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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s health care debacle. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As the wise saying goes “if you’ve nothing good to say, don’t say anything.” But President Barack Obama went ahead anyway with a prime time press conference, and as Bill O’Reilly was right to observe on Wednesday night - he said practically nothing specific about what the shape of the health-care bill would look like and viewers were left scratching their heads.

President Obama wanted to let Congress take ownership of the bill, rather than hand them a fait accompli (as Hillary Clinton did back in 1993/4), I hear Democrats chant in his defense. But if Obama wants to stay on the side-lines, then he should do so consistently. Either be genuinely deferential to Congress and stay out of the picture until a consensus emerges, or take complete ownership of the agenda - don’t try to do both. Yet the president is back in the limelight doing prime-time press conferences, and attending town hall meetings in Cleveland and such. Obama should decide which way he wants to go. If he is the salesman-in-chief, then he has to have something to sell, if not his consumers would be left completely befuddled as to why he’s putting on a show for no particular reason at all.

Liberals are mad that Obama didn’t throw a few more punches at Republicans. I think many are unwilling to admit the more pointed fact that he just didn’t do a very good job at all, because he didn’t have much to say.

So Wednesday’s press conference was a squandered opportunity. We are not in 2008 anymore when Barack Obama would announce that he is giving a speech and the whole world would stop to listen. The clock is ticking on his presidential luster, and the next time he says “hey, listen to me,” it’s going to be that much harder.

Let us be clear why health-care reform has stalled, at least till the Fall. Because the Congress, and in particular the Senate Finance Committee could not agree on a way forward. I don’t see why the President and his advisers thought that a prime time press conference last Wednesday night would have gotten things moving. In fact it probably achieved the exact opposite, when we heard on Thursday morning from Senator Harry Reid that a Senate vote before the August recess would not be possible. The president’s time would have been better spent persuading his former colleagues up on the hill in private conversations to compromise on a bill. When they’ve got a bill and all/most are united, then go out and do the media blitzkrieg, by all means. Wednesday night just wasn’t the time for that.

So it looks like the Permanent Campaign is back. The President has chosen to go back to campaign mode, selling himself. Because without a specific plan to sell, all his public appearances amount to going public for the sake of going public. This strategy belies a serious misunderstanding of American politics. Personal approval ratings do not translate to public support for specific policy proposals (not that they were forthcoming) - the president should have known this by now. They barely even translate into congressional support for presidential policies.

This error - of going public with nothing specific to sell - was compounded, and probably encouraged, by a complete underestimation of the push back from the conservative wing of the Demcoratic party (the “Blue Dogs”) worried about spiraling deficits. These were the people Obama should have been talking to. And given he’s still out town hall-ing and speechifying, I’m not sure he fully understands what came over him.

To make matters worse, Obama had to pour fuel over the fire of the Henry Louis Gates controversy during the press conference, accusing the Cambridge police of of a “stupid” arrest when he had incomplete possession of the facts. Have something to say about anything all the time has become the rhetorical ethic of the modern presidency. Obama’s observance of this ethic was a disastrous distraction to what little point he had to make at his press conference. The news cycles are now spending more time covering the Gates controversy than they are covering the health-care debate.

I’m afraid to say - though this is water under the bridge - that Hillary Clinton would have known better. This week, for the first time in his fledgling presidency, Obama looked like a total novice in Washington. His 4th press conference was a waste of time, and probably the first time since Obama broke onto the national scene in 2004 that his rhetorical wizardry had fallen so flatly on death ears. He seems to have bought the bad conventional advice - whenever you’re in trouble, just go out and give a speech - wholesale. The president should take heed:

1. The public is less attentive between election years and he must have something meaningful to say if he wants to keep their attention.
2. Especially on a complex issue like health-care where there are too many details to cover, the media is much more likely to jump at an opportunity to take the path of least resistance to cover something juicier, like Henry Louis Gates and racial profiling.
2. Just because the public (still) loves Obama doesn’t mean that they will love what he is doing as president (and not as presidential candidate).
3. It is often more important to talk to members of Congress - the people who actually pass legislation - than to deliver speeches around the nation where the only tangible return of applause is a fleeting sense of psychic gratification that one is loved.

President Obama, it’s crunch time. Stop yakking.

The American president called the Indian president to come over to his country for a cup of tea. When the Indian president came over, they had the cup of tea and went off to a jungle; The American president wanted to show him somthing.

When they reached a place the American started digging and told the Indian to help him dig. After digging 100 metres below the ground they saw a wire. The American president exclaimed “Ah Yes, see there we had technology even 100 years ago!” The Indian president didnt show any jealousy but rather invited him to his country for a cup of tea.

Later when the American President came to India and after having the cup of tea the Indian President took the american president to his jungle in india. When they reached a place the Indian started digging and asked the American president to help him. After digging 100 metres they didnt find anything. The American president was confused he said “what are you trying to show me?” “keep digging you’ll see” replied the Indian president. After digging 200, they found nothing but rubble and then finally after digging 300 metres they still saw nothing. The indian prsident exclaimed “Ah you see this? we had wire-less even 300 years ago.”

The American president called the Indian president to come over to his country for a cup of tea. When the Indian president came over, they had the cup of tea and went off to a jungle; The American president wanted to show him somthing.

When they reached a place the American started digging and told the Indian to help him dig. After digging 100 metres below the ground they saw a wire. The American president exclaimed “Ah Yes, see there we had technology even 100 years ago!” The Indian president didnt show any jealousy but rather invited him to his country for a cup of tea.

Later when the American President came to India and after having the cup of tea the Indian President took the american president to his jungle in india. When they reached a place the Indian started digging and asked the American president to help him. After digging 100 metres they didnt find anything. The American president was confused he said “what are you trying to show me?” “keep digging you’ll see” replied the Indian president. After digging 200, they found nothing but rubble and then finally after digging 300 metres they still saw nothing. The indian prsident exclaimed “Ah you see this? we had wire-less even 300 years ago.”

The Official White House Photostream on Flickr is essentially Cute Overload for US Politics. There is a type of unabashed sincerity in the Obama administration that I’ve never seen before.

I really love this photo of the President interacting with a young visitor.

And then, of course, there is Bo, shown here visiting the Oval office for the first time. Awww. Hi Bo! Hi!

Erica said, on 5/18/2009 12:54:00 PM

The Official White House Photostream on Flickr is essentially Cute Overload for US Politics. There is a type of unabashed sincerity in the Obama administration that I’ve never seen before.

I really love this photo of the President interacting with a young visitor.

And then, of course, there is Bo, shown here visiting the Oval office for the first time. Awww. Hi Bo! Hi!

Erica said, on 5/20/2009 11:51:00 PM

listing of grievances: Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops I continue listening to my podcast, because, meh, stupid girls People start coughing and opening [...]

Erica said, on 6/15/2009 2:42:00 PM

oday I Skimmed Schmaltz, and was Rawked at by a Raven.

Raven with Sausages by quinet

The schmaltz came from a mess of chicken soup I made. A thick layer of chicken fat rose to the top overnight and was skimmed off and used to season the cat’s breakfast.

Chicken soup for the soul by tsheko

The raven is a Common Raven, who was hanging out in one of the San Francisco parks that I walk through on my way to work. Common Ravens are more common out here than they are back east.

They are about the size of a small dog, and live shoulder to shoulder with their smaller corvid friends the Crow and the Western Scrub Jay. All three species enjoy Rawking, poking at things with their substantial bills, and Making Trouble.

What alliterative things happened to YOU today?

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Presidential rhetoric. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

On April 16, President Barack Obama ordered the release of Bush-era Office of Legal Council memos on counter-terror tactics, and in a statement, declared that “A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” echoing his inaugural position that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

This is a perfect example of political equivocation, a rhetorical gesture that means one thing to liberals and another to conservative. For liberals, they heard the president say that we will not allow alleged threats to our safety to become the excuse for an assault to our ideals. For conservatives, they heard that just because the president must do whatever he must to keep Americans safe does not mean that we must compromise our ideals. And so everybody applauded Obama’s lyrical line on inauguration day.

In his April 16 statement, President Obama proceeded to explain his rationale for releasing the memos: “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

The President is balancing on a precarious tightrope. In releasing the memos he is trying to appease a liberal base looking for transparency and some say vengeance, and in guaranteeing those who used harsh interrogation tactics immunity from prosecution, he is trying to assure conservatives that he is serious about maintaining the morale of those who serve our country. Ironic, because though the president was trying to seal a can of worms, he may have re-opened it.

This is the acrobatics of modern politics. A gesture to one side, and a wink to another is Obama’s only way out. The release of these memos was a gesture of good faith to Obama’s liberal base who want justice, and yet a show of solidarity with conservatives who do not want to see a witchhunt. Consider that the real action of deciding who will be prosecuted has been conveniently delegated to Attorney General Eric Holder. Decisive action will force even the most talented acrobat to fall off the tightrope - for it requires a consequential choice. But Obama can remain suspended in mid-air - in his presidential honeymoon - as long as the American people are content with mere gestures. This may not be the case this time, because liberals are outraged at what the memos detail and this will put immense pressure on Holder to initiate some high-level prosecutions, just as this has mobilized the conservative base to preempt an impending witchhunt.

For several decades now, we have been too tolerant of presidents who have excelled in rhetorical shape-shifting in order to appear all things to all people. This has occurred in part because the American people have come to believe that presidential words amount to presidential deeds. Words easily permit ambiguity; actions do not. We have bought an artificial consensus at a high cost: politics has become a spectacle of acrobatic tomfoolery. The American people appear unenthralled by Obama’s performance this time though, and while democracy will benefit from this, it is not good news for the president.

Book Review: John Adams by David McCulloughReview by Cindy Bohn of Diggin' Up BohnsJohn Adams is remembered today as the second president. Sometimes he is also remembered because until the Bushes, Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams were the only father-son combination to each serve as president. Sometimes he is remembered as a delegate to the convention in 1776. But this monumental book by

All week on the OUPblog we will be celebrating the Lincoln Bicentennial.  Be sure to read Jennifer Weber’s post on how Lincoln almost failed, the excerpt from James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln, and Craig L. Symonds post on how Lincoln and his leadership are reflected in our current President. In the original piece below Allen Guelzo, author of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, answers some FAQs about Lincoln.  You can read part one here and part two here.

OUPblog: More than one observer has noted that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free any enslaved people in the very territory controlled by Lincoln’s government. What then is its lasting importance?

Allen Guelzo: This is probably the most-frequently-repeated howler in American history, and no one who thinks twice about will ever believe they said it.

The question refers to an apparent oddity in the Emancipation Proclamation – Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate States, but did not free the slaves of the four border states which remained loyal to the Union or the slaves in the Southern areas which had been re-occupied by federal forces. So, Lincoln frees slaves where he can’t control them, and neglects to free them where he can. Right? Wrong.

We live under a Constitution which does not give Presidents plenary powers to do anything they like. Only in time of war or rebellion does the Constitution even surrender control of the armed forces to the President, and the “war powers” which the Constitution confers on the President are almost the only discretionary powers he has.

It was under the rubric of those “war powers” that Lincoln issued, and could only have issued, an Emancipation Proclamation. And since those four border states, and the occupied districts of the South, were not at war with the United States, or in rebellion against it any more, Lincoln had no “war power” authority to free any slaves there. If he had tried, slaveowners would have made a bee-line for the federal courts. And at the top of the federal judiciary, itching for a chance to strike down emancipation for good, sat Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision. Lincoln might have had the military power to free slaves in those places, but not the legal authority.

By the same token, Lincoln declares the slaves of the Confederacy free because, even though he lacks the military power at that moment to enforce his proclamation, he retained the legal authority to do so. Lincoln had never recognized the Confederacy as a valid government. In his eyes, it was an insurrection against the existing forms of constitutional government, and as such, it came directly under the weight of his “war powers.” He might not have been able to enforce the Proclamation at once, but that’s very different from saying he had no authority to free the slaves there. Having the authority, it was only a matter of time and events before the enforcement, in the form of the Union Army, caught up with the authority and liberated the ex-slaves from their masters. Many of those slaves saw the distinction clearly enough that they began running away in droves to the Union lines, where they knew that the Army would at once recognize their freedom. Together, Lincoln and the slaves made the Proclamation in reality what it already was in law. But the reality would never have happened without the law.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln called on the nation to remember the war dead by a re-dedication to “unfinished work.” What is unfinished today? The unfinished work he was talking about at Gettysburg was the war itself, which he realized had to be won if the principle of government of the people was to be vindicated. If there was a sense in which he looked beyond that, it was to the larger goal of bringing opportunity for self-advancement and self-improvement to as many as possible. For Lincoln, the promise of the Declaration (that “proposition” that all men are created equal) was realized best when an open and democratic society gave to everyone the freedom to climb as far as talent and ambition could take them – as he himself had. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, once wrote that Lincoln “was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” Douglass attributed Lincoln’s lack of racial bias to Lincoln’s sympathy with Douglass’s struggle and the “similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.” I confess, having also started on that “lowest round,” that this is what fascinates me most about Lincoln, too.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on the economic stimulus bill. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Necessity is a key word in Washington these days. President Barack Obama tells us that if we don’t pass a stimulus package the consequences will be unthinkable. “We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary,” he told the nation in his radio address last Saturday.

How can that which is imperfect also be absolutely necessary? Even though imperfection runs on a spectrum, the President will have us believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. Well, we’ve heard this before. There are no ifs and buts when emergency calls. Better a decisive mistake than an indecisive impasse, said Machiavelli to his Prince. But as the Bard taught us, “they stumble that run fast.”

Fortunately, Obama isn’t the only one playing this game. Congressional Republicans have cloaked their ideological priorities in the language of necessity too. Aid to states was slashed in the Senate version of the bill, as was money designated for school construction. We are told
that none of these are pressing concerns that deserve a place in a stimulus package, and so the vocal Republican minority have decided that that is OK for state employees like teachers to lose their jobs even if the impact of this on the economy would be immediate and demonstrable – the very criteria they are using to decide what counts as a “stimulus.”

The Senate will likely pass its version of the stimulus package bill by a precarious margin early next week, and Congressional leaders should be able to work out the differences between the House and the Senate bills. The end result will not be bipartisan, and it will not solve all our economic woes. But in its imperfections we shall see that we are not slaves to anybody’s invocation of necessity. In our system of government, no institution, no party, and no one has a monopoly – at least not for long – on what necessity demands. Even at the brink of a grave recession, we remain free to disagree on if, when, and how. And so in our recalcitrance we shall live and suffer our liberty.

Today the world turned its eyes to Washington, DC where the United States inaugurated its 44th President, Barack Hussein Obama. And while most of our executives have been sworn in here on the banks of the Potomac, our first head of state actually took office a stone’s throw from another river: the Hudson. On April 30, 1789, George Washington took his oath of office in front of a crowd assembled on Wall Street in lower Manhattan. After a long trip from his home in Virginia, he was rowed to New York and walked to Federal Hall, the site of his inauguration and the birthplace of American government. At the time, the city’s inhabitants numbered roughly 30,000, and its homes and businesses did not extend much further than the modern location of Canal Street. Just ten years later, the population of the country’s first capital had swelled to more than 60,000 residents.

Charles O. Jones is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution and the author of many books including Passages to the Presidency and Preparing to be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neustadt. In his most recent book, The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction, Jones has written a marvelously concise survey that is packed with information about the presidency, some of it quite surprising. We learn, for example, that the Founders adopted the word “president” over “governor” and other alternatives because it suggested a light hand, as in one who presides, rather than rules.  In the original article below Jones analyzes Obama’s term as President-Elect.

Following his victory, President-Elect Barack Obama conducted a model transition, one suited to the standards set by successful transitions in the post-World War II era, most notably those of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald W. Reagan in 1980. Obama played it by the book, revealing that “change you can believe in” is to be achieved by governing methods he can trust.

During the 1960 campaign Kennedy reportedly said: “If I am elected, I don’t want to wake up on November 9 [the morning after the election] and ask myself ‘What in the world do I do now?’” The answer to that question was then, and remains, fairly simple. You prepare to be president. Arrangements begin with clear notions of who you have become, what the job entails, and who can be of help.

Obama became a presidential candidate in the 2008 campaign. That assertion is less trite than it appears. John McCain remained a maverick senator running for president, Hillary Clinton was an heir apparent First Lady, John Kerry a backbench senator in 2004, Al Gore an heir apparent Vice President in 2000. No one of these aspirants fully adopted the role of presidential candidate. Obama did.

Not having become an in-house senator in his brief service or been in a position to imagine himself an heir apparent, Obama was free to acquaint himself with the style and demands of a national campaign. He learned the role well enough to hire a compatible supporting cast and to script a message absent allusions to the past. “Change: That’s what you want? That’s what I will give you.”

The October surprise on Wall Street illustrated his differences with McCain. Obama remained the presidential candidate he had become. McCain suspended his campaign to resume his familiar role as the maverick senator. Yet the complex financial issues involved required neither a campaigner nor a nonconformist. Obama understood and stayed out of it; McCain rushed in where he was not needed or welcome.

On November 5, Obama became president-elect. That role too requires an understanding of how to behave. The most important guideline: There is a president, you’re not him. Corollaries: Remind the staff not to jump the gun—their time as big shots will come. Follow the book in making appointments and organizing White House staff. Don’t promise more in the first 100 days than can be delivered. Stay out of the way, preferably away from Washington, but be accessible and nice to the press. Find out how the White House works—inside the building itself and outside in the government. Accept the help offered by the incumbent administration in learning about departments, agencies, and budgets. Visit, but don’t invade, the workaday government. Be nice to Congressional leaders but wary of their advice. Find friends in the opposition party—you will need them. Can the arrogance of a victor—that goes even more for staff.

These rules are in accord with the Law of Commonsense. Yet President Elect Bill Clinton and his staff ignored most, if not all, these advisories. Obama and his aides paid heed to all, thereby winning praise and favorable comparisons to the Kennedy and Reagan transitions.

Knowing who you have become should aid immeasurably in learning what the job entails. The rules cited here provide orientation for the most important role—President of he United States. It all starts with understanding the separation of powers. The three branches, plus the bureaucracy, share and compete for powers permitting them to get into each other’s business. For example, Congress spent the last two years curbing executive powers the new president may wish he had.

Two facts are relevant to understanding the new job: 1. The president is not the government. 2. A new president joins a government already at work. The new Congress is mostly populated by members from the last Congress; judges serve life terms; and the bureaucracy is forever. What is new is a President Obama, his staff, and appointees, all charged to make what is already there work effectively under new leadership. One other fact: The choices presidents make today have an effect on persuasive power in the future. One need only review President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, relying on bad intelligence, for a contemporary illustration. Support for his leadership never recovered.

It is too early to know the depth of Obama’s savvy in serving as chief executive. He has no record and it is impossible to “game” the presidential experience. But there are positive clues from the campaign and the transition that the president-elect recognizes what is coming. The campaign showed he knows how to hire and keep good help. He understands the need, recognizes talent, communicates purposes, and commands loyalty. Furthermore, lacking experience himself, he has demonstrated strength of character and resolve in hiring those who do have the knowledge and skills he requires as president.

The process of selecting staff and cabinet positions was impressive. He assigned the major White House staff positions early, thus reducing job anxiety among his campaign operatives and allowing them to settle in during the transition to aid him and connect with establishment figures. The cabinet and ancillary selections were announced in policy clusters, thus showcasing “teams” rather than drawing attention to a single appointment. Further, the sequence revealed policy priorities, as with the early selections of the economic and national security teams. The president-elect himself made the announcements, his physical presence leaving little doubt as to who was in charge. And whereas diversity was the result, emphasis in each case was on the capability and experience of those chosen. One notable effect of this orderly process was to project an aura of leadership.

There was a casualty. Bill Richardson withdrew prior to a confirmation hearing. One case is par for the course and can have the effect of increased scrutiny of the rest.

Does this positive start ensure a successful Obama presidency? Hardly. Unscheduled events occur and unwelcome change happens, as with Israel’s assault in Gaza. Expect more agenda-bending events to interfere with the new president’s plans, hopefully not as dramatic as 9/11 for his predecessor.
The record as I read it, however, indicates that as a candidate and president-elect Barack Obama has verified an aptitude for leadership and for knowing who can best help him lead. Less clear is whether he understands that neither he nor Congress can quickly fix much of what is wrong in the nation and the world. In a separated powers government, confidence in knowing what to do is only part of getting it done.

In the article below, written several weeks ago before Obama was President-elect, scholar Steven Niven, Executive Editor of the African American National Biography and the forthcoming Dictionary of African Biography, examined the historic candidacy of Barack Obama within the context of the civil rights movement and the changing nature of black politics. This article originally appeared on The Oxford African American Studies Center.

Barack Obama Jr., the first African American presidential nominee of a major political party, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. His birth coincided with a crucial turning point in the history of American race relations, although like many turning points it did not seem so at the time. Few observers believed that Jim Crow was in its death throes. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, less than 1 percent of southern black students attended integrated schools. Southern colleges had witnessed token integration at best. In early 1961 Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes integrated the University of Georgia, but James Meredith’s application to enter Ole Miss that same year was met by Mississippi authorities with a “carefully calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity,” in the words of federal judge John Minor Wisdom. Despite the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and promises from the new administration of President John F. Kennedy, the voting rights of African Americans remained virtually nonexistent in large swathes of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

However, the Freedom Rides that began in the summer of 1961 and the voting rights campaign that Robert P. Moses initiated in McComb County, Mississippi, in the very week of Obama’s birth, signaled a hardening of African American resistance. There was among a cadre of activists a new determination to confront both segregation and the extreme caution of the Kennedy administration on civil rights. Later that fall, Bob Moses wrote a note from the freezing drunk-tank in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he and eleven others were being held for attempting to register black voters. “This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected.”

Over the next three years, Moses, Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer, James Forman, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bob Zellner, and thousands of activists devoted their lives to shattering that iceberg. Some, including Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner gave their lives in that cause. They took the civil rights struggle to the heart of the segregationist South: to McComb, Jackson, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Albany, Georgia, and to Birmingham, Alabama. By filling county jails and prison farms, by facing fire hoses, truncheons, and worse, they ultimately made segregation and disfranchisement untenable, paving the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Obama’s childhood experience of the dramatic changes wrought by the 1960s, seen from the vantage point of Hawaii and Indonesia, necessarily differed from most African American contemporaries in rural Mississippi or urban Detroit. But it would be a mistake to argue that he was untouched by those developments. His black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr. met his white Kansan mother, Ann Dunham, at the University of Hawaii, where the older Obama had gone to study on a program founded by his fellow Luo, Tom Mboya. Mboya’s program received financial support from civil rights stalwarts, including Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier. After Obama Sr. left his wife and child behind in 1963, Ann Dunham became the dominant figure in young Barry Obama’s formative years, and Obama has argued that the values his mother taught greatly shaped his worldview. Those values were largely secular, but grounded in the church-based interracial idealism of the early 1960s civil rights movement—the beloved community inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric, Fannie Lou Hamer’s heroic activism, and Mahalia Jackson’s gospel singing.

After returning from Indonesia in 1971 to live with his white grandparents and go to high school in Hawaii, Obama’s formal education was abetted by his friendship with “Frank,” an African American drinking buddy of his grandfather, who tutored the young Obama in the history of black progressive struggles. The scholar Gerald Horne has speculated that Frank may have been Frank Marshall Davis, a pioneering radical journalist in the 1930s whose jazz criticism and poetry was influential in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late 1940s.

Obama’s work as an anti-poverty activist in Chicago in the 1980s likewise built on the legacy of Arthur Brazier and other 1960s community organizers influenced by Saul Alinsky. Arriving in Chicago in the era of Harold Washington also helped school Obama in the ways of Chicago politics. As the director of a major “get-out-the vote” drive in Illinois in the 1992 elections, he helped elect both Bill Clinton to the presidency and Carol Moseley Braun to the U.S. Senate. Connections through his wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, who lived in Chicago’s working-class black Southside, a schoolfriend of Santita Jackson (daughter of Jesse Jackson), and an aide to Mayor Richard Daley certainly helped Obama win friends and influence the right people in Chicago’s Democratic Party. The luster of his fame as the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, as well as his self-evident political and rhetorical skills undoubtedly marked Obama out from the general pack of political hopefuls. In 1996 he easily won a seat in the Illinois Senate, representing a district that encompassed the worlds of both “Obama the University of Chicago Law Professor”—liberal, wealthy, and cosmopolitan Hyde Park—and “Obama the community organizer”—the district’s poorer neighborhoods which housed the headquarters of Operation Breadbasket.

Obama’s achievements in the Illinois legislature were solid, though not spectacular. His cool demeanor, cerebral approach, and links to Hyde Park liberalism irked established black leaders in Springfield, veterans of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, who viewed Obama as a Johnny-Come-Lately who had not paid his dues. The charge that he was somehow “not black enough” came to the fore in his unsuccessful primary challenge for the U.S. congressional seat of the former Black Panther, Bobby Rush, in 2000. Although Obama secured a majority of white primary voters, Rush won the vast majority of black voters and defeated Obama by a margin of 2 to 1, successfully depicting him as a Harvard-educated, Hyde Park elitist at odds with the more prosaic values of the mainly black working-class district.

Despite that setback, Obama stunned political observers four years later by winning the 2004 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Illinois, and then crushing his (admittedly very weak) Republican opponent in the general election, Alan Keyes. Keyes—a black, ultraconservative, fundamentalist pro-lifer who had been a minor diplomat in the Ronald Reagan administration, had few direct links to Illinois—was placed on the ballot after the primaries because the Republican primary winner had dropped out following a sex scandal. Obama also benefited from a well-received keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston. It was at the DNC that most Americans first heard and saw the self-described “skinny kid with a funny name,” who urged his fellow citizens to look beyond the fierce partisanship that had characterized politics since the 1990s.

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red [Republican] States and Blue [Democratic] States,” he told the watching millions.

But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Obama’s arrival in the Senate in January 2005 provoked significant media interest, verging on what some have called Obama-mania. He was, after all, only the fifth African American to serve in that body in 215 years, following Hiram Rhodes Revels, Blanche Bruce, Edward Brooke, and Moseley-Braun. But media scrutiny and the popular interest in the new candidate went far beyond the attention given to Moseley-Braun in 1992. In part, this was because Obama’s election symbolized a broader generational shift in African American politics. Black political gains in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, were largely achieved by a generation of politicians who came of age in the southern civil right movement, like John Lewis, Eva Clayton, Vernon Jordan, Andrew Young, or in urban Democratic politics, such as Charles Rangel in New York and Willie Brown in San Francisco. Obama was not the only Ivy League–educated black politician to emerge in the early 2000s. In 2002, Artur Davis, like Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate won election to the House of Representatives from Alabama; in 2005, Deval Patrick, another Harvard Law graduate, became only the second African American elected governor of a state (Massachusetts) since Reconstruction; and in 2006 Cory Booker (Yale Law School and Queens College Oxford) and Michael Nutter (University of Pennsylvania) were elected mayors of Newark and Philadelphia, respectively. Harold Ford Jr., a Penn grad and Tennessee congressman narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race in Tennessee the same year. Patrick and Nutter are a few years older than Obama, while Davis (b. 1967), Booker (b. 1969), and Ford (b. 1970) are slightly younger. In terms of ideology, there are also similarities in these politicians’ commitment to post-partisanship, although Ford, now leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Davis, have been more willing to adopt socially, as well as economically conservative positions, so as to broaden their appeal as possible statewide candidates in the South.

But perhaps the most remarkable facet of Obama-mania is the rapidity with which the freshman Senator was discussed as a possible presidential candidate in 2012 or 2016. Or rather that would have been the most remarkable facet, had Obama not sought and then won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008! It is hard to think of a comparable American politician whose rise has been so swift, dramatic, or unforeseen, except maybe that other, most famous Illinois politician, Abraham Lincoln.

Whether Obama follows Lincoln as the second U.S. president from Illinois is unknown at this time of writing, five weeks from Election Day, 2008. At the very least, Obama’s candidacy marks another tremor in the iceberg that Bob Moses faced in that Magnolia drunk-tank in the fall of 1961, and that James Meredith faced down while integrating Old Miss in the face of a full-force white riot a year later. It is, then, all too fitting—and a reasonable marker of American progress in race relations—that forty-six years later Barack Obama became the first African American to participate in a presidential debate, not just in Mississippi, but at Ole Miss, itself, the hallowed symbol of segregationist resistance.

Yesterday General Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President and then firmly chastised John McCain’s hate-mongering ads and robocalls as “nonsense” and “over the top” for political campaigning. General Powell is a statesman. John McCain and Sarah Palin are moral meltdowns.

In the past few weeks, the deplorable duo have descended into the political sewer, belching out the same kind of gaseous slurs and lies that George Bush and Karl Rove used to defeat McCain’s Presidential bid in 2000. Remember? The smears reached peak stridency in South Carolina. McCain was accused of being homosexual, fathering a “black” child out of wedlock, and having a “dope-addict” wife. All lies. Now, after his commitment to run a “clean” campaign, McCain is indulging in even more vicious smears against Barack Obama. Fear-mongering robocalls accusing Obama of being a terrorist are clogging people’s phones in Virginia and other states. Racist TV ads that begin with Obama’s face in dark shadow visually suggest that the black man is dangerous. In every way possible, McCain is trying to make people afraid to vote for Obama.

Sarah Palin’s major function in the McCain campaign seems to be as the mindless attack dog and she acts as if she relishes the role. Forget any attempt at eloquence or intelligence. Palin follows a script filled with lies casting Obama as un-American and in league with terrorists. But who cares about lies? Following Karl Rove’s script, George Bush and Dick Cheney have conducted their entire administration based on lies. Who needs facts or evidence? Reality can be a hindrance. McCain and Palin are no different. After all, isn’t the lesson that if you repeat lies often enough, people will believe they’re true? Bush/Cheney started a war based on lies. Surely the same technique can be used to elect a president. It worked in 2004, defeating John Kerry.

Thankfully, increasing numbers of Americans are smarter this time. They see that John McCain and Sarah Palin’s lies are inciting hate and fear. At their rallies, people have shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. John McCain even had to take the microphone from a supporter who said she was afraid of Obama because “he’s a Muslim.” McCain was forced to defend Obama from the hate and fear his own campaign has stirred up. It’s more than a sorry spectacle from two adults in public office who should know better. It’s offensive and dangerous – the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that once incited mobs to lynch black men and burn women as witches.

But if we can believe the polls, the McCain/ Palin lies are backfiring. In trying to paint Barack Obama as someone voters should fear, McCain has painted himself as the scary candidate, too angry, unfocused and impulsive to be President. In ignoring the economic and social issues that are the real threats to people’s lives, McCain is sinking his campaign ship in the slop of his own making.

I have never been a McCain supporter, but even I find it sad to see a man who heroically served the United States demeaning himself for political gain. In stooping to such sleaze, McCain shows his willingness to put his political ambition ahead of the country that he says he loves.

Then there is the matter of McCain’s judgment. In addition to condoning what may be the nastiest presidential campaign in American history, McCain’s selection of the pitifully unqualified Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, demonstrates extraordinarily poor judgment. I find it hard to believe that a man who truly loves his country could jeopardize it by selecting a running mate as ignorant as Sarah Palin. Should McCain become President and suffer a health crisis – or worse – elevating Palin to the Presidency would be like putting a not-terribly-bright high-school student in the Oval Office!

Finally, in the last debate, McCain betrayed a shocking contempt for women. With huffing and puffing and much head and shoulder jerking, he mocked Obama’s support of a woman’s right to abortion to protect the health of the mother. Using air quotes, McCain dismissed women’s health as the “extreme pro-abortion position.” In that exchange, McCain In effect, was saying that women don’t count. Like George W. Bush and the Republican right-wing, McCain wants to undo all the hard-fought victories women have won for their dignity, their privacy, and their right to control their own bodies. McCain, like Bush, would take women backwards to a time when there was no birth control, no reproductive options. McCain, like Bush, would overturn Roe v. Wade, have government invade the womb, usurp women’s bodies as state property, and deny women’s most intimate and fundamental right to exercise reproductive choice. This position should be unacceptable to every woman and every enlightened man. Returning Americans to the pre-contraceptive tyranny of the gonads is not a tolerable platform of a 21st-century president.

And that’s the biggest problem. McCain hasn’t moved into the 21st-century and he seems incapable of doing so. It’s not just his age; it’s his attitude, one which the younger Palin shares. McCain is hopelessly locked in the past and his presidency would drag us all back with him. Yesterday, General Powell spoke of America’s need for “a generational change.” McCain represents a past generation. Obama has the vision, the world outlook, the understanding of complexity, and what Powell called “the intellectual vigor” to address the wretched problems left by Bush/Cheney. It’s Obama who presents the possibility for change you can believe in.

Though she ultimately lost out to Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the USA, there was much to be excited about, I think, in the fact that Hillary Clinton was running for the top job. After all, how rare for a woman to climb the political ladder to such heady heights. But she wasn’t the first. Here, Philip Carter, Publication Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, introduces an excerpt from the biography of Victoria Clafin Woodhull. She was the first woman to run for the US presidency, in 1872, and was, one might say, the original presidential maverick. I can tell you, it really does make for fascinating reading. Over to Philip…

For 50 years, until her death in 1927, Woodhull lived in England where—as in the USA—she attracted considerable attention for her ambition and unorthodox lifestyle. The Oxford DNB biography, written by the dictionary’s editor Lawrence Goldman, brings together the two halves of Woodhull’s remarkable transatlantic life. The following is an extract from her biography which can be read in full either on the ODNB website, or can be downloaded as a podcast.

The sisters faced criticism and opprobrium in England as in America. Henry James’s novella The Siege of London (1882) was read by many as a fictionalized account of Victoria Woodhull’s campaign to woo and win her third husband. Angered by constant public references to her past, in February 1894 Victoria Woodhull Martin and her husband brought an action for libel against the trustees and the librarian of the British Museum for making available to readers two pamphlets in the library on the Beecher–Tilton affair that were admitted to be libels against her….

… Featured in Country Life (14 June 1902), she engaged in local educational and rural philanthropy, but ceased any involvement in women’s suffrage or purity campaigns. A particular enthusiasm was for a scheme to develop a women’s agricultural community at Bredon’s Norton, renting out small plots of land to allow women to learn the rudiments of farming. She was one of the earliest motor car owners in Britain, driving a Mercedes Simplex and undertaking motoring tours in Britain and France, and was a founder member of the Ladies Automobile Club (1904). Having long urged that the fourth of July should be celebrated as Interdependence Day, she became a leading promoter of Anglo-American links, active in plans to mark the centenary (December 1914) of the treaty of Ghent….

….[at her daughter’s] instigation, a memorial plaque to her mother was unveiled in Tewkesbury Abbey in July 1943, paying tribute to her as ‘An American citizen long resident in this neighbourhood who devoted herself unsparingly to all that could promote the great cause of Anglo-American friendship’. Victoria Woodhull died an honoured member of her adopted country and community in a life of two quite distinct halves. That she was able to recreate herself so successfully in England after such notoriety and ignominy in America was tribute to her remarkable adaptability and force of personality.

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Elvim Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.

In recent weeks, some political commentators have observed that Senator Barack Obama is all talk, but no substance. Where his supporters see an orator of the highest order, his detractors see only a smooth talker.

Flash back to the 1980s, and we had the same bifurcated response to Ronald Reagan. Whereas some saw profundity and deep meaning in his speeches, Reagan’s detractors heard only vacuous platitudes. Indeed, Reagan’s supporters even used the same words as some liberals do today to describe Obama’s “soaring oratory.” How did Reagan score with the Reagan Democrats? By being all things to all people. The Obamacans in this year’s elections are being swayed by a parallel strategy. Talk a lot, but mean nothing.

Consider Obama’s response this week in Georgia when he addressed charges that he had been “flip flopping” between his positions : “I’m not just somebody who is talking about government as the solution to everything. I also believe in personal responsibility. I also believe in faith.” the Senator sagely declared.

But who doesn’t believe in faith? Such rhetoric misses the point, ending rather than initiating debate - a strategy consummately deployed by President Bush in selling “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by exploiting our universal and creedal belief in liberty. The question is how we should balance our respect for the identity and autonomy of religious charities with our belief in the separation of church and state. And the question is whether freedom in Iraq can and should be bought with the sacrifice of our freedoms at home and the suspension of some of our constitutional principles. By design, Obama’s and Bush’s words elided these difficult, but pressing questions.

“I also believe in personal responsibility” are also coded words Obama’s speechwriters designed to woo conservative audiences without explicitly repudiating the liberal point of view that governmental programs are the other side of the rhetorical equation that ought to have been addressed. Reverend Jesse Jackson was understandingly aggravated. Yet while Jackson has apologized for his crude verbal gaffe, we have yet to take Obama to task for his rhetorical sleight of hand because this is what we have come to expect from political candidates seeking the highest office of the land.

We are not going to face the complex problems of our time if our would-be leaders continue to take the rhetorical path of least resistance, to buy our assent without any content. To say nothing even when one talks a lot is to fulfill the rhetorical formula for, literally, empty promises. There were times in this election season when Obama rose above the anti-intellectual fray, just like there were times when Ronald Reagan and George Bush used the bully pulpit to educate rather than to merely seduce the American people. This year, when conservatives see in a liberal political candidate the same rhetorical flaws as what liberals saw in Reagan and George Bush, perhaps we will come closer to recognizing a systemic flaw in our political system, and it is the Anti-intellectual Presidency.

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Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America.  In this article, Zelinsky argues that Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform, that this is a healthy development for American democracy, and that the current system of campaign finance reform should be replaced by a simplified disclosure regime.

The most important event of the 2008 presidential campaign may already have occurred: The major party nominees have publicly confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform. Such reform has imposed increasingly complex and stringent limitations on the contributions of political donors and on the expenditures of political campaigns.

Senator Obama had been an outspoken apostle of campaign finance reform. At the outset of his presidential effort, Senator Obama had proclaimed his commitment to accept public financing and its accompanying expenditure restrictions for his general election campaign. He has now turned 180 degrees. Senator Obama will now eschew public financing and its attendant limits and will instead fund his general election effort with private donations to escape those limits.

Senator McCain’s change of heart is more complex but even more dramatic. Senator McCain was the prime Republican sponsor of the most recent tightening of federal restrictions on campaigns and donors, the eponymous McCain-Feingold Act. While he will accept public financing in the fall, Senator McCain’s supporters are actively and openly exploiting every legal loophole they can find to permit private contributors to assist his candidacy beyond the restrictions imposed by that Act. The irony is palpable. Senator McCain’s supporters are now assiduously seeking to erode the very constraints on donors and campaigns which Senator McCain had championed.

It is easy to criticize Senators Obama and McCain for their inconsistency. I suggest, however, that there is a broader significance to these events. Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform. We should now kill this complex and unfair regulatory scheme. American democracy will be healthier without the myriad restrictions which limit Americans’ ability to contribute to the candidates of their choice.

The fundamental premises upon which campaign finance reform rests are false: Money in politics is a bad thing which can and ought to be limited legislatively. On the contrary, for many Americans, a financial contribution is today the only meaningful way, besides voting, they can assist the candidates they support. In any event, campaign contributions cannot be controlled fairly and effectively. Another form of Prohibition has failed.

Consider the simpler era in which I grew up. Working on political campaigns along with other volunteers, my friends and I would meet at local party headquarters and fan out to distribute bumper stickers and campaign buttons to our neighbors. It seems quaint because, in retrospect, it was.

Contrast this low budget, Ozzie-and-Harriet world with the consultant-driven, TV-saturated campaigns which constituted primary season 2008. In these campaigns, the citizen-volunteers have largely been subordinated to the full-time, paid, professional operatives who ran these campaigns. In this environment, a financial contribution is, besides voting, the most meaningful form of support many, probably most, Americans can make to the candidate they support.

Moreover, the attempt to limit the influence of money by law, propounded as a means of leveling the political playing field, has instead reinforced the political power of the celebrities in our celebrity-based culture. During the 2008 primary campaign, both Oprah Winfrey and Chuck Norris provided enormously valuable assistance to the Obama and Huckabee campaigns, generating publicity worth hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars for the candidates they supported. None of this celebrity assistance is capped by McCain-Feingold, despite the obvious value of that assistance.

In contrast, if a non-celebrity citizen favoring a competing candidate sought to counteract celebrity-generated publicity by donating equivalent funds to purchase offsetting advertising, that citizen would have violated the law. If, for example, a supporter of Governor Romney sought to counteract Mr. Norris’s efforts via a campaign donation of $2,500 (a tiny fraction of Mr. Norris’s effective but unregulated contribution to Governor Huckabee), that Romney supporter broke the law which limited him to a $2,300 contribution. Campaign finance reform, it turns out, is just for the little people.

It is unsurprising that this system is now in disarray. The current system, with its complex contribution limits, is overly-complicated and unfair. These complex and inequitable rules should be replaced by a simplified regime which permits all campaign contributions without limit but which requires contributions to be immediately and accurately disclosed.

Whether one believes that campaign finance reform like McCain-Feingold was a noble idea which failed or was an unwise approach from the beginning, Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of that approach. We should now move from the currently dysfunctional system to a simplified regime which permits contributions without limit, which requires complete and accurate disclosure of those contributions, and which no longer puts our political life in the hands of Oprah and Chuck.

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Who Was George Washington?

Mark McNeilly is the author of George Washington and the Art of Business: Leadership Principles of America’s First Commander-in-Chief as well as Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers. On Monday he helped us celebrate President’s Day. Today he takes a closer look at George Washington on the anniversary of his birth. The views he expresses are his alone and are not meant to represent those of any company or institution with which he is affiliated.

We celebrated President’s Day on Monday but George Washington’s actual birthday is today, February 22nd. While many of us enjoyed the slew of Presidents’ Day Sales, what we may have lost is reflection on who this great man was and the impact he has had on our country. And for many who do think of him, he is not a man of history but a man of myth. For example, when talking with a friend of mine about Washington she said, “He’s sort of a fable, kind of like Paul Bunyan.” For some he is not even that. In one recent study of college students’ knowledge of American civics only 68% of freshman knew Washington’s proper role as general and statesman in the founding of our country. The rest (roughly one third of the students) thought he was a constitutional writer, a social compact theorist, advocate for states rights or the leader of the Massachusetts’ delegation to the Constitutional Convention. (more…)

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How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy! by Barbara Kerley illustrated by Edwin Fotherignham Scholastic 2008 Yes, a picture book biography about Teddy Roosevelt's tomboy daughter "running riot" in and out of the White House around the turn of the century. “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice." And so it is that while

In honor of President’s Day we asked Mark McNeilly, author of George Washington and the Art of Business: Leadership Principles of America’s First Commander-in-Chief as well as Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers, to reflect on what our original President would think of the current elections. The views he expresses are his alone and are not meant to represent those of any company or institution with which he is affiliated.  Who do you think Washington would have voted for?

“The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant…” So began George Washington in his Farewell Address to the nation in September of 1796 as he prepared to finish his second term as President. Knowing he did not want to have a third term in office, Washington used his Farewell Address to provide advice to the citizens of the fledgling nation by offering “…some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.” Looking back at this and other writings of Washington, as well as his actions in history, we might surmise what he may have thought of the upcoming election. (more…)

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by them click here. Below Domke and Coe look at the effects of MLK’s legacy on the Democratic primaries.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day has now come and gone, but King’s presence is still being felt in the Democratic primary. (more…)

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Morton Keller is the author of America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History, in which he argues that while most historians popularly categorize America’s history into short periods of time (most “eras” or “ages” lasting no longer than a decade) the truth is quite contrary. In the post below Keller, Spector Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University, puts the 2008 primary season in historical perspective.

As the 2008 election slowly proceeds, it gets curiouser and curiouser. (more…)

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Colin Grant is the son of Jamaican parents who moved to Britain in the late 1950s. He spent 5 years studying medicine before turning to the stage. He has written and produced numerous plays and is currently a producer for BBC Radio. In his new book, Negro with a a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey Grant looks at one of the most controversial figures in African-American history. Both worshiped and despised, Garvey led an extraordinary life as the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association which had branches in more than 40 countries. In the article below Grant looks at Garvey through a modern lens, comparing him to Barack Obama.

During an outbreak of the unique American pastime of lynching in the 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent for its secret weapon: Walter White. The NAACP operative was so fair-skinned that he could travel to the South incognito, infiltrate the lynch mobs and investigate their actions without fear of molestation or loss of life. Nonetheless, this unenviable task exacted a psychological toll on his delicate mind. In his later years, White would recall how petrified he was of being uncovered by hateful, bigoted Southerners who had refined their own pseudo-scientific tests for unmasking blacks ‘passing’ for whites. Caught in conversation with one such man, White was bid to hold out his hands so that his finger nails might be examined: ‘Now if you had nigger blood,’ said the smiling Southerner, ‘it would show here on your half-moons.’ Walter White survived the inquisition; his cuticles did not betray him.

In some regards, Barack Obama has pulled off a similar coup. (more…)

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In 1884 Belva Lockwood was putting the final touches on her campaign for president under the Equal Rights Party. To celebrate her role in paving the way for Hillary Clinton (love her or hate her having a women run for president is pretty cool), we thought we would excerpt Belva’s biography from The Oxford Companion to American Law edited by Kermit L. Hall. We found this excerpt by searching Oxford Reference Online.  Keep shooting for the moon ladies!

Lockwood, Belva Ann (born Royalton, N.Y., 24 October 1830; died Washington, D.C., 19 May 1917). She graduated from Genesee College (later Syracuse University) in 1857 and began a career teaching, moving to Washington, D.C. in 1866 where she founded her own school. Two years later she married Ezekiel Lockwood, who took over the school. Belva then turned to the study of law, enrolling at National University Law School in 1871 after being refused admission to the law schools at Columbian College (now George Washington University), Georgetown University, and Howard University. (more…)

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SFG : Dead President. Ink on paper. (Kilometrico ball point on 80gsm white paper).
-Get your f*ree sketch here!

Here's Hilary Clinton, part of my personal President's Day challenge. She's also on my website.