Witness Intimidation: An Urban Crisis

What would it take for inner-city crime witnesses to come forward to the police with information about a crime?

The dearth of witness cooperation with the police - the taboo of "snitching" - is emerging as one of the biggest impediments to more effective responses to the hopelessness of urban violence and social disorganization.

This New York Times article has more on the problem:

When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street corner here in June, Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother left to search for justice in a world without witnesses — where the stigma of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation prevents many from testifying about even the worst crimes.

But Ms. Glasco held out some hope, all the same. Determined not to let her son’s killer go unpunished, she urged her daughter and other relatives to work the grapevine in the neighborhood where he was killed, Whitman Park, searching for evidence, and maybe somebody willing to share it.

Discovering nothing, she pressed on.

Ms. Glasco’s extended family put together fliers and started assembling a Web site to publicize a reward. She gathered her life savings and set the figure for information at $5,000. She delayed posting it because Camden detectives asked her to wait, saying they had promising leads in the investigation.

The leads fizzled; a trip to see the mayor produced more promises of effort, but no arrests. The murder of Ms. Glasco’s son, Salahuddin Igwe — shot at 5 a.m. as he walked home from a party — remains unsolved.

Ms. Glasco is disappointed. She is also realistic. If the tables were turned, she admits, and if another mother were at her doorstep asking for information, she is not sure she would help, either.

“Snitching, telling on people, isn’t something that I personally would involve myself with,” she said in an interview last week. “People don’t want to talk to you if they think you’re a snitch. If they were your friends, they’re not your friends anymore. You’re left totally all alone.”

As the most violent neighborhood in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities, the Whitman Park section of Camden is on the front lines of the struggle with witness intimidation. An array of powerful forces converge here to discourage people from cooperating with the investigation of crimes — crimes committed against their own homes, their own neighbors, their own children.

Drugs are sold openly from street corners and abandoned row houses. Gunfire is a neighborhood soundtrack. And the competing gangs that control Whitman Park have made it clear that the price for defying them is death. Within blocks of the street where Ms. Glasco’s son was killed, six people were murdered in less than a year.

Yet many residents of Whitman Park say their reluctance to help investigators is based on more than just fear of gang retaliation. It is also a consequence of their deep distrust of the local police and prosecutors and politicians. Like residents of many other struggling, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods across the country, people here complain that racial profiling, police corruption and the excesses of the war on drugs have made them suspicious of virtually any arm of government.

It might be considered difficult - certainly among residents of secure, suburban neighborhoods, protected by affluence and quick links to ADT - to understand why people won't come forward to help law enforcement. Or maybe not. The code on the street's the most powerful form of social control, and frankly, when local armed mobs have more power than the neighborhood police department, it makes sense to stay silent.

Still, until we see change - until there's some kind of "take back the night" movement at the base of the violence - it will be impossible for these communities to be free from the terror.

I've thought much about witness intimidation. When 7-year-old Tajahnique Lee was shot in the face last summer in New Jersey no one came forward to finger her killers - that is, not one of the roughly twenty people right there at the scene who witnessed the shooting!

The phenomenon of witness intimidation is completely debilitating for African-American political and economic progress.

Juan Williams dicussed the crisis at length in his book, Enough. Williams highlights the local danger and fear of "the enemy within." Here's a disturbing section from the book:

In October 2002 the living hell caused by crime in the black community burst into flames in Baltimore.

A black mother of five testified against a Northest Baltimore drug dealer. The next day her row house was fire-bombed. She managed to put out the flames that time. Two weeks later, at 2:00am as the family slept, the house was set on fire again. This time the drug dealer broke open the front door and took care in splashing gasoline on the lone staircase that provided exit for people asleep in the second- and third-floor bedrooms. Angela Dawson, the thirty-six year-old mother, and her five children, aged nine to fourteen, burned to death. Her husband, Carnell, forty-three, jumped from a second-story window. He had burns over most of his body and died a few days later. On that chilling night, as she struggled against the smoke and heat, the mother's cries could be heard over the crackle of the flames on East Preston Street. "God, please help me," screamed Angela Dawson. "Help me get my children out."

Before she was silenced, Dawson made thirty-six calls to the police, from late-July until her death, to complain about the drug dealers who operated freely on the street in front of her house. About a month before she was killed, one of the the dealers had scrawled BITCH on the front wall of her house. As she was scrubbing away the graffiti, a young man who lived across the street, and eighteen-year old, appeared and boldly said he had written the word there, told her to leave it alone, and then hit her.

Williams goes on to recount that police apprehended the murderer, Darryl Brooks, twenty-one, who was later sentenced to life in prison without parole. The tragedy of Angela Dawson is a tragedy for the entire black community, however. The local papers reported on the gangland taboo against "snitching."

Williams quotes the Baltimore Sun, which reported that:

Families...are often unwilling to join the battle against crime because it would mean turning in a child, grandchild, cousin, or uncle....Residents still may have to coexist with neighbors who might be criminals.It'd be hard to find a more compelling theme of discussion at a major civil rights forum, but the Democrats and delegates to the meeting missed the opportunity.

Which way forward?

Certainly continued efforts at strong law enforcement and communty-based policing are necessary. But until black culture shifts toward privileging citizenship and responsibility over social neglect and chaos - there can be little hope for the success of more forceful public policies, at least for those social welfare approaches falling outside of aggressive anti-crime initiatives.

Kristol Mess? The Neocon Controversy at New York Times

The hiring of William Kristol at the New York Times triggered a Pavlovian reaction among the left-wing blogosphere. You've got to love it! Oh, the outrage! No, not the evil neocons at the Old Gray Lady!

See my earlier entry on Kristol's new position here. The Times' decision to hire Kristol is discussed in this piece from the Editor & Publisher:

A day after the Huffington Post first reported it, The New York Times has announced that it has indeed hired conservative pundit, and Fox News analyst, Bill Kristol, as a new regular op-ed columnist.

Liberal bloggers had been up in arms over the move. Kristol said, in an interview with Politico.com, it gave him some pleasure to see their "heads explode." Kristol was perhaps the most influential pundit of all in promoting the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has strongly defended the move ever since.

Times' editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal defended the move. Rosenthal told Politico.com shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views....We have views on our op-ed page that are as hawkish or more so than Bill....

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

Unlike The Times’ other regulars, Kristol will write only once a week, with his first column set for Jan. 7, and he has just a one-year contract. The paper noted in its own announcement: "In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not 'a first-rate newspaper of record,' adding, 'The Times is irredeemable.'”

Kristol, on Fox News in 2006, suggested that the paper should face charges after its big banking records scoop: "I think it is an open question whether the Times itself should be prosecuted for this totally gratuitous revealing of an ongoing secret classified program that is part of the war on terror.”

In 2003, on NPR's "Fresh Air" show, he said, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni....Iraq's always been very secular."

In the July 14, 2006 issue of The Weekly Standard, which he edits, Kristol called for a "military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."

Kristol, in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, argues that Gen. David Petraeus should have been picked as Time's person of the year, but "Our liberal elites are so invested in a narrative of defeat and disaster in Iraq that to acknowledge the prospect of victory would be too head-wrenching and heart-rending." In the Dec. 17 issue he argued, "Resisting the temptation to throw away success in Iraq by drawing down too fast or too deep is the greatest service this president can render his successor."

Well, the editors of the Editor & Publisher don't sound too happy about Kristol's new gig!

See more commentary at Memeorandum, and especially this piece over at The Politico. Or Check out Greg Mitchell's blog, who's hoping Kristol will be "laughed off the page."

The Future of Newspapers

I finished semester grading this morning, and after a visit to my local Ralphs for provisions, I decided to take the afternoon off from blogging.

What to do? Television, of course! I clicked over to Cinemax after settlling down to check out "The Constant Gardener," with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz (a slow developing film, with an annoying flashback-style storyline, but still boasting an interesting African political-geographical setting).

I checked the comments here at the blog after that, then went back to the tube to watch the much-hyped Giants-Patriots trimulcast. (The Pats finished their season undefeated - beating New York 38-35 - something not seen since the 1972 Dolphins went all the way to a 17-0 season.)

So, now it's time to keep my promise with an entry on the changing newspapers marketplace. I got the idea after noticing the comments to my Bill Kristol-to-the-New York Times post. A couple of readers suggested that the Times hired Kristol to bolster circulation by stirring controversy. I can't blame 'em. Kristol (and the neocons) did regime change once, so maybe the suggestion's not too far off the mark!

I'm also moved to write about larger changes in journalism after reading today's front-page story over at the Wall Street Journal.

I spend a lot of time discussing newspapers and the mass media every semester, as part of my course in American government. The class discussions seeem have a different conclusion every term - there's always some interesting development in the press, whether that be some new big editorial shake-up, the latest figures on the decline in newspaper circulation, or some novel corporate adaptation to shifting media markets.

Mostly though it's all the technological change - how rapid shifts in technology frequently put traditional notions of news distribution in the dustbin. Tech has always changed news consumption and markets - whether through the invention of the high-speed rotary press in the early-18th century, the telegraph and the rise of wire services a few decades later, radio broadcasting and television in the 20th century, and now the internet.

Personally, I've always enjoyed reading the old-fashioned, hard-copy newspaper, and still do - an amazing fact, considering how much I'm online! Frankly, I hoping access to the traditional broadsheet newspapers - enjoyed with a morning cup of coffee - doesn't go the way of the dinosaur anytime soon.

The Journal's article, written by Paul Steiger, who's leaving the paper, focuses on changing corporate organizational models. By the 1960s, the dominant form of press management and news distribution was the large urban newspaper, mounting large local news operations while relying on wire services for international updates. About this time - as news holdings became more concentrated and profitable - publishers invested heavily in expanding operations, both nationally and in far-flung bureaus around the world:

The result was a golden age of American journalism. In New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, of course, yet also in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Des Moines, Louisville, St. Petersburg and more, daily papers were willing to send reporters far afield in pursuit of stories exposing corruption or explaining the world. Newspapers opened or expanded Washington bureaus and added reporters abroad. Some stationed them not just in London, Moscow and Tokyo but in places like Sydney and São Paulo.

As their financial strength and staff size increased, they became fearless in pursuing corruption. A 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, protected publishers from libel judgments by public officials even if what was published was inaccurate, so long as the paper didn't know the article was inaccurate and wasn't reckless about what it published.

The news operations of the three main television networks in those days followed a similar pattern. As profits grew, they added to staff and launched foreign bureaus and investigative projects. The Sunday-night magazine program CBS launched in 1968, "60 Minutes," set a new standard for expensively produced and deeply reported video journalism.

The public seemed to approve. Intrepid journalists proliferated in films like "All the President's Men," depicting Washington Post reporters' exposure of Watergate. Enrollments in journalism schools surged, as well as applications for reporting jobs.

They were heady times indeed. When the L.A. Times investigated suspected gasoline hoarding during fuel shortages in 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.

In the end, we didn't. Our reporting showed that most of the hoarding was by people like our own readers, who'd taken to driving with their gas tanks always full. But the lesson was clear: When it came to getting an important story, don't worry about the cost.

I don't remember exactly when cracks began to appear in this halcyon life. At most big papers, circulation, revenue and profits grew through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, with recessionary pauses that weren't excessively fretted over....

In those days, we worried quite a bit about television. Survey after survey showed that, with each year, more Americans were getting their news there. While that made circulation growth tougher to achieve, ad revenue continued to rise, as newspaper readers generally had better incomes.

Cable TV added a new worry, because here was a medium that could target smaller, exclusive audiences and thus pose a greater challenge to print. Even so, newspaper revenue continued its growth.

Then in the 1990s came the digital networks and the Internet, unleashing forces that would ultimately undermine newspaper business models that had been so supportive of journalism. First came dial-up, then a few years later the Internet, and by 1995, dozens of newspapers, including the Journal, had online editions.

This last development - the emergence of the online market model of high-tech competition and instantaneous news distribution - represents the greatest challenge to the traditional newpapers as we have know them. What will happen?

Steiger focuses more on immediate market developments among the new, high-flying class of press magnate power-brokers:

What happens next? Change, rapid and largely unpredictable. Nearly every company in the industry needs major new revenue, big cost reductions or a healthy dollop of each. The people and entities to watch most closely are:

-- The entrepreneurs, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Zell. Mr. Murdoch has vast experience in media generally and newspapers in particular, controls major financial resources and has big plans to expand the Journal -- in print and online, domestically and overseas. Mr. Zell used financial engineering to control Tribune Co. with minimal investment of his own, has little media experience and isn't likely to spend much on his new properties. Both are decisive investors and operators. They aren't always successful, but it's unwise to bet against them.

-- New York Times Co. Mr. Murdoch has said he'll use the Journal to steal a portion of the general-news and cultural-news franchises of Times Co.'s eponymous flagship newspaper. But entities fight hardest defending their home turf, and the Times has both a strong, growing Web site and a Sunday edition that remains an advertising monster. It will be under pressure to follow some of the cost cutting its sister Boston Globe has done. Pure conjecture: Assuming that New York Mayor and Bloomberg LP owner Mike Bloomberg isn't U.S. president-elect a year from now, would he and Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. consider putting their two enterprises together?

-- Hearst Corp. After the inheritors of William Randolph Hearst's empire lost their bet on evening papers in the 1960s, they bulked up their revenue from magazines like Cosmopolitan, diversified smartly in TV (including a 20% stake in ESPN, now worth roughly $6 billion), and stayed in newspapers but with a close eye on profit. With four metro papers, like the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, and eight smaller ones, Hearst is in the vanguard of figuring out ways to exploit newspapers' local-reporting strengths, both in print and online.

Hearst has helped forge a partnership involving a consortium of newspaper companies and sometime-nemesis Yahoo. The idea is that together they can offer advertisers total coverage of various metropolitan areas, and feed readers back and forth. Question: Are these going to be best friends forever or a cobra and a mongoose?

Final word: Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We'll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution....

The idea is that we, along with others of similar bent, can in some modest way make up for some of the loss in investigative-reporting resources that results from the collapse of metro newspapers' business model.

I'm more interested in the longer-term development of the traditional daily paper: Will news be available exclusive online anytime soon? Will grabbing a paper, coffee, and a doughnut soon be a thing of the past, if it's not already (it's not for me, and I'm still a forty-something!).

It's certainly possible, although I'd rather stretch a crumply, half day-old newspaper over my knees than lug some widescreen laptop onto the bed or lounger while watching an Angels-Yankees game.

The New York Times Goes Neoconservative!

I'm skimming around online a bit here, and I've just learned that William Kristol has just been hired as a columnist by the New York Times!

The scoop is over at Memeorandum.

You got to love this! Kristol at NYT will drive the antiwar nuts, well, nuts!

I suspect most people are in the know, but just in case, Kristol's the publisher of the Weekly Standard, which has become one of the top-tier neocon journals of opinion in recent years (especially with the demise of the Public Interest).

Hard-left forces are already denouncing NYT's betrayal - an "abominaton" says David Sirota in a quote over at Crooks and Liars, and don't miss this comment thread over at the Huffington Post!

So what's the beef? Neoconservatives have become the pariahs of contemporary American politics. As Jamie Kerchik noted recently:

Today, no other political label gets thrown around as frequently, or with as much reckless abandon, as “neocon.” The most popular liberal blogs name and shame neocons, real or imagined, on a daily basis. The term is used in a fashion similar to the way “communist” was during the 1950s—an all-encompassing indictment—this time indicating an imperialistic and “warmongering,” even an “insane,” worldview. The anti-neocon fervor has reached truly McCarthyite proportions: just a few months ago, Steve Clemons of the left-wing New America Foundation argued in favor of “Purging the Neocons from the American Soul.”

The attacks come from both left and right. Liberals can't stand the necons because of their top policy-making leadership in the Bush administration, and especially their leading role in the push to war in Iraq. Some on the conservative right (I use that label loosely - very loosely) - like the whacked-out libertarian Ron Paul backers and the Paleoconservative Buchananites - find themselves equally enraged by the neoconservative "war party" in Washington, D.C.

You've heard he attacks, on Kristol and all the other members of the "neocon cabal": They were wrong about Iraq; there were no WMD; Iraqis didn't greet American troops as liberators; the war wasn't over in a few weeks: the Iraqi insurgent dead-enders missed their dead-end; the real (legitimate) war is in Afghanistan; Iran's destabilizing influence in Iraq is a hoax; the new front of global terror is Pakistan...and on and on and on.

These are the same folks who early this year declared the Iraq war lost, and who are now blaming the Bhutto assassination on the Bush administration (here and here). These are the same hardline forces who called General David Petraeus at traitor (when he should've been recognized as Man of the Year). All of this anti-neoconservatism continues amid the most dramatic - and underreported - strategic comeback in the history of modern warfare.

Frankly, for all my dislike of the editorial stance of the New York Times, the Kristol assignment is a journalistic masterstroke. The Times' reputation has collapsed in recent years, following the Jayson Blair scandal, the controversial leak of the Bush adminstration's clandestine - and successful - electronic surveillance program, and the steady decline in recent years of the broadsheet's reputation as the country's "unofficial newspaper of record."

Certainly, the Bush administration's success in thwarting the Democrats in 2007 (who badly overestimated their "mandate" coming out of the 2006 midterms), combined with the continued importance of foreign policy among American voters, suggests that the Times editors realized they needed to get hip to alternative - even mainstream - ideological perspectives.

The knives are still out for the neocons in many quarters, of course. Michael Desch - a political scientist at Texas A&M - has a new article out attacking Rudy Giuliani's neoconservative campaign advisors at the paleocon flagship, the American Conservative.

And for good reason: Neoconservatives still hold tremendous influence, and the positive concatenation of forces I've mentioned here bodes well for conservatives generally in 2008. As Michael Tomasky notes in the forthcoming New York Review of Books:

On foreign policy, despite the Iraq war, the neoconservatives still hold tremendous sway in GOP circles...With respect to the future [according to Jacob Heilbrunn, in his new book, They Knew They Were Right]...the neocons' main potential competitors, the foreign policy realists, have not prepared for long-term battle the way the neocons have.

Neoconservatism isn't perfect, obviously. But thank goodness Kristol's holding down the fort for one of the most comprehensive political ideologies in American politics today. I look forward to reading his essays!

Photo Credit for William Kristol: Fox News

The Political Character of Benazir Bhutto

I implored readers in an earlier post to "join me in reflecting on the awesome life of a freedom crusader, Benazir Bhutto, 54."

I thought I might get a little flak on "freedom crusader," a line fairly synonymous with "neoconservative," but I've had no takers so far.

Not everyone had glowing words for Bhutto, however, considering Ralph Peters' commentary today on Bhutto's political character. Peters calls 'em like he sees 'em, and his view of Bhutto is unblinkered by her frequent and lofty calls for Pakistani democracy:

FOR the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.

Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan's feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.

During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.

Peters is more generous in noting that Bhutto's death might be a real catalyst for progressive change in Pakistan. Other than that, I have serious disagreements with his analysis.

Bhutto certainly enjoyed her privilege and power (as the New York Times' obituary notes), but the former prime minister also genuinely fought for the improvement of Pakistani lives. As Husain Haqqani noted in today's Wall Street Journal:

In 1988, at the age of 35, Bhutto became the youngest prime minister in Pakistan's troubled history, and the first woman to lead a Muslim nation in the modern age. For her supporters, she stood for women's empowerment, human rights and mass education. Her detractors accused her of many things, from corruption to being too close to the U.S.

During her second tenure as prime minister, Pakistan became one of the 10 emerging capital markets of the world. The World Health Organization praised government efforts in the field of health. Rampant narcotics problems were tackled and several drug barons arrested. Bhutto increased government spending on education and 46,000 new schools were built.

Thousands of teachers were recruited with the understanding that a secular education, covering multiple study areas (particularly technical and scientific education), would improve the lives of Pakistanis and create job opportunities critical to self-empowerment. But Pakistan's political turbulence, and her constant battle with the country's security establishment, never allowed her to take credit for these achievements.

For years, her image was tarnished by critics who alleged that she did not deliver on her promise. During the early days after Mr. Musharraf's decision to support the U.S.-led war against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, conventional wisdom in Washington wrote her off. But Pakistan's constant drift into extremism, and Mr. Musharraf's inability to win Pakistani hearts and minds, changed that.

In fact, as Michael Goldfarb notes, Peters' analysis is an outlier. For example, Christopher Hitchens recalls Bhutto as extraordinarily courageous:

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.

And while I'm no fan of Arianna Huffington, I have to admire the kinds words she wrote in honor of Bhutto:

She was fearlessness epitomized. Many will debate her political successes and failures, her personal probity in public office, the charges of corruption against her and of course the national security implications of her death, but for now I'm just filled with a profound sadness about the end of a woman that was always brimming with life.

I have to agree with Goldfarb on this one:

I'm struck by how many Americans have offered these kind of personal anecdotes as a testament to Bhutto's character. She had written a diary at Slate, a blog at the Huffington Post, and apparently kept a correspondence with Mark Siegel--and this is the tip of the iceberg I'm sure. Christopher Hitchens offers a more even account, but he's no less troubled by her death (he, too, had personal history with Bhutto). Of course, not everyone is sad to see her go, but for all her faults, she was right on what mattered most--she was an ally in the war against Islamic extremism.

Also, be sure to check this new video, with footage of the last seconds of Bhutto's life:

As I read more about Bhutto, I'm convinced that my words yesterday were on target. I wrote:

Sometimes there's an individual connection to world leaders and events that requires some detachment and perspective. I do know that Bhutto's death will bring change to South Asia, and not for the better. We can be sure that Bhutto killers - radical Islamists acting independently, or with the green light from Pakistan's security service, the ISI - will view the attack as a successful engagement in the fight to overturn American influence in the region, to destabilize the Pakistani regime, and to pave the way for religious fundamentalists to come to power.

The Wall Street Journal lays out the specifics of such concerns in more detail:

For decades, the U.S. has watched warily as Pakistan has tangled with India, developed nuclear weapons and fostered alliances with militant Islamist fighters.

Now, the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is stoking fears both of new unrest in her country and of ripple effects in the region as extremist groups are emboldened by the demise of a secular, modern Muslim politician.

Pakistan has been on the front lines of the Bush administration's war on terror since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Washington insisted that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf sever ties to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, which harbored Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders. Pakistan also faced pressure to arrest and imprison militant Islamic activists and fight insurgents spilling over from Afghanistan.

But Pakistan has been a leaky bulwark against radicalism, creating constant friction with the U.S. as the war on terror drifts into its seventh year. Western regions of Pakistan, often controlled by local tribes, are viewed as sanctuaries for newly minted militant groups as well as vestiges of the Taliban and al Qaeda -- and perhaps Mr. bin Laden himself. Investigators deconstructing recent al Qaeda plots in Europe and the Middle East often find their roots stretching back to Pakistan.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts fear Ms. Bhutto's assassination could be part of a broader al Qaeda and Taliban offensive against Pakistan's secular leadership, focused on spreading militant influence inside the country. Success in this endeavor would pose a direct threat to the U.S. and the broader Western world.

"The global reverberations of yesterday's attacks underscore the interdependency between the United States and Pakistan," said Henry A. Crumpton, a former State Department counterterrorism chief and top Central Intelligence Agency official who led U.S. intelligence operations in Afghanistan in 2002. "The U.S. interests there are so important, whether it's the issue of nuclear weapons, the issue of counterterrorism or the issue of Pakistan-India relations."

Pakistan is the sole Islamic nation possessing a nuclear arsenal. The Bush administration has spent nearly $11 billion on aid and other programs in Pakistan since 9/11. The money has supported the nation's fight against al Qaeda. It has also been used to help safeguard Islamabad's atomic weapons.

Some analysts described fears of the "demonstration effect" of Ms. Bhutto's killing on Islamist militants seeking power through the gun in Central and South Asia, as well as other Muslim nations. The threat of violence could diminish the ranks of those willing to cooperate with the U.S.

"The whole currency of political assassination could rise" as a result of Ms. Bhutto's death, said Robert Grenier, who served as the CIA's Islamabad station chief from 1999 to 2002. "The threat could have the intended intimidating impact and make it harder for any other figures to stand up" against extremism in Pakistan or elsewhere.

See more commentary and analysis on Pakistan's crisis at Memeorandum.

John McCain: The Choice is Clear

John McCain's got a new campaign advertisement running in New Hampshire, touting his windfall newspapers endorsements in the Granite State:

Don't miss McCain's Christmas spot as well:

Also, check out my morning post on the increasing attention to McCain's foreign policy credentials following the Bhutto assassination.

Earmarking Ron Paul

Ron Paul really is a source of endless fascination - a true political oddity, his popular following lends some credence to the notion of the paranoid style of American politics.

I've posted a lot on Paul, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

For awhile there, as soon as I put up a new Paul entry, the online Paulbots would pop out of the woodwork with a relentless frenzy of attacks. In the comment thread to one of these exchanges, I noted:

I'd bet if I researched his record there'd be some big boondoggle project squeezed in somewhere to put the lie to all his "limited government" propaganda.

This line prompted some salivation from the guy at Liberty's Legacy, an unreconstructed Paulbot, who hammered back:

"I'd bet if I researched his record"

What an original idea. Maybe you should have done that before popping off?

I'm reminded of this exchange in the wake of Paul's appearance last Sunday on Meet the Press. Paul was all over the place, trying to deflect Tim Russert's questions. Check the transcript, especially noting how many times Paul backed away from the number of whack-out statements he's made over the years. How about this one, on doing away with public education in the United States:

MR. RUSSERT: It was--when you ran for president in 1988, you called for the abolition of public schools.

REP. PAUL: I, I bet that's a misquote. I, I do not recall that. I'd like to know where that came from, because I went...

Yeah, I'd bet!

But you got to love Paul's hypocrisy on federal pork barrel spending - the old earmark boondoggle! Paul's against all the pork, right? Nope, he's voted for earmarks, which he says is just "returning money to his constituents."

Check out this MSNBC story for some background:

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, defended his efforts in Congress to bring home money to his Texas district, despite his long-held aversion to big government and congressional votes to reign in federal spending.

"I've never voted for an earmark in my life," the Texas congressman said under questioning on NBC's "Meet the Press" about reports that he has requested hundreds of millions of dollars for special projects in his home district.

"I put them in because I represent people who are asking for some of their money back," said Paul, who likened it to taking a tax credit. "I'm against the tax system, but I take all my tax credits. I want to get their money back for the people."

The 10-term congressman and longshot candidate for the Republican presidential nomination added that although he has requested special projects known as earmarks, he ultimately ends up voting against them in the House. Paul is known in Congress as "Dr. No" for his votes against some types of government spending, including a medal for Pope John Paul II and civil rights leader Rosa Parks because of the cost to taxpayers.

For his home state, however, Paul has sought money for water projects, a nursing program, to expand a hospital cancer center and to promote Texas shrimp.

I guess it's not really earmarking if you're just returning your local taxpayer's money!

But hey, I better watch my back before some of Paul defenders tar me as part of the vast anti-Paulista conspiracy seeking Paul's political annihilation!

I recommend just watching Paul trash himself in the interview:

That's just part one, but check Google for more!

John McCain, Pakistan, and Election '08

As readers here know well, I've backed John McCain's presidential campaign all year, especially noting McCain's top credentials on foreign policy (see some of my earlier posts supporting McCain, here, here, here, here , here, and here).

Now, not unpredictably, McCain's stature is rising amid the turmoil in South Asia.

Red State, for example, just hopped on the McCain bandwagon:

The world has been in a state of madness for several years. But, with this morning's news, I have little doubt it will spiral further out of control.

Already whispers have begun that if Fred Thompson can't pull off Iowa, conservatives will need to rally around a candidate and that candidate is most likely John McCain.

Is John McCain the man to lead America? The Union Leader said yes. And they just might be right.

Robert Novak, in a column yesterday, confirmed the new conventional wisdom that McCain's rock-like foreign policy bona fides make him the main man against Hillary Clinton in the general election:

He never has been popular inside the party, even when it seemed he might be its anointed candidate....

But when Republicans get together privately, they tend to agree that McCain is the Republican most likely to defeat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Even while some consider the old naval aviator as cranky and hot-tempered, he has not exhibited those negative characteristics in debates. Rather, he exudes a heroic aura that goes beyond managing New York City or the Utah Olympics. That quality is shown in his Christmas card television ad depicting a North Vietnamese prison guard making a cross in the dirt.

The Politico notes further how the crisis in Pakistan helps McCain:

John McCain, older than dirt and with more scars than Frankenstein as he likes to say, suddenly wasn’t looking so bad.

Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in Pakistan and the political conversation in America had changed.

Which means at least for a little while Republicans here were not thinking about which presidential candidate was tougher on immigration or which had the best Christian conservative credentials.

Some were thinking about who might be the best leader in an international crisis and John McCain says he can fill that bill.

“My theme has been throughout this campaign that I am the one with the experience, the knowledge and the judgment,” McCain told reporters after a speech to an overflow crowd at an Elks Lodge here [in Iowa]. “So, perhaps it (i.e. the turmoil caused by the assassination) may serve to enhance those credentials.”

It doesn’t matter to McCain that 99 percent of Americans probably could not find Pakistan on a map. What matters is that most Americans can understand what it would mean if the wrong people in Pakistan were suddenly in charge of that country’s nuclear weapons.

I don't know if McCain will see much improvement in the Iowa caucuses coming out of the current international crisis. New Hampshire's a toss-up at this point, however, so McCain's intense campaign in the Granite State may get a lift from international events.

After Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest amid a wave of unrest following the assassination (the New York Times has the story).

What's next, now, for Pakistan and the world? USA Today provides some background analysis on the fallout to U.S. strategy from Bhutto's murder:

For the United States, Harvard-educated Benazir Bhutto was a combination of white knight and Trojan horse — the key piece in a belated-but-promising attempt to bring stability to the world's most dangerous nation.

The hope was that the popular former prime minister could recapture the job after parliamentary elections next month, then strengthen democratic institutions, helping to keep Pakistan's nuclear weapons away from its large radicalized Islamic population.

That strategy was left in ruins Thursday by Bhutto's tragic assassination.

Not only did the killing remove Bhutto from the picture without any obvious successor, it further weakened strongman President Pervez Musharraf, who for all his dictatorial ways is a foe of the extremists. Pakistan is now at risk of escalating street violence and stepped-up suicide bombings that would invite a new, harsh crackdown by Musharraf. Such a spiral would encourage more political instability. It would also complicate efforts to find Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Pakistan, and to uproot al-Qaeda training camps there.

While the killing underscored the limits of U.S. influence, it doesn't mean giving up on the only strategy that can prevent the cauldron that is Pakistan from exploding. In the short term, the United States has no choice other than to support Musharraf. For the longer term, it must find new champions of democracy.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's assessment:

We will learn more in coming days about the circumstances of Bhutto's death, apparently a combined shooting and suicide bombing at a political rally in Rawalpindi in which more than 20 others were also murdered. But there's little question the attack, which had every hallmark of an al Qaeda or Taliban operation, is an event with ramifications for the broader war on terror. With the jihadists losing in Iraq and having a hard time hitting the West, their strategy seems to be to make vulnerable Pakistan their principal target, and its nuclear arsenal their principal prize.

In this effort, murdering Bhutto was an essential step. Hers is the highest profile scalp the jihadists can claim since their assassination of Egypt's Anwar Sadat in 1981. She also uniquely combined broad public support with an anti-Islamist, pro-Western outlook and all the symbolism that came with being the most prominent female leader in the Muslim world. Her death throws into disarray the complex and fragile efforts to re-establish a functional, legitimate government following next month's parliamentary elections, which seemed set to hand her a third term as prime minister.

This is exactly the kind of uncertainty in which jihadists would thrive. No doubt, too, there are some in the Pakistani military who will want to use Bhutto's killing as an excuse to cancel the elections and reconsolidate their own diminished grip on power. In the immediate wake of the assassination, members of Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party have accused President Pervez Musharraf of being complicit in it. But whatever Mr. Musharraf's personal views of Bhutto--with whom he had an on-again, off-again political relationship--his own position has only been weakened by her death. It would be weakened beyond repair if he sought to capitalize on it by preventing the democratic process from taking its course.

Musharraf would be weakened by the very forces he surreptitiously promoted in his balancing game between radical Islam and the West. So far, though, it appears he's committed to fighting the terrorists and upholding Pakistan's rule of law.

I'll likely have more comment on Pakistan later. I will note now that the domestic political debate is already in full steam, and the hard-left forces are out to further demonize the Bush administration's war policy. FireDogLake's going so far as to blame the administration for Bhutto's decision to return to Pakistan, and hence Bush shares complicity in her murder.

Of course, there's no credibility to these anti-administration attacks - they're simply more nihilist screeds, designed to help bring to power in the U.S. forces aligned with those who we are fighting internationally.

Bhutto planned on a return to Pakistan, believing it was her destiny to support democratization of her people. The real culprits are the forces of terror who want to overthrow the Pakistani regime and install a fundamentalist dictatorship in Pakistan, which would lead to even more death and destruction.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007

I've been busy today grading papers and exchanging Christmas gifts. I have, of course, been watching the news on the Bhutto assassination.

I'm still taking in all the information - and thus holding off on more detailed political analysis until the morning.

Note, though, that I'm personally mourning Bhutto's death. I saw her speak in 1992, which was shortly before her return to power as Pakistan's Prime Minister, from 1993 to 1996.

Sometimes there's an individual connection to world leaders and events that requires some detachment and perspective. I do know that Bhutto's death will bring change to South Asia, and not for the better. We can be sure that Bhutto killers - radical Islamists acting independently, or with the green light from Pakistan's security service, the ISI - will view the attack as a successful engagement in the fight to overturn American influence in the region, to destabilize the Pakistani regime, and to pave the way for religious fundamentalists to come to power.

Who knows what will happen at this point? There's plenty of analysis at Memeorandum. I'll be reading and thinking about the crisis tonight, and will update in the morning with additional entries.

For now, please join me in reflecting on the awesome life of a freedom crusader, Benazir Bhutto, 54. Here's the New York Times obituary:

Charismatic, striking and a canny political operator, Benazir Bhutto, 54, was reared amid the privileges of Pakistan’s aristocracy and the ordeals of its turbulent politics. Smart, ambitious and resilient, she endured her father’s execution and her own imprisonment at the hands of a military dictator to become the country’s — and the Muslim world’s — first female leader.

A deeply polarizing figure, Ms. Bhutto, the “daughter of Pakistan,” was twice elected prime minister and twice expelled from office in a swirl of corruption charges that propelled her into self-imposed exile in London for much of the past decade. She returned home this fall, billing herself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism and a tribune of democracy.

She was killed on Thursday in a combined shooting and bombing attack at a rally in Rawalpindi, one of a series of open events she attended in spite of a failed assassination attempt against her the day she returned to Pakistan in October.

A woman of grand aspirations with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most charismatic and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited the mantle of the populist Peoples Party that he founded, and which she came to personify.

Despite numerous accusations of corruption and an evident predilection for luxury, Ms. Bhutto, the pale-skinned scion of a wealthy landowning family, successfully cast herself as a savior of Pakistan’s millions of poor and disenfranchised. She inspired devotion among her followers, even in exile, and the image of her floating through a frenzied crowd in her gauzy white head scarf became iconic.

In October, she staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.

But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounding more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm and shouted at later rallies, “Bhutto is alive!”

Despite her courageous, or rash, defiance of danger, her political plans were sidetracked from the moment she set foot in Pakistan: She had been negotiating for months with Mr. Musharraf over a power-sharing arrangement, only to see the general declare emergency rule instead.

The political dance she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to President Musharraf, the next seeming to accommodate him — stirred hope and distrust among Pakistanis. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brought the backing of the governments in Washington and London, where she impressed with her political lineage and considerable charm and was viewed as a palatable alternative to the increasingly unpopular Mr. Musharraf.

But her record in power left ample room for skepticism. During her two stints in that job — first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 — she developed a reputation for acting imperiously and impulsively. She faced deep questions about her personal probity in office, which led to corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was jailed for eight years in Pakistan on corruption charges before his release on bail in 2004.

During her years in office, as during those of her rival, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan ran up enormous and unserviceable foreign debts and billions of dollars in foreign aid went unaccounted for. Ms. Bhutto, though progressive in her approach to Islam, was not above bending to the will of religious conservatives for when politically expedient.

Ms. Bhutto grew up in the most rarefied atmosphere the poor, turbulent country had to offer. One longtime friend and adviser, Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador to Croatia, recalled meeting Ms. Bhutto 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.

The two met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembered Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim, cake-baking 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent.

Ms. Bhutto often spoke of how her father encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc, and as a young woman, she observed his political maneuvering up close.

After her father’s death — he was hanged by another general who seized power, Zia ul-Haq — Ms. Bhutto stepped into the spotlight as his successor. She called herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.

Until her death, Ms. Bhutto ruled the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.

Members of her party saluted her return to Pakistan, saying she was the best choice against President Musharraf. Chief among her attributes, they said, was her sheer determination.

But her egotism and her proclivity for back-room deals provoked distrust among detractors and some supporters.

“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto and everything else is secondary,” said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate lawyer in Lahore who knew Ms. Bhutto.

Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Mr. Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman. To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she would ask, between such a marriage and computer dating?

Mr. Zardari, 51, is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York. He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that haunted Ms. Bhutto, and him, in the courts.

There were accusations that the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure Ms. Bhutto vigorously contested.

Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power was to restore the reputation of her husband, especially after his prison term, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.

“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’” Mr. Riar said.

Photo: Bhutto, waving to supporters, moments before here death, from the New York Times.

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. Here's the New York Times' report:

The Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated near the capital, Islamabad, on Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto, who was appearing at a political campaign rally, was fired upon at close range by a gunman, and then struck by shrapnel from a blast that the government said was caused by a suicide bomber.

Ms. Bhutto, who had twice been the country’s prime minister and was a leading contender to be the next prime minister after elections in January, was declared dead by doctors at a hospital in Rawalpindi at 6:16 p.m. local time. At least a dozen more people were killed in the attack, but some reports said there were at least 20 dead.

The exact circumstances surrounding the assassination were still unclear. Senior officials in Ms. Bhutto’s party said she had finished addressing the rally and was sitting in a car waving at the crowd when she was hit in the head by a sniper in a nearby building. They said the car moved on for another 50 yards before a suicide attacker blew himself up.

Other witnesses described a single assassin opening fire on Ms. Bhutto and her entourage, hitting her at least once in the neck and once in the chest, before blowing himself up. Dr. Abbas Hayat, professor of pathology at Rawalpindi General Hospital where Ms. Bhutto was taken, said doctors tried to revive her for 35 minutes, but that she had shrapnel wounds and head injuries and was in heart failure. He said he could not confirm whether she had bullet injuries.

A close aide to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf blamed Islamic militants for the assassination, and said it was carried out by a suicide bomber.

Mr. Musharraf declared a three-day mourning period, and condemnation of the assassination flowed in from around the world. President Bush said “The United States strongly condemns this cowardly attack by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy.” Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, called it “an assault on stability.” Ms. Bhutto’s death is the latest blow to Pakistan’s treacherous political situation, and leaves her party leaderless in the short term and unable to effectively compete in hotly contested parliamentary elections that are two weeks away, according to Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani political and military analyst.

The assassination also adds to the enormous pressure on the Bush administration over Pakistan, which has sunk billions in aid into the country without accomplishing its main goals of finding the Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden or ending the activities of Islamic militants and the Taliban in border areas with Afghanistan.

Hundreds of supporters had gathered at Ms. Bhutto’s campaign rally, which was being held at Liaqut Bagh, a park that is a common venue for rallies and speeches, in Rawalpindi, the garrison city near Islamabad.

Amid the confusion after the explosion, the site was littered with pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the asphalt, and shards of glass were strewn about the ground. Pakistani television cameras captured images of ambulances pushing through crowds of dazed and injured people at the scene of the assassination.

Farah Ispahani, a party official from Ms. Bhutto’s party, said: “It is too soon to confirm the number of dead from the party’s side. Private television channels are reporting twenty dead.” Television channels were also quoting police sources as saying that at least 14 people were dead.

At the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was taken, a large number of police began to cordon off the area as angry party workers smashed windows. Many protesters shouted “Musharraf Dog.” One man was crying hysterically, saying his sister had been killed. Dozens of people in the crowed beat their chests and chanted slogans against Mr. Musharraf.

Nahid Khan, a close aide to Ms. Bhutto, was sobbing in a room next to the operating theater, and the corridors of the hospital swarmed with mourners.

Ms. Bhutto had been warned by the government before her return to Pakistan that she faced threats to her security. In October, Ms. Bhutto survived another deadly suicide attack in the southern city of Karachi on the day she returned from years of self-imposed exile abroad to contest the parliamentary elections. Ms. Bhutto blamed extremist Islamic groups who she said wanted to take over the country for that attack, which narrowly missed her but killed 134 people. But she also complained that the government had taken insufficient steps to safeguard her parade.

The government has maintained that she ignored their warnings against such public gatherings and that holding them placed herself and her followers in unnecessary danger.

The assassination comes just days after Mr. Musharraf lifted a state of emergency in the country, which he had used to suspend the Constitution and arrest thousands of political opponents, and which he said he had imposed in part because of terrorist threats by extremists in Pakistan.

With frustration in Washington growing over Mr. Musharraf’s shortcomings, and his delays in returning the country to civilian rule, Ms. Bhutto had become an appealing solution for the country. She was openly critical of Mr. Musharraf’s ineffectiveness at dealing with Islamic militants and welcomed American involvement, unlike another Musharraf rival and former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Bush administration officials began working behind the scenes over the summer to help Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf create a power-sharing deal to orchestrate a transition to democracy that would leave Mr. Musharraf in the presidency, while not making a mockery of President Bush’s attempts to push democracy in the Muslim world.

Ms. Bhutto’s assassination immediately raised questions about whether the parliamentary elections scheduled for January will now go ahead or be postponed. Mr. Musharraf was carrying out an emergency meeting with top government officials Thursday following Ms. Bhutto’s death, the aide to Mr. Musharraf said. He said no decision had been made on whether to delay the national elections.

The aide dismissed complaints from members of Ms. Bhutto’s party that the government failed to provide adequate security for Ms. Bhutto.

I will provide commentary and analysis on the assassination in upcoming posts.

Photo: New York Times

Black Candidates and the Presidency

It's a question I've been asking my students all year: Can a black candidate win the White House in 2008?

The phenomenal rise of Barack Obama in presidential politics is the obvious catalyst for such thinking. I've been paying close attention to Obama since his mercurial speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I'm attracted to his calls for greater individual responsibility in the black community, and I find his own personal charisma to be astonishing.

Can Obama win the presidency next year? He's moving closer to that goal than any African-American in history. Today's Washington Post examines what the authors call "The Steepest Climb," the long struggle for black candidates seeking the presidency:

Whether enough voters can envision Barack Obama in the Oval Office will be revealed shortly. But some black politicians believe the time is right, as the country has witnessed the gradual rise of African Americans in leadership roles -- from coaching major sports franchises to presiding over corporate boardrooms. Breakthroughs in the popular culture, where many Americans form their impressions of each other, have been among the hardest to achieve.

Norman Jewison, who directed the 1967 hit movie "In the Heat of the Night," recalled that some newspapers refused to take ads for the film, which featured Sidney Poitier as a sharp-minded detective from Philadelphia investigating a murder in a Southern town. The movie went on to earn five Oscars, including one for Best Picture. "I think [the film] woke up a lot of people in the Deep South," Jewison says. "I don't think they'd ever seen a black character on the screen as smart and talented as Sidney."

More than three decades later, actor Dennis Haysbert was cast as David Palmer, a U.S. senator who is elected the nation's first black president in the television drama "24." When Haysbert encounters strangers who recognize him, it is often this role that they want to discuss. "I've lost track of how many times people have asked me to run for president," Haysbert says, adding that he believes the role had "a major impact" on how black politicians are perceived, "simply from the feedback I get from people from all walks of life."

And yet there are statistics that are not so heartening. Less than 4 percent of the nation's elected officials are black, and 90 percent of them represent predominantly black or predominantly black-and-Hispanic constituencies. Thus, not many black politicians have won elections when the majority of voters were white. Only three black U.S. senators and two black governors have been elected since Reconstruction.

As a consequence, only a handful of blacks have even dared to run for president, and virtually all them are civic activists such as comedian Dick Gregory, whose 1968 write-in campaign garnered just over 47,000 votes, perennial third-party candidate Lenora Fulani, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose 2004 Democratic campaign fizzled. The Rev. Jesse Jackson? We'll get to him in a minute.

"We've always been conflicted about this issue of running, because the heavy hanging cloud has been that a black can't win," says University of Maryland political scientist Ron Walters, who was Jackson's top issues adviser during his 1984 campaign.

Read the whole thing.

What's interesting about Obama's campaign is that we've yet to see the kind of subterranean racial politics that surrounds black candidates at some point in every election year, especially when victory seems close at hand. In 2006 we saw that kind of controversy surrounding Harold Ford, who ran for the Senate from Tennessee:

The Tennessee Senate race, one of the most competitive and potentially decisive battles of the midterm election, became even more unpredictable this week after a furor over a Republican television commercial that stood out even in a year of negative advertising.

The commercial, financed by the Republican National Committee, was aimed at Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., the black Democrat from Memphis whose campaign for the Senate this year has kept the Republicans on the defensive in a state where they never expected to have trouble holding the seat.

The spot, which was first broadcast last week and was disappearing from the air on Wednesday, featured a series of people in mock man-on-the street interviews talking sarcastically about Mr. Ford and his stands on issues including the estate tax and national security.

The controversy erupted over one of the people featured: an attractive white woman, bare-shouldered, who declares that she met Mr. Ford at a “Playboy party,” and closes the commercial by looking into the camera and saying, with a wink, “Harold, call me.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Ford, who is single, said he was one of 3,000 people who attended a Playboy party at the Super Bowl last year in Jacksonville, Fla.

Critics asserted that the advertisement was a clear effort to play to racial stereotypes and fears, essentially, playing the race card in an election where Mr. Ford is trying to break a century of history and become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction.

Will we see a new round of racial politics in 2008? So far the Democratic primary race has avoided such politics, but often GOP-aligned groups mount racially-tinged advertisements in the general election (remember Willie Horton?)

Have voters tired of such racial politics? Keith Reeves, a political scientist at Swarthmore College, has written on black candidates in Voting Hopes Or Fears?: White Voters, Black Candidates & Racial Politics.

Reeves wrote a brief essay folllowing the 2006 election, which recaps his thesis and looks to the future of black electoral politics:

Ten years ago, I published Voting Hopes or Fears? a path-breaking, albeit controversial, book that examines the thorny subject of how black candidates competing in majority-white settings fare, especially against the backdrop of the kind of racially charged campaigns we've seen this election cycle. In it, I argued that decades after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, whites, by and large, remain resistant to the election of blacks to public office. That widespread resistance can be explained, in large part, by election campaign appeals to whites' racial fears and sentiments. Based on fresh empirical evidence examining white voters' attitudes towards black candidates and the racial framing of campaign news coverage, I documented that racial discrimination against black candidates is contemporary, specific, and identifiable....

A significantly changed electoral landscape in 2006 produced something of a political avalanche of opposition - against just about all things Republican (including three high-profile black candidates who ran under the GOP-banner: football-great Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania and Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio, running for governor in their respective states; and Michael Steele who ran a well-orchestrated campaign for a Senate seat in Maryland).

"Have we witnessed the long-awaited death of the Willie Hortonesque political commercial?"

Perhaps, "yes."

For one, changing demographics in both states - and in the country, at large - have a lot to do with voters' disgust of "Swift-Boating" of the racial kind. Meanwhile, moderate, Independent voters appear especially turned off by the racial undercurrents in political advertising.

And then there is the political pressure being brought to bear in the financial marketplace. Reportedly, black leaders and union groups pressured Wal-Mart to cut ties with one of its consultants whose brainchild was the incendiary anti-Ford ad.

But I strongly suspect that there is one other latent factor at work: the looming presence of Illinois senator Barack Obama, a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

In Harold Ford, Jr. and Deval Patrick, white voters saw a bit of Senator Obama in each man: Ivy-League, moderate, articulate, non-threatening, charismatic black men who excite cross-racial appeal while moving past the racial divisions of the civil rights generation.

If there is a broader lesson to be gleaned from Patrick's overwhelming victory and Ford's narrow defeat, it is that, finally, white voters no longer have the appetite for the nasty racial politics historically served up by political campaign operatives.

And to that I say: "Run, Barack! Run!"

I respect Reeves' research, and I hope he's correct that voters will reject subterranean racial politics in 2008.

Barack Obama's rise is extremely promising. Indeed, the Obama campaign's one of the most important developments in American politics since Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign of 1988. Of course, Obama's going to have to get back to the language of personal responsibility if he hopes to have more cross-racial, cross-party appeal. But if anyone can do it, he's the one.