Tripwires and Obama's Night-Vision Goggles

A recent article in The New Yorker has it that Barack Obama's administration betokens "The New Liberalism" that is abroad in the land. George Packer writes that Obama's presidency could be as momentous for today's liberals as that of FDR, first elected in 1932, was for progressives of an earlier era.

After a good start, however, the article bogs down in a morass of concern over whether Obama is more of a "post-partisan" than he is a progressive. For example, as Packer points out, even as, in one of the televised debates with his rival John McCain, Obama spoke positively about a woman's right to choose an abortion, he quickly modulated his strong rhetoric into a stated desire to seek "common ground" and to further abortion alternatives where possible. Pro-choice liberals, as a result, aren't quite sure of the extent to which President Obama will stand with them when the chips are down. They question, say, whether he will be too post-partisan to sign the pending “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA), which if passed would (according to this Web page)

prevent all governmental bodies at all levels from being able to “deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose” or “discriminate” against the exercise of this right “in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services or information.”

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, can't answer the Obama-on-FOCA question. But I do take the point of the liberal Mr. Packer when he says that, in contradistinction to hot-button issues like abortion, where Obama has sometimes waffled,

On questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy—which don’t immediately provoke a battle over irreconcilable values, [Obama] has given every indication of favoring activist government.

I don't think the post-partisan Obama is really in any way different from the progressive Obama, as in the question on everyone's lips, "Which Obama will show up on Inauguration Day, the progressive or the post-partisan?" Rather, the post-partisan/new-liberal Obama is the progressive/old-style-liberal Obama.

It all has to do with tripwires. The conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote in this piece for The Washington Post that there are three issue areas where Obama needs to tread carefully in order to avoid triggering a showdown with conservatives. Gerson's three tripwire issues concern the broad field of abortion and bioethics; the Fairness Doctrine (which, if re-imposed, would force radio stations to balance Rush Limbaugh with equal time for liberal talk-shows); and "card check" union elections (which if permitted by federal law would mean workers voting on union representation might no longer cast secret ballots).

I don't know how apt or complete Mr. Gerson's tripwire list is for Obama, but his basic concept is key. Obama impresses me as a man who has a unique set of night-vision goggles that let him see where the tripwires are in the political minefield. It is for this reason that he is able to be "post-partisan": he carefully avoids the deadly tripwires even as he discerns real opportunities to move the progressive football forward toward the end zone.


Today, these opportunities cluster around, per Mr. Packer, "questions of social welfare—jobs, income, health care, energy" — to which I would add, crucially, the "green revolution" that I think will be the ultimate centerpiece of Obama's presidential legacy.

Post columnist E. J. Dionne wrote recently in "Bold Is Good" that "you don't have to be 'far left' to be bold." Obama, says the liberal Mr. Dionne, should take a page from the Ronald Reagan post-1980 playbook and be unafraid to call for meaningful progressive steps (Reagan's were, of course, conservative) early in his tenure. Per Dionne, "health care, energy, tax reform and education ... are issues on which Obama should not be afraid to be audacious."

They are so, I would say, to the extent that, though they will provoke pro-forma dissent from the GOP side of the Capitol aisle, they do not have outright tripwires associated with them that would surely launch us backward into a "pre-post-partisan" shouting match, à la the mid-1990s.

Obama, says the Packer article in The New Yorker, wants very much to avoid that sort of thing as being the opposite of pragmatic. No one ever wins an argument that is based on differences in core principles and values, Obama seemingly realizes.

A case in point: Those who say abortion is tantamount to murder have a different set of core assumptions about what is true and what is false about fetal life than I and other pro-choice thinkers uphold. Pro-choice people such as I think fetal life is not yet fully-formed human life ... and so women should have the right to choose. We think it is more important to ensure that a baby, if born, is wanted and loved than that all fetuses are carried to term. Pro-life folks, obviously, disagree ... and Barack Obama would surely like to avoid all aspects of the dispute that are sterile and unproductive and cannot underpin some kind of pragmatic change for the better!

It is by virtue of his unique night-vision goggles that he can be expected avoid a sterile and unproductive blundering into such a tripwire of the old-style culture war. I do not look for Mr. Obama to make a Clintonesque gays-in-the-military mistake in his first days in office.

Red Counties, Blue Counties

Today's Washington Post has a pair of maps breaking down the Obama-vs.-McCain voting for president on a county-by-county basis across the nation. The counties that gave a majority of their votes to now-president-elect Barack Obama are shown in blue on one map of the pair, while those that favored Senator John McCain in this week's presidential election are in red on the other.

Here is a snapshot of a similar map online. Click on it to see the full-sized interactive map, from which you then can bring up other versions of the winners-by-county map as well:


In the maps, counties that went overwhelmingly for one candidate or the other are shown with a three-dimensional elevation the height of which is proportional to the candidate's margin of victory, in number of votes, in that county.

In addition, on both maps in the print edition the counties that switched their favored party in 2008 compared with 2004 are shown in gold. (In the online map, the flipped counties are not identified as such.) Surprisingly few counties switched: McCain flipped just 50 counties that had supported Kerry in '04, largely in a loose chain extending from Appalachia across the Upper Southland into Texas; Obama flipped some 286 counties that had gone for Bush in '04, mostly in the Upper Midwest, in African American-rich parts of the South, and here and there in the vast American West.

The huge majority of America's counties voted for McCain in '08, just as they had voted for Bush in '04, and the McCain 2008 map is about as close to being solid red as was the Bush map in '04.

Only a minority of the nation's counties voted majority-Obama in '08. His blue counties (the ones which Kerry also won in 2004) are heavily clustered in New England and the Northeast; in the upper Midwest, in economically distressed states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa; across the old Confederacy in areas in which I assume African-American voters predominate; in the heavily black Mississippi Delta in particular; in the Southwest, where many Hispanic and Native American voters cluster; and along the Pacific Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington State, where ethnically diverse populations include many Asians, Latinos, and blacks.

On the blue-county Obama map, however, there are several prepossessingly tall, or at least medium-sized, voter-margin spikes in large urban areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta, and the major cities of Florida and along the East Coast. By contrast, the "tallest" jurisdictions McCain could claim victory this year in are relatively puny in elevation, reflecting smaller numerical margins of victory: Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and several other mid-size cities cast more votes for McCain than Obama.

My interpretation: where the bulk of the populace is white, without a college education, not rich but typically not poor, and largely middle-aged or older, McCain won. That demographic is a shrinking one today, though, and where it is not predominant, Obama won.


How solid the red is on the McCain map is worrisome to yours truly, oldstyleliberal, an ardent Obama supporter. Ditto, how sparse and discontiguous the blue of the Obama map is. We heard a lot of talk during the campaign about healing the political divide that has beset us since the 1960s. The two maps seem to show that that did not happen. The country segments just as sharply into blue and red swatches today as it did four years ago.

True, the fact that most of McCain's red counties are represented at "base elevation" on the map, not raised to show large voter margins, is encouraging; there may well have been sizable minorities of Obama voters in the red jurisdictions. Still, many of the McCain counties are probably so low in population that if McCain got every vote in them, they'd still look flat on the map. Small-town/rural America is by definition sparsely inhabited. (I'd like to see the same maps with elevations indicating percentage-of-vote margins rather than number-of-vote margins.)

Yet I'd have to say that, historically, small-town/rural America accounts for an outsized share of our uniquely American cultural experience — a share whose importance the vast, nearly solid red of McCain's America depicts quite accurately. Clearly, the folks that define a huge proportion of our land's cultural "footprint," once in the majority but a shrinking portion of our total population today, looked at Obama and found him wanting.

Obama's mixed-race background and African-American looks clearly didn't help him in the American Heartland, which is what I'll call the vast composite of red counties on the McCain map — even when they are far from the geographic middle of the U.S.A. Ditto, the president-elect's odd name for an American, and his seemingly rootless/possibly elitist cultural identity. (It boggled my mind how many people refused to believe that Obama wasn't a Christian/was secretly a Muslim, and that he was hiding a pro-terrorist agenda.)

The pundits are saying Obama's election augurs a "post-racial" America. I'd like to believe they're right, but the sheer geographic hugeness of McCain's red Heartland says they're being premature.


The aging, white, non-college-educated population was the one McCain picked running mate Sarah Palin to garner votes from. Palin's candidacy was also aimed at women who had supported Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primaries, and at the Republican "base" of confirmed conservatives, cultural and otherwise. (These three groups, of course, overlapped.) One reason the Palin strategy didn't work is that the Alaska governor turned out to carry a lot of baggage: her record in Alaska, her unguarded, untutored statements to the press, and so on. Obama supporters dug up a lot of ammunition and they didn't hesitate to fire it at her — endlessly, it seemed to oldstyleliberal — and many of the bullets struck home.

Still and all, I imagine that Palin firmed up a large number of votes for McCain in his red-county Heartland. They just weren't enough to propel him to electoral-college victory, for sheerly numerical, demographic reasons. With the possible exception of some Clinton supporters who may have peeled away from Palin when they twigged to her political feet of clay, I believe Palin's candidacy did its intended job very nicely.


But McCain's candidacy was cursed by the onset of the financial crisis. Had he somehow been able to sidestep that particular negative, I think he might have managed to keep Obama from flipping fully nine states (including North Carolina, if it remains in the Obama column) that went for Bush in '04. Yet I believe Obama would have eked out his victory anyway in the electoral college — though not necessarily in the popular vote.

A big part of the reason is demographics. Where there are lots of non-whites, where the white majority is highly educated, where voters skew young — in parts of the country outside the red-county McCain Heartland, that is — there were oodles of voters that didn't reliably vote old-style "values." For the highly "pragmatic" voters of these blue counties, the Washington Post points out, today's "family values" center around mainly education and health care, not abortion and gay rights.

Given the opportunity to single out conservative cultural issues one by one, though, a 2008 blue state such as California will (as we just saw) narrowly support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Because any presidential candidate's bag of promises is by definition a mixed, highly complex bag, a Barack Obama will win handily in California, even when some of his positions in and of themselves seem way too liberal to gain majority support in the state.


At a point in the not-too-distant future — or so we must all hope — "pragmatic" issues such as fears about the economy will evaporate as the economy gets more robust again. What then? Will Obama be able to cruise to victory in 2012, even if he does a fine job in his first term, or will too many of the 286 counties he flipped this year desert him as former Bush voters revert to their old-style cultural/values concerns?

I'm hoping, naturally, for a liberal efflorescence to take hold between now and 2012. If that happens, enough now-skeptical Americans would be swept up in an affirmative, unabashedly liberal, pro-big government mood to offset any deserters and return Obama to the Oval Office for a second term. But how can that happen?


Obama needs to change America's basic mindset in much the same way as JFK began to do in the early 1960s, before he was assassinated in '63. The best way for Obama to "do a JFK" is to do pretty much what JFK did, starting in his 1960 campaign: convince Americans that an agenda of progressive change is our best bulwark against future adversity.

Obama has indicated he'll call for an "Apollo program" to switch us to alternative, renewable forms of energy over a ten-year period ... exactly as Kennedy called for putting an American on the moon by the end of his own presidential decade.

We had to beat the Soviets into space, Kennedy said, to show the world we were still a great country. Meanwhile, we had to back the symbolism of his space initiative by solving our very real problems at home: poverty, educational shortfalls, medical care that "the aged" couldn't afford, racial inequality. Those were issues of grit and substance. But Kennedy's space program was more than just symbolic; it jumpstarted a high-tech economy we have all benefited from ever since.

Obama understands that an "Apollo program" for energy will likewise have all sorts of benefits. Admittedly, it will take a huge monetary investment to go green. That money will have to come first from Uncle Sam, just as the costs of the space program were borne by taxpayers. But exactly as the space program did, America's "green revolution," once it gets under way, will pay large dividends. It will stimulate economic growth and foster job creation. It will break our dependence on foreign oil, and it will combat global warming. Overall, it will create a new sense of pride in our country ... and that can translate into affirmative support for a 21st-century liberal agenda, à la Barack Obama.

Obama vs. McCain on Economics

Here's an impartial rundown on the differences on economic policy between Barack Obama and John McCain: Obama and McCain have big economic differences. (The article was written before Congress passed a bill to bail out struggling financial firms, the ones holding "toxic" mortgage-backed securities, to the tune of up to $700 billion.)

A summary:

• Income tax rates on wealthier Americans (individuals making over $200,000 and families with incomes over $250,000): McCain will keep them low, and even reduce them for the very wealthy; Obama will increase them by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for people in those brackets and even imposing higher rates.
  
• Income tax rates for everyone else: McCain would cut them some; Obama would cut them even more.
• Income tax rates for corporations: McCain would slash them; Obama would not.
• Biggest tax goal: McCain's is to use tax relief to jump-start the economy and "give the country a boost"; Obama's is to "target his help to the squeezed middle class" and to narrow income inequality.
• Extending the Bush tax cuts after 2010, when they are expected to expire: "McCain would extend all of them except the total elimination of the estate tax, while Obama would extend only the cuts for individual taxpayers making less than $200,000 annually or couples making less than $250,000."
• Keeping the Alternative Minimum Tax on the wealthy from hitting millions of middle-income taxpayers in future years: both McCain and Obama would patch the AMT year-by-year to do that.
• Eliminating the current tax on estates: McCain would; Obama wouldn't.
• Overall effect on tax revenues: "McCain's plan would cut taxes by $596 billion over the next decade; Obama's would increase taxes by $627 billion during the same period [mostly by] raising tax rates on the wealthy and boosting the taxes they pay on dividends and capital-gains earnings."
• Spending cuts: "While both campaigns argue they are not getting enough credit for their plans to cut spending, history shows that campaigns always pledge to pay for their tax cuts but seldom achieve that goal because spending cuts prove much more difficult to get through Congress."
• Overall effect on the federal debt (assuming the proposed spending cuts take place): "The government's debt would go up sharply — by $3.5 trillion under the Obama plan and by $5 trillion over the next decade under McCain's plan."
• Fixing Social Security: No plans by McCain are cited; "Obama has proposed levying a 2 percent to 4 percent tax on payroll earnings above $250,000 a decade from now to deal with Social Security."
• Fixing Medicare: "Neither campaign has put forward any proposals that experts say would make a meaningful dent in fixing Medicare, the far bigger entitlement problem because of soaring health care costs."

Main concerns of independent experts:

• "Higher deficits that are expected because of [McCain's] tax cuts [especially on the wealthy] could drive up interest rates, raising the cost of money for businesses and result in less investment, not more."
• "[Obama's] new and expanded tax credits ... will further complicate an already complex tax system and won't make a very big dent in the problems of income inequality."
• "Experts say that [Obama's future increase in payroll taxes on earnings above $250,000] would fix only a small part of the problem with the pension program."
• "Some experts see tax increases, not cuts, in the country's future regardless of who wins the presidency."

If Roe Goes ...

In If Roe Goes, Our State Will Be Worse Than You Think, in the Sunday Washington Post for Sept. 28, 2008, Linda Hirshman writes of a possible dystopia that may eventuate if John McCain is elected president. She points out, first of all, something we all know already: that any McCain appointee to the Supreme Court will surely tip the scale against the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the U.S.

Some pundits who are not particularly anti-abortion have written that overturning Roe won't be all that bad. They say it may even be a good thing for each state to go through the political process and figure out what it wants to do about abortion. Potentially, many states will leave abortion legal, though perhaps with some restrictions.

But, says Hirshman, that state of affairs would mean that women in banning states who seek abortions would have to cross state lines to get them. This is a far bigger deal than just worrying about how these women could manage abortion travel. For it isn't at all out of the question that abortion-banning states could enforce their laws upon residents who obtain legal abortions out-of-state.

It would start very simply, with the state passing a law forbidding pregnant women to leave the state to seek an abortion that is illegal in the home state. But, once that is done, asks Hirshman,

How would state laws forbidding pregnant women to leave be enforced? The Hope Clinic in Granite City, Ill., is just 10 minutes from the Missouri border. Police from the prohibiting state can just take the license plates of local vehicles at the abortion clinics across the state lines and arrest the women when they re-enter the state. Or a traffic stop can produce a search. Tips from pharmacy workers, disapproving parents or disappointed boyfriends can alert the police to arrest the pregnant woman for intent to seek an abortion out of state. The state law may allow interested parties to seek injunctions to stop her from leaving.

Isn't there some legal or constitutional rule, though, that would keep states from such draconian law enforcement? Maybe, maybe not. There are Supreme Court decisions and other pronouncements on the books, writes Hirshman, that allow states to prosecute their own citizens for involvement in state-restricted activities that are perfectly legal elsewhere:

In some indirect — but ominous — cases, the Supreme Court has shown itself to be open to the idea that a state has an interest in its citizens' behavior wherever it occurs. ... In 1993, the court recognized the interest of a state that forbids gambling in upholding a federal law prohibiting broadcasters from tempting its citizens with advertisements for out-of-state lotteries.

The Supreme Court, if McCain wins, could go 5-4 in favor of (a) overturning Roe and then (b) upholding abortion-banning states' prosecutions of legal-elsewhere abortions.


Conceptually, however, a Democratic Senate could block any and all McCain nominees that might become complicit in Roe's demise. If, say, the aging liberal John Paul Stevens were to retire or die, and the Senate refused to confirm a McCain-nominated replacement, the court could operate indefinitely with only eight justices. Minus Stevens, the current lineup would be expected to split 4-4 on most abortion cases.

Not a problem? Think again:

Even if the Senate, uncharacteristically, refused to confirm a McCain nominee — or nominees, if he kept sending up names — leaving the court at eight justices, women's options would probably erode rapidly. It's easy to imagine the anti-abortion states pushing the envelope with once improbably restrictive laws, such as one requiring clinics to be licensed by the state and prohibiting women from getting abortions in unlicensed clinics, either in- or out-of-state.

If a clinic went to federal court to enjoin such a law, the case would eventually reach one of the 13 federal Courts of Appeal, 11 of which are firmly dominated by Republican appointees and would probably produce a decision either refusing to follow Roe or, more likely, making some transparent distinction between Roe and the new case. In a divided Supreme Court, four justices would probably vote to affirm the lower court, and four to reverse, leaving the appeals court's decision standing. This means that the states that fell within the Circuit in question would come under an anti-abortion umbrella allowing anything up to explicit reversal of Roe.

Get it? If a liberal justice departs the court during a McCain administration — even if the Senate majority remains staunchly pro-choice — Roe could stay on the books and yet abortions could go back to being legally unavailable, just be virtue of overly restrictive state licensing practices that the federal courts would decline to interfere with. oldstyleliberal thinks that is truly scary; he hopes Justice Stevens lives to be 110.

Redrawing the Electoral Map in 2008

In order for Democrat Barack Obama to defeat Republican John McCain for president on Nov. 4, 2008, Obama will have to redraw the electoral map from 2004. When John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in that year, the map looked like this:



Says Wikipedia, "President George W. Bush won the popular vote in 31 states (denoted in red) with 286 electoral votes. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the popular vote in 19 states and the District of Columbia (denoted in blue) and 251 electoral votes." One maverick elector in Minnesota voted for John Edwards. Bush won by just 35 electoral votes; if Ohio had gone the other way with its 20 votes, Kerry would be president today.

Obama needs to (a) hold on to virtually all of Kerry's blue states, including Michigan (17 electoral votes), which looks dicey for him; and (b) pick up some of the Bush red states. If he picks up Florida (27 electoral votes) he could even lose, say, New Hampshire (4 votes) and wind up with 274 votes, enough to win.

Florida could thus be crucial to Obama, says Dan Balz's article Obama Hopes to Reverse Party Fortunes in Vote-Rich Fla. in today's Washington Post. Right now, most experts are giving the state to McCain by a hair. But, says Balz, Obama workers in Florida are "targeting 600,000 African Americans who are registered to vote but who do not regularly turn out on Election Day."

It will be a shock to oldstyleliberal if Obama's people can't flip Florida, with that many potential supporters to be brought off the sidelines!


At any rate, you can keep up to date on how the potential electoral vote stacks up in 2008 by visiting Electoral-vote.com. As of today, Sept. 27, the electoral map, based on independent polling results, shows Obama losing no Kerry 2004 states and looking to pick up Iowa (7 votes) and New Mexico (5 votes), which Bush won last time. Plus, Obama has razor-thin leads in former Bush states Virginia (13 votes) and Colorado (9 votes). If Obama flips all four of those states, he'll wind up winning 286 electoral votes, where 270 are needed to win.

That puts Obama currently at +16. If he can't flip Florida, and this map right now shows him not doing so, then he needs at least one of the two razor-thin, potentially "new blue" states, Virginia or Colorado. He also needs to hold onto "old blue" Kerry states like Minnesota (10 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) where his lead is currently tiny.

The Archetypal Sarah Palin

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, has been impressed with Sarah Palin.

So have millions of other voters, one way or another, since John McCain announced the Alaska governor as his running mate just before Labor Day. Some love her and some love to hate her, but no other vice presidential candidate has ever, in my recollection, stirred so much passion and controversy.

When we react with our emotions and our gut feelings, then try to get our intellect on the same page, we are projecting. Specifically, we are casting the recipient of the projection in the role of an archetype.

An archetype is a potent figure in our unconscious mind, said the psychologist Carl Jung. Such an archetypal figure, common to all human beings, is the (imaginary) perfect mother. We are all born with the mother archetype, which in childhood we project onto our actual mom. That's how we "just know" our mom will nurture and protect us, in advance of any actual experience of having a mother.

Another potent figure in the unconscious mind of every human male, Jung said, is the anima, the archetype which gives us men our image of the (again, imaginary) ideal woman.

Neither of these two archetypes, nor any other archetypal ideal hidden in the deep, unconscious psyche, bears any necessary relation to those whom we project the archetypes out upon. Mom may be cruel, and the woman that a man marries because his anima was projected out upon her may turn out to be entirely wrong for him.

But never mind. We project our archetypes out onto people all the same, and we react to people based on these projections. That's part of what's going on with Sarah Palin. It's why oldstyleliberal is so impressed.


But archetypal projections are more complicated than that. Archetypes serve as points around which our life experiences and memories cluster — again, in ways that we are scarcely conscious of. These clusters Jung called complexes. We not only have a mother archetype that we all hold in common, we each as individuals have a mother complex. The mother complex can modify the archetype in strange ways. If our mother was neglectful and cruel, the mother complex that we harbor can take the ideal represented by the mother archetype and append the qualifier "... not!"

We also have, each of us in our conscious mind, structures that can pull against the dictates of the unconscious archetypes. In this day of rampant feminism, we have all learned to expect different things of women and mothers than our archetypes might otherwise have us do.

What we project is accordingly inflected according to our culture and personal history. Today, our culture is in flux regarding women, wives, and mothers. Our personal histories are widely varied as a result. Whether we are male or female, young or old, we all have complicated histories with respect to how we image women.

Some of us see Sarah Palin as an "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "Right on! Such a person is just what the country needs right now."

Others of us see Palin as representing that same "ideal" woman-wife-mother and say, "No way! She'd set the clock back a hundred years on feminism, women's rights, and a lot of other things."

All the lionizing of Palin from the right, and all the disparagement from the left, are tinged with whether we like or dislike the woman we see in the light of our projections. If Sarah Palin were Abraham Palin, with the same (thin) résumé, McCain's pick for vice president would still draw criticism, à la Dan Quayle. But not nearly as stridently.


P.S. For another take on the archetypal Sarah Palin, see The Projection of Sarah Palin at the Symbol Watcher website. This one casts Palin in the role of the Great Mother archetype: "at once container, cherisher and guardian of life, as well as ruler, possessive controller/destroyer and seductress." Interesting reading!

Let's Focus on What's Important

Yours truly, oldstyleliberal, thinks we all need to stop, take a deep breath, and retract our claws. This year's election campaign is setting all-time records for nastiness and ugliness, just when we need to keep our focus on important issues.

There is big trouble on the fiscal horizon. In his most recent Sunday op-ed piece, "The Next President's Due Bill," Washington Post columnist David Broder notes that according to the Congressional Budget Office, "the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance — a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign."

According to this report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center:

Although both candidates have at times stressed fiscal responsibility, their specific non-health tax proposals would reduce tax revenues by an estimated $4.2 trillion (McCain) and $2.9 trillion (Obama) over the next 10 years. Both candidates argue that their proposals should be scored against a "current policy" baseline instead of current law. Such a baseline assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended and the AMT patch made permanent. Against current policy, Senator Obama's proposals would raise $600 billion and Senator McCain's proposals lose a similar amount.

And Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby summarized that in this recent piece:

According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan.

We talk about the national debt in terms of changes and increments — plus or minus $1.2 trillion or so — because it's too huge to imagine in absolute terms. (To see how huge, click here.) The national debt — the nation's outstanding public debt — is the federal government's "accumulated deficits plus accumulated off-budget surpluses" (see this web page). When U.S. budget deficits grow, as they have done precipitously this year due to rising expenditures and falling tax revenues in an economic downturn, the national debt grows. And 22.7% of this debt is now owed outside the U.S. to foreign governments and international organizations (see here).

According to this article by Jeremy J. Siegel at Kiplinger.com, the ceiling on the national debt is about to be increased by Congress to $10.6 trillion dollars. This is not in itself bad, even if a lot of the money is owed to China and others: "Although our national debt is large, the annual output of the U.S. economy -- our gross domestic product -- now exceeds $14 trillion. With a national debt now totaling $9 trillion, the ratio of debt to GDP is only 63%."

So we can afford to carry a national debt this high, but even so, Siegel says, "The nation's debt will grow rapidly over the next two decades as entitlement spending surges to meet the demands of more than 80 million retiring baby-boomers." That's the "real debt crisis" we are going to be facing soon.

That's why "Defending the Insiders: Change in Washington? Not Without Them," Norman J. Ornstein's column in today's Post is must reading. Ornstein, one of those much-reviled "Washington insiders" for many, many years, says the key initiatives undertaken by the next president and Congress

... have to come in reforming our large entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — to cope with explosive growth in the number of older people. Change to these programs would mean pain for large numbers of voters. As that late, great Washington insider Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago, serious reform of entitlements, absent an immediate meltdown, can only occur if there is broad, bipartisan cover from leaders on the left, center and right, from Democrats and Republicans, from inside Congress and key interest groups such as AARP and the business community.

That kind of consensus is forged through the political process. It's done by finding allies and building coalitions via intense bargaining and politicking. The skills needed are far more likely to be possessed by Washington insiders than iconoclastic outside reformers.

In other words, we can't really afford the kind of "change" both candidates are now offering the country, if "change" means a radical shift toward either the left or the right. The kind of "change" we actually need is one that greases the wheels for broad consensus — for meeting in the middle. Washington insiders can be our most precious facilitators in this, but only if the political hatreds this election seems to be breeding can be set aside.

So, as I say, can we all just retract our claws?

My (Nonexistent) Redneck Bar Mitzvah

James Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America has captured the fancy of your intrepid blogger, oldstyleliberal. I mentioned it in my last post, Long Live the Scots-Irish!, and I hailed its author as a good vice presidential choice for Barack Obama in Jim Webb for Veep!.

Now I want to get personal. Something Webb talks about toward the end of his book hits me where I live.

That something is what he refers jocularly to as the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It has long been the custom among America's Scots-Irish for the boys to undergo an initiation. Jewish boys get bar mitzvah'd at age 13. Scots-Irish boys get their first rifle somewhat earlier, get taught to hunt and survive in the wilderness, master some form of physical or athletic challenge, even if it's mechanical like drag racing or virtual like video gaming, then go into the military. It's a process much longer than a formal initiation in a temple would take, but it is what allows a Scots-Irish boy to take his rightful place as a man within the group Webb calls the "Celtic kinship."

I missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah. As a result, I turned out to be way too "sissified."

Though I am of (mostly) Scots-Irish background, my window of opportunity — from ages 11 to 13, roughly — opened and shut without my father doing what was necessary to take me across the crucial threshold to manhood.

I started out as something of a boy's boy, wanting to go into the military, wanting to go to the Naval Academy. Dad was a chief of police and wore a uniform (occasionally) and carried a gun (also occasionally). He had come up through the ranks, taking time out during WWII to serve as an officer in the Coast Guard, a part of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater during wartime. He was an expert marksman and liked to go on hunting trips with his buddies. I idolized the man my father was.

But I was also an incipient sissy. I sucked my thumb until I was 12, wet the bed until I was 16. When I got my first BB gun, my mother laid down the law that I couldn't actually shoot it unless Dad was present to supervise.

And that was exactly the problem: Dad wasn't present all that much.

I don't remember exactly what year the trouble started; it may have been in 1956 or '57, when I (an only child) was 9 or 10. My father had been promoted from captain to chief of the then-tiny United States Park Police in Washington, D.C., in 1954, when I was 7. He had beaten out two lieutenants, former buddies of his, who as the years went by became increasingly convinced he had gotten the promotion because he was Protestant and they were Catholic.

The Catholics on the force turned against him. One of them had a brother, not on the force, that began a harassment campaign that centered on dialing our home phone at 3 A.M. in the morning and letting it ring until Mom or Dad picked up ... by which time sleep was ruined.

So there developed an ongoing civil war on the U.S.P.P., and my father's head was being called for on a platter in some quarters of the Department of the Interior' National Park Service, which had authority over the force. My father was innocent of having obtained his promotion through prejudice, or treating Catholics on the force unfairly. But that didn't matter. He was pilloried repeatedly in the Washington papers for years on end. When John F. Kennedy became our first Catholic president in 1961, the handwriting was on the wall for his career.

(By the way, I write this as one who has converted as an adult to the Roman Catholic faith. Obviously, I bear no ill will toward Catholics, either today or "back in the day" when I was growing up — and, I can say with certainty, neither did my father, who was nominally Protestant but never much of a churchgoer.)

Between, say, 1957 and 1960, I went through my "years of trouble" when I needed but wasn't getting the strong fatherly initiation James Webb calls the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It was during these same years that my father was fighting an internecine civil war while trying to administrate a police force. He was also unfortunately sick during a long stretch of this period with gall bladder problems that required two or three surgeries before he finally got well.

So he didn't have a lot of time for me. Not a lot of father-son bonding went on during these turbulent years.

When I was 11 and in sixth grade, my best friend Jip, a Thai boy, moved away. He had been my prime connection into the group of boys we played with and went to school with. I found it hard to forge my own bonds with the boys after that, and it got worse in seventh and eighth grades, by now in junior high school, when a couple of the boys began to bully me. I didn't know how to fight back. My father spoke of getting me some martial arts training, but it never happened.

As a result, I found out that I could by sheer will power make myself sick every school-day morning, so I wouldn't have to go to school. That went on for several months, until my parents consulted a pediatrician/child psychologist named Dr. Knop.

I don't know whether Dr. Knop believed in the Redneck Bar Mitzvah, but she had something like it in mind when she told my father he had to start being more of a father to me.

Pursuant to that advice, he decided to teach me to shoot a gun. But instead of doing it himself — he just didn't have the time — he had one of the cops on the force, Cpl. Papuga, a great guy and a super marksman, give me lessons every Saturday at the U.S.P.P. pistol range. I learned to shoot, but I developed no emotional attachment to it, as I would have if Dad were doing the teaching.

Later, there were horseback riding lessons. This time I was farmed out to the owner of a stable where the U.S.P.P. boarded some of its horses. Again, it wasn't the same as if Dad were doing the honors.

One day Dad and Cpl. Papuga took me groundhog hunting. For whatever reason, I was not eligible to do any shooting. Between the two of them, only Dad had a single shot at a groundhog ... and he missed. Then I got carsick on the way home. That day was not exactly my Redneck Bar Mitzvah, I can tell you.

I could go on, but you get the point. There are junctures in the life of every boy, of every person, where certain seemingly atavistic things have to happen. If they don't, it's as if life has pushed his head far down into deep water, and he has to kick one's way back up slowly, desperately, belatedly to the surface of normality. He eventually does surface, but meanwhile he is irretrievably behind in his developmental curve.

That's what happened to me, oldstyleliberal. As a result, my inclinations toward masculine stuff like going into the military simply evaporated. When I later entered as a freshman at Georgetown University in 1965, I was soon alerted to the fact that there was a war heating up in Vietnam, and I might one day have to fight in it. Little wonder that that war didn't appeal to "sissified" me. I was against it on moral grounds, but deep down I think I opposed it mainly because I knew that either (a) I wouldn't be able to hack it as a soldier, or (b) I would, but only by virtue of the belated initiation into manhood the military experience would represent.

People tend to resist belated initiations they have already compensated for having missed out on.

I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here and now, but I can now see that my having missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah and become "sissified" has shaped my life ever since, both the good and the bad aspects of it. I am undoubtedly more prone to go along with, say, the feminist movement because of this omission in my developmental process ... and that I count as a blessing. On the other hand, I realize I simply do not have the ability to distinguish between a necessary war and an unnecessary one. It's one thing to be a "normal" man and yet decide one is against all war. That's an honorable choice. It's another thing entirely to be against all wars out of a reflexive "sissified" outlook that came about because one's father was too busy fighting alligators in his career path to see to one's Redneck Bar Mitzvah.


Postscript: My father and I remained close, if at daggers drawn much of the time, after I graduated college and went out on my own. Psychologists would say my attitude toward him was "ambivalent." But we both loved Mom and managed to patch up our differences rather than tear apart our little three-person family. In 1985 Mom died, and I kept on visiting Dad regularly — he was having his daily needs seen to by a wonderful young couple who lived in the living quarters Mom and Dad had built in the basement of their new home, in 1976, just for that purpose.

On the last Christmas visit before he died in mid-1988, he went to bed early one evening, as was his wont, while I usually hitched a La-Z-Boy recliner around to watch some TV before my own bedtime. On this particular evening, he came out of the bedroom and into the living room unexpectedly. He was, I'll never forget, wearing his navy blue bathrobe, the one he got when he was in the Coast Guard in WWII and still wore.

I suspect that his short-term memory loss due to the dementia he suffered from, at age 83, had led to his forgetting that I was in the house, and he came out to the living room to see why the TV was on. This is the moment I'll cherish forever: he saw me, his son, unexpectedly there, and his face lit up.

Wanting to cover up the fact that he had forgotten I was visiting, he said, "Son, I just wanted to tell you how glad I am to have you here with me now." But I realized it was also the truth, and the peculiar situation had simply jolted it out of him.

I said, "Dad, I am very glad to be here with you." I was too surprised to say or do much more than that in response. We Scots-Irish men don't do a lot of hugging. I was too far across the room to go to him without it seeming forced, anyway.

But that was fine with him. He smiled, said "Good night, son," and went back to his bedroom.

After I went home from that visit I never saw Dad alive again. But at the very end of his life we two had managed to reconcile all our silly differences of a lifetime in that perhaps thirty seconds of a brief, unexpected encounter, and we both knew it.

Long Live the Scots-Irish!

In Jim Webb for Veep! I extolled the (hoped-for) sensibility of Barack Obama tapping this man to be his vice-presidential running mate:


The man is James Webb, recently elected senator from Virginia, a Democrat who takes a backseat to no one in his support of our fighting men and women in uniform — which is not the same thing as support for President Bush's ill-conceived war in Iraq, mind you.

Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, at that time a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He has since switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As any reader of Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America will tell you, Webb comes by his love for the military's fighting spirit honestly: it's in his Scots-Irish DNA. In his book, Webb traces the centuries-long journey of his people from the Scotland of William Wallace, proudly remembered as "Braveheart," to the Ulster Plantation of 17th-century Northern Ireland, site of the famed siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, to the backcountry mountains of Appalachia during the formative centuries of American culture.

Scots-Irish Americans were the primary fighters of the Revolutionary War and of the Civil War. These hardscrabble Calvinist Presbyterians from Scotland by way of Ulster — who in America often became Baptists and Methodists — are the unsung backbone of our basic notion of what it means to be an American, as they have spread far and wide from their original Appalachian hill country and taken their instinctive indomitability with them wherever they have roamed.


oldstyleliberal, your intrepid blogger, figures he is anywhere from one-half to three-quarters Scots-Irish. His last name is Stewart, and his lineal Stewart forebear is known to have emigrated from Ulster to the United States at about the time of the War of 1812 ... well after the main tide of Ulstermen arrived here during the fifty years or so prior to the American Revolution. My Stewart progenitor's brother (or was it a cousin?) emigrated with him; he was named Alexander Turney Stewart and founded the first department store, A.T. Stewart's, later to become Wanamaker's.

Other names in my family tree include Berry, Henry, Armstrong, Robinson, and Stephens on my mother's side, and Warnes, Davis, Campbell, and Thompson on my father's side. Of these, the only name I know for sure didn't arrive here on a boat from Northern Ireland is Warnes; the Warneses came to America direct from England. Some of the other names may or may not be Scots-Irish. I have some detailed genealogical information on my line of Berrys, for instance, but it seems to stop at the water's edge and leave in doubt where the original Berrys came from, pre-America.

My people in general seem to have spent a lot of time in Scots-Irish haunts in Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Some of those places are, of course, in the Appalachians, while others are mentioned by Webb as places that received an outpouring of the original Scots-Irish Americans, ever known (even before they were American) to have congenital wanderlust. Way back in the mists of prehistory, the Scots-Irish were descended from the nomadic ancestors of the Scottish people, the Celts.


The Celts pretty much had all of northern Europe to themselves when the Roman Empire conquered them ... anyone remember Caesar's Gallic Wars? The Gauls who held France in the Bronze and Iron Ages were Celts, related to the Celtic tribes whose territory included modern England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Even the Germanic "barbarians" before whose onslaught Rome eventually fell may have been Celts once. The Celts were everywhere, for two reasons. One, they loved to fight and conquer. Two, they hated to stay put in any one place.

Their fierce, uncivilized ways made it too hard for them to organize to fight off the well-disciplined Roman legions on the European continent, but it was a different story when Rome tried to subjugate the Celts in the far-flung extremities of Great Britain, where Roman supply lines couldn't easily reach. There the guerrilla tactics of the locals had a chance to win, and did win.

The Romans built Hadrian's wall and even another wall farther north to try to mark the top edge of their civilization. The Picts, Scots, and other Celts north of the wall weren't having any of it. They wanted their land back: the areas now known as the southwestern lowlands of Scotland and the border regions of England.

It was these areas that produced the heroes William Wallace, called "Braveheart," and Robert the Bruce, immortalized in song as the "Flower of Scotland," when another conquering civilization, that of the cruel Norman King Edward I of England, tried to force Scots to their knees in the late 13th century.


Starting in about 1610, during the period in England when the throne passed back and forth among Catholic and Protestant rulers and claimants, Northern Ireland's Ulster Plantation, controlled by England, was the target of Protestant colonization from Britain, following the mass exodus of the Catholic Gaelic leaders of that area in 1607. Many of those who arrived (were "planted") in Ulster then were lowland Scots or people from the English border areas who had basically the same culture.

Those people became known later as the Scots-Irish. When in the early 18th century the British throne tried to make these hardscrabble Presbyterians truckle to the Anglo-Irish Protestants who upheld the established Anglican faith in not-yet-independent Ireland, the Scots-Irish began decamping in large numbers to America.

Coming in largely through Pennsylvania, where they were quickly despised by the peace-loving Quaker power elite who had invited them there to act as a warlike buffer against the Indians in the western areas of the colony, they continued their trek southward and wound up in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions of Virginia and North Carolina.

Indian fighters and explorers who could not be content until they pushed further westward into the Ohio Valley and what are now the states of Tennessee and Kentucky — Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were of Ulster stock — the Scots-Irish who did not move westward were tolerated (barely) by the Tidewater aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas, who allowed them to worship in their own Calvinist ways even though it was officially illegal so to do.


Those Scots-Irish Americans then proceeded to get ambushed by history. Many of them lived in states that seceded during the Civil War, and though few of them were rich enough to own slaves, their loyalty to the Confederacy was a foregone conclusion. After all, the North was in the political hands of those who reverently looked back, culturally, religiously, and philosophically, not to Celtic Scotland but to Norman England ... which made all the difference in the world to the people who were now America's Scots-Irish.

These people had always had a bottom-up way of organizing their loyalties. It was their local clan chieftain to whom they owed their sense of duty, no some far-off lord who may or not have cared one whit for their welfare. While England under the Romans and later under the Normans was evolving a top-down democracy with many layers of duty owed and duty received, the Celtic residues in the north kept to the old, bottom-up ways of owing personal, not institutional, fealty.

When the Protestant Reformation hit, the Celts were drawn to a Calvinist/Presbyterian version of Protestantism which was maximally suspicious of any sort of church hierarchy.

When their original homeland, Scotland, was becoming a leading light of Enlightenment philosophy in the 18th century, the Scots-Irish over in Ulster were fighting oppression where they now lived and trekking to the uncouth regions of America where the only reading matter — for those who could read — was the Bible.

When the tides of history turned against the African slavery so notable in their adopted new home, the southland of America, they found they were on the wrong side of history yet again. They fought valiantly and died for the Confederacy as the bastion of, again, their God-given right to liberty and self-determination as a free people.

It was the insult of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, during which those unspeakable bullies from the North rubbed the Scots-Irish southerners' noses in their own "backwardness," that the Presbyterian-Baptist-Methodist faith of the Scots-Irish hardened into an anti-Darwinist fundamentalism, as a way of saying no thank you, we aren't having any of your "better-educated" ways of doing business in the world. That was the real reason behind the Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.


By the time yours truly was born in 1947, his father and mother had moved from the Ozarks of Missouri to the citified East, where they were upwardly mobile former Baptists (Mom) and Methodists (Dad), self-educated beyond their schooling and with modern lifestyles that were anathema to the old folks back home. When Mom and Dad took me to Springfield, Missouri, for a visit with Grandpa and Grandma Berry, they had to secrete themselves in their bedroom for a smoke and a drink of ... Scotch.

But they still delighted in watching southwestern Missouri's own version of Grand Ole Opry, called Ozark Jubilee, on TV. It was televised on a national hookup in Washington. D.C. and around the country. The music it featured was "country" music, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the music of the original Scots-Irish Americans.

Though their respective parents, my grandparents, were teetotalers, they relished a drink of spirits as much as any backwoods moonshiner of Scots-Irish derivation ever did. (Webb mentions over and over how the Scots-Irish were at one and the same time strong for God and religion and yet devoted to liquor, lasciviousness, and a life of the senses. This is something I don't suppose can ever be fully explained ... but I note that it is equally true of the African American descendants of slaves, whose sacred and secular music combined with that of the Scots-Irish to make rock 'n' roll.)

I grew up in a cultural atmosphere that derided everything my Scots-Irish forebears upheld: loyalty to one's local tribe over national aspirations, practicality over intellectuality, peace-loving ways over the love of a good fight, etc. Yet there has always been in me the sort of romantic who weeps at the end of the movie Braveheart and chokes up at a good old country music weeper like Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors."

Perhaps it is the Scots-Irish in me that keeps me a moderate oldstyleliberal and not a partisan of the far left. Perhaps it's why, after reading James Webb's book, I want to shout from the rooftops, "Long live the Scots-Irish!"

"Heed lessons of '72"

Religious studies professor Ira Chernus writes in "Heed lessons of '72," an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun, that the Democratic Party of 2008 must avoid making the same mistake it did in 1972. In that year Democrats nominated the antiwar candidate George McGovern as their presidential standardbearer. Most Americans were by that time against the Vietnam War, but instead of backing McGovern, they reelected Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Republicans tarred McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." LSD, known as "acid," was the drug of choice in the ostentatious counterculture of the day. The political radicals of the era were calling for amnesty for draft resisters. The following year, 1973, would find a liberal Supreme Court upholding a woman's constitutional "right to choose" in Roe v. Wade.

Chernus writes that the main reason McGovern lost was the insistence of insiders in the Democratic Party power structure that the platform McGovern would run on should contain a strong antiwar plank. Meanwhile, Nixon ran on a pledge to wind the war down gradually, while preserving America's "honor" — a code word, Chernus points out, for "keeping the nation's moorings in familiar cultural traditions of the past."

Chernus thinks this year's presidential contest parallels that one. Most voters actually oppose the Iraq War, but there is great danger that the skin color or unusual name and family background of Barack Obama will trigger a victory for war hero John McCain nevertheless, particularly if McCain is handed strong antiwar language in the Democratic platform on which he can embroider code words to draw votes from those who fear too much "change" in America too soon.

This analysis interests your blogger oldstyleliberal greatly, in part because he thinks it's correct, and in part because it reveals something profound about human nature. Most people want peace, preferring it in the abstract to war hands down. What's more, most people think this war is a mistake. Yet such sentiments take a back seat to an inchoate fear that coming out strongly against the war is the sign of a candidate who is more of a "goody goody" than America is ready for.

So people want to keep the "better angels of our nature" on a short leash. The "liberal" politics that promises to fulfill our human longing for peace (or justice, or equality, or unfettered liberty) needs to be restrained, lest America grow flabby and weak. We do not dare be more "goody goody" than our enemies, or they will have us for breakfast.

When push comes to shove, fear trumps our "better angels" every time.

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq is an article that has recently appeared in Yahoo! News. Worth reading, it pretty accurately reflects the crazy, mixed up sentiments of voters this year about the war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal thinks.

Clearly, the fact that sizable voter majorities think the war was a mistake does not help Senator Obama all that much. Senator McCain gets high marks for his seeming to be the better military leader, even though (or perhaps because) he vocally supports the war:

"He's more experienced militarily," said Ann Burkes, a registered Democrat and retired third-grade teacher from Broken Arrow, Okla. "And I don't know if I agree with [his] stay-the-course (policy), but I think the good probably outweighs the bad with him, experience-wise." ...

Leeann Ormsbee, a registered Democrat from Waterford, Pa., believes the United States rushed to war, but now does not believe troops should simply withdraw. The 29-year-old self-employed house cleaner says she has never voted for a Republican. She might this time.

"I do believe that he will do better in Iraq," she said of McCain. "Because he's served in the military and he has said we can't just pull out. ... I think we're just kind of stuck with it now and we have to finish."

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse calls these voters "nose-holders."

"They don't like the fact that we're over there, they don't think the decision was the right one, but they understand that if we simply withdraw our troops it would leave things worse off," he said.

The belief of yours truly, oldstyleliberal, is that things will eventually be worse off if we stay. oldstyleliberal believes that sooner or later, war begets war and violence begets vengeance.

Without fail, killing desensitizes the soul — whether one does it or merely witnesses it. And watching your comrades get killed spurs a desire for revenge. Put the two together, and you have a sure recipe for future violence.

The violent future can, however, be delayed. Those Iraqis who would seize power, terrorize their countrymen, and generally exact revenge for the last several years of killing may just be biding their time until a Democratic president enters the White House and cuts U.S. troop strength over there.

Which means that if we cross them up and elect the hawkish McCain instead, there may be a surge of postponed Iraqi atrocities coming to the fore at that time, provoking a President McCain to hit back even harder than ever, thereby stoking the resentment mill even further in Iraq.

War begets war. Violence begets revenge. It is an Iron Law of human behavior.

So Obama is right. We need to withdraw as expeditiously as we can, given the need for preventing the withdrawal itself from provoking additional chaos.

Once we are out of Iraq, we can expect to witness the ghastly sight of innumerable chickens coming home to roost in that country, and being slaughtered ... just as happened in Vietnam after the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Americans such as those mentioned in the article who oppose the war, but also oppose withdrawal, are hoping in vain that something good will happen between now and when we finally do pull the plug ... something that will cancel the balance long overdue for vengeance in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal feels their reluctance to face facts and insist on ending the war will make for a worse outcome, not a better one.

Jim Webb for Veep!

Check out Joe Klein's latest column for TIME, "Getting to Know Jim Webb." Though he won't say so right out loud, Klein thinks Webb, the recently elected senator from Virginia and a Democrat, is the clear top choice as Barack Obama's running mate in the November presidential election.



oldstyleliberal agrees. Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, as a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service." Klein says Webb, in his recent book A Time to Fight, "takes a well-calibrated ... swing at the Bush Administration's naive neoconservative foreign policy — after all, Webb opposed going to war in Iraq in a 2002 Washington Post Op-Ed piece."

I like the fact that Webb could not be more sympathetic to and supportive of those who serve in uniform, those who have so served in the past, their families, and their general culture ... which ties in closely with Scots-Irish working class from which Webb himself proudly hails. My own family's roots are likewise to be found in this slice of the American soil.

I also like something else Klein quotes from Webb's book:

"The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what do you see? Do you see a strong individual who overcame the most difficult challenges most human beings can face ... or do you see a victim?" But if some Democrats tend to pity members of the armed forces, the Republican Party "continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies. And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As some of my recent posts have indicated, on Memorial Day Weekend of 2008 I "saw the light," becoming, in my heart, a pacifist. I now oppose the Iraq War, and all wars from this point forward, as being insane. This does not mean, however, that I despise — or pity — the military. Jim Webb may or may not agree with me that we should never fight another war unless we're attacked. But I agree with him that the values of duty, honor, and personal sacrifice which the military stands for are the best things about America and should be revered by its political class, not exploited for the civilian leaders' own twisted ideological purposes.

So I think Barack Obama will have to look long and hard before he'll be able to find a better running mate than Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia.

Polls and the Iraq War

This web page provides a handy-dandy list of a whole slew of polls concerning the Iraq War. This particular blogger, oldstyleliberal, finds they seem to show a lot of disaffection with the war, yet the disaffection does not translate into a prospective rout of John McCain by Barack Obama in the fall election.

John McCain is well-known to support the war, seeing it as part and parcel of the fight for our country's life in the global war on terrorism. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has opposed the war from day one on grounds that it was "dumb" for the U.S. to start it. Their attitudes could not be further apart and still be considered by any stretch of the imagination reasonable. So one might think Obama's antiwar stance, in that it matches that of the bulk of the electorate, would make him odds-on favorite in November.

But, no. Obama may be very narrowly ahead of McCain right now — see Poll Finds Independent Voters Split Between McCain, Obama, with actual Washington Post-ABC News polling data here — but it is not clear that the war dominates the decision-making process voters are going through in lining up behind one candidate or the other in 2008. This is itself odd, I think, since questions of war and peace have historically played big roles in how we elect presidents. (Or am I wrong about that?)

At any rate, it looks as if roughly two-thirds of us continue to feel that President Bush is not handling the war well, and a clear majority feel it is not still possible to achieve victory in Iraq. A slight majority used to want us to bring the troops home in 2009 without waiting for Iraq to stabilize, but in more recent polling that percentage drops to 49 percent, possibly in response to the lower rate of American deaths of late and the consequent increase in hope that Iraq can be stabilized.

Even so, 61 percent in a May 30-June 3, 2008, CBS News poll say Iraq will probably never have a stable democracy.

Blunting the effect of pro/anti war sentiment on the prospective general election outcome is the fact that the roughly two in three Americans who are disenchanted with the war split down the middle on whether all of the troops, or just some, ought to be withdrawn immediately. Clearly, there must be quite a few of us who cannot imagine that leaving the troops in Iraq will ever bring stability, but do not want all the troops taken out of Iraq now.

That seeming contradiction probably reflects a widespread unwillingness to have us look like failures in the eyes of the world, plus a practical appreciation of the fact that a hasty departure would expose our troops to more risk, not less, during any sped up, hence chaotic withdrawal period.

Meanwhile, Democrats are nearly unanimous in opposing the war, while Republicans and Independents break about 2-to-1 in the war's favor. However, though Republicans and Independents support the war in roughly equal numbers, the former are much less willing to have the next president wind the war down than are the latter.

About a third of Americans say the country is safer from terrorist attack due to the war in Iraq than it otherwise would have been, and the number who think deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on us has only very recently begun to decline from roughly that same level to, presently, something more than a quarter of the populace.

It is clear that continuing support for the war depends greatly on the many among us who in their minds connect the war's onset directly to the terrorist attacks on American soil on 9/11. Given that skeptics spared no effort in debunking the Saddam's-links-to-terrorism myth during the early days of the war, it looks as if over a quarter of Americans have simply made up their minds that such "liberal" carping should not be listened to.

Debating the Iraq War?

Ever since this blogger underwent a Memorial Day 2008 conversion to a sort of pure and simple pacifism — in addition to continuing to oppose President Bush's current war in Iraq — he has noticed a strange dearth of op-ed chatter about the war. Not only is the idea that all war is bad well off today's radar screen — nothing new there! — but the chattering classes have gone eerily silent on questions of supporting or opposing the Iraq conflict as such.

I decided to pay a visit to the Opinions area at WashingtonPost.com to see what gives.

Most of the current verbiage I saw thumbnails of was, as expected, about politics: What we can look forward to with the coming Obama-McCain match-up was second to the rehash (will the instant replays never cease?) of the drawn out, supposedly bitter Obama-Clinton slugfest. Doing a Firefox Find on "Iraq" or "war" on the Post web page linked to above turned up exactly zero hits.

I bethought me to look for mentions of Iraq in the archives of various honorable Post scribes. First up was Anne Applebaum. The most recent Applebaum allusion to Iraq seems to have been in a May 13 '08 column on "the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma," wherein she takes a sideways slap at "the damage done by the Iraq war [that] goes far beyond Iraq's borders." Not really about Iraq at all.

I skipped David Broder, as his beat is domestic politics per se.

Richard Cohen seems to have mentioned Iraq but twice in recent months. McCain in the Mud has it that "McCain supports the Iraq war. But Iraq is still a mess." Ohh - kaaay. That settles that. Clinton in the Wilderness reveals that Clinton "offered a weak and disingenuous defense of her Senate vote in support of going to war in Iraq." Thin gruel, both of these.

Jackson Diehl has two recent pieces mentioning Iraq. The main references therein are to:

• Pundits and bloggers [who] have seized on the proposal as proof that McCain, like George W. Bush before him, is in thrall to the "radical neocons" who allegedly authored the war in Iraq.
• The rockets fired from Gaza and from Sadr City [being] two prongs of an offensive aimed at forcing the United States out of Iraq, putting Israel on the defensive — and leaving Iran as the region's preeminent power.

OK. At that point I got tired of trying to avoid stepping in "all" the incidental references to Iraq, however infrequent even these seem to have been, and went looking for just one column by someone, anyone, that addresses Iraq square on. I found an April 11 piece by E. J. Dionne Jr., Turning No Corners, which is almost on topic. Actually, its topic is not the war per se, pro or con, but rather the way that supporters and opponents of the enterprise talk past each other:

For supporters of the war, the primary issue is Iraq itself and what will happen if we leave. For the war's opponents, the focus is on how the conflict in Iraq is sapping our energies, weakening our military and diverting our attention from our interests elsewhere in the world.

Notice that opposition to the war is, per Dionne, not grounded in the war's merits or lack thereof, but in the supposed sheer impracticality of continuing to inject our ever more thinly stretched military forces into Iraq with no end date in sight.

No one today is coming right out and saying that this war should never have been fought. No one is courageous enough to say we simply ought to wrap it all up and bring the troops home now, because they oughtn't be there in the first place. No one wants to be labeled a peacenik.

Thus there is no real, ongoing debate over the war as such. To which my reaction can only be, "What's wrong with this picture?"

The Solidarity Sentiment

As I have been indicating in recent posts, I have become convinced that "war is not the answer" — not any more, not in today's world. It is accordingly of great concern to me that not many of my fellow Americans seem ready to denounce the war in Iraq in no uncertain terms. The "antiwar" Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive, Senator Barack Obama, has not engaged in ringing rhetoric against the war, by any means. Meanwhile his opponent, Senator John McCain, is at least as much of a hawk as President Bush is.

The dominant sentiment in this country seems to run as follows. The president, as commander-in-chief, made a judgment call in the wake of 9/11 that U.S. troops had to be committed indefinitely in Afghanistan, to harry Al Qaeda, and also in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. The justification for the latter involvement turned out to be ill-founded, perhaps, but at the time almost all of the present opponents of the Iraq War (with the conspicuous exception of Obama, who was not yet in Congress) concurred that Bush ought at least to be given authority to go to war if necessary.

Once he had been so authorized by Congress, he went ahead and invaded Iraq. We can argue about whether he was right or wrong, about what his real intentions were, about whether he was totally honest with the American people, about whether this war can ever be won, etc., etc., etc. What we cannot argue about now is that our troops are there, in Iraq, in harm's way right now. Many of them have sacrificed lives, limbs, physical and mental health, marriages, and other less tangible things. The mission is not yet accomplished, and more valiant sacrifice remains to be made. The last thing we at home ought to do now is pull the rug out from under our troops.

Keeping faith with the troops is job one of the patriot today ... so the story goes.

When a duly authorized commander-in-chief sends troops into danger, even if his judgment is and was flawed, we all henceforth need to suck it up and stay the course, however unlikely the chances of ultimate success may seem. To cut and run now guarantees that all the sacrifices made to date will have been in vain.

Once the bleeding and dying have begun in a war, any war, we at home must have infinite patience. If we back away hastily, we are in effect spitting on the graves of the 4,000+ who have died while carrying the American flag into peril in Iraq.

Solidarity with the troops is thus the gripping hand when it comes to sentiment about the Iraq War, for many Americans today — even those who tell pollsters of their private doubts about the purposes and justifications of that war. On the one hand, spreading democracy around the globe sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, Iraq doesn't seem ready for it. Eliminating Saddam's WMD threat was necessary; yet, was there really any threat? Saddam was, or was not, in collusion with America's mortal enemy, Al Qaeda.

Debate between these two outlooks would ordinarily be understandable, even healthy. But there is that third, gripping hand to take into consideration: the need to support the troops. Undercutting the commander-in-chief by attacking his motives and challenging his reasoning only prolongs and intensifies the danger they face every hour of every day.

That's the dominant motif in how many patriots see the war. This blogger understands it, and even though he doesn't personally subscribe to it, he realizes that it is the prime impediment to any hopes he may have for an effective peace movement to arise that will push this country away from war. Solidarity with those in uniform who bleed on our behalf is always an honorable and noble point of view. To ask people to insist on peace seems accordingly to be asking them to behave dishonorably and ignobly.

I also recognize that today's widespread solidarity sentiment is being advanced as a beautiful way to try to make amends for the shameful lack of solidarity with returning soldiers many citizens exhibited during and after the Vietnam War.

How can one argue with such a sense of duty and obligation and honor and nobility? By its very nature, it transcends pro-and-con argumentation. It repudiates reasoned discourse and silences philosophical debate ... which is a large part of its appeal. It can be a way of coming together behind the Man in the Driver's Seat and putting mere ideological disputes in the back seat or trunk, where they belong in time of war.

How to Work for Peace?

In Let there be peace on earth ..., and then in ... and let it begin with me, I told of my recent peace conversion. A PBS Memorial Day celebration, broadcast from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and intended as a paean to staunch patriotism, included the reading of a series of letters about what the war in Iraq has done to two American military families, taking the life of one husband and nearly that of the other, causing a newborn daughter to never be able to know her father, bringing untold sadness and misery to the wives of the two soldiers ... all this drove home to me that not only this Iraq War but all wars are insane.

But how do I seek peace and pursue it ... meaningfully ... in today's environment?

Is there actually a peace movement today?

According to this section of a Wikipedia article, there is. But reading it and following the links contained therein convinces me that most of its member organizations have main agendas other than peace qua peace, such as libertarianism or the environment or gay rights or radical politics. I resist utopian or ultra-ideological approaches to peacemaking instinctively. It is as if their proponents are saying that we can't have peace until we have a perfect world ... which I think we will never have until we are all perfect people.

Isn't there a more practical way to work for peace?

Besides, I personally feel the basic impetus for peace comes from a gut-level antipathy to war that bypasses all argumentation and nuanced reasoning.

This past weekend I attended a play at a local repertory theater, In The Heart of America, by Naomi Wallace, a searing indictment of war that depicts imaginary (or are they?) atrocities in the Iraq War superimposed with not-so-imaginary ones from Vietnam (think Lt. William Calley and Charlie Company's massacre at My Lai). I was accompanied by a woman friend who was raised in a military family, lost a husband in Vietnam, and would like to be thought of as true to the red, white, and blue ... but who opposes this war and this President.

In our discussion after the play, she told me she'd felt like she was being torn in two. On the one hand, it was hard for her to resonate with the anti-military, antiwar thrust of the play. On the other, she knew that the brutality laid at the feet of the warrior characters was an honest reflection of reality.

I told her about my peacenik conversion on Memorial Day weekend, about how I now see all war — even the so-called "good wars" — as insane.

I went on to present a case for believing that it's an illusion to put different wars in separate cubbyholes, according to how "good" or "bad" they seem to be. I didn't think of alluding to the image at the time, but upon reflection what I should have told her was that every war sows dragon's teeth that grow into new warriors destined to clash in the future.

World War I set the stage for World War II, which set the stage for the Cold War and fears of nuclear Armageddon, which engendered the Vietnam conflict. The "good" (in my estimation) war by which Holocaust-decimated Jews forced their way into their new and rightful home in Palestine, has led to endless bloodshed. Etc., etc., etc.

The "good" wars such as WWII lead people to believe that war can be right and just and honorable.

The "bad" wars such as Vietnam lead patriots to blame a failed war's opponents for "aiding and abetting the enemy" — implying that, next time, job one is to marginalize or silence opposition.

Either way, there will always be a next time. There will never come a time when "war is not the answer."

For war to end, conflict must be resolved peaceably. Diplomacy must be given every chance to work. Aggression must be fended off regretfully, as a last resort. But most of all, people must lose their taste for war.

That happened in Europe following WWII. A continent whose soil has historically been drenched with blood beat its swords into plowshares. Movements of the human spirit away from war are possible.

What would it take to have one here?

... and let it begin with me

Since I posted Let there be peace on earth ... yesterday, I've been asking myself what can make people want peace so badly they'll set aside the ordinary reasons they have for supporting a war such as the war in Iraq.

The answer, I think, is identification.

When I watched the PBS telecast of the Memorial Day celebration on the Mall, I identified with the soldiers and their wives whose letters to one another were reenacted on the stage. One of the men died of combat wounds in an American hospital after having helped evacuate the other man, seriously hurt in a previous battle. They were best war buddies, and their wives were too. When one of the wives finally lost her shot-up husband just days before her first child was born, the other wife was by her side — even though it was touch-and-go for her husband at that point, in a hospital far from home. He had told his wife to go where she was most needed, which meant she couldn't be with him.

When one identifies with one's fellow Americans — an infant who will never know her father and a wife whose husband breathes no more — one is apt to become an instant pacifist.

This is separate from questions of whether the war is "worth it." No war is worth it, not if it can be avoided with honor and safety intact.

This war could have been avoided with America's safety and honor intact. But that is a caluclation we may make — or not — and it has nothing at first to do with identification. We can calculate the rightfulness or wrongfulness of a war until the cows come home, and that baby will still not have a father.

When will we adopt the attitude that war is just plain bad, no matter its "justification"?

For when we do that, we will seek alternatives to war — not all of which are necessarily craven or defeatist. There are ways of neutralizing threats that do not involve bombs or bullets.


Nor is the real point whether we ought to identify with those who pay the ultimate price on our behalf, but rather whether we do identify. Of course we ought to feel their pain, as fellow human beings and fellow Americans. But how hard it is to actually do so, most of the time! It takes a special set of circumstances to trigger true empathy.

Mine was triggered because the Memorial Day concert was clearly not a peace demonstration. I knew that, and so when that tableau of heroic sacrifice and personal pain was presented on stage, I could not duck its impact by imagining that someone was trying to indoctrinate me.

And so I identified with people who I was aware probably would not have wanted me to not support the war. For that widow to oppose the war now that her husband has given his life in it would be to have his — their — sacrifice be in vain. Identification is not the same thing as agreeing with the person identified with.

At some point, reason has to chime in and say the best thing one can do for somebody with whom one disagrees fundamentally, but with whom one nonetheless identifies totally, is to respectfully continue to disagree.

At some point, reason has to generalize the individual identification and conclude that war is just plain bad.

It starts with identification, but it ends with reason.

Let there be peace on earth ...

... and let it begin with me!

It's Memorial Day 2008, and oldstyleliberal (that's me) feels a positive hunger for peace.

Last night I watched the Memorial Day celebration at the National Mall, at the U.S. Capitol, thanks to the Public Broadcasting System. In one segment, three actors read from letters written by three of the honored guests. Two were the wives of soldiers formerly stationed in Iraq, and the third was the first of the two soldiers. The second soldier is dead, having died in combat only days after helping evacuate the first, his best buddy who had been shot and grievously wounded in a firefight, and who is yet only a hairsbreadth away from having to have a leg amputated.

The soldier who died took several days in the hospital, back in the U.S.A., to lose his struggle for life, leaving behind an oh-so-young wife who was days away from giving birth to a daughter, a first child who will never know her father. The other wife was there beside her at the hospital, of course, lending support to her own best "war buddy" in an hour of danger and despair ... even though her own husband remained hospitalized in Germany and she knew he might not pull through.

After that presentation, Gladys Knight sang "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." The audience, even if it was a military pageant, sang earnestly along. Then Sarah Brightman and a children's choir sang Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu." Sweet Lord Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them [the fallen in America's wars] rest everlasting. Not a dry eye in the crowd.

Why can't we have peace on earth? Why can't we have no more fallen?

I want to work for peace.

I was a young man in the 1960s when there was a peace movement opposing the Vietnam War. I was part of it. Why isn't there a peace movement today, opposing the Iraq War?

What would be a constructive way to work for peace now?

It seems to this observer that a peace movement, to be successful, would have to bring a lot of people together. It's no good making a peace movement out of the tiny minority of folks who are naturally disposed to pacifism. Their arguments may be good ones, but they're conceptual, intellectual, high-minded, and based on assumptions that average people don't subscribe to.

Average people are patriots first. They feel a deep connection to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a horror of repeating the Vietnam aftermath, when returning soldiers were spat upon, ridiculed, and, worse, ignored.

Average people have a difficult time converging the facts that Saddam Hussein wasn't really an al Qaeda facilitator, wasn't really on the verge of getting weapons of mass destruction, with what seems to be the right attitude after 9/11. God bless America. Support the troops. Shoot first and ask questions later. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

The facts seem to suggest that the Iraq War, and even the more broadly supported conflict in Afghanistan, aren't working.

The attitude seems to require us to have infinite patience anyway.

The indisputable facts are that there are terrorist organizations and whole societies out there that want to do us dirty.

The attitude tells us to arm ourselves and fight.

Yet there is another attitude that is latent in all of us even now: Let there be peace on earth.

How do we bring that attitude to the fore?

It might be the case that we can succeed in ending the terrorist threat only if, however paradoxically, we make peace today and not war. Peace, not just as a far off hope but as something lived here and now, is the only real answer to conflict.