The Cherry Orchard

Gosh, I love America. You know why? Because America has the good sense *not* to fall for a well-funded plastic candidate like Mitt Romney. New Hampshire put John McCain on top, and while I intensely disagree with McCain’s Iraq policy, I do agree with the Republican voters that McCain is the best of their entire field.

I’m still not completely decided on Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton for my own party — I like them both very much. But I think Clinton’s inability to dominate the Democratic nomination is also a good portent for American democracy in the sense that Hillary Clinton is also a massively-financed candidate.

With regard to both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, voters are proving that well-financed candidates don’t always win. This is very encouraging for America.

The Cherry Orchard has been quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been occupied with an emergency technical redesign of my other blog. I’m still paying attention over here, though, and you better believe I’ll be back in full force to cover the 2008 Presidential Election. If you’re wondering where I stand on that right now, well, nothing much has changed. I support Hillary Clinton. I support Barack Obama. I support John Edwards. I want a change in leadership and an end to the military mania that has been so harmful to this nation since 2001.

I’ve lately been reading Tim Weiner’s award-winning new book Legacy of Ashes: This History of the CIA. This book presents a single powerful thesis: from its beginnings in Harry Truman’s post-war administration, America’s Central Intelligence Agency has been riven by a split between proponents of two opposing visions of the CIA’s role: those who favor a passive, espionage-minded spy agency and those who favor covert action over information. The latter has predominated, from the 1940’s straight through to today.

The essential question is: should the CIA report what other governments are doing, or change what other governments are doing? Should it gather news, or should it make news? The CIA was successful at making news in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, but the long-term effects of America’s bold programs to manipulate foreign governments are worrisome. Most worrisome of all — and this is a point that Tim Weiner pounds home repeatedly in this angry book — is the fact that while engaging in disruptive covert actions in every corner of the world, the CIA has clearly neglected the espionage side of national security. According to this book, we have far fewer high-functioning clandestine agents around the world than one concerned with the USA’s security would hope. We are laughably understaffed with operatives capable of reading foreign languages. We have been constantly undermined by double agents.

The commitment to covert action over knowledge seems to resonate with America’s cultural and political image, especially as expressed by Presidential candidates today. We are pragmatic, we are fearless, we “bring the war to them”, and our every move is above reproach because “we are America”. Unfortunately, this deeply ingrained approach to global politics has left Americans feeling more and more insecure in a world riven by nationalist, religious and ethnic hatred. Tim Weiner’s book is not about partisan politics — he expresses deep contempt for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (both of them best suited for domestic politics, both with terrible track records in foreign policy) and has the most regard for worldly-minded Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush.

The book does reflect upon each American citizen’s idea of what our place in the world is, and one can only pray that our national culture will become more worldly, more considerate of international concerns, more multi-lingual, more respectful to foreign religions and alternative economic practices, and less isolated, less chauvinistic, less solipsistic. If we had put more effort into understanding and infiltrating the various societies around the world (rather than trying to manipulate these societies through imperious and unilateral policies), we would never have been caught looking on September 11, 2001.

I’ve tried to resist getting too drawn in to the 2008 Presidential Election drama. Give me Hillary, give me Obama, give me John Edwards — any of them will feel like life-saving medicine after 7 years of what’s-his-name. I have been following the debates and the soundbites, but I start to feel disgusted as soon as it all starts to seem like a sporting event. Just give me a President who seems to have the basic skills for the job and who doesn’t lie to me every single day, and I’ll feel a lot better than I feel right now.

So I’m not getting too wrapped up in the Barack vs. Hillary headlines of the last two weeks, but I do want to say that Barack Obama is starting to win me over. I understood both sides of the argument over whether or not a US President should agree to meet and negotiate with a wide range of foreign leaders unconditionally (as Barack says) or whether we should maximize our advantage by seeking helpful preconditions in some cases (as Clinton says). I don’t mind the fact that Clinton chooses to emphasize the importance of pressing for advantage, but I do like it very much that Obama is articulating a larger principle: a simple, honest and open approach to foreign policy expresses America’s ideals best. I like it that Obama risked (and withstood) the criticism of other politicians in order to make this point.

And he risked and is currently withstanding even more criticism for his recent remark about renewing the battle against Al Qaeda — the original Al Qaeda, the one led by Osama Bin Laden, not the separate group that has now settled in George Bush’s Iraq — even if this means violating the borders of Pakistan.

Some find it hypocritical that a candidate who generally stands for diplomacy over war would suggest what could amount to “a war with Pakistan”. Nobody wants war with Pakistan and it’s very difficult to imagine that Barack Obama would act impulsively or recklessly against any other nation. But Obama is reminding us of a simple and important fact: our current administration has failed to weaken the organization that attacked us in 2001 and has credibly pledged to attack us again. Why shouldn’t our next President do what our current President has failed to do and defend ourselves against the group that threatens us the most?

It’s amazing how much criticism a politician has to take for speaking the plain and simple truth. Nobody wants war with Pakistan. But we remain “at war” with Al Qaeda — again, the real Al Qaeda, the first Al Qaeda — and it’s clear that Bush and Cheney, for all their bluster and military posturing, have no idea how to fight that war. I’m glad Barack Obama can recognize a real enemy when he sees one, and I’m encouraged that he can see through all the surreal nonsense of the last six years and talk about the possibility of taking action.

I don’t usually read Harper’s Magazine (though I usually mean to) but I was attracted to the June cover, which asks the question “How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling and Neglect?” under a photo of a smiling George W. Bush.

Since I tend to walk down the street pondering the exact same question these days, I picked up this magazine and was pleased to find a broad and well-considered set of essays on this question, including the following topics by the following authors: The Constitution by David Cole, The Courts by Dahlia Lithwick, The Environment by Bill McKibben, The Marketplace of Ideas by Jack Hitt and The Military by Edward Luttwak. Being generally a foreign policy minded kind of guy, I was most interested in Anne Marie Slaughter’s suggestions on Diplomacy.

How are we going to handle diplomacy after the failure known as George W. Bush waves his last goodbye? It’s a question every 2008 presidential candidate should be able to answer, for one thing, and voters are going to demand something more than the candy-coated sugar language most of the candidates have been delivering on this topic. In her Harper’s article Slaughter wisely sticks to specific instructions: close Guantanamo, get serious about nuclear disarmament, join the International Criminal Court, get serious about the United Nations, and get serious about fighting global warming.

I think these are all important suggestions, though I’d add one more and put it at the very top of the list: renounce torture as an intelligence-gathering technique (that is to say, renounce torture).

I’m less impressed with Earl Shorris on The National Character. Where Slaughter’s prescriptions are based on the existence of concrete objects (Gitmo, the United Nations), Shorris puts too much faith into the meanings of terms like “virtue”, “evil”, “courage”, “fear”. He quotes Immanuel Kant, but he needs to be doused with a bucket of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would have reminded him that all of these words are ultimately chimeral entities, and really aren’t likely to serve any useful purposes in any discussions, debates or exchanges of ideas, because they are too easily co-opted by alternative meanings or willful misinterpretations.

But Harper’s has put together a good essay series overall, and I’m glad it hammers home the point that those of us who really can’t stand the sight of George W. Bush anymore aren’t necessarily obsessive Bush-haters, and are really not motivated by emotion or anger when we talk about him incessantly. The problem is rather that we feel a desperate need to begin recovering from George W. Bush … and it doesn’t help that this walking disaster is still in office. In other words, it really isn’t about George W. Bush at all. It’s about how the hell we’re going to clean up the mess this moron made, and how we’re going to save our great country once he’s gone.

So Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of my city, has ended his affiliation with the Republican Party and may run for President as an independent. This is an interesting proposition, and since I’ve been aware of Mike Bloomberg (as a businessman more than as a politician) for over a decade and a half, I’ve got some thoughts (and a bit of newsworthy gossip) to offer.

In 1992 I was the youthful Manager of Software Development for a start-up financial database company, Loan Pricing Corporation, based in New York. We specialized in information systems for the banking industry, and our role model was a vastly successful company called Bloomberg, which had managed to sell cute little television sets with dedicated live financial news and pricing feeds to every stockbroker on Wall Street. Mike Bloomberg’s name frequently came up in meetings, because we yearned to replicate his success, and occasionally these references would take on a reverential “What Would Bloomberg Do?” tone.

My company also did business with Bloomberg (we were one of their countless data sources) and I remember a curious story making the rounds about Mike Bloomberg’s surprising insensitivity towards women in the workplace. My friend Steve, an economist and journalist, attended a meeting with Mike at the Bloomberg offices and came back wide-eyed. In the middle of the meeting, an attractive secretary walked in with refreshments, and after she left Bloomberg held up the conversation to watch her walk away with a salacious grin on his face. He then made a remark that, Steve said, caused everybody in the room — both men and women — to feel extremely uncomfortable. Others at my company who had worked with Bloomberg concurred with Steve — apparently this was a routine he was famous for, and it made everybody uncomfortable, but that was Mike. Our role model was a sexist slob.

This certainly gave me a bad first impression of Mike Bloomberg, and years later when he ran for mayor of New York City I wondered if these stories would surface and cause him problems. He broke no law, of course, but he did offer a disappointing key to his personality that might cause voters and journalists to doubt his judgement. I was surprised that no such stories ever surfaced, and I have to assume that this brash entrepeneur has matured and is no longer behaving in public like Michael Scott in “The Office”. And that’s all I’m going to say about this story, because I’ve come to have a slightly better opinion of Bloomberg, who has been my major for the last six years.

It’s not his politics but, ironically, his plain-speaking and modest personality that I’ve come to feel better about. New York City mayors tend to be loud publicity-seekers — Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch and John Lindsay come to mind — but Mike Bloomberg’s public appearances since becoming mayor have shown him to be mild, sensible and humane. He seems to seek the middle ground on most issues and never leaps towards the types of broad-stroke politics that define his predecessors. He also gets points for speaking at my daughter Liz’s Forest Hills High School graduation a few years ago — as a good Democrat, I sat on my hands when others clapped, but I have to admit his speech was refreshingly humble and appropriate to the occasion.

Clearly the man has grown up a lot — haven’t we all? — but the fact that I’ve come to not dislike his public persona doesn’t mean I agree with his politics. Until this week I’ve had no idea where he stands on the conduct of American foreign policy in the Middle East, for instance, and some Google searches have only shown that he is against a withdrawal timetable for Iraq (which doesn’t impress me much) and that he dislikes our administration’s “go-it-alone” approach to foreign policy (that brings him closer to my heart).

I’m a long, long way from supporting Mike Bloomberg for President — in fact, I’m quite sure I’d never support him for President– but my instincts and initial impressions tell me he’s more clued-in than most Republican candidates, and I like it that he avoids the stink of cloying “America Is So Great We Can Do No Wrong” chauvinism that seems to infect so many in his former party.

I don’t think Mike Bloomberg will be our next president and I don’t think I want him to be. But I’d take him over the frenetic Rudy Giuliani in a minute, and over the slick flip-flopper Mitt Romney in two minutes. I’m sticking with the Dems for 2008, but the opposition just added an interesting surprise player who may shake things up. I’m all for that.

Probably the most dramatic moment during last night’s Fox News Republican debate: Rudy Giuliani criticizing outlier candidate Ron Paul for suggesting that the 1991 invasion of Iraq was a primary cause for the September 11 attacks. Here’s Fox’s record of the moment:

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani said, interrupting FOX News panelist Wendell Goler. “That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

All the other candidates then clamored for a chance to echo Giuliani’s strong condemnation of Ron Paul. Here’s the only problem: what Paul said is a simple historical fact. It’s not even a contested fact. Every serious history of the events leading up to the September 11 attacks agrees that Saudi rich kid Osama Bin Laden formed Al Qaeda as a direct response to the arrival of USA troops in Saudi Arabia to reverse Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1991. This isn’t something only lefties and Democrats say — it’s something every credible historian is in agreement on. It’s also one of the main points of Lawrence Wright’s bestselling book The Looming Tower, widely considered the most authoritative (and non-partisan) history of Al Qaeda.

So, if Giuliani is standing there with a straight face saying “I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11″ we must conclude that he has not read Lawrence Wright’s book or any other history of Al Qaeda. And yet he believes he has the ability to lead our country’s absolutely critical battle against this enemy — from a position of ignorance about the history of this enemy, one can only assume.

Fighting an enemy from a position of ignorance about that enemy: I thought that was George Bush and Dick Cheney’s unique style, and I thought our country had at least learned the lesson that we need to understand our enemies better before we engage them in battle.

I guess not. The fact that John McCain and other candidates praised Giuliani’s dramatic criticism of truth-teller Ron Paul is pretty disturbing. My respect for a few of these candidates has just dropped a couple of notches. America cannot afford any more military leadership by politicians too haughty or proud to know the basic facts of their enemy’s history.

I’ve now had two good televised looks at Mitt Romney, who many consider the frontrunner for the Republican nomination: a televised debate on MSNBC several days ago, and a Mike Wallace profile on 60 Minutes last night.

My immediate reaction: slick, slick, slick. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Romney sure does look presidential, and his background as a successful venture capitalist and turnaround-artist for troubled companies is impressive. The 60 Minutes shots of his large family — five sons, ten grandchildren — was heartening. But the fact that he has now thrown away the old liberal-friendly views on abortion rights that got him elected as governor of Massachusetts in order to appeal to a pro-life national Republican voter base shows a lack of conviction on social issues. I also haven’t heard him say anything that’s not a safe, generic cliche about the Iraq war or the war against Al Queda or about foreign policy in general, so it seems pretty clear that he is a fix-the-economy, all-business type of politician. There could be worse, but we are at war and I am concerned that his convictions about foreign policy go no deeper than his convictions about abortion.

Why is Mitt Romney the frontrunner? John McCain’s strong convictions on the importance of victory in Iraq show strong principled consistency, but America is perceiving a fervid believer in need of a reality check. As for Rudy Giuliani — well, as a New Yorker I find his candidacy strange and surprising. For years, Rudy was our familiar “bad cop” mayor here in Fun City. He was undoubtedly an honest man and a hard worker, and he was also a familiar face. I’ve seen him on the streets or at events several times in New York City, and never for a minute (before September 11) did anybody think of this straight shooter as presidential material. When he was mayor, many of my friends just thought of him as the enforcer who put Gotti in jail and kept robberies down but also turned Times Square into DisneyWorld New York, and made it a lot scarier to smoke weed on the streets. That was his image, the sum total of it, and today six years after the September 11 attacks I still can’t imagine this rough player winning a national Republican nomination for anything.

So it looks like Mitt Romney is the frontrunner, and he seems smart enough to take whatever heat he gets in this difficult role. I’ll be watching closely and calling the shots right here.

First impressions of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates on parade: they’re all fine, and there is absolutely no reason to consider this a two-person or three-person race at this point.

John Edwards got the most votes in a well-attended Daily Kos poll, and I agree with this result. The blow-dried southerner appears serious, unflappable and appropriately angry about the current state of things. Another candidate who made a good impression on me is New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, more for his earnest body language and focused message than anything else.

Hillary Clinton did just fine, and I have no doubt that she’d be a hardworking, intensely practical President. I admire her very much for her courage and positive attitude. However, she has yet to prove that she can raise voters’ passions as well as she can raise funds, that she can appeal to outsiders as well as knowledgeable insiders, and it’s starting to seem clear that her stiff public persona remains a barrier to her electability.

As for Barack Obama, I’m sorry but I’m still not on this bandwagon at all. His performance last night was mechanical and safe, and I really, really, really don’t care that he has a Kennedy-esque mystique. In fact, I am more and more offended by the idea that anybody should consider this candidate a front-runner just based on his good looks and charisma. He did not particularly distinguish himself in last night’s debate, which adds to my impression that the buzz-to-substance ratio is too high here. Obama cerrtainly has a right to press his candidacy along with the rest of this pack, and there’s still plenty of time for him to win me over. But he’s not going to do it by standing there looking handsome, and I’m sorry to say that seemed to be his core strategy during the debate.

Of course I like Dennis Kucinich, and I’m glad to see him on this stage, just as I’m glad to see him working hard on various fronts in Congress. Kucinich would have been the evening’s designated oddball candidate if Alaska’s Mike Gravel were not there to play the angry clown. Gravel’s just fine, but he’s not going to be our next President.

Chris Dodd is running? I missed that press release. I don’t see him playing much of a role in this election, nor Joe Biden, but maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong.

One final thought: regardless of which of these politicians wins the nomination, they are all doing good work on behalf of significant causes. I’m glad they’re all around, from the staid Dodd to the blustering Gravel, and the only thing that would disappoint me now is if the party were to begin to converge on a front-runner too early. We’ve got a lot more debating to do.

Oh, finally: this stuff is pretty good.

I was away on a very refreshing vacation for a few days, which means I didn’t watch the evening news (or my regular favorite, Keith Olbermann, or my regular un-favorite, Bill O’Reilly) for about five days in a row. Here’s what I found on my return, when I checked in on the TV sound bites:

1) It’s impossible not to feel sorry for George W. Bush at this point, despite the incredible damage he has done to our country’s security, our country’s budget and our planet’s progress towards international understanding. It’s a telling fact that he has failed to follow the longstanding Presidential tradition of opening the baseball season by throwing out the first ball at a chosen stadium. The reason is obvious: there is no stadium of baseball fans in America, not even in Texas, that wouldn’t boo him off the pitcher’s mound.

But the President did address a captive audience of soldiers at California’s Fort Irwin yesterday, and the tapes show a tired, confused man straining to infuse his own words with conviction. Please watch his body language the next time you catch this politician on TV, and I think you will notice the same thing I’m seeing: Bush barely seems to believe his own words about Iraq anymore. My guess is that there are massive internal divisions plaguing the Bush/Cheney team at this point, and I wonder if the President might be smart enough to start realizing (a few years too late) how badly he has been duped by his closest advisers. The front man is starting to falter, and when I say “front man” I’m not talking about Tony Snow.

2) I’m pretty disgusted at all the talk about Democratic 2008 Presidential candidate fundraising. As I’ve said before, I really don’t give a fuck who’s raised $26 million and who’s raised $25 million. I’ve got one dollar and one vote to offer to any candidate who promises to manage our country’s future responsibly and intelligently, and all this talk of tying up the nomination with big-money bonanzas just makes me feel like we don’t live in a democracy at all

I’m also disgusted at the thought that three senators — Obama, Clinton and Edwards — are spending so much time campaigning for 2008 when there is so much important work the Senate needs to do now. My mind is not yet made up who I will support in this race, but my big one dollar and one vote just might go to the one politician of the three who convinces me that they are working hard NOW to help our country by their actions in the Capitol. Let’s live in the moment, candidates, okay? This type of electoral shenanigans is more palatable in peacetime — in time of war, it’s really very offensive.

3) I’m also sick of our nation’s romantic notions of a savior celebrity President. Most democracies on this planet are led not by their Presidents but by their Prime Ministers, who correspond most closely to our Speaker of the House. As far as I can tell, the most important elected official in the United States government right now is Nancy Pelosi, and I am very impressed by her focus, her cool unflappability and her resolve to forge her own path towards solving our problems. Why the hell shouldn’t I support Nancy Pelosi for President? She’s working hard to run our country, while the rest of these celebrities are working hard to look good on TV. Screw that nonsense — we’ve got problems to solve.

There’s my Spring Break catch-up. Go, Nancy, go!

This Hillary Clinton/Apple Computer ad mash-up that’s been making the rounds is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. However, it’s totally unfair to Hillary Clinton, who does not have a robotic personality (she’s actually just shy and not very telegenic, and in fact she’d be much more likable if she could be programmed), and who has never used her political influence as either a First Lady or a Senator to exert control over the citizens of America.

The fact is, the charge that Hillary Clinton advocates an Orwellian America comes from nowhere and is completely random. This short mock-ad is a very clever work of propaganda, but the cleverness of the underlying approach (make up a lie and put it on YouTube) is more disheartening than the cleverness of the cinematic work is pleasing.

I’m not even particularly a Hillary Clinton fan, by the way — but for all her faults, Hillary Clinton is no totalitarian Big Sister.