Category: US election 2008

Barack Obama made the obligatory candidate’s visit to AIPAC’s annual convention today. Look, I’ve been in this country through six presidential elections. I don’t recall a single major candidate who hasn’t gone to the AIPAC convention and made some extremely pandering remarks there. By that (admittedly very low) standard, Obama stands out– just a little bit– but perhaps not trivially.
Here’s the L.A. Times account of what he said , which is the fullest I can find. LAT reporter Johanna Neuman writes there:

Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Obama won applause with a promise to “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” He also assailed his Republican opponent, John McCain, for “willful mischaracterization” of his call for diplomatic outreach to the Iranian regime and said he “has no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking.”
But as president, Obama said, “I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place and my choosing — if and only if it can advance the interests of the United States.”
Calling the threat posed by Iran “grave,” Obama said that “as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.” He pledged $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade to “ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran.” To a standing ovation, he said, “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — everything.”
The presumed Democratic nominee took a shot at President Bush for delaying peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. “I won’t wait until the waning days of my presidency,” he said. “I will take an active role and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of peace from the start of my administration.”
Saying that Palestinians “need a state that is contiguous and cohesive,” Obama said any agreement “must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders” and with Jerusalem the capital of an undivided country. [Actually, that’s really sloppy reporting in that last sentence. What CNN reports Obama as saying at that point is, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” CNN also has the video of the speech.]
The Illinois senator sought to dispel concerns in the Jewish community, circulating on the Internet, that he is a Muslim and is allied with critics of Israel. Obama is a Christian. “If anyone has been confused by these e-mails,” he said, “I want you to know that today I’ll be speaking from my heart, and as a true friend of Israel.”
And he reminded the audience that African Americans and Jewish Americans had stood together during the civil rights era. “They took buses down South together,” Obama said. “They marched together. They bled together. And Jewish Americans like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were willing to die alongside a black man — James Chaney — on behalf of freedom of equality.” Calling the legacy of the three slain civil rights workers “our inheritance,” Obama said, “We must not allow the relationship between Jews and African Americans to suffer.”

Even Haaretz’s sometimes fairly hawkish commentator Shmuel Rosner was moved to observe of the parade of pandering presidential wannabes to today’s AIPAC gig that,

Generally speaking, the AIPAC delegates tended to applaud the speakers when they talked tough about Iran, and to remain relatively silent when they were talking about peace with the Palestinians…
Of course, some people will make this yet another proof that AIPAC is hawkish, warmongering, radical organization. I think it is a sign of grim and realistic skepticism. Maybe it was better for the delegates to make an effort and cheer more enthusiastically when peace was mentioned – but it was also perfectly understandable, for their part, not to.

So finally, we know who the two main candidates will be in our general election here in the US this November. Yesterday evening, Barack Obama pulled past the magic number of 2,118 delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. That, after the Democratic Party had finally held primaries or caucuses in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
I watched CNN for much of yesterday evening. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Obama all gave significant speeches. Hillary’s was almost– but not quite– a farewell speech. She has not yet conceded the nomination to Obama, but indicated she would make a decision fairly soon. I think her delivery of the speech was the strongest I have ever seen from her, though the content was pretty poor. Not just that she didn’t acknowledge Obama’s by-then obvious victory. But her speech also lacked substance.
What were more interesting to me were the speeches of the two remaining, big-party presidential candidates, MacCain and Obama. McCain’s was truly pathetic. He was speaking in New Orleans (which he insisted on calling New Orleyans, not ‘Norlins’ as most locals there do.) In that proud city that was once a hub of African-American-Cajun culture he had gathered about 200 people, all of them apparently “white”. Also, as one of the CNN commentators noted, McCain managed to assemble a crowd of such an age that he seemed to be the youngest man in the room.
I was interested to see the degree that he– like Obama– focused his speech on international issues, primarily the situation in Iraq and the whole question of the use of the US military in international affairs. I guess I’d thought that rising economic worries here at homer might have already shifted the topic of debate between the candidates from international affairs to economic affairs. But that doesn’t seem to have happened at this point.
McCain’s delivery was wooden and self-conscious.
Then came Hillary’s speech, given to a crowd that was larger but certainly not huge, in the basement gym of Baruch College in New York. As I said, her delivery was excellent. The crowd seemed dominated by ardent and somewhat cult-like Hillary-supporters. I guess they’ll need a bit of time to come to terms with her defeat. She, obviously, needs to show some clear leadership in bringing them around to give enthusiastic support to a Democratic ticket that she won’t be heading. (There’s been a lot of talk about whether Obama will choose her as his Vice. She certainly seems to be angling for that. That’s a tough decision for him to make.)
And then we had Obama’s speech, which was delivered in the same sports stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans will be holding their convention this September. In this notably “white”-dominated state, Obama had packed the 17,000-seat stadium, and according to local police there were an additional 18,000 people gathered outside, as well. His people are a little cult-like, too… But I guess that in the American system, if any candidate succeeds in generating enthusiasm and buzz, then a gathering of his/her supporters could appear cult-like from the outside. It’s something to do with the intense personalization of the system here.
He was accompanied to the stage by his radiant-looking spouse, Michele Obama, a tall, extremely competent woman, who exchanged a hug and a playful little knuckle-punch with him before she left him alone under the Klieg lights to deliver his speech.
Right near the beginning he announced, “Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.”
He then moved right into addressing his presumed opponent, McCain– something he has already been doing for some weeks now, as the certitude of his imminent victory in the Democratic primaries has grown ever larger. He described McCain as “a man who has served this country heroically,” immediately adding: “I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign.”
I think that displayed just the right amount of respect and collegiality toward McCain, though with an appropriate small edge of feisty criticism.
Here was where Obama delineated his approach to international affairs:

there are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.
Change is a foreign policy that doesn’t begin and end with a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged. I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what’s not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years – especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.
We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in – but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It’s time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda’s leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century – terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That’s what change is.
Change is realizing that meeting today’s threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy – tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn’t afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That’s what the American people want. That’s what change is.

The arguments I emphasized there all look like good and compelling ones. (Though I think that linking a withdrawal from Iraq to to more reliance on the UN– there and elsewhere– would have been better than linking it to a sort of “blame the Iraqis” meme?)
Anyway, his delivery of the speech was– as always– spectacular. Obama is a truly gifted rhetorician, along with his many other talents. Anyway, crafting and delivering a great speech requires huge understanding at the levels of both raw intellect and human affairs.
So here we are, with the national attention now shifting to the general election contest. If it were just about McCain and Obama, then I think McCain would have an extremely tough job of winning. Obama’s greatest strength is the authenticity with which he can represent his “change” agenda– this at a time when the vast majority of Americans are evidently fed up with the present situation (economic and military) and have a very poor opinion of Pres. Bush. McCain is not only 25 years older than Obama (and looks and acts it); in addition, he is closely allied to Bush’s policies on all issues, except climate change.
But it is McCain’s party association with Bush, who still holds considerable levers of power in the country, that makes me wary of predicting any easy victory for Obama. As head of the executive branch, there are any number of actions Bush and his people could take that he might hope would help push the election toward his fellow Republican.
Yes, even including actions in the arena of war and peace. This would certainly not be the first time this has happened… (Wag the Dog, anyone?)
However, initiating any kind of election-related, pre-election attack on another country would be a very risky business, at two levels:

1. It would most likely, in today’s global political climate, stir up a very extensive and damaging hornet’s nest internationally, and
2. It might not even have the “desired” effect on an electorate at home that is, I believe, considerably savvier about the risks of international escalation than the US citizenry was back in the 1990s. Indeed, a pre-election escalation or attack, against Iran or any other possible target, might even backfire at the polls. Remember what happened to Jose Maria Aznar when he tried a last-minute escalation of his rhetoric against the Basques?

From this perspective, I believe that the more we can educate the US electorate at home about the very real risks that would be incurred internationally by any unjustified US military attacks against other countries, the more we might be able to deter the Bushists from launching any such attack.
But launching a Wag the Dog attack isn’t the only thing the nation’s chief executive and his employees can do between now and November. They could also, oh, to mention one wild and crazy example, schedule some show trials to start in September? Something connected with 9/11? With a huge related media operation? That would serve in those vital last weeks before the election to work the electorate back up into a tizzy of fear and xenophobia… ?
No, they wouldn’t stoop to doing that, would they? Would they?

Today, in the (Quaker-founded) City of Brotherly Love, Sen. Barack Obama gave what is probably the most important speech of his entire presidential campaign. It was wise, thoughtful, honest, redemptive, hope-filled, and intensely focused on the central issue of his campaign: the need to bring the US citizenry together in the search for a more just social order.
The speech confirmed, for me, that Obama does indeed have the wisdom required to lead this nation in the complex years ahead.
The main challenge he was confronting in making the speech was the way that race issues have started infiltrating into the Democratic nomination race in a very insidious way. There were Geraldine’s Ferraro’s (actually quite bizarre) recent comments to the effect that Obama had gotten as far as he has gotten only because of his race; and there has been much muttering and dissemination of anti-Obama innuendo based on video clips of some sermons given by his long-time pastor in Chicago, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Wright retired some time ago from the pastroship at Obama’s church and is no longer his pastor.
Obama dealt in what I thought was a fair-minded, clear, yet generous-spirited way with the issues raised by and about both Ferraro and Wright. Regarding Wright, Obama went to some lengths to express his strong criticism of some of the specific things Wright has said (and therefore, done), while notably not disaffirming him totally as a person, a valued former mentor, and a friend.
To me, this is a very important move for anyone to make. People need to be able to criticize the actions (or words) of other people without disaffirming them as people. We certainly all need to the hold to the idea that people, all people, including ourselves, are capable of doing both good things and bad things; (and we should hope that we ourselves end up doing more good than bad.)
Obama spoke quite a lot about what Wright and his UCC church have meant to him over the years. He also, as I’ve said, criticized some of Wright’s specific utterances. Then, he paired this view of Wright, and Wright’s occasional (but, it turns out, well documented) explosions of anti-white anger, with his view of his own white grandmother. He says of Wright:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love…

This is indeed a fascinating look into what makes Obama tick. In essence, because of the multiracial character of his upbringing and his family, Obama has an “insider’s view” into the way that many white Americans talk among themselves about race issues, and of the way that many black Americans talk among themselves. Within each community, these are generally viewed as “dirty little secrets.” But keeping them secret rather than airing and discussing these fears, concerns, and accusations more openly has allowed them to fester.
He promises us something different. More honesty, more national unity, and more focus on the many very urgent tasks of social (re-)building that our country faces at the twilight of the George W. Bush years.
This is an amazing and important speech. The only small flaw– a concession, no doubt, to the problems that many strongly pro-Likud people have been foisting onto him– was his specific disavowal of an argument that Rev. Wright apparently made, to the effect that the conflicts in the Middle East have been rooted primarily in the actions of Israel (described by Obama as a “stalwart ally”–“instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
Well, my view is that the actions of Israel and the hateful ideologies of some (but not all) of the proponents of radical Islam have both contributed to the conflicts in the Middle East. And so, in an even greater way, have the actions of the US government. So Obama’s flaw there doesn’t seem major to me.
His speech is primarily about inter-group relations here in the U.S. It is a great one.

Personally, I have not a moment’s doubt about Barack Obama being ready “from Day One” to be President of the United States. I have spoken with numerous people who know him and his work far better than I do, and who have held lengthy discussions with him about national-security affairs, whose word regarding his readiness I trust. One of them is that canny and well-tested “Realist” and situational hawk Zbig Brzezinski.
What Obama brings to the role of “Commander-in Chief” that is distinctive is his readiness– eagerness, even– to completely re-frame the crucial challenge of our time, which is:

“How should we seek to redefine and clarify the relationship between the US citizenry and the other 95% of the world’s people?”

Up till now, Obama has shown his commitment to a moving determinedly away from fear-mongering; toward a calm and quietly self-confident reassessment of America’s place in the world; and toward– as he and I have both defined this– “Re-engagement” with the rest of the world on a new, more authentic, and much more respectful and egalitarian basis.
(I certainly hope he doesn’t shift his stance on these issues now.)
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has recently entered in a big way into the distinctly Bushist business of fear-mongering, much-spreading, and tinpot bellicosity.
Honestly, I don’t believe any Democratic candidate can out-McCain McCain on that basis. The only way to win– and the only way to set our country on the right track– is to change the terms of our national conversation about security affairs, completely.
If I have full confidence in Obama as Commander-in-Chief, I should add that right now I have a little less confidence in the idea that his key foreign-policy advisor Sam Power is “ready” for any high-level job involving the conduct of diplomacy. In an “unguarded moment” in a press interview in the UK yesterday– where she has gone to promote her new book– Power described Hillary Clinton as “a monster.” She also told the interviewer, Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, that, “”We f***** up in Ohio…”
Neither of those locutions is the language a diplomat of any rank would use. Power– herself a former hard-hitting journalist– is quite evidently “a breath of fresh air” in the usually very stuffy world of international diplomacy. She is also extremely smart. But not quite smart enough to have avoided that language in a press interview.
Of the two statement she made to Peev, the only one she took back was the one about Clinton being a monster. In a statement released by Obama’s campaign she said: These comments do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired.” She also said she “regretted” that remark. (Perhaps she should also have expressed regret over the language used in the other remark, too.)
I really do like and admire Sam Power. She has come under fire recently for some criticisms she voiced back in 2002 about the atrocities the IOF committed during its seizing of Jenin camp. I am strongly inclined to defend her. But if she really aspires to operate at the highest levels of US diplomacy– as I assume she well might, in an Obama presidency– then she needs to think a little more carefully before she speaks, and to use her undoubted skills in conceptualizing and wordsmithing to make sure she expresses herself in more temperate tones.

Yesterday I went to a talk that key Barack Obama foreign-affairs advisor Samantha Power gave at the New America Foundation on her new book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello. De Mello was the charismatic Brazilian UN official who was the first head of the UN mission in post-invasion Iraq (UNAMI), and was one of the 18 or so UN staff members killed in the August 2003 bombing of their headquarters there.
But given Power’s high-level role with the Obama campaign, many of the people at yesterday’s event had doubtless gone with an eye to learning something about that, too. (Though I should note that Sam Power is also an intriguing, very smart and charismatic person in her own right.)
The Obama angle suffused much of the event. In the Q&A period, some of the questions were explicitly about him, his foreign policy, and her own foreign-policy views. Even when she was talking about De Mello, it was sometimes hard to say whether she was talking only about De Mello but also about that other charismatic guy, the one she works for now. (She also worked for him as an advisor when he first entered the U.S. Senate.)
So here is how she described five key learnings that she judged De Mello had acquired during the course of his 34-year career as a UN diplomat:

1. At the beginning, he had entered with some very firm judgments and prohibitions. But then he evolved, and thought you had to find a way to deal with people. But he evolved too much. He became too obsequious to people like Milosevic and Karadzic…. He spent considerable time looking for special gifts to take them… He became too accommodating to state power in general. So then, between 1994 in Bosnia and 1999 in Kosovo, he learned he had gone too far in being friendly with them. And after that, he sought a balance between being in the room with such people, but also being very careful about being clear about his own positions while he was with them.
2. He learned the great importance of human dignity as an organizing principle for what makes people tick. He described it as the axle at the center of the wheel of all other human rights. In East Timor, when he was the UN Viceroy there, he was quite clear that what the Timorese people really wanted was to govern themselves, not have him there.
3. He had great a real humility, especially about how much he really did not know. But then, how do you deal with that and still engage? So what he had was a real commitment to empiricism, to constantly checking to see if what he was doing was actually working.
4. He would stress the importance of living a life that is not paralyzed or distorted by fear… He would often say, ‘Fear makes a bad advisor.’
5. He had a really strong commitment to the idea of service. He didn’t want to go to Iraq. but he saw the commitment to serving the institution of the UN as an instinctive one.

Later, she was asked how she would describe the essential qualities of a good political leader, in general. She replied with this list:

1. This should be someone committed to checking the effects of his or her own actions, someone committed to empiricism.
2. It should be someone unafraid of thinking outside the box.
3. It should be someone who is well centered and has a strong sense of his or her own self. (She drew a distinct contrast there with Bill Clinton in 1992 who, she said, had certainly seemed like someone who craved and needed an lot of attention from others.)

At one point, asked about the current nomination contest, she said, “Well, the good thing about going up against the Clintons is that you do get some good practice!”
She made some intriguing comments about the situation in Darfur and the debate that raged in much of the human-rights community in recent years over how important it was to get President Bush and other political leaders to publicly define the Sudanese government’s actions there as a genocide. (Power’s most famous earlier book– for which she got a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize– was a study of US policies toward all the well-known genocides of the 20th century.)
She noted that back in 2003-04, when that debate was at its height, she had argued that getting Bush to actually name it as a genocide was not really worth very much, and might even be counter-productive. She characterized her argument at that time in these terms: “If Bush says that Darfur is a genocide, then everyone else in the world would oppose that and spend a lot of time parsing what he said. And then, what happened after Bush did say it,was that the UN set up a commission that worked for six months on investigating whether it was or wasn’t a genocide. So the whole step of naming it became not a catalyst for action but a substitute for the kinds of action that were needed, which were to pay a lot more attention to intervening, providing airlift and training for the AU forces, and so on. Also, it is kind of hard to be for waterboarding on a Monday and then against genocide on the Tuesday…”
That was a great line.
Anyway, I bought the book on De Mello, and have been reading it with interest.
(Gotta get back to my own book. We have page-proofs. The publication date is May 15. Did I tell you that already?)

We did it! In Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, we voted Barack Obama overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary.
I’m watching Obama giving the victory speech. He’s doing it in Madison, Wisconsin, since Wisconsin is one of the upcoming primary states.
But Obama’s stupendous. He’s talked quite a bit about the need for clarity on the war. He said some good things about John McCain’s past heroism– a nice touch. But then he said that McCain lost his way. That McCain, who had once stood against the tax cuts Bush gave to the rich but now he supports them. A number of times Obama made the link directly between the cost of the war in Iraq and the lack of investment at home.
He’s been talking in a very personal vein– about the fact that his mother was a teenager in Hawaii, and then his father left the family when Barack was only two years old…
Most interesting of all, though, has been to see him suddenly looking like someone who is ready to be president. He’s been saying a number of times “When I am president…” and suddenly it looks as if he is growing into a self-realization of the possibility, growing into the role.
Half an hour ago, I saw a very mechanical speech from Hillary Clinton.
Oh, and now CNN has shifted over from Obama to McCain. The difference in age and energy level is evident.
Also, Obama was speaking in a huge, two-tiered stadium with tens of thousands of people there. (He has shown this amazing ability to mobilize large numbers of voters, especially young voters.) The camera there kept moving into a wide shot and then panning over the massive crowd. With McCain, now, all you can see is five other– all white– people in the frame behind him as he speaks in Alexandria, Virginia. One of them is, I think, the ageing and about-to-retie Republican Virginia senator, John Warner, who is 80-plus years old.
But McCain is also promising a respectful, decent campaign. Including– I just heard him using Obama’s signature chant of “I’m fired up and ready to go!” That, with a large smile.

We traveled to Lebanon on Thursday/Friday. Learned in Frankfurt airport about Barack Obama’s big victory in Iowa. Great news!! Got to Beirut and discovered my bag hadn’t. So I’m sitting here in one of Bill’s shirts waiting for the bag, which Lufthansa promises will turn up this afternoon.
Once again, dealing with this seven-hour time difference gives me just a tiny taste of how disorienting any sleep deprivation can be. It therefore seems clear that prolonged and systematically applied s.d. regimes, such as U.S. operatives have practised against detainees in the colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere, can cause severe damage to a person’s sense of her/himself and thereby considerably corrode the independent human personality… And that is, after all, the aim of all torture.
(I am NOT claiming that the slight disorientation I have suffered is at all commensurate with the mental incapacitation suffered by the US government’s detainees. Of course, it is a known risk, that I have voluntarily and knowingly assumed. And it is already almost past. But experiencing it is a good reminder of the reality and gravity of the much bigger problem.)
But back to Obama– a much happier thought. I have already read a lot of commentary about his victory. One of the main points I’ve noted is that the engrossing contest within the Democratic primary process in Iowa succeeded in bringing out huge numbers of new participants in the complicated process of the party’s caucus system.
That is great news– including, that it is a great portent for the general election that will take place November 4. Getting a strong turnout in the polls November 4 will be key to a democratic victory. And it is, of course, an excellent portent for the health of US democracy looking into the future, too.
Turnout for the Democratic caucuses in Iowa was 239,000. Perhaps this was the greatest number ever? I’m not sure. But anyway, it was far, far higher than most people’s expectations. It’s a high figure, too, if you remember that people had to commit to turning out on a very cold night and to spending several hours participating in the whole caucusing system. Much more complicated than simply casting a single primary ballot, which is all the Iowa Republicans had to do… And for them, the turnout rate was, I think, less than 100,000.
Another item I picked up was that Obama did better than Hillary among all groups of women in the state, except for women over 65. That’s interesting, because Hillary has tried to position herself as very much the choice for women. In Iowa, there is only a tiny sliver of African-American population, so if we take a “demographic-likeness” view of voting, then Obama had little “natural” base for his campaign there. What he proved instead was his ability to transcend many different kinds of demographic boundaries.
What does Obama represent, for me? I still have the excitement for him that I had when I went to see him in person at the end of October. I realize he is not everything I would like to a candidate to be. I wish he could speak more constructively on the Palestinian issue, the need for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, and the need for a universal health-care system. But after eight years of harsh Bush partisanship I like Obama’s willingness to try to transcend a position of strict partisanship. I really like that he is not just a re-tread of disappointing times past, as Hillary is. I like that his youthfulness could draw more Americans into active participation in the political system. I like his “difference” from the same-old-same-old that has stifled American politics for so long.
I have to say that I also really dislike Hillary trying to “claim” all of Bill Clinton’s experience and record as President as somehow also accruing to her “experience account” while also presenting herself as a person of independent accomplishment… And also her convenient omission of the fact that the one thing her husband did explicitly– if not entirely constitutionally– entrust to her care during his presidency, namely an overhaul of the health-care system, turned out to be a disastrous failure and a setback to the campaign for decent health-care; and the cause of that failure was in large part her gross mismanagement of the reform project.
So Obama’s victory in Iowa looks really exciting to me. I hope he can take some good momentum forward to the next primaries, in New Hampshire and South Carolina. (S.C. will be a good test of whether he can attract some solid support from white folk in the south and not just in demure, well-meaning Iowa.)
By the way, the main thing I came to Lebanon for is this conference at AUB. Then, I’m going to Syria.

I was one of about 5-6,000 people who crammed into Charlottesville’s tented “pavillion” this evening to hear Barack Obama speak this evening. He was considerably better than I had expected. He spoke forthrightly about his anti- Iraq war position and said one of the first things he’d do as president is to call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and make a plan to withdraw all the troops from Iraq.
(Note to Obama: Actually, you’d need to call the Secretaries of State and Defense in first, to get the diplomacy and the grand strategy right, before you call the Chiefs in.)
His two main topics were foreign policy (mainly, the war), and health care. He noted that the funds being poured into the war would be far, far better diverted into programs to rebuild American society as a community of hope rather than division and fear.
He also once, quite notably for me, said his aim would be to “Re-engage!” the US with the rest of the world.
He spoke a few times about the very bad effects Pres. Bush has had for the country and the world. He also talked quite a bit about the problems of “politics as usual”, and “bowing to the special interests”, etc etc. Those were clearly jabs at Hillary Clinton but he did not name her openly. A wise move.
He got a fabulous, enthusiastic turnout here in town, and was introduced by our Democratic Governor, Tim Kaine, who is co-chair of Obama’s national committee (I think.) Actually, Kaine was also very impressive as a speaker, when he was out there winding up the crowd for Obama.
The pundits are saying– and Kaine and Obama repeated this, this evening– that Virginia will be “in play” in the 2008 presidential election in a way it hasn’t been since the 1960s. That is, there will actually be a chance that the Dems might take the state (and therefore all of its electoral college votes), though it’s been solidly Republican for nigh these many years past.
Recently, the WaPo even said there’s a chance that our Democratic junior Senator, Jim Webb, elected last year, might be a vice-presidential running mate next year.
And more locally yet, my son this evening sent me this fascinating item from the TPM Cafe blogging area, written by a guy called Tom Periello who was explaining his decision to stand against our district’s deeply misguided Republican Congressperson, Virgil Goode.
Periello says:

I’m running for Congress because I believe my campaign can be part of an important change in American politics. The 2006 elections demonstrated the viability of conviction politics. The great midterm candidates spoke from a deep sense of right and wrong, not a desire to position themselves on an artificial spectrum of right, left, and center…

Personally, I think he’s not being fair to Al Weed, an antiwar Democrat who ran a strong and principled campaign against Goode in 2006, but who lost. And it’s not clear to me what relationship Periello actually has with Virginia, apart from currently having some kind of temporary Guest Lecturer gig at U. Va. Law School. As I understand it, having strong local connections is (not unreasonably) important to many of the voters in our district here, whereas a lot of Periello’s life-experience so far has been as a kind of globe-trotting jurisprudentiocrat… So let’s see what happens with his candidacy as it develops further.
But Obama’s event this evening was unreservedly good news. He had a great manner, a strong organization, and spoke a lot of solid good sense. Tomorrow I’ll look for a transcript of his remarks and post them here.

Updates Tues. a.m.:
(1) A commenter has pointed out that Periello grew up near C ‘ville, and indeed Periello’s website notes that he graduated from the private academy that’s a stone’s throw from my house. I believe Periello needs to do a lot better job organizing in the district than he has done so far…
(2) David Swanson was hard at work live-blogging the Obama event last night. Sean Tubbs was recording it for a podcast. I’m not seeing anything about it yet on Obama’s website.
(3) This story by Bob Gibson in the local paper reported that, “Barack Obama drew more than 4,250 people to an outdoor rally and fundraiser Monday night at the Charlottesville Pavilion, surpassing a fundraiser that Hillary Clinton staged Sept. 23… by more than 3,000 paid attendees.” Also this: “Organizer James B. Murray Jr. said the gathering was the largest paid crowd that Obama has drawn anywhere as a presidential candidate and noted that the fundraiser out-raised Clinton’s previous Charlottesville total of $200,000 by more than $100,000.” This parallel report is also worth reading.
The DP once again showed its incredibly skewed news judgment by putting those reports down near the fold on p.1. Topping them was a story titled (yawn!) “Ambulance plan remains divisive.”

Back to the book-factory for me. But great to see that the concept of the US “re-engaging” with the rest of the world on new and healthier terms is now entering the political lexicon…