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Ten Years

2011-12-27T00:35:00.000-08:00

by Jeffrey Zeldman

If you don’t like the music on the radio, start a band. If you don’t like the way existing publications are defining your profession, start a magazine.
A List Apart hasn’t always been a magazine, but it has always been an attempt to fill a gap in the web design and development conversation.

Why A List?

We started as a mailing list (kids, ask your parents).
Most mailing lists are live and unedited: Michele posts a note and the whole list instantly receives it; Tom comments on Michele’s note and the whole list instantly receives that. The trouble with such setups is that flame wars can flare up while the moderator is off brushing her teeth. (The glorious exception, now in its eleventh great year, is Steven Champeon’s wonderful Webdesign-l.)

Issue No. 129, 7 December 2001

Brian Platz and I designed the A List Apart mailing list differently. Platz and I took turns moderating. Each day, members submitted posts to us. In the afternoon, that day’s moderator would read all submitted posts, detect emerging themes and contrasts, and combine the best submissions into an edited e-mail magazine that was sent to all subscribers that night. In this way, we were able to combine the insights and vigor of a community-written publication with the crisp focus (and freedom from flames) of an edited magazine.
Within a month, our mailing list had 16,000 subscribers. Within six months, we were blissfully exhausted—and broke. A web magazine was the natural next step.

Look back in orange

Why a magazine? Because we didn’t hear the music we wanted on the radio.
Hotwired’s Webmonkey and David Siegel’s High Five were, respectively, the reigning commercial web development and design magazines. Both were excellent, but neither focused on the needs of the hybrid designer who cares about content as well as code, usability as well as design. I was a hybrid. Our mailing list’s readers were hybrids. The future of web design lay with hybrids, I thought. The magazine’s longevity and success would prove that theory.

Issue No. 36, 8 October 1999

A List Apart, the magazine “for people who make websites,” launched in late 1998 and immediately staked out the high ground thanks to wonderful writers like Lance Arthur, Steven Champeon, Joe Clark, Glenn Davis, Christopher Schmitt, and Jeff Veen, who contributed to our earliest issues.
The likes of John Allsopp, Dean Allen, Curt Cloninger, J. David Eisenberg, and Erika Meyer followed, with Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Aaron Gustafson, and Eric Meyer succeeding them.
From Issue 1 (curiously labeled Issue 1.01 because I thought it sounded more “digital” or wired or something) to the present, ALA has been a place where great writers are discovered and where great thinkers share their most important ideas. Today’s ALA author is tomorrow’s important book author and conference speaker. Behold!

The road we traveled

Talent is grand, but focused talent is grander. For most of our first decade, ALA has been the leading journal of standards-based design, introducing foundational concepts and advanced techniques that were initially mocked, feared, and hated, but are now part of every good web designer’s repertoire.
We’ve also worked to advance our profession and help the world understand it.
And we launched a conference.
See ALA producer Erin Lynch’s The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers for more historic highlights that still hold up; browse Topics to learn what else we’ve been up to these past ten years; and for dessert, visit zeldman.com to read about how A List Apart is changing.

The music of a tired plumber

Otto Leuning is a father of electronic music.

Usability Experts are from Mars, Graphic Designers are from Venus

A reporter once asked Luening to respond to the then-futuristic notion that “A tired plumber, after a hard day’s work, will settle down with his computer to compose music.”
Leuning said, “Yes, but it will be the music of a tired plumber.”
As with electronica, so with the web. Good web content takes talent and process. Some among us believe that “content is free” because “the users can now create the content.” These people fail to realize that the web’s “users” have always been able to create content. More importantly, they miss the distinction between stuff and content. Unmediated content is stuff. It does not create the same value and cannot offer the same experience as great content, well edited.

Much Ado About 5K

Here is where I thank Erin Kissane, our editor for eight years (and now a contributing editor) and Krista Stevens, Erin’s most worthy successor (and before that, acquisitions editor, a role now ably helmed by the talented Carolyn Wood).
Our editors can polish rusted flea market finds into genie-spouting magic lamps. When the writing is good (which it almost always is), they make it even better.

The gauntlet

We receive many technical articles. Those that pass muster with the editorial team go before technical editors Aaron Gustafson, Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Daniel Mall, and Andrew Kirkpatrick. Even their names are scary, if you’re the author of a technical article. Our technical reviewers make the judges on Project Runway look like fawning pollyannas. Every article is submitted to the following four-part test:

Big problems (reasons to reject the article)
Small problems (probably fixable, but should be definitely nailed before acceptance)
Stylistic quibbles or differences of opinion that the author might or might not need to rethink before writing
Unacknowledged debts to prior art or other troubling similarities

Fear of Style Sheets

As you’ve rightly guessed, most articles get rejected, but the great ones make it through—and that’s the point.
When the technical revisions finally cease, editorial kicks back in.
Erin Lynch and Andrew Fernandez do whatever it takes to deliver the article to your screen, with every kooky code demo and last-minute editorial nit-pick intact.
Jason Santa Maria, who redesigned the magazine in 2005, art-directs every issue, and Kevin Cornell illustrates.
These people are magnificent, and they work their hearts out.

Without you, we’re nothing

Here is where I thank the brilliant people who built our publishing systems before finding fortune (not from us).

Glenn Davis’s Project Cool hosted the site back when it was a mess of hand-coded HTML (mine), installing ALA as a founding partner in what may have been the first network for web designers. High Five, edited by Christopher Schmitt, was a partner as well. We rocked the 1990s.

Bruce Livingstone’s Webcore Labs built the first ALA CMS and also hosted the site after Glenn sold Project Cool. Soon afterwards, Bruce sold iStockphoto. Bling bling!

Brian Alvey built and hosted ALA 3.0 before going on to build and sell Weblogs, Inc. Mazel tov!

Dan Benjamin (also an important ALA author) built ALA 4.0, one of the first Ruby on Rails applications, and later sold Cork’d. Cheers!

Coping with the dot-com melt-down

These people were and are terrific. Without them, we wouldn’t be celebrating ten years of ALA.
Check the About page’s middle column to learn about important contributions over the years by Nick Finck, Webchick, Waferbaby, Todd Fahrner, Tantek Çelik, Tanya Rabourn, Fred Gates, Kylie Gusset, Kirk Franklin, David Whalen, Henry Li, Russell Heimlich, Damon Clinkscales, David F. Miller, and the amazing J. David Eisenberg.

Onward!

Our first ten years were about finding a voice, an audience, and a cause worth fighting for. Please join us for what comes next.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

ARIA and Progressive Enhancement

2011-12-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

by Derek Featherstone

For seven years, we’ve held tightly to the belief that using progressive enhancement is the right way to build websites and applications. Progressive enhancement is how we build sustainable, interoperable, and accessible web solutions.
You’ve seen this before. You…

start with pristine, semantic HTML,
provide a layer of presentational suggestions via CSS (these may or may not be overridden by user styles), and
provide a layer of behavioral enhancements with JavaScript (again, these may or may not be overridden or supplemented by user scripts).

At each step along the way, we have what amounts to a working solution. We build each working solution on top of other, already working solutions.
Now that the release of ARIA is approaching, let’s take a look at how ARIA fits within progressive enhancement strategy. Can we use ARIA in a way that respects progressive enhancement? Can we use ARIA in ways that ensure we have a working solution at every level?

ARIA simplified

ARIA is an emerging specification from the W3C and is an accessibility effort that a number of companies support. ARIA is designed to provide accessibility at a technical level—what you might call “programmatic accessibility”—where it doesn’t already exist. For example, many of the date pickers and other advanced widgets that we add to our websites are nothing more than a collection of

and elements that have no semantic meaning; ARIA attempts to provide that semantic meaning.
Keep in mind that ARIA is still not quite finished—it is, as of this writing, published as a working draft and is under review. This is how specs work. In fact, if you read Martin Kliehm’s 2007 article from ALA 235, Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA you’ll see that quite a bit has changed. The general ARIA concepts are still the same, but the current implementation is much simpler and will be much easier to use.
Eventually, implementing ARIA in our designs will allow us to reliably tell assistive technology “this div is actually a dialog box” or “this ordered list of links is actually a menu of choices” or “this collection of divs, images, and spans is a progress bar, and that progress bar is currently at 75%.”
ARIA offers three means to do this. They allow us to communicate:

what role a particular component has in the interface,
the properties that component has, and
the current state of the component.

We do this by using ARIA attributes and values just like we use any other HTML attribute and value, but we modify them with scripting in response to events that happen within the browser. Some of what ARIA provides also helps to establish programmatic relationships between parts of the interface, but we’ll leave that for later.

ARIA in the wild

We recently relaunched Simply Accessible, a home for all of our accessibility-related writing. In the site code we used ARIA landmark roles to provide a standardized set of navigational landmarks within the page. If you look at a sample article page such as Custom Stylesheets for iOS, the article pages have the following landmark roles defined in their code:

role="banner" for the masthead of the site,
role="navigation" for each of the navigation lists at the top and bottom of the page,
role="search" for the search form,
role="main" for the main content of the page,
role="complementary" for the related information in the sidebar, and
role="contentinfo" for the copyright statement at the bottom.

This code allows assistive technology that understands ARIA landmarks to move from one landmark to another using keyboard shortcuts (as with the JAWS screen reader) or gestures (as with Apple’s VoiceOver).
Here’s another example of ARIA in action: A slider widget on a Google Map. In this implementation of a Google Map, we’ve added ARIA to the slider control that allows you to change zoom levels. We added ARIA to this quite simply because there is no native HTML element for a slider—we have to construct it from the tools we have. So, to approximate a real slider that you might see at the operating system level, we added ARIA to the basic HTML markup. Here we have:

indicated a role for the component (role="slider"),
used aria-orientation="vertical" to specify that it is…wait for it…oriented vertically, and,
added several properties to that slider (aria-valuemin="0", aria-valuemax="17", aria-valuetext="14", and aria-valuenow="14").

As we slide the thumb along the rail to change the zoom level, we use JavaScript to change the value of aria-valuenow and aria-valuetext to match the zoom level.

Fig 1. Showing the aria-valuetext and aria-valuenow with the value of 12.

You can see this for yourself using Firebug or another developer tool. Figure 1 shows the aria-valuetext and aria-valuenow highlighted with a value of 12, matching the zoom level from the maps themselves. With JavaScript on, those values update dynamically as you zoom in or out. For true progressive enhancement, you would create a version that uses a form submission to select a zoom level and uses the Google Maps Static API, which doesn't require JavaScript.
In typical ARIA implementations such as these:

simple ARIA role attributes define the role for various parts of the page: role="menu", role="dialog", role="navigation", and role="tablist",
simple ARIA properties define connections between various interface components: aria-labelledby="someid", aria-describedby="anotherid", aria-haspopup="true", and
simple ARIA states define the current state of objects on the page: aria-hidden="true", aria-invalid="false", aria-disabled="true", aria-expanded="false".

Go straight to the source for full details on all the ARIA roles and states and properties.
To use ARIA, we’ll need several different pieces of the puzzle to fall into place. As you saw in the slider example, we need to add ARIA attributes to our HTML and then control them with JavaScript as we dynamically update the page.
Support for ARIA isn’t quite that simple, though. Yes, we can add ARIA to provide “semantic sugar,” but there is more to it than that.
Accessibility requires everyone—authors and content creators, browser vendors, assistive technology vendors, and the person using the site or app—to come to the table with the right tools.

What are the right tools for ARIA?

Some browsers have some support for ARIA. Current versions of Firefox 3, Opera 9.5+, IE8/9, and WebKit-based browsers like Safari 4+ all support some aspects of ARIA. Of course, their support isn’t complete. It can’t be, simply because the spec isn’t finished.
Some assistive technology has some support for ARIA. Current versions of JAWS, Window-Eyes, NVDA, VoiceOver, and ZoomText have some support for ARIA, but older versions, naturally, don’t.

Rubber, meet road

A really simple way to start implementing ARIA is by using ARIA’s landmark role concept.
You’ve already seen this if you looked at our Simply Accessible site. But there are a few other things to note in that page relative to progressive enhancement.
Let’s just take a look at one example—the role of “navigation.”
Here’s how we’ve coded the navigation in the

and the

sections of the site.



  
Home
Archives
About
Contact

You might be asking “Why on earth is there a role of navigation on an element called

?” And if you weren’t, you should be. These questions are ones that we’ll face every day as we move forward with ARIA.
Here’s the thing: ARIA only has some support in browsers and assistive technology. By the same token, we’ve used the HTML5

element, which, as you might expect, has only some support in browsers and assistive technology. We can use an element called

and browsers will deal with it reasonably well, but they don’t do anything useful with it, like pass it to the operating system’s accessibility API. Without meaningful support,

might as well just be a

.
This means that while

can be styled and will render in a browser, right now, there is nothing that signals a screen reader or any other piece of assistive technology that this page element is being used for navigation. However, some assistive technology recognizes role="navigation" as a landmark role. So, we double that up, and add a role="navigation" to the

element.
What about scenarios where neither HTML5’s

nor ARIA’s role="navigation" is supported? Inside the

we use our trusty unordered list with list items for navigation—the lists we’ve been using for navigation for years.
Now let’s take a look at a slightly more complicated example—specifying required form fields.

Going a bit deeper

One advantage of ARIA markup is that we’ll be able to readily communicate required fields to assistive technology at a programmatic level:


First Name

Ultimately this means that a screen reader user may hear “First Name, type in text, required.”
We could also use some CSS to provide visual cues based on this attribute:


input[aria-required=true]:after {
    content:"(required)";
}

We know that we have some support for ARIA in assistive technologies, but how would this example render right now? Generated content isn’t read by current versions of JAWS and WindowEyes, but can be read by Apple's VoiceOver. Still, we won’t be able to rely on that, and this generated content relies on an attribute selector that may or may not be supported in your browser. And what of screen readers that don’t support ARIA?
The problem is if you rely on ARIA to communicate the required attribute to screen readers, then that status will not be announced to other assistive technologies that don’t understand ARIA.
To solve this problem, we need to provide another mechanism to communicate the required status, without using ARIA.
“But wait!” you say. “We can use the HTML5 required attribute!”
Yes, you could use the HTML5 required attribute, but again, that will only work where HTML5 is supported and exposed to the accessibility API. In that case, we’ll need yet another method to provide notification of required fields.
So, let’s look at providing another, more traditional method to do this—based on work we did early in 2005 (see Required Form Fields, where we ensure that the required status is coded as part of the label).
When we do this, we provide this information to those assistive technologies in a non-ARIA state. But what is the impact on the assistive technologies that do understand ARIA? We need to take a look at several examples to see what our options are for indicating required fields.
Here’s a walkthrough of some of our basic tests. Let’s go through the simplest scenario first—HTML5’s required attribute.
Here’s an example using the HTML5 required attribute to denote the required field:


User Name

We all have great hope for this, but, as of this writing, this attribute isn’t exposed to any of the assistive technology we used for testing. The required status was not announced in any way using JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7.2, NVDA, VoiceOver, or ZoomText. Support for the HTML5 required attribute just isn’t there yet, so we need to find another way.
Another simple method would be to use ARIA alone to denote the required field:


User Name

In this case, JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7, NVDA, and ZoomText all supported and announced that the field was required. VoiceOver on the Mac did not announce that the field was required due to a bug that will hopefully be fixed in an update to VoiceOver. That’s reasonable support for this technique to be considered successful at this stage.
Let’s look at the non-ARIA scenario so that we get a complete picture.
Here’s an example using both ARIA and our traditional “in-the-label” method for those scenarios where ARIA isn’t supported:


User Name (required)

In this case, JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7, NVDA, and ZoomText all announced that the field was required twice. That certainly is better than the scenario where it doesn’t get announced at all, but we’d really like to reduce repetition to make it as easy to understand as possible. VoiceOver doesn’t recognize the text “required” in the label as it is nested inside the element (a result of the same bug mentioned above), and therefore the current version of VoiceOver doesn’t read out the text “required” when in forms mode.
Let’s try to reduce that repetition by our traditional “in-the-label” method and role="presentation" so that when ARIA is supported, the content isn’t read out:

User Name (required)
In this case, JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7, NVDA, and ZoomText all announced that the field was required twice.
Really?
Yes, really. The problem here is the way that role="presentation" works. It is designed such that when role="presentation" is added to a node, it tells assistive technology to ignore the semantics of that node, but that doesn’t apply to its child nodes, including text nodes. Bleh. This seems counter-intuitive to me, but it’s a reality that we need to deal with. Surprisingly, VoiceOver actually works in this case—reading out that the field is required, presumably because the role="presentation" on the element tells it to ignore the semantics. This basically exposes the text content, such that “required” is now read out in VoiceOver.
We even tried using ARIA, our traditional “in-the-label” method and aria-hidden="true", so that when ARIA is supported, the content isn’t read out to avoid duplication:

User Name (required)
This isn’t really what aria-hidden was designed for; it’s intended as a way to express that something is currently hidden. For example, if you have a panel or some other content that you show and hide, you should use aria-hidden="true" when it is hidden, and aria-hidden="false" when it is showing. However, the draft spec says this of aria-hidden:

Authors MAY, with caution, use aria-hidden to hide visibly rendered content from assistive technologies only if the act of hiding this content is intended to improve the experience for users of assistive technologies by reducing redundancy. Authors using aria-hidden to hide visible content from screen readers MUST ensure that identical or equivalent meaning and functionality is exposed to assistive technologies.
This sounds perfect for this application doesn’t it? We are expressing equivalent meaning in all scenarios—ARIA and non-ARIA. The support for aria-hidden in our tests was lacking. In this case, JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7, NVDA, and ZoomText all announced that the field was required twice. VoiceOver does not announce required at all when found in the content and does not appropriately deal with aria-hidden="true" on this child element of the label, though it seems to work with aria-hidden="true" on other content. This technique may be useful in the future as support for aria-hidden in assistive technology improves.
This leaves us with one final option (at least for now)—one that I’m not entirely fond of, but here it is:
Here we’re using ARIA, the traditional “in-the-label” method, and role="presentation" on an image with alt text of “Required”:

User Name
The role="presentation" on the image tells ARIA-supporting browsers and assistive technology to ignore the semantics of that node. That node has alt text of required and in the case where ARIA is supported, it is ignored.
In this final scenario, JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7, NVDA, and ZoomText all announce that the field is required, precisely once. And in older versions, where ARIA isn’t supported or with browsers that may not communicate ARIA roles and attributes to the accessibility API? They’ll get the non-ARIA version. In this case, VoiceOver does not indicate that the field is required, in all likelihood because of the same bug we’ve talked about in other cases.
Yes, this makes me want to cry, too. If that wasn’t too painful, here’s a summary of these tests in tabular form:

ARIA Tests Results

Zoom Text 9.1 JAWS 11 Window-Eyes 7.2 NVDA VoiceOver

HTML5 required Doesn’t announce the field is required Doesn’t announce the field is required Doesn’t announce the field is required Doesn’t announce the field is required Doesn’t announce the field is required

ARIA required to match other references to ARIA Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Announces “required” once

required in label and ARIA required Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice

required in label and ARIA required, include role="presentation" Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” once

required in label and aria-hidden="true" Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Announces “required” twice Doesn’t announce the field is required

required in label and ARIA required, include role="presentation" on an image Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Announces “required” once Doesn’t announce the field is required

The problem, as I see it
Part of the problem at present is that we don’t know when ARIA is supported. We need to detect objects and capabilities before we use them; if they are not present or unsupported, we can ensure that we still have a reliable solution in place. But in the case of ARIA? We have no such luck.
What is the result of using both a traditional progressive enhancement approach and ARIA together? Like any other spec, when we use a technology, we expect, generally, to have all, or at least most, of that spec supported. For example, you’d never use CSS for background colors if you didn’t also have support for text color. The same holds true for ARIA—we expect and need to rely on user agents and assistive technology to support all aspects of ARIA. Right now, as the spec is being finished and implementations are still evolving—we simply don’t have that.
For this to work, then, we’ll need to have ways within ARIA of also turning things “off”—of hiding those redundancies that we create by using traditional progressive enhancement alongside ARIA.
As we saw in the required form fields example, our best hope for this at present is a combination of role="presentation" and aria-hidden="true".
Let’s look at one final example—a “tabbed panel” interface.
Without ARIA, we can do a few things to make a tabbed panel work in all scenarios. As part of a progressive enhancement strategy, we would ensure that the content works first with basic functionality as provided by HTML. We would then change the way the tab set looks, and, finally, change the way it behaves.
Here’s a basic strategy:
Without JavaScript, we’d have an unordered list of links on a page that point to a place further down the page that contains the content for the tab. We might even include a heading at the beginning of the content that helps create the association.
Here’s a basic version that shows how we’d support this content without the use of JavaScript.
You’ll see that at the top of the page we have a basic set of links that go to content already contained in the page:

First Tab Second Tab Third Tab
This takes care of the non-JS scenario. Now that it works without JavaScript, we’ll take this a step further by transforming that same page into a set of tabs. Using some crafty JavaScript, we create a JavaScript enabled version that applies some new styles and specific keyboard functionality.
With JavaScript on, you’ll see that the basic links are transformed. We use this JavaScript to set all of this up with the AriaTabs function. In pseudo-code it looks like this:

Loop through the divs that are being used as tabs,

set class="tabPanel" so that it picks up the right CSS rules, and

hide the div/tab Panel.

Find the tab list (our navigation) and loop through each one to,

create appropriate id values to tie the controls to the tab,

set up the click for each link so that it changes the current active tab in the tablist, shows the new tab’s content, and hides the old tab’s content,

create the proper keystrokes for the tabs from the DHTML Style Guide (more on this in a moment), and

determine which tab should be showing and add the CSS class="current" so that it has a different appearance than the other tabs.

You can see the complete function here.
This example works well for keyboard users, and doesn’t require any ARIA for users of assistive technology. Screen reader users will be clicking on links that are within the same page, and that’s exactly what they’re getting. Play with that example and you’ll see that you can use the keyboard to focus on a tab control and use the left/right arrows to switch tabs or you can use the tab keystroke to move to the next tab and hit enter to display the tab.
This is an important piece of the puzzle—without ARIA, none of this will be announced to assistive technology as tabs, so sticking with links as a familiar paradigm is an important step in making this interface make sense.
As a final step, we add support for ARIA by adding ARIA attributes to provide the appropriate programmatic accessibility to assistive technology.
We use the same basic strategy as without ARIA with a few additions to the code:

We loop through the individual tabpanels to:

add ARIA support by giving each a role="tabpanel", and

hide it with aria-hidden="true".

When we find and create our tab list, we give it a role="tablist" and loop through each item in the tablist to:

give it a role="tab" and set aria-selected="false",

move up a level in the DOM to the parent and give it a role="presentation" to remove the semantic meaning conveyed by a list item (why? In the ARIA scenario, the list isn’t meaningful because this is now an ARIA tablist),

programmatically tie the tab and the tabpanel together with aria-labelledby (think of this like a element’s for/id pairing with inputs),

setup the keystroke handlers to change tabs, just as we did without ARIA, but this time, not only do we manipulate the CSS classes, we change ARIA attributes, and

add tabindex="-1" to the inactive tabs so that we can programmatically focus on them, but they are no longer in the default tab order.

You can see the complete function here.
We’ve done a lot here to set this up with ARIA and the proper keystrokes—you may be wondering, though, what are the proper keystrokes?
For all the details refer to the AOL DHTML Style Guide section on tab panels. This document attempts to codify what keyboard behaviors should exist for a variety of widgets in webpages and applications.
In a nutshell, a tab control (which we don’t natively have on the web) works like this: You use the tab keystroke to focus on the list of tabs available and the currently active tab control gets the focus. We then use arrow keys to switch between tabs and the tab key again to leave the tabbed panels.

Wrapping up the loose ends
One of the most important pieces here is understanding that in the past we’ve usually focused on creating the visual part of the interface. Now, we take what we’ve always been doing with CSS and make it programmatically available to assistive technologies by providing an expanded set of states, roles, and properties that just aren't available to us in HTML.
So now, when you’re working with an interface, and you see yourself changing class names, what else will you do? Yes, that’s right. Good to hear you say that—you’ll look at adding some ARIA to go along with it.
Simple, right?
Not quite.
We seek a dichotomy of behavior to provide the best interface possible to people that have full ARIA support as well as those that don’t. We set up keystrokes and focus behaviors with JavaScript in both the ARIA and non-ARIA scenario.
We’re changing behavior to match what we want it to be for a set of tabs. But that will only make sense when they can behave as tabs, and that’s when we know we have support for ARIA.

With ARIA support, the links will be announced as a tab when given a role="tab". Without ARIA support they’ll be announced as a link, and the user will expect them to behave like a link.

With ARIA support, we use tabindex="-1" on the inactive tabs (which are actually links). They will work just fine with ARIA support because we’ll be able to programmatically react to those keys that are designed for a tabbed interface. But without ARIA support, by adding tabindex="-1" to those links, they are no longer available to the user by using a keyboard. We’ve actually taken functionality away.

What of older assistive technology that doesn’t support ARIA? They won’t get any announcement that you’re on a tab, but the JavaScript will be coded such that it assumes you have tab functionality.
And there’s the catch, ladies and gentlemen.
The problem is that we want things to behave differently when ARIA is supported versus when it is not. Why? In a tabbed panel without ARIA, we want them to simply behave as links. In a tabbed panel with ARIA, we want them to behave as tabs. We want a seamless experience for everyone, ARIA or non-ARIA.

Where does that leave us?
I know that this isn’t every possible example of ARIA—I’ve chosen specific examples to illustrate a point. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a very big believer in ARIA. I teach it in every one of the advanced Ajax and accessibility or ARIA/HTML5/CSS3 workshops that I deliver. I’m sure to point out to every attendee that they need to be watching ARIA and implementing it where it is supported.
The problem that we have right now is that ARIA is an all or nothing deal. And writing scripts that respect both an ARIA supported methodology and a non-ARIA methodology is going to be incredibly difficult, because we have no reliable way of knowing the status of a user agent’s support for ARIA—it depends on something we can’t detect: the right combination of browser, assistive technology, and full ARIA implementation.
Suddenly, our progressive enhancement stack has been broken. We can’t detect ARIA support in the browser and therefore can’t make wise decisions on how to provide the most appropriate keyboard access for ARIA and non-ARIA scenarios.
Here’s what I believe we truly need to get the job done to the best of our professional abilities so that we can use ARIA now and still use the concept of progressive enhancement:

We need to be able to detect ARIA support in the browser, just as we detect for other capabilities.

We need to be able to detect ARIA support in assistive technology so that we know if ARIA is supported in those user agents.

Armed with those two pieces of information we can all create an interface that provides the right behavior in the right situations.
I’ve talked with others about this before and I usually hear something to the effect of “soon enough we won’t have to worry about the non-ARIA scenario because it will be supported in browsers and assistive technology.” We’ll just have ARIA support everywhere. In how many years though? Developers are out there implementing ARIA now because they’ve been told there is support in assistive technology and browsers for it. If they’re using it now, they need to be able to use it properly now.
We live in a world where all user agents simply do not have ARIA support. How long has it taken for IE6 to be a browser that we no longer support? Oh, wait. You mean you still need to support IE6? My point, exactly. We’ll have a non-ARIA scenario to deal with for a long time to come. As such, we need the tools to provide a great experience to everyone.
Translations:
Italian

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

The UX of Learning

2011-12-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

by Tyler Tate

While many desk-shackled students may wish they were napping rather than enduring yet another monotonous lecture, learning is by no means confined within the classroom. In fact, we engage in focused learning activities every day. Think of the last time you ordered a book, booked a flight, or bought a car. How did you choose which book to read, where to go for vacation, or which car was best for you? You may have searched online, read reviews, or asked others for advice to help you make an informed decision. In a word, you learned.
Learning is a complex process with distinct stages, each with corresponding tasks and emotions. Understanding how users learn can help us design experiences that support the user throughout the entire process. So let’s learn a thing or two about learning itself.

A hierarchy of learning

According to Benjamin Bloom’s landmark 1956 study, we can classify learning in a hierarchy of six levels, where each level forms the foundation for the next. At the base of Bloom’s Taxonomy lies knowledge and comprehension—the plain facts and figures we were quizzed on at school. Once the learner has knowledge and comprehends it, the learner can begin to apply her knowledge experientially as one might do when driving a car for first time. The highest levels of learning involve deeply analyzing ideas and combining them into something new—the realm of the expert.

Fig. 1: Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.

Learning as a process

While Bloom’s Taxonomy reveals the many levels of learning, understanding how these levels flow together in practice is crucial. Carol Kuhlthau, a professor at Rutgers University, studied how students researched topics for term paper assignments.. While roughly consistent with Bloom’s Taxonomy, her research yielded much greater insight into the sequential nature of learning and its implications on the digital environment. Let’s look at Carol’s key findings and see how we can apply them to design for learnability.

Fig. 2: A representation of the learning process from Carol Kuhlthau’s paper “Inside the Search Process.”

Initiation Initiation is the phase where you become aware that you need information. It’s often accompanied by uncertainty and apprehension. For example, my wife recently told me that she’s tired of taking the bus and wants a car. Hesitant at first, I eventually came around and agreed. Now I have a need to research vehicles.
Selection The selection phase involves committing to constraints that narrow the information search. In our case, we quickly threw out motorcycles, vans, and SUVs, deciding to look only at small, family cars. This phase tends to produce a spike in optimism once the learner makes the selection.
Exploration The optimism of selection usually gives way once more to confusion, uncertainty, and doubt as one realizes the many options still left to explore. Even though we had decided on small family cars, we still had to sift through dozens of makes and models, each with advantages and disadvantages. Kuhlthau’s study found that about half of her students never made it past this stage.
Formulation Formulation is the turning point where all the information encountered thus far is formulated into a specific, tangible requirement. In our car hunt we reached formulation when we decided that a four-six-year-old five-door Nissan Almera hatchback with 30,000–50,000 miles was the best fit for our needs and budget. The formulation stage is marked by less anxiety and increased confidence.
Collection Once the problem has been clearly articulated in the formulation phase, the next step is to evaluate the available solutions. Once we had a clear of idea of the model we wanted, we used automotive websites to search for cars in our area matching our criteria. Confidence continues to increase throughout the collection process.
Action The final stage of the process is to perform an action based on the newly acquired knowledge. For Kuhlthau’s students, this meant actually writing the term paper. For me, it will mean going to the dealership, paying, and driving home a new car.

Designing for learnability

Most websites invest the majority of their effort into streamlining the very last stage of this process: the action phase. It’s understandable: businesses make money through conversions. However, the company that best supports the user throughout the entire learning process has the upper hand in converting that loyal user into a paying customer. With that in mind, let’s look at digital solutions to seven learning-oriented tasks.

Explore

“Unknown unknowns” characterize the beginning of the learning process. Often, users have no idea what’s out there. Rather than expect the user to search for a precise make and model at this point, we must help the user explore. Browsing and flexible filtering options can expose users to serendipitous discovery, while personalized suggestions can help users set off on the right foot.

Fig. 3: Last.fm keeps track of the music you listen to and recommends new artists based on how your musical tastes compare with others.

Fig. 4:TravelMatch.co.uk doesn’t force you to fill in a date or a destination like most travel websites. Instead, they help users explore holiday options by providing flexible filtering, such as the destination’s temperature.

Re-find

Learning can be a long-term activity. Saving a page or item—whether in the browser, a shopping basket, or in a wish list—can help users return to something they found earlier. Showing a list of recently viewed items can also provide a more passive means for helping users re-find.

Fig. 5: Nutshell CRM shows a list of recently viewed items when the user focuses on the search box, but before they start typing.

Organize

While simple bookmarking helps users re-find, a higher-level task is to actually understand the information encountered thus far and how it fits together. Often this simply occurs in the mind; other times we may jot ideas down on paper. Whatever the medium, organizing items and ideas into categories is key to the learning process.

Fig. 6: Foodily not only allow users to save their favorite recipes, but to organize them into meal plans.

Compare

In addition to organizing items into categories, being able to view a side-by-side comparison aids in the analysis process, especially during the collection phase.

Fig. 7: Canon’s website allows users to compare up to three cameras side-by-side.

Annotate

An extension of organize and compare, annotation enables users to enrich collected items with their own notes and ratings.

Fig. 8: Globrix allow users to rate and write notes on each property that they’ve bookmarked.

Monitor

Toward the end of processing learning, the user typically has a decent understanding of what they want. And yet that ideal job, house, or car may still be elusive. The ability to save a search and receive an alert when something new appears can be priceless.

Fig. 9: Primelocation allows users to save a search, as well as to receive a daily email with any new properties matching the user’s criteria.

Collaborate

We don’t often make decisions in a vacuum. Friends, colleagues, and spouses often get their say as well. Unfortunately, the collaborative learning process is very poorly supported on the web today. During my car search, my wife and I often sent links back and forth to one another through email, a less-than-perfect solution. Shared bookmarks and collaborative annotations and ratings would go a long way in making learning on the web more social.

Fig. 10: Google Bookmarks allows users to create lists of bookmarks, share those lists with others, and comment both on individual bookmarks, as well as on the list as a whole.

From the classroom to the computer screen

Far from being monopolized by schools, learning is an essential human activity. Empathizing with and supporting users as they traverse the many stages of learning fosters happier users and a more profitable business. We could all benefit from psychologist Carl Rogers’s wise advice to educators:

A further element that establishes a climate for self-initiated experiential learning is emphatic understanding. When the teacher has the ability to understand the student’s reactions from the inside and has a sensitive awareness of the way the process of education and learning seems to the student, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased.

Translations:
Italian

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

The Accessibility of WAI-ARIA

2011-12-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

by Detlev Fischer

Web developers interested in accessibility issues often discuss WAI-ARIA, an upcoming W3C candidate recommendation aimed at making web applications more accessible to blind and visually impaired users. But, can we recommend WAI-ARIA without reservation?
The accessibility community has welcomed the development of WAI-ARIA. Clearly, there are many benefits for screen reader users. Previously, when webpages were dynamically updated, screen reader users were unaware that something had changed, or else were thrown back to the top of the page. Now, WAI-ARIA can inform the screen reader about dynamic changes. We can make complex custom widgets—such as pulldown menus, tabpanels, hierarchical trees, or sliders—accessible by mapping their elements to the roles, properties, and states defined in the standard and supported by the system’s accessibility API—provided that users have recent versions of browsers and screen readers that support the standard.
Many users, however, have no access to the latest and greatest technology. Therefore, accessibility testing is typically based on software that “users out there” are likely to encounter at the workplace.

A benchmark for accessibility testing

This is why the German BITV-Test (BITV is the German federal regulation mandating accessible information technology) prescribes using a dated browser (currently Internet Explorer 7) that would typically be used in combination with a dated screen reader like JAWS 8 that does not yet support WAI-ARIA.
For practical reasons the BITV-Test does not involve tests with screen readers. However, its checkpoints consider the limitations of older assistive technologies. The test will lower the score for sites where authors rely on WAI-ARIA—for example, by implementing widgets in a way that makes them inaccessible for users of older screen readers such as JAWS 8.
The question remains: Should accessibility testing settle for an outdated combination of browser and assistive technology that does not yet support WAI-ARIA? Doesn’t this create a disincentive for web developers who embrace WAI-ARIA to turn the dynamic web applications that clients demand into something that may be equally usable by blind users?
We have to step back a little to answer this question. First, what do the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 tell us regarding the accessibility support required by technologies like WAI-ARIA? Second, how well do today’s browsers and screen readers support WAI-ARIA? And finally, what are the practical obstacles to deploying WAI-ARIA at the workplace?

“Accessibility support” according to WCAG 2.0

Simply put, “accessibility support” is a bridge with two arches. Only if both arches are present, can users of assistive technologies access all the information that is available to users without disabilities.
The first arch is the web technology used. Web designers sticking to the WAI-ARIA specification and recommended Authoring Practices can ensure that their content is potentially accessible.
Why “potentially?” Because we are still missing the second arch: Suitable user agents. Browsers and screen readers need to be redesigned or modified to be able to actually work with new web technologies. Older versions may simply fall flat.
So declaring “accessibility support” for a particular web technology is not simply a matter of finalizing the standard. We must also gauge the degree to which newer supporting user agents have penetrated a given context of use. The situation tends to vary considerably across counties, languages, and use environments. In a section on Understanding Accessibility Support, the WCAG working group and the W3C therefore

do not specify which or how many assistive technologies must support a Web technology in order for it to be classified as accessibility supported

And

defer[s] the judgment of how much, how many, or which AT [assistive technology] must support a technology to the community and to entities closer to each situation.

While a company’s IT department may ensure accessibility support for its intranet, public websites provide information to a very diverse population using a wide range of user agents and assistive technologies.
That is why WCAG 2.0 clearly states:

Creating content that can’t be used by the general public with disabilities should be avoided.

If we accept this “general public” as our benchmark, we find that currently, there are still many obstacles to the widespread use of WAI-ARIA.

WAI-ARIA support in browsers and assistive technologies

Support for some parts of WAI-ARIA, such as document landmarks, is already quite good in later versions of browser and screen readers. However, many problems remain.

Uneven level of support across assistive technologies

WAI-ARIA support is still patchy in many screen reader/browser combinations out there—see, for example, the (slightly dated) WAI-ARIA tests on code talks. The sheer number of makes and versions of browsers and assistive technologies makes it hard to gauge the given level of support. And providing workarounds for some known screen reader bugs can make life harder for users of other, more compliant browsers and screen readers.
Blind users without WAI-ARIA support may simply not recognize a web widget if its WAI-ARIA role is not exposed. Take a tab panel implemented according to WAI-ARIA best practices. The screen reader will not tell users that they have just entered a tab panel and can now use the arrow keys to move between tabs. So users are likely to tab on beyond the tab panel’s content. And the scripted focus changes for arrow key navigation between tabs may just not work: entire sections under tabs can become inaccessible.
Let’s not forget visually impaired users. The current versions of popular screen magnifiers have no WAI-ARIA support. ZoomText is apparently not even aware that WAI-ARIA exists. Freedom Scientific plans partial support in MAGic in the next version (the current version is 11.0). Dolphin expects support in HAL and Supernova starting with version 12.5.

Correct and incorrect uses of WAI-ARIA

Currently many implementations do not conform to WAI ARIA best practices to ensure that they work as intended. WAI-ARIA coding errors can actually deteriorate widget accessibility. What contributes to the coding complexity is that the native semantics of HTML elements can be in conflict with the semantics added through WAI-ARIA roles.
The interaction of these problems means that designing with WAI-ARIA can be tricky. Web developers therefore increasingly use screen reader tests to ensure that designs work correctly across a range of assistive technologies (for a start, the NVDA screen reader is free and easy to install).

Implications of widgets for sighted keyboard users

WAI-ARIA’s main benefits are for blind users. For them, desktop-style widgets on a webpage need no longer be inaccessible. But the proliferation of such widgets also has implications for sighted keyboard users.
In contrast to desktop widgets and their conventions, the self-styled widgets on the web come in many flavors. Those that conform to WAI-ARIA best practices are few and far between. What, if any, keyboard interaction a particular widget actually affords is therefore down to guesswork.
Again, take tab panels. There is no easy way to distinguish between a common tab-style main navigation bar and a widget with a tab panel navigation further down the page. And only few tab panels out there afford arrow key navigation instead of tabbing. Sighted keyboard users will have to try out what keys will work. (For blind people using WAI-ARIA capable screen readers, this is actually less of a problem if widget roles are announced in the same way as desktop widgets.)
Another critical point is that custom widgets depend on stylesheets to position their elements. Without CSS or seen with custom stylesheets, these widgets disintegrate and are no longer usable. Widget elements may appear twice or far removed from the intended position. And background images assigned with CSS will disappear (the same happens when using custom color schemes).

Obstacles to using WAI-ARIA in the workplace

There is quite a different set of problems evident in the workplace. Often enough, the problems are outside of the user’s influence:

Many organizations deploy internet applications customized for a particular browser/screen reader combination. Customization costs are often many times higher than screen reader license or update costs. Known security holes (as in Internet Explorer 7) can necessitate upgrades, but this argument may not suffice if applications are (or ought to be) used exclusively on an intranet.
Many organizations still use old operating systems such as Windows 2000 which do not accommodate later browser versions such as IE8, and in turn, later screen reader versions. For applications and assistive technology that support rote procedures, there is no real incentive to upgrade unless workflow or major system upgrades demand it.
Many blind computer users working with WAI-ARIA-capable screen readers such as JAWS 9 or later, are not yet aware of—or trained to take advantage of—its full potential.
While NVDA and JAWS are currently most capable of dealing with WAI-ARIA, we must not forget users of other, less-capable screen readers.

Often, script-based customization for assistive technologies in the workplace tackles exactly those custom controls that WAI-ARIA could make accessible. Better support for WAI-ARIA may save much time and cost. This, however, presupposes that in creating web or intranet applications, developers use WAI-ARIA consistently and according to best practices.

Who’s without access to WAI-ARIA-capable screen readers?

While we were researching this article, we took a quick sample of one large public German employer. Of the 15 workplaces for blind users we covered, not a single one currently supports WAI-ARIA:

Seven workplaces use HAL/Lunar (between Version 6 and 10),
Four workplaces use JAWS 6, and
Four workplaces use Blindows (between Version 2 and 4).

Of course, the situation may be better at other workplaces. Nevertheless, the sample indicates that a large, possibly very large, share of blind people at the workplace currently have no access to user agents supporting WAI-ARIA.

Survey and usage statistics

Unfortunately, there are no statistics that can reliably quantify how many users have WAI-ARIA-capable screen readers. According to the WebAIM screen reader survey (October 2009), 83.6% of users update their screen reader within one year after the release of a new version. Focusing just on JAWS for a moment and considering the multiple JAWS releases after the first version with WAI-ARIA support in November 2007, the percentage of users still using JAWS 8 should have fallen well below 5%. However, the survey reflects the American market, which will differ from the situation in Germany. Also, it is likely that a high percentage of screen reader users responding to the survey were expert users and therefore, likely early adopters. We can assume that the average update rate across all users is much lower.

Unproblematic ways of using WAI-ARIA

Many applications of WAI-ARIA aim to enrich HTML to rectify some of its semantic deficits. Since HTML 4 knows no explicit elements for marking up page regions, the WAI-ARIA spec offers so-called document landmarks. For example, we can mark up a simple div with role="navigation" and expose the main page content with role="main". This allows screen reader users that support WAI-ARIA to move quickly between the different page regions.
Other attributes improve form markup: For example, we can give an input element the attribute aria-required="true" to tell screen reader users that the field requires an entry before the form can be sent. ARIA live regions are another useful construct that inform screen reader users about dynamic changes to the page without losing the current keyboard focus.
Pages semantically enriched through WAI-ARIA do not currently validate, but this drawback is acceptable: Common browsers do not mind the additional markup. (The BITV test’s code validation step maintains an exception for validation errors caused by WAI-ARIA markup.) Sooner or later, when the working draft becomes a recommendation and the W3C validator has been updated, that problem will disappear (in HTML5, WAI-ARIA validates). Some sites currently circumvent the validation problem by adding WAI-ARIA attributes to the source code via a script that is executed when the page loads.

Fallback options for users without WAI-ARIA support?

Is it not possible then, to provide fallback options for user agents that do not support WAI-ARIA? In its coverage of the role presentation, the WAI-ARIA Roles document mentions that it “may be used to provide for an accessible fallback in older browsers that do not support WAI-ARIA.”
Looking around, practical examples of such fallback solutions are conspicuously absent. It is hard to think of any useful application. Consider a custom checkbox with a native checkbox as a fallback option for screen reader users without WAI-ARIA support: moved off-screen via CSS to hide it for sighted users, and marked with role="presentation" to hide it for WAI-ARIA-capable browsers.
But does it work? The role presentation suppresses WAI-ARIA attributes (apart from global attributes), but still exposes focusable elements like checkboxes. The WAI-ARIA 1.0 User Agent Implementation Guide states clearly:

…the element must still be exposed if it (…) is focusable, so that focus events can be fired (focus must never be lost)

Therefore, for screen reader users without WAI-ARIA support but with JavaScript on, the custom checkbox would receive focus, but not reveal its role and state. For screen reader users with WAI-ARIA support, the unnecessary fallback checkbox would not announce its role, but would still be in the tab order, be selectable, and change its state after selection. Finally, sighted users would be able to use the custom checkbox, but possibly also tab to and activate a hidden checkbox without any visual feedback. This clearly makes no sense.

WAI-ARIA in JavaScript UI libraries

Many designers drawing on JavaScript functionality provided by popular JavaScript UI libraries will implicitly implement WAI-ARIA, as these libraries are adding support to their widgets and components. The situation is diverse. Dojo is said to offer mature WAI-ARIA support, YUI offers ARIA plugins for a range of widgets, and JQuery is expected to support WAI-ARIA fully in its 2.0 release. Other libraries, however, have no or only very limited support.
The inclusion of WAI-ARIA in JavaScript UI libraries is a good thing since it can be expected that here WAI-ARIA will be implemented according to best practices. However, the fact remains that on the level of hard- and software currently in use, accessibility support for WAI-ARIA cannot be taken for granted.

Recommendations

Appropriate semantic HTML elements, when available, are preferable to using custom widgets made accessible via JavaScript and WAI-ARIA. The difficulty of styling native elements reliably in CSS may appear to be a real pain for web designers: on the plus side for users, interface elements will be more recognizable and predictable when they simply look and work like the known system elements.
Designers should check whether complex custom widgets can be replaced by simpler native elements. Is it really necessary to use a combobox for an autocomplete function? Is it really unavoidable to have a tri-state checkbox? Can radio buttons with discrete values replace a slider?
This is not a call for interface design austerity. There is little harm in using fancy controls if they are given an equivalent accessible alternative. Take, for example, a slider that mouse users can move to set the amount they want to donate to SOS-Kinderdorf, a well-known charitable organization. Check out the second step of the SOS-Kinderdorf donation process (Design by Aperto AG). Depending on the amount specified, a little girl to the right expresses her gratitude in moderate to glowing terms (in German). Apparently, generosity has shot up sharply after the introduction of the slider, which should be sufficient proof of its utility.
While it would have been possible to make the slider work for screen reader users with WAI-ARIA support, the designers preferred a simple text input for the amount donated as an alternative: The tab focus order simply skips the slider. Importantly, the child’s reaction in the speech bubble is triggered by both types of input.
Let’s sum up. It is quite clear that JavaScript has become ubiquitous, and that WAI-ARIA is a welcome solution to address the accessibility gap that this development has created. Developers using WAI-ARIA today can help weed out implementation bugs in browsers and assistive technology. At the same time, they can contribute to best practice examples that can be used by many others as a blueprint.
But as long as older screen reader/browser combinations incapable of interpreting WAI-ARIA still constitute a significant part of the installed base, web designers who care for accessibility should use WAI-ARIA markup only to enrich their sites. They should not rely on it.
Translations:
German
Italian

Illustration by Kevin Cornell

Elegance in Ballet Depends on How You Build Strength in Core Muscles

2008-06-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

Submitted by: Dianne M. Buxton

Making classical ballet dancing look effortless and elegant is the goal of any dancer, including for men in ballet. Effortlessness indicates strength , and men in ballet must strive for elegance while showing muscular prowess as a rescuing prince or charismatic villain. Ballerinas strive for fluidity in their arms, upper back, and other movements requiring suppleness, yet depending on the strength of their core muscles.

Naturally, for both men and women in ballet, elegance also depends on the finesse and finer details of professional footwork and strong leg muscles. The whole body works as a coordinated unit, and this coordination depends more on the core muscles than any other area of muscles.

As a student is developing and learning the ballet body positions and the many port de bras (French words for arm movements) he or she must also have core muscles that can support the elegant and floating movements required, just like a tree trunk supports a tree when it sways in the wind. Or a swan's long neck is supported by its sturdy body weight. (perhaps that is a better metaphor!)

Classical ballet dancers easily have the abs of steel, buns of steel and all those things. But they don't want to look like it!

Daily routines in ballet training usually produce what is required to do classical ballet choreography. But unusual body proportions, starting training later, and other factors lead dancers to cross train to catch up, get ahead or get an edge on the competition. And, always, prevent dance injuries.

There are several Pilates gurus promoting their DVD courses so that anyone can work at home. Mat work courses, stretchy band work courses, and even Pilates machine courses are available, with small light weight home-version machines.

So if you are too busy to get to a Pilates studio, that is no problem. Pilates is a wonderful type of cross training for ballet dancers, as it produces the balletic elongation of muscle and builds strength. It also contributes to the fluid quality of movement that dancers strive for.

Slow motion weight training can help dancers too. The slow motion speed is to trigger the best use of the muscles, and also prevent injury. No sudden or jerky movement is done, and this protects the joints and soft tissues around the joints. Slow motion weight training has also shown to contribute to a healthy metabolism and the release of enzymes into the body that is rejuvenating in many ways. It is a detailed and fascinating subject unto itself.

Whatever stage of classical ballet training you are in, or aspire to, you can achieve elegance in your ballet dancing. How well you build strength in your core muscles will also affect your work in pointe shoes, and for the men in ballet, your partnering skills and princely or villainous virtuosity.

Why Handmade Gifts Rock

2008-06-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

Submitted by: Jamie Hollier

Handmade gifts stand out and mean more.

A wedding, the birth of a child, a new home, an important birthday… All of these are events that mark our lives forever and should be celebrated with a gift you can cherish for a lifetime. Although mixers and vacuums are invaluable tools in our society (as I learned while trying to clean the house with a broken vacuum and in-laws on the way) they just don't do justice to the important milestones of a life. Items that are handmade don't usually end up in the trash bin in five years once they break or become outdated. Handmade goods, like a beautiful clock I once received, become heirlooms that hold memories of special times and people.

Handmade goods also have a personality that a toaster can't really match, even if it is hotrod red. When an item is handmade, a little part of the creator of that piece goes into it. Artists put their ideas, personality, style, and often blood, sweat, and tears into their work. When you find a handmade gift that is just right, you find a gift that speaks volumes about who you are, who the recipient is, and the connection between you.

Society benefits when it supports handmade goods.

Supporting artists creates a stronger community and makes special bonds. Being able to send a personal message to someone that created your favorite vase is immensely different than grabbing someone with a nametag and telling them how much you love your new iron. Owning work to which you can put a name or a face is an amazing experience that creates a very personal connection to an item. When something can stop being stuff and start being art, the value of it shifts.

The arts have been a part of all societies for as long as man has existed, from cave paintings of centuries ago to a hand-knit scarf that your friend got you. Showing your support for artists by owning their work goes a long way in helping to create a world where are does matter and there is a place for beauty and craftsmanship in every home. As a child my mother dragged me to art show after craft fair to museum, and I believe that for me, that has made all the difference. A world that is devoid of art and people that make a living with their passion is a sad one indeed.

Handmade goods tend to be more green.

Have you seen the story of stuff? It is a cool website with a short but immensely educational presentation. The presentation talks about the consumer cycle and how its linear nature is detrimental to our world on many levels. From big box stores destruction of the environment for raw materials, to planned obsolesce, poor working conditions, and pollution in goods and the processes used to produce them, the consumer cycle created by larger retail operations often has much bigger effects thantheir customers realize. Handmade goods are different. They are made with more traditional and environmentally conscious methods. Many artists are conscious of the impact their work will have on the environment and strive to create green items with green techniques, often utilizing recycled or recyclable materials. Also, handmade goods are not planned with the idea of becoming obsolete; these goods are usually meant to last a lifetime at the minimum. In opposition to many mass produced goods, handmade items don't tend to end up in landfills or incinerators.

Jamie Hollier believes in the importance of handmade and artist made goods. The title of excellent gift giver has also been bestowed on Jamie for her skills with giving handmade gifts. She has been involved in the arts community since she could barely walk behind her mother at art shows and museums. You can find more information about handmade goods and gifts at Rancho Del Arte, a company that supports the arts and is a favorite shopping spot for Jamie.

Quilting and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

2008-06-25T01:46:00.000-07:00

Submitted by: Gloria Massard

Did you know that one out of every ten quilters develops carpal tunnel syndrome? Personally, I never thought about it. I figured this condition only affected "other" people. Not so. If you're a quilter, you're at risk.

What is Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?

The carpal tunnel is a narrow passageway that runs along the palm side of your wrist. It covers and protects the main nerve in your hand and the tendons of your thumb, index and middle fingers.

When you perform repetitive movements like hand quilting or rotary cutting, you stretch and compress these tendons. This irritates the nerves and causes inflammation and pain. When this occurs, it's called carpal tunnel syndrome.

You're also at risk if you keep your hands in the same position for a long time. Quilters are guilty of this when they sit at their sewing machines for many hours. If you don't give your hands and wrists a break, you increase your chances of developing carpal tunnel syndrome. If left untreated, the damage might become permanent.

What are the Signs of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?

Burning, numbness, aching or tingling on the palm side of your thumb, index finger and middle finger
Weakness in grip
Swelling of hand or forearm
Aching of the wrist or forearm
Pain spreads to arm or shoulder
Intensity increases at night or in the morning

How to Avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Adjust Your Chair
Adjust your chair height so your forearms are level with the sewing bed (needle area). Your arms should form an "L" shape. If you habitually drop your wrists while sewing, invest in an ergonomic wrist pad.

Support your Feet
If your feet dangle after you adjust your chair, use a book or footrest to fill the gap. Make sure the footrest has a non-slip bottom and slopes 10 to 20 degrees.

Adjust the Height of your Cutting Table and Ironing Board

Stand with your arms at your sides.
Bend your arms at the elbows, straight out in front of you. Your arms should form an "L" shape. Lower your arms an inch or two. This gives your elbows enough room to move without hitting the table. This is the proper height for your cutting and ironing surfaces.

Rotary Cutting: Work in Shorter Intervals
When you use a rotary cutter, you perform repetitious movements. This includes squeezing the handle and applying force to make your cuts. If you repeat these actions long enough, you'll experience a feeling of numbness. That's because you've cut off circulation to your hand. Take this as a warning, and stop cutting.

I'm excited to report that there's a new ergonomic rotary cutter on the market. It has a padded handle which takes some of the force off your hand and spreads it over a larger area. That means less damage to your hand.

Take Short Breaks
It's easy to lose track of time when you're sewing a masterpiece. But try to take a ten-minute break every hour. This keeps your circulation flowing and helps you to focus better. It also gives your muscles and tendons a chance to relax. If you're like me and you don't watch the clock when you're sewing, set a timer.

Do Stretching Exercises:

Shake your hands
Roll your wrists
Bend and flex your fingers
Stretch your arms to the side and over your head
Roll your arms in a circle
Be creative!

Prevent carpal tunnel syndrome by keeping a good posture, adjusting your sewing room furniture, supporting your feet and taking frequent breaks. If you experience signs of carpal tunnel syndrome, seek medical help right away


	Creator and publisher of http://sew-a-quilt.com, Gloria Massard shares 17 years of quilting experience with new quilters. On her website, she teaches beginners how to make their first quilt. Gloria hopes to keep this fun and creative tradition alive.

Tips for Making a Really Big Diorama

2008-06-25T01:35:00.000-07:00

Submitted by: Will Kalif

A large diorama can be a spectacular achievement that you can be proud of. I have built a few different large dioramas that are at least three feet wide and here is a collection of valuable tips, hints, and tricks that I have learned in the process.

Planning

The absolute most important stage of the whole process of making a large diorama is the stage of planning. You absolutely have to spend more than a few hours drawing up sketches and making sure everything is exactly how you envision it. Once you start building the diorama it is very difficult to make major changes. You have to know ahead of time where all the major components will be located. This is standard practice for making any kind of complex object. Car makers and home builders create complete plans before they start building anything. You should do the same. This process doesn't just lay everything out for you though. It also serves as a great way to generate ideas. Your finished product will benefit greatly from planning. And I will explain how this planning stage can also save you money.

Size, Access and Usability

Another important thing to think about is portability and ease of use. I have built dioramas that were so large it was difficult for me to work in the center of them. I just couldn't reach that far in from the edge! If your diorama is this large you may want to consider building it in two halves and then when each half is completed stitching them together with materials. I highly recommend you build a custom table for a large diorama and you put it on wheels so it can easily be moved. You also need to ask yourself if the diorama is going to stay in the room you build it in. Will you be moving it to another location after it is done? If so, will it fit easily through doorways? You might not want to tip it sideways as you move it so it might be a good idea to make it in pieces or to keep one dimension to less than twenty-nine inches so you can get it through even the narrowest doorways.

Budgeting

A big diorama can be made with a low expense if you are very crafty and creative with materials. And twenty dollars will buy you enough paper towels and Plaster of Paris to make even the largest of dioramas. But if you want to use traditional hobby textures and trees the cost can quickly escalate. Trees alone will cost between fifty cents and a dollar each depending on the size. So if you have large forested areas with scores of trees the expense can quickly climb. You can have a big impact on the cost of your diorama during the planning stage.

Biggest expenses?

The two biggest expenses for diorama making are water effects and miniatures. Miniatures can cost ten dollars each or more and realistic water costs around one dollar per ounce. And the ounces go very fast so if you want to keep the cost down be very frugal with bodies of water – and don't make them deep! Again this can be carefully controlled in the planning stage.

Building for the ease of building

One of the biggest challenges I have when it comes to a large diorama is the addition of special effects like motors, working drawbridges, lights and sound effects. I consider these additions to be the things that take an ordinary project and turn it into something special. But this adds extra cost, takes time, and adds some difficulties to the process. And the biggest thing to think about in terms of these extras is the wiring. If you have planned your diorama well you already know where all the special effects go and you can pre wire all the wires before you create the plaster shell. This makes it so much easier.

But dioramas change and you never know exactly what changes you are going to want to make until you are well underway so I recommend you run extra pairs of wires to difficult areas and build the shell so there are access hole in the back, sides, and even bottom. These access holes will allow you to add more wires and objects without destroying the terrain.

Time Management

Building a small project is something that can be done in an afternoon or a weekend but building a large project can absorb well over a hundred hours of concentrated work. And this can go up significantly if you want to achieve a high level of realism and detail. If you work on it two hours a day it still will take you several months to complete it. It's just good to consider the commitment to the project and whether you have the time to complete it.

Building a large diorama is one of the most exciting projects you can do. People go absolutely crazy over them and you will get a lot of compliments on your work. And even if you are not a skilled diorama maker you can make one that is just spectacular if you just plan ahead and follow some of these simple guidelines.

For more Great Diorama Making Stuff Visit the authors site where you can find tutorials, pictures and even videos on all kinds of dioramas: The Diorama Man

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

2008-06-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Jill Abraham is a mother of three in Scarsdale, and her view is typical of those in my straw poll. I told her about Dweck’s research on praise, and she flatly wasn’t interested in brief tests without long-term follow-up. Abraham is one of the 85 percent who think praising her children’s intelligence is important. Her kids are thriving, so she’s proved that praise works in the real world. “I don’t care what the experts say,” Jill says defiantly. “I’m living it.”

Even those who’ve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother of two and an elementary-school teacher with eleven years’ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck’s research has trickled down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, “I like how you keep trying.” She tries to keep her praise specific, rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally tell a child, “You’re good at math,” but she’ll never tell a child he’s bad at math.

But that’s at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her 8-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son are indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, “You’re great. You did it. You’re smart.” When I press her on this, Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. “When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is, Oh, please. How corny.”

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they’ve seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

2008-06-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

By Po Bronson

The inverse power of praise.

What do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas’s one of them, and he likes belonging.

Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, he mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.)

Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?

Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Burma: Crackdown on opposition and media

2008-06-10T04:57:00.000-07:00

Following the 4th May cyclone the Burmese military Junta have today been fervently
attempting to suppress all information on the manifest humanitarian disaster ahead of the
UN Secretary General’s visit, including detaining democratic youth activists and censoring
media reporting.

With the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in Burma, the Junta have rounded up and detained
thirteen prominent youth leaders from the National League for Democracy who were trying to
raise awareness of the cyclone victims.
Simultaneously, local media have been ordered by the Press Scrutiny and Registration Board not
to publish any stories that show the destruction and human suffering caused by the cyclone.
These last violations are taking place while a number of relief agencies are still prevented from
effectively accessing the victims and disaster-hit areas and providing much needed assistance
and alleviate the suffering.
“The full information black-out imposed by the authorities since September has been elevated to
heights rarely or ever witnessed before. Effective assistance depends on uncensored information
about who has been affected and how. The Burmese government is not only suppressing this
information. It is also preventing assistance in order to maintain the cloak of secrecy and fear
over the country.” said Dr. Agnès Callamard, Executive Director of ARTICLE 19
“But no disaster of this scale can ever be erased from people’s memory. No such gross failure to
respect and protect people’s most basic right – the right to life – could ever be forgotten. The
obstruction of the efforts to address the monumental disaster afflicting their people constitutes
the most obscene prioritisation of the status quo.” adds Dr. Callamard.
ARTICLE 19 urges the international community, but particularly the governments of India and
China, to use all their leverage on the Burmese authorities to stop this insanity.
ARTICLE 19 is also calling on the international community to undertake a full, independent and
public review of the nature and scale of the Burmese authorities’ violations of their international
obligations, and particularly to determine the nature of the crimes and violations resulting from
the obstruction of aid and the deliberate censorship and concealment of the extent of the deaths,
wounded, damages, displacements, and sufferings.

NOTES TO EDITORS:
· For more information: please contact Dr. Agnes Callamard, Executive Director,
agnes@article19.org, +44 20 7278 9292
· ARTICLE 19 is an independent human rights organisation that works around the world to protect
and promote the right to freedom of expression. It takes its name from Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees free speech.

The Israel Lobby

2008-06-10T03:18:00.000-07:00

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.

The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’

Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles.

Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17 February 2003):

Senior IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will disappear terror and weapons of mass destruction.

Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’ pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed in Ma’ariv, said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington Post reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled ‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled ‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone, Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that Assad was a serious threat to America.

Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially – and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly (398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into law on 12 December 2003.

The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian government had not only been providing important intelligence about al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.

Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest.

Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you should understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the Iraq war.

Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran in November 2002, in an interview in the Times. Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April 2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran.’

The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle – not, we hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard on 12 May.

The administration has responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions. Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep Washington’s attention on the issue.

One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.

It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world, Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.

Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.

The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

George III

2008-06-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

Back on February 16, when the political class was still having a conniption over Dick Cheney’s itchy trigger finger, Republican senator George Allen was already briskly moving on to the next controversy in the queue. In a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow, Allen registered his “concern” with the Bush administration’s just-revealed approval of the Dubai Ports World deal. “As you know,” Allen wrote, “Dubai has been a transfer point in the proliferation of nuclear components. In addition, the September 11th terrorists spent time in [the United Arab Emirates] and utilized its banking system in carrying out their attacks . . . I respectfully request that you carefully and thoroughly review how [the deal] could affect the national security of the United States.”

Though Allen was among the first Republicans to articulate his unease, he was hardly the most the prominent, the loudest, or the most hysterical. There were Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, sprinting to catch up with the bandwagon a week later, threatening to put the deal on ice. There were Mike Bloomberg and George Pataki (the latter from his hospital bed), joining hands with Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton to present a united front of Big Apple opposition. And there was conservative radio nightmare Michael Savage, doing what he does best—foaming profusely at the mouth and fomenting xenophobia.

Yet even amid this braying chorus, Allen’s muted voice stood out. Not because of what he said, but because of his putative position in the 2008 presidential race. A first-term senator from Virginia and former governor of that state, Allen is viewed by many Republican professionals as the likeliest GOP nominee. And even those who see John McCain as the party’s front-runner will tell you that Allen is his strongest challenger from the right—a man who, as the National Review’s Richard Lowry wrote recently, “combines the people skills of Bill Clinton, with the convictions of Ronald Reagan, with the non-threatening persona of George W. Bush circa 2000, prior to his becoming a hate-figure for the Left.”

All of which suggests that Allen’s position on the Dubai ports deal may prove to be a leading indicator of one of the most important emerging dynamics in politics right now. A year ago, the 2008 Republican race looked set to be a competition to be seen as Bush’s rightful heir and logical successor, to get as close as possible to the president without literally jumping into bed with him. But now that calculus is being rendered inoperative, for not only is Bush’s popularity with the broad electorate at an all-time low (34 percent, according to the latest CBS poll), but his support within the GOP, especially among conservatives, is slipping measurably as well. For Allen and the other Republican wannabes, therefore, the question increasingly is no longer “How close can I get to Bush?” The question is “How much distance can I, should I, safely put between us?”

Not long ago, I had my first chance to catch Allen in action before a sizable crowd, as the headline speaker in a hotel ballroom brimming with conservative activists. Allen is the son of the late George Herbert Allen, the legendary coach of the L.A. Rams and Washington Redskins in the sixties and seventies. And so this line of the senator’s was probably inevitable: “There were four F’s that were important in the Allen family—faith, family, freedom, and football, not necessarily in that order.” But that was just the start. In the space of 30 minutes, Allen referred to his audience as his “teammates,” declared the need for a “game plan,” eschewed “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” and concluded with this pearl: “Representative democracy, team, is not a spectator sport!”

If this sort of thing isn’t your brand of vodka, Allen won’t be, either. At 53, he has the face of Goober Pyle and the vocal intonations to match. (This despite being raised near Chicago and in Palos Verdes, California.) He wears cowboy boots, dips Copenhagen (his spit cup is forever at the ready), and worships both Dale Earnhardts (Sr. and Jr.). In sum, he’s the NASCAR candidate.

Yet his political skills are estimable. In his race for governor, in 1993, he came from 27 points behind to defeat the Democratic attorney general. Employing a lethal combination of backslapping bonhomie and bare-knuckle ruthlessness—to Virginia Republicans he said of Democrats, “Let’s enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats”—he largely succeeded in enacting his agenda: a more-permissive concealed-weapons law, the abolition of parole, parental notification for abortion, strict welfare reform. When Allen left office, his approval rating was 68 percent. And while his Senate tenure has been fairly slight on substance, he can boast that, as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Committee in 2004, he helped add four seats to the GOP majority—and slay “the chief obstructionist,” as he refers to Tom Daschle.

Thus has Allen emerged as the favored presidential candidate among countless Republican insiders. Mary Matalin sings his praises; so does Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman who recently signed on as treasurer of Allen’s political-action committee. Equally enamored are many conservative activists, from American Conservative Union chairman David Keene to bloviator-in-chief Rush Limbaugh. “Among the candidates so far,” Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist tells me, “Allen fits most comfortably in the center of the conservative coalition.”

Listening to Allen, I didn’t find it hard to see why. Pick any hard-right hot button—from activist judges to partial-birth abortion to the “death tax”—and Allen whaled on it like a 12-year-old on a Game Boy. But more interesting was the framework in which he cast his message. Calling himself a “commonsense, Jeffersonian conservative,” Allen repeatedly, unsurprisingly, invoked the name of the sainted Ronald Reagan. What was surprising, though, was the dearth of references (and their perfunctory tone) to President Bush.

In itself, this might be no big deal; it was just one speech, after all. But on a series of issues, Allen seems to be angling to create some space between him and Bush. On Iraq, Allen has said that he would have favored holding elections sooner and criticized the administration’s initial strategy for training Iraqi troops. On Social Security, he says he differed with Bush’s call for cutting benefits. Whereas Bush has said he wouldn’t support the recently enacted South Dakota abortion ban without exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, Allen’s chief of staff indicated last week that the senator has no such qualms.

Allen is attempting to tap into the conservative disquiet over the kind of president Bush turned out to be.

With such maneuvers, Allen is aiming to tap into the conservative disquiet over the kind of president Bush has turned out to be. The kind under whom the size and scope of the government has swollen dramatically instead of shrunk. The kind whose Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping program inspire libertarians’ ire. The kind who nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Make no mistake, this disquiet is acute and growing. Consider the must-read status on the right of Reaganaut Bruce Bartlett’s new book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Or consider a recent plaint from the pen of Phyllis Schlafly: “Bush is alienating his political base and creating what one RNC member calls an ‘enthusiasm deficit.’ ”

As the furor over the Dubai ports deal makes clear, Schlafly was putting it mildly. Avant le deluge, Bush might have taken comfort in the notion that his critics on the right were nothing more than pointy-headed purists. Now he’s confronted with poll numbers showing that 58 percent of Republicans disapprove of his policy. It’s those poll numbers that tell you all you need to know about the stances adopted by Allen, Frist, et al. They also demonstrate unequivocally that the era of GOP blind loyalty to Bush is now officially over.

There was, however, one notable holdout whose loyalty remained, if not blind, at least stubbornly persistent: John McCain, who declared that Bush had “earned our trust” and “deserves the presumption” that he “would not sell our security short.”

Now, it’s been apparent for some time that McCain has no intention of “making the same mistakes he made in 2000,” as David Keene puts it. That he’s made his peace with Bush and intends to run as his ally, not his foe. That the days of McCain the vaunted maverick are coming to an end. Yet the ports imbroglio may prove a harbinger of a more surprising dynamic in the 2008 race: a dynamic whereby McCain, out of fear of alienating the Republican base, plays the Bush loyalist, while his rival, Allen, driven by a sense that the base is shifting, plays the Bush apostate.

It’s still a long way until 2008, and any number of scenarios might yet unfold. Before Allen can turn his attention fully to the presidential contest, he must stand for reelection this November, and with the entry of former Navy secretary James Webb into the Democratic field, that may prove tougher than expected. Guided by Karl Rove, Bush may tack sharply back to the right and regain his footing with conservatives. And no one should underestimate the star power of McCain, or the role that primogeniture plays in the GOP. In the end, it may simply be McCain’s turn.

But weirder things have happened than a charming, incurious, pseudo-southern pol filling a Republican vacuum and becoming the consensus candidate. It would be ironic if someone so Bush-like emerged triumphant by fashioning himself as the anti-Bush. Ironic, but not unthinkable.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com

George W. and the Dominoes

2008-06-09T06:35:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

In the nearly five years since 9/11 ushered in the war on terror, Tony Blair has been George W. Bush’s indispensable ally—and his chief enabler. Without Blair behind him, Bush would likely have found it impossible to invade Iraq; without Blair, his refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon might have been untenable. In Britain, Blair’s slavish fealty to Bush has kneecapped him politically, inciting (in the case of his stance on a cease-fire) unrest in his own Cabinet. And it has made him a figure of mockery, taunted mercilessly in the tabloids as “the president’s poodle.”

So perhaps the speech that Blair delivered last week, as the Middle East teetered on the brink of chaos, to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council—largely ignored by the U.S. press but closely scrutinized in Britain—was merely a predictable attempt at de-poodle-fication, played primarily for the ankle biters awaiting him back in London. But on any number of levels the address was remarkable all the same.

Here you had Blair acknowledging that the West is losing “the battle against this global extremism.” (What he said, to be precise, was, “We can’t say we are winning,” which amounts to the same thing.) Here you had him admitting that “we are far from persuading those we need to persuade” that our values are “evenhanded, fair, and just in [their] application.” Here you had him arguing that we need to “change dramatically the focus of our policy”—urgently calling for a “complete renaissance of our strategy.”

For critics of the Bush-Blair approach to the war on terror, the inevitable riposte to all this will be No shit—what took you so long? But for Bush and his loyalists, the Blair critique (though, being British, and being Blair, he didn’t utter a single harsh word about the president or his policies directly) should serve as a gentle preview of what lies ahead. Although a U.N.-mediated cease-fire in Lebanon may be shortly in the offing, the past month’s conflagration there, together with the continuing and apparently worsening mayhem in Iraq, is likely to bring on a new era of resistance to the Bush Doctrine: one in which the pressure to change course will be fiercer than ever—and will emanate even from those who once offered unqualified, unwavering support.

The most insistent pressure will be on the administration to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Indeed, it was on this subject that Blair was (and has always been) most adamant, and where he came closest to poking the Bush team squarely in the eye. “Progress will not happen unless we change radically our degree of focus, effort, and engagement, especially with the Palestinian side,” he said. “In this, the active leadership of the U.S. is essential.” But Blair is far from alone. “It is too much to expect those most directly implicated—Israeli and Palestinian leaders—to lead the way,” wrote Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41’s national-security adviser, recently in the Washington Post. “That responsibility falls to others, principally the United States.”

Bush and his adjutants have, of course, heard these arguments ad nauseam—and ignored them ad infinitum. From the start, his attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian question seemed to be one, at least in his eyes, of constructive disengagement. Perhaps this was (like so many things with Bush) a rejection of his father, who enjoyed nothing more than playing the peacemaker in the Middle East. Or perhaps it was (like so many other things) a rejection of the Clinton model, which entailed untold time and immeasurable energy in the pursuit of a land-for-peace deal that still ended in failure—although, as one former Clinton foreign-policy hand noted to me, “Engagement à la Clinton doesn’t necessarily get you to yes, but while you’re trying and talking, there tends to be less shooting and dying.”

More likely, however, the hands-off attitude of the Bush crowd toward Israel and a potential Palestine owes mainly to the administration’s fixation on the war on terror generally and on Iraq in particular. For the neoconservative theoreticians who conceived the war, Iraq was to be the centerpiece of what Condoleezza Rice has lately taken to calling, with bizarre optimism, “a new Middle East”—precisely the role that more-traditional foreign-policy strategists had long hoped that a coexistent Israel and Palestine would play.

Iraq was also meant to have a catalytic effect: Once established as a model (stable, pluralistic, peaceful), it would, by a kind of chain reaction, weaken the Middle East’s dictatorships and theocracies and strengthen moderate, secular regimes throughout the region. NYU professor Noah Feldman has dubbed this policy “democratization by destabilization.” Another name, equally apt, is the “democratic domino theory.”

Employing that latter term is General William Odom, who in the mid-eighties ran the National Security Agency. As Odom points out in a recent essay for Neiman Watchdog, the original domino theory was invented to justify America’s involvement in Vietnam. And, as everyone knows, it turned out to be bogus.

And so has its democratic variant turned out—so far—to be bogus with respect to Iraq. In fact, what democratization has brought to the Middle East to date has been, most prominently, dangerous instability: the election of thuggish Hamas to control of the Palestinian Parliament; the endowing of murderous Hezbollah with a substantial voice in the Lebanese government; the election of a vengeful Shiite majority in Iraq (where, we learned last week, American generals fear that we are on the edge of civil war). Moreover, as Odom adds, “it is precisely our actions in Iraq that have opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah and Hamas actions without much to fear from the U.S.”

“Engagement doesn’t necessarily get you to yes,” says a former Clinton official. “But while you’re trying and talking, there tends to be less shooting and dying.”

So what to do? Get out now, Odom says. “We need to eat some crow,” he told an interviewer. “It will bring the Europeans back and have them cooperate. If we’re lock-armed with the Europeans, that is the greatest chance for success in Iraq.” As for the administration’s argument, put forward by Dick Cheney, among others, that precipitous withdrawal would cause yet another set of dominoes to fall—the governments in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—Odom waxes incredulous.

“The U.S. forces in Iraq opened the country to Al Qaeda cadres, and democratic elections have cleared the way for radical rulers,” he wrote in the Neiman essay. “The longer U.S. forces stay, the more likely it is that their radicalizing impact will reach beyond Iraq to Egypt and Saudi Arabia—and perhaps to Pakistan.” And “the more likely a full-scale war between Israel and its neighbors. It’s American departure from Iraq that could prevent [all this].”

Tony Blair begs to disagree. He finds it inconceivable that much of Western opinion “looks at the bloodshed in Iraq and say[s] that’s a reason for leaving.” For him, the answer is to stay the course in Iraq, but recognize that what is needed is a “whole strategy for the Middle East”—not merely, he implies, the Bush administration’s game of dominoes. “If we are faced with an arc of extremism, we need a corresponding arc of moderation and reconciliation”—more focus on hearts and minds, less on bombs and bullets.

Judging by history, the chances that the Bush administration will heed Blair’s advice are close to zero—which means that they’re about ten times higher than the odds that the Bushies will heed Odom’s. But just as Blair is far from alone in calling for the administration to play the honest broker in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, Odom is by no means alone in calling for an exit from Iraq. Last week, after months of anguished dithering, congressional Democrats essentially—nay, miraculously—adopted something like a unified stance advocating just that. Without much fanfare, a dozen of the party’s leaders (including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi) sent a letter to Bush that contained this nugget of long-sought clarity:

“We believe that a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq should begin before the end of 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces, and force protection of U.S. personnel.”

That such a stance was finally achieved in the week when the Middle East was veering close to bursting into flames may be nothing more than sheer coincidence. But it strikes me as unlikely. Though many Democrats loudly support Bush’s path on Lebanon, the party cannot help but grasp that Bush’s mismanagement of Iraq is central to the crisis there—whatever one believes about how that crisis should be handled. And, perhaps for the first time with any real lucidity, they see that running against Bush’s foreign policy could be a winner for them in November.

Certainly, the polls suggest as much and even more: that, for the first time in what seems an eon, the traditional Republican advantages on matters of war and peace have been eroded by Bush’s reckless, feckless foreign policy; and that, denied those advantages, and despite the preternatural capacity of the Democrats to blow even the ripest opportunity, the Republicans may be on the way out this year in the House, and perhaps even in the Senate. If that scenario does unfold, we may look back on this past awful month in Israel and Lebanon as a turning point—not a birth pang in the emergence of a new Middle East, but the moment when the Republican dominoes began to fall.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

God Dem

2008-06-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

At the start of the Fox News–sponsored Republican presidential debate last week in South Carolina, Brit Hume made a disappointing announcement: that because many of the candidates had already issued statements of “regret and condolence” concerning the expiration of Jerry Falwell, the moderators would seek no further comment on his life and legacy. I say “disappointing” because I was eager to hear what Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney had to say about him. Not that there was much doubt about what the gist would have been. But it would have been nice to have their acts of ritual self-abasement captured on video for future YouTube-able reference.

As it was, one had to make do with the candidates’ written encomiums, among which McCain’s—which lauded Falwell as “a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country”—was typical, if comparatively muted in its degree of obeisance. (Mike Huckabee, for instance, declared Falwell “a great man and a great influence for America and for Christ.”)

The view of Falwell among most sensible Americans is, of course, quite different: He was a hater, a lard-assed charlatan, an ostentatiously deranged clown. (What other conclusion could possibly be reached after l’affaire Tinky Winky?) That the GOP wannabes differ from this indisputable assessment owes largely to political calculation—to the perceived imperative not to get crosswise with the party’s vast Evangelical wing. No news there, I grant you. What interests me, however, is the cluster of assumptions lurking behind the calculation: that Falwell, having been among the progenitors of the religious right, continued to have great sway with it; that the movement he created still reflects his predispositions and temperament; and that, therefore, even in death, Falwell will continue to cast a long shadow over the 2008 campaign.

It’s not just the Republican candidates who share these assumptions, by the way, but liberals, moderates, and the mainstream media. They were embedded in most of the obituaries and commentary that flowed in the days after Falwell punched his ticket. The only trouble is that, on closer inspection, nearly all of them turn out to be wrong—and wrong in ways that may have important implications for the campaign that lies ahead.

A good place to start is with the Evangelical movement itself. Accounting for more than a quarter of the American population, it’s certainly a force to be reckoned with, not least politically. In 2004, Evangelicals accounted for fully 40 percent of the votes cast for George W. Bush. (Another 8 percent each were provided by traditionalist Catholics and traditionalist mainline Protestants). But unlike in Falwell’s heyday, the center of gravity of the Evangelical world is no longer the rural South; it’s the suburbs and exurbs of the West, Southwest, and Midwest. The movement is younger, better educated, and richer than it was at the height of the Moral Majority. And it’s centered increasingly around the burgeoning megachurch phenomenon.

The face of that phenomenon plainly isn’t, and never was, Jerry Falwell—or Pat Robertson, James Dobson, or any of the other superannuated Elmer Gantryesque boobs whom the press typically paints as such. The face of the modern Evangelical movement belongs instead to Rick Warren, the pastor of Orange County, California’s Saddleback Church (regular attendance: 20,000) and the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold more hardback copies (over 25 million) than any nonfiction book in history.

Now, on many social issues, Warren is just as conservative as Falwell. Abortion, bad. Gay marriage, bad. Etc. But whereas Falwell described aids as “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” Warren has donated millions of dollars to fight HIV in Africa. Whereas Falwell bemoaned the emerging strain of Evangelical environmentalism as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus,” Warren declares, “The environment is a moral issue.” And regarding his pro-life stance, Warren says, “I’m just not rabid about it.”

Not surprisingly, Warren is at pains to distance himself from Falwell and his cohort. “I’m just tired of having other people represent me and represent the hundreds of thousands of churches where the pastors I’ve trained would nowhere, no way, relate to some of the supposed spokesman of a previous generation,” he told a Pew Forum gathering in 2005. Among Evangelicals, in fact, there was widespread horror and disgust with Falwell’s comments after 9/11, when he blamed the attacks on “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays.”

“The plate tectonics are shifting,” says Bill Galston, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of Public Matters: Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century. “Many younger Evangelicals are uncomfortable with what they regard as a narrowing of the religious agenda. They regard some of the older leaders as extreme, embarrassing. Meanwhile, some of the more conservative Evangelicals are rethinking their abandonment of the traditional Protestant mistrust of salvation in the public sphere. I think all this represents a slow shift in the direction of a broader and more centrist discussion.”

None of which is to say that Evangelicals aren’t still, by and large, “values voters.” But, as Galston points out, even among traditionalist Evangelicals, personal values (such as honesty and responsibility) and family values (such as trying to protect kids from sex and violence on TV and the Internet) rank higher in importance than social issues such as abortion and gay rights. This helps explain how, in 2004, foreign policy turned into a values issue for these voters, and why the character assaults on John Kerry were pivotal, especially for traditionalist Catholics, who swung toward Bush dramatically.

Galston and other experts believe that Bush’s trouncing of Kerry among Evangelicals (by 78 to 22 percent) almost certainly will prove a topping-out point for the GOP. “For a community as large and diverse as Evangelicals,” Pew Forum fellow John Green observes, “for somebody to get almost four-fifths of the vote, we’re pretty close to the theoretical maximum.” To Green’s way of thinking, that astronomical support has much to do with the “special relationship” Bush has with Evangelicals. “It is unlikely the Republicans will be able to repeat Bush’s success with these religious groups in the near future,” he says—and, indeed, Democrats took back a few percentage points in the 2006 elections from both Evangelicals and Catholics.

And what of 2008? On the GOP side, one of the persistent mysteries of the campaign so far is how on earth the party’s three leading candidates could be Giuliani, McCain, and Romney—not one of whom has convinced many religious voters that he is one of them. And it’s worth considering that the explanation has to do with the changing nature and priorities of the Evangelical electorate, and in particular with the waning of its most culturally extreme elements. Certainly we need some kind of avant-garde theory to cope with the anomaly of Giuliani, whose social-liberal record and, ahem, colorful private life should long ago have consigned him to the Falwellian dustbin for discarded pagans. But because of the sense that the fight against terrorism is the predominant issue of the age, religious voters seem remarkably open to him.

Equally intriguing are the possibilities on the Democratic side. After 2004, all manner of analyses asserted that the party was suffering from a “God gap.” In particular, there was the research that showed a precipitous decline in the percentage of Americans who regard the Democrats as friendly toward religion—from 42 percent in 2003 to 29 percent in 2005.

But the Democratic gains, however slight, among religious voters in 2006 suggest that the party may, just may, be closing the God gap—a very big deal, if true. In 2006, Democrats won 27 percent of the Evangelical vote across the country and even more in certain contests. “If the Democrats could win 35 percent,” says Green, “many races, even in the South, would become very competitive … In the big swing states of the Midwest, 35 percent … might guarantee a Democratic victory.”

This is why Galston, an architect of the New Democratic faith and a former Clinton White House official, has been pounding on the party to repair its irreligious image. And he is not alone. “Democrats finally got the message—2004 was a wake-up call,” he says, and it’s hard to deny the evidence thus far on the presidential hustings. Here you have Hillary Clinton, eschewing the language that describes abortion as a morally neutral medical procedure and arguing instead for an aggressive strategy to reduce its frequency. And there you have Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate most at ease in talking about the importance of his faith since … well, Bill Clinton.

No one should discount the inherent difficulties Democrats face in dealing with religion. Unlike Republicans, who because of the God-fearing composition of their electoral coalition can ignore nonreligious voters, Democrats must undertake a balancing act: reaching out to the devout without offending their secular base. But for the first time in a long time, hairline cracks seem to be appearing in the edifice of opposition they face from religious voters—just as Giuliani may be discovering that Evangelicals aren’t as monolithic a voting bloc as everyone has presumed. Here’s hoping these trends continue unabated, if for no other reason than that they’d cause Falwell to start spinning like a dervish in his grave.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

The Dems’ Next War

2008-06-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

In the closing days of a campaign that would consign his party to minority status in Congress and himself to lame-duckhood, George W. Bush addressed the election’s defining issue with a consistent refrain. When it came to the war in Iraq, Bush declared, “the Democrats have no plan for victory. They have no idea how to win. Harsh criticism is not a plan for victory.”

Bush’s argument was desperate, flailing, and, of course, ultimately futile. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have the ring of truth about it. Indeed, throughout the campaign, and especially in its final month, Democrats had placed front and center their critique of the administration’s catastrophic mishandling of the war. They had called incessantly, loudly, vaguely, for a “change of course” in Iraq. And they had demanded (it turns out, hallelujah, effectively) the pomaded head of Donald Rumsfeld on a platter. What they hadn’t done by any stretch, however, was lay out a plausible and coherent alternative to Bush’s lunatic stay-the-course-ism.

For an opposition party that controls no branch of government—one that could argue credibly that it bore little responsibility for getting us into Iraq and had even less capacity to get us out—such a strategy had much to commend it, at least politically. QED. Yet the very success of that strategy on November 7 rendered it inoperative for the future. As both a political and practical matter, from the moment the Democrats take control of the House and Senate in January, they will be under pressure to come up with a unified approach to bringing America’s calamitous adventure with Iraq to a non-apocalyptic end. How and whether the Democrats rise to that challenge will have large implications for the party’s putative resurgence—and the early signs are that the process may not be very pretty.

To understand why, you need only spend a little time reflecting on Joe Biden and Jack Murtha. No Democratic senator has been more visible (and voluble) on Iraq than Biden. And no Democratic congressman has a higher national profile on the issue than Murtha. But when I talked to Biden the other day, he instantly put a mile’s distance between them. “We’re kidding ourselves if we think there isn’t a real distinction between Jack Murtha and Joe Biden,” he said. “Jack and a number of other Democrats, more in the House than the Senate, have reached the conclusion that Iraq is lost; that there is no way to turn lemons into even a bitter lemonade. And then there are those of us who still think that if real corrective action is taken quickly, it’s possible to turn those lemons into a palatable lemonade—not good-tasting but palatable.”

Last spring, Biden and Les Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, put forward a detailed plan for doing just that. In outline, the plan calls for giving up the notion that a Western-style liberal democracy can be achieved in Iraq—and instead forging a settlement whereby the nation would be turned into a loose federation of three regions dominated, respectively, by the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. To secure the support of the Sunnis, they would be guaranteed a proportional share of Iraq’s oil revenues. The U.S. would convene a regional summit and seek to sign up Syria, Iran, and other neighboring countries to a nonaggression pact. International peacekeepers would be enlisted to patrol hot zones such as Baghdad; a new reconstruction program would be started. And American troops would be drawn down gradually throughout 2007—though with no date-certain specified at the outset for withdrawal.

Even critics of Biden’s plan, who fear that dividing Iraq in three is a recipe for sectarian mayhem, praise its seriousness and rigor. Biden tells me he’s convinced—“I don’t have any inside information, but I’d be shocked if this isn’t true”—that many of its elements are being incorporated by the Iraq Study Group, the highly touted task force headed by Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton that will probably release its recommendations in the next few weeks. Biden says he considers the ISG a cause for hope, “because it might be the cocoon out of which comes a bipartisan agreement that gets the president to change course.” In fact, he is already working feverishly behind the scenes to stitch together a cross-party consensus in the Senate— talking to Republicans such as Chuck Hagel, Dick Lugar, and John Warner—around something like his plan.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, however, the picture is rather different. There, Murtha is gearing up for a bruising fight with Maryland congressman Steny Hoyer for the job of House majority leader. That Murtha is a tenable candidate at all owes almost entirely to his decision, a year ago, to announce that he favored the immediate pullout of American troops from Iraq—a decision that, coming from a conservative, 74-year-old veteran with close ties to the military, carried enormous political weight. For a time, Murtha’s “plan” for redeployment drove certain Democratic leaders (including Nancy Pelosi) to distraction; today, his prescience makes him a seminal figure, a kind of seer. But when I tried to figure out exactly what the plan consisted of, I discovered there was nothing beyond a call to bring home troops by “the earliest practicable date.”

“It’s not a plan—it’s a cry of pain!” says Biden. “Jack sees his beloved military getting crushed by the burden and the weight of this war. He goes over to Walter Reed and sees these boys and he aches.” Biden goes on. “Jack thinks that there’s nothing retrievable in Iraq. There’s a lot of people I admire—hard-nosed guys like [Zbigniew] Brzezinski—who have concluded that, look, a civil war is inevitable; just figure out a way to contain it … But if you reach that conclusion, the question is, what’s Plan B? What are you going to do to diminish the prospects of this turning into a regional war?”

On some level, you might think that, for Democrats, Biden’s questions are merely academic. Although the party will soon control Congress, the military and diplomatic apparatuses still belong to Bush. So no matter how unified the Democrats emerge on Iraq, no matter how exacting and meticulous are their proposals, no matter how hard they push, the president still has it within his power to damn the torpedoes and plunge ahead. “It’s virtually impossible for a congressional party to formulate foreign policy,” Biden said. “All we get to do is react.”

Biden believes that, regarding Iraq, “it’s possible to turn those lemons into a palatable lemonade.”

Yet Biden also knows that the Democrats’ internal wrangling over Iraq has the potential to be explosively divisive, as the antiwar left and the Netroots make demands that party centrists may find extreme. And he knows that voters will be watching the party carefully to see which route it takes. There can be no doubt that the results of the 2006 midterms constitute a stinging and nearly total repudiation of Bush’s management of the war and his handling of foreign affairs more broadly. What they don’t amount to, though, is a ringing endorsement of Democratic leadership in those areas—not least because the party, by design, turned the campaign into a referendum on Bush and not into a choice between two competing visions of dealing with the world.

If the Democrats hope to translate their remarkable gains this year into a period of dominance, the essential victory is still to come: the White House in 2008. And for that win to happen, Democrats will need to overcome the longstanding doubts that voters have about them regarding national security. Like it or not, we still live in a dangerous time—an age of terror, even. And like it or not, cleaning up the mess in Iraq involves more than merely bugging out.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

Missing McCain

2008-06-09T06:16:00.001-07:00

By John Heilemann

The speed and severity of the unraveling of John McCain’s bid for the presidency is nearly impossible to capture—but let me offer one small anecdote that’s as revealing in retrospect as it is darkly ironic.

Just four months ago, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard hosted an intimate gathering of operatives from the campaigns of McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney. Despite Giuliani’s lead in national polls, the consensus around the table was that McCain was the race’s front-runner. His lead in endorsements was noted, as was the strength of his organization and the size of his retinue. (“There’s a few people here we haven’t hired yet,” joked the McCain campaign’s chief executive, Rick Davis.) At the end of the session, moderator Mark Halperin, then the political director of ABC News and now at Time, posed a final question to the assembled adjutants, turning first to Davis: “Will the senior campaign team that is currently in place for Senator McCain be in place in December, yes or no?” To which Davis replied, provoking much hilarity, “It will only get bigger.”

The temptation here is to describe the peals that attended Davis’s self-mockery as prescient, knowing. But the truth is that no one in that room would ever have predicted the staggering meltdown—the anemic fund-raising, which has left McCain’s campaign with fewer dollars on hand than Republican no-hoper Ron Paul has, requiring a radical downsizing of McCain’s organization; the decline in his poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, which has left him trailing not only Romney and Giuliani but often ghost candidate Fred Thompson; and now the immolation of his brain trust, which has left him without the counsel of his master strategist, John Weaver—that McCain has suffered since then.

It would be pleasingly counterintuitive to declare that McCain, at this, his lowest moment, is now poised for a miraculous recovery. Indeed, I’ve been itching to write exactly that all through his recent free fall. But, alas, the contrarian impulse has its limits. Though it’s not impossible to conjure a narrative in which McCain wins the nomination, doing so requires half a bottle of Maker’s Mark, followed by a nitrous-oxide chaser. A more sober assessment of his predicament suggests the Straight Talk Express may be up on blocks before 2008 arrives—and that, in turn, raises a blunt question for a man who prizes bluntness above all: Why not walk away right now and avoid further humiliation?

It’s difficult to imagine a more embarrassing week, of course, than the one he’s just endured. A week, that is, in which his campaign was revealed for what it had become: an acrimonious clusterfuck. Here you had a campaign manager, Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush-Cheney 2004, as impervious to the concept of fiscal discipline as his former boss, the president. (“An organization in Alabama?” a Republican strategist marvels. “That’s not the Bush-Cheney campaign; it’s a parody of the Bush-Cheney campaign.”) Here you had Davis, whose fund-raising forecast of $120 million for 2007 was vastly higher than any Republican, let alone McCain, has any hope of achieving. And here you had Weaver, who’d worked with Davis in 2000 and despised him so intensely that when Davis was bequeathed the forced-out Nelson’s job, Weaver preferred to abandon his longtime patron rather than carry on.

Operational infighting and disarray are nothing new in presidential machines, particularly when a would-be juggernaut morphs into a sputtering jalopy. “The staffing and budget issues are just symptoms,” Dan Schnur, McCain’s communications savant in 2000, tells me. “This is what happens when you try to run an Establishment campaign with a non-Establishment candidate. The decision to go that route was understandable, defensible. It’s traditionally how you win the Republican nomination. But it was never going to work for McCain, because it isn’t who he is.”

Needless to say, as wretched as McCain’s organization has been, the core of his electoral problems revolve precisely around who he is. His ardent support for George W. Bush’s troop surge into Iraq, and his hawkishness on the war in general, have cost him the affection of the moderate Republicans and independent voters who flocked to him in 2000. (They have also turned the media—which in sunnier times McCain referred to as “my base”—against him.) His liberal position on immigration has served as a reminder to hard-line conservatives that he isn’t one of them, crippling his efforts to prove otherwise with, for example, his nauseating courtship of the religious right (which wasn’t working anyway). Perhaps because of all this, the McCain on display in 2007 has been a grim shadow of his former self: sour, cranky, uninspiring, lifeless, and uncomfortable in his skin.

Dramatic though it was, the McCain staff shake-up is likely to have close to zero effect on any of these factors. So what happens now? It seems to me that there are two broad scenarios, neither of them pretty.

The first scenario is that McCain’s campaign collapses ignominiously before the end of the year. For all practical purposes, his operation today is broke, and with the stench of death now shrouding the endeavor, the reluctance of donors to whip out their checkbooks is certain to become even more acute. In a startling burst of candor, Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire who serves as McCain’s national campaign co-chairman, raised this very specter last week. “If he doesn’t recover financially and in the polls by the fall, it will be very difficult for him to continue,” Rudman told the New Hampshire Union Leader. (When your campaign co-chair starts using the conditional when speaking of your survival, you know that you’re in deep caca.)

McCain’s early exit, naturally, would reshuffle the Republican deck. The most obvious beneficiary would be Giuliani: His social liberalism might appeal to moderates still wedded to McCain—and his increasing bellicosity on foreign policy (please note the recent addition of Norman Podhoretz to his roster of advisers) might attract those who venerate McCain’s militarism. Fred Thompson, too, assuming that he enters the race and adopts a hard-line posture on national security, might benefit similarly. And while Romney, whose gathering potency in Iowa and New Hampshire have arguably made him the new front-runner, might reap the fewest migrating voters, the extinction of the McCain opposition-research squad, which has sought relentlessly to poison Romney in the press, would surely be seen as a welcome development by Mr. Headroom.

The second scenario is that McCain survives until January through a combination of creative financing, bare-bones operations, and a root-and-branch strategic rethink. On the money side, the campaign has said it’s considering accepting federal matching funds for the primaries, which would immediately bring in $6 million and up to $21 million total. And rumors are circulating that the campaign intends to shift its focus to New Hampshire (the site of his upset of Bush in 2000) and South Carolina (with its large population of veterans), while forgoing Iowa, which McCain skipped last time around and where he’s currently weakest.

For McCain to have any prayer of resurrection will require more than this sort of retooling, however. It will require him to resuscitate his previous image—and for voters to buy it. “Maybe he goes back to the tiniest New Hampshire high-school gym he visited in 1999,” posits Schnur. “One of McCain’s greatest strengths is his willingness to admit mistakes. He may be the best apologizer in American politics. So he acknowledges the obvious. He says, ‘I’ve been trying to be somebody I’m not. Now I’m starting over.’ ”

The troubles with this scenario are many and glaring. If McCain does accept public money, his campaign will be bound by state-by-state spending restrictions—many of which are so tight that they would put him at a daunting disadvantage. (The limit for New Hampshire would be a mere $818,000.) Skipping Iowa would increase the chances of a Romney victory there, which would in turn make him all the more formidable in New Hampshire. Then there’s the matter of whether McCain’s new campaign chief is cut out to run a guerrilla operation. In 2000, Weaver often railed about the bureaucratization and sclerosis endemic to McCain headquarters. He dubbed the place “the Pentagon”—and Davis was its SecDef. “Rick is good at many things,” says a Republican strategist who knows him well, “but insurgencies are not among them.”

Even on the most optimistic reading, what this scenario envisions, in essence, is McCain as the Republican John Edwards: a candidate placing all of his chips on a single state (in McCain’s case, New Hampshire; in Edwards’s, Iowa) and hoping that a victory there will create sufficient momentum to carry him through the others. If you’re in the mood to be Panglossian, you might observe that although being the Republican Edwards plainly is not ideal, it’s conceivably better than being the new Bob Dole—the role that McCain seemed destined to play had he maintained his front-running status.

For more than a few Republicans, no doubt, the fall of McCain is a cause for rejoicing. But I wonder if they’ll feel that way when all is said and done. McCain’s flaws are real enough, but no one can dispute that he’s a serious man, with serious ideas, who would have seriously changed the GOP, a party in a serious state of crisis. Nothing similar can remotely be said of what remains of the Republican top tier. McCain’s marginalization leaves them all floating, weightless, barely tethered to reality, short of ideas and gravitas, let alone convictions. I suspect that they will miss him more and sooner than they now know.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

The Loneliest President

2008-06-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

Photo-illustration by Michael Elins

(Photo: Corbis)

Back in the Fall of 1994, when he was running for the governorship of Texas, I spent the better part of a week on a bus with George W. Bush. And all the stories you’ve heard are true: Up close and personal, avant le deluge, Bush was a winning figure. He was charming, savvy, and not half as dumb or allergic to policy as I’d been given to believe; he seemed inclined to a mode of moderate conservatism not that different from his father’s; he had even demonstrated a brand of political courage—resisting the demonization of illegal immigrants—rare in the GOP. Like a lot of people who first encountered Bush in those days, I came away impressed. And, also like a lot of people, I have spent a fair amount of the past six years wondering what the hell became of that guy.

And so I was intrigued this past November, when a number of old Bush hands averred that the Republicans’ drubbing at the polls might compel a resurrection of Bush’s pre-presidential persona—and thus might actually be good for him. “It creates a real opportunity where potentially he could get more things done with a Democratic Congress,” one Bush confidant told me. “He is very pragmatic. He’s said he doesn’t want to warm the seat. He wants to get things done. So it could be a very interesting couple of years.”

Today, of course, it’s screamingly obvious how naïve—nay, fantastical—such notions were. Sure, Bush’s State of the Union was littered with halfhearted nods to bipartisanship. Yet on the central, seminal question of Iraq, he has adopted a course no less bloody-minded (literally) and confrontational than his approach for the past four years. By ordering a new infusion of troops, he has not only extended a defiant middle finger to the Democratic congressional majority and the American public. He has gravely imperiled his own party’s future, rendering himself a pariah among all but his most lunatic supporters—and his non-Iraq agenda DOA.

All of which raises a pair of pressing and intertwined questions. Whatever else one thinks of Bush and his lieutenants, their political acumen has always been estimable—last year’s rout notwithstanding. But now they seem to be pursuing their aims in a manner clueless, reckless, and hopeless. Has Bush simply lost touch with political reality? Or has he actually lost his mind?

Among veterans of prior administrations, the consensus is that Bush is almost certainly as untethered as he appears—and that the condition is far from unprecedented. “By the second half of a second term,” said one of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet secretaries, “even a halfway intelligent president has (1) scraped the bottom of the barrel of the talent pool, so the aides and advisers are third-rate at best; (2) adopted a bunker mentality that disregards and disdains all criticism; and (3) basically stopped giving a shit about what anyone outside his inner circle thinks. For a quarter-way intelligent president, like Bush, these impediments are far more serious, because the only sources of true thought lie beyond the periphery of his bunker.”

Yet it’s worth considering the possibility that Bush’s madman-at-the-wheel métier owes as much to psychological factors as to structural ones. For some time now, armchair psychiatrists have argued that Bush suffers from a classic case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, citing his sense of grandiosity (“I’m the decider”), his arrogance and lack of empathy, and his tendency to surround himself with sycophants as evidence. Certainly, Bush seems to be in the grip of something close to a bona fide delusion (“a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes,” says the DSM-IV) about the situation in Iraq—and in a state of near-clinical denial about the likelihood that his policy there has irretrievably failed.

How else to explain his rejection of the proposals put forward by the Iraq Study Group? Utterly unexpected, baffling on its face, Bush’s decision may well be judged the most pivotal of his last two years in office—and the 2008 election cycle. For here the president and his party were handed an exit strategy on a silver salver: a set of recommendations leading to a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops that most Democrats would have swallowed hard and signed onto. Not that Iraq would then have magically vanished as an issue. But it would no longer have been an exclusively Republican responsibility—or an exclusively Republican nightmare.

By giving the back of his hand to the ISG, therefore, Bush smacked his party upside the head, too—and then administered an even crueler blow by ordering the surge. That Republicans, by and large, believe that Bush’s behavior demonstrates that he no longer gives a good Goddamn about their electoral fortunes was manifestly clear last week on Capitol Hill. And it will be even clearer in the week ahead, when any number of GOP players agree to one or another of the symbolic votes registering disapproval of Bush’s war-management policy. As one of the most prominent dissenters, Maine senator Susan Collins, put it succinctly at a breakfast the morning after the State of the Union, Iraq is “not a very happy subject” for congressional Republicans.

For Collins, who like 20 other Senate GOP incumbents is up for reelection in 2008, the solution is relatively simple: Run as fast and as far away from the president as her pumps will carry her. Infinitely more complicated—and more perilous—are the calculations facing the crop of Republican presidential wannabes. All recognize that getting nominated by an overwhelmingly conservative primary electorate more or less requires sticking with the president. Yet all realize that being implicated further in the greatest foreign-policy calamity in a generation could doom them in a general election. The horns of this dilemma are jabbing with particularly violent force into the side of John McCain, who six months ago was widely viewed by the political class as our likeliest next president—but whose position now, with the body count in Baghdad destined to rise instead of fall for at least another year, seems conspicuously more tenuous.

Meanwhile, Bush’s gambit has only strengthened and emboldened the Democrats. By consensus, newly minted Virginia senator Jim Webb’s brisk and forceful State of the Union response was the best such Democratic riposte in years; more to the point, it signaled that the party, long cowed by the fear of being portrayed as McGovernite pansies on matters of national security, may at last see political advantage in adopting a more assertive voice. At the same time, by doubling down on a losing hand, Bush has only buttressed the appeal of putative anti-warriors John Edwards and Barack Obama. He’s even provided Hillary Clinton what she’s long been craving: a way of plausibly positioning herself as standing athwart his plans for Iraq despite having voted to authorize them at the start.

Maybe it’s true what many Republicans suspect: Bush doesn’t care a whit anymore about the future of the party. But you’d think that, if he really wishes not merely “to warm the seat,” he would care about his capacity to chalk up a few domestic wins before the clock runs out. Yet Bush seems to believe that the pursuit of such victories won’t be terminally impeded by the furor without end over Iraq. To which the only reply must be: Fat chance, bub.

To any impartial observer, the conclusion here is fairly inescapable: We are looking at a presidency that is, for all practical political purposes, finished—except to the extent that Bush can wreak more havoc by means of his monomania. The cynical interpretation of his recent moves is that he is stalling, trying to buy himself a few more months of time, praying that something, anything, will happen in Iraq that will let him claim a kind of victory, however trifling or evanescent. But I don’t quite buy that theory. The more convincing explanation is that Bush believes he is playing for history now—hence his obsessive focus on the single issue that he believes, rightly, will define his legacy. Where we see a failed president in Bush, he looks in the mirror and sees himself as a leader who pursued a burdensome, painful path and whose vindication will be meted out long after he has left office. As a righteous man who forged ahead in the face of weak-willed and wrongheaded opposition, in particular the impulse toward appeasement. As Harry Truman. As Winston Churchill.

Pathological narcissism? Delusions of grandeur? Res ipsa loquitur. There have been other presidents, of course, who could readily be described as suffering from these same maladies. (All of them, you could argue.) But not since Richard Nixon has Washington seen a case so severe—or so tragic. Today, Bush’s poll numbers are mired at Nixonian levels circa Watergate. He is similarly isolated, similarly aggrieved, similarly blinded to his own faults and follies. Similarly out to lunch, that is. (Though he hasn’t yet invited Dick Cheney to pray with him in the Oval Office—at least as far as we know.) And he is also similarly unloved and unlamented by the very pols who so recently fetishized and fawned over him.

How unloved? How unlamented? After the State of the Union, ABC’s political director, Mark Halperin, speculated that, if a secret ballot were held in Congress to end the Bush presidency, it would pass “by a margin of, oh, 500 to 35.” In a week of shopping that hypothetical on the Hill, I found not a single person ready to dispute it.

The Right Man

2008-06-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

By John Heilemann

Willard Mitt Romney enters the press room at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, where a conclave of conservative GOP congressmen has gathered to plot its resurrection. Assuming his place before the cameras, the former Massachusetts governor checks the floor to find his mark: two strips of white tape forming a small X on the low-pile carpet beneath his feet. Romney plants his shoes squarely on the X and starts offering answers so tightly scripted and robotic that he brings to mind Max Headroom—then, all of a sudden, he’s distracted and off-kilter. “This white spot on the floor here, this marker, is stuck to my heel here,” he mutters, staring downward and doing a little jig, ignoring the question just put to him (on Iran) until the damn thing finally falls from his loafer.

The metaphor suggested by Romney’s performance is too perfect to resist. By all accounts, including his own, Romney has been for most of his life a middle-of-the-road Republican of moderate views on issues from abortion to gun control to taxes. But ever since he decided to run for president—a decision he will make official on February 13—he has labored to present himself as a rock-ribbed man of the right. He has hired a team of White Tape People to tell him where he needs to stand to win his party’s nomination. He has gamely hit his marks. And yet now, just as Romney seemed to be establishing a foothold, he finds himself increasingly tangled up in his own inconvenient record.

The conspicuous and occasionally ruinous flip-floppery of presidential candidates is nothing new, of course. (See Kerry, John, 2004.) Nor is avid pandering to the GOP’s extremist constituencies by previously non-wing-nut Republicans. (See McCain, John, 2008.) Romney’s offenses in both these categories are, no doubt, egregious. But the fact that, in spite of his current struggles, Romney is still taken seriously illustrates a number of the central dynamics driving the campaign on the Republican side. At a moment when the Democrats, miraculously, have at hand a troika of top-tier candidates—Clinton, Obama, Edwards—who are capable of drawing thousands-strong crowds (in early 2007, for heaven’s sake) and look like eminently credible winners, the GOP is saddled with a crop of hopefuls at once uninspiring and implausible. Also with a president who seems determined to dig the already-cavernous hole in which the party is mired all the way to China. As Republican despond edges toward despair, the desperate search for a savior is beginning to kick into high gear. Hence the rise of Romney.

At first glance, he has the appearance of an attractive standard-bearer. A successful businessman (he made a fortune as the CEO of Bain & Company and founder of Bain Capital) and organizer of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics before becoming the Bay State’s governor, in office he pushed for the passage of a health-care reform plan applauded on both the right and the left. He’s well spoken and great-looking, with blindingly white teeth and a head of hair that rivals Ronald Reagan’s in the annals of Republican follicular achievement.

But Romney’s drawbacks are as glaring as his assets—starting with his Mormonism. “Look, let’s be honest, Mormons are weird,” says a former Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Massachusetts, voicing a view widely shared by secularists and Evangelicals alike. (According to a recent poll, only 38 percent of voters say they’d definitely consider backing a Mormon for president.) Romney, a church “elder” who served as a missionary and whose great-grandfather had five wives, will surely attempt to deal with the issue by pulling a JFK: declaring that his faith would never impinge on his political obligations. Equally likely is that he’ll abandon lame-ass humor as a tactic, given that his japes in the past—“I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman … and a woman … and a woman,” he cracked to Don Imus last year—seem, unsurprisingly, to have put no one’s mind at ease.

At the moment, however, Romney’s religion is causing him fewer headaches than his policy gymnasticism. As a challenger to Ted Kennedy in 1994 and in his 2002 statehouse bid, Romney was unequivocally pro-choice (“I believe that abortion should be safe and legal”). Today, he is just as unequivocally pro-life. On gun control, Romney in 1994 supported the Brady bill and a ban on assault weapons, adding, “I don’t line up with the NRA.” Today, he declares, “I’m a member of the NRA.” On gay rights, in 1994 and 2002, Romney argued that he’d be a more aggressive advocate of domestic partnerships than his Democratic foes—and then did little, in the view of the right, to resist the legalization of gay marriage in his state. Today, Romney thunders against the latter concept and against civil unions too. Same story on stem-cell research.

Bad as all this reads on paper, it’s even worse on video. And here Romney has run smack up against one of the defining realities of the 2008 campaign: YouTube, where clips of the old Romney stating his liberalish social views with apparently firm conviction have been on display for weeks. “Words on a page have an intellectual impact,” says Californian Republican media strategist Dan Schnur, “but words captured on video have much more emotional impact.” A print gotcha, in other words, makes a candidate look inconsistent or craven. A YouTube gotcha makes him look as if his pants are a towering inferno.

Romney doesn’t need to be loved by the right. “He just needs to be the tallest jockey at the track,” says a consultant.

Thus is Romney scrambling around the country, meeting with the hard-right brigades, offering deeply—deeply!—felt reassurances that he is really—really!—one of them. These reassurances take the form of a narrative, in which Romney, while grappling with the stem-cell question, meets with researchers and experiences a road-to-Damascus conversion. “I concluded that we should be wary of people who experiment with life, who experiment with our kids, and who toy with the building blocks of family and society,” he said in Baltimore. “On the issue of life, this fiscal conservative became a social conservative.”

How convincing is he about all this? To my mind, not very. God knows any half-sane columnist will defend to the death the right to change one’s mind. Yet the timing of Romney’s policy U-turns—at precisely the moment when he first got that I’m-a-gonna-run-for-president gleam in his eye—inevitably raises suspicions. What can you say about a guy who used to maintain that his role model was his father, former moderate Michigan governor George Romney, but now leaves his dad conspicuously off the list of his political heroes, instead citing Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower?

Needless to say, what matters isn’t what people like me might say but whether Republicans find Romney’s account of his switcheroos persuasive. And here the news is no less grim for Mitt. According to the latest Fox News poll, Romney’s support among Republicans nationally fell from 8 percent in December to just 3 percent at the end of January. To a large extent, Romney’s desultory numbers reflect low name recognition. But that they’re trending down instead of up should be, must be, freaking him out, even at this early stage.

In truth, the emergence of Romney as a top-tier candidate in the eyes of political insiders has had less to do with his strengths than with the staggering weakness of the Republican field. Until last fall, the putative front-runners for the support of the GOP’s Establishment conservative faction were senators George Allen and Bill Frist. But Frist was laid low by his joined-at-the-hipness to George W. Bush, while Allen consigned himself to the ash can of history by losing to Jim Webb in Virginia. Giuliani and McCain, despite their dogged efforts to assuage the right, continue to be viewed warily there—the former for his own social liberalism, the latter for his manifold betrayals to the cause eight years ago. And though Christianist wannabes such as Kansas senator Sam Brownback appeal to the GOP fringes, their obvious unelectability dooms them from the get-go.

The case for Romney’s viability, therefore, boils down to this: He’s the minimally acceptable man to the right who has a chance of winning. “Social conservatives rarely get their first choice, but they have veto power,” says Schnur, McCain’s communications director in 2000. “Romney doesn’t need to be their best friend; he just needs to be better than McCain or Giuliani. He needs to be the tallest jockey at the track.”

Can Romney be the Willie Shoemaker of presidential politics? Maybe so—but the more likely outcome, it seems to me, is that he’ll be the Pete Wilson of 2008. Back in 1995, recall, Wilson was the au courant Republican governor (of California) who was going to sweep into the presidential race and vanquish all before him. Like Romney, Wilson hailed from a state with a history of spawning presidential nominees. Like Romney, he had access to big money and a record of policy innovation. And, like Romney, he was a moderate whose drift to the right (on immigration) seemed utterly inauthentic. Wilson exited the race before the first primary vote was cast.

A fair observer would point out that that parallel is by no means perfect. Romney has assembled an A-list campaign team with tons of national experience; Wilson didn’t. And, unlike Romney, Wilson refused to yield to, er, modify his pro-choice stance. Even so, the central similarity is undeniable—and so are its implications. The real problem for Romney, as it was for Wilson, is not that he’s a cultist or a contortionist but that he’s a hollow man. And there’s nothing that the White Tape People will be able to do about that.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

General Alarm for Rudy

2008-06-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

An air of aching familiarity hovered over the anti–Rudy Giuliani rally staged last week on Park Avenue by an array of aggrieved 9/11 families, firefighters, and rescue workers. This was, after all, the fourth time the group, led by Deputy Fire Chief Jim Riches, who lost a son in the conflagration, has leveled its passel of 9/11-related charges—the comprehensive lack of preparedness, the faulty radios, the placement of the emergency command center in the WTC complex even after the 1993 bombing—against the former mayor. But familiar or not, the protest afforded Riches the chance to announce his long-term objective: “We intend to Swift-boat Rudy the way they Swift-boated Kerry,” he told the Daily News.

A normal presidential candidate would regard such a threat as at least mildly unnerving. But Giuliani more likely takes it as a kind of compliment—a sign that he has crossed the threshold, that he’s now the man to beat in the Republican presidential race. (Who would waste any energy plotting to Swift-boat Sam Brownback?) Projecting an image of presumptive nomineehood, in fact, has lately been at the center of his strategy: his trip to London, full of foreign-policy pronunciamento and saber-rattling toward Iran; his feral attacks on MoveOn.org over the Petraeus-Betray-Us ad; his declaration that 2008 will boil down to “Who does America want for their [sic] future, Rudolph Giuliani or Hillary Clinton?”

In political circles, the reaction to the notion that Giuliani—with his record of out-front social liberalism, soap-operatic personal life, and dabbling in transvestism—might actually become the GOP standard-bearer has long been McEnroe-esque: You cannot be serious! Yet Giuliani has led in virtually every national poll since he declared his candidacy. The entry of Fred Thompson, who has come across more like Deputy Dawg than a plausible Rudy-slayer, has done little to change that. And although Giuliani trails Mitt Romney by double digits in Iowa, he’s within striking distance of first in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he tops the field in Florida and California. Translation: It could happen.

Even so, Giuliani remains a highly problematic candidate, just not in the ways that so many assume. The received wisdom has always held that Rudy would make a formidable general-election contender yet a prohibitively weak one in the Republican primaries. Eight months into the campaign, however, it strikes me that the reality might prove precisely the opposite—that Giuliani may be the candidate most in tune with the GOP primary electorate, but that the very qualities that have served his cause best so far would cripple his chances in the general.

I caught up with Giuliani recently in Washington, where he’d come for his much-anticipated audience before the National Rifle Association. By now, you will have already absorbed the highlights of the occasion: Rudy’s awkward stabs at tension-defusing humor (“It’s great to be in England,” he said at the outset), the rank intellectual incoherence (the claim that 9/11 “cast somewhat of a different light on the Second Amendment”), and, of course, the freaky-deaky cell-phone call from Judi. What the press reports failed to convey, however, is the sheer discomfort that Giuliani conveyed at being in front of this crowd, the way that his body language seemed to be harrumphing “If I must.”

And yet he came. He made the effort. And although he manifestly didn’t conquer—I’d wager that he didn’t win a single convert in that room—he emerged without even a flesh wound. He paid respect and gained some, too.

Giuliani’s campaign has not been replete with Sister Souljah moments, and far from challenging the NRA, he engaged in some flip-floppery, disowning the lawsuit he filed as mayor against gun manufacturers. On immigration, too, he has thrown his transmission into reverse (1994 Rudy: “Some of the hardest-working and most productive people in this city are undocumented aliens”; 2007 Rudy: “People that come in illegally, we’ve got to stop”). But by the standards of, say, Romney, whose wholesale abandonment of his past persona—soon, I expect, he’ll be telling us he’s realized that he’s a Baptist and not a Mormon—has been mind-boggling in its totality, Giuliani has been a model of consistency. He has stuck with his stance in favor of a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Ditto on domestic partnerships.

That Giuliani has suffered so little for his heresies owes much to the ineptitude of his rivals. Consider the kid-glove treatment of the horror-cum-burlesque show that is Rudy’s personal life. The other day, Romney attempted to score points here—but instead of going for the jugular, he lunged for the capillaries, observing that “when it comes time to run against Hillary Clinton,” the Republican nominee will need “to bring all their family together as I have on the campaign trail.” Now, contrast this with the words, a few days earlier, of former Iowa governor and current Clinton co-chair Tom Vilsack: “I can’t even get into the number of marriages … and the relationship he has with his children,” he said, grinning. “He’s got a very interesting past.” Republicans, N.B.: That’s how you serve up chin music in the major leagues.

But Giuliani’s success has been about more than being blessed with subprime opponents. It’s been about his ability to frame both his candidacy and the contest in terms favorable to him. Forget about the social issues, he says, in effect, and focus on what matters: foreign terrorists and homegrown liberals, the two enemies that unite all of the factions of the GOP, which views them both as mortal threats to civilization. The core of his pitch is that only he is rough enough, tough enough, and mean enough to combat the threat of Islamofascism. And only he has the balls to keep the White House out of Clinton’s clutches. The image he offers of himself as president is badass-in-chief.

Giuliani says that his role model in all this is Ronald Reagan, but the analogy is flawed in a way that begins to suggest the troubles that he’d have in the general election. No doubt, Reagan’s character was marked by resoluteness, especially about the Soviet Union. But Reagan was, above all, a congenital—indeed, often mindlessly sunny—optimist. Giuliani, by contrast, is a pessimist from the top of his sweaty bald pate to the toes of his black wingtips. His vision of the world, as it was of New York, is dark, dark, dark. He conceives of the war on terror as a multifront conflict stretching out for decades, in which the only sane course is to be perpetually “on offense,” not least militarily.

In truth, Giuliani’s outlook resembles George W. Bush’s more than Reagan’s. If anything, his line on foreign policy is even harder, more impudent, than that of the current president (oh, how the mind doth reel). Giuliani assails the United Nations as “weak, indecisive, and outright corrupt.” He threatens to “set [Iran] back five or ten years” if it comes close to acquiring nukes. With his broadsides against MoveOn and Clinton—“the left of the left”—he is singing straight from Bush’s hymnal. Any number of his advisers, such as Chris Henick, a protégé of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, are masters of polarization. And then there’s the 9/11 thing, Bush’s trump card and now Giuliani’s. It’s fair to conclude that, with Rudy as the Republican nominee, 2008 could look very much like 2004 all over again.

A lot has changed on the political landscape in the past three years, however. The collapse in support for the Iraq war is the obvious example, and one that makes Giuliani’s bellicosity seem particularly ill-suited to the times. (I mean, really, how many voters in either party are in favor of less diplomacy than there’s been in this administration?) In 2006, the swing of independent voters from Republicans to Democrats cost the GOP control of Congress. With the economy looking iffy, the concerns of those voters have shifted to such issues as health care, about which Giuliani has nothing—apart from witlessly railing against “socialized medicine”—to say. With its assault on immigration, the GOP has alienated Hispanics, one of the groups that pushed Bush over the top in 2004. How will Giuliani’s tilt toward restrictionism play with them?

As for 9/11, anyone who’s read the book Grand Illusion, by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, will tell you that the evidence is quite compelling that Rudy’s performance on that awful day—and, crucially, before it—wasn’t all it’s been cracked up to be. And with critics like Riches and Jerry Hauer, Giuliani’s adviser for emergency preparedness, spoiling for a fight, Rudy’s glossy image as a hero could be in for some paint-peeling revisionism.

The broader point is this: For Republicans to have a chance in 2008, they will need a candidate willing to make a “clean break” with Bush and his policies, including on Iraq. That’s not me talking, it’s Newt Gingrich, though I couldn’t agree more. What Gingrich doesn’t say is that, for the GOP, falling back on polarization wouldn’t just be lazy but ill-considered. If Clinton does wind up the Democratic nominee, there will be an opening for a calm, coherent, pragmatic Republican to seize the center, which remains profoundly wary of her.

Giuliani’s adherents argue that he can do just that, as demonstrated by his repeat mayoral victories in this bluest of cities. Yet for all his moderation on cultural matters, Giuliani’s wins here weren’t built on a purplish appeal. His shtick was divide and conquer, polarize and demonize. And so it remains today. To the red-meat munchers who vote in Republican primaries, that might not sound so bad—especially when the alternatives are clowns or empty suits or both. But to the rest of the country, it will likely sound like a recipe for four more years all too much like the past seven.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

The Evita Factor

2008-06-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

The ad begins with a frozen image of Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy; on the audio track the former intones, “Soy Barack Obama y yo apruebo este mensaje.” The next shot features Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago, looking straight into the camera, speaking in Spanish, too. “We know what it feels like being used as a scapegoat just because of our background and our last name,” goes the English translation. “And no one understands this better than Barack Obama.”

The commercial, which went on the air this week in California and Arizona, is remarkable on a number of levels. There’s the bluntness of the language. There’s the crudeness of the appeal. There’s the way the ad plays the victim card with all the subtlety of Doyle Brunson slapping down a royal flush—something that Obama has refused to do in any other context. The other day, over a meal in Los Angeles, I asked two seasoned political pros what would happen if an adman proposed running a spot so artless, so thoroughly off-message, on English-language TV. Both responded without hesitation: The idea would be laughed out of the room.

That the Obama operation is running such an ad tells you a great deal—and not merely that it’s trafficking in the sort of identity politics it claims to abhor. It indicates just how much is at stake when it comes to the Hispanic vote on Super-Duper Tuesday, February 5. It reflects how aggressively, if perhaps belatedly, Team Obama is moving to prevent a royal culo-kicking among Latinos. But it also hints at something darker and more troubling for Democrats: that the race-tinged politics being practiced by both sides poses major risks down the road to whichever of them is left standing.

The importance of the Hispanic vote on February 5 can’t be overstated. Of the 22 states holding primaries or caucuses that day, there are seven in which Latinos make up more than 10 percent of the population. In 2006, they accounted for 19 percent of the vote in California, 10 percent in Illinois, 9 percent in New Jersey, and 7 percent in New York—the four biggest prizes in terms of delegates on Tuesday. As Simon Rosenberg, the head of the progressive advocacy group NDN, puts it, “Never before in American history have Hispanics had so much influence in picking a presidential nominee.”

From Hillary Clinton’s point of view, this is terrific news. In Nevada, the one state so far where Hispanics have been a major factor, she whupped Obama among those voters by a margin of 64 to 26. According to an L.A. Times/CNN/Politico poll this week, she holds a two-to-one advantage among Latinos in California. Polls in other heavily Hispanic states show a similar spread.

Why is Hillary so popular among Latinos? According to Obama, the answer boils down, as so much does, to her husband. “She’s inheriting goodwill that came from Bill Clinton,” he asserted in an interview with CBN News. Clinton, after all, was the first president to have two Hispanic Cabinet secretaries serve simultaneously. His immigration policies were tolerant; the economic boom over which he presided produced jobs in the barrio. Even at the height of Monicagate, his approval rating among Hispanics hovered at 70 percent.

For some constituencies, the dynastic implications of Hillary’s candidacy might be a turnoff. But for Hispanics … not so much. “There’s a whole long tradition in Latin America of strong women whose political careers are built on the backs of their husbands, who ran the country first,” one of Clinton’s advisers pointed out to me. “It’s happening again, right now, in Argentina, for example.” The strategist smiled slyly. “I guess you could say that Hillary is benefiting from the Evita effect.”

Whether the Evita effect is fact or fiction—“Something like 6o percent of Hispanics in this country are Mexican-American, and there’s no tradition like that in Mexico,” one prominent Hispanic politician scoffed when I put the theory to him—the Latino vote has long been at the center of the Clinton campaign’s strategy. Her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, is Hispanic; her guru in this area, Sergio Bendixen, is arguably the foremost Hispanic strategist in politics; her Über-savant Mark Penn once predicted to me that Latino Protestants would likely be the soccer moms of 2008. Employing targeted media and an array of high-end Hispanic endorsers—New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—the Clinton squad has worked this demo with enormous energy and focus.

But Clinton critics see something else at work in her bid for Hispanic votes, something uglier and more divisive: an effort to play off, and even exacerbate, historic tensions between brown and black voters. The campaign provided ammunition to its accusers when Bendixen was quoted by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker as saying, “The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” At the Las Vegas debate the following week, Clinton maintained that Bendixen was merely making “a historical statement.” And in a sense, this was true. But Lizza tells me that Bendixen cited a list of campaigns around the country where the dynamic in question held sway—suggesting that the campaign had studied the matter carefully and was counting on it as part of its crucial “Hispanic firewall” strategy for February 5.

I asked Federico Peña—who served both as Bill Clinton’s Transportation and Energy secretary and is now an Obama backer—what he thought of all this. “I think it’s outrageous,” he replied. “It’s what I would expect from a Republican candidate, frankly.” Peña went on to attempt to debunk the theory that Hispanic voters won’t support a black candidate, mentioning David Dinkins (who won 73 percent of the Latino vote in 1989), Mayor Harold Washington in Chicago (80 percent), and Mayor Wellington Webb in Denver (70 percent), among others. “And you can flip it around,” Peña said. “When I ran for mayor of Denver, I got very strong African-American support.”

Peña argued that while Clinton certainly has garnered considerable support among the Hispanic leadership, Obama’s standing at the grassroots level is strong and growing. Peña cited his stance on allowing illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses as particularly important. “When people hear that Hillary not only waffled on the issue but then came out against it, they are shocked,” Peña said. Does he believe that Clinton took that position with an eye toward the general election? “My answer is yes,” he said.

And yet, until recently, Obama had been a kind of missing person in the fight for the Hispanic vote. There was little outreach, a dearth of endorsers, no media effort to speak of. In his soaring speeches about how “there’s no such thing as false hope,” Obama would name-check the civil-rights movement but say nothing of the farm workers; he would evoke Martin Luther King but never César Chávez. For a long time, says Rosenberg, “it was hard to determine if they had a Hispanic strategy at all.”

Considering Obama’s pan-racial appeal and his message of omni-inclusion, this omission is mystifying. One theory is that he was endeavoring mightily not to let himself get pigeonholed as the Benetton candidate. But another is that Hispanic politics fell outside the comfort zone of Obama’s high command. David Axelrod, his chief strategist, is a Chicagoan through and through: For him, ethnic politics are all about black and white. David Plouffe, his campaign manager, is a Dick Gephardt guy (not many Hispanics in St. Louis); Steve Hildebrand, his field architect, earned his stripes with Tom Daschle (even fewer in South Dakota). “At bottom, ironically, it’s a very traditional white-guy campaign,” observes a Democratic strategist. “And this Hispanic thing is still very new to a lot of operatives—they just didn’t know how to do it.”

With February 5 looming, however, they had no choice but to dive in. The endorsement of Ted Kennedy—whose family name and status as the champion of liberal immigration reform are gold among Hispanics—provided the campaign with a powerful weapon to deploy. And so has a late-stage rush of estimable Latino endorsements, such as that of California congressman Xavier Becerra. Still, it’s hard to argue that this last-ditch effort puts BHO on level footing with HRC. Although Obama has taken to arguing that the contest between him and Hillary is between “the future and the past,” when it comes to fashioning a campaign in tune with the nation’s emerging demographic realities, the Clinton campaign has been far more forward-looking—even visionary.

No sensible person examining the electoral map could doubt that Hispanics may hold the key to the outcome in November. If Democrats can carry their core states plus Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, hey, they’re home—even without Ohio or Florida. (Add either one of those and you’re looking at the makings of a durable Democratic majority.) In the aftermath of the searing immigration wars of the past two years, Latinos in those states are ripe to be plucked. But now that the Republicans seem intent on nominating John McCain, that plucking won’t be automatic. And winning will require turning out both Hispanics and African-Americans in big numbers. Let’s hope that Obama finally gets the picture—and that Clinton sticks to playing Evita and doesn’t morph into Lee Atwater.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

Obama's Path

2008-06-09T05:40:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

The morning after Super-Duper Tuesday, Barack Obama held a press conference in Chicago, where he was asked an obvious question: Isn't it a mite disingenuous for him to continue to cast himself as the underdog in his race against Hillary Clinton? "I'm never disingenuous," Obama deadpanned. "I think we are less of an underdog than we were two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, we were a big underdog. Now we are a slight underdog." Obama added, with a smile, "I think we are turning out to be a scrappy little team."

Never let it be said that Obama is a man without a sense of humor. Put aside his performance the day before, when he won a majority of the states and a majority of the delegates (or so his side maintains) up for grabs. Put aside the fact that in January his campaign raked in an astonishing $32 million and that another $6 million arrived in the following 24 hours. Consider instead that on the very same day, Clinton was forced to acknowledge that she'd injected $5 million of her own money into her operation, with possibly more self-funding to come. Consider that some of her senior strategists were offering to work without pay. Consider that her team was asking, pleading for more debates-and gamely, if lamely, trying to label Obama as the "Establishment candidate."

Now, honestly, which of these campaigns sounds as if it's riding high? And which sounds like it's reeling?

Unwelcome as it may be in terms of spin, the reality is that Obama stands as the front-runner in the race. The question is whether he can translate that position into the nomination. And here the answer is far less clear. Though the path that could transport Obama to victory isn't difficult to discern, it's a road pockmarked with potholes. Also one that appears increasingly likely to carry him and his party into terra incognita—maybe even past the end of the primaries and all the way to the Democratic convention.

Beyond his own estimable political skills, the greatest advantage that Obama has going forward is money. The resources required by the states that lie ahead may seem like a drop in the bucket compared with those demanded by Super-Duper Tuesday. But we're still not talking chump change. To run effective air and ground operations in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, says Jonathan Prince, a top adviser to John Edwards, "a serious campaign probably needs to spend around $5 million a week." And that's just three—albeit the most delegate-rich three—of some two dozen contests yet to come.

Making a nut of virtually any size should pose few problems for Obama, whose team is reportedly on track to raise another $30 million in February. From the start, his campaign has assembled a small-donor machine that, as David Axelrod put it to me, "lets us build ever-expanding concentric circles of support." But no such mechanism exists on the Clinton side, which rested its vaunted fund-raising apparatus on the backs of big contributors, most of whom are tapped out. While the campaign is working feverishly to get its online buckraking pistons pumping—and, indeed, in one day last week, they generated $4 million—it finds itself scrambling to play catch-up. Might Bill Clinton have to spend some of the $20 million he's reportedly owed from Ron Burkle on radio ads in Cleveland or Fort Worth? The mind reels, but, hey, who knows?

Obama's second major advantage is the calendar. Between Super-Duper Tuesday and March 4—when Ohio, Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island vote—nine contests were set to take place: four caucuses (a format Obama has dominated), four primaries with a big percentage of black voters (ditto), plus the primary in Wisconsin, in which independents can vote (double ditto). But Clinton's people conceded this week that it was possible that their candidate would win not one of them. And if that or something like it occurs, sheer momentum might propel Obama to a sweep on March 4.

This is Obama's dream scenario, but it may also be a fantasy. From Iowa onward, Obama and Clinton have each assembled a formidable electoral coalition. Hers: downscale Democrats, especially women; senior citizens; Hispanics. His: upscale Democrats, especially men; independents; blacks; young voters. The trouble for Obama is that the demographics of both Ohio and Texas aren't particularly favorable to him. In 2004, just 10 percent of Democratic-primary voters in Ohio earned more than $100,000 a year-and fully 25 percent of those who voted in Texas were Latino. Moreover, HRC will have the bulk of the Establishment support (Ohio governor Ted Strickland is behind her, for example) in both states.

Yet no matter who prevails in Texas or Ohio, there's a reasonable chance that the outcome will settle nothing. Why? Because, as we all were instructed ad nauseam by the TV bloviators on Tuesday, the Democratic process is governed by the principle of proportionality—which means that, unless one side really clobbers the other in a given state, each of them winds up with a roughly equal number of delegates. The intent of proportionality is to protect genuine underdogs. But in a fight between heavyweights, the effect, as Clinton communication czar Howard Wolfson puts it, is "more to avoid picking a nominee rather than picking one."

The implications of all this are firmly grasped in Obama-land. This week, the campaign inadvertently released a spreadsheet containing a detailed projection of the outcomes of the remaining primaries and caucuses. It predicted that Obama would win nineteen of them, but that he would lose by between four and seven points in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The bottom line? After the final votes had been cast in Puerto Rico on June 7, Obama would emerge with 1,806 delegates and Clinton with 1,789-both a couple hundred short, that is, of the 2,025 necessary to nail down the nomination.

It's possible, to be sure, that the Obama spreadsheet was leaked intentionally in a bid to set expectations. But the assumptions undergirding the projection strike most political professionals as credible. More to the point, its overall thrust, that in all probability the race is headed toward deadlock, is accepted by the Clinton people. "It is likely that no side will gain an appreciable or significant advantage in overall delegate counts between now and March 4, past March 4, even past April," Wolfson says. "For all of those who, for cycle after cycle, wished for a battle that goes to the convention...you could be looking at such a contest here."

If the race does indeed unfold that way, the cards that Clinton intends to play are already face-up on the table. First, she plans to rely on her advantage among the nearly 800 party panjandrums—elected officials, state chairmen, national committee members—known as superdelegates, who can vote any way they choose. Clinton currently claims a 259-170 lead among these people, with the remainder still planted on the fence; the received wisdom holds that aggressive chit-calling by Clinton and her husband will keep her ahead among this crowd all the way until the end. But if that lead doesn't prove sufficient to put Clinton over the top, her campaign is already agitating loudly that the delegates from Michigan and Florida—two states that were penalized by the DNC for moving their primaries forward and that Clinton won handily in the absence of any real competition—be seated at the convention in August in Denver.

Obama's counteroffensive against the Clintonian Michigan-Florida maneuver is already under way. His campaign correctly argues that to seat those delegations would make a mockery of the DNC, the rules it set, and the entire process. In Michigan, only Clinton (along with Chris Dodd) left her name on the ballot—and thus to count the delegates chosen there would unfairly penalize Obama. As for the superdelegates, Obama began limbering up for that battle the morning after Super-Duper Tuesday, previewing the pitch that he intends to make should the occasion warrant it. "If this contest comes down to superdelegates, we are going to be able to say we have more pledged delegates, which means the Democratic voters have spoken," he explained. "Those superdelegates, those party insiders, would have to think long and hard how they would approach the nomination."

The trace of confrontation in Obama's tone suggests how ugly things could get in Denver if Clinton attempts to take possession of the nomination this way. It hints at the crisis of legitimacy that could explode, ripping the party in two. In these circumstances, the moral responsibility for avoiding such a crisis would lie squarely with Hillary and her husband, but the political challenge, and opportunity, would rest with Obama. The superdelegates are, it's true, the embodiment of the Democratic Establishment. But in case you haven't noticed, much of that Establishment has lately turned its back on the Clintons—or put the boot in them. Many, maybe most, of the superdelegates are open to persuasion. A surprising number may even be ready to "turn the page." What they want most of all is a Democratic nominee who can win. If Obama fails to bring enough of them over to his column, it should tell us something: That the man sure can give a hell of a speech, but he can't close the deal.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

Changing the Changeling

2008-06-09T05:36:00.001-07:00

By John Heilemann

The spin emanating from Barack Obama’s campaign is always prompt and pointed, which offers some small compensation for its high degree of predictability. On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, an e-mail from Obama press secretary Bill Burton hit my in-box at 11:21 p.m., announcing pithily in its subject line the essence of the message that the campaign would deliver relentlessly in the days ahead: “A fundamentally unchanged race.” On a number of levels, this spin had the virtue of comporting with reality. It was true that Hillary Clinton’s win had done little to erode Obama’s nearly insurmountable pledged-delegate advantage. It was true that, even after being bested by 200,000 ballots in the Keystone State, Obama retained a solid lead in the overall popular vote. And it was true that the likelihood of Obama’s eventual nomination remained extremely high.

What was not true, however, was that the outcome in Pennsylvania had changed nothing of importance. As the next few days would prove in spades, Clinton’s victory had done more than allow her to fight another day. It had altered the narrative of the campaign, however temporarily. For the past six weeks, the central question occupying the political world was, Why won’t—or when will—Hillary quit? But now the questions du jour were starkly different: Why can’t Obama close the deal? Why can’t he connect with working people? And, relatedly but even more ominous, is Obama unelectable?

That such questions are being asked at all should be worrying to Obama-land, for raising doubts about the hopemonger’s prospects against John McCain is the only way that Clinton might yet derail his coronation. And the answers to those questions should be more worrying still, since they point to significant vulnerabilities—from his aloofness to his alleged elitism to the mere fact of his race—that could seriously hobble Obama in the fall.

But before superdelegates leap to any rash conclusions, and before any other fretful Democrats start leaping from the nearest bridge, they’d do well to remember that Clinton and McCain have glaring weaknesses of their own. And although many Democrats bemoan a primary process that has left Obama bruised and battered, by exposing his foibles this grueling ordeal may yet prove salutary—because the only thing more dangerous than a flawed candidate is the starry-eyed, mushy-brained delusion that he is perfect.

A few days after the New Hampshire primary, a prominent Democratic operative not aligned with either Obama or Clinton imagined for me a scene that he believed would occur in countless blue-collar and rural homes across the country as the race unfolded: “The husband comes downstairs on Primary Day, and he says, ‘Ma, you’ll never believe what I’m gonna do—I’m gonna vote for Hillary Clinton!’ ” A pregnant pause. “ ‘Because there’s just no way I can pull the lever for that black fella.’ ”

For a few weeks back in February, during Obama’s astonishing string of primary victories, this projection seemed too pessimistic. First, in Virginia and Maryland, Obama ventured into two racially diverse states and ate into Clinton’s impregnable base among working-class whites. In Virginia, he carried the white vote overall and beat her among whites earning under $50,000 a year; in Maryland, he defeated her among white blue-collar men and white Catholics. Then came Wisconsin, where he trounced HRC by nine points among whites overall and won among voters at every income and education level. Suddenly, the pertinent question was: What Clinton coalition?

But in Ohio and Pennsylvania (and, to a lesser extent, Texas), Hillary was able to reassemble that coalition with a vengeance. In the Buckeye and Keystone states, she scored 64 and 63 percent, respectively, of the overall white vote and racked up even higher margins among blue-collar Caucasians. Why does this matter? Because for more than 40 years, the ability to capture working-stiff whites has been the sine qua non for Democratic success at the presidential level. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did relatively well at this and won; Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry did not. Indeed, the writers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have calculated that, to win the White House, a Democrat needs to win 45 to 48 percent of lunch-pail-toting white voters in the heartland states.

That Obama is having big trouble with such voters would be bad enough by itself. But making matters worse is his abysmal recent performance among white Catholics: He claimed 34 percent of their vote in Ohio and 29 in Pennsylvania. In the past two elections, according to Brookings Institution scholar Bill Galston, among others, white Catholics have emerged as perhaps the most pivotal constituency in the electorate—one concentrated in midwestern states that Democrats must win and whose dramatic swing toward George W. Bush was arguably decisive in 2000 and 2004. (According to Galston, in fact, that shift alone accounted for Dubya’s victory over Kerry in Ohio and Florida.)

And Obama isn’t merely losing godly ground among white Catholics. Whereas in Maryland and Wisconsin he outpaced Clinton by as much as 30 points among regular churchgoers of all stripes, in Pennsylvania she whipped him by double-digits among the observant, while he did best among those who never attend religious services. At the same time, whereas Obama used to routinely thump Clinton among voters describing themselves as conservative, moderate, and somewhat liberal, in Pennsylvania the only ideological cohort he carried was the self-described “very liberal.” In a flash, a candidate who once was hailed as post-partisan, post-ideological, and post-racial was looking like a typical secular lefty, with a base comprising college students, African-Americans, and upscale “progressives.” No wonder, then, that Judis—but not just Judis—has started to wonder whether Obama might just be “the next McGovern.”

The reasons for Obama’s image transformation aren’t hard to pinpoint. In the minds of more than a few white voters the controversy surrounding his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright has helped turn Obama from a candidate who is black into a black candidate. His now-infamous bitter/cling comments went a long way toward cementing a picture of him that was already forming—as a down-the-nose-looking elitist at worst, as a detached academic at best. His association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant Weatherman turned elder statesman of Hyde Park, has helped his enemies to cast him as a spiritual descendant of old-school sixties rabble-rouserism.

But neither Ayers nor any other random bits of ephemera account completely for Obama’s rebranding as a standard-issue liberal. “He’s tried to be post-partisan on the cheap,” says Galston, “through bring-us-together rhetoric and leadership style as opposed to substance.” Galston, it should be said, is a supporter of Clinton’s, but he harbors no animus toward Obama—and, more to the point, he’s 100 percent correct. After months of trailing Obama, I can’t recall a single policy or proposal he’s offered that couldn’t have been put forward happily by Nancy Pelosi or Ted Kennedy.

The bright side of this story—and there is a bright side—is that the fall election isn’t shaping up to be one in which charges of liberalism or other cultural caricature are central. Instead, what lies before us is a contest, as McCain put it recently, about great issues and large differences. The war in Iraq. The onrushing recession. The collapse of the mortgage market. Health care and climate change. “In years when peace or prosperity are at stake, let alone peace and prosperity, other considerations become secondary,” says Galston. “This is such a year.”

On all these matters, Obama is—or could be—a superior Democratic messenger to Clinton. And in one crucial respect, he has already proved to be her better: In his extraordinary ability to draw new participants into the political arena. This may be the single best salve to Democratic worries about his electability, which are, after all, rooted in a static notion of the electorate; in a belief that the electoral battlefield of tomorrow will be roughly the same as the battlefield on which yesterday’s campaigns were fought. If the Democratic primaries thus far have taught us only one thing, it’s that such assumptions are badly misguided.

For all the labored comparisons of Obama to Jack Kennedy, it’s here that the analogy may actually prove valid. As Galston points out, “In 1960 Kennedy did worse than a more traditional—a.k.a. a Protestant—Democrat would have done in substantial portions of the South. He won because he expanded the electorate and got a disproportionate share of the parts that expanded most. His numbers among Catholics were phenomenal! So there’s an intriguing parallel: Obama may lose a greater portion of the white working class than another Democrat would get, but he may very well be able to make it up among the new voters he brings into the process.”

A happy thought, for sure. But Obama and his people would be making a grave error if they take too much comfort from it. What the past two months have shown beyond doubt is that Obama’s campaign is in desperate need of a serious midcourse retooling—in particular, a sharper economic message, delivered from a brawler’s stance, in order to give those blue-collar voters who’ve sided with Clinton a bedrock reason to stay in the Democratic column and not flee to McCain, as many now threaten to do. Even more important, though, the time has come for Obama to move beyond his airy mantra of post-partisan transformation. The polarization that plagues our politics is an awful thing, no doubt. But the irony is that before Obama can do anything to change it, he needs to win. And winning will require him to channel the very partisan furies—the anger at Bush, the ire toward the Republicans, the palpable yearning for a fight—that he eventually hopes to tame.

E-mail: jheilemann@gmail.com.

Econobamanomic Theory

2008-06-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

The six-week campaign waged by Barack Obama in Pennsylvania will no doubt be remembered for many incidents that the candidate would just as soon forget. The gutter balls in Altoona. The gormless queries about whether Yuengling is “some designer beer.” The tortured backpedaling from, explanations of, and apologies for his bitter/cling faux pas. But what will stick in my own wonky mind about the contest in the Keystone State is something else entirely: It was here that Obama finally turned in earnest to the topic of the economy.

Not that he had much choice in the matter, even before Bittergate. Having been clobbered by Hillary Clinton in Ohio, particularly among blue-collar voters, Obama and his people clearly saw the importance of proving that he could talk the economy talk. So he went to Pittsburgh and trashed NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Colombian free-trade deal. He went to Wilkes-Barre and attacked Big Oil for price gouging. He went to Washington and told a group of building tradesmen, “It’s time we had a president who didn’t choke saying the word union.” He went to last week’s debate in Philadelphia and declared that he felt the pain of “a gentleman in Latrobe who had lost his job and was trying to figure out how he could find the gas money to travel to find a job.”

Now, the knock on Obama for months has been that he’s guilty of a maddening policy vagueness. That whereas Clinton has trafficked in specificity and substance, he’s stuck to vaporous theme and inspiration. But Obama’s recent economic shtick has been anything but nebulous. In fact, it has been nearly as laundry-listy as Hillary’s patented spiel. The proposals pile up, the numbers tumble out—$60 billion for infrastructure, $80 billion for middle-class tax cuts, $150 billion for green technologies—and the mind begins to reel.

Something is better than nothing, to be sure, and many of Obama’s plans strike me as perfectly sensible. What’s missing, however, is an overriding theory of the case—a powerful narrative that both frames and makes sense of the changes whipping through the economy like a Bengali typhoon. Obama may not need such a narrative to win the Democratic nomination. But without one, he’ll find himself fighting in the fall without the gnarliest club at his disposal for the bludgeoning of John McCain—and for beating back Republican charges that, just below the surface, he’s a reflexive, old-school liberal. Obama, it seems, has the right idea: Steal a page from the Clinton playbook. The problem, so far, is that he’s been pilfering from the wrong Clinton.

What everyone remembers about Bill Clinton’s race in 1992, of course, is that he focused on the economy “like a laser beam,” as he put it. They remember “It’s the economy, stupid.” What they often forget is how cohesive, compelling, and even daring was the story he told about the source of the insecurity so many voters were feeling: the story of an economy in the throes of a profound, irreversible structural transformation, driven by technology and globalization. Clinton made no bones about the pain all this would cause. He didn’t hesitate to inform workers in old-line industries that many of the jobs that had disappeared were never coming back. But Clinton also laid out an ambitious agenda to upgrade the nation’s store of human capital, enabling anyone willing to make the effort to “make change their friend.” He called that agenda Putting People First, and it played a big part in persuading voters to put him in the White House.

“Having the right narrative is just as important as having the right policies,” says Robert Reich, Clinton’s first Labor secretary and author of the 1991 book The Work of Nations, which provided the underpinnings of Putting People First. “People are confused. Half of them think the cards are stacked against them by some devious mastermind inside the Carlyle Group. The other half don’t understand enough to be that cynical. They’re looking for an explanation for what’s happening to them. If you just give them a ten-point plan, they tune out.”

It’s not quite fair to say that neither Obama nor Hillary has offered any narrative whatsoever. “But what they have isn’t an economic narrative—it’s a political narrative,” says another adviser who played a role in shaping WJC’s message. “ ‘It’s all George W. Bush’s fault. Things are bad. I’m gonna make them better. Oh, and John McCain is Bush II.’ That’s what they’ve got.”

Obama, for his part, does more than blame Dubya—his circle of censure is wider, if no less predictable and no more insightful. He puts much of the rap on trade deals lacking “enforceable labor standards” that fail to “put American workers first.” He rails at China for “dumping goods” on the United States and undervaluing its currency. He bangs on about “corporate lobbyists in Washington … writing our laws and putting their clients’ interests ahead of what’s fair for the American people.”

The optimistic reading of this account is that Obama is simply following in the time-honored tradition of Democratic-primary pandering. Because if he believes this story, hoo boy, he may be beyond salvation. For all the caterwauling over NAFTA et al., the negative effects of such trade deals on the American economy are vanishingly small. As for amending them: “It won’t make a flying fuck of a difference to U.S. workers if there are labor standards in these trade agreements or not,” says one of the preeminent Democratic economists in the country. And though it’s easy (and fun!) to bash Beijing and Gucci Gulch, they pale in importance beside other forces—information technology primary among them—in affecting the prosperity of working- and middle-class voters.

For Obama, the challenge, which Clinton met so effectively in 1992, is to fashion a narrative that acknowledges and even embraces those forces and then describes how they can be channeled. His failure so far to offer anything like that is a source of frustration among Democrats (including many who support him) who believe that doing so is of paramount strategic importance. That his political advisers, including chief strategist David Axelrod, are avowedly policyphobic is typically cited as an explanation, as is the fact that his economic team—led by Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago academic who got himself and his candidate in hot water with his off-message chat with a Canadian official about NAFTA—is politically green. “Austan is a nice guy and a smart economist,” says one Democratic economic-policy geek. “But about this kind of stuff, he’s totally clueless, which is kinda frightening.”

But Obama’s difficulties in this realm are deeper than that. In 1992, Clinton was able to set himself apart from a prevailing Democratic orthodoxy that was retrograde in the extreme. “Clinton’s story was the right story then, and though certain things have changed, it’s still the right story,” says former Treasury secretary and ex–Harvard president Larry Summers. “So you can say things that are new or you can say things that are true, but it’s hard to say both—which makes it difficult to frame an exciting economic narrative.”

Reich maintains, however, that the Clinton story would be a decent starting point for an Obama narrative. “Democrats have to be willing to say, ‘We had a great shot in the nineties, we did a little, but mostly we did dipshit,’ ” Reich tells me. “You can blame it on Gingrich or Greenspan or the Reagan deficits. But there’s a huge unfinished agenda to be completed.” In Reich’s view, the next part of the story is what’s happened in the past ten years: that all the growth has gone to the top 5 percent of earners, and the thing that kept the middle class afloat—debt—has reached its outer limit. “In the Clinton era, we had the middle-class squeeze,” he says. “Now the middle class is collapsing, and the only way for the economy to utilize its productive capacity is to make big investments in education, health care, and green-tech.”

Robert Shapiro, another veteran of the 1992 Clinton economic team and author of a new book on globalization, agrees. “The narrative is: The U.S. is way ahead in the global economy, but we need to make basic changes so that everyone can prosper,” Shapiro says. “We need to get control of health-care and energy costs, because without it, American workers will never see rising wages—since the burden on businesses is otherwise too great.” As for training, Shapiro has proposed giving grants to all the community colleges in the country to keep their computer labs open on nights and weekends so that anyone can show up and learn (for free) the skills they need to compete in a tech-centric economy. “We can do it for $125 million a year, and even if it costs twice that much, it would be worth it.”

The Obama campaign has already adopted this last idea of Shapiro’s. And as the hopemonger moves closer to securing the Democratic nomination, the party’s savviest economic-idea merchants are beginning to congregate around him. (Late last week, Reich formally endorsed Obama; his first memo to Axelrod advancing his concept of “bottom-up economics” will no doubt have been dispatched by the time you read these words.)

For Democrats, all this should be a cause for hope—if Obama will listen, that is. Assuming he is the nominee, he’ll face in McCain and the GOP an opposition hell-bent on caricaturing him as the ideological offspring of George McGovern and Mike Dukakis (with a Weatherman for a godfather), as a hackneyed, knee-jerk, retrograde lefty gussied up as an avatar of the future. For Obama, therefore, telling the right kind of story about the economy will not only allow him to trump McCain on a subject where the latter has barely the faintest clue. It will offer him perhaps his very best chance to prove he is what he claims to be.

What Is the What If?

2008-06-09T05:32:00.000-07:00

By John Heilemann

History will record the Indiana and North Carolina primaries as the events that secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for Barack Obama—and put the final nails in the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Oh, sure, Clinton intends to finish out the remaining primaries. And she’ll certainly keep pressing to seat the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations. But the harsh attacks on Obama are almost certainly a thing of the past, and the chances of a scorched-earth march to Denver are vanishingly small. Clinton may have pushed things further and longer than some Democrats would have liked. But the notion that she’s some lunatic party-wrecker is the purest dum-dum drivel.

That the primaries in the Hoosier and Tar Heel states proved the scenes of HRC’s demise strikes me as ironic, because they were also the first time all year that she actually found her groove. In high-school gyms, train depots, and fire stations, she turned in performances that were sharp, energetic, and laced through with an antic, even madcap, populism—her vows to “go right at OPEC,” her attacks on Wall Street “money brokers” for their role in causing the recession—that drew whoops and hollers from the working-class audiences to which she was playing. Her staff was exhausted, bedraggled, shriveled; Hillary fairly glowed. “What’s got into her?” I asked one of her advisers in Evansville, Indiana, late on the night before the vote. He smiled and said, “She’s finally having fun.”

The operative word in this remark was finally. For much of the campaign, Clinton’s joylessness, her unhappy warriorhood, was painfully evident. Unlike her husband, who has always reveled in the rituals of politics like a toddler attacking a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, Hillary seemed to regard appealing for votes as a pesky chore for those who aspire to govern. It was only at the end that the stump became for her a source of vitality.

Unfortunately for Clinton, this change in affect came too late in the game to alter the final score. But it raises questions that I suspect will haunt her and her adjutants for many months to come: What if Hillary had found her métier—and also her champion-of-the-working-class, fighter-for-the-forgotten message—a year ago, instead of a month ago? What if she’d run as the gritty, scrappy battler all along, rather than coming across as the bloodless, entitled, imperious candidate of inevitability?

This is hardly the only road-not-taken that will cause lost sleep among the Clintonites once this thing is well and truly over. Indeed, the list is longer than the still-secret roster of donors to her husband’s presidential library. But herewith I offer my personal Top Ten “what ifs” as a kind of roundabout postmortem of an operation that will surely be remembered as the coulda-shoulda-woulda campaign.

1. What if Hillary had gone negative against Obama last fall?
In 2007, the Clinton campaign treated the hopemonger with kid gloves, which seemed a sensible strategy as her lead over him widened and he struggled to gain his footing. But then Obama caught fire after his famous speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in November, and some Clinton advisers (including 42, it’s been reported) argued that the time had come to take him out, by making many of the same arguments regarding his inexperience that Hillary would deploy months later. Doing so would have entailed substantial risks in goody-goody Iowa. But then Clinton came in third there anyway—and Obama, unscuffed, was off and running.

2. Speaking of Iowa, what if Clinton had skipped the caucuses?
The idea was floated a year ago by her former deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, who wrote, in a 1,500-word internal memo, “If she walks away from Iowa she will devalue Iowa—our consistently weakest state.” The risks here, too, were obvious enough: How could the putative front-runner forgo the first contest? With the benefit of hindsight, however, some Clinton hands concede that Henry was prescient in his fears and arguably correct in his prescription.

3. What if Clinton had apologized for her Iraq-war vote?
Her refusal to do so contained elements of both principle and calculation. But it opened the door to BHO and allowed him to argue that wisdom was more important than experience in foreign policy. And it provided Obama and John Edwards with a point of attack that drowned out Clinton’s positive message for much of 2007.

4. What if Clinton had learned the real lesson of New Hampshire?
To most observers, that lesson was obvious: Clinton’s sudden, shocking display of humanity had put her over the top against the odds. All along, there had been a running debate within her camp about softening her image and incorporating elements of her biography—her decades as a champion of the nation’s children, for instance—in her campaign narrative. But Hillary sided with her chief strategist, Mark Penn, in the view that this was sissy stuff. She was befuddled by all the fuss made over her tears in the Granite State. And she came to believe that the aggressive contrasts with Obama drawn by her campaign—in particular, by her finger-wagging spouse—had made the difference there. So instead of continuing to let her private side show through, she returned to her programmatic focus and often robotic style of presentation, a choice that kept her in her comfort zone but demonstrated a lack of capacity for growth.

5. What if the Clintonites hadn’t spent their war chest like a bunch of whiskey-addled sailors?
Of all the unexpected developments of 2008, perhaps the most astonishing is that, by the end of January, the Clinton campaign was broke—while the insurgent Obamans were flush, allowing them to outspend Hillary in the states after Super Duper Tuesday by two or three or four to one. One difference was Obama-land’s mastery of the Web as a fund-raising tool, which the Clinton people never got the hang of. But another was the latter side’s grotesque overexpenditures in 2007, a grievous error that must be laid at the feet of her former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, an operative Clinton valued more for her loyalty than her ability to actually do the job. Recipe for disaster.

6. What if the Clintonites hadn’t ignored the other caucus states?
Arguably their single biggest tactical blunder was the decision last fall not to invest in building organizations in places such as Minnesota, Washington, Maine, and Idaho, where Obama would not only win but rack up huge pledged-delegate margins. The decision was rooted in arrogance and complacency; in the faulty premise that by carrying the big states on Super Duper Tuesday, Clinton would be able to bring the race to an early conclusion.

7. What if Clinton had dumped Mark Penn before he shot himself in the head?
No single figure was more influential in the Clinton campaign than her portly, perpetually rumpled supreme Svengali. And no one was a greater source of the instability and infighting that turned what was supposed to have been a well-oiled juggernaut into a leaky, creaky vessel. Roundly despised by colleagues, a walking catalogue of conflicts of interest, and a man with no history of successfully negotiating a Democratic presidental primary, Penn might still have been an asset had his strategic advice been sound. But it wasn’t (see No. 10).

8. What if Clinton had “divorced” her husband after South Carolina?
Bill Clinton is a man of gargantuan political talents, to be sure. But his omnipresence made Clinton fatigue an inescapable facet of the campaign’s thematics. And after the debacle in the Palmetto State, which thoroughly (and maybe permanently) alienated black voters from Hillary’s cause, it was clear to many on her team that he was doing more harm than good to his wife’s electoral prospects. Should she have sidelined him, standing up one day and declaring that she was a big girl and could fight her own fights, thank you very much? Some Clintonites think so. And even those who disagree admit that WJC’s energies should have been more carefully, productively channeled. “There was no way he wasn’t going to play a role,” says one. “But did we ever find the right role for him? I think the answer is obviously no.”

9. What if Clinton had gone magnanimous on Obama and the Reverend Wright?
The GOP strategist Alex Castellanos offers an intriguing theory about how Hillary might have reacted differently, and more effectively, to the issue that threatened to swallow Obama. “After the Reverend Wright controversy, Obama was suffering the worst press month of his campaign,” he says. “Hillary had a choice. She could have gotten bigger, more presidential, less political; she could have risen to defend Obama, saying, ‘This is outrageous and has no place in politics.’ Instead, she chose to become smaller, more political, less presidential. She diminished the value of the attacks on him by making them hers. Her instincts betrayed her. What if she had chosen to soar above a weakened Obama? That was her moment. And I believe she missed her last great opportunity to win this race.”

10. What if Clinton had cast herself as the candidate of change?
At the insistence of Penn, Hillary positioned herself from the outset as the avatar of experience, “ready from day one,” as she liked to say, to become the commander-in-chief. But this strategy profoundly misread the prevailing winds gusting across the political landscape—winds favoring a candidate representing a fundamental break with the past. It’s often said that Clinton, as a dynastic figure, would have found this impossible to pull off. But as the first plausible female president ever, why should this have been so? “There was always a powerful positive case for her as the change candidate,” says Democratic guru Bob Shrum. “Instead, she let herself become the Establishment candidate in a year of change.”

And here lies a final point worth making. In the days ahead, retrospective second-guessing and finger-pointing will be everywhere and vicious in Clinton-land—and God knows, as the list above makes clear, there’s blame enough to go around. But in the end the success or failure of any electoral venture rests mainly on the candidate herself. For Clinton, this will undoubtedly be the hardest truth to grasp. But if she hopes to do better next time—and trust me, there will be a next time—grasping it fully will be essential.

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