87% of audience votes “no” for McCain

In an article written for the Washington Post’s PostGlobal section, Mona Eltaway writes that when the Doha Debates audience was asked who they preferred for the U.S. Presidency, “The result was a resounding ‘no’ for Sen. John McCain.”

According to Ms. Eltaway’s article, 87 percent of the audience voted against the motion “This House believes the Middle East would be better off with John McCain in the White House.”

The verdict came during the latest episode of “The Doha Debates”- a monthly forum on Arab and Muslim issues aired on BBC World to a potential audience of nearly 300 million viewers across 200 countries.

With the economy taking deeper nosedives, it has seemed as if Obama and McCain were – in successive debates – doing their best to ignore the rest of the world and fixate on domestic issues. While that might be understandable for worried Americans and the rest of us who live here, other parts of the world are eager to know how the next occupant of the White House will affect their lives too.

And affect he will, especially the Middle East where the Bush administration has pursued one disastrous policy after the other and where there is palpable dread that the U.S. would want to pursue yet another one by attacking Iran.

It wasn’t an evening of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Rather it was a chance for people from the region to express what worries them the most about the U.S. When they got the cue for questions, it was as if the Middle East had stretched far beyond the peaceful Doha night to include trouble spots that are rarely on the mind of the U.S. voter come election time.

Asked to identify just their country of origin, we heard from men and women from Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Qatar, Sudan, Yemen and the U.S.

Obama is going to have a lot to do to repair the image of the U.S. abroad, especially in the Middle East. To many citizens of the Middle East, the Bush policies towards the Middle East have been…well, let’s just say that they don’t rank above zero on a scale of one to ten. Obama is going to need one hellava Secretary of State and State Department. World class people, to say the least.

Obama wins…and so does the world

Newspapers and broadcasting companies all across Europe are leading their next editions with the win of Barack Obama. His win is filling their front pages. Canadian Broadcasting has been covering the election all evening.

This is huge news all across the world. A lot of people will be smiling.

Socialism?

Do you think “socialism” is a terrifying thing, about to invade the policies of America?

If so, you really must hate Social Security and Medicare. When those programs were first introduced, they were called socialist. Republicans ran the “red scare, socialist” mantra across America to attempt the defeat of these programs.

If you think Obama’s health care plan is socialist, then I suggest you check out Switzerland. The Swiss are very conservative. They own more guns per capita than the U.S. They are adamant about privacy, just look at their banking regulations regarding privacy.

Yet, they voted a few years ago for National Health Insurance, even though the Conservatives worked hard to defeat it, saying it was socialist and too expensive. Nevertheless, the leader of the Conservative wing now says the Swiss would never give up their National Health care system. They like it too much. It’s been a boon to their GDP, their pharma companies (among the largest in the world) have no problem with it, the people love it, and health insurance companies are very happy with it.

So, what is the problem with solutions that work for business and helps citizens? This is not 1955 any more.

Anxiously watching the election…and my fingers are crossed

I know I’m not alone in being glued to the election news today. I know I’m not alone in having my fingers crossed and hoping my guy, Obama, wins.

This election is very important to me, not because of me – an aging Baby Boomer – but because of all the young people in this country. They deserve a better U.S. and a better world than the one that G.W. Bush and his crowd have made.

After a serious study of both McCain and Obama – their histories, their philosophy, what others who know them well say about their personalities and character, how they think and behave, and their various policy positions – I chose Obama. I sincerely believe he will be better for the younger generations of this country. I believe he has a better ideas and a better temperament.

I also think that a President Obama will be much more conservative than predicted. This guy is very smart, very pragmatic, level headed and inclusive, as his Conservative and Federalist Society compatriots at Harvard Law stated. He may very well have more trouble with his Democratic Congressional colleagues than the Republicans.

Throughout today, I’ve also been reading foreign papers and checking out chat rooms with a large foreign constituency. Everyone is paying extremely close attention to this election, even though many of them do not understand our electoral process. By a large majority, they’re hoping for an Obama win because they see in him a truly positive change in American foreign and economic policy from what the disastrous Bush policies which McCain, they believe, will continue or be even worse.

Obama will be better for the younger generations in this country as well as for older, near-retirement, middle-class people like me. So, I have my fingers crossed.

OP-ED: No More Economic False Choices

If Obama wins the election tonight, and there’s a very good probability that he will, he’s going to face an enormous challenge getting our financial house in order after eight years of profligate spending and decreased revenues. Plus, there are added problems of the continuing credit crunch, vast numbers of mortgage defaults, and increased job layoffs as the recession deepens.

How he’s going to deal with these problems is on everyone’s mind. Well, here is a good indication of what he will do. Robert Rubin was the Treasury Secretary under Clinton and is a financial adviser to Obama.

This op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday explores how to get the economy working again and encourage job growth…as well as deal with the deficit.

Fiscal rectitude versus stimulus and public investment: The Bible got this right a long time ago (paraphrasing slightly): there’s a time to spend, a time to save; a time to build deficits up and a time to tear them down. Though one of us (Mr. Rubin) is often invoked as an advocate of fiscal discipline, we both agree that there are times for fiscal discipline and times for fiscal largess. With the current financial crisis, our joint view is that for the short term, our economy needs a large fiscal stimulus that generates substantial economic demand.

We also jointly believe that fiscal stimulus must be married to a commitment to re-establishing sound fiscal conditions with a multi-year program that includes room for critical public investment, once the economy is back on a healthy track.

The U.S. faces a number of challenges, but most Americans agree that the two most important are dealing with the economic problems created during the Bush years and rebuilding our image abroad. This op-ed gives us a pretty good idea of how to deal with the economy…and what we will see from an Obama administration.

Bush Legal Counsel speaks about Obama

Bradford Berenson, Harvard Law, class of ’91, associate White House counsel, 2001-’03, Conservative

He made an extraordinary decision. He turned his back on what would normally be the standard route for any president of the Harvard Law Review, which is to take very prestigious judicial clerkships, probably including a clerkship at the Supreme Court of the United States. And he returned to Chicago instead to begin political work and community work.

From the perspective of people on the Review in 1991, that was an unfathomable, unheard-of decision. The clerkships only take — even if you do get a Supreme Court clerkship — two years. And they’re an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary credential, an extraordinary opportunity to serve the country and serve the judiciary. …

Barack was more than capable of getting any clerkship in the country he wanted. … He turned his back on that and did something entirely different. It was clear he had a different plan and a different vision for his own life and saw himself, in some ways, as a breed apart and running separate from the pack, even back then.

Did you ever talk to him about why he made that decision?

… I can’t remember the specifics. I have a vague recollection of being aware that he was a few years older than the other editors, saw himself as … having a little less time to spend on detours; that he wanted to go straight after the things he was interested in and that clerking would have been something of a detour. …

His interest in politics, and his political ambitions, were well-known among the editors at the time. He had received a lot of attention when he became president of the Law Review, the first African American. There had been stories in the national news media about him. He’d been involved in community organizing in Chicago before he came to the law school. And so in the annual parody issue of the Law Review that comes out at the end of the year as part of the banquet, there were a lot of cracks and jokes made at his expense about politics and his interest in politics. …

How did he take stuff like that?

Very good naturedly. I never saw Barack lose his cool, get angry, have a fit of temper, raise his voice. Most of the time if he was frustrated or bemused by something, there’d be kind of a wry smile, maybe a knitting of the eyebrows. But he was a very cool character, a very cool customer in all senses of that word. And any ribbing directed at him was taken in stride and with very good humor, very good nature. …

So when you watch him through this primary campaign … [does he seem different than the guy you knew back then?]

When I see him on the political stage now I very much feel like it’s the same guy that I knew and spent those years with on the Harvard Law School campus in Cambridge. He doesn’t seem like a new man, a different man, someone who’s radically remade himself, a Gatsby figure at all. He was then who he is now. And some of that same cool, some of that same affability, some of that same unflappability, that good faith, that good character, that intellect, they were all apparent then. And I think they all come through now and are part of the secret to his appeal.

So much for the McCain-Palin attempts to paint Obama as a scary radical–someone to be afraid of!

Obama’s Core Beliefs and Agenda

I know a lot of Republicans are out smearing Obama with scary labels and painting him as someone to be feared, but he’s far more centrist and conservative than Republicans depict him. (Italics below are mine, for emphasis.)

For example:
Mike Kruglik, Community organizer from Chicago

Obama and I were meeting with a group of leaders one evening on the South Side [of Chicago]. And after these meetings, we would get together and debrief. … And after we got through with the debriefing, as we’re walking out to our cars in the parking lot, this panhandler comes up to Obama and he asks him for a dollar.

Obama then did something that I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody do, including myself. He looks at the young man, he says, “Now, young man,” he says, “You are better than that.” He said, “You’re embarrassing yourself and you’re embarrassing the community. You need to reflect on what you can do to get yourself straight.” And he walks away.

What does that show about Obama? Well one thing that it shows is tough love, otherwise known as agitation in the lingo of an organizer. You’re agitating people to be better instead of commiserating with them about their fears and their weaknesses. You’re challenging them to be better. And, you know, after I told that story, a reporter asked Obama, what did he think about this idea of agitation? And he said, “It’s a way of scraping away bad habits that one person does for another person out of concern for that person’s strength and power and potential.”

But of course, there’s something else that one learns from that episode. And that is, Obama believes that everybody deserves a decent shot at life. But he doesn’t believe that that’s going to be handed to you. It’s not a matter of giving handouts. It’s a matter of people realizing their own potential like he has himself.

So later on, when welfare reform became an issue in the State of Illinois, he didn’t just say, “I’m against welfare reform, period.” He understood that it’s a bad idea to pay people not to work. But he wanted to make sure that if we were going to reform that system, that there would be transportation and child care and necessities that people would need to move from poverty into work.

Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker

He’s a cautious guy. And he’s a deliberate and, in a sort of old-fashioned sense, a conservative guy. I think that’s one of the things that people miss about him. They mistake the message of change for being somehow an ultra-left-winger or something.

If you think about … what he wants to change, it’s sort of a correction back to the center in American politics. The argument to the Obama campaign is that the last eight years have been ideologically radical in one direction.

Ron Brownstein, The National Journal; author, The Second Civil War

With Obama, you’re getting a candidate who I think is clearly committed to a different style of how leadership works; that it is not simply a matter of mobilizing elites, and not even simply a matter of the bully pulpit of the president talking at the country.

I think he has a vision of leadership, growing out of his experience, to a large extent, as a community organizer, that is much more of a president talking with the country, a much more interactive kind of style of leadership.
[…]
We have someone in Obama whose life has been to a large extent, in personal terms, about reconciling differences and building bridges. Mixed race, mixed nationality, feeling like a fish out of water in many communities — in the white community, in the African American community — trying to find his place where he fits in, I think has given him a kind of integrative view of how you pursue change and how you make things happen in the same way that perhaps Bill Clinton’s growing up in a family with an alcoholic instilled his desire to be someone who would find ways to make peace and to find ways to synthesize ideas that seemed incompatible.

Ben Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone

He’s come from sort of two cultures independently. One of which is this kind of community organizing, left-wing culture and the other of which is this sort of counterintuitive academic culture. …

So from each of these backgrounds, you have a kind of deep skepticism about American power and how it’s constructed and how it’s yielded. And I think the idea that somebody who is young and has a fresh idea might aspire very quickly to overturn all of that and sort of run things, is less shocking and surprising if you start with much less piety towards American power in general.

Rabbi speaks out in defense of Colin Powell and condems “Obsession” DVD

In an article for the Shalom Center, Rabbi Arthur Waskow praised Colin Powell for his thoughtful commentary when Powell endorsed Obama for President. “The correct answer is, he [Obama] is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: ‘What if he is?’ Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America.”

Powell was appealing within and beyond the actual America to that patriotic vision of America that sings, “O beautiful for patriots’ dream that sees beyond the years/ Thine alabaster cities gleam — undimmed by human tears.”
[…]
The atmosphere of fear and hatred toward Islam has actually increased in the US during the last few years. Why? Partly because it has been deliberately stimulated. But partly because of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Most people who do something that runs against ordinary rules of decent behavior want to believe there is some extremely important reason to do it. So if you spend almost a trillion dollars and send thousands of Americans to their deaths and thousands more to lose their legs, arms, eyes, genitals, minds, and souls — all in order to kill Muslims who are not terrorists, do not have weapons of mass destruction, and are citizens of a weak and defenseless nation — it becomes imperative to see Muslims and Islam – without distinctions — as extremely dangerous. Not quite human. Not real Americans. Not one more thread in the lovely multi-colored fabric of American democracy.

And of course the fear and rage had a root in the actions of a small number of terrorists who did claim Islam as their justification, even though the mainstream organizations and leaders of Islam and the vast majority of Muslims in the world condemned the terrorist attack.

But this disorganized fear and rage would have remained disorganized, inchoate, ineffective, if some organizations had not whipped it up.

Enter a DVD called “Obsession,” which a month ago was mailed as a free embedded ad to the readers of more than a dozen major newspapers.
[…]
“Obsession” is an attempt to make not a band of terrorists but all Islam the enemy. Bad enough in itself; even worse that it was deliberately sent to millions of homes through newspapers in the major “swing states” of presidential politics. It was an attempt to transform religious fear and ignorance into religious hatred, and hatred into an election tool.

I suppose the people who did this hoped that if they could change some votes in those key states they could save America and the world from leaders who were thoughtlessly “soft on terrorism” or “blind to the threat of Islam.” They may even have thought not that their ends justified their means but that their ends and means were in ethical coherence. But those who stirred racial hatred in the 19650s and ’60s thought they were saving America from the disaster of cultural “mongrelization” in a soup of racial inferiority. And the McCarthyists of the 1950s thought their stirring fear and hatred of “subversives” was saving America from the disaster of Communist espionage and take-over. And those who imprisoned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s thought they were saving America from the disaster of widespread sabotage. (All of these folks probably hoped to increase their own power as byproduct; but who doesn’t?)

Indeed, their means and their ends did cohere. Repression born of fear will breed more repression born of hatred. There are two grounds to challenge their practices: the ground of caring for truth, and the ground of caring for love.
[…]
Speak out against the obsessive fear of Islam. Speak out to highlight the most important line in Colin Powell’s interview. Speak out to political candidates, urging them to speak in all sorts of houses of worship if they speak in any. Speak out to the publishers of the newspapers that carried “Obsession” as an ad, asking them whether a DVD about the “International Jewish Conspiracy” would have found so quick acceptance, no matter how much the money offered their shrinking bank accounts. Speak out to their editors and columnists as well, asking them to critically analyze the film. Since the producers of “Obsession” have started circulating a follow-up film called “The Third Jihad,” be proactive in addressing the future as well as the past.

Above all, do not leave the defense of Islam’s dignity and honor to Muslims alone. Christians and Jews must make clear that their own celebration of the One affirms the diversity that alone can express the Infinite.
[…]
The speaking out and the listening, even beyond our concern with truth, must flow from our concern for love. For the love that all our traditions teach: love your neighbor as yourself. For the deep and loving understanding that the Quran teaches: God brought into the world different cultures and communities not for us to hate and despise each other but to lovingly know and deeply experience each other in our diversity.

With blessings of shalom, salaam, peace —

Arthur

McCain is a “Redistributor” too

McCain has been tossing out the term “redistributor” to describe Sen. Obama, as if Obama is a socialist. At least, that’s the implicit connection he’s trying to make. But it’s far from true.

Newsweek’s Andrew Romano, in his column, writes:

Conservatives are eagerly pushing the charge–online, at rallies and in my inbox–that “Barack the Redistributor” is a secret communist, Marxist or socialist. (Today, the right is misreading as evidence of his pinko ways a 2001 interview in which Obama complains that progressive activists once wrongly wanted the Supreme Court to “ente[r] into the issues of redistribution of wealth.”) Now, I understand the appeal of this line of attack, which provides voters with a familiar, 20th-century bogeyman to fear. But characterizing Obama’s plan to tax the nation’s top earners at 39 percent instead of 36 percent as socialist is absurd. Dwight Eisenhower taxed top earners at 91 percent. Richard Nixon taxed them at more than 50 percent. Even Ronald Reagan didn’t lower the top marginal rate to less than 50 percent until the last two years of his second term. Were these Republicans secret socialists, too?

Romano’s column concludes:

Deep down, I suspect McCain knows that Obama isn’t really a socialist. Why? Because he once sounded a lot like his rival on taxes. During the 2000 campaign, for example, a young woman asked McCain why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” “Look, here’s what I really believe,” he added. “That when you are–when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.” He soon backed up his words with action. After Bush was elected, McCain told Congress that he was disappointed by the president’s plan to “cut the top tax rate of 39.6 percent to 36 percent.” When it came time for a vote, the Arizonan stood on the Senate floor and announced that “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.” Unless McCain was a socialist in 2000 and 2001, Obama isn’t a socialist now.

John McCain understands and even promotes a progressive tax policy that taxes higher wager earners more than lower wage earners. The same thing Obama believes. The bogeyman title is nothing more than an attempt to scare the voting populace.

Wealth Redistribution – Standard practice in U.S. government policy

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg’s article, Spread The Wealth? What’s New?, refutes McCain’s statements that Barack Obama “believes in redistributing wealth.”

Redistribution has a “from” side (taxation) and a “to” side (spending). On the “from” side, the notion that government should use taxation to increase rather than decrease equality is hardly Marxist. In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith [the father of modern economics] begins his section on taxation with the following maxim: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.” To ask otherwise, Smith writes, would be obviously unfair.

Until the 20th century, the bulk of government revenues came from tariffs, which are regressive, meaning that they redistribute income away from the poor. The progressive principle was enshrined in American practice with the arrival of the federal income and inheritance taxes. The champion of these policies? None other than John McCain’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt. We got progressive income taxes with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. The federal estate tax we have today came in 1916.

McCain is a consistent adherent to his hero’s principles. Unlike George W. Bush, McCain supports the retention of an estate tax (he favors reducing it to 15 percent on estates above $5 million). McCain opposes the flat tax, which would repudiate progressivity (though with a $46,000 exemption, it would still redistribute income). Some of us still remember the John McCain who opposed Bush’s 2001 tax cut, saying it was unfairly tilted toward the rich.

Weisberg goes on to write:

Curiously, the most prominent proponents of more-aggressive wealth redistribution have been Robin Hoods of the right. Milton Friedman is considered the father of the negative income tax, a 1960s-era proposal to simply give cash to the poor. Richard Nixon pitched a version of this plan in 1973. The idea was that writing checks would be preferable to more bureaucratic programs like welfare. Our most explicit redistributive program today is probably the earned-income tax credit, which supplements the incomes of people who work but don’t earn enough to escape poverty on their own. Gerald Ford signed this bill into law and Ronald Reagan greatly expanded it.

McCain has long-favored the EITC, calling it “a much-needed tax credit for working Americans.” McCain doesn’t support the repeal of Social Security or Medicare, or a raft of other wealth-spreading programs like food stamps. And he’s got redistributive measures of his own invention, too, such as a tax credit to help people with lower incomes buy health insurance.

Weisberg ends his article by writing:

There’s little in Obama’s background or writings to suggest he favors more-ambitious redistributive policies. His most expensive new social program is an expansion of health-care coverage that would not create a universal entitlement (as many Democrats want to do) and which has been credibly priced at less, or only slightly more, than McCain’s plan. There’s little reason to think that Obama would depart from the bipartisan consensus that has favored federal spending at approximately the same level for the past 40 years.

What has changed in that period is the way the market has distributed wealth. Since the 1970s, income inequality in the United States has increased dramatically. Obama, like a lot of fellow liberals, would like to find ways to reverse that trend without diminishing overall economic growth. The old John McCain worried about that problem, too. We may see that guy again, after the election.