It’s a good day to be an American.

On Tuesday we voted and early Wednesday morning there was a tangible difference in the streets. I was lucky to be in New York City on election eve, sitting with some old friends watching the returns come in. The next day John Stewart on his Daily Show made a joke that he was afraid someone was going to ask him home for pie. People were looking each other in the eye on the streets of New York, in the subways and coffee shops, registering joy and relief and maybe a little disbelief. It was all so fresh as to be a little unbelievable that Obama was actually elected – and soundly. John McCain made a conciliatory speech displaying the patriotism that has been his hallmark, encouraging people to come together to solve the mammoth problems we face. I hope his supporters took his words to heart because little will be accomplished if the country isn’t united. Nearly half of the country voted for McCain and I suspect many of them were voting against Obama. We are still a country divided but the challenges we face are so fierce that nothing short of genuine cooperation is going to permit us to succeed in dealing with the recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the environmental crisis and the glaring inequality of wealth that has intensified over the last twenty years.

Today we have earned a moment of celebration: Tomorrow we must begin rebuilding.

Election Day 2008

Morning has just risen on Election day in America, a country nearly as divided in its civil discourse as it was when Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. Then as now, the nation was struggling for its very existence and a long, thin man from Illinois entered office with a mission to prevent its dissolution.
Unless I am very wrong, the closing of this day will find another long, thin man from Illinois standing before the American people, worn from a grueling campaign, joyful in his victory, yet tempered in that joy by the knowledge of the daunting task that lays ahead.
I was watching him speak last night, making his last speech of the day, the final speech of this election campaign, before an audience of over 100,000 people in Virginia, and I was struck by the sight of it, this bright young African-American Senator who has taken on his shoulders the hopes, the desperate hopes, of the tens of thousands assembled there that night. And although he was charged by the passion that swelled around him, his eyes were clear and focused and he never appeared to be carried away by the moment. It was as if he knew he was about to turn a page in his life, that he realized the great responsibility would soon be his to bear.
Much has been written about his election being the most important in recent history and I would have to agree. The economy is in shambles, we are engaged in two wars, our planet is in danger of passing a point of no return and the politics of the last twenty years has brought about a balkanization of the nation into red and blue camps, fiercely divided by religious ideology, money and fear.
I wouldn’t want to be Barack Obama, but I am hopeful for the first time in a long time that we are about to elect the right man for the most important job in the world. I wish him well, not just for the outcome of today’s election, but for the promise he embodies. He is not a magician, and no single person will be able to cure the ills we suffer from, but he is the best hope we have to unite this divided nation and lead it through the troubles we are certain to face in the coming years.

November 4, 2008

McCain reigns in the Knuckleheads

The election is drawing near and as I wrote in my last post, the campaign has gone negative - Obama’s campaign is now running about 30% negative ads and McCain about 90%. The McCain crowds have become increasingly hostile and vocal in recent days, claiming Obama was a terrorist and a liar. Then yesterday, John McCain, at one of his Town Hall meetings, was taking questions from the audience. People made comments that they were afraid of Obama and that Obama was a Muslim. Instead of egging them on McCain set them straight – he said he respected Obama even though his disagrees with him and that Obama is not a Muslim and is a good citizen and that people should not fear him or his presidency should he be elected. That was the John McCain I thought was running, a man with whom we may have disagreements but a person of honor. I was relieved to hear what McCain said about Obama and I hope his supporters will listen as well. Maybe McCain has begun to reign in the knuckleheads who have turned his campaign so negative. Some good news is welcome these days - and this is good news.

Into the dirt ...

Once when I was a kid I noticed a large flock of birds resting on the power lines outside our house. My mother told me that a cold front must be arriving and the birds were gathering to head south. A similar phenomenon takes place in the mid-west where we lived for a time, when the sky suddenly darkens and wind goes eerily still just before a huge storm arrives.

In America today you can sense the winds changing. William Kristol, in his column today in the New York Times, signaled the arrival of the dirty winds of the Republican Presidential campaign. It is a wind we have seen before, once swirled and stirred by the likes of Lee Atwater (who long ago offered to pay a mutual friend of ours to spy on me when I was a lowly operative in a failed campaign to unseat Strom Thurmond) and later by his protégé Karl Rove. Obama can see it coming, everyone knows it’s coming. McCain has little choice anymore, having struck his deal with the devil to win this race at any cost.

Gone are the lofty pronouncements of running a clean campaign on the issues. That became undeniably clear with the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate – a person who is nothing but a Hail Mary pass for votes. It strains the imagination that McCain can possibly believe she is capable of running the country at the hour it faces it’s greatest challenges since the eve of World War Two.

So all bets are off and its down into the dirt we go.

Autumn in America

It’s autumn in America and to borrow from Stephen Colbert, so am I.

The trees have started turning colors, those that are strong or lucky enough to have survived the worms that settled in during late summer and shrouded much of the green matter in the southern Catskills. Yesterday morning it was cold and felt like fall, so much so that I had to build a fire to warm the cabin. The price of fuel oil is so high that I turn on the heater only when I absolutely must. The talk around here is that the coming winter is going to be a particularly cold one. It’s always cold in this neck of the woods, but this year the price of heating has charged the change of seasons with a note of dread. Our local town hall has started a food drive for folks in the area on fixed incomes who might have to make the choice this winter between buying food and buying oil, not a very pleasant prospect to consider.

Things are not sunny here in America. The economy is making everyone very nervous, the price of everything is going up at an alarming rate, manufacturing plants are closing or relocating to countries where the price of operating is cheaper, we are still at war and the presidential election is right around the corner. A little over forty days remain before the election.

This weekend I was in Scranton, Pennsylvania talking with voters. I’m not an expert on politics, and generally I don’t spend much time in these pages writing about it, but in the last few months the subject has been much on my mind so I hope you’ll forgive me if, for the next few weeks, I devote a little more space than usual to the topic.

This election feels like it’s going to be a close one. Of the families I spoke with this weekend, some had already made up their minds how they were going to vote, lifelong Democrats for Obama and their Republican counterparts for McCain. But there are a significant number of people who haven’t made up their minds. Now some people aren’t likely to tell a stranger who knocks on their door on a Saturday morning how they are going to vote, but there are also people who really haven’t decided which candidate is going to better address the issues they care about the most. There’s an awful lot of misinformation out there that has been spread by both parties against their rivals but there is also a genuine lack of understanding about what each of the candidates would do regarding healthcare and the economy – the two issues that I heard most often would turn these voters one way or another. It was also interesting that Sarah Palin was never brought up as a factor. For all the press she has gotten in the major media, she was a non-issue to the folks I spoke with in Scranton.

If there was one thing that stuck with me it is that the candidates had better use the remaining days before November 4th to spell out their respective positions on these two issues clearly and distinctly.

With so little time and the race as tight as it is, the coming debates could make the difference in this election. Neither of the candidates is going to have the time to stump in every swing district and political ads have become so discredited that people just switch them off, so it’s down to the debates. Obama has got to appear presidential while staying on the safe side of aloof while John McCain needs to present a consistency on the issues that seems to have eluded him during the campaign. The challenge to each of the candidates is to convince the voters that he is ready to lead on day one. Hillary’s “3AM” commercial was more to the point of this election than it might have seemed at the time. But the issue isn't just national defense, it’s everything, and the concern isn’t about which person is older or more experienced it’s about which of the two of them has the better grasp on the issues of healthcare, national security and the economy and has the most clearly developed plan to act when he assumes office. Experience as an issue in this campaign has had it’s day, I didn’t hear it mentioned once this weekend. Obama and McCain – for better or worse – are the two candidates in the race right now and the voters have accepted that. Now they are looking to see which of the two of them can get the country out of the mess it is in and back to something like normal.

It’s likely these debates will be compared with the Kennedy-Nixon debates, because the similarities are so strong - the young Senator versus the old Pol, experience versus change. The first of three debates will be this Friday night and I can only imagine the level of preparation both camps are putting into this. It could be the most important day of the campaign thus far.

Seven years

HH is only five, or already five depending on how you look at it. He arrived two years after that morning in 2001.

When the doctor told us his due date was September 11th neither of us said a word, we just looked at each other and fiddled with our hands in our laps. We lived in lower Manhattan then, saw it all with our naked eyes, smelled it, tasted it, lived it and no doubt have some of it buried deep inside.

A great deal has happened in the last seven years; the war is still raging, the war that feels more and more like the permanent war of “1984” and our country, what a beating it has taken, and is taking and seems destined to go on taking. The liars are in charge and the desperate deceived have forgotten how to tell truth from fiction and lost the will to even try. They cheer and chant and wave flags and have learned to hate those who challenge their beliefs rather than respect the competition of ideas.

I don’t recall a time in my life when I was more disheartened at the likely choice of the majority. The re-election of Richard Nixon was a low-point and yet even then I didn’t have the feeling that his being in office actually jeopardized the very existence of the nation. Things are different now. We live in a far more dangerous world, an angrier world and a more complex world. America has always been a beacon of hope and promise but the current administration has transformed that beacon into a target and today we find ourselves one of the least trusted nations on the planet.

I actually despair at the idea of Senator McCain ascending to the Presidency. I don’t doubt that he believes he will do what is best for the country. I don’t believe he would intentionally put the nation at risk, but I am certain he will do just that. President Bush has poisoned our democracy. Through eight years of chipping away at the fundamental principles of our commonweal, he has left the nation divided, angry and fearful in mind and spirit and he has both hardened the resolve of our enemies and dramatically increased their ranks.

McCain will almost certainly involve America in another war, either through provoking it by bellicose posturing of the type he is practicing today with respect to Georgia and Iran, or through a knee-jerk response to a provocation that is designed to elicit just such a response. 9/11 was all about dragging us into a ground war in the Middle East and the monsters who planned and executed those attacks have been successful beyond their dreams. Can you imagine how quickly the situation could deteriorate if McCain is the man making decisions about how to respond to the next one? It is a very short step from the battlefields on which we are now engaged, to a war that engulfs the entire planet.

I believe the situation is that grave, the stakes that high, and the outcome of this election that important. But the thing that bothers me the most is that the country is divided into bunkers of hard right and hard left. It’s no accident that “country first” was the slogan of the Republican Convention. It’s no secret that we are a divided nation and that those divisions have crusted over into chasms during the last eight years. Our ideological blinders are firmly in place, fellow citizens who hold different beliefs are now enemies and the spin-doctors of the respective parties are engaged in campaigns of half-truths, outright misrepresentation and desperate fluff. The country is dancing in the darkness toward its demise. We are in the deep shit, and if I was Howard Dean I would be on the phone day and night to every person I knew of honor or merit or distinction, pleading with them to get out into the streets to educate, mobilize and energize the electorate. This may be the last chance we have to change our nation’s course before that course is chosen for us.

On this, the seventh anniversary of that morning in September, we should all try to remember what life was like before the terror. Ours was not a perfect nation on September 10th 2001 but it was a better one.

The World is Watching

I don’t know about the rest of you, but no matter which candidate you support in the upcoming US Presidential election, this promises to be one of the most exciting and possibly uplifting contests ever.

If I had to make a bet this morning I would put my money on Barack Obama. John McCain is a principled man with a long record of service but I expect the majority will vote for change, radical change, not the incremental adjustments of an independent-minded Conservative but the kind of change that will alter the course of America’s foreign and domestic policy from the collision course with infamy on which it is now directed, toward embracing the very best of our country.

For better of worse we live on an ever-shrinking planet and the United States is the global superpower. I had dinner last night with a psychologist who works with inmates in a Swedish prison, trying to rehabilitate the promising few. We got to talking about the upcoming election in the USA. She brought up the War in Iraq and I instinctively became defensive, not because I support the War, but as an American living abroad it is impossible for me not to at least offer another point of view when I hear Europeans and others talking about the US.

When I heard what she was saying, however, I realized that it wasn’t any particular policy she was objecting to; she was acknowledging fact that even though other countries in the world do far worse things than ours, when the US enters a war or takes sides, that decision changes everything. That’s not really news, it was the way she said it that struck me, the look in her eyes and the almost plaintive acknowledgement that we all have a stake in this election.

These are difficult times and there is much to do. There are also bad guys out there who make trouble in their own lands and are inclined to make trouble with their neighbors. It can’t be our job to police the world - there are neither the resources nor the public will to do so. But we can lead. We can lead by demonstrating that our political system works. We can lead by practicing fairness in our trade policies, by aggressively addressing the global crisis of the environment and we can lead by demonstrating compassion toward those who do not currently have a stake in the American dream or in any other for that matter.