Of the myriad people, things, and ideas that have come under assault during the last eight years we should not forget about privacy, which took a consistently harsh beating at the hands of the Bush administration. Remember finding out that back in 2002—in secret, ironically enough—the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communication originating within the United States. With cooperation from giants of the industry, the NSA monitored the phone calls of hundreds and probably thousands of citizens, without ever having had to show due cause for doing so.

Early on Saturday morning, the weekend before Election Day, I drove down to Philadelphia with my old college buddy James to put in some get-out-the-vote work for the Obama campaign. James, a staff member for a union of service workers, was obligated to work long hours in a variety of grassroots campaign work. I had never done this before.

We showed up at party headquarters for the 33rd Ward around 9:30. This was in a vacant storefront in a downtrodden strip mall on a hill (a vantage point appropriate to the military tenor of campaign work). James hailed fellow veteran union men and women from around the northeast, all in loud Obama t-shirts with union insignia. I studied the ward map. Here in Kensington--an impoverished, post-industrial majority-minority neighborhood in the northeastern part of Philly--most of the campaign’s efforts were directed to registering and mobilizing new voters. So far there had been a groundswell. Neighbors persuaded neighbors, parents petitioned children and vice versa, spouses and lovers had nagged and pleaded with one another. There were a lot of older people at the campaign office, but a lot of younger people, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, were showing up too: grabbing coffee out of Philadelphia Eagles-branded Dunkin' Donuts boxes, stepping up as Spanish-speakers, holding doors open and giving pragmatic advice to one another. “Tryin’ to make it happen,” said one of the old ladies manning the bottled-water buckets outside.

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Here are some things I remember, from being an old person.

I remember the turnstiles in the Willie Horton ad, representative of Michael Dukakis’s commitment to releasing black rapists and murderers.

I remember the 1991 SNL skit, a fake ad against the Brady Amendment (requiring a seven-day waiting period for hand-guns), where Chris Rock and a masked accomplice rob a nice white family as they sit at home waiting for permission to buy a handgun to protect themselves. The masked accomplice ends up shooting Chris Farley, who collapses dramatically into the coffee table, and then Chris Rock says: “Nice shot WILLIE HORTON! Why’d you have to go and do that, WILLIE HORTON?”

I remember the New Yorker Talk of the Town when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” Read More

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.
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How can Barack Obama, a man who only recently paid off his student loans and who lives a relatively modest life in Chicago's Hyde Park, a few blocks from one of America's poorest neighborhoods, be more "elitist" than John McCain, the son of an admiral (not to mention the husband of a beer heiress), or more "elitist" than Hillary and Bill Clinton, a couple whose joint earnings since 2000 top 100 million dollars? Yet the E-word, and the charge that Obama is out of touch with the experiences of white, blue-collar workers, first leveled against Obama by the Clintons during the primary race, still hang heavy over his otherwise charmed campaign.

These charges stick around not because of the working-class credentials or commitments of Obama's opponents, but because of a problem inherent in contemporary politics that neither party ever addresses, that highly educated professionals are the driving force, financially and politically, behind both major parties. The Democratic leadership particularly continues to present itself as the best hope for the working class, while sharing few economic interests and fewer cultural experiences (now rebranded as "values") with the people it claims to represent. Read More

The technical issues first. No chiaroscuro, but a pervasive, lumbering shroud of murk: action scenes seem to take place behind screen doors; the camera is only inches away from the actors' faces. Gotham, land of spires and leering gargoyles, is downgraded to glassy downtown Chicago, the Second City looking as poor in the half-light as if it were the Twenty-Seventh. Heath Ledger is good, sure, perhaps the only actor taking any joy in the proceedings: but is he any better than Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow? He spends far too much time in the movie explaining himself and his cheerful anarchism, even though his point is that explanations are superfluous. "I don't have plans," he tells us, and neither do the filmmakers. The logic of the action is a joke without a punch-line: cars, trucks, motorcycles slam together and hundreds of gas barrels explode, all inconsequentially: the body count is a staggering thirty-six, but had a pile more been thrown onto the fire, the effect would have felt equally numbing, like stacks of $185 million dollars being thrown at your head. Was the film edited? It's hard to tell. The Scarecrow, villain of Batman Begins, appears early in the film to attempt a minor crime only to disappear in remainder, forgotten. Gotham's mayor holds up a cigar cutter for an extended interview scene, but never cuts a cigar. Read More

On an unseasonably warm June day in Santiago, nearly 1,500 Chileans gathered behind the presidential palace to pay homage to Salvador Allende on the centennial of his birth. The police had erected a fence-like barrier to separate the assembled politicians and dignitaries—all dressed in elegant suits and ties or stylish winter dresses with colorful shawls wrapped around their shoulders—from the public, which was composed primarily of scruffy students, aging revolutionaries, blue-collar workers, reporters, and a few stray businesspeople out on their lunch break. Every five minutes or so, a portly man wearing a hard hat raised a bullhorn to his mouth and yelled, "Comrade Salvador Allende!" Immediately the crowd answered, "Present!"
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Here's a thesis to try out on friends: The anti-war movement, in its current form, is an unwitting complement to US government policy, not an opposition to it. It will enable a cowardly premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, an event that will be a horrendous betrayal of the Iraqis we promised to "liberate" and a complete failure of political imagination, and which both the Bush administration and the anti-war movement will claim as a victory. Read More