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May 19, 2011: What I've Been Reading (and Writing)

I've just finished reading two very different books: Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns" and Deval Patrick's "A Reason to Believe."

"The Warmth of Other Suns" is the best book I've read in years. For anyone who strives to write narrative nonfiction, collective biography, or even history in general, this book is a model.

Isabel Wilkerson spent over 15 years interviewing hundreds of black southerners who had migrated to northern cities during the World War II era. She ultimately settled on three individuals whose stories she tells in detail. Robert Pershing Foster, a native of Monroe, Louisiana, made the trek to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Ida Mae Gladney journeyed from Mississippi to Chicago in the late 1930s. George Starling fled Florida in the 1940s and made his way to New York City. These three stories represent the three spurs of the Second Great Migration: The move west to L.A.; the well-trod Mississippi-to-Chicago route; and the east coast odyssey that terminated in Harlem.

This structure works extremely well. And it frees Wilkerson to simply tell their stories. Which is no simple task at all - but one that she accomplishes with stunning eloquence, sophistication, and an eye for detail.

This is history at best: a well-told tale, recounted in hundreds of different variations, whose broader meaning and profundity is always apparent.

Wilkerson is skilled at finding drama in the everyday: it is captivating just to read what it was like to labor in the fields of the South. Or, to work not only in the cotton fields of Mississippi but also the orange groves of Florida - a variety of southern labor I had never really thought much about before. She takes simple settings like these and weaves them into a grand epic. Robert Pershing Foster's harrowing drive from Louisiana to California is most memorable. That story will stick in my mind forever.

I assigned this book in my graduate course at Harvard. We found parts of the book to quarrel with, but they're nothing more than quibbles. In my opinion, this book was robbed of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes.

Onto Deval Patrick.

I have to admit that "A Reason to Believe" is often the highly-cliched type of autobiography that one would expect from a politician. Still, I enjoyed reading it. His life story is truly fascinating. Patrick was raised on the South Side of Chicago, in grinding poverty. He earned a scholarship to Milton Academy, then made his way to Harvard and to Harvard law, to the U.S. Justice Department, and the boardrooms of Texaco and Coca-Cola before becoming governor of Massachusetts.

Patrick's life trajectory is interesting enough. But also seems willing to open up a bit, and to try and convey his thoughts and emotions at each point along this arc - even if they aren't particularly flattering in retrospect. On some topics, he is strikingly candid: namely his tortured relationship with his father and his wife's excruciating battle with depression. Stunningly enough, Diane Patrick was hoping that her husband would lose the gubernatorial election. She didn't want a life in the media limelight. When Deval did win election, and when he was subjected to intense scrutiny early in his administration, Diane succumbed to a mental breakdown.

He also talks a little more explicitly about the way his own racial identity played into his first gubernatorial campaign, when Republican Kerry Healey attempted - without much subtlety - to stoke the racial fears of white voters.

The result is a surprisingly revealing story. It has plenty of melodramatic moments. But if you can wade your way through those - and if you happen to have a soft spot for the Bay State, black history, and the stuff of American politics - you're in for a treat.

If you want to read what I've been writing lately, I recently published a review of James Cobb's latest book in the Wilson Quarterly.

Also, I have piece coming out in Slate at the end of May or beginning of June. It's on LBJ's White House phone conversations during the months of the "Mississippi Burning" saga. These conversations reveal a side of LBJ that many of the biographies and other classical portraits have missed.

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December 9, 2010: The Bay State as Blueprint

For the past month, Massachusetts has basked in its revived reputation as an exceptional political land. Massachusetts voters held back the conservative tide – again. Democrats won every congressional election in the state, and Governor Deval Patrick scored a convincing victory. He is the first African American governor ever to run for (and to win) re-election.

The rest of the country has shaken its head in wonder or mockery, or looked on with a yawn. Mostly, political analysts have dismissed Massachusetts as a place that marches to its own beat. The ghost of George McGovern has returned, one is tempted to assert. This is merely Massachusetts being Massachusetts, which is a bit like Manny being Manny: the lunatic exception that proves the rule.

Scott Brown’s election showed that Massachusetts is not fated to vote Democratic. The Bay State stands well within the American political landscape, not above or apart. Granted, Democrats outnumber Republicans here three-to-one – but independents still represent a majority of registered voters.

Deval Patrick endured a rocky first term during which his approval ratings plummeted. In the end, he persuaded this restive – and overwhelmingly white – electorate to return him to office.

Patrick’s victory suggests that hope and optimism can still sell. He reprised these major themes from his 2006 campaign. While Republican Charlie Baker whacked away at the condition of the Massachusetts economy, Patrick declared that it was actually not a complete disaster. Patrick highlighted the few rays of hope that existed on this cloudy horizon, and faulted Baker for his dark pessimism. Barack Obama, like Patrick, has always been at his best when espousing a hopeful message. The two leaders originally scored shocking victories in part because they seemed like walking embodiments of the American dream. We can all recite by rote Obama’s self-described “unlikely story.” Patrick is a son of Chicago’s South Side who earned a scholarship to a prestigious Massachusetts prep school, then ascended through the ranks of America’s corporate and political worlds. Coming from these men, messages of hope can lift up American voters even in the toughest of times.

Patrick also embraced and explained what he achieved while in office. He articulated why he thought his policies had been effective. Other Democrats ran scared this fall; nobody wanted to trumpet the party’s legislative accomplishments. But Patrick sensed that he had no viable alternative. The more Patrick owned his programs of the past four years, the better he fared.

When Patrick first triumphed in 2006, he won on the strength of a formidable grass-roots network. Throughout this past year, Patrick has argued that Scott Brown surged to victory because he “ran a grass-roots campaign.” The style was as important as the message. Patrick traipsed into towns and cities where he had not been since 2006, and he won voters’ hearts all over again.

Then there is the ever-present issue of race. In 2006, Patrick showed how a black politician might win over a majority-white electorate. He talked about change and unity. One year before “Yes We Can,” Patrick’s slogan was, “Together We Can.” He spoke rarely of his racial identity, though he never ignored it. He said enough to mobilize the Bay State’s black voters, and to encourage others who were proud to topple a racial barrier. Patrick first achieved in miniature the kind of breakthrough that Obama would forge on the world stage.

This autumn, race barely entered into Patrick’s re-election campaign. If white voters had to search their souls about whether to support an African American leader, they did it four year ago.

When Obama runs for re-election in 2012, he may encounter a landscape in which his race operates as both more and less of a factor than before. Obama’s re-election bid, like Patrick’s, will center on issues of taxes, the role of government, the budget, and the recession. But Obama also confronts an opposition movement that displays a deep hatred – hatred of a kind Patrick rarely faced in Massachusetts. The most rabid among them think of Obama as neither a Christian nor an American citizen. The resistance to America’s first black president is almost all white, and it is vicious. The racial issue may yet rear its ugly head in two years. On this score, the nation might not be so lucky in 2012 as Massachusetts was in 2010. But as the Democrats craft their response to this and more, they would be wise to look toward the state they carried so convincingly in these midterms.

It is tempting, but incorrect, to dismiss the Bay State as a fringe that votes black only because it bleeds a deep blue.

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October 18, 2010: Sam Roberts and the Legacy of the Rosenbergs

In the pages of the New York Times, Sam Roberts has been fighting and re-fighting the Cold War for decades. More precisely, he has often weighed in on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – hoping for the smoking gun that would finally prove their guilt. Roberts was thrilled to review Walter Schneir’s posthumously published “The Final Verdict.” Schneir, an early and staunch advocate of the Rosenbergs, “has changed his mind” at long last.

Roberts begins with the facts: “Let’s stipulate: Julius was a Soviet spy. Ethel probably aspired to espionage, but the government had no definitive, admissible proof against her.” Really? This is what Roberts is spilling his ink on? He seems vengeful in his effort to seek out the last of the Rosenberg defenders and rub salt in their post-Venona wounds. OK: Julius may well have been a Soviet spy. But it is far from certain that Ethel “probably aspired to espionage.” What is certain is that the government had no “admissible proof against her” – and it still went ahead with the execution. I find it hard to disagree with Walter Schneir’s “final final answer.” In Roberts’s words, Schneir “largely absolves the Rosenbergs of any involvement in atomic espionage.”

But to any American under the age of forty, Roberts comes off as an old guy still harboring a petty grudge. As an American historian, I happen to think that it is still worthwhile to try to uncover the final “truth” of the Cold War-era spy cases. But not if that’s all this is about. Not if this endeavor provides a forum for Sam Roberts to gleefully reassert his belief that nothing can exculpate Julius Rosenberg.

Because in a “post 9/11” world, there is something much more profound at stake in our examination of the Rosenberg case. The essential fact is that the United States government employed the flimsiest of evidence in its quest to execute two of its own citizens. Furthermore, their crime was “conspiracy to commit espionage.” Not espionage itself. Not treason. Not terrorism. Not murder. Whether or not Julius spied for the Soviet Union is of secondary importance at this point. The larger issue is that the United States government executed these two people – two New York Jews – at a time of hysterical anti-communism and persistent anti-Semitism. In a word, they were scapegoats.

We shouldn’t be re-fighting these old vengeful wars. Anyone with half a heart can see that, even if Julius was a spy, the punishment did not fit the crime. And that is what will stand out through the decades, after Roberts and his ilk are long gone. In the twenty-first century, we should be trying to understand how this abominable sentence could have been carried out in our democracy, in the name of our ideals – and we should think about how we can ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

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August 28, 2010: If Glenn Beck Knew the Half of it

Today, on the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington, Glenn Beck is taking his cause to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. According to Beck, Tea Partiers are "the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement." The Tea Party itself circulated a petition declaring, "We believe, like Martin Luther King, Jr., in a colorblind, postracial society."

These pronouncements make me wonder whether Glenn Beck and his acolytes have any idea of the society in which Martin Luther King truly believed.

Here are 5 Things Beck and other "Tea Partiers" may not know:

1.) Martin Luther King, Jr., fought for the expansion of the federal government. King was an ardent supporter of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs. He favored numerous new laws and large expenditures on welfare, health care, education, and the like - from the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Civil Rights Act to the 1968 Fair Housing Act (a bill passed shortly after his death).

2.) King defined himself as a democratic socialist. He believed that an unfettered free market contributed to vast inequalities in income, and that the United States ought to redistribute more wealth.

3.) In 1967 and 1968, King led the "Poor People's Campaign." Moreover, he was a friend of organized labor throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He believed that unions and blacks were natural allies in the struggle for a more just America.

4.) For all this and more, King's enemies labeled him a "Communist." One billboard, popular on southern highways, featured a photo of King consorting with other leftists. It screamed, "King at Communist Training School."

5.) The 1963 March on Washington was a march for "Jobs and Justice." King believed that the federal government ought to "guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work."

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July 9, 2010: South Africa On My Mind

Anyone who knows me could pretty easily craft a melodrama that captured my head and my heart. They would write a story about race and sports.

"Jerry Maguire" comes to mind - a sports movie with a genuine interracial friendship. Or "Friday Night Lights" - at least the good seasons, like the Smash Williams story in season one. I watched "Invictus" last week, however, and was disappointed. It had the race and the sports, but not really the history. Telling the Nelson Mandela story through a couple of rugby matches didn't really resonate with me.

Which brings me to South Africa. I don't follow soccer at all until the World Cup. Then I immerse myself in the game, once every four years. What's so great about the World Cup is the history enfolded within it. When nations play one another, everyone knows it's about more than just the players on the field - it's about epic narratives of countries and their people, involving everything from border spats to continental rivalries.

This is why it's shocking to me that so few members of the media are talking about the Dutch in South Africa. Widely considered "the best side never to win a World Cup," the Netherlands might finally reach this apex in the very land that they dominated so horrifically. If they win the crown in Johannesburg, they will achieve this in the city that they built on the back of black blood. Does nobody else find this intensely fascinating? So compelling and almost terrifying?

The Netherlands has never played up to its potential on the world stage before. To do so, it had to return to the nation that it conquered at the ends of the earth.

There are some pretty straight-forward reasons why nobody is talking about this. For starters, there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between the soccer players in orange in 2010 and the Afrikaners in the 1940s, those architects of apartheid. In recent years, the Dutch squads were awash in racial diversity. Patrick Kluivert scored 40 goals for the national team. Former Dutch footballer Ruud Gullit now sits in the ESPN studio and dissects each match.

And when you really pry open the history of any nation, ugly ghosts will come quickly to the surface. Was Franco's Spain any more humane than Botha's South Africa? Who can really say? What I can say is that if the World Cup were being played in Israel, and if Germany made it to the championship game, there would be a lot more talk about the weight of the past than there is right now.

The Afrikaners themselves certainly see the link. Orange flags fly from South African cars and across the sheltered white suburbs from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

I'm no expert on South Africa, but I do know that it's a place still ravaged by racial inequality, racial violence, and - yes - racial hatred.

The few articles that have been published about this - one in the Christian Science Monitor, one in the Wall Street Journal online, and another by the Associated Press - present disparate portraits of black South Africa's response to Holland's soccer success. In some narratives, they strongly support the Netherlands. In other stories, black South Africans glimpse in the all those seas of orange an awful racial history and a still difficult present.

(A quick congrats to my close friend Jeremy Sharrard who, before the World Cup began, predicted a Netherlands/Spain final. For the record, I picked Spain over Brazil.)

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May 25, 2010: It's All About Race

When I watched the clip of Rand Paul's now-infamous interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, it sent me back not to 1964 but to 2003. During the first several months of that year, I devoted all of my waking hours to researching what white southerners thought of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seven years ago, I was gleeful when I discovered the stacks and stacks of letters that citizens had written to their elected representatives. Now, the thought of those letters - folder after folder, pile upon pile - makes me shudder.

In an attempt to defeat the Civil Rights Act, southern senators filibustered for a record three months. Their constituents cheered them on. Sam Ervin, leader of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, was in the thick of the fight. So was Richard Russell, the de facto head of the southern Democrats. I pored over Ervin's papers, which remain the largest collection of all at the very-large Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill. I also spent days at the Richard Russell Library in Athens, Georgia. Anyone who reads these letters will arrive at one inescapable conclusion.

Opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was all about race.

Sure, most every white southerner couched his opposition in the vernacular of freedom generally and property rights specifically. But the law was then, and it always has been, about one particular type of freedom: the freedom of black people to enter a business if they wished to do so. (Yes, Title II was all about public accommodations. Neither Rand Paul nor Barry Goldwater had much of a problem with that. White southerners did, but, for now, that's neither here nor there).

The typical white southerner would begin a letter to his senator the way Iredell Hutton began his note to Sam Ervin. Hutton owned the Paramount Theater in Burlington, North Carolina, and the Civil Rights Act was still a year off when he penned his letter. Hutton was incensed, and quite frightened, by John F. Kennedy's June 11, 1963 speech. Kennedy first proposed the idea of civil rights legislation. Kennedy called this issue "as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the Constitution." The president and the cinema owner didn't read the same Scriptures or revere the same Constitution.

"Little by little they are taking away our individual freedoms," Hutton said of the "Kennedy boys." "It is getting to be a hell of a note when a person that owns a business cannot sell to or serve whom he chooses." Indeed, this was the essence of Goldwater's argument in 1964 - and of Rand Paul's argument in 2010. But in hundreds upon thousands of letters written by white southerners, this was only the beginning of the argument - not its thrust. The Civil Rights Act was not about serving an individual American in the abstract. It was about serving a black person in a southern business. And therein lay Hutton's real objection. "When the negro has earned the right, he should be accepted and not until then." Congress deemed that African Americans had finally "earned" that most American of rights in July 1964. Millions of white southerners disagreed.

If we argue about the Civil Rights Act, this is what we are arguing about. And behind every theoretical debate about "big government" lurks something real and physical. In the specific case of the Civil Rights Act or in the general case of the Tea Party, we're not really arguing about principles.

We're arguing about whether a family (black or white or Latino, and almost always impoverished) should lose their home because of the actions of traders on Wall Street (often rich and white). We're arguing about whether working person without employer-provided health care should be allowed to see a doctor when he or she is sick. And, yes, the fact is that the number of black people who can't afford health care is vastly disproportionate to the number of whites. When we argue about the role of government, we're not arguing about concepts. We're arguing about what happens to the most disadvantaged among us. And when a vast majority of the disadvantaged are black people, then we're also arguing about race.

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February 25, 2010: An Anniversary Barrage

Get ready, because the 1960s are upon us - again. Or, for those of us born in the late 1970s, the Sixties are upon us for the first time. That decade when everything happened, when so many things changed, when the world seemed up for grabs - when history was made every ten minutes.

Just as the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of February 1, 1960 effectively launched the decade, so the recent articles and exhibits commemorating that struggle have officially kicked off the fiftieth anniversary of the Sixties.

For the next decade, we could be treated to a silver anniversary with every meal. Soon we will be seeing the Kennedy/Nixon debates once again and replaying that epic election. We will see Martin Luther King, Jr., hundreds of times, landing in jails, rallying the troops, orating so eloquently that justice will have no choice but to roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Next will come the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Freedom Rides and the Albany Movement, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The cast of characters are too many to list, and there are the cities whose very names speak multitudes: Birmingham; Philadelphia (Mississippi) and Selma; My Lai, Hanoi, and Saigon.

Then there are the assassinations: Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy - the killings that so maimed, tore, and stained the nation. These all must have their fiftieth anniversaries. How could they not?

And didn't the 60s also have LBJ? And Woodstock? And Muhammad Ali?

That's just to confine it to the United States. A few things happened in Prague and in Paris, in Moscow and Mexico City.

And that's all just a start. Brace yourselves, because it's about to hit.

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January 31, 2010: Letter from Massachusetts

It's been 15 years since I last lived in Massachusetts. I moved back to my native Bay State two weeks ago - and, my, what a rude return.

My clothes were barely out of my bags before the Harvard Square burger joint Mr. Bartley's was advertising its newest addition to the menu - The Scott Brown.

So much for the comfortable and progressive Massachusetts of my memories, I thought. I watched the local news for hours on that election night. One series of interviews with "the people" was set in a Worcester pub. Here were all of these innocents proclaiming their allegiance to Scott Brown. I felt like Don Draper in Palm Springs, or like my own strait-laced grandfather when he was once plopped down on a bench on Main Street in Northampton. "Who are these people?!"

That's a loaded - not to mention a rhetorical - question, one I'm not quite prepared to answer. But I can say one thing for certain: when Massachusetts voted Scott Brown into the "people's seat," they were not voting against the idea of a government-run health care system. That's because they already have it.

Granted, Bay State voters seem sick of one-party rule in the state. But their vote can only be construed as an anti-health care vote insomuch as one acknowledges that Massachusetts already has universal health care. This point, while occasionally noted by the national media, has rarely been explored. And it needs to be. Massachusetts voters dislike "taxes" and "big government" in the abstract. By the same token, they also really like - and understand the need for - the social services that their government provides, health care chief among them. They weren't voting against health care per se. They were saying that since they already have a statewide system, it wasn't so critical that they install a senator to support the national bill. Altruistic? Of course not. Anti-health care? Not really.

A glance at Massachusetts political history also tells us that as much as a particular brand of liberalism has dominated state politics for the past half-century, its senate seats have been won by scions of prominent families or owners of larger-than-life personalities.

It has been almost a hundred years since senators were first elected by popular vote. Since then, Massachusetts has elected two Lodges, two Kennedys, two Weeks', a Coolidge, a Saltonstall, and a Kerry. The outliers? David Walsh served for about twenty-five years; Frederick Gillett and Paul Tsongas each served for a term. And in perhaps the most compelling senate campaign of all, Ed Brooke - an African American and a Republican - bested Chub Peabody in 1966. Brooke went on to win re-election six years later; no black senator or governor has won re-election before or since. Nobody else served a full term in a Massachusetts senate seat.

Significantly, they have all been men. And in general, seldom have female politicians been perceived as charismatic, smooth, or stylish. Martha Coakley certainly projected none of these qualities. She was perceived as the next in line among state Democrats; Scott Brown pilloried her as the choice of the "machine." And as strong as the Massachusetts political machine has been at the local levels, that strength rarely translates to elections of statewide and national significance. Brown seemed the candidate from the lustrous family; he was glamorous as much as he was populist. He was the one who floated above, while Coakley remained in the humdrum muck of politics-as-usual.

For these reasons of personality as much as policy, Brown - and not Coakley - convinced the electorate that he was the rightful successor to the Saltonstalls, the Brookes - and the Kennedys too.

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November 15, 2009: The Other 20-Year Anniversary

Two days before the Berlin Wall fell, monumental breakthroughs occurred in American racial politics. Douglas Wilder became the first African American to be elected governor – and in a southern state, no less. David Dinkins won election as the first black mayor of New York City, as did John Daniels in New Haven and Norm Rice in Seattle. The New York Times editorial page boasted of “trans-racial triumphs, once as unimaginable as the end of the wall.” Such victories displayed a nation in transit, traveling “messily, unevenly, toward a standard of racial equality probably unknown in history.”

The ensuing years rendered that new day of racial equality more a figment than a reality – painful truths demonstrated by Crown Heights and Rodney King, by every statistical indicator from incarceration percentages to poverty rates.

One year removed from Barack Obama’s presidential victory, Americans might look back two decades and view the election season of 1989 in a new light. For it writes the prologue to the rise of Obama. November 2008 forces us to re-remember November 1989. Those elections no longer smack of hopes unfulfilled and expectations unmet; that piece of the past now becomes an essential chapter in an epic American story.

In 1989, all four candidates emphasized messages of change, healing, progress, and unity. They offered themselves as motors to propel their states beyond a painful racial past, or to steer their cities around an ugly present.

German television stations and British newspapers followed Douglas Wilder across Virginia. His campaign ads urged, “Keep Virginia moving forward. Don’t let Marshall Coleman take us back.” Wilder referenced the years of massive resistance against school integration, when the “old commonwealth’s reputation was corroded.” He navigated the swirling currents of Virginia’s history: the blemishes of slavery and segregation on the one hand, and the tradition of the Founding Fathers on the other. Wilder’s presence in the statehouse could help Virginia purge the sins of the past, and realize the prouder parts of its heritage. Wilder eked out a victory, heralding a new Old Dominion.

Race was even closer to the surface of David Dinkins’s campaign. The Democratic primary battle between Dinkins and Ed Koch unfolded amid an ever-exploding terrain. This included the infamous rape in Central Park and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Dinkins offered racial healing to a city in dire need of it. He won a nine-point primary victory, praising New Yorkers who “voted our hopes and not your fears.” In the general election, up against Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order appeal, Dinkins invoked the “gorgeous mosaic” of cultures, races, and ethnicities that composed the city. Dinkins’s uplifting message carried the day.

In New Haven, John Daniels made sure that voters understood the stakes. “The whole race issue is a key factor. How can a black man…be elected in a city which is… predominantly white? Can the city overcome racism?” He won the election with 69 percent of the vote. Daniels proclaimed in triumph, “People are busting with pride and joy.”

In this sagging post-industrial city, citizens craved change. If voters elected black politicians, they seemed to be guessing, then their cities might also change for the better.

A longtime city councilman, Norm Rice entered Seattle’s mayoral campaign on the day of the filing deadline – deciding to run only after the issue of race came to assume political weight. Another candidate, Doug Jewett, had emphasized the controversial issue of school busing and heightened racial friction. Rice presented himself as the only leader who could bridge America’s most bedeviling divide. In a city where less than one in ten residents were African Americans, he won a sixteen-point victory.

No such reconciliation was in the offing. In 1991, Mayor Dinkins could not extinguish the racial fires that burned in Crown Heights. Wilder changed the color of the Richmond statehouse, but no gubernatorial election could batter down the racial inequalities that defined American life. By 1994, Norm Rice was the only one of the four leaders still in office.

Barack Obama’s election places all of this in a different context. It raises the possibility that the story of American racial politics does not wind inevitably toward violence, tension, and inequality – but that interracial progress is as much a part of that tale as regression. The elections of 1989 might now be glimpsed as one small step within a longer journey. And as Americans recall the elections of 1989, they will see that Obama’s presidency did not amount to a complete break from the past. He did not signal a rupture with America’s racial history. Rather, he was the culmination of one of its slices. Obama not only followed in the footsteps of black candidates who had forged multiracial coalitions two decades before. He also made their footsteps larger.

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October 26, 2009: A World Series From Hell

For reasons unknown, the baseball gods have pitted the Yankees against the Phillies. The conventional wisdom has it, as Tim Kurkjian writes at ESPN.com, that "this could be a World Series for the ages." For Mets fans, it is a waking nightmare.

I was talking with my brother, wondering which fate is worse: to live in Philadelphia when the Phillies win the title (as I would be), or to live in New York when the Yankees win (as he would be). The fans of both teams are intolerable, but for very different reasons.

Yankee fans feel entitled to the championship each and every year. Often arrogant and more than a little spoiled, they pity the supporters of every other team - bemused and confused as to how anyone could ever enjoy rooting for a club that often battles mediocrity.

Phillies fans, on the other hand, are forever looking to unload the enormous chip on their collective shoulders. The City of Brotherly Love is a huge metropolitan area, with a bustling downtown and plenty to be proud of. But it is also an intensely insular place, one in which it never even occurs to most city residents that the individual they are passing on the sidewalk might not have grown up within a 30-mile radius. Philadelphia is a solidly second-tier city, with the mentality of a third or fourth-tier city. Phillies fans are far more aggressive and violent than are Yankee fans, yet there is about Phillie-lovers something much more authentic and emotional.

When the playoffs began, I was rooting for anything except a Yankees-Phillies series. Now that the worst has come to pass, I must grudgingly cast my lot with one or the other of these evils.

And the Phillies have one enormous tie-breaker: former Met Pedro Martinez. At this point, I would like nothing more than to see Pedro throw two shutouts against the Yankees. So I will join my Philadelphia brethren for the next two weeks, and raise a glass high for Pedro.

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September 30, 2009: Health Care Blues

There is little reason to weigh in on the health care debate when Rachel Maddow so expertly skewers the opposition; I often have nothing to say other than "Amen."

But when I read the reports about yesterday's votes against a public option (in the Senate Finance Committee) I found my head spinning. I needed to work out these thoughts by putting words to the page.

Forget "death panels" and trumped-up fears about "socialism." The bizarre thing is the way that Republican senators attacked the public option.

First, Charles Grassley claimed, "Government is not a fair competitor." A government plan would "ultimately force private insurers out of business." He fears that the government plan would be so great, the public option so attractive to so many millions of Americans, that private companies could not match it. I don't really see the problem here. If the government can offer a far better plan than private insurers, why shouldn't it? Anti-government conservatism of the past was rooted in the fundamental idea that the private market - because it responds to economic incentives - will certainly produce a better product than any "government bureaucrat" would. Grassley has turned this reasoning on its head. He seems