Will GOP learn from Democrats' mistakes?

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" website (circulation: 90,000) on November 21, 2011 under the title "Will GOP learn from Democrats' mistakes?" The link can be found here:
http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-newt-gingrich-rozsa-yv--20111121,0,4120825.story

If I were a Republican, I would be very concerned right now about the future of my party.

Allow me to explain. As of the moment, President Barack Obama is an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Unemployment remains chronically high, his approval ratings are mired in the low 40s, and he has done a horrendous job of selling his signature achievements to the public. While other geese have been in far hotter water than this and still managed to escape uncooked, it's clear that the Republicans can walk away with this thing if they nominate the right candidate.

That candidate is Mitt Romney. He is articulate, intelligent, squeaky-clean. His policy proposals are conservative enough to meet the basic economic, social, and foreign policy requirements of any Reaganite with realistic expectations (emphasis on the word "realistic") and his strong business record is perfect for a political market defined by economic hardship.

He is, in short, the kind of inoffensive moderate conservative who is capable of swaying independents while remaining acceptable to party regulars (the latter quality being sorely absent from this year's only other Republican moderate, Jon Huntsman). This is exactly what the GOP needs to win elections. If historical precedent wasn't enough to illustrate that point, current polls consistently back it up.

And yet …

And yet because the word "moderate" appears before "conservative" in Romney's ideological label, hard-line right-wingers are determined to find someone else. Hence the slew of month-and-a-half-long love affairs we've seen with a series of fad candidates. From late March through the end of April, the beau ideal was Donald Trump. They went through a lag period after he was deflated by his humiliation at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but in mid-July they flocked to Michele Bachmann, where they remained until the end of August. Rick Perry took her spot in the beginning of September, and there he stayed until mid-October, when it suddenly became Herman Cain's time to shine. Now his four-to-six weeks are up, and Newt Gingrich is the latest craze.

Since the Iowa caucus is being held on Jan. 3, it's unclear whether Gingrich will still be on top when it matters most, since the recent past suggests he'll be right near the end of his month-and-a-half expiration date by that time. Barring any major gaffes on his part (not inconceivable given his track record), it's entirely possible that he'll be able to stay fresh just long enough to pull it off in Iowa and then take the whole thing. That said, it is equally conceivable that he'll fizzle out shortly beforehand and thus either give the nomination to whichever lucky rebound candidate replaces him or, as happened post-Trump, cause a lag in the Anyone But Romney movement, allowing Mitt to emerge triumphant while the hard right scrambles for a suitable replacement.

This latter scenario is obviously in the best short-term interests of the party, but it doesn't address its deeper problem. As groups like the tea party become increasingly powerful in the Republican organization, they keep knocking out moderate conservatives who would have been elected and replacing them with zealots who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In 2010 this cost them the Senate, as the tea party spurned moderate conservatives four times in favor of extremists (Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware) and, in turn, lost general elections which by all indications Republicans could have otherwise won. Now this same habit threatens to cost them the presidency, for while Romney may still lose to Obama, it is delusional to believe that a Gingrich, Cain, Perry, Bachmann, or Trump could ever beat him.

It is this delusional quality that would make me a very concerned partisan indeed if I were a Republican. When the Democrats went through a comparable phase in the 1970s and 1980s, they nominated a series of liberal stalwarts — George McGovern in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988 — who were beaten even in elections that data showed could have been won had they gone with a more moderate alternative (Ed Muskie instead of McGovern, Al Gore instead of Dukakis). Republicans would be well advised to learn from this recent historical lesson.

On Occupy Wall Street

This article was originally published on the "Newark Star-Ledger" website (circulation: 300,000) on October 14, 2011 under the title "Agenda for Occupy Wall Street: A Rutgers grad student's proposal."

The pundits are claiming that Occupy Wall Street lacks a coherent agenda. I have one for them that can be summed up in two words: Rebuild America.

Although Occupy Wall Street’s anger has been targeted at the American plutocracy (a term best defined by Theodore Roosevelt as “government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the ‘money touch,’ but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers”), it would be a mistake to assume, as many right-wingers have done, that this movement is driven by a desire to wage war against a particular class. People are taking to the streets not because they wish to punish the wealthy for being successful, but because the working class is being deprived of the opportunity to achieve similar success.

Millions of Americans are struggling desperately to obtain full-time work at a living wage, finding again and again that the jobs they need don’t exist. The argument that putting more money in the pockets of big business and the wealthy creates jobs has been discredited by the fact that both groups are richer than ever before while unemployment remains chronically high. At a time when so much of our infrastructure is crumbling and so many nascent industries are calling out for cultivation, the obvious answer is an ambitious government program that invests money in developing our nation while simultaneously putting people back to work. Because such an endeavor would cost a great deal and America can’t afford to further increase its dangerously large deficit, the only fiscally sound way for this to happen would be to raise taxes on the wealthy. Unfortunately, a seemingly impenetrable coalition of libertarians and conservatives, buttressed by the strong financial backing of plutocrats like the Koch brothers, is preventing such tax increases from being implemented.

This is where Occupy Wall Street has stepped in, and this is why I propose that their agenda consist of three parts:

1) They should define their cause around the passage of the American Jobs Act. For one thing, it is far more difficult to propose new measures than it is to exert pressure behind initiatives that already exist. What’s more, this is a bill that would actually go a long way toward fulfilling many of America’s needs. It would invest billions in construction projects and infrastructure improvements, thus strengthening our society while lowering unemployment, as well as protect the jobs of our teachers, police officers, and firefighters and expand the private sector workforce by making it illegal for businesses to discriminate against the unemployed.

2) Republicans and tea party members claim that infrastructural programs are both socialistic and fail to create jobs. Because history proves the lie to such assertions, it is vital for Occupy Wall Street to wield this tool to its advantage. It must be pointed out that programs such as the ones they propose have a distinguished history in America, tracing back to the origins of our republic and being supported by presidents like George Washington (the Post Office Act of 1792), Abraham Lincoln (the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862), Franklin Roosevelt (the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935), and Dwight Eisenhower (the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956). On each occasion these programs were remarkably successful at not only employing large swathes of the population, but at developing our nation and increasing its prestige in the world community. Even Obama's stimulus bills accomplished more than their critics wish to acknowledge. Although unemployment had been rising at a catastrophic rate of 0.4 percent per month between the month of the Wall Street meltdown (September 2008, when it was at 6.2 percent) and the month Obama's policies could take effect (May 2009, when it reached 9.4 percent), it stabilized between 9.4 and 10.1 percent as a result of the first stimulus bill. After Obama attached a second stimulus to the Bush tax cut extensions, it fell to between 8.8 and 9.4 percent, where it has remained ever since.

3) They must work to reelect Barack Obama. While many of the criticisms of his presidency are legitimate, it is clear that he is trying to define the election of 2012 around the American Jobs Act. If he is defeated, there can be no doubt that whichever Republican replaces him – be it Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, or anyone else – will oppose not only that specific bill but all other internal improvement measures that follow the tradition of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. If Obama wins, on the other hand, the fact that his victory will have been built around job-creating internal improvements will compel him to push for that agenda. This is a rare perfect storm of political opportunity, and Occupy Wall Street should take advantage of it.

Because we live in a culture that focuses on sound bytes instead of sophisticated arguments, even a movement as admirably diverse as Occupy Wall Street needs to find a simple way of summing up its position. While many of the current slogans are effective, there is one that truly captures not only the spirit of the movement, but the policies which it should support.

That slogan, once again, can be summed up in two words: Rebuild America.

The original article can be found here: http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/10/agenda_for_occupy_wall_street.html

On Civil Rights

This article was originally published in "The Express Times" (circulation: 40,000) on October 3, 2011 under the title "Public schools in Pa., N.J., flunk civil-rights teaching test."

Can you identify the source of this quote?

“We conclude that in the field of public education separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

If you can’t, don’t worry. Not even today’s high school students are expected to know that it came from the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In fact, when 12,000 12-graders last year took the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam, all they were asked to do was identify school segregation as the problem being addressed in that passage.

It didn’t matter. Even after being given several hints (including extra sentences from the excerpt and the detail that it had been written in 1954), only 2 percent of the test-takers could provide a correct answer.

Unfortunately, a recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center made it clear that this is hardly an isolated instance of historical ignorance. As the report points out, “across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history.”

And before you go about laying the blame below the Mason-Dixon Line, the reality is that the South far surpasses any other section of the country when it comes to this subject, with nine of the 12 states that scored the highest in civil rights history coming from the former Confederacy. New Jersey, on the other hand, received a score of 15 percent on civil rights topics, earning it an ‘F.’ Pennsylvania’s ‘F’ was even more embarrassing, as it came with an abysmal score of zero.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with this widespread ignorance of civil rights history is that it neglects to recognize a large and important segment of the American community. With more than one-eighth of our population either wholly or partially of African ancestry, it is inexcusable for such a critical aspect of the black experience to be so inadequately taught.

What’s worse, a lack of understanding about the civil rights movement ultimately devalues the importance of race in other areas of our history.

For example, race impacted the debates at the Constitutional Convention (causing slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person when assigning congressmen), shaped regional economies during the antebellum period (causing the South to remain agrarian while the North was industrialized), gave birth to the Republican Party (as a vehicle for opposing the expansion of slavery), and, more than a century later, helped the GOP win social conservatives by nominating candidates who opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, including Barry Goldwater (who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional) and Ronald Reagan (who denounced the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South”).

This dearth of historical knowledge also has far deeper social implications. In the absence of a more sophisticated understanding of civil rights history, Americans have been left with a simplistic “Hollywood” fairy tale, one in which the racists of the past are so blatant in their villainy that most of us can rest comfortably with the knowledge that no one outside of a fringe group could hold similar views today.

When the word “racist” is used to conjure up grotesque caricatures instead of flesh-and-blood human beings, then it becomes all too easy for people to insist that the term for such a bogeyman can’t possibly apply to police officers who racially profile African-Americans, shopkeepers who instruct their employees to trail black customers, and tea partyers whose intense hatred for our first black president is unusual even for the normally superheated world of American politics.

Until we remember that the racists of the past were men and women who – though willing to picket a desegregated school, cast a ballot for George Wallace, or raise hell when a black family moved into their neighborhood – were for the most part no better or worse than the rest of us, we will always be susceptible to repeating their mistakes.

Of course, this isn’t to say that race is the only area of history in which the public’s knowledge is woefully limited. From the religious right-wingers who claim America was founded as a Christian nation (and thus ignore Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists and Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, as well as James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments) to the radicals of all stripes who wear the Guy Fawkes mask from “V for Vendetta” (without knowing that Fawkes’s goal was to create a Catholic theocracy in England), ignorance of the past can be seen in almost every aspect of our political life.

That said, because racism remains such a serious problem in America today, improving our knowledge of the civil rights movement seems like a particularly good place to begin correcting this deficiency.

The original article can be found here: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/10/guest_column_public_schools_in.html

On Gay Rights

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" (circulation: 90,000) on October 2, 2011 under the title "Santorum complaints hypocritical."

In a recent interview with Politico, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum issued a scathing denunciation of Google. "If you're a responsible business," he remarked, "you don't let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country."

One might expect such strong words to be reserved for the greatest rascals of American capitalism – you know, like the Wall Street firms whose chicanery plunged our nation into its current economic mess, or perhaps the corporate executives who throw hardworking employees onto the unemployment rolls instead of accepting modest cuts to their own massive salaries. What could Google have done to provoke such a condemnation from the erstwhile senator?

To answer that question, one must look back to 2003, when an Associated Press reporter asked Santorum why he opposed gay rights:

"We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now (a reference to Lawrence v. Texas), that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they (homosexuals) undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery."

And again:

"In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

While Santorum may think saying he only wants to protect family and marriage conceals the hatefulness of his views, history reveals that most advocates of oppression have come up with excuses for their prejudices. When Grover Cleveland spoke out against the right of women to vote, he claimed that he was motivated not by sexism, but by a desire to protect "the characters of the wives and mothers of our land." Similarly, when George Wallace fought against integration, he spoke for millions of segregationists when he dismissed charges of racism as "fantasy" and insisted that they opposed civil rights measures because they would lead to "the destruction of the Constitution and our nation."

In other words, Santorum wasn't fooling anyone, least of all prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activist Dan Savage, who decided that it was time to strike back against the bullies. Using humor as his weapon, he declared "Santorum" to be a new word and held a contest to see who could come up with the funniest definition. Thousands of submissions were considered, and when a winner was finally selected, a website was created to solidify its place in the American lexicon.

Because of its unprintable nature, I can't tell you what definition Savage ultimately chose. Suffice to say that it became very popular, was viewed by millions of people, and has thus became the No. 1 hit whenever a Google search is conducted for "Santorum."

That brings me back to the recent interview, in which Santorum demanded that Google exempt him from its search engine's algorithm so that attention might be drawn away from Savage's website. There is a comic irony in seeing a man who — though quick to brandish a laissez-faire philosophy when opposing regulations on businesses that would protect workers and consumers — doesn't hesitate to call for interfering with the practices of one particular business because it is allowing him to be ridiculed.

In a way, this symbolizes one of the defining hypocrisies of the modern Republican Party, which supports the principle of "small government" when it is politically beneficial (such as by serving the financial self-interests of the base of rich donors referred to by George W. Bush as the "have mores") but abandons it as soon as that is no longer the case (like when it angers homophobes). While Santorum may be unusually obnoxious, the sad truth is that his views on gay rights aren't far removed from those held by most of his fellow GOPers. Even as we celebrate the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the Santorum incident is a sobering reminder that we still have a long way to go.

The original article can be found here: http://www.mcall.com/opinion/yourview/mc-santorum-rozsa-yv-20111002,0,2282411.story

On the Constitution

This article was originally published in "The Morning Call" (circulation: 90,000) on August 15, 2011 under the title "Constitution was born of compromise."

When reviewing "Atlas Shrugged," the magnum opus of libertarian paladin Ayn Rand, famed anti-communist Whittaker Chambers made this observation about her philosophy: "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal."

Unfortunately, this mentality is all too prevalent among tea partyers today. While they may not share Rand's views on religion (she was a militant atheist while tea partyers are often Christian right-wingers) and social morality (she supported the rights of homosexuals and others with nontraditional lifestyles, whereas the tea party tends to favor their repression), they certainly ape her claim to having cornered all understanding of the Founding Fathers' will. This is a most unfortunate development.

Take, as an example, the brouhaha over President Barack Obama's health care reform legislation. As one of the critics of the health care law, the tea party claims that the 10th Amendment, which declares all powers not expressly enumerated to the federal government as belonging to the states and/or the people, renders the health care law unconstitutional.

Liberals and others who support the law point out how the commerce clause of the Constitution allows the government to regulate interstate commerce, while the general welfare clause permits the state to create new taxes and spending programs so long as their objective is to promote the overall well-being of society. They further add that not only do both of these criteria apply to the issue of health care reform, but that also arguing against them on 10th Amendment grounds would nullify virtually every important progressive social reform since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, from federal spending on education and transportation to the passage of Medicare and the outlawing of child labor.

Right-wingers, naturally, respond with points of their own, from citing James Madison's restrictive interpretation of the general welfare clause (and ignoring Alexander Hamilton's rebuttal) to claiming that excessive regulation impedes economic growth.

And each side ultimately expounds at length about the ideological and historical arguments that can buttress their respective positions. This is both natural and healthy, as reflected by the ongoing legal battle that has taken Obamacare to the federal district courts -- where jurists have so far issued wildly divergent rulings -- and will, inevitably, bring it to the Supreme Court.

Where tea partyers add an unhealthy element to these debates is that they insist not merely that they are right but that their opinions are the only ones capable of being legitimate. They don't view liberals and centrists as having different interpretations of the Founding Fathers' intent, but of deliberately wishing to subvert it. What's worse, they depict all modern Democratic presidents -- from the bold social liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson to the center-leftists like Bill Clinton and Obama -- as being not merely incorrect, which can be reasonably argued, but as being sinister and radical, which cannot.

The irony here is that the men whose ideas tea partyers embrace as immutable gospel were hardly monolithic in their views. Individuals like Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Pickney, Paterson, Randolph and Franklin disagreed so frequently and dramatically that ideologies from across the political spectrum can use their writings for support.

Indeed, when reading the Federalist Papers or the transcripts of the Constitutional Convention, it is the very contentiousness of those proceedings that makes the document produced in Philadelphia and ratified by the 13 states, from Delaware to Rhode Island, so magnificent.

While it is easy to craft a charter or manifesto when the individuals involved in composing it are of one mind, it is quite another to do so when disagreements fly as thick and fast as insects in the summer heat. The beauty of the Constitution lies in the fact that it was the product not of divine ordinances dispensed from a higher power, but of a series of courageous compromises agreed upon by imperfect men.

Tragically, this is one reality that tea partyers, in the name of their self-proclaimed crusade, refuse to accept.

The original article can be found here: http://articles.mcall.com/2011-08-15/opinion/mc-tea-party-constitution-rozsa-yv-0820110815_1_tea-partyers-health-care-constitution

On the Tea Party

This article was originally published in "The Express Times" (circulation: 40,000) on July 28, 2011 under the title "Tea Partiers acting like spoiled children in debt debate."

Even though I am hardly a fan of the disproportionate influence of big businesses in our government, the reality is that the vast majority of them don’t want a default any more than centrists, leftists and moderate conservatives.

The blame here rests entirely with the Tea Party and their enablers in Congress, all of whom stand alone in their unwillingness to compromise in the name of the greater national good.

Indeed, although I can think of plenty of financial crises that were deliberately perpetrated by specific individuals and institutions (Nicholas Biddle causing a bank panic in the summer of 1833; James Fisk and Jay Gould cornering the gold market in 1869; the Wall Street derivatives traders from the 2000s), this is the first instance in which a large political movement has deliberately sabotaged the American economy.

Please note that I’m not saying that past political movements haven’t inadvertently harmed our country in this manner. What I’m pointing out is that, in the past, the occasions in which political and financial agency was exercised to knowingly destroy our economy took place because a handful of men and women (OK, usually men) did so in the name of power and/or profit.

For the first time in American history, it is a large ideological group that is willfully causing a massive economic crisis. What’s worse, that ideology seems to be best summed up by Earl Warren’s observation about how “many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but regard the things government does for others as socialism.”

This goes a long way toward reinforcing the fact that there is something fundamentally immature about the Tea Party. Because Tea Partiers overwhelmingly tend to be white, Christian and more affluent than the average American, their claim to being victimized by the government — and specifically by regulations and taxes — is deluded at best and downright disingenuous at worst.

In that respect, they remind me of children who throw temper tantrums when their parents won’t buy them a new toy (an offense of which I was occasionally guilty — although in my defense, I was 5).

Even though they act like their plight is inconceivably terrible, and express that conviction with equal parts anger and hyperbole, their sturm und drang must never be mistaken for a valid case. If you even pay attention to them, much less cede to their demands, you grant them a legitimacy they don’t deserve … and, more important, which society can’t afford.

That is where my analogy between spoiled children and Tea Partiers falls apart. Whereas the former are merely obnoxious, the latter strive to inflict suffering on the unemployed and working poor, oppress those with cultural values that differ from their own and deliberately destroy entire economic systems when their pettiest demands aren’t granted in every way, shape and form.

All in all, I’d rather give political influence to the problem child than the Tea Party.

The original article can be found here: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/07/guest_column_tea_partiers_acti.html

Barack Obama’s Legacy

This article has already been printed in the September 12th issue of The Rutgers Observer but, because that newspaper is having financial problems which prevent its archives from appearing online, I decided to also post it here.

Historians love to shed light on the present by using analogies from the past; if nothing else, it helps validate our profession. That is why, as Barack Obama’s presidency prepares to wrap up its thirty-second month, I can’t help but be reminded of where Harry Truman was thirty-two months into his own administration. For Truman it was the end of 1947, and just like Obama in 2011, he was confronted with low approval ratings, a lousy economy, a hostile Congress, lackluster support within his own party, and a growing consensus that his time in office would be viewed by history – to say nothing of the voters – as a failure.

Today Truman’s first thirty-two months are remembered for his bringing an end to World War Two, his controversial use of the atomic bomb in Japan, his work in establishing the United Nations, his setting of Cold War precedent through the Truman Doctrine’s espousal of Soviet containment, and his use of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct postwar Europe. Although Obama’s accomplishments are obviously very different from those of Truman (and, thankfully, he doesn’t have an atom bomb to mar them), their beneficial impact on his legacy is just as great:

(1) He passed two stimulus bills that helped control the damage caused by the 2008 economic meltdown. Between September 2008 (the month of the meltdown) and May 2009 (the last month before the first stimulus could start to have a meaningful effect), unemployment increased from 6.2% to 9.4%, at a catastrophic average rate of 0.4% per month. As a result of Obama’s first stimulus bill, however, unemployment stabilized, vacillating between 9.4% and 10.1% from May 2009 through the end of 2010. After he attached a second stimulus bill to the Republican increase on the Bush tax cuts, the range of unemployment fell slightly, causing it to hover between 8.8% and 9.4% since the beginning of 2011.

(2) He passed a sweeping health care reform bill that will provide coverage to more than thirty million Americans by means such as expanding Medicaid eligibility, creating health insurance exchanges in each state, and offering subsidies to help small businesses and low-income families afford insurance premiums, even as it ends many of the unjust policies commonly practiced by insurance companies (e.g., discriminating against people with preexisting conditions or placing annual and lifetime coverage caps). Although the health care reform bill is going to soon reach the Supreme Court, only one aspect of it has any realistic chance of being overturned – i.e., the individual mandate, which protects insured Americans from having their premiums increased by the medical costs of the uninsured by imposing fines on those who can afford insurance but refuse to purchase it – and even that can be replaced by a system such as auto-enrollment if necessary. Consequently, by the end of the decade, the only Americans without some form of insurance will be illegal immigrants, those who opt out of Medicaid despite being eligible, and those who opt out of private insurance despite being able to afford it.

(3) He passed legislation that addressed many of the core factors which caused the 2008 meltdown, from the exploitative practices of credit card companies (the Credit CARD Act of 2009) to chicanery in the financial sector (the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010).

(4) He made significant strides toward gay rights by repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and expanding the aegis of federal hate-crime law to cover gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.

(5) He made controversial decisions to continue the Guantanamo Bay interrogations (opposed by liberals) and shift our intelligence focus from Iraq to Pakistan (opposed by President Bush and John McCain), both of which led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden.

(6) He fulfilled the central promise of his presidential candidacy – i.e., he brought an end to the Iraq War, with combat operations in that nation ceasing in 2010 and transitional forces scheduled to leave by the end of this year.

Of course, like Truman, the fact that Obama’s achievements aren’t more widely recognized touches upon some of his major weaknesses as a political communicator. Similarly, just as Truman was too timid to stand up to Republicans on matters like red-baiting, so too did Obama’s reluctance to alienate Republicans cause him to avoid taking the right positions on issues like Planned Parenthood funding, legalizing marijuana, and withdrawing from Afghanistan. Most disastrously, it caused him to refrain from pushing for a stimulus package large enough to get us out of our $3 trillion hole when he first took office, leaving America with a bill that merely stabilized the unemployment rate instead of actually reducing it.

Fortunately, it appears that Obama is starting to learn from his mistakes. By calling an emergency session of Congress and demanding that Republicans pass the American Jobs Act, he has deftly constructed a win-win situation – if they pass something resembling his current bill, as many as one million jobs could be created, while if they refuse, he will be able to characterize them as obstructionists. Either scenario helps both the country and his political standing.

Do you know who did something like that and was reelected as a result of it? Harry Truman.

Hypnotizing Jews: Rand Paul & Co. Expose Obama's Diabolical Scheme

Did you think the radical right had lost its marbles when it claimed Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?

Was it clear that things could get no wackier when they insisted his health care reform bill included death panels to extirpate the elderly and disabled?

Were you certain they’d reached a critical mass of lunacy when they hysterically declared that his back-to-school speech was really an attempt to indoctrinate America’s children with socialism?

In the words of Al Jolson… you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Apparently two Republican members of Congress and a Republican Senator-elect believe one of Obama’s secrets to winning the 2008 election was…

Hypnotizing the Jews.

I am not creative enough to make this up.

According to “The Jewish Forward”, a right-wing coalition of doctors known as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) “published an article in 2008 wondering if Obama is ‘a brilliant orator, or a hypnotist?’ The answer, according to the paper published on the group’s website, is that Obama has used in his speeches ‘covert hypnosis intended only for licensed therapists on consenting patients.’ And those most affected by Obama’s covert hypnosis were Jewish voters.”

Further research has yielded that members of AAPS include Rand Paul, the Republican Senator-elect from Kentucky, as well as his father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, and another radical conservative, Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia. Given how active these men are in shaping and promoting the agenda of AAPS, they were no doubt both aware of and in agreement with the contents of the article which presented this outlandish argument.

That’s not all. According to the “professionals” at AAPS, Obama didn’t rely solely on oratory in his dastardly plot to hypnotize Hebrews. As the “Louisville Courier-Journal” reports, “the AAPS article notes that the Obama campaign logo ‘might just be the letter ‘O,’ but it also resembles a crystal ball, a favorite of hypnotists.’”

To be fair, it is true that 78% of the Jewish vote went to Barack Obama in 2008. In fact, he received more votes from Jews than he did from members of any other white religious group (Protestants – 34%, Catholics – 47%, Evangelicals – 41%)* or, aside from blacks, any other ethnic group (Latinos – 67%, Asians – 62%, Whites – 43%). Considering that Obama’s overall popular vote performance was 53%, his disproportionate strength among Jews could very well be viewed as suspect – if, of course, one lacks historical perspective.

I mention historical perspective because, with it, one sees that Democrats have averaged 75% of the Jewish vote in every presidential election since 1928.

That was the year Al Smith’s nomination cemented the Democratic Party’s association with the cosmopolitan brand of liberalism that, throughout history, has tended to appeal to Jews. Since then, every Democratic presidential candidate has decisively won the Jewish vote. Indeed, with only one exception (Jimmy Carter in 1980), Democratic support among Jewish voters hasn’t fallen below 60% in that entire eighty year period.

In short, it seems reasonable to assume that the Jewish community’s historic affinity with liberalism – and as such with America’s liberal party, the Democrats – is more likely to have caused Obama’s solid Semitic support than any Svengalian code words or covert crystal balls.

Once that has been established, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Paul Broun have not only been proven wrong on this specific issue, but have lost the right to ever be taken seriously again. In part this is because society, for the sake of its collective intelligence, needs to draw a line separating the people who disseminate egregious stupidity from the ones who make meaningful contributions to our political discourse. More important, however, is the fact that an unmistakable strain of racism coils beneath the surface of the more vitriolic rumors being spread about our first black president. While there is no reason to question the motives of conservatives whose criticisms of Obama are based on legitimate ideological differences, the stench of bigotry – the kind that is fueled by sheer hatred before being made socially acceptable through the use of an indirect approach – contaminates the over-the-top asininity with which Obama is assailed today. The only thing separating AAPS’s theory from the allegations that Obama isn’t a native citizen, added death panels to his health care reform bill, or tried to spread socialism to our children is that AAPS adds a dash of anti-Semitism to the larger racist brew.

Besides, it’s ridiculous to believe that a tricked out ‘O’ could actually hypnotize Jews into voting for Barack Obama. I’m Jewish and the logo doesn’t have any effect on me…

“Aren’t I pretty, Matt?”

No! I must resist your power!

“Hope……Change…… Hope…… Change……”

I can’t support Obama! He’s a Kenyan Socialist!

“Yes you can……Yes you can……”

SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I MOBILIZE THE PROLETARIAT!

Obama and the Black Vote: Rebutting a Racist

My good friend Christina asked me for help.

Her acquaintance, a man I'd never met named Leon, had made the following claim about Barack Obama and the black vote:
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Unfortunately Obama will get over 90% of black votes as long as he runs for president. If this was being done by white voters, then blacks would have been screaming racism, and rightfully so.
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It is interesting that, according to Islam, the child goes according to the father, so that makes Obama Muslim. His father was Muslim from Kenya, his stepfather was Muslim from Indonesia. And I also find interesting that even Christian blacks voted for black Muslim. Right Christina?

Soon another friend, Aubrey, expressed agreement with Leon's opinions while adding a few comments of his own:

I'm just saying before this election less then 45% of the African American population turned out to vote... then the minute they find out there is a BLACK man running for office more then 60% of the population ended up voting.

As it seemed that this belief about Obama and the black vote was widely held, I figured I should rebut it. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to the post in which Leon made his comments, so I was only able to directly confront Aubrey. Here, unedited, is what I wrote to him:

While there was a slight uptick both in black voter turnout and black support for the Democratic Party in 2008 (i.e., between 5% and 7%), the increase was nowhere near significant enough to justify your assertion that "black people only vote based on race" (and before you complain that you never said that, you made a point of agreeing with the person who did). Here are the facts (for the sake of convenience, all of the statistics cited have been rounded):

1a. African-Americans have been a Democratic bloc for decades, thanks to a process that began during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency (when his New Deal programs helped millions of impoverished black people and received their appreciation) and reached its climax in the election of 1964 (when the Republican Party nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, a man whose opposition to civil rights legislation was the official sign that the GOP was jettisoning of black interests in an ultimately-successful effort to woo Dixiecrats and other racists). That is why, in the pair of presidential elections before the 2008 contest, the Democratic candidates received 90% and 88% of the black vote, a figure that Obama only increased to 95% in 2008. This rise, though not insignificant, is rendered less impressive when you take into account that Obama's share of the overall popular vote was 5% higher than that of the Democratic candidate from the previous election, a margin that black voters surpassed by only 2%. For more on that, see:http://riskinghemlock.blogspot.com/2009/05/demographic-breakdown-of-presidential.html

1b. Black voter turnout rose from 60% in 2004 to 65% in 2008. While this was in contrast to overall voter turnout levels, which remained steady at 64% between 2004 and 2008, it was consistent with a pattern of higher turnout among demographics that tended to be part of the Democratic base, including Asians, Hispanics, and women. For more on that, see:http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1209/racial-ethnic-voters-presidential-election

1c. This is not to say that blacks didn't vote in larger numbers, or support the Democratic candidate at a greater percentage, than had been the case in elections when the Democrat wasn't a black man; both of those things are true. The data, however, suggests that although Obama's race was important to many black voters, it was hardly the sole or even decisive variable.

2. I'm tired of people acting as if Obama's inexperience means his supporters could have only gravitated toward him on the basis of his race. Plenty of presidential candidates have been backed by large and passionate movements despite their short resumes and/or ambiguity on the issues, from Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Willkie to John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.
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Had I been able to respond to Leon, I would have repeated all of that before adding the following:

3. Apart from the fact that Obama's ability to be a good president wouldn't be impaired if he was a Muslim, the reality is that Islam does not pass down automatically through the father.

4. Even if being a Muslim was passed on paternally, both of Obama's parents had officially disavowed their childhood faiths by the time he was born (and atheism, I am certain, is not inherited).

5. Even if Obama had spent his childhood as a Muslim, either by default due to his father's background or because he had been deliberately raised that way, he was baptized as a member of the United Church of Christ when he was twenty-seven.

Now that I have addressed all of your points - and in a matter that is beyond reasonable dispute, since as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - I have two questions for you:

1. Why were you so quick to believe that blacks only supported Obama because of his race?

There is no way you came to this conclusion based on objectively conducted research, since all of the relevant historical and statistical information contradicts it. Once that has been established, the only explanation which makes sense is that you have a predisposition to dislike black people and, as such, was naturally inclined to believe something that depicted them in a disparaging fashion.

Is this my way of calling you a racist?

Yes. The term "racist" is a strong one, but when someone reveals a prejudice against another race (prejudice being defined in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary as "(1) a preconceived judgment or opinion, (2) an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge"), the term "racist" must be used.

2. Why were you so quick to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

That one I may just chalk up to stupidity.

Was I rude in my replies, both hypothetical and actual? Perhaps... but if our politics had more intelligent rudeness and less stupid civility, we would be a lot better off.