My Epiphany

I had an epiphany the other day. I was not on the road to Damascus. Rather is was driving down New Jersey Avenue looking at the U. S. Capitol building in the morning light. And with that epiphany I changed my mind about Barack Obama.

I have been horribly impatient with him, with the pace of progress, with the oppressive burden of 30 years of idiocy and pseudo-conservatism. Like many liberals, I wanted everything done now. I wanted a dynamic president who demanded change. Now.

But I was wrong.

Bear with me while I digress.

Once upon a time -- just about half a century ago -- we elected another young president, the first Roman Catholic, to the presidency. He wasn't a liberal as he may romantically seem in retrospect, but he was a breath of fresh air. He was visibly strong in the face of miitary threats and talked about wonderful plans. In the beginning he seemed like the answer to the plodding Eisenhower years, yet he accomplished little.

Folks tend to toss that off as the result of his assassination, but I don't think that's true. I think he was destined to be a different kind of agent of change. His main job was to make a Roman Catholic president not so scary to the American people, to reassure us that the Pope wasn't in charge of Washington. (This may seem ridiculous to folks now, but it wasn't then. It was a huge issue.) And he did that. He put to rest the concerns about putting a Roman Catholic into the White House. And he created a space wherein his successor was able to accomplish some of what Mr. Kennedy spoke of.

I think that Mr. Obama is another such president.

It now seems to me that Mr. Obama's job is to show us that we needn't be afraid of an African-American president, to reassure us that there won't be watermelon growing on the White House lawn, to teach us that we don't have to cringe in fear because a black man walks down the street or hails a cab. He can't do that by being angry, by being insistent, by pushing us and rushing us and making demands. He can only do that by being the rock steady person that he appears to be, unflappable and pleasant.

Perhaps if he survives his first term he can be more dynamic in his second. Or perhaps cleaning up the mess of the past 30 years will have to wait for his successor. But I am convinced we, as a nation, need this time. We need the zealots and bigots to rage and scream while the president stays steady. And by doing just that he allows this nation with its horridly racist undertones to move just a little bit closer to a place where race doesn't matter.

Where Does Obama Go From Here?

The meme du jour seems to view Barack Hussein Obama as the rightful heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the progenitor of the New New Deal. Franklin Delano Obama is the subject of a Paul Krugman piece that argues for bold economic strokes and audacity. But he is an economist. We would expect no less. Michael Lind writing in Salon is also stuck within the window of his own specialization. Viewing the nation through a lens of broad changes based largely on centralization and decentralizaation, he tells us, in a stunning display of egomanaical fancy, that we hae entered the era of the Fourth Republic.

More often these comparisons seem based on the nature of the presidency that came before the two men then wander into a comparison that, in my view, is based largely on a lack of imagination. Here is George Packer for The New Yorker.

Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious.

In spite of the fact that the right from the time of Barry Goldwater on has been doggedly struggling to obliterate all of the social changes created during the new deal I don't see the Roosevelt/Obama comparison as a good fit. Nor do I see the occasional comparison between Reagan and Obama apt, in spite of Obama's obvious admiration for the accomplishments of Reagan.

Listening to the radio the week of the election -- that was just last week, wasn't it? -- I heard someone say that for him the morning after the election was November 23, 1963. The promise that seemed to die with the assasination of John Kennedy seemed alive for him again. That felt exactly right to me.

Which brings me to the appropriate comparison for the Obama presidency -- Lyndon Baines Johnson, an effective yet tragically flawed presidency. If Obama can do the kinds of things that Johnson did, can be legislatively bold while avoiding getting bogged down in a war in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever a war seems to beckon him, he could become a great president ushering in an equally great era.

This is a blog entry, not a book chapter, so I'm not going to wade through all of Johnson's accomplishments. Robert Dallek synopsizes some of his major accomplishments

Johnson seized upon the national mood of regard for the fallen president to win passage of his major unrealized legislative initiatives - an $11 billion tax cut, the 1964 civil rights bill, and subsequently, in 1965, the Medicare/Medicaid and federal aid to education laws.

Johnson was not content to simply embrace JFK's proposals. He successfully took up the cudgels for the voting rights, open housing, immigration reform, environmental protections, consumer safety bills, cabinet departments of transportation and housing and urban development, cultural reforms like the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Freedom of Information Act. The War on Poverty also became part of his presidential legacy. Head Start, food stamps, elimination of urban slums, public housing, expanded social security, legal services and expanded welfare to needy citizens added up to an assault on poverty that reduced the percentage of Americans living in penury from roughly 23 percent to 12 percent. Although a number of Johnson's initiatives fell short of what he hoped they might accomplish, his domestic reforms added up to a record of liberal alterations that rivaled FDR's New Deal.
Moreover, Johnson's civil rights actions permanently transformed the South.

I don't know what they teach in schools these days about Johnson but his fatal flaw was his belief in the war in Vietnam. Dallek again

Convinced it was in the country's national interest to combat Communist aggression in Vietnam, believing that a failure to fight a limited war would lead to a larger one with Russia and China, and fearful that losing Vietnam would touch off a right-wing, McCarthyite reaction in the United States, Johnson sent over 500,000 U.S. troops to fight the war.

His assumption that a combination of bombing, ground forces and aid to the Saigon government would assure the independence of South Vietnam proved to be false. Despite repeated assertions that American was winning in Vietnam, Johnson could not convince Americans we were achieving our goals, especially after Tet, the North Vietnamese-Viet Cong offensive early in 1968 that seemed to give the lie to Johnson's assertions about the fighting.

We still bear the cultural scars from these decisions. And from Bush (and McCain's) equally flawed efforts to create an American empire, in spite of those failures. Obama started out with the right impulses, speaking out against an invasion of Iraq. Yet during the campaign he began to speak of a "surge" in Afghanistan. There have been leaks about closing Guantanamo but it is too soon to see whether he has a less militaristic model to take its place. We hear rumors of Mr. Gates staying on as the Secretary of Defense while we hear pleas to cut the defense budget.

President-elect Obama is a smart guy. He is well known for being cool, no drama Obama. If he can keep his head about him, if he can learn from history and hold onto his core, he can become a great president ushering in a great era in United States history. I wish him the best.

RIP

Stephanie Tubbs Jones dead of an aneurysm at 58. Too young. Here, from Viewimages, she is on the House floor with Barack Obama, John Lewis, Jerry Nadler, and an unknown gentleman certifying the Presidential election.

Swords Into Plowshares

Martin Luther King speaks out against the war in Vietnam.

A Year Ends; A New One Begins

I wish each and every one of you your heart's desire.

I wish, for me, an election that allows reasonable people to govern not from a place of fear but from a place of hope. I keep hearing rumbles from folks who wish for a third party, something that apparently seems more centrist. I had enough of "centrism" during the Clinton administration. Today in honor of my liberal soul I am going to reproduce Steve Gilliard's, may he rest in peace, article from December 3, 2003 because it speaks for me today even more than it did then.

I'm a fighting liberal

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

Thank you to the Group News Blog for pulling together some of Gilly's best work and for continuing to struggle to make more of what he had to say accessible.