A Post About Barack Obama

A couple of days ago, Glenn Greenwald wrote a post about Obama’s response to being called unpatriotic for not wearing a flag pin, and for not putting his hand on his heart on one occasion during the national anthem:

By far, the most significant pattern in how our political discourse is shaped is that the right-wing noise machine generates scurrilous, petty, personality-based innuendo about Democratic candidates, and the establishment press then mindlessly repeats it and mainstreams it. Thus, nothing was more predictable than watching the “Obamas-are-unpatriotic-subversives” slur travel in the blink of an eye from the Jack Kingstons, Fox News adolescent McCarthyites, and Bill Kristols of the world to AP, MSNBC, and CNN. That’s just how the right-wing/media nexus works.

Far more notable is Barack Obama’s response to these depressingly familiar attacks. In response, he’s not scurrying around slapping flags all over himself or belting out the National Anthem, nor is he apologizing for not wearing lapels, nor is he defensively trying to prove that — just like his Republican accusers — he, too, is a patriot, honestly. He’s not on the defensive at all. Instead, he’s swatting away these slurs with the dismissive contempt they deserve, and then eagerly and aggressively engaging the debate on offense because he’s confident, rather than insecure, about his position:

About not wearing an American flag lapel pin, Obama said Republicans have no lock on patriotism. “A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.”

Says Creature at The Reaction: “[That’s] why Obama is no John Kerry.”

Obama also answered a reporter’s question about his patriotism after a town hall meeting in Lorain, Ohio:

After a town hall meeting in Lorain, Ohio, a reporter asked Obama about “an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to paint you as unpatriotic.”

The reporter cited the fact that Obama once failed to put his hand over his heart while singing the national anthem.

Obama replied that his choice not to put his hand on his heart is a behavior that “would disqualify about three-quarters of the people who have ever gone to a football game or baseball game.”

The reporter also noted that the Illinois senator does not wear an American flag lapel pin, has met with former members of the radical anti-Vietnam War group, Weather Underground, and his wife was quoted recently as saying she never felt really proud of the United States until recently.

Asked how he would fight the image of being unpatriotic, Obama said, “There’s always some nonsense going on in general elections. Right? If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. If you recall, first it was my name. Right? That was a problem. And then there was the Muslim e-mail thing and that hasn’t worked out so well, and now it’s the patriotism thing.

“The way I will respond to it is with the truth: that I owe everything I am to this country,” he said.

Then today, we found out how Obama handled an issue that is arguably even more controversial than Iraq: Israel. Did he show the same kind of moral courage as he did when talking about being called unpatriotic?

Spencer Ackerman’s post title sums it up: “Iron Like A Lion in Zion“:

There we go!

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.

“If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress,” he said.

He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than “just crushing the opposition” is being “soft or anti-Israel.”

Now that is the sort of thing that a real friend of Israel says. Not a fair-weather fake friend who’d rather not risk angering your buddies, but the kind of friend who takes your car keys from your hand at the bar. Let’s see the Rubins of the world twist his words, so we can demonstrate how little they actually care about the actually-existing state of Israel.

Music to Matthew Yglesias’s ears — and to mine, too. That’s what happens when your position on Israel is based on true concern for Israel and the Jewish people, rather than on the desire to follow an apocalyptic fundamentalist script about the Rapture and the End Days.

By the way, Obama made those remarks in Cleveland, at a special meeting with about 100 members of that city’s Jewish community. The New York Sun has the complete transcript; here is a snippet from it:

… We need to change how Washington works because politics shouldn’t just be about scoring political points, it should also be about solving problems. We need to change our priorities to make healthcare more affordable. To have an energy policy that not only creates jobs and secures our planet but also stops sending billions of dollars to dictators and effectively leads us to fund both sides of the war on terrorism. We need a change in our foreign policy to allows to end the war in Iraq responsibly and lead the world against the common threats of the 21st century, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, genocide, poverty and hopelessness in the world.

These changes are founded in a view of the world that I believe is deeply imbedded in the Jewish tradition. That all of us have a responsibility to do our part to repair the world. That we can take care of one another and build strong communities grounded in faith and family. That repairing the world is a task that each of us is called upon to take up every single day. That is the spirit that I expect to take with me to the White House. …

Give that man 100 points for doing his homework! I don’t think I’ve ever heard a presidential candidate talk about tikkun olam before. That impresses me, because it shows a level of respect that the right’s blank check support for Israel’s military and political policies could never do.

The way Obama presented himself in this meeting, and his comments about Israel-U.S. relations, bodes well for the black-Jewish relationship in an Obama presidency — and that’s a good thing, because Jews and African-Americans have such a strong historic bond:

The American Jewish community has a deep and historic connection to the African American community. We marched for civil rights together, and died together for them in Mississippi. There have been moments of conflict for sure, but those have been the exception and not the rule. Hopefully many American Jews will see Barack Obama the way I do: as a real American hero whose core values reflect both the best of the Jewish tradition and the best of America.

Noam Scheiber reflects on another interesting aspect of Obama’s campaign: the affinity many of the “leading wonks” on Obama’s staff have for an economic philosophy that emphasizes practical solutions to problems based on human behavior, and not on a particular ideological stance:

As a young economics professor in the late 1970s, Richard Thaler began noticing small but nagging ways in which ordinary people defied the predictions of economic theory. A friend confided that he mowed his lawn to save $10, but winced at the suggestion that he mow someone else’s to make $10. A colleague confessed that he’d never go out and buy a $50 bottle of wine for a family meal, but that he’d recently opened up a $50 bottle at dinner because it happened to be lying around. The textbooks assumed people would behave identically when equal amounts of money were at stake. But here they were doing completely different things depending on the context.

By the late ’80s, Thaler had begun recording these observations in a column for a leading academic journal. The column laid the groundwork for a book, called The Winner’s Curse, published in 1994. And the book widely signaled the arrival of a previously obscure sub-field known as behavioral economics. Behaviorists like Thaler believed that the perfectly rational, utterly selfinterested maximizers of economists’ imaginations had little in common with actual human beings, who frequently err when making simple calculations, who have trouble with self-control, who often act out of altruism or spite.

But what’s really interesting is how Thaler and his fellow behaviorists responded to this fairly critical insight. Though rational self-interest was the central tenet of neoclassical (i.e., modern) economics, they didn’t take a wrecking ball to the field and replace it with some equally sweeping theory of human behavior. Instead, they labored to bring economics closer in line with how the world actually works, one small adjustment at a time. “‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly,'” Thaler wrote in the introduction to The Winner’s Curse, quoting the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. “I hope to accomplish that first step–awareness of anomaly. Perhaps at that point we can start to see the development of the new, improved version of economic theory.”

As it happens, Thaler is revered by the leading wonks on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Though he has no formal role, Thaler presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama’s top economic adviser, a fellow University of Chicago professor named Austan Goolsbee. “My main role has been to harass Austan, who has an office down the hall from mine, ” Thaler recently told me. “I give him as much grief as possible.” You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama’s savings plan exploits this so-called “status quo” bias.

And, yet, it’s not just the details of Obama’s policies that suggest a behavioral approach. In some respects, the sensibility behind the behaviorist critique of economics is one shared by all the Obama wonks, whether they’re domestic policy nerds or grizzled foreign policy hands. Despite Obama’s reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren’t radicals–far from it. They’re pragmatists–people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, “Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground.” It might as well be the motto for Obama’s entire policy shop.

I’m getting more excited by the day at the possibility of an Obama presidency.

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