GaraLog

Obama and the left

As the Obama Administration has in recent days taken a couple of steps in the civil liberties/national security area  – trying to block the release of torture photos and declaring an intent to retain some form of military commissions for terror suspects (while considering a system of preventive detention), the media has had some fun with a story line about the left’s “souring,” as Politico put it, on President Obama.  There were similar stories in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.  As someone who spends a fair amount of time with a pretty broad spectrum of the so-called left, I think it’s a bogus narrative, and moreover reveals some uncomfortable realities about which people are perceived to speak for the left and what issues they consider important.

I should say first off that while I think the President was dealt an awful hand on Guantanamo, military commissions, the misdeeds of the prior administration and the like, I do have some serious concerns about the discontinuity in several areas between his policies in this realm and those of the Bush Administration.  I wouldn’t use the kind of language in condemning them that the Center for Constitutional Rights and, until this morning, the ACLU has been using, both because I think that is counterproductive and, more importantly, fails to recognize real and profound differences both in policy and tone.  But I think there are genuine concerns, and the human rights and civil liberties groups should continue to do their job and hold the Administration accountable.  It is not their job to worry about the political environment in which Obama is operating.

That said, there is something a little strange about a situation in which the President gives a thoughtful, passionate and eloquent speech on terrorism, national security and human rights, which he did today, which is extremely forceful in its reiteration of the end to torture and the closing of Guantanamo, despite the drumbeat of criticism he is getting from the right, and two things happen.  First, TPM Café, to take one prominent blog of the left, reports all day a steady parade of dismay from human rights and civil liberties organizations.  Second, Dick Cheney in his speech just following Obama’s, and Rush Limbaugh on his radio show this afternoon, essentially accuse the President of waving a white flag to Al Qaeda.  Both were categorical and withering in their attacks.  They heard the same speech that, say, Michael Ratner of CCR did.  Go figure.

Bottom line in terms of Obama’s leadership is that most people are likely to think he got it right, and is striking the right balance, in the metaphor he seems to favor.  I think for various reasons he strikes the balance too heavily on the alleged security side – the torture photos are going to come out anyway some way or another, and why be on the wrong side of that; we have a perfectly good judicial system to try suspected terrorists; long-term preventive detention violates core notions of human rights and due process – but I think he makes a thoughtful case, in the context of principles and values that I have come to trust in him, for why he lands where he does, and what he plans to do to safeguard rights given the choices he is making.  David Cole, no civil liberties slouch, says as much in a Times blog post today.  So let the fights go on, and I hope our civil liberties advocates win most of them and that they don’t have to find themselves too often in opposition to the President.

What I object to, though, and this is the point of the post that I am only now, quite long-windedly getting to, is the characterization of this important debate as an abandonment or betrayal of the left by Obama.  Here’s why.

In the first place, though other critics of the Administration’s civil liberties/security policies may not agree with me, I think Obama and the people around him are operating in entirely good faith.  This is not some kind of political triangulation, a Sister Souljah moment designed to show the broader public that Obama can smack down his friends – the kind of false test the center-right is always demanding of progressive politicians.  Obama has genuine real-world issues to balance, and I have no reason to believe he has not arrived at his few possibly mistaken decisions genuinely and in a typically thoughtful and engaged manner.

Second, who decided that the civil liberties of suspected terrorists – the toughest cases for almost anyone to figure out – are the make-or-break issue for “the left?”  Here we have an Administration that is making an all-out effort to pass national health care, and is nearer to getting it, or something close to it, than we have ever been, despite being in the middle of an economic crisis.  The stimulus package and the proposed budget constitute the largest shift in social welfare policy – the strongest series of steps to protect poor and working people – since the Great Society over forty years ago.  The long-delayed children’s health insurance bill was signed into law, and with the full inclusion of immigrant children, thanks to the leadership shown by the White House.  Great strides have been taken in changing our idiotic Cuba policy, with barely a whimper, thanks to Obama’s exquisite sense of timing, and we are moving on various fronts to talk with our adversaries and deal respectfully with parts of the world given the back of America’s hand by the Bush Adminstration.  The EPA and Interior Department have taken step after step to strengthen environmental standards and conservation, after years of a government which substantially dismantled regulations.  I could go on and on.

There is a category of concern among progressives that is not so much about where Obama comes out as about whether he is moving quickly or deliberately enough.  Despite being behind the tide of history, no one seems to fault him on his opposition to same-sex marriage.  But there are other obviously wrongheaded policies, like the ban on gays in the military, that he has not yet moved to reverse, despite declaring his intent to do so.  A number of steps, including the one I mentioned above on child health insurance, have been taken to bring about a more humane approach to the treatment of immigrants, but immigration reform is still in the pipeline.  He’s outspokenly pro-choice, and repealed the global gag rule on his second day in office, but has not moved on promised pro-choice legislation.  Same is true with respect to labor and the Employee Free Choice Act.  On all these matters, time will tell.  At this moment I choose to trust Obama’s intentions while working to create a climate in which he will have the room – and face the pressure, where necessary – to do the right thing.  He is doing so many other things at once, particularly on key issues of vital importance to poor people, that it is hard to fault Obama for not moving more quickly on immigration reform or a few other matters that are guaranteed red meat for the far right.  To judge from the Cuba policy and a number of other issues, the President has a better sense of timing than most of his critics.  (Not to mention a more genuinely democratic base of support, and a considerably more diverse Cabinet and White House staff than virtually any institution in the “progressive infrastructure,” but I’ll leave that discussion to another day.)

Another development that seems to be causing anxiety among some progressives is the Supreme Court vacancy created by David Souter’s resignation.  Here no one expects the President to appoint someone hostile to civil rights and liberties, but there are a number of voices calling on him to begin to counter the forty-year rightward trend on the court by selecting someone of avowedly liberal views, someone who will be a balance to Scalia and Thomas, even if their voice may be raised for many years in dissent.  I certainly think the court needs that, and over his four or eight-year opportunity to shape the court, I hope the President makes some picks like that – Harold Koh, for example, once he’s spent some time at the State Department.  But I think it’s unlikely he’ll do so now, guaranteeing a battle royal in the Senate when he is trying to move health care, the budget and other matters.  And by temperament and instinct, Obama doesn’t seem to think that way.  That’s fine with me.  But if it ends up as Elena Kagan or a similarly non-ideological warrior, I expect many of my fellow progressives to cluck about missed opportunities.

If I have any significant zone of worry about the Obama administration, it is not so much about discontinuity in national security policies as discontinuity in financial and banking policies.  Some good steps have been taken, like the credit card reform bill he is about to sign (despite its being saddled with appalling pro-gun provisions, since Western and Southern Democrats are no less in thrall to the NRA than Republicans), but I have a lot of disquiet about the Summers/Geithner axis and the possibility that the markets will recover, if not thrive for some time, without the necessary corrective actions to an out-of-control financial sector that thse guys had as much as anyone to do with creating, without genuine accountability, without recovery in the “real” economy.  We have progressive institutions that are strong and vocal on human rights and civil liberties, and that is vitally important.  But we lack the voices on economic justice, or the voices that are there lack the access to media.  Not to mention the fact that the policy infrastructure, the parallel universe of ideas to Rubinomics, has also suffered from underinvestment.

If what the left in America is most concerned about is poverty and inequality, Obama is shaping up as an extraordinary champion and deserves more vocal support. But that the media, looking as always for an intramural fight, focuses instead on an important but limited set of issues that have to do with identity and rights (and readers of this blog or anything else I’ve written and done for thirty years should know that I don’t have to establish my bona fides on those matters), and can find dissatisfaction there, it is because what they see as the principal organs of the left have little to say or do about the issues of most concern to the lives of poor and working people.  We have lost ground steadily in debates over the Supreme Court, and the role of judges generally in recent decades, because we have allowed those debates to be framed almost entirely in terms of issues like separation of church and state or abortion.  I want a court that forcefully upholds those rights. But I also want one that is, as the President has put it to the derision of the right, “empathetic” to those who have been economically marginalized in a society all of whose key institutions have steadily sided in recent years with the rich against the poor.  If we can get people to care about the Supreme Court not just because it is going to stop some Alabama judge from putting the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn, not just because it is going to force the government to treat a suspected terrorist more fairly, but also because the court has a critical role to play in fairness for working people, we will have made a genuine and important change in this country’s politics.

Because I think Obama has a deep understanding of all this, despite doing some things – and he will do more, no doubt – that we may be bound to oppose, I have more confidence in him at this juncture than in most of his liberal critics.  So this is one fairly satisfied liberal (or whatever we call ourselves these days) right now.

You know you have politics a bit too much on the brain

When Michelle Obama appears to you in a dream and tells you Hillary will win Ohio by four points and Texas by one. And that was in Paris, where I was trying not to pay attention to US election developments. So, the morning after, it looks like this will go on a bit longer -- though the delegate math, as Jonathan Alter pointed out in Newsweek, is inexorably in Obama's direction. This slight delay in getting rid of the likes of Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe, Mark Penn, Sidney Blumenthal (though he IS a good writer, when not breaking kneecaps off for the Clintons) and Howard Wolfson would be tolerable if I didn't know that most of them will slide comfortably into CNN or MSNBC punditry, never being far from my eyes and ears -- unless I can shake my election addiction.

Clinton, Obama and me: a confession

Last week the New York Times had an article, in the Metro section, about Barack Obama's days in New York in the 1980's, interviewing people he worked with at some kind of finance office and at NYPIRG, the Ralph Nader-founded organizing group, where he was assigned to work the City College campus.  The gist of the article was that some people who knew Obama then had a somewhat different recollection of the times than the candidate writes about in his memoir and refers to in various speeches, that he overstates both the soullessness of the business job and the cluelessness of the largely white, good-government NYPIRG types, the better to make a point about his political and personal awakening.

A few months ago the Times had a front-page story based on letters that the young Hillary Clinton wrote from Wellesley to a guy she was close to in high school.  This cretin had sold or otherwise made available the letters to the Times.  They contained no startling revelations about her plans for Marxist world domination, lesbian love affairs, or disregard for Tammy Wynette, Billy Graham or NASCAR.  But they were the earnest musings of a college student going through all the personal and political changes that college students go through, which is to say they were at times quite cringe-worthy.

Both of these articles evoked strong sympathy pangs in me.  In Obama's case, because I find that my memory is poor for events in my crowded life, even ten or twenty years ago, and because, like most people, I have a tendency to embellish my past a bit to make myself look better, or sometimes worse, depending on which makes for a better story.  In Clinton's case, because, readers of this blog will not be surprised to know, I have run my mouth off about my innermost thoughts in reams of diaries and letters ever since I learned the Palmer Method.  I have enough of these, going thirty-five years back and more, and come across and read them from time to time, always producing a strong impulse to go back in time and slap and vigorously shake my pompous, pretentious, oh-so-worldly 19- or 22-year old self.  I even cringe at the self that emerges in the letters I have from others who are responding to some letter I wrote them that I haven't seen since I dropped it in the mailbox 33 years ago.  I shudder to think that my letters to them are still out there.  Half the time, I swear, I can hardly remember the person I was engaged in some intense exchange with, much less the events that gave rise to such heated communication.  So I feel for Hillary Clinton.  No one should have to be reminded of what a jerk you were in college, at least not by someone other than your long-suffering parents.  (And let's not forget that this woman has already had to endure the release of a government report documenting the minute details of what her husband's lover did with a cigar, etc.  That's enough revelation for twelve lifetimes.)

The Obama issue is slightly different, at least so far.  What's going on there is the normal human tendency (the normal one -- not the tendency to fabricate your resume or your war medals) to embellish events of the past, partly because it makes for a better story, which you come to believe yourself, the more you tell it,  and partly because you hardly remember the events in the first place, so you fill in the blanks.  Thinking about the Obama article, I realized that I've probably embellished the stories I like to tell about my own life.

Sometimes I give the impression that I was a kind of Horatio Alger figure, pulling myself up by the bootstraps.  I often say that I was the first in my generation to go to college, which is true.  But my great-grandfather was a doctor,  my grandfather an optician, my father a salesman, and I'm a foundation executive -- kind of reverse evolution.  True, as I say, my parents never took me to visit any college I applied to, and certainly were in no position to pull any strings to help me get into Columbia, where I was admitted on a fluke.  But it's also true that every job I had before coming to New York my father got me, by putting a word in with the friend who ran the men's clothing store (whose books he did at night) or the commodore at the Yacht Club, who was one of his bosses at the elastic web manufacturing company whose wares he sold to clothing firms all over New England.  I often say that I never went to an art museum or an orchestra performance, or flew in an airplane, until I was an adult, and all of that is true, also.  I say that most of the books in my family's home were Reader's Digest Condensed Versions, which is true, and that almost every book I owned as a child was a 29-cent Golden Book from the grocery store rack.  I never even heard of most of the classic children's books until I was a nursery school teacher myself.

But both of my parents, who never went to college -- my father because he was one of seven, and the only one who got higher education was my Aunt Jackie, who went into the convent, and my mother because no one considered that an option for a girl, and she was one of six -- were (and are, still, in my mother's case) very literate people who were always reading a book, who always did the crossword puzzle, who were incapable of misspelling a word or making a grammatical error.  Everything I am in those respects I owe to them, that I'm crystal-clear about.  The one trip my family did take in my entire childhood -- when my father and grandfather packed my brother and me in the  back of the station wagon after the Ed Sullivan show one Sunday night and took turns at the wheel driving us to Washington, DC, where my uncle was stationed in the Navy, and where we spent the week visiting the Mint, the F.B.I., the Smithsonian, Mount Vernon and so on, made an impression that lasts to this day.   The man who has 37 miniature plastic statues of the Presidents lined up in order on a shelf in his bathroom is the child of that trip.

I digress a bit.  My basic point is that I am sure that many people who have heard me talk about my background have come away with a slightly different impression of it than what is probably the actual reality, even though I have never lied about anything (to my knowledge).  So it is with other stories in my repertoire.  I introduced a gay rights resolution in 1970 at the New England Model Congress in Springfield, where I was a delegate.  I slept naked on a wooden slab suspended from the wall by two chains, with only a rolled-up piece of toilet paper for a pillow, when I was arrested for alleged possession of controlled substances in 1974.  I ran my Scholastic Press Award-winning high school newspaper into the ground in 1971 when my principled decision to cut sports team coverage lost our modest advertising base.  All good stories.  All essentially true.  But I wonder. 

If I was running for President, some kid from Attleboro High School might surface to say he co-sponsored the resolution at the model congress, and I was in the bathroom when it was debated.  The cop who booked my friends and me in Suffolk County that early October night in 1974 might produce the then-governing regulations for the county jail and show that all prisoners got blankets as standard issue, or that there were no closed-circuit t.v. cameras in the cells, as I always stress when I tell the story.  Brother Brendan, the St. Bernard's High School principal with whom I recall a very unpleasant conversation about the fate of The Sabre, might tell reporters that I was a distracted and inattentive manager who preferred to spend more time hanging around with my clique of cool, self-styled cultural and political sophisticates in the Seminar Room (our version of The Algonquin Round Table) than doing the hard work of reporting and editing.  I don't think  that's the case, but it might be.  Or worse, some long-forgotten fellow student or colleague with a yen for fifteen minutes of celebrity or an axe to grind might come forward with his or her own embellished version of the past, and all of a sudden I'm Al Gore in 2000, inventor of the Internet and the inspiration for Love Story.

So I feel the pain of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  And before signing this off, may I say that I think I met Obama at a dinner party in Hyde Park when he was a State Senator, as I've been telling people, though he left before dinner, but it's possible he was delayed in Springfield for a vote and never made it at all.  But Michelle was there, I'm sure of it -- but I'm sure she and the kids left early. Or maybe she had to pick them up from the sitter's.  It's hard to recall -- it was seven or eight long years ago.  And I really did talk for five minutes with Obama, by then a U.S. Senator, at a D.C. gala dinner a few years ago, and he really did do a very good job of at least pretending he was familiar with all the good works I was doing in the philanthropic world.  Though it may have been only three minutes.  Or maybe two.  And he might have called me "Gary."

I don't want a President too dumb to pack a novel when he travels -- or a Sudoku book, even

"More recently, in a Fox News interview, Mr. Romney made an unusual aside when he described how charged up he often gets after a day of campaigning.

"'I find myself having to read for an hour or so before I can fall asleep," he said. "And thanks to the Gideons, I've got good material."

-- "Gingerly, Romney Seeks Ties to Christian Right," New York Times, October 16

[Alternative title for this post:  Sure.  More likely: "Name of Movie Will Not Appear on Bill."]

Maybe Arthur Dove Opposed Social Security...

One of the penalties I pay for being involved in public policy issues is that I find it necessary to read  The Weekly Standard, to see if on occasion the right-wing has any new or interesting ideas besides trashing anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman as a secret Marxist or Islamofascist fellow traveler.  (The answer, by the way, at this writing is:  no.)  But from time to time there is something that amuses me greatly, and so it was with the latest issue, featuring the late artist Edward Hopper on the cover.  Why, you may ask, is the organ of the U.S. right featuring on its cover an artist who died forty years ago ?  Turns out he was a "McKinley conservative," though quiet about his politics, and among other things he opposed FDR's court-packing moves in the 1930s.

Well, things are a little rough for the right these days, so they can be forgiven for claiming a long-dead artist as a lost hero of the movement.  I look forward to more such excavations:  In Next Week's Standard -- Enrico Caruso Was a Supply Sider!  Sarah Bernhardt Opposed Partial Birth Abortion!

Hillary -- and us -- at this moment

The success of Hillary Clinton's campaign to date -- how much she's outclassed her leading opponents with her knowledge and assuredness (and I write this as an Obama favorer, still leaning toward him but waiting and wishing for him to justify the slightly audacious nature of his candidacy), how she's widening her early lead, how her nomination is coming to seem more likely, and how her election as President in November 2008 is an event with better odds in her favor than anyone else in the race in either party -- has, not surprisingly, led to a backlash.  She and the Clinton juggernaut can take care of themselves pretty well -- indeed, the fact that they can is a significant part of her appeal, as someone who can take a licking and keep on ticking -- but some of the backlash offends me, and as a non-Hillary partisan I want to take a moment to say why.

Some of it is plainly sexist.  Hillary -- and is it sexist to call her by her first name, which we tend not to do with John, Joe, Bill, etc.?  But otherwise how to distinguish her from her Presidential husband? -- as a "hellish housewife" who is such a nag we elect her to shut her up?  Impossible to imagine a male candidate being referred to in that way.  Quoted by Maureen Dowd (who has her own issues), Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, says:  “She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.”  Yeah, it must be pretty tough, Leon,  when you're trying to watch the big game and the ball-and-chain wants you to fork over the charge card so she can run up a big charge at the Bergdorf's sale.  Sometimes it's easier just to give in than fight.  Women are like that.

Shame on him, and shame on Dowd for associating herself with that view.

And some of the Hillary backlash is beginning to remind me of what did in Howard Dean ("the scream") and Al Gore ("the sigh").  In her case, it's the laugh, or as some would have it, the cackle.  Whole New York Times story on that last week.  It's hard to believe this is happening, but I know we should all be alert to a wholly manufactured, pack-of-press-wolves story when we see one in the making, particularly given the performance of the press in the last few elections in contributing to the making of a lasting impression of the careful and fact-respecting Al Gore as a liar and exaggerator and the moderate Howard Dean as a dangerous radical.  The caricature of Hillary as the love child of Che Guevara and Evita Peron has always been wildly at odds with the lengthy known record, and outside the hard right, it's falling away with exposure.  But riding ridiculous issues like her laugh can, and is intended to, annihilate her authenticity, and whatever we think of her policies -- which are more than fair game -- no one who cares about the integrity of our politics should stand by and watch it happen.  Exactly the kind of thing you think Frank Rich would be writing about. Except he's too busy knocking Hillary.

Bipartisan ranting

Matt Bai has a shrewd piece in today's New York Times Week in Review about how MoveOn.org, despite the heavy attacks rained down in it by the "Petraeus/Betray Us" ad, probably helped solidify and extend its support among its progressive donor base.  No doubt.  In general, I like MoveOn, and know a number of the key leaders (if such a non-hierarchical organization can be said to have them).  I probably know, though I haven't checked into it, the creative geniuses behind the Petraeus ad.  Nevertheless, I think it was a stupid blunder, whether or not it boosted MoveOn's coffers.

It's not that I think we should be civil and polite about this obscene war, and I aim to be less and less polite about it from now on.  It's that when your tactic gratifies your opponents, makes life much more difficult for your allies, and shifts the public discussion away from where you want it to be -- well, that's no reason to crow.

As for the Republicans, strangely in the position of having their eventual nominee be anyone's guess, with each of the alternatives even more highly flawed than in a normal election cycle, it is tempting to go a bit easier on them.  But I find myself ticked off by the fairly gentle media coverage of Giuliani's pandering speech to the National Rifle Association.  Maureen Dowd this morning got in a few good digs, mainly on his cell-phone schtick, but here is this supposedly tough guy -- the guy many Republicans (and God forbid some Democrats and Independents) are drawn to in spite of his ideological transgressions and multiple marriages because they think he can Stand Up to Islamofascist Terrorists -- who is quaking so much at the gun lobby, safe enough for him to take on when he was trolling for votes on the Upper West Side but not now,  as he bends down before the far-right Republican base, that he can't eat enough crow.  Romney's even worse, since at least Giuliani has the grace not to pretend he loves to dress up in camouflage and shoot rabbits, and there are a few things, like immigration and abortion, where he hasn't contorted himself into quite the pretzel shape that makes Romney the envy of aspiring yogis everywhere.

One of them, I suppose, will emerge as the Republican nominee, and the flip-flopper in the 2008 Presidential election will not be the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.  Whatever one things of Clinton, Obama and Edwards, so far they hold the same positions on the key issues that they held, say, four years ago.

Another primary victim?

I learned in Alaska last week that the incumbent Governor, Frank Murkowski (who left a Senate seat to take up resident in the state capitol in 2003, then appointed his daughter to the vacancy he created) is in danger of losing his job in the Republican primary taking place today.  As of last week he was running third, at 17%  in the polls, but the more politically savvy Alaskans I spoke with refused to count him out, so it will be interesting to see what happens today.  It's not everyday an incumbent loses in a primary, and it's a measure of the isolation of Alaska that until today's Seattle Times story I'd seen nothing about in the press outside the state.  And as the article demonstrates, there are quirky reasons for it that have little to do with national trends.  Murkowski is famously cranky and curmudgeonly (in contrast to his sparking daughter, who was elected in her own right in 2004 and wins plaudits all around despite the sketchy circumstances of her initial appointment), but so is the state's senior Senator, Ted Stevens, and he seems beloved by people across the political spectrum.  The state seems to produce more than its share of iconoclastic politicians.

Who is a bigot?

This seems like a good question to consider on the holiday devoted to Martin Luther King.  A few things have put me in mind of it recently --  the spectacle of Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, and the very good New York Times Magazine article yesterday on "covering", by an associate dean of the Yale Law School,  Kenji Yoshino.

My heart sinks at the quite likely prospect that Alito will take a seat on the Supreme Court.  We reminisce about how Robert Bork was stopped because his views of the Constitution were too extreme for most Americans, but in fact he was stopped because of that and because the Democrats controlled the United States Senate with 55 votes.  Now the Republicans are in that enviable position.  Simple political equations tell us that when you keep losing elections -- and when the kind of Republicans elected, with but a handful of exceptions, are on the right wing of their increasingly right-wing party -- you make it all but impossible to stop bad judges or almost any bad nominees.  The trap set for our side is that a judicial nominee has to be exposed as a crook or a bigot in order to attract a "no" vote from a nervous Red State Democrat or a New England moderate Republican, who might as well be on the endangered species list along with the spotted owl.

It's the wrong test, of course.  The bigotry one -- where Lindsey Graham's defense of Judge Alito against these spurious charges caused his wife to leave the hearing room in tears -- speaks volumes about where we are in this country on race and other discrimination issues.  For many Americans, it seems, standing in the schoolhouse door to bar the entry of a black student, or turning the fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators equates with racism, and since we see little of that any more in America -- and virtually none of it from public officials -- racism is a thing of the past.  Or where it emerges, as it does with some regularity, in police violence or in incidents like the torture and murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas a few years back, we can all comfort ourselves that these are the acts of an ostracized few, who receive the punishment they deserve from a civilized and shocked society.

So no, by those standards, Samuel Alito is not a bigot, nor are any of the men and women who will vote to confirm him, or the conservative justices alongside whom he will soon, barring an unforseen development, take a seat.  But consider the words of my friend Ted Shaw, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, testifying last week against Alito and dealing with the "bias" charge:

MR. SHAW I want to be very clear because one of the members of this committee raised the issue of whether anyone was alleging that Judge Alito harbors a bias. I want to be very clear at the Legal Defense Fund - on behalf of the Legal Defense Fund - that we are not saying that he harbors racial bias or that he's a racist. That would, as I indicated before, diminish all of us.

Whatever his reason for ruling the way he does in cases, the record is consistently clear, as my colleague and friend Reginald Turner has indicated and as our report has indicated. It is very difficult for African-American plaintiffs in civil rights cases to prevail. Now it's not limited to African-American plaintiffs, but those are the individuals whom we represent at the Legal Defense Fund. Certainly his view of the interpretation of civil rights laws extends to gender discrimination, some of the cases of which we've highlighted in our report. And it extends to other areas with respect to individual rights.

Now, we believe that his views, with respect to reapportionment, which have been aired here are deeply troubling. We believe in the area of criminal justice, his views are troubling. But I particularly want to point to an area about which we have a deep concern.

The analogy with baseball has been very popular - and I want to end on this point - before this committee and in these nominations. And Judge Alito at one time used to like to say about affirmative action that Henry Aaron would not be regarded as the all-time home run king and hero that he is if the fences had been moved in whenever he came to bat.

I think that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about affirmative action. The issue, with respect to civil rights and affirmative action advocates, is not asking - is not about asking that the fences be moved in. It's about asking about an opportunity to take the field, to stand at the plate. It's about opportunity to play the game.

We have a structural racism in this country that is deeply entrenched, centuries beyond the original sin of slavery and decades beyond the systematized system of racial apartheid that Brown v. Board of Education began to dismantle.  (For just a few of the manifestations of this, see my introduction to the OSI Annual Report, available at www. soros.org, or my 2003 Ylvisaker Award speech, linked on the right-hand column of this blog.)  But we have very few bigots as traditionally defined.  It's not useful, or right, to run around calling people racists, or rise up in indignation at false bigotry charges, as Lindsey Graham did, when the sum of a man's policies and positions are bad for the interests of black and brown people at every pivotal moment.  We have to find a new way to talk about this.

Kenji Yoshino's article, drawn from a forthcoming book, makes a real contribution in this regard, for it gives a name to what traditionally-discriminated-against minorities have to do to "pass" in the contemporary world, where being black or gay is not in most instances a barrier to employment or advancement, but being TOO black or gay (wearing cornrows or getting married in Massachusetts) is.

Over the Top: The Left Version

To the extent that I wrote about politics and government in this space, the right, and particularly the Bush Administration, is my principal target, and deservedly so.  It's the worst, scariest U.S. government in my lifetime, and probably ever.  I will continue to bash away at it.

But sometimes my friends -- or, broadly speaking, ideological allies -- scare me, too, and an ad in last Monday's New York Times is a prime example.  "We Demand Bush Step Down," urges www.worldcan'twait.org   There's a bullet list of administration sins -- lying, torturing, fostering greed, blocking abortions, etc. -- and then this striking sentence, leading off the narrative:  "People look at all this and think of Hitler -- and they are right to do so." 

I added the emphasis.  This is way, way over the top.  If there is virtually no difference between Bush and Hitler, bad as things are, then words have lost their meaning.  Moreover, it is the kind of thing that closes the minds of the people you are trying to persuade, overwhelming whatever legitimate argument you are trying to make.  (And I believe an increasingly strong case can be made for impeachment, utterly remote as the chances of that are with a Republican-controlled Congress.)  And the idea that Bush will be driven out of office by a people's movement is a fantasy.

It doesn't surprise me that Ward Churchill, Lynne Stewart or Mumia Abu-Jamal would put their names to this ad, but a number of other names -- some of whom are friends and colleagues of mine -- do surprise and disappoint me.  I don't know what misguided impulse of solidarity caused pro-choice activists like Frances Kissling and Warren Hern, scholars like Frances Fox Piven or Rosalind Petchesky, or writers like Russell Banks and Kurt Vonnegut to sign this, but it is harder to take them seriously now that they have.