SLOW Movement

FT: Human beings or human resources?

Human beings or human resources?

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11

Recently, my partner Ching Ling got an iPhone. It is an amazing piece of engineering, so sleek and clever and attractive to handle that you could hardly fail to fall for it. A poet friend who, a while ago, penned a magnificent invective against mobile phones, comparing them to sex aids, would have to revise his lines. This thing is more like a cat: you stroke it and it purrs. Not always a well-behaved cat; plugged in for recharging, it woke us up in the middle of the night bleeping loudly. I have no idea what it wanted.

Essentially, though, it is a toy. Once you acquire an iPhone, you can’t stop playing with it. But the phone is also playing with you. It is making money out of you, cajoling you into signing up for all sorts of unnecessary applications. Watching me playing with it, Ching Ling observed that I had reverted to the age of five; shortly after she revised that to three.

The iPhone represents the power and attraction of the new – of technological innovation, promising social benefits but driven by commercial interests that do not uphold the principle St Paul enunciated in his first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child ... I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. I really don’t know whether an iPhone will help me to live better; I rather suspect not. I have no idea whether mobile phones in general have added to the sum of human well-being. We seemed to get on quite well without them; I have a feeling they have made it harder for people to be on their own.

For a long time now the power of the new has trumped the power of the old. But almost a year ago, when President Barack Obama gave his inaugural address, I noted a sea-change. In the most stirring piece of political oratory delivered for decades, Obama made a distinction between new challenges and instruments and old values, including “tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”. Later in the speech he harked back to one of the battles that gave birth to the US. It seemed the old was making a comeback, and in the UK that coincided with a sense of hollowness and decrepitude in the political project that has dominated the late 1990s and the 2000s, New Labour.

One old thing Obama did not so much talk about as represent was the power of the word. The word is probably the ultimate old thing that went out of fashion: words became “mere rhetoric”, windy nothingnesses set against the hard truths told by numbers. But Obama did not offer rhetoric so much as oratory, and many commented on the debt his speeches owed to classical models. Something rather strange and fascinating was going on: a youthful president, of African-American ancestry, was speaking not in bullet points but in the style of Cicero.

My gripe with Obama’s old things is that they are not old enough. He may speak in the style of Cicero but his values are drawn from the Enlightenment. Of course that makes sense, because America is a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment values Obama praises, such as tolerance and curiosity, are both admirable and essential – especially so in the context of insurgent bigotry. But they are not sufficient.

Sixty-five years ago, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had a nightmare. The Enlightenment, instead of liberating mankind, had bound it in chains. “The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with calamity ... What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to enslave both it and human beings.”

You don’t have to go quite as far as the two dour Frankfurt philosophers to see that the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen both in the state of nature, reduced and damaged possibly beyond repair, and of human beings, retooled as “human resources” – that is, means to be exploited rather than ends in themselves.

I think we need to go back beyond the time of the Enlightenment and the birth of the US to rediscover the values that give god-like dignity (what Plato called the “divine something”) to human beings and restore the non-instrumental beauty of the natural world. One place to start would be the beautifully redesigned Medieval and Renaissance galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. And within those galleries you might pause in front of the Symmachi panel, an exquisite late Roman ivory carving showing a young woman performing a pagan rite at an outdoor altar. Under the shade of a spreading oak an offering is being made, and thanks are being given. We don’t know exactly of what, for what, but we can imagine it has something to do with sky and earth, and the sustaining of life.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Britian's first female diplomats

For 26 years – from their entry into the Foreign Office until the marriage bar was lifted – the UK’s women diplomats had to choose between a husband and public service.

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Britain’s first female diplomats

By Alex Barker

Published: November 6 2009 14:25 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:25

Lady Cicely Mayhew, first woman to join the British diplomatic service, this year

Cicely Mayhew, the first woman to join the British diplomatic service, lives in a handsome cottage near Blenheim Palace, on a street that once served as a set for “Miss Marple”. Now well into her eighties, her memory is not what it was. But she still recites long passages of Shakespeare, chants marching songs from Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoys a pot of vanilla ice-cream most days to make up for wartime rationing.

She is remarkably matter-of-fact about having blazed a trail for women by becoming the King’s first female emissary in 1947. “My attitude was, about time too!” she says. Mayhew had already come up against the barriers that ambitious working women faced – during her wartime service at Bletchley Park, where the codes that protected German communications were cracked, she received lower pay and ranked beneath men who could not boast a first from Oxford. By comparison with that, the diplomatic service was a step forward, albeit a touch patronising. “Our new lamb, that’s what they called me,” Mayhew recalls. “They were all very kind, very courteous.”

The Foreign Office had fought for decades to keep Mayhew’s kind out, often going to great lengths to prove women unworthy. In response to one 1930s committee investigation, it called on every head of mission to consider the question of women in the service, the results of which FCO historians recently reprinted in a striking paper. Even by the standards of their era, the views are extraordinary.

One ambassador said it was “unthinkable” for a diplomat to “produce babies”. Our man in Berne feared that “the clever woman would not be liked and the attractive woman would not be taken seriously”. Then there was this from Bucharest: “The hard-bitten Englishwoman nurtured in the London School of Economics, with a Marx and Engels outlook; the product of Girton or Somerville, interested chiefly in ancient Greek theatre, but wielding from time to time a forceful hockey stick; the shires girl who breakfasts off an ether cocktail and who will abandon the Chancery entirely for the polo field – none of these would be suitable representatives.”

When women, led by Mayhew, finally breached the Foreign Office ramparts, little was changed to accommodate them. Old habits endured. New applicants were still taken to a grand country house, plied with stiff Martinis and tested after dinner, without warning, on administering a fictitious island. There was no special guidance for female entrants and, in age-old Foreign Office tradition, no training either. “You were just flung into a department head-first and told to get on with it,” said Rosamund Huebener, who joined the year after Mayhew. “I had no idea what I was doing and nobody knew what to do with me. It was tremendous fun.”

Some continents, however, remained out of bounds: the Middle East and, more surprisingly, South America. “They thought any young woman would suffer what was euphemistically called a fate worse than death at the hands of some Latin lover,” says Dame Margaret Anstee, who went on to a glittering career with the UN in Bolivia among other places.

Lady Cicely Mayhew in Yugoslavia in 1948

For her first posting, in the late 1940s, Mayhew asked to “have a look behind the Iron Curtain” and embarked on an adventure to Belgrade with her shaggy dog, Hamlet, at her side. Her next assignment was Geneva. It didn’t last long. A dashing foreign office minister – dubbed “the Socialists’ most eligible bachelor” – arrived on an official visit in 1949. At dinner Mayhew commended a speech the minister had delivered earlier that day. “Then he said something about how he had another speech to make – and proposed,” Mayhew recalls. “I was so surprised I said yes.”

And that was the end of Cicely Mayhew’s career as a diplomat. More than anything else, her future had depended on one thing: staying single. Along with all female diplomats, Mayhew’s letter of service stated that she would be “required to resign on marriage”. Other Whitehall departments had dropped the so-called “marriage bar” after the war. The one exception was the diplomatic service.

Very little official explanation was offered, save that diplomats could be sent anywhere in the world at short notice, a condition deemed incompatible with married life. (What on earth would their husband do?) Diplomatic Service Regulation No 5 was just “the order of things”. Those women who left to marry were stripped of their pensions and given a dowry, amounting to a month’s salary for every year they had served. The marriage bar remained in place, rigorously enforced, until 1973.

For 26 years, from the moment women were admitted to the diplomatic service to the point the marriage bar was lifted, Britain’s pioneering female diplomats faced the starkest choice possible between their careers and their private lives, between public service and a husband. There was no middle way.

. . .

The Foreign Office’s decision to do away with the marriage bar was inevitable. Debate was already under way in Britain about the need to guarantee basic equality in the workplace and elsewhere, and in 1975, Harold Wilson’s Labour government passed the Sex Discrimination Act. If the Foreign Office had not removed the bar voluntarily, it would not have been long before it was forced to do so. The mandarins knew they would eventually have to bend with the times.

But – bizarre anachronism though it now appears – the existence of the marriage bar for female diplomats as recently as 36 years ago underlines both how much has changed in the relationship between people and their jobs, and how little. Society still agonises over trade-offs made by working mothers and the halting progress women are making towards equal representation, particularly in senior executive and professional positions. The solution has been to seek – and to legislate for – the “work-life balance”, a state of being we are all enjoined to achieve.

The pioneering female diplomats who served in the Foreign Office between 1947 and 1973 had that balance struck for them. Their superiors concluded that no accommodation between career and family was possible – at least not one involving a husband or children. It was a bar that at some point applied to professions ranging from teaching to the law (see panel below). The tide of equality legislation swept it away, implying to the generations who followed that no job is inherently incompatible with a family life.

But, as any female diplomat will attest, some jobs lend themselves less well to family responsibilities. The barriers may have gone, but the personal trade-offs remain. Moving across continents every three or four years takes a toll on any family or relationship. Women remain significantly underrepresented. To this day the Foreign Office struggles to design a system that is flexible, meets equality legislation, is fair to both sexes, is kind to families and effective. It may be a puzzle with no solution.

. . .

Faced with the stark choice between professional ambition and desire for domesticity, most of Cicely Mayhew’s contemporaries also chose a husband over a career. Mayhew, in common with others, admits it was not a straightforward decision to leave the job she loved. “It is silly to pretend I didn’t have doubts, then or later,” she said. “Did I do the right thing? Should I have stayed? Now of course I have my family, two boys, two girls. How could I possibly wish them away?”

Departures such as hers touched off something of a brouhaha among the male superiors left behind. “The Foreign Office is perturbed,” declared one newspaper article (which described Mayhew as a “glamour girl”). “Its women diplomats are so attractive that it is losing them too fast. All their training and experience is being lost.” In the face of this exodus, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin apparently snapped: “We’ve turned the Foreign Office into a matrimonial bureau!”

Dame Anne Warburton, our first female ambassador

Of course, it was not the marriage bar that was blamed so much as the fact that women had been allowed into the service at all. Grace Gardner, who joined in 1947, came up against similar bunkum. When she announced she was leaving, a “rather crusty” senior colleague blurted out: “The trouble with you women is that you will go and get married.”

“You’ve had 11 of the best years of my life,” Gardner replied. “What are you grumbling about?”

Yet it is wrong to assume that the pioneering female diplomats saw the marriage bar as unjust at the time. The gravity of the choice it forced upon them certainly added an extra edge to marriage proposals (one Foreign Office veteran admitted that it took her six years to decide). But many took the marriage bar for granted or never thought of mixing a family and a career, regardless of the rules. There was no push to remove it.

Some of those who persevered came to rationalise the direction their careers had taken as the result of never having met the right person. One put it this way: “If you are very much in love, it is pretty clear what you do.” Some pioneers are candid about the emotional price of a career in diplomacy, of options narrowed, of paths chosen “in spite of yourself”. But none admits to having forgone pure love for a job.

“It didn’t bother me very much. If I wanted to marry, I would have been ready to leave the service,” Anne Warburton told me as we sat drinking coffee, looking out at her Suffolk garden. “There were times when I enjoyed that side of life, but not to the point of wanting to leave the service. I was enjoying life as I was.”

Warburton became Britain’s first female ambassador, presenting her credentials to the Danish court in 1976. Others followed, but there were no more than a dozen senior women through the 1970s and 1980s, and until 1987, when Veronica Sutherland took up her post in the Ivory Coast, every British female ambassador was unmarried and childless.

Warburton is still regarded inside the diplomatic service with some awe. But she is unassuming and modest to a fault. If there were barriers in her way because of her sex, she bears no grudges. She recalls the odd case of discrimination. (Our ambassador in Helsinki once turned down a woman for a posting, claiming “policy is so often made in the sauna”.) But Warburton was never seriously put out. “If you arrive as the herald of other people, maybe you feel that that’s good, that’s progress and you don’t start complaining.”

Some pioneers acknowledge that later generations may find it odd that they did not protest more. “If the Service has changed its attitudes, so too have the women who belong to it,” explained Juliet Campbell, the former ambassador to Luxembourg and probably the first to lead a majority-female mission overseas. “In retrospect, I am struck by how those of us among my contemporaries who thought of ourselves as feminists felt we had to prove ourselves, without concessions. To have suggested that any special allowance be made was a tacit admission of inferiority.”

Juliet Campbell, former ambassador to Luxembourg

Campbell married in her mid-forties, long after the marriage bar had gone. Had she come close to leaving? “I did have moments. But, to be honest, I used to ask myself why I didn’t get married, and I think maybe belonging to the Foreign Office was part of it,” she said. “You had this life, you moved on every two or three years or whatever, and you didn’t form quite the same forms of relationship.”

It is a common gripe. Diplomacy is a peripatetic business that leaves little time for blossoming romances or ageing parents. Every diplomat’s contract includes a mobility clause, meaning they can be sent anywhere at any time. “There was an assumption that you couldn’t expect to spend all your time in green pastures,” said Campbell. “I remember being told that it was time to go and get my knees brown. You couldn’t expect because you had children or, as I later discovered, elderly parents, to think that this was a reason you could stay in easy touch, because you would be told, rather briskly, ‘we all do at this stage of life’.”

A stint as a single woman in Bangkok was particularly hard. “Society moved in certain sorts of groups and circles and as a relatively senior woman you were neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring,” she said. “There were the wives, there were what were then known as dolly-birds, the pretty secretaries, and there were lots of gorgeous Thai girls all over the place. I somehow felt I didn’t belong. That’s probably the biggest price, at times: you can gather I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m not fussing, but I would say I had periods of being acutely lonely.”

. . .

There was no party to say goodbye to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones when she left the Foreign Office. It was Christmas 1995 and she was a 32-year veteran, the most senior woman diplomat of her time and arguably the most influential the service has ever had. But there was no card, no carriage clock, no leaving do. “You must be joking,” she told me as we sat in her small Chelsea house. “I just left. It was not very nice. Everybody had a sense it was a failure, which it was, in a way.”

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, whose glittering Foreign Office career ended in regret

Too much time has passed to unpick properly the rights and wrongs of why she resigned. One fact stands out: she is the only political director in living memory not to move on to a top ambassadorial post. She wanted Paris, the plum appointment, and asked not to return to Bonn, where she had just served. In the event, a man six years her junior was given Paris, while she was only offered a ticket to Germany. She walked.

Neville-Jones admits playing her hand badly. But she is still smarting at the sniping that followed her exit. Anonymous diplomats were quoted saying her mind was not up to scratch, that she was “strong-willed and abrasive”, not “sufficiently emollient for the niceties of diplomatic life”, a touch heartless. “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?” she said, jumping forward in her chair. “That is not something that you would ever hear about a man.”

Who did she confide in during this difficult period? “Well that’s one of the hard things about not being married, because you’ve nobody else to talk to. I talk a bit with my brother, my brother’s very supportive,” she said. “My mother couldn’t begin to understand what was happening. Though, interestingly enough, she said to me afterwards, ‘I sensed you were unhappy in that job.’ So it must have shown.”

She pressed on in business, and recently joined the Conservatives as David Cameron’s national security adviser. But almost 15 years on, her premature departure still splits opinion. The controversy survives, in part, because the women’s diplomatic revolution is unfinished. Not long after Neville-Jones, another senior woman fell at the Paris hurdle. And a woman has yet to hold one of the seven top Foreign Office jobs.

I wondered if Neville-Jones sacrificed anything to the marriage bar. “Well, I’m not married,” she said, after a moment’s pause. Over the years she rejected a few suitors, but only came close to accepting one proposal, and even then never really “agonised about it”. She admits the marriage bar played a part. “Do I regret it?” she went on, anticipating my question. “It would be nice to be married. But do I look back and say, this is a fearful regret? No, I don’t. The one thing I do think about my life is – for God’s sake – don’t complain. You choose to do something, you take what goes with the territory.”

. . .

Yet there is little doubt that, from a woman’s perspective, what goes with the territory is changing. The marriage bar is long gone. Our man in Havana is now our woman. The number of women in senior management remains woefully low – 21 per cent of the total and just four out of the top 29 jobs – but compared even with a decade ago, when the proportion was 6 per cent, it is a small triumph.

The new watchword is flexibility. Sir Peter Ricketts, the well-regarded head of the Foreign Office, has introduced schemes to help balance family and career. A “mobility clause” still appears in every contract, but it is far less strictly enforced. Job shares are more common: a husband and wife team now head the mission to Zambia. So is remote working. So the schemes are in place – the real battle is to change the culture. A Foreign Office survey found that more than 40 per cent of staff still feel issues of work-life balance and flexible working cannot be openly discussed.

Anne Pringle, ‘rock chick’ and Britain’s first female ambassador to Moscow

One symbol of the new female-friendly service is Anne Pringle, the first female ambassador to Moscow since diplomatic links were established 450 years ago. A self-described “rock chick”, she joined the service four years after the marriage bar was lifted and benefited from the new regime. Early on, she still sensed that “people didn’t hear the message till a bloke had said it”. But once she started being noticed, she was supported.

As a man who has just married a diplomat, I’m understandably concerned about the peripatetic lifestyle. Moving countries every four years – kids and careers in tow – sounds like the opposite of settling down. Pringle spoke to me with some trepidation – knowing my wedding was just a few weeks away. “I hope I don’t put you off,” she said.

She didn’t. But her lifestyle would not suit everyone. Since they married 20 years ago, her Moscow posting is the first time she has worked in the same country as her husband. “I don’t think anyone would pretend it’s easy. I’d say my husband and I are past masters at shuttle diplomacy,” she told me. For a while it was Paris and Brussels, then Singapore and London. “It is quite a long haul. But it’s worked for us. We have barely missed a beat and certainly barely ever missed a weekend,” she said.

At this point, she must have noticed the wobble in my voice. “Most people find it slightly bizarre that we are still very, very together. But you have just got to find what works for you. The joy of nowadays is that you are not in a straitjacket. Spouses 30 years ago were in quite a straitjacket in terms of not having many choices for what to do. Now things are a bit more flexible and that helps both sides.” I do hope she is right.

Alex Barker is an FT political correspondent

...............................................................

A brief history of the marriage bar

Airline stewardesses
c. 1930-1968

Boeing Air Transport’s hire of eight young nurses as flight attendants in 1930 set the precedent for employing only attractive, unattached women, writes Sonia Van Gilder Cooke. In the 1960s, stewardesses challenged the industry’s tacit marriage bar and in 1968, airlines dropped the policy along with forced retirement at the age of 32.

Postal workers
1875-1946

In the early 1870s, the Post Office opened the doors of its Returned Letter Office and Savings Bank to women workers. In 1875, however, the Office introduced a marriage bar that stayed in place for seven decades, until 1946.

Bank workers: Barclays
c.1915-1961

Women first joined Barclays during the first world war, yet had to wait until 1961 to retain their positions after marriage. The Bank of England and Lloyds Bank had abolished their marriage bars by 1952, but Barclays continued the policy, with its chairman suggesting as late as 1964 that “family commitments” rather than career should be the priority of young female employees.

Broadcasters: BBC
1932-1944

Despite the eminence of many married female employees in its early years, the BBC adopted a marriage bar in 1932. The bar was jettisoned in 1944, the same year the BBC reporter Audrey Russell became the nation’s first accredited female war correspondent. Gender discrimination persisted, however: women could not become general trainees or newsreaders until 1960.

Teachers
1923-1935

In 1923, London County Council banned the hiring of married women teachers; it was followed by educational authorities nationwide. The National Union of Women Teachers argued that marriage brought “human understanding” to the classroom and won the right to continue working after marriage in 1935.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: The Magic of Michelle

October 24, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Magic of Michelle

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Forgive me in advance for fawning, but Michelle Obama is the coolest first lady ever. She clinched it for me this week by jumping double Dutch on the South Lawn as part of a “healthy kids fair.”

The scene underscored my impression of the first lady as utterly unencumbered by convention. She seems to feel free — free enough to loosen up and laugh a little, free enough to let her inner child peek through the veil of parenthood, free enough to be herself.

I couldn’t imagine recent first ladies jumping a puddle on the sidewalk, let alone two ropes swinging at the same time in opposite directions. So, on behalf of New York City, the so-called double Dutch capital of the world (so much so that this year it became a varsity sport in the city’s schools), allow me to say: Well played.

I could pile on platitudes here about her professional accomplishments, or explore to what degree she is redefining the role of women, or predict how she will be viewed by historians in the pantheon of her predecessors. I could, but I won’t. That’s not my bailiwick.

But I will say that she seems particularly suited to these times. She provides a certain authenticity and clarity of self in a time of uncertainty, projecting a casual grace onto a world of amplified anxiety. She has become a powerful symbol of fearlessness, refinement, frugality and frivolity, managing to be both fun and serious simultaneously. She’s genuinely human.

Mrs. Obama is redefining my concept of a first lady, and I like it. Apparently, I’m not alone.

In April, at the peak of her popularity, a New York Times/CBS News poll measured her favorability at 67 percent. The same poll found that a stratospheric 84 percent approved of how she was handling her role as first lady. That means that even half of those who didn’t hold a favorable view of her as a person still liked what she was doing as first lady.

(It should be noted that polls by USA Today/Gallup and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, both released this week, put the first lady’s favorability ratings in the 60s and above those of her husband.)

It’s hard to believe that this is the same woman who during the presidential campaign was repeatedly portrayed as the neo-radical albatross to a postracial candidate.

This is America. We respect fearlessness, regardless of what we feel about the person who embodies it. With Mrs. Obama, we have it both ways.

If George W. Bush was the president that Americans most wanted to have a beer with, then Michelle Obama is becoming the first lady we most want to have a laugh with. And that’s cool.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Leaders' spouses make the best truth-tellers

Leaders’ spouses make the best truth-tellers

By Michael Skapinker

Published: October 12 2009 22:24 | Last updated: October 12 2009 22:24

At a recent lunch the Financial Times hosted for management consultants, one of them introduced us to the “spouse test”. Before you submit a proposal to a potential client, the consultant said, ask your spouse to read it. If he or she can’t make sense of it, rewrite it.

The role of spouses in telling us when we are going wrong at work is largely hidden. This is understandable; married life is private. Almost the only time we get a glimpse of what a spouse has contributed to a senior executive’s career is when the couple gets divorced.

Even then, the courts typically concentrate on what the wife (usually it is the wife) has done to maintain a comfortable home and bring up the children, freeing her husband to focus on making his entrepreneurial or corporate fortune.

Occasionally, the judges will go a little further, as in the important English case of Charman v Charman, where the Court of Appeal in 2007 referred to the man being ousted from his company, after which “the parties grew close and the wife gave the husband considerable emotional support”.

Emotional support is often as far as spouses are expected to go. Colette Young, founder of ExecuMate, which counsels corporate spouses, advises forbearance too. “As a spouse, you can’t say ‘put that BlackBerry away’. You have to know part of that life is they’re on 24/7,” Ms Young – whose husband Larry Young is chief executive of Dr Pepper Snapple, the drinks company – told Associated Press.

Should spouses go further? A public declaration of devotion to the boss is usually embarrassing and not very effective.

Sarah Brown’s lauding of her husband at last month’s Labour party conference – “my husband, my hero” – does not seem to have done an enormous amount for the prime minister’s electoral prospects.

Linda Lay’s public defence in 2002 of her husband Ken, the former chief executive of Enron – she called him a “moral human being” and said that they had lost millions of dollars too – was widely held to have been a public relations disaster.

There must be more to being a leader’s spouse than this. Who better to moan to about your cabinet colleagues and the ungrateful voters – or about the board, the shareholders and the staff? Who better to advise you to cancel the furious e-mail you were about to send?

A recent (unauthorised) book about their marriage reports that Michelle Obama advised her husband against making Hillary Clinton his running mate and insisted, against his initial judgment, that the “Yes we can” campaign slogan would be a winner.

Denis Thatcher did not give interviews, but his wife knew the difference his business experience could make to her political judgment. “Nothing escaped his professional eye – he could see and sense trouble long before anyone else,” Margaret Thatcher wrote in The Downing Street Years.

She said that her husband’s knowledge of the oil industry meant she had someone to turn to during the second oil price shock of 1979. “Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone,” she said.

However, the signal service spouses can render is to tell leaders what no one else dares to.

In June 1940, Clementine Churchill wrote a letter to her husband, tore it up and then wrote it again. Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Winston Churchill, described the letter as “terrifying”, which it must have been – both for the writer and the recipient.

“My darling,” Mrs Churchill began. “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner. If an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas – good or bad – will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you – I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’.”

“My Darling Winston – I must confess I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you – Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness.”

“Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemmie.”

You don’t get that quality of advice from many management consultants.

michael.skapinker@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/skapinker

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Economist: Chinese history textbooks - The frugality of truth

Chinese history textbooks

The fragility of truth

Oct 8th 2009 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

History just ain’t what it used to be

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

SCHOOL textbooks in China have a habit of bending the truth, to suit Communist Party dogma or to reinforce moral messages. Rarely does anyone challenge them. Exams require rote learning, and children are not encouraged to question received wisdom. A group of 20 or so teachers from across China, however, has recently caused a stir by pointing out some mistakes.

Their efforts, widely reported in the official press, have steered clear of politically sensitive issues such as the party’s own record. Indeed the errors they have focused on sound little more than nitpicks. They question, for example, a commonly told tale (not just in China), that Thomas Edison, who was later to invent the light bulb, supposedly helped a doctor illuminate an operation performed on his mother by manipulating candles and mirrors.

In Chinese schools, however, the dividing line between historical fiction and history can easily be confused. Children are often not taught to make a distinction. As a result, students lose the ability to look for and identify mistakes, says Leng Yubin, one of the teachers campaigning for a textbook purge. The press has quoted comparisons of these errors to the adulteration of milk with toxic melamine, which poisoned tens of thousands of infants last year.

China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, perhaps unwittingly stirred the debate last month when he visited a Beijing high school. After sitting at the back of a class, he pointed out a mistake. A textbook described the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu as in north China, whereas they are officially in north-western China. Why, asked one widely circulated commentary, did it take the prime minister to point out such an error? The publishing house reportedly retorted that geographically speaking, north China is correct.

Such brushes with orthodoxy are unlikely to make much headway. Occasional reports have surfaced in the official press in recent years that Mao Zedong did not, contrary to widespread belief, declare on October 1st 1949 in Tiananmen Square that the Chinese people had “stood up”. (He said something like it at a less dramatic ceremony a few days earlier.) But during recent 60th anniversary celebrations of communist China’s founding, several reports in state controlled newspapers revived the old myth.

Another dubious assertion is being visibly perpetuated. The authorities have said that 56 columns erected on Tiananmen Square for the celebrations will stay put. They represent China’s officially recognised 56 “ethnic groups”. It is a number that few Chinese schoolchildren would dare to challenge. Yet when the communists came to power there were found to be more than 400. Officials eventually settled on the much lower figure and suppressed further debate.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Economist: Singapore's sand shortage - The hourglass effect

Singapore's sand shortage

The hourglass effect

Oct 8th 2009 | SINGAPORE
From The Economist print edition

Seven maids with seven mops might fail, but Singapore gets close

“LOOKING for sea-sand for reclamation project in Singapore. Prompt reply is greatly appreciated.” Many such pleas can be found on Alibaba.com, a popular Chinese trading-website. Malaysia banned sand exports as long ago as 1997. Indonesia followed suit in 2007 on environmental and, some say, political grounds. Ever since, it has become harder for Singapore to secure supplies for its booming construction industry and sea-fill plans.

AFP

The good old days, when Indonesia’s loss was Singapore’s gain

The ban by Indonesia, its biggest supplier, led to a surge in the price of sand, used in both concrete and land-reclamation. The government averted a short-term crisis by releasing sand from its stockpile and helping contractors find new sources. However, Indonesia’s embargo, followed swiftly by a Chinese ban on sales of sand to Taiwan, set in train a domino effect.

Environmentalists argue that large-scale sand-dredging can deplete fish stocks and cause erosion, risking landslides and flooding. So Singaporean contractors turned to Cambodia, where prices are low and environmental standards almost non-existent. But this May Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, outlawed exports of sand. Again, environmental pressures were cited, but there may also have been a political motive.

After the Cambodian ban Vietnam’s sand exports surged, achieving volumes seven times as big as last year, with Singapore the main customer. Then last month Vietnam’s construction ministry called for a temporary halt to the trade, to assess its impact on the environment and the local building industry. NGOs in Thailand and Bangladesh have also pressed their governments to reject recent requests to allow sales of sand to Singapore.

Sand prices, which peaked at over S$60 ($43) a tonne in 2007, have fallen during the slowdown. Simon Lee, of the Singapore Contractors’ Association, believes a new regulation requiring sand importers to have alternative back-up supplies will help insulate his members from further turbulence. A spokesman for Singapore’s national-development ministry adds that construction companies have been importing sand from “various” regional countries and claims that “recent restrictions on sand exports have not affected the supply of construction sand to Singapore.” But global demand for dwindling supplies of sand and other materials is mounting. Critics say that Singapore needs to shift faster from building cheap but resource-intensive concrete structures towards more expensive construction techniques that use, say, more steel and glass.

Relying as it does on low-wage, low-skilled migrant workers from South Asia, Singapore’s construction industry is not yet ready for such a high-tech transformation. And in the short term there are still plenty of willing suppliers. Tim Sintop, an American whose trading company wants to export sand from Myanmar and has already secured several contracts in Singapore, is upbeat: “The more bans there are elsewhere, the better for us.”

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

WSJ: Margaret Thatcher on what 'consensus' really means

NOTABLE & QUOTABLE

OCTOBER 6, 2009, 7:01 P.M. ET

Notable & Quotable

Margaret Thatcher on what 'consensus' really means.

Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech:

For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus." . . .

To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

September 23, 2009

Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

By JULIA MOSKIN

GREAT NECK, N.Y.

BEYOND THE KOREAN BBQ Kim Yoon-ok, the first lady of South Korea, flips a savory pancake stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers during a demonstration in Great Neck, N.Y.

TALKING about food is built into the job for first ladies: cookie recipes, menus for state dinners and, now, organic farming are all in their sphere of influence. But Kim Yoon-ok, the wife of the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, seemed to go beyond the call of duty on Sept. 21 when she picked up a spatula to cook pajeon — savory pancakes stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers — for a group of American veterans of the Korean War.

To the consternation of her bodyguards, and in a moment that seemed more inspired by Rachael Ray than by Michelle Obama, the first lady plunged into the rows of guests to hand-feed bites of her pajeon to some silver-haired veterans and their wives.

“I wanted to give them a new taste of Korea as something positive and delicious,” she said in an interview afterward, her first with a member of the Western news media since her husband took office last year. (She spoke through an interpreter.) “From the war, they do not have many pleasant food memories.”

Mrs. Kim, along with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef; Moon Bloodgood, a Korean-American actress; and Salvatore Scarlato, a local war veteran with a flamboyant cooking style, were all taking part in the South Korean government’s mission in the United States this week. While Mr. Lee met in closed sessions at the United Nations, his wife, 62, embarked on a new career in the field of culinary diplomacy.

The government’s Korean Cuisine to the World campaign began in April, with official goals that include quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants abroad and lifting Korean food into the “top five rank of world cuisines” by 2017. Putting aside that such a ranking system does not exist, the campaign shows how seriously food is now taken by many governments, especially in Asia.

As sushi has served as a kind of cultural crowbar, opening doors for Japanese tourism, culture and exports, the South Korean Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has high hopes for bibimbap and bulgogi.

Bang Moon-kyu, a ministry official who is leading the campaign, said that it has about $10 million to spend in 2009, including grants and scholarships for South Koreans to travel and attend culinary school. The campaign has already established a research and development lab devoted to the popular street-food dish called tteokbokki, a garlicky, richly spiced dish of rice cakes bathed in red chili paste. Tteokbokki (pronounced duck-bo-key) got its own festival in March, spinning off from the larger annual Seoul festival of rice cakes, or tteok. “And tteokbokki is only the beginning,” he said.

“First was Chinese food in the U.S., then Japanese and Thai,” said Min Mon-hong, director of tourism for Korea. “Korean is the next big boom.”

At least seven arms of government, including the military, were represented at the Sept. 21 event, which took place at Leonard’s in Great Neck, a local venue for proms, weddings and bar mitzvahs. The catering, by the New York restaurant KumGangSan, was vastly more flavorful than the usual kosher fare.

As the cameras of the Korean news media clicked, Jean-Georges Vongerichten showed off his one-handed pajeon-flipping abilities. “I’ve been teaching him some sauces and marinades,” said Mr. Vongerichten’s wife, Marja, who is Korean-American. “I think he would do great things with gochujang,” she said, referring to the spicy, fermented paste of ripe red chili peppers that is one of the basic seasonings of the Korean kitchen.

New York City is viewed by the campaign’s officials as a vast field of opportunity for shaping world opinion about Korean food. Although the city lacks a truly ambitious, transporting Korean restaurant, the flavors have made major inroads here. At the Momofuku restaurants, David Chang made his name by layering the intense flavors of Korea into Japanese and American dishes; at Ssam Bar, his version of tteokbokki is crossbred with Italian gnocchi in a light, fiery, herb-spiked pork sauce. New York Hotdog in Greenwich Village serves hot dogs topped with bulgogi (redundant, but tasty) and burgers with kimchi.

For many years, authentic Korean food was perceived, even among Koreans, as too spicy, too garlicky and too sour for the world stage. (The strong smell of kimchi was a running joke among the American veterans on Monday). In South Korea, exotica like pizza and hamburgers became fashionable once the country began to recover from the devastation of the war years.

But high-end restaurants in Seoul are now turning away from Western food and toward Korean tradition, drawing on both everyday snacks like pajeon and painstaking arts like the making of tteok, sticky rice pounded into a dizzying array of shapes, colors and flavors.

Making tteok, like almost all cooking in Korea, was traditionally done by women; hundreds of female slaves and workers were employed by the kitchens of the royal court during the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910. “The court cuisine has become trendy in the last few years,” said Michael Pettid, the author of “Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History.” “More people can afford to eat things once reserved for the elite, like tteok.”

Last week on 32nd Street in Manhattan, where Korean restaurants are clustered, Eun-joo Song, a Korean-American student at Parsons the New School for Design, expressed doubt about the need for any official campaign. “I think the restaurants here can speak for themselves,” she said, gesturing at storefronts advertising barbecued beef, organic tofu and handmade dumplings. “Governments can’t tell people what to like.”

Although Mrs. Kim’s official role was to promote Korean food, she did use her platform to raise a tender political topic. “You all look very healthy to me,” she said, gazing out at the veterans in their blue dress uniforms. “You might live to see the reunification of the two Koreas.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

ST: The making of Men In White (People's Action Party)

Aug 29, 2009

The making of Men In White

A new book on the People's Action Party took three senior journalists more than five years to complete. Backed by four researchers, they conducted 300 interviews and pored over 60 years of press and government records for the 692-page book. Insight finds out about the challenges they faced, what they did to overcome them, and how they put Men In White together.

By Zakir Hussain

The book, which has a print run of 30,000, will be available at leading bookstores after the launch on Sept 8 at $39.90 a copy before GST. THE man was a key player in the formative years of the People's Action Party (PAP). He had been with the party almost from the start and was privy to many of its goings-on. So it was natural that Straits Times writers Sonny Yap, Richard Lim and Leong Weng Kam identified him as a key player they must interview when they started work on a book on the PAP. Unfortunately, the retired politician was known for being reticent and guarded, and for keeping his views to himself since he left politics in the 1980s. The team's initial overtures were rebuffed. It took more than six months of effort before he agreed to speak, Mr Yap, 59, tells Insight. Every now and then, the writers would call up a contact who knew him personally, and the reply would be that he was still pondering over it. Then one day, they had a lucky break. He asked for their list of questions. But it was followed by months of silence. 'In the meantime, whenever we interviewed or met anyone who knew the subject, we would ask them to intercede on our behalf, to convince him that we had no hidden agenda, that the book was not another exercise in PAP propaganda, that we would be fair, objective and balanced,' says Mr Yap. Finally, one night, a contact called to say the subject would like to meet Mr Yap for lunch. That was the breakthrough. 'It was a getting-to-know-you session in which I tried my best to win his confidence,' recalls Mr Yap. 'After that, the first interview was arranged, and we went on for three more interviews and several lunch discussions where he warmly opened up on his role in the PAP. Thanks to his inputs, Men In White is so much more complete, balanced and richer,' he says. Persuaded by Goh Chok Tong IT WAS not just that key player - plus many others who played a part in the PAP's colourful past - who needed to be cajoled, convinced and won over. Mr Yap himself had to be persuaded - by then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong - to work on the book. He had said no when asked by then-Straits Times editor Leslie Fong. 'I didn't want to wind up my journalistic career by doing a PAP propaganda book,' says Mr Yap, who has more than 30 years of experience in journalism. He was with New Nation, the defunct afternoon tabloid, from 1971 to 1982, before moving to The Straits Times. Over tea at the Istana, Mr Goh assured him the book would be a Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) publication, and was meant to fill a void in Singapore's history for the younger generation. 'He assured me I would have editorial autonomy over the project, and the PAP would be involved only in rendering research assistance,' recounts Mr Yap. He said yes. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew also repeatedly stressed to the writers throughout the book project, when they interviewed him, that the book was their version of the PAP story, and not the party's. 'Indeed, confidence-building and convincing people that the book was not PAP propaganda were the prerequisites to clinching many of the interviews,' Mr Yap tells Insight. 'Whether they were former PAP or non-PAP players, we knew we had to overcome their initial reactions of scepticism, if not cynicism, doubt, suspicion, belligerence and, occasionally, outright hostility.' Several former PAP politicians, who were still embittered over how they were unceremoniously dropped, said it was pointless to talk about the past and that they wanted to move on. One former PAP stalwart, who helped to rebuild the party during the big split of 1961, slammed down the phone on the writers, saying he had nothing more to do with the party. In 1961, leftist elements broke away from the party and formed Barisan Sosialis. They included 35 out of 51 branches, and 19 out of 23 branch secretaries. There were also former party members who gave scraps of information on the phone, and said they would give a fuller account when they met the writers. But they never responded again to them. Some agreed to an interview but did not turn up at the arranged time and place. Others were extremely cautious, and insisted that every quote used in the book had to be checked back with them. Getting former leftists to agree to interviews was even more challenging, says Mr Yap. 'They assumed that we were engaged in yet another exercise to deify the PAP and demonise the opposition.' Some asked the writers: 'Do you know we had been detained by the PAP Government for many years? Why should we help you do a book on the PAP?' Others asked if the writers were intelligence agents trying to pry more information out of them to use against them. Some demanded to know whether the team would print what they said. 'Some questioned our questions, some questioned the premises underpinning our questions,' recalls Mr Yap. 'How do you define a communist?' and 'Why do you describe so-and-so as a leftist?' were but two questions they encountered. Yet others took issue with the writers' knowledge and ability to do the book. Mr Yap remembers being ushered into the home of a former Barisan Sosialis official, who gestured to a long table with books on Marx, Engels and Lenin, rows of Hansard volumes which carried the verbatim proceedings of legislative assembly sessions in the 1960s, and stacks of speeches and documents. Seeking out former leftists 'HE SAID rather sternly, 'You can't possibly be qualified to write the PAP story until you have read all these. If you don't read them, how can you grasp the context of my replies to your questions?'' Mr Yap recounts the conversation. Another former prominent leftist and political detainee grilled him for 45 minutes before beginning the interview. It turns out he wanted to check Mr Yap's knowledge of Singapore politics and discern his leanings and biases. The interviewee said he had dumped every book on the PAP into the dustbin because whenever he gave interviews to the authors, he found the information given was used to vilify him and the leftist movement. Mr Leong, 55, was also able to draw out former Mandarin-speaking leftists in Singapore and abroad, with his command of the Chinese language. A big help was a series of articles on former politicians from the early years, he says. Called Life After Politics, the series was done shortly before he started on the book. For the series, Mr Leong spoke to a number of former leftists and won their trust and confidence with his balanced portrayals of their life experiences. Many of them put in a good word for him and helped him locate several left-wing leaders of the PAP who had either quietly retired here or had fled Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s. 'Often, one interview would lead to another,' he recalls. Slowly, insights unfolded on key developments in the party's history, like the plots by leftists to seize control. Former Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan gave the team the names of people who were deported and are now living in Hong Kong. Mr Leong also spent a week tracking down and interviewing former leftists and members of the Malayan Communist Party in the peace villages in southern Thailand. He travelled with Straits Times executive photographer Wong Kwai Chow, 56. The interviews were an eye-opener, he says. The experience of a key leftist in exile there, Mr Chan Sun Wing, a former top aide to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, forms the prologue of the book. Mr Leong also met former teenage Chinese schoolgirls in pigtails, who were part of the leftist movement here. 'After more than 50 years, those I met in 2003 were frail (some could hardly walk), and in their 60s and 70s. 'One of them told me she was the daughter of a rich businessman in Singapore, living in a big mansion with servants at home and ate very good food every day. But she gave up all that to join the leftist movement, and went underground when security officers were after her,' he recounts. She, with many others, escaped to Indonesia and later joined her compatriots as armed guerillas in jungles along the Malaysian-Thai border. Says Mr Leong: 'They were young and innocent and idealistic, and for that they paid a very high price. 'To this day, they do not think it was wrong,' he adds. Mr Cheong Yip Seng, former editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division, who oversaw much of the work on the book, says he was very pleased that many of the left-wing leaders agreed, some after much persuasion, to be interviewed. 'Nobody has told a non-partisan story of the PAP. It was long overdue,' he says. 'Here was a chance to get a version of the history from the defeated faction of the PAP, the radical left who came so close to winning. If we did not reach out to them, their voices would have been suppressed forever,' he adds. 'By any yardstick, it was a gripping tale. I had lived through part of that history as a journalist and know it had all the ingredients of a thriller,' he says. Mr Cheong also sees the book as a way to reach out to younger Singaporeans. 'My sense is that they have only a vague idea of how Singapore got here,' he adds. The book began life in two parts. Mr Yap and Mr Leong worked on telling the story of the party's early years, while Mr Lim explained how the party consolidated its hold on Singapore. As the book neared completion, they decided to add a third part to examine the party's longevity. 'I was sad we were not able to reach a few, including Mr Lim Chin Siong. He had died before we started,' says Mr Cheong. Mr Fang Chuang Pi, who led the communist underground in Singapore at the time, died in Hat Yai, Thailand, in 2004 before the team could reach him. Ong Eng Guan stays mum THERE were also a handful of party stalwarts who resolutely declined to be interviewed. Among them was the first mayor of Singapore, Mr Ong Eng Guan. Mr Leong visited his office to speak to him, and managed only to put in a word with his wife who said she would get him to call back. He never did. Many key players, however, shared their stories willingly, and extended their help and assistance in recommending and persuading former comrades to speak. They helped the writers to get in touch with past players lost in the mist of time, and gave them access to their memorabilia. 'At their age, they knew that if they didn't give their side of the story, it would pass into eternal oblivion,' notes Mr Yap. But one major challenge was that many of the subjects interviewed were in their 70s, 80s and even 90s. Their memories were fading, if not failing. As a result, the writers had to fill in the blanks and counter-check what the subjects said against other accounts and research. 'Often, we had to jolt their memories. Some asked for newspaper clippings to help them refresh their memories,' recalls Mr Yap. 'We were often confronted with conflicting and contradictory accounts, and trying to reconcile them posed a tremendous challenge for the team.' They had to cross-check recollections and details with other interviews, news reports and records. But notes of their early eventful meetings could not be located with any of the founding members or with the party headquarters. The notes could have been destroyed to avoid them falling into the hands of the Special Branch, misplaced when the party headquarters moved, or taken away by defectors when the party split. The lack of records left the writers, in some cases, with no way of ascertaining whose version was right, such as how the founders came up with the party logo. So, they opted to reflect the various individuals' views on the matter and left it at that. Still, the authors say the book would have been harder to write if it were done, say, 10 years earlier. In this case, the distance of time helped. 'Former leftists may not have opened up earlier,' says Mr Leong. Even as the writers were busy arranging interviews, the team of researchers led by former Straits Times journalist Leong Ching, 40, was hard at work. They trawled the National Archives and the archives of unions and universities, tracked down people the writers wanted to interview, and hunted down odd pieces of information for close to four years. They also combed through Malay- and Chinese-language newspapers which reported on the PAP's internal struggles. Others on the research team were Ms Goh Sue Lin and Ms Tan Mui Ling, both 29, graduates from the National University of Singapore who also helped to provide translations of Chinese reports. Veteran journalist Sia Boon So, who is fluent in English, Chinese and Malay, was also on the team and translated many Malay newspaper reports. Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu journalists also helped in explaining Malay and Tamil materials. Ms Leong notes that there were some disappointments - such as when the families of key players declined to give the team access to their taped interviews deposited with the National Archives. As a younger Singaporean, she felt that the climate of political awakening in the 1950s and 1960s made the process of research exciting. 'I spent hours in the dark halls of the oral history department, listening to the voices and reading the transcripts of men long dead, describing their dreams and passions, and their version of what happened,' she says. 'Politics in those days was literally a matter of life and death - and many lost their lives in the struggle,' she says. Ms Leong, a PhD candidate at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adds: 'It has been said that history is written by the victors. Actually, in the course of doing the research for this book, I realise that history is written by those who take the trouble and have the resources and the will to strive for a more perfect understanding. 'Working towards providing a complete version of history is not possible, but I believe the resources SPH put into this book make this as close as possible to any historically accurate version now or in future,' she says. Ms Leong notes that while the early years of the party were rich in stories, its later years were nearer what people would treasure and remember. 'What makes a good story doesn't always make good public policy,' she quips. Changes after 1984 election MR LIM, 60, admits he had an easier task persuading people to talk, as many PAP leaders and MPs were forthcoming. PAP ministers, in particular MM Lee, Senior Minister Goh and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gave a considerable amount of their time in several interviews with the writers. Mr Lim worked on the chapters which looked at the years when the party was firmly in control. At times, politicians shared bits of information that had never been made public. The challenge, he notes, was trying to make the narrative nearly as exciting as the chapters on the party's early years. It helped that the party gave him access to its confidential post-mortem report of the 1984 General Election, which marked a turning point in the PAP's post-independence history. 'It was a no-holds-barred report,' says Mr Lim, who saw in it a blueprint for the PAP's subsequent direction towards a more consultative style. At that election, the PAP saw a steep plunge in support: It garnered 64.8 per cent of the vote, a plunge of 12.8 per cent from the 1980 election. Two opposition candidates - Mr J.B. Jeyaretnam in Anson and Mr Chiam See Tong in Potong Pasir - were victorious and the PAP lost the political dominance it had enjoyed since 1968. 'We tempted fate,' the party said in the report, which was made public for the first time for the book. 'Had it not been for the tremendous depth of support which PAP enjoyed, we would have been voted out of office,' it said. The Government had rolled out one controversial policy after another in that election year - from steps to favour graduate mothers to a report that proposed raising the retirement age from 55 to 60, then 65 and consequently pushing back the age when people could withdraw their Central Provident Fund savings. The post-mortem was put together by a team set up by then-assistant secretary-general Goh Chok Tong, and chaired by Mr Ong Teng Cheong who went on to become second deputy prime minister and elected president. The report was written up by Mr Lee Hsien Loong, who was a first-time candidate. It made recommendations on what the party should do to rebuild the support it had enjoyed, and these proposals were reflected in many of the changes to the PAP's style in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The party had to revamp its image, engage people emotionally, and stop harping on the quality of its candidates as this reinforced the perception that its super-achievers were too removed from the ground. But it also had to accept that 'the opposition is here to stay' - and the party should try to maintain a large and stable majority rather than eliminate the opposition altogether. 'Instant rapport' with white outfits AS THE interviews progressed, Straits Times verbatim reporters Gavin Chua, Simon Tan and Serene Ng rendered the taped voices, accents and intonations into ready-to-use transcripts. Over several years, they produced hundreds of transcripts. The writers decided to use their reportorial techniques and go for a 'voices approach'. They would speak to as many people as possible who were involved in the PAP and reflect their views and versions of events. Mr Yap and Mr Leong worked on telling the story of the party's early years, while Mr Lim would narrate the later years and explain how the party consolidated its position. By August 2006, drafts for these two parts of the book were completed and ready to go, but Mr Cheong decided to bring the story up to date by including recent developments, including the general election that year. A decision was made to do a second book on PAP governance - to trace the origins, evolution and implementation of the key principles underpinning the party's rule of Singapore. But this idea was scrapped, and replaced by a third part on PAP governance and survival. At the same time, updates and revisions were made to the earlier parts, and the writers had to do their own research. They also settled on Men In White as the title. Mr Yap recounts how at the PAP's inauguration at Victoria Memorial Hall on Nov 21, 1954, many members of the audience were taken aback by the sight of the party's founding members and convenors striding onstage in white open-necked shirts and cotton trousers. They had expected to see them in ties and suits. 'That struck an instant rapport with the people, as one interviewee told me,' he says, adding that the party whites have since been a defining element of the PAP till today. The drafts were completed late last year, and the final okay was given for each and every page in June before the book went to press this month. Mr Cheong, who guided the team, was glad the writers produced many gripping inside stories. 'The PAP was also generous with its time, and their leaders spent many hours with the team,' he adds. Says the book's editor, Ms Lee Mei Lin of publishing company Marshall Cavendish which was involved in the production and design of the book: 'Editing the book was worth every minute because there was new information to read about and much to discover all over again.' Says Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang: 'It wasn't difficult supervising this project. 'The material was compelling and the writers were very seasoned. My job was to move the project along, make sure there were no large gaps in the story and act as a sounding board for the writers to bounce off their ideas.' Adds Mr Han: 'We usually think of the PAP in organisational terms, how effective it is as a party and what its ideology was. 'But if you read the book, you'll find that it's mainly about people who believed in what they were fighting for - both for and against the PAP leadership - and were not afraid to step forward because they wanted a better future for Singapore.' The writers captured this spirit, and the process of chronicling it is best reflected in their acknowledgements in the book. They said: 'It was indeed the ride of a lifetime.' zakirh@sph.com.sg

===

A TALE FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE 'Nobody has told a non-partisan story of the PAP. It was long overdue. Here was a chance to get a version of the history from the defeated faction of the PAP, the radical left who came so close to winning. If we did not reach out to them, their voices would have been suppressed forever. By any yardstick, it was a gripping tale. I had lived through part of that history as a journalist and know it had all the ingredients of a thriller.' Mr Cheong Yip Seng (above), former editor-in-chief of SPH's English and Malay Newspapers Division Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Washington Post: For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots

For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots

By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Intellipedia, the intelligence community's version of Wikipedia, hummed in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in June, with personnel at myriad government agencies updating a page dedicated to tracking the disputed results.

Similarly, a page established in November immediately after the terrorist attack in Mumbai provided intelligence analysts with a better understandinsg of the scope of the incident, as well as a forum to speculate on possible perpetrators.

"There were a number of things posted that were ahead of what was being reported in the press," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA officer who helped establish the site.

Intellipedia is a collaborative online intelligence repository, and it runs counter to traditional reluctance in the intelligence community to the sharing of classified information. Indeed, it still meets with formidable resistance from many quarters of the 16 agencies that have access to the system.

But the site, which is available only to users with proper government clearance, has grown markedly since its formal launch in 2006 and now averages more than 15,000 edits per day. It's home to 900,000 pages and 100,000 user accounts.

"About everything that happens of significance, there's an Intellipedia page on," Dennehy said.

Intellipedia sprung from a 2004 paper by CIA employee Calvin Andrus titled "The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community."

Dennehy listened to a presentation by Andrus and recalled the skepticism among colleagues about adapting Wikipedia to the intelligence community. He shared their skepticism. "But something he said interested me enough to look into it further," Dennehy said.

Context was also a factor. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, intelligence agencies had come under intense criticism for failing to pull together disparate strands of information pointing to the possibility of a major incident.

"We were all doing it in stovepipes," Dennehy said.

Dennehy described 9/11 not so much as a catalyst but as a selling point to explain how Intellipedia could help collate information. "Cal used 9/11 as a backdrop," said Dennehy. "It was really more about what was happening on the Web."

In 2005, Dennehy was given the job of leading the effort and persuading the intelligence community to use it, a task likened to "promoting vegetarianism in Texas" by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group devoted to improving the federal government.

Cultural resistance to Intellipedia includes concerns that foreign intelligence agents could hack into the system. Many intelligence officers, particularly of the older generation, simply do not trust it.

"There isn't any one agency that is more or less prone to use it. It's really a product of individuals," said Don Burke, a fellow CIA officer who helps promote the Intellipedia initiative.

Burke said Intellipedia remains largely the province of early adopters. While some pages are robust and balanced, he added, "there are other pages that leave a lot to be desired, to put it bluntly."

A CIA officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of his work, said Intellipedia "makes it very real-time. You can move down the road fast and focus on catching bad guys. We can really bring our expertise right to the war without leaving our desks."

Intellipedia, which uses the same software as Wikipedia, operates on three levels: an unclassified version, a secret version and a top-secret version. Beyond that, there are "bread crumbs" that could lead a user with proper clearance to additional information offline, Burke said.

Burke said that beyond major incidents such as the Mumbai attack, the biggest advantage is in connecting users seeking information on small, obscure subjects, something he described as "a thousand small wins a day."

Burke and Dennehy have been chosen as finalists for the 2009 Service to America Medals, sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service. The recipients of the medals, which are awarded in eight areas of public service, will be announced next month.

Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, described Intellipedia as an important post-Sept. 11 reform, but one that did not involve a major bureaucratic shake-up, as with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"It's the kind of work we need to see more out of government," Stier said. "They're connecting the dots without rearranging the deck chairs."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

Foreign Policy: Think Again - Twitter

Think Again: Twitter

The groundbreaking microblogging service is great for sharing links and communicating with friends. It's not so good at spreading democracy and overthrowing dictatorships.

BY EVGENY MOROZOV | AUGUST 6, 2009

"Authoritarian regimes should fear Twitter"

Not at all. You can't fear what doesn't exist -- and Twitter barely exists, if it exists at all, in most authoritarian countries. Generally, either they have their own microblogging services or Internet access is too slow and expensive for Twitter to be broadly useful. Furthermore, anyone who does use Twitter probably speaks English, has international contacts, and travels more than the rest of the population -- in other words, they are already lost causes, as far as the regime is concerned.

Combined with other tools - e-mail, social networking, and blogs -- Twitter can certainly be helpful in spreading news about upcoming flashmobs and protests. The demonstrations following Moldova's disputed election earlier this year were a perfect example, where a dozen local Twitter maniacs used the service to spread news about their flashmob. Eventually, their campaign (which went beyond Twitter and included Facebook and LiveJournal as well) attracted thousands of people and spilled into loud protests. While the Moldovan "Twitterati" had very little impact on the events on the ground, they did a great job using Twitter's global, viral reach to keep the protests in the international news.

However, Twitter use in authoritarian countries comes with major drawbacks. Twitter creates an extensive online paper trail that can be easily used against dissidents. In fact, as Twitter use becomes more common, authoritarian governments are likely to exploit Twitter to gather open-source intelligence on the opposition -- not a difficult task for anyone with an Internet hook-up. So Twitter could help authorities identify dissent at very early stages, tracking not just individual activists, but entire activist networks. An online friend list could enable a serious crack-down.

"Twitter was the best source of news about the post-election protests in Iran."

It depends. Twitter was a great resource during the protests -- for people who knew how to use it. If you had spent the previous six months carefully studying the Iranian Twitterverse, you would already know who to trust and who to ignore. Unfortunately, 99.9 percent of the readers around the world who turned to Twitter during the uprising had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

Most of them relied on particular "keywords" (like #iranelection) to read everything that was being posted about the events in Tehran. After a few days, the #iranelection and #moussavi channels contained so much noise that they became attractive destinations for spammers and marketers. (Many of these spammers are clearly run on some sort of auto-pilot, because #iranelection is still one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter, though very few users seem to still be talking about the election.)

To make things worse, supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began spreading misinformation.  Some of them were quickly ferreted out on sites like Twitspam.org, but the damage was done.

Of course, not everyone was going into the Iranian Twitterworld blind. The best way to read the Iranian tweeters was probably second-hand on the sites of established bloggers like The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, both of whom did admirable work curating the valuable posts and vetting out the junk. Still, the Iranian protests pointed out some of the dangers of relying on Twitter for breaking news from abroad.

"Twitter is a great organizing tool."

Perhaps. If your objective is to get 500 people to do the Thriller dance in Grand Central Station, Twitter, with its penchant for all things viral, is your best friend. The NYPD (which also Twitters, by the way) might even decide to let you get away with it.  But if you're trying to overthrow a tyrannical government somewhere in the Middle East, you may want to think twice. Members of the local Mukhabarat (secret police) may trail behind the NYPD in their tech-enthusiasm, but chances are they are also reading your feed. You'd be much better off organizing your revolution with more secure tools -- like encrypted e-mail or even instant messaging -- and turning to Twitter only to publicize the protests that are already underway. 

The events in Moldova fell somewhere in between: a flashmob that, rather unexpectedly, grew into a mini-revolution. The events in Iran were part of an organized campaign by the Moussavi camp and, as such, were probably carefully planned offline by a handful of Moussavi's top aides who spread the word using tools they learned as young revolutionaries in 1979. Leaflets, posters, and even fax machines can still be very effective organizing tools, precisely because they are not dependent on the Internet -- which, as Iranians found out during the protests, can suffer from unbearable slowness or equally unbearable censorship. Twitter was instrumental as a publicity tool, but played little role in instigating or coordinating the protests.

"Twitter is replacing blogging."

Not quite. Twitter is surely taking over many of the niches previously reserved for blogging: simple link-sharing, for one. It also seems much better positioned to allow discussions of breaking news -- checking multiple blogs takes an eternity compared with Twitter's instant flow of information. But blogs still have a good chance of survival.  One-hundred-forty characters is not very much; blogs could become a space for longer, more analytical writing, an ironic fate for a medium once mocked for its own brevity and shallowness.

The mainstream news media also continues to be suspicious of Twitter. It took about five years to convince most newspapers and magazines that blogging was an acceptable medium for reporting news, and many are still catching up. Twitter may take less time to sink in, but don't expect it to happen overnight.

The situation in the developing world is different, particularly in countries where blogging hasn't yet fully taken off or where zany platforms predominate that define what "blogging" is and how it's done. Russians love LiveJournal, Brazilians love Orkut, and the Chinese love QQ; for them, these sites offer a platform not only for blogging, but also for social networking, instant messaging, and other online distractions. Thus, even if they do find Twitter very appealing, their primary digital life happens on other platforms. 

On the other hand, the proliferation of the mobile Internet in Africa might cause millions of new Web users to skip the blogging stage altogether and jump straight to Twitter: After all, it's hard to write an 800-word essay on a cellphone keypad.

"Twitter doesn't have a business model and might go under soon."

Don't worry. First, Twitter is very addictive -- and people are usually eager to pay to keep their addictions going. Second, it's a great intelligence-gathering tool for news organizations, marketers, and even the CIA. As with very good network, its value will rise as more members join. There's still a need for better tools to make sense of all the data generated on Twitter -- but this is not an insurmountable task. Someone will eventually figure out how to unlock Twitter's data reservoirs for the wider public (that is, the wider paying public).

Third, it still makes a very appealing acquisition target for Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The problem is that none of them know how to keep its entrepreneurial spirit alive. (Google already has a dismal record of killing similar companies by buying them. Just look at Twitter's early, ill-fated competitor, Jaiku -- or, actually, don't look.) But this problem isn't impossible to solve either.

Finally, the more we talk about "Twitter revolutions," the more American diplomats and policymakers fall in love with the tool. "Twitter diplomacy" might soon replace the expensive efforts of the struggling Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). So what that they would only get 140 characters to express the American position on a given subject? Stripping these messages of the legalese would only add to their appeal, while helping to tap into the otherwise ADD-ed minds of the "digital natives" who might never have heard the radio broadcast of BBG's Voice of America because they don't know what radio is. And given how much U.S. government money has spent to bolster the BBG, even buying Twitter outright would look like a rounding mistake.

"Twitter is brimming with spammers, impostors, and just plain crazy people."

Sure.  But that's also true of the Internet as a whole, and it doesn't stop us from using it. Compared to e-mail, Twitter spam doesn't really look that menacing, and its administrators are beginning to crack down on those who abuse the system to push sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll on unsuspecting tweeters.

Impostors are indeed in vast supply. For instance, I suspect that the funny "Slavoj Zizek" that I am following on Twitter is not really the radical Slovenian philosopher. But this endless guesswork only makes it more fun. Twitter is a very curious universe in which even impostors add value, as long as they share cool and interesting links. (Would the real Zizek have turned me on to the marvelous site "White People Who Study Hegel?") The proliferation of impostors might even present Twitter with an actual business model, something it lacks at the moment: charging celebrities for authenticating their accounts and displaying a proud "I've been authenticated" badge. Successful companies have been built on less.

"Twitter conversations are shallow and serious people should avoid it."

Who cares? Obviously, Twitter is not the letters section of the New York Review of Books. Those looking for deep, long, insightful conversations shouldn't bother. But what attracts so many smart people to Twitter is a chance to follow what other smart people are reading and browsing -- and to do so in real time. What "Twitter virgins" do not understand is that Twitter actually facilitates the discovery of all those long and uber-insightful conversations that are happening elsewhere. As a discovery tool that works for everyone, it beats everything else out there, from syndication services like Delicious and RSS to aggregator blogs like Kottke and BoingBoing.

In the Twitter universe, you are what you follow -- so if you find Twitter boring, you're probably following the wrong people. Figuring out how to sift through all the noise and actually get hold of signal can be a challenging task, of course, requiring time and a fair amount of tinkering. But ultimately it pays off. A carefully maintained Twitter feed can deliver you information that is far more diverse and interesting than it was in the pre-Twitter days. One-hundred-forty characters are more than enough to describe a link or express one idea. 

So far, Twitter's influence on global politics is still very marginal; while it helps to draw public attention to otherwise overlooked problems and places, this will stop as soon as the media discovers yet another digital darling. But despite what you may hear from the overly conservative naysayers, Twitter's cultural impact is far greater. We may currently be at the very dawn of the era of Twitter Renaissance. Avoid it at your own peril.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

All contents ©2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC. All rights reserved.

Economist: Corazon Aquino

Excerpt:

Mrs Aquino may come to be seen as just another example of Asia’s political-widow syndrome, in which the doughty wife of a slain statesman rises to replace him. It has happened in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. No one, however, has done it with such modesty, pluck and charm as Cory Aquino.

===

Corazon Aquino

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Corazon Aquino, president of the Philippines, died on August 1st, aged 76

Reuters

IF GREATNESS was thrust upon Corazon Aquino, and for a while it was, she did her best to parry it. The decisive moment came after eight hours of prayer at St Joseph’s Convent of Perpetual Adoration in Quezon City, the former capital of the Philippines. There the self-proclaimed “plain housewife” resolved that she would, after all, accede to the request of 1m petitioners and run for president in the election that the wicked President Ferdinand Marcos had just called. Days of humming, hawing and after-youing were at an end, and the people had a champion. She was the lady in the yellow dress, simple, bespectacled, plain not just in her housewifery but also in her demeanour, a contrast in every way to the stylish Imelda, who was still stuffing the boudoirs of the presidential palace with frocks and furs and shoes, shoes, shoes. The power, however, was with the people, and the people were with Cory.

It was a tumultuous time for the Philippines, a country that has never been easy to take seriously. Its Spanish-American colonial experience, invigorated by Malay, Chinese and indigenous influences, has produced an Asian variant of the rum-and-Coca-Cola culture. In the 1980s this meant visitors could be forgiven for thinking they had arrived on the set of a wacky sitcom, perhaps made for the Central American market, in which the actors, all speaking American with a Latin twang, were masquerading as the nation’s public figures.

Strangely, though, they had nicknames that evoked either the Broadway characters of Damon Runyon or, more bizarrely, the upper classes of Wodehousian England: Bongbong, Teddyboy, Ting Ting and Ballsy, for example. But the aristocrats, pallid though they were by Philippine standards, were less Edwardian buffers than mestizos of Spanish-indigenous or Spanish-Chinese blood, whose landholdings and feudal attitudes were reminiscent of nowhere so much as time-warped Pakistan. Adding to the exotic admixture were such minor curiosities as Cardinal Sin, whose inspired name suggested someone in the Vatican must have had a sense of humour, and the ouija tables introduced to the Malacañang Palace during the Marcos presidency, which yanked the mind back towards the Chinese occult.

Against such a backdrop, Mrs Aquino—devout, shy and apparently devoid of ambition—was on the face of it an improbable tribune of the Filipinos. But circumstances propelled her. In August 1983 her husband Benigno, better known as Ninoy, a leading opponent of the president, had returned home from three years’ exile in the United States. He was at once shot dead. Over 2m people attended his funeral, which turned out to be, in effect, the first of a series of mass demonstrations against the regime, many of them prominently attended by the woman in the yellow dress. These culminated, after Marcos had tried to steal the election and some soldiers had mutinied, in an outpouring of protesters onto Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, known as EDSA, the huge arterial highway that loops round the capital, Manila. Three days later, on February 25th 1986, Marcos was on his way to Hawaii and Mrs Aquino was president (see article).

The guts but not the nous

Cory had not been passive. She had seen off the charges of crypto-communism, faced down the efforts at intimidation and rejected the ill-judged attempt by Ronald Reagan’s envoy to make her share power with Marcos. But her greatness was already at an end. As president, she introduced a democratic constitution and set the judiciary free. Her land reform, however, failed to break the grip of the aristocrats, and her promises to end the long communist insurrection were soon set aside. Worse, she failed to control the army. Her greatest achievement was to survive seven attempted coups and hand over peacefully at the end of her six-year term.

At bottom, she was quite conservative. She spoke for the people but her family was rich, landed and firmly set in the political establishment. In 1948, after studying in Philadelphia and New York, she had worked as a volunteer in the campaign of Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate. Nothing she was to suffer later would either shake her faith or turn her red. The “revolutionary” government she proclaimed owed nothing to Marx or Mao. Decency and honesty she had in plenty, and on occasion a hint of steel. But these were overwhelmed by indecision, naivety and a lack of political instinct.

Today Mrs Aquino’s reputation rests mainly on her role as the leader of a people-power revolution of the kind that seemed to be sweeping the world a few years ago. Her yellow dress and the yellow ribbons it inspired are even seen as the forerunners of the roses, tulips and other coloured emblems of these uprisings. Unfortunately, in the Philippines, as elsewhere, people power has sometimes turned into mob rule rather than direct democracy: in 2001 President Joseph Estrada, though legitimately elected, was deposed in another EDSA revolution.

As the yellow fades, Mrs Aquino may come to be seen as just another example of Asia’s political-widow syndrome, in which the doughty wife of a slain statesman rises to replace him. It has happened in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. No one, however, has done it with such modesty, pluck and charm as Cory Aquino.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

NY Times: Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

Excerpt:

Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

===

July 19, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Lunch with the FT - Lord Tebbit

Lunch with the FT: Lord Tebbit

By Jan Moir

Published: July 17 2009 16:23 | Last updated: July 18 2009 02:06

A weekday lunchtime in the Goring hotel, central London. Here, captains of industry, newspaper executives and politicians gather to murmur importantly over dressed crab, Dover sole and lashings of steak and kidney pudding.

In this world, where every plate is gilded with the hotel’s name, the atmosphere is hushed, the upholstery plush and the modern Swarovski chandeliers are hideous; like sparkly teenagers’ earrings hammered into the lobes of a dowager duchess.

On the dot of one o’clock, Lord Tebbit appears at the entrance to the dining room; a charcoal-pinstriped blot on the cream carpet horizon. He makes his way through the tables, looking neither left nor right, and slides into the chair opposite with an air of harassed relief. Heads turn but if he does recognise any other lunching Conservatives or party drones, he does not acknowledge them. “I am desperate for a drink,” he says, holding his hands in front and making them tremble, “but I had better not.”

He flips open the menu and scans the list with the interest and concentration of someone properly interested in his food. A preparation of Lincolnshire wild rabbit with mustard sauce attracts his attention.

“Aha. I wonder if their mustard sauce is as good as mine?” he muses. He orders whitebait followed by the rabbit, a true Edwardian luncheon of champions. I have smoked salmon and then cod.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12

Tebbit, a former cabinet minister who retired as an MP and entered the House of Lords in 1992, is one of the few leading figures from the Thatcher era still active in politics. However, the fact that many members of his party clearly wish that he was not is quite delicious to mischievous political commentators.

Seen as the voice of the socially conservative right within the parliamentary party – and of discontented, old school Tory voters without – he makes no secret of his scant patience with David Cameron and his glossy band of new Tory brothers. With typically blunt expediency, he has accused the party leader of “planting the poisonous tree of Blairism” in the shadow cabinet and also blamed him for losing traditional Tory support by racing to the centre ground.

Before last month’s European elections, he urged voters to boycott the Tories, and other main parties, to show their disapproval of the expenses debacle. Cameron was so furious he threatened to throw the former Conservative party chairman out of the party, saying: “He’s treading a very careful path, and I would warn him if he slips off that path he will find he’s sitting as an independent.” Tebbit was unperturbed. “I will be a Tory until I die, whether I am in the party or not,” he said in response.

For many years, Tebbit’s chilly reputation as Margaret Thatcher’s dark enforcer owed more to how he was portrayed in the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image than to any genuine traits of personal thuggery. The Tebbit puppet was repeatedly coshing recalcitrant members of the cabinet with his rubber truncheon. Tebbit has always claimed that he thought the puppet was funny but, in some ways, it has acted as a social barrier. At times, he has the wan but hopeful air of someone who would like people to find him more amusing than they actually do.

Tebbit became Thatcher’s right hand man and one of her closest political advisers because he was a shrewd tactician and a tough operator, not a bovver boy with a grudge. It is true, however, that his voice can sound menacing, especially in the lower register. Even when he is discussing something as innocent as snacks. “My guilty secret,” he says in an assassin’s whisper, “are those lovely salt and black pepper crisps.”

He remains friends with Lady Thatcher to this day. His background as a working class boy who had bettered himself though education, hard work and application appealed to her own bootstrap ethics, as the daughter of a grocer. “She is quite frail now,” he says. “Some days she is on cracking good form and other days she just isn’t.” They reminisce about old times but prefer to discuss the events of the day. Are they proud of the current state of the party? “One is always proud of one’s party, even if it takes an effort at times. It is like still being proud of your children even when you find them doing something absolutely disgusting,” he sighs.

His mobile phone rings loudly – a surprising shriek of technopop. “Maurice, I will come back to you, I am having rather a difficult day,” he tells one caller. The phone rings again. “Bloody hell, these things never stop, do they?” he cries and jabs at the off button. He looks tired and his parchment skin is tight and papery, like an onion’s.

He also seems a little fractious. “That’s because I am,” he says.

In the past three weeks, the 78-year-old peer has exhausted himself moving house from Sussex to Suffolk, caring for his disabled wife Margaret and putting the finishing touches to his first recipe book, The Game Cook. Cookery? This seems an astonishing distraction for a politician once described as a “semi-house-trained polecat” by former Labour leader Michael Foot but Tebbit is full of surprises. He has been happily killing and cooking his own game since 1974, when Margaret suggested he should take up shooting as a distraction from politics.

Even before that it was his own mother, the daughter of a butcher from north-east London, who taught him how to skin a rabbit. “Growing up during the war, you were acutely aware of food. If you caught a rabbit for tea, it was great,” he says, describing his mother and his wife as his “twin cooking gurus”.

Game holds no terrors for him. “I can shoot it, pluck it or skin it, clean it, cook it and eat it,” he says. He has a fondness for game risottos, which he thinks he might have invented, and his speciality – and a favourite recipe – is pheasant cooked with apples and cream. He also likes venison and rabbits, curried game, and stuffing birds with black pudding or haggis drenched in whisky. You could say that his cooking, much like him, is never bland.

“If someone buys the cookbook who has never heard of me, I think they will guess by the end that I am a politically incorrect Tory,” he says. Indeed, Tebbit reveals that he was shocked to discover, in the course of researching the book, that many mallards are gay. “Hmm, yes. The mallard is a rather outré bird. It is the most homosexual duck in the world. All the chaps are a bit ... that way,” he says, cocking his head. How does that make him feel about them?

“They are still very good to eat.”

It’s not that Tebbit doesn’t like mallards, I deduce, just that he doesn’t think any mallard in a same sex relationship should be allowed to adopt a duckling or become home secretary (in a letter to the Daily Telegraph in 1998, Tebbit wrote that homosexuals should be barred from the office of home secretary, at the time responsible for laws on adoption and families).

Despite his hardline reputation, however, as both a reactionary and a hunter, he displays an alarming tendresse towards some species of wildfowl. Has the man often referred to as the Chingford skinhead finally gone soft on us?

“I do confess to a touch of sentimentality,” he says.

Oh yes?

“I find it quite hard to shoot woodcock. They are so beautiful.”

Go on.

“There are not that many of them where I shoot anyway. And, when they do appear, I just can’t quite bring myself to do it.”

Tebbit knows roast woodcock is considered the finest of all game birds; a delicacy that is traditionally served with the head still attached and the skull split through the middle. This is so that the tiny woodcock brain can be scooped out with a teaspoon and eaten. “Well, I am not so sentimental that I wouldn’t eat its brain,” he says. That’s better. That’s the Tebbit the tabloids know and love.

He squeezes a muslin-wrapped lemon over his whitebait and paves a slice of bread with a slab of butter. As the small fry are despatched, he looks vulpine, brooding. In repose he often does, even if feeling mellow and dreaming of crisps. When the manager brings him his splendid, golden rabbit pie, with a brimming sauceboat on the side, Tebbit’s mood brightens. His metaphorical chef’s hat is back in place.

“That looks very interesting. That’s a mustard and cream sauce, is it?” he asks.

“English mustard and cream, Lord,” comes the reply.

“I do my sauce with two mustards and cream.”

“Two mustards and cream, very good, Lord.”

“English and Dijon mustard.”

“Excellent, Lord. Well, I will leave ours for you to try.”

Tebbit nods, pushes away a copper pot of mashed potato, tells me that he would have served spinach, not cabbage, with the pie. “Spinach flattens down nicer,” he explains.

Tebbit’s political leanings are not the only thing that can be discerned from his new book. You don’t have to look too closely to see the deep poignancy that lurks behind the pages. After the 1984 IRA Brighton bomb that injured him and left his wife permanently disabled, cooking and eating together remained one of the few pleasures the Tebbits could still share and enjoy.

“Food and drink are very precious to us. In our marriage, there are two very different parts of our life,” he says, evenly and quietly. “We have been married for 53 years and for 25 of them, Margaret has been disabled. It is a bit of a sod. So we are trying to make what we can of it.”

Lady Tebbit can “just about” hold a glass of champagne or a cup of tea but that is the extent of her free movement. For a quarter of a century she has needed the support of two carers around the clock and the devotion of her husband even more. In this, he has never wavered. He even wakes up twice every night, to turn her over to avoid bed sores. “I take the view that you never know, do you, when you say those words, ‘For better or worse, in sickness or health’. You don’t know what the future holds. But I think sharing things like the kitchen and food is a very good thing.”

Even in his darkest moments, he has never felt, in any way, responsible for what happened. “No, I never had any feelings of guilt,” he says. There is a terse pause. “It is entirely false that I would think like that.”

Neither does he forgive the men who ordered, approved or carried out the attack. “I have never accommodated myself to the idea of them being regarded as human beings anyway. So to that extent I suppose I am unforgiving. In fact, I know I am unforgiving. I could forgive them if they showed any contrition, regret or remorse, but I can’t forgive someone who justifies what he [the bomber, Patrick Magee] did.”

Two years ago, BBC Radio 4 invited Tebbit to take part in a “healing” radio programme with Magee. The peer declined, having no taste for the modern appetite to massage away the atrocities of the past with an oily love-in and apologia. Tebbit sees this kind of appeasement as symptomatic of the weakness, decadence and lack of resolve in modern British society. “Do I want to meet these people? Yes, I would like to bump into them. If I was driving a heavy truck,” he says.

Tebbit has lived many lives. A bright boy, he went to an academically selective state school in north London and, in 1947, straight into journalism, on this very newspaper. “I was just a kid. I started in the prices room calculating the indices. You probably have to be a graduate in statistics to do it now but, in those days, we used to crank them out on a hand-held calculator with a book of logarithms. Amazing, really.” After four years in the postwar RAF, where he flew jets and once had to fight his way out of a burning Mosquito, Tebbit joined the airline BOAC, married and had three children before going into politics. He is a man with experience of the world, unlike so many of today’s career politicians. “That is a big part of the problem,” he sighs.

History may look more kindly on Tebbit than his bare-knuckle reputation once suggested. In a political world thick with sleaze and recrimination, he is increasingly seen as a beacon of personal and professional integrity. Not by everyone of course. Not even by everyone in his party. Yet that is not what concerns him right now.

Deciding that he will “duck the puds” in favour of a cup of coffee, talk turns once more to the merits of the sauce. “I do think mine is much better,” he says. “It is more robust, for a start. It is more mustardy. Mustardier. And more pungent.”

Well, that sounds about right.

Norman Tebbit is signing copies of ‘The Game Book’ (JR Books, £14.99) at the CLA Game Fair at Belvoir Castle on July 24.

Jan Moir has a restaurant review website www.areyoureadytoorder.co.uk and writes for the Daily Mail

..................................................

The Goring
Beeston Place, Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1

Luncheon x 2 £70.00
Deep-fried whitebait
Wild rabbit with English mustard sauce
Salmon with fennel salad
Roast cod with baby leeks and pea sauce
Bottled water £4.25
Coffee x 2 £10.00

Total (including service) £94.78

..................................................

Jan Moir on how political dining has changed

The rise of New Labour in the 1990s went hand in hand with a political democratisation of restaurants in Britain. Yes, Jeffrey Archer had always gone to Le Caprice but now glamorous new eateries were springing up all over London. The River Café was an early favourite of the fashionable left, even providing the Blair family supper on election night in 1997. Months after Locanda Locatelli first opened its doors in 2002, the restaurant critic AA Gill was absolutely appalled to see the prime minister there in a T-shirt, eating herb crust sea bass.

The Blairs also took Bill and Hillary Clinton to dine at Le Pont de la Tour (pictured) on the Thames at Tower Bridge, a place Ken Livingstone also fancies for the views and the French food. When he was London mayor, Livingstone – who wrote a restaurant review column for the Evening Standard for many years – ran up a bill of more than £1,000 there. That’s a lot of coquilles à la creme.

More recently, Jamie Oliver has proved a hit with Gordon and Sarah Brown, who asked him to cook Welsh lamb and asparagus for the G20 leaders at Downing Street this year.

The Tory leader David Cameron, an enthusiastic home cook, is also a fan of Oliver’s recipes, though he admits that his wife is better in the kitchen. He has good taste in restaurants, too, particularly those local to his home on the fringes of Notting Hill in west London.

He likes the scruffy but atmospheric Galicia tapas bar and restaurant on Portobello Road and has also recently been seen at Le Café Anglais, chef and FT columnist Rowley Leigh’s restaurant. The signature dish there is a cute cup of Parmesan custard served with anchovy toasts. Cameron also dines regularly at Hereford Road, chef Tom Pemberton’s excellent beacon to seasonal British produce.

It’s all a long way from Norman Tebbit’s time in government, when most Tory lunches and dinners were taken in clubs such as White’s, Boodle’s, the Garrick and Brooks’s and it was important to pretend that you weren’t interested in food or actually quite enjoyed eating overcooked, indeterminate meat.

Unless, that is, you were being treated to lunch at Wiltons – still a Tebbit favourite – or the Savoy Grill. The old Savoy Grill, that is, where famed maître’d Angelo Maresca presided over a room that looked like the interior of a grand ship and lamb was carved in long ribbons from a silver trolley. “When I was chairman of the party,” recalls Tebbit, ”my secretary used to refer to it as the works canteen.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Newsweek: Meet The Sotomayors

Meet The Sotomayors

One is a Latina firebrand, the other a model of judicial restraint. It's the latter who will appear before the senate judiciary committee. But it's the former, conservative critics fear, who will sit on the highest court in the land. Will the real Sonia Sotomayor please stand up?

Evan Thomas, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Brian No

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

In the press portraits written since Barack Obama named her to the Supreme Court in May, two Sonia Sotomayors have emerged. One is the fiery Latina activist who formally complained to the federal government about her university's alleged ethnic bias; who sat on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund when it accused New York City of discrimination in hiring and voting rights; who sometimes suggested that judicial opinions should reflect the gender and ethnic backgrounds of the judges who write them; who asserted that "a wise Latina woman" was likely to reach a better decision than "a white male." The other is the federal court of appeals judge who writes careful, narrowly reasoned opinions that are unexciting but unalarming, that rarely stray from the mainstream.

This week, at her confirmation hearings, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be eager to find out which Justice Sotomayor will show up at the Supreme Court on the traditional first Monday in October that begins the court's year. There is no way the senators will be able to know for sure. Sotomayor's judicial record reveals little. Judges on the federal courts of appeals are supposed to stick to the law and to obey precedent. Supreme Court justices, on the other hand, have a freer hand. While they are supposed to respect the slow evolution of the law, they have more discretion than lower-court judges to express personal views, to vote their consciences, to make the law fit what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called "the felt necessities of the time."

At her confirmation hearings, Sotomayor is not likely to tip her hand. Her testimony will be carefully considered and undoubtedly guarded. But it is possible to look at the experience that she says did more than any other to shape her—her undergraduate years at Princeton—and get a sense of how her mind works and how she approaches problems. The portrait that emerges is of a shrewd politician who wants to change the system by working within it.

"My days at Princeton … were the single most transforming experience I have had. It was here that I became truly aware of my Latina identity—something I had taken for granted during my childhood when I was surrounded by my family and their friends," Sotomayor said in a speech to the Third World Center at Princeton in 1996. Her sentiment is not unusual among minorities at the school, which has the most Southern and conservative heritage in the Ivy League. Michelle Obama, who attended Princeton in the early '80s, wrote in her senior thesis that she had never felt more aware of her "blackness" than when she was a student at the university. Although Princeton has become quite diverse, many nonwhite students still say they feel a heightened sense of racial identity.

Princeton transformed Sotomayor in another way that she did not mention in her speech. It taught her how to play a particular sort of power game, to get ahead the Princeton way—not by assertion or bullying, but by reason and carefully prepared persuasion. These are values that Princeton has long taught and still tries to teach. Change is to be achieved by working within the system, not by tearing things down.

When Sotomayor arrived in the fall of 1972, she recalled in her 1996 speech, Prince-ton was "an alien land for me." She was a member of only the fourth class to take women. There were very few blacks or Hispanics. It seemed to Sotomayor that the other students had all gone to prep school and taken tennis lessons and enjoyed ski vacations. In the summer after her freshman year, she read the children's and adolescents' classics she had missed but that seemed familiar to all the prep-school students—Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, and the novels of Jane Austen.

Sotomayor apparently never encountered outright discrimination. Princeton students are usually too polite for that. Exclusiveness was more subtly, even unconsciously, conveyed. On Sotomayor's very first day, a Southern girl turned to her and two other Hispanic girls and said how wonderful it was that Princeton had all these strange people.

In her freshman year, Sotomayor took a survey course on Latin American history. "She was clearly very intelligent and engaged, but very rough," recalls her professor, Peter Winn. "She was intimidated. She didn't speak in class. She had no idea what she was getting into." Sotomayor has recalled that her writing was "stilted and overly complicated," her "grammar and vocabulary skills weak." Winn undertook to improve it, showing her how to write clear, declarative sentences. More important, he taught her critical thinking. Sotomayor had come from a Roman Catholic high school, Cardinal Spellman, where learning was rote and students were taught to obey authority. Winn's rule was simple: "Be critical of everything, especially things you agree with." Sotomayor was extraordinarily determined to learn, but also cautious and deliberate. "She was slow to join things," Margarita Rosa, who was an activist and a member of the student group Acción Puertorriqueña, told The Daily Princetonian. "She sized up things for a while before she decided to become a part of something." But by the end of her sopho-more year Sotomayor was co-chairman of Acción Puertorriqueña and involved in other groups, as well as a member of the student-faculty Discipline Committee, a powerful position campuswide. Along with other Hispanic leaders at the university, she filed a complaint with the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare accusing Princeton of "an institutional pattern of discrimination" against Puerto Ricans and Chicanos. The letter is full of strong language, alleging a "total absence of regard, concern, and respect for an entire people and their culture" and "an attempt—a successful attempt so far—to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion."

One might think the Princeton administration would be irked by the negative publicity from such a wildly hyperbolic legal complaint. But "no, no, no, no, no," says former Princeton president Bill Bowen. "We were committed to making progress, and we were making progress" on minority hiring and admissions. Sotomayor and the other activists were, in effect, pushing on an open door. Princeton's largely liberal administrators were already committed to transforming the school from WASP bastion to multicultural meritocracy. The only debate was over timing—the university did not wish to act hastily. The important thing was that Sotomayor and the other student activists were working within the system. Though Princeton's campus was tamer than most during the tumult of the late '60s, university administrators were shaken by a building takeover by black activists in 1969.

"What I remember most [about Sotomayor] was just how mature she was," says Bowen. "We didn't see her as wanting to do anything except to improve the university. She wasn't trying to tear anything down." According to some Prince-ton contemporaries interviewed by NEWSWEEK, she reined in the hotheads who wanted to take more direct action, like occupying buildings. Sotomayor was a "true all-rounder," says Bowen. "All-rounder" is a term of high approbation at Princeton, which has long prized brilliant amateurs over narrow specialists. In her senior year she won the Pyne Prize, the university's highest award, for the student who combines scholarship with leadership in campus organizations—the true "all-rounder." She was not a grasping careerist. "She was not one of these students who pushed herself on you," Bowen recalls. Rather, she mastered the very Princeton art of succeeding without appearing to want it too badly. She learned how to show a sense of scholarly detachment. In her 178-page summa cum laude Princeton thesis on the achievements and failures of a Puerto Rican leader named Luis Muñoz Marín, she begins by saying she will put aside her own view—a fairly radical one, that Puerto Rico should be an independent nation. The tone of the thesis is balanced and considered, though with a few bows to faddish radicalism, such as referring to the U.S. Congress as the North American Congress.

Sotomayor has said that she first became interested in the law watching the TV show Perry Mason as a young girl. It is unclear when she first decided that she wanted to be a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Winn, her Princeton mentor, says he would have guessed that after Yale Law she'd become a crusading civil-rights lawyer. Instead, she became a prosecutor representing the state—joining the Manhattan district attorney's office, where Robert Morgenthau, the politically powerful D.A. for life, became one of her champions. (She also continued the activism that started at Princeton by serving from 1980 to 1992 as an engaged board member of the Puerto Rican legal-defense group.) In 1984 she moved on to join a private law firm—gaining experience representing private clients that would serve her well in a career on the bench. Well-connected politically in the Manhattan legal establishment, she became a federal -district-court judge in 1992. When she was elevated to the court of appeals in 1998, there was widespread speculation that she would in time become the Supreme Court's first female Hispanic justice.

She has said nothing in her judicial opinions that would get in the way of that ambition. Her opinions are mostly solid, careful, noncontroversial. She has been a good deal feistier and more overtly liberal off the bench—showing her true colors, conservative critics say. Now their speculation is that she will abandon all restraint once she is given life tenure on the high court. Says Ed Whelan, head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a leading intellectual conservative critic of the nominee: "As a lower-court judge, she's been obligated to follow Second Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, and she's had ample incentive to do so in order to preserve her viability for the Supreme Court. As a justice, she'd be liberated from the duty to follow precedent she disagrees with. Her disturbing speeches and her fervent embrace of quotas and other left-wing causes provide the clearest window into what to expect from a Justice Sotomayor."

But Whelan and the others may be misreading her. To be sure, she has a reputation for speaking curtly to lawyers appearing before her (especially when they are unprepared) and for occasionally confronting other judges. And it's possible that she will tangle with the most outspoken and sharp-tongued conservative on the court, Antonin Scalia. But it's perhaps more likely she will take a low-key approach, sticking to careful and well-prepared opinions. Sotomayor is not a schemer or a conniver, says her old professor, Peter Winn. But he recalls that when she outmaneuvered those prep-school boys who had seemed so alien to her during freshman year, she permitted herself a wry laugh or two.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/206245

© 2009 

WSJ: Obama and the Speech

OPINION: WONDER LAND
JULY 16, 2009

Obama and the Speech

What is the point and purpose of the President's orations?

By DANIEL HENNINGER

Can Barack Obama talk his way onto Mount Rushmore? He might. In fact, if just half of what Mr. Obama has said that he, we or the world should do comes to pass, he's going straight to that mountain.

More than any U.S. president, The Speech is the primary vehicle of Barack Obama's politics. Web sites have been erected as shrines to his speeches. Obamaspeech.com offers the text of 100 Obama speeches back to 2002. The electronic library stops at January 2009, when the White House site takes over. Currently it's up to 36 pages listing the titles alone of the president's remarks and speeches.

Six months into his presidency, with more surely to come, it is an appropriate moment to ask: What is the point and purpose of Barack Obama's speeches?

Ken Fallin

One answer -- offered by students of talk from Aristotle through Alfred North Whitehead -- is obvious: The purpose of the rhetorician's art is to persuade. John Locke, watching democracy's advance, had a darker view; rhetoric, said Locke, is an instrument of error and deceit. Or both: talking people into error.

In our time, public remarks remain first of all a photo-op to make a president glow in public. Mr. Obama is taking it to another level, making the public speech the central act of his presidency.

On his just-completed foreign trip, he gave a major address in Moscow reinterpreting the Cold War and another in Ghana laying out a persuasive path to prosperity for the African continent. In June he gave a major speech on Islam's place in history and its relationship to the rest of the world, spoke the next day at length on the meaning of Buchenwald and a day later about D-Day at Normandy. He seems to be on TV every day, talking.

The first thing to be said about this body of work is that it is astonishingly good. Even by the something-for-everyone standards of political speech, much of Mr. Obama's somethings are strong and worth hearing.

Here's the problem: Mr. Obama is not the nation's Speaker in Chief. He's not a senator, and he's no longer a candidate. He's the president. A president's major speeches are different than those of anyone else. That high office imposes demands beyond the power of a podium. Inspiration matters, but the office also requires acts of leadership. A U.S. president's words must be connected to something beyond sentiment and eloquence. Too much of the time, Barack Obama's big speeches don't seem to be connected to anything other than his own interesting thoughts on some subject.

Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger asks if Barack Obama can talk his way onto Mount Rushmore.

Lincoln's eloquence flowed from the pain of the Civil War. Washington's Farewell Address, perhaps America's greatest political speech, was a magisterial summing up after leading an army to victory in the Revolution and then the nation's beginning. FDR's remembered speeches were pushed into life by the Depression and then world war.

Ronald Reagan's great "tear down this wall" speech in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate was just one piece in an elaborate Cold War endgame strategy.

LBJ's most famous speech, to a full session of Congress in 1965 a week after the violent civil-rights march in Selma, wasn't just a reflection on civil rights in America but itself a central event.

With one notable exception -- health care -- there is a disconnect between the scale of Mr. Obama's ideas and his actions, and sometimes even reality, as when he says a U.S-Russian commitment to a world without nuclear weapons would be the "legal and moral foundation" for persuading the world's rogues to do the same. What, exactly, comes after the moral foundation?

The Russian "reset" isn't a foreign-policy statement; it's a sentiment. If you were the head of an Islamic nation, what policy conclusion were you supposed to take from that Cairo speech? All past administrations have been willing to talk to adversaries. When he speaks as president, Mr. Obama's audiences have reason to expect that some concrete actions or policies will flow from seemingly major statements. Other than more diplomats talking, I don't think much of anything is going to follow these. The Speech was pretty much it.

Then there is health care. With characteristic eloquence, Mr. Obama defended his federal health-insurance entitlement for the middle class in a major speech to the American Medical Association. If enacted, Mr. Obama's plan would be the most significant piece of social entitlement legislation since 1965, the year Medicare and Medicaid were enacted as the cornerstone of the Great Society.

It may well be that this in fact is the foundation on which Barack Obama intends to build his own vast social vision. If so he will be doing it with no real event or trauma to drive a policy of this scale -- no war, no civil-rights movement. Instead, he is trying to shape a presidency from the force of his own political personality carved out of a mountain of random eloquence. It might work, too.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

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FT: Control, halt, delete

Control, halt, delete

By Joseph Menn, Richard Waters and Kathrin Hille

Published: June 26 2009 19:30 | Last updated: June 26 2009 19:30

User ID: a police officer checks registrations at an internet café in Xuchang, central China. From next month, Beijing wants new computers to be installed with extra controls

This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. “Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,” it said. “We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Editorial Comment: Internet censorship - Jun-28

Obama aide hints at perks for cyber security - Apr-23

Back seat for NSA on cyber security - Apr-22

Analysis: Deeper peeper - Apr-14

Efforts to fight cyber-crime fall short to virus - Apr-02

Report reveals China-based cyber spying ring - Mar-30

Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, “soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history”.

Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.

China is trying to force censorship software on to every new personal computer, while Iran succeeded this week in virtually eliminating the spread over the internet of first-hand accounts from protests in the streets at the handling of its presidential election.

That stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.

Both carry the added attraction of deniability: many regimes are employing advanced repressive techniques that are hard to identify in action, let alone circumvent. At a time when new communication technologies, from text messaging to Twitter, promise to put greater power in the hands of the individual, these techniques are having a chilling effect. Internet experts from more open societies fear that this will lead to greater self-censorship by organisations and individuals, which they see as the most effective tool of all.

Even the optimists warn of setbacks. “In the end, the winners of the race are most likely to be citizens and activists who use these technologies for democratic purposes,” says John Palfrey of Harvard University, an authority on internet filtering. But he adds: “With respect to individual battles, the states that practise censorship and surveillance are winning some of them.”

The number of such states is in the dozens, researchers say. In Burma and Moldova, governments recently resorted to pulling the plug on mobile phone networks amid unrest magnified by text messages; in Uzbekistan, there is widespread suspicion of internet monitoring but few ways to prove it. That is despite the fact that a lot of the surveillance and security software in the hands of governments across the world comes from western suppliers. In what is by its nature among the most globalised of industries, technology companies are seeing a revenue boost from governmental interest in data mining, search and storage products, though they periodically draw fire from activists for assisting repressive states.

The most gripping evidence of the change at hand has come from Iran. The theocratic regime has been in a protracted struggle over the free flow of information and communication with many of its largely young urban populace since the day after this month’s disputed election.

STRONG-ARM TECHNIQUES

How curbs on net users work:

Internet filters
Method: Set up on the main conduits of the internet, known as backbones, these software filters block traffic from websites on a proscribed list.
Example: “Great Firewall of China”.

Deep packet inspection
Method: A layer of software that looks to identify the content of individual pieces of information, or “packets”. This can be used to read, store or block individual messages and connections to websites.
Example: Commercial providers including Phorm and NebuAd.

Denial of service attacks
Method: Large numbers of PCs bombard a website with requests, making it inaccessible to other users.
Example:Sites in Estonia and Georgia during conflicts with Russia.

Toeing the party line
Method: Some regimes recruit people to present their case online, sometimes paying them.
Example: “50-cent bloggers” in China.

Self-censorship
Method: Governments bring pressure on companies to restrict access to content. Bloggers must register.
Example:MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service in China, bans phrases including “human rights”.

Edge-of-network restrictions
Method: Censors push control to a more local level. Internet providers’ terms of service make them act as agents of the state. Restrictions at the edges of the network can reach all the way to curbs installed in PCs.
Example: China’s Green Dam/Youth Escort software.

Tehran has a decided advantage in that it runs the country’s leading internet service provider. Called DCI, it throttled back the amount of bandwidth available to its citizens so that web video traffic dropped by as much as 90 per cent and e-mail leaving the country fell by nearly as much.

Data assembled by Arbor Networks, a US internet security company, show the Iranian government was picking and choosing what types of traffic to let through and which parts of the net to leave unimpeded. Just as the security forces adjusted their response to counter the changing nature of the protests on the ground, Iran’s internet police changed which sites could be reached.

Facebook and other social networks were easy to block and fell quickly. Twitter, a web-accessible broadcasting service that can process messages from mobile phones, proved harder to take down without killing off all text messaging.

Activists proved agile at hopping from one medium to another. For more than a week, outsiders would send people in Iran the addresses of “open proxies”, computers outside the country set up to relay traffic. That way, Iranians could still reach sites they were blocked from accessing directly. But the authorities hunted down most of those proxies and cut off access. Finally, on Thursday, they killed most outgoing traffic, including Twitter blasts.

“It’s a big problem when a government is just willing to shut down communications,” says John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, who was helping dissidents get the word out. “If they do that, you’re down to smoke signals.”

Iran’s response evolved rapidly, aided by filtering technology in place long before the election. No country, though, has been as thoroughly policed through as many means as China, which has long been on the cutting edge of censorship.

Now, Beijing is trying to cement its control with a decree that from July 1, all computers sold in the country must come with a program called Green Dam/Youth Escort, which the government says will be used to block access to pornography sites. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer makers are protesting and have won the support of US trade officials, who are threatening to bring the matter to the World Trade Organisation.

“Green Dam will be a game-changer, if in fact it goes into effect,” says Harvard’s Mr Palfrey. “The desktop is the last bastion of personal freedom. It would change the way people use these devices in extraordinary ways.”

Beijing has for years blocked many sites by setting up filters on the country’s largest internet backbones, using a method nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The central government has more recently heaped additional blocking and monitoring responsibilities on to internet service providers, web companies and local censors, all of which have been upgrading the technology they use.

TRS, a Chinese supplier of internet security products, says growing numbers of police departments are replacing their traditional search engine-based efforts with state-of-the-art data mining applications, which are capable of analysing large bodies of information.

All this has its limits. “Controlling public networks is very, very difficult,” says Tony Yuan, chief executive of Netentsec, another Chinese security provider. “Bandwidth and traffic are huge, so normally you don’t have the computing power.”

But the latest effort by China’s central authorities takes them further still, to the PCs that stand at the edge of the network. It is not clear they will succeed. The computer makers and US government are being joined in their opposition by security researchers who have identified flaws in Green Dam that could allow third parties to take control of PCs.

Even if the blanket order is delayed, circumvented or quietly forgotten, the Chinese government has already gained access to many PCs. Earlier this year, Beijing made the bundling of Green Dam a precondition for eligibility of PCs in its subsidy programme for PC sales to rural residents. In May, it ordered all schools to install the program. “I would estimate that we’re already looking at more than 10m computers in China with Green Dam installed,” says an executive at a Beijing internet portal company.

An estimated 300m Chinese have online access. Though the more determined among them are likely to find ways around Green Dam, many may not even try to defy the message of disapproval being sent by Beijing.

Some of the surveillance and censorship technology in Iran and China is home-grown but much of it is western. Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between the two European companies, says, for example, that it was required to sell Iran equipment for monitoring phone calls as part of a contract for a communications network. Cisco has periodically come under fire for selling its routers to China but says the same equipment is used in both open and closed internet systems.

Under laws in the US and elsewhere, telecommunications companies must make it easy for law enforcement agencies to conduct authorised wiretaps – and equipment providers say they cannot shut that capability off depending on the customer.

Collection, in fact, is no longer so much the problem: analysing the masses of data is a bigger issue, as is massaging search technology to look for more than simple keywords that alarm officials, such as “Tibet” and “democracy”. That technology is becoming much better – spurred in part by the increasing global attention to cyber security. Notably, the US defence department this week approved a new military cyber command that will answer to the National Security Agency, which in recent years has been exposed for mining Americans’ e-mail without warrants.

Concerns about pernicious criminal software and “denial of service” attacks, which have shut government websites in Estonia and elsewhere with bombardments of useless data, have prompted further efforts to scrutinise internet traffic. But according to some researchers, technologies developed to counter insidious attacks such as these will only serve to advance the techniques of information control – to the eventual detriment of future mass revolts against oppressive political forces.

“If security starts becoming job one, then a lot of things being used by repressive states will become commercialised and normalised,” says Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks filtering. “We’ll be doing the same thing as Iran, or using the same technologies. And that’s what I worry about.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

NY Times: Iran's Second Sex

June 27, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Iran’s Second Sex

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN

From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.

Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”

How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.

A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.

Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”

In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.

Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”

But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.

This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.

Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.

In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.

Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.

Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.

I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.

When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.

Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.

Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.

Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.

I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Obama's secret - Muppets, motherhood and apple pie

See also: TIME: Tickle me Obama - Lessons from Sesame Street

Obama’s secret: Muppets, motherhood and apple pie

By Chrystia Freeland

Published: May 8 2009 16:02 | Last updated: May 8 2009 16:02

There are not many Harvard-trained lawyers who, after three months in the White House, would describe the highlight as the opportunity to appear alongside Big Bird and Elmo.

Michelle Obama’s apparent delight in her stroll down Sesame Street is part of a role she has thrown herself into with gusto: that of “mom-in-chief”. Her genuinely private family life does seem remarkably content. But Mrs Obama also deserves the president’s professional thanks.

She is one of the keys to the political mystery that is torturing the Republican party: the perplexing fact that the unabashedly liberal Barack Obama is strongly trusted by an American public that is less so.

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, it has been conventional wisdom to describe America as a “centre-right” nation. Recent surveys tend to confirm that view. Just one in five voters in the 2008 election described themselves as “liberal”, while more than a third said they were conservative.

Yet those voters handily elected a president who campaigned on a progressive agenda. In office, Mr Obama has pursued that agenda forcefully – and the country seems to approve of that, too. When Mr Obama’s administration passed the 100-day mark, Americans gave him a higher favourability rating than any president since Reagan achieved at that moment.

One source of Mr Obama’s appeal is his cerebral serenity – the right sort of charisma for these troubled times. Another may be those troubles themselves: thanks to the recession, and Wall Street’s role in creating it, Americans are uncharacteristically receptive to higher taxes for the rich and a more muscular state. Yet the fact remains that some of Mr Obama’s most explicitly liberal policies, such as his blanket ban on torture, are among his least popular. And according to one recent poll, nearly half of Americans deemed the president to be more liberal than they were.

But, to the howling frustration of the increasingly marginalised Republican party, Americans’ trust for Mr Obama trumps their views on his specific policies: his overall job rating is higher than nearly all of his scores on single issues.

Which brings us back to Michelle Obama and the Obamas’ joint creation of a vision of family life that is both perfect – and perfectly traditional.

When Mrs Obama, a Princeton graduate, met her future husband, she was senior to him at the law firm where they both worked. For much of her married life, she out-earned him.

Yet, in the White House, the new first lady has been the ideal small ‘c’ conservative wife and mother. She has planted an organic vegetable garden on the south lawn and says her main focus is settling her daughters in a new city. Mrs Obama has embraced the more ornamental aspects of her role with grace, too – indeed, she has already inspired a style book, whose subtitle dubs her “the first lady of fashion”.

The contrast with the last Ivy League-educated female lawyer to live in the White House is instructive – Hillary Clinton seems to have been Mrs Obama’s guide to how not to do it. The first lady does not call herself Michelle Robinson Obama; her husband did not offer the nation two for the price of one; and you are more likely to see Tom Daschle lead the new administration’s healthcare charge than have Mrs Obama come close to such a fraught issue.

If you doubt the significance of Mrs Obama’s circumspection, consider the abuse she received on the campaign trail on the few occasions when she ventured beyond Hallmark sentimentality. When Mrs Obama ribbed her husband about his inability to put the butter back in the fridge, she was chided for “emasculating” him by liberal doyenne Maureen Dowd. Mrs Obama’s observation that “for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country” was seized on by the right as a menacing sign of a lack of patriotism.

The New Yorker magazine famously caricatured that view by depicting Mrs Obama as a fist-bumping militant with an assault rifle strapped over her shoulder. That same cartoon had Mr Obama dressed in sandals, a robe and a turban, with an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace.

Some hard-core conservatives, who have taken to calling the commander- in-chief a socialist, an appeaser and even a Manchurian candidate, may think this image is close to the “real” Obama. As one letter in The Wall Street Journal lamented: “This is what can happen when the campus radical you might have known decades ago somehow gets elected president.”

But the man most Americans see when they peek into the White House is, instead, a reassuringly traditional paterfamilias with two charming daughters and a wife who looks great in a sleeveless dress and spends most Saturdays cheering those girls on the soccer pitch. And, since this is 21st-century America, the Obamas also provide the occasional, tasteful glimpse of what looks like love – witness those hand-holding photos after their private dinner last week.

Conservative writer David Brooks has warned Republicans that Mr Obama is dangerous because he has figured out how to sell his progressive agenda with an appeal to traditional conservative values such as thrift, hard work and prudence. True enough. But what makes Mr Obama an even greater threat to the right is the first family’s enticing presentation of all of those small ‘c’ values. God help the Republicans if photos of their Mother’s Day celebrations this weekend include the dog.

chrystia.freeland@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/arts/columnists/chrystiafreeland

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

TIME: Tickle Me Obama - Lessons from Sesame Street

Monday, Jun. 15, 2009

Tickle Me Obama: Lessons from Sesame Street

By NANCY GIBBS

Most presidents are easy to pin down on our cultural maps. Ronald Reagan was raised in Dixon, Ill., but we placed him in Hollywood, telling America's story on the big screen. Bill Clinton may have been the Man from Hope, Ark., but the mischief of nearby Hot Springs was in his blood. George W. Bush was practically born on the Yale campus, yet Texas was his true terroir.

Which brings us to Barack Obama, who belongs ... where exactly? Kansas? Kenya? Hawaii? Harvard? None of these quite fit our blender in chief, but it struck me recently that Obama does have a cultural home: he's the first President from Sesame Street. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)

When Sesame Street founder Joan Ganz Cooney met Obama at a fundraiser last year, she was prepared to hear what she always does. "I'd have bet you a million dollars," she says, "that [Obama] would tell me how his kids watched Sesame Street." But instead the President-to-be told her that he and his little sister watched the show. "I realized that this is the first President young enough to say that."

The Obamas clearly have a deeper personal connection to the show than their White House predecessors did; it was aimed, after all, at kids like them. (Full disclosure: I have a personal connection too; some of my friends work on Sesame Street, and they aren't furry.) When Michelle Obama visited the set in Queens, N.Y., to talk about "healthy habits" a few weeks ago, she was practically fizzing. "I'm on a high," she said. "I never thought I'd be on Sesame Street with Elmo and Big Bird." Let it be noted that this visit came after she'd met the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace and welcomed Stevie Wonder to the White House and enjoyed all kinds of other not-too-bad perks of being First Lady. "I think it's probably the best thing I've done so far in the White House."

The President is every bit as much a product of the show, but it's not just his age and mastery of the alphabet that make Obama the first Sesame Street President. The Obama presidency is a wholly American fusion of optimism, enterprise and earnestness — rather like the far-fetched proposal of 40 years ago to create a TV show that would prove that educational television need not be an oxymoron. Unlike Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans in their idyllic Treasure House, or the leafy land of the suburban sitcom, Sesame's characters were colorful, their milieu was urban; there was noise and grime and grouches, and they hung out on the stoop, not the porch. Parents who were not white, not rich, not able to afford a fancy preschool knew this show was designed for them. Maybe it would level the playing field a little. (See pictures of Barack Obama's college years.)

It wound up doing much more. Sesame Street is now the longest street on the planet. It runs from Harlem to Honolulu; on to Obama's childhood home in Indonesia, where Jalan Sesama celebrates unity through diversity; through South Africa, where one Muppet is HIV positive; through Israel and Palestine and Egypt, where girls are told how important it is that they keep reading and learning. It creates citizens of a highly globalized, post-racial world. "The only kids who can identify along racial lines with the Muppets," genius puppeteer Jim Henson observed, "have to be either green or orange."

And yet for all its empathy, Sesame Street has been highly cerebral as well, the perfect hatchery for the Empirical Presidency. It is the most heavily researched children's show ever, conceived by an experimental psychologist, incubated in a Harvard seminar room, vetted by linguists and nutritionists and child-development experts (who once vetoed a segment in which Elmo crawled inside the letter O because they feared that a toddler might see it as permission to climb into a toilet). Obama famously prizes intellect over instinct; he says he wants to see the data and for the data to drive the decision. Sesame writers test-drive their skits on focus groups of young children to see how long they can hold the kids' attention and how well the writers deliver their desired message; if the kids drift, the segment dies. The same can be said of any number of Obama's dreamier campaign promises.

Sesame Street's genius lies in finding gentle ways to talk about hard things — death, divorce, danger — in terms that children understand and accept. The polls can tell a President what the American people want to hear, but after so many years of sandbox politics and childish games, there comes a time to grow up. Given the hard choices, does the President think we're ready to handle complexity and delay gratification? If not now, when? Professor Obama has at least talked to us like we're adults. The question remains whether President Obama will govern as though he believes it.

See pictures of Sasha and Malia Obama at the Inauguration.

See pictures of Barack Obama's nation of hope.

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