Entries associated with the tag "Barack Obama":

I liked Sarah Palin's speech a lot. Eric Zorn allows that the speech was "well-wrought" and that "as an orator, as a presence on the stage, as a personality she was, let's be honest, OK." That sounds like very faint praise, but in context Zorn means she was far from being the embarrassment Democrats prayed she'd be.

I maintain she was way better than OK. I hear the defensive muttering and I dismiss it. The first words that come to mind are "gleefully, shamelessly unfair," and where convention oratory is concerned, there's no higher praise. Palin kicked Barack Obama's ass. Obama, not being in the hall, was in no position to kick back, but Palin showed how to do it. She painted a bright red circle around every one of his vulnerabilities.

She cleared the air. Now Obama knows and we know how the Republicans intend to mock him, belittle him, insinuate against him. The other candidates during the Democratic primary debates had sputtered that Obama was inexperienced. Palin said to America, he's a posturing ninny.

I'm happy to see that my Reader colleague Whet Moser had pretty much the same reaction.

I kept thinking as Palin rattled on, "Now we see what he's made of." Game on.

Barack Obama has made a campaign issue of his good judgment on the Middle East, and I'm beginning to wonder if that good judgment now has him exactly where John McCain wants him.

From the get-go Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq as the wrong war for the wrong reasons. McCain lined up behind his president. Now Obama wants to redeploy our Middle East forces. He wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 14: "Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Irag is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq. As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan."

Famous last words -- "finish the job in Afghanistan." American and allied armies invaded soon after 9/11 and overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks, but it turned out the job wasn't finished. The Taliban leaked back in. Was the problem simply that we were two combat brigades short?

"The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan," Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times on July 30, "is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want." He approvingly quoted from a July Time cover story by Harvard professor and Kabul resident Rory Stewart: "A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining."

Friedman supported the Iraqi invasion in the beginning, though not for the reasons President Bush gave to the nation. Friedman sees the whole, vast Arab-Muslim world as a dysfunctional realm that has failed at modernity. Far more important than the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Friedman believes, is the creation of "islands of decent and consensual government" that offer young people an alternative to clerical nihilism. He thought Iraq could become such an island. He seems to think that again. "The reason the surge helped in Iraq," he said in his July 30 column, "is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists -- the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news."

So McCain, if he has his wits about him, can say this: "Thanks to the surge, whose effectiveness my opponent refuses to admit, the Iraqis now see a way forward to peace and democracy. If they are correct, Iraq will set an example for the entire Muslim world of a nation prosperous, pious, progressive, and free. This is an outcome my opponent was unable to imagine and cannot imagine yet. For some reason, he'd rather fight in Afghanistan, a primitive collection of clans and warlords on the fringes of Arabia that for centuries has defied every attempt to civilize and reform it, chewing up and spitting out every invading army that tried. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found in Afghanistan, and neither is the future of the Arab-Muslim world. My opponent is young and naive and doesn't understand any of this."

Maybe Obama does and maybe he doesn't, but as violence increases in Afghanistan the idea that it's the "good war" is being called into question even in precincts that might considered Obama's base. The leftist listserve Portside has just forwarded me a couple of articles that warn Obama to watch out. Conn Hallinan, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, commented, "The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan."

On WTTW's Chicago Tonight last Friday, Joel Weisman asked his panel of reporters for their thoughts on the Democrats' "Teflon candidate," the "media darling" to whom "nothing sticks" -- Barack Obama. I waited for someone to point out that the same language pretty aptly describes John McCain.

Nobody did. Political campaigns are about pinning an unflattering label on the opposition, and Obama's already been stuck with a pretty good one -- the candidate to whom nothing sticks. No matter how much he's hammered, he's presumably getting away with murder.

To the extent that Obama's gotten a pass from the media, it's because he's a political phenomenon. McCain's appeal is a lot more personal and durable. He served and suffered in war and his courage can't be questioned -- his bio is catnip to middle-aged, male political writers. Aside from that, he enjoys a glass, tells a good story, blows up when he's angry, swears like a man -- or like a journalist -- and he likes our company. Dammit, he's one of us! And those political writers remember that back in 2000, when everyone was younger and McCain's original Straight Talk Express was hauling the most enthusiastic, idealistic candidate in the field, Bush stopped him with lies. So he's owed.

Michael Tomasky gives a lot of space to McCain's relationship with the media in his review of three new books on McCain in the June 12 New York Review of Books. The books aren't particularly friendly -- Tomasky says they argue that "while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man." If that's true -- and I find myself not wanting to believe it because I've admired McCain enormously myself -- Tomasky doesn't expect the media to notice.

He writes, "The McCain we see publicly now is determined to do anything he has to do to win. It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who bled in a cell [in Hanoi] while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition better than, say, Hillary Clinton does."

When two media darlings run against each other for president, the coverage is hard to predict. I wrote a few weeks ago that it could turn into a media civil war -- Kool-Aid against Kool-Aid. But journalists being such skeptics, when it comes down to a choice between admiring promise and admiring achievement, achievement will win every time -- even if promise has a lot more to offer the future. The press could make McCain pay for being too old and too Republican, but it'll find him a lot easier to forgive than Obama for wrapping the press around its finger. 

Barack Obama's finally clinched the Democratic nomination, but he'll probably look back on this stage of his campaign as the easy part. Among the issues he can expect to be pounded on in the months ahead is the one about who he knew and how he knew them.

Obama's already resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ to get out from under his associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger -- which didn't help at all with such hostiles as the National Review. Tony Rezko made national news as an Obama associate when he was convicted Wednesday, and the GOP jumped in immediately with this video. And here's Michael Kinsley on "Obama's radical friends" Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The former Weathermen "remain spectacularly unrepentant, self-indulgent, unreflective--still bloated with a sense of entitlement, still smug with certainty," in Kinsley's view, but he points out that if Obama has shown bad judgment in associating with them, so has  a "comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others -- including Republicans and conservatives." As Kinsley sees it, when Ayers, whose dad ran Commonwealth Edison and was on a lot of important boards, decided the revolution wasn't going to happen he simply went home and the establishment took him back into the fold.

Moral: Be careful who you meet on the way up. You'll meet them again on the way further up.

An editorial in the new issue of the National Review scolds Barack Obama for maintaining ties that were too close for too long with Trinity United Church of Christ and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And it wonders, why did Obama join Trinity in the first place? No friend of Obama's, the National Review thinks some answers can be found in a story from the Reader's archives. The profile of Obama by Hank De Zutter "that appears to shed some light" ran on December 8, 1995, soon after Obama decided to run for the Illinois Senate. It's pretty much the one and only portrait of the candidate as a young man. 

The National Review editorial leans heavily on reporting on Obama by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. According to the National Review, De Zutter "tells us that the young politician did not accept 'the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation -- which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks to "move up, get rich, and move out.'

The NR goes on, "Obama didn't embrace black nationalism to the extent that Wright did -- but, according to the profile and to Obama's first book [Dreams From My Father], that was only because Obama regarded that approach as an impractical way to organize constituencies for his own brand of change."

And what brand was that? The editorial continues: "For Obama and Wright, integration encouraged blacks to buy into the notion that they can overcome obstacles like racism and poverty on their own, without relying on the government. That kind of self-reliance makes it harder to build coalitions for liberal policies, and such coalition-building is what community organizing -- Obama's post-college vocation -- is all about."

In other words (I think), Obama believed integration promoted self-reliance. But self-reliance made Obama's job of community organizing harder. Which means . . . that Obama opposed integration? Does the National Review intend to position Obama this fall as someone whose history of community organizing and church membership prove he's actually a segregationist?

Maybe. Here's Kurtz had to say in the article the National Review was drawing on: "Obama's repudiation of integrationist upward mobility is fully consistent with his career as a community organizer, his general sympathy for leftist critics of the American 'system,' and of course his membership at Trinity. Obama, we are told [by De Zutter], 'quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground.'" It's presumably a short jump from critiquing integration to repudiating it. Kurtz continues, "De Zutter gives us a clear glimpse of Obama's radicalism. . . . [He] shows us that the full story of Obama's ties to [the Reverend Michael] Pfleger and Wright is both more disturbing and more politically relevant than we've realized up to now."

Back to the National Review editorial. It says that according to De Zutter, "Obama said he was 'tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up -- at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit -- and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change.' The formula Obama devised was simple: He would supply the agenda, and people like Wright would supply the rage."

In other words (I think), Obama and Wright -- make that "people like Wright" -- were in cahoots.

My reading of De Zutter's profile is very different. Obama had observed that the rage was in endless supply, and he wanted some good to finally come of it. But he did not intend to "supply the agenda." In a passage of the Reader article that the National Review ignores, De Zutter explains: "What makes Obama different from other progressive politicians is that he doesn't just want to create and support progressive programs; he wants to mobilize the people to create their own. He wants to stand politics on its head, empowering citizens by bringing together the churches and businesses and banks, scornful grandmothers and angry young."

De Zutter's article, by the way, does not make a single mention of either the Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Trinity United Church of Christ. But so it goes with fundamental texts. Stanley Kurtz and the National Review found in it what they wanted to find in it -- not one word less, not one word more.

Some articles lose us almost before they begin:

"On the day before the night he made history, Barack Obama shot hoops at the Back Bay Club in Chicago, and called the odd superdelegate or two . . . " from the front page of Wednesday's New York Times.

If you ever find yourself singing Chicago's praises to the folks who wish you'd come back home to Topeka, without actually believing a single word you hear yourself saying, then I have just the article for you. Salon's "Look Homeward, Obama," by Dan Conley, a former speechwriter for Mayor Daley, is as dewy-eyed a  portrait of our city as you'll find this side of a City Hall press release. Conley's larger point is that when Obama preaches the politics of consensus he should be taken seriously, because . . .

Because "anyone who doubts that a toxic political environment can be overcome should look to Chicago. Consensus has become more conspicuous than conflict. Deal-making is more important than showboating. In short, the city's politics has become post-partisan. It's a concept that should be familiar to anyone who has followed Obama's presidential bid."

I don't think there's any question but that Richard M. Daley has run a more inclusive administration than his father, Richard J.,  and that the son's big insight was the recognition that most of his political opposition would go away as soon as he cut it in on the action. Conley aggregates personalities as disparate as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers, because they all measure up to what he seems to think is the only standard that matters in Chicago -- they all have something to offer. Ayers, for example, "has become an expert in public school reform. He wants to participate at the table and he brings something to that table, so he's taken seriously. . . . In Chicago, as long as you bring something to the table, people are willing (almost eager) to ignore the less flattering dimensions of your character."

And as for the screwed-over little guy who's the hero of 10,000 newspaper columns, Conley bathes his tormentors in as gentle a light as will ever find them: "Critics might also argue that leaving a seat at the table open -- and allowing a multitude of unelected leaders to emerge -- opens the door to corruption. Chicagoans would respond that the true naif is anyone who thinks that citizens who are inactive in politics -- who bring nothing to the table -- should share equally in the largesse of government. Politics does not reward passivity."

Conley came to town in the mid 90s, and he's got a shaky grasp of the history that set the stage he found when he got here. For instance, he suggests that Council Wars preceded the '83 primary between Byrne, Daley, and Washington. And today's docile City Council symbolizes restoration, not reform.  Conley writes: "In the same chamber that during the Council Wars featured endless parliamentary maneuvers and more than a few fistfights, policies are ratified in generally dull proceedings; details are usually ironed out internally before going public." Conley likes to think of this colorless secrecy as post-partisan; someone else might call it post-antiauthoritarian. Details are forever being quietly ironed out internally by Chicago's movers and shakers, who regard public knowledge of their intentions in pretty much the same way biologists regard the atmosphere of Jupiter -- as incompatible with life as we know it.

Conley's article has stirred up a lot of response at Salon, where plenty of his readers wonder what he's been smoking. Some don't recognize Conley's Chicago, some don't buy the idea that Obama was ever enough of a player in Chicago politics to warrant being discussed in that context. But others are Obama fans happy  to embrace Conley's premise, which he restates in conclusion: "What Obama promises is an America where politics is a good thing, where arguments on the merits are encouraged, where a seat is always open for anyone eager to sit at the table and contribute what they can."

. . . your own opinion doesn't count for much. A couple of weeks ago Barack Obama whomped Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and lost to her narrowly in Indiana, outcomes that were generally expected. Overnight, the media (and apparently the Democratic Party) decided that was that -- Obama had wrapped up the nomination. The tone of the coverage underwent a sea change. Clinton was now an object of affection and indulgence:

My column on Wednesday argued for Clinton to gracefully exit the stage now that it looks like there are no more rabbits to pull out of her electoral hat. But readers -- not all of them women -- pushed back. Let her quit when she's good and ready, many argued. She's earned that right. Carol Marin, Sun-Times.

She wasn't denied the nomination. She wasn't cheated. She simply competed fiercely and did not win. That doesn't mean her candidacy was not a triumph. Michael Tackett, Tribune.

revisionist gratitude:

Does Senator Barack Obama come out a bloody mess, or a battle-tested warrior? . . . Could competing against Mrs. Clinton have improved Mr. Obama as a candidate in the same way that competing against Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the 1980s made Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan champions in the 1990s? Mark Leibovich, New York Times.

and avuncular wisdom:

Yes, Hillary, America is worth fighting for. But the best way to fight for America now is to give up the fight. Sun-Times editorial.

But then there's today's primary in West Virginia, where polls show Clinton leading Obama better than two-to-one. Which means that the media's next assignment will be to sound less than absurd dismissing Obama's crushing defeat. It's not easy being a pundit. This will test the best of them.

It's a time to worry.

As if it didn't have enough problems already, the American press is facing an election-year crisis. Long kept afloat  by peddling shock, distortion, and outright calumny about our finest public servants, it now must ask itself: who's going to buy newspapers that suck up to both candidates?

Just today I find John Kass of the Tribune labeling Barack Obama "the gentle faun of American politics, supported for years by a compliant, yearning media eager to portray him as a reformer." And Arianna Huffington at huffingtonpost.com fretting about "the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society." Says Huffington, "Every time McCain screws up, the media jump all over themselves to make it better, as if grandpa had said something embarrassing at the dinner table and it needed to be smoothed over as quickly as possible."

Mind you, a presidential showdown between Bambi and Grandpa Walton figures to be a classic, especially if Bambi's running mate is Scarlett O'Hara (Maureen Dowd in the Tuesday NYT), and Zeb Walton's is Mary Poppins (Dowd again.) But, face it, both Kass and Huffington have a point. What if it's more than a point -- what if they're basically right? Well, rest assured that Kass is no acolyte of Obama's, or Huffington of McCain's. They've put us on notice --  not that this fall's coverage will be long on rainbows and bluebirds and short on grit, but that the campaign itself conceivably could be lost in the cut and slash of media waging a civil war.

Given that Barack Obama so obviously hasn't closed the deal, as they say, with blue-collar Democrats, the question is why, and reporter John McCormick makes some useful observations in Friday's Tribune. Obama's "sometimes aloof," can sound "a bit smug," and "tends to pace across the stage as if there is a giant blackboard behind him." What's more, according to a Tribune analysis, he "tends to speak two grade levels above" Hillary Clinton -- high school senior to her high school sophomore.

What all this adds up to is an apparent deficiency of what pundits who probably don't have it either like to call the "common touch." I sounded this alarm myself  back in 2006, but the matter went untended and now the partridges have come home to roost.

If there's an undertone to McCormick's matter-of-fact report it's more amused than alarmed. Nobody likes a didact, but Obama actually was a professor -- he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And McCormick rounds up a colleague to testify that "the notion that he looks down on working people is the most ludicrous thing you could imagine" and a former student to say that "he was one of the least hubristic professors I had."

So now we have both a University of Chicago law professor and a U. of C. law school graduate vouching for Obama as a man of the people.

It's a start. 

On Tuesday the New York Times ran an op-ed piece in which a couple of academics and a former defense department official proposed some questions for General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who'd flown in from Iraq to be grilled by Congress.   

Because that was the point of their visit, right? To face tough questions from the people's representatives? The nation's at war. The people running it are accountable. Petraeus and Crocker didn't come all this way just so three candidates for president could strut their stuff.

But did the coverage focus on the questions and the answers? No. Tribune headline: "Gen. Petraeus answers his next boss: Presidential candidates take turns grilling commander." Sun-Times headline: "Top Iraq general faces next commander in chief." New York Times headline: "At Hearings, a Chance to Explain Iraq Views and Audition as Commander in Chief." 

Those headlines would do if senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama had led the questioning. The coverage offered no evidence that they did. The Tribune article (top story in the Wednesday paper) offered details on a "complex, often indirect discussion" between Petraeus and the three senators who seek the White House. Note the verbs employed: ". . . said McCain. . . . McCain's assertion. . . . she said. . . . Clinton said. . . . Obama acknowledged. . . . Obama told Crocker. . . . McCain said. . . . Clinton argued. . . . Obama contended. . . . Obama also suggested. . . . McCain said..."

Did any of the three senators ever actually ask the two witnesses anything -- in the old-fashioned sense of not knowing but wanting to find out? The Sun-Times wasn't reassuring. Here I read that "McCain asked questions designed to support his argument that the United States should maintain its troop presence in Iraq." But that would be the sort of question to which the desired answer is "Doggone right!" "You said a mouthful," or "I couldn't have put it better myself." 

Meanwhile, "Clinton argued" and "Obama pressed." 

The Times story (registration is required for this and other Times sites) told us that McCain "said there was significant progress in Iraq" and that Clinton disagreed, but that the two of them "reserved their real fire for each other." Meanwhile, Obama called the war a "massive strategic blunder." But finally, a breakthrough. The Times reported, "'What conditions would have to exist for you to recommend to the president that the current strategy is not working?' Mrs. Clinton asked General Patraeus, with only a slight edge of exasperation in her voice." An actual question had been cited in a newspaper! It sounded rhetorical -- according to the Times Clinton promptly declared that the conditions "are unclear, they lack specificity." But a rhetorical question beats none at all. Another such question was attributed to McCain. Wondering about the recent fighting in Basra he asked Patraeus, "What's the lesson that we're to draw from that, that 1,000 Iraqi army and police deserted or underperformed?" and then told the general, "Suffice it to say, it was a disappointment."

In a separate story, "Petraeus Urges Halt in Weighing New Cut in Force" (this was the page-one story, to the Times's credit), Clinton "cited," Obama "restated his view," and McCain "argued." A sidebar was labeled, "What the Candidates Said."

Eventually I found something wonderful on the Times Web site -- video links to and full transcripts of the interrogations of all three senators. Give them credit. McCain gave a nine-minute statement in which he praised Patraeus and Crocker to the heavens, but then he settled into seven minutes and 40 seconds of innocuous questioning. Clinton spoke of her reservations about the war for four minutes and 38 seconds and then asked questions for another eight and a half minutes. As for Obama, he plunged right into his Q & A. After five minutes he called it off, asked the chair's indulgence, and for the next eight minutes and 16 seconds made a "couple of key points" about Iraq that demonstrated how troubled he is. At one point he even posed a question to Crocker, though he allowed that "maybe it's a rhetorical question" and told the ambassador "you don't necessarily have to answer it."  

Maureen Dowd wrote a column for the Times's oped page that focused on the testimony and pretty much ignored the candidates. In her account, "a confused Chuck Hagel asked the pair. . . . Senator Biden asked a trenchant, if attenuated, question. . . . Senator John Warner asked the essential question," and Barbara Boxer was the "voice of reason, [asking] 'Why is it, after all we have given, . . . it's the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?'" 

As a rule of thumb, questions from noncandidates don't seem to be as newsworthy as nonquestions from candidates. 

I’m not saying you’ll never see a bad picture by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, but I’m pretty sure you’ll never see a naïve one, certainly not in the pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair. So just now people are talking about her cover for the April Vogue: a bellowing LeBron James, basketball superstar, one arm around the waist of a delighted Gisele Bundchen, supermodel.  “She looks like she’s on her way to something fashionable and exciting,” comments essayist Jemele Hill at ESPN.com. “He looks like he’s on his way to a pickup game for serial killers.” And Hill notes that the blogosphere has been commenting on the “striking resemblance to the racially charged image of King Kong enveloping his very fair-skinned lady love interest.”

On the other hand, someone commented, "I mean how could they take a simple thing like a picture and turn it into a racial thing." That's at FOX Sports at MSN, where they ran a poll on whether the cover was racist and 77 percent of some 400,000 votes said it wasn't. I don't think it's racist either, but Hill says there are “racial undertones” to Liebovitz’s cover, and of course she’s right and it's no accident. James looks every inch the master of his domain, Bundchen seems larkishly carefree (that is, she registers larkishly carefree, her assignment), and I couldn’t help but think the first time I studied the cover about how far we’ve come since Emmett Till. 

What’s wrong with racial undertones anyway? Why deny them? We can't have the national conversation about race that Barack Obama just called for and flinch at racial undertones. If race weren’t a context that alters whatever it touches, there’d be no need for the conversation. Hill locates a white professor who’s written a book about black athletes and who complains that Vogue opted for “primitive racial emotion as opposed to something tasteful and edifying.” There’s an oxymoron! The cover’s edifying because it’s tasteless -- tasteless in its emanation of something illicit. Sometimes I think the credo of high style is “First, be tasteless,” and those times when tastelessness forces people to analyze why they’re offended, that seems like a pretty good credo.

Liebovitz, by the way, took the family picture Obama used on his Christmas card not long ago. And while we're on the subject, where would Obama be politically if he had a white wife? Would the black vote still solidly support him? Would he still be the first black presidential candidate that millions of whites could imagine voting for?

The last sensational and controversial cover of Leibovitz's that I can remember was for Vanity Fair’s 2006 Hollywood issue, the one with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, both nude, posing with the issue’s art director, Tom Ford. The story behind this cover was that Ford had been a last-minute replacement for Rachel McAdams, who showed up for the shoot, was told to take her clothes off, and skedaddled.

That shoot did go wrong. The right cover, the shocking cover, would have had McAdams in the picture with her clothes on. Of course Johansson and Knightley would never have gone along with it. Posing naked with a saturnine Ford was high style, but alongside a demurely attired McAdams they’d have looked like submissive tramps.

An approving nod to the Sun-Times for finding it no big deal that Barack Obama is on friendly terms with Bill Ayers, even though, back in the day, Ayers was a Weatherman who "bombed the U.S. Capitol, a bathroom in the Pentagon, and even cased out the White House." The Sun-Times regrets that Ayers "remains sadly unreflective about his Weatherman days, as revealed in his memoir Fugitive Days. . . . But Ayers, it is also true to say, has since followed in the footsteps of the great Chicago social worker Jane Addams, crusading for education and juvenile justice reform. His 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, has been praised for exposing how Cook County's juvenile justice system all but eliminates a child's chance for redemption."

Having gone so far as to compare Ayers to Jane Addams, the Sun-Times beat a swift retreat to a shrug. "Ayers," the editorial summed up, 'is nothing more than an aging lefty with a foolish past who is doing good."

I admired Fugitive Days for answering the $64 question, "What were they thinking?" To me, his refusal to disassociate himself from his old self made the book credible, though others wanted something more ashamed and repentant. At any rate, a few days after the book was published 9-11 happened. That same morning, the New York Times carried an interview with Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn that began with Ayers saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." The book was damned and disappeared.

Writing about William F. Buckley a few days ago, I quoted conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg scowling at the Obama-Ayers relationship. How come, Goldberg wondered, "being a radical means never having to say you're sorry"?

Is Ayers, for all his good works, unapologetic and unreflective?

I interviewed him when his book came out. "I gave up something precious--my own individual mind and heart," he told me then. "The distinction I'm making is that I don't think we should apologize for our extremism. I should apologize for a lot of other things."

A cliche is a figure of speech you get by without. If you use it yourself it’s vernacular.

At the end of every year the rhetoricians are heard from, and I was troubled to see it is what it is show up in a couple discussions about phrases it was time to let be. According to an Associated Press report carried in the Tribune, it was just chosen by Lake Superior State University for its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. But then so was waterboarding. The AP says the LSSU choices are taken seriously enough that a previous year’s were posted on an Arizona Supreme Court bulletin board as language for attorneys to avoid. The U.S. Supreme Court faces a landmark ruling concerning habeas corpus and Guantanamo, and if the justices banished waterboarding from the discussion they’d be sneered off the bench.

Even if it is what it is says nothing at all (and I don’t think it does), it says it in a nicely Zen-like way. Consider the case made against it by columnist Rem Rieder in the December/January American Journalism Review. Rieder’s theme is the need for frank talk in hard times; he scorns publishers who order cutbacks and promise inanely that their papers will "do more with less." He rightly salutes a Spokane editor who warned his staff that cuts were coming and told them bluntly, "Doing more with less is corporate-speak BS and you won't hear it from me. There is no way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig.”"

But then Rieder digresses. "While we’re banning expressions, how about adding 'It is what it is' to the dustbin? Is it just me or is this suddenly ubiquitous catchphase truly annoying? First of all, what does it even mean? Are there lots of people out there who think it is what it's not? Second, it carries the connotation that we're stuck with the status quo, no matter how melancholy, and nothing can be done about it."

Not true. It simply means "a pig is a pig." Rieder has missed his own point.

Whatever. (Most nominated word for LSSU’s 1997 list. Yet still useful for making abrupt transitions.) The word of the year for 2007, as chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary, is locavore. It wouldn’t be my choice. I propose the fast-finishing transformational. Here’s Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on December 19: "I still don’t know what Bali was about, but I do know that it was incremental, not transformational--and incrementalism, when it comes to clean energy, is just a hobby." Here’s Mary Schmich in the Tribune on December 2: "Sixteen. It’s a transformational age. . . . Between the ages of 16 and 19, moral codes are fixed and futures are charted."

I began seeing transformational everywhere after Andrew Sullivan sensitized me to it with his fine essay in the December Atlantic on Barack Obama. Sullivan sees Obama’s faults acutely, but he supports him for president because, in Sullivan's view, Obama's candidacy is "potentially transformational." Sullivan thinks America is in dire need of transformation, and my guess is that in their bones most Americans agree with him. No American under 30 has lived through a presidential election without a Bush or Clinton on the ballot.

From a news release e-mailed Tuesday:

Roland S. Martin joins Essence Magazine

Award-winning journalist joins Essence as special correspondent; launches new blog on Essence.com.

(August 7, 2007) New York, NY-Award-winning journalist and CNN contributor, Roland S. Martin, will launch his new blog on essence.com today with the notorious question, "Is Obama Black Enough?" Martin will post to the site, the online home of ESSENCE, the preeminent lifestyle magazine for African-American women, twice daily and will cover a myriad of issues including politics, race, religion, relationships, parenting, and more.

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To: Campaign Headquarters

Re: Our candidate’s current 8.4%

The Problem: We’re sucking exhaust fumes.

The Solution: It’s time to step on the gas.

The Opportunity: 90,700.

That's the number I came up with when I googled “Obama” and “black enough.” As in “Is Obama black enough?” It’s a big number. It tells us people are asking, “Is Obama black enough?”

Our job: To define the answer.

From the looks of it, about 80 percent of the people asking “Is Obama black enough” are reporters with deadlines. For instance, Dennis Byrne has raised the topic, and so have John Kass and Leonard Pitts, and Clarence Page and Dawn Turner Trice, to name just a few celebrated columnists at the Chicago Tribune. Lynn Sweet’s been on it at the Sun-Times and just the other day Mary Mitchell upped the ante with a front-page story asking if Michelle Obama is black enough.

Now Roland Martin, former editor of the Chicago Defender, has joined the fray.

Remember, reporters are important agenda setters. If enough newspapers in enough towns hammer away at the same question, sooner or later some people will begin to think it could be important. That’s what we’re beginning to see with “Is Obama black enough?” Our push polls show that when voters are called at home on Sunday evening and asked these questions --

“When you vote for president do you look first for the candidate who is exactly black enough?”
“How important is it to you to elect a president who is exactly black enough even if his policies put the nation in imminent peril of conquest by jihadist hordes?”
“Do you think electing a white president sends the wrong kind of signal to the rest of the world no matter how wise and resolute that white president is?”

-- it turns out there’s an undercurrent of surly discontent we can tap into.

But we’ve got to get out ahead of the curve on this one. The candidate needs to remind voters of what a long hard road America has traveled since he was a happy, barefoot boy in the 50s with a stay-at-home mom.

And then 1960! What a proud time to be an American! “Americans didn’t elect John F. Kennedy president because he was just a little bit Catholic,” the candidate will say. “Any more than Americans elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he was just a little bit crippled.

“An America that advances by half steps is not the America I know and love, nor is it the America the world fears and envies and respects. Do we want to send the world the message that the only kind of black man it is willing to elect president is someone many say is not black enough!

“I personally find that idea deeply offensive. And I find it astonishing that the junior senator from Illinois is willing to send such a message.

“I will not be party to it. Americans, show the world what we're made of. Elect a black-enough black or none at all!”

And etc.

This message will resonate especially well among southern white voters who used to be Democrats but have migrated in recent years to the party of Lincoln. It will also find favor among northern black nationalists. These two blocs could form the basis of a grassroots coalition that will make this candidacy the talk of Sunday morning television.

“Some say the bell tolls for America. I say freedom rings.” (Good line. Work into speeches.)

Edward McClelland, a frequent Reader contributor who's covered Barack Obama for this paper in campaigns gone by, offers a few stinging recollections in a critical but ultimately friendly commentary posted Sunday by Salon. DailyKos.com describes McClelland's piece as "incredibly negative," but if you think that, you've drunk the "Obama juice" McClelland writes about and believe the senator is beyond criticism.

But DailyKos makes an interesting observation. Originally Salon touted the story on its home page with this display copy: "How Obama Learned to Be a Natural: Today he drips with charisma and inspires fawning admiration from all quarters. But Obama began his journey as an uppity young man with little political future." DailyKos argues that the word uppity in the intro guarantees that McClelland's story will be read as a slash-and-burn job.

It's a word that doesn't appear in the story itself, at least not in the published version. "I did use the word uppity in my original draft--referring to Obama as a cocky young man," McClelland allows, "but that was changed to 'presumptuous,' understandably. I wasn't thinking of the racial implications when I wrote it. After all, I was talking about one black politician challenging another, so uppity wouldn't have the same racial connotation in that context.  Maybe the copy editor saw that version and seized on the word.... It definitely influenced the way some readers looked at the piece."

Smug. Presumptuous. Insults safe in any company.

Remember Billy Crystal as Fernando, the Latin dandy who understood it’s much more important to look good than to feel good? The Sun-Times has become the Fernando of newspapers, fabulously designed even when there’s nothing much in it to read. But layout won’t be enough for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and to carry out the all-important, highly coveted assignment of following and writing about it, the Sun-Times has chosen none other than Jennifer Hunter, the publisher’s wife.

It has to be difficult being the publisher’s wife. When you’re given a post on the editorial board and then a column – blessings previously bestowed on Hunter – mopes in the newsroom talk. They draw the obvious parallels between the high-living old regime of Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel, who was some sort of editorial VP entitled to stick her nose in anywhere, and the upright new crew led by publisher John Cruickshank and Hunter, who's apparently similarly entitled. What’s changed? they ask. And when Hunter asks for and gets the Obama beat, they consider the question answered.

But then it has to be difficult being a publisher with a wife like Hunter. You’re damned at the office if you give her big opportunities, and probably damned at home if you don’t. In her favor, Hunter has a lot of experience as a journalist, and just because most of it was in Canada doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. Her first piece on Obama, February 9, was a solidly researched story on the political rise of Lincoln, whose mantle Hunter sees Obama hoping to don -- she cites his decision to launch his presidential campaign from Springfield’s Old State Capitol. Tossing around terms like daring and hubris and serious chutzpah, she told Obama to watch his step. 

But someone with her nose for vainglory should be embarrassed by the italicized boilerplate that's apparently going to run after each of her pieces: “Jennifer Hunter is an award-winning journalist who is following Sen. Barack Obama on his run for the White House.” The sulking Sun-Times newsroom consists of almost nobody but award-winning journalists. Hell, this is Chicago. I’m an award-winning journalist myself.  If Hunter thinks she needs to say anything about herself, she should say she’s the publisher’s wife and then write so well the city forgives her.

“We got more than a game here -- we got history,” said the voice-over in the second-quarter commercial. “Not just getting here, but what getting here represents.”

There was a time when milestones in civil rights weren’t so warmly welcomed, when landmark events that represented progress and justice to some Americans meant the crumbling of hallowed traditions to others, and dissenters in high places were sure to mutter, “Too much, too fast.” Frito-Lay’s celebration of the latest milestone, a Super Bowl with two black head coaches,  gives us reason to suspect -- with absolutely no disrespect intended for Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith -- that the big civil rights battles are behind us.

We’re definitely in another era. I just read Debra Dickerson’s essay for Salon on Barack Obama, who “isn’t black,” says Dickerson, because he’s not the descendant of African slaves. Dickerson apparently has in mind two categories of African-Americans, indistinguishable to some of us but not to others, or possibly to themselves -- sort of the way it was in Rwanda. I did some googling but I couldn’t pin down whether Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith are descended from slaves. If they’re not—well, shame on Frito-Lay for botching its due diligence.

Newspaper readers might be diminishing in number, but they’re not getting any less inquisitive or ornery. In September I heard from Chicagoan Frank Palmer, a frequent correspondent. "The nation’s press," he wrote, "was up in arms when the Sudanese arrested a Yank reporter for the Trib." This was Paul Salopek, who spent over a month as a prisoner in Sudan, where he was accused of spying. "Freedom of the press is a universal principle," Palmer continued. "Every government should be held to it. Well, almost every government. It turns out that the U.S. military has been holding an AP photographer for FIVE MONTHS. No charges have been filed. Want to bet that the printer’s ink spilled over this case won’t be a fraction of that spilled over the earlier one?" I didn’t take the bet.

Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi Sunni, was arrested April 12 by U.S. marines in Ramadi, and he’s been a prisoner since – at this point over 11 months. The U.S. military in Iraq has told journalists that Hussein's been linked to al Qaeda members and to Iraqi insurgents. The Associated Press lobbied quietly on his behalf until September, when the exasperated wire service went public. "Bilal Hussein has been held in volation of Iraqi law and in disregard to the Geneva Conventions," AP CEO Tom Curley said in a statement. "He must be charged under the Iraqi system or released immediately."

The December-January issue of the American Journalism Review carries a ten-page story on Hussein. In it, Curley’s quoted as saying the AP has tried to investigate every specific claim the military has made against its photographer and found them to be "false or total exaggerations." Says Curley, "I have no problem saying the Pentagon lied to us more than once."

AJR is a trade magazine. There was a flurry of coverage in the popular press after the AP brought Hussein to the public’s attention, but he hasn’t gotten much attention since -- though as long as the AP is working on his behalf it can hardly be said the media have forgotten him. (To keep up with the coverage, visit the Web site the AP has established for Hussein.) AP spokesperson Linda Wagner says, "Some blogs, such as Daily Kos, have referenced the situation recently, and a number of year-end stories about the dangers of being a journalist have mentioned Bilal's detention."

What about the Tribune, which was rightly preoccupied with Salopek last summer? It published a toughly worded editorial on September 21. "America is in Iraq to help foster a democratic system and the rule of law," it concluded. "That means Hussein deserves to see the evidence against him and respond to the charges. If he was using a press pass as a cover to help terrorists, bring that out in a fair trial. Otherwise, free him." According to the Tribune’s archives, the paper hasn’t mentioned Hussein since.

But newspapers can’t write about everything -- that's why it's so easy to accuse them of sins of omission. Tribune reader Robert Pruter of Elmhurst is grumpy because he caught columnist John Kass writing something that in his eyes was not only nasty but dead wrong. On December 22 Kass’s subject was Barack Obama, and he said this: "He’s a decent fellow and I like him. He might make a fine liberal president someday. And though I disagree with him on policy, I’d bet my White Sox tickets that his wife, Michelle, won’t keep 800 secret FBI files of their political enemies hidden in some White House bedroom."

Pruter recognized this as a shot at Obama's competition, Hillary Clinton. Hundreds of FBI files of Republicans turned up in the White House early in the Clinton presidency, and word was that the president’s wife had ordered them brought in. But in the end the office of the independent counsel concluded that a low-level White House aide had requested the files on his own authority because he mistakenly thought they were on people who still worked at the White House and had to be cleared for access.

"Filegate," as it was called, obsessed President Clinton’s critics, including independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward would write, "[Starr] also would proceed with the FBI files probe. Again, Clinton was absolved. His staff had written a 400-page memo showing that they had no evidence tying Clinton to the files. Why continue? ‘My order says I have to focus on Anthony Marceca and others!’ Starr said in protest, referring to the Army detailee who had worked updating FBI files collected by the White House.... He had a duty." Robert Ray, who was Starr’s successor, shut the investigation down.

Pruter e-mailed Kass to tell him he was "appalled" by the column and to walk him through the facts. Pruter wrote editor Ann Marie Lipinski, whom he mistakenly referred to as the publisher, about Kass, advising her "to terminate his employment." Leaving no stone unturned, he also e-mailed the Tribune's public editor.

He says no one at the Tribune got back to him. The column was left to speak for itself in the Tribune archives, mainly about Kass's dislike of the Clintons.

John Kass has a theory about Barack Obama and why everyone likes him. "It's as if writers are helplessly channeling the brilliant Obama/Daley media crisis manager David Axelrod, who is using secret powers to enter their minds from afar," writes the Tribune columist.

That could be. I have another theory. Axelrod used to manage the late senator Paul Simon's campaigns. I think Axelrod has sent Obama Simon's Christmas card list. I used to get a card every year from the Simons, whom I didn't know. This year for the first time I got a card -- a "Happy Holidays" card -- from the Obamas, whom I don't know.

But their card is a little different. Unless memory fails, Senator Simon didn't send out cards featuring a family portrait by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Or if he did, he kept the photo credit to himself. Whereas the Obamas' card says "Photo by: Annie Leibovitz" on the back, right above "Authorized and paid for by Obama 2010, Inc." (On Daily Kos right now there's a discussion about how it measures up to the portraits on Christmas cards from John Edwards and the Clintons.) The photo appears to be an outtake from this shoot for Men's Vogue, which raised some eyebrows when it accompanied a profile by Jacob Weisberg earlier this year.

It's one thing to get called out for a tricky little real estate deal with Tony Rezko--at some point Obama was obliged to show he's a true man of his state and knows his shenanigans as well as the next pol. But a Christmas card by Annie Leibovitz? I wondered if I wasn't actually looking at a rather crafty dirty trick perpetrated by political enemies conniving to paint him as something of a snob. Surely Obama himself would never announce to every constituent he sends a holiday card to that he's too good for the hard-working yeoman photographers of Illinois.

Or ıs he runnıng as the junior senator from Vogue? (Who, incidentally, figures to run strong in the neighboring state of Vanity Fair?)