Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Hillary Clinton continues to plunge ahead on what is fast becoming a death march.  By not leaving graciously in the face of an obvious loss, she threatens to tarnish her own legacy and that of her husband. No question but that she has every right to demand that all the primaries be concluded before she leaves. But she is not really competing in the Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota primaries. Instead, she is running a final “change the rules campaign”.

That final campaign intends to confuse her loyal and enthusiastic supporters, especially those devoted “older white females” who have identified with her and invested so much emotional capital in her race. She makes them promises she cannot keep and may leave them feeling so bitter against Obama that they will turn away from him in the general election.   Is this what Clinton really wants?

Campaigning in Florida she played the victim card, calling upon the names of heroes of the past who fought against the male establishment to gain women the right to vote. Her need to change the nomination rules is equated with the centuries-old struggles of all women to gain equal rights. This is unbecoming to a courageous and dedicated public servant. She is better than this.

Clinton deserves considerable credit for her hard fought campaign. She clearly has a future in American politics, certainly in the Senate, and maybe in a future presidential campaign after 2016.  She plays the gender card to gain sympathy, but Clinton, unlike other female candidates of the past, entered her senate career with an advantage no one else is likely to have any time soon.

She is the wife of a former president, a credential that brought her money,  fame and votes. It also brought her Harold Ickes, who worked for her husband in the White House and who has been around delegate fights since the 1970s.

As Clinton’s delegate guru, Harold Ickes masterminded her delegate strategy. Ickes knows the party rules; he was a principle author of major rules changes before the 1972 presidential primaries.  Earlier this year, as a member of the 2008 rules committee, Ickes voted in favor of taking away delegates from Michigan and Florida because both states held primaries out of turn.

Ickes cast that vote as a member of the Clinton campaign team. When his candidate did not wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday, Ickes changed his mind. Suddenly Clinton could use some extra delegates. And just as suddenly, Florida and Michigan delegates, and vote totals, just had to count;  democracy itself demanded it.  

Flashback to 1980, and there is Harold Ickes on the floor of the Democratic convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden, working as Senator Ted Kennedy’s delegate manager. His goal?  Prevent President Jimmy Carter’s nomination for reelection.

 I have written of my own experiences in confronting Ickes at that convention. Carter had earned a majority of the delegates in the caucuses and primaries, more than enough to win the nomination. At a convention that should have launched Carter’s reelection campaign, Ickes forced a floor fight over a rule change vote to permit Carter’s pledged delegates to dishonor their pledge to Carter and vote instead, for Kennedy. 

The rule, then known as the “faithful delegate” rule, required pledged delegates to honor their commitment through the first ballot. Ickes wanted the convention to “free the delegates” from that commitment. The rule change was defeated.  Carter won the nomination, but many believe that the incumbent president’s image was damaged by his efforts to unify the party. He had reached out to Kennedy, and was rejected.

I have talked with a few Carter veterans of that convention who are Obama supporters.  They tell me they have forgiven Kennedy now that he has crossed over to the anti-Ickes side. But the memory lingers, which is why it was not a surprise that once Ickes emerged as the Clinton delegate manager, it was only a matter of time before the party rules became his target. To paraphrase a 1945 movie tag line, Ickes is back and Clinton’s got him.

Senator Clinton’s own New York governor and a supporter, David Patterson, described her recent efforts as signs of “desperation”.  It is not desperation; it is Ickes Redux.  The New York Times caught some of the flavor of her “change the rules” campaign when she spoke in Florida:

I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country.”

She also sought to whip up populist sentiment, telling voters in Boca Raton, where the 2000 election played out vividly, “You didn’t break a single rule, and you should not be punished for matters beyond your control.”

She argued with fervor that the nomination should be determined by popular vote. She has claimed to have the lead in the popular vote by including Florida and Michigan in her tally. 

Sorry, Senator, but you are listening too much to Ickes.  Democratic party rules determine the process the party follows to name its presidential candidate.  To demand that the popular votes and delegates from Florida and Michigan be counted requires a change of the rules 45 seconds before the game ends..  In any baseball game, it is still three strikes and you are out, not two strikes and not four strikes. Three strikes is the rule the teams agree to play by from the sandlot to the World Series.

A majority of the national popular vote does not determine the winner of a general election presidential campaign. Electors from states make that decision based on the majority votes in individual states. Delegates pledged to specific candidates who earned a seat at the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver won those seats by votes cast for their candidate in their state primaries and caucuses.

It is not the majority of the national vote total that determines the nominee.  As the Clinton slogan master James Carville might have said to her, “it’s the delegates, stupid!”.

Still, Senator Clinton persists in running to win her own “change the rules primary”.  Her campaign has become a hopeless and reckless effort that dimishes her and the party she tried, and failed to lead. If she insists on taking her fight to the convention, she will badly tarnish the image of Senator Clinton as an accomplished political fighter whose second place finish could be an inspiration to all future female candidates for any office, public or private.

How Obama handles Clinton in the months ahead as she faces final defeat will help determine his own public image as a leader and affect the outcome of the November general election. If Obama gives Clinton too much, like the vice presidential nomination because she wants it, he looks weak. If he is respectful of her and gracious in victory without giving away too much, he will emerge as a strong candidate.  Senator Clinton has an important role to play in these final weeks before the Democratic convention.  She will not be the nominee, but she can still come out a winner. It is her choice to make. 

by James M. Wall

If Hillary Clinton really loves her country, her party and her family, she will end her campaign in Kentucky Tuesday night.  She can declare victory there and congratulate Barack Obama for his victory in Oregon on the same night. She could even bring husband Bill back to the stage to celebrate her Kentucky victory as a team.

Clinton has already overstayed her campaign presence. She has already lost whatever chance she might have had to run for vice president with Obama, an honor that John Edwards may have earned with his endorsement the day after Clinton’s 40 point victory in West Virginia. 

Unless Hillary has a few more Jerimiah Wright tapes, or worse, hidden in her back pocket,  there is little she can do to halt Obama’s march to the nomination. This week’s endorsement of Obama by Edwards highlights the former North Carolina senator’s appeal to those working class white voters Clinton has tried to claim as h er own.

They don’t belong to her. Her late campaign, newly-created populist image arrived a little late for her to successfully pose as a shot and beer buddy to workers of the world. Populism was not in play during her husband’s tenure in the White House, and it was not in evidence earlier in this campaign; Edwards, the son of a cotton mill worker in North Carolina, was the working class hero this campaign season. She only became a populist when the Jerimiah Wright tapes struck the Obama campaign and knocked the candidate off stride for several weeks. 

In the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary, Clinton unveiled her new Hillary persona, bragging about her summers fishing on her grandfather’s lake in Pennsylvania. She failed to mention that her non summer months were spent back home in Park Ridge, Illinois, an upscale Chicago suburb where at one point she served as a volunteer in the Goldwater campaign, hardly a place to learn about the trials of working class voters.  She did not meet many shot and beer buddies in that suburb, nor were they in her classes at Wellesley and Harvard. 

After law school, Clinton went to work for the Little Rock-based Rose law firm. She served on Wal-Mart’s board for six years prior to her husband’s run for the presidency. According to Common Dreams website, for the six years Clinton served on the Wal-Mart board, the company was “rabidly anti-union, was exploiting sweatshop labor around the world, discriminating against women workers, forcing workers to labor off the clock and destroying communities that did not want them. This should not be a shock: Clinton was a partner in the Rose law firm, one of the most active anti-union law firms in the country.”

Obama has decided to ignore Clinton as long as she remains as an opponent in this race.  Clinton rushed to condemn Obama’s connection to his highly respected Chicago pastor (who admittedly has a tendency to go over the top in his ministerial preaching style). In contrast, Obama has refused to indulge in personal attacks against Clinton’s past record.  He will emerge as the Democratic party ‘s nominee with his high ideals still largely in place. 

The same cannot be said for either Clinton or her husband.  Now is the time for both of them to bow out gracefully and start rebuilding trust with the party and the nation. Three more weeks of aggressive campaigning will only further damage the Clinton brand, once much admired by the progressive community. Of course, Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico will not get to have their candidate visits, but perhaps Obama, Clinton and Edwards could make a victory lap to all three locations. Come to think of it, the beaches of Puerto Rico would be a good place for party leaders to plan for the November campaign. And maybe, patch up any left over hurt feelings.

by James M. Wall

Jewish Voice for Peace and Just Foreign Policy have presented former U.S. President Jimmy Carter with a petition of 5,000 signatures supporting Carter’s meeting with Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal. The two men met in Syria, April 18.  Through the petition drive, the two Jewish groups support Carter’s contention that Hamas must be included in any Israeli and Palestinian peace talks.

News of the petition drive has spread rapidly, encouraging JVP and JFP to continue the drive with a new goal of 20,000 signatures. Stories about the drive have already appeared on internet outlets Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Common Dreams. It also was covered in the Jerusalem Post. 

Copies of the petition are being delivered this week to the three Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, each of whom is on record opposing Carter’s plans to meet with Meshaal. In January, 2009 one of the three must confront Israel’s 40-year military occupation of Palestine.

President Bush is currently traveling in Israel for that country’s 60th anniversary celebration.  Bush will not only ignore Hamas, but he will also ignore another anniversary, the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the ejection of Palestinians from their homes and villages in Palestine in 1948. Sandy Tolan, author of The Lemon Tree, writes in the Huffington Post that the Nakba is a narrative which Bush will not hear. 

The three candidates contending for Bush’s job will follow his lead Instead of listening to Carter’s counsel for them to speak to all sides in the conflict. They give every indication that no matter who wins in November, the US president willl continue to ignore the issue they must face if to bring peace to the region.

Instead of trying realism in the region, McCain, Obama and Clinton waste the public’s time with trivial discussions about a gas tax relief.  In doing so, they overlook a biblical connection to their gas tax discussion.  Obama, who opposes the suspension, says the savings to the average driver comes to $30 a month. Check the New Testament; a $30 savings is a reminder that Judas accepted his own thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus. 

The candidates stay on the Bush message by attacking the world’s preimminent  peace maker. Told of their rejection of his Hamas meeting, Jimmy Carter smiled, and said to a television interviewer, “I forgive them”.

Carter knows Hamas is essential to any future peace agreement, having earned a place at the negotiating table by winning a majority of the seats in the Palestinian Authority legislature in the January, 2006 election. Carter monitored that election and declared it to be both open and fair. 

Hamas’ victory over Fatah was inevitable. Fatah was not delivering services; its officials were notoriously corrupt; Fatah was tainted by its support from the US and Israel, and, a point that media observers missed, Hamas knew more about Politics 101 than Fatah.  

Half of the Palestinian legislature was chosen by a national popular vote;  the other half was selected by districts. Hamas got a share of the nation-wide seats, and cleaned up in the districts. It did so by applying common sense political wisdom: hold your candidates in each district to the number of seats available.   If a district had five open seats, Hamas ran five candidates. Fatah lacked the discipline to keep its members from over loading the district ballots, thereby diluting their votes.

How could Fatah make such an irresponsible political judgment? Politicians make mistakes. Hillary Clinton ignored the caucuses and she had no plans beyond Super Tuesday. When establishment candidates get complacent, they lose.   

Jimmy Carter spent several days in the West Bank and Gaza before election day. He needed only one look at those overloaded district ballots to recognize that here was yet another reason that Hamas would win. The one-time Georgia state senator knows politics, and though I never heard him say he anticipated the outcome, he knew some Israel leaders opposed an election they feared would bring an Hamas victory. Like Carter, the Israelis knew far more about the dynamics of their political situation than President Bush, or Secretary of State Rice.

Carter also knows the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He shared that history in his book, Palestine Peace not Apatheid.   He also knows the players on both sides. McCain, Obama and Clinton know many Israelis in the region, but they are allowed to talk only with Palestinians approved by Israel.

This leads to acts of woeful ignorance. A few years back Hillary Clinton stood inside the Israeli settlement of Gilo (now called a suburb) and declared Israel’s “security” wall as a good thing for the Palestinians. In the current campaign John McCain played his version of the “Wright guilt by association card” by solemnly announcing that an Hamas official wanted Obama to be elected in November.

Obama left it to the media to point out that McCain sought and received an endorsement from a fundamentalist preacher who has used the Catholic Church and “whore” in the same sentence.

Carter is a veteran negotiator who knows there will be no peace in any conflict without full participation of all relevant parties.  He did not hesitate to hold discussions with Hamas leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to meet with him. He also withheld the customary security protection (until he woke up to the bad publicity and hastily sent a team to join Carter’s Secret Service team).

I was in Bethlehem on election day in January, 2006 when Hamas  won its legislative majority. At a busy polling place two blocks from my hotel, and a short walking distance from the Church of the Nativity, I took note of the predominance of  Hamas’ green banners. This was not surprising since in an earlier Bethlehem city council election Hamas won every seat but one. The sole Fatah seat is held by the only Christian on the council. 

The day before the 2006 election, I joined Jimmy Carter in a Ramallah meeting with his election monitoring team and with the Palestinian Election Commission. The Commission is chaired by a Palestinian friend of mine of many years, Hanar Nasir, now retired as president of Bir Zeit University.

When I slipped into the meeting room, Carter seemed surprised to see me. In typical Carter fashion, he insisted on halting the meeting and explaining to the group that, in political talk,  the two of us “go way back”.  Nasir was not surprised that I was there. He had given my name to the security guards. 

The Jewish Voice for Peace and Just Foreign Policy petitions will soon be read by someone in the offices of Obama, Clinton and McCain. The candidates themselves would be wise to study those names generated by two major Jewish peace and justice organizations. They and their growing number of supporters are also voters. 

Guest Column by Andrew Weaver

Editor’s Note: Andrew Weaver is a good friend of mine and a close observer of the United Methodist Church. I asked him to write the first guest column for this blog. Andrew is a United Methodist minister and research psychologist living in New York City. He is a graduate of The Perkins School of Theology, SMU.

On April 8,  Southern Methodist University President R. Gerald Turner sent a letter to all the delegates of the South Central Jurisdictional Conference (SCJ) of the United Methodist Church (UMC). Turner wanted to persuade the delegates to support the proposed Bush library and partisan think-tank at the SMU Dallas campus.

Three days later, George W. Bush, who is to be honored by the Bush library, acknowledged that he has been deeply involved in the details of the torture he has authorized. 

An ABC News report indicated:  “President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”  According to White House sources, the discussions about torture techniques were so detailed that some of the “interrogation sessions were almost choreographed”.

Earlier, on March 8, Bush vetoed legislation that would have banned water boarding and other methods of torture by government employees.  The legislation would have limited CIA agents to 19 less-aggressive tactics outlined in the U.S. Army field manual.  The president stated that the government “needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects”. 

Water boarding has a long and sickening history.  It was used as a means of torture and coerced baptism during the Protestant Reformation. During the Spanish Inquisition the Catholic Church used the torture to convert Jews, Mennonites, witches, and other suspected heretics. 

It is a brutal and horrifying method in which the torturer immobilizes the victim on his or her back. The head is tilted downward. Water is poured over the face forcing the inhalation of water into the lungs.  As the victim gags and chokes, the terror of imminent death is pervasive.

In the supposedly “less enlightened” 18th century, the Methodist Church founder,  John Wesley, explicitly spoke strongly against any torture of prisoners of war. 

For Wesley, war is justifiable only on the principle of self-preservation: Prisoners of war are confined for the purpose of preventing them from harming their captors.  A war of self-preservation does not give a nation the right to torture, or kill, or to enslave an enemy when the war is over.

United Methodist Bishop Scott J. Jones of Kansas, a SMU trustee, describes Bush as a “faithful member” of the United Methodist Church. The Rev. Mark Craig, an SMU trustee and senior minister of the Highland Park Church in Dallas dismissed opponents of the library and think tank as a “fringe group, a marginal group without any standing other than the fact they happen to be one of 8 million United Methodists”. The Bush family are members of the Highland Park Church.  

President Bush refers to himself a “proud Methodist”, but he has shown little sign of contrition, regret or repentance for his personal behavior which violates Methodist standards set long ago by John Wesley. Instead, Bush attempts to justify himself and place a shield of protection around government officials who use torture. 

The half billion dollar partisan think-tank to honor President Bush on the SMU campus is essentially being planned (the Dallas Morning News calls it “advising”) by former Bush political guru Karl Rove. Neither SMU nor the United Methodist Church will have any control over the direction of the program or the people they hire. Consider the implications: Scooter Libby as distinguished Chair of political ethics?

This absence of university control was made clear in 2005 when, according to a New York Times story:

In outlining the project to prospective universities in 2005, two officers of the foundation, Marvin P. Bush, a brother of the president, and Donald J. Evans, said the institute would be answerable to the foundation, not the university. And they said: “Part of its mission will be to further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration,” including “compassionate conservatism” and “defeating terrorism.”

The South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church will meet July 15-19, to debate and then vote on whether to approve the construction of the Bush Library and think tank.  There will be 290 United Methodist clergy and laity delegates to that conference representing 1.83 million United Methodist church members from Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Louisiana. These delegates are the ultimate authority over the use of the land where the new project is scheduled to be built.  

A significant majority of these delegates are progressives and moderates who have the power to say no to the construction of the library and the think tank honoring Bush. To encourage delegates to consider a no vote, you may go to here and sign a petition protesting the Bush library on SMU’s campus. 

Which is the greater threat to humankind,  the sermon snippets of Jeremiah Wright or the promise by Hillary Clinton that she will obliterate Iran if it attacks Israel?  The answer should be obvious. Except that by the strange political and media standards currently at play in the presidential primaries, the answer is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  

When Clinton uttered her televised threat that she would  ”wipe Iran from the face of the earth”–the Iranian version of obliteration–she ignited little response from the keepers of the political narrative.  Maureen Dowd took a mild disdainful slap at Clinton in her New York Times column dismissing the “obliteration” comment as “inane”. The political culture has decreed that there will be no obliterate gate in future stories on Clinton’s primary defeat. 

The Obamas have been parishioners in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for the past 20 years. Wright, the church’s pastor during those years, is a charismatic preacher whose sermonic style in carefully isolated snippets, “shocks” (as in Casablanca ) politicians, pundits and a secular media that remains completely tone-deaf to traditional black preaching.

You have to wonder, which journalist or opposition research staffer spent all that time and examined all those sermons to find a few harmful snippets? Twenty years of once a week sermons adds up to roughly 1000 sermons, allowing for two vacation Sundays a year.  That is a lot of preaching, which might even have led to some conversions. Future historians who want to trace the start of this episode should start by interviewing any recently converts to the faith. Or better yet, just ask, who stood to gain the most from publicizing the snippets? 

Sermons by Barack’s pastor became a You Tube favorite. The problem is that Wright, not Obama, is responsible for the snippets. The sermons were preached by a man who has been a friend of the Obama family and who developed a congregation which focused on service to the community. He was also a pastor who helped Obama combine his personal faith with public service. 

It was difficult for Obama to turn away from Wright. He waited several weeks before making the painful separation, which was easier to do after Wright spoke at the Washington’s National Press club and elevated his rhetoric from sermon snippets to an emotional defense of prophetic preaching. 

A prophet brings judgment against power–”Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the Lord hath spoken. Jeremiah 14:15). Barack Obama is not a prophet, he is a politician, which is a role distinction, not a criticism of either the prophet or the preacher.

Newspapers cover political campaigns as sports events. The Boston Celtics enter the NBA playoffs “embattled” with older players (or blessed with talented veterans, depending on the point of view of the writer). The language chosen is appropriate to the sports metaphor. The morning after Obama won the North Carolina primary, the Times continued to designate Wright as an Obama’s “embattled” burden:

“In winning North Carolina by 14 percentage points, Mr. Obama whose campaign had been embattled by controversy over the incendiary remarks of his former pastor recorded his first primary victory in nearly two months.”

Obiliteration is a policy issue, as in, when, why or how to go to war. The Wright snippets, on the other hand, touch on deeper cultural issues which involve racism and religion-bashing. Will John McCain ever suffer from the endorsement he received from the Rev. (”The Catholic church is a whore”) John Hagee”? 

He might, on a slow news day. But the Hagee story won’t reach the level of a McCain embattlement. White fundamentalist preachers are known in media circles for their offbeat observations.  Besides, McCain was not a Hagee parishioner; he was a white politician looking for right-wing white support.

Barack Obama, Wright’s most famous parishioner, will continue to be embattled with the “Wright issue”. Meanwhile, as long as Hillary Clinton insists on “fighting” for the nomination, more than 63 million Iranian men, women and children remain under a threat of future obliteration.      

Obama told a San Francisco fund raising gathering that some Pennsylvania voters are “bitter” and cling to their churches and guns, a sure sign, his political opponents and the media insisted, that he is an “elitist”. His unfortunate offhand analysis became an explanation for his drop in popularity. Wright and bitter gate become political and media short hand for Obama as anti-American and an elitist.

Who among us will ever forget that memorable interview when, asked if she believed Obama was a Muslim, Hillary Clinton paused dramatically and responded, “He says he is not and I believe him.”  The doubt was planted.  The media doesn’t touch it, but emails abound with the false allegation that Clinton did little to dispel. 

Watch to see which issues emerge in the general election that attach themselves to Obama or McCain with the suction power of one of those hideous blobs from the movie Aliens. Expect Wright to be one of them. Once fixed in the public mind negative embattlements rarely go away.  

Update on this post, May 8:

Prime Minister Olmhert has said he will resign as Israel’s Prime Minister if he is indicted.  This will further delay a peace agreement by the end of the year. 

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert now says he is ready to make “tangible changes” in the West Bank. He promised those changes to Palestinian President Mahmoud after the two leaders met on Monday in Olmert’s official residence.  Jerusalem newspaper Ha’aretz reported that Olmert “understands that their months of peace talks must be accompanied by action on the ground”.

The two leaders met for two hours after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “urged Israel to do more to improve living conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank.”  Meanwhile, trapped behind a massive wall which has been built on their land in a blatant land grab which violates international law, Palestinians have little reason to expect anything other than continued expansion of settlements and harsh attacks in Gaza.

A senior Israeli official assured Israel’s Army Radio that Olmert and Abbas had made “significant progress on the borders issue.”  Since the Palestinians insist that the permanent border between Israel and Palestine must be on the Green Line which was established in 1967, it is hard to imagine any “tangible change” Olmert will make. Will the wall be taken down?  Will settlements be removed? Of course not.  Olmert is so politically weak that he is a “partner for peace” without equity.

There have been five legal cases brought against Olmert since his government took office two years ago. Olmert has not been charged in the most recent corruption investigations. He has never been convicted of wrongdoing. The corruption probes, however, have reduced his politicaL standing. Olmert also has been “battered”, according to Ha’aretz, “by the inconclusive 2006 war in Lebanon, and ongoing Palestinian rocket and mortar fire at Israel from the Gaza Strip.”

Olmert’s political career is expected to end soon.  George Bush leaves office in January, 2009. And there are reports that President Abbas will give his negotiations with Olmert two or three more months. After which some of Abbas’ aides predict he will consider resigning if he concludes the talks have failed. Previousl Israeli promises have produced no “tangible changes”. 

Three new leaders will start over in January, 2009. They will need more than “promises, promises” if they expect to address an increasingly dire humanitarian situation in the West Bank and Gaza.