoria. The day when Bill Clinton had been a stellar asset to his wife's campaign had come and gone. The autumn book-and-fundraising tour might as well have been years and not just a season ago. . . .
The day in Victoria was shot through with the aloneness that increasingly was a companion on the trail. Eventually, I would follow Bill Clinton to more than twenty small-town rallies in five states, where sometimes I was the only print reporter present. . . .
This isolation set me apart from fellow wayfarers. When in April Kit Seelye called to ask about getting Obama's remarks at the San Francisco fundraiser, she said that the Friday my piece went up, late in the afternoon the political team at the New York Times had been together reviewing their coverage of the past week and planning the next, thinking that Hillary in Bosnia would still be the story, when BlackBerries began to go off. I often think about Kit Seelye's aside--and always in the context of how terrific is that, how great to be part of a team. The gang of twelve at OffTheBus had long since dispersed. We no longer had conference calls. . . . I was out in the field alone and making decisions on my own. Eventually, I would think long and hard about the choices I made.
At the time I covered the rally in Victoria, I had decided not to follow up on another story about Bill Clinton that had come my way--one involving his longtime mistress. I mention the nature of the Clinton story with some specificity now only because months later, after the Democratic primaries, the National Enquirer wrote about the relationship. In Texas, staring this story in the face, immediately I turned aside. If I know all about this woman, then surely every national reporter does and is as wary of the story as I am. Nevertheless, I was careful never to mention anything to anybody at OffTheBus. I rationalized the refusal to follow through by telling myself that Clinton's private life was peripheral to the race. But then there came a moment in the Texas primary when the nature of the Clinton marriage suddenly appeared front and center.
A difference between Election 2008 and preceding presidential races is that only one political ad for TV had as much impact as any of half-a-dozen YouTube videos. The brilliant television ad was the "3 A.M. crisis phone call at the White House" that the Clinton Campaign ran in Texas before the primary. The Clinton team knew Texans--folks obsessed with all things big, including such big prospects as national security. So the red phone ad, as it was sometimes called, was powerful persuasion. If I heard a Texan say it once, I heard it a hundred times: thank goodness Hillary will have Bill next to her at 3 A.M. By late February, a piece that gave depth to this naïve view of the Clintons' relationship was suddenly something to think about. But in fact I never really considered it. Executing such a story could have had consequences for the mistress's children, who were still minors. There was no way I would write something that I knew in advance would mortify a high school student in front of his peers. My mother's outrage and pain at the political sex scandal that had blighted her adolescence was just too vivid a presence. [A previous chapter in my book recounts my family's involvement in politics--what had once seemed quaint history but that I gradually realized was shaping every observation I made. The relevant incident for my Texas decision was an old collision between sex and politics that hurt my mother and her siblings, all young teens at the time. In the 1930s, E. H. Crump, boss of the Memphis political machine, hired a man to woo my grandmother and then used the ensuing billets-doux to blackmail my grandfather, who was mayor. To summarize the earlier chapter: political machinations went awry; children paid the price.]
So I continued to rationalize. I told myself various truths: many different kinds of loving experiences make a good world; no one except partners themselves know what goes on behind the bedroom door. As a woman who has been married for thirty-six years, I appreciate the complicated and forgiving nature of long attachments. Nuance about the dynamic of a successful marriage had been one of the things lacking in the widely-criticized New York Times piece on John McCain's supposed infatuation with a lobbyist. Therefore, I told myself, the presence of a mistress really does not tell us all that much about the rich relationship between Bill and Hillary Clinton. But, in the end, I passed on the story for personal reasons. And I came to see that family history, which had always been a penumbra belonging to the dead, was shaping my own storytelling.
Choosing what to write, a luxury most reporters do not have, is a two-sided gift. Time and again I chose--sometimes wisely, sometimes not. That power, too, would become a burden. I began to wonder if it were a good thing for a reporter to be flying solo--if it were not better to be part of a team that deliberated late on Friday afternoons. Whether to write about Bill Clinton's mistress may have been too big a decision for one reporter on the scene. On the other hand, if an editor ordered me to hand over material I had gathered on the company dime, would I feel relief--or guilt at handing off a hit that I was not willing to execute myself? Never have I come to any satisfactory accommodation with this conundrum, a companion of a sort for the increasingly-long twilight drives as winter turned into spring and summer."
Notes from a Clueless Journalist is available starting tomorrow as an e-book at Amazon. Yes, I am piggybacking on the renewed interest in the 2008 story that Halperin and Heilemann have stirred. Now I write mostly about foreign affairs. This week I will be discussing Obama's war on terrorism at target="_hplink">www.mayhillfowler.com.]]]>