1968-2008: OUR TIME FOR CHANGE HAS COME? (Part III)

SPECTACLE '08

BY most accounts Obama delivered a stellar performance during his August 28 acceptance speech in front of 85,000 supporters at Mile High Stadium (Invesco Field). While not making reference to Dr. King by name--and in that manner not allowing racial politics to overshadow the wider imperatives of his speech--he nonetheless concluded by channeling the historic nature of the moment, weaving his campaign themes together with an eloquent plea to rekindle the collective aspirations articulated in "I Have a Dream." Obama bellowed from the convention podium:

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit -- that American promise -- that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend...

And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead -- people of every creed and color, from every walk of life -- is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

'We cannot walk alone,' the preacher cried. ' And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise -- that American promise -- and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

The Democratic National Convention in Denver came on the heels of Obama's highly successful overseas trip designed to demonstrate his grasp of foreign policy and prove that he could pass the "commander-in-chief" threshold. In Iraq the Senator appeared about as "presidential" as possible while meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who all but endorsed Obama's timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. After capping his stop through the Middle East and Western Europe with a July 24 speech in front of 200,000 people gathered at Victory Column in Berlin's Tiergarten Park, Obama turned his attention towards the selection of a vice presidential running-mate. In what was initially viewed as a generally pragmatic and strategic choice, Team Obama named Joe Biden of Delaware--the sixty-five year-old chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden matches if not surpasses McCain's legislative bona fides (35 years in Congress) and is considered an "expert" on foreign affairs. He therefore helps negate what has been perceived as Obama's most glaring weakness: inexperience.

Biden's foreign policy leaves much to be desired among many progressives, as he voted for the 2002 Iraq war authorization and his general views on the Middle East are conventional, i.e. titled towards the Israeli perspective by default. Yet, his selection has also been more tolerable to Obama's leftwing base than would have been a number of the rumored alternatives, such as Senators Evan Bayh (Indiana) or Hillary Clinton. To be sure, Biden is thoroughly enmeshed in the Beltway establishment and doesn't exactly have a strong record of reform. Still, he is hardly among the worst of the worst in the Democratic (let alone Republican) party when it comes to being a corrupt "Washington insider" in the pocket of "special interests" (perhaps his greatest offense relates to connections with the credit-card companies based in his hometown of Wilmington). For the most part Biden is regarded as an amiable and independent-minded politician who offers his candid opinion on a regular basis, often straying from the party's proscribed "talking points." Furthermore, having a working/middle-class background filled with personal and familial tragedy, Biden's biography tugs at liberal heart strings in a manner similar to Obama's--he is in fact considered one of if not the "poorest" member of the U.S. Senate with a current net worth of around $300,000. Biden has also become a highly vocal critic of Bush-Cheney policies, although he could have used his powerful Senate position to do more by way of holding the White House accountable for its dubious actions in the "war on terror," i.e. torturing detainees, spying on law abiding U.S. citizens, and misleading the nation into an (arguably) illegal war. To his credit, the Delaware Senator recently affirmed Obama's stated commitment to pursue criminal charges against members of the Bush-Cheney administration if and when merited by investigations. Thus, Biden's selection can be seen as an attempt to combine the older senator's realistic grasp of "how Washington works" with the younger senator's desire for reform. And if Obama represents the reemergence of an RFK-like figure appealing to young progressives, it should be noted that Biden shares a birth date (separated by fourteen years) with Robert Kennedy on November 20. Meanwhile much like Obama today, during his primary campaign in 1988 many compared Biden's efforts to Kennedy's 1968 run for the nomination.


BEYOND THE CONVENTIONS

An estimated 38 million people watched Obama's speech in Denver, the largest audience ever for a political convention. "Mainstream" media discourse focused on the willingness (or lack thereof) among Clinton supporters to get on board with Obama-Biden, as well as which part of the ticket was going to most aggressively attack McCain. At the same time, "independent" media including Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! covered both the DNC and RNC (in St. Paul Minnesota) from an "un-embedded" point-of-view that focused as much on people and issues excluded from the conventions as on the choreographed speechifying inside the Pepsi and Xcel Energy Centers. DN's comprehensive coverage, "Breaking with Convention," offered incisive analysis of the insidious confluence of money and politics typified by these televised gatherings produced in partnership with corporate sponsors who also happen to be campaign contributors. Perhaps most egregious (or at least obvious) in these regards, the AT&T logo was emblazoned across an official 2008 DNC tote bag distributed to delegates, which reminded critical observers that while AT&T donates significantly to the coffers of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, the company could have suffered greatly due to pending civil lawsuits alleging that telecommunications companies collaborated with the dubious Bush-Cheney "warrantless wiretapping" program. Thus while these tote bags may seem benign enough, as noted by media critics such as Glenn Greenwald they symbolize the symbiotic relationship that exists between politicians and corporations like AT&T, which in fact threw a lavish private party for Democratic legislators in Denver that has been construed as an expression of gratitude for those who supported the retroactive immunity provision in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

As the Democratic and Republican wings of the nation's political and corporate elite gathered in celebration, dissent was therefore on display both outside and inside the conventions halls. Protesters in Denver and St. Paul were met by a massive and heavily militarized police presence designed to intimidate activists and preemptively destabilize their antiwar/anti-establishment mobilizations. While Democracy Now! provide unfiltered coverage of these demonstrations, Amy Goodman was arrested outside of the RNC as she and two of her producers were swept up by riot police who overreacted violently to sporadic vandalism among groups that had broken away from the peaceful gatherings. Meanwhile inside the DNC, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich delivered a characteristically impassioned speech that appealed directly to the progressive wing of the party. A twice presidential candidate in the 2004 and 2008 Democratic primaries who has within the last year introduced--so far unsuccessfully--articles of impeachment against both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, Kucinich told the convention (in part):

Wake Up America! In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the neocon artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt...Wake up, America! The insurance companies took over healthcare. Wake up, America! The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing...We went into Iraq for oil. The oil companies want more. War against Iran will mean $10-a-gallon gasoline. The oil administration, they want to drill more, into your wallet. Wake up, America!...

Now, this administration can tap our phones. They can’t tap our creative spirit. They can open our mail. But they can’t open economic opportunities. They can track our every move. But they lost track of the economy while the cost of food, gasoline and electricity skyrockets. Now, they have skillfully played our post-9/11 fears, and they’ve allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many. Every day, we get the color orange, while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green. Wake up, America!

Kucinich is dedicated to the "global peace and justice movement" along with those who took to the streets in Denver and St. Paul. Yet, he continues to work within the Democratic Party while many of his allies criticize it from the Left. Thus in June Kucinich told Amy Goodman of his reservations about Obama's apparent abandonment of the progressive ideals that seemed to have helped him win the primary: "This election...is about hope, certainly, but it’s about something else, too. It’s about shifting away from policies that have destroyed our economy. And I am looking forward to having a conversation with my good friend Barack Obama about what he intends to do about matters relating to NAFTA, about Social Security privatization, about whether or not he’s going to be leaving troops in Iraq...before I give a personal endorsement." Although it is unknown whether or not he has had a recent conversation with the Illinois Senator, Kucinich withheld his official endorsement of the Obama-Biden ticket until the very end of his convention speech.

At the same time, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is perhaps the Republican equivalent of Rep. Kucinich in terms of electoral politics. A physician and longtime legislator who was the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate in 1988, Rep. Paul generated a wealth of enthusiasm among disaffected young conservatives during the 2008 primary season. As part of a grassroots internet following, Paul's "Campaign for Liberty" attracts a diverse group of political affiliates under the banner: "The Revolution Continues." Paul's platform has some ideological agreement with the Left, especially in the realm of foreign policy where he calls for an end to "U.S. imperialism" and the closure of all American military bases across the world. Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, for instance, struck a similar chord at the first Democratic primary debate in South Carolina on April 26 2007. When NBC's Brian Williams asked the assembled candidates about "the three most important enemies to the United States"other than Iraq, Gravel answered: "We have no important enemies. What we need to do is to begin to deal with the rest of the world as equals...We spend more as a nation on defense than all the rest of the world put together...The military industrial complex not only controls our government, lock, stock and barrel, but they control our culture." Therefore after being quietly excluded from subsequent Democratic debates, not to mention the DNC, Gravel made an unsuccessful bid to become the 2008 Libertarian nominee. Ron Paul, meanwhile, more or less excluded himself from the RNC and instead organized a "counter-convention" across the river at Minneapolis' Target Center where at least 10,000 people shadowed the GOP's nomination of John McCain at a "Rally for the Republic." Staking its claim on a return to the (conservative) principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights regarding small government, controlled spending, and an isolationist foreign policy, the "Ron Paul Revolution" is also fiercely committed to pure "free-market" capitalism, i.e. total financial deregulation (a la Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman) as well as staunch support for the Second Amendment.


THE "THIRD PARTY" FACTOR

A true maverick within the Republican Party (unlike McCain) who is generally respected even among opponents, Paul steadfastly refuses to compromise his ideals by endorsing this years' GOP ticket. Instead, Rep. Paul rather surprisingly organized a "Third Party Press Conference" in Washington D.C. on September 10 in which independent candidate Ralph Nader and Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney joined with the (rightwing) Constitution Party's nominee Charles O. “Chuck” Baldwin. At this forum Paul urged his supporters to throw their efforts behind one of these candidates rather than vote for the "lesser of two evils." Libertarian nominee, and former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr decided at the last minute to skip this event. But according to the the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Barr joined the other candidates in signing a "statement from Paul pledging their support for limited government, personal liberties, bringing U.S. troops stationed abroad home, and for an investigation into the Federal Reserve." Whether they be from the far Left or the far Right, this collection of odd political bedfellows--Paul, Nader, McKinney, and Barr is coherently united around the goal of reforming government in order to expand the political process beyond the "broken" two-party system. In an intriguing twist, Barr--who had helped lead the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton--has asked Paul to join him on the Libertarian ticket. However, the Texas Congressman has apparently declined his former colleague's offer.

Excluded from debates and otherwise not covered seriously by the mainstream media, the Green and Libertarian Parties in particular have rather sizable and devoted followings that would conceivably be represented in Congress if the American version of electoral democracy were closer to European-style multiparty (coalitional) parliaments. It is also fairly obvious that Ralph Nader's political fortunes would be quite different if the media landscape were not dominated by the interests of Time Warner (CNN), Disney (ABC), General Electric (NBC), Viacom (CBS), and NewsCorporation (FOX). After his 2000 run as a Green when he arguably siphoned enough votes from Al Gore to help put Bush over the top, Nader ran again in 2004 as an independent earning less votes and less attention. Nader's 2008 running-mate is Matt Gonzalez, a former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who as a Democrat-turned-Green lost a close race for mayor in 2003. But the independent Nader/Gonzalez ticket is floundering in many respects this election cycle, and thus during a June 25 interview with the Rocky Mountain News Nader caused a minor controversy when he made the following remarks: "There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American." Nader added: "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?"

Although some pundits unfairly attacked Nader's comments comparing Sen. Obama and Rev. Jackson as racist, a more sober assessment might echo the words of Joan Walsh who asked in her June 25 Salon.com column: "Is Ralph Nader Losing It?". The same day on MSNBC's Hardball Walsh joined host Chris Mathews and others including Bob Herbert of the New York Times in agreeing with Obama, who after rebutting claims that he hasn't addressed certain issues, declared: "Ralph Nader is trying to get attention. He‘s become a perennial political candidate. I think it‘s a shame because if you look at his legacy in terms of consumer protections, it‘s an extraordinary one. But at this point, he‘s somebody who‘s trying to get attention and whose campaign hasn‘t gotten any traction." Nader has indeed not received as much attention in 2008 as he did in 2000 and 2004, in large part because of the historic nature of this year's campaign and the fact that, unlike either Gore or Kerry, Obama has a genuinely progressive base of supporters. Hence the cries of outrage at Obama's perceived abandonment of his core constituency, which was more or less at the heart of Nader's charge that the Illinois Senator is simply another centrist Democrat aligned with Wall Street and the corporate oligarchy. Yet such a critique of Team Obama's strategy of triangulation, or perhaps of the candidate's apparent willingness to compromise his ideals, is rather different from Nader's musings that "he wants to show that he is not a threatening...another politically-threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as a black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically, he‘s coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it‘s corporate or whether it‘s simply oligarchic, and they love it. Whites just eat it up.”

Granting that he could have phrased himself better, and giving him the benefit of doubt as far as his intentions, it still seems rather clear that Nader is not grasping the complexities of racial politics--nor of race in politics--by decrying the fact that Obama is trying to reassure the ruling elite that he's on their side. The Senator is, after all, effectively attempting to become the ceremonial leader of a global "white power structure." Nader surely knows that it would be foolhardy for any candidate--black or white--to expect to run for and become president by appealing primarily to people in poor communities who don't contribute to campaigns and, quite often, don't vote. Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, or Nader himself might be the president today if the American electoral system were truly democratic in that sense. This is exactly why it is promising that--despite his obligatory entanglement in the murky and dubious realm of power politics--Barack Obama remains connected to a grassroots (progressive) orientation informed by his ethnic heritage and solidified through experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Chicago's South Side. This life story as a multiracial community organizer and constitutional lawyer/law professor separates him from other presidential candidates, as well as from other high-profile black politicians such as Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice. Unlike previous African-American presidential hopefuls on the Left including Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, who were known as civil rights leaders and never gained sufficient antional support, Obama has developed his image as a political leader who supports causes attached to the legacy of the civil rights movement without being seen as an activist. He can therefore claim to be "post-racial" in the sense of not being a candidate whose constituency is defined by skin color and limited to those who look similar to himself. Nader's blanket dismissal of Obama as simply more of the same therefore ignores reality: it is truly phenomenal for a black man to potentially be a few months away from entering the White House, let alone an African-American with progressive roots who appeals culturally to the largely depoliticized "hip-hop generation" yet has managed to not be vilified as a "black candidate" in large part because of being half white.

While it is appropriate and worthwhile to be skeptical of Obama's policies and campaign strategies, one must question the wisdom of Nader's decision to launch haphazard attacks that seem to have earned him only a brief spurt of negative media attention focused on personality rather than substance. Moreover it is clear from Obama's reaction to Nader's comments that it might have in theory been possible for the longtime consumer advocate to have formed a political coalition with the onetime community organizer now seeking the nation's highest office. Yet Nader's stubborn and awkward combativeness all but assured Obama's subsequent distancing from the man who, despite being a tireless crusader for social justice, may be most remembered for having helped (s)elect George W. Bush in 2000. Admitting that he has no chance of winning the presidency in 2008, Nader could have pursued a more strategic campaign aimed at opening a critical dialog with the Democratic candidate in order to press Obama in a progressive direction. To that end, he and Matt Gonzalez might have been better off working from within the Green Party, but instead their independent campaign overlaps and in some ways duplicates the efforts of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and her Green running-mate Rosa Clemente. Although claiming to be in solidarity with McKinney and Clemente, Nader and Gonzalez are inevitably cutting into their votes and ultimately diminishing the strength of the Greens as a progressive center-of-gravity.

Ousted from the House of Representatives by energized opponents, and essentially banished from the Democratic Party, the firebrand McKinney recently relaunched her political career with the Green Party; Clemente is a journalist and self-described "hip-hop activist"of Puerto Rican descent who was raised in the South Bronx. Like Nader and Gonzalez, McKinney and Clemente are having a difficult time gaining traction with voters during an election that has been so focused on the nation's first would-be black president. Hence, their evident frustration during a July 21 interview with Democracy Now!, when Clemente was prompted to tell Amy Goodman: "There have been some people caught up in Obama-mania, as I call it and other people, that are upset [about the possibility of the Greens taking votes away from Democrats], but they don’t understand, I think, right now the situation that we’re in. They don’t understand that the Democrats and Republicans joined forces to keep the Green Party off the ballot. They don’t understand that we are being whited out of every mainstream and even some progressive media." Therefore striking a defiant if not also hostile chord, she continued: "And my question to them [Obama supporters] is always, or my response: if we are not telling the truth, if we are not about empowering the majority of the American people, why are forces that are worth $200 million, $300 million not only keeping us off the ballots, but not even talking about us."

Clemente's rhetorical stance is indicative of a tendency among ideologues on the Left to masterfully diagnose problems without being able to develop a strategy for overcoming them. Furthermore, such progressives often value idealism more than pragmatism in political leaders who thus find themselves "preaching to the choir" as their radical rhetoric alienates those who haven't already been won over. Many therefore respect what McKinney and Clemente (as well as Nader and Gonzalez) represent, while questioning the long-term effectiveness of their campaigns. From this perspective Amiri Baraka of the Black Arts Collective published an uncompromising critique of those who are voting Green rather than standing with Obama as the only prospect for real and immediate progress from within the electoral system. According to Baraka: "The people who are supporting McKinney must know that that is an empty gesture. But too often such people are so pocked with self congratulatory idealism, that they care little or understand little about politics (i.e. the gaining, maintaining and use of power) but want only to pronounce, to themselves mostly, how progressive or radical or even revolutionary they are."

Sure enough, Baraka tapped into a controversy that has fractured the American Left more or less since 1968 when the assassination of Robert Kennedy amid an escalating war in Vietnam perpetuated chaos at the DNC in Chicago and opened the door for Richard Nixon's ascendancy. What had in fact climaxed that year as the inchoate beginning of a socialist-inspired global revolution lost its cohesion and unraveled sending the movements of the "sixties" in divergent and often competing directions. In a recent reflection among scholars and activists on Pacifica Radio's Against the Grain (KPFA) titled "Appraising '68", Barbara Epstein and John Sanbonmatsu argued that, as an outcome of 1968, a rather large portion of the Left--often informed by some version of anarchism--views either electoral politics in general or the two-party system specifically as a tool of the ruling elite; another camp, inspired by elements of postmodernism, rejects the oppressive nature of "politics" in favor of a liberating "culturalism" devoted to exploring identity formation and related concepts. While productive and perhaps even essential in an intellectual/academic sense, this factionalism has contributed to a steady decline of progressive influence in national electoral politics since the late sixties. Scholars such as Epstein and Sanbonmatsu therefore refer to the insights of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose theory of cultural hegemony posits that power is ultimately attained through overlapping economic and ideological struggles in which the dictates of political compromise often necessitate the formation of strategic coalitions. Although debate continues over how to best navigate the current system, one important lesson of 1968 is that progressives can continue ignoring electoral politics only at their own peril. Whether this means going Green with McKinney, standing firm with Nader, or casting a vote for Obama is a somewhat separate question. So to is the issue of how progressives can and should re-unite after the election, especially under an Obama-Biden administration.


THE "OTHER SHOE" DROPS

Yet as the 2008 election enters its final forty days, it appears as though neither McKinney nor Nader will be a serious factor, especially compared to the potentially larger impact that Bob Barr and Ron Paul could have among conservatives. Moreover, whatever momentum may have developed inside the ranks of third party campaigns was surely blunted by the McCain camp's shocking vice-presidential nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, a deeply religious political neophyte with hard-line conservative views and none of the heretofore requisite qualifications for national office. Thus providing an emergency shot of adrenaline to a campaign that desperately needed to shift the nation's focus, Palin's RNC speech in fact drew slightly more viewers than Obama's historic moment in Denver, as did McCain's remarks the following evening. Many Left pundits gravitated to the notion that Palin's selection as the GOP's first female VP candidate was a cynical ploy designed to peel "white working-class" women voters--especially disaffected Hillay Clinton supporters--away from the Democrats. Yet with her performance in St. Paul, it became clear that her primary function on the campaign trail would be to provide red meat for the conservative base by using a combination of attacks and one-liners to reignite the "culture wars," i.e. debates over abortion, gun-control, gay marriage, etc. She thus went immediately for the jugular against Obama while defending her record as Mayor of Wasila, Alaska, telling the convention: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.

We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco."

For a while it looked like the GOPs' quite risky decision to select Palin might just pay-off, as she began drawing large crowds and became a fresh face who could deliver a great speech; some even began calling her the "Republican Obama." With the help of Palin's self-styled image as "an average hockey mom"-turned reformist politician who successfully challenged the corrupt Alaska lawmakers in her own party, McCain managed to recapture his branding as a Senate "maverick" willing to buck the Establishment. No doubt informed by a lack of enthusiasm for McCain, the GOP campaign that had been built on touting experience as an antidote to the risk involved in electing Obama suddenly felt compelled to begin promising its own version of change. While keeping Palin far away from the press, and in fact pursuing a reinvigorated "attack the media" strategy of defense against mounting scrutiny of her record (as well as McCain's apparently hasty decision), for a few days the election reached the peak of inanity as political commentators parsed the meaning of "lipstick on a pig" in order to detect a hint of sexism in Obama's stump-speech. Meanwhile conservative women took to wearing Palin paraphernalia and chanting, with reference to the Governor's energy policy: "drill baby, drill!" But just as Republicans could claim to have recaptured momentum and changed the election narrative to their advantage, the "Palin bubble" began to burst. This occurred first as serious questions arose regarding the Governor's honesty, as she for instance claimed to have resisted Alaska's infamous pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere" project when in fact she had initially supported it. Meanwhile the Alaska Senate is currently investigating the possibility that Palin wrongfully fired the state's public safety commissioner for personal reasons and is now covering-up her actions; thus, "Troopergate" threatens to be a major political headache for the McCain campaign as an official bipartisan report will be completed on October 10.

As all this was brewing, a sudden Wall Street nosedive on September 15 in what appears to be the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression permanently changed the conversation. Both candidates have now been forced to react to an unfolding financial meltdown of unkown proportions. Combined with an increasingly tense geopolitical situation in the Middle East, and now also between Russia and the West, it is beginning to seem more than a little bit like the 1930s all over again. What will be the effect on the election of collapsing financial markets alongside a proposed $700 government bailout at a time when the Iraq war has already depleted the Federal Reserve? Is Obama promising to be the next FDR as much as the next RFK? Where, for that matter, are Bush and Cheney these days? Is this just the begining of a whole new page in both American and world history?

Stay tuned...