Jaw on floor

Well, this oughta silence those mumblings that his international influence wasn't enough to get the Olympic bid.

Too early? I don't need to turn on Fox to know that those commentators are already saying, "Give me a break." I suppose it's already an achievement to have changed the mindset of the international community and given so many people hope. That is, assuming that people feel that way, and many do. Within America, of course, we've been a bit more fickle, fearing the stock market and unemployment and blaming Obama for not fixing everything NOW. Look at his rollercoastering approval ratings.

For that matter, I would bet that most Americans will be doubly surprised by this because we've paid so much attention to his domestic agenda lately (healthcare, cars) that nobody is thinking at all about nuclear proliferation. Afghanistan's had a bit more air time, but it's far from being the #1 issue on everyone's radar yet.

All in all? Too early, yes. Because so much more is expected from him. If he really has changed the world climate, metaphorically at least, it's a good start. But in order to silence the critics, he'll have to change the climate in reality. Kyoto II, here we come.

P.S. Very America-centric Nobel year. I don't recall so many Americans getting the prizes in years in the science fields. Wonder who will get economics.

I owe him

Without Ted Kennedy, my parents would never have come to America.

This is probably the best and most unshakable tribute I can give him. He was one of the chief movers and shakers of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that, contrary to his own rhetoric, did do quite a bit to reshape the ethnic makeup of immigrants to this country, my own two parents among them in the early 1970s. My mother came in as a medical worker (a nutritionist), my father as a student (and, I suppose, stayed on after school as spouse).

Was his career, or rather the post-1969 part of his career, worth a woman's life? I can't answer that question, but I also never voted in Massachusetts during an election for him. I also don't come of a region or generation that has much use for the Kennedy mystique -- that odd combination of machismo, public service, politics, and privilege -- and I recognize that he paid a pretty high price for his, burying one soldier brother and two assassinated brothers. Teddy did a fairly good job overall of living up to both the best and worst that was ever said about the Kennedys. But I know that because of him, I am here.

At least the dog is cute

Are you kidding me? I thought it was bad enough when the media followed Obama to Five Guys -- and I think for PR's sake he'd better quell those outings for a while, as it's distracting people from the work he's doing -- but all these news stories about him killing a fly during some interview have me completely baffled. Why? Has the 24-hour news cycle really gotten that unfillable?

Storm about to break

I was fairly disgusted when Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic party for reelection purposes, so I was very interested indeed when I heard that Congressman Joe Sestak (from the district right outside Philly) wants to challenge him in the Democratic primary, against the will of the Dem leadership and possibly even the Obama administration, saying it would take an "act of God" to stop him.

Sestak is a retired admiral and a bit of a... say it with me... maverick, which is why he is bucking the will of the party. I can't say I blame him. The question is whether as a second-term congressman with much less money than Specter and low name recognition can make it. I found this article on philly.com very interesting, particularly the poll in which voters read a list of characteristics about the two went for Sestak.

The Dems will want to avoid a dogfight primary, but I don't know what they could offer Sestak to get him to stand aside, and you'd have to shoot Specter. This will be well worth watching.

Hail to the late-night chief

As a devoted late-night hound, how could I miss Obama's appearance? I'm watching it even as I type. Leno's actually doing quite well at both asking questions and being entertained, and it's actually striking to me how little Obama's demeanor has changed. To me, it makes perfect sense that he should be the first president to appear on a late-night show; there's nothing wrong with it. If it's good enough for the candidate, it's good enough for the president, and lord knows other politicians make use of them often enough as entertaining, safe means of communication.

Remember how Rachel Maddow said very early that Obama had not perfected the art of the sound bite? He still tends to take the long intellectual view. When Leno asked Obama about the AIG bonuses, he began his answer with the structure of AIG, rather than the bailout. A small but interesting insight into his approach, I think.

ETA: I knew the second I heard it that he was going to get in trouble for joking that his current 120 bowling average was like the Special Olympics. Yup, I was right. And justly so, I suppose. I don't doubt that Special Olympic bowlers could probably kick his butt, and it's only right that people know that these athletes are formidable.

Less pork

Not legislative pork, but actual pork. I happened to hear on the radio this morning (WGN, I think) an announcement of the mercantile exchange. Pork, hogs, February cattle, April cattle, April milk futures: all down considerably. The announcer concluded, "All things considered, not too bad on a day when the only exchange that's higher is the fear factor."

Then the nurse came out to draw my blood. It was a good morning.

Rhetorical questions

If, as Chris Matthews wearily noted while Obama was speaking and dancing with his wife at his eighth inaugural ball, our new president's political gift consists of the ability to muster repetition with spontaneity, then the repetitive nature of political rhetoric must also come naturally to him. At the same time, there's a shock value to certain words that breaks up the repetition. "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus..." and then a break of the rhetoric to include those so rarely included, "AND nonbelievers." Very nicely done. Rhetoricians were disappointed by the lack of a "by the people, for the people" repetition, but I think Obama's words will be just as important.

But he did have one quasi-biblical rhetorical moment that I thought was very fine; when invoking the revolutionary history of the U.S., he led into the future with, "So it has been; so it must be." I thought that was a nice summation of his theme of "remaking America." If he had put that closer to the end than the beginning, it might have had a little more impact. But overall, I thought it was an excellent speech, and an inauguration full of symbolism. Thanks, John G. Roberts.

New toy

I've finally taken the 10 seconds necessary to Google and select a website that tracks Supreme Court news (cases on the docket, cases decided). I'm looking forward to upcoming case District Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial District v. Osborne, mostly because it proposes the issue of plaintiffs' access to the state's biological evidence in order to test the DNA. Why, on the face of it, would the state oppose such access? In this case, we're talking about a convicted felon who wants to test the condom and hairs found at the scene of the crime.

Supposing that the DNA evidence could exonerate him, why would the state actively want to keep an innocent man in jail? I am supposing that the state is concerned about inconclusive results of some kind (though how exactly, I don't know -- insufficient biological material, perhaps). There's also the specter of financial burden and judicial chaos as felons rush to get access to just about anything to test for possible skin cells left on surfaces, etc. Fortunately, I think this will be less of a factor as the years go on. But I have to go look at how this is done. I would hope that the material is sent to an independent testing firm who sends results to both sides, but I suppose that all this still leaves everything open to bloody-glove police conspiracies. It's a tangle.

Today, life is good (Obamapalooza, II)

I was at the rally last night in Grant Park to watch history be made -- very quickly, as it felt. We were settled in for the long haul (and just as well, because even if you were ticketed, if you didn't come early or on time, you probably didn't get in in time for the big stuff). Ohio's call provoked a huge cheer, then Virginia, then CNN (which was on the big screen in the park, with commercials blacked out) called it for Obama and it was almost stunning. I also didn't expect McCain to concede with such celerity, nor Obama to come out and give his speech so swiftly thereafter; I guess they decided to let everyone go to bed, especially on the east coast.

A huge, fairly well-behaved crowd, ethnically mixed as you'd expect in a big city but not more so, so to speak, with a bewildering array of t-shirts, ranging from "got hope?" to "Al Franken 2008." Obligatory boos for states called for McCain, gracious clapping during his speech. Not the best choice of music, Obama staffers: one of the commercial breaks featured Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten," and I thought to myself, I'm leaving.

You may not have seen everything we did at the Park; for that matter, I didn't see anything that happened on TV after Virginia was called, because they switched coverage first to McCain and then to park coverage. First we had an invocation by an African American bishop, then a few words and the Pledge of Allegiance by a white man, then the national anthem by an African American woman who was not great. The crowd around me started singing to drown her out. Afterwards, a few songs were played to fill in the gap: "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," some Brooks & Dunn, etc. And then the First Family was announced and... you saw the rest!

A few photos for you:

The crowd at Congress Plaza, waiting to start getting into the park. This was about 7:30pm.


Another crowd shot, in the park.



And finally...

Those beams of light behind the jumbotron are not actually fairy lights being emitted for Obama, as Jon Stewart might joke; they're security searchlights.

The Promised Land (Obamapalooza, I)

East o' the moon, west o' the sun, or the other way around... Who knew that the promised land was south of Balbo and north of Roosevelt? Preparations are massively underway at Grant Park for the Obama rally on Election Night. Streets are already blocked off (including the aforementioned Balbo), as well as the sidewalks all around, to prevent you from either scoping out or sabotaging the grounds, I assume. In order to get around the grounds, my friend and I had to cross over Lakeshore Drive (hence the across-the-street shot here) and walk down to Museum Campus and cross back to Michigan on Roosevelt. Quite a detour. Yet not big enough to fit the million and more who are expected, I don't think, so I don't know what they will do; plans are probably hampered by Buckingham Fountain's renovation, which means that a huge section of the park is already closed.

As you can see, other than the fencing all around, white tents and pavilions are going up, as well as huge towers with massive klieg lights, and no doubt some wind machines to blow the fairy dust all around. We also spotted rows and rows of port-o-potties, and a parking lot next to the grounds was almost full, though I don't know where all those people were -- we couldn't really see through the trees. Security is already ramped up; in addition to the blocked off streets and policewomen standing at corners to redirect, we spotted a Homeland Security truck turning into the parking lot and a federal police car circling the area.

Very little has been announced about the rally, except that I do know I'm not one of the 8,000 who got tickets and will be in the inner circle. I hope they communicate it well at some point, but anyone who tries to drive through downtown on Tuesday night is a born fool.

Barackometric pressure

Just a clever title. (Not that clever.)

What I was really thinking of was the academic job search (MY search, of course) as a barometer of the economy as a whole, like anything else. Watching searches slowly get axed is about as disheartening a thing as you can imagine; talk about things being totally out of your hands.

But Barack's upcoming infomercial made its way into my consciousness and my title. I'm seriously worried about backlash; it's a show of excess wealth at a time when I think a lot of people are going to bristle at the slightest show of excess. If you have read any of the comment strings on articles about the planned Grant Park rally, you'll know what I mean.

A voice in the wilderness

Le blogue Bérubé is back, boys and girls. That's right, one of the 100 most dangerous liberals in America is blogging again to see us through these woeful times. Link is my slowly growing blogroll below and to the right.

Feed the rich

It drives me stark raving insane to see people complaining about increased taxes on the wealthy and calling it 'socialist' (because it was unwisely framed as spreading the wealth, or sharing the wealth, or whatever). Again, I have never been an ardent Obama supporter, but this issue has always bothered me.

Don't people think?

Consider it as an exchange for services rendered. For example, I, in my unwealthiness but (to be Bourdieuvian for a moment) being possessed of much social capital, fly numerous times a year to numerous destinations, two of them international last year. This means, just off the top of my head, that I require the FAA, TSA, passport services, international customs, a reasonable amount of intelligence devoted to ensuring that nothing national security related happens to me in the air, regulations ensuring that Boeing made my plane without child labor, environmental regulations ensuring that said plane emits only its fair share of pollutants, foreign consulates in case I get arrested or get ill, some type of economic negotiations ensuring that my $2 will get me one British pound rather than a sixpence... I also use the oil that will be pumped out of Iraq by Bush's cronies after this multi-xillion war, or already is, since the Iraqis are having a terrible time building their own oil business without the cooperation of the multinationals.

Now, on the other hand, I do not own a yacht. I do not go on boat trips of any kind, and I but rarely make it to the beach. The Coast Guard and I are only distant friends.

I have no car. I am not on highways that often. The DMV and I are only occasional acquaintances. Pave the interstates, by all means, I still need them occasionally. Police presence, sure. Regulate car manufactures, work with labor unions, inspect mines from which metal is drawn to make sure they're safe; I need all that, too.

Everything takes maintenance, and if you live the high life using and abusing the structure, you pay your fair share. Now, I agree with Josh (I think it was) on the West Wing, who said that as we ask rich people to pay for so much, we should at least not hate them for it. Fine by me. But I think they need to consider what they're paying for.

Identify this

Has it come to this? Has the Invisible Man of Ralph Ellison's great construction become yet one more archetype we can project onto the 'blank screen' that Barack Obama or any politician -- though this archetype might demand one of color -- offers us during a long and increasingly defensive campaign?

What follows here you may all discount as the ravings of a sulky young academic who doesn't even have an academic job yet, but who comes home from the gym and reads the five (online) pages in the New Republic written by David Samuels on Barack Obama and a novel she has spent the last several years of her life thinking about on and off. I expect it's the way young Shakespeare scholars felt watching Stephen Greenblatt on Colbert. Personally, I begrudge Stephen nothing. It would be patently idiotic. But since I owe Samuels nothing, I'm bringing it.

It's not that Samuels is completely off in his analysis. Obama is a transformation of the invisible man (or Invisible, as Arnold Rampersad dubbed him, or IM, as I cheekily called him in my first dissertation draft) in certain ways that are too compelling to ignore: a young ambitious man thrown in front of a crowd, who finds that they love him for his oratory, and then gets steered astray by political advisors he can't ignore. On the other hand, Samuels wanders way off track when complaining about how Obama can't talk about his "carefully constructed" identity, which he equates with his foreign family, enough and therefore has sacrificed (or invisibilized) that part of his autobiography for the sake of the electorate. He ends not with a bang but a whimper, saying that all the talk about race is really just self-indulgent nonsense, and Barack Obama needs to grow a pair (or borrow Hillary's) and focus on fixing the Things That Matter, like the economy, Iran, and public education.

This flies directly in the face of his previous five pages, in which he, like I, praises Dreams from my Father highly for its literary qualities and the limited yet stunning candor of its accounts. What would Ellison have done with some of Obama's strange adventures, Samuels admiringly asks? Well, I think we already know, if we go back to look at Invisible Man. Community organizing gone wrong, authority figures turned menacing, it's all there. Race matters. Cornel West said so, and he was in one of the Matrix movies, so he must be right.

What is irritating Samuels, I think, is the way that Obama, despite the justly famous "A More Perfect Union" speech, does not fit into U.S. molds of race, and the fact that he's not able to use that to blow the mold itself wide open. How he would do this without making himself unelectable is certainly difficult to tell. That he does not do so makes him, in Samuels' plaint, invisible. We might also justly say that it makes the American public illiterate. (On an empirical note, after the 80th time I heard my father complain during primary season that we knew nothing about Obama's family, I threatened to buy the book and ship it to him. I then recited Obama's family tree as far as I could.)

It is, again, not an unreasonable charge. Still, there are so many rebuttals to this, beginning with the one Samuels wisely foregrounds: 'doesn't everybody?' I seem to recall a young Arkansas governor whose campaign blathered on and on about Hope. Hope, Arkansas, that is, the most felicitously named birthplace in the history of American politics. A more reasonable rebuttal is, for god's sake, let us have invisibility as a weapon. Let Obama cloak himself with whatever he can to fend off the darker possibilities that can be projected onto his blank screen with a planetarium-sized "overhead projector." Remember Sybil in Invisible Man, who gets Invisible to 'rape' her and fulfill her fantasies about black men? She gets only an oblique mention by Samuels.

But let's also turn and look at Ellison's novel, which has a problematic relationship with foreignness, back-to-Africa, Afrodiaspora, or whatever anachronistic term you would like to apply to this. There's no palling around with Ras the Destroyer, who rides through Harlem like a horseman of the racial apocalypse. Coming from South to North is culture shock enough. There's no blame to be assigned here; it's simply a fact that Invisible, and perhaps Ellison himself, can't embrace Africa as a source of power and pride as Ras asks him to. Can't or won't? Samuels says that it doesn't matter in the end; either way you're invisible. Can or will? Either way, you're foreign. The funny name doesn't help.

And we're back to nationalism. For all the academic talk of globalism, globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora, there's no good place for it in a political campaign, and a faint unease about it in American politics as a whole. If Barack Obama were Deval Patrick (governor of Massachusetts from the South Side of Chicago), there'd be none of this quiet current of 'he's not really black, so he doesn't deserve the special treatment he's getting.' Obama has to avoid being cast as the crazy, violent, foreign Ras whose story goes nowhere in favor of being the invisible man who... oh wait, as Samuels also points out, ends up writing in a basement.

But the chief difference? Samuels talks about it, but fails to emphasize its importance: Obama's already written it all, and it was in a law office, not a basement. His is not an identity in progress like Invisible's. He's come to some kind of useful terms with his Ras-like father (as much as anyone ever comes to terms with a distant father, I'd say) and his own foreign experiences. He knows how to be the young frontman of the Democratic party. And casting himself as a blank screen may deny him some rhetorical freedom, high energy and an extra ping of the teeth, but I highly doubt that it's chipping away at his identity. In the end, the only ones who are denied anything are the audience members. It's not Obama who has to focus on the facts and issues; it's us. To paraphrase Michael Douglas speaking Aaron Sorkin, we're drinking the sand because we don't know the difference.

We could go pick up the book.

Stephen in the World

How could I forget to post the vid of my old prof, Stephen Greenblatt (famed Shakespeare scholar and author of the best-selling bio Will in the World), on the Colbert Report? The dueling Stephens traded quips, quotes, and political analysis in a really fantastic segment that ended with Colbert saying to Greenblatt, "Don't f___ with me, man." Awesome.

Heavy baggage

I haven't been particularly impressed by Obama's words during this economic crisis, and yet he seems to be gaining some ground as voters worry more and more about it. In the end, I guess it's hard for McCain, who after all was one of the Keating Five, to give any signs of a fresh approach to anything involving banking.

Oh yes! Remember them? In the midst of a little savings and loan crisis? McCain and Glenn: American heroes, American politicians.

How is this not being mentioned at all? It's that miraculous political tactic that Clinton also exerted quite well: it's old, it's been talked about, therefore we don't need to rehash the past.

Keeping informed

Before I go to bed to rest for yet another busy day, let me make a pitch for everyone to read or keep reading Robert Reich's blog, which has had a lot of concise, smart commentary on the economic crisis at hand. The former treasury secretary is an especially interesting person to listen to at the moment that we may literally be handing our fortunes over to the current treasury secretary as a kind of financial czar. The link in my list of Blogs I Read below and to the right. As I write this, news sources are announcing that a tentative bailout deal has been reached, but no details are available yet. I'm waiting to read what I can and then get Reich's commentary, and make up my own mind.

Tim Russert

I was greatly shocked to see that Tim Russert died just a couple of hours ago of a sudden heart attack. Political commentator, NBC Washington bureau chief, host of "Meet the Press," and moderator of many of the recent primary debates, he was a huge force in the political media and an extremely good predictor of electoral politics. I've been watching him so long that I can't even remember when I started -- it can't be my whole life. I always thought he was a very even-handed, engaging, intelligent figure. That's not to say that I always agreed with his angles, but overall I always found him one of the ones worth watching. Especially given some of our other alternatives (that Gibson-Stephanopoulos hosted debate, anyone?) he will be sorely missed in this upcoming election and beyond. It leaves a gaping hole in our political coverage, which despite the blitz of primary attention is normally so unincisive.

I believe! (a bit)

In the spirit of finding out more about your leaders, I generally turn not just to the Colbert Report but to that awful genre, the political autobiography. I posted about this early in the life of this blog (see "Obamarama"). Political autobiographies are uniformly thick and bland, like rice pudding with no flavoring. Hillary Clinton's Living History was no exception; she can't afford to answer the questions you'd really like to ask. I remember Jay Leno mocking it relentlessly because she describes, in vivid detail, her shock and respiratory distress when Bill finally confessed that the affair with Monica Lewinsky was real. His punchline: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me six thousand times..."

But I went back to it, like Jonathan Edwards' dog to its vomit, now that Obama is quite definitively the Democratic candidate, and dug out Dreams from my Father: A story of race and inheritance.

It's amazing.

Not that there aren't moments of blandness or telling omissions, but there is also a lot of hard reality about the entanglements of racism and racial identity, and the awful unlimits of self-deception in those regards. His relationship with his white grandparents is the most revealing -- that would be the white grandmother he mentioned in his famous speech on race who was afraid of black men walking down the street. Here also is the story of his childhood in Indonesia with his Indonesian stepfather, his tenuous relationship with his father, his slow meeting with his African half-siblings (ending with the time he spent in Kenya getting to know them), and his ridiculous floundering as a community organizer in Hyde Park. This is, in essence, the foundation of that great speech.

It is, in some ways, just a big coming to terms with racial identity that could easily lapse into the McGreevey confessional, except that it is so extremely well written, with a more complex philosophy of creating identity. (And for those who cry ghostwriter, there's a lot said now about how his law firm was so annoyed that he would just sit in his office with his feet on his desk and write his damn book. I don't doubt that there was editing, but I'm willing to believe that the fundamentals are all his.) And well structured, moving back and forth in time to juxtapose key memories.

I have not been an Obamaniac, Obama girl, or whatever other nickname you can come up with, and as a disillusioned child of the 1992 election, I am still jaded about the bright young candidate with the Kennedy blessing. But this book made me want to believe.

Karma's a stitch

That's right. Not for Eliot Spitzer (though that too), but for all those snooty New Yorkers who have always enjoyed laughing at NJ, and never more than when our ex-straight ex-governor stepped down. Yes. Stepped down. Promptly, no beating around the bush. And yes, wife by his side. Honestly, what a ridiculous, sad situation. Big picture: possibly -1 superdelegate for Hillary.