Sara Haile-Mariam

Yeah…I’m not sure I want to comment on this much more than to say that I find the media frenzy, while at times entertaining, to be really extravagant. Obviously, as a political junkie I appreciate the discourse and speculation as much as the next person– but at the same time, given everything else going on in our country, now isn’t the time for politics. So while I sincerely wish we were at a point where Sarah Palin’s resignation was the most dramatic thing happening in the world- it’s not, and we can’t forget that. So, I figured, I could (A)write about Sarah Palin(from a social commentary point of view, there’s certainly a lot to dissect)….or (B)I could write a piece where I point out everything else that actually warrants our attention. I went with option B.

“It’d be easy to talk about Sarah Palin—but those conversations won’t bring us closer to reforming an education system that leaves children, and in some cases entire districts, behind. Those conversations won’t bring us closer to reforming our immigration system or to giving every young person who wants a college education a way to afford it. I get it, she resigned, her decision has sent the political world in a frenzy. But c’mon- how much more is there to say?”

Full Global Grind Piece here.

“Friend –

This weekend, our family will join millions of others in celebrating America. We will enjoy the glow of fireworks, the taste of barbeque, and the company of good friends. As we all celebrate this weekend, let’s also remember the remarkable story that led to this day.

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, our nation was born when a courageous group of patriots pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the proposition that all of us were created equal.

Our country began as a unique experiment in liberty — a bold, evolving quest to achieve a more perfect union. And in every generation, another courageous group of patriots has taken us one step closer to fully realizing the dream our founders enshrined on that great day.

Today, all Americans have a hard-fought birthright to a freedom which enables each of us, no matter our views or background, to help set our nation’s course. America’s greatness has always depended on her citizens embracing that freedom — and fulfilling the duty that comes with it.

As free people, we must each take the challenges and opportunities that face this nation as our own. As long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content. And as America comes ever closer to achieving the perfect Union our founders dreamed, that triumph — that pride — belongs to all of us.

So today is a day to reflect on our independence, and the sacrifice of our troops standing in harm’s way to preserve and protect it. It is a day to celebrate all that America is. And today is a time to aspire toward all we can still become.

With very best wishes,

President Barack Obama

July 4th, 2009

P.S. — Our nation’s birthday is also an ideal time to consider serving in your local community. You can find many great ideas for service opportunities near you at http://www.serve.gov.”

Happy Independence Day.

Another piece on Global Grind on how the situation in Iran speaks to the importance and power of one voice.

Speaking of which, checkout this WAPO piece on exactly that, how Americans are using technology to impact events over there. One of the individuals profiled, Chas Danner, is a good friend. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been blown away by how his actions (on his computer in Brooklyn) could have such a profound effect on so many.

Some criticism of The President’s speech today. I have no illusions, today’s speech wasn’t an anecdote to the World’s problems. However, I truly believe that the approach leveraged, that of empathy and emphasizing commonalities, is a winning approach. Nonetheless, it’s imperative to look at what the President didn’t do, in order to identify opportunities for additional dialogue and action.

Shirin Sadeghi

“At times in his speech, it was almost as if Obama in his elegant oration was pandering to the fundamentalists and the oppressive governments who have defined the Islamic dialogue for decades. He said that he does not want to be a prisoner of the past, but his speech was littered with history which, while accurate, is old news when it stands alone without direction or context.”

Peter Daou

“Yes, Obama is targeting the Arab ’street’ and global public opinion - but to the corrupt regimes that dominate that region of the world, his oration means virtually nothing. Repression and suppression will go on uninterrupted. And to those whose abiding hatred of Israel (and thus America) is absolute, Obama’s words will be seen as empty and hypocritical.”

Ira Stoll (h/t Ben Smith)

“The sections about the Palestinian Arabs were even weaker. He said of the Palestinians: “For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.” This buys into the claim that it was 1948, not 1967, that was the original tragedy for the Palestinian Arabs, and feeds the idea that the Palestinian Arabs have a claim to all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.”

Shmuel Rosner (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

“Obama’s Cairo speech had a misleading quality to it. The president was speaking the rhetoric of Reagan, while intending to execute the policy of George H. W. Bush. Conveying the image of an emotional, forthcoming, and understanding bridge-builder, he is actually a cautious and calculated leader, wanting to scale down America’s foreign policy–back to the days when “interests” were king, not ‘ideologies.’ Obama is a new type of the old ‘realist.; He is a realist with feelings–one that can naturally combine a call for halting Iran’s nuclear weapons because of ‘America’s interests’ (and others’) with his personal story of ‘an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.’”

International Empathy, is what we saw today. A truly incredible speech that seeks to draw parallels and commonalities among countries that have grown accustomed to drawing upon historical differences to justify contemporary failures to advance in a more productive direction. President Obama didn’t chafe at those differences, rather he explained them, he empathized with the plight of Israel, and Palestine, and the Muslim world. He articulated the story of America, and made it accessible to those who have been told for far to long that our country is to blame for their grievances. I am proud of the President today, but even more so, I’m inspired to see diplomacy move in this direction and to see empathy emerge as a tenant of President Obama’s administration.

From his 2004 Convention speech as a candidate for the US Senate, to his race speech as a candidate for President, to this speech today as President of the United States- Mr. Obama has aimed to see the world in the eyes of others. No doubt, this approach complicates things, and in many cases good intentions will not be enough. Nonetheless, today marks a new beginning for international diplomacy. Today is when the promise of his Presidency began to come to fruition.

Full transcript here.

“The thing that I consider to be my most profound obligation, is keeping the American people safe”.

Obama indicates that he’s open to a Congressional review of the Bush torture memos released last week. Still, he remains steadfast in his belief that if anyone is going to be prosecuted, it’s going to be those who made the legal arguments that permitted such heinous acts rather than the individuals who committed the acts themselves.

Was the 2008 Presidential Election a sign of a long term political realignment? Larry Sabato’s thinks so elaborating in his new book, The Year of Obama.

Politico offers a summary:

“The big idea of this book is that 2008 looks to be a realigning election — a very rare event in American history. The previous three were 1896, 1932, and 1980. Translation: The Democratic majority is going to last for a while. There have been 38 presidential elections since 1860, and Obama received the 6th highest share of the vote for a Democrat. Only FDR (four times) and LBJ (once) exceeded Obama’s percentage. There were three giant demographic shifts that powered this:

“— The young broke more than 2-1 Democratic, and it was an intense preference unlikely to fade quickly. As this group ages and replaces older voters, Democrats will benefit even more since this group’s turnout will go up.

“— The proportion of minority voters (black, Hispanic, and Asian) shot up and is likely to climb consistently every four years (mainly because of Hispanics). Democrats get about three-quarters of the votes of minorities, taken as a collective group.

“— Americans with post-graduate educations have begun to move firmly to the Democrats, not just because of Bush and the economy but also because of the GOP’s conservative stance on social issues (abortion, gay rights, etc.)

If Sabato’s analysis holds steadfast, and I do think it will, then perhaps it’s time to rethink the sixties, often argued as a decade that solidified the defeat of the left. The issues of the sixties are still be debated today (racism, sexism, homophobia, peace, environmental efficiency) but over the last four decades, the country has moved to the left on all of those issues. As much as the Right insists that we remain a “center-right” country, I think we’re arriving at a point where that no longer proves true- left has become mainstream, and President Obama has helped this dynamic along. He’s been able to insert a sensibility into political discourse that makes progressive principles, make sense. Now a realignment isn’t guaranteed, I’ve heard a number of young people in particular refer to themselves as “Obama Democrats”- meaning that they align with the individual and not necessarily the party. However if the GOP, well, keeps doing what they’re doing (pretending that nothing has changed), and if more Conservative Dems can refrain from taking conservative positions simply to prove that they’re independent minded (I’m looking at you Bayh) then I think we’re bound to see some really interesting developments over the next 10 years.

A bit crazed this week (evidenced by my lackluster blogging) but I’ll have more commentary up this weekend.

In the interim, I didn’t want to pass on the chance to commend the President for his performance abroad thus far. In 48 hours he has…
1.Set the foundation for negotiations with Russia with the intention of collaborating to combat nuclear proliferation (and to work in concert to lower our nuclear arsenals).
2.Laid the ground work for strong diplomatic cooperation with China.
3.Released a stern joint statement with South Korea warning of a stern response if North Korea goes ahead with their planned mission launch.
4. And, evidently, played moderator between France and China during today’s deliberations.

If you want obsessive coverage and commentary of the G-20, be sure to check out Politico 44, The Huffington Post’s G-20 Big News Page, or the Guardian’s Live Blog.

Back on this side of the pond…while the President’s away, the Republicans have chosen to play. Yesterday, the GOP released a rather…dismaying alternative to the President’s budget (which passed the House today). Bob Cesca lays out the contradictions in this piece.

Jonathan Martin of Politico has a piece out today on the “unprecedented” criticism coming out against the Obama administration today from the New York Times. The article notes-

“It’s not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it’s perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper’s lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail. The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.”

Frankly, I read all of the aforementioned articles today and I didn’t really walk away with the same shock and awe that Mr. Martin did. Yes, they were all fairly critical but I would hardly say that it was unprecedented. “Elite opinion in the Washington- New York corridor” has spoken out against the President on numerous occasions, particularly throughout the Presidential campaign and I think that the Politico article today says more about elite opinion than today’s NY Times Op-Eds. Deliberation and dissent, particularly when spoken by those of similar political ideologies, has become almost taboo in contemporary times. A multiplicity of views is often categorized as some sort of indication of weakness or disarray. The Republican party tends to embrace this phenomenon chastising anyone who dares to stray from the party line as “not a real conservative”. Democrats on the otherhand don’t seem to employ the same strategy and the Obama administration has taken great strides to indicate that we’re in the era of inclusion.

More after the jump….
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Thomas Friedman has a great Op-Ed out today on how the President could use his powers of inspiration to address the financial crisis.

This line from Dov Sidman’s book “How” provides insight on how the President might use rhetoric to help navigate us out of the crisis.

“Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”

I couldn’t agree more with Friedman’s assessment, there’s an absence of values in our financial sector that culminate to create an agenda based on getting rich quick, gambling big regardless of how those bets might impact the collective, and the inability to accept responsibility.

Now to be clear, a blame game is not what we need. There are a variety of factors that led to this mess, and trying to dissect the crisis to identify the main culprits shouldn’t be a priority right now. What we do need to be doing is understanding the crisis so as to prevent a sequel.

Now where does the President fit into all of this? President Obama has been using his soap box as of late to lavish his praises on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Inspiring confidence in the architect of the solution is certainly important, however it fails to address the concerns associated with his proposal. An increase of transparency is necessary and the full roll out of the banking plan this week will hopefully include more details. Still, transparency alone will not make this a teachable moment. What needs to be addressed is how we go about changing the general approach of how business is done in Washington and on Wall Street. We already know that greed and irresponsibility lead to current crisis, now what will get us out?

That hasn’t been articulated as clearly- I’d like to see the President outline why investors and bankers should remain cognoscente of how their actions impact society as a whole- it seems like an obvious answer but perhaps this is a moment that requires stating and repeating the obvious until it sticks. The President has indicated that additional regulations will be put in place to prevent irresponsible wheeling and dealing from reoccurring, that’s great, but unless the attitude that inspired those transactions is confronted than surely the overly ambitious would find a way to get around those regulations.

In addition to new laws we need an ethical framework that helps us navigate those laws that goes back to a national sentiment that Barack Obama reminded us of when he first entered the national scene “E Pluribus Unum”

Out of many. One.