Political Culture: Peter Buffett’s Activism Through Music … And $$$$$$

Those clunky translation earpieces were nowhere to be found last Thursday night in the United Nations General Assembly, as a multinational assemblage of talent and star power filled the great hall with music and poetry rather than the usual polyglot diplomacy. The occasion was a concert titled “Breaking the Silence, Beating the Drum,” which sought to remember the victims of past slavery while raising awareness of the contemporary tragedy of human trafficking.

Among the African and African-American luminaries in attendance, from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the Blind Boys of Alabama to choreographer Bill T. Jones, perhaps the evening’s central performance came from a white guy: musician and activist Peter Buffett, who premiered a new song, “Blood Into Gold,” that he had created in collaboration with the chart-dominating Senegalese rapper/vocalist Akon. The song had been commissioned by the nonprofit Culture Project specifically for the event, and UNICEF produced a video to accompany it.

The issue of human trafficking is having a bit of a moment in the culture right now. The Liam Neeson film Taken, which has taken in more than $137 million at the box office this winter, concerns the kidnapping of young women for sale into sex slavery. (To be more direct, it concerns an ex-CIA operative who massacres the gaggle of nasty Albanians who kidnapped his daughter, but whatever.) Meanwhile, the documentary War Child has been making the rounds of film festivals worldwide, relating the story of a Sudanese child soldier and building on the attention brought to the issue by mainstream films such as 2006’s Blood Diamond.

“It’s interesting how these things happen – how an issue such as trafficking, or Darfur, can suddenly achieve such a public moment,” Buffett says. “Part of it is that, thanks to advances in technology, we’re in this strange time when we can see into the lives of faraway people like never before. So we’re starting to see these darker elements of humanity, and find out what people are capable of.”

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Political Culture: Education on the Cheap

The original, furiously populist theme of this column, as I envisioned it last weekend, was “Nationalize the Banks, Now!” Well, as of Monday that was taken care of, so, moving right along …

It seems inevitable that, no matter how much the majority of Americans support the broad outlines of President Obama’s budget plan, Congress is going to make a point of exacting at least a pound of flesh. That’s what Congresses do. Surely Obama is ready for it — his team no doubt put their request together expecting to have to give up significant elements of their plans.

The big question is whether Congress will merely tinker around the edges or will take a hatchet and chop away one or more of the three “pillars” on which the budget sits: health care, energy, and education. The decision probably will rest on another choice that Senate Democrats will soon make — whether to seek broad bipartisan support or ram the budget through, via the reconciliation process. (The latter scheme was devised in the 1970s to make contentious budget proposals easier to pass by rendering them immune to filibuster, thus empowering the congressional majority. Reconciliation has been used frequently since the Reagan administration, most famously for Bill Clinton’s first budget, on which Vice President Gore cast a tie-breaking vote.)

Sen. Kent ConradThe congressional knives are already being sharpened, with Democrats wielding scalpels and Republicans machetes. That’s not to say Democrats are being any more responsible or open-minded about it; it’s just that the special interests they’re protecting are more localized and less demanding. (Democratic Senator Kent Conrad’s refusal to consider reform of farm subsidies is by far the most irresponsible — and cynical, and stereotypical — bit of special-interest bootlicking so far on the record.) But it’s the Republicans who will try to send the Change Express flying off the tracks, by killing health-care or energy reform to placate the insurance and oil industries.

Or will they? The GOP may have lined up rhetorically behind “I hope Obama fails,” but they must be able to read the tea leaves, which say the electorate wants these programs and will punish the party that obstructs them. My guess is that the Senate Republicans instead will try to gut the funding devoted to health-care reform, in particular, without killing it entirely, and then will try to pull a “But Dagwood, look how much I saved you!” maneuver. (If you’re too young for Blondie references, look it up.)

The Republicans’ best chance for success, however, may be taking the axe to Obama’s education proposals. Obama ran for president promising to nationalize the student-loan system, expand Pell Grants, dramatically increase early-childhood education funding, and institute merit-pay reforms that reward excellent teachers with better salaries. All those pledges are fulfilled in his budget request, to the tune of more than $150 billion over 10 years – and that’s on top of $100 billion in education spending that already passed in the stimulus bill. (more…)

Political Culture: Can Obama Do Anything About Darfur?

In Rod Lurie’s first political potboiler, Deterrence, a U.S. president audaciously entered a nuclear confrontation with a newly aggressive (and surprisingly well-armed) Saddam Hussein. While hardly an original concept in 2000, the year of the film’s release, Deterrence offered a crucial kick: The president making these threats was Jewish, and therefore his every decision was perceived (fairly or not) through the prism of his religion and his assumed loyalty to Israel. Indeed, as the time for button-pushing neared, even his closest advisors began to wonder how many Americans their guy was willing to sacrifice in order to protect the Holy Land.

The above paragraph could easily launch a discussion of the bizarre spectacle staged yesterday by controversial National Intelligence Council nominee Charles Freeman, who blamed the apparently nefarious “Israel lobby” for forcing him to withdraw from consideration. The influence of AIPAC, and the third-rail effect of giving too much weight to Arab concerns when discussing Israel’s security, are fascinating topics – but they’re not the ones I’m interested in today. (Feel free to discuss them in the comments section.)

Instead, I’m interested in another ethnic president — and the possibility that his very ethnicity may have some impact, positive or negative, on our desire or ability to finally get something done in Darfur.

This has been another momentous week in the planet’s longest-running human disaster. Last Wednesday, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and Bashir responded by expelling all international aid groups and NGOs from Darfur. The Obama administration’s initial response was, in a word, pathetic: a State Department spokesman noted that throwing out the NGOs “is certainly not helpful to the people who need aid.” You think?

A follow-up response at the United Nations was a bit more vigorous, but the fact remains that, less than three weeks before the onset of the region’s rainy season, nearly 2 million Darfuris stand to lose their access to adequate shelter, health services and/or potable water. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has been shouting valiantly into the wind on this subject for six years now, warned this week that by cutting off the food, medicines and water-extraction assistance that has helped them survive in Darfur’s massive refugee camps, Bashir is once again committed to killing Darfuris en masse. Susan Rice, Obama’s U.N. ambassador, called the move “genocide by other means.”

Darfur, of course, is one more foreign-policy catastrophe that Obama has inherited from the previous administration. There’s no question that Darfur has always been a complex problem, strategically speaking – the Western allies’ dismay over the fate of the region balanced against China’s refusal to brook punishment of its Sudanese oil-trading partners. Still, the fact is that more could have been done on the Darfuris’ behalf all these years, and China’s obstinacy could have been overcome, had Americans and Europeans considered Darfur to be in our nations’ strategic interests. (more…)

Political Culture: I Have More Influence than Rush Limbaugh

It’s been a giggle this week watching Democrats paint Rush Limbaugh as the “bloated, drug-addled” head of the Republican Party, as Paul Begala put it the other day. It’s been even more of a giggle watching Republicans contort themselves into rhetorical knots as they try to deny Limbaugh’s stature without offending the man himself.

Democrats have been playing a lot of winning hands lately, and this is another one. They’ve learned the trick that Republicans used throughout the Bush years: When there’s a leadership vacuum in the opposing party, focus your attention on the person whom voters will find most unpalatable. Hillary, then Nancy Pelosi were the GOP’s bogeywomen. Now, since positively no one is afraid of Mitch McConnell or John Boehner, since no one has yet stopped laughing at Michael Steele or Sarah Palin, and since Bobby Jindal still needs to find a grown-up first name (if not a persona to match), Democrats smartly have anointed Rush as (to borrow a phrase) The One.

To the extent that the Dems can encourage Americans to equate Limbaugh with opposition to President Obama’s grand schemes – and to the extent that they can keep us more disgusted with Limbaugh’s oft-stated hope that “Obama fails” than we are concerned about the fiscal ramifications of Obama’s potential success – they will have played this game of misdirection brilliantly. But let’s not pretend that it’s anything more than a game. (more…)

Political Culture: Whose Mandate Is It Anyway?

The last couple weeks have served as a brilliant, if butt-ugly, reminder that governance should be judged not on the back and forth of day-to-day events, but on outcomes. When the history of President Obama’s first month in office is written, it will state that he moved swiftly and boldly (and perhaps “wisely”) to combat a calamitous economic crisis, pushing through stimulus legislation that emerged from Congress in pretty much the form and amount he requested, and in impressively short order. The sturm und drang over line items that came and went, honeymoons that supposedly ended early, and Bipartisanship: Impossible will be rendered mere footnotes to the end result.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the minutiae of this past month should be disregarded completely. Indeed, they offer an assortment of clues to the manner in which Obama’s administration will play out over the long term. As long as he continues to get what he wants, Obama will use both carrots and sticks to engage the Republicans and maintain the bipartisan high ground; the minority party, meanwhile, will likely play nice and talk up what a great guy Obama is, while offering little to no actual support for his agenda.

Note, however, that last phrase: “his agenda.” As I noted, historians will regard this stimulus as distinctly Obama’s package – and once the bill reaches his desk for signature he will take full ownership of it. But since the day after Inauguration, this legislation has hardly felt like it belonged to Obama. He made a big show of acceding to various GOP tax-cut proposals during the weeks before he took the oath, but once in the White House he left the bill almost entirely in Congressional leaders’ hands to shape, reshape and fight over. He seemed determined not to get his own hands dirty, not to demand specific items in specific amounts nor to reject specific Republican proposals out of hand.

He allowed the House to steer the bill too far to the left, then the Senate to over-correct to the right, before yesterday’s frenetic negotiations concluded with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ben Nelson, Arlen Spector and the Ladies from Maine all smiling. (Here’s another clue to the next two years: As long as those six people are smiling, Obama’s agenda will sail through the legislative branch.) The president’s own arm’s-length embrace of this process wound up costing him only a few billion in education funding here, a few billion in aid to the states there…

…And about 25 percentage points of popular support for the legislation. That’s the extent of the disconnect between Obama’s approval rating and that of the stimulus package itself. Obama’s decision to allow Pelosi and Reid to shape and guide the bill not only made opposition less painful for the Republicans – it cost Obama considerable buy-in from a public that clearly wants him to seize his mandate and succeed with it, but is far less attached to the fortunes of the Democratic Congress. (more…)

Political Culture: Taking a Hit (For All of Us)

Like most people I know, my favorite feature in Us Weekly is the “Stars — They’re Just Like Us!” spread. You know, Brad Pitt with his fly down, Ryan Phillippe pushing a cart at Ikea … (No, I do not read Us Weekly! Sometimes I just, you know, catch a glimpse when my wife leaves it open on the vanity.)

Next week, Us readers might see a spread featuring Michael Phelps (“They take bong hits in public!”), Tom Daschle (“They cheat on their taxes!”), and Christian Bale (“They tear underlings a new asshole!”). A lot of those readers might be appalled. But how many of them would have a right to be?

OK, forget Bale — that tirade truly was out of the ordinary. But before we send Batman after these other two arch-villains, can we please take a moment to consider the sheer mundaneness (mundanity?) of their actions?

The bong water swirls, and makes the News of the WorldPhelps is a 23-year-old with pockets full of dough and time on his hands. He’s part of the Pineapple Express generation, for crying out loud! How many of his peers, much less their ’60s-bred parents, really care if his idea of blowing off steam involves sucking down illicit smoke? A recent survey quoted no fewer than 42 percent of Americans who said they’ve tried pot, and the nation’s marijuana laws are steadily becoming as flaccid as the stuff supposedly renders its male users (I have no direct evidence, of course). Why is this a big deal?

As for Daschle, yes, the dollar value of his outstanding tax liability was eye-popping. Still, I encourage the working mom who has never once handed a wad of cash to the nanny without reporting it to the IRS — or the homeowner who has never once acted on his impulse to fudge the “charitable contributions” line on his 1040 — to cast the first stone. The rest of us should pause a moment. There must be some reason why tax-debt resolution has become such a growth industry in this country — and it can’t be that liberal politicos are the only ones responding to all those commercials on Fox News.

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Political Culture: Bipartisanship — What Is It Good For?

As of last night, absolutely nothin’. (Legislatively speaking, at least.) But you gotta give Barack Obama points for trying.

Presidents don’t often do what Obama did on Tuesday. A week to the day after his inauguration, he returned to Capitol Hill and spent three hours glad-handing House and Senate Republicans in an effort to win at least a modicum of their support for his massive stimulus package. True to the promises he had repeated throughout the campaign – that he would change the terms of political debate and encourage legislators to rediscover the art of compromise – Obama surrendered his home-court advantage, reminded Republicans of the concessions he had already made (tax cuts added, spending increases deleted), and asked them to help show the citizenry that its government has a firm, somewhat unified grip on the situation.

And the Republicans, true to their nature, responded, “Thanks, but no thanks.” (Apply Palinesque intonation at your peril.) Last night, not a single GOP House member defied his sewn-together-from-corpses leader, John Boehner, to vote for the package.

House Minority Leader John BoehnerOne of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.

Whether it was poetic like the opening moments of Camelot, or poetic like a sweet picture of a baby seal taken immediately before it’s clubbed, remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Congressional Republicans, despite their current status as the Detroit Lions of American politics, have decided to go down to defeat in prose. (more…)

Political Culture: Obama Ascendant

“Tomorrow is some shit, people,” Adam Yauch declared matter-of-factly Monday night, after searching for an appropriate way to close out the Beastie Boys’ fearsome inaugural-eve Rock the Vote gig in Washington. He meant it positively, of course – and he certainly cracked himself and his audience up with his offhand bon mot. (“You can Google that tomorrow,” he added – and, as of now, he’s right.) But his imprecise phrasing struck me as a delightfully precise reflection of the Rorschach blot that was Barack Obama’s inauguration.

There were at least 1.8 million stories in the bone-chilling city of Washington on Tuesday – most likely a lot more, considering the many thousands who came to town but never made it to the Mall. Each of us had his own reasons for being there, brought his own personal history and emotions, and emerged with his own tales to tell. We had all come to celebrate and to stand up for our new President and his achievements, but we were also there to commemorate our own successes and indulge our own euphoria.

Young people flooded into town because this was the first time they felt truly connected to the workings of their country, and they were justifiably excited about the role they had played in Obama’s victory – and because they knew, as my friend said the other day, that this was going to be “the party of our lifetime.”

For hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, the draw to DC was of course a profound one, and many of those who showed up did so in their grandest finery, even in the bitter chill of Tuesday morning. Their enthusiasm during the endless walks and Metro rides, their tears through the events of Sunday and Tuesday, the huge numbers who turned out to work in soup kitchens and on park cleanups during Monday’s Obama-mandated Day of Service, the thousands of charity and social workers who crammed into the JW Marriott hotel for a “People’s Inaugural Project” convention and then dominated the Neighborhood Ball … their resplendence in three-piece suits and chinchilla coats, putting to shame us whiteys who were shivering in bulky sweaters and ski caps. It was a sight to see. (more…)

Political Culture: Shall We Plunge the Sword In?

Sometime in the early afternoon next Tuesday – after Barack Obama takes the oath of office, and before the new President and First Lady take the traditional stroll up Pennsylvania Avenue – one of the day’s most joyous events will be ignored by the vast majority of inauguration watchers. TV viewers will be taking a long-needed lunch/potty break; meanwhile, on the National Mall, several million jubilant yet wretched souls (myself included) will begin wondering whether it’s worth continuing to freeze our asses off outdoors, or whether we should blow off the parade and go see a movie.

At that hour, on the Capitol grounds, a once-powerful private citizen will board a helicopter and leave the city in which he has resided these last eight years. As he lifts off and flies over that city – a metropolis whose defining institutions he has left in profoundly worse shape than he found them – one can only hope that he will look down upon those millions of revelers and achieve an all-too-rare moment of self-awareness. That he’ll turn to his wife and say, “Laura, there sure are a frickin’ lot of people down there who are glad to see me go.”

As the hours blissfully speed away toward the end of the Bush administration, assessments of its “legacy” continue to bog down – not over the relative weights of its accomplishments (were there any?), nor over rankings of its disastrous failures, but over an astonishing question that pretty well defines the first decade of the 21st century: Will these criminals ever be punished?

The question is not, were crimes committed? They were. On torture and indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on the partisan hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys and other supposedly non-political appointees, on cooking the intelligence that led us into Iraq, on shielding the identity of a covert CIA operative – and on heaven knows what other nefarious actions? — history will indeed record that criminality ran rampant through George W. Bush’s administration.

How much those crimes will continue to cost us as a nation, in terms of constitutional liberties defiled and international standing lost, is yet to be determined. But the prevailing expectation is that the perpetrators of those crimes – from Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet and their uppermost advisors straight down through the executive-branch bureaucracy – will walk away from them scot-free, subject to no verdict apart from that rendered by history. And as Bush himself has gleefully reminded us on numerous occasions lately, “By the time history renders its verdict, you and I will be dead. So I don’t worry about history.” (more…)

Political Culture: White Like … Who, Exactly?

We white folks are feeling pretty good about ourselves these days. And why not? A couple months ago, almost half of us voted to put a black guy into what is now ironically called the White House – more than enough to win him the election, when combined with his avalanche of African-American support. And polls show that even a majority of those who didn’t vote to put him there think that, all in all, America has done the right thing by breaking the color barrier at the very top of our meritocracy.

Since the election, we’ve imagined how the world will look to us with renewed respect and affection and hope, and envy even, because we’ve had the audacity (particularly after the colossal disgrace of the past eight years) to hand the keys to a member of the race whose oppression and struggle defines our history. And we’ve rejoiced in the anticipation, not to mention the first anecdotal reports (breathlessly passed along by the news media), of young African-Americans using Barack Obama’s election as inspiration to improve themselves and set their ambitions higher. You go, girls! (and boys!), we root silently. If a black man can get himself elected president, what’s stopping you from achieving the American Dream? No more excuses!

But wait just a minute, there, bub. Our cheerleading assumes a universal, colorblind buy-in to an “American Dream” that was dreamed up, after all, by white people. And who’s to say that the young African-Americans we’re rooting for might not already be achieving at the same level as young whites – if only the society we’ve inherited didn’t still keep a rather stiff boot on their necks?

Sure, we voted in enough numbers to elect a black guy president – but aren’t we still complicit in the maintenance of inherently racist educational, economic, political and legal institutions that keep the vast majority of African-Americans from succeeding on anything like Obama’s level? Well? Say something, cracker! Defend yourself, peckerwood!

Those no doubt bear some resemblance to the arguments that will soon be offered (though perhaps without that last bit of derision) by Tim Wise, the “anti-racist” activist and author whose latest treatise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, is coming out in paperback this month. Full disclosure: I have not read this slim (120 pages) volume of buzzkill musings, but that’s OK – I just got around to finishing Wise’s last book, the less-slim yet provocative White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.

With its brevity, its already-clichéd title, its lack of hardback-itude, and its Inauguration-friendly release date, Between Barack and a Hard Place bears all the earmarks of a cash-in. But Wise should be forgiven the indiscretion, because in recent years his authorial career has suffered from exquisitely poor timing. White Like Me first hit bookstores in early 2005, and (after not exactly flying off the shelves) was already headed for the remaindered racks when Hurricane Katrina suddenly shone a brilliant light on the struggles of poor blacks in our major cities – and white America’s inattention to those struggles. Sensing that the book had just barely missed its historical moment, Wise’s publisher offered him, in effect, a mulligan: a second edition that would incorporate an “open letter” to his fellow whites about Katrina. The new version, as fate would have it, was published in late December 2007 – just a week before a gaggle of honkies caucusing in Iowa launched the Obama campaign toward the presidency. (more…)