The Gore endorsement rally (with a special appearance by Detroit Piston Chauncey Billups), but Obama’s speech in Flint, in which he detailed his economic plans, plans the Wall Street Journal describes as “a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces.” From his Journal interview:

“Globalization and technology and automation all weaken the position of workers,” he said, and a strong government hand is needed to assure that wealth is distributed more equitably….The heart of Sen. Obama’s spending program is his plan to spend $15 billion a year for 10 years on energy technology. It would be funded by revenue collected from a separate Obama proposal to cap greenhouse emissions through a system of trading pollution permits. Sen. Obama would auction those permits to producers of carbon dioxide, such as electric utilities, and figures the sales would yield about $100 billion a year. Most of that would go to consumers as rebates on utility bills, he said. He also would fund an “infrastructure reinvestment bank” that would finance $60 billion in high-speed railways, improved energy grids and other projects over a decade. He would double spending on basic research, subsidize investment in high-speed Internet hook-ups, and offer $4,000 a year in tuition credits for students who later perform public services.

The focus on his economic stimulus reminded me of earlier chatter in The New Republic and, more recently, by John Cassidy in the New York Review of Books about Obama’s ties to behavioral economists. the Flint speech tilts Obama towards Cassidy’s argument that Clintonian-style working around the edges of the economy will not suffice.

Obama continues to offer the promise of “green jobs,” planning to spend $150 billion to “create up to 5 million jobs,” offering as examples a Pennsylvania wind turbine factory and the manufacture of “hybrid or electric cars.”

My energy plan will invest $150 billion over the next ten years to establish a green energy sector that will create up to 5 million jobs over the next two decades. Good jobs, like the ones I saw in Pennsylvania where workers make wind turbines, or the jobs that will be created when plug-in hybrids or electric cars start rolling off the assembly line here in Michigan. We’ll help manufacturers — particularly in the auto industry — convert to green technology, and help workers learn the skills they need.

(On the Media looked at the rhetoric of “green jobs” last month.)

In recent weeks, I’ve noted Obama’s apparent tack rightward on Colombia , and Israel-Palestine and Iran. Today, in an interview with Jorge Ramos, Obama threatened sanctions against Venezuela, calling Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is a “threat” to the national security of the U.S.  The latter statement is new–  last month in a speech, he said that Venezuela does not “pose a serious threat to the U.S.”

Will Obama move even further to the right next month to compensate for McCain’s visit to Colombia? Will he

Jack Kelly also noticed Obama’s change in heart:

Sen. Obama at AIPAC was significantly more hawkish than he was earlier on the campaign trail. Has he changed his world view? Or is he just changing his spots in pursuit of votes?

(I should add that I’m not wholly opposed to seeing Obama turn “right” turn right. I agreed with the Washington Post’s call that Obama rethink any “arbitrary timetable” for withdrawing troops from Iraq.)

Jennifer Golz and her editor at the Naperville Sun could benefit from reviewing the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association’s Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology. In reporting on a fairly standard theft conviction, Golz thinks it’s sooo weird to discover someone who prefers to live as a woman. In Male defendant’s lipstick, ponytail don’t deter judge at sentencing, Golz writes,

Taylur Harkless is a young man from Naperville…..Harkless donned a fitted black sweater and patent handbag, with his black hair pulled high atop his head in a ponytail. His lips quivered in red lipstick as Judge Kathryn Creswell sentenced the 18-year-old man for his role in the theft…He will join his accomplice and “lover,” Luis A. Aguilar, 21, of Aurora, who was sentenced to four years in prison

Besides the egregious use of inverted commas to refer to Harkless’s boyfriend, twice, (recalling some of Mike Royko’s most loathsome comments 20 years or so ago), the Sun doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of being transgendered, which the NLGJA defines as “people whose biological and gender identity or expression may not be the same. ” The Stylebook Supplement suggests “when writing about a transgender person, use the name and personal pronouns that are consistent with the way the individual lives publicly.”  Oh well, Naperville Sun, better luck next time you write about a  transgender resident of your community . As Sassafras points out, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Noam Cohen looks at Obama’s online success in the Sunday Times. Placed alongside similar recent pieces from Umair Haque, David F. Carr and Marc Ambinder , and we have a trend, (which makes me skeptical.)

In Obama and the Rise of Asymmetrical Competition, Haque’s thesis is that the Obama campaign “reversed tremendous resource asymmetries” by “shifting from core to edge” and “leverag[ing] resources at the edges of the firm, instead of at it’s core…:[O]ften, in a hyperconnected world, instead of hoarding a critical resource, more value can be created by sharing it at the edges….[Today, ] “pint-sized revolutionaries are able to pop seemingly out of nowhere and topple yesterday’s giants – fast.”

David F. Carr, a BO volunteer in Florida, explores “the Barackobama.com Difference.”

Obama’s strategy didn’t rely on unique or bleeding-edge technology—far from it—but on using established hardware and software to empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers…. The secret sauce is not so much the software as how the campaign uses it. The Web tools that let volunteers organize themselves happen to mesh particularly well with Obama’s message [of] “this is your campaign, this is not about me.”

Cohen:

Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”

The flood of praise for the campaign’s online successes often obscures the real-world challenges that accompany it. Obama campaign CTO Mike Slaby addressed those challenges at a forum organized by Northwestern’s Media Management Center and the Kellogg School. Your believers are the best advocate for you, he said. But since you you don’t get to tell people what to say, the key is communicating to your peopole the values you want them talking about. In any case, it’s “scary to give up control.”

Aminder takes on another theme we’ve looked at here– how the online campaign could translate into governance:

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer….But the Web, like the politics it seeks to transform, is unruly and fickle. The online networks that have turbocharged Obama’s candidacy could end up hemming him in, and even stalling his agenda, as president.

Obama has pushed transparency and straight talk in his campaign, but such values were absent from  notable actions he’s taken since the Tuesday night victory speech. He’s trumpeted openness in the Senate and on the campaign trail, but the theme was not evident yesterday when he snuck away from the press, and us, to meet with Hillary Clinton. (Lynne Sweet pointed out Obama’s inconsistencies on transparency a few months ago.) NBC’s Chuck Todd shoots down David Weinberger’s hopes for an open vetting process, and suggests maybe it’s not so bad:

“This is only a taste of the media deception to come, the granddaddy of them all when it comes to secret meetings is the vice presidential search,” Todd said, after calling an end to the hunt for information. “It’s a frustrating game campaigns play when it comes to these private meetings. But they rarely pay a real price because secretly the press corps enjoys the chase.”

Reviewing Obama’s AIPAC speech, Dana Milbank writes that  “as a pandering performance, it was the full Monty.”

He promised $30 billion in military assistance for Israel. He declared that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps‘ Quds Force has “rightly been labeled a terrorist organization.” He used terms such as “false prophets of extremism” and “corrupt” while discussing Palestinians. And he promised that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided”… [and] threatened to “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. . . . Everything.”

Calling the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization seems to contradict his past criticism of Hillary Clinton’s Senate vote; the latter comment uncomfortably echoed Clinton’s “totally obliterate” comment, which Obama criticized when it was uttered in April. Obama himself doesn’t seem to agree with his united Jerusalem push, as his campaign has already issued a “clarification.”

We’re a Winner, Keep on Pushing, Its All Right, and I’m So Proud will be heard at more than one celebration Tuesday, the anniversary of Curtis Mayfield’s birth.

From the new documentary, Movin’ On Up” The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions:

An Obama supporting friend told me early last year that her concern was not whether he would be elected, but whether he’d be a great president. This weekend, the Washington Post seemed to take after my friend, asking how “transformational” a president he might be.  Jim Hoagland pointed to

the widening gap between Obama’s repeated attacks on “Washington’s conventional thinking” as the root of all evil and his reliance on established consensus when he is questioned in detail on Middle East peace, Iran, the U.S. position in its own hemisphere and other key issues….[H]e is largely right in arguing that new thinking is desperately needed in U.S. foreign policy — but he is failing to show how an Obama presidency would produce and apply such thinking to the policy disasters he decries. This means he is not using the campaign to gather public support for the specific steps that he will need to take if he is to be a “transformational” president.

The Post’s lead Saturday Editorial calls for him to demonstrate some “already-overdue rethinking.”

If the positive trends continue, proponents of withdrawing most U.S. troops, such as Mr. Obama, might be able to responsibly carry out further pullouts next year. Still, the likely Democratic nominee needs a plan for Iraq based on sustaining an improving situation, rather than abandoning a failed enterprise. That will mean tying withdrawals to the evolution of the Iraqi army and government, rather than an arbitrary timetable; Iraq’s 2009 elections will be crucial. It also should mean providing enough troops and air power to continue backing up Iraqi army operations such as those in Basra and Sadr City. When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.

Were it not for Hillary Clinton’s silly assassination reference last Friday, perhaps Barack Obama’s detailed and nuanced speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami might have received more attention. I’m not sure that any major presidential candidate has presented such a detailed overview of Latin America policy in my lifetime. I disagree with parts of the speech (on the embargo, I’m closer to Chris Dodd, Brent Scowcroft, and, well, 184 national governments), agree with others, and find other aspects inspiring. I’m particularly impressed to find such a thoughtful meditation from a man who has never been to the region (other than that March vacation in St. Thomas), and am curious as to what policies his administration would promote.

Al Giordano liked the speech, at least in part:

When was the last time – if there ever was one – that a US presidential nominee spoke in terms of a “top down” versus “bottom up” dialectic regarding democracy in the Americas?…The message to the majority of South American nations is clear: no longer will US policy toward an entire region be determined by just one country’s government….What was new and different… was not of his own invention, but, rather, a consequence of the changes that have already occurred from the bottom up in Latin America and his luck or wisdom to be young enough to have noticed…

Giordano also highlights Obama’s “panders:”

[The speech] broke definitively from some of those [28 year-old orthodox] policies while pandering to others…Obama’s break with US policies and in favor of easing certain aspects of the embargo toward Cuba were bracketed by the blanket statement: “I will maintain the embargo.” Equal to his Republican rival, John McCain, this statement was at odds with past statements by both men, years ago, indicating that the embargo had failed and it was time to move on.

The speech has been a hot topic of Latin Americans, and Latin Americanists, Cubans in particular. As El Pais corresopdent Antonio Cano points out, “Cuba is to Latin America what Palestine is to the Arab world. (Cano adds that Latin America has “seemed to have lost its international relevance.” The BBC reports on an laudatory open letter the Cuban dissident group Women in White wrote Obama responding to the CANF speech.

They applauded his offer to allow Cuban Americans to freely visit relatives here [and said] that a more creative policy could help the transition towards democracy and that the current confrontation is used by the authorities in Havana to justify their repression.

A Cuban newspaper columnist named Fidel Castro also found parts to like, and dislike:

Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor. I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him and about expressing my points of view on his words frankly….Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable hand-outs and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it….

Tom Hayden’s critique:

[T]he best that can be said of this speech is that it’s a brave beginning, a break from Bush…Now that Latin America, on its own, has swept those dictatorships away and is following its own democratic path, it is presumptuous of Obama to propose himself as the savior of Latin America from Hugo Chávez, guerrillas and drug lords, all of them symptomatic responses to US policies over many decades…If Barack Obama can ask us to better understand the black anger of his pastor Jeremiah Wright, surely he himself should be able to understand the volcanic rage that echos across Latin America in voices like those of Hugo Chávez and before him, Fidel Castro.

Hayden alos criticizes Obama’s planned expansion of the Drug War:

[I]t is legitimate both in terms of policy and politics for Obama to defend a law enforcement approach as part of the mix, but a war on gangs, like a war on drugs, is hopeless, counter-productive and immoral without a war on the greed that is devouring hundreds of millions of young people in Latin America….[T]he dangerous flaw in Obama’s speech was his apparent commitment to supporting the US counterinsurgency war In Columbia, secretive drug wars across the continent, and a veiled threat against Venezuela…

Who wrote Obama’s speech? Earlier this spring, the Miami Herald (dead link, alas) reported that Dan Restrepo of the Center for American Progress coordinates Obama’s Latin American team. Whoever wrote the CANF speech did not seem to borrow much from the U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality report released by the bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations earlier in the month. (Steve Clemons called the report “a zinger…just fantastic.”) The Council’s six points on Cuba policy include at least two that we didn’t here from Obama:

5. Mindful of the last one hundred years of U.S.-Cuba relations, assure Cubans on the island that the United States will pursue a respectful arm’s-length relationship with a democratic Cuba.

6. Repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law, which removed most of the executive branch’s authority to eliminate economic sanctions.

The pledge to “target support to bottom-up growth through micro financing, vocational training, and small enterprise development” was reminiscent of chatter of a Marshall Plan for Mexico that I’ve heard from Steven Hill and Gregory Rodriguez, both of the New America Foundation.

There’s been less written about the Andean policies in the speech. Obama promised to expand the Andean Counter-Drug Program (Plan Andino), and supports Colombia’s “right” to send troops into its neighbors’ territory, and threatened “strong sanctions” against Venezuela and Ecuador. Rather than condemn the Bush administration’s attempt to aid, at least, a coup against Hugo Chavez, Obama merely refers to its “clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez.” Jack Tapper asserted that Obama’s contradicted himself in describing his Andean policies; an assertion challenged by the campaign.)

Last year I referred to the possibility of seeing Obama as a blank slate. With regards to Latin America, and likely many other policy areas, Obama is less “a vessel for other’s expectations” (to borrow from Robert Timberg’s description of candidate Reagan) and instead terrain over which advisers and experts will contest.

Jim Webb’s well-timed book tour has made him “one of the veep candidates of choice for the liberal intelligentsia” according to Greg Sargent at TPM. In the flood of blog posts about Webb, his experience as an Emmy-award winning reporter for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHours is rarely mentioned. Robert Timberg discussed Webb the journalist in his 1996 book The Nighingale’s Song.

Webb’s [1983] report from Beirut, which lasted barely seven minutes, was awarded an Emmy. It was his first foray into television. He would later say that the lesson of Lebanon was: “Never get involved in a five-sided argument that’s been going on for two thousand years.”

According to Timberg, Webb was in agreement with then-Rep. John McCain:

John McCain wasn’t buying anything coming out of the White House about Lebanon…”The fundamental question is, What is the United States’ interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, What peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, What government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, How can the U.S. presence stabilize the region?

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports on the work my friend Quinn is doing in support of the Rat City Rollergirls in a trademark negotiation with Starbucks.

Starbucks has asked the league to change its logo, said Quinn Heraty, a New York lawyer representing the Rat City Rollergirls and its national association, The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.

“The issue is with the shape of the logo, including what they’re calling concentric circles,” she said. “They’re saying that the dimensions of the circles are too close to their own. … I mean, come on, circles and portraits? Big deal. Starbucks didn’t invent that….The Starbucks lawyer said that the girls on the roller derby team look scary, and she didn’t think, in her own personal opinion, (that) Starbucks would want to associate themselves with the scary characters of Rat City Rollergirls,” Heraty said. “I just thought it was funny.”

Starbucks is tough. But the Rollergirls are known for being tough, too - and sexy. The amateur league, ranked second in the nation, regularly sells out its monthly bouts where women on skates adopt sporty and sexy alter egos and knock down other women.

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