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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Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh

If you consider where we were only seven years ago, the notion that the world and President Bush’s record would be the victim not to terrorism but to bad mortgages would have seemed incredible. And yet, the political terrain today is not made by the war on terror as much as it is by a war for banks. Iraq, it now turns out, was less expensive than the proposed bailout of American capitalism. America has not been crunched by WMD wielding terrorists – the great fear in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – but by credit.

Both candidates are playing a necessarily cagey game on economics – the platform on which neither expected the 2008 race to be decided. National security differences have, if anything, lessened between Obama and McCain. The winner is going have to make Pakistan central to his version of the war on terror. It was actually Obama who spoke first to the Pakistan problem. Again, his threatened belligerence toward this nation belying assertions that he intends to render US foreign policy more humble and, in the eyes of Islamists, more likeable. He intends no such thing, if his emerging rhetoric is any guide.

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Trading a kidney for tickets to see Obama at the DNC. On Craigslist.

Good deal? Trustworthy?

I’m not sure, but at least they picked a very well rendered, accurate picture of a kidney, courtesy of *ahem* Cambridge University Press’ A.D.A.M. Atlas of Anatomy.

Plus, it’s hilarious. Click to embiggen.

Thanks to Laura for pointing this one out.

Thank you, CBS News. On their Political Animal blog, find the whole run-down of contradictions in last night’s speech. Many people aren’t familiar enough with her to be able to know, for example, whether she supported the ‘bridge to nowhere.’ For Newsweek’s report on Obama’s acceptance speech, see Obama’s Speech Sometimes Stretched the Facts.

Below is an excerpt:

Palin: “But listening to him [Obama] speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate.”

Ha, ha, ha. I gave a rundown of Obama’s accomplishments in the Senate here. They include the Lugar-Obama bill on nonproliferation, and an ethics reform package that the Washington Post called “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.” Ruth Marcus summarizes his record on reform:

“He helped pass a far-reaching ethics and campaign finance bill in the Illinois state Senate and made the issue a priority on arriving in Washington. Much to the displeasure of his colleagues, Obama promoted an outside commission to handle Senate ethics complaints. He co-authored the lobbying reform bill awaiting President Bush’s signature and pushed — again to the dismay of some colleagues — to include a provision requiring lawmakers to report the names of their lobbyist-bundlers. He has co-sponsored bills to overhaul the presidential public financing system and public financing of Senate campaigns.”

Not a single major law or reform, indeed.

And I wasn’t aware that writing memoirs was something to be ashamed of. Obama has, in fact, written only one. McCain (with Mark Salter) has written at least two.