P.M. Carpenter

Once, during the commodity-rationing days of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt publicly mentioned that the White House might substitute salads for desserts to help conserve unrationed sugar and hence keep it that way, which promptly caused a run on sugar, which thereby forced its unscheduled rationing. Later, the puzzled, Congressionally chastised and somewhat shaken first lady commented, "It never crossed my mind that you couldn't tell the American people the truth and count on them to behave themselves accordingly."

Eleanor, of course, knew better than that. She spent an adult lifetime diplomatically and necessarily hedging on what she knew to be much harsher truths about American society, especially those that conflicted with hidebound attitudes about race. Her husband was not unsympathetic; just presidentially wary of offending white voters and all those powerful Southern pols who held the legislative future of his New Deal and the war's prosecution in their grubby, racist little hands.

Better to step gingerly, very gingerly and with very, very small steps at that. That was the smart political move, because both Eleanor and Franklin knew they could not, in fact, tell the American people the whole truth and count on them to behave themselves accordingly.

And so it has been with minor exceptions since the mid-20th century, and well before that, of course.

Not only race, but issues of gender, the fair distribution of wealth, America's proper role in the world, fiscal intelligence ... One could go on and on, listing all the things that smart politicians avoid telling the truth about. The "why" has already been answered. They got where they are by not telling the truth, by not trusting the American people, by not counting on them to behave themselves and to do the right thing.

And now comes Barack Obama, who surely felt as shaken as Eleanor Roosevelt in the wake of the nation's outcry over a few mostly truthful words about America's role in the world. It was as though he had spoken the words himself; and he could have, but in far more diplomatic terms. It was merely the harshness of the original words that shocked -- their theme, rephrased and softly spoken as a Press Club lecture, on the need for soft American power over hard would have gone down with little notice and absolutely no uproar.

That's what those original words were fundamentally about: not black liberation, but national liberation -- the blownback consequences of our international arrogance and one region's monstrously executed suggestion that we start thinking about changing course. For our own good, as well as others.

But they were spoken by a black preacher, whose church was attended by this black politician, hence the latter's response was culturally defined and necessarily confined to the meaning of blackness in America, and not the meaning of America, period.

Sen. Obama went, it would seem, as far as he could go. As he composed his responding speech he scratched his head more than once, I'm sure, asking himself why he was writing only about racial miseries -- which we can do nothing about overnight and which the good reverend was not, in reality, addressing -- rather than tackling the enormously pregnant question of imperial miseries -- which we can at least begin reversing on January 20, 2009.

As far as he went -- as far as he could go -- he performed brilliantly. That's not just my review; that's the review of virtually every commentator out there, whether center, left or right. With grace, eloquence and almost unparalleled intellectual integrity he tackled the "Race Question" in America.

Americans' degree of receptiveness to being told the truth and then behaving accordingly remains, of course, undetermined. But there are hints. In a weekend Washington Post story, a white male in Pennsylvania spoke for probably millions when he offered that Sen. Obama "could have thrown [his preacher] under the bus, but he didn't, and that shows loyalty. I respect that." Nevertheless the reverend's words seemed to this gentleman "completely un-American," and this left him still uncomfortable about the Illinois senator.

But that comment in itself poses a separate and quite interesting question. Did he mean "anti-American," not un-American? -- anti-American in the literal sense that the preacher opposes American policies? That usage would have been more fitting, because there is nothing more authentically American than a local community leader questioning his government's actions abroad. After all, no less than that most American of all American presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, once said that "To announce that ... we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

In our culture -- and please permit me to stress that stipulation -- I can't think of anyone better qualified to publicly address what is "morally treasonable" than a preacher. And that's all the Reverend Wright did. It's as American as stuffing ballot boxes.

So the next question is: Will Obama tell the American people the truth about our role -- our multicolored role -- in the world? Can he extend his intellectual eloquence to the race-transcending issues raised by Wright? Can he, with the same pluck, face down the American people, tell them the truth and count on them to act accordingly at the polls?

Or would he be left as shaken and chastised as Eleanor Roosevelt? No, no, Senator, set us straight about race, if you must -- we'll let you go that far -- but don't tell us we have most everything else wrong, too.

That's what I'd like to see asked and answered.

Yesterday, in a brief survey of what I believe political historians will chronicle as the chief cause of Hillary Clinton's now-failing presidential bid, I wrote: "After seven years of vastly experienced presidential lying, conniving, weaseling, obfuscating, twisting, manipulating and swindling, the last thing most voters wanted was more Washington experience."

What I first wrote, but then deferred to another day -- like today, was, "the last thing most voters wanted was more of the same Washington experience."

I deferred those three, excised little words because they were post-genesis, so to speak, to her ultimately failing bid. In other words, in this election cycle any candidate's emphasis on experience was almost certain to result in a sum loss of voter appeal. It made little difference whether Hillary's was similar or unsimilar to George W. Bush's. "Experience" itself -- stripped of all external judgment, favorable or unfavorable, about that experience -- was a long-term and almost surefire buzz-kill from the get-go, as long as some other candidate had something else to offer.

But that was then, and this is now. And now, in these waning primary days that nevertheless hold some potential, however slim, for a Hillary comeback, external judgments about the "sameness" of Hillary's experience make all the difference indeed.

For the still-undecided, Democratic primary voter is now faced with a choice that comes down to this: Do I prefer the candidate who is capable of tolerantly listening to the occasional abhorrently phrased view? Or shall I go with the candidate who offers every indication of nailing down another, at-minimum four years of manipulation, twisting and swindling?

Forget for the moment, if you can, gentle voter, the second candidate's almost laughably swindling explanation of her Iraq war vote, which is now costing you and the families of 4,000 needlessly dead Americans anywhere from one to three trillion dollars. Just put that out of your mind, set it aside as a little slip-up, a bit of mere negligent oversight. We all make mistakes, even when we mean to.

But as you set that aside, there are still those other indications of what could come. And like her war-vote explanation, those indications are at best unsettling when you consider the vast expanse that separates them from honest reality -- that removes them even one inch from the realm of the Bushlike manipulated, the twisted, the downright swindling.

Much has been written, for instance, about the chasm that lies between Hillary's overall and boastful claims to foreign policy experience and the actual, factual record. There's no need to press her on this matter, as is needed with respect to Iraq. Here, she eagerly and freely offers up case after case of extensive and personal involvement in our foreign affairs of the 1990s.

But the reality of it? As I said, so much has already been journalistically vetted and reviewed -- and panned -- there's no need to resurvey it all here. Yet one instance does merit repeating at some length, because the immense chasm is almost breathtaking in its panoramic wonder.

This, from "Fact Checker" Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous." When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

Numerous reporters ... covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady....

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony ... shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.... [CBS News] footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

The affair -- from original reality, to told version, to corrected version --is borderline comical in its bizarre surreality, and a definite candidate for one of those 527 ads in the general election. But it is, as well, disturbingly and quite unfunny.

After "35 years of experience" Hillary had to know that someone would check her story. Yet did that prevent her audience manipulation, her twisting of events, the tale's swindling core? Not a bit. She just blustered ahead and bellowed whatever she thought people would buy -- and they would be awed. She trusted, that is, in the electorate's unremitting gullibility and common ignorance of the truth.

Remind you of anyone currently in power? Care to go through that same experience again?

If Hillary had always fought the good fight -- whether as First Lady or U.S. Senator -- and then simply told the simple truth about it, her experience might have been a plus. But this year is an unfavorable one for the wholesale market of manipulation and swindling. Too many people were already primed to reject it.

Political reporters Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen of The Politico have finally said with prodigious, black-and-white clarity what so many others in the mainstream press have been fudging and dancing around: "One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning."

Thank you. 

That wasn't so hard, was it? 

In all immodesty, however, I said much the same on Iowa's morning after, although for more ecumenical reasons (which we'll get back to shortly) than those delineated yesterday by Vandehei and Allen.

For them, now, as it has been for the realistically grounded for some time, it is all about -- yep -- the math. You can cut, slice, rearrange and bounce the pledged-delegate and popular-vote numbers any which way you want, but they always come back to one inalterable conclusion: Barack Obama wins.

Ah, but there are those superdelegates, you say, who are beholden to nothing and nobody but their own consciences and political futures. One never knows which way those winds may be blowing down the road, so there's still a chance. To which, with butcher knives in hand, Vandehei and Allen had this to say:

"The only way she wins [with] Democratic superdelegates [is if they're] ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency." Then, the two journalists' death blow to such fantastical musings: "People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet."

In effect, Vandehei and Allen continue, the mainstream press and broadcast media have been playing mind games with the electorate -- and especially Hillary's supporters. "Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is," and mostly, almost exclusively, because journalists love a good horse race and didn't want to see this one at the finish line.

Virtual and honestly reported fait accomplis don't sell newspapers or ramp up ratings. Can you hear it? Tune in again tomorrow, folks, when we'll remind you, again, that it's seven long months to the next major showdown.

Click. This far out, covering Betty Crocker Bake-offs would hold more news-consumer appeal.

So those journalistic partners with the Clinton campaign perpetuated "the myth," as the Politico titled its story, of Hillary's fighting viability. Oh, the drama of it all.

But to get back to what I promised, the real and determining drama of the Obama-Clinton race came decisively on the evening of January 3. The following morning I opened a column with, "Barack Obama can start taking drape measurements at the White House," for "it's hard to see how, and by whom, he can be stopped now." I closed it with this: "You may pre-order your Obama Inaugural Ball tickets today."

I wasn't riding some personal wave of Obamamania when I wrote that. In fact, in a moment of mistaken objectivity I had largely written off Obama's chances in an earlier piece. It was, merely, that Iowa delivered a crushing confirmation of what most voters were screaming for -- "change."

Abrupt, incontrovertible, unmistakable change. That hung in the air, voters would not be denied, and it didn't take many tea leaves to read the immediate electoral future. That was the new objectivity, only this time there was proof.

And that was the wave on which Hillary tumbled -- early, decisively and irreversibly. She and her staff of old-politics, 45-percent-coalition advisers immeasurably misread the national mood.

After seven years of vastly experienced presidential lying, conniving, weaseling, obfuscating, twisting, manipulating and swindling, the last thing most voters wanted was more Washington experience. But what did Hillary give them? Thirty-five bloody years of it. Reams of it. Mountains of it. Endless lectures and tutorials about it.

For a candidate known for her slyly calculating nature, it was one of the most colossal miscalculations in American political history. And that, I'm sure, is how future political historians will write her political obituary of 2008, just after noting another colossal and preceding miscalculation -- her 2002 Iraq war vote.

So again, thank you, Messrs. Vandehei and Allen, for finally writing what other journalists already knew but shied away from saying with such piercing clarity at point-blank range. Once the striking reality of it dawns on Hillary's base, perhaps a new day of progressive unity will dawn as well. Or at least begin dawning.

It's about time. Because this race was over as of January 4. It just took a while for journalists to get around to reporting it.

Although no one yet knows anything of any verifiable substance -- especially the haplessly in-charge Condoleezza Rice, which naturally is just par for the course -- Barack Obama really needed this.

Thank you, oh "-gate" giving gods, for in all your mysterious playfulness we see that you do indeed giveth what you taketh away. And these days really quickly, too.

This is politics, so imagination and suspicion are happily permitted to substitute for material reality and facts. We watched this axiomatic sordidness unfold with splendid exactitude in the aftermath of the Rev. Wright fiasco -- 1) a "scandalous" story breaks ... 2) a thoughtful, convincing response is offered ... 3) the punditry crowd ensues with half-baked speculations and recriminations about number two, not one. We can rest assured, I trust, that irresponsible network jabber will dominate now, as much as before. It's only fair.

Like I said, this is politics, and that pretty much says it all.

When Watergate was in its infancy, the indefatigable services of two obscure but intrepid reporters were required to convince the big-boy media that some serious skulduggery was afoot. It's rather stunning now to think that after watching Dick Nixon in action for 30 criminal years that the media would have had to be prodded into investigative action, but in that era the nation was still clinging to its last, thin vestiges of innocence.

Surely the president of the United States wouldn't, couldn't be so dumb as to authorize or cover up a felony committed for utterly blockheaded gain. But he was.

And although the investigative subject material was about as serious as it then could get, only a few noticed that a burgeoning media circus was being conceived, and would soon be in need of regular feedings.

It began with some gravitas -- the nightly network coverage of an overseas crisis and then the 24-hour cable procreation of Carter-watch; he could do this, should do that, he didn't, end of presidency.

In his place -- no surprise -- a slick, photogenic, media-indulgent political entertainer. Before long, we were down to tailing a serious but horny senator in his quest to replace said entertainer, and not long after that our current-events education derived almost exclusively from other bimbo eruptions and the occasional, unsubstantiated financial scandal.

A big and booming business was here to stay -- the obsessive, profitable feeding of the unenlightened masses with heaps-more unenlightenment.

In our unaware darkness we never stopped to consider, for example, that the private and not entirely uncommon act of adulterous fellatio could alter if not end the course of Western civilization, but by golly it could, it just could. All we needed, as good citizens, was the proper news and information and truckloads of partisan, talking-head humbug.

We were not disappointed. "They" were happy to oblige, because this puppy needed feeding. It was the stuff that future political careers were made of, as well as craven cable-network saturation, network-correspondent face time, and scads of speculation-peddling opportunities for otherwise idle commentators.

By the time a monumental issue of actual Western civilization-altering concern rolled around -- you remember, that little unprovoked war we launched in the world's most volatile region -- it just wasn't sexy or squalid or scandalous enough to merit our full attention. Besides, it was all so damn ... complicated. Dry, objective, straightforward network analyses wouldn't do, because those are so damn ... unprofitable.

Fast forward to the present. Is he black enough or too black? Is he a secret Muslim? Does he hold hand over heart? Does he wear a flag pin? Was he sitting in the pews? Is he, in short, as gullible as we are?

Now that's news, and rightly the kind of crapola we can base our presidential preferences on.

There's only one antidote for the political victim and only one balancing act performable by the media: any other shrill speculation about any other possible scandal will do nicely as a tiring-scandal substitute. Odds are, Condi Rice's operation was merely performing as incompetently as always, but let us jump to every other possible conclusion first. That's far more entertaining.

So for the next 48 hours, sit back and enjoy. And watch for any sign of Barack Obama folding his hands in prayer, for that's a surefire indication that he's thanking God for these little tidbits of counterbalancing media hysteria that determine our national leadership. We're too shallow not to love them, as well as too shallow to grasp the authentic reasons behind his candidacy.

Maybe we'll just stumble our way into salvation.

As great oratory goes, Barack Obama's race speech rivaled JFK's inaugural address, Lincoln's second, and virtually anything ever spoken by FDR. The national jury came in with that unanimous decision after very little deliberation, so I repeat it here without fear of hyperbole.

But his was more -- much more -- than just great oratory. It was, in addition, that rarest of displays -- that of a politician in possession of an authentic and deep historical understanding of the American Experience.

This man does more than memorize and re-heave the latest and hottest-button talking points scribbled by jaded advisers designed to position their guy with a short-term edge. He's a profound thinker, for the benefit of the long haul, and he uniquely invites the nation to think along with him.

That's unprecedented in my lifetime, and was enlightening enough as well to finally move me from mere opposition to one candidate to confident support of another. It takes a lot of something quite powerful to stir a bona fide cynic, but Obama stirred this one.

He did it through the use of an open, personal and pragmatic reasoning power that reminded me of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats -- exhortations of splendid leadership, for sure, but also artfully crafted and gentle reminders that we all need to be on the same page before we can effectively move forward.

His speech was the stuff of the professorial without the haughtiness. Between the lines Obama was asking, simply, Do you get it? Do you understand what I'm saying here? Because if you don't, I'll gladly back up and we'll go over this material one more time. And we'll keep going over it until everyone understands. It's not that difficult, really. It's just that no one in my political position has ever asked anything of you before.  

Other politicians ask only for your vote. Obama is asking for your heart and mind. And he seems to genuinely care less about personal power and next-hump victories than national reconciliation through individual comprehension.

Understanding precedes constructive action, if, that is, the action is to take root in real and lasting change. 

Never have I heard a politician so courageously confront the sadly manifest, which other politicians spend lifetimes merely exploiting for temporary advantage:

We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

True, those words were necessarily devoted to the race issue. But the sentiment inside addressed every issue lingering on the table -- we can keep buying the slop that's peddled by pols for their benefit, or we can stop, think and say, at long last, No more. The tawdry game of the old politics of personal advantage through group division stops here and now. We wish to come and reason together, but first we must understand.

That's all that Obama was saying, but considering the quotidian servings of dumbed-down and diversionary garbage served up by the business-as-usual political class, it was a lot, a whole lot, and it was profound.

Nothing I've written here was anything you probably didn't hear from the vastly arrayed, network commentariat yesterday. For that redundancy, I apologize. But I would make one observation about the commentariat itself, which I did not hear expressed.

Now keep in mind this is no statistically verifiable sociological survey, but it occurred to me that the women commentators, by and large, seemed to "get it" far better than the males, by and large. One can speculate as to the why, and in the process foolishly get oneself into a lot of hot water. But I'll take the foolish plunge.

Obama's speech required emotional concessions as much as intellectual engagement -- and again, it seemed to me, and perhaps me only out of some old-school and deeply engrained sexist bias, that the women's reception embraced both, as they are better culturally equipped to do. The men, on the other hand, often preferred to trail off on the political mechanics of it all -- this part worked, that part didn't, could be trouble.

In brief, the women seemed to be urging on these collectively assorted insensitive brutes: This man Obama is trying to say something that transcends your superficial obsession with political tactics, you nitwits. Try, for once, opening your hearts as well as your minds and perhaps you can then profitably absorb the full and enlightening impact.

Which is strikingly counterintuitive when you stop to think about it, since it's women that Obama the man has always had the greatest challenge with electorally.

The headline, "McCain Profits in Iraq as Democrats Brawl," was followed by a textual emphasis on only the brawling. Such is news.

The Arizonan's tremendous good fortune in the primaries -- his ultimately revealed and colossal mismatch against a pathetic horde of ultimately revealed and colossal blockheads -- was, I'm sure, enough to convince him of the power of his assorted superstitions.

Now, however, I imagine the senator believes that he's transcended the rewards of mere superstition; that, indeed, God Himself has partisanly aligned by celestially commanding, "Let Democrats be Democrats."

For when afforded such divine permission, Democrats are sure to fill the hard-copy news with phrases like "Democratic infighting," "the campaign fracas," "their warring," and as "the Democrats feud," Republicans "profit."

And are they ever profiting: "In a hypothetical match-up against Clinton, a weekend Zogby poll gave the Arizona senator 45 percent to her 39 percent. Against Obama, McCain led by 44 percent to 39." Juxtapose that with match-ups of but a month ago, when Obama led by a margin of 12.

Then juxtapose that with this remembrance as well: This was to have been the year of the Great Conservative Crack-up. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, foreign policy conservatives -- they were all at each others' throats, a much-anticipated if not inevitable development springing from the historically uneasy construction of the Great Conservative Synthesis of the early 1960s.

George W. Bush may have engineered the train wreck, but John McCain was sure to bring it home. When the neoconservative McCain wasn't insulting social conservatives he was offending economic libertarians, or at least his history of doing so was both unforgettable and unforgivable by the insulted, offended constituencies. Conservatism's uneasy alliance was shattered: the 2008 general election would be more mop-up for Democrats than match-up.

What Democrats failed to remember, however, was that their own party, since at least 30 years before the conservative synthesis, has also been an uneasy alliance of competing political sentiments, if not actual ideologies. Their unifying difficulties -- their repeated inclination to scatter philosophically hither and yon -- run much deeper than mere organizational disorderliness.

Beginning in the New Deal era, throughout the Great Society battles and now, to today, the tensions within the Democratic Party have been, in the most sweeping terms, those between its progressive elements and the older-school conservatives. Reaganism appropriated most of the latter in the 1980s, only to have its hold attenuated somewhat in the '90s by the triangulating Bill Clinton, and whose wife now wishes to call them home en masse.

But whose home? The progressive dwelling erected by FDR and furthered remodeled by visionaries such as Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Paul Wellstone? Or the conservative Democratic home of Scoop Jacksonism, which tosses a socially progressive bone now and then but adheres to the fundamental electoral attractions of a globally muscular and intrusive America.

And let there be no mistake: the latter is precisely what Hillary Clinton represents, and that representation is precisely what lies at the heart of Democrats' modern disunity.

The representative's gender, along with her opponent's race, has merely complicated the divisive equation. Older white women, especially, would no more reward with their votes a white, neoconservative, Democratic male in 2008 than they would write in a vote for the late Jerry Falwell. They have to know that, and the energy required to suppress the knowledge must be as exhausting as it is embarrassing.

I'm not unsympathetic. As a male, I try my best to keep in mind the allure to women of a woman candidate, no matter how unprogressive some of her past may be. I would hope, however, that if I were a woman I would also wait till a genuinely progressive one came along, rather than throwing in with the Democratic neoconservatives for gender's sake.

Hillary's Iraq speech yesterday was intended to alleviate widespread concerns about her voting past, but to me it only drove the pain home. As Reuters summarized it: "She said the war has sapped U.S. military and economic strength, damaged U.S. national security, taken the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans and left thousands wounded."

In other words, Hillary reminded us that the war has produced exactly what progressives predicted in 2002 that it would produce. Mrs. Clinton was a knowing voice in the institutional body that handed Mr. Bush a blank check to prosecute this militarily and economically sapping, security-damaging, life-taking and human-disfiguring war, nevertheless she knowingly sided with the neocons -- and all for the Scoop Jackson-, Joe Lieberman- and Ronald Reagan-Democrat vote.

Some political acts are so cowardly, so callous, so cynically motivated and lastingly harmful as to shut down any consideration of forgiveness. Hillary's was one of them. Absent it, her admittedly overplayed "35 years of experience" would have blown away Barack Obama. This would have been no contest.

Her gender and her opponent's race now keep her afloat, but again, let there be no doubt that at the core of the party's modern-day split is the deeper historical and ideological division between long-term, visionary progressivism and short-term, opportunistic neoconservatism.