I have always held in this race that while of course we shouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate based on something as skin deep as skin color, that nonetheless all things being equal in terms of character, temperament, policy proposals, principles, and priorities, that there is a crucial psychological bonus to having a black president. It is simply of too inestimable a value to send the message to the youth of America and around the world about what kind of a country we live in.

This great article is about an early fruit of this impact:

As I’ve considered Sen. Obama’s accomplishment, I’ve determined the most profound impact he’s had — not considering the possibility of him becoming president and proving to be one of our better ones — is on our future more than our present or our history.

I didn’t grasp that until I took my 2-year-old to the doctor last week and he took a vision exam. It was through young Alexander’s eyes that I saw how important this moment in time could be.

The nurse administering the exam pointed to different shapes and images on a chart, asking Alexander to identify each. One of the recurring images was that of a flag. It wasn’t an American flag, but a flag just the same.

To a 2-year-old, a flag is a flag, right? Alexander is most familiar with the U.S. flag. When the nurse pointed to the flag, he answered confidently.

“Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it as best as a 2-year-old could.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Barack Obama.”

As she went through the chart, she once again came to the flag.

“Barack Obama.”

“Do you know what he’s saying?” I asked her.

“No.”

“He’s saying Barack Obama.” Why? Because he was making an association. Most times when he’s seen Sen. Obama on TV, the Democratic nominee has been standing in front of the U.S. flag.

Whether Sen. Obama wins the presidency or not, he has had an untold effect on the future and psyche of America.

My son will live a lifetime in which he knows an African-American can ascend to the highest levels in this country. He won’t think it odd for a black man to seek to lead a nation. He as well as many white, Asian, Hispanic and other children, whether they like the candidate or not, won’t think it odd or a novelty to see a black man standing in front of the American flag — the ultimate display of patriotism, despite misguided and mean-spirited efforts to paint Sen. Obama as being otherwise — articulating his concerns and love for his country.

Because of Barack Obama, many of our children won’t grow up with as many of the psychological bruises those before them might have endured.

I grew up being told that I could one day be president. But much of what I saw and heard suggested otherwise. I saw and experienced the discrimination. Blacks only secured the right to vote in my lifetime. I saw many black kids in school being steered away from advanced courses and training that would have prepared them to shoot for higher goals.

Not only does Sen. Obama’s feat help shape a 2-year-old’s thoughts about himself and the world around him, but it affects so many others, from high-schoolers to college students to older folks.

An important speech.

As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

This commercial actually ran against Obama….

Amidst an insightful piece on Obama’s use of language, there’s this interesting thesis about what style indicates about substance.

How much can you tell about a candidate’s fitness to lead a country based on a single clause? The substance/style debate has been around for centuries—and, like all the other venerable binaries, is probably best considered as a symbiosis. Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call. Bush’s difficulty with basic units of syntax has not been trivial: It signals a wider habit of mind that has extended to every corner of governance. Hillary’s tendency to express herself in distant clichés very likely lost her the nomination—and, one might argue, rightfully so. Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year. It’s silly to downplay the importance of verbal intelligence to a job that makes you the mouthpiece of arguably the most influential nation in the world.

Fascinating article about what sounds like a fascinating book.

Thaler and Sunstein correctly assume that people are busy, their lives are increasingly complicated and they have neither time nor inclination nor, often, the ability to think through even all important choices, from health care plans to retirement options. Therefore the framing of choices matters, particularly using the enormous power of the default option—the option that goes into effect if the chooser chooses not to make a choice.

For example, Obama advocates that where defined contribution savings plans such as 401(k)s are offered, there should be automatic—note well: not mandatory—enrollment by employers of new workers. Contributions to such plans are tax deductible, taxes are deferred on the accumulating money and often employers match part of the employees’ contributions. What is at stake is, essentially, free money. Yet when an employee must affirmatively opt in, participation falls far below 100 percent. Obama’s proposal would simply change the default option: Employees are in unless they choose to opt out, which they would be free to do.

Abundant evidence indicates that most would not, which would serve the national interest because Americans’ savings rate is a disgrace. In fact, in 2005 it turned negative, and if insufficient saving persists, that inevitably will mean bigger government to provide for people who have not provided for themselves.

By a “nudge” Thaler and Sunstein mean a policy intervention into choice architecture that is easy and inexpensive to avoid and that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing an individual’s economic incentives. “Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Thaler and Sunstein say the premise of libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy “tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” So “libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened.”

Flip-flopping on NAFTA, Obama explains his position in his native politician language:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

What that means in English is “Politicians pander and lie to get elected and I’m a politician, so I’m no exception.”

I give Obama the credit of having enough honesty that he here and elsewhere not only admits he lied but also accurately attributes it to his being a politician. Problem is with the lies and with the attempt to excuse his behavior on those grounds.

I understand the felt need to pander. I actually also prefer his true position on NAFTA to his rhetorical one for the primaries.

What I don’t appreciate is his consistent unwillingness to take an unpopular stance on principle. On gay marriage, he has given tacit approval of the California Supreme Court’s position, so there is reason to hope he won’t sell out the gays like Clinton did with DOMA. But his official position says he will indeed oppose marriage for gays. He claims he will reverse Bush’s assaults on the constitution, but thus far is silent on the Congress’s contempt for the constitution expressed in its passing of the FISA legislation. I put up with pragmatically, but less and less appreciate, his pandering to evangelicals on both the left and the right to insist on increasing rhetoric that insists religion should play a large role in governmental thinking. It would be nice if maybe he could take leadership and combine the Democrats’ just call for universal health care with the Republicans’ just call for tort reform that would eliminate the enormous amount of money wasted on unnecessary medicine aimed at protecting doctors’ from irrational malpractice suits. It would be nice if Obama didn’t pander to ethanol producers in Iowa. It would be nice if he could take a principled, controversial stand on anything, actually.

I agree with most of Obama’s platform and McCain is an extremely dangerous, militaristic Neo-Con and scary deficit spender who wants to stack the Supreme Court with people with no concern for civil rights. Plus McCain is as big a flip-flopper, if not bigger,than Obama is. So, there’s no doubt the only remaining hope in this campaign for any kind of reversal of the disastrous Bush policies and mindset in government is a President Obama. But it’s increasingly clear that while Obama will not have Bush’s vices, he can be expected to have most of Bill Clinton’s, excluding only the sexual ones.

It is definitely a lesser of two evils election as usual though, I’m finally coming to see and accept that. For a short period there I actually thought it might be something else.

I like Obama a lot for a lot of reasons, but I’ve never bought into the myth that he’s not a scheming politician at his core. So, this article doesn’t surprise me but it’s still disappointing.

A pretty hilarious series of photos wherein people in the background intentionally or unintentionally “ruin” (or in some cases make) the photo.

Just read this description of Hillary and Obama meeting in the halls at the AIPAC conference the day after he clinched the nomination.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/47837/

The scene unfolding in front of me is a semiotician’s fantasia. For months, Clinton and Obama have battled (and battered) each other more or less as equals. But now there is no longer even a faint pretense of parity. When they first spy each other in the corridor, Clinton hugs the wall deferentially to let Obama pass; their brief tête-à-tête only ensues at the latter’s instigation. When the chat is over and the nominee strides toward the freight elevator to make his exit, his Secret Service agents brusquely shoo away Clinton’s aides: “Stand aside for Senator Obama! Make way for Senator Obama!”

I’m really not sure that this is a very accurate inference about the nature of Nietzsche’s shift in writing style from his early works into his middle phase, but it’s interesting to ponder nonetheless:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSpAWVa4Jak

This news is so devastating. He was the best.

From a New York Times profile on quotes Obama:

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

regardless of whether it’s put-on humility—there’s something in there to meditate on a bit, I think.