February 2008 Archives

O.C.S., he says, will set in when people realize that Obama's PAC is giving $698,000 to superdelegates, when they realize he is considering backing off his promise to abide by the public finance campaign-spending rules in the general election and when he fails to stand up to the lobbyists and the special interests in the Democratic party.

As I write, it doesn't look like Wisconsin got the O.C.S. diagnosis in time.  No, they seem to have chosen, and chosen wisely.

My support for Obama has always been because he can use his power with words to mobilize the American people to get substantive change accomplished. I am happy that he is not afraid to play serious politics, Old School style.  He is not naive enough to believe you can get elected on a lot of talk of hope. He knows he needs to win over (which means buy off via legal contributions) all those with loyalties to the Clinton machine.

So, if I were advising him, I would tell him forget the promise he made about campaign contributions.  That was before the people of the US told him that they wanted to finance his campaign themselves via internet contributions to the tune of $36 million in January alone.  This is different from taking huge money from few people. So, I would tell him to say that he has decided to forego public financing because the promise he made previously was intended to ensure that big money special interest groups were out of the mix.  Obama's money is not coming from special interests, but from hundreds of thousands of people giving a little at a time.  This accomplishes the same goal and leaves him free to out spend McCain by a lot.  

What I like about Obama is that he plays by new rules but is ready to respond with tenacity to old ways when needed. Meanwhile, Clinton's tired negative strategy is falling on deaf ears.  McCain seems to be trying some of the same tricks--he says Obama is peddling empty promises, that he and his wife are unpatriotic, etc.--they have no idea what they are dealing with here.

Krugman and Brooks think Obama can't play hardball. Watch him.

This is hope with a hard edge. 

One of Hillary Clinton's main foreign policy advisors is Lee Feinstein, the Clinton Campaign's National Security Director.  He co-wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in 2004 with Anne-Marie Slaughter that was critical of the Bush administration's strategy of unilateral preemption even as it argued for a "collective duty to protect" the lives and liberty of citizens of "nations run by rulers without  internal checks on their power...."  It sounds as if the extent of their critique of the Bush Administration is the unilateral nature of their approach.  The "collective duty to protect" seems to be a re-affirmation of the strategy of preemption but "exercised collectively, through a global or regional organization."  Indeed, they suggest "the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough."

Obama's foreign policy team includes Joseph Cirincione, Lawrence Korb and the human rights scholar Samantha Power.  Cirincione has argued for a policy in which diplomacy plays a central role in the attempt to "contain and engage" nations like Iran.  He argues: 

This fits well with the central idea of Samantha Power's Pulitzer prize winning book, A Problem from Hell, which is "that if the shapers of US foreign policy looked out for the human consequences of their decisions, the world and the United States would be far better off."  When Obama speaks powerfully about change it is to give voice to this very different way of pursuing foreign affairs.  This is part of the substance that underlies the style.

For a good, balanced discussion of the substantial differences between Clinton and Obama on this issue see, Stephen Zunes's article, Behind Obama and Clinton, on Common Dreams.

I want to thank Marcus Dracos for pointing me to information about the various advisors of the candidates, and for his thoughtful analysis of the differences between Clinton and Obama.  Much of what is written here grew out of conversations with Marcus.

To view Samantha Powers talk about why she works for and supports Obama, see below:

The song is moving and I hope it will move others in states across the country this Tuesday to vote for what American could be, for what it is supposed to be.

In early January, we traveled to the National Aquarium in Baltimore.  Little did we know when Chloe posed for this picture in front of a wall of fish eyes, that just a few weeks latter we would be at the Franklin Institute watching a young staff member dissect a cow's eye.  Chloe was fascinated.  She is developing a keen interest in everything having to do with the operation of the body.  She watched that dissection with the same sense of curious wonder that she had when watching the video of open heart surgery they have there at the Franklin Institute.  This interest in the body, in its operation and its repair has it roots in her longstanding interest in bodily injury and the possibility of recovery.

I have written in the past about what a wonderful mimic Hannah is.  Here at the Children's Museum in Philadelphia, she carries it to an extreme.  To watch Hannah at play with her own image was to see a girl at ease with herself taking pure joy in making herself multiple.  She danced for quite a while to the delight of her parents and grandmother.