Oratorical Animal

Let Us Now Praise Good Argument

I spend a lot of time on this blog, when I manage to blog, debunking bad public arguments. I tend to be particularly harsh on various members of the New York Times op-ed page. So, when I see something good there--very good in this case--I ought to praise it. All praise to Steven Simon. He has written a lovely example of good public argument.

In the first sentence, Simon identifies the issue: "The Justice Department's decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in a federal court in New York City has elicited several criticisms." That's a clear and admirably even-handed statement. It also foreshadows the main rhetorical strategy: refutation. Simon will document the opposing positions and then explain why they are wrong. The second sentence previews that effort and differentiates between "pointless" and legitimate arguments. That, too, is useful. One should be able to separate apparent and real concerns and it also justifies his argumentative choices; he dispatches the pointless ones quickly and devotes better than half the essay to the claim that the trial "will give a terrorist a platform."

The first section of the essay quickly dispatches the "straw men." In each case, Simon identifies the source of the argument, summarizes its substance, and explains why it is wrong. Each move is important.

By identifying the source, Simon directly engages his opponents and gives readers the chance to look up those opposing claims. That contrasts sharply with the usual "some people say" formulation that, more often than not, distorts the other side and prevents any effort to discover whether an existing person said what is claimed. Simon does his opponents the courtesy of open debate.

By summarizing and quoting opposing claims, Simon demonstrates his fairness and lifts his credibility. He uses their words when summarizing their claims. Equally important, by being so specific, he invites his readers to check his facts. He implicitly claims that he can be trusted.

By explaining why those claims are wrong, Simon both engages the opposition, as we expect in a public debate, and prepares readers for further disputes. When they hear these claims again, they can resist them. To use a metaphor, he inoculates them against more opposition discourse. Readers now know how to answer these fallacious claims.

So, for instance, he notes that John Yoo, "a former Bush Administration lawyer," (quite a fair summation), argues that the trial would be an "intelligence bonanza" for the enemy. Unlikely, Simon contends: "Our prosecutors are certain that there is enough unclassified evidence to make their case. Moreover, the most prized intelligence is recent, specific, and actionable. Al Qaeda today is most concerned with discovering when and where the next drone missile attack will take place in Pakistan, information not likely to be disclosed during a trial about a conspiracy hatched more than a decade ago."

Simon's first claim, the one about prosecutors, requires readers to take him on faith, but the second is supported by some pretty convincing reasoning. It seems logical that the proximate threat--death--would interest Al Qaeda more than the distant one--they already know what they planned a decade ago.

The essay continues in that fashion. The disposal of the pointless claims is generally quite rational, but the essay grows appropriately more emotional as he moves to the argument concerning the trial's propaganda value. Here, Simon engages in a reversal; he contends that methodical public exposure of this kind of evil will be most helpful to the American cause. He supports that claim with historical examples, with contemporary examples of radical clerics losing faith in Al Qaeda, and with contrasts to other alternatives. The latter, he contends, do not embody American values of transparency and justice as clearly as does a trial.

Good to see this essay--right on the facts, right on the argument. This would be a great example with which to open a public speaking, argumentation, or basic criticism class.  

Apologies/UI

I'm sorry. I've been neglecting the animal here of late because work has been eating me alive. Now that I've made a deadline or two, I hope to be a more regular contributor to my own blog--although our national convention next week means little or no posting then. But there is again light at the end of the tunnel unless that's a train.

On another subject--I've complained here before about university administrators "returning to the faculty." Our internal publication, Inside Illinois, had two lovely contrasting articles this week. On p. 1, we learn again of Richard Herman's resignation, of his return to the faculty, of his, um, substantial renumeration as a "special advisor" and a "faculty member."

Meanwhile, there's Tim Wood on p. 4, with his Old Spice baseball cap. He's a pipefitter/steamfitter at the UI. He's been here for thirty years. Retired in August, if you can call putting a roof on his family home and working the harvest at the family farm "retirement." He was assigned primarily to north campus. He kept the pipes working. I can only imagine what feats of shoestring engineering and maintenance imagination were required to do THAT in places like Lincoln Hall. He and his wife, a nurse, are putting their two sons through college.

If I had a choice, as an Illinois taxpayer, which one of these gentlemen I'd choose to grant better than 250k a year, that'd be an easy call. No doubt in my mind whatsoever.

Professional Presidents

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, an occasionally amusing, but often damaging fiction pervaded American politics: the civic republican theory of leadership. Civic republicans believed power corrupted, absolute power corrupted absolutely, and even a little power raised a faint and unpleasant odor. Therefore, if one pursued power one was, by definition, corrupt and unfit to wield power. Presidents should not seek the office; the office should seek them.

Like much republican thought, it made for attractive theory and annoying practice. Beginning with, oh, the third US presidential election (1796), the campaigns became fraudulent exercises in which the candidates disclaimed any desire for the office while slipping the knife into the backs of one and all who stood in their way. Thankfully, William Jennings Bryan (1896) and then Teddy Roosevelt put an end to this charade.

Except that the feeling didn't fade from American culture. There was a continued love for all things amateur, whether it made sense for those practices to be amateur or not. In sports, for instance, it took golf and tennis until the 1960s to finally make sense and it took the Dream Team, for heavens sake, to bring a symbolic end to the amateur era in Olympic basketball.

But the fiction still lingers with University presidents. Due to an admissions scandal, the University of Illinois has recently accepted the resignations of its president (system president--commands campuses at Springfield and Chicago as well) and the chancellor (in charge only at Urbana). Both men will, in a phrase I love, "return to the faculty."

Really?! The last time the Illinois Chancellor taught an undergrad, s/he was doing "The Hustle." With rare exceptions (Drew Gilpin Faust being one), presidents, chancellors and the like either have not been teachers/scholars for decades or have never filled that role. In fact, some enter administration precisely because they could never have made it as scholars (cough--UGA--cough).

Yet departments (as I have done) go through this fiction of offering them tenured faculty appointments. They are in no way (again, DGF and the like being exceptions) qualified for those appointments, yet we know we have to give them.

Look, university presidents are now corporate chieftains. They are rarely scholars elevated by their peers on the faculty to serve in this high position of responsibility (against their wishes, of course) and eager to return to teaching Math 101. They are professional fundraisers, schmoozers who try desperately, constantly, and sometimes successfully to make money. I appreciate that; I like them very much when they can do that, given that UI has gone from something like 40% state supported to 17% in the last couple of decades. Presidents matter.

But they are not teachers or scholars. And now these two will "return to the faculty" for salaries in the 350-400k range and do what? Teach? Please.

University presidents should no longer be given tenured appointments. If they are scholars, they can be given one when they retire, if everyone agrees. But like 19th century presidential elections, tenured appointment for many of them now is fraud, pure and simple.

They are professional adminstrators. Treat them as such. It's not as if the former president of GM "returned to the factory line" when he was forced out, nor is George W. Bush training fighter pilots for the Air National Guard (not that he could). At a time of extraordinary budget stress, just what will the Illini two do to justify those paychecks? 

Lincoln and Leff

It's been a busy and happy week here at the University of Illinois because we've been hosting Michael Leff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. Sadly, Mike was the last of the Lincoln's Rhetorical World speakers and, as always, we're grateful to a variety of folks, including the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement, the Department of Communication, the Lincoln Bicentennial Committee, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

It was the latter, in particular, that helped to make Mike's reading group appearance possible. As is our norm for all visitors, he provided us with three essays and we spent an interesting hour and a half talking about them and eating pizza. Three issues stood out in the discussion.

The first was character. Mike's recent work explores the ways in which character flows through and structures public argument. Modern logic, of course, dismisses character as a consideration in the search for truth; the truth is what it is regardless of the person who says it. Thus, nearly all public speaking and argumentation textbooks still list ad hominem attacks as a fallacy. But as my mentor, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, has noted, arguments don't walk into a room by themselves. Inevitably, character plays a powerful role in public argument and our discussion ranged through various manifestations of that role, in addition to the normative element generally present in nearly any discussion of character.

From there, the discussion turned to a second concern, the relation between informal logicians and rhetoricians, as both dialectic and rhetoric, as it were, begin to explore what it means to have a counterpart. Mike has been impressed in particular with a number of Canadian scholars and this is the second time I've heard that school of thought invoked in the last six months (the other being the Zarefsky conference at Northwestern). After the meeting, I quickly requested a couple of different books from the library--time to learn something more.

The initial two discussions articulated nicely--informal logic does wish to explore character--and worked well with another of Mike's recent concerns, anecdote. To put it too crudely, an anecdote is something between a briefly cited example ("The Canadian health care system...") and a fully developed narrative, even myth ("A shining city on a hill..."). Contemporary politics reveals again and again the character work that anecdotes accomplish; the paper we read explored presidential debates, but I kept thinking of one of Obama's favorite campaign anecdotes.

Ashley Baia was a twenty-three year old white woman who organized for the Obama campaign in South Carolina. At one meeting, she told a heartbreaking story of her reasons for being there--her mother's illness and health care--and asks the others why they were there. The last to speak, an "elderly black man," Obama says in his 2008 MLK Day speech, states, "I am here because of Ashley." Obama acknowledges, in that telling of a now-familar story, that a "single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough....But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake. And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta. And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia. And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together, we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down."

The anecdote, I think, is Janus-faced. It looks closely to the particular, to the feeling of specific people and to that lovely concrete moment, but it looks outward as well, to all of us and to the walls of Jericho, to our faith and to the ideals of the nation. In that moment, Obama recast his rhetorical situation, from a particular speech at King's church in Atlanta, Georgia to the sweep of American history, to the African American faith tradition.

And that, in turn, was the third of our topics, to Mike's effort to rethink situation and tradition, along the lines suggested by a good deal of Jim Jasinski's work. In the example I used here, the African American faith tradition (Obama invokes Joshua to open this speech, too) frames his argument and elevates that moment and his people. His text transforms that context and that, too, marks powerful oratory.

A good discussion. And pretty good pizza as well. Thanks again to everyone who participated and to all those who made Mike's appearance and the series possible.

Nobeling Goldman, Sachs

As I've mentioned here before, I have a peculiar interest in economics, despite my complete lack of any numerical competence. They awarded the Nobel Prize in economics this week. For the first time in its history, a woman, Dr. Elinor Ostrom, of Indiana University won the prize. She shared the honor with Dr. Oliver E. Williamson of California, Berkeley. Hooray! to both.

A couple of things struck me about this award. First, neither winner is technically an economist. Williamson teaches in a school of business while Ostrom is a political scientist. The NYT article that I linked to above, in fact, introduced them as "two American social scientists" and Robert Shiller of Yale had a nice comment: "This award is part of the merging of the social sciences. Economics has been too isolated and too stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It has derailed our thinking." Indeed--in his interview, Williamson takes a nice little shot at Alan Greenspan, always a good thing.

Second, both winners studied institutional economics, the effect that, duh, institutions and social structures have on economic activity. Here at the Dept. of Comm Illinois, we had a reading group last year (in addition to our rhetorical studies group; we're a beehive of intellectual activity) on institutional research and the ways in which the NYT and other sources explain Ostrom's work, in particular, sounds a bit familiar.

She studies what I would call the normative and regulative rules that govern institution formation when people confront a "commons"--a shared resource that a number of people have an interest in preserving. In other words, what values and behaviors evolve to maintain a resource that provides a living for the people concerned? Her work seems to skip from one side of the political aisle to another. Internal norms, she argues, work better than external rules in such situations. Let parties come up with their solutions rather than impose government regulations. But the old market theory example of the "tragedy of the commons" (that greedy individuals will destroy a shared resource and it should be sold to self-interested private owners) is also wrong. Cooperative behavior evolves to preserve the resource, she argues. An institution, shared sets of rules for common beliefs and actions, emerges and the resource is preserved.

Which is quite cool. Except for the column that appears on the same page, detailing the ways in which Goldman, Sachs intends to cock a snook at American taxpayers. The semi-private economic giant, which appears to run the Treasury Department, New Jersey, and the Democratic Party on the side, is setting aside more than $23 billion for its annual bonus pool--the largest in its history and more than twice the size of its 2008 pool.

Please recall three pertinent facts. First, the government bailed out Goldman to the tune of $10 billion last year. GS paid that money back and claimed it was unnecessary, but somehow liked the very public govt. endorsement received at the time. Second, the government allowed GS to reorganize as a bank holding company which, in turn, offers it cheap financing. Finally, given those two events, GS is now implicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America. So, when it takes the chances it takes, it knows it's not going to be allowed to fail. Heads, GS wins. Tails, taxpayers lose. All the thrill of rooting for the house in Vegas or the Yankees in the playoffs. But highly profitable. For GS employees.

I understand that Dr. Ostrom researches "relatively small forests in undeveloped countries." But I'd sure like to turn her loose on Goldman, Sachs and come up with some way to preserve our commons and give those people a conscience. Sadly, that may require a Nobel in genetic engineering.

Thoughts on the Nobel Peace Prize

*It's now called the "NoBush" Peace Prize. In all seriousness, even liberals seem to have underestimated the disdain that much of the world held for George W. Bush. Actually, it was not even disdain--it was despair. The United States is still irreplaceable in world affairs and when it, in effect, becomes a rogue nation, then it's an enormous problem for the world. Obama's determination to restore the United States to the political and moral center of the family of nations earned him this prize.

*It's still too early.

*It may be too early, but it's also a great honor for the nation. Republicans should be proud. Instead, they're acting like a ruling oligarchy when its annoying human rights activist wins the Peace Prize. Honestly, how much time do these folks wish to spend proving Paul Krugman right? It's become a cottage industry on the right.

Lighten up, guys. When your anger is matched only by the Taliban, Hamas, and al Qaeda, it's time to rethink your position.

*I'm really happy for Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Imagine all the times he's got to wake up the president with bad news. This morning, he got to say, "Sorry to wake you sir, but you've won the Nobel Peace Prize." That'll put you in the good graces of your boss.

*Poor Hillary. She's jetting all over the world, breaking her elbow, running the State Department, doing all of the hard, nasty, grunt work, and along comes this guy and wins the Peace Prize. Well, Tracy knows how you feel.

*The committee used the word "daring" and focused on the future. Obviously, this is not the usual Nobel Prize. They gave this award for some of the same reasons they give the Peace Prize to human rights activists: It is meant to increase Obama's leverage. He can carry that (symbolically, I hope) into the room with the president of Iran or Russia or the prime minister of Israel or Kent Conrad, for that matter, and drop that sucker onto the table. It's not everything. But every little bit helps.

*As a rhetorical critic, I can't wait for this Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Betcha lil Jon Favreau has already googled, "King Peace Prize acceptance speech" and "Faulkner Peace Prize acceptance speech."

*What should Obama say today and later: "It's a duty, not an award, a responsibility as well as an honor." That's the attitude-strive to be worthy of the burden that's been placed on you.

*Really, everyone. It's good thing when everyone likes your president. Honestly.

Woo-Hoo! I'm a REPUBLICAN!!!

Or so says Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. When I arrived home yesterday, what to my wondering eyes should appear but an envelope with 8 tiny items making me, the Oratorical Animal, "a REGISTERED participant in this important touchstone survey." My answers "will be used to represent a broad sampling of Republicans in your area." I'm also a "grassroots Republican" and Michael believes that I "deserve to have a voice in the way this country is governed" even though I "did not vote for Barack Obama." Hmmm, that might be a problem. But, hey, I got the letter. And I now know that "the Republican party is not dead and we are not going away." We! Did you see that "we"?! So, let's sit down with this survey, shall "we"?

"Should English be the official language of the United States?" As a good Republican, I guess I can only say "No," especially since Newt Gingrich has started a Spanish language website. Newt and I are both good Republicans, so Newt can't possibly be wrong, can he?

"Do you believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the US Senate?" Absolutely! In fact, let's  write that in on my answer column: A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y. "Yes" seems such a liberal, girly word by comparison. I'm a REPUBLICAN now!

"Do you support the creation of a national health insurance plan that would be administered by bureaucrats in Washington, DC?" You bet! My new party is so cool. That loser Obama won't even propose a single payer plan, a Medicare for all. I love Medicare. I'd love "Americare." And the Republicans put it right in the middle of their survey. They're going to bring that to me?! Wow. Let's get those liberals out of the way. Remember, I need to fill in the entire circle and I should probably use a #2 lead pencil. YEEEEESSSSSS.

"Do you believe that the federal government should allow the unionization of Department of Homeland Security employees who serve in positions critical to the safety and security of our nation?" You mean like truck drivers? And teachers? And the rest of the government? And my fabulous union grandfather?! A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y. Solidarity Forever! YEEEEEESSSSSS.

There's so much more. I don't have time to share it all with you because this is a very important "2009 Obama Agenda Survey" which is "REGISTERED in" my "name and affixed with a tracking code to ensure that it is accounted for in the tabulated results." Michael "needs to hear back from" me "right away." You see, "We have been on the defensive" but "In 2009 that all changes!" Gosh, it's already October. I've got to get this in the mail "right away" so Michael can "refocus and rebuild."

After all, "the future of the Republican Party is in [my] hands."

:)

Is Conservatainment Brain-Dead?

Steven Hayward has recently attracted a good deal of attention among liberals and conservatives for his provocatively titled op-ed piece, "Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?" As he himself notes in the essay, titles help. This one sure did.

On one level, it's difficult  to understand why my conservative friends on Facebook, for instance, seemed intrigued and impressed. It's predictable. The jarring title leads into a meditation on the glory of times past leads into lamentations of the sinful present leads into predictions of future bliss. It is, in other words, a jeremiad, perhaps the most familiar rhetorical genre in American history. The title may ask the question, but the answer is assumed by the genre itself: Of course not. There may be some bad apples today, but surely conservatism will soon cease to be conservatainment and recover its true character. 

Moreover, one has to wonder at some of the "good" examples offered by Hayward. George Gilder? Hugh Hewitt? Jonah Goldberg? Glenn Beck? Really?! Look, I've read my Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Milton Friedman, and Brent Bozell/Barry Goldwater. Hugh Hewitt is no Richard Weaver. Hayward visibly sweats to come up with signs of hope.

On the other hand, I see the attraction precisely because of the jeremiad. As Sacvan Bercovitch argues, the formulaic structure of the jeremiad--glorious covenant, sinful decline, inevitable redemption--assures true believers that a renewal of past truths--of the covenant--will lead to redemption. The logic of the jeremiad is clear: a failure to maintain the covenant has led to decline. Ever stronger adherence to its traditional values will bring about redemption. They are not wrong nor have they ever been wrong. They are right and they need to be more right; purity saves all. It's no coincidence that Hayward is writing a massive account of the Reagan years. The truths of the past will assure future success.

Equally important, there is nothing systemically wrong with conservatainment by this account. The problem rests not with its policies or belief systems; it rests with the failure of conservatainers to put those truths into action or to believe strongly enough in those truths. Like Tinker Bell, conservatism will live again if we believe. Hayward sets the stage for the ritualistic scapegoating of George W. Bush as a liberal--dissociating Bush/conservatainment from Reagan/conservatism. Redemption then follows as surely as sunrise follows night.

Although the structure of the essay assures conservatives of their eventual triumph, the form struggles mightily--ineffectually--to contain two powerful contradictions. First, Hayward's argument--and he is one of many--implicitly dismisses the Bush years far too easily. Second, he discusses, but cannot fully grasp, the structural challenges facing a conservative intellectual revival.

If there is to be a conservative intellectual revival, it must grapple honestly with the implosion of the conservative agenda in the Bush Administration. Much as Democrats in the 1980s needed to critique and understand the collapse of New Deal liberalism in the Carter Administration, so, too, do conservatives need to face squarely the collapse of Reaganism in the Bush years. Hayward doesn't bring it up. Bruce Bartlett honestly admitted Bush's failures, but attributed them to a betrayal of Reaganism. Judging from the title of his next book, he now seems ready for a more difficult intellectual task.

George W. Bush took the logic of Reaganism to the end of the line--tax cuts, military force, judgmental values. In turn, said policies blew up the budget, created few jobs, heightened income inequality, froze median income, wasted military power, cost American lives, won no wars, lowered American credibility, and confined Republicans primarily to southern states, with a few fundamentalist plains states thrown in for good measure. When Neil Patrick Harris is the most popular television personality out there because he is clearly one of the most interesting people on the planet, then the Republican Party needs to rethink its ideas/prejudices. Reaganism won't cut it, any more than a new New Deal saved Democrats in 1984 or 1988.

In addition, Hayward nicely traces the role of talk radio in contemporary conservatainment, but he can't bring himself to articulate the systemic problem that results. On the one hand, he notices that market incentives matter. On the other hand, he fails to notice that those market incentives cut the wrong way. Talk radio is entertainment; its reason for existence is to draw an audience for advertisers and so Rush, Bill, Sean, Glenn and the rest entertain to draw that audience. Similarly, big conservative organizations traditionally buy up the red meat books in bulk to push them to the top of bestseller lists. The market incentives strongly encourage conservatainment. You can make money that way. And that's what they're in business to do.

I'm not sure how to change that. But those incentives need to be changed. And that change is only likely to come when somebody--Bartlett, perhaps?--seriously engages conservatism's failures. Hayward is not the guy for the job nor does this essay begin that needed task. 

Opposing the Public Option

A variety of health care reform plans, including the president's, have a public option. As I understand it, all of the plans currently under serious consideration would require everyone to carry health insurance, just as we are required to carry automobile insurance. Yet private plans are enormously expensive and often not available for those who do not have employer coverage. So, most plans set up a health insurance exchange for those people who need to buy on the open market. The public option comes in here; alongside the private plans offered by various insurance companies on the market, there would be a public plan.

Why have one? The idea is twofold. First, it gives people an alternative and, especially in states with 1-2 dominant health insurance companies, the government would provide competition. Second, competition, in turn, would lower costs. As we all know from cable companies, when 1 source controls the vast majority of a market, prices mysteriously rise and quality of service mysteriously falls. Amazing, that. 

That's it. Nothing mysterious or strange here. In fact, the justification for a public option matches almost exactly the justification for the TVA when FDR and George Norris put it through in the 1930s. A public power option would keep private plans on their toes. It proved quite helpful.

Yet many so-called moderate Democrats oppose the public option. Yesterday, three Democrats voted against two versions of it in committee: Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Their arguments are suspect.

First, they claim to care about the deficit. They do not want the program to increase the budget deficit. Unfortunately for them, every single study, including the nonpartisan and respected Congressional Budget Office, states that the public option would save taxpayers money by lowering health care costs through competition. In some studies, the amount is trivial. In others, it is large. But it is always savings.

Moreover, these very same Senators happily voted for Bush tax cuts with no budgetary offsets and the Bush prescription drug plan with no budgetary offsets. In fact, Lincoln and Conrad recently voted to throw away 250 million dollars on abstinence education. The program does not work. That's been proven. It is a waste of money. They don't care. So, their deficit conscience is quite selective.

Second, they argue that a government option might drive every other insurance program out of business. Yes. That's why the Post Office has driven UPS and FedEx out of business and rules the world. Ninety-nine percent of the time these folks argue that the federal government can't run a one-car parade without screwing it up. Now, they want to claim that a public option--just an option--open only to those Americans buying insurance on the private market will drive everyone else out of business? They often try to claim that government subsidies would unfairly boost the public option. But the bills under consideration would not do so. They can't, if they are to make the budget targets Obama has created.

Third, they claim the public option doesn't have 60 votes. That is the cloture figure, the number of votes it takes to close debate in the Senate. They're assuming here that the Republicans would filibuster a health care reform bill on the Senate floor that contains a public option. But there are 60 Democrats. No Democrat has said that s/he will vote against cloture. I'd like to know just who plans on voting against cloture. Who's willing to kill all health care reform efforts and undermine a Democratic president? Several oppose the public option, but it has more than 50 votes; it has a majority. Who among these "Democrats" is willing to vote against cloture?

Fourth, they claim they want a bipartisan bill and Republicans won't sign onto a public option. This would make some sense if any Republicans had offered any deal which would cause them to support the bill. They haven't. Tort reform. Abortion regulations. Coops. No public option. Nothing. Nada. Zero. These moderate "Democrats" are negotiating with themselves. The Republicans want to kill health care refrom and there's no deal to be had here. Lucy will pull the football again, Senators.

It would be nice, I think, if someone among these three (and a few others) would simply tell the truth. They don't want health care reform. Then, its supporters could dispense with them, remove them from their leadership positions in the Senate (and a majority of the Democratic caucus ought to enforce some discipline), and get on with it.

I'm increasingly beginning to believe that Conrad is just stupid, lazy, and uninformed. But the others probably are not. They need to become part of the solution, not part of the problem. Or they need to get out of the way. The majority needs to start acting like a majority.

Obama at the UN

Like my friend Blogos, I've been falling into the fall at a rate that is, as Nixon would have it, immediate and precipitous. I've spent a bit of time with the president's speech at the UN and, although I don't want to venture a full evaluation, what strikes me most is the legacy of John F. Kennedy.

You see it first in the language. When Obama speaks of domestic issues or when he campaigns, he sounds like MLK--he echoes the repetitive phrasing, the climax constructions, the stories, the biblical allusions. But when he addresses foreign policy, like the Cairo University address for instance, he picks up the cadence and the style of JFK.

Take the opening. Obama's second line is the sort of rolling triad (a three phrase, balanced sentence) favored by Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, and, ironically, George W. Bush. From there, Obama consistently invokes the short, punchy phrases that characterized Kennedy's style, putting the disjunctive alternatives to particularly good use: "The religious convictions that we hold in our hearts can forge new bonds among people, or they can tear us apart. The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. The energy we use can sustain our planet or destroy it." The short phrases, the stark alternatives, the light/dark metaphor, the active voice, the alliteration, and even the small internal metaphors (bonds/harness) also marked JFK's discourse.

Nor is the resemblance only stylistic. Like JFK in many venues (particularly American University), President Obama urges the world to act on the basis of both interests and values: "We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect." This is a kind of right makes might philosophy, one characteristic of both John and Robert Kennedy. Call it liberal realism.

Obama, like Kennedy, believes there is evil in the world and believes we face difficult adversaries. But if we engage those adversaries, draw them into the global economy, they'll be unable to compete, as the Soviet Union was unable to compete, in a liberal global order. If it's a battle of consumer goods between the US and al Qaeda, we, um, win. We're Florida and they're Charleston Southern. Seriously.

Third, like Kennedy, Obama loves structure and he recognizes the importance of good will. So, just as AU included concrete steps to demonstrate that the US was interested in a new relationship with the USSR, so, too does this speech begin with a series of concrete steps that have already demonstrated US sincerity since Obama took office. Just as AU worked through a series of carefully organized questions, so, too, does Obama idenitfy four pillars "that I believe are fundamental to the future that we want for our future."

And that is a fourth resemblance. Like Kennedy, Obama consistently differentiates between past and future. That pair is combined with several others: easy/hard, simple/complex, old/new. All are designed to contrast the laziness with which we can perpetuate old conflicts with the restlessness with which his audience, the preferred identity we adopt, approaches the future. We are smart, subtle, careful, tough, reasonable, strong, and competent. That is, in fact, JFK's liberal realism.

A realism that's also distinguished by reciprocity--what works for one, works for another. That's the fundamental notion of fairness that JFK brought to the world stage and so does Obama. For instance, "The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestineans. And--and nations within this body do the Palestineans no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against Israel over constructive willingness to recognize Israel's legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security."

Yet there is one additional reciprocity note worthy of exploration. President Obama has sent a series of signals of late that he will no longer tolerate, for lack of a better word, free riders. Here's the line, excerpted often in the last few days: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems. We have sought--in word and deed--a new era of engagement with the world. And now it is time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

I suspect Obama, seeing an America with limited resources, is tired of deploying the vast majoirty of the military force that is used; tired of a global economy which relies far too heavily on the American consumer as the consumer of last resort; tired of nations relying on his stimulus package to be the primary stimulus package; and tired of critics who won't step up to the plate.

I'm probably overstating a bit--but not a ton. Obama is willing to engage, but he needs a response. Reciprocity is the core principle of his liberal realism.