What He Said

Ezra Klein, in response to the response on Ron Rosenbaum's article that heaped light praise on liberal guilt and its possible role for Obama, says good and true stuff:

Ross has an interesting rejoinder to Ron Rosenbaum's defense of liberal guilt, and he asks, "Its political consequences aside, is guilt an appropriate response to the sins of your ancestors (whether biological or ideological)? Or is it a character flaw - a form of self-congratulatory scrupulosity...what's at issue in the debate over 'liberal guilt' isn't whether Buckley should feel guilty about what Buckley did; it's whether I, as a twentysomething conservative, should feel guilty about what he did - and, more broadly, whether I, as a twentysomething white American, should feel guilty about what white Americans used to do to black Americans."

This merits two replies. The first is whether "guilt" is quite the correct term here. I don't actually know many liberals who wake up feeling personally bad about themselves because their great-grandfathers were complicit in Jim Crow. Rather, I know a lot of liberals who believe we, as a society, bear a debt to African-Americans which is nowhere near repaid. It's easy to get hung up on the word "guilt," but "responsibility" may be a better term.

The second point is that it's not merely what "white Americans used to do to black Americans." If racism could be spoken of in the past tense and contemporary society had achieved some rough level of racial equity, then guilt would indeed be a peculiar response. But white America profited handsomely, hugely, off of slavery. And those proceeds weren't quickly spent down in the late-1800s. They exist, currently, in our assets, our bank accounts, our inheritances. As I found when I wrote a feature on poverty in 2005, when the measure is a family's yearly pay, whites take home $55,768, blacks net $34,369, and Hispanics make $34,262. Roughly divided, blacks and Hispanics make 61 percent of what whites make. Wealth, however, is another story: White households have an average $88,651 in assets. Hispanics have $7,932 and blacks $5,988. A quick trip back to the calculator shows that Hispanics have nine percent as much wealth as whites, while blacks command a bit less than seven percent.

So guilt, responsibility, whatever you want to call it. It's not simply a response to injustices committed a century ago, but a reply to inequities that persist today. White America profited from slavery, racism, and economic discrimination, and black America paid for it -- they paid for it financially, and educationally, but also psychologically. Their grandparents couldn't drink at white water fountains, their parents were passed over for jobs and harassed on the street, they find nooses hung in their workplace. Those of us who traverse this country without that legacy and its attendant psychic and economic effects have, frankly, come out the winners here. The stats tell the story: We are richer, better educated, less likely to spend time in jail, and so forth. Are all those disparities attributable to racism? Maybe, maybe not. But certainly some of them are. And so we who have benefited from these injustices -- even indirectly -- do have some responsibility to try and right them.

Yep.  I don't agree with all of the tenets of Rosenbaum's argument, but Klein is spot-on, as he often is.  The reasons I like Obama?  See his 2002 speech about Iraq, during which he outlined an outcome of the war that is amazingly like what happened:

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.... The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors...and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president.

And this op-ed by his U of C colleague Cass Sunstein is persuasive as well:

Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.

He is also a friend. But since his election to the U.S. Senate, he does not exactly call every day.

  On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.

In about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the president's power as commander in chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counterargument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.

This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side.

This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years -- a careful and evenhanded analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view.

The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of the Reagan administration.

But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by both Republicans and Democrats. Some local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn't hurt that he's a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able.

It's kinda sad that the idea of a curious, open-minded president seems so appealing, but these are our times.