When Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency in 1860, a divided America was his world and facing that division the calling of his life. When Barack Obama assumes the presidency, his world will be, the world. Whether you like him or not or supported him or not, there can be no doubt that Obama will truly be a global president. He may, like his predecessor, choose to ignore this fact and spend his days watching sports on television and practicing his freethrow by chucking wadded paper into trash cans, but it’s not likely. Obama seems to clearly understand that America has a major, and perhaps last, chance to assert itself upon the world’s stage in a definitive role. Despite our weakened moral authority and financial and military capacity, we are nevertheless still the big kid on the block. But that status is only as big as the occupant of the Oval Office wants it to be, and can make it be. It is this, more than healthcare or job creation, that will define Barack Obama.

While a restless Russia and an uncertain North Korea require some attention, there is really only one place that Obama needs to focus and that is Palestine/Israel. Virtually all of the other major burning challenges we face- Pakistan, Iran, Iraq- are branches from that central tree. Zionism, and the American support for it, is the central organizing principle that keeps all manner of Muslim radicals together in the great crusade of their time. They fight us not because they “hate our freedoms” as the Bush Administration spokespeople have been blathering for all these many years, but because we have been an eternally unwanted Western presence in the Islamic world. To Arab eyes, that Western presence includes the vast majority of Israelis who came from Europe and America to invade Palestine and muscle almost a quarter of a million people who lived there out of their homes and into refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere.

Those who have fallen in behind the trendy “two state solution” grasp for straws. The two state solution won’t work in Palestine any better than it might have in America in the 1860’s or the segregated South of the 1950’s. There is simply no way to equitably divide resources and land, assuming equality was even on the table to start with, which there is no reason to think it would ever be. The Israel that digs its hole of shame ever deeper by sending tanks into civilian towns and villages is hardly going to share water and land and nor will the children and families of those crushed beneath those tanks drink that water or live on that land without memory and without family who remain stranded in Jordan.

Barack Obama has an opportunity to recognize that there can be no “search for solutions” anymore. There is no searching to be done, the solution is naked before us all. The problem has never been identifying the medicine, it has always been swallowing it. In a world that gets increasingly diverse each and every day, staving off diversity is like trying to hold back the tide. It is called segregation and it has never worked anywhere in the world. Until the Zionists open their doors not only to those whom they drove out over half a century ago, but to all of those who have different religions and customs, and create an inclusive, American style democracy they will never know peace. Perhaps Obama can help them take that medicine because a truly integrated Palestine/Israel will go an almost incalculable way to healing the rest of the world’s fiery ills.

This morning’s news was filled with graphic video images of people being rescued as thousands of gallons of water rushed around their stranded cars. The culprit was a fifty year-old water main that had finally given way- something that should long ago have been replaced. The same is true of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, which collapsed into the Mississippi River last summer killing 13 people. At the time of the collapse, crews had brought tons of equipment and material onto the deck for a long overdue repair job that added pressure to the failing bridge. Neglect, neglect by the government who bears the responsibility for our national infrastructure, is culprit in both instances.

Now consider the fiasco that is our national economy, from our manufacturing base to Wall Street. The one constant in all of our failing and failed sectors of the economy is the lack of national leadership to prevent captains of industry and finance from running amok and destroying the very marketplaces they need for survival. With no meaningful emission or environmental standards, the auto industry ignored investing and developing long-term innovations and went after short-term profits with the big vehicles guaranteed to keep us under the yoke of foreign oil producers. The financiers on Wall Street, in banks and all manner of hybrid institutions invented to hide transactions likewise chased quick dollars for themselves, and lied and cheated each other to the edge of oblivion. As Americans, we marketed (lied) each other into a netherworld of “must have” consumer products of dubious use and value from ever more dextrous phones and cameras and music players to laser hair removal to the aforementioned monster trucks and SUV’s. Those who could not afford to keep up were able to tap into unregulated credit markets and went deeper and deeper into debt, and that downward spiraling of debt was extended into the housing market where mortgage brokers happily pocketed a commission to saddle folks with loans that were fast tracked to foreclosure. Again, neglect is the culprit here.

Now, turn to the enormous challenge we now face in Afghanistan in particular and the Middle East in general. After meddling in the Soviet/Afghan war and blithely arming thousands of people from all over the Islamic world via Pakistan to repel the Soviets, we just walked away and left the region in chaos. Out of our mess grew the Taliban, al Queda and all manner of fellow travelers who have now grown into an interconnected web of hostility we have only begun to deal with. All of the above challenges are the fruits of the ideas and convictions and the powerful influence of Ronald Wilson Reagan and it is his legacy that we, as a nation, must now confront for the treacherous poison that it was if we are ever to emerge from this mess. This doesn’t mean the end of free markets, a return to the 1970’s or an invitation to European styled socialism, but it does mean accepting that libertarians are higher than hippies and there needs to be an adult in the room and that government is the only entity that can perform that function.

“Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem,” Reagan so famously uttered in his first inaugural speech, and we needn’t have ever looked any further for testimony to the sheer stupidity he brought to every aspect of his presidency. Government is a tool, a mechanism that carries out the designs of political leaders. It’s like saying “the wrench is not the solution, the wrench is the problem.” Reaganism can be accurately described not as any sort of reform but as simply throwing as many perfectly good wrenches out the window as possible. Famously incurious, Reagan lacked the intellectual ability to think out the long term consequences of his stupid ideas, but now we all get to see, taste and smell them ourselves. Capitalism and relatively free markets are one thing, but for almost thirty years, there has been no one minding the store while those that could stuffed their pockets and those that couldn’t slid further and further behind. Now, suddenly, people are looking around the empty shelves and unpaid receipts and credit debt and wonder “what happened here?” Reagan happened, is the answer, and we all just merrily went along with him because the village idiot was cute and funny and sang a nice song. Now we, and our children, are very likely to pay for it in a big way unless Barack Obama really can channel Abraham Lincoln and shepherd American society to “think anew.”

It’s part of the transition ritual that people on all sides of the political spectrum try to read the tea leaves around a president-elect to see how he will compare with the campaigner. Few anticipated that George W. Bush would so quickly abandon his “compassionate conservative” rap, for example, and turn out to be the ideological American Taliban hard-liner he was. Many also felt abandoned by Bill Clinton literally almost within hours of his swearing in. These are classic cases of people reading into spaces left by candidates, often deliberately, and setting themselves up for disappointment by projecting what they want and hope to see rather than what’s actually there. The sense of disappointment is even worse for those who labored on a candidate’s behalf under these illusions of shared views and plans. As they were with Clinton, people on the left are no doubt dismayed by some of Barack Obama’s cabinet appointments and had imagined he was much more one of them than he actually is. Those on the right are finding he is not the Muslim anti-Christ they feared was going to outlaw Christmas trees and teach their children the mechanics of gay sex. Anyone who actually reviews his interviews and speeches will find that Obama continues to say what he’s said all along about policy and about people, almost verbatim. We are getting what he advertised and he is doing and saying and just exactly what he said he would.

Barack Obama really is trying to change decades of precedent by uniting the country from the center in not only our politics, but in American life, and is creating his own platform from which to build his version of “change.” He is uniquely able to attempt this because, having raised 100% of his own money and put together his own organization, he is the first president in our history who does not have to pay anyone- any party hacks or unions or corporations, etc- back. Obama is a smart guy, but beyond the policies and the politics, this was an idea Americans reeling from the last eight disastrous years found desperately appealing. Throughout his campaign, Obama not only championed this idea, but came across as the one to make it happen, a fair, honorable and fundamentally decent, non-ideological person who doesn’t ever get too hepped up or impassioned. Our intuitive understanding of this is why we elected him.

Much of Obama’s “change we can believe in” was about diversity, but what exactly that means is not so clear. For many on the political left the much bandied term often seems to be limited to the process of expanding participation and amplifying previously diminished voices based upon skin color and sexual orientation, the twin focus points of the academy over the last forty years. The reason for this is because since the 60’s, the academy has become ever more populated and influenced by gays, lesbians and members of ever loosely defined “communities of color” who have fought long and hard for an equal footing in both the legal and cultural spheres of American life. The tension between these aspirations to integrate people of diverse skin tones, languages and cultures, and acceptance of gay and lesbian lifestyles, and the more conservative American traditions, has formed the front lines of American politics ever since.

Barack Obama, however, has never subscribed to either ideology and for him “diversity” is defined much more literally as “mixing” rather than “equalizing” and anyone on the left who didn’t understand that before certainly should get it now that he has selected evangelical Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. While it’s unlikely that a preacher who called for a return to segregation or for laws restricting marital rights based on skin color would be invited to perform this service, the president-elect clearly does not view sexual orientation in the same way. He won’t condone racial bigotry, as he so eloquently told us all in his Philadelphia speech in the wake of his Jerimiah Wright mess, but bigotry towards gays and lesbians is, well, acceptable to him- or at the very least finds it less unacceptable. It is this that forms the core of the disappointment and anger that has risen.

Rick Warren was not only a vocal proponent of California’s anti-gay Proposition 8, but he has clearly stated that he views homosexuality in the same vein as bestiality or pedophilia and that the performance of homosexual acts constitutes sufficient, extra-legal rational not only for scorn and shame but for exemption from the 14th Amendment’s protection against the deprivation of rights. If indeed it is true, as he claims, that Obama finds these views objectionable, we can safely bet that had all anti-gay measures across the country been decisively voted down in recent years, Warren would be an ignored spectator at next month’s festivities. So, what the president-elect is then de facto doing by asking Warren to give this invocation is conceding the pragmatic political point is that the pastor’s bigotry is shared by enough Americans that as one of their representatives he nevertheless deserves a place at Obama’s table. This is “diversity” for Barack Obama.

Obama has a coolness and self confidence that increasingly appears to be impervious to slights and insult. Rather than seeing the face of bigotry, he appears to dispassionately see a concept that is up for debate, and feels a righteous confidence in his ability to challenge it. This concept is essential to Obama’s leadership- to be able to rise above the personal and the damaged past and deal at the conceptual level with moving forward. It’s as though he were saying to us all “shit happened, let’s get over it and move on.” But with Rick Warren, it’s not about moving forward, or accepting diversity. It really is a question of flat out bigotry, and Obama’s answer appears to be that Warren’s ugly presence will be tolerated, like George Wallace was in the Sixties, because his views are so broadly shared. But given the bigotry and legal ramifications of those views, as a former professor of courses on the Constitution this is troubling to put it mildly, but as a moral leader it’s totally disappointing. It impossible to imagine that Obama would let his little girls listen to an invocation by someone who didn’t believe as black Americans they were due their full rights. What a shame it is that he clearly doesn’t feel the same way about gay Americans, or at the very least has chosen this early moment to put them on notice not to expect him to be a champion for their rights.

It’s appalling to see comparisons being made in the press today between Caroline Kennedy and Sarah Palin with regard to “readiness” to serve in elected government. That is like comparing Bill Cosby and Mike Tyson for readiness to babysit your kids. You had to laugh out loud if you saw New York’s self-serving Republican toe rag of a representative Peter King trying to make the case that Caroline Kennedy was unfit to fill the United States Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton because Kennedy had “never done anything but hang out on Park Avenue.” King, of course, has long had designs on that seat and is gearing up for a run in 2010. It goes without saying that the very last person King, who has all the charm of a rat in a dumpster, would want to face is Caroline Kennedy. His is not the only voice of discontent, of course, and there are some who would see Kennedy’s appointment as the triumph of celebrity over substance, as though she were a former athlete or an actress from Hollywood. While Kennedy should certainly be interviewed and tested and her voice and thoughts heard and scrutinized, any voice calling her “unqualified” is nothing but an alert that its owner is either jealous or, more likely, just an ignoramus.

Let’s not forget those halcyon early days for Palin. When she was announced as John McCain’s running mate, Democrats feared their cruise to the White House might have been brilliantly torpedoed from Alaska. Most people were unfamiliar with her, but assumed that the always street savvy Republican crew running the campaign had done their homework and had found and launched a top notch politician to be among the faces and minds of their party’s future. It was not until Ms. Palin opened her mouth that she made fools of herself and the forces in her party that promoted her nomination and embarrassed every woman who’s ever sold Mary Kay. Palin was handed, unearned, the gift of the national stage and she alone made the most of that opportunity to thoroughly soil herself in front of our unbelieving eyes. Palin’s status as national laughingstock was hard earned indeed.

What Ms. Kennedy’s sudden pursuit of public office represents, and what should be obvious to political observers and the press, is not that she suddenly woke up one morning with Palinblagojevich disease and now needs daily doses of media attention therapy to live but that she is now willing to endure it. Throughout a lifetime of quiet service, primarily in the field of education, Ms. Kennedy resisted annual calls to join the fray of electoral politics from Democrats eager to fall in behind the juggernaut her candidacy would be. In addition to being the only surviving child of John and Jackie Kennedy, she is, lest we forget, a graduate of Harvard who got a law degree from Columbia. Unlike her beautiful but notoriously dim late brother, she has a brilliant mind and has co-authored two books on the Constitution and edited several volumes of poetry. She is an expert in art, having worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and studied for a year at Sotheby’s in London. She is, in short, exactly the sort of person- brilliant, educated and cultured- that we should all want to see in the halls of government.

The reason Kennedy is now entering the ring, and suffering the swarms of mouth foaming, camera and microphone wielding vermin that pass for “the press” in New York can be summed up in two words, “Barack Obama.” She has, like so many Americans, simply been inspired by him and the new era of American life that he is leading us all towards. But she clearly understands that such an era will not be a spectator sport, and that the changes he aspires to require all of us to pick up our end of the rope and start pulling too. That is what she is doing. After decades of avoiding the institutional meat grinder that keeps the gifted at bay and leaves our governance to empty attention whores like Gavin Newsom, Rod Blagojevich and Sarah Palin, she is now willing to give us all the gift of her service. It’s not because she wants attention, or because she just wants to hear her own footsteps on the marble floors of the capital so she can look into the mirror and see “somebody” looking back, it’s because she actually wants to serve her country and to do what she can at this critical juncture to make it a better, healthier and more sane place. She already has benefited from what her country can do for her, she’s now ready to step away from her quiet and comfortable life to do what she can for it.

The world dodged a bullet yesterday when an angry young Iraqi reporter expressed the feelings so many felt around the world when he threw his shoes at President Bush during a surprise farewell visit. Bush has not only come to embody everything the rest of the world likes the least about America, but lived up to the worst fears of a lone superpower drunk on arrogance and ego. Mexican president Vincente Fox summed Bush up best as a “pickup cowboy,” someone who likes to wear the hat but is afraid of horses. Bush liked to wear the uniform of an airman for his now famous photo-op on the deck of the USS Lincoln as well, but was not often seen in it during his stint in the Texas National Guard. He had a fine time talking tough through a bullhorn amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, but didn’t do shit about it. Muhammed Ali once said, “it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it,” and Bush personifies the opposite- the arrogant, bragging American who most certainly can’t do it. He is, and has been his whole life, a big talker who never backed up his words. A total fuck up.

But just consider for one moment if that Iraqi reporter had brandished a gun instead of his footwear and shot Bush. He would have turned the lightening rod of scorn into a sympathetic figure and galvanized the two nations Bush has damaged most, his own and Iraq, into suddenly opposing camps. Few in America would think to blame Bush for the stupidity of a personal visit to a country he personally devastated, and the focus would be on the ungratefulness of the Iraqi people, for whom, sadly, so many Americans wrongly feel they or their loved ones gave up their lives. All the hurt and the anguish pent up over the waste of those lives would have suddenly been unleashed in outrage over the attack on an American President. Worse still, any and all criticism of the wounded or slain Bush would suddenly become muted and the worst president since Woodrow Wilson would become an untouchable folk hero. All of Bush’s shortcomings, his inability to reason or think or speak a clear sentence would overnight become endearing. Halted too would be any investigations into the breathtaking offenses Bush committed against the American people and our Constitution. America would have embarrassed itself grandly to the world by shedding tears over this turd who has wreaked such havoc around the world and the hole we are now in would have been so much deeper and the world so much more polarized.

Instead, so very fortunately for all of us, affection for him remains limited to the twenty percent of Americans who were excited about Sarah Palin and believe that Joan of Arc was kin of Noah. The rest of us will remember him rightly as the greatest political failing our country has ever produced. And maybe, just maybe, we can learn from it.

One of the most amazing things about the extraordinary Barack Obama is that he was able to maneuver his way through the notorious cesspool of Chicago politics without getting dirty. Politics is a dirty game to start with, but in Chicago it’s particularly nasty sewage and he had to swim alongside some serious turds. But other than his house deal with Tony Rezko, not even Hillary Clinton’s machine was able to find anything on him. It’s just hard to fathom how a choirboy can not only get along, but get ahead there but, if the Clinton’s with all of their resources couldn’t dig up anything, it’s hard to imagine any turd was left unturned. The Clintons are, let’s face it, very experienced turd turners.

Enter the strong late candidate in the rich field of contenders for Douchebag of 2008, Illinois governor Rob Blagojevich. It’s a award that looked all but sewn up by former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick whose bald faced lies were so hilariously exposed by his imbecilic and pornographic text messages. But, by trying to sell off his appointment to Obama’s vacated senate seat- and discussing it on the phone in graphic and naked terms- Blagojevich blew past the hapless Kilpatrick for the lead for the coveted award. But like any other politician who starts to go down, there is a rippling effect that starts attorney’s phones ringing, and you can bet they are ringing all over Chicago and Washington. In particular here, Jesse Jackson Jr’s ear must be red as he apparently had agreed to “pay to play” with Blagojevich and whose career, and perhaps liberty, is now in peril. But like any criminal who gets caught, Blagojevich will try to leverage anything he has to avoid prison, and anything he might have on Obama and his people will top that list.

What makes this so challenging for Obama is the notion of guilt by association coupled with the underlying suspicion so many have that he can’t have come from Chicago and be that clean. So clean in fact that Obama is literally holding the rest of the American political establishment hostage. There can be no doubt that a status quo filled with old boys and old ways would love to see this new kid in the clean uniform who threatens them taken down a few notches which is why the Republican National Committee wasted no time in making a noise. The more threatening forces are moving much more quietly, we can be sure.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Obama in this mess is the Web Hubble principle. Mr. Hubble, you may remember, was a Clinton crony from the infamous Rose Law firm in Little Rock where it turned out he was in the frequent habit of charging clients for time he did not put in and work he did not do. Hubble took a very public trip from the Associate Attorney General’s office to the Big House, and the journey was spiced up further by the revelation that among the bills sent to clients was thousands of dollars spent at Victoria Secret from which Mrs. Hubble received nary a thong. Before Hubble, of course, Ronald Reagan had James Watt, Michael Deaver and Joe Strauss. Jimmy Carter had Bert Lance. The list of presidential cronies who humiliate their bosses is virtually endless. So, it’s has just become an accepted axiom that each successive resident of the White House will have a douchebag or two in the laundry basket. Except, Barack Obama. Obama has much of the country believing that he is what he says he is and that he has indeed practiced his espoused brand of “new politics” from which no skeletons should appear. As the Blagojevich saga unfolds, and the tapes get played, we can only hope that neither he nor Rham Emmanuel makes a damaging appearance and that we can continue to believe- to hope- that Obama did indeed make it through Chicago without “getting any on him.”