Today the Washington Post ran a story covering the widespread enthusiasm for the candidacy of Barack Obama on the part of people throughout the world.  Kenyan’s, especially, seem to be pleased that one of their own (Obama’s father was Kenyan) may sit in the Oval Office next January.  The general consensus seems to be that an Obama presidency would be one in which America had more respect for other countries and peoples throughout the word.  Quoth one citizen of India:

“This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime,” said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. “A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different.”

A President Obama would almost certainly chart a substantially different course in foreign policy than his predecessor (eg. no more well thought-out schemes to conquer other nations that are perceived to be giving America the stink eye).  However, I wonder if some of this jubilation is premature.

There have certainly been racist presidents throughout American history as evidenced by Woodrow Wilson’s determination to give ignorant Latins a Princetonian education in “elect[ing] good men.”  But the majority of U.S. foreign policy maneuvers the world has found so noisome over the last two decades have largely derived from a sense of American national interest, whether properly construed or not, rather than any racial or ethnic antipathy.  Even the nation’s first black president idly watch Rawandan Tutsis put to the slaughter, backed Iraqi sanctions that starved thousands of innocents, and exacted vengeance on Sudanese pharmaceutical manufacturers for unrelated acts of terrorism.

What will the world think when a hypothetical President Obama is confronted with a tough foreign policy choice and he acts in the interests of the United States?  Would his solidarity with the peoples of the world stop him from striking Iran if he was told it was on the verge of completing a deliverable nuclear weapon?  Moreover, even if Obama sought to endear himself to the foreign public by, for instance, doubling U.S. development aid or signing on to the International Criminal Court, there is no guarantee that such measures would make it through a Congress beholden to the far more parochial views of the American public.

I am an Obama supporter, to be sure.  I believe he is this country’s best option for both foreign and domestic policy, and I think he has what it takes to be a great executive.  But I think a dose of realism is in order before global expectations get out of hand.  Barack is no George W. Bush, but he will govern for the people of the United States, not the world.

A disturbing piece out of the Washington Post today recounts the reaction from some voters encountered by many of Senator Barack Obama’s campaigners while making their rounds.  The story offers many anecdotal accounts of hostility and racial slurs like this one:

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

It also notes that, in spite of the experiences of campaign staff, gathering objective data on the racial attitudes of voters is difficult.  Thankfully, American society has made some progress since the days when publicly expressing overtly racist views was socially acceptable behavior.  However, if the experiences recounted here are true, there still much further to go.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity Church sat for his first interview since the eruption of the controversy over his politically charged sermons and his relationship with presidential candidate, and church member, Barack Obama.  For those who are interested, the entire interview with Bill Moyers on the latter’s PBS program can be viewed online here.  Personally, I found the discussion to be very enlightening, both in probing the context behind the ostensibly damning sound bites that have circulated so broadly and in revealing who Reverend Wright actually is and what his church is about.

The media reaction to the interview has been typically disappointing.  Rather than try to examine Wright’s thoughts, which have so shocked mainstream (white?) America,  we are presented with more excerpts painting an artificial picture of a man on the defensive and stories about the Wright story being a story again, and how this will hurt Senator Obama.

Frankly, I don’t see Reverend Wright’s sermons as having much of anything to do with Obama’s campaign.  I prefer to let the senator explain his beliefs on his own, rather than speculating about what vague, subconscious influence his pastor may or may not have had on his thinking.  I would be far more concerned if Obama had actively courted and received an explicit political endorsement of his campaign by a truly radical and hateful minister like McCain backer Pastor John Hagee.

Rather, I prefer to explore what lies behind Reverend Wright’s sermons and, having seen the coverage and listened to the man, I think it boils down to a few simple facts: 1) the United States of America is imperfect, 2) U.S. policies have consequences, and 3) as citizens of a democracy, all Americans bear some responsibility for the country’s imperfect policies.

America is not untainted.  While it is a truly great country, worthy of love and admiration, its history and present state must be appraised realistically.  It is a country of great liberty as well as great inequity, one of immense charity as well as immense power.  It is a country whose people willingly shed their blood across the globe in the name of their democratic ideals yet whose government fostered the most vile forms tyranny abroad to “defend” those same values.  However much good there may be here (and I think it far outweighs the bad), we must be willing to admit that there is a dark side that necessitates a continual struggle for greater justice within the framework of our democratic society.

We must also recognize that to the extent the bad persists, it will have real consequences for the citizens of this country.  One of Wright’s most contentious statements was that America’s “chickens had come home to roost” on September 11th.  He was not trying to say that innocents deserved to die on that day or that such atrocities were just retribution against the United States.  They were horrific acts of base criminality.  But the idea that they are entirely unconnected to American policies abroad, to “collateral damage” from Tomahawk missile strikes, and to the embrace of authoritarian regimes distant lands; to suggest these things are unrelated is to be willfully blind.  Understanding the motivation for an act is not to condone or justify it, and Reverend Wright did no such thing.

Finally, the reason I believe that Wright has caused so much vituperative chatter in the country large is because of what his ideas mean for America’s citizens.  If we as citizens of a democracy were to accept the premise that our government is engaged in some actions that may be unjust and ultimately detrimental to ourselves, then we also accept an obligation to put a stop to it.  If we take seriously the ideals embodied in our founding documents as well as the moral imperatives represented in our country’s many faiths, how could we not cry out and strive to correct our state where is has gone astray?

This is the root of the anger as I see it.  For while Reverend Wright may have been directing his indignation at a government he sees as unjust, the reality is that couched within his charges is an implicit criticism of all Americans; not for racism, or militarism, or nationalism, but for the malign neglect of our awesome responsibility to hold our elected government accountable.

What is “free and fair trade?” What are the two Democratic presidential candidates positions on it? The Associated Press has a good overview of the candidate’ current positions on NAFTA compared to their past statements on it. And it reminds us of what “free and fair trade” ultimately is…bullshit. Anyone with even a basic grounding in economics knows this phrase glosses over a number of trade-offs and complexities (don’t worry…I won’t go into the Hecksher-Ohlin model) while allowing a candidate to appear to be Wal-Mart’s best friend and at the same time cozy up to that most endangered of American species, the unionized manufacturing worker.

What will a Democratic trade policy look like in 2008? My hope is that it will steer clear of protectionism, but do more to address the short term displacement of workers and shoot for marginal increases in labor and environmental standards abroad. In my wildest dreams it would involve cutting-off the flow of government largess to agribusiness and allowing foreign crops to compete on an even footing in America. But, given the amount of money that has poured into the campaign even at this early date and the most prominent sources of said financing, my expectations are that it will be a continuation of Clinton-Bush trade policy with lip service paid to working to Americans.

Yesterday on Meet the Press Ralph Nader announced he will make another bid for the presidency in 2008.  You can watch Tim Russert’s interview of Nader here:

This time around, the Green machine has dispensed with his “tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum” characterization of the other candidates (or perhaps he’s just waiting until there are only two left) though he still has criticism a plenty for Republicans and Democrats both. His incessant hyping of his campaign website leads me to believe he’ll be trying to mimic the success of netroots candidates like Howard Dean in 2004 and Barack Obama this year.

Of course, the first line of questioning that Russert pursued was related to the charge that has dogged Nader for almost eight years: that his candidacy “gave” the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 by taking votes away from Al Gore in Florida. Since its inception, this critique has prompted a slew of criticism from the left and resulted in widespread opposition to Nader’s 2004 run, often on the part of the very same people that had backed the Green candidate four years earlier (perhaps most memorably when Michael Moore and Bill Maher both knelt before Nader and begged him not to run during Maher’s live HBO talk show).

However you feel about Ralph Nader’s politics, the man has taken a lot of unfair heat for the results of the 2000 election. Sure, perhaps if Nader had bowed out in 2000, Gore would have picked up enough votes to overcome Bush’s razor thin margin of victory (537 votes, to be exact). Perhaps if any of the other third parties that received more than 537 votes in Florida had bowed out, the same would have happened. Perhaps if the Supreme Court had ruled differently in Bush v. Gore the result might have changed. Or maybe, and this is a stretch, if Al Gore’s campaign had been more effective than one for an off year election to city zoning commission, he could have won on his own.

Let’s face it, the 2000 election was Al Gore’s to lose. He was effectively running as the incumbent on the record of a wildly popularly presidency and unprecedented economic growth. And he couldn’t even win his home state. Hopefully this time around rather than whining about the Green specter putting literally tenths of percentage points of the popular vote at risk, the Democrats and other progressives will suck it up and campaign for a candidate on the basis of his or her merits, letting the voters (or at any rate, the Electoral College) have the final say. If we intend to operate as a democracy, it’s time to grow up.