Obama Holds His Ground

The President just interrupted a press briefing with Robert Gibbs to further discuss the controversy over Henry Louis Gates. And while he acknowledged that his language could have been different, he pointedly did not apologize or submit that he said anything wrong.

Obama said he spoke directly with Crowley today and has extended an invitation to meet with the officer.

However, the president did not back away from his other remarks on racial profiling in America. “The fact that it has garnered so much attention, I think, is testimony to the fact that these are issues that are still very sensitive here in America,” he said.

“I continue to believe that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station,” he said. “I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.”

“My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way it should have been, or the way they would have liked it to be resolved,” the president said.

Obama further rejected the criticism that as president he should not have weighed in at all. “That I disagree with,” he said. “Race is still a troubling aspect of our society. Whether I were a black or a white, I think me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive as opposed to negative understanding about the issue is part of my portfolio.”

The president expressed frustration that the controversy has distracted from the conversation he’d rather be having. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody’s been paying much attention to health care,” he quipped.

Greg Sargent has more. Good for him. The press can attack him all they want, but he is standing up on a legitimate policy issue - racial profiling and police misconduct - which will resonate for a hell of a lot of people in this country. The media might go nuts, but Obama was right to say what he said, and he's right to defend it.

Post-Racial Society

We've moved so far beyond race, that even a Harvard professor can be treated like a profiled suspect... oh wait, he was blacktoo?

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had “no idea who he was messing with,’’ the report said.

We may have a biracial President, we may have a more enlightened society at the margins, but we have not conquered the problem of race by any stretch of the imagination.

Our Racial Problem

I know that Barack Obama's election ended all racial strife in America, but somebody forgot to tell the TSA.

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."

Serves them right, making small talk to one another on a plane. While being dark-skinned and Muslim-looking at that!

The TSA and AirTran ended up taking everyone off the plane and re-screening them and their luggage, before allowing them to take off - only without that trouble-making family. According to TSA, this is an example of the system working.

Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the pilot acted appropriately.

"For us, it just highlights that security is everybody's responsibility," Howe said. "Someone heard something that was inappropriate, and then the airline decided to act on it. We certainly support [the pilot's] call to do that."

In a society suffused with the "TIPS" program and Total Information Awareness and calls to "watch what you say" and to be on the lookout for suspicious activity, this is what we get. Those cultural signifiers are not easily washed away, the urge to be "alert" and "ready" and "aware" and "on watch". And ultimately, there are very strict, not-even-subliminal definitions on who we have to watch and who we don't have to watch. And ethnicity is the dividing line.

George Bush may be leaving office, but the culture of paranoia he helped to usher in most certainly has not. And deputizing Americans to be part of a 300-million-strong network of spies has impacts on public policy, too. After all, how far is it to leap from eavesdropping on conversations at the mall to eavesdropping on phone calls? As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about, from a civil liberties standpoint.

One of the biggest changes a President Obama can make, if he cares too, is in the national mood, to reject this presumption of guilt, this culture of fear, this demonization of the other, this automatic transfer of second-class citizenship. There's no kind of profiling that is more justifiable than any other. It's all part of a creeping assault on our collective civil liberties and it has to stop.

Stakes

In the heat of an election, amidst the media din, sometimes everyone forgets why they're undertaking the fight. The contest becomes one of personalities and soundbites instead of issues and solutions. In this election, there is a definitive reason for that; the rot at the core of our government has a bipartisan patina and has been met by official silence across the political spectrum. There are serious assaults on our Constitution and our civil liberties that haven't had so much as a 30 second glance in the traditional media. And yet they are very deep problems that will not go away with a new Administration in Washington.

As the Bush administration enters its final months with no apparent plan to close the Guantánamo Bay camp, an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would close the detention camp, but the review of the government’s public files underscores the challenges of fulfilling that promise. The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees.

“It would be very difficult for a new president to come in and say, ‘I don’t believe what the C.I.A. is saying about these guys,’ ” said Daniel Marcus, a Democrat who was general counsel of the 9/11 Commission and held senior positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations.

The strength of the evidence is difficult to assess, because the government has kept much of it secret and because of questions about whether some was gathered through torture.

If you hadn't guessed, this is (to me, anyway) a signal that the CIA and the intelligence community is going to go to the greatest lengths possible to bury George Bush and Dick Cheney's mistakes on a variety of fronts. The unspeakable tragedy of the Uighurs, innocent bystanders wrapped up in sweeps in Afghanistan, who have been dismissed of any charges and told by a federal judge that they should be released, but who today will be told that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives in prison, is but one example. The rule of law has taken a beating over the past eight years, as federal statutes and international conventions and war crimes resolutions have been totally ignored, and illusions of security took great precedence over liberty. I don't remember this getting much mention at all over the past week:

WASHINGTON — An operation in 2004 meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before and after that year’s presidential election focused on more than 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, but most were found to have done nothing wrong, according to newly disclosed government data.

The program, conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, received little public attention at the time. But details about the targets of the investigation have emerged from more than 10,000 pages of internal records obtained through a lawsuit by civil rights advocates. Parts of the documents were provided to The New York Times.

The documents show that more than 2,500 foreigners in the United States were sought as “priority leads” in the fall of 2004 because of suspicions that they could present threats to national security in the months before the presidential election and the inauguration. Some of those foreigners were detained and ultimately deported because they had overstayed their visas, but many were in this country legally, and the vast majority were not charged.

We're talking about massive ethnic and racial profiling, enormous data mining schemes, a near-total ignoring of relevant statutes on privacy and civil liberties, all done in a systematic fashion and guarded zealously by elites throughout Washington. The courts can offer a bit of relief here, by asking for secret documents providing the legal basis for the illegal wiretapping program, for example, but considering that the Congress immunized telecoms who participated in the program, that relief is small indeed.

There are stakes to this election but they don't end on November 4. I think Glenn Greenwald, as usual, put this best:

It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don't assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I've explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness -- reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.

Much of this is deeply embedded in the political culture. Very few people in the political and media establishment object to any of it; most either tacitly accept or actively believe in it. And the natural instinct of political officials -- especially new arrivals determined to achieve all sorts of things -- is to consolidate, not voluntarily relinquish, extant political power. It will help to have in the Oval Office someone who has, at least at times, evinced the right instincts on these matters (even though during other times he has acted contrary to them), and the better outcome on Tuesday (the defeat of John McCain) will likely ensure some very modest, marginal improvements in terms of the rule of law, executive power abuses and constitutional transgressions. But that outcome is merely necessary, not remotely sufficient; the election by itself will not produce fundamental changes in most of these areas. That's going to take much more than a single election, standing alone, can or will accomplish.

That work will go on beyond 2008 and into 2010, as the progressive movement matures and seeks to hold accountable those who directed, engaged in, or tacitly accepted the worst of the abuses of the Bush Administration. Elections end with confetti drops but they really represent a beginning and not an end. As we seek together to change the country and not just the nameplate in the Oval Office, it's going to get more difficult. But the importance of it, in the looks on the faces of those Uighur prisoners, in the eyes of the Muslim immigrants questioned for no good reason, from the lips of the innocent phone-callers whose communications have been captured and stored, is too vital to forget.

Obama at LA Trade Technical College

Hey all. Sitting here in the spin room at the Kodak Theater prior to tonight's Democratic debate. The place is kind of swamped with media, and I guess Blitzer's doing his live show just outside, so there are a lot of sign-holders afoot.

Earlier today I was down at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, a community college near downtown, to watch a townhall meeting with Senator Barack Obama. A lot of his Southern California supporters were on hand, including Assemblyman Ted Lieu, labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, Congressmen Xavier Becerra and Adam Schiff, LA City Councilmembers Yvonne Burke and Bill Rosendahl, and State Senators Dean Florez, Gil Cedillo, and Majority Leader Gloria Romero. I have as much respect for Senators Cedillo and Romero as anyone in the State Senate. They have been at the forefront of taking on tough issues; in the case of Sen Romero, prison and sentencing reform, and in the case of Sen. Cedillo, immigration measures like driver's licenses and the DREAM Act (which Obama said he would sign). It means a lot to me that they are on board Obama's campaign.

After a pre-program which included all Spanish-language music (LA Trade Tech is a heavily Latino and black college), the overarching them was one of unity. The very first thing Obama stressed in his opening remarks was the black-brown divide. There were several signs passed out by the campaign that said "Si se puede." And he again talked about how he abhored the divisive tone of the immigration debate, where we "let lawmakers turn us against each other." He talked about helping the struggles of the middle and lower classes as "the cause of my life" (a pull from John Edwards?), and told the crowd that "you are determined to make something of yourselves - you just need the government to provide a little help so you can realize your dreams." The podium carried the sign "Reclaiming the American Dream," which is new messaging AFAIK.

After remarks which covered health care, education reform, relief for homeowners caught in the mortgage crisis, and making college affordable, Sen. Obama took questions. The first was about the Iraq war and yielded familiar comments; the second, about homelessness, was a completely new topic to hear in this campaign. I think Obama's answer was key. (paraphrase):

"We must build more shelters, but we also need to look at how we prevent more homeless. A quarter of the homeless are veterans who come back from war with PTSD or brain trauma, they don't get the help they need, and they self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. So we need to fix that. But we have an issue with mental health services generally in this country. I want to see mental health parity. Insurers need to cover mental health the same way they do physical health. Because depression can be as debilitating an illness as a broken arm, and probably more. It will save us money in the long run, because all types of services come into play when you deal with homelessness - police, EMT, the judicial system, our jails, etc. Another thing you're seeing is more homeless families on the street, because the government has gotten out of the affordable housing business. We need an affordable housing trust fund so that people of modest means can find a place to live in their communities."

I don't think you can read the response to that question and say that Obama is somehow a Reagan disciple. His State Senate district in Chicago faced these issues head-on. This is not typically a plank in someone's platform. Politicians don't often talk about homelessness for whatever reason. But he showed an understanding of the issue and it really appeared that he would take it seriously were he to become President.

Other questions included Darfur, making college affordable, immigration, K-12 and early childhood education (which Obama stressed as very important), and the economy. Another question that jumped out was about racial profiling. The questioner was very animated about it, and apparently there was a recent incident on campus. Obama said that he was the only candidate who's ever passed a racial profiling bill, which got the support of both parties in the Illinois State Senate. Police departments learned to work with the law and believed that it aided their performance and showed areas where they needed to improve.

Unfortunately, we don't have a political system, and certainly not a political media, that pays attention to these issues. But I do believe that this is how regular people want to make their choices. They get a load of crap tossed at them about superficial issues and there's a lot of clutter to cut through. But people have real questions and real values they want to see expressed in a President, certainly more than they're getting now. If the media listened for a change to what answers people were actually seeking, perhaps they would provide them.

UPDATE: I should add that none of this more aggressive attacking of Clinton's foreign policy positions were on display today. I actually appreciated an unafraid Obama willing to go on the offense. And those differences are real. Of course, this won't endear him to his conservofans, who I agree are really only blowing smoke on Obama with the expectation that he'll lose, and then they can see "that awful Democratic Party stopped the great Obama." It is something of a trick.