Month: January 2009

So I’m hanging at the real must-hang shindig of the Inaug – Bodenner and Appel’s Blue Ball House Party – and turn around and there’s Barack. Less tired than in person, and in life-size cardboard, grinning right at me. And just as I was about to pull a Favreau and give some good Wonkette-bait, I realized what everyone else realized. The hands …

His final speech from the mountain-top, the night before he was murdered:

Just getting up. Sometimes a blogger just has to party. If not now, when?

Jim Fisher gages poet Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration challenge:

There’s no starker demonstration of our culture’s separation of poetry and state than the fact that our nation’s poet laureate, a consultant post to the Library of Congress filled on an annual basis since 1937, is not expected to produce verse for government events. It’s easy to see why: What poet today would allow his or her voice to be yoked to the policy of a presidential administration, even one as popular as Obama’s? At what point would the poetry become propaganda?

Hendrik Hertzberg:

It has been widely said that never has so much been expected of an incoming President, but that’s only half right. The public clearly expects quick action, but the outlook for the near future is so grim that few expect quick results. Obama himself has been stressing the urgency of the first and the need for patience with regard to the second.

Speaking on the economy last Thursday at George Mason University, he called for “dramatic action as soon as possible” to deal with “a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime, a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks.” Resolving that crisis, he added, “will take time—perhaps many years.” What the public does anticipate is not miracles but competence, and its confidence in Obama’s abilities has grown. In the most recent survey—a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released on December 24th—eighty-two per cent of those questioned said they approved of Obama’s performance during the transition. Of course, the esteem in which Presidents-elect are held always increases as the rancor of the campaign begins to fade, and feelings of good will are always plentiful at Christmastime. Still, Obama’s ratings are unusually high—fifteen points higher than either of his two predecessors’ at the corresponding moment in their transitions, and arguably higher than anyone’s since the modern era of polling began. “Obama walks in with nearly twice the support on the economy that President-elect Clinton had in January, 1993, and he beats Ronald Reagan as well,” Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director, said.

Radley Balko despises the war on drugs:

If you look at a graph of the U.S. murder rate going back to about 1915, you’ll notice a few interesting patterns. There’s a spike at around 1919, just at the onset of alcohol prohibition. The graph then takes a dramatic dip in 1933, just after the repeal of prohibition. There’s then another spike in the late 1960s, just as Richard Nixon took office and fired the first shots of his war on drugs. That spike falls in the 1970s as President Carter took a less militant approach to drug prohibition, but then with Reagan’s reinvigorated war in the 1980s, it begins another upward ascent.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Prohibitions create black markets, and black markets spawn crime. Drug prohibition, then, spawns violent crime. There’s a reason we don’t often hear about a Michelob deal gone bad. Because alcohol is legal, there are no turf wars, no sour deals, no smuggling operations to defend.

My inaugural piece for the Sunday Times is now online. It’s my best shot at understanding the man again as what once seemed unimaginable takes place before our eyes. Money quote:

He doesn’t charm like Clinton did and Bush tried to. Unlike both men, but especially Clinton, he appears to have no need to be loved by everyone in the room. He often finds it hard to disguise how tired he feels. He is capable of evoking enormous inspiration, but he has yet to be able to hide it when he is bored. There is a wryness to his conversation and a dryness to his humor, both of which are sustained by an intellect of power. The revered liberal jurist Larry Tribe has said that in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School, he has never had a cleverer student than Obama. I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Intellectually, Obama is in Bill Clinton’s league. But what he has over Clinton is emotional intelligence to buttress his grasp of policy.

What he gets, what he seems to intuit, is how to make others feel as if they are being heard. This is simple enough in theory but hard to pull off consistently in practice. His model is to figure out what another person needs and, if it helps Obama to get what he wants, to provide it.

He sensed that Hillary Clinton needed independent respect in defeat. He couldn’t give her the vice-presidency, which she desperately wanted, because it would have given her a dangerous rival power base if they succeeded. So he offered her the next best thing, and she, unlike her husband, was smart enough to say yes.

He realised that Rick Warren was an egomaniac and wanted some kind of platform, so he gave him a largely symbolic role at the inauguration and allowed Warren to preen. He knew that what Washington pundits really craved was not the truth, but a sense of their own importance. So he let them throw him a dinner party.

He sensed that McCain was in deep emotional withdrawal after his horrifying and crude descent into raw partisanship last autumn. And so he celebrated the old, bipartisan McCain and asked for his support in the Senate.

This is not typical for politicians in any climate and era. In the post-Clinton, post-Bush divide of the US, it’s a shock of sorts, and one most Washingtonians have yet to absorb. More shocks, I suspect, are to come, as people begin to realise that the new politics Obama promised is actually more than just a marketing device for a campaign.

Yes he can. The question in my mind right now is: can we?

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I have to disagree with that Gary Lutz Poseur Alert.

"The Poseur Alert is awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity."

This selection meets none of those criteria… well maybe a little pretentious, but expounding on the mutability of words by context is by definition a bit of that. Still:  I didn’t think it was bad writing.  My mind followed the paragraph through without gasping for breath or stumbling.  It was coherent.  It wasn’t bad writing designed to look like profundity, because (at least I think) it was actually sound writing (with sound reasoning) that was indeed profound. And, just to say:  I’ve no idea who Gary Lutz is.

Thomas Hegghammer reviews L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam:

The jihadists begin to appear particularly down-to-earth when set alongside another class of Islamic extremists that have been all but ignored in the West: Islamic apocalypticists. These are people who believe an end-of-the-world battle between the forces of good and evil is forthcoming. Belief in the imminence of the end of time has been on the rise in the Muslim world since the late 1970s, and in a fascinating new book, Jean-Pierre Filiu investigates the origins of Islamic apocalyptic thought and its disturbing modern manifestations. Filiu examines both the Shiite and Sunni traditions from the seventh to the 21st century, and shows that the past two decades have seen a spectacular rise in the scope and popularity of apocalyptic literature.

Anita Bartholomew looks at the War on Drugs price tag – and what we could better spend it on in the current economic crisis:

As long as marijuana is illegal, we’ll still be directing billions to enforcement, prosecution and incarceration. And we still won’t realize the revenues that regulation and taxation can bring.

We could use those lost billions right now. Estimates of the combined savings from legalizing marijuana, and revenues from taxing it like alcohol or tobacco, range from $13.94 to $41.8 billion per year. That’s enough to pay for all or most of President-elect Obama’s proposed ten-year, $150 billion alternative energy investment. Or it could contribute roughly one-fifth to one-half of the $75 billion per year estimated cost of Obama’s proposal to extend health insurance to all.