One of our field reps, Bob Barnett, just informed me of some great news out of his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Many thanks to Michael Boggs at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville for bringing it to our attention.

The University of Louisville awards major prizes–the Grawemeyer Awards–every year in five different categories: Music Composition, Education, World Order, Psychology, and Religion.

This year’s World Order prize goes to Cambridge author Michael Johnston. Johnston’s book, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy seeks to understand corruption by looking at how it manifests in different countries, including bribes, cartels, and outright plunder. According Rodger Payne, a Louisville political science professor who directs the award:

Corruption is a pervasive global problem that undermines economic and political systems, Johnston’s approach is particularly useful because it puts forward a practical agenda for reform.

Johnston is Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. They recently interviewed him on their blog.

Columnists have approached last week’s deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks from many angles, as William Kristol points out in his New York Times column today. Are we dealing with the a repressed minoritystriking out? Revenge killings for prior attacks by Hindus? A coordinated group with an agenda? What does this mean for India’s peaceful Muslims?

Kristol emphasizes the attackers’ rationale over what Politico columnist Jim Leach describes as “barbarism.”

But Leach doesn’t want to discuss that rationale — even though it’s not hard to find. Ten minutes of Googling will bring you to a fine article, “The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups,” from the April 2005 issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. It’s by the respected journalist and diplomat Husain Haqqani, who, as it happens, is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani explains, is a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.” He notes that “Lashkar-e-Taiba has adopted a maximalist agenda for global jihad.” Indeed, the political arm of the group has conveniently published a pamphlet, “Why Are We Waging Jihad?,” that lays out all kinds of reasons why the United States, Israel and India are “existential enemies of Islam.”

I suspect that there is a middle-way; one that underscores both the senseless, cultic (to use a loaded word) practices of jihadist violence and the nationalistic agenda-based jihad that is at odds here. Cambridge author Laurent Murawiec wrote an article for this blog (Can Terror Be Understood? Oct. 9) rebutting a study of terrorists that seemed to indicate that a street-gang-like sense of belonging has as much to do with terrorist motivations as anything else.

Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad, instead, examines the practice of jihad as something truly barbaric, but with definite roots.

Read Murawiec’s article here >>

Diane Rehm interviewed Cambridge author Yasheng Huang yesterday, and the streaming audio is now live!

Give it a listen >>

Huang is author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, recently featured in my favorite magazine, The Economist.

James R. Flynn

Obama may think it safer to keep his sanity intact. But unless he presses on some hotly debated topics, we’ll be left with a world at risk.

Barack Obama will want to show that a black President can fill the office with dignity. The simplest way to do that is to chart a middle course that does not “divide America” into warring camps. This would dictate doing only the minimum needed to solve the present economic crisis and avoid alienating his liberal constituency. It is the safest way to encourage Americans to judge candidates on their merits rather than on their race. Obama has spent so much of his life in activism and advocacy to enhance the status of black Americans; who am I to second guess him if he settles for that?

And yet, he may want to take a shot at being a great President, and try to change the false images of reality that render US domestic and foreign policy so hopeless.

Black America and desperate America

When Jack Kennedy became the first Catholic President, everyone knew that the issue of state funding of church schools could not even arise. This now holds equally true for the expansion of affirmative action for blacks, that is, policies that give blacks preference over whites for government jobs, university entrance, and so forth.

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Considering Bush’s decision-making style, and what many perceived as a reckless, ham-fisted approach to policy, it’s no wonder that the press is scrutinizing Obama’s style very closely.  And already, people are cautiously sizing-up Obama’s poised, deliberate way of addressing questions and problems.

Cambridge author Joan Hoff was recently interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education about his “professorial” style during discussions.

“He seems to be reflective when directly asked a question,” says Joan Hoff, a research professor of history at Montana State University at Bozeman and author of A Faustian Foreign Policy: from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (Cambridge University Press, 2008). While academics might find that style of speaking “calming and reassuring,” she says, it might come across as too wordy to the general public.

For Hoff, Obama shouldn’t “overdose on deliberation.” I guess I might fit into the “academic” category, and yes, “careful” and “deliberate” are words I’d use to describe my ideal president’s decision-making. But hordes of people didn’t flock to see Obama the professor.

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