Collins, Cohen and Kristof

La Collins wrote about “The Audacity of Listening,” and says if you look at the political fights Barack Obama’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity.  Mr. Cohen’s column is titled “The Mother of Friendships Lost,” and he states Barack Obama needs Tony Lake and Richard Holbrooke to forge his “team of rivals.” The huge challenges of American foreign policy demand no less.  Mr. Kristof wrote about “The Pain of the G-8’s Big Shrug,” and says the G-8’s collective shrug about the Darfur genocide — because the victims are black, impoverished and hidden from television cameras — will be a lingering stain.  Here’s La Collins:

We have to have a talk about Barack Obama.

I know, I know. You’re upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way to the right. Drifting to the center. Going all moderate on you. So you’re withholding the love. Also possibly the money.

I feel your pain. I just don’t know what candidate you’re talking about.

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Here’s a helpful story: Once upon a time, there was a woman searching for a guy who was ready to commit. One day, she met an attractive young man.

“My name is Chuck,” he said, grinning an infectious grin. “I’m planning to devote my entire life to saving endangered wildlife in the Antarctic. In five weeks I leave for the South Pole, where I will live alone in a tent, trying to convince the penguins that I am part of their flock. In the meantime, would you like to go out?”

“I have just met the man I’m going to marry,” she told her friends. She had been betrayed by poor listening skills, which skipped right over the South Pole and the tent. Of course, after five weeks of heavy dating, Chuck flew away and was never heard from again.

A year and a half of campaigning and we still haven’t heard Obama’s penguins, either. It’s not his fault that we missed the message — although to be fair, he did make it sound as if getting rid of the “old politics” involved driving out the oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists rather than splitting the difference on federal wiretapping legislation. But if you look at the political fights he’s picked throughout his political career, the main theme is not any ideology. It’s that he hates stupidity. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in 2002 in his big speech against the invasion of Iraq. He did not, you will notice, say he was against unilateral military action or pre-emptive attacks or nation-building. He was antidumb.

Most of the things Obama’s taken heat for saying this summer fall into these two familiar patterns — attempts to find a rational common ground on controversial issues and dumb-avoidance.

On the common-ground front, he’s called for giving more federal money to religious groups that run social programs, but only if the services they offer are secular. People can have guns for hunting and protection, but we should crack down on unscrupulous gun sellers. Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.

Dumb-avoidance would include his opposing the gas-tax holiday, backtracking on the anti-Nafta pandering he did during the primary and acknowledging that if one is planning to go all the way to Iraq to talk to the generals, one should actually pay attention to what the generals say.

Touching both bases are Obama’s positions that 1) if people are going to ask him every day why he’s not wearing a flag pin, it’s easier to just wear the pin, for heaven’s sake, and 2) there’s nothing to be gained by getting into a fight over whether the death penalty can be imposed on child rapists.

His decision to ditch public campaign financing, on the other hand, was nothing but a complete, total, purebred flip-flop. If you are a person who feels campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing America right now, you should either vote for John McCain or go home and put a pillow over your head. However, I believe I have met every single person in the country for whom campaign finance reform is the tiptop priority, and their numbers are not legion.

Meanwhile, Obama has made it clear what issues he thinks all this cleverness and compromising are supposed to serve: national health care, a smart energy policy and getting American troops out of Iraq. He has tons of other concerns, but those seem to be the top three. There’s definitely a penguin in there somewhere.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Paris:

There are relationships for which a novel is a more adequate form than journalism. Their twists, and attendant psyches, demand an act of the imagination to render them. Into that category falls the recurrent charged drama of Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke.

Its latest subplot emerged last month when Barack Obama announced a 13-member Senior Working Group on National Security that includes Lake but omits Holbrooke, probably the most prominent Democratic foreign-policy luminary excluded from the inner circle.

Some may see no more than victors’ justice in this omission. Lake, who was national security adviser to Bill Clinton, sided with Obama from the outset. Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who bullied Bosnia’s warring factions into peace in 1995, supported Hillary Clinton.

But other prominent Hillary backers — including two former secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, and a former defense secretary, William Perry — glided into a top Obama team oddly weighted, for a professed change agent, toward veteran Washington insiders.

In this context, Holbrooke’s nonglide was conspicuous. Having known Lake and Holbrooke since I covered the Bosnian war, I asked Denis McDonough, the senior foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, if Lake closed the door on his former friend. “No, no, no,” McDonough said.

Doth he protest too much?

I don’t know, and Lake did not respond to attempts to reach him through McDonough and an e-mail message. But I do know this: If Obama is in his earnest about his admiration for the concept of a “team of rivals,” a phrase borrowed from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s so-named biography of Lincoln, he can find no better test of it than pairing Lake and Holbrooke.

(I applaud the team-of-rivals idea, practiced by Lincoln in bringing opposed Republicans into his cabinet. Nothing has been more damaging to the Bush administration than the president’s distaste for, and incapacity to absorb, vigorous dissent in the policy shaping process.)

The two men have known each other since Vietnam. They were “best friends, without a doubt,” in Holbrooke’s words. He named a son Anthony for Lake. Lake made Holbrooke godfather to his second child. Idealism, restlessness and brilliance united them. Temperament and ambition divided them.

Lake, 69, is controlled, measured, elusive, a man whose fierce competitiveness is dressed in the elaborate constructs of a probing intelligence. His energy and determination are no less apparent for being introverted.

Holbrooke, 67, by contrast, is sprawling, relentless, candid, a man of devouring appetites and extrovert energy, at once ingratiating and loyal, cajoling and ruthless — the doer to Lake’s thinker. If you want somebody to pull the trigger, or close a deal, think Holbrooke. He has compared diplomacy to jazz: improvisation upon a theme.

At some point, these differences became poison. The experiences of the first Clinton administration — when Lake got a top job and Holbrooke got nothing before becoming ambassador to Germany — turned poison to venom. Holbrooke’s Bosnia exploit, and Lake’s aborted nomination to head the C.I.A. in Clinton’s second term, deepened tensions.

Last year, a friend of mine now working on European issues for Obama, met with Lake. “So, it’s the duel of the consiglieri,” he said, referring to Lake’s backing of Obama and Holbrooke’s of Hillary Clinton. Lake laughed. When asked if he wanted to be secretary of state, he waved away the notion, but said he wanted to make sure Holbrooke didn’t get the job.

McDonough didn’t comment when I recounted this. Lake framed a negatives-laden rhetorical question about Holbrooke to Time magazine earlier this year: “Would I say Dick can play no role? Absolutely not.” There are others, including Warren Christopher, who are no Holbrooke fans.

I, like others who witnessed his Bosnian diplomacy, am a fan, however maddening the Holbrooke ego. It was impossible, having watched mass Balkan slaughter over years, not to marvel at his ability to forge enduring peace against all odds. He deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

At a ceremony in Berlin this month, President George W. Bush’s father, the 41st president, described Holbrooke as “the most persistent advocate I’ve ever run into.” Translate as: Don’t get between this bull and what he wants.

That can be useful, put to the service of the nation he loves, at a time when America, enmeshed in two wars, needs to cut deals in Iraq, with Iraq’s neighbors, and in Afghanistan. Lake has called himself a “pragmatic neo-Wilsonian.” I’d call Holbrooke an “idealistic neo-Kissingerian” — a man for a rough world.

McDonough, in an e-mail, suggested Holbrooke would get an invitation. “Others we are eager to include in the group — and whom we have told we are going to work into the group — were also formerly with Clinton, including Wendy Sherman and Richard Holbrooke,” he wrote. Sherman is a former assistant secretary of state.

Get Holbrooke in, rejuvenate a too-traditional inner circle with some fresh talent like Christopher Hill and the ousted Samantha Power, and forge a true “team of rivals” boasting the mother of all rivalries. America’s huge foreign policy challenges demand no less.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Is genocide really that bad?

As President Bush and the Group of 8 leaders who are meeting in Japan again shun their responsibilities in Darfur, there is a serious argument to be made that genocide is overrated as an international concern. The G-8 leaders implicitly accept that argument, which goes like this:

Genocide is regrettable, but don’t lose perspective. It is simply one of many tragedies in the world today — and a fairly modest one in terms of lives lost.

All the genocides of the last 100 years have cost only 10 million to 12 million lives. In contrast, every year we lose almost 10 million children under the age of 5 from diseases and malnutrition attributable to poverty. Make that the priority, not Darfur.

Civil conflict in Congo has claimed more than 5.4 million lives over the last decade, according to careful mortality surveys by the International Rescue Committee. That’s at least 10 times the toll in Darfur, but because Congo doesn’t count as genocide — just as murderous chaos — no one has paid much attention to it.

Does a mother whose child dies from banditry, malaria or AIDS grieve any less than a mother whose child was killed by the janjaweed?

The world has been trying to pressure Sudan to stop slaughtering Darfuris for nearly five years, yet the situation in some ways is worse than ever. In contrast, we know how to combat malaria, child mortality and maternal mortality. The same resources would save far more lives if they were used for vaccinations and bed nets.

So instead of pushing President Bush to worry about Darfur, where it’s not clear he can make a difference, get him to focus on bed nets or deworming or iodizing salt in poor countries or stopping mother-to-child transmission of the virus that causes AIDS or so many other areas where his attention could have a humanitarian impact.

Genocide is horrific, but that doesn’t make it a priority.

This is a coherent and legitimate argument, and there are moments when I catch myself sympathetic to it.

Yet in truth, genocide has always evoked a transcendent horror, and it has little to do with the numbers of victims. The Holocaust resonates not because six million Jews were killed but because a government picked people on the basis of their religious heritage and tried to exterminate them. What is horrifying about Anne Frank’s diary is not so much the death of a girl as the crime of a state.

There are also practical arguments, for genocide can create cycles of revenge and displacement that make it far more destabilizing than any famine or epidemic. The Darfur genocide may well lead all Sudan to fragment into civil war, interrupting Sudanese oil exports and raising oil prices.

The Armenian genocide still festers after nearly a century; and former President Bill Clinton has said that his greatest foreign-policy mistake was his failure to respond in Rwanda. In the same way, the G-8’s collective shrug today about the Darfur genocide — because the victims are black, impoverished and hidden from television cameras — will be a lingering stain.

After five years of genocide, President Bush still hasn’t taken as simple a step as imposing a no-fly zone or even giving a prime-time speech about it. He gave Beijing a gift, his pledge to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics, without pushing hard for China to suspend military spare-parts and arms deliveries to Sudan.

The Islamic world has been even more myopic, particularly since the victims in Darfur are all Muslim. Do dead Muslims count only when Israel is the culprit? Can’t the Islamic world muster one-hundredth as much indignation for the genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims as it can for a few Danish cartoons?

This coming Monday, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is expected to seek an arrest warrant in connection with Darfur, and his past statements suggest that it may be for the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide. That would be a historic step requiring follow-through.

A personal note: I have seen children dying of AIDS and hunger; I have had malaria and been chased through the jungle by militias. I want the G-8 to address all the aspects of global poverty, yet nothing affects me as much as what I have seen in Darfur.

I tilt obsessively at the windmills of Darfur because, quite simply, its people haunt me: the young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet; the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were dead.

Yes, genocide truly is “that bad.”