The Friends of Obama
There’s a story, probably apocryphal, that Warren G. Harding, surveying his presidency, lamented that “in this job I am not worried about my enemies. It is my friends that keep me awake at night.”
THE SCRAPBOOK is reluctant to draw parallels between the political world of 1923 and this year’s presidential campaign, but we’re willing to risk a low-caliber wager–say, two bits–that Senator Barack Obama might be thinking Harding-like thoughts about some of his admirers.
We need hardly remind readers about Senator Obama’s spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah (God Damn America!) Wright; now comes novelist Alice (The Color Purple) Walker–“home from a long stay in Mexico”–with an “open letter” excerpted in Britain’s leftwing flagship, the Guardian. Message: She’s for Barack Obama for president.
Some of the essay is taken up with Ms. Walker’s trademark lunacy–“True to my inner Goddess of the three Directions . . . this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for”–but in due course she gets down to business in no uncertain terms.
To begin with, she’s against Obama’s rival Hillary Clinton not because of the content of her character but the color of her skin. “I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did,” writes Alice Walker, “but I cannot.” In fact, as she explains, “white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers”–which is not, as might be expected, good behavior.
Readers will recall Andrew Ferguson’s delightful deconstruction of Senator Obama’s applause line–“We are the ones we have been waiting for”–which, as he revealed (“The Wit and Wisdom of Barack Obama,” March 24), is the title of a recent collection of essays by Alice Walker. In her Guardian piece, Ms. Walker expands on the idea in characteristic fashion: We look at Barack Obama, she declares, and we “are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.”
Ordinarily, this would be the place where THE SCRAPBOOK offers some pithy summary of the previous two paragraphs; but why bother? Like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Alice -Walker’s words speak for themselves, loud and clear. To adapt a Democratic phrase: With friends like these, Senator Barack Obama might succeed in swift-boating himself.
Remembering Michael Kelly
Of the horrors of war, there is no end. But we remember this week with particular sadness the death in a Humvee accident in Iraq five years ago of the writer Michael Kelly, a friend to many of us at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
David Brooks memorialized him in these pages at the time:
When we think back on his remarkable life, we think first of endearing moments like that game. We think of his capacity for personal organization, which was nonexistent. He had a great talent for losing credit cards. When he left the staff of the New York Times he found he had tens of thousands of dollars of expense account receipts he had never turned in.
We think, sadly and prayerfully, of his wife, Max, and their two young boys, and of his parents and his siblings, who are at the heart of a warm and glowing community on Capitol Hill. And we think finally of his enormous contributions to his profession and to his country, as someone who sought out the truth, who fought for just causes, and who never backed down. He was everything a newspaperman should be, and everything the rest of us should aspire to.
Five years later, those thoughts have dimmed not at all. Because of the kind of man he was, Mike would have been the first to insist that we remember as well the service of Staff Sgt. Wilbert Davis, 40, of the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, who lost his life in that same accident on April 3, 2003.
Hail, Bhutan
THE SCRAPBOOK sends hearty congratulations to the people of Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom bordering China that became the world’s newest democracy on March 24. Two parties contested the election. Each was led by a former prime minister. There were few policy differences between them. Turnout was heavy. In the end the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (don’t ask) crushed the People’s Democratic party.
The birth of the new democracy is a tribute to the judgment of Bhutan’s former ruler, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who called for elections and a new constitutional monarchy, before turning the throne over to his son in December 2006. It will be a while before Bhutan joins the community of nations that have an unrestricted press, a vibrant civil society, and integrated market economies. But the former king understood that free and fair elections are an important part of modernization. Bhutan’s much larger northern neighbor could learn a thing or two from its example.
Speaking of which, in our last issue we wrote about Hu Jia, the Chinese dissident under trial at the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court for “subverting state power” (“Gold Medal in Tyranny,” March 31 / April 7). While it was almost certain Hu would be found guilty, global human rights activists had hoped that the court would be lenient in sentencing him, considering the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. Well, last week the verdict came in. Hu will be sent to prison for three and a half years. Apparently “leniency” is not in the Chinese government’s vocabulary.
Correction of the Week
From the March 30 New York Times:
The reporter who interviewed them, one of two who worked on the article, never explicitly asked the women whether they traded sex for money or were prostitutes, call girls or escorts; he used the term “sex workers,” a term they used themselves that describes strippers and lap dancers as well as prostitutes. Though Ms. Anderson advertises herself as a “dominatrix with a holistic approach,” he did not ask her whether that meant she also performed sex acts for money, nor did he ask Ms. O’Donnell what her work actually was before characterizing it. He and the editors should have explored whether he had determined these things precisely.
After the article was published, both women contacted The Times and said they do not perform sex for money; Ms. O’Donnell refused to be specific about what she does.
We’d call this the “holistic approach” to correcting one’s errors.
