I am a regular reader of Newsweek magazine. Most of the time, I don’t like what I read in there. I find its journalism often sloppy, if not downright dishonest. The fact is, I read it through gritted teeth most of the time.

For instance, I think they’re highly tilted toward John McCain in this election. He was their preferred candidate during the Republican primaries. Although they’re intrigued by Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, especially now that he’s the Democratic Party nominee, McCain remains their man.

They’ll do anything, including shred any credibility the magazine has left to get him elected.

But, I am writing today to praise Newsweek, not to bash it. At least praise Christopher Dickey, its longtime foreign correspondent, for a superb piece on the magazine’s cover this week.

Southern Discomfort is a special piece of journalism, well written. As a writer, one of the things I struggle with is the pronoun “I.” Dickey wielded it judiciously in this piece to great effect. He did not get in the way of telling this story, which is quite an achievement.

I could try to quote from it but there’s so much that’s good in the piece that you, dear readers, would be better off buying the magazine at the newsstand, or reading the piece here:

I cannot resist one quote from the article, which got me:

“I think if there were a better economy more people would take a risk on Obama,” said Patricia Murtaugh Wise, a lawyer from Nashville sightseeing with her kids at Atlanta’s landmark Varsity Drive-In restaurant. Her friends are blaming Bush more than his party, she said. “I’m not sure people are saying, ‘Because Bush got us into this, let’s vote for a Democrat.’ I think people are saying, ‘Let’s get a new person in there’.”

Her name notwithstanding, the quote and the reasoning behind it are patently stupid. If, as the woman said, times are good, her excuse not to vote for Obama would be that he’d ruin the good thing she had going.

Unfortunately, all the good Bill Clinton did as president, the goodwill he won with African Americans and the great relationships he forged over the course of his political, he’s not intent on frittering away in bitterness. He’s affronted by Sen. Barack Obama’s political ascent and he’s not going to let it go, promising now to speak his mind next year.

Next year?

Give it a rest, Mr. Clinton. The nation has more pressing matter to attend to than the swamp in your mind.

Clinton Embraces Return to Ambassador Role: After the Bitter Primaries, He Calls Charity ‘My Life’ By Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, August 3, 2008; A01

KIGALI, Rwanda, Aug. 2 — There will be no Clinton restoration — not this year, at least. But the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton has begun.

The former president in many ways ended the Democratic primary campaign more isolated than his wife, with his own friends and allies unhappy with his flashes of anger and ill-chosen words and blaming him in part for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat. With a negligible relationship with Sen. Barack Obama — he has spoken to him just once since the primaries — Clinton has been shut out of the Obama campaign almost entirely and does not know even basic things, such as the role he will play at the Democratic convention.

It is uncharted territory for the most successful Democratic politician of his generation, and part of the reason he was in Kigali on Saturday, the latest stop in a grueling journey across Africa to visit some of the places where his charitable foundation has been active — and in the process re-establish his role as a global elder statesman. At the same time, Clinton began, slowly, to discuss the bruising Democratic primary season that ended two months earlier.

In his first extended interview since his wife exited the campaign in defeat, Clinton said he was glad to be back doing international foundation work. “This is my life now, and I was eager to get back to it, and I couldn’t be happier,” Clinton said in a hotel suite, with three aides looking on.

In a session that lasted more than 45 minutes, Clinton described his role in the 2008 campaign as “a privilege, an honor,” and said, “I loved it,” but he declined to discuss any of his own possible mistakes, describing them as a distraction. “Next year, you and I and everybody else will be freer and have more space to say what we believe to be the truth” about the primaries, he said.

Clinton volunteered very little praise of Obama, beyond describing him as “smart” and “a good politician” when asked about him toward the end of the interview. He did, however, muse at length about the role that race could play in the general election — the issue that some of his former black allies angrily accused him of introducing in the Democratic primaries — as a factor, if not a decisive one.

Amid encouraging recent poll numbers, the Washington Post points out some obstacles to an Obama victory in the general election on Nov. 4.

At the heart of the Obama campaign’s strategy is a national effort to increase registration and turnout among the millions of Democratic-inclined Americans who have not been voting, particularly younger people and African Americans. The push began during the primaries but expanded this month to a nationwide registration drive led by 3,000 volunteers dispatched around the country.

Gaining greater African American support could well put Obama over the top in states where Democrats have come close in the past two elections, and could also help him retain the big swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.

There is no guarantee that African Americans will register to vote or, even if registered, would turn out to vote on election day. I covered (in the margins) the bitterly racial mayoral rematch between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in 1993 as a reporter for the New York Daily News.

I can offer anecdotal evidence: The fear that blacks felt of a Giuliani mayoralty (which were later borne out) was palpable on election night. But many of the black Harlem residents that I interviewed that election night, despite seemingly knowing what was at stake, did not bother showing up to vote.

The Obama candidacy is an opportunity for Americans to make a choice. It is also an opportunity for black Americans to make history. Sen. Obama bet his whole candidacy on democracy from the bottom up. The challenge is not just for well-meaning whites to vote for the clearly superior candidate in this election. The challenge is also to African Americans.

Or will they prove Obama wrong?

I may have said this before but I used to love reading Paul Krugman and I certainly hope to get around to loving to read him again.

Right about now, he’s lost all credibility with me.

His column today is a prime example of how he lost me. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran a, as Sen. Barack Obama said, valiant race. She lost and conceded and threw her support behind Sen. Obama. Krugman was one of Mrs. Clinton’s most fervent supporters.

Deploying column after column to bludgeon Sen. Obama’s policy positions and extol the wisdom and virtues of HRC, Mr. Krugman seemed blinded to any good points Obama may have made during the course of the campaign, or to any good qualities he may have.

I don’t mind partisanship, or even disingenousness. I subscribe to the adage that all is fair in love and war. But what I do mind dishonesty.

And the best face you could put on most of the arguments Mr. Krugman has marshalled in support of Mrs. Clinton and against Mr. Obama is to say that they are dishonest. Even when the examples he’s using are right on the money. Or, should I say especially when . . .

Anyway, in “It’s a different Country,” Mr. Krugman was at it again.

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.

Mr. Krugman’s examples are these:

Big Government: Americans don’t dislike big government. They actually support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, government programs that dominate domestic spending.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?

Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.

There’s nothing wrong with this argument. On its own, it is right.

Mr. Krugman goes on to talk about other examples, including the decline in urban violence.

As the historian Rick Perlstein documents in his terrific new book “Nixonland,” America’s hard right turn really began in 1966, when the Democrats suffered a severe setback in Congress — and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

Krugman acknowledged that none of these examples mean that Obama would win the presidency. He then concluded this way:

But if Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.

First of all, let me say that, if the country Paul Krugman is talking about is these United States of America, it is not that different a country.

I questioned the country Krugman is talking about because he wondered in his column why “racial division” has “become so much less important in American politics.” America remains and will be for a long time a deeply racist and racialized nation. I take no pleasure in saying that but it is the truth.

The genius of the Obama campaign is in figuring out a way to navigate the virulent currents of our public life. He is a singular figure (Just as Sen. Clinton, for an entirely different reason, has been a singular figure in convincing us a female could be a commander-in-chief) who has come along with a promise of leading us to a better place.

Because the Democratic Party establishment was already committed to HRC, Obama fashioned his own brand new constituency so that his message could eventually resonate with people who might otherwise not listen to an African American candidate.

Obama had to do that in order to get anyone to listen to him. And, as it is, both candidates brought record number of people out to vote during the primary and caucus season.

Jesse Jackson made a couple of exhilarating runs at the presidency, crafting a “rainbow coalition” of minorities, women, and the poor and working classes but it was never going to be enough because, ultimately, you needed white voters, which the Rev. Jackson did not get in the requisite numbers.

Obama signaled this time was going to be different when he won the overwhelmingly white Iowa and came a scintillating second in just as white New Hampshire.

It was indeed Obama’s transformative campaign and not a de-racialized nation that led to those early triumphs and the ones that followed.

For Krugman to come out with his column Monday denying that and offering other reasons, as valid as they may be, strikes me as sour grapes bordering on churlishness.

“Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have long history and they both missed the boat when it came to the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive. There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains that they say to one another, and it’s, ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight,’ ” Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, said in this video.

“If this cultural group could get at the same table as black America you could rechange populist American politics. Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government,” he added.

Listening to Jim Webb in this rather too brief snippet convinces me more than ever that he should be Sen. Barack Obama’s running mate. I don’t know if he’ll accept the vice-presidency but, I think, together, he and Obama could craft a message that could reshape the Democratic Party for generations to come.

I want to take race off the table as a wedge issue. I want to make the Republican Party a minority party that speaks to only a small percentage of Americans, the very wealthy. I believe in Webb and his wisdom. He should definitely be a part of the national dialogue.

He mentioned in the video a Wall Street Journal opinion-editorial article that he wrote in Oct. 2004. In Secret GOP Weapon: The Scots-Irish vote , Webb examined the Republican Party’s success wooing poor and working class whites to their cause:

To an outsider George W. Bush’s political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated references to God, and to resoluteness of purpose. But to a trained eye and ear these performances have the deliberate balance of a country singer at the Grand Ole Opry.

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A friend sent me an e-mail yesterday that I’m only seeing just now. She said:

[A]s you’ll be reading this on primary day tomorrow, I wonder why so little coverage of Obama’s big lead in Oregon — considering it is a much whiter state that W. Virginia or some of the other states Hillary has done well in. Oregon has less than a 2% black population, but Obama is leading big. Could it be some white people actually will vote for him? Even working class ones from small states?

Good question. I don’t pretend to know the answer. I know a lot has been said about Appalachia and the poor whites of Scots-Irish stock who just won’t cotton to voting for a black candidate.

In the general election, when the debate is properly joined, I would like to see Sen. Barack Obama test this out. I want to see him persuade these voters that he’s a much better alternative to what the Republicans are offering.

In an interesting article in The New Republic, John B. Judis examined how race is used in elections and how it is likely to play in this election. History guarantees that Republicans will appeal to race in every way possible during the election. The lesson, he said, is for Obama not to become his own walking Willie Horton advertisement.

In The Big Race: Obama and the psychology of the color barrier, John B. Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic who has authored several interesting pieces on the contests between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, argues that Obama’s success in the general election may depend on what terms the debate is framed. Obama could hit electoral jackpot if he is able to change the subject to the Iraq war and the moribund state of the American economy, Judis wrote. He continues near the end:

Some of these have to do with abilities. A 1995 study found that voters believe black politicians “lack competence on major issues.” Other stereotypes relate to ideology.

Several studies have shown that if subjects compare a black and white candidate with roughly equal political positions, they will nevertheless see the black candidate as more liberal. Obama is already vulnerable to charges of inexperience, and, after Wright surfaced, he fell prey to an ideological stereotype as well. Whereas he benefited in the initial primaries and caucuses from being seen as middleof-the-road or even conservative, his strongest support has recently come from more liberal voters. In Pennsylvania, he defeated Clinton among voters who classified themselves as “very liberal” by 55 to 45 percent, but he lost “somewhat conservative” voters by 53 to 47 percent and moderates by 60 to 40 percent. In a national Pew poll, Obama’s support among “very liberal” voters jumped seven points between January and May, while his support among “moderates” dropped by two points. Since Obama’s actual policies are, on the whole, no more liberal than Clinton’s (his health care plan, for instance, is inarguably more conservative), these trends strongly suggest that some voters are stereotyping him because of his race.

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he should be able to inherit the white women who backed Hillary Clinton. As political psychologists have shown, these voters should be largely amenable to his candidacy. He should also continue to enjoy an advantage among white professionals. But Obama is likely to continue having trouble with white working-class voters in the Midwest–voters who tend to score high on racial resentment and implicit association tests and who, arguably, decided the 2004 election with their votes in Ohio. Obama will also have trouble with Latinos and Asians, groups that score high on both indexes, and that can be important in states like California. It’s not hard to quantify Obama’s problem: If 9 to 12 percent of Democratic primary voters in swing states have been reluctant to support him because he is black, one can assume that, in the general election, 15 to 20 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents may not support him for the same reason.

Can Obama surmount these obstacles? If the strong version of Mendelberg’s thesis is correct, then the very fact that Obama is African American will undercut any appeals to racial fears or resentments. And, if elections were held in the manner of the Iowa caucus, where voters publicly debate their positions and where Obama won substantial white workingclass support, then Mendelberg’s stronger thesis might well prove true. But elections are held in the privacy of a voting booth, where a voter can give voice to fears and resentments without danger of being heard. Obama may be able to sway some white voters to his side by drawing attention to race, but probably not enough to fully compensate for the disadvantage he faces.

If addressing racial resentments directly is not the answer, what is? As Mendelberg also suggests, it’s changing the subject–doing what the Republicans of the 1870s and the Democrats of the 1990s did. This year, that means diverting voters’ attention from the politics of race to the plight of the economy and the continuing quagmire in Iraq.

In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America’s racial history continues to influence the calculations of voters–sometimes near the forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their unconscious. For liberals, acknowledging these obstacles is the first step to blunting them. If Obama can focus the election on the economy and Iraq, he could very well win in spite of the angry words of Reverend Wright and 200 years of both old- fashioned racism and newfangled racial resentment. If he can’t, he is likely to suffer the same fate as Michael Dukakis–and this time it won’t take a Willie Horton commercial.

I have been vacillating between being optimistic and not so far this year. I will settle for Obama coming out alive, his family and integrity intact, whether he wins the election or not.

Roger Cohen of The New York Times (or should I say the International Herald Tribune?) is fast becoming my favorite columnist. He is a great writer with a searching conscience and vision.

Cohen was writing about the decision by Congress in 2003 to spend $500 million to build the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is set to open in 2015.

The question Cohen asked, after taking a measure of the Holocaust Museum, was why there is no institution before now to wrestle with the America’s tortured racial history, especially as it pertains to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and violence perpetrated against African Americans, including lynchings.

A timely question.

For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or “the politics of history.” It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race.

The King Center is a fine institution. But it’s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation’s most divisive subject. Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

I lived in Berlin for three years, a period spanning the Bundestag’s decision in 1999 to build a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The debate, 54 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, was fraught. It takes time to traverse the politics of history, confront guilt and arrive at an adequate memorialization of national crimes that also offers a possible path to reconciliation.

Germans have confronted the monstrous in them. In the end, they concluded the taint was so pervasive that Degussa, which was linked to the company that produced Zyklon-B gas, was permitted to provide the anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating.

America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race.

It was a consciously somber, serious disquisition on an incendiary topic. Going into it, I lamented the absurdity of Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), having to make the speech in the first place. A third of the way into it, I was glad he was making the speech.

I don’t believe the speech will settle anything for those who were not going to support Obama anyway. It may not even have persuaded former supporters who broke with him over the issue.

But, if you’re open-minded, this was the nuanced, heartfelt speech you hoped for. He eschewed the obvious rah, rah political applause lines and spoke quietly, calmly, without anger or frustration. I am glad he gave the speech.

I should say that one line in the speech rang false to me:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

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