The OTHER thing that should not be forgiven

This remarkable, ten minute editorial by Keith Olbermann offers an enormous list of things that "we" have forgiven Senator Clinton for.

Olbermann says that the one thing that is unforgivable is Clinton's raising the spectre of assassination.

His list, however, was all about her actions in pursuing the nomination. On this Memorial Day weekend, it is fitting to point out the one enormous issue not of process, but of substance, that was missing from Mr. Olbermann's list: Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the war in Iraq. 4,080 of our nation's children have given their lives for that war. By some estimates, the total number of casualties linked to the war range between 150,000 and a million human beings.

As Barack Obama notes, even the proponents of the war have "failed to demonstrate how the war in Iraq has made us safer." Yet, Senator Clinton continues to defend her vote to go war.

We cannot forgive that which Clinton has yet to acknowledge requires forgiveness. Come clean, Senator Clinton, admit what Barack Obama knew from the outset: The Iraq war should never have been authorized and should never have been waged. Until then, whatever forgiveness you need for mistakes you make on the campaign trail will pale in comparison to the unforgiven enormous lapse of judgment that has, sadly, given this nation 4,080 more true heroes to remember and honor on this Memorial Day.

A sad reminder of why we are in this

Ted Kennedy has a brain tumor.

Even with the a health care plan that equals what every American would get under an Obama or Clinton administration, he has a brain tumor. Even with the world's best health care, most patients with this kind of cancer are expected to lose this battle within one to five years. He may lose this battle, but his tireless work on our behalf should inspire us to win this war.

Not only must we provide health care for all Americans -- and let us meet Ted Kennedy's goal of having this in place by 2010 -- but let us also return our focus to spending money in a manner that makes us safer.

Barack Obama says that the Iraq far has made us less safe. But that is hardly the whole story. The cost of the Iraq war is at least one trillion dollars. The total cost of the Bush tax cuts is around three and a half trillion dollars. With a little over three hundred million people in the United States, that amounts to $1,500 per person. Every family of four has spent $6,000 financing the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Total spending on all health research conducted world-wide was $129 billion in 2003, and was estimated to be rising at $10 billion per year. By this estimate, spending in 2008 will be $179 billion in 2008.

Quick math: We have spent, in tax cuts for the wealthy and the Iraq war, more than 25 times the total global annual investment in basic human health research. Imagine the progress we could have made, the lives we could have saved, had that money gone to seeking a cure for cancer and AIDS. How much safer our children would be if we had used the money to tackle the looming disaster of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Would a decision to spend this money on research instead of war and tax cuts have resulted in a cure that would could today use to resolve Ted Kennedy's malignant glioma? Maybe not. But it has absolutely cost millions of people world-wide their health and in many cases their lives. Imagine if we had accomplished in the seven years since the tax cuts and war efforts had taken place what we will not, under today's spending scenarios, accomplish for decades? What if the state of the art of medicine in 2008 was equal to what, with today's spending, it will not be until 2033?

We will never know. And saddled with debt and war, it will be difficult to move toward progress. But move we will. There is hope. We are a strong nation. And we will find the strength to redefine our priorities in a way that makes us all safer -- not just from real or imagined military threats, but from all things that threaten our health or welfare.

Ted Kennedy, you have fought for the health of this nation for decades, and we thank you. We hope your unmatched determination keeps you by our side far into the future. But we will have learned nothing from your example if we do not pause and ask: If America had heeded Ted Kennedy's voice on health policy, tax policy, and the war, how many families would have been spared the sorrow that his family now feels? What diseases that now ravage our lives would be relegated to easily cured annoyances?

We stand on the edge of a sea change in American politics. It is fitting that Ted Kennedy, an icon of the future that could have been, stands today beside Barack Obama to seek the future that we deserve. It is easy to say "yes, we can". It is easy to say "change", or "hope". But today, in the most grim manner possible, we are reminded that those words have meaning.

Fixing Campaign Finance The Obama-Tzedakah Way

Much has been written about Barack Obama's "Amazing Money Machine." As of March 31, 2008, Obama had raised about two hundred thirty four million dollars from individual donors. This puts him on track to raise over half a billion dollars for the 2008 elections. And he is doing it with an average donation of under $100. Indeed, his fund raising base is so wide that almost one out of ten Obama voters has given money to his campaign.

It is clear that Obama's model has changed the thinking about campaign finance reform. Joshua Green's article in the Atlantic describes the impact as the conventional wisdom now casts it: "Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat."

This is a terrific achievement whose importance to democracy cannot be overstated. But the conventional wisdom that the significance lies in simply diluting the importance of big donors misses the point.

The significance is not that Obama's model ended the system whereby the "a handful of rich donors control the political process." Indeed, McCain -- apparently a campaign finance reformer only when it advanced his political ends -- proves that the rich still control much of the process. His McCain Victory '08 fund creates a "hybrid legal structure" under which "up to $70,000 in individual contributions [can be accepted] by channeling the money into different McCain-centric funds. The first $2,300 of that would go to McCain's primary campaign. The Republican National Committee would receive $28,500 of the donation. The remaining funds would be divided equally, up to $10,000 a piece, among four states the campaign has designated as battlegrounds for November: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico." So a husband, wife, and three adult children could donate $350,000.

It is a remarkable achievement that Obama has built his small money donor base to the point where he can seriously consider eliminating even the inference of improper influence by voluntarily capping donations at well under the currently federally permitted maximum of $2300. Indeed, he would be a formidable fundraiser even with a $150 cap. But as Clinton's $11,000,000 loans to her campaign and McCain's efforts to raise $70,000 per donor indicate, the small donor model does not work for all candidates. Indeed, that model did not work for Obama at the outset, as he was not able to launch his campaign solely with the small donations that he is considering making his sole source of financing going forward.

The significance of what he has done in this year is not that he proved small fund raising is viable in a presidential race (Howard Dean did that). Rather, he proved that functionally anonymous giving can drive a campaign's finances. And that people will give at least $2,300 with no realistic expectation of buying anything except a better chance for their candidate to win.

True, over $200, there is no anonymity -- it is all reported. I maxed out in the primary, and you can look that up on opensecrets, Huffington's fundrace, or directly from the FEC. But the point is that with over 1,500,000 donors, Barack Obama has no idea who I am. His staff doesn't know me. Honestly, I didn't even get a thank you note. And I shouldn't. Because this is not about me. It is not about any of the million and a half donors. Rather, it is about all of us. The thank you I want is Barack Obama, in the White House, keeping his promises. So I donated precisely because I don't get access based on my donation. And in an Obama administration, neither does Halliburton, or the drug lobby, or the $100,00 a pop Clinton "Hillraisers", or McCain's bundlers. Certainly, Obama has big donors in his past, but he has proven they need not be promised a thing -- as they are not central pieces in his fund raising. If he does move forward with voluntarily limiting donations to less than the federal cap, it will seal the deal.

Democrats are often criticized for not discussing their faith, and I should point out that this concept of anonymous giving forms a central part of mine. In Judaism, "Tzedakah", translated as a form of "justice", refers "to the religious obligation to perform charity, and philanthropic acts, which Judaism emphasises are important parts of living a spiritual life; Jewish tradition argues that the second highest form of tzedakah is to anonymously give donations to unknown recipients. Unlike philanthropy, which is completely voluntary, tzedakah is seen as a religious obligation." While it is preferable to give to an unknown recipient to avoid shaming them, when the identity of the recipient is important, Tzedakah teaches that we should still give anonymously, noting that "the greatest sages used to walk about in secret and put coins in the doors of the poor."

The wisdom of anonymous Tzedakah is obvious: One should not give for their own glory or private benefit.

Putting the lessons of the Obama campaign finance revolution together with the lessons of Tzedakah, it becomes obvious how campaign finance reform must play out in order to truly isolate politicians from the undue influence of the money they need to run their campaigns.

My Obama-Tzedakah proposal is this:

(1) Precisely flip the reporting rule. Currently, donors giving $200 and over must be identified in campaign finance reporting. Instead, only donors giving under $200 should be permitted to be identified.
(2) Require that campaigns be prohibited from directly accepting donations over $200.
(3) Allow donations over $200, but require that such donations be made to the FEC which collects the money and forwards it, together with many other donations, in one check to the candidate, while being required by law to keep secret the identity of the donor and the candidate to which they donated. The donor is not permitted to get any kind of receipt or canceled check that identifies the identity of the recipient. For online donations, the donor would be required to be donate through a site operated by the FEC.
(4) The FEC would report aggregate statistics, but not the amounts of individual donations (i.e. "in March 2012, Obama's reelection bid received $28,888,221 from 90,000 donors"). Preferably, the banks and FEC would not be permitted even to identify the fact that somebody had donated to federal campaigns, or to provide any receipt or canceled check for such a donation. If such a rule is not functional, the FEC should make that information available to the public, but only in an aggregate way, giving a single number for each donor's total contributions to all federal candidates combined.
(5) Candidates would be allowed to oversee the process using attorneys or accountants who are prohibited from reporting back to the campaign any specific donor identification information.
(6) To provide a disincentive to end-run the process through a 527 or a structure like McCain's Victory '08 Fund, the maximum donation cap should be significantly increased.

What do we get from this?

First, counter-intuitively, we get more transparency. While we lose the ability to see who gave to which candidate, we get an iron-clad list of everybody who was promised a quid-pro-quo: Nobody. Because a candidate cannot verify that a contribution went to them, even a donor who showed a canceled check for a huge sum could not prove to the candidate that it was made to that candidate, or even in that race.

Second, the free speech arguments that could ultimately fell existing campaign finance laws would be eliminated. The only remaining argument is that it is a free speech right to hand a big pile of money directly to a candidate -- hardly a convincing concept.

Finally, the benefits of the Obama model are immediately visited on the old fund raising models as well. While a person who truly believes in a candidate will still make a big donation, few people will believe they can donate their way to a federal judge or ambassador appointment regardless of the size of their anonymous donation or the number of anonymous donations they claim to have bundled.

The Vice Presidential Gambit

Many are questioning what Clinton wants out of this process. The math alone makes Obama the inevitable nominee. The Superdelegates are switching their Presidential preference or at least questioning it. So what is her exit strategy?

Nobody knows for sure. She may want help retiring her campaign debt, input on policy issues, or a role in picking Vice President. But these rewards are simply too small for her. She wants the ability to force herself onto the ticket as the candidate for Vice President. This ability, whether exercised or not, allows her not to request things of Obama, but to demand them. Refuse them, and Obama has a running mate not of his own choosing.

How does this work? The fact that Obama is rapidly closing in on the 2,025 delegate votes necessary to clinch the nomination does not mean that he can command those same delegates to vote for his Vice Presidential choice. Obama has a lead of about 168 elected delegates. The initial flood of superdelegates to Clinton, the pained stories of superdelegates suffering the anger of the Clintonites, all of the superdelegates who feel they have debts to the Clintons add up to a huge number of delegates seeking redemption from the Clintons even as they pledge to vote for Obama as the better, and inevitable, nominee.

Redemption could easily be offered in exchange for a vote for Clinton as Vice President -- even over Obama's objections. Even the pledged delegates might seek to heal wounds or form a "dream ticket" by putting Clinton in as Vice President despite Obama's objections. Certainly the superdelegates would be motivated to mitigate the Clintons' wrath. Assuming an even split in the preference of superdelegates (not who they will vote for, but who they wished would win -- a very different question), and assuming the 168 elected delegate gap remains, only 85 Obama delegates need to vote for Clinton for Vice President in order to put her on the ballot. By staying in until the bitter end, Clinton cannot win the Presidential nod -- but she can, and intends to, close the gap further in a way that strengthens her the Vice Presidential gambit.

This would be a horrible outcome. Barack Obama needs the ability to pick his own running mate. It would be unprecedented in modern times to deny a nominee his Vice Presidential pick. I am hopeful that delegates will honor history and reason in giving Obama his Vice Presidential pick. But forcing herself into the Vice President slot is very much within the reach of Clinton, and becomes closer with every delegate she picks up. The question is whether her ego forces her to flout tradition and reason in this way.

The Devolution Is In The Details

The "Gas Tax Holiday" debate points up a key difference between Clinton and Obama, but not the difference Clinton hopes. Clinton has made a point of taking positions that can be explained in a single sentence that appeals viscerally to voters, regardless of whether those positions are actually good policy.

The most recent example is the gas tax: "Hillary wants the oil companies to pay for the gas tax this summer - so you don’t have to." However, economists universally agree that a gas tax holiday "would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers," "would encourage people to keep buying costly imported oil and do nothing to encourage conservation," and "would provide very little relief to families feeling squeezed."

Obama's position is that the economists are right, and what the people deserve is a comprehensive fix, not a band-aid. Unfortunately, a comprehensive fix is complicated to explain and even more complicated to get properly reported in the press. As articulated by Obama, it sounds like this: "That's why we'll put a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use it to help Indiana families pay their heating and cooling bills and reduce energy costs. We'll also take steps to reduce the price of oil and increase transparency in how prices are set so we can ensure that energy companies aren't bending the rules. And to help Indiana families meet the rising cost of gas, we'll put a middle class tax cut in their pockets that will save them $1,000 a year, and we'll eliminate income taxes altogether for seniors making less than $50,000."

Clinton and McCain have both shown their willingness to believe that a good idea will devolve to into a political disaster if it cannot be easily explained. Barack Obama is unwilling to compromise good policy for political expediency.

When Barack Obama is sworn into the office next January, we will put to rest forever the idea that Americans are simply too inattentive and disinterested to be swayed by an argument that requires polysyllabic words. We have insisted for generations on free, quality high school education for all our people. It is time to believe in the return from that investment.

Enough With The Elitism Arguments

I keep hearing Clinton surrogates claim Barack Obama is an "elitist". The latest is that he must win Indiana or he is an "elitist" and out of touch with white working class voters. Will somebody in the media please pull out a dictionary? At the outset, he is not elitist because he does not believe that an elite group should rule the nation (compared to, say, those who find it acceptable for two families to run the United States for 28 sequential years). The inevitable Clinton fallback is that his elite education set him up to be elitist. I went to Harvard Law School while Barack Obama attended, and that argument is totally contrary to that experience I shared with him.

There is no secret club, no secret handshake. If we were let in on a special natural right to run the world based on our "elite" education, I must have been absent that day. What I took away from my experience was not a respect for elite, top-down rule, but an abiding fear of it. It is this disdain for elitism that I hear in Obama's voice.

From the first day, we learned that judges make close calls. And they often make them wrong. Three years, and thousands of cases studied, reinforce these core truths: The world is not simple; judges and leaders make mistakes; and the mission of government is not to dictate truth, but to protect the ability of the people to fix those mistakes (or, as the "elitists" of the 18th century put it, to provide the people a mechanism for "redress of grievances").

I have long described Harvard Law's lingering lesson as recasting our bimodal "black or white" world as a spectrum of grays. I see this lesson reflected in Barack Obama's words that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America." Our nation, in short, is not one where half of the people are right and half are wrong, but one we try to make our way to the right answer by compromise, discussion, and cooperation.

Our recent leaders, by contrast, have tried to break that great strength by casting us as a nation of opposites. They are wrong. They are selfish. And they are doing it to ensure that they perpetuate their own rule -- the very definition of elitism.

The argument that the Clinton campaign repeatedly makes to superdelegates, that Obama is less electable in a general election, is the model of elitism. We, the people, have a grievance: We are sick of politics as usual. We are ready for a change. The Clintons, having ruled the nation for a decade, know that the voters didn't really mean what they said with their votes. The voters are simply incompetent to pick the right candidate to run against McCain. And the Clintons are willing to overrule the people because they don't trust the judgment of the people. How much more elitist could one be?

Well, actually, slightly more. The Clintons also know which voters matter. Which ones should be listened to, and which ones should be ignored. Caucus state voters are simply activists -- ignore them. African American voters, students, highly educated voters -- they aren't the "real" democrats, ignore them. White, working class voters -- they know better than any of the others who the best candidate is. I hear in that a refrain that democracy be damned, and I say no. Democracy is at the core of our ability to fix the mistakes of the past. And none of us are so learned or elite that we dare tamper with the gears of our democracy.

What drew me first to Barack Obama was not his thrilling speaking style, but his substance. He gets it -- trust the people. His campaign is run from the grassroots. His great strength -- often mocked by those who believe in top-down rule -- is to inspire ordinary citizens to make a difference. To deliver to the people not the change they seek, but the tools to to make that change. His time in office will one day end, but those tools will remain to empower people for generations.