Ah, Ha Moment?

The obvious choice for The Hopester's running mate: Senator James Webb (D-VA). Currently, The Jarheadster has taken The Geezer to task because The Geezer is ducking the issue of a GI Bill for current veterans; The Geezer (with the support of The Hillster) is preoccupied with a summertime gasoline tax holiday. However, while reading about The Geezer's dodge on veterans affairs, a link referring to The Jarheadster's 2006 encounter with The Dubster popped up. Hallelujah! The Dubster tried to make small talk with The Jarheadster about Senator Webb's son's wellbeing as a Marine in Iraq. In the brief exchange, Senator Webb said to the POTUS, "That's a matter between me and my boy, Mr. President." The Dubster deserves worse: impeachment, but this will do for the moment. The Hopester needs The Jarheadster on the ticket this fall; Senator James Webb knows how to talk to the current POTUS and he will know how to talk to The Geezer, too. Enough of the arrogance of The Dubster, The Dickster, and their ilk. If this is (fair & balanced) humility, so be it.

[x Washignton Fishwrap]
In Following His Own Script, Webb May Test Senate's Limits
By Michael D. Shear

At a recent (November 2006) White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Webb was narrowly elected to the U.S. Senate this month with a brash, unpolished style that helped win over independent voters in Virginia and earned him support from national party leaders. Now, his Democratic colleagues in the Senate are getting a close-up view of the former boxer, military officer and Republican who is joining their ranks.

If the exchange with Bush two weeks ago is any indication, Webb won't be a wallflower, especially when it comes to the war in Iraq. And he won't stick to a script drafted by top Democrats.

"I'm not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall," Webb said in an interview yesterday in which he confirmed the exchange between him and Bush. "No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I'm certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. [But] leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is."

In the days after the election, Webb's Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill went out of their way to make nice with Bush and be seen by his side. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sat down for a lunch and photo opportunity with Bush, as did Democratic leaders in the Senate.

Not Webb, who said he tried to avoid a confrontation with Bush at the White House reception but did not shy away from one when the president approached.

The White House declined to discuss the encounter. "As a general matter, we do not comment on private receptions hosted by the president at the White House," said White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino.

Webb said he has "strong ideas," but he also insisted that -- as a former Marine in Vietnam -- he knows how to work in a place such as the Senate, where being part of a team is important.

He plans to push for a new GI bill for soldiers who have served in the days since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but not as a freshman senator. He has approached the Democratic leadership about getting senior legislators to sponsor the bill when the 110th Congress convenes in January.

A strong backer of gun rights, Webb may find himself at odds with many in his party. He expressed support during the campaign for a bill by his opponent, Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), that would allow concealed weapons in national parks. But an aide said this week that Webb will review Allen's legislation.

"There are going to be times when I've got some strong ideas, but I'm not looking to simply be a renegade," he said. "I think people in the Democratic Party leadership have already begun to understand that I know how to work inside a structure."

His party's leaders hope that he means it.

Top Democratic senators, including incoming Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), had invested their money and prestige in Webb before he won the party primary in June. His victory was also theirs, but now they have to make sure he's not a liability.

"He's not a typical politician. He really has deep convictions," said Schumer, who headed the Senate Democrats' campaign arm. "We saw this in the campaign. We would have disagreements. But when you made a persuasive argument, he would say, 'You're right.' I am truly not worried about it. He understands the need to be part of a team."

One senior Democratic staff member on Capitol Hill, who spoke on condition that he not be identified so he could speak freely about the new senator, said that Webb's lack of political polish was part of his charm as a candidate but could be a problem as a senator.

"I think he's going to be a total pain. He is going to do things his own way. That's a good thing and a bad thing," the staff member said. But he said that Webb's personality may be just what the Senate needs. "You need a little of everything. Some element of that personality is helpful."

Webb has started to put himself out front. On "Meet the Press" last week, he dispensed with the normal banter with host Tim Russert to talk seriously about Iraq and the need for economic justice in the United States.

He announced yesterday that he has hired Paul J. Reagan, a communications director for former governor Mark R. Warner (D) and a former chief of staff for U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.). It will be Reagan's job to help his boss navigate the intricacies of Washington and Capitol Hill without losing the essence of his personality.

"The relationships he has built over his long career will serve me well," Webb said in a statement yesterday.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), who campaigned hard to get Webb elected, said yesterday that the first-time officeholder doesn't have the finesse of most experienced politicians.

"He is not a backslapper," Kaine said. "There are different models that succeed in politics. There's the hail-fellow-well-met model of backslapping. That's not his style."

But Kaine said that Webb's background, including a stint as Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary, will make him an important -- if unpredictable -- voice on the war in Iraq.

"There are no senators who have that everyday anxiety that he has as a dad with a youngster on the front lines. That gives him gravitas and credibility on this issue," Kaine said. "People in the Senate, I'm sure, will agree with him or disagree with him on issue to issue. But they won't doubt that he's coming at it from a real sense of duty."

Washington Poststaff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.

[Michael D. Shear, a political reporter for The Washington Post, covers the McCain campaign in 2008.]

Copyright © 2006 The Washington Post Company

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What A Wonderful World

Reading The Flatster's piece on our energy "problem" summoned a stream of consciousness featuring the schmaltzy strains of "What A Wonderful World" (Words & Music by George David Weiss & George Douglas; Recorded by Louis Armstrong, 1967; Featured in the film score for "Good Morning Viet Nam"). The Dubster presided over a "tax rebate" at the onset of his glorious reign and another "rebate" as he rides off into the sunset over Crawford, TX. Be sure to emphasize the "Duh" in "Dubya." Now we've got bipartisan stupidity: first, The Geezer calls for a "gas-tax holiday" this summer and The Hillster falls all over herself to get aboard the "Stupid Talk Express." The Dubster, who never met a stupid idea he didn't like, will jump aboard, too. As the price of oil trends ever upward, our energy policy geniuses are going to solve it with another REBATE! The Flatster, in this Op-Ed piece, is on target: the idea of a "gas-tax holiday" is another version of 3-Card Monte. Even though P. T. Barnum did NOT say, "There's a sucker born every minute," The Geezer and The Hillster believe this motto with all their empty hearts. If this is is a (fair & balanced) sham, so be it.

[NY Fishwrap]
Dumb As We Wanna Be
By Thomas L. Friedman

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

[Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. He became the paper's foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Mr. Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Mr. Friedman joined The Times in 1981 and was appointed Beirut bureau chief in 1982. In 1984 Mr. Friedman was transferred from Beirut to Jerusalem, where he served as Israel bureau chief until 1988. Mr. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel).

Mr. Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, was released in April 2005 and won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. In 2004, he was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement and the honorary title, Order of the British Empire (OBE), by Queen Elizabeth II.

His book, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1989 and The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) won the 2000 Overseas Press Club award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy and has been published in 27 languages. Mr. Friedman also wrote Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism (2002) and the text accompanying Micha Bar-Am's book, Israel: A Photobiography.

Born in Minneapolis on July 20, 1953, Mr. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford. Mr. Friedman is married and has two daughters.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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One Slight Change Needed

Don Wright was on target in a recent cartoon. However Wright should have substituted "Idiot" in lieu of "Patriot" in the second panel. If this is (fair & balanced) truth to power, so be it.

[x Palm Beach Fishwrap]



[Don Wright is a cartoonist known for his editorial cartoons. He started his newspaper career as a photogapher and photo editor, switching to editorial cartooning in 1963. He worked for The Miami News until it ceased publication in 1988, and has worked at The Palm Beach Post since then. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1966 and 1980 and the National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award for 1985. He has also won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism twice, the Inter American Press Award three times, the Overseas Press Club Award five times, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award twice, the National Headliner Award and the Best of Cox Award twice.]

Copyright © 2008 Don Wright

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April (May, June, and July) Madness?

The Hopester is on the ropester. He'd better learn to do the rope-a-dope because The Hillster has already claimed that she is the distaff Rocky (Rockette?) and she's in the fight as long as she can stand upright. There is a slight glimmer in the Hoosier state, though. The Hopester is also a hoopster. He's got game and The Hillster might be able to throw back shots of Crown Royal but she doesn't have the kind of shots Hoosiers appreciate. Instead of debate, let The Hillster and The Hopester play a game of H-O-R-S-E with the loser leaving town (and the campaign). If this is a (fair & balanced) double-team, so be it.

[x San Antonio Fishwrap (Express-News)]



[John Branch has been the editorial cartoonist of the San Antonio Express-News since 1981. He began his career at The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina in 1975. Branch graduated in 1976 with a degree in studio art, and began drawing for his home town paper, The Chapel Hill Newspaper. His work work has been reprinted in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and many other publications throughout the country. A member and former officer of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, Branch has had two collections of his work published, Would You Buy a Used Cartoon From This Man?" and Out on a Limb.]

Copyright © 2008 John Branch

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Blog Vlog On?

Background info from Wikipedia: Video blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging, is a form of blogging for which the medium is video.

Now, meet the Duncans: Walt (dad and dentist), Connie (stay-at-home mom), and Jeremy (professional teenager, age 15). The dad is clueless in the classic sitcom format, the mom is nearly as clueless, and the professional teenager is bored and contemptuous of all of the cluelessness. As a blogger-cum-vlogger, I resemble these remarks. If this is (fair & balanced) cluelessness, so be it.

[x Zits]
By Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott

Click on image to enlarge.

[Jim Borgman lives in Cincinnati with his wife Suzanne Soled and their five perfect teenagers. Jerry Scott lives in California with his wife, Kim and their two daughters, ages 6 and 14, from whom he steals ideas daily.]\

Copyright © 2008 Jim Bogman and Jerry Scott

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What Have We Learned Today?

From James B. Conant (late 1950s) to NCLB (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001), from the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (The Ikester) to The Dubster, we have heard cries that the ed-biz in this country is in Big Trouble. One of the more famous ed-biz jeremiads came during Dutch's watch in the early 1980s: A Nation at Risk. On the 25th anniversary of one of the most famous critical reports about the ed-biz, Georgie Will offers his own jeremiad about our ed-biz. Unfortunately, Georgie targets the teachers' union (The National Education Association or NEA) as the source of our discontent. Unfortunately for Georgie, the NEA is a bunch of wimps. If the NEA was the ed-biz equivalent of the Brotherhood of Teamsters, we'd be be talking about a real union. However, Mr. Peepers of the NEA will never be confused with Vito from Bayonne, NJ, a member of Teamsters Local Whatever. Give the anti-union riff a rest, Georgie. However, the truth remains that our ed-biz is that of a third-world nation today. If this is (fair & balanced) pedagogical criticism, so be it.

[x Washington Fishwrap]
Education Lessons We Left Behind
By George F. Will

If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

— A Nation at Risk (1983)

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities — the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.

Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir (Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik) that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" — Moynihan's description — that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.

But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.

In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas — solemnly avowed, never fulfilled — said: "That will not happen." It did not.

Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.

A nation at risk? Now more than ever.

[George F. Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy. His column appears on Thursdays and Sundays.

Will began his syndicated column with The Post in 1974. Two years later he started his back-page Newsweek column. Will serves as a contributing analyst with ABC News and has been a regular member of ABC's "This Week" on Sunday mornings since the show began in 1981. His books include Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (1992), Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1989), and Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983).

Will was the recipient of a 1978 National Headliners Award for his "consistently outstanding special features columns" appearing in Newsweek. A column on New York City's finances earned him a 1980 Silurian Award for Editorial Writing. In 1985, The Washington Journalism Review named Will "Best Writer, Any Subject." He won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1977.]

Copyright © 2008 The Washington Post Company

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(The Context Of) Obama's Last, Best Hope

Today, the BBC offered an interview with Professor Joseph Nye (Harvard) who opined that the best presidents had "contextual intelligence." Unsurprisingly, The Dubster has zero contextual intelligence. Nye upholds Dwight Eisenhower as a prime example of contextual intelligence: mastery of the hierarchy of Army command, service as president of Columbia University without incident, and two terms as president of the United States. The source of this tour d'force was Ike's contextual intelligence. During the BBC interview, professor Nye said that Ike rated a 10 in contextual intelligence. It is no coincidence that Eisenhower's political nickname, "Ike," was commonplace. Nye granted The Hillster and the The Geezer scores of 7. And, The Hopester? Nye gave him a 9 for his life's journey from interracial origins abroad, his editorship of The Harvard Law Review, his work as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, and the audacity of his candidacy for the presidency as a first-term U.S. Senator. The problem here is that most voters want to fix on gutter balls in a bowling alley or the lack of a flag pin on his lapel; contextual intelligence is not a LIS (low information signal). If this is a (fair & balanced) national tragedy, so be it.

[x Financial Times]
Good Leadership Is Deciding How To Decide
By Joseph Nye

George W. Bush has famously described his leadership role as “the decider”. But deciding how to decide is as important as making the final decision. What should be the composition of the group the leader turns to? What is the context of the decision? How will information be communicated and how much control does the leader maintain over the decision? A leader who gets any of these factors wrong may be decisive, but also decisively wrong.

The US president described his leadership style as having three core components: outline a vision, build a strong team and delegate much of the process to them. His decision-making on Iraq, however, has been criticised for the grandiosity of his vision, failure to manage the divisions in his team and failure to monitor the delegation of decisions. Without contextual intelligence, being a “decider” is not enough.

Understanding context is crucial to effective leadership. Some situations call for autocratic decisions and some require the opposite. There is an infinite variety of contexts in which leaders have to operate, but it is particularly important for leaders to understand culture, the distribution of power, followers’ needs and demands, time urgency and information flows.

Ronald Heifetz, the leadership theorist, argues that the first thing a leader needs to diagnose is whether the situation calls for technical and routine solutions or requires adaptive change. In the former case, the leader may want to clarify roles and norms, restore order and quickly provide a solution. In the latter case, the leader may want to let conflict emerge, challenge unproductive norms and roles and let the group feel external pressures so that it learns to master the adaptive challenge. This may require delaying decisions. Leaders are often tempted to decide quickly to reduce followers’ anxieties rather than to use these anxieties as a learning experience. This is a very different image of leadership from simply being “the decider”.

General Electric prides itself on producing leaders, but half of its high-flyers who went on to become chief executives of other Fortune 500 companies had disappointing records. Why do some leaders succeed in one context and fail in another? A common answer is “horses for courses”: some run better on a dry track and some in mud. Many a good CEO turns out to be a disappointment when appointed as a cabinet secretary.

Contextual intelligence is an intuitive skill that helps a leader align tactics with objectives to create smart strategies in new situations. It implies a capability to discern trends in the face of complexity as well as adaptability in trying to shape events. Bismarck once referred to this as the ability to intuit God’s movements in history and seize the hem of his garment as he sweeps by. More prosaically, like surfers, leaders with contextual intelligence have the judgment to adjust to new waves and ride them to success.

Contextual intelligence allows leaders to adjust their style to the situation and their followers’ needs. It enables them to create flows of information that “educate their hunches”. It involves the broad political skill not only of sizing up group politics, but also of understanding the positions and strengths of various stakeholders so as to decide when and how to use trans actional and inspirational skills. It is the self-made part of luck.

In unstructured situations, it is often more difficult to ask the right questions than to get the right answer. Leaders with contextual intelligence are skilled at providing meaning by defining the problem that a group confronts. They understand the tension between the different values involved in an issue and how to balance the desirable with what is feasible.

Psychologists generally agree that multiple forms of intelligence exist. What we today measure as IQ was originally developed a century ago in the context of the French school system. Thus it focuses on linguistic, mathematical and spatial skills that tend to predict success in school, but not necessarily in life. Contextual intelligence consists partly of analytic capabilities and partly of tacit knowledge built up from experience, which tends to be expressed in rules of thumb. In some situations, such “street smarts” are much more important to success than “school smarts”. But as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two Democratic presidential rivals, have recently debated, in novel situations judgment is more important than experience.

Contextual intelligence also requires emotional intelligence. Without sensitivity to the needs of others, pure cognitive analysis and long experience may prove insufficient for effective leadership. Ronald Reagan was often faulted on his cognitive skills, but he generally had good contextual intelligence. Jimmy Carter had good cognitive skills, but was often faulted on his contextual intelligence. As one wag put it, he was better at counting the trees than seeing the forest.

The best leaders are able to transfer their skills across contexts. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was successful both as a military leader and as a president. Many leaders have a fixed repertoire of skills, which limit and condition their responses to new situations. To use an information age metaphor, they need to develop broader bandwidth and tune carefully for different situations. That set of skills is contextual intelligence. Leaders need to learn it and, especially this year, voters need to judge it.

[Joseph S Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and author, most recently, of The Powers to Lead (2008).]
.
Copyright © 2008 The Financial Times Limited 2008

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Uh, Oh! Stick A Fork In Obama?

Joe Klein introduced me to Professor Samuel L. Popkin (University of California at San Diego) and the concept of "low information signaling" in political campaigns. According to Popkin (in The Reasoning Voter), most voters make their electoral decision over stupid things like bowling a 37 or (not) wearing a flag pin. Klein mentions Michael Dukakis in a tanker's helmet, John Kerry's chosen sport of wind-surfing, and Al Gore's audible sighs during a debate in 2000. Klein should have included The Trickster's upper-lip-perspiration and darting eyes in 1960. He also should have included Jerry Ford's attempt to eat a tamale in San Antonio without removing the corn-shuck wrapper in 1976. A classic LIS (low information signaling)-moment occurred with Poppy Bush (41) checked his watch during a debate in 1992 while The Slickster was droning on about whatever. On the opposite side of the coin, The Slickster mastered LIS by wearing shades and blowing into a saxophone on "The Arsenio Hall Show." Eating a Big Mac didn't hurt The Slickster, either. Now, we have The Hillster knocking back shots of Crown Royal and getting teary-eyed when another woman asked "How do you do it?" The Hillster does it (as does her husband), according to Klein, because she's a "robo-pol." Terminator-like, she'll be back to tell The Hopester, "Hasta la vista, baby." If this is a (fair & balanced) political obituary, so be it.

[x Time]
The Incredibly Shrinking Democrats
By Joe Klein

"This election," Bill Clinton said in the hours before the Pennsylvania primary, "is too big to be small." It was a noble sentiment, succinctly stated, and the core of what Democrats believe — that George W. Bush has been a historic screwup as President, that there are huge issues to be confronted this year. But it was laughable as well. The Pennsylvania primary had been a six-week exercise in diminution, with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton too — losing altitude and esteem on an almost daily basis. Even as he spoke, the former President was in the midst of a tiny, self-inflicted absurdity, having claimed in a radio interview that the Obama campaign had played the "race card" against him. And that was the least of the damage.

Hillary Clinton won a convincing victory in Pennsylvania, but it came at a significant cost to the Clinton family's reputation and to the Democratic Party. She won by throwing the "kitchen sink" at Obama, as her campaign aides described it. Her campaign had been an assault on Obama's character flaws, real and imagined, rather than on matters of substance. Clinton also suffered a bizarre self-inflicted wound, having reimagined her peaceful landing at a Bosnian airstrip in 1996 as a battlefield scene complete with sniper fire. After six weeks of this, according to one poll, 60% of the American people considered her "untrustworthy," a Nixonian indictment.

But that was nothing compared with the damage done to Obama, who entered the primary as a fresh breeze and left it stale, battered and embittered — still the mathematical favorite for the nomination but no longer the darling of his party. In the course of six weeks, the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement. All of which deepened the skepticism that Caucasians, especially those without a college degree, had about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language. And worse, it raised questions among the elders of the party about Obama's ability to hold on to crucial Rust Belt bastions like Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey in the general election — and to add long-suffering Ohio to the Democratic column.

Yes, yes, the bulk of the sludge was caricature, and some of it, especially the stuff circulating on the Internet, was scurrilous trash. But there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message. In his 1991 book, The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of "low-information signaling" — that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin. In the era of Republican dominance, the low-information signals were really low — how Michael Dukakis looked in a tanker's helmet, whether John Kerry's favorite sports were too precious (like wind-surfing), whether Al Gore's debate sighs over his opponent's simple obfuscations were patronizing. Bill Clinton was the lone Democratic master of low-information signaling — a love of McDonald's and other assorted big-gulp appetites gave him credibility that even trumped his evasion of military service.

The audacity of the Obama campaign was the belief that in a time of trouble — as opposed to the peace and prosperity of the late 20th century — the low-information politics of the past could be tossed aside in favor of a high-minded, if deliberately vague, appeal to the nation's need to finally address some huge problems. But that assumption hit a wall in Pennsylvania. Specifically, it hit a wall at the debate staged by ABC News in Philadelphia — viewed by an audience of 10 million, including a disproportionate number of Pennsylvanians — that will go down in history for the relentless vulgarity of its questions, with the first 40 minutes focused exclusively on so-called character issues rather than policy. Obama was on the defensive from the start, but gradually the defensiveness morphed into bitter frustration. He kept his cool — a very presidential character trait — and allowed his disdain to show only when he was asked a question about his opponent's Bosnia gaffe. "Senator Clinton deserves the right to make some errors once in a while," he said. "What's important is to make sure that we don't get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history."

It is the transcendent irony of this campaign that Obama, who entered the race intent on getting past the "dorm fights of the '60s," has now become deeply entangled in them. Each of the ABC moderators' questions were about controversies that erupted in the '60s. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons had their roots in the black-power movement that corrupted Martin Luther King Jr.'s "beloved community." The sprouting of flag pins on the lapels of politicians was a response to the flag-burning of antiwar protesters; the violence of Weather Underground members like William Ayers, with whom Obama was said to be "friendly," was a corruption of the peace movements as well. All of these occurred before Obama reached puberty — and they helped define the social atmosphere in academic communities like Chicago's Hyde Park, where Obama now lives. For 40 years, the Republican Party has feasted on the secular humanism, feminism, distrust of the military and permissiveness that caricature such communities. For 40 years, the Democratic Party has been burdened by its inability to break free of those stereotypes.

Obama's challenge to the primacy of that sort of politics is both worthy and essential. His point, and Bill Clinton's, is indisputable: there is a need for a big election this year. A decision has to be made about the war in Iraq. The mortgage-market and the health-insurance systems are falling apart. There is a drastic need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels for national-security, environmental and basic supply-and-demand reasons. The physical and educational infrastructures of the country are badly outdated. In order to have an election about those big challenges, we need to shove some serious social issues — like gun control and, yes, even abortion — and phony character issues to the periphery. But Obama is going about it the wrong way. "After 14 long months," he said in his concession speech, "it's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics, the bickering that none of us are immune to, and it trivializes the profound issues." What's wrong with that, you might ask? It's too abstract, too detached. Too often, Obama has seemed unwilling to get down in the muck and fight off the "distractions" that are crippling his campaign. Obviously, this is strategy — his appeal has been the promise of a politics of civility (and as a black man, he wants to send low-information signals that he is neither angry nor threatening). But what if, after ABC had enabled the smarmy American-flag-pin question from an "average citizen," Obama had taken on George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson directly, "Why aren't you guys wearing pins? Why isn't Hillary?" Indeed, this was Clinton's strategy in an earlier debate, upbraiding her questioners from MSNBC — and it may have turned the tide in her favor in Ohio and Texas.

In the last days of the Pennsylvania campaign, Obama made a halfhearted attempt to go negative. He ran ads distorting Clinton's health-care plan, claiming that it would force everyone to get health insurance (true), even if they couldn't afford it (false). He devoted more and more of his stump speech to slagging Clinton. "She's got the kitchen sink flying, the china flying — the buffet is coming at me," he said during a whistle-stop tour of southeastern Pennsylvania. His delivery of the kitchen-sink line was droll, but the rest of the tour was surprisingly soporific. He seemed fed up with campaigning — as any reasonably sane human being would be at this point — and embittered by the turn the race had taken.

I'm not sure that Bill and Hillary Clinton are reasonably sane human beings, at least not when they are running for office: they become robo-pols, tireless and seemingly indestructible. Senator Clinton was on fire in the days before the Pennsylvania primary, as energized as I've ever seen her. She barely mentioned Obama at all but fiercely plowed her latest field — the populist granddaughter of a Pennsylvania factory worker, the daughter of a Penn State football player. As she said in her victory speech, "You know, tonight, all across Pennsylvania and America, teachers are grading papers, and doctors and nurses are caring for the sick, and you deserve a leader who listens to you. Waitresses are pouring coffee, and police officers are standing guard, and small businesses are working to meet that payroll. And you deserve a champion who stands with you."

There was a warmth and a feistiness to Clinton in Pennsylvania — the very qualities that Obama was lacking. She had embraced the shameless rituals of politics, including some classic low-information signals, downing shots of Crown Royal and promising lower gas prices, attacking her opponent over trivia and threatening to "obliterate" Iran. It was enough to earn the ire of the New York Times editorial page, which harrumphed, "By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues ... she undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be President."

Well, tsk-tsk and ahem! But part of the problem with editorial writers — and, truth to tell, columnists like me — is a narrow definition of the qualifications necessary to be President. It helps to be a warrior, for one thing. It helps to be able to take a punch and deliver one — even, sometimes, a sucker punch. A certain familiarity with life as it is lived by normal Americans is useful; a distance from the élite precincts of academia, where unrepentant terrorists can sip wine in good company, is essential. Hillary Clinton has learned these lessons the hard way; Barack Obama thinks they are "the wrong lessons." The nomination is, obviously, his to lose. But the presidency will not be won if he doesn't learn that the only way to reach the high-minded conversation he wants, and the country badly needs, is to figure out how to maneuver his way through the gutter.

[Joe Klein is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, known for his novel Primary Colors (1996), an anonymously-written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2003 he has been a contributor at Time magazine. In April 2006, he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster-consultant industrial complex". He has also written articles and book reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, LIFE and Rolling Stone.]

Copyright © 2008 Time, Inc.

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Roll Over, Ralph Ellison!

Colson Whitehead's Op-Ed piece in today's NY Fishwrap is why I post entries to this blog. In these times, a laugh out loud (LOL) moment is as precious as a gallon of gas, a pound of rice, or a superdelegate endorsement. This blog is brought to you courtesy of The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black Bald. If this is (fair & balanced) satire, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Visible Man
By Colson Whitehead

I try to keep a low profile. Maybe you see me in the hallway but don’t know my name. Say hi to me in the coffee room but don’t really know me. I break my silence now because of this election mess. Before the primary in Pennsylvania this week, Bill Clinton was doing magic tricks — now you see the race card, now you don’t. Geraldine Ferraro and Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, have been complaining that Barack Obama is leading in the Democratic presidential campaign only because of his skin color. Multimillionaire TV pundits are lecturing “the common man” on how outraged they should be about Mr. Obama’s elitism.

It’s all hokum, and I should know. For it is I, The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black.

Most folks don’t know much about me, apart from the feeling of injustice that hits when I walk into the room with my easy charisma and air of entitlement. I understand. It’s weird when your government passes legislation, like equal opportunity laws, that benefits one single person in the country — me, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black.

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

Guns? I wish I had a gun! Ever run out of truffle oil before a dinner party and have to go to Whole Foods on a weekend? It’ll make you want to spread a little buckshot around, that’s for sure.

Look, we’re all hurting, trying to make ends meet. I have serious overhead with all the résumés I send out. The postage is one thing, but I also like to print my résumé on a nice creamy bond. I think it sends a message. Then there’s the dry cleaning and the soap — I prefer to be clean and articulate in my interviews, put my best foot forward. I think it’s working. People are responding to how I present myself.

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black?

Frankly it’s a lot better than my last two gigs, The Guy Who Left the Seat Up and The Guy Who Took the Last Beer, although I do suffer from a lot of work-related injuries, as you can imagine. For all this jibber-jabber about how I don’t understand a working man’s problems, you should take a look at my medical chart. I have carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, miner’s lung, scapegoat rash and vintner’s dropsy, and just last week I burned my thumb making horseshoes. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a blacksmith. But I heard they had an opening and I couldn’t help myself.

I put in a good day’s work, unwind with a little Marx, and then settle down for some well-deserved rest. I have a nice bed. It is a California king. It is stuffed with gold doubloons, the treasure I have accumulated by gathering the bonuses and raises that would have gone to Those Who Would’ve Gotten It Except for That Black Guy. The bed is quite comfortable. I sleep O.K.

It makes the head spin, this talk of who’s elitist and who’s not. I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.

It’s as if Someone Out to Prevent Me From Getting What I Worked For is preventing me from getting what I worked for. If only there were something — a lapel pin or other sartorial accessory — that would reassure people that I can do the job.

Some people say Barack Obama and I get everything handed to us on a silver platter. But we don’t let it bother us. We’re taking those silver platters and making them our canoes. Then we’ll grab our silver spoons and paddle to a place where people get us. North Carolina, maybe. Or Indiana. I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. We’ll paddle on, brother, paddle all the way to the top.

[Colson Whitehead (full name Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead) is a New York-based novelist. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the MacArthur "Genius" grant. He was born in New York City in 1969, attended the Trinity School in New York, and graduated from Harvard College in 1991. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and The Village Voice. Whitehead, a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is the author of the forthcoming novel Sag Harbor. That novel will be Whitehead's fifth, following The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), The Colossus of New York (2003), and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Roll Over, Beethoven!

Today, I met the world's oldest (average age: 82) cover band, Young@Heart. (Note: Cover bands typically play a mix of songs from different decades and different styles. Some cover bands play material from particular decades, for example a 1980s cover band. Others focus exclusively on a single group, and are called tribute bands: it is not uncommon to find Led Zeppelin cover bands, Pink Floyd cover bands, or U2 cover bands. Cover bands are very popular for weddings and corporate events, as well as in bars and clubs because they play many songs familiar to the guests.) A group of senior citizens from Northampton, MA perform songs from a diverse range of musicians and bands such as Jimi Hendrix, Coldplay, Sonic Youth, the Ramones, James Brown, and more. In a newly-released documentary ("Young@Heart") by British filmmaker Stephen Walker, we meet a civic chorus of (mostly) octogenarians who peform the gamut of rock and roll music under the direction of Bob Cilman. The rendition of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" in a concert at a local correctional facility was a high point. Until Stephen Walker made this film, Young@Heart was known only in western Massachusetts. If this is a (fair & balanced) epiphany, so be it.

[x Young@Heart site]

Copyright © 2007 Young@Heart

[x MSNBC.com]



Copyright © 2008 NBC

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Earth Day 2008

More and more it seems that the dystopian version of our future will prevail. If this is (fair & balanced) environmental sorrow, so be it.

[x The Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]

Click on image to enlarge.
Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius

[x The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair]
By Denis Hayes

Following an idea pioneered by the Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the first nationwide Earth Day was celebrated on 22 April 1970. (A month earlier, San Francisco had organized its own Earth Day celebration at the instigation of the social activist John McConnell.) Concerned by the dark side of economic progress and inspired by the protest movements of the 1960s, twenty million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a cleaner environment. In its aftermath, President Richard M. Nixon proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in July 1970 and Congress passed the Clean Air (1970), Clean Water (1972), and Endangered Species (1973) Acts. In 1990, Earth Day, held every year since 1970 on 22 April, became a worldwide celebration.

Copyright © 2008 Denis Hayes

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Clueless Redux

After 4th grade, U. S. educational achievement goes downhill until our 12th graders are at the bottom of the heap. Tony Carillo knows that we are clueless. If this is (fair & balanced) art imitating life, so be it.

[x F-Minus]

Click on image to enlarge

[After years of studying fine art and classical drawing, Tony Carillo resorted back to the simple, yet stupid doodles that used to get him in trouble in the third grade. His creation, "F Minus," ran in his college paper, The State Press, during his final four semesters at Arizona State University. Carillo, a native of Tempe, AZ, lives less than a mile from the house where he was born.]

Copyright © 2008 Tony Carillo

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Clue? It's Not Colonel Mustard In The Library; It's Us!

Bob Herbert notes that The Hillster throws down shots of Crown Royal and The Hopester rolls gutter balls and neither makes mention of the fact that this country is at the bottom of educational achievement in the world. The Geezer is no better as a man who finished 5th from the bottom of his class at Annapolis. Our current POTUS is proof that somewhere a village is missing an idiot. We get the leaders we deserve and we will end up with a shot-swilling harpy or a klutz who can't stay out of the gutter or a hell-raiser who would have flunked out of the Naval Academy if his name had been anything other than that of his grandfather or his father (both Navy admirals). The jeremiads have been continuous since 1918 and have called for educational "reform" and "renewal." Yawn. Nothing of substance has changed the fact that the United States now has a third-world system of education. Bob Herbert is dead-right: we are clueless. If this is (fair & balanced) self-condemnation, so be it.

[NY Fishwrap]
Clueless in America
By Bob Herbert

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”

Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.

Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades:

“In math and science, for example, our fourth graders are among the top students globally. By roughly eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. And by the 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring generally near the bottom of all industrialized countries.”

Many students get a first-rate education in the public schools, but they represent too small a fraction of the whole.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, offered a brutal critique of the nation’s high schools a few years ago, describing them as “obsolete” and saying, “When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”

Said Mr. Gates: “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

The Educational Testing Service, in a report titled “America’s Perfect Storm,” cited three powerful forces that are affecting the quality of life for millions of Americans and already shaping the nation’s future. They are:

• The wide disparity in the literacy and math skills of both the school-age and adult populations. These skills, which play such a tremendous role in the lives of individuals and families, vary widely across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

• The “seismic changes” in the U.S. economy that have resulted from globalization, technological advances, shifts in the relationship of labor and capital, and other developments.

• Sweeping demographic changes. By 2030, the U.S. population is expected to reach 360 million. That population will be older and substantially more diverse, with immigration having a big impact on both the population as a whole and the work force.

These and so many other issues of crucial national importance require an educated populace if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the moment we are not even coming close to equipping the population with the intellectual tools that are needed.

While we’re effectively standing in place, other nations are catching up and passing us when it comes to educational achievement. You have to be pretty dopey not to see the implications of that.

But, then, some of us are pretty dopey. In the Common Core survey, nearly 20 percent of respondents did not know who the U.S. fought in World War II. Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11 percent thought it was Harry Truman.

We’ve got work to do.


[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends.

Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board.

In 1990, Mr. Herbert was a founding panelist of "Sunday Edition," a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of "Hotline," a weekly issues program on New York public television.

He began his career as a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., in 1970. He became its night city editor in 1973.

Mr. Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing. He was chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury for spot news reporting in 1993.

Born in Brooklyn on March 7, 1945, Mr. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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(Real) Dirty Dancing

Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes won a Grammy in 1988 for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group; their hit, "I Had The Time Of My Life," was the finale song in the ultimate chick-flick, "Dirty Dancing" (1987). Ironically, Bill Medley was one-half of The Righteous Brothers (with Bobby Hatfield) and the duo became members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. The Righteous Brother in the current presidential campaign is Senator Barack Obama. If this is a (fair & balanced) case of life imitating art, so be it.

[x Versus site]
THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE ♫ (Click on the link at left for sound.)
[The Democratic Primary]
Parody Lyrics by Marcy Shaffer

To "(I've Had) The Time of My Life"
(Words and Music BY Franke Previte,
John DeNicola and Donald Markowitz)

CLINTON:
Well, I've had the fight of my life.
'Til now I always breezed my way right through.
And it's true.
that I grew.
'Cause of tussling with you.

OBAMA:
I too have had the fight of my life.
With all that muscling from you.

CLINTON:
Straight Talk Express I can defeat.
Barack, oh, yes, I ran to meet
Destiny.

OBAMA:
And I'm convinced I cannot fail.
Like each time Harvard plays at Yale.
Hillary.

CLINTON:
My innuendos on the rise.

OBAMA:
My spinners wiser to devise
Strategy.

BOTH:
So forget what's done on news.
You can bet no one will lose
Gracefully.

OBAMA:
You've misspoken.

CLINTON:
You have been provokin'.

BOTH:
It is masterstrokin'!
See how we run!

Really:
I've had the fight of my life.
'Til now I always breezed my way right through.
And it's true.
that I grew.
'Cause of hustling from you.

CLINTON:
Oh, those calls at 3 a.m.
Have a stratagem for them?
I'd like to hear.

OBAMA:
Are you awake then from concerns
Where those stacks of tax returns
might steer?

CLINTON:
Hah!
When those delegates convene.
I can tell, I'll be queen of the year.
BUT remember:

You have taught me
That it could be NOT me.

OBAMA:
How far you have brought me!

BOTH:
See how we run!

Thank you.
I've had the fight of my life.
And I'll be number 44 before I'm through.
What I'll do.
will be new.
'Cause of tussling with you.

Yes, I've had the fight of my life.
And maybe to my debut interview.
I will coo.
that I flew.
'Cause of tussling, yes,
tussling with you.

Janis Liebhart - lead vocal; background vocals
Gary Stockdale - lead vocal; background vocals
Greg Hilfman - music director

[Marcy Shaffer is an attorney-cum-parodist.]

℗ © 2008 RMSWorks LLC. Lyrics © 2008 RMSWorks LLC.

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No Kool-Aid For Me, Thank You (Part II)

Bittergate? What about Watergate? And all of the "Gates" in between? Thomas Frank writes of plutocrats in the Wall Street Fishwrap, no less. I guess the plutocrats can tolerate a mascot in their midst. If a choice must be made of the lesser among plutocrats, that choice is Senator Barack Obama, not The Hillster nor Lou Dobbs. No plutocrat Kool-Aid is sold at this pop-stand. If this is (fair & balanced) beverage choice, so be it.

[x Wall Street Fishwrap]
Obama's Touch of Class
By Thomas Frank

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book — What's the Matter With Kansas? — is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Mr. Obama's offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: "Bittergate."

In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama's gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama — "elitism." No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Consider the shower of right-wing love that descended in February on small-town newspaper columnist Gary Hubbell, who penned this year's great eulogy of the "angry white man," the "man's man" who "works hard," who "knows that his wife is more emotional than rational," and who also, happily, knows how to "change his own oil and build things."

This stock character, unchanged since his star turns in the culture-war battles of the last few decades, is said to be as furious as ever, and still blaming the same villains for his problems: namely intellectuals, in the guise of "judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives." But what he really wants is a chance to vote against Hillary Clinton, and "make sure she gets beaten like a drum." I guess our angry toiler didn't yet know about the Crown Royal.

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

[Thomas Frank is an author who writes about what he calls "cultural politics". He is the founder and editor of The Baffler and the author of several books, most recently What's the Matter with Kansas?. Other writings include essays for Harper's Magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the Financial Times. He has recently joined The Wall Street Journal as a columnist.

Frank was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1965. He grew up in a local suburb, Mission Hills, Kansas. Frank graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School. He later attended the University of Kansas. He also attended the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1994. He currently lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Wendy, and their children.]

Copyright © 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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No Kool-Aid For Me, Thank You (Part I)

This is the first part of a two-part series exploring the fallout over Senator Barack Obama's "elitist" references to working-class bitterness in our time. Obama is labeled elitist by The Hillster, a multi-millionaire graduate of Wellesley College and the Yale University Law School. This charge of elitism by The Hillster is akin to Lou Dobbs' sneer that Senator Barack Obama was "another Ivy league knucklehead." This jibe comes from Lou Dobbs, Harvard '67. The only knuckleheads in this equation are those fools who give credence to The Hillster's anti-elitist rhetoric and Dobbs' anti-Ivy League spew. All of this enlightened chatter hasn't been heard since Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) staggered in a drunken stupor through the halls of Congress. The perjorative term for buying into nonsense is "drinking (someone's) Kool-Aid" as the poor wretched members of the Jim Jones cult did in mass suicide in Guyana in 1978. Those poor souls who think that Barack Obama is an elitist have consumed the most recent vintage of irrational Kool-Aid served up by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lou Dobbs, and their ilk. If this is a (fair & balanced) antidote to hypocrisy, so be it.

[x LA Fishwrap]
Talking To Ourselves
By Susan Jacoby

As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public's increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing -- or any hearing at all -- to opposing points of view.

A few years ago, I delivered a lecture at Eastern Kentucky University on the history of American secularism, and was pleased, in the heart of the Bible Belt, to have attracted an audience of about 150. The response inside the hall was enthusiastic because everyone there, with the exception of a few bored students whose professors had made attendance a requirement, agreed with me before I opened my mouth.

Around the corner, hundreds more students were packing an auditorium to hear a speaker sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ, a conservative organization that "counter-programs" secular lectures at many colleges. The star of the evening was a self-described recovering pedophile who claimed to have overcome his proclivities by being "born again." (And yes, it is a blow to the ego to find oneself less of a draw than a penitent pedophile.)

It is safe to say that almost no one who attended either lecture on the Kentucky campus that night was exposed to a new or disturbing idea. Indeed, virtually everywhere I speak, 95% of the audience shares my political and cultural views -- and serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit.

Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation's best cultural traditions.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Americans jammed lecture halls to hear Robert Green Ingersoll, known as "the Great Agnostic," attack organized religion and question the existence of God. They did so not because they necessarily agreed with him but because they wanted to make up their own minds about what he had to say and see for themselves whether the devil really had horns.

Similarly, when Thomas Henry Huxley, the British naturalist who popularized Darwin's theory of evolution, came to the U.S. in 1876, he spoke to standing-room-only audiences, even though many of his listeners were genuinely shocked by his views.

This spirit of inquiry, which demands firsthand evidence and does not trivialize opposing points of view, is essential to a society's intellectual and political health.

Richard Hofstadter, in his classic 1963 work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, argued that among "the major virtues of liberal society in the past was that it made possible such a variety of styles of intellectual life -- one can find men notable for being passionate and rebellious, for being elegant and sumptuous, or spare and astringent, clever and complex, patient and wise, and some equipped mainly to observe and endure. ... It is possible, of course, that the avenues of choice are being closed and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another. It is possible; but insofar as the weight of one's will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it not be so."

Hofstadter was of course using the word "liberal" with a small "l," in the sense that the term had been used in the past -- as a synonym for open-mindedness and concern for liberty of thought instead of as the right-wing political epithet it has become during the last 25 years.

When I recently spoke about the militant parochialism of American intellectual life on a radio talk show, a caller responded by telling me that there was nothing new about Americans preferring to bask in the reflected glow of their own opinions. Talk radio and political blogs, in his view, are merely the modern equivalent of friends -- and haven't we always chosen friends who agree with us?

Well, no. Tell it to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who certainly had many, often bitter disagreements about politics and whose correspondence nevertheless leaps off the page as an example of the illumination to be derived from exchanges of ideas between friends who respect each other even though they do not always share the same opinions.

"You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other," Adams wrote Jefferson in 1815.

It is doubtful that today's politicians will spend much time trying to explain themselves to one another even after they leave office. They are, after all, creatures of a culture in which it is acceptable, on the Senate floor, for Vice President Dick Cheney to tell Vermont's Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go [obscene verb] yourself"

There is a direct connection between the debasement of political discourse and the public's tendency to tune out any voice that is not an echo. "Swift boating" can succeed in politics only because of the correct assumption that huge numbers of Americans lack the broad knowledge that would enable them to spot blatantly unfair attacks. If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, we will surely hear, from the slimier corners of the blogosphere, a renewal of the lie that he is a Muslim. John McCain got the same treatment from George W. Bush supporters in the 2000 campaign, when the rumor that his adopted child from Bangladesh was really his own illegitimate African American baby cost him votes in the Republican primary in South Carolina. Voters of any political persuasion who watch only cable news shows or consult only blogs that support their preconceptions are patsies for these kinds of lies.

Ironically, the unprecedented array of choices, on hundreds of cable channels and the Web, have contributed to the decline of common knowledge and the denigration of fairness by both the right and the left. No one but a news junkie has the time or the inclination to spend the entire day consulting diverse news sources on the Web, and the temptation to seek out commentary that fits neatly into one's worldview -- whether that means the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report -- is hard to resist.

Genuine fairness does not mean the kind of bogus objectivity that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but it does demand that divergent views be understood and taken into account in approaching public issues. In re-reading Hofstadter several years ago, I was struck by the fairness of his scholarship, a serious, old-fashioned attempt to engage the arguments of his opponents and to acknowledge evidence that ran counter to his own biases. I had not noticed that when I read the book for the first time in the 1960s because fairness was, to a considerable degree, taken for granted in those days as an ideal for aspiring young scholars and writers.

A vast public laziness feeds the media's predilection today to distill news through polemicists of one stripe or another and to condense complex information into meaningless sound bites. On April 8, for example, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, testified before the Senate in hearings that lasted into the early evening. Although the hearings were on cable during the day, the networks offered no special programming in the evening, and newscasts were content with sound bites of McCain, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioning the general. Dueling presidential candidates were the whole story.

Absent from most news reports was testimony concerning the administration's ongoing efforts to forge agreements with various Iraqi factions without submitting the terms to Congress for ratification -- a development with constitutional implications as potentially serious as the Watergate affair. No matter. Anyone who wanted to hear Petraeus bashed or applauded could turn to his or her preferred political cable show or click on a blog to find an unchallenging interpretation of the day's events.

The tepid interest in the substance of Petraeus' testimony on the part of the public and much of the media contrasts sharply with the response to the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. All 319 hours of the first round of the hearings were televised, and 85% of Americans tuned in to at least some of the proceedings live.

I remember those weeks as a period when everyday preoccupations faded into the background and we found time, as a people, to perform our civic duty. An ongoing war may lack the drama of Watergate, but it is doubtful that anything short of another terrorist attack on our soil would convince today's public that it ought to read the transcript of a lengthy congressional hearing or pay attention, for more than five minutes, to live news as it unfolds.

It is past time for Americans to stop attributing the polarization of our public life to the media, the demon entity "Washington" or "the elites." As long as we continue to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing public affairs without the filter of polemical shouting heads, we have no one to blame for the governing class and its policies but ourselves.

Like Hofstadter, I yearn to live in a society that values fair-mindedness. But it will take nothing less than a revolutionary public recommitment to the pursuit of fairness, knowledge and memory to halt, much less reverse, the trend toward an ignorant single-mindedness that threatens the future of democracy itself.

[Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason. Another of her most recent book is Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004). Freethinkers was named a notable book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The New York Times. It was also named an Outstanding International Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement (London) and The Guardian.]

Copyright © Los Angeles Times

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Say What You Mean And Mean What You Say

The most current Clintonista attack on Senator Obama was prompted by Obama's claim that any of the three contenders for the presidency (The Hillster, The Hopester, or The Geezer) would be better than The Dubster. The Hillster focuses on The Geezer's hawkishness on Iraq (and Iran) as the reason The Hopester is hopeless as a viable candidate. The Geezer would be an improvement over The Dubster — not because his views on Iraq are enlightened — but because The Geezer is not an idiot. The Geezer's views on Iraq are foolish, as Professor Juan Cole shows below, but The Geezer makes more sense than The Dubster on any subject (let alone Iraq) any day of the week. The Hillster misses the point. There is a darker reason for the effort to plant al-Qaeda in Iraq.

On January 20, 1942, a meeting of fifteen senior officials of the Nazi German regime — was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The Wannsee Conference implemented the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem which took the shape of death squads, concentration camps, and genocide. Flash forward to 2002 when the war criminals in The Dubster's administration met in The Dickster's office and authorized the use of torture in questioning "al-Qaeda" combatants. At the Wannsee Conference, Jews (and other undesirables) were targeted for inhuman methods. At The Dickster's Conference in 2002, "al-Qaeda" was targeted for torture. If this is a (fair & balanced) crime against humanity, so be it.

[x The Modern World]

Click on image to enlarge
Copyright © 2008 Tom Tomorrow

[x Informed Comment (a blog maintained by Professor Juan Cole)]
McCain and the Myth of al-Qaeda in Iraq
By Juan Cole

I am quoted in this NYT piece today on John McCain's allegations that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq and that there is a danger of "al-Qaeda" taking over the country if the US leaves.

Those allegations don't make any sense. McCain contradicts himself because he sometimes warns that the Shiites or Iran will take over Iraq. He doesn't seem to realize that the US presided over the ascension to power in Iraq of pro-Iranian Shiite parties like Nuri al-Maliki's Islamic Mission Party and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. So which is it? There is a danger that pro-Iranian Shiites will take over (which is anyway what we have engineered) or that al-Qaeda will? It is not as if they can coexist. Since the Shiites are 60 percent and by now well armed and trained, and since the Sunni Arabs are only 17 percent of the population and since only about 1 percent of them perhaps supports Salafi radicalism--how can the latter hope to take over?

Even if McCain only means, as his campaign manager tried to suggest, that "al-Qaeda" could take over the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, that doesn't make any sense either (McCain has actually alleged that al-Qaeda would take over the whole country.) The Salafi radicals have lost in al-Anbar Province. Diyala Province, one of the other three predominantly Sunni areas, is ruled by pro-Iranian Shiites. That leaves Salahuddin and Ninevah Provinces. Among the major military forces in Ninevah is the Kurdish Peshmerga, some of them integrated e.g. into the Mosul police force. Hint: The Kurds don't like "al-Qaeda", i.e. Salafi radicalism. Jalal Talabani is a socialist.

So the Shiites and the Kurds among the Iraqis, now more powerful than the Sunni Arabs, would never allow a radical Salafi mini-state in their midst. They would crush them. And substantial segments of the Iraqi Sunni population have already helped crush them.

Moreover, Shiite Iran, secular Turkey, Baathist Syria and monarchical Jordan would never put up with a Salafi radical mini-state on their borders. They would crush it. Jordan's secret police already appear to have played a role in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who had his own "Monotheism and Holy War" organization that for PR purposes he at one point rechristened "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" (he actually never got along with Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri).

McCain's whole discourse on Iraq is just a typical rightwing Washington fantasy made up in order to get you to spend $15 billion a month on his friends in the military industrial complex and to get you to allow him to gut the US constitution and the Bill of Rights.

[John "Juan" Ricardo I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on television, and testified before the United States Senate. He has published several peer-reviewed books on the modern Middle East and is a translator of both Arabic and Persian. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, "Informed Comment." Cole earned, in 1975, a B.A. History and Literature of Religions at Northwestern University. In 1978, he took an M.A. in Arabic Studies/History at American University in Cairo. His Ph.D. in Islamic Studies was awarded in 1984 by the University of California at Los Angeles.]

Copyright © 2008 Juan Cole

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