Obama: a fresh start
Barack Obama has promised to run the most transparent administration in history. He could make a good start by opening the government’s files on torture, says Jameel Jaffer
(more…)
An end to culture wars?
This is a guest post by Anthony Dworkin
Among the many things to celebrate in Obama’s convincing victory is American voters’ rejection of the ‘culture war’ agenda that Sarah Palin brought to the Republican ticket. Opinion polls showed clearly that, while Palin was loved by Republican voters, she put off independents and moderates and probably cost the McCain ticket a good number of their votes. Palin’s attempts to suggest that Obama did not see America the same way as ‘real Americans’ did not gain much traction, nor did the inflammatory claim that he had been ‘palling around with terrorists’ because of his association with William Ayers. Faced with real economic problems and a challenging international environment, the swing voters who decided the election were not interested in Palin’s wild attempt to stoke cultural divisions.
By conviction and by temperament, Obama is clearly inclined to consensus-seeking and toleration, and as president he can be expected to foster a more inclusive and respectful national dialogue.
Internationally, too, he will almost certainly shift the United States further away from the strident ‘with us or against us’ approach that Bush adopted in his first term and never entirely discarded. It’s becoming fashionable to say that people will be disappointed in Obama because the substance of his policies will not represent as much of a shift as people have allowed themselves to hope for. Perhaps, though there will be noticeable differences in America’s counter-terrorism policies, with an end to military tribunals and more genuine due process for detainees. In any case, political style and tone is important in itself. Obama will shift public debate in America, and America’s public engagement with the world, in the direction of greater respect for different opinions, outlooks and cultures. That will be an important benefit in itself.
Anthony Dworkin is executive director of the Crimes of War Project and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Give Obama time to reinvigorate liberties
This is a guest post by Stryker McGuire, contributing editor for Newsweek
Barack Obama rides into the White House on the back of such high expectations that he cannot help but disappoint. And among those he will disappoint will be advocates of civil liberties, including freedom of speech. First, now that he has been elected, there will be vast sigh of relief, from within the United States and from the outside.
As a man of the soft left, as someone who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and of course as an African-American who himself felt the sting of racism and discrimination, Obama will be seen as a civil libertarian. And rightly so, I think, if we can go by what he’s said and, equally important, by what he’s written in Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. He will undoubtedly close down Guantánamo — an act which carries great weight. I would never expect him to revert to the Bush Administration’s onetime policy of eavesdropping on US citizens’ international phone calls and emails without a court order.
But can we expect Obama to unwind, for instance, all of the provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act that many civil libertarians find offensive? I don’t think so. The last few weeks of the presidential campaign were filled with Republican vitriol among Obama’s supposed ‘socialism’ (which amounts to little more than a continuation of Democrat and Republican taxation policies since the Great Depression) and his ‘palling around with terrorists’ (which amounts to his perfectly above-board association with a widely respected Chicago education expert who in his youth was a founder of a violence-prone domestic radical group). Vitriol it was, but Obama, especially in his early time in office, will almost certainly find himself ‘compensating’ for that kind of labelling.
Just as they should not overburden Obama with unrealistic expectations, civil libertarians should grant him time and space to settle into office and into what we hope are his natural, liberal tendencies.