CE Week #7: “Obama’s symbolic misstep”

Kathleen Parker
Orlando Sentinel
October 12, 2007

The much ado about Barack Obama’s decision not to wear an American flag lapel pin was, well, symbolic.

To follow the debate that followed the headline that followed the nonstory about a dated decision is to witness where acute partisanship has led us. From the hue and cry on the right, you’d have thought Obama had flushed a Bible down the toilet.

What Obama did might have escaped anyone’s notice but for what he said when a reporter in Iowa recently asked him about the missing pin. In the Age of Public Virtue, it is apparently essential that citizens flaunt their patriotism; crucial if they’re running for public office.

 

Obama replied that he had worn a flag pin immediately after Sept. 11, but removed it when he felt it had become a substitute for “true patriotism.”

He said he preferred to demonstrate his allegiance to the US of A by “speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security” and by trying “to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

One could argue that Obama didn’t say exactly the right thing, politically. When campaigning for president, it’s probably best not to insult all those nice Iowans who have flagpoles in their front yards and flag pins in their lapels.

On the other hand, most honest brokers know exactly what he meant, and he’s not wrong. Overused symbols lose their meaning.

There was a time not long ago when displaying one’s political or religious affiliations – as well as one’s affections – was considered seriously bad form. Today it’s bad form to be private, and votes swing on which candidate lays on the best kiss.

From crucifix necklaces and fish lapel pins that declare “I’m a Christian” to colored rubber wristbands that convey solidarity with cancer victims and environmentalists, we’ve become a nation of exhibitionist symbolists.

Competitive caring is the new national sport in which the victor is judged not by acts of charity but by the number of bracelets stacked on his wrists. We wear stickers after we vote or give blood – and plaster yellow ribbons on our SUVs – lest anyone doubt we support our troops.

By making symbols fashionable, we’ve ratified boasting as an act of redemption and elevated empathy to an existential conceit. I care, therefore I am. I care more than you do, therefore I am more than you are.

I wear this lapel pin, therefore, my country ’tis of me, not thee.

But of course that ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes those most publicly virtuous are the least. Some “values” conservatives have wide stances, for instance. Some greenies travel to global warming conferences in private jets. Some politicians wear flag pins just because.

Hypocrisy isn’t inevitable, but neither is the wearing of symbols a guarantee of sincerity.

There’s an obsessive-compulsive component to this ritualized belonging that is tied to another characteristic of our age – anxiety. We find relief by forming identity groups around what we fear. We create symbols and rituals as ways of organizing that anxiety and exercising control over the thing that controls us.

Buy a pink toaster and maybe breast cancer won’t get us. Affix a fish emblem to our cars and maybe Jesus will get us home safely. Valium with adhesive backing.

Consciously, we know it’s “just” a symbol, but symbols have power by virtue of their ability to reach the unconscious – our primitive selves – and to trigger an emotional response. Our little lizard brains get upset and we react viscerally when others disrespect our cherished symbols.

That may explain why Obama’s comment caused such a stir. The American flag doesn’t just stand for patriotism. It stands for an idea and calls up an entire landscape of American memory.

It also pays silent homage to all who came before, those American forefathers who spilled their blood so that a Barack Obama – biracial son of an American mother and a Kenyan father – someday could run for president of the greatest nation man ever conceived.

That’s a heap o’ wallop packed in a cheap trinket.

Wearing one wouldn’t necessarily make Obama a better patriot, but it might make him a better politician.

Published in: on October 14, 2007 at 8:01 pm Comments (1)

CE Week #7: “More Unum, less Pluribus”

William Mckenzie
Dallas Morning News
October 12, 2007

My hunch is that for many of us, our fascination with World War II stems from a deep, hidden yearning for community. We respect the bravery of soldiers who served and bled for their country, but the new Ken Burns documentary, following the Tom Brokaw books, grabs our attention because we envy a time when America had common purpose.

We obviously aren’t united about Iraq. For that matter, except for a few weeks after Sept. 11, we haven’t been a very unified nation since before Vietnam.

 

World War II was different. One of the more interesting parts of Burns’ PBS series is his look at four communities back home while battles raged in Europe and the Pacific. He interviews people about how the war played out in towns such as Sacramento and how the conflict affected them.

He’s essentially saying that greatest generation wasn’t made up only of soldiers in the field. It was the folks back home, too. Everyone was wrapped up in the cause, right down to girls following their boyfriends’ deployments on maps of Europe and women joining the work force for the first time.

Burns summed up the difference between then and now when he recently told USA Today that we lack “the shared sacrifices World War II demanded that created community and made us spiritually richer.”

Today, “we aren’t asked to give up anything. We’re narcissistic free agents,” he said. “Surfing the Internet alone. Watching TV alone. Driving alone. There’s too much Pluribus and not enough Unum.”

It wasn’t until I considered this element of community – and who makes up the greatest generation – that I was able to put my finger on what I so admire about my mother and the ladies she has banded with for more than five decades. The more I think about them holding together as friends since they were young girls, sharing everything from Pearl Harbor to firstborns to shattering deaths, the more I realize they are a microcosm of the community for which many of us yearn.

These women still meet for cards each Tuesday, but the Poker Club, as it is called, is about much more than the aces, jacks and deuces they put on the table.

They probably wouldn’t think of themselves this way, but together they are the antithesis of today’s go-it-alone ethos. They have been meeting each week since before Eisenhower was president, before many women worked and long before anyone dreamed of the term “greatest generation.”

Like many other wives and mothers of their era, they often made their mark silently. They enjoyed common rites of passage while bearing up through adversity for the good of their families.

The Poker Club members married after World War II, had children, joined the PTA, attended Little League games, drove in carpools, hosted birthday parties, celebrated graduations and watched their children marry and start families of their own.

They also ran into their share of struggles. Together, they endured the dissolution of marriages, their children’s ups and downs and the loss of friends. At any given moment, life wasn’t working for one or more of them.

So they counseled each other, bore up through disease and addictions and survived tears at hospitals.

In other words, they persevered. And they made it through glorious and shattering personal and world events because they stuck together.

We celebrate the men who won World War II, who fought in the trenches and came home to start their careers after liberating a continent and triumphing in the Pacific.

But women like these, whom you can find in every community and whom Burns brought to light in his documentary, are just as important in helping us understand – and perhaps recapture – the sense of community their generation experienced. They may not have won a war, not literally, but they were part of the rebirth of our nation after a long and deadly conflict.

As hard as it is to imagine now, we will find our way past Iraq someday. Maybe then we can recapture that sense of community. If we do, we probably will have an even more direct connection with World War II and the greatest generation.

And may we then recall as fondly the women in our own communities who pushed their families forward, held each other together and looked ahead, not back.

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CE Week #7: “Rudy Giuliani – Would You Buy A Used Hawk From This Man?”

By   Michael Hirsh
With Sarah Elkins And Steve Tuttle
Newsweek Neocons can’t help but slink around Washington, D.C. The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives — who favor the assertive use of American power abroad to spread American values — something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudy Giuliani apparently never got that memo. One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement.

Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country’s unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a “world war” with “Islamofascism” and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. “I decided to join Giuliani’s team because his view of the war — what I call World War IV — is very close to my own,” Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) “And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win.” Giuliani clearly hopes this image, born of his heroic performance on 9/11, can carry him to the GOP nomination and to the White House. But is he really the candidate who will “keep Americans safer” if his primary tactic is to go “on offense” in the “long war,” as he often puts it in his campaign stump speech? Critics will say that the neocons already tried that — in Iraq. Still, what’s left of the neocon movement does seem to be converging around the Giuliani campaign, to some degree, because he embraces their common themes: a willingness to use military power, a tendency to group all radical Islamist groups together as a common enemy, strong support for Israel and an aggressive posture toward Iran. “He’s positioning himself as the neo-neocon,” jokes Richard Holbrooke, a top foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans. (He’s argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was not the moral offense it’s been portrayed as, though he doesn’t say Muslims should suffer the same.)

Some traditional conservatives are wary of the Giuliani team. “Clearly it is a rather one-sided group of people,” says Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank. “Their foreign-policy manifesto seems to be ‘We’re right, we’re powerful, and just make my day.’ He’s out-Bushing Bush.” Giuliani campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella says that while the candidate listens to these advisers because “he wants to have as much information as possible, at the end of the day he makes his own decisions.” In some speeches and writings, Giuliani has clearly departed from the more extreme views of Podhoretz — who has said he “hopes and prays” that Bush bombs Iran –and others. His foreign-affairs team also consists of those who take a more centrist view, chief among them his policy coordinator, Yale scholar Charles Hill, who is more skeptical of policies like democracy promotion than most neocons. “I don’t really know much about neoconservatives,” Hill tells NEWSWEEK, adding that the team engages in “lively discussions.” Asked recently in London about Iran, Giuliani said he hoped to avoid military action in the end, but he indicated that the threat of using it should be made plain. “I believe the United States and our allies should deliver a very clear message to Iran, very clear, very sober, very serious: they will not be allowed to become a nuclear power,” he said. Podhoretz, by contrast, tells NEWSWEEK: “I believe that a bombing campaign is the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.”

Regardless of any differences on Iran, Giuliani’s neocons are in line with his pro-Israel stance. As mayor of New York — home to the largest Jewish community in the United States — Giuliani became renowned in the 1990s for his aggressive support of Israel and his mistrust of Palestinian leaders. In 1995, with the Oslo peace process underway, Giuliani kicked Yasir Arafat out of a concert for world leaders at Lincoln Center. Arafat “has never been held to answer for the murders he was implicated in,” the mayor said. On a trip to Israel in 2001, Giuliani told an Israeli audience: “We’re together with you. We are bound by blood.” Earlier this year, in an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Giuliani suggested that “too much emphasis” had been placed on promoting negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. He said “it is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist in the creation of another state that will support terrorism.” One of his advisers, Pipes, has advocated “razing [Palestinian] villages from which attacks are launched.”

All the other candidates for president, both Republican and Democratic, are also advocates of Israel, as are most American voters. And Giuliani’s GOP rivals have also taken strong stands against Iran’s nuclear program. There are also a few neocons advising them — most notably, Liz Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, who has joined Fred Thompson’s team. Yet other GOP candidates, like Mitt Romney, have shied away from identifying too much with neocons, especially those who worked for the Bush administration. Romney has consulted with critics and skeptics of the Iraq War, including Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Barry McCaffrey and former NATO commander Joseph Ralston — but he’s also met with hawks like Fred Kagan. “He talks to everybody, more or less,” says one campaign adviser who didn’t want to be named talking about internal campaign strategy.

Giuliani may be gambling by leaning so heavily on the unpopular neocons. He also knows, however, that painting the War on Terror as a broad moral crusade — the basic neocon approach — is probably the only way he can win over a conservative Republican base that doesn’t like his squishiness on values issues like abortion or his marriages. Giuliani has succeeded by casting the War on Terror as the “defense of Western civilization, and for many [conservative] voters that is a moral issue” that may be as important as abortion, says Gary Bauer of American Values, an advocacy group that promotes traditional marriage and pro-life views, among other conservative issues. (He’s not backing a candidate.) “Without that it would be inconceivable that a socially liberal New York mayor could be leading in the polls for the Republican nomination.” Giuliani’s support of Israel also plays well with Christian evangelicals who have made survival of the Jewish state part of their doctrine. Then there is the Clinton factor. Even key Southern evangelical leaders who don’t favor Giuliani because of his views on abortion, like Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, tell NEWSWEEK that Giuliani is still running strong because the right sees him “as the only candidate who can beat Senator Clinton.” No matter whom he’s taking advice from, Giuliani knows that the impression that he can make Americans safer than Hillary Clinton could ultimately bring him the nomination and the presidency.

With Sarah Elkins And Steve Tuttle

Rudy’s Right Hands

Will Giuliani make us safer? His foreign-policy team boasts some of the Bush era’s most assertive neoconservatives. They include:

Norman Podhoretz

The latest book by neocon maestro Podhoretz, “World War IV,” warns that radical Islam poses a greater threat than communism or Nazism did. He wrote an essay, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” subtitled “I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.”

Martin Kramer

The conservative think tanker has been sharply critical of American scholarship on the Middle East. His blog argues that America should be more concerned with bringing down “Islamist zealots … who detest America” than in democracy-building.

Daniel Pipes

The historian founded the Middle East Forum, which advocates for “fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful” and “countering the Iranian threat.” The Web site he started, Campus Watch, opposes anti-American and anti-Israel bias.

Peter Berkowitz

Giuliani’s senior statecraft, human-rights and freedom adviser, Berkowitz — a professor at George Mason Law School — is a champion of philosopher Leo Strauss, the inspiration for many of the neoconservatives’ policy stances.

Nile Gardiner

The former Thatcher adviser is director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, which shapes “U.S.-British policy towards rogue states.” Gardiner says we’re in “another Munich moment” with Iran and has likened Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

Robert Kasten

Kasten, a former U.S. senator, consistently supported aid to Israel and sided with Reagan neocons in the ’80s. He also crossed swords with the U.N. over its “coercive” family planning and favored cutting aid to countries that don’t vote with the United States at the U.N.

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CE Week #7: “Eco-Rebels”

By Bryan Walsh

Maybe it happened the day after Hurricane Katrina or the night Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, but the first phase of the global-warming debate has ended. Even Skeptic-in-Chief George W. Bush recently convened a global-warming summit, where Condoleezza Rice told foreign diplomats that “climate change is a real problem–and human beings are contributing to it.”

But the climate wars are far from over, and there are still dissidents emerging to challenge the green mainstream. Unlike past skeptics, they accept the basics of global warming but question its severity and challenge the orthodox faith that Kyoto Protocol-style mandatory carbon cuts are the best way to save the planet. Call them the bad boys of environmentalism: gadflies like the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who just came out with the book Cool It, and rebel greens like the political consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who detail their apostasy in Break Through. While their solutions may be flawed, the questions these contrarians raise about climate change are central as we shift into the next and more difficult phase in the debate: what should be done about it.

Lomborg is the right’s favorite environmentalist, and it’s easy to see why. Though he believes that the world is getting warmer and that humankind is causing it, Lomborg’s not too worried. Endangered polar bears? He insists that they’re actually thriving. Rising sea levels swamping coastal cities? Lomborg argues that floods won’t be biblical and that man-made defenses will be sufficient. The main effect of global warming, he writes, may be that “we just notice people wearing slightly fewer layers of winter clothes on a winter’s evening.”

The Dane’s grasp of climate science seems shaky at best. The polar bear is far from O.K.: the U.S. Geological Survey reported last month that two-thirds of the population will disappear by 2050 because of shrinking sea ice. But his main argument is still worth considering. Lomborg believes that it would be far too costly to reduce global carbon emissions enough to actually cool the climate. Since warming is coming no matter what we do and poor countries will suffer the most from it, we should instead direct scarce resources to helping those nations adapt to climate change. That means improving health-care systems and aiding economic growth so that poor countries are better prepared for calamities ahead, climate-related or not. Lomborg is correct to point out that if we’re so worried about the future famines and diseases and refugees of a warmer world, we might want to first do a little more for the hundreds of millions suffering from those catastrophes right now.

Americans Nordhaus and Shellenberger have backgrounds in both politics and environmentalism, and they mercilessly skewer the political mistakes of the green movement. For all the public attention climate change has won, U.S. greens have so far failed to achieve national political action on the issue–and the authors insist that won’t change as long as environmentalism remains wedded to what they call the “politics of limits.” Mandatory emission cuts alone won’t be enough to drive the kind of innovation needed to break the world of its fossil-fuel habit–and China and India will never sign on to caps that could limit economic growth. Instead, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue for Apollo-program-style government investment in clean-energy research, on the order of $30 billion a year. It’s a smart, if not wholly original idea–not least because it would allow greens to frame climate change as an inspiring challenge, not just a pending catastrophe. And that’s a contrarian position that just might help win the climate wars.

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CE Week #7: “Still Looking For Mr. Right”

By NANCY GIBBS, MICHAEL DUFFY

One thing the Council for National Policy (CNP) is never supposed to do is make news. The invitation-only club, whose aggressively vague name is an invisibility cloak for some of the most influential economic and social conservatives in the country, meets three times a year to plot the vast right-wing conspiracy’s next moves–and remind its members not to talk to reporters or even refer to the group by name. Those attending the three-day September meeting in Salt Lake City got to hear Vice President Dick Cheney talk about the war and Mitt Romney testify on his home turf for family values. The agenda included sessions like the Next Generation of Conservatives, presented by the Rev. Jonathan Falwell; What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?; and Parents’ Rights in Public Schools.

But it was a much smaller group of religious conservatives attending the conference who couldn’t resist the opportunity to dust off their flamethrowers and aim them squarely at the rest of their party. On Saturday afternoon, a group of about 45 huddled privately to hear Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, handicap the 2008 race. And out of that two-hour rump session came the warning that within 48 hours landed in every political inbox: If Republicans go ahead and nominate the “pro-abortion” Rudy Giuliani, social conservatives will consider a third-party candidate in 2008. Republican leaders, explains conservative patriarch Richard Viguerie, “think they can holler, ‘The bogeyman’s coming, the bogeyman’s coming!’ every four years, and conservatives will get on board. There is zero evidence of that. They think we will be so afraid of Hillary and losing the Supreme Court that we will just fall in line. Well, we might want to run another candidate.”

The party’s right wing has been flapping for months at the prospect of a pro-choice Republican nominee. But Giuliani is also pro-immigration, pro-gun control and sufficiently indifferent to Evangelical sensibilities to interrupt his let’s-kiss-and-make-up speech at the National Rifle Association and take a cell-phone call from his third wife, whose very existence is a reminder of how little they all have in common. And yet Giuliani continues to float atop most national polls, with 30% Republican support overall and a 27% plurality among Republicans who attend church regularly. Is it possible that his fans haven’t read the fine print? “We ask if they know about his position on abortion, and an amazing number do not,” says political scientist John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, who found that even among Republicans who rank social issues as very important, two-thirds did not know Giuliani’s abortion stance.

To many values voters, Giuliani’s rise is one more insult in the wake of the serial GOP sex scandals in Congress, the failure of George W. Bush’s Administration to amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, and a hunch that religious voters register on the Republican radar only when Election Day is in sight.

For a moment this summer, the savior was supposed to be Fred Thompson–who, whether or not he’s a true conservative, has certainly played one on TV. But with reminders that in real life he supported the hated campaign-finance-reform bill, lobbied for family-planning groups, didn’t go to church and was enough of a federalist to leave the definition of marriage to the individual states, it didn’t take long for Thompson’s halo to dim. Lest anyone remain smitten, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson sent his followers a rocket in September, writing “He has no passion, no zeal and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

There were some at the CNP breakout who shared the spirit but questioned the wisdom of making the third-party threat. Recalled a participant who likened the splinter group to a kamikaze mission: “I was just sitting there thinking how every third-party effort has accomplished the exact opposite of what was intended. Perot helped give America the Clintons, and Nader delivered the White House to Bush.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister often cited as the ideal bridge-building vice-presidential pick, was in no hurry to see his brethren break away. “The fact that a few people talk about a third party doesn’t mean that they are the rank and file.”

But the threat has a certain beautiful logic, even if following through with it would be suicidal. To conservatives who don’t love Giuliani but hate Hillary Clinton, the message is very simple: Don’t bother swallowing your principles to stop Clinton because if enough pro-lifers shift to a third party, Rudy loses anyway. The purists are also making a pragmatic argument: If your conscience doesn’t guide you, how about self-interest? Take abortion off the table, warns Richard Land, the Southern Baptists’ political point man, and “what you do is give the Democrats a license to go hunting for Evangelical votes on other things they care about–on climate change, economic justice, racial reconciliation.” Green’s research suggests that this risk is real. It’s much harder for the GOP to mobilize Christian conservative voters, he says, if abortion is not part of the debate.

And yet the virtuecrats face a challenge from Republican voters who back Giuliani on principle–just a different set of principles from Dobson’s. For many voters, the existential threat of Islamic terrorism trumps domestic social issues like abortion and gay marriage. A Pew Research Center poll finds a continuing shift in the issue valence: even among white Evangelical Protestants, the war is described as very important by 66%, compared with 56% for social issues. That can only help the former New York City mayor whose local war on terrorism was viewed as more competent than Bush’s and who famously ejected Yasser Arafat from Lincoln Center and practically wore a cape to work as an urban crime fighter.

Land flatly asserts that “Giuliani would be the nominee if he were pro-life.” Of course, he adds, “even if he told me he was pro-life, he also told three wives he’d love, honor and cherish them till death do us part.” As for Giuliani, he responded to the third-party threat by embracing the very argument his critics despise. “Every poll shows that I would be, by far, the strongest candidate against Hillary Clinton,” he said the day after the grenade landed. “There hasn’t been one taken in the last six or seven months that shows anything other than I’m the Republican that has the best chance to beat her.” Perhaps he is getting accustomed to being left out of the club that doesn’t want him as a member. The Iowa Christian Alliance just threw a dinner to which they invited all the GOP candidates–except one.

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