Politics

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More Thoughts on Prop 8

In her The Last Word Column  in the November 24 issue of Newsweek Ann Quindlen wrote about gay marriage and the decision in Loving v. Virginia.

One of my favorite Supreme Court cases is Loving v. Virginia, and not just because it has a name that would delight any novelist. It’s because it reminds me, when I’m downhearted, of the truth of the sentiment at the end of “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s brilliant play: “The world only spins forward.”

I also wrote about Loving in my post Marriage in Massachusetts.  It is also one of my favorite decisions as well as a wonderful story.

The world is going to continue to spin forward.  The denial of Constitutional rights to a specific group can never last.  There may be one step forward (see Connecticut and New Jersey) and two back (California and other other states which have adopted anti-gay marriage statutes recently), but we will keep moving forward.

And then there is this great Jack Black video.  It has been out there for a while, but it is always worth seeing.

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Obama Polls and Senate Seats

So many stories, so little time.

There is the most recent NBC poll  that shows that

Two out of three respondents say they’re pleased with Obama’s early appointments and three-fourths believe that the level of his involvement in making policy has been exactly right.

Another two-thirds view the president-elect in a positive light — a rating that’s more favorable than the numbers Bill Clinton and George W. Bush received 1992 and 2000.

There is the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.  I think he lives in a world of his own.  It is not clear if he really talked to anyone about a price for the Obama Senate seat or if he was simply speculating outloud.  I guess we have to wait and see how this unfolds.  So far it seems unlikely that the President -Elect or anyone on the Transition Team was involved.

And will Caroline Kennedy be appointed to Hillary Clinton’s senate seat?  Ruth Marcus had an interesting take in the Washington Post yesterday.  Marcus writes, ” before getting all huffy about Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications for the job, let’s take a breath and remember Jesse Ventura and Sonny Bono. ”   Kennedy has written a number of books, worked with the New York City Schools, and is a lawyer – not terrible qualifications.

Those Senate seats seem to be creating lots of problems.  The Governor of Delaware appointed someone who is widely acknowledged as a caretaker until 2010 when Beau Biden might run for the seat.  That was controversial in Deleware.  I thought replacing Biden, Clinton, and Obama was supposed to be a piece of cake.  Guess not.

 

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Challenge to Obama’s qualifications

The Supreme Court has been asked to take a case which questions whether  Barack Obama is Constitutionally qualified to be President.  At issue is the fact that his father was not an American citizen even though his mother was and he was born in Hawaii after it was granted statehood.  The allegation is that he is not  a “natural born citizen.”

NBC has an interesting take on the situation concluding that it is unlikely the Supreme Court will intervene.  Politico.com adds an interesting piece of information:  Clarence Thomas is the one asking that the Court consider taking the case.

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide Friday whether to take up a case over president-elect Barack Obama’s citizenship — one of a few around the country seeking to nullify his election, but this one has an interesting lineage. It was referred to the high court by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African-American justice.

Maybe Thomas is just returning the favor — putting through a case that questions whether Obama should be president, after Obama said he wouldn’t have picked Thomas for the high court.

Can I believe that Thomas could be so petty?  You betcha!

A decision is expected on Monday.

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More on Mumbai

In my last post I asked for a motivation for the terrorists who took over parts of Mumbai for 3 days.  Then, on the Rachel Maddow show was the answer.

Richard Engel explained it all with maps and graphics.  The idea is to draw the Pakistani army away from the Afgan border toward India which leaves vunerable the mountains where the Tailiban and others have been operating.

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Post Thanksgiving Random Thoughts

President Elect Obama has named a large percentage of his Cabinet already including some surprises.  I really didn’t expect Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.  I think it is a smart move, however.  Get the Clintons inside the tent.  I was also a little surprised that Larry Summers was not named to Treasury.  The reason circulated was that this was due to his insensitive remarks about women and our ability to do math and science made while he was President of Harvard. (He also managed to offend many who taught in the Henry Lewis Gates’ Institute for Black Studies.)  If this is true, it shows a surprising sensibility which bodes well for the Obama administration.  On the whole, I feel good about the fact that he is surrounding himself with smart people and expects them to express differing points of view.

Bob Herbert wrote in his column today

Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?

I think that question hits the nail on the head.  It will be difficult to turn things around after 8 years of benefit only for the rich and powerful and only an illusion for the rest of us.

And what is up with those kids in Mumbai?  They never bargained for a the lives of any hostages or made any political statement or demands.  What did they want?  What cause did they think they were advancing?  It seems to me that they just wanted to act out some violence like in the movies.

Our tree is up although not yet decorated.  I have cards to address and presents to wrap.  Time to try to occupy one’s mind with something other than the current sorry state of the world with hope for the future.

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Race and Corruption

Both the State Senator, Dianne Wilkerson, and as of yesterday, our City Council member, Chuck Turner, have been accused by federal prosecutors of taking bribes and then lying about it.  Both were caught on tape in sting operations.   Chuck is a neighbor.   I know both and have worked with them on various projects including constituant services.  I have supported their campaigns.  So this is a major shock.  I have mixed feelings and a lot of questions about the situation. 

First, there is the question of how much we can trust the Boston FBI office.  This is the office that had agents in bed with the Winter Hill Gang and James Bulger.  One agent has just been convicted of murder and will probably finish his life in prison.  So when they produce evidence that two black politicians representing the largest concentration of African-Americans in the City of Boston I have to feel to some degree that this is racial, a singling out of two office holders who are black and trusted by the community.

Second, assuming that this was a trap set by the FBI why would either of these two intelligent people walk into the trap?  Have they taken bribes all along and just happened to get caught this time?  Why didn’t they refuse the offered money?

Third, why are they being prosecuted when the current Speaker of the House, Sal DiMasi, is suspected of rigging a state contract bid so a friend could benfit?  I do know the answer to that one:  The investigation of that situation is on-going with it just having been turned over to the Attorney General.

Finally, I want someone to do a study of all the African-American officials nationwide and through the last 40 years who have been brought down by scandal.  There has to be more than selective prosecution because of race.  Is there some feeling of entitlement that develops once they have been elected?  And they are all smart people who should have been able to learn from history.

The following quote from Chuck Turner in an interview conducted prior to his arrest which will be published in the Boston Globe Magazine tomorrow as part of a column by Tom Keane  I find troubling.

From an ethical standpoint, I don’t think the vast majority of Congress should be allowed to sit. Ethics should include a commitment to the needs of the people of this country which the Congress has not displayed. Given the fact that all our state governments and the federal government is controlled by money, I think it is hypocritical to talk about ethics when you talk about our political leaders or our business leaders, religious leaders, etc.

Its time for Americans to admit that ethics never have had a significant influence on American politics. If Americans cared about ethical behavior, why did slavery last for two hundred years and neo slavery last for another two hundred? Why does America have the weakest laws in the Western World to protect a working person right to have a fair return on their labor. Why were the Irish treated as animals when they were driven to America by the politics of the English ancestors of the Yankees who treated them as if they were black when they were driven here. I’m surprised Tom. I didn’t think you were in denial of the reality of the moral depravity of this country.

Is Chuck really saying that because the political system is controlled by money rather than by higher moral principles a green light to take a bribe?  Is this the “everyone else does it” excuse?

Yes, there is money in government.  Money gets spent and contracts get let.  That is how governement gets things done.  If he is talking about the election/campaign system being corruptive, there is truth there.  But I’m not sure that money is the only reason slavery persisted and is not the only reason government often fails to act.  Is the real issue that Turner and Wilkinson are still trapped in a world that sees everything as racial, everything though the eyes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s while the world has moved on?

The Boston Globe quoted several young men who are likely to run for Turner’s seat.  Ego Ezedi, Carlos Henriquez, and Scotland Willis have all run unsuccessfully for City Council.  All expressed the same general idea that maybe it was time to move on.  That maybe it was time to stop looking constantly through a racial lens.  Ezedi in particular looks to Barak Obama:

Ego Ezedi, the executive director of the Roxbury YMCA who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in 2003, said: “I am not a black politician. I have never represented myself as that. I’m a public servant who happens to be black.

“This is not a black-white issue; it’s an ethics issue,” he said of the arrests of Wilkerson and Turner.

Ezedi added that he draws more inspiration from the way Barack Obama’s campaign energized younger voters. “It’s important for all of us to transcend boundaries of race when it comes to politics,” he said, “and what better time than now, especially when you look at what’s happening nationally?”

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Does Experience Matter?

Rachel Maddow expressed concern the other night about whether or not putting so many Clintonites into the Obama White House was really change.  She had as a guest, Malcolm Gladwell, who explained a theory I had not heard of before.  Gladwell thinks that in order to get mastery of anything  – playing the piano, writing, managing, etc. – one needs, on average, 10,000 hours of practice.  So if we want cabinet secretaries and White House staff who can begin work immediately what choices does Obama have?  He needs to turn to Democrats who worked in some capacity either in the Clinton/Gore administration or have experience on the Hill.  I think we need to remember that whatever policies they carried out in the past, they will now be implementing Obama policies.  Gladwell points out in the interview that the ideal would be a mix of neophytes  and experienced hands.  I will have to get a copy of one of his books like The Tipping Point or his newest, the Outliers.

I’m not as invested as some on the left in seeing him create immediate radical change – and I’m not certain what exactly that would mean.  For me, just having a President who speaks in complete sentences is a radical change.  Just having a President who can listen to various points of view and distill them into a plan of action is a change.  

And we have the Clinton lesson of gays in the military as an immediate action which got Bill off on the wrong foot.  To say nothing of the health care fiasco.  So moving slowly is OK with me.  I agree with Amy Goodman that Executive Orders can set the tone and it would be wonderful if President Obama’s first was to outlaw torture.  A good message internationally as well as domestically.  It is one on which even Republicans (who still deny they engaged in the practice) could agree.

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A Clinton as Secretary of State?

There has been chatter throughout the campaign about the television show West Wing and the similarities to the Obama campaign.   The Jimmy Smits character as Obama, for example.  And we all remember that Smits beat the Alan Alda character in that election.  Maureen Dowd even wrote a fictional account of a meeting between Barak Obama and the fictional President Jed Barlet. But the endless talk about Hillary Clinton as a possible Secretary of State brings to mind another fictional example.

Andrew Greeley wrote a mystery story The Bishop in the West Wing about an Irishman from Chicago elected President in a long-shot campaign.  The Bishop in the story is Greeley’s on-going character, Bishop Blackwood Ryan who comes to solve a mystery in the White House.  The interesting part is not that the fictional President, Jack McGurn, is from the South Side of Chicago but that his Secretary of State is Bill Clinton who is also the former President.  Father Greeley, who was recently injured, in a fall was a guest of the Clintons at the White House several times during the Clinton administration.  The book is dedicated to William J. Clinton.

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A Fixer Upper and other transition thoughts

This Tony Auth cartoon from earlier this week shows the magnitude of what the Obama-Biden administration will have to do before they can even initiate any new agenda items.

To begin with you have a President, George W., who keeps talking about transparency while his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, won’t say what he did with the $350 billion or to which banks and companies he gave money.  Is this a case of the fox guarding the hen house?  Is this a planned looting?  One has to ask.  Bob was reminded of Cato the Elder so I pulled out a copy of Plutarch’s Lives and started reading about Cato.  I know that I read many of the biographies 40 years ago as a student at St. John’s College (Annapolis), but this was really tough going.  I did gather that Cato was known to guard the public purse to the extent that once he gave away his horse rather than put the public to the expense of shipping it back to Rome.

I’m not one who will criticize President-elect Obama for including so many former Clinton officials in his transition – particularly on the teams going into the agencies.  First, they are the last Democratic group who have experience and second, many of them will know what to look for.  I’m thinking, for example, of Roberta Achtenberg who will be looking at HUD.  I was impressed with her when she was heading HUD Fair Housing and I was working in the area.  So I’m not all hysterical about “the return of the Clintons” which some are making sound like a horror movie.  Much better to have some veterans help you than to follow the Clinton model take too long to get started because people you appointed didn’t know the lay of the land.

And speaking of the Clintons will Hillary be Secretary of State?  I think a good choice as it will keep in in the fold and prevent her and Bill from freelancing.  But then what do you do with Bill Richardson?  Energy?  Transportation?  I think Obama would be smart to include both of them in his administration.

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Doctor Dean

I was a Dean supporter during the 2004 primaries.  I even went to hear him speak when he had a rally in Copley Square – Kerry territory.  I blogged on his site.  Worked on organizing the Asian American community in Boston on his behalf.  After he dropped out and announced his run for DNC Chair, I cheered his 50 State strategy as did most of the state chairs and committee people from states that the Democratic Party had neglected. 

Now as John Nichols writes in the The Nation today:

When the DNC chair said, “I hate what the Republicans are doing to this country, I really do,” everyone knew he meant it. And, as it turned out, Americans were coming around to the same conclusion.

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The fact is that Dean’s work is done. He was an essential player in the transformation of the Democratic Party from what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich described back in 2005 — “essentially a glorified fund-raising mechanism” — into the clearly-defined “movement” party that Barack Obama would lead in 2008.

With that 50-state strategy, his full embrace of netroots activism and, above all, his refusal to pull punches, Dean made being a Democrat mean something. That turned out to be the cure for what ailed a party that has benefited immeasurably from the doctor’s able treatment of its condition.

Howard Dean saved the Democratic Party by creating the base that lead to victories in 2006 and 2008.  Will he return to being a doctor in Vermont or will he be Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration?