You, Go, Girl!

Scott Thomas, The Hopester's Webmeister, has created a new page for The Hopester's Web site:

New Obama Truth Site

The Righties and Dumbos know not shame. They will lie, cheat, and steal. They would sell their mothers for an election victory. May the Dogs of Hell (Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, Hannity, O'Really, Rove, the Tennessee Dumbo organization, and their ilk) all return to their kennels in the Hot Place. The best news is that The Hopester will raise another $100M this month. The Righties and the Dumbos are going to be outspent and on Election Day, "No Sale" will be rung up on the cash registers of their hearts. Hoist by their own petard. This couldn't happen to more deserving people (and it's a stretch to call them people when bastards is more satisfying). If this is (fair & balanced) joy amidst revulsion, so be it.

[x Time]
The War Over Michelle Obama
By Nancy Gibbs and Jay Newton-Small

Through the primaries, Michelle Obama was such an effective proxy for her husband that Obama aides nicknamed her "the Closer" because she'd get more commitment cards signed at her rallies than the candidate did at his. At 44, she is vivid, engaging, part therapist, part professor, part girlfriend who comes over for coffee and tells you hard truths about the stupid mistakes you're making.

But in recent weeks, Michelle has also become a favorite target of conservatives, who attack her with an exuberance that suggests there are no taboos anymore. The latest strike came from the Tennessee Republican Party, which posted a YouTube ad ridiculing Michelle's now famous "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" remark. That prompted Barack Obama to throw down a gauntlet of his own. "I would never think of going after somebody's spouse in a campaign," he told Robin Roberts of Good Morning America. "She loves this country ... And especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values ... to start attacking my wife in a political campaign, I think, is detestable."

Such pushback may have been an act of chivalry in the face of talk-radio furies and bloggers attacking, as one commenter did, "the bitter, anti-American, ungrateful, rude, crude, ghetto, angry Michelle Obama." But it also may signal that as attention turns to the general campaign, Michelle could be a liability as well as an asset. Her speeches can sound stark and stern compared with her husband's roof raisers. He's all about the promise; she's more about the problem. It's not just that she says times are hard and "we're not where we need to be"; with that, the vast majority of the country agrees. She goes further, worrying out loud about the country's lack of fairness, the corrosive cynicism of its citizens and how Americans "spend more time talking about what we can't do, what won't work, what can't change" than about what is possible. "The challenges that we are really facing have very little to do with health care and all the practical things that people like to think about," she told TIME. "At our core, it is how we see one another. That's how it all starts for me." So the test may be, in the weeks ahead, How will voters see her? And is her understanding of the state of our union one that they share?

It's a little brazen for Obama to say his wife can't be a target when he uses her as a shield, like a charm against charges that his own biography is somehow too exotic, too alien, too Jeremiah Wright and not enough Norman Rockwell. In his telling, her life as a Chicago city worker's daughter whose family ate dinner together every night, who made it from public schools to the Ivy League to the long, twisting road to the White House, is a tribute to "an America that didn't just reward wealth but the work and the workers who created it."

In the early going, Michelle Obama was not an obvious conservative target, since in some obvious ways she's so conservative herself. When asked what her priorities as First Lady would be, she said her only cause would be giving her children a decent upbringing in the White House. She seems indifferent to the prospect of her power. She doesn't expound on her husband's five-point plans; she just tells her story, whose bass notes are the deep hum of family, work, sacrifice, aspiration. You can watch her in her triple pearls, hear about her love of mac and cheese and reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show and imagine her as the most traditional First Lady since the ones named Bush.

In her stump speech, her tribute to her father can bring a crowd to tears. Struck with multiple sclerosis, he went to work on crutches; he never was late, never gave up and never complained. He put two children through Princeton, writing each check with pride. "My father, like most Americans, just wanted to know that after a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice that one day, he could put his feet up and look over all that he had done and retire with a little respect and dignity," she says. "That's what most Americans want."

She says she tells the stories to let people know we're not so different from one another, since if we don't realize how much we have in common, we'll never get anything done. And then she lays out her case: the days when a father could support a family on a city worker's salary are long past. She paints a picture of crumbling neighborhoods and failing schools, unavailable health care, shrinking pensions, single parents working double shifts. "This has been the case for my entire lifetime," she says, and warns that "we're raising a generation of 'young doubters,'" children who are insular and timid. "They don't try, because they already heard us tell them why they can't succeed."

This is, apparently, too much for some conservatives. They hear "whining" from a woman preaching a "Gospel of Misery," about everything from her student loans to the high cost of piano lessons. When she describes the steadily deteriorating conditions during her lifetime, they counter with the stats: rising home ownership, falling poverty, a quadrupling of the population with a college degree, an explosion of science and technology and opportunity. When she says that "before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls," conservative blogger and radio star Hugh Hewitt levels his warning: "Whenever someone from the government comes to you and says, 'We have to fix your soul,' be very afraid ... No one believes outside of the hard-core left that government can fix your soul." The National Review put a glowering picture of Michelle on its April cover, called her "Mrs. Grievance" and declared that "Michelle Obama embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology which is not where most Americans live."

They are probably right to think that most Americans have a happier impression of the past 40 years. But the skies have clouded in the past year, and this time around, the attacks make one wonder how those who find Michelle Obama's gritty realism out of bounds would mount a campaign in this climate. By suggesting everything is swell? By gliding silently over the battered economic landscape at home in order to talk instead only about terrorism abroad? That is certainly not where most Americans live either.

Those who hear Michelle in person often talk about feeling that they are seeing for the first time a political figure who understands what their lives are really about. "It was like she was telling our story," says Amindi Imoh, 18, a sophomore at the University of South Carolina whose parents emigrated from Nigeria in 1981, who was especially moved by Michelle's description of her childhood. Michelle admits that she's had to learn to be more careful about everything she says. "She doesn't want to become the news," says a campaign aide. "She wants to be a character witness for her husband."

Whether by coincidence or by design, she has brightened her message recently, talking less about what's wrong than about what's possible. "We live in isolation sometimes, but the truth is that people want the same thing. They're tired of the divisions, they want peace, they want fairness, they want equity," she told a group of phone-bank volunteers on May 19 in Louisville, Ky. "They're willing to sacrifice. They're willing to put things that are valuable to them on the table for the greater good."

It's a cliché of American politics that even in hard times--or maybe especially then--people always vote for the optimist. This does not mean we wish our problems away; only that in good times or bad, we want to think we face obstacles with ingenuity and grit. Maybe Michelle Obama is telling hard truths. Or maybe her truths are not as widely shared as she suggests. Barack Obama's "Yes, We Can" stump speech is wrapped around American decency and imagination. Her story has heroes too, but she doesn't bother to keep the stragglers in the closet. Her voice in this race is one more reminder of the new road we are traveling. The 2008 campaign is its own frontier: a race in which candidates on both sides talk about the need to come together as a country, even as their life experiences speak to the depth of the differences between us.

[Nancy Gibbs was named a senior editor of TIME in October 1991, chief political writer in 1996, and Editor-at-Large in 2002.

She first came to TIME in 1985, assigned originally to the International section. In 1988 she became a feature writer, whose award-winning cover stories include "The Right to Die", "Teens, Sex and Value" and "The Columbine Tapes".

After moving to the Nation section, Gibbs wrote more than 20 cover stories on the 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns, and in 1998, helped lead TIME’s coverage of the impeachment drama.

A native New Yorker, Gibbs graduated in 1982 from Yale, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in history. In 1984, she earned a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall scholar. In 1993 she was named Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she taught an advanced writing seminar: "Politics and the Press."

Jay Newton-Small covers politics for TIME. She has covered the Bush 43 White House and also Congress from the DeLay era to the present. And, yes, despite the misleading name SHE is a she.]

Copyright  2008 Time, Inc.

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Trifecta: 1The Krait, 2The Nickster, and 3Roger The Dodger

Wow! The Op-Ed section of the NY Fishwrap was chock full o'nuts today. ¹The Krait led off with comments on The Hopester's latest political adventure and she concludes with a piece of advice to The Hopester: Take a nap! ²The Nickster (Nicholas Kristof) suggests a new speech for The Hopester: a meditation on sexism to bookend with his earlier mediation on racism. There's one thing about The Hopester: he can speechify. The Geezer sounds more and more like Bob Dull. The election of '08 could be a replay of '96 if The Geezer can't do any better than an imitation of an old coot yelling from his front porch: "Hey! You kids! Get off my front yard!" Today's trifecta ends with Paris-based, ³Roger The Dodger (Cohen) writing about The Dubster's final world tour. The world has changed and The Dubster (like The Geezer) doesn't have a clue. If this is (fair & balanced) commentary, so be it.

PS: Mrs. Hopester recently was dissed by Faux News. Those fools referred to Mrs. Hopester as "Obama's Baby Mama." Don Imus and his "nappy-headed ho's" chit-chat would fit in at Faux News. A "baby mama" is an unwed mother is urban slang and the pejorative belongs in the same box with "nappy-headed ho's." The beat goes on with the Righties and Dumbos. Stupid is as stupid says.

[x NY Fishwrap]

¹Barack’s Bad Day
By Gail Collins

Everybody knows that the very first rule in picking a vice president is to do no harm. Really, you can choose anybody. How dumb would you feel if it turned into an embarrassment? This is why the careful, modern candidate sets up a screening system.

Now ask yourself: how dumb would you feel if you got in trouble over your selection for the vice-presidential screener.

Barack Obama is having the first postprimary crisis, a moment in which the only conceivable response is: what was he thinking?

James Johnson, who resigned Wednesday as the leader of the Obama vice-presidential selection committee, is an old Washington hand who had helped Walter Mondale and John Kerry with the same task. His aura of experience was apparently not diminished one whit by the fact that both the candidates he assisted lost and that one of them ran into embarrassing controversies over his running mate.

The immediate cause of Johnson’s downfall was a charge that he had been given a sweet deal on three home loans by the head of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, which Obama had criticized for its role in the subprime lending crisis. Since Countrywide seems to hold the mortgage on every house in the United States, it is also disliked by many, many Americans on general principles.

So far, not so bad. As Obama pointed out, you cannot really expect a presidential candidate to set up a committee to vet the people who are going to be on the vetting committee. Although you can bet that by 2012, that will become standard operating procedure.

But there’s all this other stuff. Johnson is the former head of Fannie Mae, which under his direction, according to regulators, engaged in accounting practices that were, at best, sloppy. At the same time, he sat on the boards of five different corporations, where he appeared to serve as cheerleader for the theory that corporate executives deserve to be paid obscene amounts of money.

How does someone go up to Barack Obama, who once sponsored a bill to curb excessive executive compensation, and say — “You know the vice-presidential search committee? For chairman, how about Jim Johnson? Remember, the guy who tried to give the head of UnitedHealth Group $1.4 billion in stock options?”

When Johnson quit on Wednesday, the McCain headquarters issued a statement saying that the fact that he had been selected in the first place raised “serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment.” This does not seem like a great avenue of attack for a campaign in which a large chunk of the top staff was recently dismissed for being lobbyists.

Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate the cases, the McCain spokesman said: “America can’t afford a president who flip-flops on key questions in the course of 24 hours.” Under a McCain presidency, the bleeding would presumably go on for weeks and weeks before the inevitable occurred.

Although McCain has, so far, not demonstrated that he can manage anything more challenging than a backyard barbecue, that still does not make the Johnson story look any better.

Keep in mind that the head of the vice-presidential vetting committee is not a job for which there are a limited number of qualified candidates. You could appoint a hero firefighter or a nun to be the public face of the search. You hire experts to do the background checks. You would want your own trusted advisers sitting in on the interviews. The other two committee members, Caroline Kennedy and a former deputy attorney general, could have managed on their own.

But no, we have to have a seasoned wise man whose high standing among the movers and shakers of the nation’s business and political elite seemed to hinge on the fact that he feels every single one of them deserves more money.

Talk about unnecessary disasters. It’s like having your career ruined because you invited the wrong person to host a party in honor of your nephew’s godparents.

Gentle spirits may decide that it’s a good thing that the Obama campaign is getting this sort of thing out of the way early. Crueler ones may note that at least they can’t blame this one on Hillary.

Rather than falling into complete depression at such an early point in the game, let’s work under the assumption that the people involved were so tired that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Just before the final primaries, I was in South Dakota talking to George McGovern, who is the gold standard when it comes to disastrous vice-presidential selections. If Obama ever asked him for advice, McGovern said, he’d tell him to avoid exhaustion.

“I got that advice from Barry Goldwater. He said watch out for fatigue. That’s when you make mistakes,” McGovern added.

One ridiculous decision doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be a good candidate.

But it does suggest that he needs to take a long nap.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.]

²The Sex Speech
By Nicholas D. Kristof

One of the missed opportunities of the primary season was that Hillary Clinton never gave a speech about gender comparable to Barack Obama’s speech about race.

That was understandable: She didn’t want to be reduced to the “woman candidate.” But such a speech might have triggered a useful national conversation about women in leadership, and so, Mr. Obama, now it’s up to you: Why don’t you give that speech? I’m helpfully offering some talking points:

Racism is deeper, but sexism may be wider in America today. In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate, and sexist put-downs are heard more publicly than racial ones.

Presumably in part because of sexism (and also because of self-selection), women today are still hugely underrepresented in the political arena. Women constitute about 23 percent of legislators in the 50 states, a proportion that has risen only slightly in the last decade. In addition, the political commentariat is overwhelmingly male, which is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters felt unfairly battered.

We aren’t always aware of our own biases. Some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are sure that she was defeated by misogyny, while those who voted against her invariably are dismissive: The reason I didn’t vote for her isn’t that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s a dynastic opportunist who voted for the Iraq war and ...

The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of. Many studies have presented research subjects with the exact same C.V., alternately with a male name and a female name. Usually, the male is perceived as a better fit for executive posts — even among well-meaning people who are against gender discrimination, and even among women.

At the end of the day, none of this proves or disproves the thesis that gender bias played a role in the election. But if Mrs. Clinton was hurt by gender, her problem wasn’t misogynists so much as ordinary men and women who believe in equal opportunity — but also are conditioned to think that a president speaks in a gravelly voice.

A conservative may end up the first woman president. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t “very Catholic.” In the same way, the first black president probably won’t be “very black,” either in complexion or in any personal history with the civil-rights struggle. And the first female president probably won’t be “very female,” in the sense of emerging from the women’s movement.

Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, both conservatives with no association with the women’s movement, offer hints of the kind of woman who may rise to the White House. Or consider the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for president at a major political party convention. She was a Republican.

Women make a difference in politics, but not a large one. When women first received the right to vote in 1920, the assumption was that they would be a big help to Democrats, who had been more sympathetic to women’s suffrage. Instead, Republicans won the next three presidential elections. Today, the best guide to a senator’s voting behavior is his or her political party and home state, not his or her sex.

Still, it has been disproportionately women in Congress who have championed issues like family planning and abortion rights, and they also seem modestly more attentive to concerns about gender discrimination. Less perspicaciously, women were crucial players in achieving Prohibition.

Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.

In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.

Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.

What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.

That truly would be a noble legacy of this campaign debate about gender and politics.

[Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (1990 and 2006), he previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times.]

³Bush Does Europe Incognito
By Roger Cohen

An American president is in Europe and nobody cares. That’s a moment.

Of course, a couple of months ago an American president went to a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, and said Georgia and Ukraine should be on a fast track to membership, and nobody listened. That was a moment, too. Last time I checked, NATO without the United States didn’t amount to squat.

The president had choreographed his Bucharest appearance with a prior stop in the Ukrainian capital. Did his NATO allies care that he would lose face? Nope. I care because, like this president, I think Georgia and Ukraine should join NATO as soon as possible. Lock in liberal systems where you can.

But that’s not my subject here.

The American president, of course, is George W. Bush. He’s doing a farewell lap, or limp, around European capitals, or retreats. His German stop has been in downtown Meseberg. A rapturous Berlin welcome was not assured.

Rome, Paris, London — an itinerary to stir the imagination, but never his. That’s been the thing about Bush: no curiosity. “Russia’s big, and so is China,” he opined in 2006. The insights tended to stop there. He’s probably happier at Schloss Meseberg, a kind of German Crawford.

“Ich bin ein Crawforder.” Has a ring to it, even if it’s as meaningless as this exit tour.

But Bush-bashing has become a bore. I won’t indulge in it, except to say one more thing.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament.” Bush’s endless malapropisms have made his intellect the object of ridicule. But his mind was not the problem. It’s a better mind than his “nukelar” trashing of language suggests.

Bush’s chip-on-the-shoulder temperament is another matter. He has proved mean, vindictive, surly, controlling and impatient, as befits his guns-at-the-ready gait. Apologizing for tough-guy rhetoric now, as he has, is no remedy. There’s nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of New Orleans levees.

This deficiency of temperament has been devastating. America’s leader must still inspire and give hope. The U.S.A. is the last ideological country on earth. If its message doesn’t resonate, big issues go unaddressed. When it’s dusk in America, the shadows spread wide.

This desultory stroll around a Europe more focused on his successor is a reflection the damage a flawed temperament has done to trans-Atlantic ties. Europeans got tired of being scowled at.

In selecting Barack Obama and John McCain as the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively, Americans have chosen men in full, unafraid to betray contradictions. They are tired of brittle bravado. With Bush, they have seen that, after a certain age, you get the face you deserve.

So Bush goes not with a bang, but a whimper. That’s not just about him. Europe and America need each other less in a changed world. Europeans have less need to bow and scrape when a U.S. leader arrives. Their continent is whole and free.

For the United States, fast-developing relationships — with China, India, Brazil — and the challenges of the Middle East loom larger than puzzling out what clout some treaty might one day give an E.U. president.

Still, a lesson of the Bush presidency has been that trans-Atlantic cooperation matters. Its absence in Iraq has been disastrous. Its unevenness in Afghanistan has been costly. Its wooliness over Iran has been unproductive.

Bush, in Kranj, Slovenia, said at the start of his European tour that Iran “can either face isolation, or they can have better relations with all of us if they verifiably suspend their enrichment program.” That’s a tired theme. The joint statement with European leaders on Iran could have been issued any time in the last several years.

Let’s face it, now that the curtain’s almost down, nobody’s been itching to present Bush with a diplomatic triumph, whether in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel-Palestine. An ungenerous temperament does not inspire generosity. It’s time for some fresh thinking, but above all a fresh spirit, a fresh temperament.

Just before Bush showed up in Europe, I was on a panel with Robert Boorstin, a senior Google executive. He didn’t talk about Iran. He talked about the world’s 1.4 billion Internet users and the way that number’s growing by 250 million a year.

He talked about the 10 hours of video being uploaded on YouTube every minute of every day. He talked about the world’s 3 billion mobile devices, with another billion coming in the next three years. He described the “largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”

Connectivity: pass it on. We need an American president who embodies it, in Berlin and, eventually, in downtown Tehran.

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming Foreign Editor in 2001. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of three books: Soldiers and Slaves, published by Alfred A. Knopf; Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, published by Random House; and (with Claudio Gatti) In the Eye of the Storm, publised by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.]


Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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