Publisher's Note

Could This “Smart” President Be Really, Really Stupid?

Are you tired of hearing how “smart” Barack Obama is? I reached my limit over the summer, when The New York Times Magazine quoted Valerie Jarrett, the president’s liaison to Chicago City Hall, declaring, “I mean, he’s really by far smarter than anybody I know.”

Well, as any Chicago schoolboy knows, there are many different kinds of smart. And right now our commander-in-chief is not looking particularly brilliant— at least on the level of substantive politics.

Take, for example, Obama’s intervention in Chicago’s failed bid for the Olympic Games in 2016. The Daley machine has escorted Obama most of the way during his short political career, and the Daley brothers, Richard and William, like their father, have never been known for their scholastic achievement. Indeed, book learning isn’t much respected in The City That Works— it’s why the public schools are generally so bad.

What really counts with the Chicago political establishment is whether you can deliver the goods, and Obama has notably failed— that is, the tens of thousands of patronage jobs and potential real-estate killings that would have fallen into Richard M. Daley’s hands had the International Olympic Committee voted the way the Chicago City Council usually does: 49-to-1 for whatever the mayor wants. It didn’t matter to City Hall that there wasn’t enough money in the public coffers to pay for staging the games. What mattered was all that boodle for friends and political allies who could have been cut in on the action. As far as I know, the Daleys aren’t personally corrupt about money. But they love power and they deeply value the currency of political leverage. The Olympics would have meant enormous amounts of leverage.

When Obama initially tried to get out of going to Copenhagen, he violated two cardinal rules of Chicago politics: demonstrate loyalty to the boss (be it mayor or ward committeeman) and be persistent. You don’t send your wife to bring home the bacon, and I’m certain that Valerie Jarrett and Rahm Emanuel (the other Daley henchman in the White House) got calls from the home office prompting them to remind the young president of his true responsibilities.

However, when the president suddenly announced that health-care reform did not require his undivided attention and that there was, indeed, time to spare for a transatlantic round trip, he just looked dumb and disorganized. Worse still, the Chicago delegation hadn’t really polled the IOC members (there’s always a way to do that, no matter how “secret” the proceeding) before sending the president on his Mission Impossible. In a legislature, the whips count the likely yes and no votes before a bill is brought to the floor; if they don’t have enough votes for passage, they shift to Plan B, often a tactical retreat designed to avoid public humiliation. Evidently, nobody counted the IOC votes before Obama got on the plane. Eighteen votes out of 94 does not justify sending the president of the United States on a lobbying trip. Not only was Obama humiliated, but his patron, Richard Daley, was also made to look politically incompetent.

Of course, failure to bag the Olympics is just one crack in the “smart” Obama image. I well understand that clever politicians make cynical choices to gain power, even when they know those choices will probably hurt the broader public. So far, Obama’s most cynical choice was to align himself with Robert Rubin and Wall Street in order to raise money for his presidential campaign. Second is his campaign pledge to escalate the occupation of Afghanistan to counter Republican claims that he and the Democrats were appeasers on “terrorism.” In third place is his decision to hand Max Baucus (the senator from Montana who moonlights as an insurance-company lobbyist) the task of “reforming” health care, thus guaranteeing that there would be no genuine reform.

All these maneuvers might seem tactically “smart”: Goldman Sachs, Citicorp and the hedge funds contributed mightily to Obama’s election; John McCain wasn’t able to call Obama a peacenik or “soft on Al Qaeda”; and Baucus’s insurance and nursing-home friends weren’t put to any trouble, which would have caused Obama problems with Baucus about other tax matters before the Senate Finance Committee.

But maybe such cynicism isn’t altogether so smart in 2009. Wall Street, unpunished and unrepentant after three decades of recklessness, is poised to embark on new, unregulated financial adventures, such as the issuance of securitized life-insurance policies known as “life settlement” bonds. Rewarded for their failures with huge sums of public money, the newly emboldened casino managers are liable to sink the ship next time, instead of just flooding it.

In Afghanistan, American soldiers are consistently dying in small batches (under orders from their Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader) while Afghan civilians continue to perish in far greater numbers under American and British bombs supposedly aimed at the Taliban. You don’t even have to remember Vietnam or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan to recognize the profound absurdity of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy. Respectable experts, from Edward Luttwak on the right to George McGovern and William Polk on the left to Andrew J. Bacevich somewhere in the middle, have demolished the notion that such a military campaign can succeed in subduing a nationalist or tribal rebellion.

As for Baucus and health care, it’s clear that whatever bill comes out of the Finance Committee, large numbers of Americans will remain uninsured or underinsured. This means that the emergency room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York will continue to overflow with poor children who come for primary care because their parents can’t afford a pediatrician. And it means that America’s industrial corporations will continue to suffer from a competitive disadvantage with manufacturers based in civilized countries where health care is considered a public trust and a right and the government pays the bill.

Does this sound smart? Or does it sound really, really stupid?

Reading Great Stuff I Didn’t Know I Knew

Vacation for me isn’t just vacation from work; it’s vacation from reading for work. During my working year I read an enormous amount of journalism and history (all of it claiming to be non-fiction), and by summertime this steady ingestion of prosaic “reality” has worn me out.

So when I took off for Vermont and then Europe in August, I made sure my reading material was purely literary, though not necessarily highbrow. I don’t believe in “literature” as a rarefied luxury accessible only to an elite of educated readers. Serious (and some not-so-serious) novels, memoirs and poetry can make life more worthwhile for anybody, in part because they provide relief from the loneliness, often painful, that accompanies the thought: “Am I the only who feels this way?”

Years ago, the poets Mark Van Doren and Archibald MacLeish synthesized the essential value of “great” literature in a conversation that touched on Shakespeare’s genius. MacLeish ventured that “Shakespeare certainly knew things that nobody else knew,” but he was promptly corrected by Van Doren, also an eminent English professor at Columbia. Shakespeare’s “distinction” wasn’t that he had unique or exclusive knowledge, according to Van Doren, but rather that “he knew what everybody knew.” Yes, MacLeish acknowledged, “he knew what everybody knew, but he knew it in a way that nobody else could.” Van Doren then further refined his assessment: Shakespeare “was more like everybody else than anybody else was. . . . [T]hose lines of his that stun us, stun us because they are perfect statements of what we already knew.”

Perfectly stated, I think, although I didn’t take any Shakespeare to read on my trip. I favor directed reading, but with a certain amount of random selection, and for that there’s still nothing better than browsing a good, small independent bookstore, such as Shiretown Books or the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vt. How else could I have stumbled across Rachel Cusk’s Italian travel memoir, The Last Supper, which I bought for the Tuscan leg of my journey. I’d never heard of Cusk or her novels, but I like it when fiction writers try their hand at reporting. At the same time, I felt I needed a classic novel for my time in Vermont (we were staying at Sinclair Lewis’s former country house), and somehow a famous author like Anita Brookner looked more enticing on the Shiretown shelf than it would have in Barnes and Noble. Why had I missed all of Brookner’s previous 23 novels? Why not give Strangers a chance.

With the first half of my vacation covered, I needed books for the second half in France. Thanks to my French mother, I switch languages completely when I cross into “l’Hexagone,” so these works had to be in French. I’m embarrassed that I only recently discovered the late French writer and Resistance hero Romain Gary through his beautiful (though often falsified) memoir, Promise at Dawn. Both Gary and his second wife, the American actress Jean Seberg, committed suicide, so the arrival this past spring of a memoir by their son, Alexandre Gary, was a major literary event in France. How, I wanted to know, had the now 45-year-old son survived such a crushing trauma? Therefore, I had in hand S. Ou L’Esperance de Vie when I arrived at JFK for the flight to Rome.

However, I worried that too much literary sadness might cause excessive angst in sunny Italy. The last time I was there, 12 years ago, I read Frank McCourt’s spectacularly depressing Angela’s Ashes. McCourt’s description of freezing and starving in rainy Limerick had clashed rather starkly with the earthy cuisine and warm blue sky of Tuscany, so this trip, for emotional insurance, I selected an old reliable police novel, Maigret et les Braves gens, by Georges Simenon.

Of course, none of this guaranteed a satisfying read. I used to horde books I was sure I would like by my favorite authors for just this kind of long vacation, but I finally ran out of Graham Greene novels a couple of years ago and decided I ought to take more chances. This time I was lucky. To be sure, Brookner, Cusk, Alexandre Gary and Simenon aren’t Shakespeare, but they all seem to know things I already knew but didn’t know I knew. And they all write exceedingly well.

Brookner was a revelation, perhaps because she so surprised me with her narrative power. How could the interior monologue of a lonely, 73-year-old retired English bachelor hold my interest; how could I possibly care about his last-ditch romantic yearnings? Well, by the end of Strangers I was dying to know which path, or woman, he would choose. First, though, I felt his despair: for Paul, “the future held little more than the grim routines that had always sustained him, together with the hope that they would sustain him to the end.” But then came a glimmer of hope on the rue Madame in Paris: Suddenly, “that life of making do, of making the best of a comfortable but uncomforting existence, could no longer be sustained.”

I found myself rooting for Mrs. Gardner, a lively, impulsive divorcee of around 50 whose “evasiveness was a way of exculpating herself from obligation: it was pre-emptive, in the sense that it proclaimed her to be guilt free. And it was a technique that seemed to serve her well. She would pay for her company with the endless fascination of seeing her will at work.” Which isn’t to say that I didn’t sympathize with Mrs. Gardner’s competitor, Sarah, Paul’s acerbic ex-girlfriend, now widowed, gloomy and losing her nerve.

As for Cusk, I wasn’t initially optimistic, for she mostly traveled with her husband and two young children to places in Italy where I wasn’t going. Indeed, for the first half of The Last Supper I was more impressed by Cusk’s rendering of her native Bristol and fellow English then by anything she had to say about foreigners. Why not just stay home and describe what you know? Thank goodness she didn’t; every time I feared that Cusk was descending into Brits-abroad clichés she brought me up short with startling insights, particularly about art, tennis and Catholicism. And her miniature psychological profiles of St. Francis and Raphael seemed daringly refreshing, whether or not they’re true. I’m grateful when she goes home to England and avoids turning into a boring, professional expat.

I won’t try to translate Alexandre Gary, but an English-language publisher should do it, or at the very least revive a discussion of Romain Gary and the subject of suicides by artists. The son’s survivor’s tale is a harrowing one that stands on its own as a good book. Even when he falls into sentimentality — his invocations of Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday and sensitive prostitutes are annoying — I’m inclined to cut him slack. For a son to rebound from two such sensational acts of self-hatred and anger by celebrity parents is something quite extraordinary.

And then there was Maigret — unfailingly smart and persistent, but after all these years of catching killers still plagued by self-doubt. In les Braves gens he’s investigating thoroughly “decent” people, so the knots of deception are very hard to untie. The thing is, when Maigret finds the trail going cold, he just works harder (often fortified with cognac or white Sancerre) and interviews more people, which is a very good rule to follow for journalists, including me. Not surprisingly, Maigret and his creator view reporters and newspapers as nuisances, unavoidable background noise to be filtered when they impede investigation. A little hard on the journalistic ego, I admit. But then, we can’t all be Simenon, Cusk, Brookner or Alexandre Gary.

My Introduction to Cronkite’s Kindliness

When Walter Cronkite’s son, Chip, took the lectern of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan last month to remember his father, he thanked him for various kindnesses.

But something he said about his father as a working journalist, something that had nothing to do with their personal relationship, stayed with me. It brought back memories not only of my own late father but also of another Cronkite kindness that wasn’t revealed to the thousand or so mourners who filled the church on July 23. What’s more, it reminded me why I went into journalism in the first place.

Chip recalled that Walter would modestly describe himself as “just a reporter” who “ended up reporting bigger and bigger stories.” But— and this is what struck me— “he was fast, too. I liked watching him swivel around and rewrite stories during commercial breaks.”

I’ll bet he was fast. Only someone who has worked on a wire service can appreciate just how fast a writer Cronkite had to be to cover World War II. The sheer volume of words— and the speed with which they had to be dictated or typed— was astonishing. At St. Bart’s, Sandy Socolow, Cronkite’s last executive producer, evoked the deceptively simple creed of the wire-service trade: “Get it first, but get it right.” It’s a lot harder than it sounds, and it took a very special talent to do it well under the stress of war.

However, according to my father, Roderick, there was someone even faster than Cronkite at United Press, a mutual friend named Jim McGlincy, who also covered the war and was Cronkite’s roommate when they were based in England. If Cronkite epitomized restraint, sobriety and good judgment throughout his distinguished career, McGlincy was the opposite— rash, bad-tempered and alcoholic. In his memoir, army P.R. man Barney Oldfield related a not untypical Mc-Glincy story after the Allies retook Cherbourg from the Germans, in late June 1944:

“In the press camp, there was a prophetic incident when U.P.’s James McGlincy, armed with a souvenir German pistol and fortified with Calvados, came into the sleeping tent one night, waving the gun and looking for ‘the enemy.’ Rightly assuming the gun to be loaded, his ‘friends’ promptly rolled out of their sacks and disappeared to safer territory until one of their number disarmed him.”

Prophetic, indeed, since McGlincy’s drinking only got worse (he would later fire a pistol at close quarters in a Maastricht hotel). McGlincy’s “enemy” was himself. The shooting incident got him sent back to Paris, but a newsman of McGlincy’s quality couldn’t be kept down, either by U.S. Army discipline or self-destructive behavior. Not long after the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, McGlincy went to the scene and filed a searing dispatch, which I’ll quote in part:

“Driving into Hiroshima we saw a buzzard sitting on a tree. Nobody but a buzzard would want to pick over this city— undoubtedly the most destroyed city per square mile of all those that have been bombed and shelled in six years of bloody war in Europe and the Pacific…. One bomb— that is the key to the most staggering single event of this war. You can ride through Hiroshima and look at it again and again and all the time you say to yourself, ‘One bomb did all this.’… From that one bomb people are still dying…. According to Japanese doctors, their hair falls out, their gums bleed and they have stomach and kidney trouble…. They get weaker and weaker and finally they die…. In this city you can smell the stench of death as it used to stink from the bodies of dead Germans who were left to bloat in the summer sun in Normandy. In this city you can see all the ruined cities of the world put together and spread out. In this city you can see in the eyes of the few Japanese picking through the ruins all the hate it is possible for a human to muster.”

I don’t know how many newspapers — if any — printed this U.P. report. Self-censorship on Hiroshima was widespread in the American press until John Hersey wrote about it in The New Yorker a year after the bomb dropped. But such a story shows that McGlincy had a lot more to him than bluster and orneriness. And it’s the kind of journalism I always wanted to do.

McGlincy stayed on for a few more years at UP, which is where he met my father after the war, in Paris. Although my dad had been rejected for the draft because of a childhood injury, he volunteered for the American Field Service and drove an ambulance through the bitter winter fighting of 1944–45 in the Vosges mountains. During the campaign he caught pneumonia, endured lots of shelling, and lifted numberless corpses and wounded soldiers.

But like Cronkite, my father didn’t come out of World War II damaged the way McGlincy did. For my dad, the post-war United Press was mostly fun. He liked to tell me how Cronkite, who was his boss’s boss and based in Brussels, once visited the Paris bureau on the Rue des Italiens and tried to get him “to take the job more seriously.” To demonstrate, Cronkite sat down at a typewriter, said, “Here’s how you should do it, Rod,” and then banged out a snappy lead sentence.

McGlincy, meanwhile, went on to a checkered career in newspapers, mainly in New York, where he nevertheless shared a George Polk award in 1954 for the Daily News. The demons stayed with him, though, and when he found himself down and out in the late 1970s, his old friend Cronkite came to the rescue and gave him a job at CBS News. Sandy Socolow told me that McGlincy in his 60s was a “sad sack” and a “wreck,” although his drinking days were over. There wasn’t much left of the newsman either. “He was a writer, but he did precious little,” said Socolow. “We were carrying him.”

But the newly “meek and mild” McGlincy still had a functioning intellect, and it so happened he was a devoted subscriber to Harper’s Magazine when my father and I organized the foundation-funded rescue of the publication, in July 1980. After Cronkite announced the resurrection of Harper’s on The CBS Evening News, McGlincy reconnected with my father, who had become a successful businessman. One of them had the idea to invite Cronkite to come on the board of the newly created Harper’s Magazine Foundation, where Walter served from 1982 until his retirement, last December. Just two years ago, he delivered a funny, impromptu speech at a Harper’s screening of Ken Burns’s documentary The War that elicited a standing ovation.

I wasn’t a close friend of Cronkite, but we had good, instructive conversations over the years, including one in 1988 at McGlincy’s memorial service at the United Nations Chapel. I’m proud I was asked to speak along with Walter, who I assume paid for the service, since it was probably beyond the means of Jim’s son and ex-wife.

They say that in his heyday Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. His generosity and loyalty to Jim McGlincy, as well as to my father and me, makes me think he was a good deal more than just trustworthy. I’ll miss him.

Thurber, Addams and My Funny Bone

When I was growing up, my sense of humor was largely defined by James Thurber and his famous story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” In our home, as in so many other upper-middle-class American families in the ’50s and ’60s, Thurber was the last word in sophisticated satire, whose only possible rivals were Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip and Charles Addams, of Addams Family fame.

I vividly remember my father and a friend of his, psychoanalyst and New Yorker devotee Alfred Flarsheim, gleefully reciting the highlights of Mitty’s heroic fantasy life– with particular emphasis on the “pocketa-pocketa-pocketa” machine sounds that accompany him on his death-defying, devil-may-care exploits in the air, in the courtroom and over the operating table. That the middle-aged Mitty was living a life of quiet desperation was central to the joke– his James Bondish daydreams occur while on a shopping trip to “Waterbury” with his overbearing wife, who reminds him “to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done.”

Long before John Updike, John Cheever and Evan Connell portrayed him in fiction, the beleaguered, frustrated, middle-to-upper-middle-class white male was a fruitful subject for Thurber’s deft cartoons and writing. It is the Mitty persona, I imagine, that recoils in the Thurber cartoon in which a lawyer confronts a witness with a kangaroo and declares: “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.”

For years, I accepted the culture’s line on Thurber– I stipulated, as Edward Weeks wrote in The Atlantic, that he was “the No. 1 funnyman in the U.S.” And I had plenty of company: Even the resolutely unsophisticated and unfunny Reader’s Digest decreed that “James Thurber is one of the funniest men in America.” True, “much of his humor has been labeled ‘nonsense,’ but there is an uneasy feeling abroad that the inhabitants of ‘Thurber’s World’ of deranged sanity may be us.”

But something about Thurber’s approach to laughs has always made me uncomfortable. I had a sneaking suspicion that he was more than a bit off target in his send-ups of modern life, in the same way that Lewis Carroll was weirdly off key in his supposedly delightful “children’s” book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a very disturbing tale I don’t recommend for children. The Life magazine blurb in my yellowing mass-market paperback copy of The Beast in Me and Other Animals gives us a clue: While Thurber may well have been “the greatest working humorist of our day… his lethal, deceptively casual pot shots at human foibles continue to amuse the people he is insulting.” Well, why were they laughing if they were being insulted by killer words?

Recently, I got an insight into my uneasiness about Thurber and his canonization (most notably in a Library of America edition that puts him on the bookshelf right up there with Lincoln and Melville). By good fortune, I watched the excellent Thurber documentary made by my friend the painter Adam Van Doren, which favors its subject but nevertheless describes what was clearly a tortured soul. Thurber’s childhood– especially his accidental loss of an eye and his eccentric mother– made for a very complicated stew.

I won’t play amateur psychologist with someone I don’t feel I understand. But the unattractive aspect of Thurber that may have resonated with my unsentimental, often mocking father, was best described by Van Doren’s grandfather, Mark, the brilliant Columbia English professor and poet who was a good friend and admirer of Thurber’s.

In a filmed conversation with Archibald MacLeish, Van Doren the elder described how on first meeting Thurber, in 1941, the famous “humor” writer wept when they were alone together. Van Doren asked what was the matter and Thurber, who had recently lost his sight in his remaining good eye, replied, “this blindness is a punishment…. In my writings I have always dealt with meanness and stupidity. My subject has never been goodness and strength. I have always talked about poor, weak people. I made fun of them. So this is a punishment. I have been stricken blind.” A gross exaggeration, as Van Doren sought to reassure Thurber, but very sad coming from America’s Number 1 funnyman.

However, something else has shaken my faith in Thurber’s undisputed top ranking in the pantheon of humorists. By chance, last month I visited the Charles Addams Foundation, in Sagaponack, Long Island, where the great cartoonist of the macabre had occupied, with his third wife, his last home and studio.

Unfortunately, Addams’s spooky creations are best remembered through the silly TV series, The Addams Family, which aired in the mid-’60s, and a 1991 movie of the same name. But a tour of his comfortable, utterly unspooky house and its lovely Giverny-like garden dramatically revived my earliest feelings about Addams’s work– and my doubts about Thurber’s. Addams’s cartoons, displayed throughout the house among other memorabilia, were simply laugh-out-loud funny. And– odd for such overtly sinister humor– I didn’t feel bad, or mean-spirited, after I’d laughed.

Since Addams didn’t write pieces, the best point of comparison between him and Thurber is their respective reflections on the war between the sexes. Both cartoonists portrayed spouses in states of distressing confrontation– in Addams’s work they’re frequently at knifepoint or gunpoint. With Thurber, the wife is frequently oversized, aggressive, and spiteful, as in his cartoon where a tall woman looking down at her dismayed husband says: “When I Realize That I Once Actually Loved You I Go Cold All Over.” Ouch. I get the joke, and the ironic twist, but I don’t laugh when I scan this cartoon because it’s just too bitterly unhappy.

Addams’s portrayals of conjugal conflict do something quite different. A boring-looking, expressionless American couple is visiting the Coliseum in contemporary Rome; projected above is the husband’s fantasy of his wife being chased by a lion in front of huge crowd in ancient Rome. Very funny, as well as grim, yet not merciless. And Addams generously grants wives their due in relation to annoying husbands, as in the cartoon where an elderly woman greets her shaggy, unkempt spouse at the door: “This had better be good, Robinson.”

Moreover, Addams’s couples share the pain of life: the man tying his wife to the railroad tracks while she presses her finger on the rope to help him tie the knot; Morticia and Gomez in intimate embrace, side by side in front of a cold, unlit fireplace:

“Are you unhappy, darling?”

“Oh yes, yes! Completely.”

Somehow, Addams’s deliberately inhuman-looking characters are more humane and redeeming to me than Thurber’s chilly, uncompassionate caricatures. And they have a better feel for the restorative power of humor. There’s real warmth and good humor between the ghoulish Morticia and Gomez. Walter Mitty’s life is pathetic and discouraging, and his relationship with his wife is frigid. After all this time at the Thurber Carnival, I’d rather live with The Addams Family.

Obama a Very Smooth Liar

It isn’t quite fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to take back later. For now, I won’t quibble with the St. Petersburg Times’s Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises and breaking only six.

And yet, broadly speaking, Obama has been lying on a pretty impressive scale. You just have to get past his grandiloquent rhetoric— usually empty of substance— to get a handle on it. I offer a short, incomplete list, which I’m sure others could easily enlarge.

• Obama portrayed himself as the peace candidate, or at least the anti-war candidate. He is not a peace president, nor is he stopping any wars. True, he promised military escalation in Afghanistan (to blunt John McCain’s accusations of wimpishness), but well-meaning folks believed their new hero would genuinely move to end the occupation of Iraq and seriously try to negotiate with the Taliban. Instead, he has not only increased the number of troops and attacks against the Afghan insurgency, he has also expanded on George Bush’s cross-border raids into Pakistan, which have killed many civilians. The way things are going, Pakistan could become the new Cambodia and Obama the new Nixon.
  
  
  
  In Iraq, Obama has promised to withdraw all the troops . . . unless, which means that we’re not leaving. Whether it’s 50,000 troops remaining at the “invitation” of the so-called government of Iraq, or just enough to man the 14 permanent military bases, or some combination of U.S. military personnel and private mercenaries that exceeds 50,000 soldiers, our army will almost certainly stay in Iraq past the stated deadline of Jan. 1, 2012.

• Obama said he wanted to reform Washington and “fix” its “broken” system of corrupt lobbying. But Obama is neither a reformer nor a skilled legislative mechanic. Hatched from the Daley Machine in one-party Chicago, Obama wouldn’t be president today if he rocked boats. Witness the appointment of Roland Burris by the corrupt former Governor Rod Blagojevich to fill Obama’s Senate seat: not a word of public protest from the new administration because Burris is a made man in the Chicago Democratic organization. So what if “Tombstone Roland” can be heard on the U.S. attorney’s wiretaps of Blagojevich, dancing around the delicate question of how to raise money for Blago without appearing to be buying his seat.
  
  
  
  As for pork-barrel politics, Obama named one of its greatest champions, Chicago’s own Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff, and the new budget (as well as the “stimulus” package) is loaded with pork. Meanwhile, have you heard anything serious about campaign-finance reform from Obama? Not very likely from someone who refused public financing and still has about $10 million left over from record receipts of $745.7 million. It’s just a detail, I know, but Obama’s naming of former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn III as deputy secretary of defense seems to be at odds with the president’s alleged crusade against special interests and the “revolving door” between private business and government. He has also “sold” ambassadorships to campaign donors. The biggest plum, London, is slated for Lou Susman, a Chicagoan and former Citigroup executive who bundled $239,000. Paris has been reserved for Charles Rivkin, who raised about $500,000 for Obama.

• Obama, with his Arabic middle name and his big Cairo speech, wants people to think that he is the Muslim world’s new best friend. Well, the photograph of a cheery Obama with Saudi King Abdullah and a smiling Emanuel with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, proves the contrary. The Saudi royal family hates the idea of representative government for ordinary Muslims and is cruelly indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. A democratic, independent, partly secular Palestine could only make the Saudi oligarchy look bad. Thus, the House of Saud is perfectly happy with the status quo, and so, evidently, is Obama.
  
  
  
  Without Saudi pressure, there will be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Saudi oil is the only lever that would cause America to press Israel into making real concessions. Indeed, the president doesn’t mean for one minute to force Israel into anything more than symbolic withdrawals of its illegal settlements on the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Saudi elite continues to play its double game, paying protection money to extremist Islam and granting pensions to the relatives of suicide bombers. It’s just politics, say Barack and Rahm, grinning ear-to-ear with their sleazy new friends from Riyahd. Just keep the oil pumping around election time and all will be well.

• Obama makes like he’s a friend of organized labor, at least he did during the Ohio primary when he needed to beat Hillary Clinton. At the time, he put out a flier headlined “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals” and charged that “a little more than a year ago, Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was a ‘boon’ to the economy.” In a debate with Clinton on Feb. 26, 2008, he said, “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA] in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about” and “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to get “labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”
  
  
  
  But two months ago, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk said such a blunt instrument was no longer necessary and that the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were now “of the mind that we should be looking for opportunities to strengthen [the North American Free Trade Agreement].” And, of course, there is no discussion at all about renegotiating Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, a “bad trade deal” that has done even greater harm to American workers and unions than has NAFTA.

Meanwhile, as I noted in my April 15 column, “Wall Street sharks circle the UAW,” Obama and his banker friend Steven Rattner are liquidating the United Auto Workers even as they liquidate the American auto industry. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s pseudo-secretary of labor, said as much. “The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bailout is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise,” he wrote last month in the Financial Times— no surprise, considering that Obama’s chief economic adviser remains Lawrence Summers, a champion of deregulation and “free-market” economics in the Clinton administration and very much the enemy of labor unions.

Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.

As Hitler Tightened the Screws: Hypocrisy and conniving in France

Have you ever asked yourself what you would have done if you had found yourself in Paris on June 14, 1940, when the German army rolled into town? Collaboration so quickly became the norm that this fundamental question– would I have run, fought, played ball or just kept my head down?– rarely gets posed in public. Of course, the answer would have depended largely on whether you were Jewish, or French, or both. But whatever your origins, or your politics, the practical and moral choices presented that day still trouble the conscience and demand debate.

Two exhibitions now running in New York describe the different paths taken by French writers– mostly less than admirable– when Nazism swept over a country reputed to be imbued with Enlightenment principles of liberty and tolerance. At the New York Public Library, the ambitious show “Between Collaboration and Resistance” describes the life of the literati under the Occupation; at the Museum of Jewish Heritage we can observe the depressing trajectory of the “French”-Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky, whose life and death mirror the intellectual evasion so prevalent under Nazi and Vichy rule in her adopted homeland.

As a writer and publisher, I don’t pretend to know what I would have done, much as I like to fantasize that I would have joined the Resistance, or, like Romain Gary, fled to London to follow de Gaulle. My hypothetical moral dilemma is too bound up in the experience of my French mother, who spent the war in the occupied zone in relative comfort though anguished isolation. Her father was anti-German and pro-British, but he nonetheless kept his wood-veneer factory running full tilt to meet the demand of German furniture makers. His justification, in part, was to prevent his employees from being deported to work in German munitions factories (some were forced to go anyway). But I wish he had lived long enough for me to ask why, if he was so anti-German, he didn’t enter into clandestine resistance along with the tiny minority who chose to stay and fight.

My grandfather died when I was six, so I didn’t get the chance. Paradoxically, some of the money he made during the war helped pay for my private schooling in America, and a good education is what enabled me to study with the great historian of Vichy France, Robert Paxton.

But we imagine intellectuals to be more principled, or at least more thoughtful, than ordinary businessmen. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the public-library exhibition (curated by a team led by Paxton) to suggest that French writers behaved any better than other Frenchmen. To be sure, there were notable exceptions, like the novelist Louis Aragon, a communist, and his wife, Elsa Triolet (as well as the French-writing Irishman Samuel Beckett), who actively resisted. Other literary figures of Jewish origin, like Jacques Schiffrin (aided by André Gide) and André Maurois, wisely found refuge in America, where they were able to work for the anti-Nazi cause.

But paradox and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Some non-collaborators wrote for collaborationist journals and, for a time, even Maurois naïvely supported Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist Vichy regime that governed the so-called free zone in the south and eventually conducted its own roundups of Jews. As the historian Thomas Christofferson writes, “Purity never existed, not even among intellectuals…. For the most part, the intellectual resistance was a limited, Parisian phenomenon that very few people experienced firsthand.”

One of the most damning pieces of evidence at the library is a short dismissal letter dated Nov. 5, 1940, written by the publisher Gaston Gallimard to Schiffrin to place his company in conformity with Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws: “Dear Sir, Reorganizing our publishing house on new bases, I must end your participation in the production of the collection ‘Bibliotèque de la Pléiade’…. Please be assured, sir, of my sincerest regards.” This odious bit of realpolitik did not, however, prevent Aragon and Camus in 1942, and Sartre in 1943, from having their books published by Gallimard.

Other publishers conducted themselves no more honorably, firing their Jewish employees with little or no hesitation. In muted contrast was Albin Michel, which reluctantly continued to subsidize Némirovsky while she sought safety with her family in a village in Burgundy. But Némirovsky was, like Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight. If many intellectuals blinded themselves to Vichy’s fraudulent declarations of independence, Némirovsky virtually committed suicide in pursuit of “Frenchness” in the eyes of Vichy. At the Museum of Jewish Heritage, we can read her pathetic letter to Pétain of Sept. 13, 1940, in which she seeks special status by differentiating herself from other, supposedly less desirable Jewish immigrants to France. By now converted to Catholicism, she writes: “I cannot believe… that one makes no distinction between the undesirables and the honorable foreigners who, if they have received royal hospitality from France, are conscious of having done their best to deserve it.”

A very fine writer, Némirovsky, but politically tone deaf. Raised in a monied banking family that fled Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, her snobbery and sense of class entitlement trumped her common sense– she seems literally to have believed that writing well in French, along with her upper-class credentials and religious conversion, would spare her the fate reserved for all Jews by Hitler. Already in 1938, Irène and her banker husband had been denied French citizenship, but she didn’t take the hint. In any event, Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws were applied without prodding from the Germans, so French anti-Semitism was homegrown and citizenship was no protection. Less than two years after she wrote to Pétain, Némirovsky was arrested by the French police inside the occupied zone and deported to Auschwitz, where she was gassed to death.

But as disgracefully as the French responded to Hitler– and as well presented as these two exhibitions are– there’s something disturbing about watching Americans proceed in shocked judgment of foreigners and their moral crimes. In the end, the Occupation is a French story that may continue to fascinate Americans simply because France is more interesting than, say, Holland, where a higher percentage of the Jewish population was deported. It may also be that Americans, in their perpetual innocence, prefer to consider the sins of others rather than examine their own history.

Before we get to feeling too self-righteous, we ought to mount a public exhibition on American policy toward Vichy (where the U.S. ambassador remained until May 1942), Jewish refugees (the Roosevelt State Department turned away convoys loaded with fleeing Jews from East Coast ports and maintained its strict quotas on immigration throughout the war), and the death camps themselves (the U.S. government played down early reports of the growing Holocaust). The exhibit could include a section, drawn from Charles Glass’s forthcoming book, Americans in Paris, on the 5,000 or so Americans who remained in Paris during the Occupation, not all of whom distinguished themselves ethically.

One of those Americans was the very wealthy Florence Gould, a willing collaborator who presided over a Franco-German literary and artists’ salon all through those four dark years. The Florence Gould Foundation is a major funder of the library exhibition, which is to say that some moral questions are very complex.

Panel: Liberalism, imperialism and the politics of human rights

Harper’s readers are cordially invited to attend a panel discussion in New York City, Sunday, 19th April, 12–2pm.

Liberalism, Imperialism & the Politics of Human Rights

Jacob Stevens (Chair)—Verso Books

Richard Seymour—author, “The Liberal Defense of Murder” Samuel Moyn—History, Columbia University John R. MacArthur—Publisher, Harper’s Magazine

Register at: www.leftforum.org.

Wall Street Sharks Circle the UAW

Barack Obama’s commitment to helping labor has always been suspect, but handing over the American car business to the investment banker Steven Rattner might well turn the president into the last great union buster.

To be sure, we’re already long past the point where industrial unions have any real clout in our so-called service economy— this thanks to “free trade” (that is, guaranteed cheap labor in foreign locales and low import tariffs on foreign-made goods) and Bill Clinton’s alliance with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Franklin Roosevelt’s old party of labor is now almost entirely the party of Wall Street and only a severe depression might alter this political reality. When Obama sent economist Austen Goolsbee to reassure the Canadian government that the candidate’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Ohio primary didn’t mean anything, he meant it.

But this isn’t to say there aren’t a few remaining pockets of working-class resistance to the money power that Wall Street and the DLC would like to crush. And right now, Rattner and the Treasury Department task force’s biggest target is not the overpaid executive staff at General Motors, but the United Auto Workers union, the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization.

Just wait a few weeks, and the demands for concessions from the allegedly overpaid and cosseted UAW members will rise to levels of shrillness far greater than the very brief — and ineffective — outcry over the AIG bonuses.

It wasn’t so long ago that the UAW set the standard for successful collective bargaining and trade-union integrity. Its greatest leader, the leftist Walter Reuther, was so powerfully independent that in 1968 he even dared to bolt from the AFL-CIO and its reactionary boss, George Meany.

The break stemmed in part from the longtime rivalry between industrial and craft unions— Meany started out as a plumber— but it also resulted from Reuther’s greater radicalism and vision. It was the UAW that early on organized black workers, won excellent medical benefits for its members and initiated the innovation of “pattern bargaining” with the auto industry, targeting one car company at contract time instead of taking on the whole business.

Reuther could do this because he had a huge number of members who owed their middle-class status to the UAW, as well as to the G.I. Bill and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

At its peak, in 1979, the UAW boasted a membership of more than 1.5 million and a close relationship (perhaps too close) with the leadership of the Democratic Party. Even into the 1980s, the UAW remained so important that Douglas Fraser, Reuther’s protégé and eventual successor, was elected to the Chrysler board of directors, the first union leader to serve on the board of a major American corporation. Fraser and the union had helped Chrysler through its 1979 crisis, successfully lobbying for government loan guarantees and accepting wage cuts and layoffs to keep the company out of bankruptcy.

Chrysler’s bailout and revival were organized by the company’s chief executive, Lee Iacocca, who saw the handwriting on the wall written in Japanese characters. I’m no fan of this self-promoting blowhard (his opportunistic hypocrisy on tariffs and trade policy is stunning), but at least he was a car person with a degree in engineering and a sense of what sells. Nobody in the Carter administration or Congress told Iacocca to resign, or Douglas Fraser to stay off the Chrysler board, as a condition for the loan guarantees.

They wouldn’t have dared.

Today, Barack Obama consorts with the hedge fund/banking crowd that gave so much money to his “transformative” campaign, while he makes believe that he cares about unions. So beholden is the president to finance that he fires the General Motors CEO, Rick Wagoner, and puts in charge a banker who knows how to break up businesses, not build them— Steven Rattner. It doesn’t cost Obama anything politically because the industrial lobby hardly counts anymore, especially compared with a Wal-Mart/retail lobby that loves “free trade” for its Chinese imports made by 50-cent-an-hour labor.

Meanwhile, Obama feels he has nothing to fear from a UAW that has shrunk to a mere 460,000 or so members and believes (falsely) that it has no alternative to supporting the Democratic Party. Have you ever seen UAW President Ron Gettelfinger on TV?

Right-wingers still whine about “big labor’s” supposedly disproportionate influence, but campaign contributions tell a different story: The finance, insurance and real-estate sector (FIRE) gave Obama just over $38 million in this last campaign, while labor gave a paltry $466,324, according to the research group Open Secrets. Granted, UAW political-action committees donated $2.32 million to various Democratic candidates in the latest election cycle (according to the FEC), but this is loose change in the world of Steven Rattner and his wife, Maureen White, a former banker and one-time national finance chairwoman of the Democratic Party. Combined, the bundled contributions of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and J.P. MorganChase, just to the Obama campaign, amounted to $2.28 million.

Nevertheless, we will hear no end of the overpaid and gluttonous autoworkers who dared to demand health insurance, pensions and good wages. Isn’t it outrageous that a GM production worker can make $28 an hour, including benefits, and that he or she can retire in some comfort after decades on the assembly line? Isn’t it terrible that GM is contractually obliged to take care of its workers? God forbid we protect Americans by raising the 2.5 percent tariff on imported cars to compensate for indirect Japanese export subsidies.

But the UAW’s critics needn’t worry. Whether Obama eases GM into Chapter 11 bankruptcy— that wonderful system of corporate protectionism— no doubt favored by Austen Goolsbee and Lawrence Summers, or whether he forces the UAW to destroy itself with givebacks, we’re headed for the end of the line for middle-class unionism.

Bankruptcy would make it easier to break union contracts, but the UAW, relentlessly attacked for being too successful for its members and so far unable to organize Japanese car plants in the United States, will probably cave in for PR reasons before it comes to Chapter 11. If that happens, it won’t be a union anymore.

Meanwhile, autoworkers (and automakers) in Japan will continue to benefit from government-funded national health insurance unavailable to American employees of non-union Japanese plants in the U.S. And Steven Rattner can go on throwing benefits for Democrats at his home on Fifth Avenue.

Obama is Far From a Radical Reformer

Assessing the gigantic new budget proposed by Barack Obama is hard enough, but the $3.6 trillion behemoth turns incomprehensible when left- and right-leaning journalists assigned to analyze it seem unable to separate wishful thinking from political reality.

An early skeptic about the left-handed phenom from Chicago, I’ve never had any illusions about Obama’s commitment to left-wing “change.” Yet that’s exactly what pundits across the political spectrum say Obama is putting forth.

Of course, we heard it all before in the Clinton administrations—“Ah know you voted for chaiinge”—but the change Clinton had in mind was realigning the Democratic Party to the right of center, where he could raise more money for his political campaigns. Millions were thrown off welfare—while millions of unregulated “derivatives” were hurled into the debt markets, anti-union, anti-labor “free trade” pacts were passed and a pre-emptive war was launched against Serbia without U.N. consent.

Now Obama, a product of the non-ideological Daley machine and advised largely by Clinton retreads, has presented what ought to be described as a cautious, centrist budget, albeit one with a huge deficit. Sure, it’s a lot of money, but given the severity of the recession, it’s hardly excessive. Indeed, such unradical liberals as Paul Krugman have criticized Obama’s pre-budget stimulus package as not being nearly aggressive enough.

The same could be said of the new budget, and yet “liberals” and “conservatives” alike insist that Obama has set into motion a bold leftward shift in thinking. From the official left, The Nation magazine calls the budget proposal “an audacious plan to transform America.” In the center, Clive Crook, of the staid Financial Times, calls the new budget “a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal” and Obama himself “conservatism’s worst nightmare.” On the official right, The Wall Street Journal warns ominously of “The Obama Revolution” and asserts that the president is “attempting not merely to expand the role of the federal government but to put it in such a dominant position that its power can never be rolled back.”

From these commentaries, you might think that a crypto-socialist had taken up residence in the White House. But such a reading of Obama is absurd.

First, the “soak-the-rich” aspect of the proposed tax changes is vastly overstated. Obama wants to reduce the deduction that top earners take on their charitable giving, but he timidly declines to raise the highest marginal-income-tax rate immediately, preferring to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011. Not until 2012 would the President’s rich Wall Street and corporate-executive campaign donors be forced to pay 39.6 percent on part of their income—hardly confiscatory when one recalls that the top marginal rate remained above 90 percent through both Eisenhower administrations and part of Kennedy’s. Similarly, the top rate on capital gains was as high as 36.5 percent during the Nixon/Ford era; Obama aims to raise it to just 20 percent from the current 15.

Fiddling with the tax code (not reforming it) is supposed to help pay for better health care. Already, Obama’s health plan doesn’t cover everyone, but it does ensure that insurance companies and HMOs will continue reaping profits off illness and bad luck. President Truman, hardly a radical left-winger, proposed authentic national health insurance in 1945 in the form of an optional, federally administered fund to which anyone could pay a modest monthly fee and be guaranteed payment of all their medical bills. Participating doctors would have been reimbursed by the government, but such participation was to be voluntary. Such a common-sense “single-payer” program is not even being considered by Obama and Democratic leaders.

Even so, left and right persist in the fantasy that the president is a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character prepared to “take on” the powers that be. It’s one thing to rationalize the vast sums that Obama raised for his campaign from commercial and investment banks (“Well, you have to get elected,” etc.). But rationalizing the laissez-faire beliefs of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner—exhibited most notably in their scandalous opposition to derivatives regulation in the Clinton administration—borders on the idiotic. The left pretends that Summers isn’t really Obama’s chief economic adviser, while the right pretends the former Treasury secretary has converted to left-wing Gaullism. In reality, Summers and Geithner are in place precisely to prevent real reform of a banking system that helped put Obama in the White House.

On budget matters, so far, Obama’s economic “brain trust” is brain-dead. Comparisons with FDR are spurious, given that the administration so far won’t even discuss restoring some form of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal law that separated investment banks and commercial banks. Meanwhile, Obama seems to have forgotten his proposed “reform” of NAFTA or of our cheap-labor investment agreement with China (so-called Permanent Normal Trading Relations). And he’s certainly not calling for higher tariffs to protect American industry and wages, or for bank nationalizations.

The Wall Street Journal’s Big Brother socialist bogeyman is a canard. There’s no authentic national economic planning in the Obama budget, just the usual hodge-podge of programs that sound good to this or that constituency, congressman or columnist.

Here’s one little bit of central planning that could have helped, but isn’t seriously addressed: rebuilding the nation’s passenger- and freight-railroad network, badly weakened by deregulation and mismanagement. The stimulus bill has $8 billion for high-speed rail lines and the proposed budget adds another $5 billion over five years. This is chump change compared with the cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and paltry next to the typical cost-plus Pentagon boondoggle.

Why not spend $50 billion on railroads? It would make the country more energy-efficient, put lots of people to work installing and upgrading track, and encourage General Electric to rehire the 1,200 people it just laid off at its locomotive plant in Erie, Pennsylvania. With faster, better trains (including urban rapid-transit lines), American companies could get back into the passenger-train-car building business, now lost to Canada and Europe, and American steel mills could profitably use some of its excess capacity.

Obama, a moderate with far too much respect for the globalized financial class, is surely the unleft, unradical president. Which makes you wonder why left and right find common cause in saying otherwise.

Studs Terkel: “Radical conservative”

Killing time before the Studs Terkel memorial celebration in Chicago on January 30, I glanced up at the magnificent Tiffany dome of the Chicago Cultural Center and noticed it was ringed with a quotation from Joseph Addison: “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.”

It seemed a fitting backdrop to Studs’s brilliant run as an interviewer and author, but paradoxical nonetheless. Chicago was Studs’s stage, his inspiration and his beloved home, but the Second City was never really hospitable to his left-wing dissent and often hostile to his deeply intellectual nature. Throughout his broadcast, writing and acting career, Studs did his best to keep serious ideas—literary, political, historical and musical—in play, but in Chicago, Addison signifies only one thing: a street where the Cubs play baseball.

To be sure, the third floor of the Cultural Center was packed with up to 400 intelligent, well-spoken people. Among them was the former WFMT program manager and announcer, Norman Pellegrini, who with the late Ray Nordstrand helped invent the institution that Studs became on the radio. I grew up enamored of those resonant, cosmopolitan voices, which brought light and cheer on frigid days and evenings when all of Cook County felt like it was hibernating — physically and philosophically. Winter is Chicago’s emblematic season and by the time the event began at 6 p.m., the temperature along Michigan Avenue had fallen to 13 degrees.

The speakers, drawn from Studs’s wide array of devoted friends, leaned heavily on anecdote, ranging from the eloquent to the funny to the tragicomic. Studs the kinetic force and anti-snob, arguing politics with uptight yuppies at his bus stop; Studs, randomly passing out photocopies of articles on the bus to work; Studs, relentlessly interviewing “ordinary” people (an adjective he loathed for its “patronizing air”) on the train to Washington for the big 1963 civil-rights rally and even when he didn’t have his tape recorder. Sydney Lewis, Studs’s longtime collaborator on radio and books, stole the show when she recalled the first time she met him, at the Quiet Knight, a North Side club where she worked as a waitress in the late 1970s. When Lewis tried to take Studs’s order, he launched a thorough inquiry into her life, to the point where she finally lost patience: “Mr. Terkel, I read Working, I loved Working, but right now I am working. What do you want to drink?”

With all the tributes, it was left to the “outsider” from New York, André Schiffrin, Studs’s editor and publisher, to appraise Terkel the intellectual who raised popular oral history to an importance and respectability it had never previously enjoyed. It’s fair to rank the 42-year Schiffrin-Terkel partnership with other great editorial alliances, such as Maxwell Perkins and Ernest Hemingway, for the cultural impact of Studs’s interview books (not to mention the sales) has been immense. Impossible now to forget or ignore the bottom-up histories of the Great Depression (Hard Times) and World War II (“The Good War”), or the eternal plight of the working class (Working) with all those millions of copies in print.

I confess that I also used to pigeonhole Studs as a “character” and “political radical”—that I didn’t fully appreciate the subtlety of his intelligence or his writing. We first met at a 1976 fundraiser for Fred Harris’s populist presidential campaign, which took place in the weirdly uncomfortable Coho Room of the old Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive. The space was too small for the overheated crowd—a mistake by the organizers, including me—but Studs was unfazed. He ratcheted up the audience like no one I’ve ever seen; then, borrowing from some long-forgotten pitchman, played a kind of “Simon Says” trick: He told everyone to reach high up in the sky, then loooow down to the ground, and finally (after a significant pause for effect), deeeep into their pockets. It brought the house down—and the wallets out.

Years later, in 1992, when Studs interviewed me on WFMT, I got a better sense of his wide knowledge of American literature and history. But it wasn’t until I attended a small dinner at Schiffrin’s Manhattan apartment—I think it was 2002—that I realized the extent of Studs’s sophistication. Besides Studs, the guest star was Jonathan Miller, the English polymath, whose career as medical doctor, comedian, theater director, and author makes him one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Studs was quite hard-of-hearing but he was still very acute. The conversation turned to British playwrights of a bygone age, none of whom I’d heard of. Then, suddenly, the table-wide discussion became a two-way street: Studs and Miller just talked, including lots of quoting lines, while the rest of us listened. I can’t say which man was more erudite or spoke more authoritatively.

On another occasion, late one night in the lobby of the Iroquois Hotel (his preferred Manhattan hotel after the Royalton went glitzy), Studs regaled me by reciting full-length poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, one of many poets whose work he knew by heart. As the mordantly witty Sydney Lewis told me, Studs had a lot of extra time for reading in the early 1950s, when the anti-communist witch hunters put him on the blacklist and he lost his television show.

I don’t know how Studs managed to “get the truth from people even when they were lying to themselves,” as André Schiffrin put it. But I do believe that Studs, the great democrat, would have agreed that Democratic Chicago (not to mention American democracy) is something of a lie, one all too often concealed by self-deceivers pretending that the Daley machine has turned “liberal” and more “open,” especially with the advent of Barack Obama.

Living witness to five decades of boss rule, most of it by the Daleys, is Leon Depres, who came to the memorial in a wheelchair, just three days short of his 101st birthday. Depres appeared in Studs’s 1995 Coming of Age compilation about the elderly, and seemed as clearheaded as in the days when, as Fifth Ward alderman from the Hyde Park neighborhood, he defied Mayor Richard J. Daley (his son Richard M. Daley is now mayor) as part of the tiny independent block—at its peak numbering five—in the 50-member City Council. When I asked him who today would qualify as an independent alderman, he could think of only one: Joe Moore of the 49th Ward.

No friend of the Daleys (though he appreciated the current mayor naming a bridge for him), Studs called himself a “radical conservative,” asserting that “radical means getting to the core of things.” At the core of his life was the importance of memory and of hope. His great friend Nelson Algren, the moody chronicler of hopeless Chicago, rebuked “The City of I Will” by asking, through his fictional characters, “What if I can’t?” Studs valiantly resisted that question all his life; he knew plenty of real-life Frankie Machines (Algren’s drug-addicted anti-hero from The Man With the Golden Arm), but he never joined them in their despair.

But Studs was hardly a Polyanna. In his lovely memoir, Touch and Go, he railed against America’s loss of memory—a “national Alzheimer’s.” Though he wrote the book toward the end of the last Bush Administration, I think his analysis still applies today as President Obama recycles the people and policies of the Clinton Administration while the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan grind on: “Basically, there is an affront going on, an assault on our intelligence and sense of decency. We have a language perverted, a mind low-rated, and of course, the inevitable end result — forgetfulness…. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.”

The Catalog Factor: Why investors should buy newspaper stocks

Noting the imminent death of newspapers is all the rage, fast becoming one of the reigning clichés of the day. I beg to differ, but not for the self-interested reasons one might imagine. To explain, I’d like to tell a story—a newspaper story.

Nearly 30 years ago, when I was a young reporter on the Chicago Sun-Times, the copy-desk chief was a brilliant and acerbic man named Tom Moffett. Moffett thought that reporters were lazy wimps—he said that the really hard work took place on “the desk”—and he dared me one day at the Billy Goat Tavern (of Saturday Night Live fame) to work for him. Was I man enough? Over my fourth Old Style I insisted I was. The next day my city-desk bosses agreed, and I was loaned to the copy desk for six weeks as a kind of career-broadening internship.

Moffett was right—his sink-or-swim boot camp for copy editing and headline writing was brutal, far more challenging than doing a typical newspaper story. In those days, the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, though morning papers, were fighting a savage circulation war, producing extra editions in the afternoon to capture readers orphaned when the two companies folded their evening papers, the Chicago Daily News and Chicago Today. Thus, the morning shift had to put out an entirely new edition in about 90 minutes, then start over for the next morning’s paper. All told, there were seven editions. Even with new computer technology automatically counting the spacing and length, this wasn’t easy.

Moffett had a decidedly cold demeanor in “the slot” and he was famous for rejecting headlines three and four times until you got it right. Worse was his withering look when you missed some obvious error in a story, for no news went to the composing room without Moffett’s approval, and he took his responsibilities very seriously. I was humbled, and frankly worried that I couldn’t cut it. Reporting and rewrite could be pressured, but the stress on the desk was on an altogether different level—something like being a short-order cook during the lunchtime rush.

One afternoon, about a month into my desk experiment, I was back in “the Goat,” where it always felt like nighttime because of its location, in perpetual shadow, under the elevated section of Michigan Avenue. Moffett was holding court with a group of us—critiquing the day’s paper, handing out praise and scorn in equal measure—when suddenly he made two pronouncements in my direction. First, I had passed his test with my mettle intact: I was capable of being an adequate copy editor. Then, as if anticipating my objection to a life on the desk, he smiled and remarked, “Someone’s got to keep the ads from bumping into each other.”

I laughed uneasily. I had gone into journalism for the romance and, I hoped, to have a political impact. I wanted to be a newspaperman in the mold of my great-uncle, Charles MacArthur (who co-wrote, with Ben Hecht, The Front Page), my father, Roderick, and my brother, Greg: lots of fun, lots of action, and maybe even a foreign assignment. Because of Vietnam and Watergate, I also dreamed of breaking a big, world-beating story, like something from Seymour Hersh or Woodward and Bernstein, that might do some good.

Of course, I knew that a newspaper was a business. But like many members of my generation, I pretentiously imagined that the journalism part of the daily press was inherently more important than the money side, even to the most jaded publisher. Only when I became a publisher myself did I fully understand the facts of business life, although money considerations never killed my sense of romance or my appreciation of the craft of journalism.

Nowadays, with all the doom and gloom, I find myself defending newspapers as moneymaking enterprises, rather than as tribunes of the truth (if only!). I’m at pains to point out to colleagues and customers alike that as a business model print newspapers are just fine. Plenty of them are still making money, just less than they did in the distorted boom years of the ’80s and ’90s when investment bankers and leveraged-buyout sharks discovered the joys of monopoly publishing.

True, shortsighted stock manipulators in search of easy money have (while piling up crushing amounts of debt) starved newsrooms and circulation departments of essential investments that would lead to more readers, ads and eventual profits. And the Internet has certainly seized the attention of many consumers of news, although I don’t see how anyone can stand to stare at a screen long enough to read anything at length. (A computer repairman tells me he craves downtime in the presence of good old tactile paper that permits him to lean back and relax without the buttons and eerie glow.)

But the reading experience is not necessarily what will keep newspapers alive. There’s another, quite prosaic reason that printed publications will survive and thrive, the one that Tom Moffett was alluding to back at the Goat. Ads on paper not only “bump into each other” when there’s no journalism in between, they also bump into readers — and I mean physically. What will save newspapers is the “unavoidability factor” — that no one, no matter how tech- and screen-oriented, can avoid the advertising printed on paper, at least not without unusual effort.

Consider the behavior of ordinary people after the letter carrier comes. Once they’ve collected the mail, including catalogs, junk mail and newspapers, even the most ad-resistant, Web-addicted individuals will glance at some of the printed matter on the way to the garbage can. If the advertising is any good, recipients usually slow down and place certain catalogs, envelopes, magazines or headlined articles aside while throwing the rest away.

Such mail-order companies as Land’s End have learned at great cost that replacing catalogs with the Internet just doesn’t work. Customers may order online, but most of them are responding to a mailing or an ad. No offense to my fellow journalists, but newspapers and magazines are first and foremost effective catalogs, which some people like to read. If the headline or cover line grabs you, there’s a good chance you’ll start turning the pages and bump into the ads. Advertising on the Internet and TV (with Tivo, muting, and zapping), is simply too easy to dodge.

Moreover, advertising itself can be fun to read. During World II, I’m told that American GIs overseas complained about the stripped-down “pony editions” of magazines that didn’t carry advertising. The soldiers wanted to know what was for sale back home.

It won’t be long before advertisers fully recognize the limits of the Internet and the inevitability of paper. If I were an investor, I’d be buying up newspaper stocks while they’re dirt cheap.

A Hypocrite as Our Diplomat in Chief

When it comes to foreign affairs, Barack Obama seems like a serious person with an authentic liberal’s concern about the health of the world beyond our borders. After all, he campaigned for president in Berlin and his blurb appears on the back of a book by Reinhold Neibuhr, the great liberal theologian and internationalist.

But so far, the president-elect’s Cabinet choices make a joke of the liberals who backed him in the hope that something fundamental might change in America’s belligerent behavior abroad. As the neo-conservative Max Boot approvingly observed, the appointment of Gen. James Jones as National Security Adviser and the retention of Robert Gates as defense secretary “could just as easily have come from a President McCain.”

So too, in principle, could that of hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, which makes Obama’s rhetoric of restraint in foreign affairs begin to sound as empty as President Bush’s professed skepticism about “nation building” eight years ago during his race against Al Gore.

It’s worth recalling that in the second debate with Gore, Bush even smirked at the concept: “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. . . . I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops.”

He had that right. Indeed, you wouldn’t recognize the pre-emptive war fanatic of post 9/11 if it weren’t for Bush’s earlier statement during the debate in support of the U.S.-led bombing of Yugoslavia/Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. It was then that the Clinton administration initiated its own pre-emptive war — in response to Serbia President Slobodan Milosevic’s alleged “genocide” against the Kosovar Albanians. The three-month bombing campaign was conducted under the auspices of NATO, not the United Nations, and thus was every bit as illegal under international law as the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. At the time, Kosovo was formally part of a sovereign Yugoslavia and NATO could not argue that the Milosevic regime had threatened or attacked a NATO member.

Hillary Clinton favored both pre-emptive wars, and was particularly aggressive in the case of Serbia, according to Gail Sheehy’s book, Hillary’s Choice. Sheehy quotes Hillary’s recollection of a talk with her husband: “I urged him to bomb.” Challenged by the president on the possible consequences — for example, more executions of ethnic Albanians and damaging the NATO alliance — Hillary replied, “You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?”

At the very least, this was a gross exaggeration. Serb repression of Kosovo’s national aspirations, while often brutal, was nothing resembling a “holocaust,” and the Kosovo Liberation Army’s provocation, including the assassination of Serb policemen, helped worsen the conflict. No doubt Milosevic was a very bad man, but that didn’t stop U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard from calling the KLA, in 1998, a terrorist organization. Civilian casualties on the two sides are impossible to pin down accurately, but they appear to have been comparable, perhaps 2,000 Albanians killed by Serb forces and 1,500 Serbs killed by NATO warplanes in Belgrade and elsewhere.

This all may be blood under the bridge, but it gives us an insight into the shoot-first temperament of the future secretary of state. According to former Clinton adviser Dick Morris, “Hillary has a Manichean view of issues, splitting the political world into dueling forces of good and evil. . . . She sees herself as idealistic, moral, and righteous, and can only conclude that those with opposing views must have opposite motives.”

After Bush offered his solidarity with the Clintons over bombing Belgrade, Hillary was happy to return the favor over bombing Baghdad. In her Oct. 10, 2002, Senate speech explaining her vote for war authorization, she declared that “perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.” Like little Serbia’s oppression of its Albanian minority and its alleged threat to the American “way of life”?

Politician to the core, Hillary couldn’t resist the following hypocrisy: While she wanted “to ensure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and support for the president’s efforts to wage America’s war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction,” she insisted that her vote was not “a vote for any new doctrine of pre-emption, or of unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose.”

Well, they say you can’t have it both ways. And trying to may well have cost Hillary the presidency, since Obama’s early stance against the war is what gave him a leg up in the primaries.

But it’s not Hillary’s bellicose positions that are surprising. As a long-standing member of the Washington policy establishment and a “humanitarian interventionist,” it’s easy to see why she went along with the received political wisdom on Kosovo and Iraq.

What’s harder to understand is why Obama — elected on a platform of greater prudence — chose a trigger-happy hypocrite, who once mocked his “lack of experience” in foreign affairs, to be his diplomat-in-chief. I suspect it’s because the next president has no intention of genuinely getting out of Iraq — that he will make symbolic withdrawals of combat brigades, but plans to make permanent most of the 14 military bases constructed since the invasion.

Furthermore, I think that his foolish commitment to troop escalations in Afghanistan — much of which will come from troops transferred from Iraq — represents continuity with the Bush Doctrine more than it does rupture.

In the end, maybe Hillary and Barack don’t make such an odd couple. We won’t know for sure, however, until a Democratic Party-sponsored cluster bomb — dropped in the name of women’s rights and democracy — kills a lot of women and children in a village near Kandahar.

Rahm Emanuel’s Political Pirouettes

God help me, but I had to laugh when I heard the news that Barack Obama had named Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. What else could I do? Without even so much as a symbolic gesture in support of reform, the great agent of “change” immediately selected as his chief political enforcer a figure who epitomizes the Washington consensus of the past two decades—pro-“free trade,” pro-Iraq invasion/occupation and, perhaps most importantly, pro-pork barrel.

Which isn’t to say that Emanuel does not possess great talents essential to the success of an Obama administration. It just depends on how you define success. If Emanuel’s legendary aggressiveness were put to work in the service of “good government,” he might, indeed, do wonderful things. But I somehow doubt that’s what Obama has in mind for his friend from Chicago as he embarks on his 2012 re-election campaign.

Like Obama, Rahm Emanuel was launched in politics by the Daley machine, but he really made his name in the Clinton Administration as one of three principal White House lobbyists for the North American Free Trade Agreement, in 1993. Working alongside Mayor Richard M. Daley’s brother, William, and then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, Emanuel developed a reputation for having “a personality that killed plants on contact,” in the words of Margarita Roque, a former House staffer.

I can confirm Roque’s assessment, since in my own interviews with Emanuel, he outdid himself in ferocious candor. Asked to describe the effectiveness and reliability of his pro-NAFTA allies at the Business Roundtable, Emanuel was effusive in his praise of Allied Signal Chairman Larry Bossidy and a few others at Boeing and IBM. But as for “the rest of business — not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Ordinarily, I might appreciate such a remark, but Emanuel was only expressing a certain type of politician’s contempt for anyone who is not a politician or their surrogate—for people insufficiently ruthless to “get the job done,” as Obama puts it. That Emanuel dared to say this during his brief tenure as an investment banker only accentuates his sense of superiority over the mere mortals who live outside the charmed triangle of Capitol Hill/K Street/Democratic Party power.

To be sure, a President Obama needs a henchman—but it’s important to know to what end. Like H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, Emanuel will no doubt involve himself in many pressing matters of state, from maintaining the status quo in the Mideast to deciding which campaign contributor gets to be ambassador to Sri Lanka.

But in RahmObama world, it’s the political tasks that always come first, foremost among them rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. At the top of a very urgent list of priorities will be thanking Mayor Daley for his early endorsement of Obama during the primaries—preferably with a goody guaranteed to create a lot of patronage jobs, such as bringing the 2016 Olympic games to the Windy City.

As a congressman and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel has reached deep into the pork barrel, and last year he defended an “earmark” that permitted the rebuilding of a bridge in his district “that not only was rated as deficient but also was identified by the Department of Homeland Security as a major evacuation route in case of a terrorist attack on Chicago.” Posing a largely rhetorical question, Emanuel wrote: “Does that make me an ‘earmark thug’ or a congressman who took care of a critical need in his district?”

It’s unclear what would motivate Al Qaeda to target Illinois’s 5th Congressional District—why bother hitting Wrigley Field and the Cubs when they’re already doomed?—but what is clear is that Emanuel knows how to game the system. What’s more, like his tutor, Mayor Daley, he understands the political value of “terrorism” to accomplish important civic improvements. In 2003, Daley unilaterally tore up the runway of Chicago’s lakefront airport, Meigs Field, in the middle of the night, so he could reclaim the land for a park. As justification, the mayor cited the threat of terrorist attack (from the air), even though neither Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge or his agency were ever consulted and Ridge declared himself “disappointed” by the Meigs shutdown.

With all this, I can’t deny feeling a kind of admiration for Emanuel. All through the 2008 campaign, he performed a balancing act—never publicly supporting Obama until Hillary Clinton dropped out—worthy of a professional ballet dancer. In fact, Emanuel was a ballet student when he was growing up in suburban Chicago, good enough to be offered a scholarship by the Joffrey Ballet. As it happens, I spent a lot of time as a kid at the studio where he trained, the Evanston School of Ballet, watching my sister, a future professional, take class.

It would be easy to suggest that Emanuel’s tough-guy behavior is a case of overcompensation for having spent so much of his young life in what some might view as a “feminine” milieu. I don’t see it that way, even though I resisted occasional recruiting attempts by the school’s co-founder, Phyllis Wills, for the usual “that’s too sissy” reason.

Anybody familiar with the ballet world knows that the small number of dancers who make a paying career of it are the equivalent of professional athletes—every bit as accomplished as the best football, basketball and track stars—and not sissies at all. In ballet, the self-discipline and physical training required to “get the job done” are not for weaklings.

Thus, Obama may well have done himself a favor by picking a former ballet man to run the White House. We can only hope that if Emanuel does his grands battements in the Oval Office, he doesn’t accidentally kick over the red phone and start a war.

Americans Unwilling to Face Reality

It’s not as though no one saw it coming. Here’s the economist Michael Hudson, writing in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “The reality is that, although home ownership may be a wise choice for many people, this particular real-estate bubble has been carefully engineered to lure home buyers into circumstances detrimental to their own best interests…. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.”

Other commentators, including Warren Buffet, said similar things about the derivatives market. He was prescient, but hardly anybody listened. Americans, perhaps even more than other people, have difficulty embracing the concept of “reality.” In part, this is religious. America remains the land of infinite redemption where any crook can suddenly go straight. In part, it stems from our turbo-charged ethos of capitalism. This has always been the land of get-rich-quick and damn the consequences. We are a nation of fantasists, and things have to get really bad before a politician has the right to trade in hard truth.

I doubt that, even now, things have gotten bad enough. Even with all the frenzied commentary about the credit crisis now choking the media (while the financial geniuses assembled at the corner of Wall and K Streets scramble to save their hides), I’m struck more by what’s not being said than what is. Every day I add to a list of critical omissions from the debate. Where, for example, is the voice of organized labor? In previous generations, we could have expected to see the president of the AFL-CIO or the United Auto Workers on the sets of the major talk shows. Apart from David Brancaccio’s NOW on PBS, I couldn’t find a single TV program that featured what might be called a “labor leader.”

Where are the alternative candidates for president like Ralph Nader and Bob Barr? I was pleased to hear that Nader, a long-time critic of the deregulated economy, was permitted to appear on CNN and The O’Reilly Factor after the second McCain-Obama debate–but the time for that appearance should have been before the House passed the bailout bill.

Why is the heavy financial support for Barack Obama and John McCain from Wall Street off-limits for discussion? It’s unlikely the candidates be asked about that subject in tonight’s debate—the two parties write the rules to discourage tough questions—but some impertinent journalist might speak up. If you can’t get the media-trained Obama to give a straight answer, why not simply present a graphic contrasting Obama’s Reno speech supporting the bailout and Nader’s argument against it?

For that matter, in its recent take-down of Alan Greenspan and Clinton Administration deregulation (including the refusal to regulate derivatives trading), why didn’t The New York Times mention that former Clinton Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers are principal advisers to Obama on the economy? In the same vein, why isn’t Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, challenged on his slow response to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures?

The only serious critic I’ve found was interviewed in France’s Le Monde: Columbia finance Prof. Rama Cont argues that six months ago the bailout of the two mortgage agencies would have cost $100 billion instead of an eventual $400 billion to $500 billion. Who pocketed the difference, thanks to Paulson’s “indulgence” of his former colleagues? According to Cont, it was short sellers at Goldman Sachs and hedge funds.

Meanwhile, where are the deep thinkers who might enlighten us in this hour of fear, including Karl Marx? Don’t laugh–Marx had much to say about the so-called “contradictions of capitalism” that bears re-reading today. Nothing he wrote is perfectly applicable to subprime mortgages and the derivatives crapshoot. But Marx’s understanding that unfettered capitalism, while fantastically productive, leads to instability by concentrating wealth in too few hands—that a mass-production/mass-consumption society is fundamentally incompatible with oligarchic control of wealth—is something even Rush Limbaugh could appreciate.

If Marx is too rich for your blood, at least we might hear from John Gray, the renegade former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Gray is today’s most intelligent critic of globalization and “free trade.” He could explain to a television audience that a great deal of America’s “real economy” (as opposed to an economy based on derivatives trading and shopping at Wal-Mart) has already left the country for cheap-labor locales such the Pearl River Delta, in China, and the south bank of the Rio Grande, never to return. And he could describe the destruction wreaked upon traditional societies that suddenly become host to outsourced American factories. Youngstown and Utica are hurting, to be sure, but it’s no picnic either these days for the working class in Nogales or Dongguan.

Finally, there are the great realist novelists, who often see more clearly than journalists. So far, my Google searches have not picked up any excerpts from Zola’s novel Money being read on the nightly news. In this brilliant chronicle of a speculative stock bubble, launched by a character named Saccard in 1860s Paris, Zola cuts right to the heart of America’s boom-and-bust neurosis: “Wasn’t such great and rapid prosperity the result of the methods for which [Saccard] was now being blamed? All of this came together. If one accepted the success, one had to accept the risks. When you overheat a machine, it sometimes explodes.”

Event Alert: John R. MacArthur discusses the presidency pre-debate in Brooklyn, NY

An African-American candidate is running against the oldest candidate ever (and his running mate is a woman). It seems that–finally–anyone can be president. But can they? Harper’s Magazine Publisher and noted political commentator John R. MacArthur will discuss his new book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America with esteemed historian Eric Foner (read an excerpt from the book). A live screening of the second presidential debate will follow.

October 7, 2008 at 7:00 P.M.

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL

The Melville House Bookstore (DUMBO)

145 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn (Corner of Plymouth and Pearl) (MAP) Subway: F to York; A/C to High St.

Refreshments will be served.

For more information call (718) 722-9204

The Presidency in Wartime: George W. Bush discovers Woodrow Wilson

Illustration from Harper’s Magazine, January 1917

Excerpted from Chapter 10 of You Can’t Be President: The outrageous barriers to democracy in America, published by Melville House. John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

More from the book:

• An excerpt from In These Times
• Listen to an interview with Brian Lehrer
• View an interview with Amy Goodman (Video stream; transcript; YouTube video links: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

To understand what war—hot or cold—does to American democracy, examine the last three years of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, from 1917 to 1920. Wilson’s reputation today remains essentially positive, even glorious. This professor-turned-politician is remembered for the most part as a visionary who was martyred in the cause of world democracy and peace. A self-styled idealist who called World War I “a war to end all wars,” Wilson claimed that America was fighting to make the world “safe for democracy,” not for any crass political motives. For these reasons, millions of high school students have been taught more about Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his failed crusade for American entry into the League of Nations than about George Washington’s or Dwight Eisenhower’s prescient, regrettably unheeded farewell addresses, which argued for restraint in foreign policy and against the dangers of a large, permanent military establishment.

But the Woodrow Wilson of dramatic oration and lofty principles was also an intolerant demagogue whose repressive policies and personal ambition sullied his stated aspiration to save the world from war and corruption. Long before there was McCarthyism, there was Wilsonianism, with its own “red scare” tactics and assaults on civil liberties that may have made Joe McCarthy envious. Although he had always insisted he was trying to avoid war, as early as his December 7,1915, State of the Union Address to Congress, Wilson was hinting at the war-fevered crackdown to come:

The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue…. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and neighbors! But the ugly and incredible thing has actually come about and we are without adequate federal laws to deal with it. I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.

What was incredible, and ugly, was the ferocity of Wilson’s antidemocratic impulse. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his book Secrecy, Wilson’s “plea… astonishes still, as much for its passion as for what it proposes… No president had ever spoken like that before; none has since.”

Wilson disingenuously campaigned for reelection in 1916 as a peace candidate; his slogan, “He kept us out of war,” was a critical tactic in his very narrow victory over the Republican Charles Evans Hughes. But getting into World War I was uppermost in Wilson’s mind. As historian Walter Karp wrote in The Politics of War, “As he [Wilson] once confided to his wife, he himself ached for the opportunity ‘to impel [the people] to great political achievements,’ achievements that, in Wilson’s view, the ignoble masses were incapable even of desiring without strong leaders and strong governments to drive them.”

He resorted to moral blackmail and brute force when faced with domestic political opposition, whether to his war plans or to his vision for postwar peace

Wilson got his way, and from his speech before a joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917, calling for a declaration of war against Germany, until October 2, 1919, the day he suffered a massive stroke while campaigning frantically for Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the great proponent of democracy engaged in the most anti-democratic domestic crusade in American history. Wilson’s self-righteousness encouraged coercion, rather than persuasion, and he resorted to moral blackmail and brute force when faced with domestic political opposition, whether to his war plans or to his vision for postwar peace. For example, if the treaty and the League of Nations were not approved, there would result “in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world.” As the historian Anders Stephanson wrote, Wilson’s messianic obsession with making the League into what Wilson called a “wholesale moral clearinghouse” meant that opponents of his vision were heretics.

Wilson, the would-be messiah, also targeted political rivals, most prominently Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party of America, who had done remarkably well in his run for president against Wilson and four other candidates in 1912.The 900,000 votes won by Debs that year amounted to 6 percent of the popular vote, the highest percentage ever for a socialist in an era when socialist and other left-wing mayors were being elected in cities such as Milwaukee and Schenectady. Debs’s subsequent opposition to Wilson’s push for war placed him in political jeopardy, and it was only a matter of time before the weight of the law came down on him. After making an antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918, Debs was arrested and convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act. He served more than two years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary until President Warren Harding commuted his sentence on Christmas Day 1921.

Less well known today is the prosecution of Robert Goldstein, a film producer who at one time had been connected with D. W. Griffith. In 1917, Goldstein released a movie innocuously titled The Spirit of ‘76, though the response of the war-fevered government was anything but innocuous. As described by Zechariah Chafee Jr. the great legal scholar of the period, Goldstein’s silent film was little more than a patriotic montage that celebrated the American Revolution. Goldstein made the movie before the war, and so he couldn’t have anticipated that Wilson’s violent attachment to his new British war ally would result in a jail sentence. Writing when the Espionage Act was still in force and the stroke-incapacitated Wilson still occupying the White House, Chafee himself was risking his career and possible prosecution when he published Freedom of Speech in 1920. This may account for the terseness of the following passage:

[The Spirit of’76] contained such scenes as Patrick Henry’s Speech, the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Valley Forge. After a year and a half of work the picture was finished, just before the outbreak of our war with Germany. The film was displayed in Los Angeles to the usual audience, which was not shown to contain either soldiers or sailors. The government thereupon indicted Goldstein for presenting a play designed and intended to arouse antagonism, hatred, and enmity between the American people, particularly the armed forces, and the people of Great Britain, particularly their armed forces, when Great Britain was “an ally” of the United States, because one scene, the Wyoming [Valley, Pennsylvania] Massacre, portrayed British soldiers bayoneting women and children and carrying away girls. The film was seized, the business was thrown from prosperity into bankruptcy with a loss of over $100,000, and Goldstein was convicted of attempting to cause insubordination, etc., in the armed forces and sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary at Steilacoom, Washington.

Chafee allowed himself a small joke when he remarked on the “unfortunate” case name of United States v. The Spirit of 76, but this was not a time for irony or joking, since political satire could very well land you in jail during the Wilson Administration. The point of Wilson’s spear in his crusade against sedition was his Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who often acted to halt subversion before it even occurred. Using the Espionage Act and the Alien Act of 1918 (which targeted foreign-born anarchists and revolutionaries for deportation), Palmer’s notorious campaign targeted thousands of suspected communists and anarchists, who were supposedly slipping into the United States from Europe and Russia intending to foment revolution. The Palmer Raids, conducted by employees of the U.S. Department of Justice, began in earnest on November 7, 1919, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and culminated in January 1920 with the arrest of more than 3,000 members of the Communist and Communist Labor parties. From the start, the government also grabbed innocent bystanders who happened not to speak English. In his history of American crackdowns on civil liberties, First-Amendment advocate Christopher Finan described one raid, on November 7, which targeted the Russian People’s House in New York City’s Union Square. Government agents arrested about 200 people, mostly students: “Approximately 75 percent of those arrested were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and many were quickly released.” Outside New York, “others were not so lucky. Nearly 100 men were locked up in Hartford, Connecticut for almost five months” on suspicion of being communists. In all, the raids netted over 4,000 alleged communists, of whom 800 were deported, including the prominent radical Emma Goldman.

In the atmosphere of Wilsonian hysteria, not only were left-wing militants with foreign names arrested and deported; so, too, were legally elected representatives to Congress and state legislatures denied their seats. Victor L. Berger, a socialist elected to the Fifth District of Wisconsin in 1918, was excluded from Congress at the beginning of its new session in April 1919. Running a second time in a December 1919 Wisconsin special election against a fusion Democrat-Republican candidate, Berger won again. By now convicted under the Espionage Act for vocally opposing the war, Berger presented his credentials to the House once more, in January 1920, and was once again excluded, by a vote of 330-6. Three days before Berger was refused his seat, five socialists elected to the New York State Assembly were denied theirs as well, by a resounding 140-6 vote.

Although Wilson has been celebrated as a tragic visionary, it’s not hard to find, even among his admirers, voices critical of his heavy-handed promotion of American entry into the League of Nations and his self-destructive refusal to accept Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s “reservations,” which doomed the League. Godfrey Hodgson, a sympathetic biographer of Wilson’s close friend and adviser, Col. Edward House, says, implausibly, that Wilson “hated war,” but he is clear on what he views as Wilson’s failings as a politician, in contrast with the wily tactician House: “Faced with opposition, Wilson’s instinct was that anyone wicked enough to disagree with him must endorse his noble vision or face his messianic wrath.” However, the portrait favored by admirers of the twenty-eighth president as an idealistic amateur among cynical professionals—particularly Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Lodge—understates Wilson’s ability to marshal popular support and his genuine tactical skills in day-to-day politics. Wilson may have been headstrong and “vainglorious,” in Walter Karp’s description, but he was no fool about building a political career and getting elected.

It is an enormous irony that Wilson came to prominence during the high-water mark of the Progressive Era, since this Virginia-born, Georgia-reared conservative was an out-and-out racist of the most conventional sort. The southerner Wilson presided over the segregation of the civil service and once said to a group of black protesters that “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” Moreover, Wilson’s stated adherence to the cause of Progressivism was at best opportunistic and at worst specious. Yet his anti-progressive, anti-populist instincts did not prevent him from succeeding in politics. As Karp wrote,

As long as domestic affairs remained predominant, Wilson was on a collision course with the entire reform movement…. The solution to his problem Wilson had arrived at long before he ever faced it, when he praised the domestic political advantages of the Republican “plunge into international politics [by way of the Spanish-American war].” If he could make another such plunge and “impel” the nation to “great national triumphs” abroad, he could not only avert failure but reap glory as well. As soon as he took office, therefore, Wilson began trying to persuade the American people that the true spirit of reform was to be expressed not at home, but in a new altruistic foreign policy, a policy, in Wilson’s words, of “service to mankind.”

Even the great internationalist Wilson displayed scant interest in world-shaping foreign policy or war-making until he gained high national office. “Before his presidency,” wrote Anders Stephanson, “Wilson had showed no signs of reforming zeal in foreign affairs… A single memorandum, some scattered remarks, revealing nothing so much as a strong desire to be safely in the middle, an inkling that the experience of war had opened up possibilities for better national government at home: rather a meager sum total for a well-known scholar of political systems.”

Besides James Polk, architect of the expansionist war against Mexico in 1846, perhaps no president has entered the White House with a less altruistic vision of foreign affairs or of war-making than George W. Bush. Having already avoided military service in Vietnam by using his father’s influence to enter the Texas Air National Guard, Bush had no political interest in 2000 in promoting an ambitious foreign policy. To make matters worse, this candidly provincial son of a worldly father found himself frequently embarrassed by his lack of basic knowledge about foreign countries, famously failing in a 1999 television interview to name the leaders of India and Pakistan, countries that were just then facing off in a potential nuclear confrontation over Kashmir. Bush initially made a point of presenting himself as cautious and unlearned in foreign affairs, apart from his relations with Mexico as governor of Texas. In an April 2000 interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, the then presidential candidate said, “I’m a fast learner, and listen, [but] I am not going to play like I’ve been a person who’s spent hours involved with foreign policy. I am who I am.” In his October 3,2000, campaign debate with Vice President Al Gore, Bush portrayed himself as an anti-Wilsonian:

I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as national builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.

But, like Wilson, Bush quickly learned the uses of war for political gain. According to his fired campaign ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, Bush was already thinking about the potential political benefits of war before he was elected. In an interview with the journalist Russ Baker published in October 2004, Herskowitz said:

It [Iraq] was on his mind. He said to me: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.” And he said, “My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.” He said, “If I have a chance to invade … if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Whatever his learning curve, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush largely reinvented himself as the direct heir to Woodrow Wilson, minus some of the rhetoric about international cooperation. Like Wilson, Bush leaned heavily on the concept of “self-determination” to justify his “liberation” of the oppressed Iraqi people. Like Wilson, he seemed to be ignorant of the contradiction in his “vision.” As Joseph Schumpeter observed: “To try to force the people to embrace something that is believed to be good and glorious but which they do not actually want—even though they may be expected to like it when they experience its results—is the very hall mark of anti-democratic belief.” So complete has been the transformation of Bush from the parochial parody of a Texas “good ol’ boy” to “nation builder” and crusader for democracy that by 2007, historians like Godfrey Hodgson could assert that the current Bush Administration “is unmistakably Wilsonian,” that is, “the idea that it is the destiny of the United States to use its great power to spread American ideas of democracy and the American version of capitalism to the world.” Bush himself invoked Wilson in a November 2003 speech in London eight months after the invasion of Iraq. With Queen Elizabeth II and all of British officialdom in attendance, the new slayer of dragons and dictators made pointed reference to his newfound Wilsonian heritage when he declared,

The last President to stay at Buckingham Palace was an idealist, without question. At a dinner hosted by King George V, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson made a pledge; with typical American understatement, he vowed that right and justice would become the predominant and controlling force in the world…. At Wilson’s high point of idealism, however, Europe was one short generation from Munich and Auschwitz and the Blitz. Looking back, we see the reasons why. The League of Nations, lacking both credibility and will, collapsed at the first challenge of the dictators. Free nations failed to recognize, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain sight. And so dictators went about their business.

Following Wilson, Bush has used his rhetoric of freedom to launch an aggressive assault on freedom in the United States—including the most important amendments in the Bill of Rights—in order to dampen dissent against the Iraq War as much as to fight terrorism.

Bush may not be systematically arresting opposition leftists and deporting them, or silencing filmmakers, but police in New York during the Republican Convention of 2004 did make mass arrests of antiwar demonstrators on largely fraudulent, and utterly unconstitutional, grounds. Instead of the Espionage Act and mass deportation under the Alien Act, we have the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001), Homeland Security Act, secret prisons, and “rendition” of terrorist suspects to “third party” countries where they are interrogated without lawyers present and tortured. The “Bush Doctrine” justifies preemptive war–and it also evidently justifies preemption of the Constitution.

Palin Using Her Child as Political Prop

Sarah Palin never had much hope of getting my vote, but when she told the Republican convention that special-needs children would have “a friend and advocate in the White House” in a McCain administration, I felt obliged to give her a hearing. God knows, kids with disabilities and their parents need powerful friends, so I even called my own special-needs daughter to the television to watch.

Unfortunately, the camera kept cutting to Palin’s snowmobiler “guy,” alternately cradling and brandishing the couple’s Down syndrome baby, who appeared to be fast asleep. At first I told myself that this might be a good thing–special education and physical therapy are scandalously underfunded in this country, and some TV images of a cute Down syndrome baby might help to raise consciousness about the problem.

But something about the aggressive theatrics sparked another, quite unpleasant image in my mind. When I visited Hanoi in 1994, beggars, sometimes men, would confront me on the street carrying limp babies that looked as though they were on the verge of death, if not actually dead. I later learned that the babies were drugged into listlessness and that many of them were “rented” by the beggars for their daily rounds. I confess that I was so horrified by this tactic that I recoiled instead of giving them any money. How could anyone, no matter how desperate, use a baby in that way to get sympathy?

I think we should pose the same question to Governor and Mr. Palin. While they certainly deserve consideration for the suffering they will endure as parents of a handicapped child, I don’t see how that earns Palin my vote. More to the point, why should I cast a ballot for a candidate who is so desperate for my support that she’s willing to exploit her unlucky offspring as a campaign prop?

Something ugly about the handsome Palins revealed itself in St. Paul. I’m not in politics, so I can’t fully appreciate the wild ambition that drives people like Sarah and Todd–that makes them do things that ordinary folks would never have the stomach for.

The writer Walter Karp summed it up this way: “Politicians are bolder than you and I.” Clearly, Sarah Palin is very bold. While her husband and two of her daughters passed around the baby for the cameras, she was reveling in the spotlight as only a politician can. Love me, admire me, her smiling face told the throng. I imagine it was the same thing at the high school basketball games and beauty pageants where she first experienced the drug of fame.

But the two mothers of Down syndrome kids whom I knew from my daughter’s old grammar school mostly had to smile through tears of frustration; they didn’t really have the time to grandstand, either about their virtue or their problems. And I’m pretty sure that neither one of them was a Republican, because nobody knows better than a special-needs parent how hostile the G.O.P. has become to the idea of spending public money on the helpless. The party of Reagan/Bush/Palin is famously the party of self-help (except when it’s the party of help-yourself-to-taxpayer-money).

Moreover, the “Special Schools” budget in Alaska isn’t very special. “We add 20 percent to the school districts’ funding to account for the extra costs of spec ed, voc ed, bilingual ed, and gifted ed,” a state spokesman, Eric Fry, told the group MOMocrats. “They can spend any part of their budget on spec ed, as needed.” Oh, “gifted and talented” kids are special ed, too. And as I read it, nothing is guaranteed for the neediest kids with the most severe learning disabilities. Meanwhile, their exhausted and demoralized parents have to compete for resources with the pushy parents of kids deemed too smart for regular education.

To be sure, things aren’t any better in supposedly liberal New York City, where there isn’t nearly enough to go around. The public schools can barely identify, much less educate, the special-ed kids who overwhelm the system. As with everything else in America, the class system comes into play in special ed. Such wealthy white suburbs as Westport, Connecticut, with its extensive public-school inclusion program, put other underfunded districts with big minority enrollments to shame.

My wife and I are lucky we can afford to pay the exorbitant tuition for private special-education schools. But the great majority of parents in our situation have to sue the city Department of Education for tuition reimbursement. Higher-functioning special-needs kids, including ones with Down syndrome, usually get some money; lower-functioning kids often have difficulty finding a school that will take them under any circumstances.

Of course, the Palin baby show was mostly just an advertisement against legal abortion, so why not just come out and say it instead of pretending to support government social spending? But inauthenticity was the order of the day, and advertising, as Daniel Boorstin writes, is “the characteristic rhetoric of American democracy.”

I was finally so sickened by the Palins’ (and the TV networks’) grotesque play for ratings that I abruptly turned off the set. And I told my special-ed daughter, who is smart enough to know better, not to believe a word that Sarah Palin says.

Money Over Morals: Obama’s the candidate of the hedge-fund partners

Among the several unpleasant outgrowths of the Obama–Clinton death duel, perhaps the most disturbing was the widespread perception that the junior senator from New York was more attuned to the cares and hardships of the working class than her chic counterpart from Illinois.

I still don’t understand how anyone could have overlooked the damage done to blue-collar America by the former first couple’s stalwart commitment to “free trade”—in the form of NAFTA and permanent “normal” trade relations (PNTR) with cheap-labor China—but evidently many did, particularly in states like Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Every time Hillary told the story of her grandfather toiling in a lace factory in Scranton I wished some comedian would say: “My grandfather sweated and suffered so much in that lace mill that Bill and I vowed that no one in Pennsylvania would ever again have to work in a factory. With NAFTA and PNTR our dream has been realized!”

But Hillary couldn’t have gotten away with such hypocritical nonsense without Barack Obama providing her a pass on class, the great unmentionable in a country that pretends that everyone is born equal and anyone can become president. For all his supposed concern about regular folks, Obama’s sympathy for the beleaguered people who still do manual labor remains suspect, while his willingness to appease the wealthy elites who preach the benefits of “free markets,” low taxes and job-destroying trade bills appears entirely sincere.

Granted, Obama has made a few gestures toward reducing the vast gap between the lower-middle class and the richest 1 percent of Americans, who now possess about 22 percent of the nation’s wealth (the top 10 percent control 48.5 percent). In August 2007, for example, he co-sponsored, with Democratic Senators Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, and Dick Durbin, of Illinois, the Patriot Employers Act, which would give a 1 percent tax credit to employers who, among other things, hired more American workers and paid their employees at least $7.80 an hour. Around the same time, pressed by his populist rival John Edwards, Obama also said he would support legislation to treat the income of hedge-fund managers as regular personal income, instead of the current practice of taxing it at the capital-gains rate of 15 percent. Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic nominee has proposed restoring the top income-tax rate to the Clinton era’s 39.6 percent from its current 35 percent.

But these measures are just a few raindrops on a scorched earth of class bias fomented by every president since Ronald Reagan. Obama’s campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, is stunningly frank about his affinity with wealthy donors during his Senate campaign in 2004: “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks.”

If you think that this passage is merely foolish, you’re missing the point. The Audacity of Hope is carefully calculated to present Obama as a non-threat to the big-money interests that pay for campaigns. Even so, Obama tries to have it both ways: “On core issues,” he writes, “I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed.”

But it’s easy to be candid when you’re talking about proportionately so little money: a 4.6 percentage-point increase in an investment banker’s income tax to a hardly confiscatory 39.6 percent (the top marginal rate remained over 90 percent until 1964) won’t make much of a dent. As Obama notes, “My own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways.” Thus, “I know as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population.”

Flying “above the fray” (as a new senator Obama rode 23 times in corporate planes before halting the practice) is precisely what has let Obama raise so much money from the likes of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup.

With friends like Robert Rubin (now of Citigroup, late ruler of the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department), Obama can afford to condescend to the laid-off Maytag workers of Galesburg, Ill., their jobs moved to dollar-an-hour Mexico. Sad though it may be, he writes, it’s “hard to deny Rubin’s basic insight: We can try to slow globalization but we can’t stop it.” Such clichéd thinking is one reason that the Employer Patriot Act is languishing in the Senate Finance Committee; it’s why Obama proposes only tinkering with NAFTA, and why he barely addresses China, whose vast pool of low-cost labor is the far greater problem for American workers.

Meanwhile, Obama has stopped talking about making hedge-fund managers pay income tax on their partnership income at the same time as he proposes to increase the capital-gains rate to 25 percent. This is tactically clever, since it sends a friendly signal to the hedge-funders, while suggesting to progressives that he’s no pushover for Wall Street. At 25 percent, those “smart” and “interesting” financial touts would still be paying far less tax on their hedge-fund income than if they had to pay the top income-tax rate. So far, Obama has outraised John McCain among employees of hedge funds $822,000 to $348,000—this although John McCain wants to leave the capital-gains rate at 15 percent and opposes treating hedge-fund partner income as personal income. But there’s a money logic to this seeming incongruity: Hedge-funders specialize in predicting winning investments, and the accommodating Obama looks like a better bet than the more honestly pro-plutocrat McCain.

Obama spends so much time courting the rich that I’m not surprised that James Webb has removed himself from consideration for vice president. Webb is the most articulate Senate critic of America’s class divide. “The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th Century,” he wrote two years ago. Webb understands that class stratification is aggravated not only by tax and trade policy but also by public schools that serve increasingly as holding pens for students who can’t afford better private or parochial education. Attendance at an elite private school or university, as Obama well knows (and his Ph.D. mother appreciated), is one of the greatest aids to upward mobility in America today, as well as the best guarantee, along with a low inheritance tax, that people of means will maintain their children in the economic status they’ve become accustomed to.

Webb’s bald rhetoric about “robber barons” and “class struggle” might have proven inconvenient for the boy wonder from Chicago when he was at a fundraiser on Park Avenue. But if Obama’s candidacy fails, it might be Webb, and not Hillary, who picks up the pieces in 2012. Obama was right when he said that small-town, low-paid Americans are “bitter” about the broken promises of politicians. With “Democrats” like him and the Clintons leading the country, these left-out citizens might finally turn really angry.

Saying Nothing, But Still Power-hungry

They say America is the land of the second chance -- the chance to make good on a promise, a project or a virtuous deed that might lead to redemption. But in the case of Henry Kissinger, the chances never seem to run out, no matter how much harm he does.

Twice in the last two months I've heard the world's most famous (and venal) diplomat -- now said by Bob Woodward to be advising President Bush on Iraq -- make speeches that might be deemed comical if they were-n't so depressingly emblematic of this country's endless tolerance for con men, courtiers and failures. Kissinger should have run out his string years ago, but there he was, nearly 84 and still vigorous, commanding the rapt attention of people who by now should know better.

How does he get away with it? The crimes committed by Kissinger in the service of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford are well known, exhaustively described by William Shawcross, Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens, among others. I've always thought that Kissinger's role in pointlessly prolonging the carnage of Vietnam while Nixon's national security adviser was his greatest sin. But I don't mean to minimize his other acts of diplomatic debauchery, both large (contributing to the destruction of Cambodia and the overthrow of Salvadore Allende, in Chile), and smaller (giving the green light to Indonesia's immensely bloody invasion, and subsequent occupation, of East Timor).

I suspect that the secret to Kissinger's enduring influence, against all moral suasion, is his sheer persistence. He is a tireless self-promoter, with more energy and vanity than men half his age. Last month, at the memorial service for Arthur Schlesinger Jr., this servant of Republican Party power was called upon to eulogize a man identified with the Democratic Party and the cause of liberalism. But before a packed audience of nearly 900 people that included Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Norman Mailer and Bill Clinton, Kissinger talked almost entirely about himself.

It seems that when Henry was a young professor at Harvard in the 1950s, he wrote Arthur a letter about nuclear- weapons policy in response to something Arthur had said. Next thing you know, Arthur had passed Henry's great thoughts along to the editor of Foreign Affairs, resulting, Henry recalled, "in my first published piece on public policy."

Imagine that. An Adlai Stevenson Democrat got Henry started in his villainous life in politics. Bravo for Arthur! Bravo for Henry! The "eulogy" continued in this narcissistic vein to the point where Kissinger might just as well have brought out his résumé and handed it to Clinton to pass on to future president Hillary. I'm not sure that Schlesinger would have wanted to be remembered as the man who launched Kissinger's sordid career, but there was no stopping Henry's ambition amid the historic grandeur of the Great Hall of Cooper Union, scene of one of Abraham Lincoln's most celebrated speeches.

Two weeks later I got to observe Kissinger working another, more conservative room, this one filled with hundreds of admiring business people, members of the Economic Club of New York. In keeping with Kissinger's courtier spirit, the lunch was held in the Trianon Room of the New York Hilton, and club president Barbara Franklin did her best to promote an atmosphere worthy of Versailles.

Kissinger, declared Franklin in her introduction, was "the most influential diplomat" of modern times, "his brilliance the stuff of legend." But wait. Though "we still depend on him; we still need him," the great man's precious time had other claims upon it. Kissinger would have to cut short his answers during the question period after his speech, since his attendance was required that very evening at a White House state dinner honoring Queen Elizabeth II.

A collective frisson passed through the audience. But that wasn't the only thing to get excited about. Something really, really important was in the offing. "In another break with precedent," intoned Franklin, Kissinger's talk would be off the record. A second frisson, and then the "one and only Henry Kissinger" approached the podium.

I furiously began scribbling in my notebook, to better violate the ground rules. Whispering "confidences" to docile reporters ("you're the only one who can appreciate the sensitivity of this information") to reward them for their servility is Kissinger's stock in trade. In front of 500 or so people, the notion of an "off-the-record" speech was even more preposterous than the idea that Kissinger would ever tell a journalist anything important that he didn't want known.

And, true to form, there was virtually nothing in the doctor's speech that would have been worth quoting in a news story. Not always clearly understandable under the heavy German accent, Kissinger recounted a little bit of history studded with clichés: "In the 17th Century there emerged the idea of sovereign states" whose "frontiers were declared impermeable"; "Nationalist appeals to military service in Europe are in decline"; "Europe prefers the use of ‘soft' power"; the United States is inclined toward the use of "‘hard' power."

Presumably to suggest an interest in stopping wars, Kissinger made vague reference to Immanuel Kant's essay "Perpetual Peace," though he may have meant it ironically. In any event, he didn't say anything of substance about the burning issues of the day, namely Iraq and Iran. Only truisms: The modern Middle East, apart from Iran, is made up of artificial states created by "Victorian powers" and "loyalties in the region were tribal and religious." You don't say.

Then this: "Vietnam had a definable opponent. ... When I hear people say we should withdraw from Iraq or send more troops, people do not understand the turmoil we are facing. ... We cannot let a region fall into the hands of a revolutionary group." Nevertheless, "things are not hopeless." For further information, you have to hire Kissinger Associates, and that costs a lot more than a ticket to an Economic Club luncheon.

Indeed, the only thing that Kissinger said that approached anything resembling candor was his statement that China could not maintain an annual growth rate of 11 percent "with an African standard of living in the interior of the country and a European standard on the coast."

Kissinger's tactics work wonders on the self-regarding rich. One of two after-lunch questioners, Richard Nixon's son-in-law, lawyer Edward F. Cox, tried hard to outdo Franklin, calling Kissinger, "the pre-eminent strategic thinker of our time." But a brilliant self-promoter doesn't make a brilliant thinker or diplomat.

When, in answer to a question about the Suez crisis of 1956, Kissinger replied that "this was not [President Eisenhower's] greatest moment," I remembered just how shortsighted Kissinger can be. Suez was, in fact, one of Eisenhower's four greatest moments as president, including the ending of the Korean War, the forced integration of Little Rock's Central High School and his farewell address, in which he warned us about the "military-industrial complex." Halting the British-French-Israeli seizure of the Suez Canal from Nasser's Egypt was as principled as it was pragmatic: It told the world, not to mention millions of oppressed Muslims, that America would tolerate only so much re-colonization in the post-war era.

This was far too subtle and ethical for Kissinger, who, as a "private citizen," in 1979, lobbied hard to admit the deposed shah of Iran to the United States for cancer treatment. Despite President Carter's initial opposition and strong warnings from the American embassy in Tehran, Kissinger, David Rockefeller and their allies wore down the administration and got their way. The shah entered New York Hospital and the Ayatollah Khomeini's outraged Revolutionary Guard, fearing a counterrevolutionary plot, seized the hostages at the U.S. embassy, permanently poisoning relations between Tehran and Washington. Now that we need Iran's help in Iraq, Kissinger's intervention on behalf of the shah looks worse every day.

But were the members of the Economic Club really as stupid as Kissinger thinks? After his stage-managed exit to attend to the Queen (and King George), I noticed a prominent real-estate man, a Democrat whom I know slightly, whispering earnestly to another guest: "Kissinger said nothing. That's bad news because it means there's no way out of Iraq." I guess Bush must be really desperate. Or maybe he's just as dumb as people say.

I Deconstruct My Recent French Vote

A few days after I voted in the first round of the French presidential election, I dropped by the French Cultural Center on Fifth Avenue to attend a reception in honor of the American novelist Paul Auster—and to gather some political intelligence.

Having reluctantly followed the candidate recommendation of a French novelist friend, I wanted to hear what other literary types were saying about Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, who will face each other in a run-off next Sunday. And I wanted to know: As a dual national and first-time elector in la présidentielle, had I voted the right way?

French elections must seem peculiar to Americans. For one thing, ordinary Frenchmen evidently think that they run their country, which would explain in part the extraordinary turnout of 84.6 percent on April 22. Despite some unfortunate imitation of U.S. media techniques, France’s publicly financed campaigns remain remarkably unpolluted by plutocratic wealth, special interests and vote fraud. Strict limits on campaign spending and TV advertising ensure that the richest candidates or parties don’t necessarily get the greatest amplification.

Thus José Bové, the anti-corporate altermondialiste who famously led the dismantling of a partially built McDonald’s, was guaranteed the same minimum of state-sponsored TV time as the right-wing front-runner Sarkozy. To be sure, the four major party candidates got more news coverage than those on the fringes. But nobody had to feel cheated out of hearing genuinely alternative viewpoints—12 in all, ranging from far left to far right. In France people don’t generally assume, as I do in an American election, that the fix is pretty much in from the start, including which issues get discussed on TV. Unlike our tame, dumbed-down “debates,” the French candidates are often obliged to respond to smart, sometimes hostile questions from real citizens in a studio audience.

So I had the luxury of voting intelligently for president of my maternal republic in a way that I’m almost never afforded in my paternal republic. My choice was between a radical with whom I mostly agree (Bové), the candidate of the traditional left to whom I was drawn by instinct (the Socialist Royal) and the candidate with the best chance of beating Sarkozy (François Bayrou of the center-right UDF party). Sarkozy (the leader of President Jacques Chirac’s traditional right UMP party) had ruled himself out for me last September when he made (as minister of the interior supposedly paying his respects on the anniversary of 9/11) an entirely political visit to George Bush at the White House, just two months before America’s crucial mid-term elections. This was fraternizing with the enemy, and coming from a politician who lays claim to the independent, nationalist lineage of Charles De Gaulle, unforgivable.

So what to do to stop Sarkozy? My French friend, a female novelist who had always voted socialist, counselled me to cast le vote tactique for Bayrou, since all the polls showed him beating Sarkozy in the second round, whereas Sarkozy was shown beating Royal in every hypothetical match-up.

Initially I had wanted to vote for Bové because he was the only anti-free-trade candidate who was neither dogmatic communist (there were three Trotskyite candidates in the race) or crypto-fascist like Jean-Marie Le Pen. But Royal made a strong argument against voting too much on principle. In 2002, she harped, so many leftists abandoned the Socialist candidate for president that Le Pen of the National Front squeaked through to the second round, leaving the far left and social democrats alike with no choice but to vote for Chirac—hardly their cup of tea.

Still, I hesitated up to the last minute. All three mainstream candidates—Sarkozy, Royal and Bayrou—supported the yes in the 2005 referendum on ratification of the proposed European constitution—which was, in effect, a referendum on globalization and free trade—while 55 percent of the French electorate, including me, voted no. Apart from American imperialism in Iraq, I believe that economic liberalism and its “free-trade” component represent the greatest menace to world stability, so how could I support either Bayrou or Royal (Sarkozy is a declared liberal on economics)?

Moreover, Royal embodies what the French mockingly refer to as la gauche caviar, which, like the Hollywood/Wall Street-driven Democratic Party, has all but abandoned its working-class constituencies. The pro-Europe socialists cloak their betrayal of workers in their notion of a “Social Europe”; the Democrats cloak theirs in the rubric of “free trade.” Being a socialist these days in France can be almost as bourgeois a badge as showing up at a David Geffen fundraiser.

In the end I took my novelist friend’s advice and voted for Bayrou, to little effect, since Royal easily took second place behind Sarkozy. Having bet wrong, I was a little embarrassed at having been so pragmatic; after all, I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. So in casual conversations at the Auster soirée I was cautious about mentioning my vote tactique. Sure enough, a socialist acquaintance, a literary critic, said she was horrified by my choice and jokingly shouted out her threat to “report me.” But to my relief, another female novelist praised my good sense at the same time as she despaired about the likelihood of a Sarkozy victory.

Come next Sunday, I’ll vote enthusiastically against Nicolas Sarkozy, unenthusiastically for Ségolène Royal. Not ideal, but it beats choosing between George Bush and John Kerry.

The Vast Power of the Saudi Lobby

Given my dissident politics, I should be up in arms about the Israel lobby. Not only have I supported the civil rights of the Palestinians over the years, but two of my principal intellectual mentors were George W. Ball and Edward Said, both severe critics of Israel and its extra-special relationship with the United States.

Nowadays I ought to be even bolder in my critique, since the silent agreement suppressing candid discussions about Israeli-U.S. relations has recently been shaken by some decidedly mainstream figures. These critics of Israel and its American agents include John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University of Chicago, and Harvard's Kennedy School, respectively; Tony Judt, a historian at New York University; and former President Jimmy Carter.

Somehow, though, I can't shake the idea that the Israel lobby, no matter how powerful, isn't all it is cracked up to be, particularly where it concerns the Bush administrations past and present. Indeed, when I think of pernicious foreign lobbies with disproportionate sway over American politics, I can't see past Saudi Arabia and its royal house, led by King Abdullah.

The long and corrupt history of American-Saudi relations centers around the kingdom's vast reserves of easily extractable oil, of course. Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt met aboard ship in 1945 with King Ibn Saud, the special relationship with the desert kingdom has only grown stronger. The House of Saud is usually happy to sell us oil at a consistent and reasonable price and then increase production if unseemly market forces drive the world price of a barrel too high for U.S. consumers.

In exchange we arm the Saudis to the teeth and turn a blind eye to their medieval approach to crime and punishment.

Even during the Saudi-led oil embargo of 1973-74, an exceedingly hostile action against the United States supposedly justified by Washington's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Nixon administration treaded very softly. Despite the illegality of the embargo it arguably violated international law as well as a bilateral commercial agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia the White House and the State Department could hardly have been more diplomatic toward their Bedouin friends.

As the historian J.B. Kelly recounts, the U.S. ambassador to Riyahd, James Akins, did his best to placate King Faisal by urging the Saudi's American-owned oil concessionaire ARAMCO to, in Akin's words, "hammer home" to the White House that the embargo wouldn't be lifted unless "the political struggle [between Israel and the Arabs] is settled in [a] manner satisfactory to [the] Arabs."

In all, as Kelly wrote, "a most peculiar recourse for an ambassador to employ to influence the policy of his own government."

But this was a blip on the screen of harmonious petrol politics. After Iran's Islamic revolution overthrew the trusted shah, in 1979, the thoroughly anti-democratic Saudi oligarchy appeared an island of stability and thus of greater strategic value to Washington. Indeed, in a head-to-head match-up with the Israel lobby in 1981 over the proposed American sale of AWACS planes to the Saudis, the Saudi lobby won a close vote in the Senate. Leading the Arab charge on Capitol Hill was the debonair Prince Bandar, who demonstrated that charm mixed with a lot of money could beat the Israelis, even during the pro-Israel administration of Ronald Reagan.

Bandar was quickly promoted to Saudi ambassador to Washington, where, in 1990, he was assigned the task by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney of, in effect, doling out press passes to the U.S. media before the Gulf War this in spite of the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. troops were swarming into the kingdom to defend it against a perceived invasion threat from Saddam Hussein. When he wasn't entertaining congressmen and spreading good cheer through his highly paid lobbyist, Fred Dutton, Bandar was busy making friends with, at first vice president, and then president, George H.W. Bush, and by extension with Bush's son, the future president. This personal relationship with the Bush family has served Bandar and his family very well, as documented in Craig Unger's book, House of Bush, House of Saud.

But the prince and his royal relatives evidently also impressed the Clinton administration. Before he died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, the former FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill complained to French investigator Jean-Charles Brisard that Saudi pressure on the State Department had prevented him from fully investigating possible al-Qaida involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, and of the destroyer Cole in 2000. As with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, there's always talk of the Saudis playing a double game with al-Qaida publicly denouncing it and privately paying it off but you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that the Saudis don't have America's best interests at heart.

So it gets worse. Now, according to Seymour Hersh, Bandar has virtually joined the Bush administration as a shadow cabinet member. Hersh's New Yorker article last month described "the redirection" of U.S. foreign policy against Iran and Arab Shi'ite terrorists in collaboration with such Sunni-dominated countries as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt (this in spite of the fact that Sunni rebels, funded in part by Saudi "private citizens," have killed the bulk of American solidiers who have died in Iraq).

The wise men in this new policy council reportedly include Vice President Cheney, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams (an Iran-Contra convict who is very pro-Israel), the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, and none other than Bandar, now the Saudi national-security adviser. Such is the cynicism of Bushian, Israeli and Saudi foreign policy that Abrams collaborates with Bandar, whose country does not recognize Israel and whose "charities" give money to the families of suicide bombers who blow themselves up inside the Jewish state.

Lately, King Abdullah has been making anti-American noises, calling the U.S. presence in Iraq an "illegitimate foreign occupation." But like the Saudis' paper-thin devotion to the Palestinian cause, this is just so much realpolitik. In March 1974, the oil embargo was lifted without any conditions concerning Palestinian rights. Today, as the Shi'ism scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb told Mohamad Bazzi, of Newsday, "the Saudis are being more autonomous, but it's a very contrived sense of autonomy" designed "to give [them] more political cover so they can rally Arab support against [Shi'ite] Iran."

If you're naive enough to believe that the Saudi king's rhetoric signifies a genuine break with the United States over Iraq, or anything else, then you might also believe that the Israel lobby is more powerful than the Saudi lobby. And if you think that Israeli security means more to George Bush than Saudi oil, then you might even believe that Bush saw 9/11 coming.