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Last month on Capitol Hill, a tedious slur on Henry Kissinger (“war criminal”) provoked an irate reaction (“low-life scum”). The clash between Senator McCain and the protesters of Code Pink garnered media coverage and YouTube clicks. The Senate’s hearings on national strategy not so much. This is unfortunate. For world-weary superpowers, opportunities for sustained strategic reflection are rare. The transfer of power in the Senate affords such an occasion, and John McCain has seized it. His committee hearings nonetheless illustrate both the many challenges facing American foreign policy and the limits of strategy as a guide to foreign-policy choice.

Making strategy is intellectual work. The strategist seeks to explain the patterns of world events, hopeful that comprehension will guide policy and permit policymakers to shape global trends. Requiring interpretation, making strategy is akin to writing history, but what the strategist explains is the present and future. Henry Kissinger once put it thus: “I think of myself as a historian… I have tried to understand the forces that are at work in this period.”

During the Cold War, the forces at work were clear — or so it now appears. The world was divided, and the United States stood for freedom and against the Soviet Union. Washington did not push the USSR too hard, for doing so risked war. Instead, policymakers adhered to a strategy of containment, the logic of which presumed that the USSR would crumble upon its inner contradictions. History vindicated this theory, and many now yearn for the coherence that containment presumably imparted to US foreign policy. The Cold War was dangerous, General Brent Scowcroft told the McCain hearings, but at least “we knew what the strategy was.”

Americans should not yearn for such clarity. Containment nostalgia distorts the actual adaptability of US foreign policy in the Cold War. The search for strategic coherence is, moreover, inappropriate to the needs of US foreign policy today, which requires not intellectual cohesion but tolerance for complexity, improvisation, and even contradiction.

Consider Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski — two of the sages who addressed McCain’s committee. They rank among America’s clearest strategic thinkers, but neither was in his own time a strategic dogmatist. Henry Kissinger began as an adept practitioner of Cold War geopolitics, but as new challenges mounted, he pirouetted to champion cooperation on issues, like energy, that had little to do with the Cold War. From these efforts, the International Energy Agency and the G-7 were born.

Brzezinski, with President Carter, worked to build a “framework of international cooperation” for a world that the Cold War no longer defined and brought human rights into the foreign-policy mainstream. Only as US-Soviet relations deteriorated in the late 1970s did the Carter administration adopt an invigorated anti-Soviet policy. Pragmatic adaptation to events, not devotion to strategic coherence, enabled policymakers to lead the United States through one of the hardest phases in its superpower career, prefiguring the Cold War’s resolution on American terms.

America today faces complex and discordant challenges. For John McCain, a revanchist Russia, a rising China, a truculent Iran, an implacable Islamism, and a rash of failing states make the world more dangerous than ever. McCain might have included (as Scowcroft did) global climate change, an existential challenge for industrial civilization. It is seductive to presume that a singular strategy could enable the United States to transcend, resolve, and master the myriad challenges it faces.

The hope is forlorn. Containment during the Cold War provided no roadmap for policy. At most, containment enjoined acceptance of the world’s division and optimism in the West’s prospects. Within this loose outlook, policymakers improvised and adapted, pursuing diverse agendas. The most effective, like Kissinger, understood that even superpowers do not determine the course of world events; instead, their leaders must react and respond. Presuming the reverse risks the kind of strategic hubris that embroiled the United States in the quagmire that President Obama has struggled for six years to resolve.

What role then for strategy? Strategic thinking, which weighs costs and benefits and contemplates long-range consequences, is a prerequisite for responsible foreign policy. Yet Americans should beware the notion that world affairs can be comprehended within coherent, meta-historical frameworks: the Cold War, globalization, the clash of civilizations, and so on. To be creative, strategy must acknowledge both the provisionality of its own conclusions and the validity of alternative perspectives on the world. Like history, it must remain a work in continual progress.

Heading image: Ford Kissinger Rockefeller by David Hume Kennerly. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Strife over strategy: shaping American foreign policy appeared first on OUPblog.

       

Don’t believe everything you read—or see—online. One of the newer Google search features is to include a biography box for individuals who have entries on Wikipedia. The problem is that Google’s algorithms occasionally select random photos to include as part of these profiles. So, we end up with situations like the above in which Beauty and the Beast co-director Gary Trousdale is depicted as Disney producer Don Hahn.

Or how about director Bob McKimson substituting for director Frank Tashlin?

And I don’t even know how this one happened: Disney director Clyde Geronimi (Sleeping Beauty) is replaced by U.S. Senator John McCain.

It began with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. The choice of this incompetent, unqualified, inexperienced, and stupid person as a vice presidential candidate called McCain’s judgment into serious question. Had the old war hero turned senile? How could he have put such a person a heartbeat from the Presidency? The mere thought of Palin in the White House was frightening. But McCain’s choice was far more than a scare—it insulted America and unleashed a wave of violence and racism that continues.

Never forget the crosshairs map Palin posted on her Facebook page. She urged her Twitter followers, “Don’t retreat, reload.” Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ face was in one of the crosshairs. On January 8, 2011, Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head outside a Tucson Safeway supermarket. Fortunately she survived and is making a remarkable recovery. But America is still coping with the incivility and insults initiated by Palin and taken up by the Tea Party and Congressional Republicans.

The insults continued after President Obama was elected and took office. With exhortations to “take back our country,” the Tea Party, overwhelmingly made up of whites, spread its unsubtle racist message. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “take back our country” meant take it back from the black guy who’s President.

Four days before the President was inaugurated, the tone was set by radio talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh. On January 16, 2010, Linbaugh said, “I hope Obama fails.”

During the President’s first term, Congressional Republicans took up Limbaugh’s mantra, deciding to do everything in their power to destroy the Obama presidency by holding up, blocking, weakening, misrepresenting, and voting against everything the President and Democrats wanted to accomplish.

Republican senator Mitch McConnell stated the Republicans’ position quite clearly: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told Major Garrett in an interview published in the National Review in October 2010. A month later, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he repeated his position: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” In another time, such a call of opposition to a sitting President would have been considered treason. But over the past two years, Republicans have, like obedient little soldiers, followed McConnell’s marching orders, turning their backs on their country and the people who elected them and abandoning their responsibility to participate in government.

Despite repeated attempts by the President to work in a bipartisan fashion, Republicans refused, becoming the “Party of No.” No to health care for all Americans. No to the President’s job creation bill. No to restoring regulations of the banks whose fraudulent practices caused the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. No to repealing the Bush tax cuts that added billions of dollars to the deficit. No to taxing millionaires and billionaires so they pay their fair share. Last summer, Republicans’ political brinksmanship with the debt ceiling resulted in the first downgrade in the national credit rating in U.S. history. In carrying out Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell’s dictum to bring about failure of the Obama administration, Republicans have made Congress dysfunctional and the economic recovery slower than it might have been had they spent more time working with the President instead of working against him. That President Obama has been able to accomplish so much despite Republicans’ intransigence is a tribute to his political skill, patience and intelligence.

Now we come to this election year and the line-up of potential Republican presidential candidates who are as insultingly unqualified as Sarah Palin. All celebr

Former Sarah Palin aide Frank Bailey has landed a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Howard Books. His memoir, Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, will be released on May 24th.

Bailey became close to former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during her gubernatorial campaign; he remained in her inner circle  during John McCain‘s presidential race. He co-wrote the memoir along with author Ken Morris and Mudflats blogger Jeanne Devon. On her site, Devon revealed that the three writers spent two years on this project.

Bailey had this statement in the press release: “I write because I am convinced that Sarah’s priorities and personality are not only ill-suited to head a political party or occupy national office, but would lead to a disaster of, well, biblical proportions.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Time Magazine reported that it has “confirmed by sources” that author and John McCain speechwriter Mark Salter wrote O: A Presidential Novel.

Salter has also written a number of nonfiction books with McCain (including Faith Of My Fathers and Worth the Fighting For).  Simon & Schuster had stoked speculation among journalists over the anonymously written novel about the Barack Obama White House–releasing hints, a web video, and excerpts from the forthcoming novel.

Time Magazine has more about the clues: “(Flashback: Page Six touted Salter.) Simon and Schuster topper Jonathan Karp was Salter’s editor on books he did with Senator McCain.-Salter has been holed up in Maine since leaving his job in the Senate. The descriptions that Karp has given of the author matched Salter.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Former John McCain campaign adviser Nicole Wallace used the frustrations resulting from her work on the McCain-Palin campaign to write her debut novel, Eighteen Acres. The embedded video from Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint shows a scene from the book launch party at SoHo House.

Wallace began writing her novel immediately after Barack Obama‘s win ended the McCain and Sarah Palin‘s campaign. The novel explores the ups and downs faced by the first female president and her two female staff members during a re-election battle.

Here’ s more from Publisher’s Weekly: “The book is ‘partly an emotional response to the election’ admitted Wallace, whose contentious relationship with Sarah Palin was spotlighted in Going Rogue. Yet it is not a retaliation (as fun as that sounds). Wallace instead toyed with the genre of political fiction as a medium for exploring the complexity or ‘indignities’ of woman’s role in politics. Drawing mainly from her six years as a senior aid with the George W. Bush administration, she offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the White House from an ambitious female’s perspective.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we see how Alice in Wonderland mirrors our own political world.  Read other posts by these authors here.

That is what the playing card Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, (and in all previous versions) shouts, a flippant order to decapitate everyone and anyone who dares show her any insolence, no matter how trivial the offense. The movie is a reminder of the excesses and abuses of authority. It exposes the often illogical and dangerous decisions that emerge from unaccountable rulers. There are many signs that Alice would encounter these same dangers in America today. Two congressional events from last week come immediately to mind. One was the passage of a bill to prevent the torturing of American school kids and the other was the introduction of a new bill that would require government authorities to treat anyone arrested as if they were already guilty.

On March 3, 2010, the House passed HR 4247, Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. The bill is designed to prevent the occurrence of torture in schools, including forceful restraints, seclusion, and beatings. Hundreds of U.S. children have suffered from such physical and mental abuse, resulting in countless injuries and death in many states, according to the General Accounting Office. What is most interesting about this new law is that so few Republicans voted for it. The final vote tally was 238 Democrats and 24 Republicans voting for the bill. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, 145, voted against. The reasons Republicans gave for voting against the bill were that not enough information was available about the prevalence of such school torture, the need to protect state’s rights, and their reluctance to impose federal guidelines on private schools. These are all legitimate concerns. I would wonder, however, why such concerns trump something as insidious, shocking and unconstitutional as the use of torture on children in our schools? Why are we so casual about burying our children alive, as Charles Dickens once described solitary confinement?

Another curiosity from last week appears to spring from the same odd rabbit hole that Alice fell into. Senators John McCain and Joe

I posted these two cartoons for the last contest "Caricature." (I wish now I'd posted my Britney Spears "Wheel" for caricature.) Oh well.
I drew these after the presidential candidates announced their selections for vice-president.
Do you see John McCain's face in the elephant?

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Eve Donegan, Sales and Marketing Assistant

David Ehrenfeld is a professor of biology at Rutgers University and holds degrees in history, medicine, and zoology. He is the founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology, lectures internationally, and is the author of The Arrogance of Humanism and Beginning Again. His most recent book, Becoming Good Ancestors, focuses on the interactions, both negative and positive, among nature, community, and our exploding technology, and explains the critical role of honesty in moving towards a sustainable society. In the post below, Ehrenfeld talks about the role of energy in the presidential debates and suggests that the candidates have not talked about the really big energy problems that we face.

The presidential debates made one thing clear: regardless of who won, energy technologies are about to get a great deal of attention and money from the U.S. government in 2009. John McCain said that in a McCain presidency he would be trying to build dozens of nuclear plants, step up offshore drilling for oil, and fund “clean coal” technology. Barack Obama said he would focus on wind, solar, and geothermal power, on biodiesel, and on increasing energy efficiency. There was considerable overlap between their energy agendas, but neither candidate mentioned the two elephants in the room.

The first elephant, a medium sized one, is that the technologies the candidates said they would promote, and those they didn’t mention, are not sure bets for solving the energy crisis quickly, if at all. Some, like “clean coal,” hydrogen, and oil shale, come with inherent technological problems that will limit their usefulness for the foreseeable future. Others, like offshore drilling and nuclear power, will take years or decades before they pay a net energy dividend, and there are serious safety issues, which cannot be brushed aside. Biodiesel competes with agriculture for land, and can cause ecological problems – oil shale and “clean coal” need lots of fresh water. Geothermal, wind, solar, and tidal technologies, promising as they are, will be limited in the quantity of energy they can supply. Nuclear and many of the other energy technologies yield only electricity – unlike fossil fuels, they don’t provide chemical feedstock for making the plastics, synthetic fabrics, and many other chemicals that modern society demands. Regardless of our hopes and fantasies, there doesn’t seem to be a really cheap and super-abundant energy source like 20th Century oil and gas on the horizon.

It’s true that we have no choice but to continue to develop alternative energy technologies. In some cases, present problems will be overcome, and there is always the possibility that we will discover entirely new ways of producing energy. But it would be reckless to count on it. Chances are slim of finding a replacement for cheap oil and gas in time to keep our current economy running without tremendous disruptions.

And then there is the other elephant in the room. This second elephant is much bigger than the first – maybe it’s a mammoth. Yet if either candidate noticed it, he didn’t want to talk about it, although it’s simple enough to describe. Learning how to cope with the consequences of our excessive energy use, and acquiring some restraint will be even more important than finding new energy sources. In other words, what if we do find ways to keep on supplying ourselves with vast quantities of affordable energy, but do nothing to moderate our energy consumption? What happens then to what remains of the ecosystems on which we all depend?

The winning candidate is going to have to deal with all the secondary issues arising from our overuse of energy. How will we hold back global climate change if we keep on pumping energy into a stressed environment? With many of the ocean fisheries already gone or going, what will happen to the ones that are left if there is limitless energy to fuel all the world’s fishing fleets indefinitely? How long will the remaining tropical forests last if there is unlimited energy for indiscriminate logging and for shipping timber and timber products to markets thousands of miles away? If there is enough cheap energy to maintain high input agriculture – with its energy-consuming nitrogen fertilizers, huge machines, heavy pesticide applications, factory-farmed livestock, and corporate conglomerates – what will happen to our dwindling supply of precious farmlands, soils, animal and crop varieties, and farmers? These are the sorts of problems that will haunt the new president and the rest of the world even more than the problem of energy supply.

The only energy strategy that can make these elephants vanish is learning to get along with less energy. Conservation based on new lifestyles will be as much of a challenge as creating alternative energy technologies, but it’s faster, cheaper, and far more certain of success. Can we do it? Can conservatives and liberals ever agree on an agenda to move to a low-energy society? There is no choice if we want our society to survive.

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On the eve of this historic election, our friends at SurveyU (a Ypulse advertiser and research sponsor at the Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup East) have just released data on college students and early and absentee voting. If anyone is still... Read the rest of this post

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 rehabilitation of liberalism. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Whatever happens at the polls in two weeks, the pendulum has swung back in Liberalism’s direction. Economically, culturally, and ideologically, liberal answers are regaining legitimacy.

After all, even though the Democratic party nominated a liberal anti-war candidate over a more moderate establishment candidate this year, and the Republicans turned to a maverick with a reputation for bi-partisanship, the Democratic candidate is ahead in practically every battleground state that George Bush won in 2004.

How quickly times have changed. Whereas John Kerry was swiftboated in 2004, Obama (like Reagan) is developing Teflon powers as he continues to ride his surge in the polls despite stories about Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN. When terrorism was issue number one, people preferred a Republican president; but when the economy becomes issue number one, people prefer a Democratic president.

This is why Sarah Palin’s charge that “‘spreading the wealth‘ sounds a little like socialism” isn’t getting much traction. Spreading the wealth sounds like sharing the wealth, and these days such thoughts aren’t all that unpopular. After all, the Bush administration’s decision to obtain equity stakes in several private banks in return for a liquidity injection isn’t exactly laissez faire.

Culturally, the country appears to have moved on from those culture wars we heard so much about just four years ago. Just this year, the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts’ decisions to legalize same-sex marriage and the lackluster response from the conservative community indicates the shifting cultural tectonics. Abortion isn’t such a hot button issue this year either. Anti-abortion Catholics have endorsed Obama in significant numbers. If anything, McCain’s selection of a running mate who will not make an exception to her pro-life position for rape and incest reveals a campaign completely in illusion about where the country is culturally. McCain’s contempt for the “health” exception for women will seriously damage his chances with women.

We also see the ideological shift in cross-party endorsements for Obama. Breaking a century and a half year old tradition, the Chicago Tribune has endorsed Barack Obama. Christopher Buckley’s defection is both substantially and symbolically powerful, as were the endorsements of Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. And now Colin Powell has joined the bandwagon, characterizing Obama as a “transformational” leader. The last time we saw such language being used to describe a potential president was during the landslide and realigning elections of 1932 and 1980.

In the days to come, Republicans will push back to insist that this is still a “center-right” country - as Karl Rove and Charles Krauthhammer have done - and they will try to remind Americans that Democratic control of all branches of government may not be a good idea. But if the result of the White House race is still unclear, no one doubts that the Democrats will strengthen their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Average Joe, the median independent voter has moved to the Left of Plumber Joe, the median Republican voter. It may be time to excavate “liberal” and “liberalism” from the dictionary of political incorrectness.

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I'm Left Handed and So Is Our Next President...

Last night I watched the presidential debate between Barak Obama and John McCain on TV (I'd listened to the first one on the radio) and noticed that, like me, they are both left handed.

Naturally, I did some googling and found that there have been lots of lefties in the White House. Says the Washington Post:

No matter who wins in November, 6 of the 12 chief executives since the end of World War II will have been left-handed: Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton and either Obama or McCain. That's a disproportionate number, considering that only one in 10 people in the general population is left-handed.

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 last Friday’s debate. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

In the first presidential debate on Friday night, Senator McCain tried repeatedly to cast Senator Obama as a naive lightweight who does not understand foreign policy. Seven times, McCain laid the charge that Obama just doesn’t get it.

-”Senator Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”
-”And, yes, Senator Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy…”
-”What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand is that if without precondition you sit down across the table from someone …”
-”I don’t think that Senator Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power.”
-”If we adopted Senator Obama’s set date for withdrawal, then that will have a calamitous effect in Afghanistan and American national security interests in the region. Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand there is a connection between the two.”
-”Again, a little bit of naivete there. He doesn’t understand that Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia.”
-”Senator Obama still doesn’t quite understand – or doesn’t get it — that if we fail in Iraq, it encourages al Qaeda.”

In schools, in the boardroom, even around the kitchen table, people tend to prove their knowledge by proving what they think to be true rather than by attacking their interlocutors for their failure to understand. McCain was deploying a peculiar form of persuasion that we see often in our politics: he was trying to make a self-referential claim by an other-referential jab. By calling Obama naive he was trying to imply that he was not. Since it is bad taste in politics (as in real life) to be a self-professed know-it-all, it was, McCain probably thought, a classier act to simply dismiss Obama as naive and allow the conclusion that he understood foreign policy better to follow.

Yet this was exactly the failed strategy that Al Gore used against George Bush in their presidential debates in 2000. Although some pundits thought that Al Gore was scoring debate points, many viewers came away thinking that he was a condescending know-it-all.

Even the most artful rhetorician of our time, President Ronald Reagan, had to strike the right balance of tone and humor to successfully get away with his “there you go again” rejoinder. This well executed line in his debate with President Carter in 1980 was one of the defining moments of that campaign. But it gained traction only because there was a growing consensus in the electorate that the decades-long liberal formula for solving the country’s economic woes was obsolete and in need of overhaul. “Do you still not get it” only works when the audience has already gotten it and moved on to newer solutions, leaving one’s interlocutor alone in the dustheap of history.

The problem is that in 2008, Obama is not alone in his views. There are significantly more voters tired of George Bush’s unilateralism, his hard-headed focus on the war on terrorism in Iraq, and his refusal to negotiate with rogue nations than there are voters who would prefer to stay his course. Unlike in 1980 when the country was moving to the political right, this year, many Independents will be apt to wonder if it is McCain who still doesn’t get it.

Senator McCain would do well to remember that the primary season is over and he needs to stop speaking only to his base if he wants to narrow Obama’s lead in the polls. The strategy of calling one’s debate partner naive (a euphemism for a fool) does not often get one extra points from neutral bystanders, independent voters. If Republicans were, like McCain, exasperated on Friday night with their perception that Obama just wouldn’t see the obvious, McCain probably appeared condescending to Independents with the forced grins by which he greeted Obama’s alleged displays of naivete. McCain needs to stop harping on the charge that Obama doesn’t get it but start proving that HE gets it - that many Independents and Democrats are looking to restore the country’s relationship with the rest of the world, that there are many Americans who see the war in Iraq as a foreign policy tangent to the brewing problems in Afghanistan. Maybe Senator Obama doesn’t get it. But do you, Senator McCain?

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By Cassie Ammerman, Publicity Assistant

D. Michael Lindsay is a sociologist at Rice University and the author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. With the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, the Republicans seems to have gained some points in the polls (as we can see in Elvin Lim’s piece, here). In this essay, first posted on Beliefnet’s Casting Stones blog, Lindsay explains one probable reason for that gain.

Sarah Palin electrified the Republican National Convention last week. The Democrats are still smarting from her one-liners, and senior McCain advisors have to be concerned that, while she excites the party’s base, she also outshines the candidate. They will, no doubt, continue using her as the campaign’s “attack dog,” but there’s another aspect of her rhetoric worth thinking about. Consider the following section from her acceptance speech in St. Paul:

…Politics isn’t just a game of clashing parties and competing interests. The right reason [for political involvement] is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it. No one expects us all to agree on everything, but we are expected to govern with integrity, and goodwill, and clear convictions, and a servant’s heart.

Palin offered these same lines in Dayton, Ohio, on the day she was tapped to be McCain’s running mate. Why would a person seeking the country’s second most powerful office talk about governing with a “servant’s heart,” and more importantly, why would she repeat such an odd phrase in the biggest speech of her life?

Quite simply, it is one of her main assignments—to mobilize fellow evangelicals for the religiously unmusical John McCain. Up until two weeks ago, 2008 was looking an awful lot like 1996 for the Republicans. Most evangelicals were going to vote for McCain, but they weren’t that excited about it. Their support was tepid at best. That is no way to win the White House, especially with the Democrats’ surging enthusiasm over the Obama-Biden ticket.

John McCain has many advantages for a year when Republicans are so unpopular, but he has been plagued by not being able to connect with evangelical voters. No matter how many times he recounts the story of the cross on the ground in the Hanoi Hilton, the Episcopalian-turned-Baptist cannot speak the evangelical vernacular like a native.

If there is one political lesson McCain learned from George W. Bush, it is that a Republican has to signal his allegiance to evangelicals early and often. However, it must be done with a measure of subtlety. To be truly effective, the politician has to communicate to evangelicals “I’m one of you” without being explicit. Once you know what to look for, though, one can see that public figures broadcast these signals all the time. As I showed in my book, entertainers who are Christians signal their faith commitments as often as politicians. For example, the cover of U2’s album All That You Can’t Leave Behind features an airport sign with “J33-3,” alluding to Jeremiah 33:3. In his 2006 co-authored book, Bono explained the signal as a reference to the Bible: “That’s Jeremiah 33:3. The Scripture is ‘Call unto me, and I will answer you.’ It’s celestial telephony.”

When Sarah Palin referred to governing with a “servant’s heart,” the phrase resonated with millions of American evangelicals who have heard that phrase all of their lives. It is a shorthand for the humble leadership Jesus admonished in the Gospel of Mark, and the term is so prevalent among evangelicals that it has become a punch line for sermon jokes.

Politicians signal messages to all kinds of audiences when they are speaking to large, diverse crowds. Signaling allows the speaker to communicate certain messages subtly without risking full disclosure. When overt reference is inappropriate or might draw unwanted attention, evangelicals use signaling to reveal their faith allegiances without even mentioning God or Jesus. The effect is blunted when, as Barack Obama did in concluding his acceptance speech, the speaker explicitly states “in the words of scripture…”

And it happens not just with biblical allusions. Seemingly secular phrases can be endowed with religious significance for evangelical audiences. That is what made Sarah Palin’s reference to the “common good” even more intriguing. After John Kerry lost the 2004 election, Mara Vanderslice, Kerry’s religious outreach adviser, established Common Good Strategies, a political consulting firm for Democrats interested in connecting with people of faith. Within a few years, “common good” had become the mantra of left-of-center believers. The slogan for Faith in Public Life, an initiative housed at the Center for American Progress, is “a resource center for justice and the common good.” Bill Clinton lectured at Georgetown on the topic in 2006, and devout Democrats such as Senator Bob Casey regularly incorporate the rhetoric in speeches and on the campaign trail. In fact, BBC News noted in 2006 that Casey mentioned the phrase 29 times in a single talk.

Could it be that Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase is coincidental, that it was not intended to tap these religious sensibilities? Not likely. The same person who helped President George W. Bush master the art of signaling to the faithful—Matthew Scully—wrote most of Palin’s speech. Moreover, the was address vetted extremely carefully; it was, after all, her national introduction before 37 million Americans. McCain advisers knew enough to realize she was far more fluent in the evangelical vernacular than the Arizona senator.

Critics may claim these are only rhetorical flourishes. Nothing guarantees that signals translate into votes. That may be so, but politics is largely about symbols. Political symbols mobilize the masses. No Republican has won the White House in modern history without the staunch support of evangelical voters. When John McCain began his bid for the Oval Office, observers thought he didn’t have a prayer of winning their support. With this “Hail Mary pass” of enlisting the Alaskan governor as his running mate, John McCain’s political savior may just turn out to be a pit bull with lipstick.

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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 Palin’s nomination. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

John McCain’s campaign has turned a 7 point deficit into a 4 point lead according to the new USA Today/Gallup poll. This post-convention bump did not come from McCain’s acceptance speech, which only received an “excellent” rating from 15% of those polled, compared to the 35% Obama received. The bump came from Sarah Palin. Here is the poll’s most important result: before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-19%.

The new McCain campaign message is that change is about reforming Washington, aided in no small part by a Number 2 that has developed/created quite a reputation for reform. This new configuration appears to be overshadowing Obama’s definition that change requires a change in party control of the White House, because it has tapped into the anti-Washington sentiment felt among the Republican base.

Palin is running not as the back-up plan (as most vp candidates have), but as right-hand woman, and this is why Barack Obama took the risk of appearing unpresidential today by attacking Sara Palin directly himself. But Obama’s response - “You can’t just make stuff up” - sounded like a petulant kid crying foul rather than an effective counter-punch. As the campaign fumbles for a working riposte, it will become clear that the answer was always right before their eyes. By an ironic twist of fate, Hillary Clinton, though unsuccessful in her own presidential bid, has become the queen and kingmaker. Sarah Palin would not have risen from political obscurity into national prominence but for the schism generated by Clinton’s candidacy within the Democratic party. Yet Joe Biden cannot perform the role of attack dog as viscerally as he would if Palin were a man, and so ironically, Clinton will have to be dispatched to play this traditionally vice-presidential role. The question is whether the media will give Clinton the time of day now that the primary season is decidedly over.

Safe for the October surprise still to be discovered, the tectonics of the match-up are now mostly settled. With the VPs now selected, two previously toss-up states have moved into the “leaning” category: PA has moved in Obama’s direction because of Biden, and MO has moved in McCain’s direction because of Palin. The only vice-presidential debate sceduled on Oct 2 will be more critical than the first of three presidential debates on September 26. There’s been a lot of talk of Gallup polls conducted immediately after the conventions only getting it right fifty percent of the time, but less acknowledged is the fact that by the first week of October - the week the vp candidates shall debate - these polls have gotten it right almost every time since 1952. On October 2, Biden and Palin will have their one chance to get it right for their respective campaigns.

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‘High School Musical 3′ on MySpace (since most of the viewers are over 14, right?) - Club Penguin’s newspaper (doing better than its real world counterparts - kinda funny) (Wired) - Smart girls rock! (new Vanilla Star Jeans ad... Read the rest of this post

I quickly sketched this caricature of Barack Obama while watching the Democratic National Convention. I'm looking forward to the hooplah on Thursday night. Obama could be a really fun President to draw. But then again, so could John McCain.

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 role of race in our upcoming Presidential elections.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

And so it begins. Of course race was going to become an issue this year. It was never possible that the first competitive African-American candidate for president, Barack Obama, would face no obstacle in terms of his racial eligibility for the Oval Office. The only question is how race would rear its ugly and inevitable head.

Already a pattern has emerged. The minority candidate is always accused of playing the minority card. Senator John McCain was quick to throw this accusation last Thursday. This was a response to Obama’s

claim the day before in Missouri in which he charged the Republicans for trying to scare voters by questioning his patriotism and “funny name” and by pointing out he doesn’t “look like those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The question of who really was playing the race card can only be answered in the eyes of the beholder. But let it be said that allusions to Obama’s otherness have been made on both sides from earlier on in the campaign. In naming the “race card” at this particular moment in the campaign and not earlier, the McCain campaign is not just retaliating or reacting to Obama’s actions or words, it is strategizing.

Remember when the Obama camp was accusing Hillary Clinton of playing the gender card? In some degree, Obama is getting the first taste of the medicine Hillary Clinton had to swallow during the primaries. Accuse a minority of playing a minority card, and s/he is dealt a double blow: supporting members of the majority are reminded of the candidate’s minority status and his/her electability problem; at the same time, opposing members of the majority have their stereotype of a whining minority candidate reinforced. When Hillary Clinton was accused of playing the gender card, some of her supporters were reminded that there are some sexists out there who would never vote for her (the “polarizing,” “unelectable” narrative about the Clinton campaign) no matter what, and so cast their votes in favor of Obama. At the same time, those who were already against her strengthened their view that she was a whining, sore loser.

Obama suffers an analogously double hit with the charge that he has played the race card. Independent general election voters are reminded that race is still a salient factor in American politics and some of these voters may see no value in throwing away their vote for an unelectable, polarizing candidate. At the same time, those opposed to Obama are vindicated in their belief that he is an angry race-baiter.

The dominant strategy for a majority candidate, then, is always to accuse a minority candidate of playing a minority (gender or racial) card. Whether or not the card is actually being played, it always benefits the majority candidate to say that it is. Remind enough people that that a minority is a minority, and the faithful lose heart, while the bigots (those who would reject a candidate purely on the basis of his/her minority status) gain ground.

For a majority candidate to not acknowledge his privilege and to deploy a strategy that is asymmetrically available only to him is to engage in the lowest kind of politics. Race is already going to be an explosive issue this year without politicians stoking it. A gentleman acknowledges an underserved advantage when he possesses one. I urge the McCain campaign to take on Obama’s campaign on higher ground.

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John McCain, Republican candidate for President of the United States of America Cintiq + Sketchbook Pro

Check out this CNN Overview on McCain and Obama’s Stances on Education.

The Mats by Francisco Arcellana and illustrated by Hermes Alegre won the 1995 Philippines National Book Award for Children's Literature. The first American printing was 1999 by Kane/Miller.

The story of The Mats is simple yet powerful. I would say, however, that this picture book would be better for older readers than younger readers. This isn't a toddler and preschool friendly story. As some of the concepts, some of the meaning would be lost. That's just my opinion. Make your own judgment call. But this is as good a time as any to state my philosophy on picture books: NEVER EVER EVER read a picture book aloud to a child (or a group of children as the case may be) without first reading it yourself. Side tangent: Just because a book is packaged as a picture book doesn't mean that it is kid-friendly. There are picture books geared towards adults though they may be disguised and masquerading as a kid's book.

Anyway, back on topic, The Mats is a simple story. A family is waiting for the return of the father. The kids are eagerly awaiting his arrival. They know that he is bringing gifts. He's going to be bringing home a new mat for every member of their family. While they are waiting for his arrival, the narrator feels the audience in on the family's background. We're told about the family's mat. A mat that was a gift to the newlyweds. A mat that is reserved for special occasions. "Mama always kept that mat in her trunk. When any of us got sick, the mat was brought out and the sick child made to sleep on it. Every one of us had at some point in our life slept on it. There had been sickness in our family. And there had been deaths..."

After his arrival, and after the family meal, everyone gathers around to see each mat be presented or gifted. Each mat is to have a name of the family member. The children are told that they cannot use the mats until they are older and go away to the university. But they see that there are three mats remaining.

The revelation or realization that the mats are to memorialize the three sisters (or three daughters depending on your perspective) that had died young is heartfelt and moving. There is sorrow and joy in the remembering.

I liked it. I did. But this would not have been a picture book for me as a kid. I would weep at anything and everything. But I do recommend this book. It is beautifully done. The story was originally a short story.

Francisco "Franz" Arcellana was born in 1916 in Santa Cruz, Manila, the fourth of eighteen children. After studying philosophy at the University of the Philippines, he worked briefly as a journalist before becoming a teacher and a writer of fiction. Collections of his work include Selected Stories (1962), Fifteen Stories: Storymaster 5 (1973) and The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1990). His stories have been translated into several languages. In 1990 he was declared a National Artist for Literature by President Corazon Aquino. He lives with his wife in Diliman, Quezon City, in the Philippines.

Hermès Alègrè was born in Daet, Camarines Norte in 1968. He set out to become an artist at an early age, drawing pictures on the sand which his playmates would often proceed to erase. Undaunted, he studied art in the Philippine Women's University. After receiving his degree in fine arts, he decided to paint full time. His first picture book, Bahay Kubo, was published in 1993. His work has appeared in over thirty galleries. He lives in Las Pinas, Metro Manila.

HALFWAY DOWN THE DANUBE has an interesting discussion going on about the democrats and McCain. (Click this 189. blog post title for link.) A view from western-Asia, eastern-Europe.

Definitely worth checking out, and definitely worth clicking on the links provided -in the HDTD blog, and in the comments.

I love the videos on HDTD--both the Obama one (linked) and the "McCain" take-off (embedded).

Right now, I'm still rooting for Hillary Clinton, but if Obama wins the nomination, I'm going to add those videos to my blog, too.

Dead mothers are always a good plot device. There is nothing like the absence of a mother to create a suitable amount of angst, heartache, uncertainty, and self-doubt. Think of the Alice books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, where the first couple of books in the series are driven by the fact that pre-teen Alice is growing up without a mother, surrounded by men in her family, and suffers the nagging fear that she is not approaching the formative years of her life with due female influence. And more recently we have had the mother-less Bee from Being Bee, and Jack from The Night Tourist. Now there is Evie Adler in K.L. Going's The Garden of Eve. Her mother is ten months dead from cancer, and Evie is left with her botanist father who has never appreciated--or even understood--magic the way her mother did. He is too much of a scientist to put much stock in fairy tales, or stories in general. When he takes on the job of trying to revive a dead apple orchard in Beaumont, New York, far from their Michigan home, Evie is resentful. They move into a house right next door to a cemetery--but the only cemetery Evie cares about is the one back in Michigan, where her mother is buried. Her father devotes his time to the orchard--but all Evie can think of is the magic garden she used to plan with her mother, a perfect garden with magnificent trees and noble beasts where the three of them would always be together. When Evie is given a seed supposedly from the Garden of Eden, Evie thinks she has her chance to find that perfect garden, and consequently find her mother, too.

There is a lot going on in this book, some of it allegorical and some of it just old fashioned mystery. There is the boy Alex, whom Evie meets hanging around in the cemetery. Is he really dead, as he claims to be? Is the orchard where Evie's father toils really cursed, or has it simply been abandoned? When Evie plants her seed and enters the magical garden--by way of eating an apple, of course!--is she in Eden or is it a trap? There is another Eve who grew up in Beaumont and disappeared many, many years ago. What happened to her? And will Evie find peace after the death of her mother?

Some of the pieces in the book are tied together a little bit too neatly, but for the most part this is an engaging and thoughtful book. Evie is disillusioned without being broken. The father is pragmatically devoted to his work but all open-hearted and open-minded business when Evie needs him most. The supporting characters range from saintly (the dead mother)to utterly convincing (Alex). Readers who like their books with magic and symbolism will enjoy this.

I was working at my desk in my dorm room at NYU. The radio was on, as always. Vin Scelsa was on the air. I may be Station tuned to the place where rock lived-- emphasis on past tense-- WNEW-FM in New York City. It was in the 11:00 PM hour when I heard the news. I froze. Phones rang from room to room. Doors flung open, faces in disbelief, white shock. I went back to the radio, back to the music where rock lived, and Vin Scelsa, mourning with us, played Bruce's JUNGLELAND.

John Lennon was dead?
Dead?
No way. No no no way.


Twenty-seven years later and the loss of John Lennon still shocks the conscience and breaks the soul. A light of the universe went out that night, taking with it the creative genius that gifted this world with his lyrics and music. The music didn't die. It never does.

From http://www.coreylevitan.com/features/lennon.html (LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN:)
"If it wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us would be in some place much different. It's hard to come out here and play tonight, but there's nothing else to do." -- Bruce Springsteen to a Philadelphia concert audience, Dec. 9, 1980


"beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy"

Someone else remembers the annoucement on the radio as I did:
"I was actually listening to the radio in New York that night (I'm old) and this sounds real to me. I only wish the person had captured Vin Scelsa on WNEW-FM who was one of the first to announce that a wire story had a person identified as John Lennon being shot outside the Dakota. He said he hoped it was not true. Then he played Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland" all the way through. And when it was over he said, unfortunately, it was true and Lennon was dead. I will never forget that night."

Whenever there is something to be explained to small people, I usually turn to books. Having the right book to broach subjects like sadness and grief can be a godsend. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book is one of those, though I would advise a solitary reading before sitting down with the children, as its understated language, poetry really, is overwhelmingly emotive. As Rosen explained in an interview, he wrote the book following the death of his eighteen-year-old son Eddie. During school visits, children used to ask him what became of Eddie, following his appearances in previous books.

“When I said, ‘He’s dead,’ you’d see the kids just nodding, ‘Oh, right, that’s what happened, is it?’ Very matter of fact.” Which may be how Rosen had the sense that children could handle the material in his Sad Book, a book that, quite simply, makes sense of sadness.

Quentin Blake’s illustrations are integral to conveying the depths of emotion and actually draw children in to the meaning by offering scenarios which may touch parallels with their own lives. Rosen is not coming up with easy, pat answers. His grief will never go away – but he does talk about how he deals with it and the small but effective ways he can be kind to himself that mean the grief is not allowed to take over his whole life. It’s not a book to be picked up lightly but it offers a chance to reflect and can help children realise they don’t have to be isolated when they are feeling deeply sad.