With apologies to Jon Stewart who said it first: you don't know Dick.

The good old Prince of Darkness is at it again. No, not Cheney this time. Undeterred by the failure of his predictions for a Hillary Clinton – Condaleezza Rice face off in the 2008 election, he’s now decided that the Obama administration has run its course. Check out Dick Morris’ comments about the supposedly floundering Obama presidency in his recent contribution to Rasmussen Reports (hat tip: HNN).

Dick's argument?

1. “Superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power. In this context, polls are like parliamentary votes of no confidence in European systems. While the government does not fall if it loses in the polling, it limps on until either its ratings improve or it is voted out of office at the next election.”

Now, Richard, time for a little constitutional law 101. The United States does not have a "presidential system." It has a tripartite political structure in which a share of power resides with an independent congress, and in particular with the Senate. This hasn't been too obvious recently, because the only bills the Bush administration tried to pass were tax cuts. Obama, with some justice, believes that congress needs to be involved in the legislative process; a view he shares with every other major legislative president of the twentieth century. Julian Zelizer’s interesting piece on congress and the presidency at Politico suggests that Obama may still need to improve how he handles Congress. But he has no hope of getting his agenda passed if he simply ignores the reality of congressional power and accepts Morris' claim that we live in a presidential system alone.

2. “Now Obama faces the loss of power that comes with dropping poll numbers. The two early symptoms of this creeping impotence are his inability to pass the union card-check legislation or to force action on healthcare before the August recess, once highly touted administration goals.”

Can we get some perspective here, please? A delay, not even a defeat, on the most ambitious healthcare reform bill for a generation suddenly means that the Obama presidency is neutered? Obama comes across as too wonkish in a single press conference and then gets sidetracked on Henry Louis Gates, and suddenly he’s heading for failure?

The great ability of arrogant people is to overestimate their own importance. CIA operatives conclude that they can bring down governments. Newspaper editors conclude that they turn elections. Pollsters decide that the little sheets of paper they bring to the Oval Office really determine which laws pass and which ones fail. But it ain't true.

3. “As is usually the case, the apparent cause of these defeats -- the buildup of public disapproval of both bills -- is not what is really at work. Rather, it is the president's obvious inability to improve the economy that is exacting the daily toll in his approval ratings evident in all of the surveys... 

“Obama's very activism in promoting the stimulus package in January as a cure-all has set him up for failure now that he cannot deliver on his overblown promises. Unlike Clinton's presidency, Obama's cannot be rescued by good public relations. His obvious failure to turn the economy around drags him down at every turn.”

Obama has been in office roughly six months. Patience is a virtue. Mr. Morris, you’d do well to think back to Ronald Reagan’s first term, when the president took a hammering over the failure of supply side economics to improve the economy, then was triumphantly reelected in 1984 when recovery seemed to suggest it was morning again in America. I have my disagreements and agreements with Obama’s approach to the economic crisis. Only time will prove how effective it is. But the fact is that he’s got till 2012 to get it right, and quite frankly the chances are that even if he did nothing the economy will be in recovery by then.

4. “Will the group of moderate Democrats that is increasingly blocking his programs prove to be a lasting coalition? As long as Obama's economic failures continue, they will grow and harden in their opposition to his radical agenda. Once their president's popularity tanks, Democratic centrists will not look forward to running in an election defending his policies. The race to distance themselves from his failures will be on.

“That’s not how Republicans work. Among the GOP, the tendency to hunker down and follow the leader into oblivion is all too obvious. The elections of 2006 and 2008 provide vivid examples. But Democrats, particularly those who sit nervously astride red states, are not made that way. Their proclivity toward dissent and independence, muzzled in times of presidential popularity, emerges when approval ratings drop.”

Of course people who advocate change are more likely to disagree than people who advocate stasis. “A new direction” naturally leads to the question “which direction?”, whereas “let’s stay here” doesn’t need any follow ups. But Democrats are politicians, too, and Democrats in congress should recognize that their only opportunity of collapsing the Republican majorities that have dominated American politics since the 1980s, is to be effective. Obama is immensely popular. Despite recent poll data, there is evidence to suggest he can pull people on his coat tails. If not him, who are the Democrats going to present as their public face? Nancy Pelosi?

Maybe Morris is right that Obama needs to leverage his bully pulpit as he did with the stimulus package. But let’s face it, Obama’s strategy of including congress in free and open debate and focusing on co-operation as far as possible has worked so far. People (including me) have been saying since the election that he needs to take a more combative approach, and pretty much every time they’ve been wrong and Obama’s been right.

Who knows how well Obama will be considered by history? In fact, who knows how Obama will be regarded in six months? If US drones get a freak hit on Bin Laden, these supposedly all-powerful sliding polls will fly off the charts. At the end of the day, late July in a president’s first year of office is, even for a troublemaker like Morris, perhaps a little premature to be writing any president off.

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We've been lied to again

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece in his blog today about the threats made by the Obama administration to the British government if they obeyed a high court injunction to release details of the (mis)treatment of a British internee at Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed.

Essentially, the Obama administration threatened that intelligence cooperation with the British could be cut off if they went ahead and disclosed what kind of abusive actions had been taking place at Guantanamo. Greenwald cites a report in The Guardian which reveals that "threats were issued by the Obama administration not only in the form of that previously disclosed letter, but also personally by Hillary Clinton in a May meeting with him and other British officials."

1. Americans can hardly think this is what they voted for when they elected a man who spoke out so vehemently against the abuses that took place under the Bush administration. As with the decision to withhold release of the second torture photos, the administration has obviously concluded that there is still a lot of dirty information to come out that could further damage the United States' already horrendous reputation around the world. A classic tendency in the public is to underestimate how stable policies are between succeeding administrations, but this is surprising all the same. 

2. When this controversy first hit back in February - after the British government redacted the information it gave to the High Court - Foreign Secretary David Miliband denied that he had been subject to any pressure from the United States. So, ahem, that would be a complete fabrication then, David? Lying through your teeth were you?

When it comes to torture, the hands are just too bloody. Politicians on either side of the Atlantic have concluded that the public can't handle the truth, or rather if the truth came out none of them would get to keep their jobs (although I'm sure they justify it to themselves in terms of protecting the national interest). Are we really in a position now where, when it comes to torture, we can't trust a single word that any politician says?

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Shatner does Palin

Genius:

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Last call on Gates-gate: bad policing but the racism lies elsewhere

Since the main reason the Henry Louis Gates affair is being kept in the news is to derail the health care plan, I suppose it behoves us all to just shut up about the whole thing. But the President declared in his apology that wasn’t an apology last week that this should be considered a “teachable moment.” So with the promise that, unless something miraculous happens to this case, this is the last I’ll be saying about it, here’s my take on exactly what happened on that fateful Monday afternoon in leafy Cambridge.

Note: for the sake of clarity, in this discussion I’m going to define “racism” as “an action predicated upon a prejudicial belief about an individual based on their race.” This isn’t Webster’s or anything, I know!

Stage One: The Call

The call was made by a Portuguese American employee of Harvard Magazine, Lucia Whalen. The full recording is now available from the Washington Post website:



WaPo claims two things in its highly dodgy article about this – first, that Whalen is not white but is “olive skinned”; and second that Crowley was not told their race before arriving. If you listen to the recording, you’ll realise that neither of these things is exactly true. In respect to the colour of the witness, Whalen is obviously calling on behalf of an old lady neighbour, who doesn’t want to be identified and who made the initial spot. “She interrupted me, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all,” Whalen says.

Nevertheless, Whalen is obviously trying to take responsibility for the call as a good public citizen protecting an older person. So until we know something about the other witness, we cannot categorically eliminate the prospect of racism based on Whalen being of Portuguese stock. (As if somehow coming from Portugal guarantees you aren't racist, anyway! What, only certain ethnicities are racist?) Second, the unmentioned lady clearly said that she’s not sure about one of their races and that the other might be Hispanic. This information – "not sure, one might be Hispanic" – is passed on to Crowley.

Nevertheless, I personally can’t see much evidence for the initial police call being driven by racist assumptions: that is, that the call wouldn’t have been made if the two people jimmying the lock were white, or that the police responded differently because of the idea that those involved weren’t white. I don’t really believe that the possibility that one might be Latino is likely to have made much difference to Crowley. Maybe with the unknown lady, but that will remain a mystery. I'll concede that this is a gut call, and perhaps if I was an African American I might think differently.

In fact, what’s most noticeable about the call is that Whalen isn’t especially nervous, that she clearly raises the possibility that they might be residents and that they saw suitcases, and that the operator seems kind of seem unimpressed by the whole potential crime. None of this ambiguity and lack of urgency is relayed to Crowley by the police operator, who instead says there’s a possible break-in in progress with two individuals with suitcases – clearly making it sound like the suitcases were there to bundle stuff into, rather than a reason to doubt whether a crime was taking place. So, if Sgt. Crowley did turn up primed for dealing with criminals rather than citizens and was therefore heavy-handed, it probably wasn’t because of a racial dimension so much as ambiguous information being relayed to him. Even then, we probably can’t be too harsh – this all took place in a matter of minutes, after all.

Stage Two: The Incident

The events of the initial meeting are disputed (see previous post for the police reports and Gates’ account of what happened). First, interestingly, the police reports suggest that Crowley meets Whalen first, who then tells him that two “black males” had broken in. Given the recordings of the 911 call, I find it very hard to believe that she had changed her mind about the race from “unsure, possibly Hispanic” to “both black males” in the few minutes between the call and Crowley arriving on the scene. To be honest, I don’t think is a sign of racism, either, though: I think that Crowley just misremembered the conversation and wrote “black males” into his report based on the fact that he subsequently found two black males in the house (in order to accentuate the aura of authority that the police report naturally holds). Again, not racism but poor policing.

Next, Crowley sees Gates and asks him to step out onto the porch, Gates refuses. Both sides agree that this is what happened.

Next, Gates asks Crowley to identify himself. Gates says Crowley refused, Crowley says that he did. I don’t see any way of knowing who is correct on this. Obviously, it's significant in that if he did refuse it fuelled Gates' fear that he was being treated abusively; but we'll never know. I'd call it fifty-fifty.

Next, Gates provides identification to prove he is who he is says he is. Gates says that during this process the policeman entered his house without permission; Crowley suggests that Gates began threatening him with his social power – “you don’t know who you’re dealing with”, etc. – and accusing him of being racist – “this is what happens to a black man in America”. Again, we can’t be certain what happened, but I think the most convincing explanation here is that Gates saw red, and that this ultimately caused Crowley to see red too. Based on his life’s study of the issue of racism in America, he naturally assumed that the white police officer was treating him harshly because either he was a racist or the “neighbour” who called it in was a racist.

He hadn't heard the calls, he didn't know anything about Crowley, so he made a generalisation. I can’t see any evidence he was correct. That, unfortunately, suggests to me that the racist in this conversation was Henry Louis Gates, who assumed that just because the officer was white and (possibly) behaving like an asshole, he was doing it because Gates was black rather than because he was a cop. I'm white, and I've have American cops treat me like shit for no reason before (another story, though).

Finally, the row extends outside the house. A crowd gathers. Crowley arrests Gates, calls a wagon, and has him hauled off. Given what just happened, I think it’s far more likely that Crowley arrested Gates because he was angry – because he was angry about being accused of being a racist, amongst other things – not because Gates was black. Again, the likelihood of abuse of police powers is greater than the evidence of prejudicial behaviour because Gates was black.

Stage Three: The Aftermath

First, all charges are dropped, suggesting that the police knew they were on dodgy legal ground. Second, Gates calls in the big guns, letting the press know about what happened. Obama is informed, presumably by one of his press people. Third, Obama is asked in a press conference what the incident says about race in America and – as I pointed out at the time – makes three clear points. First, he denies that there is any evidence yet present that the incident was racially motivated. Second, he objects to police heavy-handedness, saying that “any of us” would be angry about being arrested in our own houses. Third, that there is a continuing problem of racial profiling in America.

This ignites the firestorm, based almost exclusively – whether said explicitly or implicitly – on the assumption that Obama is backing his buddy because they’re both members of the black community’s talented tenth. Instead of headlines reading "Obama refuses to say Gates' arrest driven by race", we get headlines saying "Obama attacks police as stupid" and "Obama defends his friend Henry Louis Gates, who claims to be a victim of racial profiling." Both (i) class and (ii) racial tensions feed into the hostility toward Obama/Gates here, not to mention (iii) the partisan need by Republicans to distract attention from health care and (iv) the media’s need to get a good story by pulling their golden child president down a peg or two.

Looking at this, again I think there is evidence that Gates’ claims of racial profiling are prejudicial, based on knowledge of the last few hundred years of African American history rather than evidence of what happened on the day. However, I see no evidence whatsoever that Obama showed any sign of racial prejudice. Meanwhile, the public and the media reaction was filled to the brim with racial assumptions and little knowledge of events. Racism, racism, everywhere.

Conclusions

Look closely at this reconstruction and you’ll see there’s massive unknowns. But it broadly sounds right to me. My judgement, then, is that:

1. Gates made an unfortunate race-based generalisation – understandable, perhaps, but ultimately racist according to the definition I first provided.

2. There is no clear evidence that Crowley at any point behaved in a racist way. If he did behave in a racist manner, it was very subtle, and a response to an idea of "uppity black men" that was stimulated after Gates responded aggressively to his questioning. By contrast, there is to my mind plenty of evidence that the operator gave him ambiguous information, and that Crowley abused his powers because he objected to being shouted at and being accused of being a racist by Gates. I can certainly believe that a police officer would haul a white person off for talking back just as easily. Bad policing, yes; racism, I can't see much of it.

3. Obama made no racist statement and exhibited no racist assumptions at any point. His declaration that arresting a man in his own home was excessive, still seems to me to be spot on.

4. The public – us – whipped up by the media, saw the whole thing as entirely bound up with our assumptions about race in America. Certainly if you look back to my first post on the issue, you’ll see from the title that I was willing to accept that the whole thing was a product of racial profiling, even if I also talked more generally about the abuse of police "disorderly behaviour" powers. Many people continue to think that; just as many others things that there was some kind of African American cabal between Gates and Obama to destroy America’s police force.

So, racism yes, but not really on Crowley’s part. He was just a cop who messed up because he doesn’t like people talking back to him. The worst racists in this whole sorry mess had nothing to do with the initial incident, they just reported on it and read about it in their newspapers.

And that’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. Unless someone wants to prove me wrong!

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We haven’t heard the last of Sarah Palin

In the lead up to the Ford-Carter election in 1976, reporters were describing the GOP as a “frail and fractured remnant of the party that had swept to an easy victory only four years before.” After Carter’s election, the GOP was almost completely written off by some pundits. In some of their less impressive pieces of electoral analysis, reporters heard the political scientist Nelson Polsby, who should have known better, argue that the “Republicans are so weak that the U.S. no longer has a real two-party system” and Robert Teeter, Ford’s chief pollster, conclude that the GOP had entered “permanent minority status.”

Fast forward to 2009. Palin announces her retirement from Alaskan politics and is widely derided, leaving office today apparently with “her political future clouded by ethics probes, mounting legal bills and dwindling popularity.” With her popularity apparently sliding so badly, her spokespeople are furiously denying this departure is part of a calculated effort to go for national office. “Spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton disputed the notion that Palin is running for president or has media deals lined up. ’I cannot express enough there is no plan after July 26. There is absolutely no plan,’ she told The Associated Press earlier this month. ‘The decision (to quit) was made in the vacuum of what was best for Alaska, and now I'm accepting all the options, but there is nothing planned,’ Stapleton said.”

Yeah, right. And the moose in Alaska don’t think there’s a calculated plan when the helicopter containing Palin and high-powered rifle come bearing down upon them over the snowfields.

Reagan, narrowly defeated by the incumbent, Ford, is an obvious figure for Palin and her advisors to compare her with. Not only because he was and is the great white hero of the new conservatism, but also because his path from defeat in the 1976 primaries to victory in the 1980 presidential election should be exemplary for her, and because he was widely seen as a photogenic but politically empty candidate but managed to take the presidency anyway. (A huge difference here, of course, is that by 1976 Reagan had actually been heavily involved in politics for more than thirty years, not least as Governor of California. Thirty years ago, Palin was still in high school.)

The 1976 primary, like the 2008 general election for Palin, established Reagan as a virtually undisputed heavyweight in the conservative wing of the Republican party, but left the party as a whole in bad shape and the candidate seemingly adrift, on the wrong side of history to many opponents' minds. So the lesson is clear: four years is a long time in politics. To those who quietly hope that Palin is actually worn out from politics and just wants to make money from a book, think again. To those who think her current travails are permanent, think again.

Assuming that Palin thinks we’re in 1976 all over again, then we should expect certain key efforts to develop over the next year or so. First, she and her team will seek to shape the narrative of what happened in 2008. At the moment, there’s two stories competing for dominance in the story of the Republican’s self-destruction against Obama. The first is that the Republicans were hamstrung by Palin, who came across as a ridiculous candidate, who lost all credibility amongst all but a small segment of the population, and who had to be silenced because she knew next to nothing about policy. The second is the Palin was hamstrung by the Republicans, that the real mistake was McCain’s campaign’s decision to silence her, and the GOP should have unleashed the Barracuda, which would have invigorated the Republican base and divided the Democrats.

Obviously, it’s vitally important for Palin that she ensures that Republicans come to believe the latter is the true story. As late as the 1980 primaries, there was still a powerful centrist element (mostly united behind George H. W. Bush) contesting the story behind Ford’s 1976 defeat and arguing that the party needed to play to the centre ground. It was only after 1980 that the story of an unstoppable rise of conservatism since Goldwater in 1964 came to be accepted as unvarnished truth.

She will also, at the same time, need to develop a response to the allegations of political immaturity which were so palpable in 2008 and – if recent polls are anything to go by – now dominate the public’s perception of her. A critical way to do that will be to develop the “learning” story, that the 2008 election – and her experiences after that – have broadened and deepened her. She had the right instincts and character already, they’ll say, and now she’s learning how to use them. Listen to this from TIME’s discussion with Reagan immediately before his primary defeat. “Looking back, Reagan sees his candidacy as an experience that broadened his views and sharpened his skills as a campaigner. He believes that he has been resolute under pressure, relying more on his own instincts than on the advice of aides. He regards his pursuit of the nomination as a good occasion that enabled him to talk with and to people whose hopes and fears are of real concern to him.” Even before he’s out of the running in 1976, and he’s already shaping the message for 1980!

The second thing she’ll need to do, and she’s already implied she’ll be doing this, is to build a corps of conservatives who are personally loyal to her and will give her a big bump early on in any primary campaign, from which she can create a sense of inertia. Clearly, the easiest way for her to do this is to get touring and speaking across the country on behalf of other conservatives. Assuming none of these ethics scandals (or anything else) derail the exercise beforehand, a major indicator of her pulling power as a 2012 candidate will be her attendance schedule in next year’s mid-terms.

And the third is to get associated with some of the major stumbling issues for Obama in the next few years. One of Reagan’s great successes between 1976 and 1980 was in speaking out loudly and repeatedly on the Panama Canal treaties that Carter was negotiating, and which were a red-button issue for many nationalist Americans. Reagan led the Republican opposition to the treaties from outside the machinery of government, and was associated closely with a grassroots direct mailing campaign on the issue. The linkage between 1970s/1980s Republicanism and direct mailing is well known, and analogous perhaps to the grassroots influence of internet players today (hence Palin’s efforts to court the Twitterati and conservative blogosphere elect, presumably, are intended to mimic the same effect, allowing her to orchestrate campaigns without political title or office.)

The great thing about these kind of issues is that you don’t need to be in government to have a view – you just need reporters willing to listen to you – and you don’t have to present an alternative. I’m sure we’ll see Palin picking on a few key issues and tacking herself to them. For the life of me, I’m not sure I believe her current favourite – drilling – is the ideal choice, because there's going to be more and more jobs in alternative energy if Obama's plans start working. And she’s got a long, long way to go to be respected on any foreign policy question. But in politics, four years is a long, long time, and there’s no reason to assume she won’t be able to do these, especially if things go very wrong in Cambodia - erm, I mean, Pakistan.

If Palin can get this stuff right, she can resurrect her career. Unlike many candidates who trade on competence rather than charisma, she's probably better off out of office, because she's less likely to get caught up in corruption scandals. But she'll still need to get busy if she wants to stay on the front line of the political imagination in American life. I think we can safely predict that this is not the end of the Alaska insurgency.

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Chris Rock offers some tips to Skip Gates

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Obama: now shall we all just calm down, please?

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“This is what happens to black men in America!”

Despite my outrage in my previous post, I can’t help but admit that the police report of Gates’ arrest, with its combination of ridiculous standard police protocol reporting speak and image of five foot seven cane-wielding 'gentleman' professoriate, makes for pretty funny reading. (It’s available to read at The Smoking Gun, by the way.) In fact, the scene is pretty irresistible.

The principal officer’s Latino colleague, Carlos Figueroa, reports, “As I stepped in, I heard Sgt. Crowley ask for the gentleman’s information which he stated ‘NO I WILL NOT!’ The gentleman was shouting out to the Sgt. that the Sgt. was a racist and yelled that ‘THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK MEN IN AMERICA!’ As the Sgt. was trying to calm the gentleman, the gentleman shouted ‘You don’t know who your [sic] messing with!’”

More seriously, though, it’s worth comparing the report with Gates’ account of the events to see how it is that both sides in such a situation have ended up seeing themselves as innocent parties (see New York Times caucus blog, about half way down).

In Gates’ recollection, in contrast to the police report, Sgt. Crowley entered the house without permission and refused to give his name or badge number when asked. His refusal to exit the house was because: “If I had stepped outside of my house, he couldn’t come in my house legally without a warrant. He couldn’t arrest me without a warrant. Had I stepped outside he would have slapped handcuffs on me for being under suspicion of breaking and entering because he was responding to a profile.” In short, the behaviour that the officers considered to be disorderly stemmed from Gates' own expectations of police heavy-handedness, based on long evidence of the treatment of black men in America. (Aside: the exact point Obama was trying to make in his press conference remarks.)

If we take the police report at face value, it sounds like Gates may have been verbally aggressive, seeing the police officers as representatives of something bigger that is wrong with America (which the police officers may not agree with). It certainly sounds like he addressed the police in a disrespectful manner. But even so, a bit of shouting and accusing the police of being racist shouldn't be sufficient grounds for arresting somebody! That’s just crazy. The police should be addressed with respect. But they should forebear those people who don't address them in that way - otherwise they end up confirming the suspicion that underneath it all is a differential mode of treatment for black people than white.

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What did Obama actually say about Gates and the Cambridge police?

I have quite a lot of intemperate thoughts about this issue with Henry Louis Gates, but to preserve ears from unnecessary bleeding I’ll try and confine myself to a few simple points.

The press has taken a line that Obama gave uncharacteristically forthright remarks on the issue in his health care press conference, that he let personal feelings push him into overstepping the mark, that he abandoned the image of post-racial politics he so carefully crafted during the election. Some have praised him for this, some have criticized him for it. But there seems to be a general consensus that Obama somehow let the cat out of the bag in a politically dangerous way. Ben Smith at Politico, for instance, says “an off the cuff remark ... put him at the center of a familiar public melodrama of white cop and black victim in which big-city mayors – never mind presidents – tread with the greatest of caution.” Katherine Q. Seelye at the New York Times says it "represented an extraordinary plunge by a president into a local law-enforcement dispute." Andy Soltiss at the NY Post again repeats the plunge metaphor, saying "President Obama plunged his administration into a racially charged controversy yesterday by again siding with a black Harvard scholar who accused police of racism."

The implication behind this is that the president let his feelings take over his good judgement, even if those feelings were justified. But this is a nonsense, a testimony to how difficult it is to have a frank conversation about race in modern America, and a sign that the media are being deliberately provocative on an extremely sensitive issue for their own low reasons.

It’s worth taking a moment to look at the facts. What did Obama actually say at the White House press conference? Here’s my transcript:

“I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased in this. I don’t know all the facts. What’s been reported, though, is that a guy forgot his keys, er, jimmied his way to get into the house. There was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place. So far so good. Right, well, if I was trying to jigger – well, I guess this is my house [laughter] it probably wouldn’t happen, but (laughing) let’s say my old house in Chicago ... um, here I’d get shot [more laughter].

“But - so far so good. The reporting, police are doing what they should, they get the call they go to investigate what happens. My understanding is that at that point Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in. I’m sure there’s some exchange of words, but – my understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his ID and shows that this is his house. And at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct. Um, charges which were later dropped.

“Now, I don’t know, not having been there, not having seen all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is, um, a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately – and that’s just a fact.

“As you know, Elaine, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately, and that is a sign, an example of how race remains a factor in this society. That doesn’t lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made. And yet the fact of the matter is that this still haunts us, and even when there are honest misunderstandings the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and oftentimes for no cause casts suspicion even when there is good cause. That’s why I think that the more that we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody’s going to be.”

So: first, he caveats his statement by highlighting his personal friendship with Henry Louis Gates. Second, he points out that he only knows what’s been reported. Third – and here’s the important point – at no point does he actually say that race had anything to do with Gates’ arrest. His observation that the police were stupid refers simply to their decision to arrest someone who had already proved he lived in the house he was supposed to have been breaking into. Which, surely we’ve all got to admit, is stupid! And he specifically says that “any of us”, i.e. white or black or whatever, would have been angry about such a violation of our civil liberties. As he later repeated in an ABC interview, "I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement, because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don't need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who's in his own home." (hat tip: WSJ).

The reporter originally asked a question along the lines of “what does the Gates case show us about race in America.” Obama's response was that it may well have no racial component at all, but that the troubled history of racism in America and the indisputable evidence of racial profiling in other stop and searches means that even cases with no racial content can raise uncomfortable fears and suspicions: a point, I should note, that’s been amply proven by the reaction to Obama’s remarks.

Obama’s comments about race were, as usual, remarkable in their sensitivity; and his comments about the Cambridge police contained no racial element. Would that I could come up with such an interpretation “off the cuff.” It’s others, as usual, and to be honest I think it's mostly the media, that’s distorted this extremely tactful statement into some kind of outburst of “angry black man” hysteria. Incredible. And offensive, since the media obviously place themselves somehow above and beyond the continuation of this racial controversy - as if they're somehow just reporting the facts.

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Cost containment

The big words on the street this week: cost containment. The Republicans and anti-reform lobbyists on health care know that they have essentially lost the battle on the need for change. The rhetoric of "cost control" therefore is the only way of making a case that can end the chances of a health reform bill passing.

And fair enough, too. With trillion dollar deficits and a per capita health spend that is far higher than any other country in the world, the US desperately needs to address the cost of Medicare and Medicaid as well as its coverage. Which is why Obama's wonkish speech and Q&A yesterday spent so much time emphasising the proposals as a cost control measure, even while all attention is focused on the debate with Blue Dog Democrats.

My hope is that the Blue Dog influence will ultimately be a positive one: cost control measures from within the party are likely to be constructive, and as the pressure grows partisanship will naturally raise the likelihood of a decent compromise between Democrat wings. Sensible, meaningful restraints on the insurance industries seem close to impossible, unfortunately, but there's still scope for limiting the degree to which they're bought off to pass this measure.

My fear, though, is that since the congressional system has utterly failed with matters of cost control (and not just in medical matters) for most of the past century, we could end up with another failure here, discrediting an essential reform effort in the process. Spending reforms have always proven easier to pass than savings, because the benefits of spending are highly tangible, and thus reap rewards in votes, whilst the benefits of budget balancing are long term and intangible, and thus less likely to pass into money or electoral success. (This, by the way, is a generalisation just as true for Republicans as Democrats, despite the rhetoric from the right. It's just that the spending priorities are shifted.)

To reassure us, we're told that the decision to cut the F-22 fighter, saving $1.75bn from the defense budget, marks a great triumph and a sign that congress can make the tough decisions when necessary. Gail Collins calls it a "huge, huge victory." Seriously? $1.75bn cut from a $600bn plus budget? For a product that has been palpably unnecessary, and undefended for most of its design life, except by the special interests who were building it? If this counts as a huge victory, no wonder the US has ended up ten-odd trillion dollars in debt...

If the labour that the President and others had to put into canning this ridiculous boondoggle is commensurate with the amount of money involved, we'll be struggling till the millennium before the government can even think about paying down the hole in its finances. This is bad enough in itself, but if it brings down health care reform with it, it'll be a tragedy.

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If you're going to go around racial profiling...

... it's probably not best to begin with one of America's most successful and famous living African American scholars.

Apparently, Henry Louis Gates was arrested trying to get into his own house the other day. All charges have now been dropped, but the interesting points are (i) the policeman refused to hand over his badge number; and (ii) when Gates got narky, they arrested him for disorderly conduct, although he'd already shown his driver's license and Harvard ID.

Disorderly conduct and other similar "disturbing the peace" indictments are some of the most worrying of police powers to me, since even though they tend to produce relatively minor punishments in practice they give almost total freedom for officers to arrest, hold, fine and sometimes seriously prosecute individuals who happen to have disputed their authority, with justice or not. They're the policing equivalent of the slush fund that employees can dip into without anyone knowing where the money's going, and they have a tremendous silencing effect when it comes to standing up to the authorities.

Sometimes, undoubtedly, it's necessary to restrain an individual who is being violent or abusive. Policemen and women should be treated with respect. But at the end of the day, the only reason we hear about this case, and the only reason the charges have been dropped, are because something like this happening to Henry Louis Gates will immediately appear on the front page of the New York Times. Were the rest of black America so protected, perhaps the police might think twice about using these discretionary powers to buttress their own sense of authority...

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He who controls the past

From the Guardian: Following on from its continual harassment of Memorial, the human rights organization, the Kremlin is again demonstrating its willingness to rewrite the Soviet past to redeem the Putin present by shutting down www.hrono.info:

"Rumyantsev said the authorities may have pulled the plug after an article was posted on 16 June criticising St Petersburg's pro-Kremlin governor, Valentina Matviyenko. The article attacked Matviyenko's decision to cut an allowance given to survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
"The closure comes amid official attempts in Russia to rewrite some of the darkest aspects of its 20th-century history. School textbooks now portray Stalin not as a mass murderer but as a great, if flawed, national leader and an "efficient manager" who defeated the Nazis and industrialised a backward Soviet Union...
"Much of Soviet history is now taboo. Particularly sensitive for the Kremlin is the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, under which Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up Europe, with Moscow annexing the Baltics and two-thirds of Poland. The Kremlin also refuses to acknowledge Ukrainian claims that the Stalin-engineered famine of 1932-33 amounted to a genocide."

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Young enough to own a walking stick

The Daily Beast has a fairly typical let's-all-get-morally-outraged-about-those-terrible-secretly-racist-Republicans campaign going, that the new chair of the Young Republicans "seemingly approved" a friend making offensive and racist remarks about the Obama administration (see also here and here).

Ok, we're not talking great contributions to American political discourse here. But as far as I can tell, what Shay is supposed to have done here is essentially write "lol" next to some dumb redneck racist crapola that you'd hear in any bar in most states not on found a coast. Ahem sorry, but we're not talking newsworthy material at a time of major international and domestic crisis. What is this, "let's all slap each other on the back for being liberal and enlightened" time? No better than Fox. And as someone who has gone on record about being less than perturbed about the death of print journalism, can I also say that, ahem sorry TDB people, but going through someone's facebook account doesn't add up to a serious investigation. Grow up, chaps, and prove that you can actually do some work that involves leaving the office, and then maybe we'll take your e-mails seriously. Alternatively, don't try and pass yourself off as a news outfit, and just stick to what you can do well, aggregating, instead of picking on minor numnuts in the Republican lowrarchy just because you've got a social networking account. Such as the link you provided to what passes for policy in Sarah Palin world (see here), which really is a travesty.

That said, my real reason for commenting was actually this: Chair of the Young Republicans? Young? At thirty-eight?? Jeez - either times are tough for tapping the youth in the heartland these days or thirty years of socialised medicine have been delivering Methuselah-type longevity to the American people.

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Ward Churchill still on the job market

From Fox/AP: "A judge refused Tuesday to reinstate a University of Colorado professor who was fired on plagiarism charges after he likened some Sept. 11 terrorist attack victims to a Nazi leader... If it stands, the ruling means Ward Churchill cannot return to the classroom even though he won a lawsuit in April arguing that his firing was politically motivated."

Warning Prof. Churchill! Endowments have crashed, the American university sector isn't well: now's not the time to be an unemployed lecturer...!

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28 palaces: Because I'm worth it!

The National Security Archive has got hold of some fascinating transcripts of quite a few interrogations conducted by the FBI with Saddam Hussein in 2004. Of course, any really juicy contemporary stuff is either redacted or unreleased, so the documents primarily focus on interviews related to the history of Iraq and the region.

Amongst other things, the interviews reveal how dictators justify their rule to themselves. The February 15 report reads, "Hussein advises that he considers himself a revolutionary, not a politician. In both 1968 and 1974, he asked the Party to allow him to be excused from his official position. However, the Party refused his request." I wonder what the consequences would have been for the party hierarchy if they'd accepted his offer!

Similarly, on May 10, Hussein remarks how he does not require an extravagant lifestyle. "Hussein was then question on the number of palaces and their extravagant nature," the interrogator wryly reports. "Hussein stated that the palaces belong to the nation and not to one person." An argument that's been around for at least as long as there's been kings squatting on the necks of servile labour.

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The line between tragedy and farce

Yesterday’s pompous airborne standoff between the circling president Zelaya and the Honduran army which was blocking his landing had all the drama of a classic moment in history without the accompanying sense of meaning. Reporters seem, unsurprisingly, unable to work out its political consequences. Ever since the remarkable events surrounding the failed coup attempt against Chávez, Latin American crises have tacked dangerously close to the absurd in their taste for the dramatic, and yesterday was no different. What would have happened if Zelaya had landed, anyway? The wannabe government would have arrested him. Zelaya says that if he had a parachute, he would have jumped from the plane. I’m sure they had parachutes...! On both sides, showmanship of the worst order.

With the Liberal party, Church, business elites and army lined up against the erstwhile president, and the OAS, World Bank, EU, United States and most of the rest of Latin America condemning Micheletti and Co., it’s tempting to see this as a crisis of Honduras’ elites against the world. The decision to kick Honduras out of the OAS (the first time something like this has happened since Cuba) is pretty remarkable. The “ousters” have dramatically failed in the public relations battle; few people in the rest of the world seem to see these events as anything other than a straightforward coup; sanctions are beginning to be implemented from the international community; the danger to democracy is seen as coming from the army.

It’s extremely difficult to see how the administration could back down and allow Zelaya to return, but it’s equally hard to imagine Honduras being able to resist the combined might of the rest of the continent for too long, especially as the risk of regional escalation will ultimately ensure US-backed engagement of some sort or another in the absence of a resolution. One thing that is clear, though: this conflict will continue to unfold in performance as both sides attempt to press their claims through overblown public action.

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Constitutional crisis in Honduras

(Apologies, this is a little behind the times but I've been away the past couple of days...)

There’s a strange parallelism to the claims currently being offered by both sides in the complex events that are unfolding in Honduras.

Supporters of the “ousters” – the term that the international media is preferring as a more neutral equivalent to coup plotters – claim that (Ex?-)President Manuel Zelaya, “Mel”, was attempting to reform the Honduran constitution to allow him to serve multiple terms and thus establish himself effectively as a constitutional dictator. Designed to limit this classic tendency toward the perpetuation of personalist rule in Latin America, the Honduran constitution explicitly prohibits the alteration of the framework of elections to permit presidents to seek re-election. The key clause is article 239 of the constitution, which reads:

“El ciudadano que haya desempeñado la titularidad del Poder Ejecutivo no podrá ser Presidente o Designado.

“El que quebrante esta disposición o proponga su reforma, así como aquellos que lo apoyen directa o indirectamente, cesarán de inmediato en el desempeño de sus respectivos cargos, y quedarán inhabilitados por diez años para el ejercicio de toda función pública.”

"A citizen who has held the title of Chief Executive cannot be President or Designate.

"Anyone who breaks this rule or proposes its reform, or those who support either directly or indirectly the same, will immediately cease to hold their respective offices, and will be banned for 10 years from the exercise of all public functions." (With apologies for dodgy translation.)

Thus, the coup was not a coup, it was the legitimate exercise of constitutional power by Congress and the Supreme Court, who controlled and ordered the military. This argument is, of course, rather undermined by the fact that in the process of supposedly defending the constitution, the military set about violating several other due process clauses of the same constitution (against protestors and supporters of Zelaya, not to mention Zelaya himself, who was jetted out of the country under quite peculiar circumstances).

Meanwhile, the left claims Mel that was operating entirely legally in his efforts to reform the constitutional structure of Honduran government to allow for multiple terms of office. At Counterpunch, Alberto Vallente Thorensen admits that the article says what it says but claims (in my view rather Aesopianly) that Mel was not violating this rule since he was trying to rewrite the constitution, not amend it.


Thus we have the classic elements of a constitutional crisis: both sides claim to be the legitimate parties and the other to be violating the due process of law. Meanwhile, both sides attack each other with what are the deeper, underlying issues: the right accusing the left of being stooges of Chávez and Castro; the left accusing the right of operating as proxies for an elite who will sell out their country to the United States (“vendepatrias”), and noting that many of the military leaders, rather unsurprisingly, have close connections with the US School of Americas / WHINSEC apparatus.


Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been going through some rather peculiar contortions, informally accusing the “ousters” of being coup-plotters but not formally saying so, since that would require the US to implement sanctions against the nation. It seems that the Obama administration is unhappy with the precedent that the removal of a Latin American president by the military would set, and afraid of the impact it might have on perceptions of US power in the region (both amongst those who think the US is behind everything and those who think the US is no longer a force to be reckoned with), but not entirely supportive of an individual who has been a regular critic of the US under both Bush and Obama.

Whatever one thinks about the question of blame, one thing is undoubtedly clear. Whilst arguably imposed for the best of reasons, Article 239 has proven to be badly constructed and dangerous. Not in placing term limits; this, given the context, seems an eminently reasonable thing (and I’ve elsewhere criticised Chavez for leading the effort to undermine constitutional legitimacy rather than establish a political tradition outside of personal rule). No, the problem is with the sanction. The requirement for the “immediate removal” of the advocate of constitutional reform provide no opportunity for discussion, investigation or a process of impeachment, which – as the US model shows – allow for a thorough airing of views, and a degree of public (and judicial) examination of the issues before any irrevocable decision is made. Whilst it seems at times that this only builds tension, actually it allows groups to engage in public debate before any final or shattering decision is made. Here, the speed of the action has inevitably left massive doubts about the real motives behind the action and the guilt or otherwise of the president, and it’s now extremely difficult to see how either Zelaya can be reinstated or broader violence averted.

It’s notable that impeachment crises in the US have as often been effective without reaching their end as they were in the final vote. In fact, look at the Clinton impeachment process: the final vote settled nothing that had not already been determined during the trial by media. Often we consider this a bad thing, but actually it allows for a degree of public engagement that this kind of judicial fiat in Honduras precludes.

It seems the best thing that the acting government could do now would be to try to reach some kind of accord which would allow for the safe return of and a trial of Zelaya and a more neutral adjudication of the issues at stake, perhaps under OAS auspices or similar. "If we were able to get to a ... status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome," Clinton says (rightly, but with no clear indication of how to get there). Unfortunately, the country is so deeply polarised, a neutral adjudication seems far from probable. Obama will be even more of a magician than I think he is if he is able to wangle the Central American republics out of this one...

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