That creature Kristol has typed a fetid little thing called “Let’s Not, and Say We Did.” He claims ambitious men sometimes do a disservice to the best in their own communities, and Barack Obama is an ambitious man. If you loved him on Iraq, you’ll love him even more on race. Mr. Cohen writes about “A Second Life in Champagne,” and about tumult and equilibrium: it is not easy to marry images of devastation and death on the one hand, patient purpose on the other. Mr. Krugman’s column is titled “Taming the Beast,” and he says both Democratic candidates have been disappointingly quiet about the need to reform our out-of-control financial system. Here’s that poisonous creature Kristol:
I shuddered only once while watching Barack Obama’s speech last Tuesday.
It wasn’t when he posed the rhetorical questions: “Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?”
The real question, of course, is not why Obama joined Trinity, but why he stayed there for two decades, in the flock of a pastor who accused the U.S. government of “inventing the H.I.V. virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” and who suggested soon after 9/11 that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
But orators often ask themselves the convenient questions, not the difficult ones. And Barack Obama is an accomplished orator.
Nor was I shocked when Obama compared Reverend Wright, who was using his pulpit to propagate racial resentment, with his grandmother, who may have said privately a few things that made Obama cringe, or with Geraldine Ferraro, whom “some have dismissed … as harboring some deep-seated bias.”
After all, politicians sometimes indulge in ridiculous and unfair comparisons to make a point. And Barack Obama is an able politician.
And I didn’t shudder when Obama said he could no more disown Reverend Wright than he could disown the black community. I did think this statement was unfair to many in the black community, and especially to all those pastors who have resisted the temptation to appeal to their parishioners in the irresponsible and demagogic manner of Reverend Wright.
But ambitious men sometimes do a disservice to the best in their own communities. And Barack Obama is an ambitious man.
The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”
As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!
Of course, memories are short. In 1997 President Bill Clinton announced, with great fanfare, that he intended “to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented [if he did say so himself] conversation about race.” That conversation quickly went nowhere. And just as well.
The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.
What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. Such policy debates can lead to real change — even “change we can believe in.” “National conversations” tend to be pointless and result-less.
Or worse. Especially when they’re about race. In 1969, Pat Moynihan, then serving on Richard Nixon’s White House staff, wrote Nixon a memo explaining that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ The subject has been too much talked about. … We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.” Moynihan, who was reacting against the wild escalation of racial rhetoric on all sides, was unfairly pilloried when the memo was leaked in 1970. But he was right then, and his argument is right now.
Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years” — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren’t stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
Over the last several decades, we’ve done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won’t make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.
Luckily, Obama isn’t really interested in getting enmeshed in a national conversation on race. He had avoided race talk before the Reverend Wright controversy erupted. And despite the speech’s catnip of a promised conversation on race tossed to eager commentators, it’s clear he’s more than willing to avoid it from now on.
This is all for the best. With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.
•
In last week’s column, I cited a report that Senator Obama had attended services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on July 22, 2007. The Obama campaign has provided information showing that Senator Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error.
Heh. Facts, schmacts … he don’t need no stinkin’ facts… Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Jérôme Philipon, the managing director of Bollinger, the venerable house that makes perhaps the world’s finest Champagne, grew up on a Picardy farm. As a boy, he would find scraps from World War I battles: belt buckles, helmets, shell fragments.
These relics fascinated him. They summoned a remote world of Franco-German carnage. But never did he expect to see with his own eyes a triage of the dead.
“I suddenly found myself in a world I’d only imagined,” he tells me. “Bodies covered in mud and blood arriving on pick-ups and being sorted in front of me and my wife, piles of dead to the left, survivors to the right.”
As Philipon recalls this post-tsunami scene, we are seated at a wooden table in a handsome room in the heart of Champagne. Below us run cellars that stretch for miles and contain 14 million bottles. Around us are hills of fine Pinot Noir vines.
Everything speaks of a rooted place: the 2007 vintage won’t go on sale until 2016. Almost a decade is needed to usher fruit and acidity to perfect balance.
Tumult and equilibrium: it is not easy to marry these images of devastation and death on the one hand, patient purpose on the other. But if I were to try, I would say that after unimaginable loss, we strip away the superfluous and, guided by a kind of homing instinct, return to the essential.
Modern existence scatters us. It can take tragedy to gather us in. Modernity is about me. Loss can be an awakening to service.
On Dec. 24, 2004, Philipon, then a Bangkok-based executive with the Coca-Cola Company, checked into the Sofitel Hotel at the Thai beach resort of Khao Lak with his wife, Florence. With them were their four young children: 8-year-old Mathilde; Charles, aged 7; Auguste, 4; and 1-year-old Octave.
The children had been born across Asia — in the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand – as Philipon, working first for Nestle and then Coke, moved across a region that inspired him.
He felt unshackled from heavy French habits. New products prospered in expanding markets. Even on a Christmas Day far from home, there was a feeling of “plenitude.”
Then the tsunami struck. After breakfast together on Dec. 26, the family had scattered: Florence and Mathilde to their room, the three younger children with a nanny to the “Kids’ Club” on the beach, Philipon to an adjacent gym.
He was on a treadmill when he saw people running. A post-Christmas prank, he thought, until he saw the wall of water. He jumped from the machine as the gym windows exploded. The wave flipped him as if he were “in a huge washing machine.”
Wedged under a pick-up truck, he thought: this is how it ends. But the debris-filled tide dragged him onward. Breathless, he clung to a palm-tree. When the water rushed back out, he cleaved to a plastic cooking oil container.
On the first floor of the hotel, he found his wife and daughter, who had scrambled to safety on the roof. They looked down at the Kids’ Club, a flattened ruin among corpses.
Philipon scrambled onto the beach but could not find his kids. Evacuated to a hospital, he witnessed the triage of the dead, before returning. Charles, his oldest son, had been a champion swimmer. Might he?
But there, under the ruins, was the boy’s corpse.
It took six months to identify the other boys — Octave on April 1, 2005, and Auguste on July 3. “It was impossible for me to think of the future until I had found their bodies,” Philipon says.
Three children gone: the hardest thing still is considering what they might have been. “But we had to start again and knowing that life can be very short, really knowing that, we knew you must do what you love.”
Philipon, 45, has brown eyes of a boyish candor. He is bereft of self-pity, a man who’s come home. The stoical are discreet.
Coca-Cola brought him back to Paris to a great job, but when the offer from Bollinger came, he had no hesitation. The very French history he had fled now provided ballast. Here was a family business offering the top job for the first time to an outsider: tradition and innovation.
Philipon and his wife found strength — in their Catholic faith and their roots. In October, 2006, they had a son, Constantin, and late last year, a daughter, Penelope. “We now have three on earth and three in the sky,” he says.
This Wednesday, he tells me, Constantin will be exactly the age Octave was when he died. As in the Bollinger cellars, past is woven into present and future. Balance is all; and bravery at once the most silent and eloquent of virtues.
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
We’re now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn’t.
Now, I don’t expect presidential campaigns to have all the answers to our current crisis — even financial experts are scrambling to keep up with events. But I do think we’re entitled to more answers, and in particular a clearer commitment to financial reform, than we’re getting so far.
In truth, I don’t expect much from John McCain, who has both admitted not knowing much about economics and denied having ever said that. Anyway, lately he’s been busy demonstrating that he doesn’t know much about the Middle East, either.
Yet the McCain campaign’s silence on the financial crisis has disappointed even my low expectations.
And when Mr. McCain’s economic advisers do speak up about the economy’s problems, they don’t inspire confidence. For example, last week one McCain economic adviser — Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000” — insisted that everything would have been fine if state and local governments hadn’t tried to limit urban sprawl. Honest.
On the Democratic side, it’s somewhat disappointing that Barack Obama, whose campaign has understandably made a point of contrasting his early opposition to the Iraq war with Hillary Clinton’s initial support, has tried to score a twofer by suggesting that the war, in addition to all its other costs, is responsible for our economic troubles.
The war is indeed a grotesque waste of resources, which will place huge long-run burdens on the American public. But it’s just wrong to blame the war for our current economic mess: in the short run, wartime spending actually stimulates the economy. Remember, the lowest unemployment rate America has experienced over the last half-century came at the height of the Vietnam War.
Hillary Clinton has not, as far as I can tell, made any comparably problematic economic claims. But she, like Mr. Obama, has been disappointingly quiet about the key issue: the need to reform our out-of-control financial system.
Let me explain.
America came out of the Great Depression with a pretty effective financial safety net, based on a fundamental quid pro quo: the government stood ready to rescue banks if they got in trouble, but only on the condition that those banks accept regulation of the risks they were allowed to take.
Over time, however, many of the roles traditionally filled by regulated banks were taken over by unregulated institutions — the “shadow banking system,” which relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass those safety regulations.
Now, the shadow banking system is facing the 21st-century equivalent of the wave of bank runs that swept America in the early 1930s. And the government is rushing in to help, with hundreds of billions from the Federal Reserve, and hundreds of billions more from government-sponsored institutions like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks.
Given the risks to the economy if the financial system melts down, this rescue mission is justified. But you don’t have to be an economic radical, or even a vocal reformer like Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to see that what’s happening now is the quid without the quo.
Last week Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, declared that Mr. Frank is right about the need for expanded regulation. Mr. Rubin put it clearly: If Wall Street companies can count on being rescued like banks, then they need to be regulated like banks.
But will that logic prevail politically?
Not if Mr. McCain makes it to the White House. His chief economic adviser is former Senator Phil Gramm, a fervent advocate of financial deregulation. In fact, I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible.
Both Democrats, by contrast, are running more or less populist campaigns. But at least so far, neither Democrat has made a clear commitment to financial reform.
Is that simply an omission? Or is it an ominous omen? Recent history offers reason to worry.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the Clinton administration went along too easily with moves to deregulate the financial industry. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that big contributions from Wall Street helped grease the rails.
Last year, there was no question at all about the way Wall Street’s financial contributions to the new Democratic majority in Congress helped preserve, at least for now, the tax loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
Now, the securities and investment industry is pouring money into both Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s coffers. And these donors surely believe that they’re buying something in return.
Let’s hope they’re wrong.
Unfortunately, they’re probably not…
