What makes it hard for the pundits is that Obama fits nowhere. He attends an African American church in a community in which he did not grow up but to which he came to work and help as an outsider. He lived as a biracial child with white grandparents in a multicultural Polynesian society and then in an Asian one and back to the "US" state in the middle of the Pacific. He is not Muslim but has a Muslim name. He is not Kenyan but has a Kenyan name. He is not a woman but has the empathy and sensitivities of a woman. He is not a writer but has published two successful books. He is not an actor or singer but has earned a Grammy.
Barack Obama, excuse me, the Senator is a bridge between all of these parts of his own life - Africa and America, African Americans and Caucasians, Pacific Islanders and mainland Americans, Asians and Americans, Ghetto kids and suburban kids, Christians and Muslims.
Is this not as atractive as a woman who has lived in state supported mansions for most of her adult life, in Arkansas and Washington and not much of anyplace else with mostly white people and who espouses liberal social values but has a husband who asked not to have blacks on one of his committees during his administration and patronizes Barack Obama by comparing him to an unsuccesfuol previous candidate with a totally different misson and style? Isn't this better than someone who would put out a fear ad like the Willy Horton one and claim experience she does not have (SCHIP)?
There is no doubt this is better. How could that not be clear, so let us make it so.
Posted February 19, 2008 | 11:30 AM (EST)
It's one thing for supporters of Hillary Clinton to make the case that her experience in Washington politics would make her a better president than Barack Obama. But it's quite another to actually vilify Obama's ability to inspire as a "cult of the personality" or "nothing but words."
It is particularly disturbing when serious progressive writers who should know better repeat this attack on Obama's inspirational abilities. It demonstrates a failure to grasp the principal lesson of the last thirty years of American politics.
In fact, it is precisely the absence of inspiration in progressive politics that has kept Progressives on the political defensive for decades.
That's because to inspire people, Progressives have to appeal to something much more important than endless lists of policies and programs. To inspire people, Progressives have to appeal to our values and to our vision for the future.
John Kerry did not lose the presidency because he lacked solid, progressive policies and programs. His campaign rolled out new ten point programs practically every other day. He lost because the Republicans erroneously convinced a significant number of persuadable voters that John Kerry lacked core values -- that he was a flip-flopper.
Right after the last election I struck up a conversation with a New Jersey cab driver. I asked him, "What do you think of Jon Corzine?" "Good guy, tough guy, stands up for what he believes," came the reply. "What do you think of George Bush?" "Good guy, stands up for what he believes," he said. "What do you think of John Kerry?" I asked. "Phoney... a flip-flopper," he responded.
His evaluation of these political leaders had nothing to do with positions or policy papers. The Republicans had convinced him that Kerry didn't have core values.
From 1932 until the mid 1970s -- at least in our domestic politics -- progressive values provided the dominant frame for mainstream political debate. They defined political "common sense." By 1980, the Reagan revolution had changed that -- and rightwing values have framed the American political debate for the thirty years since.
That's largely because Progressives went into a "defensive crouch." Our candidates advocated "Republican-lite" positions. We refused to debate the fundamental differences between the progressive and radical conservative values. Chief among these differences is the central question of whether we're all in this together, or all in this alone.
Often our leaders retreated to the discussion of small, incremental policy initiatives that presumed the right wing's assumptions about the primacy of "private markets" over people, and the innate inferiority of democratically elected governmental institutions compared to corporations that are in fact unaccountable to the public interest.
Beginning in 2005, our successful defense of Social Security, the obvious failure of NeoCon foreign policy, and the spectacle of Katrina -- began to change that. Progressives began to emerge from their defensive crouch and stand up proudly for progressive values once again.
Then came Obama, with his ability to inspire Americans to devote themselves to our values in a way that resonates with average people. His self-confident appeal to hope and possibility -- his "yes we can" -- have captured the imagination of millions of Americans. His ability to inspire has allowed him to simultaneously engage swing "persuadable" voters and the millions of stay-at-home "mobilizable" voters who would support progressive candidates if they could just be motivated to vote.
People want to be inspired. Inspiration is about making people feel empowered to be more than they are. They want to be inspired because they desperately want meaning in their lives. They want to be part of something larger than themselves and they want to feel that they can play a significant part in that larger purpose.
Meaning comes from being devoted to something outside of yourself -- to a cause, to a person, to a religion, to your art.
That's why "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" is so resonant -- so inspirational.
The Right has understood this need for meaning--and has addressed it -- with calls for devotion to the "Conservative Movement," to fundamentalist religion, to xenophobic nationhood.
For three decades, Progressives have often tried to compete by offering the bloodless alternative of a "policy agenda" -- and many times a timid one at that.
For thirty seven years I have devoted much of my professional life to campaigns to implement progressive policy initiatives. So I certainly agree that we need sound, bold policies. Once in office, a new president must in fact deliver on real, concrete policy.
But to change policy in a fundamental way requires more than good programs. It requires a progressive realignment of the American political debate. It requires that we redefine the value frame for American politics. And that requires inspirational leadership that proudly affirms our values.
Just as important, it requires inspirational leadership that can mobilize millions of Americans to demand the enactment of a progressive program once a new president is in place. Frederick Douglass was right. "Power surrenders nothing without a struggle. It never has. It never will." Progressives won't win legislative battles with an insider game.
In 1993 we had a Democratic President and Democratic Congress, but we lost the battle for universal health care. What we needed then, and what we need now, is a massive national mobilization to pass universal health care, change our labor laws, enact campaign finance reform, provide universal access to higher education and preschool, end global warming and change our foreign policy.
Leadership, more than anything else, is about mobilizing people into action. People take action when they feel empowered -- when they are inspired. They will not take action simply because they are "convinced" we are right. They will take action when they are motivated by inspiration to be a part of an historic endeavor.
Inspiring leadership is not just "another quality" that would be "nice" to have in a president. And it is certainly not to be assailed as a "cult of the personality."
America needs inspiring leadership to re-establish the preeminence of progressive values; to define a progressive vision for its future; to mobilize Americans to enact a progressive agenda -- and most importantly -- to convert this historic opportunity into generational progressive political realignment.
No one knows for sure what either a Clinton or an Obama presidency would mean for America. But I believe that Barack Obama presents us with a candidacy more likely to provide the inspirational leadership that we need, than any politician since Robert Kennedy's quest for the White House ended that June night in 1968.
For concerned pro-choicers:"...Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fully pro-choice. I know that either of them will support and defend a woman’s right to choose if elected president. NARAL Pro-Choice America has endorsed both of these pro-choice leaders in their previous races for U.S. Senate, and I am confident about their commitment to women’s reproductive health and right to choose...." Nancy KeenanPresident, NARAL Pro-Choice America
For those who wonder how whay an older, experienced feminist should consider Obama
Why This Older Woman Is For Obama by Patricia Wald, Retired Chief JudgeCourt of Appeals for the District of ColumbiaJanuary 15, 2008 I have spent more than 40 years of my near-80 in public service as a federal judge, international judge, public interest lawyer and government official. A veteran of the woman's movement since its infancy in the 1960's, an ardent Democrat and an equally ardent supporter of women's rights-to-choose, to work, to live as we see fit, and yes, one day to elect a woman President, I hail the advances in my lifetime that have resulted in Senator Clinton's dynamic bid for the Presidency.But women my age fought for the opportunity to be judged on our skills, talents and abilities, not on our gender, and that is the standard by which Senator Clinton's candidacy should be judged. Perhaps we were naïve, but legions of us believed that if we were allowed to enter the game alongside men, we would prove our worth.Which is a prelude to why I now support Barack Obama and have recently spent 8 days on the icy streets of Cedar Rapids, Iowa campaigning for him.As someone who cares mightily about restoration of our country to conditions under which my grandchildren live and flourish, I have carefully assayed the dueling claims of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama to lead the nation. Senator Clinton proclaims a decisive advantage in experience that notably embraces her days as First Lady. The Clinton Administration of the 1990s has much to be proud of, but bears responsibility for some damaging policies as well. I mention here only a few that I encountered while on the bench. It oversaw the largest incarceration boom in the nation's history even as crime rates slowed. The 1994 "tough on crime" legislation sponsored by the White House and which she lobbied for expanded the federal death penalty and gave fiscal incentives for states to legislate "truth in sentencing" laws. The Administration also supported a federal "three strikes" law patterned after California 's that overwhelmed prisons, and legislation that pushed youthful offenders into adult institutions. The result of policies like these was a generation of young men and women, heavily tilted toward minorities, which suffered more severely than their crimes warranted. Credible researchers and political leaders later repudiated these policies for their costliness, ineffectiveness in improving public safety, and devastating impact on families and minority communities. Since then Senator Clinton has shown reluctance to support retroactive application of the sentencing reductions for those in prison for crack cocaine violations whose penalties have since been drastically cut by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.Her Senate career reflects a cautious and expedient legislator; her ambivalent attitude toward the Iraq war – particularly her failure to read the critical intelligence report before voting to authorize military action – give pause when considering her claims to leadership and change. I find that Senator Obama's record is fully as impressive as hers. His well documented years organizing and unifying poor communities in Chicago give him first-hand knowledge of conditions on the ground that a new President will surely need in tackling the still intractable issues of race and poverty. He has been an unswerving supporter of women's right to choose, despite the Clinton campaign's repeated misstatements of his record. He has played a leadership role in Illinois for children's health insurance and tax credits for working class families. As someone whose career has been in law enforcement I admire especially his unremitting honesty and his respect for the law and its processes. This has been amply demonstrated in the face of false and misleading statements about his record in this campaign.His ethics reform legislation was labeled by the Washington Post as "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." His opposition to the Iraq War at a time when it was overwhelmingly supported by political leaders and the public is a testament to his sound judgment, even as others fell into lock-step behind a flawed and deceptive strategy.To be old means to remember and that can be a blessing and a curse. Much has been written about "hope" and "inspiration" that Senator Obama brings, particularly among the young. For me these are not vague and amorphous qualities. I recall a time during the 1960s and into the 1970s when many of us passionately believed in the power of Government and in ourselves to be forces for positive social change. We sought out visionary leaders who could appeal to our inner angels. When Robert Kennedy said in 1968, "I dream of things that never were and ask why not," he voiced the deepest longings of our country as he called on us to find a way to go forward – together black, white, Latino, poor, rich, young, old, male, female – to challenge injustice and poverty.We have not heard so soaring an appeal in 40 years. We have suffered through spates of painful, ugly, and mean-spirited leadership. Our sights have been blurred and misdirected, our youth dispirited and politically apathetic. Now, Barack Obama tells us, "in the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long . . . [we] can be one people, reaching for what's possible."My ten grandchildren and their peers need not be seared by our failures and our mixed memories. I want them to be moved by the same idealism that once moved us. We should not deny them that chance. For all Senator Clinton's talents, skills, and accomplishments, Barack Obama provides the greater hope.************Patricia Wald served as judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for twenty years, including five years as its Chief Judge. Retired from American judicial service, she later was a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia . Judge Wald also recently served as a member of the Iraq Intelligence Commission (the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction), an independent panel tasked with investigating U.S. intelligence surrounding the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
And what about legislative exprience?
Excerpt from: Judge Him by His Laws By Charles Peters Friday, January 4, 2008; Page A21 (WashingtonPost.Com)
People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability. Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters' fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.) ***************************************
(Below are Excerpts from Blog: Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy)
Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation. And there he was again, introducing a tech plan of which Lawrence Lessig wrote:
"Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency -- the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work. But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington. After the debacle that is the last 7 years, the duty is upon the Democrats to be something different. I've been wildly critical of their sameness (remember "Dems to the Net: Go to hell" which earned me lots of friends in the Democratic party). I would give my left arm to be able to celebrate their difference. This man, Mr. Obama, would be that difference. He has as much support as I can give." Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard people saying that Obama wasn't "substantive". Curiously, Obama has an actual legislative record, and so it is possible for us to see both how he approaches bipartisan cooperation and what results it yields. And it turns out that Obama does achieve results by working with Republicans, and doesn't tend to compromise on core principles.
Last year, I considered some of his bipartisan initiatives in the Senate -- notably on nonproliferation and ethics reform -- and concluded that what Obama actually does has nothing to do with the sort of bipartisanship that people rightly object to:
"According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side. This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama's bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)" Consider a different example:
"Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused. Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped. This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it. Obama had his work cut out for him. He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics." The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping. By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many. Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping." Getting legislation like this passed is a real achievement. Getting it passed unanimously is nothing short of astonishing. Mark Kleiman, who knows this stuff extremely well, put it best:
"1. Obama was completely right, and on an issue directly relevant to the more recent debates about torture. Taping interrogations is an issue that really only has one legitimate side, since there's no reason to think it prevents any true confessions, while it certainly prevents false confessions (over and above the legal and moral reasons for disapproving of police use of "enhanced interrogation methods").
His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind. His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side. This isn't what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama's bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)
Since I think that American politics doesn't do nearly enough to reward people who take a patient, craftsmanlike attitude towards legislation, caring as much about fixing the parts that no one will notice until they go wrong as about the flashy parts, I wanted to say this. Specifics below the fold. Nonproliferation: the poster child for issues that people ought to care about, but don't. Here Obama has teamed up with Richard Lugar (R-IN). How did this happen? Here's the Washington Monthly:
"By most accounts, Obama and Lugar's working relationship began with nukes. On the campaign trail in 2004, Obama spoke passionately about the dangers of loose nukes and the legacy of the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation program, a framework created by a 1991 law to provide the former Soviet republics assistance in securing and deactivating nuclear weapons. Lugar took note, as "nonproliferation" is about as common a campaign sound-bite for aspiring senators as "exchange-rate policy" or "export-import bank oversight."" The way to a wonk's heart: campaign on securing Russian loose nukes. -- In any case, in addition to working on nuclear non-proliferation, Obama and Lugar co-sponsored legislation expanding the Nunn-Lugar framework (which basically allows the US to fund the destruction or securing of nuclear weapons in other countries) to deal with conventional arms. From an op-ed Obama and Lugar wrote on their legislation:
"These vast numbers of unused conventional weapons, particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that can hit civilian airliners, pose a major security risk to America and democracies everywhere. That's why we have introduced legislation to seek out and destroy surplus and unguarded stocks of conventional arms in Asia, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Our bill would launch a major nonproliferation initiative by addressing the growing threat from unsecured conventional weapons and by bolstering a key line of defense against weapons of mass destruction. Modeled after the successful Nunn-Lugar program to dismantle former Soviet nuclear weapons, the Lugar-Obama bill would seek to build cooperative relationships with willing countries. One part of our initiative would strengthen and energize the U.S. program against unsecured lightweight antiaircraft missiles and other conventional weapons, a program that has for years been woefully underfunded. There may be as many as 750,000 missiles, known formally as man-portable air defense systems, in arsenals worldwide. The State Department estimates that more than 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by such weapons since the 1970s. Three years ago terrorists fired missiles at -- and missed -- a jetliner full of Israeli tourists taking off from Mombasa, Kenya. In 2003 a civilian cargo plane taking off from Baghdad was struck but landed safely. Loose stocks of small arms and other weapons also help fuel civil wars in Africa and elsewhere and, as we have seen repeatedly, provide ammunition for those who attack peacekeepers and aid workers seeking to stabilize and rebuild war-torn societies. The Lugar-Obama measure would also seek to get rid of artillery shells like those used in the improvised roadside bombs that have proved so deadly to U.S. forces in Iraq. Some foreign governments have already sought U.S. help in eliminating their stocks of lightweight antiaircraft missiles and millions of tons of excess weapons and ammunition. But low budgets and insufficient leadership have hampered destruction. Our legislation would require the administration to develop a response commensurate with the threat, consolidating scattered programs at the State Department into a single Office of Conventional Weapons Threat Reduction. It also calls for a fivefold increase in spending in this area, to $25 million -- a relatively modest sum that would offer large benefits to U.S. security. The other part of the legislation would strengthen the ability of America's friends and allies to detect and intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction or material that could be used in a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon. Stopping weapons of mass destruction in transit is an important complement to our first line of defense, the Nunn-Lugar program, which aims to eliminate weapons of mass destruction at their source." Dealing with unsecured stocks of shoulder-fired missiles and other kinds of conventional weapons, stocks that might fall into anyone's hands, be sold on the black market, and end up being used against our troops or our citizens, or fueling civil wars that tear countries apart -- it seems to me that this is an excellent thing to spend one's time on. Avian flu: Obama was one of the first Senators to speak out on avian flu, back in the spring of 2005, when it was a quintessentially wonky issue, not the subject of breathless news reports. There's a list of Democratic efforts on avian flu here; Obama shows up early and often. He has sponsored legislation, including what I think is the first bill dedicated to pandemic flu preparedness. It's a good bill, providing not just for vaccine research and antiviral stockpiles, but for the kinds of state and local planning and preparedness that will be crucial if a pandemic occurs. (I was also very interested to note that it requires the Secretary of HHS to contract with the Institute of Medicine for a study of "the legal, ethical, and social implications of, with respect to pandemic influenza". This is actually very important, and not everyone would have thought of it.) He has also spoken out consistently on this topic, beginning long before it was hot. Here, for instance, is another op-ed by Obama and Lugar:
"We recommend that this administration work with Congress, public health officials, the pharmaceutical industry, foreign governments and international organizations to create a permanent framework for curtailing the spread of future infectious diseases. Among the parts of that framework could be these: Increasing international disease surveillance, response capacity and public education and coordination, especially in Southeast Asia. Stockpiling enough antiviral doses to cover high-risk populations and essential workers. Ensuring that, here at home, Health and Human Services and state governments put in place plans that address issues of surveillance, medical care, drug and vaccine distribution, communication, protection of the work force and maintenance of core public functions in case of a pandemic. Accelerating research into avian flu vaccines and antiviral drugs. Establishing incentives to encourage nations to report flu outbreaks quickly and fully." This is very good policy, especially the parts about increasing surveillance and response capacity here and abroad. (Effect Measure approves too.) Regulating Genetic Testing: It was while I was reading about this issue that I first thought: gosh, Barack Obama seems to turn up whenever I am reading about some insanely wonky yet important issue. And this one is not just off the radar; it and the radar are in different universes. Anyways: You might be surprised to learn that there is very little quality control over genetic testing. I was. If I offer some genetic test, I can basically say what I like about what it will reveal, so long as I avoid violating the laws against fraud. And if you think about how easy it would be to avoid those laws just by talking about, say, a test for some gene that has been found to be slightly associated with increased IQ, you can see how many deceptive (but not legally fraudulent) claims this allows.
Moreover -- and more seriously -- there is very little oversight of the quality of labs that do tests -- that is, whether or not they tend to get the right answers when they do those tests. There is a law (passed in response to evidence that significant numbers of people were getting incorrect results on pap smears) that requires what's called proficiency testing for labs. But though the law requires that the government develop special proficiency tests for labs that do work requiring special kinds of knowledge, and though genetic testing plainly fits that bill, the government has not developed any proficiency tests for genetic testing labs. This is serious, and bad. Suppose you are mistakenly informed that you are a carrier for some horrible disease: you might decide never to have kids. Suppose you have a fetus tested and you are told that it has, say, Downs' syndrome: you might abort. To do these things as the result of a lab error would be horrible. Not nearly as horrible as the results of some false negatives, though. Consider this case (from a very good report on the topic):
"A Florida couple both tested negative for the genetic mutation that causes Tay-Sachs, a fatal childhood disease. Two copies of the mutation are required to cause the disease. The couple learned that the test results were incorrect for both parents when their son began exhibiting symptoms of Tay-Sachs shortly after birth. He died eight years later" Tay-Sachs is an unbelievably horrible disease:
you and your spouse are at risk for carrying this disease. You both get tested; neither is a carrier. You give birth to an apparently healthy child. But after a few months, the child you love stops developing normally, and it turns out that both your test and your spouses were misinterpreted, or screwed up, or whatever, and as a result your child is going to die a horrible death by the age of four. Oops! You can probably guess who has introduced legislation that addresses this problem. The people who wrote the initial report (note: I know them; they're very good) think it's good. So do I. Reducing medical malpractice suits the right way: Contrary to popular belief, medical malpractice claims do not do much to drive up health care costs. Still, medical malpractice litigation is a problem. Tort reform would address this problem at the expense of people who have been the victims of real, serious medical malpractice, who would lose their right to sue, or have it curtailed. If you read the medical literature, however, it turns out that there's a much better way to minimize malpractice suits, namely: apologizing. Strange to say, it turns out that people are a lot less likely to sue when doctors and hospitals admit their mistakes up front, compensate the patients involved fairly, and generally treat people with respect. It certainly would have helped in this case:
"A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee. The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won't tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients' rights." I'd want to know what happened too, if someone cut off all my arms and legs. And in a case like this, if it was malpractice, limiting the damages a person can collect doesn't seem like the right answer, somehow. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton teamed up to introduce legislation aimed at helping hospitals to develop programs for disclosure of medical errors. (They describe it in this NEJM article.) Again, I think it's good policy: this really is what the evidence suggests is the best way to reduce malpractice claims, and it does it without curtailing the rights of people who have already been injured through no fault of their own. Moreover, when people feel free to discuss their errors, they are much more likely to figure out ways to avoid repeating them. (The legislation provides support for this.) And that's the best way of all to deal with malpractice claims: by addressing the causes of medical malpractice itself. *** Those are some of the wonkier things he's done. (There are others: introducing legislation to make it illegal for tax preparers to sell personal information, for instance, and legislation on chemical plant security and lead paint.) He has done other things that are more high-profile, including:
His "health care for hybrids" bill
An Energy Security Bill
Various bills on relief for Hurricane Katrina, including aid for kids and a ban on no-bid contracts by FEMA
A public database of all federal spending and contracts
Trying to raise CAFE standards
Veterans' health care
Making certain kinds of voter intimidation illegal
A lobbying reform bill (with Tom Coburn), which would do all sorts of good things, notably including one of my perennial favorites, requiring that bills be made available to members of Congress at least 72 hours before they have to vote on them.
And a proposal to revamp ethics oversight, replacing the present ethics Committee with a bipartisan commission of retired judges and members of Congress, and allowing any citizen to report ethics violations. This would have fixed one of the huge problems with the present system, namely: that the members have to police themselves.
I've been thinking quite a lot about the passage of time this past week, as I've been celebrating three years' survival with stomach cancer. That's a short time, in the scheme of things-- less than 5% of my life, for example, less than a single Presidential term-- but a long time in the world of stomach cancer survival. Time, as we all know, is oddly elastic, especially for something that we measure so precisely.I was reminded again about the elasticity of time this morning, when Robin Chapman and I gave a talk about our poetry anthology, On Retirement: 75 Poems, at Attic Angels, a local retirement community. In the talk, we describe the process of putting the anthology together, and also the arc of the retirement years as part of the process of human development. The audience was, as you might expect, mostly elderly; most, in fact, probably ten or twenty years older than either Robin or I, who are in our 60s. They were attentive and obviously interested in what we had to say, but I suspect that they--with their much longer experience of both retirement and the aging process--had more to teach us than we could teach them.Among other things, those of us who have been retired for a while begin to understand that we are not indispensable. Our former employers have long since replaced us with younger, more energetic people: employees who still burn with the fire of ambition, and who see in the workplace possibilities that we long ago dismissed (out of cynicism or hard experience) as unrealistic, unwise, or simply too difficult to merit any expenditure of our time and energy. We have more important things to attend to: long-deferred avocational goals, causes we believe in, grandchildren, crossword puzzles and exercise classes to keep our minds and bodies strong. There are good reasons for retiring-- and good reasons (in addition to saving on our higher salaries and better benefits) that our employers were not unhappy to replace us with younger colleagues.But none of us really feels "old." We know time has passed--two decades, three, four or more--but we still see ourselves as the twenty-somethings who fell madly in love; the thirty-somethings who gave our all to work; the young parents who spent weekends juggling toddlers' play time, grocery shopping, and endless loads of laundry. We need grandchildren to load our iPods and un-freeze our computers; we know that time and technology has moved along; but many of us are nostalgic for causes and passions that compelled us when we were college students. I remember, when I was a teenager, thinking that World War II was ancient history. In fact, I graduated from high school in 1962, only 17 years after the end of that war. Right now, we are about twice that far from the end of the Vietnam War; nearly forty years past the "Summer of Love." It all seems as though it was just yesterday, but surely, it is "ancient history."Which brings me to the question of Hillary vs. Barack. I am, as those of you who know me are aware, a strong feminist. But we are long past the the Second Wave of feminism. That is a hard lesson to learn for those of us who were raised with limited options, when there were virtually no women doctors, no women lawyers, no women politicians, no career opportunities for girls other than secretary, teacher, librarian, cosmetician. The Second Wave was truly liberating for us; we don't want to give it up, don't want to acknowledge that times have changed, though four decades have passed. But even in the late 1960s, I had a hard time believing that a woman in the White House would be enough to ensure peace, though I certainly wanted to believe it. (How could a mother justify sending young men off to be killed?) Nonetheless I, like most bright girls of my generation, like--I suspect--Hillary Rodham, was brought up to "think like a man" if I wanted to be respected, to be taken seriously. Thinking like a man, acting tough enough to be considered for Commander in Chief by a still-sexist voting public, is not likely to produce a significantly different kind of president, even if she is a woman.So the feminist desire for a woman in a White House is not enough to convince me to vote for Hillary. But even more, the understanding that time has passed (even when it seems to have stood still), informs my support for Barack Obama. I believe that it is essential to our democracy to engage young people in the political process. I want my children and their friends to feel the kind of passionate involvement that I and my friends felt during the Vietnam era. We believed that what we did would make a difference. And it did. We weren't very engaged in traditional politics; we were, after 1968, mostly turned off by the electoral system. But politics, in a larger sense, was an essential part of our life.Barack Obama inspires this sort of commitment in a new generation. That is what I understand to be the consequence of his call for hope and for change. The new generation is the future of our nation, in the same way that the younger colleagues who fill retirees' jobs are the future of any workplace. It's particularly important, I think, that those of us who have experienced the cycle of hope and disillusion in politics since the Kennedy era, recognize how important it is that we return to a politics of hope. Imagine how awful it would be to have come to consciousness some time after 1970 or so! For anyone under the age of about 40 or 45, this is the case. A few years ago, I was working with a very smart, very politically savvy, very progressive younger friend who had trouble accepting the possibility that the political pendulum might have reached the far right of its swing, and that she could, in her lifetime, see better times. All she had ever seen of politics--all my children have ever seen--was so demoralizing and discouraging that she could barely imagine even the possibility of a different political mood, much less of progressive policies.A politics of despair can only inhibit political participation, and will ultimately destroy democracy. Barack Obama not only understands the importance of a politics of hope; his speeches and his actions have already inspired millions of younger people to get involved in politics. That is why I am joining my children in their support for his campaign, and why I encourage you to support him, too.Reminder: I will be reading from my memoir about fear on Tuesday, Feb. 19th (primary election day in Wisconsin), 7 PM at Avol's (at the site of the late, lamented Canterbury Bookstore in Madison). Please come if you can!
Were Barack Obama not identified as African-American he would have trouble attracting black voters. Now that he is marginalized as the black candidate, he will not get as many white votes...maybe. What was he supposed to do? Use bleaching cream? simulate Jesse Jackson's rhetoric.
We have a brilliant biracial American candidate who has been put in a corner by a white former president and his wife, the former first lady.
I want to hear rescue strategy from the campaign experts.
Dick Morris says Bill C is purposely trying to show a rejection of HIllary by blacks in SC so that Barack has less of a chance w/ white voters nationally.
Insights and plans?
I spent an hour signing up for access to the nat'l phone bank so I could make Nevada calls from home and have now spent an hour or more trying to figure out how to do it. Help, please. How can I get a list of names to call from home --- I HAVE BEEN approved, gotten the email, password for myself, etc. to do this but can't figure out how to get a list assigned to me. Please advise.
I want Obama to win Nevada.
Question: whay is no one bringing up Hillary's support for the war POST vost speeches where she was FULLY supportive of Bush publicly, on record, in public speeches. It was not just one vote,.
Thanks,
Dear Maureen Dowd,
I have always loved your vitriol. Your sarcasm. When aimed at the right people. But now I see you will take on Barack Obama. And I fear for his life. I want to say "back off," but you know what? He can take it. Why? For the same reason that I plan to support him - he has faced his demons, knows his own foibles, is clear about the difference between skin color and heart and soul colors...I am afraid he might be too much, for even you. And when it somes to Michelle, watch out, Maureen. If SHE goes up against you, you are custard.
I started to title this blog "International Health Professionals for Obama" and I thought of "Poets for Obama" and then "Global something or other for Obama" and then realized the point of it all is this: my life, the life of Barack Obama and of many others is founded on a philosophy of clear personal boundaries but few borders between life as it is where we sleep most nites, and life as it is with friends, through travel,work, or virtual communication.
So, it is now "People Without Borders" - a tribute in its similarity to "Doctors Without Borders" and similar groups who work throughout the world, and nothing to do with immigration!
Our lives are filled with people of different religions, races and cultures and we value it more because of expanding our personal "borders" of experience and relationships.
That is why whether Barack Obama is black or white is not so important.
That is why the fact that his mother bore him with an African, raised him in the Pacific and in Asia are important.
And that is why even MItt Romney's religion is NOT important.
Let us get to the substance of values and actions, and beyond superimposed, single variable markers of identity. I think that is why I passionately support Barack Obama.
Like many democrats I fear my own hope. Here is yet another candidate (McGovern, Dean, McCarthy...)that reflects my values but not those of "most Americans." As if I were better.
In my experience, barring the fact I have not spent time with many current and former members of the Ku Klux Klan, people gravitate towards the comfortable and are converted by the inspiring. You can find a person of any age who spends his or her days in a small circle of comfort tell you a story with great excitement of meeting someone different and unique, not like themselves at all, and with great admiration. But they must meet them in a comfortable space. And, most of all, they must feel trust. That requires that they not be challenged on their own comfortable values, but attracted to new ones, or at least to the person who cherishes values different than their own.
That is the brilliance of Barack Obama.
When he speaks, he does not belittle those who are different than he is and who do not share his values. He does not even speak of them. He does not threaten. Rather, he uses the word "we" and paints a vision of marching with him to a new era. Flowery, perhaps; idealistic, definitely. But effective, nonetheless.
So, those who believe the people actually love to live without borders, welcome to this blog.
