Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race

John Judis has a great new piece on the political psychology of racial resentment, as it relates to Barack Obama's presidential bid, at the New Republic:

The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.

Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

Judis writes from the left of the spectrum, but he's even-handed.

I studied racial politics and psychology in some detail in the 1990s (prior to teaching an upper-division course on Black Politics).

I'm a conservative on these issues, but I never underestimate lingering racial bigotry in the country.

I may have mentioned previously that I pumped gas at the local Chevron station when I was at Fresno State (a great job, frankly, for the study time, even if it didn't pay well). When I moved to Santa Barbara I worked for a time at the Chevron filling station downtown, on the weekends, for less than a year while I started my graduate program.

I'll never forget one Saturday morning in Santa Barbara, when my boss - the owner - was working around the station with a couple of his handymen, and three stereotypical poor black women drove up in a really old, beat-up station-wagon. They looked like prostitutes: Lots of makeup, loose, low-cut blouses, with long fingernails and smoking cigarettes. They were lost and asked to see a city map. The boss helped them to a map posted at the window, and they lingered a little before heading down the road, the exhaust spewing out the back of their thrasher of a wagon. I stood near the boss and his buddies while they watched the women drive off. They were laughing, and the boss says, "I love black women. I wish we could still own a few." The other two guys thought this was the funniest thing since blackface, and they were all slapping themselves on their knees in hilarity.

I couldn't help thinking how damned stupid these men were, frankly, given my own background. I wondered if they had any clue as to issues of, say, the politics of "high yellow" racial mixing! I walked away, and talked it over with my wife (then fiancee) later that day. We agreed, you're always going to have some ignorant crackers, but views like these - in my own experience - are an extreme minority. That's not to say that bigotry and discrimination are not a prolbem, or that they're unhurtful. But as a long-time student who worked his way up from community college to a Ph.D. from the University of California, I can attest personally to how committed are those in the educational system to upward racial mobility. In industry, sure, we see lingering patterns of discrimination, but affirmative outreach programs in the corporate sector are extremely advanced, the norm even. It's too bad, really, that we now often focus on racial access to the exclusion of excellence (with some added racial hate-mongering, but more on that in later posts).

As for racial resentment in politics today, I'm thinking back to one of the readings I assigned when I taught my class back in 1999: Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South. The book's a classic in the study of black politics and civil rights. Black and Black offer a very perceptive model of progressive racial intergration, operationalized as black movement through three "belts" of the traditional white society "color line":

Black Americans have confronted massive discrimination in each of three broad categories. Controversies in the outer color line have concerned the "segregated position of Negroes in the public arena"; disputes in the intermediate color line have focused on "economic subordination and opportunity restriction"; and tensions in the innermost ring have involved white acceptance of blacks in intimate friendships and private associations.

Black and Black draw here on the research of Herbert Blumer, and his early essay, "The Future of the Color Line," which is discussed more recently in Lawrence Bobo's research essay, "Prejudice as Group Position: Microfoundations of a Sociological Approach to Racism and Race Relations."

In election '08, Americans - who this week in the Democratic primaries are turning out to see Barack Obama in record numbers - are close to breaking the highest barrier to the outer ring of blacks in the political system, if Obama's elected in November. Moreover, blacks have made incredible strides in all sectors of the American economy since the civil rights movement, so much so that the most important but under-discussed fact of black life in America today is the expansive black American middle class.

Even on the "innermost ring" of the color line, blacks today are integrating into "intimate friendships" as never before, and public opinion is more open to the interracial marriages than at any time in American history.

As I've noted before, one of the great benefits of Obama's presidential campaign is that it provides the country the greatest opportunity in the post-civil rights era to really openly discuss race, and for Americans to vote their greatest hopes and fears concerning the nation's most longstanding division.

More research will sort out the fine points of this year's voting patterns, but Judis notes that economic class - not racial animus - is most likely the biggest impediment to electing a black president this year:

What, then, can the political psychology of race tell us about the current primaries and the coming general election...?

One indication is the exit polls. The percentage of voters who backed Hillary Clinton (or, earlier, John Edwards) while saying that the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote is a fair proxy for the percentage of primary voters who were disinclined to support Obama because he is black. That number topped 9 percent in New Jersey; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states, it was more than 11 percent. And that's among Democratic primary voters, who are, on average, more liberal than the Democrats who vote in general elections.

Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which exploded into the news after the Ohio primary, may do lasting damage to his candidacy by undermining his attempt to transcend race. Wright's words tie Obama to the stereotype of the angry, hostile--and also unpatriotic--black who is seen as hating both whites and white America. Wright turns Obama into a "black candidate" like Jackson or Sharpton. And, as a black candidate, Obama falls prey to a set of stereotypes about black politicians.

Some of these have to do with abilities. A 1995 study found that voters believe black politicians "lack competence on major issues." Other stereotypes relate to ideology. Several studies have shown that if subjects compare a black and white candidate with roughly equal political positions, they will nevertheless see the black candidate as more liberal. Obama is already vulnerable to charges of inexperience, and, after Wright surfaced, he fell prey to an ideological stereotype as well. Whereas he benefited in the initial primaries and caucuses from being seen as middleof-the-road or even conservative, his strongest support has recently come from more liberal voters. In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among voters who classified themselves as "very liberal" by 55 to 45 percent, but he lost "somewhat conservative" voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In a national Pew poll, Obama's support among "very liberal" voters jumped seven points between January and May, while his support among "moderates" dropped by two points....

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he should be able to inherit the white women who backed Hillary Clinton. As political psychologists have shown, these voters should be largely amenable to his candidacy. He should also continue to enjoy an advantage among white professionals. But Obama is likely to continue having trouble with white working-class voters in the Midwest--voters who tend to score high on racial resentment and implicit association tests and who, arguably, decided the 2004 election with their votes in Ohio.

So, there is some racial resentment there, but overall, given the cult-like phenomenon that's already emerged around the Illinois Senator, the question's not likely whether the country's ready to elect a black president. The question is whether people want this black man.

The fall campaign will put that question to the test.

More later!

The Democrats and Muslim Terrorists

Malise Ruthven's got a new review essay on Islamic radicalism, "The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists."

Ruthven's well worth reading. Tough on both sides of the political spectrum, he makes some interesting observations on the Democrats and the threat of Islamist terrorism, with reference to Roy Gutman's, How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan:

A searing critique of US policy in Afghanistan after the departure of Soviet troops in 1989, it traces the policy shifts in Washington and especially the loss of focus that assisted the rise of the Taliban. Gutman's central claim, that the inability of the US to prevent the September 11 attacks was not so much an intelligence or military failure as a strategic foreign policy failure, will not make comfortable reading for Hillary Clinton's advisers.

Foremost among the errors that he documents in detail was the failure of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright to give adequate support to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most able of Afghanistan's mujahideen commanders, in the face of pro-Taliban pressure from the Pakistan military. Massoud, the Tajik leader, headed a multiethnic coalition and practiced a moderate version of Islamism that contrasted starkly with Taliban extremism. His troops were much more disposed to observe the rules of war than their opponents.

Because of the Lewinsky scandal and complications arising from Pakistan's nuclear policies, Clinton was distracted, with ultimately devastating consequences.

David Horowitz makes some similar points in his book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9/11.

More Women in the Sciences and Engineering? Nah, Maybe Later...

Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Elaine McArdle over at the Boston Globe's got some ideas:

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions: sexist companies, boy-friendly science and math classes, differences in aptitude.

Women make up almost half of today's workforce, yet hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation's engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women's own preferences are the single most important factor in that field's dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other "hard" sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

It's important to note that these findings involve averages and do not apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each gender. The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.

But if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths. And understanding how individual choices shape the gender balance of some of the most important, financially rewarding careers will be critical in fashioning effective solutions for a problem that has vexed people for more than a generation.

Oh boy! A "certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society"?

Don't tell that to the feminist lobby at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences!

Obama and the Iranian Threat

Jennifer Rubin's got a great post up on Barack Obama and Iran, "Not A Serious Threat:

This remarkable bit of footage from Barack Obama’s appearance in Oregon last night is now floating around on YouTube. It might be useful as an undergraduate course exam: how many errors can you spot? Obama apparently believes that Iran and other rogues states (he lists Iran, Cuba and Venezuela) “don’t pose a serious threat to the U.S.” Iran, specifically, he tells us spends so little on defense relative to us that if Iran “tried to pose a serious threat to us they wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

So, taken literally, he seems not much concerned about Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorist organizations, its commitment to eradicate Israel, its current actions in supplying weapons that have killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq, and its role in eroding Lebanon’s sovereignty through its client Hezbollah.

And then there is is unbridled faith in diplomacy, unaffected by the lessons of history. Was it presidential visits with the Soviet Union that brought down the Berlin Wall? Or was it the 40 year history of bipartisan military deterrence, the willingness of Ronald Reagan to walk away from Reykjavik summit, the resulting bankruptcy of the Soviet Empire, the support of dissidents and freedom fighters in the war against tyranny, and the willingness to identify Communism as a center of evil in the late 20th century?

You can understand why every attempt by John McCain to discuss global threats is labeled “fear-mongering” by Obama. In his world this is all a fantasy and we are not at risk. All perfectly logical . . . if you divorce yourself from reality.

John Bolton's also got some skin in the game:

President Bush's speech to Israel's Knesset, where he equated "negotiat[ing] with the terrorists and radicals" to "the false comfort of appeasement," drew harsh criticism from Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders. They apparently thought the president was talking about them, and perhaps he was.

Wittingly or not, the president may well have created a defining moment in the 2008 campaign. And Mr. Obama stepped right into the vortex by saying he was willing to debate John McCain on national security "any time, any place." Mr. McCain should accept that challenge today.

Foreign policy may end up being the great neutralizer this fall. Obama's far ahead in the fundraising race (and in youth support), but in the battle over Iran, McCain'll put Obama up on his knee.

Will the Real Manly Candidate Please Stand Up!

Via Ann Althouse, here's a blogger who's looking for the most manly candidate:

I'm working on a mini-project here to track mainstream media and politicians calling Obama a faggot, directly or indirectly. This will become a dominant narrative this fall as McCain is a real manly man and Obama can't bowl over 37. We all know who the GOP and the corporate media are going to back.

I was thinking about this during Pansy-gate, that it doesn't really matter if the word pansy was meant as an anti-gay insult or an anti-weak-and-feminine insult - saying that being a pansy is bad is homophobic. Feminine, prissy, anti-gay, sissy, weak, and non-gender conforming insults all come from the same place: that there's only one way to be masculine and one has to be that type of masculine to properly lead an organization, be competent at his or her job, or be a worthy human being. That concept is inherently sexist and homophobic, no matter whether or not someone uses the word "faggot" itself....

What I'm looking for here are comments in the mainstream media (talk radio doesn't count) that call Obama some form of "faggot."

Althouse throws down her able best John Houseman law prof reprise (gender-neutral allusion, of course):

As long as we're obsessing about whether criticism of Hillary Clinton is a manifestation of sexism, why not get some balance and obsess over whether criticism of Barack Obama is homophobic? Well, for one thing, Hillary Clinton is, plainly, a woman, but talking about Obama in these terms floats a rumor. You could also have a mini-project tracking insinuations that Obama is a Muslim. Are you criticizing the insinuations or propagating them?

Ouch!

But hey, I thought Obama was tougher than Indiana Jones on Good Morning America today: Hey, "Lay Off My Wife!"

More fun at Memeorandum!

American Power: Member in Good Standing of Right-Wing Blogosphere!

Readers may recall how I routinely joke about my limited impact on the web, happily toiling away in the "9th tier" of the blogosphere.

Of course, some of my readers have indulged me, suggesting that I underestimate the influence of American Power - but modesty is the best policy! So I'm intrigued, frankly, to be included in the second installment of the "The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere."

But you've got to love the picture! Here's the stereotypical right-winger, according to the Village Voice mandarins:

I look nothing like that guy, LOL!

Yo, calling Captain Ed!

Here's this, though, from the post:

"Did [the California Supreme Court] just hand the state to McCain?" asked Instapundit. Ten points is a big spread to cover, but rightbloggers hope the shlockwaves will be felt nationwide — even though Obama has himself said he believes "marriage is between a man and woman." Ed Driscoll called Obama's position a "smoke-but-didn't-inhale nuanced all-bases-covered position" because the Senator otherwise favors civil rights for gay people, in Driscoll's view a fatal weakness. Power Line concurred: "There is good reason to believe that McCain's judicial appointees would approach the issue quite differently from a legal standpoint than Obama's would." That won't fit on a bumper sticker, so Ann Althouse suggested Republicans work their anti-gay magic in a whispering campaign: "McCain only needs to stimulate feelings that things are changing too fast, that courts are taking over too aggressively, and that unknown, worrisome things might happen — unless stable, restrained judges are put in place... Obama's message has been change. He's committed to that message, and it can be turned against him." So, what scares Americans more: four more years of Republican rule, or homosexuals? We wait breathlessly for Clio's judgment.

Well, well ... what company! Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, and Power Line, among others!

I'm stylin'!!

Michelle Malkin's got a link at the post too - I hope I'm not getting that far right-wing!

Now, if I could just get some link love from Newshoggers - then I could truly say goodbye to the lower 9th ward, ehh, I mean tier, lower 9th tier!!

Democratic Activists Will Push Obama Toward Trade Protection

Support for free trade has been declining among partisans of both parties this election season.

Yet as this morning's Wall Street Journal reports, the Democratic Party in the last couple of decades has become the party of trade protection, and intense pressure from the party's restrictionist wing will likely prevent Barack Obama from adopting international economic openness should he take the White House next January:

Since at least John F. Kennedy, presidential candidates have campaigned as tough on trade and then governed as free traders. Some business leaders are expecting the same if Barack Obama makes it to the White House.

Don't count on it.

Sen. Obama, the Democratic party frontrunner, and his rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, have expressed some support for trade liberalization during their careers, as public opinion and congressional politics have shifted markedly against free trade. A coalition of anti-free trade activists and labor unions also has used the long primary season to wring commitments from the two candidates on an astonishingly detailed list of trade issues, making it hard for them to reverse course.

The two Democrats are on record saying they would rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico -- if not pull out of the deal -- remake Nafta arbitration panels, oppose trade pacts that President Bush wants to push through Congress, designate China as a currency manipulator and examine whether World Trade Organization commitments impinge on issues as diverse as local-content rules and subsidies for colleges.

While only Sen. Clinton has said she would take a formal "time-out" on new trade deals, a President Obama would likely do the same thing, given the commitments he has made.

Sen. Obama "wants the right kinds of trade policies," says his chief international economic adviser, Daniel Tarullo, a former Clinton White House economic aide. "We need to address shortcomings of past trade agreements and the international environment," especially Chinese foreign-exchange policy, he says.

The Illinois lawmaker stresses that any trade deal must include provisions to protect unions' rights to organize and bargain collectively. Violations could be enforced through trade sanctions.

That's significantly different from current practice. Few trade deals cover labor; Nafta does, but the chances of assessing damages under the accord are remote.

The provisions "can help put pressure on countries to keep improving worker conditions," Sen. Obama argued in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," a view he repeats regularly on the campaign trail. But his stump speeches don't include the doubts he expressed in his book. The changes "won't eliminate the enormous gap in hourly wages between U.S. workers and workers in Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique or Bangladesh," he wrote.

Rising protectionism is a worldwide phenemenon, but it's been boosted as a political issue by hard-left anti-globalization activists, many of whom have hammered the Democrats on import competition and labor standards.

Of all the principles of economics, there are few that have been more powerfully demonstrated than the notion of comparative advantage. In the post-World War II period, the trends in the U.S.-led international economy have been toward increasing prosperity, and those nations with the most liberalized trade regimes have been best at expanding GDP growth and reducing poverty.

Trade protection has become a knee-jerk issue among those freaked out by growing transnational interdependence, but the benefits are real, and a shift to protectionism today would curtail American export success and harm job growth in highly integrated U.S. job sectors. Note, further, what former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills has said about the patterns of trade expansion in the postwar era:

The U.S. experience since World War II proves that increased economic interdependence boosts economic growth and encourages political stability. For more than 50 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has led the world in opening markets. To that end, the United States worked to establish a series of international organizations, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)....

The results to date have been spectacular. World trade has exploded and standards of living have soared at home and abroad. Economist Gary Hufbauer, in a comprehensive study published this year by the Institute of International Economics, calculates that 50 years of globalization has made the United States richer by $1 trillion per year (measured in 2003 dollars), or about $9,000 added wealth per year for the average U.S. household. Developing countries have also gained from globalization. On average, poor countries that have opened their markets to trade and investment have grown five times faster than those that kept their markets closed. Studies conducted by World Bank economist David Dollar show that globalization has raised 375 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 20 years.

And the benefits have not been only economic. As governments liberalize their trade regimes, they often liberalize their political regimes. Adherence to a set of trade rules encourages transparency, the rule of law, and a respect for property that contribute to increased stability. Without U.S. leadership...the world would look very different today.

In today's political environment, in which just 10 percent of Americans say the ecomomy's getting better, the case for expanding free trade may be a hard sell.

The challenge for the candidates will be to convince their constituencies of the continued benefits of trade openness.

For more on the dangers of growing protection, and trends in labor market dynamics, see Purple Nation, "Frank Gets it Wrong Again," which offers a powerful criticism of Thomas Frank's recent article, "Our Great Economic U-Turn."

Nazi Germany's Years of Extermination, 1939-1945

I imagine it's just a coincidence, but I picked up Saul Freidlander's new book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, just a couple of day prior to President Bush's recent statements on appeasement, delivered during his visit to Israel.

I commented on the controversy in an earlier entry, "Bush's Knesset Address: Revisiting the Lessons of Appeasement."

The Years of Extermination's a massive tome, roughly 700 pages, not counting another 100 pagers of footnotes on documentary sources.

I'm not going to rush though it, in any case. I've got a couple of books going currently, although I've commited to reading Friedlander in his entirety.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a passage from the introduction, on the nature of German anti-Semitism in the 1930s. We talk so much about racism and oppression in all the current debates over political correctness, foreign policy, the abomination of the American project, etc., but what people don't often do is bear themselves straight up, and pay respect to historical memory.

Here's Friedlander:

The peculiar aspects of the National Socialist anti-Jewish course derived from Hitler's own brand of anti-Semitism, from the bond between Hitler and all levels of German society, mainly after the mid-thirties, from the political-institutional instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by the Nazi regime and, of course, after September 1939, from the evolving war situation. In The Years of Persecution, I defined Hitler's brand of anti-Jewish hatred as "redemptive anti-Semitism"; in other words, beyond the immediate ideological confrontation with liberalism and communism, which in the Nazi leader's eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating Jews. The Nazi leader saw "the Jew" as the principle evil in Western history and society. Without a victorious redeeming struggle, the Jew would ultimately dominate the world. This overall metahistorical axiom let to Hitler's more concrete ideological-political corollaries.

On a biological, political, and cultural level, the Jew strove to destroy the nations by spreading racial pollution, undermining the structures of the state, and, more generally, by heading the main ideological scourges of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, internationalism, pacifism, and sundry other dangers. By using this vast array of means and methods, the Jew aimed at achieving the disintegration of the vital core of all nations in which he lived - and particularly that of the German Volk - in order to accede to world domination. Since the establishment of the National Socialist regime in Germany, the Jew, aware of the danger represented by the awakening Reich, was ready to unleash a new world war to destroy this challenge to his own progress toward his ultimate aim.

These different levels of anti-Jewish ideology could be formulated and summed up in the tersest way: The Jew was a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the Aryan race and to the German Volk. The emphasis is not only on "lethal" but also - and mainly - on "active." While all other groups targeted by the Nazi regime (the mentally ill, "asocials" and homosexuals, "inferior" racial groups including Gypsies and Slavs) were essentially passive threats (as long as Slavs, for example, were not led by Jews), the Jews were the only group that, since its appearance in history, relentlessly plotted and manuevered to subdue all of humanity.

This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi system was not hurled into a void. From the fall of 1941, Hitler often designated the Jew as the "world arsonist." In fact the flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they did only because, throughout Europe and beyond, for the reasons previously mentioned, a dense underbrush of ideological and cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed the entire world. It is this constant interaction between Hitler and the system within which he ranted and acted that will be analyzed and interpreted, as it was in Years of Persecution. Here, however, the system is not limited to its German components but penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.

When I read Years of Persecution, I was particularly disturbed by the growing segregation of Jews in Germany, leading up to the breakthrough event, Kristallnacht. I've read numerous works on Nazi history, starting back years ago with William Shirer, and then through graduate training with scholars like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Ian Kershaw, and Michael Burleigh. Each interpretation, each different historiographical thesis ... this history, frankly, is among the most important developments of modern times, for it requires one to consider the ultimate nature of supreme evil, and how each one of us can realize a personal philosophy of personal justice and right.

I'll have more on Friedlander as I move along in the book.

In the meanwhile check out Richard Evans' review of Years of Extermination at the New York Times.

Photo Image: Auschwitz

Obama Draws Record Crowd in Portland

Barack Obama drew the largest crowd of his campaign today in Portland, Oregon, the New York Time reports:

Senator Barack Obama drew one of the largest crowds of his campaign so far on Sunday, addressing an estimated 75,000 people who had gathered here on the banks of the Willamette River.

“Wow! Wow! Wow!” were his first words as he surveyed the multitude, which included people in kayaks and small pleasure craft on the river on an unseasonably hot day in Oregon.

It is “fair to say this is the most spectacular setting for the most spectacular crowd” of his campaign, he told the audience. His wife and daughters, who have been with him most of the weekend, joined him on the stage at the beginning of the event but left as he was about to speak.

Mr. Obama has been campaigning extensively in Oregon, a state he hopes to win in Tuesday’s primary, as the Democratic presidential nominating race ticks down to its last handful of contests. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on a four-day swing through Kentucky, which also holds its primary on Tuesday and where she appears likely to draw the most votes.

Mr. Obama stopped earlier at an ice cream parlor, Lew’s Dari-Freeze and Drive In, in Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland. There, answering questions from reporters, he edged closer to declaring victory in the Democratic battle than has been his habit. He said he was returning to Iowa to await the results of the primaries on Tuesday night because “we thought it was a terrific way to bring things full circle.”

Portland has got to be ground zero of Obama support. Either that, or that river-side burg's emblematic of the Obama phenom in "progressive" cities nationwide.

Check out this video of the event, from the Huffington Post:

See also, the Portland Tribune, "Poll: Obama Trouncing Clinton in Oregon."

Also, don't miss my earlier entry, "Barack Obama's Cult of Personality."

George Bush, John McCain, and U.S. Foreign Policy

The New York Times has a big article up on John McCain's foreign policy, "The McCain Doctrines."

I'm going borrow from James Joyner's post, on Daniel Drezner's take on it:

Dan Drezner argues, persuasively, that John McCain’s foreign policy is not, as critics charge, simply a continuation of George W. Bush’s. Essentially, while McCain has strong neoconservative tendencies (i.e., he’s quite willing to intervene militarily based on morality alone even if there is no compelling U.S. security interest at stake) but that’s he’s much more aware than Bush that the need for the support of the American public.

He quotes extensively from a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine from Matt Bai. The key [paragraphs]:

It’s clear, though, that on the continuum that separates realists from idealists, McCain sits much closer to the idealist perspective. McCain has long been chairman of the International Republican Institute, run by Craner, which exists to promote democratic reforms in closed societies. He makes a point of meeting with dissidents when he visits countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan and has championed the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the Burmese resistance. Most important, as he made clear in his preamble to our interview, McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet.

McCain argues that his brand of idealism is actually more pragmatic in a post-9/11 world than the hard realism of the cold war. He rejects as outdated, for instance, a basic proposition of cold-war realists like Kissinger and Baker: that stability is always found in the relationship between states. Realists have long presumed that the country’s security is defined by the stability of its alliances with the governments of other countries, even if those governments are odious; by this thinking, your interests can sometimes be served by befriending leaders who share none of your democratic values. McCain, by contrast, maintains that in a world where oppressive governments can produce fertile ground for rogue groups like Al Qaeda to recruit and prosper, forging bonds with tyrannical regimes is often more likely to harm American interests than to help them.

Here's how Joyner concludes:

On this score, I think McCain is right. That he’s more aware of the limitations of American military power to shape the world than Bush, too, is a hopeful sign. I do wish, however, that he was more reluctant still.

Now, back to Drezner:

This strikes me as a spot-on assessment of McCain's foreign policy instincts -- a little less postmodern, "we create reality" than George W. Bush's, but nevertheless leaning quite heavily in the neocon direction.

It's this passage, however, where McCain mentions something I haven't heard from him before on foreign policy:

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

“I think we’ve learned some lessons,” McCain told me. “One is that the American people have to be willing to support it. But two, we need to work more in an international way to try to beneficially affect the situation. And you have to convince America and the world that every single avenue has been exhausted before we go in militarily. And we better think not a day later or a week later, but a year and 5 years and 10 years later. Because the attention span, unfortunately, of the American people, although pretty remarkable in some ways, is not inexhaustible.”....

McCain is relying on the same strategy to achieve success both in Iraq and in the November election. In each endeavor, McCain is staking everything on the notion that the public, having seen the success of a new military strategy, can be convinced that the war is, in fact, winnable and worth the continued sacrifice. Absent that national retrenching, McCain admits that this war, like the one in Vietnam, is probably doomed. Near the end of our conversation in Tampa, I asked him if he would be willing to change course on Iraq if the violence there started to rise again. “Oh, we’d have to,” he replied. “It’s not so much what McCain would do. American public opinion will not tolerate such a thing.”

The Bush administration's fundamental mistake was to believe that a generation-long project could somehow be pursued without the need for consensus by anyone outside the executive branch. McCain seems to get that.

After researching what the American people think about foreign military interventions, I'm pretty sure that the American people don't want us in Iraq regardless of how well the surge works (Bai makes this point later on in the article). I'm not sure, however, whether this will be the deciding factor in how they vote in November.

The paradox: for McCain to be a more prudent foreign policy president, he needs to have a hostile public constraining him. Of course, if that's the case, then it's entirely possible he won't be elected president in the first place.

This is all very interesting, although note something about Drezner's conclusion: The research he's talking about is his thesis that Americans are "realist" in their basic orientation to American forward power internationally (which is, surprisingly, the opposite of the major "internationalist" strand posited by scholarship on U.S. public opinion on foreign policy).

In other words, the public views foreign commitments in terms of crude national interests (cost-benefit analysis), and thus if Americans "don't want us in Iraq," we can expect pressure to force a withdrawal from the war early next year.

I don't read public opinion that way, as I've noted many times (the war's unpopular, but the public's not demanding a precipitous surrender).

Thus Drezner's reading of McCain and public opinion misses something.

As Thomas Powers has suggested at the New York Review of Books, it's not so much that McCain "gets" the intense public resistance to costly foreign adventurism. If public opinion's as bad as it is, then the skills we need in the next president are the courage to admit we've lost the war and the political leadership to guide the political system to extract our forces from the supposed fiasco.

McCain won't do any such thing, of course. But I think Powers is wrong anyway, because I have a different take on public opinion: Success is contagious. If we continue to make gains thoughout the post-surge period of the deployment, the public will ride out the storm. (And we are continuining to make progress: See, for example, Captain Ed, "Guess Who Realized the Surge is Working?", on Nancy's Pelosi's acknowledgment of progress in Iraq.)

As expensive as the war is, Americans don't want to lose. The election campaign will allow McCain to clarify these issues, and with his experience, he'll most likely be a better salesman than President Bush on the vital need for a continuing commitment to the Iraqi people.

Barack Obama's Cult of Personality

I've been chronicling Barack Obama's embrace by the progressive/radical left for some time now. Thus it's no surprise to me that Obama supporters have turned to artistic iconography to build a cult of personality around the Illinois Senator.

As the Washington Post indicates, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer pictured above, has created the Democratic primary's "equivalent of the Che poster," an agitprop pop-art image for the Bolshevik-constructivist set.

The Obama cult is the topic of this week's cover story at the Weekly Standard, "Let a Thousand Posters Bloom":

More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light--clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy clouds illuminating his sacred head. But even away from the Obama mother ship, graphic designers and pop artists have adopted the candidate as their own, producing a raft of posters and prints in support of his campaign.

Last summer, an Obama poster began appearing in downtown Chicago, plastered randomly in public spaces. Drawn in mustardy yellows, Obama appeared from the shoulders up, staring straight at viewers, with a sunburst exploding behind his head. Below the image, in large block letters, the poster proclaimed "The Dream." At the time, the artist was identified only as "CRO," but, as the posters spread, CRO was revealed to be Ray Noland, a 35-year-old graphic artist....

To get a sense of Noland's politics, you need only look at the details. In one print, a crowd of Obama supporters is waving tiny placards, some of which read "Surge of Diplomacy" and "Peace Is Patriotic." Another poster, titled "No! From the Go," bears the slogan "U.S. out of Iraq."

Noland's designs attracted a huge amount of attention in the art community, and even some interest from the Obama campaign. At first, campaign officials asked him to donate his images, according to the New York Post. He declined. But the campaign finally did purchase a poster, which was used as part of the official promotion for a September 2007 rally in New York City.

Shepard Fairey was the next to step forward. He is best known for his early 1990s underground "Andre the Giant has a posse" campaign, a cultural phenomenon designed around a small, easily reproducible likeness of the wrestler. Fairey distributed thousands of stickers and posters bearing the image, which eventually took on a life of its own, turning up in cities and towns across the globe--the image itself becoming part of the popular culture. Fairey specializes in this sort of epiphenomenon, which he calls "propaganda engineering." As his website proudly proclaims, he's been "manufacturing quality dissent since 1989."

Fairey is not new to politics. As he told Creativity-Online.com, "I've been paying attention to politics since the mid-'90s." In 2000, he created an anti-Bush poster. In 2004, even though he "wasn't really that impressed" with John Kerry, he mounted what he calls a "pretty aggressive anti-Bush poster campaign" called "Be the Revolution" in support of Kerry. It wasn't until Obama appeared on the scene that Fairey really fell for a candidate. He would later explain that he admired Obama's "radical cachet." "I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace."

In January, he unveiled two posters in support of Obama. Done in blood red and grays, the prints depicted a large, iconic Obama, head thoughtfully cocked. One version of the poster proclaims "HOPE," the other, "PROGRESS." As Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum noted, the Fairey motif was something like "Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art," all of which suggests that the subject might be "a Third World dictator." But the American Thinker's Peggy Shapiro grasped the poster's more proximate ancestor: Fairey was using "the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda .  .  . [recalling] the idealized portraits and personality cult of the 'Beloved Leader' such as Stalin and Lenin."

Fairey's posters have become huge hits--you often see them at Obama rallies adorning either T-shirts or signs and plastering urban places such as bus kiosks....

Artists keep flocking to the Obama campaign, designing posters, sometimes selling them, and often giving them away for free....

Designer Jean Aw, trying to explain the attraction, told the Huffington Post that "By placing such an emphasis on building a visually appealing brand, Obama is validating the importance of design in communication. This in turn builds support from the design community, who might feel that a design-conscious candidate best represents their personal beliefs."

Of course it is equally possible that artists are responding instead to an ideological kinship with Obama. The Upper Playground is an artist collective in San Francisco, which the San Francisco Chronicle helpfully describes as a "multiplatform international lifestyle brand encompassing artist-centered clothing and housewares." In February they endorsed Obama, writing, "For too long we have been plagued by mediocrity and incompetence at the Executive level. As an international company, we feel that it is time to support a candidate that truly embodies the American spirit in both his campaign and his ideologies. We believe that Barack Obama is that candidate."

Meghan Daum at the Los Angeles Times, in commenting on Fairey's agitprop fame, offers the best summary of Obama's idolatry:

The Obama poster has spread Fairey's fame, but is the image good for the candidate? Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara -- which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is -- Fairey's Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop. There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silk-screen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.

This cannot be the Obama campaign's idea of good public relations...

Well, the Obama folks apparently think so.

Totalitarian chic is popular, and as this is widely considered the "change" election, voters have only themselves to blame if, God forbid, they eventually succumb to the cult of Obama in November.

Equal Footing? Same-Sex Marriage and the Civil Rights Legacy

I discussed California's same-sex marriage ruling in an earlier entry, "The Presidential Politics of Same-Sex Marriage."

The question of whether gays should be legally permitted to marry is far from resolved, and the California Supreme Court has done the country a service by placing a (really) hot-button social issue back on the political agenda.

I don't get too fired up about gay rights issues (gays should be able to serve openly in the armed services, for example). However, I do have a problem placing the quest for homosexual rights on an equal plane as the historic black American freedom struggle.

It turns out that California Chief Justice Ronald George is saying he was influenced in his legal thinking by Jim Crow segregation from the post-bellum South, via the Los Angeles Times:

In the days leading up to the California Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage ruling Thursday, the decision "weighed most heavily" on Chief Justice Ronald M. George -- more so, he said, than any previous case in his nearly 17 years on the court.

The court was poised 4 to 3 not only to legalize same-sex marriage but also to extend to sexual orientation the same broad protections against bias previously saved for race, gender and religion. The decision went further than any other state high court's and would stun legal scholars, who have long characterized George and his court as cautious and middle of the road.

But as he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

"I think," he concluded, "there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

So, does "doing the right thing" mean that gay rights is the new social justice issue of the 2000s? Are gays that oppressed?

Here's this from the Weekly Standard in 2006:

THE MOVEMENT TO REDEFINE MARRIAGE to include same-sex unions has packaged its demands in the rhetoric and images of the civil rights movement. This strategy, though cynical, has enormous strategic utility. For what reasonable, fair-minded American could object to a movement that conjures up images of Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellows campaigners for racial justice facing down dogs and fire hoses? Who is prepared to risk being labeled a bigot for opposing same-sex marriage?

As an exercise in marketing and merchandising, this strategy is the most brilliant playing of the race card in recent memory. Not since the "poverty pimps" of 35 years ago, who leveraged the guilt and sense of fair play of the American public to hustle affirmative action set-asides, have we witnessed so brazen a misuse of African-American history for partisan purposes.

But the partisans of homosexual marriage have a problem. There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights. As the eminent historian Eugene D. Genovese observed more than 30 years ago, the black American experience as a function of slavery is unique and without analogue in the history of the United States. While other ethnic and social groups have experienced discrimination and hardship, none of their experiences compare with the physical and cultural brutality of slavery. It was in the crucible of the unique experience of slavery that the civil rights movement was born.

The extraordinary history of the United States as a slaveholding republic included the kidnapping and brutal transport of blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision--Dred Scott v. Sandford--denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.

It is these basic facts that embarrass efforts to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the goals of generally privileged groups, however much they wish to depict themselves as victims. Whatever wrongs individuals have suffered because some Americans fail in the basic moral obligation to love the sinner, even while hating the sin, there has never been an effort to create a subordinate class subject to exploitation based on "sexual orientation."

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a gay activist's aspiration to overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?

One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, and always has made clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level--biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual--that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people--despite the desire of "polyamorists" to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed.

Moreover, the analogy of same-sex marriage to interracial marriage disregards the whole point of those prohibitions, which was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, deny the recognition as lawful "marriages" to some forms of sexual combining--including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as equal.

People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting traditional, monogamous marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.

Well-intentioned liberals shudder upon hearing the word "discrimination." Its simple enunciation instills guilt and dulls their critical faculties. But once malcontented members of any group--however privileged--can simply invoke the term and launch their own personalized civil rights industry, the word has been emptied of its normative and historical content.

I doubt that's a message the major gay rights organizations are ready to embrace.

See more on this, at Memeorandum.

Will McCain Talk to Terrorists?

Did you see Jamie Rubin's piece over at the Huffington Post, "Talking with Our Enemies: McCain Should Admit The Truth and Stop Attacking the Messenger"?

Rubin argues that McCain's open to political dialog with terrorists, and the Arizona Senator's backing of President Bush language of appeasement, offered in his Knesset speech, was political opportunism.

Here's Rubin:

There is a war going on in Iraq. This fall's election will be a virtual referendum on the war. That is a real issue. Instead of debating that, President Bush and Senator McCain are determined to attack the character of their political opponents. As a Democrat, I am tired of having our patriotism attacked. Yesterday, the Democratic Party leaders were unified in denouncing these kinds of attacks. Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Joe Biden and the Majority Leader Harry Reid all spoke in unison to defend Senator Obama.

So I say to the McCain campaign, just admit the truth, either he made a mistake or he changed his mind, then let us return to debating the issues as Americans.

That sounds pretty tough.

But there's a problem. Rubin also said this, earlier in the entry:

The question and answer I released yesterday was a full question and a full answer. Nothing was left out of the question or the answer. Nothing is taken out of context....

I have dug out what I believe to be all of the discussion on Hamas during our interview....

As you can see, there is no conditionality in any of his answers. Nowhere does he say what Senator Clinton and Senator Obama say: that is, Hamas has to renounce terrorism, recognize Israel and accept the previous agreements of the Palestinian authority before we could deal with them. Instead, Senator McCain is talking about engagement with Hamas and how it could come about.

Nothing was taken out of context? No conditionality?

Jonathan Martin has the video from the interview (also cited by Rubin):

So what's the problem here? How do we interpret this passage on McCain's position on Hamas?

I think the United States should take a step back, see what they do when they form their government, see what their policies are, and see the ways that we can engage with them, and if there aren’t any, there may be a hiatus," McCain said. "But I think part of the relationship is going to be dictated by how Hamas acts, not how the United States acts.

McCain clearly says let's "see what their policies are..." In other words, don't enter into relations until we see if Hamas renounces killing and terror.

That sounds like a precondition to me.

See also, Gateway Pundit, "Obama Repeats Jamie Rubin's Lie On McCain (Video)."

Hell Freezes Over: McCain Now GOP Savior

Back in January and February, the big question on the GOP side was whether base conservatives would rally to John McCain's banner after he secured the nomination.

We still have quite a few folks out there suffering from McCain Derangement Syndrome, but I just have to get a chuckle out of today's piece over at the Politico, "GOP Turns to McCain to Reinvent Party":

In a delicious piece of irony, many dispirited Republicans, devastated by Tuesday’s special election loss in Mississippi, now believe their savior to be John McCain — a not-so-constant conservative many of them also have long intensely disliked.

The logic: McCain, the vaunted maverick, can move the party away from President Bush and reinvent a Republican brand that, at the moment, is in tatters.

“The public is prepared to believe that McCain is a different kind of Republican,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Donatelli, McCain’s point man at the committee. “This is not some political idea that was cooked up.”

But for all the talk and expectation that McCain will run from Bush like a scalded dog, the reality is different; so far, he hasn’t drawn many stark contrasts at all. Since winning the nomination, his policy proposals and high-profile speeches have included more conventional conservative dogma than nonconformist deviation.

To be sure, there are areas where McCain has walled himself off from the White House. A more aggressive response to global warming is one, and McCain spent two days in the environmentally conscious Pacific Northwest pressing the topic this week.
But on such central issues as the economy, health care, the judiciary and national security, McCain hasn’t wavered far from the right’s prized principles: tax cuts and less spending, market solutions and tax incentives, judges who will strictly interpret the law, and a stay-the-course approach on Iraq.

I noticed many times earlier this year - when Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, and all the big right wing bloggers were hammering McCain -that the very qualites for which the Arizona Senator was being attacked (bipartisan compromise, especially) would be the issues that made him the most attractive to independents and moderates in an election expected to be all about "change."

McCain's going to be fine this fall. All the lefties think they've got a shoo-in of an election this year, but the Maverick's holding his own so far, and once Obama finally wraps things up, the conservative 527s are going to lay into him like Cuban pinata.

See also, "Obama, McCain Highly Competitive for Independent Vote."

Che Guevara Totalitarian Chic

Remember seeing those "I'm With Stupid" t-shirts, with an arrow pointing one way or another?

Well, the latest version of these the are iconic Che Guevara shirts, which seem to be more ubiquitious all the time.

I've got a couple of students this semester who wear Che gear to class every day. I want to bonk them on the head: "Hey, this guy was Cuba's executioner. Don't you know this? Why do you wear the image of a man who's also infamous as a 'cold-blooded killing machine.'"

You don't need an arrow with these shirts: They just announce, "Hey, everybody, I'm stupid."

I've written about this problem before, which to me indicates the anti-intellectualism of America's youth, and especially the brain-washing by many in the education profession.

But yesterday while out shopping at the mall with my oldest boy, I noticed an attractive, shapely young woman with an eye-turning, body-clinging t-shirt. Naturally I checked out the woman's figure first, but then I said s#!t to myself when I saw Che's image atop her chest!

Anyway, I thought I'd just vent here a bit. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, I guess.

See some other sources as well:

"The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand."

"Che Guevara: Totalitarian Diaries"

"A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini."

Image Source: Those Shirts

**********

UPDATE: Black Five has an awesome post up on this, "Don't be a DouChe'":

...Dear angry, hate-filled lefties welcome to Blackfive. We aggravate more hippies by 9 am than most people ever do...

Last Resort Colleges: The Basement of the Ivory Tower

I'm not exactly sure what the Atlantic editors were hoping to accomplish with their story from the June edition, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower."

The story's about students at "small private" and community colleges, where most of those in attendance are of the second chance variety - and the third, fourth, and beyond. I was expecting some shocking expose, seeing as the article's written by "Professor X," an instructor who apparently wants to speak out about the "dark side" of college instruction without placing her teaching position at risk. But this piece is not only tame in its expository promise, it's a retread of a well-told story.

Here's a little from the article:

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home....

The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum....

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

These passages are probable the most important in the essay, but the notion that students are barely able to write is no surprise to teachers at community college, where I teach, and certainly around most schools everywhere else in the United States.

Recall the other day I wrote about Professor Steven Aird at Norfolk State University, who was fired for failing too many students. The university would not comment on his case (see the article, from Inside Higher Ed), but the spokeswoman did say this:

Something is wrong when you cannot impart your knowledge onto students. We are a university of opportunity, so we take students who are underprepared, but we have a history of whipping them into shape.

Norfolk State University's a "historically black college," and it turns out that just 20 percent of the student body is capable of performing university-level academic work.

In California community colleges, the overwhelming majority of students need remedial education, but with open enrollment many of the most demanding classes in history, political science, psychology, and so forth, are open for all to enroll. I'm often pleased to have students who would be just fine at Berkeley or UCLA, but the range of abilities is astounding, and it's not an understatement to say a great bulk of my charges just can't read, and thus they can't possibly do all the "higher order" thinking that's the rage with assessment-driven administrators and outside accreditation agencies.

In any case, as far as "Professor X" is concerned, perhaps the Atlantic editors are surrounded by so many Harvard graduates (like Ross Douthat and Matthew Yglesias) that they haven't really thought too much about the real trenches of education. Or if they do (Sandra Tsing Loh did write an awesome article for the magazine on California's public schools a couple of months back), it's all theoretical, removed from everyday experience. To offer feature stories on the "basement of the ivory tower" is to assuage the guilty sensibilities of their elite liberal readership (I'm left to wonder so much, at least).

All is not lost, though. The story's online version has some cool links to older Atlantic education articles, for example, James Byrant Conant's, "Education for a Classless Society," from May 1940!

That's pretty cool. There's a couple of other good ones as well.

But still, Allen Bundy, an emeritus professor of English from my college, has argued that community college instructors should not consider themselves professors at all (see "Basic Skills Problems at Community Colleges"). They're remedial coaches, for the most part, and the job of the two-year college faculty should be to teach basic skills instruction for the lumpen students who enroll in our classes.

Here's Bundy in another article, "California's Exit Exam: An "F" for Education":

Almost 47,000 California high school students will not receive diplomas this year because they failed an exit test designed in 2004 designed to measure standards that would insure graduates' diplomas had substance. Of that number almost 21,000 are non-native speakers and about 28,000 are poor.

Although the issue is incredibly complicated, what the test failure demonstrates is the magnitude of the problem in states like California that are faced with educating non-native and dialect English speakers....

Problems with language in our students is not a surprise for me As a community college English teacher in California, I have witnessed, over the past 35 years, changes in the speaking and writing skills of almost all high school graduates who came to me for "college" instruction.

In fact, one of the reasons I retired so soon (at fifty-eight-years-old after thirty-five years as a full-time instructor at the college) was that my students did not have the ability to read, write, or think at a level expected of a two-year college student, and I found that I could make only a limited contribution to their success.

It's not just community colleges, or "private" institutions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece recently entitled, "America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree." The basic point? College education is has been devalued by the democratization of the halls of higher learning:

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

So readers can see why I question the editorial judgment of the powers that be at the Atlantic.

But perhaps all is not lost.

Fareed Zakaria, in his recent piece, "The Future of American Power," praised higher education in the U.S. as "the country's best industry." He's right, in the aggregate, but his point about "deep regional, racial, and socioeconomic variation" across the nation's educational system is probably a more daunting problem than the those evincing elite-level optimism can possibly understand.

The Consequences of Defeat

Via Maggie's Farm, here's an excerpt from John McCain's address to the National Rifle Association yesterday:

Senator Obama has said, if elected, he will withdraw Americans from Iraq quickly no matter what the situation on the ground is and no matter what U.S. military commanders advise. But if we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. A reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will view it as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the Sta te of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly.

The consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for premature withdrawal, as both Senators Obama and Clinton do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date. Thanks to the counterinsurgency instigated by General Petreaus, after four years of terribly costly mistakes, we have a realistic chance to succeed in helping the forces of political reconciliation prevail in Iraq, and the democratically elected Iraqi Government, with a professional and competent Iraqi army, impose its authority throughout the country and defend its borders. We have a realistic chance of denying al Qaeda any sanctuary in Iraq. We have a realistic chance of leaving behind in Iraq a force for stability and peace in the region, and not a cause for a wider and far more dangerous war. I do not argue against withdrawal because I am indifferent to war and the suffering it inflicts on too many American families. I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are. But I know, too, that we must sometimes pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later. I want our soldiers home, too, just as quickly as we can bring them back without risking everything they suffered for, and burdening them with greater sacrifices in the years ahead. That I will not do. I have spent my life in service to my country, and I will never, never, never risk her security for the sake of my own ambitions. I will defend her, and all her freedoms, so help me God. And I ask you to help me in that good cause. Thank you, and God bless you.

This is why I've supported McCain, from the beginning.

See also, Classical Values, "We Owe It to Our Military."