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By the fall of 2002, Barack Obama had been in the Illinois state senate for not quite six years. He was a member of the Democratic minority, representing a swath of Chicago's South Side. He had done what he could in a state capital where Republicans ruled, and he was ready for a change. As it happened, so were voters in Illinois, who that November put the Democrats back in power in Springfield.
A few months later Obama went to see Emil Jones Jr., the newly chosen state-senate president and the man who loomed as perhaps the most powerful black politician in Illinois. He went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an "old ward heeler" who backed the wrong horse in Harold Washington's successful quest to become the city's first black mayor. Jones had had to jockey for a place on the stage near the new mayor at a public event that Obama had helped plan.
Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists were the sort who used politicians as foils, "shunned them, more or less, I guess," Jones told me on a winter morning, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray in his office high above the city that Carl Sandburg famously called "coarse and strong and cunning." Jones went on: "They were in-your-face types. I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, 'You don't gotta be outside. Come on in the office.' "
A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and—with Jones's help—tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama's team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot. Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to "work hard." He promptly became Jones's point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.
"After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later," Jones recalled, relishing the tale. "And he said to me, he said, 'You're the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.' " Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: "And I told Barack, 'You think I got a lot of pow-er now?,' and he said, 'Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er.' And I said, 'What kind of pow-er do I have?' He said, 'You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!' " Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. "I said to Barack, I said, 'That sounds good!' I said, 'I haven't even thought of that.' I said, 'Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?,' and he said, 'Yeah. Me.' "
Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. "The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, 'Let me think about this.' " Obama knew that Jones's support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. "We met a little later that day, and I said, 'That sounds good. Let's go for it.' "
This is not a story about the presidential horse race. It's not about the policy positions of a freshman senator and candidate for national office. It's about the enduring character of a boy and a young man, and how that character has emerged in adulthood. The Barack Obama who wrote so poignantly of adolescent alienation and the search for racial identity is the same Barack Obama who learned, the hard way, how to deal with the likes of Emil Jones Jr., a man whose cell-phone ring tone is the theme from The Godfather. Obama's good looks and soft-spoken willingness to ponder aloud some of the inanities of modern politics have masked the hard inner core and unyielding ambition that have long burned beneath the surface shimmer. He is not, and never has been, soft. He's not laid-back. He's not an accidental man. His friends and family may be surprised by the rapidity of his rise, but they're not surprised by the fact of it.
In The Audacity of Hope, whose publication in the fall of 2006 effectively turned what was first billed as a book tour into a march toward the New Hampshire primary, Obama cops a plea to the quintessential qualification for any presidential candidate: "a chronic restlessness, an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me." He has tried to turn this to his advantage. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington," he said in announcing that he would run for president. "But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change." Obama's restlessness is a quality that would lead him to conclude, again and again, that the time had come to make a move—to take a chance, to aim higher—when others told him to wait his turn. Far more often than not, his timing has been right.
As the presidential campaign whirls through the front-loaded primary season, Obama's character has been under high magnification. The main point of attack is that he is not "tough enough" or experienced enough; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd titled a column about him "The 46-Year-Old Virgin." Hillary Clinton has openly encouraged this derisive assessment for many months. At the same time, coming across as too tough and gritty—too skilled at the sharp-elbowed arts of politics—will undermine the very qualities that make Obama attractive in the first place. The trap is obvious.
The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama's life and career suggest he has that talent—or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, "He's a very cool customer."
Wags More, Barks Less
"This campaign cannot be about me," Obama told a cheering crowd in Chicago on the weekend he declared his candidacy, a year ago. "I am an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams." But, for better or worse, his own campaign is all about him and the compelling idea he embodies.
His life is the story of a person just slightly ahead of his time, of a boy and a man whose search for the meaning of his paternity, and thus his identity, has led him, over and over again, to make his own luck. Every person alive faces the challenge of finding a place in the world. Obama had to work harder than most to find his own place, and he long ago concluded that it would be a prominent one, in the public arena.
Barack Hussein Obama owes his very existence to a defiance of conventional odds. He was born and came of age in Hawaii, the 50th state and in many ways among the freest-thinking, where mixed-race ancestry is such a given that residents refer to their own backgrounds as "chop suey" or "poi dog," where hotel-room bureau drawers hold not only the Gideon Bible but the Book of Mormon and the Teachings of the Buddha, and where bumper stickers urge, wag more, bark less. If Obama comes across as a bit of a softy—if you don't see the toughness or the ambition at first—it may be in part because he spent his formative years in a place where "Live Aloha" had not yet become a slogan aimed at recapturing a more gracious time, but was simply a way of life.
His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was the white daughter of a Kansas furniture and insurance salesman who had wanted a son, and who moved to Hawaii on the eve of statehood in search of a new lease on life. She loved the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and the music of Mahalia Jackson, and thought Harry Belafonte was, as her son remembers, "the best-looking man on the planet." At 18, she met and married Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a former Kenyan goatherd and an economist-in-training who had recently become the first African student in the history of the University of Hawaii—this in 1960, a time when inter-racial marriage was still illegal in almost half the mainland states. The couple divorced in 1963, when their son was just 2, and Barack met his father (who ultimately claimed paternity of a total of eight children by four women before dying in a car crash at age 52, in 1983) precisely once more in his life—for a month, at Christmas, in Honolulu, when he was 10.
Ann next married an Indonesian national named Lolo Soetoro. She eventually began pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology that required frequent fieldwork in Indonesia, and Barack spent four years of his childhood there, in the world's most populous Muslim nation. Because his mother wanted Barack to have the best possible bite at the American Dream, she left him in Hawaii for much of his adolescence in the care of his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who fed him a poly-cultural diet of sashimi and Jell-O with grapes, and got him admission and a scholarship to the prestigious Punahou School, in Honolulu. He arrived there in fifth grade as a round-faced boy with baby fat, and left the lanky figure of today.
Yet Obama had to grapple with the reality of life as one of only three black students in an elite high school of 1,200. The yearbooks show him as a respectable contributor but not a star. A friend once scrawled his funny-sounding last name in wet concrete outside the cafeteria, as a goof that might get him into mild trouble. (School officials point it out proudly these days, the way presidents point out the holes from Ike's golf spikes in the Oval Office floor.) By diligent effort, constant practice, and a mean jump shot, he made the second string of the state-champion basketball team in his senior year, earning a slot that might have gone to a younger, more promising player. He went to college for two years in the West Coast sprawl of Los Angeles—at Occidental—and for two years in the dominant East Coast metropolis of New York, where he transferred to attend Columbia.
After weeks of rooting around in his past, in Chicago, in Springfield, in Honolulu, I went to see Obama in his Senate office. He had just returned from the Senate floor to a sparely decorated inner sanctum, notable for a large, bright, almost child-like painting of Thurgood Marshall. After exchanging pleasantries (we have a connection: my sister-in-law, Betsy Myers, a former Clinton-administration official, was chief operating officer of Obama's campaign; she took the job after I received this assignment, and we have not talked about her new boss since), Obama sat down and put a foot up on the coffee table. Our conversation ranged from Indonesia to Illinois, but my first question was simple: when did he realize that he had an ambition that might be ever so slightly audacious?
"There was a fundamental rupture in my life between Occidental and Columbia, where I just became more serious," Obama said. While he was in New York, his father died, giving the son "a sense of urgency about my own life." He added, "Now, that doesn't mean at that point I somehow instantly had these grand ambitions for political office. But I do think it was at that point in my life—those two years when I was in New York—where I made a decision that I wanted to, I wanted to make my mark."
He began making that mark in Chicago, the capital of the American black diaspora. Obama arrived not knowing anyone, but ended up finding his life's work, a deep Christian faith, and the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his two young daughters. Chicago remains his home today. In his work in Chicago, he not only explored his identity as a black American but determined to get the law degree that he believed would best prepare him for a career in public life. Since then, Obama has never veered from the course he set. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review not because he had the best grades (though he had good ones) but because he won the trust of both conservative and liberal factions in an arena in which the arguments were passionate because the stakes were so small. He spurned a sure path to a Supreme Court clerkship, opting instead for a small civil-rights practice, part-time teaching of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and a contract for Dreams from My Father, his gripping memoir, which was published to general praise in 1995 but then sank from sight for almost a decade.
One of the clearest-eyed grandees of the Chicago establishment, Newton Minow has long seen something special in Obama. Minow played key roles in the two presidential campaigns of Adlai E. Stevenson, then went on to become John F. Kennedy's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously pronouncing television programming "a vast wasteland" in 1961, a few months before Obama was born. At 81, sitting in his law office at Sidley Austin, in the Loop, above a stretch of street christened Honorary Newton N. Minow Way, Minow is talking about the young man his daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard Law School, recommended for a summer associate's job two decades ago. At Minow's firm Obama fell in love with a young lawyer, Michelle Robinson, who would become his wife. Minow acknowledges that he initially opposed two of Obama's earlier runs for office—his unsuccessful congressional-primary race against the Democratic incumbent, Bobby Rush, in 2000 (the only election for office Obama has lost so far), and his campaign for the Senate, in 2004—and says he asked Obama both times, "Are you nuts?"
Minow opposed Obama's decision to run for the presidency too, until he caught the senator on C-span during a book-promotion tour in Iowa in late 2006. The formal program was over, but the cameras lingered, capturing Obama's interaction with the crowd.
"I adored Jack Kennedy," Minow explains, "and I saw the 21st-century version of Jack Kennedy in my mind. He is astonishing. I think the fundamental point is the country wants a different kind of politics." He adds, "I also believe the race issue and the gender issue are yesterday, particularly with young people." One-upping Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's gifts, Minow, a former Supreme Court clerk, says, "I believe as the country sees Barack, gets to know him, they will see the same thing I see: really a combination of a first-class mind and a first-class temperament, all in the same person."
Dreams from His Mother
Obama owes much of that mind, and that temperament—his spine, his audacity, his empathy—to a person about whom the public knows very little: Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 52. In the preface to the paperback edition of Dreams from My Father, which was first published in hardcover the year his mother died, Obama writes that, if he had known how her life would be cut short, he might have produced a very different book, and he dedicated The Audacity of Hope to his mother and to her mother, Madelyn Dunham, "the women who raised me."
"I don't think there's any question," Obama said of his mother when we spoke, "she was the most positive influence in my life."
I went to meet Alice Dewey, a granddaughter of the philosopher John Dewey and an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, who was the chairman of Ann Dunham's Ph.D.-thesis committee and became a close friend over many years. "For him, he needed to write the book about his father," she said of Obama. "But when he says, 'Who am I?,' then Ann is a very important part of that." We were sitting in her cluttered cubby of an office on the campus in Manoa, in the hills above Honolulu. "She was the most hardworking person I maybe ever have met," Dewey told me. "And did it without seeming to. She was cheerful, down to earth. She absolutely was the kind of person you wanted on your side in any situation, from a barroom brawl to an academic argument, and she was always there for the little guy, particularly the little woman." For most of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, she shuttled between Hawaii and Indonesia, doing academic research and paying the bills by teaching English or working for nonprofit organizations such as the Ford Foundation.
Her boldest step of all may have been marrying Barack's father, a fellow undergraduate at the University of Hawaii, whom she had met in a Russian-language class. Obama has acknowledged that the precise circumstances of their marriage are a bit cloudy, even to him; it would turn out that his father was already tribally married to another woman, in Africa, and after he left Barack and his mother to pursue graduate studies at Harvard on a scholarship, he would marry and divorce another American woman, and then father a child by a second African woman.
Ann Dunham kept up a fond correspondence with Barack's father, even after her marriage to Soetoro, another foreign student, who eventually went to work for an American company, Union Oil, in Jakarta. She made sure her son knew of his father's intellect and his government jobs in the post-colonial regime in Kenya, and of the improbable courtship the two had shared. But Obama's father would remain a distant, intimidating, absent figure, the disappointing details of whose life and career Barack would learn about only much later. "The truth is that none of the men in my life were that successful or that stable," Obama told me. "They made an awful lot of mistakes."
It was his mother's presence—and not infrequent absence—that most colored his early years. She cried easily and remained an impossible romantic. (She would pull her children from bed to look at a particularly beautiful moonrise.) But she also possessed enormous drive and determination. In Indonesia, she would wake Barack up before dawn for English lessons from a correspondence course. Alice Dewey told me that Dunham "divorced happily" from Soetoro—who died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment—in part because "he gradually became more and more like a Westerner and she became more and more like a Javanese." Obama told me he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. "I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records," Obama said. "I still remember 'Moon River.' He'd be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their expectations diverged fairly rapidly."
"She was sort of unflinchingly and unwaveringly empathetic, you know," her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is nine years younger than Barack, told me over coffee one afternoon in Honolulu. "She had an ability to see herself in so many different kinds of people, and that is something she was very strict about with us—that absence of judgment, of acrimony. She was always very good at finding a language that the other person would understand, regardless of where they were from, or their socio-economic background. And I think that's something that's been given to us, a major gift that's bestowed on us."
The water to Ann Dunham's fire was her mother, Madelyn, who at 85 still lives in the same high-rise in Honolulu where she helped raise Barack; she is ailing, and declines interview requests. "Barack is interesting," Maya said, "because he has our mother's romantic tendencies, but he has our grandmother's pragmatic tendencies."
The Dunhams had eloped just before Pearl Harbor, and Stanley enlisted. Madelyn gave birth to Ann living on an army base, and while Stanley served with Patton in Europe, Madelyn was a Rosie the Riveter in a bomber plant at home. "When my grandfather came back, he, by virtue of the G.I. Bill, gets to go to college," Obama told me. "She doesn't. She's working as a secretary." Stanley Dunham embarked on a peripatetic career as a salesman in Kansas, Texas, Washington, and, finally, Hawaii, where his wife worked her way up about as high as was possible for a woman with no college education. She became the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii, and for most of her marriage earned more money than her husband, who ended his days as a kind of Willy Loman in an aloha shirt, dreading the insurance sales calls he had to make. Madelyn insisted on being called Toot—short for Tutu, Hawaiian for "grandparent"—but balked at eating roast pig and poi at her neighbors', preferring to go home for scrambled eggs and cigarettes.
"She was the opposite of a dreamer, at least by the time I knew her," Obama said. "Whether that was always the case or whether she scaled back her dreams as time went on and learned to deal with certain disappointments is not entirely clear. But she was just a very tough, sensible, no-nonsense person." During his teenage years, Obama said, it was his grandmother who "injected" into him "a lot of that very midwestern, sort of traditional sense of prudence and hard work," even though "some of those values didn't sort of manifest themselves until I got older."
"My Afro Stickin' Up"
The story of Barack Obama's adolescent struggle with his racial identity, his disquiet, his dabbling with marijuana and cocaine, is by now well known, and well told in Dreams from My Father. His personal page in the Punahou senior yearbook includes not only a picture of him in full Saturday Night Fever leisure suit and wide collar but also a photographic still life of a beer bottle and a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers. When I mentioned this, Obama laughed and said, "Right, and I'm sure if my mother had had any clue what that was, she would not have been pleased."
Less well known, but perhaps more revealing, is just how tough the young man then known as Barry had to have been to hide his deepest feelings from the wealthy world around him at Punahou, which had been founded for the children of white missionaries in 1841. No one among the many classmates and teachers I talked to remembers ever seeing any sign of the boy who avoided the only other black kid in his fifth-grade class ("as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation," he later wrote), chafed at the use of the n-word by an ignorant coach, and immersed himself in the writings of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X, only to find "the same anguish, the same self-doubt, a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect."
"We were shocked beyond imagining that he was unhappy," one of his classmates, Kelli Furishima, who now manages a kitchen-supply store in Honolulu, told me. "He carried himself comfortably at all times." Eric Kusunoki, who was Obama's homeroom teacher during all four years of high school, and still teaches at Punahou, told me that he never picked up any hint of Obama's feelings: "He never let on," says Kusunoki.
The school was, and is, happily multicultural, but its corny cheer is a white-bread chant, whose origins are murky, even to school officials: "Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie! / V-I-C-T-O-R-Y! / Are we in it? Well, I guess! / Punahou, Punahou, yes, yes, yes!" When I asked Obama about this, he just smiled and said, "What can I tell you?"
The school's style of basketball was just as vanilla. "His game didn't really fit our system," recalled Alan Lum, a teammate who now teaches second grade at Punahou. "We ran a structured offense. We were very disciplined. Barry, he did a good job with that, but he was a very creative player, you know? I guess a lot of his best days were on the outside courts, playing with friends." Obama acknowledged as much. "Basketball was a good way for me to channel my energy," he said. "It did parallel some of the broader struggles I was going through, because there were some issues in terms of racial identity that played themselves out on the basketball court. You know, I had an overtly black game, behind-the-back passes, and wasn't particularly concerned about fundamentals, whereas our coach was this Bobby Knight guy, and he was all about fundamentals—you know, bounce passes, and four passes before you shoot, and that sort of thing. So we had this little conflict that landed me on the bench when I argued.
"The truth was," Obama continued, "on the playground, I could beat a lot of the guys who were starters, and I think he thought it was useful to have me there in practice."
If most of Obama's friends did not know his deepest feelings, he nevertheless managed to let some of them show, in writing, as he did in this poem for the school literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola:
I saw an old, forgotten man
On an old, forgotten road.
Staggering and numb under the glare of the
Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,
Slide from right to left, to right,
Looking for his life, misplaced in a
Shallow, muddy gutter long ago.
I am found, instead.
Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together.
A transient spark lights his face, and in my honor,
He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,
And walks a straight line along the crooked world.
Kelli Furishima showed me the poem, marveling, "And he was a jock!" Furishima also showed me, but asked me not to quote verbatim, the tender inscriptions in her yearbooks from Obama, who, in tiny, precise architect's printing, expressed regret that they hadn't gotten to know each other better, and the hope that someday he might be worthy of her attention. He signed one of them, at the very bottom of the page, with a squiggly cartoon of a mound protruding from the edge of the paper, and these words: "my afro stickin' up over the top again."
When I mentioned the poem to Obama, he at first had no memory of it. After I read it to him, he said, "That's not bad. I wrote that in high school? You know, it sounds in spirit that it's talking a little bit about my grandfather."
Obama acknowledged that the first years of college were simply an extension of "a cloudy period of, you know, having too much fun." But then, he told me, his mother's values began resurfacing, and in New York he could not ignore the obvious strains and tensions of urban life, or the tensions within his own. By the time he had finished Columbia, spent a year working as a writer and financial analyst for the publishing and consulting firm Business International Corporation, and gotten his first taste of community action, in Harlem, he knew what he needed to do: "I wanted to devote myself to something larger than making money or having a good time."
A Really Tough Crowd
Obama embarked on what he says, even now, was the hardest work of his life: the three and a half years of community organizing in the impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago's far South Side. His job: to work with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based effort that aimed to organize low-income residents to improve local conditions. The challenges were huge. He knew no one. He was in search of his own identity as a black man, but was greeted quizzically by some black ministers, who did not see why they should make common cause with the white Catholic clergy working with the organization. Congregants of every denomination wondered why Obama did not have a church of his own. It was a test of both mettle and resilience. Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama and is now an adult-Christian-education teacher in a Catholic parish outside Chicago, told me, "Barack never had any practical political experience before coming to Chicago, and that was one of the things he learned about, and he learned very quickly." Kellman added, "In part, that was a conscious decision: that idealism only takes you so far."
Even as he confronted the limits of community action, Obama was confronting the limits of his own father's achievements. It was in Chicago that he was first visited by Auma, his older half-sister from his father's first marriage, in Africa, and began to understand that the figure he knew mostly from letters and his mother's lionizing memories had in fact died a broken man, his once bright hopes dimmed by political and personality conflicts with the Kenyan regime, and his personal life a shambles of drinking and family dysfunction. Obama visited Kenya, met his extended family of half-siblings, and began to make peace with his father's memory. His father's story became "an object lesson," Obama told me. "I saw the pain of my sister and my brothers on my father's side. I mean, they had a tough time; they had a much tougher time than I did. And I think it's fair to say—and it's a hard thing to say—but I was probably lucky not to have been living in his house as I was growing up. I do think that part of my life has been a deliberate attempt to not repeat mistakes of my father."
Michael Kruglik, a fellow organizer, was struck by Obama's intensity and toughness. "I was sort of amused, almost, by this debate about: Is he black enough?," Kruglik said, referring to the contention of some critics that because his ancestors were not slaves Obama lacks the authentic experience of other American blacks. "Because if you saw the way he was then, he didn't go around saying, 'I'm a young black man on a search for identity.' What he did was he said, 'I'm here and I want to get something done.' " Kruglik added, "I wouldn't use the phrase, because it probably doesn't have the currency now, but there was a certain edge on it. It's not a militancy. But it was an intense commitment, and an intense vibe, that came off him."
By the time Obama decided to go to Harvard Law School, in the winter of 1988, he knew he wanted a career in the public arena. "I think Barack realized how much more useful he could be if he was actually inside, trying to make the system change, rather than trying to push it from the outside," his friend Valerie Jarrett, former chairman of the Chicago Stock Exchange, told me. Obama himself described the years in Chicago to me as the time when he "finally and fully grew up."
At Harvard, Obama shone as never before, though without seeming to show off. Jackie Scott Corley, now a law clerk to a judge in San Francisco, who knew Obama at Harvard, says, "I've never been in a place with a larger collection of egos. Lawyers, in particular, are already Type A. He stuck out as putting himself apart from that." In his second year, he ran for president of the Law Review, and after a marathon voting session was elected on the 19th ballot, as an overt compromise candidate.
Nancy McCullough, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, was a year behind Obama at Harvard and recalls him as "someone who wanted the group decisions to reflect the group's intent, not Barack's intent. One of the reasons people were comfortable putting him in the presidency was because he was going to listen closely enough that, whatever decisions had been made, people would know that he had [listened]. He was masterful in how he facilitated people's talking.
"I actually would have been happier for him to say sometimes, 'This is how we're doing this, and shut up!' "
Obama himself made it clear that his ambitions were growing, that maybe it was time to start getting his hands on some pow-er. "I probably figured I would practice law for a while but then be part of some large-scale community-rebuilding effort, maybe running a large not-for-profit, or setting up a large not-for-profit, that could tackle some of the issues I'd been dealing with," he told me. "But I don't think at that point that I was absolutely focused on politics. I did think that there would be a possibility that at some point I'd be interested in politics." And he added, "Sometimes I look back on letters I wrote, or notes, and I think there is a vague sense that at some point I might run for public office, but it wasn't a systematic plan that I'd come back and work for three or four years and run for state senate and then go for the mayor's seat. I don't think it was that worked out."
"Let Him Wait His Turn"
Obama returned to Chicago and began work on the book he had decided to write, about his search for the meaning of his father's life, and his own. He joined the civil-rights law firm presided over by Judson Miner, who had been Harold Washington's corporation counsel, and began teaching constitutional law part-time at the University of Chicago. In 1992, he served as executive director of Illinois Project Vote!, a voter-registration drive that added an estimated 125,000 black voters to the rolls and was credited with helping elect Carol Moseley Braun to the U.S. Senate.
Four years later, in 1996, Obama ran for the state senate himself. He played hardball, not only knocking Alice Palmer, the incumbent, off the ballot for not receiving enough valid signatures on her nominating petitions, but clearing the field of all other rivals too. By this time, Obama told me, he was "fairly practical" and "pretty mindful of wanting to forge alliances with people, even unexpected folks." Yet he was also ambitious. One of his first moves was to co-sponsor a measure that would have amended the Illinois state constitution to make health care a fundamental right. Needless to say, it failed. But by the time Obama left Springfield, eight years later, he had managed to pass a measure mandating a study of a path to universal coverage, one that is bearing fruit in current proposals by the Democratic governor.
What Obama did best in Springfield, with the help of Emil Jones, was to rack up the kinds of small but measurable achievements that could further his ambition. "What I was able to do was to position myself as the negotiator for the Democrats on certain issues, where the Republicans were willing to give some cooperation," Obama recalled. Jones says he promptly put him in charge of carrying the Democrats' water in negotiations on the first overhaul of state ethics laws in 25 years, and on a revamping of the state's welfare laws. Neither measure went as far as purists in both parties wished: the ethics measure's ban on lawmakers' personal use of campaign funds exempted existing accounts, for example. But Obama made friendships across the aisle.
In 2000, Obama made the one genuine miscalculation of his career: he decided to challenge Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman from Chicago's South Side and a former Black Panther, in the Democratic primary. He was not alone; Donne Trotter, a fellow black state senator, also entered the race, which meant that Emil Jones had to remain neutral. There were plenty of reasons not to run, but Obama was restless. "Bounce passes, and four passes before you shoot"—it wasn't his kind of game.
"You're in the minority and you're looking to get out of there," Obama's colleague John Cullerton, a member of an old political family who himself once challenged the venerable incumbent Dan Rostenkowski in a primary, told me. He added, "The thought was: these chances don't come along very often, and if you pass up the opportunity, you think of yourself being on a porch at 70, thinking, I really could have run. The other thing that motivates you is you really think you're better than the other guy." Obama clearly thought he was better than Rush, who, he argued, hadn't done a lot for the district. Much of the black establishment felt otherwise. "I called every black friend I knew in town, successful businessmen," Newt Minow recalled. "They said, 'Let him wait his turn.' He lost. I think that was a very good thing for him."
Two years later, the Democrats took control of the legislature and Obama saw another opportunity. Peter Fitzgerald, the rich but lackluster Republican who had held one of the state's two seats in the U.S. Senate for a single term, looked vulnerable in 2004 (and, indeed, opted to retire). Obama told Michelle his would be an "up or out" strategy, and he needed to get some things done. He found a willing ally in Cullerton, who represented North Side neighborhoods and was the newly named chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Their agenda included the death penalty, then among the hottest issues in the state. After widespread evidence of wrongful convictions, the Republican governor, George Ryan, first suspended executions, then commuted the sentences of some 150 inmates on death row. He appointed a task force that included the novelist Scott Turow to make recommendations for reform. But the G.O.P.-controlled legislature had not taken action by 2002, when Ryan, his administration beset by corruption scandals, chose not to run again, and Democrats took the governorship for the first time in 25 years, also taking control of the state senate.
Cullerton and Obama teamed up. They faced stiff opposition—from abolitionists on the left, who didn't want "improvements" in capital punishment, because they wanted to end it, and from a broad group of police and prosecutors on the right. Obama took on a particular and pioneering measure to require videotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital cases. Laboriously, he negotiated compromises—such as giving judges discretion in administration of the program—that persuaded the police and prosecutors to go along. The measure passed overwhelmingly.
"He took it on when everyone else said it was a complete nonstarter, and in fact no one would touch it with a 10-foot pole," Cornelia Grumman, an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune who won a Pulitzer Prize for her commentary on the subject, recalls. "But he worked it, and worked it, and went back and forth for months and months between the Fraternal Order of Police and the State's Attorneys Association, and to the reformers, and then to the Chiefs of Police, and then back again to everyone. And he really skillfully negotiated that stinker into an actual bill."
By then the Senate race was crowded, dominated by two independently wealthy newcomers to politics: on the Democratic side, Blair Hull, a former securities trader who had made his first stake playing blackjack and pumped $29 million of his own money into the race, and for the Republicans, Jack Ryan, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who had made a fortune and then spent time as a teacher in an inner-city Catholic school. Another Democratic contender was the state controller, Dan Hynes, from an old Chicago political family, who figured to have strong labor and organization support.
But Obama had his own ace: Emil Jones, whose support had the effect of tying the hands of Mayor Richard Daley and Governor Rod Blogojevich. "He knew if he had me in the run for the Senate, it would put a block on the current mayor," Jones recalled. "The current mayor and the father of the controller, which was Dan Hynes, they were roommates in Springfield when the mayor was a state senator, so they had a relationship. Another big financial backer for the governor was Blair Hull. Barack knew if he had me it would checkmate the governor, 'cause the governor couldn't come out and go with Blair Hull, 'cause the governor needs me. Same with the mayor. So he had analyzed and figured all of that out. He knew I could help him with labor support. And I could put a checkmate on some of the local politicians that didn't know him, but they couldn't really go against me. It was just like in a football game: you got this talented running back, but without those linemen opening the holes and blocking, the running back would never get out of the backfield."
Obama secured the nomination and in November 2004 won election to the Senate.
Finding a Place in the World
In his Springfield hotel room one night that summer, watching a basketball game on TNT, Obama began, as he recalled, "jotting down some notes," some thoughts about what he'd seen so far in his Senate campaign, incorporating parts of the stump speech that he'd developed. "Wrote it on the back of, I think, a schedule and some legal pads," he told me, recounting the tale with the easy assurance of someone who might write the speech of a lifetime on, say, the back of an envelope. But Obama's words in this instance were no idle jottings. He had been asked by John Kerry to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, in July. This is the speech in which Obama declared, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."
Obama's good friend Martin Nesbitt, a successful black businessman in Chicago, spent the day of the speech with him, traveling from appearance to appearance. "We were walking down the street in Boston, and this crowd was growing behind us, kind of like Tiger Woods at the Masters. And I turned to Barack and I said, 'This is incredible. You're like a rock star.' And he looked at me and said, 'If you think it's bad today, wait till tomorrow.' And I said, 'What do you mean?,' and he said, 'My speech is pretty good.' " It was an extraordinary display of self-confidence, and self-knowledge. "All of the rest of us are groping as to how to handle this, because we couldn't ever imagine we'd be in this place we're in," Obama's brother-in-law Craig Robinson told me. "I think the way my sister is processing it is day by day. I think the way that Barack is processing it is as just another step in his strategic plan."
It has become all but impossible to mention Obama without invoking the name of his fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln, however preposterous the comparison might seem at first blush. Obama himself is not so presumptuous as ever to liken himself to Lincoln, but he unself-consciously summons Lincoln's legacy, as he did when announcing his candidacy on the grounds of the Old State Capitol, in Springfield.
What Obama did not mention—and what is so easy to forget about the holy Lincoln of hagiography, and the melancholy Lincoln of martyrdom—was Lincoln's steely ambition, the conviction from an early age that he was destined for great things, and the cold political calculation that enabled him to beat out a half-dozen more experienced and ostensibly better-qualified men. These were the people that the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has memorably called Lincoln's "team of rivals." And the Lincoln to whom Obama might be plausibly compared is not the Lincoln of statuary and the Second Inaugural but the circuit-riding prairie lawyer of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, or the searching, questing Lincoln of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize–winning Abe Lincoln in Illinois, produced on Broadway on the eve of World War II.
That Lincoln was the young, improbable character described by his law partner, William Herndon, as "the most ambitious man in the world." His cousin Sophie Hanks said of Lincoln that he "always had a natural idea that he was going to be something." In 1832, at the age of 23, still struggling to master English grammar and after only six months' residency in New Salem, Illinois, Lincoln ran for the state legislature. He lost, but took 277 out of 300 votes cast in his adopted village. Two years later, he ran again, and this time won, and two years after that he had this to say to an older, more experienced man who challenged his re-election: "The gentleman has seen fit to allude to my being a young man; but he forgets that I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians." Sound familiar? Lincoln's folksy stories masked his cunning, and his tenderheartedness sometimes concealed his ambition. But both were there in full measure, and long had been. Lincoln set about at a very young age to find his place in the world, and with the conviction that his rightful place would be one of great significance.
On February 11, 1861, the day before his 52nd birthday, Lincoln left Springfield to assume the presidency, and as he did so he made one of the most eloquent speeches of his eloquent life, summing up his feeling for the place that had made him. "Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man," he is reported to have said. "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return."
Obama's own farewell to his colleagues in Springfield, on November 8, 2004, was less eloquent but no less heartfelt. Afterward, he faced the Springfield press corps for the last time. Someone asked why he had already ruled out running on a national ticket with Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. His answer was crisp and immediate. "You know," Obama replied, "I am a believer in knowing what you're doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I'm not one of those people."
But he is one of those people. He is. And wherever he is going, he has been one of them for a long, long time.
Todd Purdum is *Vanity Fair'*s national editor.
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text:
John and Marlena visit Lexi. The men go off together and Marlena asks how Lexi's doing and Lexi puts on a brave front. Marlena calls her on it and encourages her to open up. Lexi is thankful for the offer but she just wants to spend her time enjoying what little time she has left. Lexi is trying to say her goodbyes now, just in case. She apologizes for the awful things Stefano has done and they tear up and agree to enjoy every precious moment they have left. The men return and they drink champagne. The ladies go off to shop online for Theo and the men bond. John offers support to his friend. The ladies return to eat cheesecake and John comforts Lexi. He promises to be there for Theo and Abe. "I'll even take him to a damned Cubs game if he wants, as long as it's at Yankee Stadium!" Lexi laughs and feels lucky to call him her friend. John chokes back tears. They eat cake and Lexi feels tired so she goes off to bed. Marlena and John weep once she's out of the room.
As Sensitive As Sandpaper.
Kate gives Sami advice, Will comes clean, and Lexi says farewell.
Austin and Carrie anxiously arrive at Daniel's office to confirm Carrie's pregnancy. Rafe and Nicole arrive and Austin goes off with Daniel to sign some papers while Nicole gives Carrie and Rafe time to talk. Outside, Nicole gossips to Daniel about Rafe and Daniel suggests she see another doctor. She's been putting it off. Meanwhile, Rafe is hurt knowing that Carrie's been having sex with Austin after professing to love him. Carrie shares that it happened after she learned he was having a baby with Nicole. Carrie's sorry Rafe found out the way he did. If the test is negative, she'll leave Austin. Rafe asks what happens if it's positive? Austin returns and finds Nicole with Daniel. He's not happy Carrie is alone with Rafe. Nicole claims Rafe's filling out paperwork and heads into Daniel's office to usher Carrie out. Nicole can see Rafe's worried that Carrie will stay married if she's pregnant. Rafe runs off and Nicole offers pregnancy advice to Carrie and tells her to take things one step at a time. Daniel confirms Carrie's pregnant.
At the square, EJ gives Will some errands to run. Will is surprised to see EJ taking this so seriously. Will ignores a call from Sami and EJ assumes he's upset because Sami discussed private matters with EJ. He says Sami was merely looking for a way to make things right but Will says it didn't go down that way and he can't forgive her. EJ thinks Will may be wrong about Sami. Will snipes, "She shot you in the head." EJ grins and points out Will did as well. What happens if Sami really changes this time? Will calls EJ on taking sides but he's not. Will thinks EJ must be proud that Stefano is the big hero right now. EJ says he was in the dark about it all along and isn't happy that Stefano acted alone. It's not the first time Stefano has done this. Will gets a look. EJ goes on to say Stefano has been undermining him. Will's surprised EJ didn't fire him. EJ is confused. He plays along and gets Will to admit that Stefano forced him to make sure Rafe and Nicole knew about the grief sex.
Kate overhears Sami leaving a message for Will at the pub and makes snide comments before asking what's up. Eventually, Sami explains what happened the day Will came out. Kate's surprised Sami didn't know and claims she's more sensitive. Sami snorts. "You're about as sensitive as sandpaper." Kate thinks Sami's focus on cheating on Rafe made her blind to her son's issues. Kate knows Sami felt guilty and it wasn't her intention to hurt Will. Kate's been there and she knows Will still loves her. Kate thinks Sami knew deep down that her son was gay. She's sure Will feels he has lost his mother because of this and tells Sami to be patient and compassionate and keep her feelings in check. Sami thanks Kate for the advice and they get back to sniping at each other.
Sneak peek!
Lexi reveals her health is going downhill faster than she expected.
Bo has a gun...
EJ confronts Stefano.
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text:
Under the Burning Bridge
Photos, thoughts and rambling scribblings from and about France
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
Hollande: time to dissolve parliament and call national elections?
This spectacular defeat forced Hollande to be seen to react, and that's why he let PM Jean-Marc Ayrault go and installed Manuel Valls in Matignon to replace him. But the change has not been anything like effective so far.On the contrary, things have gone from bad to worse.
The day Valls was named a group of 100 socialist dissidents let him and Hollande know that they might not give the new government the parliamentary vote of confidence that would officially allow it to take office and begin work. They backed down in the end but the tone was set - the dissidents were here to stay.
What are the dissidents angry about? They are angry at Hollande's Social-Democratic conversion, which they say goes against everything that socialism represents. They feel that nothing is being done to make life easier for ordinary citizens and that the poor are being milked dry to help the rich. In other words, their objections are of an ideological nature.
Meanwhile, the reality on the ground remains dire. France failed recently to persuade the EU to give it more time to get its finances in order. This latest demand was the third in so many years and the EU's curt refusal showed that it has finally decided to force France to engage the structural and economic reforms that it has been trying to put off or has not been able to implement.
Further bad news followed in the form of Hollande being obliged to fire a prominent Elysée advisor because he was suspected of a conflict of interest in his business dealings. The opposition poured oil on the flames and Hollande's popularity ratings began to fall even further.
The extent of his unpopularity became painfully clear to him today when he was roundly bood by socialists who had come to hear him speak at a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of legendary founding socialist Jean Jaurés, a man of deep socialist convictions who is still revered within the party today. Accusing him of betraying socialism and Jaurés' legacy, the protestors also demanded to know why he had not held his election promises to be 'the enemy of finance'.
Then, just this afternoon, the dissidents decided this afternoon to reject planned spending cuts by the government and either vote against them in parliament or abstain. These cuts are designed to contribute to the €50 billion the government is trying to raise to honour François Hollande's New Year promise to cut the business sector some tax slack to enable companies to keep prices down and hire more staff. That plan is the 'Pact of Responsibility', and Hollande said at the time that it was "urgently needed". Four months on however, almost no progress has been made on it and this is largely due to the dissidents' stalling tactics.
In other words, Hollande is facing a serious backbench revolt that is holding up reforms and legislation and he and his government have been unable to move forward on changes at a time when they are of the utmost importance.
How long can this situation be allowed to continue? A massively unpopular president and government, open revolt in his party, a paralysed parliament, the country is to all intents and purposes at a standstill.
François Hollande is very much aware of his situation and may well be thinking that if he cannot be permitted to implement his own policies that it's time to begin to consider dissolving parliament and asking the people to decide in legislative elections. If this were to happen the result would almost certainly be a victory for the opposition UMP and a 'government of cohabitation' between Hollande and his enemies, who may, ironically, be more open to his more liberal plans. As to the dissidents, many of them would be out of a job.
What if the dissidents threw out his cuts when they are voted upon? What if he threatened dissolution? Would the threat force the dissidents to climb down? We don't know yet, but we do know that something must be done, and soon, to ensure that France has a functioning government at the very moment it most desperately needs one.
Sunday, 6 April 2014
Suicidal French socialists should take Winston Churchill's advice
|Courtesy of AFP/Archives
Yet, incredibly, Valls and Hollande are today facing the biggest revolt by backbench Socialists since Hollande became elected, and the cacophony of dissent is deafening. Added to this is the fact that the ecologists have decided not to participate in the new government, thus weakening it from day one.
It began on the very evening that the election results were announced, but it went relatively unnoticed at first. Consisting of a document called The Conditions for Confidence - For a Contract of the Majority, it demands that the government and Hollande change their policies and insists that Hollande must implement his election promises. It goes on to outline a series of measures its authors say should be taken immediately in order to change course.
The reason for the dissent is that Hollande and Valls have made it clear that the government's policy package is to remain more or less intact. This means we shall see more cuts and more money - €50bn - dedicated to helping businesses to create new jobs. It's a brave - some would say foolhardy - move designed to get France's economy back on track and reduce deficits.
Who is behind it? The main instigator seems to be no less that party First Secretary Martine Aubry, a woman who has never hidden her disdain for Manuel Valls and who is still licking her wounds after being defeated in her efforts to become Prime minister after Hollande's victory. This led her to refuse a cabinet post and keep her distance from Matignon. So far the document has been signed on to by 86 députés and senior left-wing figures, including the First Vice-president of the National Assembly and the presidents of several parliamentary commissions. At least a couple of dozen more are expected to sign it before Valls presents his new policies to parliament for a vote of confidence next Tuesday.
It begins by declaring that "dialogue with the new government begins now" and goes on to list its demands. Here are those that are directly related to the economy;
[We must] obtain a reorientation of Europe that puts an end to the policies of austerity that have pushed Europe into recession [by establishing] sustainable budgetary trajectories....To put that into plain English;
[We must] concentrate public means on the real creation of jobs and intensify industrial renewal. For that, we must substitute a national investment pact, negotiated with companies, for the more costly conditions that are without conditions [for business] that are being considered right now in the Pact of Responsibility.
[We demand] measures in favour of low salary earners, fiscal reform and a progressive CSG [a tax that helps finance the Social Security system] and an effort in favour of those on modest retirement benefits.
[We need to] Reaffirm and amplify the choices and engagements undertaken in 2012: beef up efforts to regulate financial and banking activities.
- France should confront the EU (and Germany) and demand that the very budgetary constraints that France helped to create to save the euro should be scrapped in favour of a more laxist approach that would increase national debt, thus risking the ire of the markets, the IMF and the moneylenders.
- France should create tax-funded jobs, thus increasing the tax burden on households in order to create artificial jobs that don't create wealth. Also, business should be forced to contribute to the effort, thus lessening the possibility of them creating real jobs and frightening investors away.
- More public money should be found to help the less well off.
- Hollande should put his "I am the enemy of finance" promise into effect, with stricter demands being placed upon the markets and banks, despite the fact that doing so unilaterally would ensure that France became the international paria of the world of business, lending and investment.
In other words, this document demands that France revert to the very policies that got it into this mess in the first place. Hollande tried them for almost a year until it became clear that doing so risked driving the economy straight over a cliff and pushing the country into a deep recession.
French socialists still seem to be stuck in a timewarp in which believe that business, bosses and the rich are their enemies and that France can tax its way out of debt using their money. Adopting these policies would be akin to committing economic suicide and Hollande and Valls should reject these demands out of hands.
I am reminded of these wise words;
"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle."- Winston Churchill
Thursday, 3 April 2014
Hollande and Valls create France's first ever de facto Social-Democrat government
|Manuel Valls, French Social Democrat
Well, they may have 'heard the message', but Hollande has clearly decided that it's not because he heard it that he should listen to it. That's why he has chosen to continue to implement his highly unpopular policies, which consist of a mix of measures designed to help businesses, tax households and kickstart a decrease in France's record unemployment rate via structural reforms. Going further, he has eliminated a couple of dissenting voices in the ranks of the cabinet and installed Manuel Valls in Matignon. But why Valls?
Hollande's presidential election campaign was highly ambiguous, alternating as it did between promising to reform France's antiquated job market and saying he was the "enemy of finance", or saying he would reduce public spending yet promising job creation based on it being financed by the state. However, after a few initial months trying to borrow his way out of debt whilst continuing to spend he was sharply reprimanded by the EU, investors and the markets. It was at this point that he took the plunge and opted for what is called in France 'the social compromise'. This is the name given to the post war acceptance by the left that the head-to-head ideological class fight against capital was doomed to defeat and that it had become necessary to trade off some of its more hardline values and compromise more with a changing world. In other words, Hollande began to 'do a Tony Blair' and adopt more liberal policies.
Mid-January saw Hollande announcing his 'pact of responsibility', a plan to inject money into the business world and make it easier for companies to hire and fire, and to drive his point home he announced that he was a Social-Democrat in the sense that he was going to "take action to reach a compromise with big business." The announcement was roundly condemned by the left wing of his party and all the other left-wing parties, the press didn't quite know what to make of it all, and the public became even more disillusioned with him than it had been up till then. But the government was rattled by the extent of the revolt, which reached its peak when the local elections came around, hence Hollande's drubbing. Hollande now needed a whipping boy, a sacrifice to feed to the lions of public opinion.
Enter Manuel Valls. He was a natural choice for two reasons. Firstly, he is a stickler for discipline, and party discipline in particular. During Ayrault's time dissention was rife within the cabinet, which sent out conflicting statements on just about everything to the point where the government looked more like a rudderless ship with a rowdy and rebellious crew aboard than anything else. Valls, however, is expected to restore order and impose a more coordinated and disciplined system of communicating with the press and public, whereby unofficial press statements and interviews shall become more sparse and dissention within the ranks sanctioned. Think 'professional', instead of 'amateur', politics.
More importantly however, he has been chosen because he shares Hollande's political and ideological approach. Intensely disliked by left-wingers, he, like Hollande, is a self-proclaimed Social-Democrat whose ideas have often been compared to those of Tony Blair. He will be best remembered at the Interior ministry for continuing to implement policies from the days of Sarkozy that resulted in a no-nonsense policy of deporting Roma and other illegal immigrants as well as failed asylum-seekers.
He is also known to be a critic of the dogmatic left-wing approach to fixing problems that consists of clamouring for more spending as well as tighter controls over the business sector. A pragmatist, Valls considers that the only way out of the economic hole that France is in is to reform its employment legislation, help businesses to create jobs and accept that belts are going to have to be tightened. In other words, he is a 'Hollandist'.
The Hollande-Valls tandem shall probably last until the next presidential elections, three years from now, and between now and then they are to steer the country through a round of spending cuts, debt-paying and structural reform of the economy in general that is designed to get the country back on its feet.
One may agree or not with these policies, but one thing's for sure, Hollande and Valls are no longer representative of a socialist agenda. They are implementing an unabashedly social-democratic agenda. If they fail, the right will sweep back into power like a tsunami, and the Socialist Party will be in opposition yet again after just one term in office.
But if they succeed, they will, ironically, have effectively killed off French Socialism and replaced it with fully-fledged social democracy.
Sunday, 30 March 2014
French local elections: Hollande is not the only big loser
|A French polling card, one of millions that went unused today
Meanwhile, opposition UMP and Front National voters had their tails up. They knew they had every chance on capitalising on their first round gains, they were smelling blood, and they have finally got it in the form of a crushing defeat for the socialists and François Hollande.
This was the first national ballot since Hollande's election in May 2012, and as such this shattering defeat effectively represents payback time for a President and government who have been in trouble since the day they were elected. Hollande quickly came under pressure to deliver on his best-known election slogan, which was "I am the enemy of finance", and indeed he did begin his mandate with some harsh news for business and good news for the public. But as the country's financial situation degraded it was soon clear that this honeymoon could, and would, not last. 'Finance' finally picked up the gauntlet and France has been harshly sanctioned by international financial organisations, investors and the credit rating agencies ever since. Finally, disastrous unemployment levels, a catastrophic loss of foreign investment and widespread discontent with the way the country was being run led him to capitulate and tax households to the limit whilst giving tax breaks and other favours to business in a desperate ateempt to stimulate the jobs market.
In other words, disastrous as this result is for François Hollande and his government, it comes as no surprise. The first round resulted in very poor results for the socialists, whereas the UMP and FN did well. The abstention rate last week was 36.45%, and today saw it reach yet another new record high of 38%.
Unsurprisingly, the UMP, which despite the fact that it has had more of it share of problems lately what with a bitterly divided leadership and much internal squabbling, is tonight's big winner, having taken France's fourth-biggest city - Toulouse - as well as Saint-Etienne, Carcassonne, Laval, Quimper, Roubaix, Ajaccio, and many other towns.
The Front National captured a record number of towns, mainly in the south of the country. This tally included some fairly sizeable towns such as Béziers and Fréjus,
As for the Socialists, the pickings were meager, with the victory off Annie Hidalgo in Paris in a closely-fought battle being the only tiny sliver of good news on what has otherwise been an awful day for them, a day during which they lost well over 150 small-to-medium towns.
The future now looks extremely bleak for Hollande, who is widely expected to announce a cabinet reshuffle within the next few days, with PM Jean-Marc Ayrault being tipped to be replaced by either Laurent Fabius or Manuel Valls.
But the biggest loser here isn't Hollande, who is a career politician. After all, he's 'just' a president, and as such he can be replaced. What cannot be replaced however, at least not in the next few years, is the public's lost faith in its institutions and politicians. Today's record high abstention rate and sanction vote are merely the outward signs of a deep malaise in French society, a society that is becoming increasingly alienated from the democratic process and is profoundly cynical about its future prospects.
Successive French governments have tried to put off essential economic and social reforms for as long as possible. But these reforms are slowly but surely being imposed upon a recalcitrant France by globalised trade and a change in the world region pecking order that sees Europe in decline and Asia on the up. Hollande too has been resisting, and although he has done enough to persuade the moneylenders and the EU to stay off his back for a short while, much more needs to be done to catch up on the long years spent neglecting major structural problems in the economy.
France is a country that knows it must change, but is tetanised by fear at the very prospect of having to do so. The people are resigned and dispirited, and the reputation of the ruling classes is as bad as it has ever been in all the 27 years I have lived here.
What France badly needs right now is a president and parliament that can rise to the occasion and persuade the people to support them, however grudgingly, as they seek to get the country back on its feet.
In other words, France needs the one thing it doesn't have today - a pragmatic, charismatic and inspiring leader.
Sunday, 13 October 2013
France struggles to turn good ideas into profit: is it serious Doc?
|Panama Canal construction - 1896
The first article is on Le Figaro's '100 Years Ago' pages, and it recounts the interesting story of how the Panama Canal was imagined by the French, but built and exploited by the Americans.
Various countries and leaders had dreamed of building the canal since as early as the 1500s, but the French would be the first to try. Construction began in 1881 with major funding from both industry and the state, but the project soon proved to be more difficult than had initially been planned. It was eventually abandoned due to a combination of the ill-prepareness of geological and other studies, insufficiently trained engineers with little experience, unexpectedly high death rates among the workers due to malaria, poor equipment, financial mismanagement and political corruption. The fiasco had cost a fortune in lost investment and the loss of 22,000 lives due to illness and accidents.
The result was that the United States - who were also interested in building a canal - subsequently took over the project and finished it successfully thanks to better preparations and more expertise in the field of construction. France had conceded what would have been a major commercial and geopolitical advantage to America and its influence in South America has never fully recovered to this day.
I then went to Nouvelobs' site where I came across an article with the headline 'The French invent lots of things, and foreigners profit from them'. The article discusses the results of an international classification of countries according to the number of patents for newly-invented products they produce, and at first glance France does very well indeed seeing as it takes third place.
But the good news stops there. France may possess more patents than many other countries but the vast majority of the money it makes from them comes from selling them to foreign countries, who then go on to transform the prototypes and theoretical expertise they have just bought into sellable - and profitable - products. The country's technological prowess may be excellent, but France's industrial trade balance is in deficit.
French Minister for Higher Education and Research recently summed up the situation with the following statement, made during a parliamentary speech;
"We must overcome the valley of death that separates research and innovation here in France. [...] French mentalities have been recalcitrant with respect to the links between the academic world, the world of research, and industry for far too long." She pleads for improvements in the way France looks at intellectual property "..to ensure that the excellence of our research, which is financed by public money, is not pillaged by others."So there we have it. Two examples over a 100-year timespan that demonstrate France's ability to imagine and begin projects only to fail to capitalise on them due to a lack of vision and foresight. It would seem then that France is indeed "..good at inventing things but bad at selling them'.
But does that really matter? After all, France is still one of the top six economies in the world and the French, despite their penchant for complaining, enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world.
I am reminded of another expression that the French often use to describe themselves. It says that the French are 'sweet dreamers'. Perhaps they are after all, and there's nothing wrong with that in my book.
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
A self-confessed pedophile is released on bail to await his trial. WHAT????!!!!
A 27-year-old military serviceman from Toulon in France who stands accused of repeatedly raping his niece over a period of three years has been released on bail.
The accused man has already admitted that he raped his niece on five occasions, the first of which was on July 1, 2009. The girl was 11 years old at that time. He is also known to have accessed pedopornographic images on the Internet over a period of several months.
The judge justified his decision to free the man to await trial instead of holding him in custody pending trial by saying that he had "furnished details about all the acts of which he is accused", that nothing "would lead one to consider that he lied during his spoken statements to the police", and that there is nothing to indicate "that there may be other victims". The judge concluded that the accused "presented solid guarantees that he would not skip bail."
It goes without saying that this judgement has outraged many people. The police are furious that long months of hard work designed to put a suspected repeat-offender pedophile behind bars has failed even before his trial, the public - and parents of young children in particular - is dumbfounded, and it's the same story for all those associations and other organisations that fight child abuse and pedophilia.
And I am outraged too. I am absolutely incensed that in this, a supposedly modern and progressist society which says it respects human - and that includes children's - rights, a judge can free a man who has admitted that he raped a child five times. I am sickened by the judge's mealy-mouthed, totally biased and subjective reasoning, and - although I would never dream of voting for them myself - I fully understand why the French political party which is making the most positive progress in polls at the moment is the.......
.......extreme-right National Front.
Posted by Fripouille at 13:23 8 comments:
Labels: child abuse, child rape, crime, france, incest, pedophilia, rape
Monday, 30 September 2013
Photos of the Vieux Port of Marseille
Also true though is that despite the city's problems, the Vieux Port of Marseille is one of the most beautiful ports to be found not only in France, but in the whole of Europe.
So here are some photos of it that I took a couple of years back. The one here at the top of the page is the statue of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on top of the Notre Dame de la Garde, which overlooks the port and is the highest point in the city. I'm posting these photos as a reminder that Marseille is not just about violence, it's about a historical past, grace and elegance too.
Humans have inhabited Marseille and its environs for almost 30,000 years, but the Vieux Port didn't begin to take on an international aspect until after the Greeks arrived there. There is testimony to that in the form of a commemorative plaque that is imbedded into the quayside. It reads;
It was here that Greek sailors who had come from the Greek city of Phocea in Asia Minor came ashore in about 600 BC. They founded Marseille, from where civilisation would illuminate the West.
The port is of the picture postcard variety and it's easy to understand why.
The Vieux Port is home to many sailing boats and smaller yachts.
The port is U-shaped, with the top of the U representing the exit towards the Mediterranean, but if you're near the exit and want to visit the other side don't worry, you don't have to go back down and all around the U to get there because some bright entrepreneur once had the excellent - and very popular - idea of operating a ferry from one side to the other. Here's the crew, and as this photo shows the people of Marseille like to take things easy when they can. From whence this dual command post, at which one of these guys sails the ferry across, and the other sails it back. Very efficient.
The Vieux Port was heavily defended many years ago by forts on either side of the entrance. Here's one of them, St Jean.
Once beyond it you are in the Mediterranean, and from the moment this fort is no longer in view you are en route for the rest of the world.......
But beautiful though it is, there is much more to Marseille than its port, so I'll be back in a few days to post some photos of the downtown area and its attractions.
Have a good day, wherever you may be..
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Posted by Editor on 05/25/03
St-Wendel World CupWorld Cup coverage sponsored byVélirium 2003
Christophe Sauser (Siemens Mobile Cannondale) won late and Gunn Rita Dahle (Merida) early as the World Cup opened today in St Wendel, Germany. Top North American finishers were Alison Dunlap (Luna) and Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski (RLX-Polo Sport), a distant 12th and 15th respectively. Canadian riders had an uncharacteristically off day, with Roland Green the top man in 19th and Alison Sydor the top woman in 15th place.
St Wendel, nestled among the rolling hills in the pictureseque Saarsland region, just south of the Mosel River, is a regular stop on the World Cup circuit, with 2003 marking the sixth year it has been included in the series. Christophe Sauser is a four time World Cup winner, but reserves high praise for St Wendel: "Here and Houffalize are the best to win, I think. Mentally this is a very hard race."
Leading up to the race there was considerable concern about the weather and the trail conditions. When it rained two days before the race, the 7.9 kilometre course became unrideable on the climbs and descents. It rained on Saturday morning, leading to more worrying by the riders, but the sun shone all day after that, drying things up considerably. Race day dawned with overcast, damp skies, but the rain held off, and the course was 100% rideable - albeit with sticky, strength-sapping mud in the woods.
Sydor led the charge out of the start loop and up the first paved climb of the women's 5 lap race, but once the riders hit the first steep technical climb, Dahle went to the front and rode the field off her wheel. Prior to the start, the Norwegian had admitted being nervous about starting the World Cup with the rainbow jersey. "I want to show that I am worthy of this jersey."
After such a dominant performance, everyone would agree that she is, indeed, 'worthy'. Dahle was 25 seconds clear of a chase group containing her team mates Sabine Spitz and Irina Kalentieva, Marga Fullana (Orbea) and Annabella Stropparo after 1 lap, with Sydor, Barb Blatter (Specialized), Laurent Leboucher, Alison Dunlap and Chrissy Redden (Subaru-Gary Fisher) a further 30-plus seconds in arrears. One lap later Elena Giacomuzzi was 32 seconds down, with Spitz and Kalentieva at a minute, Fullana at a minute and a half, and Blatter leading a small chase group containing Dunlap at 2:18. Chrissy Redden and Alison Sydor were in a second group at 2:35, with Marie-Helene Premont (Oryx) in the next group at 3:18
Giacomuzzi was replaced by Spitz and Kalentieva in the chase, steady at 90 seconds, but the rest of the field was now 3 minutes behind Dahle, who continued to pour on the pressure. By race end she was 2:33 in front of Spitz, 2:57 ahead of Kalentieva, and 3:25 in front of two late charging Polish riders - Maja Wlosczowska and Anna Szafraniec (both Lotto-Pzu S.A.).
"The race course was fine - sticky, but everything could be ridden. It was easy to make a mistake, and then you had to get off and run, so I was very focussed, very careful."
While the women's race was decided early, spectators needed a scorecard to keep track of what was going on in the men's 7 lap (plus start loop) event. Defending World Cup champion Filip Meirhaeghe, world champion Roland Green and German champion Lado Fumic led the field up the first climb, but there were still 15 riders in contention at the end of the first lap, with Sauser, Marco Bui, Jose Hermida (Bianchi-Motorex), Roel Paulissen (Siemens Mobile Cannondale), Bart Brentjens (T Mobile), Julien Absalon (Bianchi-Motorex), Seamus McGrath (Haro-Lee Dungarees) and, in a rare off-road appearance, Olympic champion Miguel Martinez (Full Dynamix), all in the fast front group. Ryder Hesjedal (Subaru-Gary Fisher) was feeling the effects of his multiple trans-Atlantic commutes, and dropped out after two laps.
One lap later, Meirhaeghe was out with a flat, but Thomas Frischknecht (Swiss Power) had moved up and the group was still doing sub-22 minute laps. Fumic was doing a lot of work at the front, as was Green and Bui, but Sauser was lurking.
"I was always trying to stay at the front group, and keep the pace high. I could see that when we were in the woods in the technical portions that I was one of the best riders today, and that if I was focussed and smooth I could be the strongest."
The front group was gradually shrinking, lap by lap, as the pace (which increased in laps three, four and five) took its toll. Brentjens was one of the first to go, then Frischknecht and McGrath. Martinez succumbed on lap 5, and on lap 6 Sauser made his move, exploding the remainder of the group.
"I went hard at the base of the first technical climb, and (Marek) Galinski (Orbea) was the only one to go with me. That was okay, because I wanted someone to work with on the flat sections. On the last lap I attacked again in the same place and was able to ride away."
Behind him, Bui, Fumic, Absalon and Cedric Ravanel (Orbea) managed to limit the damage, but the others went quickly backwards, including Green. The world champion, who was forced to dropped out of Big Bear last weekend, is still feeling the effects of the crash he suffered last month.
"It was better than last week, but I just haven't had any good training since Georgia. My shoulder is prettymuch healed up, and now I just need a couple of good weeks of training to get my endurance and intensity to where it needs to be."
Sauser cruised in for an 11 second victory over Galinski, who is fresh off an 11th place overall finish at the Peace Race - part of his training for the World Cup. Julien Absalon, who just moved up to the senior ranks from Espoir, dropped Fumic in the last half lap to take the third podium spot.
Race Notes
McGrath: "I had a good start, but I didn't have anything in my legs, the pace was just too hard for me. Every lap I just kept losing spots, so I almost don't feel that I was in the race."
Sydor: "I felt really good the first lap, and then I realized that I was going way too fast, and I had to start going at my own pace. It was a hard fought 15th place, that's for sure. I've seen this happen before - the year before the Olympics every one is very motivated and every UCI point is a hard fight.
Here I led into the woods, but I missed my line on the climb and had to run up. Gunn-Rita passed me then, and a few others. I could see Gunn-Rita was going so strong that I knew she would probably get it."
Redden: "It was really fast! I was able to ride the long climb every lap, and I got a good start. The first couple of laps were okay, but on the third I fell back a bit and was fighting to stay in the position I was. It is a really tough race because there is nowhere to rest on the course."
Premont: "At the end I was feeling better, but the start was so hard, so fast, that I had trouble keeping up with the pace. As I started to ride into the race I began to go better and was able to catch some people. My rear tire was not a good choice also - it was too narrow and slipped on the muddy climbs."
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