A chance encounter with a deaf student shows the president may not be perfect — but he knows how to communicateVIDEO
(Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
He sings.He looks great in sunglasses. He hasn’t tried to punish the American female population for having uteruses lately. Barack Obama may be far from perfect, but he’s pretty goddamn cool.
The latest evidence? His encounter with 26-year-old Prince George’s Community College student Stephon, who was born deaf. As Districon reports, the president was appearing at an energy policy event with Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley when the young man got close enough to shake his hand. That’s when Stephon told him in sign language, “I’m proud of you.” And Obama smiled and signed back, “Thank you.” Afterward, Stephon signed on YouTube that what transpired between them “was so amazing… I was just speechless.”
It wasn’t the first time Obama has demonstrated that he has some basic signing skills – he similarly delighted the blogging community four years ago when he signed to a fan on the campaign trail. But his latest interaction was both a lovely moment of bonding and empathy and a swell reminder to all of us of the stunning power of being able to communicate, even a little, in another language.Continue Reading
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of «Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream.» Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams
From jobs to contraception, the GOP can’t find an attack on Obama that sticks. Time to call for a tax cut!
By Robert Reich
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. (Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
This originally appeared on Robert Reich’s blog.
Republicans are desperate. They can’t attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.
Their attack on the administration’s rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.
Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.
Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.
Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.
So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.
Call for a tax cut, of course.
It doesn’t matter that their new “tax reform” plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.
It doesn’t matter than the plan doesn’t detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan’s original voucher plan – which would have drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.
It doesn’t even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans,
All that matters is the headlines.
“House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates,” says Bloomberg Businessweek. “Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform,” says Reuters. “GOP’s Budget Targets Taxes,” blares the Wall Street Journal.
Presto. Republicans have gotten what they wanted on the basis of saying absolutely nothing.Continue Reading
Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of «Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.» More Robert Reich
A decade after the attacks, our national security regime continues to grow ever more punitive and secretive
By Karen Greenberg
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning (Credit: AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaida so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter. You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties.
Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.
Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.
1. Ever More Punitive(Ever Less Fair-minded).
Those who imagine the era of overreach in the name of national security coming to an end any time soon would do well to remember that some spectacular national security trials are on the horizon — and that we may be entering a new age of governmental vindictiveness. Among the most newsworthy of those trials: the military commissions at Guantanamo that will bring to the docket Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and his co-conspirators, as well as Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged point person in the 2000 suicide attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden. These will likely include capital charges and be prosecuted in a spirit of vengeance.
But that spirit won’t stop with al-Qaida ringleaders and operatives. A series of cases not involving attacks on or the killing of Americans will also be argued in the name of national security and in a similar spirit of vengeance. To begin with, there is the upcoming court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of downloading classified U.S. government documents and leaking them to the website WikiLeaks. And then, of course, there is the potential prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in federal court — a federal grand jury is now considering his indictment — for his alleged collaboration with Manning.
Both cases have been hailed with a righteous anger that might strike an outsider as akin to frothing at the mouth. Top officials have insisted that the WikiLeaks materials threatened American lives and left “blood” on the hands of both Assange and Manning (though no one has yet pointed to a single individual physically harmed by the release of those documents).
At the more bloodthirsty end of the American political spectrum, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), among others, have called for Manning’s execution. As Rogers explained, “I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here… [Manning] clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don’t know what is.”
A similar, if less lethal, desire for punishment lies behind the Obama administration’s determination to aggressively pursue and crack down on leaks to the media from inside the government, even when they don’t involve the actual theft of government documents. Obama, of course, entered the Oval Office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy when it came to the workings of the government, only to move beyond George W. Bush in attempts to clamp down on whistleblowers.
The pending trials of two former CIA officers exemplify this pattern. Jeffrey Sterling is charged with leaking classified documents to the New York Times’ James Risen about plans to release flawed information to Iran in a potentiallycounterproductiveeffort to subvert its nuclear program; John Kiriakou just pled not guilty to releasing information to the media about Bush-era torture policies. All told, the administration has gone after six suspected leakers — more than all previous administrations combined — using the draconian Espionage Act.
In the matter of leakers, the message couldn’t be clearer or more vengeful. The government’s position has been this: expose us and we will turn on you with a fury you can’t imagine. As terrorists have been warned that new laws and legal systems can be built to deal with them, those accused of leaks to the press are being told that even the full extent of the law may not be the limit when it comes to punishment.
Witness the treatment of Bradley Manning in his first year of punitive captivity before he was charged with any crime: he was kept in a Marine brig in total isolation and forced to sleep naked. Or consider the attempt not just to prosecute but to destroy the life of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake. He was accused of leaking classified information on what he considered to be a wildly wasteful NSA program. In the end, though charged under the Espionage Act, he pled guilty to the misdemeanor of essentially borrowing a government computer — but not before his life had been turned upside down and his job lost.
2. Ever More Legal Limbo (Ever Less Confidence in the Constitution).
By now, it’s old hat to acknowledge that the indefinite detention of those once deemed “enemy combatants,” now termed “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” has become as American as apple pie. Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration insists on its commitment to holding nearly 50 Guantanamo detainees in indefinite detention without charge or trial.
In May 2009, in a speech at the National Archives, the president couldn’t have been clearer: indefinite detention, he stated, would remain an option in the national security toolbox under his administration. In this way, he guaranteed that an American version of offshore (in)justice and the essential character of Guantanamo, which he once claimed he would shut down, would continue intact.
In 2012, however, there is a worrisome new indefinite detainee category to worry about: U.S. citizens. Previously, Americans were exempt from incarceration at Guantanamo and so from its policy of detention without trial. In 2002, Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi-American citizen, when discovered at Guantanamo Bay, was hurried to a plane in the wee hours of the morning and whisked away, a sign of the rights still accorded American citizens. Similarly, the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, apprehended on the Afghanistan battlefield, was brought into the federal court system.
Lately, however, Congress has shown less respect for the distinction between rights accorded to citizens and non-citizens. Last month, Congress passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The debates over its passage reflected a concerted effort to make American citizens as well as foreigners subject to indefinite military detention.
Ultimately, citizens supposedly remain exempt from the new law, but even so, it was a close call and a signal about where we may be headed. As a recent Congressional Research Service report on the NDAA explained, it is “not intended to affect any existing authorities relating to the detention of U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens, or any other persons captured or arrested in the United States.”
Still, there remain many fears and much confusion about what protections are retained by U.S. citizens under the Act. Nor did President Obama’s signing statement, asserting that he would “not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” assuage those fears and confusions. If American citizens were indeed protected from indefinite detention under the new legislation, why was such a signing statement necessary?
There is yet another place where the law seems to have plunged into legal limbo without in any way abridging U.S. actions: the high seas. Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that it was detaining 15 pirates captured off the coast of Somalia — and that they were being held without reference to any legal status whatsoever. According to New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers, “where interdiction ends, an enduring problem begins: what to do with the pirates that foreign ships detain?”
According to the State Department, the pirates will be tried. But where? In the words of Vice-Admiral Mark I. Fox, “We lack a practical and reliable legal finish.” In other words, the U.S. has not yet found a country under whose law it can try them. In the meantime, according to the latest reports, the U.S. Navy continues to confine them. Think of this, conceptually speaking, as a floating Guantanamo intended to hold for-profit enemies.
3. Ever More Secrecy(Ever Less Transparency)
“Necessary” secrecy has been the fallback explanation for much of the information that has been withheld from public scrutiny since 9/11. The military commissions at Guantanamo will proceed, for instance, in part on the claim that, if the accused, many of whom have already been held for a decade, were to be tried in federal court, too much would be revealed that could somehow compromise the country’s security.
To counter civil libertarian claims that secrecy is only an attempt to hide embarrassing or wrongful behavior, the current administration has promised “transparency” in the military commissions scheduled to begin later this year. Efforts at transparency, announced last fall, included a website where documents — filled with redactions (blacked-out sections) — could be accessed by the public, and a closed-circuit viewing, albeit with a 40-second delay, for the media and members of the victims’ families.
It has taken next to no time, though, for the government to contradict those vows of transparency, ensuring that, in the polite words of Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog, Guantanamo will remain “not a place of openness.” Meanwhile, all mail between the detainees and their military defense counsels is being screened, a practice that understandably has those lawyers in an uproar.
In the category of non-transparency and the growth of secrecy as a first principle of government, there is the administration’s elaborate dance of nondisclosure over a memo produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It was evidently written to justify the assassination by drone in Yemen last September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, alleged to have been the “bin Laden of the Internet.”
Until recently, the administration has ducked questions about al-Awlaki’s killing and that of another American citizen, Samir Khan, the editor of the al-Qaida magazine Inspire. In January, the government announced that Attorney General Eric Holder would soon make public the OLC memo that legalized the killing, but delayed the Attorney General’s explanation until early March. Meanwhile, the New York Times and the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for its release. On March 5th, Holder finally gave a detailed explanation of the tortured reasoning behind the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, but still, no memo seems to be forthcoming.
During the past year, the imposition of secrecy on government activities of all sorts has only become more pronounced. To offer just one egregious example among many, consider the government’s behavior in the case of formerCIA agent Jeffrey Sterling. At its request, a federal judge has now agreed to allow it to invoke the “silent witness rule.” In other words, she will let government documents be shown to the jury without being made public, on the grounds, according to prosecutors, of “national security.”
After a decade in which the customary practice in matters of “security” has been to sweep all too many government documents of significance into the shadows under that rubric of national security, this should hardly be surprising. Americans now know ever less about what the government they elected does. If it were not for the FOIA lawsuits of the ACLU and others, very little of what we do know about torture, warrantless surveillance and other instances of government malfeasance would ever have seen the light of day. Consider the increasing number of whistleblower prosecutions as one more way to try to shut government activities off from the eyes of the citizenry.
4. Ever More Distrust (Ever Less Privacy)
For years, the prospect of warrantless wiretapping in the name of national security has had a chilling effect on Americans who have opposed government policies in the war on terror. In 2008, President Bush signed a new FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which authorized the government to snoop on citizens with minimal oversight from the already secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. (They were set up in 1978 to oversee the granting of surveillance warrants against potential foreign intelligence agents.) The Obama administration has continually opted to uphold this power and the government’s freedom to warrantlessly tap electronic communications between people outside the United States and people inside the country in the name of national security.
Meanwhile, the latest revelations in the ever-more-distrust, ever-less-privacy sweepstakes are led by news that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens. The NYPD infiltrated mosques and universities, collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes, in conjunction with a CIA officer (now withdrawn) using methods traditionally reserved for that agency.
This surely represents, however informally, an abrogation of the CIA’s mandate to conduct its surveillance only abroad, and it’s likely that no one involved will pay a penalty for it. In addition, in a striking combination of security overreach and police profiling, the NYPD has been investigating and surveilling Muslim-American citizens well outside the city limits — from New Haven, Connecticut, to Newark, New Jersey.
To make matters worse, the government just approved the use of surveillance drones as part of a growing law enforcement arsenal for gathering information in the United States. On February 14th, President Obama signed a bill allowing for the use of such drones in a broad array of arenas, ranging from business activities to law enforcement.
The message is clear enough: this year (next year and the year after) will be the year of more snooping. For law enforcement, your life is apparently an open book.
5. Ever More Killing(Ever Less Peace)
Scarcely a day goes by without news of the use of Predator and Reaper drones to kill individuals in foreign countries, including in recent years Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines. It’s as if the CIA and the military have been handed a new toy that they just can’t refrain from using, or teaching others to use. According to the Atlantic, “Conservative estimates suggest hundreds of noncombatant civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone.”
Meanwhile, the drumbeat for war with Iran continues to build. Faced with the prospect of an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic, the Obama administration has refused to definitively back away from the prospect of becoming part of that war.
“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment,” the president said. “I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”
In fact, the urge to stop a potentially disastrous confrontation, which could seriously affect the price of oil and the global economy, has sent high military and civilian officials winging from Washington to Israel with warnings against an attack on Iran. Still, war continues to be treated by diplomats and others almost as a fait accompli.
The news then is certainly grim, and moving in one clear direction — the use of the law, or at least the Justice Department’s version of the law, to justify whatever acts thegovernment feels are necessary against whomever they deem to be the enemy. Attorney General Holder summed the situation up tellingly in his defense of the al-Awlaki killing.
In significant detail, he explained that the killing of an American citizen (and terror suspect) was lawful, despite the fact that it brought into question the guarantee of due process under the Fifth Amendment, and despite the guarantees offered by the laws of war. “Due process,” he declared, “is not judicial process.” It was a startlingly honest admission of something new under the American sun: due process is now what the president and his closes advisors decide it is, a constitutional rethinking of the first order to justify the “targeted killing” of an American citizen.
To sum up,the legal gray zone Washington has, over the course of a decade,plunged us into — and everything that goes with it, including punitive measures, attempts to bypass constitutional guarantees, the spread of secrecy and surveillance, a growing distrust of American citizens, and straightforward killing — isn’t something we will soon put behind us. The move away from the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the law is very clearly the way of the American future in our new age of enemies.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.Continue Reading
Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School and author of «The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days.» More Karen Greenberg
Davis Guggenheim’s slippery «The Road We’ve Traveled» reframes Obama’s stagnant first term as a tale of daringVIDEO
By Andrew O’Hehir
(Credit: YouTube/barackobamadotcom)
We get to see Barack Obama’s 200-watt smile only fleetingly in “The Road We’ve Traveled,” the 17-minute video made by “Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim that the president’s reelection campaign released on Thursday. (The video is linked above, and embedded below.) No slouch at turning boring non-accomplishments into effective propaganda, Guggenheim knows he’s got to save the smile for the right moment, and most of Obama’s appearances in the video show him in steely and/or inspirational mode: Declaiming about morality to schoolteachers and autoworkers and gay soldiers, or sitting hunched and pensive in still photographs, surrounded by his economic team as the incoming headlines get worse.
But the money shot, when it comes, is golden. Obama appears very briefly as a talking-head interview subject, talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden — which is framed, right around the three-quarter mark, as the signal accomplishment of the president’s first term. Everybody always wants to know how he felt when he knew for sure that bin Laden was dead, Obama says, but he allowed himself no time for satisfaction or gloating. “Our guys were still in that compound,” he says, and he couldn’t relax until he knew that “everybody was accounted for, including the dog.” (By the way, what dog? Was this known?) Then comes the smile, the big, brilliant, sneaky, I’m-your-cool-friend-and-the-leader-of-the-free-world smile. He kills sinister Arab villains and rescues doggies! Boom — reelected.
OK, it’s undoubtedly not that simple, largely because there’s no telling how many people will actually watch “The Road We’ve Traveled,” and because wishing for a viral-video hit is not the same thing as creating one. But Guggenheim has crafted a compelling and superficially convincing narrative out of the Obama administration’s three years, turning its real-life history of infighting, indecision and political stagnation into a tale of unprecedented courage and risk-taking.
As Tom Hanks, the film’s narrator, intones in describing the Osama attack (over black-and-white still photos of Obama gazing at the World Trade Center memorial and attending 9/11 commemorations), “It was the ultimate test of leadership, a victory for our nation. There would be many others.” Indeed there would. Drone attacks that killed numerous civilians in dusty, faraway places; the assassination of United States citizens without any semblance of due process; an obsession with secrecy and clandestine warfare that make Dick Cheney’s trip to the “dark side” look like a Goth girl’s dorm-room poster. None of those things is specifically mentioned in “The Road We’ve Traveled,” of course, but — wait, did you hear about the puppy!
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently (and amusingly) mocked Guggenheim for going on TV with Piers Morgan and failing to come up with one negative thing to say about the president. I’m not sure what he expected: Guggenheim is a highly skilled hired hand, a message-massager whose task is to blend craft and ideology so smoothly that they come to resemble art. He does not make a living by being frank, or by having opinions of his own. He turned a slide show hosted by a famously dull former politician into an Oscar-winning documentary, and tried to repeat that success with “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which was basically a veiled infomercial for the charter-school industry. On balance, I would say that “The Road We’ve Traveled” is more honest than that film was; it never hides its agenda or feigns a disinterested perspective.
“The Road We’ve Traveled” is conspicuously aimed at middle-class, largely white and politically moderate voters, both Democrats and independents. These are precisely the people who broke decisively for Obama in 2008, of course, and whom he now needs to lure back. The tone is largely nonpartisan and non-ideological, although the plastic orange mug of House Speaker John Boehner makes a few comic-book-villain appearances. (Nancy Pelosi, who was speaker during Obama’s first two years, is never seen or heard from.) Mitt Romney’s name appears once, as the author of that infamous “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” Op-Ed in the New York Times. (That whole thing about tying the barfing dog to the roof of the car? That really does define the guy’s character, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, is Obama’s thing with the dog meant to remind us of that?) Still, certain assumptions are clear: The target audience favors universal healthcare, and is basically OK with public-sector unions, equal pay for women and equal rights for gays.
Guggenheim takes on two apparently disparate tasks in this video, and effortlessly blends them together. The first one is to argue that everything you might have thought was a failing of the Obama administration — the crap economy, the half-assed healthcare bill, the dragged-out and inconclusive overseas wars — is actually not just a strength but a historic triumph. “Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt,” says Hanks somberly, “had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.” (An ambiguous, non-provable claim, to be sure, but it might be true.) There’s an undeniably defensive quality to the first several minutes, as a parade of expert witnesses — David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Austan Goolsbee, Bill Clinton — reflect on the atrocious economic situation that faced the incoming president in 2009, and on his immediate and decisive actions to set things to rights. If it looked more like hapless floundering and Wall Street toadying at the time, they all seem to imply, it’s because you weren’t paying attention.
The corollary task is to create an inspirational and almost abstract montage that imbues the Obama presidency with a sense of historic purpose and direction. This pays tribute, as every reelection campaign must, to the 1984 “Morning in America” Ronald Reagan ad, still a masterwork of this lightweight-Leni Riefenstahl genre. Hanks’ script does not actually include that commercial’s famous closer — “Why would we ever want to return to where we were, less than four short years ago?” — but that’s the unspoken premise of the entire thing.
“The Road We’ve Traveled” does not convey anywhere near the brimming confidence of Reagan’s history-making ad, nor should it. Clear away its splendiferous smoke and mirrors, and Guggenheim’s video depicts a reelection campaign poised partway between desperation and optimism, between collective self-delusion and a sense that genuine accomplishments might still be possible. At least as seen in this movie, Barack Obama the candidate holds two genuine trump cards and an ace in the hole. (I’m not even counting the doggie successfully airlifted out of Pakistan, or the fact that Obama’s likely opponent is incredibly rich, universally disliked, and practices a minority religion most Americans find weirder than Islam.) He knocked off the world’s No. 1 supervillain, and the economy has at last begun to look a little better. If that’s not enough, he’s also eager to remind you that, no matter how many things he has screwed up in an abysmal and depressing four years, the entire world doesn’t think he’s a total idiot like that last guy was.Continue Reading
More Andrew O’Hehir
The “smoking gun” video confirms Obama’s strength and weakness: He always tries to have it both ways
By Gary Kamiya
(Credit: nymag.com)
Just before he died on March 1, the right-wing attack dog and disinformation specialist Andrew Breitbart promised to reveal explosive videos of a racially charged speech made by the young Barack Obama that would “change this election.”
Breitbart’s death at age 43 led wingnuts on the right to mutter darkly that he was taken out by nameless forces, presumably working for a Satanic Commie Muslim with the initials B.O. Now the video has been released, and it is safe to say that if the Obama administration did dispatch a hit team to silence Breitbart, it was a serious miscalculation. If Breitbart really believed that this feeble artifact would change the election, it would have been much better for the White House if he remained a key member of the right-wing brain trust charged with reclaiming the White House.
The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.
As the video opens, Obama says, “And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first-year black law students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front and not giving us a lecture, but engaging us in conversation. And speaking the truth.”
Here Obama says something indecipherable; there may be a gap or edit in the video. Then, after apparently praising Bell’s achievements, Obama goes on to rhetorically ask, “How did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” After loud applause, there is another apparent gap or edit in the video. Obama’s final words are “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
Before he died, Breitbart claimed that this video would show “why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” Sure enough, right-wingers have seized upon it to portray Obama as a race-card player and friend of white-hating academic extremists. It’s this year’s version of the Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “scandals,” in which Obama was accused of playing footsie with, respectively, a radical Weatherman, a Palestinian academic and an incendiary black clergyman.
Obama’s association with Derrick Bell will turn out to be even more of a non-event than those fizzled bombshells. But the story does shed some light – for better and for worse — on Obama’s temperament, his intellectual style and his racial politics.
To understand the video, one must understand the context. Academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was roiled by an enormous controversy over “multiculturalism.” The debate took many forms. In the humanities, multiculturalists argued that works by minorities, women and gays had been systematically excluded and devalued by institutions of higher learning, and that it was time to change the canon to end the hegemony of “dead white males.” Students at Stanford marched through campus chanting “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Activists demanded that campuses create Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies departments, and hire more minority faculty members. The conflict was bitter, long-lasting and spawned an enormous literature.
Perhaps the most extreme variant of multiculturalism was found in law schools. Called “Critical Legal Studies,” this movement asserted that law was essentially political and served the hegemony of the white racist power structure. As one of its leading figures, Derrick Bell argued that racism was intractable and permanent and that minority professors were systematically excluded simply because of that racism. He further argued that minority professors, by virtue of the oppression and discrimination they allegedly experienced, possessed unique talents and perspectives not available to white professors, and should be hired on that basis alone.
Bell was given to writing in “non-traditional” forms, like science fiction, and argued that narratives and the like should have the same academic standing as footnoted, peer-reviewed papers. In one such story, “Space Traders,” Bell imagined that a group of spacemen had come to earth and offered to remove all of America’s black people, in exchange for vast wealth and other benefits.
The leaders of America agree, and all of America’s blacks are sold into slavery.
In another allegorical fable, “The Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action: The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” Bell imagines how an elite law school would react to the hiring of a super-qualified African-American candidate who, if hired, would increase the faculty’s minority percentage to 25 percent. The white dean in Bell’s parable refuses, saying that doing so would change the racial character of the school to an intolerable degree. The hiring would “threaten, at some deep-seated level, the white faculty members’ sense of ideological hegemony.”
In a devastating critique of Critical Legal Studies in the June 1989 Harvard Law Review (available online via many public libraries), Randall Kennedy demolished the arguments of Bell and two other leading CLS scholars, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda.
“Stated bluntly, they fail to support persuasively their claims of racial exclusion or their claims that legal academic scholars of color produce a racially distinctive brand of valuable scholarship,” Kennedy wrote, and then proceeded to back his argument up in detail. For example, he noted that Bell refused to even engage with the obvious reason that there were so few minority candidates, namely that not enough were qualified. Instead, Bell simply asserted that the criteria of judgment was flawed in some nameless way. Bell was clearly only interested in the outcome, not the process. If it took putting a thumb on the scales to get more black people hired, so be it. The scales were rigged anyway.
What Kennedy wrote of Matsuda was equally true of Bell: By claiming that being a member of a minority group automatically connotes a certain and superior worldview, he argued, she “stereotypes scholars.” The CLS racialism simply inverted pernicious white stereotypes about black people: Instead of being inherently inferior, they were inherently superior.
Kennedy also noted that various CLS supporters came to him (he doesn’t say it, but Bell was among them) and urged him not to publish his piece because it would hurt the movement – behavior more befitting members of a Communist cell than scholars interested in dispassionate inquiry. Of Kennedy, Bell said, “the cause of diversity is not served by someone who looks black and thinks white.”
In short, Bell was a crude racial essentialist. He believed there was such a thing as “thinking white” and “thinking black.” As James Traub noted in a New Republic piece, he was so afraid of giving aid and comfort to white people, and causing harm to blacks, that he refused to condemn the abhorrent anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
As befit his racialist ideology, Bell was also a consummate race-card player. His academic career consisted of a long series of racial confrontations with the institutions he worked for. After being hired as an avowed racial token at Harvard, Bell left for Oregon, where he became the first black dean of a non-black school. But he resigned his deanship when the faculty voted against giving tenure to an Asian woman. He then went to Stanford, where a bizarre incident unfolded. Many of the students in his constitutional law course complained about his teaching, saying it was disorganized and excessively politicized. Some began to audit other courses. In possibly the most impolitic move in the history of academia, the university then set up a parallel series of lectures, which were designed to “supplement” Bell’s courses. When black law students protested, the parallel series was canceled.
Bell then returned to Harvard, where he staged a five-day sit-in to protest the school’s failure to hire two radical CLS faculty members, both white. This led a faculty member to say, “This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South.”
The episode that led to Obama’s involvement started in April 1990, when Bell announced that he would leave Harvard if a black woman was not hired. He demanded that Harvard hire Regina Austin, a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania. But – in a real-world demonstration of one of the problems Kennedy criticized – Bell was unable to defend her credentials, which made her look like a token. When Austin was predictably and summarily rejected – the appointments committee refused even to vote on her candidacy –Bell took heat from feminists for chauvinism. Austin never forgave Bell for the public humiliation she endured.
Enter Obama
This is where Barack Obama, second-year law student, came in. According to Thomas J. Sugrue’s 2010 book “Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race,” “the Black Law Students Association (of which Obama was a member) accused the law school dean of racism, railed against the fact that Harvard had no tenured black women and only a handful of nonwhite faculty members, and led a series of teach-ins and protests … to demand the diversification of the law school.” The debate was bitter, with both sides claiming the mantle of the civil rights movement.
Obama took part in the protests. At one rally, according to Sugrue, he even compared Bell to Rosa Parks. But – and this is the key point – Obama tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute. It is worth quoting the relevant passage from Sugrue at length:
Despite his sympathies with Austin and Bell, Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”
Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.
Sugrue concludes that “Obama’s experience at Harvard tempered his sympathy for the race-conscious politics of the black freedom struggle.”
The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.
Anyone who has read Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” in which Obama grapples with the long-standing tension in the black community between colorblind universalism and Black Power-tinged separatism, will realize that the Bell case put Obama in a difficult situation. As a member of the Black Law Students Association, for him to have sat this dispute out would have been extremely difficult. It was a mom and apple pie issue. He would have come across as a race traitor. (It should also be noted that Bell, whatever his shortcomings as a scholar and thinker about race, was praised as a fine mentor to black students.)
At the same time, Obama was not a racial bomb-thrower. As Sugrue notes, Obama’s racial views were not yet fully formed, but Obama never subscribed to Bell’s crude racial essentialism and guilt-card playing. If he had been forced to openly state whether he agreed with Bell’s racialist theories, he would have been caught in a bind, trapped between the racial solidarity that was expected of him and the universalism he was inwardly inclined toward. But he was not forced to. He was able to live to fight another day by mouthing bland generalities about how Bell’s scholarship “opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” In short, he displayed the chameleonic abilities of a future politician.
In his 2008 book “A Bound Man,” Shelby Steele argues that Obama’s Achilles’ heel is precisely his attempt to have it racially both ways. For Steele, Obama is trapped by his need to simultaneously assert black solidarity and a universal identity. The Bell case is a small example of this double bind in action.
Does it matter? At the political level, no. This isn’t a scandal. Who cares if a young law student went racially along to get along? Besides, Obama was just demonstrating for “diversity,” an anodyne goal that has now received a quasi-official societal imprimatur as well as an explicit legal one. (Much as I hate to agree with Justice Scalia about anything, there is a connection between Bell’s crude racial essentialism and the Supreme Court’s 2003 pro-“diversity” ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.)
Nor does it matter at a personal level. I don’t think that America cares that much about whatever convoluted Hegelian racial dialectic Barack Obama may have gone through in the course of creating his identity.
But it may matter at another level. Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to – and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness. The big question, if he is elected for a second term, is whether he is capable of unifying the opposite strands of his character, forging a single identity. That would mean letting the chips fall where they may, and living up to his promise to transform America by finding within himself the only attribute he has so far lacked: courage.Continue Reading
Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya
He schooled Netanyahu, made the GOP warmongers look like idiots, and weakened the Israel lobby
By Gary Kamiya
Presiden Obama gives a speech at the AIPAC conference in Washington on March 4. (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
President Obama just gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a serious whupping. In the process, he greatly reduced the risk of a catastrophic war, made his saber-rattling Republican opponents look like idiots, and seriously weakened the powerful Israel lobby. And he did it all while pledging undying support for Israel. It was a virtuoso display of political judo.
Obama faced a very delicate task this week. Netanyahu came to town to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s big conference. This is Washington’s annual pro-Israel orgy, in which politicians from both parties vie with each other to declare their undying fealty to a tiny foreign country. Sitting out this bizarre ritual is not an option. As the New York Times reported, AIPAC delegates from all 50 states scheduled 530 meetings with members of Congress: Only five congressional offices did not take meetings, and two of those were vacant.
This year the stakes were higher than ever. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby, of which AIPAC is the biggest and most formidable arm, were beating the drums for war with Iran. AIPAC had already successfully lobbied for a draconian and ineffective sanctions bill, opposed by Obama, which resulted in a 13 percent spike in gas prices, to their highest ever at this time of the year. The Senate passed the bill 100-0. With hypocrisy that would be breathtaking if it weren’t an everyday event, Obama’s warmongering GOP opponents seized upon the high gas prices to attack Obama.
The Republican strategy was to paint him as an insufficiently ardent supporter of Israel (notwithstanding the fact that he had quietly accepted repeated humiliations by Netanyahu, completely abandoned the Palestinian issue, and gave Israel everything it wanted every time it asked, including vetoing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements that simply repeated an official U.S. position) and a cowardly appeaser on Iran. By so doing, they hoped to peel away crucial Jewish votes in swing states like Florida, and dry up the vast campaign contributions (by some estimates as much as half) made by Jews to the Democratic Party.
Obama had to thread the needle. He, along with America’s military and intelligence agencies, knew that a war with Iran would have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. and the world. But he could not say that explicitly.
He had to engage instead in a kind of Kabuki dance, making just enough warlike gestures to placate Israel’s supporters while furtively signaling, with almost imperceptible movements, that he meant the exact opposite.
The first step was to stake out the most aggressive possible position on Iran, short of actual war. He chose the recipient of this message carefully: Jeffrey Goldberg, a hawkish mainstream journalist with credibility among Obama’s target audience, right-leaning Democratic American Jews. Making like Dirty Harry and saying, “I don’t bluff,” Obama told Goldberg that preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb was not only in Israel’s interest, but in America’s. He then laid out the usual reasons: Iran might give the bomb to terrorists, it would feel emboldened to make trouble, and its possession of the bomb would spur a destabilizing arms race.
Whether or not Obama actually believed what he told Goldberg is unclear. (In fact, the arguments he used are weak and unconvincing, as this definitive piece by Paul Pillar shows.) But that was irrelevant, because Obama had and has no intention of starting a war with Iran. All that was necessary was that he cover his flank with Israel’s amen corner.
Then Obama had to meet with Netanyahu. This could not have been pleasant. The two men do not like each other. Obama knew that the far-right Israeli leader wants to see a Republican elected president. He was forced to watch helplessly as Netanyahu went behind his back to Congress, garnering endless standing ovations in a display so egregious that it led the ultimate establishment columnist, the Times’ Thomas Friedman, to use the expression “the Israel lobby” – vindicating the courageous academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who a few years earlier were smeared as anti-Semites for using the same expression. But Obama played his role flawlessly, making all the right noises about America’s undying support for Israel – even using the folksy “we’ve got your back” – while quietly rejecting Netanyahu’s demand that America abandon diplomacy and attack Iran.
But it was in his press conference after addressing AIPAC that Obama demonstrated his mastery of political judo. By attacking those who were “beating the drums of war,” he simultaneously painted his GOP rivals as irresponsible lightweights and fired a warning shot across Netanyahu’s bow.
Even more significant was his statement, “It’s also not just an issue of consequences for Israel if action is taken prematurely. There are consequences to the United States as well.” By drawing a subtle but clear distinction between Israel and the United States, Obama threw down the gantlet to Netanyahu and to his American supporters: If Israel attacks Iran, the United States is not going to fall on its sword for you. It isn’t going to be 1973, when we came riding to your rescue, or your 2008 slaughter in Gaza, which we ignored. It’s going to be Suez in 1956. And you aren’t going to like it.
Obama felt emboldened to confront Israel and its American supporters for three reasons. First and foremost, he knew Americans do not want another ruinous Mideast war. Second, he correctly assessed that most American Jews would vote for him and continue to give him money even if he refused to be Netanyahu’s hand puppet. And third, by turning the war into a partisan issue, Netanyahu and the Israel lobby left Obama no choice but to punch back. And once he did, he fundamentally shifted the terms of the debate.
It’s hard to say whether Netanyahu, the GOP or the Israel lobby is the biggest loser here. Netanyahu might be. As Aluf Benn, editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz noted, by invoking Auschwitz, Netanyahu moved closer than ever before to committing himself to attacking Iran. But because Obama outmuscled him, Netanyahu now faces an excruciating choice: do nothing and stand revealed as a Neville Chamberlain, or attack Iran and risk destroying the “special relationship” with America that is Israel’s strategic cornerstone. The true significance of Obama’s subtle marginalizing of the Israel lobby is that it puts enormous pressure on Netanyahu not to attack.
The GOP is not feeling too chipper today either. Normally, the War Party could count on there being no downside to urging war, especially if it involved “defending” Israel. But Iraq and Afghanistan have changed that. The American people have no stomach to fight yet another war in the Middle East. And they definitely have no stomach to fight a war for Israel.
Which takes us to the lobby. By demanding a war with Iran that Israel wants, and that President Obama and the American people do not, it committed the two unforgivable sins: It made it clear that Israel and America’s interests do not always coincide, and it took Israel’s side over America’s. That was bad enough, and the embrace of the GOP’s dreadful candidates was the final straw. AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby are now locked in a steamy ménage a trois with Netanyahu and the GOP. For Democrats, proponents of peace, and those who desire justice in the Middle East, it’s a match made in heaven.Continue Reading
Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya
