Oh happy day!

One glorious day! One day of triumph and hope and new beginnings.

Does it make up for eight years of hell? Was the suffering, death, trashing of the Constitution worth it?

No and no.

But it is a new beginning. Obama has much to do, not just with his plans to move the country forward, but with the much needed repair work of the damage that has been done by his predecessor.

If anyone can do it, he can, with our help.

Yes, he can.

Yes, we can.

Conservatives swoon over Obama, Brooks admits conservatives were wrong, and I get to say "I told you so"

It is a time of hope and history, and the disgraced and vanquished Republicans want to be part of it.

And so two nights ago when Barack broke bread with some conservative commentators at the home of George Will, they swooned and are now claiming bragging rights, even saying "he likes us best" because they had dinner with him while the next day liberal commentators met in his office and were only offered water.

Their bragging only shows them for the losers they are. And poor ones at that.

But Barack is bigger than that. Unlike Bush, who only wanted to be president of warmongers and neoconservatives and preachy moralists, Barack wants to be the president of the entire country. And he is willing to meet with them and share ideas.

To be fair, a few conservatives are humbled with the recent economic meltdown, some realizing that conservative ideology has failed. In David Brooks column today, for instance, he talks about the failure of the Republican belief that people behave rationally when it comes to business and financial decisions and that in fact human behavior is far more complicated and involves a certain amount of "mental chaos."

This mental chaos explains how people can respond so quickly and intuitively to so many different circumstances. But it also entails a decision-making process that is more complicated and messy than previously thought.

So David Brooks has finally admitted what Democrats have always known - that life is messy, people are imperfect, and sometimes radical freedom leads to disaster.

I wrote about this six years ago in an essay titled "Why I am not a Republican." The article is long, but if I were to write it today, I would add one other reason to the three I outlined. I am not a Republican because they only learn the hard way. Democrats are more progressive. They look ahead and try to prevent problems, while Republicans are faith and ideology based and refuse to consider that they might be wrong or they might not be addressing real problems. Only when disaster strikes are they forced to admit they were wrong, and often it is far too late.

I said of Republicans:

Republicans have a very black and white view of the nature of man. On the one hand, when promoting their economic policies, they appear to be stubborn believers in man's innate goodness. Their promotion of radical free markets, unregulated business, less governmental aid to the poor, lower taxes and privatizing social security, among other policies, is evidence of that. They insist that capitalism, left to itself, will be beneficial to all. Trickle down economics and radical individualism are republican mantras that assume that everyone has an equal shot at the "American Dream," that the wealthy will take care of the poor that didn't get trickled down on, and unregulated business can be trusted to do what's right. Republicans simply expect people to be good.

Of Democrats, I said:

Democrats, in my opinion, are more realistic about the nature of man. While democrats profess the belief that people CAN be good, and while they continue to
hope for the best, they accept that humans are ultimately flawed creatures, frequently selfish, weak and easily tempted to do wrong, especially when they get together in corporate board meetings. Because democrats do not expect people to be perfect, they understand the need for some governmental regulation. Sometimes, they think, man must be protected from himself - or more accurately, people must sometimes be protected from each other.

Thus, democrats believe in the importance of governmental oversight, especially of businesses that all citizens are dependent upon - like energy companies and the media. They also believe in the importance of protecting labor against unscrupulous management practices and so traditionally it has been the democratic party that has championed labor unions. Democrats are not so naive as to believe governments or unions always do the right thing, but they believe that these organizations are strengthened with the power of many voices and can hammer out reasonable and balanced policies as long as negotiations aren't done in secret.

Community vs. Individualism

When in the company of conservative Republicans I often hear the refrain that Barack Obama is going to raise their taxes. Raising taxes, of course, is anathema to Republicans, and Republican legislators and political pundits have successfully convinced Americans that even if Obama allows the Bush tax cuts to expire, as they are intended to do, that is a tax hike by Democrats.

What differentiates this liberal Democrat from those conservative Republicans is the idea that there is more to life than "what's in it for me." When I hear conservative Republicans, especially wealthy or very, very comfortable ones, whine about taxes I want to ask them just how much money they need, because the reality is a small tax hike would not hurt them at all when it comes to their needs. Sure, they might not be able to go on three vacations a year, or buy that second or third house, or that fifth car or that new wardrobe, but is that the measure of good public policy or a healthy society - how much the wealthy get to keep to spend on items they don't really need?

I honestly have never been able to understand this mentality that the wealthy have a right to get even wealthier and if the poor don't pull themselves up to be successful, too bad! They have only themselves to blame. This makes no sense to me. The poor don't have themselves to blame. They are kept down by ponzi schemes and tax codes and historical prejudice and legislation that favors the wealthy. They have few opportunities for either education or jobs that might get them out of the endless cycle of failure and poor health and poverty that comes from the deck being stacked against them by decades of public policy that deprives them of basic needs and then blames them for their poverty.

We have developed in this country an ethic of individualism, which preaches the ideology that anyone can make it, anyone can overcome misfortune, anyone can go from rags to riches and the reality is that this ideology is a myth. Here in the United States, regardless of evidence to the contrary, we think people are responsible only for and to themselves and to no one else and we feel very little obligation to reach out to others.

I have felt this profoundly as I have tried desperately to care for two ailing parents, one with a terminal disease, and one with a progressive neurological disease. As an only child, with no relatives nearby, I have felt more alone than I have ever felt in my life. No one offers to help. No government services are available. Even the medical profession makes life difficult with the many hurdles that we must all jump through just to get help.

We simply don't live in a society where we believe we are our brother's or our sister's keeper. We live in a society where the rule is to "look out for number one" and "what's in it for me?"

Conservative Republicans have the same mindset in foreign policy. "America right or wrong." "We're number one." "You're with us or against us." The Republican view is that America can do what it wants around the world because America can do no wrong. It doesn't matter what other countries want or need, it is only America's needs and wants that count.

Liberal Democrats would like to see a shift to a more communitarian outlook - one that says we're all in this together and unless the poorest among us have a chance, we will all be the worse for it. We would like to see the poor, the jobless, the uninsured be given a chance to feed their families and get medical care and live in decent housing. And if that means the wealthy or the relatively more well-off have to pay a few more bucks in taxes, so what? Are the wealthy really that selfish? And we would like to see more community service and more reaching out to those who need assistance, either in taking care of their ill relatives or in caring for their children while they go to work.

And no, having a communitarian outlook, one that says we thrive and prosper as individuals only when we assure that all of us are cared for, does not mean we are communists. I wish conservative Republicans could get over that - it's ignorant, narrow minded, and uninformed, not to mention unkind. But then, I have never seen conservative Republicans as possessing an abundance of kindness or open-mindedness.

Barack the Outlier

For the past month I've been sick - first a terrible upper respiratory infection complicated by bronchitis, then last week a stomach virus which knocked me out for a couple of days. Those things cripple your ability to write or even care about much that is going on.

But, knock on wood, I think I'm finally better and yesterday I wrote an article on my website OUTRAGED CITIZEN about the history that will be made tomorrow. Check it out.

During much of the past month, not being able to do many of the things I normally do (including helping my ailing parents) I had the opportunity to catch up on some reading. I finished Barack Obama's first book: Dreams from my Father. I started Malcolm Gladwell's latest book: Outliers. I highly recommend them both.

The interesting thing about these two books is that they complement each other. Gladwell's thesis in the book is that successful people are not individuals who have enormously high IQs or who pull themselves up by their bootsraps by sheer determination. Instead, he shows how time after time there are forces at work that give the successful person unusual access or opportunities that others, with just as much determination or just as much intelligence, simply do not have. For instance, Bill Gates was the son of a successful Seattle attorney and a wealthy mother who sent him to a prestigious prep school, Lakeside, where the mothers raised enough money to purchase a computer that connected to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. Here's how Gladwell summarizes the opportunities Gates had:

Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968? Opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay for the school's computer fees. Number three was that, when that money ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed, which happened to need someone to check its code on the weekends, and which also happened not to care if weekends turned into weeknights. Number four was that Gates just happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington. Number six was that the university happened to have free computer time between three and six in the morning. Number seven was that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke. Number eight was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem happened to be two high school kids. And number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away, writing code.

Gladwell also says that highly successful people have spent enormous amounts of time practicing their craft or skill, be it computer programming, musical performance, or athletics. The amount of time it takes for someone to become top of his field, a real expert at something, Gladwell estimates to be 10,000 hours or ten years. By the time Gates had dropped out of Harvard, he had accumulated that many hours.

In reading about Gladwell's thesis I see how well it applies to Barack Obama. With Obama, the 10,000 hours of practice would be in dealing with other people and learning to navigate in a world of diversity, a world in which he constantly had to adjust and shift to get along. And what better skill is their for politics than the ability to relate to people and get them to relate to you?

In Gladwell style, let me try to summarize the opportunities Obama had.

Opportunity number one was that Obama was born to brilliant parents of two different races. Opportunity number two, Obama was raised mostly in the diverse state of Hawaii. Opportunity number three, Obama's mother married an Indonesian man and took him to live there for four years where he went to school with both Christians and Muslims. Opportunity number four, schooling was limited in Indonesia so Obama's mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents where his grandfather's contacts allowed the middle class family to send their grandson to a prestigious prep school. Opportunity number five, Obama was accepted at Occidental College in Southern California where he met students of all races but learned to embrace his African-American heritage and became active in the anti-apartheid movement. Opportunity number six, Obama was accepted at Columbia University in New York and learned to navigate the tough neighborhood where he lived. Opportunity number seven, Obama applied to be a community organizer in Chicago and worked there for three years, failing at several projects in this on-the-job-training before he began to achieve small successes. Opportunity number eight, Obama was accepted to Harvard Law School. Opportunity number nine, prior to law school Obama traveled to Kenya, the land of his father, and met hundreds of relatives who had all heard of him, and learned what a real community was. And opportunity number ten, Obama became editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review where he formed relationships with both conservative and liberal students and scholars and made many connections that would serve him well in his future political career.

By the time he was in his late twenties, Obama had learned the skills of listening, debate, compromise, negotiation, and consensus building. He had developed the "no drama Obama" style through years of dealing with people who were different from him, and people he had to introduce himself to. Very few people of his intellect and ability have the experience with people that Obama had and these experiences make him uniquely qualified to be our first African American president.

Lunatic Watch

New feature on the blog: lunatic watch, where I note stories and articles highlighting the worst of the worst of the soon to be former Bush administration as well as legislators and other elected officials who do insane and destructive things.

First entry: a blog on Daily Kos simply reporting the administration in their own words, with appropriate (and sometimes disturbing) pictures.

Innocent faces

These are the innocent faces of my three grandchildren as they enjoyed viewing the Rose Parade floats.

Over 100 children just as innocent as these were killed by Israel over the past few days.

New Year, same old violence

Happy New Year!

We started out the New Year learning that Israel was bombing the Palestinian territory of Gaza, where unemployment is fifty percent, blockades have made food and supplies in short supply for months, and people live in crowded homes often without sewers and other necessities of life. After the bombing, Israel began a ground invasion. They claim they are hunting for the leaders and weapons of Hamas, to make Israelis safe.

So why have they killed over 100 children?

This is war. This is always war. No matter how a country may justify it, no matter how intellectuals around the world may say it is appropriate, no matter how the warring parties try to avoid civilian casualties, there are always children who pay the ultimate price, children who never have the chance to grow up.

In the small territory of Gaza, there is a record of how many children have been killed. How many children have we killed in the much larger countries of Iraq and Afghanistan? It could be in the tens of thousands but we will never know. We don't keep track.