Category Archives: Politics

The First Time I Read About Obama

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An endorsement of Obama

Months before his famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I read about a young Chicago politician facing a rough and tough fight to become only the third black person elected to the United States Senate. The piece, written by the New Yorker’s William Finnegan, made an immediate impression on me. Here was a constitutional law professor who had been the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, he was clearly intelligent, but even beyond that, everyone agreed that there was something special about him. He was principled, charismatic, a natural leader and a self-professed “legislation nerd” whose main concern seemed to be the most pragmatic way to move legislation in the right direction. We wasn’t an ideologue, he has a man who wanted to get things done.

When I heard that he had been selected to give a keynote address at the Democratic Convention, I was excited to see him speak, and of course I wasn’t disappointed. No one was. No one could have been. I remembered reading this specific bit at the time and thinking how true it must be now:

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ”

I’ve often thought about this piece in the last couple of years as Obama made his triumphant run for the Office that Bush holds, but I had never gone back to read it. The New Yorker recently republished the profile on their website and it was just the opportunity I needed. Please take the time to read The Candidate.

One thing that is always mentioned about Obama is his preternatural calm. This is something he would be caught on tape mentioning about himself in preparation for the candidate debates. As reported in Newsweek’s remarkable “How He Did It“, Obama said, “There’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”

This same aspect of his character is mentioned in the New Yorker piece:

People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s long, annealing trip into their midst, although they often remark on his unusual calm. Now forty-two and a state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even won the “collar” counties around Chicago, communities that supposedly would never support a black candidate. And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.

That’s exactly the sort of guy I want handling the financial crisis, or the three am phone call.

Here’s another thing I liked about him at the time: While he had his problems with NAFTA, he clearly understood the upside of trade. Finnegan writes:

He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear. Then he said, “There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t believe in free trade,” which provoked a small recoil. These men were ardent protectionists. A little later, he said, with conviction, “I want India and China to succeed”—a sentiment not much heard in the outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking after American workers.

Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”

David Axelrod makes a couple of appearances in the piece. This, of course, was long before I had any idea who David Alexrod was:

“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said. “After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted.” What he wanted was to practice civil-rights law in Chicago, and he did, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation for a small public-interest firm.

One thing that was played up in this piece that I didn’t hear about in either the primaries or the general election is that Obama is not the typical product of the Chicago political machine. If anything, he is a testament to the fading power of that machine.

To an outsider with only the broadest idea of Chicago politics, Obama’s victory in the Democratic primary actually looked like a victory over cynicism. He had not slimed his opponents. Nor was he the candidate of the fabled local machine—that was Dan Hynes, the state’s comptroller, who comes from a powerful Illinois political family. Precinct captains and party organizations and old-line labor unions (most of the Teamsters, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.) had supported Hynes. The machine, however, is an outdated conceit. “A few creaky parts still work,” David Axelrod told me. “They can still elect a few water commissioners or sub-circuit-level judges. But no precinct captain can tell people how to vote for President or the Senate.”

And here was the money-shot for me: Obama comparing a good piece of legislation to great writing or great music:

Obama seems to be a true legislation nerd. When he talks about the maneuvering it took to line up the state’s prosecutors behind the videotape bill, and to keep the police associations neutral, his eyes narrow in pleasure. “You can’t always come up with the optimal solution, but you can usually come up with a better solution,” he said over lunch one afternoon. “A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence.” He nodded. Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” was playing in the background. “Or a good piece of music,” he said. “Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‘Huh. It works. It makes sense.’ That doesn’t happen too often, of course, but it happens.”

In a short entry that accompanied the republication of this piece on the website, William Finnegan talks about why he left out talk of Obama having the talent to become the first black President.

What I didn’t include was something else Schakowsky said. “I think he’s got it,” she told me. “He can go the distance. He could be the first black President.” The quote was too bald, too broad, too bannerlike. Lots of other people in Illinois, including some Republicans, talked up Obama’s extraordinary promise, his possible future on the national stage, and I did use some of those remarks. But just coming out and saying “first black President” felt not only absurdly premature but like bad juju.

I guess we can all be happy that no bad juju got released.

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The Messy History of Voting in America

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The New Yorker’s Politics Issue had some great reads in it, including the eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama, and the fascinating profile of Arianna Huffington, but my favourite piece was written by Jill Lepore and titled Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is an historical overview of the messiness and madness of the American electoral process. In particular, the piece focuses on the adoption of the secret ballot (also known as the “Australian Ballot“) in the United States.

One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore  tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.

Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...]  Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.

Violence and intimidation at the polls was common in this era. That is true not only in the U.S., but here in Canada as well. (According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, British Columbia adopted the secret ballot in 1873, Ontario in 1874, and P.E.I. didn’t adopt it permanently until 1913.) The primary reason, it seems, that violence flourished at the polls at this time in history was that suffrage was expanding faster than the mechanisms needed to handle it.

In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

[...]

With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.

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Canadian Election Results: Everyone Lost

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Stephen Harper

Only in Canada could we have an election that no one wanted, that nearly no one paid attention to, and yet wind up with a result that left everyone disappointed.

There was just no good news for anyone last night.

  • The Tories increase their seats in a minority government, but so what? This was probably their best opportunity to win. It was an election that opposition parties lost because they couldn’t make the public believe in an issue and the Tories failed to capitalize, falling apart in the last two weeks thanks to a poor campaign and bone-headed policy decisions. They didn’t break through in Quebec and without a majority, they still can’t implement the agenda they really want. Harper gets to hang on for another year, maybe two, depending on what happens to the economy.
  • The Liberals fall to historic lows, unable to defend Ontario, unable to get people on board with a Green Shift Plan that should have been easy to sell. They are now a party in disarray, doomed to at least a year of in-fighting. Dion is a decent guy, his heart is definitely in the right place, but Canada’s Natural Ruling Party can’t abide loses.
  • The NDP gambles big, spending more than they’ve ever spent before, in an effort to perhaps become Canada’s option to Stephen Harper. Despite the gains the party made, they failed to really break through anywhere. A good campaign, but a moral victory is not enough.
  • The Greens get walloped. Despite their leader being in the debates and higher profile coverage of their party than ever, they fail to win a single seat and their vote fails to materialize on election day.
  • The Bloc wins, sort of, by not losing. At the beginning of the election they looked doomed, but they managed to hold onto Quebec yet again. That’s a victory of sorts, but they too are facing leadership issues and could easily descend further into irrelevance.

Ho-hum. Everyone back to first positions. Let’s do this thing again. How’s eight months sound?

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How to Vote Strategically in the Canadian Election

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Canadians will go to the polls on Tuesday to elect a new federal government. It is a cliche to suggest that whatever election happens to be going at the moment is “the most important election of our lifetimes,” but this is an important election. For the first time in our history we have major parties that have recognized the environment and climate change as central campaign issues and who will make reducing carbon emissions a fundamental part of their governing strategy.

The problem, however, is that even if you are concerned about the environment there are a number of parties you could legitimately choose to vote for and in Canada’s first past the post system, voting for your first choice of party can easily help hand the election to exactly the people you don’t want to win. Deciding how best to use your vote can be complicated. Luckily a couple of websites have popped up to help make your decision easier.

  • Vote for Environment – When you enter your postal code on this website, you’ll get a break down of how best to use your vote for the environment in your riding
  • Pair Vote – Every vote a party gets matters, even if they don’t win the riding, their future funding is directly related to their total vote tally. With Pair Vote, you can vote strategically and still help make sure your preferred party gets all the votes and funding it deserves by swapping votes with someone in another riding.

Use them. And use your vote wisely.

[UPDATE] Unfortunately, it is now too late to sign up for Pair Vote. You’ll have to find a way to vote strategically on your own.

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The sad, great life of John Stuart Mill

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John Stuart Mill

One of the great quotations that liberals love to pull out of their hats it this one from John Stuart Mill: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

That’s one of the reasons our reaction to Sarah Palin is so natural. She fits neatly into the stereotype we hold of conservatives as backwards, backwoods, bible-thumpers who have no interest in, or understanding of, national issues or global politics, let alone the philosophical underpinnings on their own beliefs.

The stereotypes we hold about conservatives are constantly reinforced by blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh who spout idiocy that appeals to the basest aspects of human nature: fear, ignorance and selfishness. We listen to these men and imagine our idiot, racist, sexist, homophobic uncles cackling with glee at having their worldview reflected back at them and justified. (This is our image of typical McCain supporters.) Even though we run into intelligent thoughtful people who are conservatives and who dismiss Bill-O and Rush as slavering populists who have nothing to do with their movement, we just can’t imagine being on the same team as the vast population of stupid folks that make up the conservative base.

The man we want to stand with is Mill.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik outlines Mill’s life by way of reviewing British journalist Richard Reeves’s book, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mill’s life is that he was, in a way, the Mozart of philosophy:

Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary. Latin, Greek, ancient history, political economy: “By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat his examinations for university entrance.

A childhood robbed of all child-like things is sad to contemplate. Though it did produce a great mind, there were consequences. Mill plunged into a two-year-long depression at the age of twenty. He couldn’t write or work. He took refuge in music and poetry, particularly the romantics, and that finally lead him out of the darkness.

Gopnik’s training as an art historian shows through in one of the best parts of the essay where he describes how the influence of art lead Mill towards conservatism at this point in his life.

His love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.

As Mill emerged from his depression though, and started to consume the works of Continental philosophers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, he turned his mind to the idea that we should all have the right to build the best world for ourselves that we can, according to our own ideals. He would become the paragon of liberal thought, an advocate of individual rights, the rights of women, and a fierce opponent of slavery of every kind. On every issue of his day, and even in ours, Mill stands as a hero whose advocacy was generations ahead of its time.

However, Mill’s life, it seems, would always be sad and complicated. The great early feminist Harriet Taylor was the love of his life, but she was married to another man for the first twenty years they knew each other. They were married when Harriet’s husband died, but as Gopnik notes:

John and Harriet’s intellectual idyll was long-lived in shadow, short-lived in sunlight. Mr. Taylor died in 1849, and in 1851 John and Harriet were married. But after only seven and a half years Harriet died of one of those sad, unnamed wasting diseases that blighted the period. Mill had a monument—of the same Carrara marble as Michelangelo’s David—constructed for her in Avignon, with an inscription that included the lines “Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers / this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.” That same month, Mill sent off to the publisher the finished manuscript of “On Liberty,” dedicating it to the memory of “the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement.” (Darwin was finishing “On the Origin of Species” that same year, and also saw it published the next; the two books remain the bedrock of the liberal age.)

At the time of Mill’s own death, he was not highly regarded. He had entered politics after Harriet’s death and he was regularly jeered for his radical views in parliament. The press mocked him for his feminism and obstinant stance against slavery. He did have some followers amongst the lower-classes however.

His working-class admirers helped raise a statue to him on the Thames Embankment. But Mill asked to be interred in a remote French town. Five people came to his burial. This was the one place he wanted to be, with Harriet, in the tiny cemetery outside Avignon, where he could rest beside the one love he had had. In the end, it was all he knew.

I always think it fitting somehow that the lives of great men (and women) are so often sad. Their greatness would almost be too much to contemplate if they didn’t also have to pay a worldly price for it. In the end, isn’t that the story of Christianity as well?

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The Amazing Adventures of Chabon & Obama

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Photograph of author Michael Chabon at a book ...

In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, Michael Chabon wrote one of the most lyric and powerful defences of a politician I have ever read.  Obama vs. the Phobocracy, though it was written only a few months ago, feels like it belongs to an earlier time. Reading it again today reminds me of the hope that Obama’s candidacy truly represents. Before we got bogged down in the day-to-day sniping and histrionics of this campaign, before hatred of Sarah Palin seemed to dominate the discussion, before the constant mocking of McCain’s age, we had the simple luxury of being able to imagine what it would be like to have a President like Barack Obama. The main question at that time was whether we were ready to let ourselves believe, or whether we would let fear win the day; fear of “the other,” fear of losing yet again, and most powerfully: fear of our own disappointment.

Well, Obama won the nomination and we moved on to a new phase of the campaign. Inevitably, there were disappointments along the way. It’s hard for anyone to remain perfect in our eyes. That first blush of love must wear off as we get to know the real man in whom all of our hope was invested. Even for us progressives, the most wide-eyed Obama supporters, by the time of the Democratic National Convention, this race had become less about Hope than it was about Winning.

Michael Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, was an Obama delegate to the convention and he tagged along for the ride. The experience as Chabon has written it up in The New York Review of Books, in a piece called Obama & the Conquest of Denver, manages to capture the exhilaration of this moment in history, even given the realities of a long and difficult campaign. Chabon acknowledges the fact that Obama has been a little bit tarnished by the race so far, but he concludes that the candidate has comported himself with as much honour as could be expected and that he has revealed himself to be that which he has always claimed to be: a principled, but pragmatic man.

No major writer at the moment confesses such a debt to genre fiction as Chabon does, and he starts off describing the convention as though it was some combination of scenes from Dune and The Lord of the Rings.

It was [...] like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain. Suddenly it was hard not to feel that we were, once again, teetering on the point of something momentous, but something different than the previous momentousness.

There is some spectacular writing here. This is Chabon describing the concelebratory nature and mass nostalgia of the whole event:

There was a daily mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood up—on the last night, Obama Night, tens of thousands stood up, and put their hands over their hearts, and said the magic word, indivisible. I was a little self-conscious about doing that, at first, but found that I still remembered the words perfectly, and it was like singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch, an act of collective recollection of the past, of a time when people routinely stood up and sang together, stood up to recite pledges, credos, oaths, poems. The entire party convention is a collective act of that kind. It’s a throwback, a holdover, a relic, like baseball. It’s also, weirdly, a formal, public celebration of spoken language, a kind of political eisteddfod.

Wonderful word that: eisteddfod. I had to look it up.

If I have a complaint about this piece, it’s that Chabon simply can’t let the baseball analogies go. Here he is on the impossible expectations of Obama’s acceptance speech:

Like everyone, I found myself wondering about the speech that he was going to give on Thursday night. Everyone seemed to agree, employing another term from the approved glossary of bromides, that his speech needed to be “a home run.” Obama needed to “hit it out of the park.” But that was not quite the honest truth. We needed Obama to hit it out of the park. That was what we had drafted him to do. He was our hottest prospect in a very long time. Everything we hoped for in the grandstands he would carry to that podium on his shoulders. And that was why I had come to Denver: to add my little featherweight of hope to his burden.

The Republican Convention was dominated by mocking attacks at Obama, with very little room, it seemed to me, given to the ideals that the conservative movement is based upon. It was nice to be reminded in Chabon’s piece of some of the truly wonderful moments of the DNC:

At one point (Bill Clinton) said, “Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” and I felt, for the only time before Stevie Wonder sat down behind his keyboard on Thursday night and started in on “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” something of the shiver of pleasure that artistry induces. Only Obama and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana on Tuesday night, who abandoned his prepared and vetted speech for a skylarking series of off-the-cuff remarks, managed to pull off the same difficult trick of sounding, while engaging in oratory, like he was putting his genuine beliefs into the only form, the only words, that truly suited them.

There has never been a more highly anticipated political speech than the one that would wrap up the convention. Surely there have been speeches that were more watched, and there have definitely been speeches that were more important, but there has ever been another speech where so many people were expecting to witness greatness from a speaker.

But I still had not heard what I had come to hear, what we had all come to hear, the speech of a lifetime (to date) by the greatest orator of his generation. One of the things that had served to discourage me over the course of the primary season was a general acceptance of the premise that oratory was a specious, feckless, inherently untrustworthy art. The Obama camp would rightly dispute the charge of offering only “pretty words,” but they never seemed to argue the larger truth: that ultimately words were all we had; that writing and oratory, argument and persuasion, were the root of democracy; that words can kill, or save us; something along those lines. “You can only say what you can first imagine,” as I heard Tobias Wolff (the short-story master, not the Obama campaign adviser) explain to a group of people at an Obama fund-raiser. It was a mark of Obama’s fitness to lead, to me at least, that he possessed sufficient natural reserves of imagination to kick oratorical ass.

Because of the expectations, there was no way that the speech could fail to disappoint, at least a little bit. There was simply too much work to be done in the speech (outlining specifics, appealing to undecided voters, reassuring Americans that he was really one of them) to allow room for a truly great speech from beginning to end. There were great moments, and there has never been a better performer, and the last 15 minutes of the speech were truly wonderful. Ultimately though, it was what the speech represented, more than the speech itself, that mattered. Chabon writes:

Over the years my hometown of Columbia lost its vision and became divided by lines of race and class and religion. The candidate who promised to try to remake our politics had yet to fulfill his goal. He might fail. But promises, I thought, were like speeches; if you didn’t make them, you would never be able to imagine the better world that they implied.

In the end, the notion of that better world is what matters so much about this election to me. I understand the pragmatic arguments that McCain supporters make. I can even recognize the fact that Obama’s resume might seem thin to some people. I suppose I can even make peace with the fear of the unknown and that will drive some voters away from him. Ultimately though, I just don’t understand how people can resist the hope of a better future that only Obama could possibly deliver. Even if he fails, even if all the hope turns out to have been false, it will have been worth it just to try, just to have that moment when the problems of the world seem solvable.

After Obama vs. the Phobocracy and Obama and the Conquest of Denver, I cannot wait for the third installment of the great Chabon/Obama trilogy, hopefully to be titled: Barack Obama in “Raiders of the Lost Constitution”

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Replace McCain with a tub of lard

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With John McCain announcing that he is suspending his campaign and pulling out of the debate tomorrow night, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber is reminded of a famous episode of BBC4′s “Have I Got News For You” where the Right Honourable Roy Hattersley fails to show up for the third time and is thus replaced with a tub of lard.

I wasn’t familiar with HIGNFY until I watched that clip this morning, but I was fascinated to learn that Boris Johnson has made many memorable appearances on the show, including several episodes where he served as a guest host. Apparently he even won a BAFTA in 2003 for work like this episode, where it appears he’s either having trouble with the teleprompter, or is stuck in some kind of time warp.

Keeping America’s Shitty Jobs at Home

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One thing that disappoints me about every politician I like is their unswerving devotion to populist trade policies. Here’s that I want in a politician:

  1. Someone who understands that free trade helps everyone, rich and poor alike
  2. Someone who understands that it is alright for jobs to go whereever labour is cheapest
  3. Someone who also believes that we should also have terrific social programs at home and a first-rate education for everyone
  4. Someone who doesn’t think that their morals or family values are superior to anyone else’s

I guess you could say, I’m looking for someone who combines all the best aspects of socialism, libertarianism and capitalism all in one package. Is this too much to ask? In the meantime, Go Obama.


Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

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