La Collins produced something called “What We Learned in the War,” and says that Americans of all ages tend to both respect military service and ignore it when picking a president. John McCain presumably understands this. Mr. Cohen writes about “Mbeki’s Shame,” and says the South African president has a history of denying the facts before him, and his own people and Zimbabweans have paid the price. His post-Mandela record is now tarnished. Mr. Kristof writes about “The Luckiest Girl,” and tells us that one of the most remarkable of this year’s new college graduates, Beatrice Biira, credits her success to something utterly improbable: a goat. Here’s La Collins:
As we slink off into the long holiday weekend, let’s see if we can tout up the lessons learned from Wesleygate.
That was the outcry that erupted when Wesley Clark, the retired general, suggested that John McCain’s military command background did not, by itself, qualify him to be president. You’d have thought that Clark had dissed McCain’s record as a prisoner of war. (“Minimized five and a half years in a hole!” — Laura Ingraham.)
Clark, who has been available for a vice-presidential nomination for so long that his shelf-life sticker is expiring, actually said that the year McCain once spent running an aviation squadron in Florida did not amount to serious executive experience. “He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall,” Clark told CBS’s Bob Schieffer energetically. “He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say: ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not — do you want to take this risk?’ ”
A picky observer might have a few quibbles here. Do wartime squadron commanders typically receive reports from diplomats? Also, is this the best possible line of attack for an Obama supporter to take, when Barack’s only big claim to executive leadership was being a community organizer? Not generally a job that involves ordering bombs to fall.
Clark was careful to say that he considered McCain a hero for his P.O.W. suffering and that he honored his service. This is a Democratic mantra that must preface every single mention of the presumptive Republican nominee. For instance: “We honor Senator McCain’s service. (Pause) His plan for the budget looks as if it was worked out by an elementary school math class in crayon.”
When Schieffer pointed out that Obama had neither run a squadron nor “ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down,” the correct response was: “No, and he honors Senator McCain’s service.” But instead, Clark blurted out: “Well, I don’t think that riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”
Here we see a violation of the first rule of the political talking head: Speak softly when cable TV hosts are entering a summer slow-news week.
Nevertheless, what Clark said was obviously true. Many McCain backers feel that his endurance as a prisoner of war revealed qualities important in a commander in chief. But I have never heard anybody argue that the getting shot down part, was, in and of itself, a sign of presidential leadership.
The responses from the right ranged from “smear … libel … beyond the pale” (Karl Rove) to a Republican commentator on Fox claiming that the Obama-ites were saying “being shot at is not military service.”
McCain’s reaction suggested he’s already run out of material for heated but meaningless controversies. First, he said talk like that “doesn’t reduce the price of a gallon of gas by one penny.” Strategically, this was a waste of a good rhetorical device. Someday a random political disaster is going to strike McCainland. Then, the senator is going to say that you can talk about (fill in terrible embarrassment) all you want, but it will not bring the price of gas down a single penny. And everybody will point out that he already said that about Wesley Clark.
Later, McCain ratcheted up and called on Obama to fire Clark. Actually, the term was “cut him loose” since Clark does not have a position from which to be fired. There was a time when this might have had some traction, but we’ve had so many calls for so many people to be fired lately that it’s gotten ho-hum. We yearn for the good old days when people saved proposals of employment termination for larger errors, like, say, mismanaging an entire war, or subverting the Constitution.
Obama failed to get truly engaged in the back and forth. It was, as he said in his patriotism speech, one of those fights “rooted in the cultural wars of the 1960s — in arguments that go back 40 years or more.” (Translation: Dudes, this all happened when I was six.)
Americans of all ages tend to both respect military service and ignore it when picking a president. In the last four elections, they’ve rejected the guys who went to war and elected the draft, er, nonembracers. McCain presumably understands this. When Bob Dole, a wounded veteran, announced his candidacy in 1996, McCain backed Phil Gramm, a Texas senator who had piled up a series of draft deferments that made Bill Clinton look like Nathan Hale.
About those lessons: McCain’s campaign has announced a staff reorganization, so perhaps he realizes that he needs better outraged-response material. Wesley Clark has learned that he’s not going to be vice president. And maybe both camps now understand that this is not the year for debates about management experience. The next president isn’t going to have much. It’s O.K. If we cared about management, we’d have stuck with Mitt Romney.
And, as always, IOKIYAR. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Sometimes stubbornness gets measured in blood, and sometimes the wounds of race are blinding.
That’s the kindest verdict I can find for the listless mediation in a devastated Zimbabwe of Thabo Mbeki, the South African president. Faced by all the brutal expressions of his neighbor Robert Mugabe’s megalomania, Mbeki has prodded here and there, like a learned physician mildly intrigued by a corpse.
As a once flourishing economy has imploded, as inflation has assumed Weimar proportions, as millions have fled to South Africa and as an octogenarian tyrant has dispatched goons to murder and ravage, Mbeki has gone on mumbling that the people of Zimbabwe must solve their own problems.
They tried by giving a clear victory to the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in the March 29 election. But the 48 percent to 43 percent lead over Mugabe fell short of an absolute majority, conveniently so, allowing the liberator-turned-despot to terrorize his way to a sham second-round victory and sixth term.
Enough already! Mugabe in his labyrinth is ruinous. That, however, has scarcely bestirred Mbeki of “What crisis?” fame. As Georgina Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, put it: “Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy is comatose.”
Herding cats is easier than finding significance in the Delphic utterances of Africa’s Mr. Imperturbable. I interviewed Mbeki back in 2003, along with my New York Times colleague Felicity Barringer. The conversation yielded a 345-word story, huge given Mbeki’s erudite-sounding vacuity, worthy of a Soviet apparatchik.
Mbeki did, however, say that he’d been urging Mugabe to meet with his political opponents — sound familiar? — and declared of Zimbabwe: “The political problems and conflicts they’ve experienced, I think they’ll get over that.”
Right.
That was five years ago. Now, we hear that Mbeki’s hopeful of arranging a meeting between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, and we have the African Union calling this week for a Zimbabwean “government of national unity.”
Fine sentiments, but it’s late in the day. I can’t see Tsvangirai, even if he were offered the post of prime minister, finding any “unity” with Mugabe and his militarized ZANU-PF party, which he wants to disarm.
This mess is Mugabe’s, but Mbeki has been his enabler. Why? The filial respect of a fellow African liberation fighter? Distaste for Tsvangirai, a former trade union leader, at a time when Mbeki’s own power has been undermined by South African trade unions and their man, Jacob Zuma? A loathing of Western interventionism?
No doubt the above play a part, but I think the real clue lies in Mbeki’s previous act of blind stubbornness, whose harvest was not the blood of neighbors but of his fellow citizens.
For more than three years, Mbeki indulged in a bout of AIDS denialism that stopped antiretroviral drugs from getting to millions infected with H.I.V. Hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths ensued.
Mbeki was never specific about the roots of his dissent, now sidelined if never disavowed. But when asked in Parliament in 2004 if he believed widespread rape played any role in spreading AIDS, he exploded:
“The disease of racism,” he said, led to blacks being portrayed as “lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist.”
The link between H.I.V. and AIDS, in this angry vision, was a fabrication foisted on Africans by whites determined to distract the continent from real problems of racism and poverty, and accepted by blacks afflicted with the slave mentality engendered by apartheid.
Mbeki’s pseudoscience was death-propagating nonsense. But his theories of sexuality under apartheid were not.
I spent enough time under apartheid to see that the portrayal of blacks as sexual animals was integral to a white policy of dehumanizing them. More than once, I was asked with a boozy sneer by South African whites if I could ever imagine being attracted to a black woman.
So when Mugabe rails against the white colonialists, and expropriates white farmers, and portrays himself as the African fighting back white colonialism — when he resurrects the long struggle — I suspect he strikes a chord with Mbeki, whose own pragmatism is no Mandela-like conciliation.
“The racial petulance lives on in Mbeki,” said Peter Godwin, whose superb book, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” chronicles how he and his sister Georgina saw their family’s life in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, destroyed. “He’s the black intellectual living with the fact that whites think they are better.”
Mbeki should read Godwin’s book. It might even inspire him to criticize Mugabe. But then, he’d say, it’s a white man’s work. And that’s the truth.
But what the disaster of Mugabe and of Mbeki’s nonmediation teaches us is that the wounds of a racist past, however deep, cannot justify a nation’s dismemberment. Mugabe must go, South Africa move on, and Mbeki must consider the blood that has flowed from his myopia and now tarnishes his legacy.
Here’s Mr. Kristof:
This year’s college graduates owe their success to many factors, from hectoring parents to cherished remedies for hangovers. But one of the most remarkable of the new graduates, Beatrice Biira, credits something utterly improbable: a goat.
“I am one of the luckiest girls in the world,” Beatrice declared at her graduation party after earning her bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College. Indeed, and it’s appropriate that the goat that changed her life was named Luck.
Beatrice’s story helps address two of the most commonly asked questions about foreign assistance: “Does aid work?” and “What can I do?”
The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice was born and raised. As a girl, she desperately yearned for an education, but it seemed hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldn’t afford to send her to school.
The years passed and Beatrice stayed home to help with the chores. She was on track to become one more illiterate African woman, another of the continent’s squandered human resources.
In the meantime, in Niantic, Conn., the children of the Niantic Community Church wanted to donate money for a good cause. They decided to buy goats for African villagers through Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps impoverished farming families.
A dairy goat in Heifer’s online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of chicks or ducklings costs just $20.
One of the goats bought by the Niantic church went to Beatrice’s parents and soon produced twins. When the kid goats were weaned, the children drank the goat’s milk for a nutritional boost and sold the surplus milk for extra money.
The cash from the milk accumulated, and Beatrice’s parents decided that they could now afford to send their daughter to school. She was much older than the other first graders, but she was so overjoyed that she studied diligently and rose to be the best student in the school.
An American visiting the school was impressed and wrote a children’s book, “Beatrice’s Goat,” about how the gift of a goat had enabled a bright girl to go to school. The book was published in 2000 and became a children’s best seller — but there is now room for a more remarkable sequel.
Beatrice was such an outstanding student that she won a scholarship, not only to Uganda’s best girls’ high school, but also to a prep school in Massachusetts and then to Connecticut College. A group of 20 donors to Heifer International — coordinated by a retired staff member named Rosalee Sinn, who fell in love with Beatrice when she saw her at age 10 — financed the girl’s living expenses.
A few years ago, Beatrice spoke at a Heifer event attended by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist. Mr. Sachs was impressed and devised what he jokingly called the “Beatrice Theorem” of development economics: small inputs can lead to large outcomes.
Granted, foreign assistance doesn’t always work and is much harder than it looks. “I won’t lie to you. Corruption is high in Uganda,” Beatrice acknowledges.
A crooked local official might have distributed the goats by demanding that girls sleep with him in exchange. Or Beatrice’s goat might have died or been stolen. Or unpasteurized milk might have sickened or killed Beatrice.
In short, millions of things could go wrong. But when there’s a good model in place, they often go right. That’s why villagers in western Uganda recently held a special Mass and a feast to celebrate the first local person to earn a college degree in America.
Moreover, Africa will soon have a new asset: a well-trained professional to improve governance. Beatrice plans to earn a master’s degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas and then return to Africa to work for an aid group.
Beatrice dreams of working on projects to help women earn and manage money more effectively, partly because she has seen in her own village how cash is always controlled by men. Sometimes they spent it partying with buddies at a bar, rather than educating their children. Changing that culture won’t be easy, Beatrice says, but it can be done.
When people ask how they can help in the fight against poverty, there are a thousand good answers, from sponsoring a child to supporting a grass-roots organization through globalgiving.com. (I’ve listed specific suggestions on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, and on facebook.com/kristof).
The challenges of global poverty are vast and complex, far beyond anyone’s power to resolve, and buying a farm animal for a poor family won’t solve them. But Beatrice’s giddy happiness these days is still a reminder that each of us does have the power to make a difference — to transform a girl’s life with something as simple and cheap as a little goat.
