The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.

Something had to give. The mathematics of the whole big picture had come to rest on the assumption that already over-stressed basic resources could expand along with economic expansion. They could not. We may now be seeing just the beginning of this realignment of economic expectations, forced by circumstance.

As major resource scarcity spreads, with China losing ever more arable land to encroaching northwestern deserts and road building in the industrial east, as China’s exploding demand for petroleum, steel, copper, water, meat and grains, put pressure on world markets and pushes the cost of basic goods like food staples ever higher across the world, as the unsustainable demand for fuel moves the US corn belt to shift to cropping for ethanol —as much as 40% of world corn exports are from Iowa, which now devotes 18% of harvest to bio-ethanol—, we are experiencing the natural results of an economy that hinges on hyper-exploitation of resources. The correction, when fully upon us, may yet be far more severe than the 2008 credit-freeze crisis.

Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.

It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.

Already, wealthy governments are moving to take over cropland in poor countries in order to shore up their own food supplies, as the food security crisis spreads throughout the world, affecting even the wealthiest economies. The fear is that this over-consumption now extending to land use in poor foreign states may lead to a wave of mass starvation throughout the developing world, sparking conflicts and threatening the integrity of the international system as such.

According to the Guardian’s Julian Borger:

“In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented,” Atkin said. “We’re used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much.”

At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.

India and Bangladesh are constantly disputing river water resources that both countries depend on for basic sustenance for tens of millions of people. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are gripped by a struggle over control of the Nile’s water, with the river running dry at the Nile delta on the Mediterranean during some seasons. The Colorado River in the US has failed to reach the sea and is seeing its flow through the Grand Canyon significantly reduced, as states in the Colorado River Basin dispute claims on the river’s water.

Hyper-exploitation even extends to the use of natural resources like water as dumping grounds. The level of toxic chemicals and plastic polymer byproducts now found in ocean water the world over has reached alarming levels, threatening vast ecosystems and undermining the health of human beings and wildlife in most of the world. Drinking water across the US was found to be contaminated by high levels of pharmaceuticals earlier this year, raising the specter of as yet unknown potential harm to public health, over the long term.

High levels of contaminant emissions or toxic dumping are an abusive use of natural resources we often overlook —like air, land, water and forest cover— in our quest for combustible fuels, industrial-scale production and economies of scale we hope will reduce costs, even if they also increase the risk to our long-term economic and physical health and wellbeing. We are now facing a structural economic crisis, which requires us to reformulate and rebuild our economic model, at the most basic levels, a process which will be more or less painful, depending on how seriously we commit to getting it done and done right.

We hear at a constant clip the talk of “Clintonistas” coming “back to power”, of “Bushies” and “Busheviks” leaving a scorched earth behind them in Washington, with the entire potential for cross-party negotiation having to be restructured from scratch, of “Obamaphiles” calling down prophetic hopes from a blue sky vision of national renaissance, a 21st century reshaping of the messianic strain of Western thought. We are asked to believe that major policy initiatives are as easy to formulate or predict as a seating chart, as judged by résumés, for the first Obama cabinet meeting.

Is Obama another Lincoln, in the good sense? Is he a reformer who comes in a moment of crisis at the end of a figurative civil war of cultural values and economic ideologies? Is it at all rational to say that someone who worked in government in the 1990s is automatically a “Clinton loyalist”? Is it impossible to understand that “post-partisan” is not an entirely new idea and some professionals have ably served the policies of presidents from both parties with diverse political philosophies and violently divergent personality types?

We hear of “preternatural calm”, a beautiful if haunting phrase to speak of the unique quality of poise and gravitas that the president-elect exudes, even in moments of extreme political pressure, such as difficult primary losses, bruising personal attacks, financial crisis and ferocious tactical debating gimmicks. Obama is not exactly “preternatural”, not immortal, not a gift from Heaven, but he does exhibit a tremendous devotion to information, to acquiring, sorting and facing evidence, to dealing with crisis from a position of confident assertion.

Clearly, President-elect Obama, like any gifted politician, basks in the glow of the reverence shown him by his cheering supporters; as is only human, he appears buoyed by this, by moments of sublime connection with a multitude incomparable in modern politics. But buoyed and determined are different things: he is different from his two predecessors in this quality, not requiring so much the adulation of the masses and reassured by their support for his principled optimism and determination.

This means that the Clintonistas have a chance to come into his fold without necessarily having to make ideological hay; the Busheviks can forgive his party and his progressivism, and confidently say he will be a towering historical figure and capable of working “across the aisle”. The question is not whether Busheviks and Clintonistas will throw off their guerrilla trappings and work in the rarefied air of informed policy and pragmatist public service, but whether the Obamaphiles are as magnanimous as their hero.

This, I think, is why we are witnessing one of the most seriously heavyweight cabinets put together in modern memory, with rivals and divergent views, monumental egos and past clashes, coming together at one table to make sense of a time of historic peril and crisis. We are seeing allies of McCain, not just Clintonistas, but Hillary Rodham Clinton herself, former and current Republicans, major legislative over-achievers, hard-hitters and natural diplomats, even a Kennedy or two —according to many in the press—, getting together to fight out the future intellectually, before they force us to take a chance on tired ideas.

This is an historic opportunity, and the media are doing us all a disservice —not least the president-elect or his 67 million voters— by oversimplifying, commodifying and Page-sixing, the transition process. There is a lot of excitement among wonkish types and historians, and we are getting that fix too, but it must be said, we are witnessing what may be the generational restructuring of the dynamics of hard politics in our country, and the “label politics” of the 1990s and 2000s is far less relevant than many in the press seem to believe, and, consequently, very unhelpful.

What we are seeing now is the beginning of the Obama period in our national political history. He is not a Clinton, nor will his administration function as if it were Clinton III, we can be assured of that by any number of obvious traits exhibited by Senator, Candidate and President-elect Obama. He is certainly not Bush and there is no Rovian dealing steering the transition; he has shown truly preternatural abilities to avoid getting bogged down in the ugly name-calling and character assassination that has dominated for two decades in Washington. This is of great historic import, have no doubts.

Barack Obama has promised the most transparent administration in our nation’s history, and as such, a reinvention of government, civics and the nature of the Executive. Getting there will be a major challenge, and it is not wrong to posit the argument that it may be impossible. But 8.5 million more people thought he was the man to do it than thought so of John McCain. So now, as we watch and wait, speculate and gesticulate, rhetorically, about the weight and nature of every breath taken during the transition, we owe that democratic conscience a chance to prove its wisdom, a chance to see transcendence get underway.

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change

A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.

We are emerging from a period of over-accustomed abundance, in which there was never supposed to be any doubt in the popular consciousness that generalized prosperity had reached a mythic level of sustainable undeniability; circumstance could not turn it back. That there was little real structural planning for sustainability was ignored. Economists, politicians, accounting firms, major banking institutions, and governments across the world, ignored the clear signs that flaws in the flow of matter and energy through an increasingly globalized economy were being obscured by convenient assumptions and poorly underpinned strategies.

Moments of exquisite beauty, of reverence for the mystery of the natural marketplace, became pervasive: the worship of plenty was so far-reaching, it seemed to be assumed that fashion icons could hold a philosophical stable center by waxing poetic about baroque ostentation. The bawdy glitz of Las Vegas, the all-at-once beaming-up of skyscrapers in Dubai, a quixotic-hubristic race to colonize the Moon, were hallmarks of the ’98-’08 balloon economy.

Meanwhile, the land of abundance was yellowing at the edges, the rich foliage of its temperate heartland was fading: the state of Ohio reached beyond 25% of the entire population officially on food stamps. Bankruptcies hit their highest level since laws were tightened in 2005. The fading of excess into a tired dream from an era of blind ambition meant we began to see that vast treasures could be diminished to a faint reserve of solace, scattered like guarded oases across the economic landscape.

Property values dropped. Oil prices soared. Banks pushed to cover unsustainable debt by 1) adding more unsustainable debt to their portfolios, and 2) using Congress to legislate against individual consumer bankruptcies. In August, home foreclosure filings again hit an all-time high —not the first record-setting month of 2008—, revealing a shocking level of underlying economic malaise. The dawn of an era of scaled-back expectations, of limited budgets, of belt-tightening and solemn fireside chats, had arrived.

As if every flaw and pitfall built into our way of functioning were invisible to even the most well-trained eyes, we basked in the golden distractions of a notion of manifest destiny, as if history were paying us its due for having imagined prosperity, suffered for it, and brought it into being. We thought nothing of the responsibility that comes with using with such endless hunger the resources available to us.

But the signs of a new “gilded age” were visible and were seeping into the consciousness of concerned observers. The problem was, however, what to do to forestall the onset of institutional chaos, an economic quagmire, the emotional unraveling of markets which had become the backbone of our projected fortunes. The political climate was calling for good news, not for good ideas, and so we collaborated in putting off awareness of what was in store.

Now, words like “depression” are on the winds of mass culture. John Steinbeck’s dustbowl epic The Grapes of Wrath is again a popular seller, not just for high-school required-reading lists. As a nation, we now face the problem of wanting to find warmth and solace, economically and spiritually, in a time of silver-cold rushing waters and a gathering storm of painful, forced change. In times of unwanted struggle, at the root of our basic humanity, we ask how much light and warmth we can derive from a bankside campfire, around which we tell the hopeful stories of a better day to come.

A thread running through those stories was the epic struggle of the 2008 election season, which began in earnest in the fall of 2006, officially during the first months of 2007, and led to an entire year of neverending dialogue about all things political, legislative, presidential and economic. The election was like a campfire culture that sprung up in cities and towns across North America and the world, in which people at the individual level, disenchanted by years, or decades, of political disappointments, began to think something new might be in the offing… an example of community-based leadership.

Yet the singular truth of the moment, related to that adage that “all politics is local” —what we learned from the need of so many to interact on a high plane of social discourse, of civic involvement— was that the individual will, the nature of one’s ability to grasp and to face difficulty, would be the root of recovery. If left on the open sands of desolation, the individual will could be strong, could be noble and definite, and yet falter; but coming together, negotiating around a campfire mentality of solemn devotion to a shared vision of liberty and prosperity, that individual will could be something more, something both brilliant and effective, part of a vibrant declaration of intent.

Admittedly, we could ask ourselves: can we direct our best efforts by way of “tried and true” mechanisms for steering the ship of state? Are the old ideas now out of touch, out of date, aged, brittle, risky? The ancient dichotomy between central planning and laissez-faire had been rusted over and abandoned; the split between social conservatives and economic progressives had withered; the logic of political confrontation was wearing thin. Something new was bursting on the scene.

As if to illustrate that a free people freely reinvents itself, and charts a new course, at will, with special vigor in the hardest of times, political strategy became a liability and complex examination of the facts and the future course of a people at last became the fashion. Clarity of thought before prejudice; hope and determination before fear and division; a sea change coming over the political culture of a deeply divided nation, struggling to find its way.

With the logic of edges, of the far edge of aspirational capitalism, the far-edge of binary politics, the far-edge of belief in ideals, combining to threaten the capacity of individuals, communities and political entities to envision a future of possibility, a logic of horizons grew up in the midst of concern and even panic. We saw that there could be a root structure deep enough to keep us from falling over the edge, into the deep of unsettled failings. We could reach the horizon and beyond.

The white of clear light, the blue of nourishing waters, the red of whole forest-scapes clamoring for a few last waves of warmth before winter: a dizzying but reassuring landscape of old growth entities, ideals and genuine concerns, informed our rudderless drift. Somehow, there might be another way, aside from sliding with the momentum of unstable ground, down into the waiting abyss; there might be the root-structure necessary for a fertile regrowth of economic and spiritual fortunes.

What may come next, what policies are precisely appropriate, what the existential value of competing political philosophies might be, if inclusion or exclusion are wise or perilous, became topics for discussion. Political discourse became a kind of heating oil to warm the spaces between living, working and fretting about impending upheavals, despite the persistent injection of wisps of hysterical fear-mongering. The space of political debate expanded into vastly divergent realms of life and culture, became a warmer, more habitable space.

As a nation, the United States of America has swelled from a band of small colonial villages to a continent-wide solid-state political union. Its history of democracy and humanist values has been fraught with dangerous threads of injustice, bias, hardship, combat and hypocrisy, yet its cultural thrust has been continually to move toward more openness, more inclusiveness, more equality and shared opportunity. The fall of 2008 was a season in which it became reasonable to most people to express concern that in fundamental ways, the nation had veered from that steady course, and needed new direction.

Like a pointilist composite of brushstrokes, the concept of new direction, together with the heat and light of economic distress, the urgency of concern about the security of one’s family’s wellbeing, the genuine worry that communities could spin apart or basic economic structures be allowed to decay, we found humanity seeking stalwart examples, straight arrows, a view of the land beyond the woody time of doubting.

Letting the old assumptions fall to earth, we seek a path to the other side. It could fairly be said there is a new atomization of the structure of society, a new decentralization of the tools of governance, in that politically, the vast center of American politics has summoned forth a style of campaign and a style of leadership that speaks to small entities across a vast narrative of history.

Local organizers moved thousands to volunteer, and the process of a general awakening about the difference between media-fomented cognitive dissonance and fact-based examination of safe passage to the spot beyond the horizon, refit the mechanisms of political discourse, and put control together with principle, in the hearts and minds of voters, citizens, actual people out across the landscape. The “conditions on the ground” became apparent, because a composite sketch of the emotional landscape, the moral and political priorities of a people, was better able to be drawn, from a debate about quality of ideas, as ideas and as practiced.

The old-model social-spending paradigm, as a way of competing with the “supply-side” fund-the-investors paradigm, shifted, and has been replaced by a complex ecosystemic mindset, which conceives of economic processes not as simple ‘expansion’, but part of a fabric of growth processes, a cultivation of longer-term potential for sustained abundance. A generative economics coalesced out of a host of strategies competing for absolute dominance of the political center.

If we could make something real and fecund out of the bewildering tangle of disappointments and excesses, if we could apply that reality like a ritual medicine to the workings of the collective mind, we could perhaps discover that amid the fallen visions and the dying embers of collapse, there is an already-existing road out of the wilderness, back to the heart of what we are as human beings. Generative economics is part of that renewed aspirational style, that desire to defy difficulty and the encroaching gloom, and seed the sustainable future, with what we have at our disposal now, in the present.

The startling array of concerns, perils, styles, ideas, crises, and best efforts, flowing together, could seem at times an unwieldy array of competing claims on our attention or our faith. But somehow, maybe because there is no other way, the future as seen from the real danger of extreme crisis comes to include illuminated approaches, that bridge gaps, heal fractures, draw from pools of shared awareness and reorient the mind to craft a more intelligent way forward.

There is a basic parallel between the growth of the individual mind, the salvage of a desolate spirit, and the process to which democracy, as a way of life and on the plane of ideals, of necessity, tends. The ability to reinvent a problem, so it can be better dealt with, to reinvent a social environment, so it can better adapt, to reinvent the meaning of government or principle or hope or failure, the ability to redefine crisis, is stitched into the process of changing a government, casting a vote for a philosophy about the future.

So, asking your forgiveness for the indulgent streak running through this essay, I return to the original question: what will this turning bring? We can see a new boldness, a feeling that somehow, it is necessary to filter the foreground from the background noise, to make a sincere effort at renewal, to put faith in actual human beings to do right by their fellow citizens.

We should see, coming into being, in coming months and years, new political coalitions, new social organizations, visions that seed the cultural landscape for improvement, working to ensure that the lessons for democracy that we now have at hand can actually be remembered, examined, and practiced. This is a time in which the aspirational and the factual can actually be seen coming together, in which we have given ourselves room to breathe, because we have trusted in the possibility of working to bring the real substance of a better day into being.

Reversing a perfect storm of crisis, deficit and discontent is the tall task that from day one threatens to distract Sen. Obama from his ambitious policy proposals to effect change across the board and restore institutional efficiency and fairness in American government. He will have to fashion solutions for a time of economic upheaval, real security problems relating to at least two wars, a policy approach to what appear to be Chinese and Russian expansionist ambitions, and do so within the context of his own policy proposals and campaign promises.

On the first day after his election, President-elect Obama received a stark —albeit not personal— warning from the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, that Russia would redeploy its military to counter an American-built battery of defensive long-range missiles in central Europe. On the second day, the IMF warned it expects all advanced industrial economies to contract in 2009, except Canada, posing what may be a yet more severe economic challenge than was expected by either candidate, even given the heated rhetoric of the campaign.

Reversing the Credit Freeze

The $700 billion financial rescue package passed by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Bush has already begun to be implemented, with $250 billion in assistance going to the 9 largest banks in the US, in exchange for the Treasury Dept. taking a percentage stake in the ownership and direction of the firms. The next Treasury secretary will oversee one of the most far-reaching economic spending projects the US government has ever undertaken, and will be in many ways more powerful than any government official to date, in terms of potential direct effect on economic trends.

President-elect Obama has professed from the start that this bailout must be orchestrated in such a way that it protects “Main Street” interests, earns the taxpayer a return on investment —so it does not ultimately amount to additional spending—, and promises to freeze all foreclosures for at least 90 days. Implementing this strategy will have to happen quickly, but the consequences could be severe if mishandled.

An effective handling of the situation, however, could permit the application of fiscal policies in line with a new economics of generative investment, distinct from supply-side, but also distinct from simple social spending. With a national organization of engineers projecting a need to spend at least $1.6 trillion just to upgrade infrastructure to current standards, the public works environment will necessarily fit into any new fiscal policy developed by a Pres. Obama.

Reversing the Iraq Security Slide

The most recent installment of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) describes security gains in Iraq as tenuous and warns that across the nation, violence is potentially ready to reach new levels. There is uncertainty about whether the presence of American troops is reducing or inflaming tensions still, and concern the security gains that have stemmed from the “Anbar Awakening” might be lost if Shi’a militia in the south launch a bid for power in Basra or push for broader influence in Baghdad.

While much was made of “the Surge” or “the surge strategy” by Republican candidate John McCain, the troop surge was in fact a military tactic, designed to “stop the bleeding” in an increasingly desperate security environment. Added troops (the Surge), together with Gen. Petraeus’ community-building plans and capitalizing on the Anbar Awakening, in which Sunni leaders turned against the insurgency, produced meaningful improvements in terms of number of violent incidents, but some of those gains are now said to be sliding, as overall quality of life and economic conditions have not followed.

Reversing the Taliban’s 2nd Rise

Failure to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden has led to Al Qaeda and Taliban militants taking root in remote areas of Pakistan’s border territory, according to American intelligence agencies and NATO forces in the region, where they may be reconstituting their command structure and planning a broader war. High numbers of civilian casualties in recent air raids have provoked hostility toward NATO forces among the population, and sympathy for the Taliban as a potential nationalist movement.

A Pres. Obama will need to redirect US involvement in the region to choke the communicative and physical resources of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership in hiding, hold warlords in firm opposition to those groups and involve the population in concrete advances toward better civil services, democratic processes and national and local security.

New efforts to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan will have to be based on a zero-civilian-casualties approach to military action. They will have to eschew information-gathering processes where money is paid to informants who may have tribal, factional or even neighborly grudges against those they turn in (this method has been blamed by American officials for multiple cases in which weddings were bombed, with some officials speculating it could be an attempt by Taliban supporters to build anger against US and NATO forces.

A resurgent Taliban could again turn Afghanistan into a failed state, even without taking power, potentially forcing the Kabul government into de facto exile, by limiting the scope of their domain to Kabul itself, which has suffered bombings and ambushes in increasing numbers. President-elect Obama has vowed to pursue and defeat both the Taliban and Bin Laden and his top commanders.

Reversing Global Warming Threats

The work of governing during a time of potentially radical economic transition, from a 19th-century model of combustion industry to a 21st century model of 100% emissions-free energy production is about reversing the threats to global climate stability, not reversing the warming trends themselves. The goal is to reduce the long-term warming effect that may result from excessive industrial and transport-linked carbon emissions.

Warming trends will continue, and the consequences may be severe, even if we achieve maximum reductions in carbon emissions. Obama’s approach to combatting the environmental and security threats posed by global climate change will have to speed the transition to a 100% clean-energy economy, while preparing policy and military and economic assistance abroad to help do the same, and to face the potential mass destabilization or migration stemming from desertification of some regions, water shortages and agricultural collapse.

Reversing the Underinsurance Crisis

There are nearly 50 million American citizens with no private-sector healthcare coverage and no registered government healthcare assistance. There may be another 25 million who are “underinsured”, meaning their coverage does not extend to all the areas where they need assistance. With fully one-quarter of the population lacking sufficient health insurance coverage, costs are soaring and the fallout from inadequate care —untimely deaths and worsening chronic conditions—, failure to resolve this issue in coming years will mean a significant ongoing drain on our nation’s economic resources and a threat to our general quality of life.

President-elect Obama has promised to push for legislation that would help the private sector deliver complete health coverage, at affordable prices, to all Americans. The Obama plan is not socialized healthcare, and it is not a government-run system. It will make requirements of the private sector that are not currently in place, and will use tax incentives and competitive pricing models to reduce the cost of drugs and to maximize the amount of total insurance coverage provided for low premium payments, as well as requiring that all pre-existing conditions be covered.

Reversing Policy Disorder (Staff)

Pres. Bush’s tenure has been marked by periodic waves of defections and resignations, protests over policy positions and political tactics. He has left President-elect Obama with the above-mentioned list of untended calamities, and Obama’s transition team and inaugural staff will have to hit the ground running, ready to implement serious programs of reform on each of these points. “No drama Obama” has emerged as a common reference by campaign staffers for their candidate; he is thought to be seeking a team of serious policy experts and public servants with a history of working on the issues they will be tapped to address.

Obama’s first top White House aide was reported early on the first day after the election victory: an offer of the post of White House chief of staff to Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL). Emanuel mulled the decision, and reports suggested he might turn it down to continue his career in the House, or to avoid uprooting his family, but this afternoon he accepted. By all accounts, the pick continues Obama’s demonstration of keen judgment and an eye toward efficacy.

While some Republicans attacked, saying Emanuel is a vicious partisan, other Republicans said he handed them tough defeats in 2006 and 2008, organizing the House Democratic electoral effort, but is a policy powerhouse, a relentless organizer for legislative votes and has friends “across the aisle”. The choice gives President-elect Obama the same determined, level-headed gravitas with which he campaigned, as a hallmark of his White House staff.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been talked about as a potential candidate for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He is one of the nation’s leading legal advocates for action to protect the environment and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. His work for clean air standards, ecosystem-resilience, and environmental advocacy broadly, makes him a sensible choice: a no-nonsense field expert, ready to tackle the major legal issues related to environmental protection from the first day.

There is talk Obama would ask Defense Sec. Gates to stay on, at least for a time of transition, while he works to craft the next phase of natural security policy. Gates may be asked to oversee a process of long-term Iraq-deployed troop reduction, with Gen. Petraeus, as head of Central Command, overseeing the transition from focus on Iraq to focus on Afghanistan and eliminating the Al Qaeda command structure and ground operations in the region.

Reversing Putin’s March to a New Cold War

Russian prime minister —formerly two-term president— Vladimir Putin has been for nearly a decade working to build Russia’s strength as an international economic and security power. Much of his success in this area is related to the steep increase in global demand for crude oil and the corresponding jump in prices. Russian petroleum and natural gas reserves have been the fundamental building block for all of Vladimir Putin’s new expansionist policies.

His successor, Pres. Medvedev, delivered a 90-minute state of the nation address the day after Sen. Obama was elected president of the United States, and he vowed to take a number of aggressive military postures to counter an American missile defense shield in Europe. The threat amounts to the most direct comment on the potential for an attempt to return to the bipolar Cold-War-era world, raising significantly the security stakes of America’s relationship with Russia.

President-elect Obama will have to demonstrate almost immediately his ability to fulfill the promise of an “aggressive diplomacy”, rooted in the strength of America’s military and economic power, but manifest in a genuine effort to engage in dialogue and collaborative problem-solving with foreign powers. Russia poses the most complicated negotiation, and starting on 20 January 2009, Pres. Obama will have to privilege the vision of a cool cooperation with the Putin-Medvedev power bloc, to craft a viable diplomatic bond and avoid a new cold war.

• Further reporting on the Obama transition, at CafeSentido.com

Café Sentido’s first official editorial endorsement of a candidate for public office

Renewal is the keyword for this election. Change is the bridge that will take us to the place of renewal, but the intent behind the change message, must be renewal. It is vital to examine the candidates’ proposals for the direction of our nation, in this light. Who can best harness what is best in the American system of laws and in the landscape of American values, to effect an historic renewal of faith in our institutions and of commitment to civic responsibility and prosperity and dynamism in our society, generally?

Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, is the candidate that is best positioned to offer this solution to our nation, in these troubled and challenging times. His positive vision of a dynamic American society, capable of innovating to combat a global energy crisis, principled in defending Constitutional law and human rights, combines the open and dynamic nature of American democratic culture with an energetic commitment to tackling new challenges, motivating a resurgence of the kind of major projects that will help rebuild and spur our economy.

The distinction between the two candidates’ visions, in this respect, has become even more evident due to the destructive and hollow campaign tactics adopted by Sen. McCain and his party. In a vicious attempt to smear Sen. Obama with some vague responsibility for the actions of individuals over whom he holds no actual responsibility and whose views he has denounced, the campaign of Sen. John McCain has sought to poison the electoral process, distract the minds of voters, and obscure what appears to be an inability to compete in the realm of ideas.

That sort of campaign of distraction is destructive to the healthy functioning of democracy and ignores the basic right of the electorate to govern its elected officials with the advantage of reliable information, firmly in hand. Fudging the truth for political gain can lead to ill-conceived policies that undermine the wellbeing of the nation (the 2003 WMD policy debacle, and ensuing war, are just one example).

Sen. Obama’s approach to domestic and foreign policy is consistently principled and pragmatist, rooted in an understanding of our system of laws, its founding ideals and the nature of our liberties. His policies hint at an underlying philosophy that seeks to do what is necessary to achieve the highest goals of our practical ambition, yet always uphold that essential allegiance to the “better angels of our nature”, work together with those whose collaboration we need and be firm about the rule of law and the fundamentals that give us a moral high-ground in dealing with the broader world.

The Supreme Court

Perhaps the single most important outcome of the next president’s tenure will be his effect on the make-up of the Supreme Court. It is estimated that 3 of the 9 justices may retire in coming years. Those 3 justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens, are considered firmly “liberal”, while the Court already leans toward the conservative Republican side of American political ideology. What’s more, 7 of the 9 justices were named by Republican presidents.

Sen. Obama has said he would not use ideology as a test for nominating justices. While considered liberal by many on the conservative side of the American political spectrum, Sen. Obama has been seen as a pragmatist moderate by many who have worked with him (the “most liberal senator” label comes mainly from one conservative group’s analysis of his positions on Iraq and Roe v. Wade). And, he was actually a Constitutional law professor. He has said his standard for nominating judges would be to place judges on the Court who have devoted their careers to upholding the Constitutional rights of individual Americans, and who consistently apply the legal protections afforded by the Constitution, respecting and upholding the balance of power between the three independent branches of government.

But whether he would nominate overtly liberal judges is almost unimportant —this point will be of interest to any conservatives who believe there should be balance on the Court—, because the fact that the 3 justices likely to retire are considered liberal means that an Obama presidency would essentially leave the Court as it is now, with 3 liberals and 6 conservatives, and 4 of those far to the right of most mainstream conservative viewpoints (more on this below).

Though he also says he rejects an ideological litmus test as “wrong”, Sen. McCain has suggested he would consider ideology, saying he would nominate judges with a notable conservative record and that opposition to Roe v. Wade was a “qualification” in his mind. He referred to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito as “recent favorites”. Both espouse a radical legal philosophy known as the “unitary executive”, which baselessly interprets the Constitution as granting the president near absolute power, based solely on the notion of perpetual war and the president’s right to disregard written law.

Philosophically, the unitary executive is a tautological pure-power doctrine, rooted in the use of power as the legitimizing factor in power’s use, an idea against which the whole of American law is constructed. The Constitution provides citizens with specific rights and grants them any not named, while it provides the government with limited powers and denies it any not named. The unitary executive, as interpreted to grant the president permanent commander-in-chief status, and with it permanent near-emergency powers, ignores the role of the courts and the Congress in limiting executive power, their principle responsibility.

In this respect, Roberts and Alito are far to the right of nearly all justices to sit on the Court in recent decades, and some Constitutional law scholars have suggested their views are a wholesale rejection of representative democracy as a form of government, let alone as the law of the land. They have taken the principle of a president having “authority” over all areas where federal money is spent or federal laws enforced.

The Constitution grants Congress both the “power of the purse”, the ability to dictate to the Executive what money can be spent to what end, and formal oversight powers, the ability to investigate, judge and punish the Executive, where violations of law occur. Courts can adjudicate specific details of specific instances, but cannot strip Congress of these powers, nor can the Executive.

A McCain presidency would likely push the Supreme Court far to the right for a generation to come. If Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens all retire, and McCain nominates 3 “conservative” justices, there will be 9 “right of center” judges out of 9, on the Court, 8 of whom were named by Republican presidents, with possibly a majority young enough to stay on the court for another 20 to 30 years.

Justice Clarence Thomas is 60 years old, while Alito and Roberts are 58 and 55, respectively. They are, by far, the 3 most conservative judges to sit on the Court in a generation or more. Adding only 2 more relatively young justices could easily create a “hard-right” majority that will rule more or less uniformly for 20 years or more. The lack of balance on the Court could radically limit the individual liberties of American citizens, and reverse decades of civil rights legislation.

If Sen. McCain were to become president, he would likely —if his campaign promises are sincere— have a radical and one-sided impact on the Supreme Court. His guidelines for naming justices could eliminate any left-of-center dissent on the Court, and even minimize the voices of moderates. His penchant for Alito and Roberts could mean the unitary executive doctrine would gain force, reducing the checks and balances that allow Congress and the Courts to rein in executive power, a fundamental requirement of American constitutional democracy.

Economic Issues & Environment

On economics, the two candidates differ in somewhat traditional, if unique and interesting ways. McCain wants expensive tax cuts for higher-income earners, while Obama focuses his cuts on driving a resurgence of the embattled middle class and reversing the widening of the wealth-poverty gap. 100 million Americans, on the lower end of the income ladder, would likely see no expansion in net income, due to Sen. McCain’s tax plan, while 95% of “working families” would benefit from cuts or credits under Obama’s plan.

Sen. Obama’s proposed plan is fiscally conservative and disciplined. Sen. McCain calls it a “socialist” redistribution of wealth, which it is not. All changes to the tax code are technically a “redistribution of wealth”, as are taxes as such, but so is all spending, all market activity, all trade of any kind. It is inappropriate and inaccurate to compare Sen. Obama’s tax policy to “socialism”, because it does not seek to centralize economic power in the apparatus of the state.

Obama’s plan is generative, aiming to stimulate economic growth by letting consumers and small businesses animate the market by spending according to their needs and priorities. McCain’s plan is constrictive, in that it does transfer wealth to the wealthy, away from public services and away from those who need them: it narrows the scope of opportunity by focusing not on most businesses or households, but on the largest businesses and wealthiest households.

Obama’s generative economics redirects spending to vital social programs that help build the fabric of community and afford a wider range of opportunity to all, treats education and infrastructure as the high-return investments they are and offsets new costs with money already in the budget, so the deficit doesn’t explode, as it did after both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s supply-side tax-cut plans were implemented.

Sen. Obama’s plan wisely treats assistance to encourage the coming revolution in clean energy and related infrastructure as a way to unravel the financial burden of sending $700 billion per year to foreign nations for oil, an economic and security imperative. Energy independence is vital, and Sen. Obama’s plan gets us to a sustainable clean-energy future more quickly and more deliberately than Sen. McCain’s plan.

His vision is dynamic, comprehensive, workable, and deadly serious about getting the optimum results for the good of the nation. That combination is the rarest thing in modern politics, and having crafted such a vision —ripe with all the specifics needed to make it viable— demonstrates an unusual talent from which our civilization and our democratic experiment can benefit greatly.

His leadership throughout the financial crisis has been deferential and steady: he is committed to responsible, sustainable action to prevent the collapse of major financial institutions and restore prosperity to the middle class, and appears ready to hear the best suggestions, pool the most able minds, and navigate among them to craft the best policy for the nation. There is a stark contrast in Obama’s responsible, generative approach and Sen. McCain’s at times haphazard, self-conscious attempts to intervene.

That we need a “green tech revolution” is now more than self-evident. To combat global warming, by reducing carbon emissions to natural background levels, and protect vital ecosystems, weather patterns, and water resources, we must aggressively pursue the building of a vibrant, clean energy economy. Sen. Obama is more comprehensive and more environmentally-minded, focusing on achieving each of these goals, without further putting our environment at risk from dirty technologies or over-dependence on high-contaminant energy sources —in case of seepage or massive release— like nuclear.

Education Policy

We have heard often not only in this election cycle but over the last 8 years that “people are blind”, or they “hear only what they want to hear”. A big part of this is that our educational system has provided both too little information and to little training to seek, judge, place and relate information, in other words: to think.

My grandfather —a conservative Republican politician, who taught me that citizenship was about being a thinking actor in society, an intellect with a civic conscience— was fond of the proverb: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. A timeless truth, no doubt, but all the more true of those who have too little information about realities other than their own to choose a better way. We need to reinvigorate our test-score-obsessed education system with real intellectual curiosity.

Sen. Obama’s proposals for education reform draw from successful programs and aim to help build community, get parents involved and get us back to that mentality wherein a citizen must be a thinking person. A brief summary:

• For children aged 0 to 5 years: universal opportunity for preschool —if desired—, quality child-care for working families, expansion of Head Start and Early Head Start
• Reform No Child Left Behind, so that 1) it is funded; 2) it helps students acquire knowledge, develop intellectual curiosity; 3) its standards help struggling schools instead of punishing them
• Double charter-school funding, reward states that do the most to improve charter schools, close charter schools that fail “chronically” to perform as intended
• Prioritize math and science, recruit Masters-level academics in these fields to teach, provide for strong science curriculum “at all grade levels”
• Combat chronic absenteeism, provide for enriching after-school activities, motivate students to work for eventual entry into colleges and universities
• College funding: provide expanded grants and credit options so that every student can pay for college, simplify the financial aid application process
• Recruit, train, reward and retain teachers, all with concrete programs aimed at improving the quality of teaching broadly and recognizing the great efforts the best teachers put in
• Mentoring programs that help new teachers learn from experienced ones, with pay increases for qualified teaching mentors, so the program is more effective

Today’s minds must be imaginative and adaptive, because global society and information technology advance so quickly one must constantly be able to learn and adapt. This is, as Sen. Obama has said, a matter of national security, because a lag in adaptive intellectual capacity translates into a lag in economic dynamism, and no military power can maintain primacy if its economy falls into a cycle of endemic decline.

Diplomacy & Security

The most fundamental characteristic we need in a commander-in-chief, in the fluid and extreme security environment of the 21st century, is judgment. This means not just a military mindset, not just awareness of what occurred during the years of the Cold War and its denouement, but the ability to distinguish between good choices and perilous diplomatic pitfalls. It also means the judgment to know how our system of laws fits into the international legal arena, including the defense of human rights, and a respect for the strengths and virtues of international law.

Article VI of the Constitution of the United States of America states that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land”. It further states that judges shall be bound by those treaties, except where the Constitution specifically provides the contrary. This means that laws like the Geneva Conventions —in large part crafted to fit the values of American democracy and the principle of the rule of law— are in essence part of our Constitutional law.

To uphold the oath of office, a president must understand this, and serve the Constitution and our democratic system, by respecting our treaty obligations under international law. John McCain has been inconsistent at best in adhering to principle in the face of radical positions taken on war and peace and the rule of law, by the current administration.

One example, after vowing to oppose any form of prisoner abuse, and doing so for a year, Sen. McCain voted to give the president the authority to order the fake drowning of detainees, along with other —some undisclosed— “enhanced interrogation” methods. This violates the Geneva Conventions, and ignores several American laws on prisoner treatment, but beyond that, the apparent political calculation is morally incomprehensible.

He has, to a great extent, limited his foreign policy discourse to warning of Cold-War type future threats and attacking his opponent’s judgment. In fact, Obama has shown insight and judgment, and not just on the question of Iraq war WMD intelligence. His call for engagement and diplomacy with countries like North Korea and Iran has been followed by the example that North Korea has again reversed its course toward nuclearization, due to successful negotiations, and the Bush administration, at the urging of several former secretaries of State, has engaged Tehran diplomatically in an effort to find a path toward denuclearization.

Sen. Obama’s proposals for Defense would rebuild the American military to operate effectively in the 21st century, whose threats are categorically different from the 20th century’s. They would also seek to guarantee the freedom of space, so that no military power is exerted there or becomes a threat to the US from Earth’s orbit. They would cut wasteful and ineffective weapons programs, focus on much needed armor, UAVs, cost-effective and technically viable missile defense, and provide better funding for veterans, so they get the best possible medical care, long-term, and have the opportunity to study and advance after service.

Obama’s diplomatic worldview is one in which the United States projects its will and serves vital national security interests through aggressive diplomacy, actively working to provide a path toward political solutions in otherwise intractable problems, with the knowledge that an agile and overwhelming military force underlies all negotiations. Proof of strength is not the resort to military force, but the ongoing demonstration that success can be achieved without it.

He understands that threats to third parties —Iran, Syria— will not fix the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but worsen it, and that a sustained prioritized diplomatic effort to build a peaceful two-state solution will allow Israel to live in peace and security, always with the US guarding its security, but not provoking its less friendly neighbors to paranoid or aggressive action.

Using diplomacy as a tool for broadening and improving the view of the US around the world, Obama plans to re-open “shuttered” consulates in the “tough and hopeless corners of the world”, so that much needed aid and services provided by American aid workers, can be seen to originate directly from the US political system, as an expression of the basic values of American democracy, which have been so poorly communicated over the last 8 years. This is a vital part of any strategy to make us all safer from random threats of terrorist or rogue-state activity.

Campaign Tactics

The executive leadership of a national political campaign is an essential read of an individual’s character, and mettle as a democratic political leader. John McCain used to ride a bus called the “Straight Talk Express”, and it was a media phenomenon. On that campaign bus, he used to give very candid interviews to reporters, in which he expressed his genuine opinions and talked a big game about reform to fight corruption in Washington. That was 2000.

His candidacy was derailed by some of the most inhuman, racist smears seen in modern politics. He was embittered, and nearly left his party as a result. Now, to defeat Barack Obama, who simply does not use such tactics, he has hired the same Machiavellian hacks that killed his campaign for honesty and reform and gave us 8 years of George W. Bush, in which we’ve seen unprecedented extralegal domestic spying, suspension of habeas corpus, a trillion-dollar war, and economic mayhem.

John McCain likes to say he’d rather lose an election than lose a war, that he puts his “country first”. But in fact, his campaign tactics seem to demonstrate that he sees himself as exempt from the principles of ethics and honesty that he has always proclaimed to be his guiding vision. Somehow, it would be better for the nation to lose out on those values, than for John McCain to lose an election. The unsavory tone and the sometimes hateful rhetoric that has emanated from his campaign has elicited mild protests from the candidate, but ultimately, he has refused to stop the smears.

He has done this against an opponent that has never once engaged in such tactics against him, and even some of the most aggressive political operatives in his party have said what is taking place is possibly the ugliest smear campaign in recent decades. He has failed utterly to take responsibility for “robocalls” seeking to imply Sen. Obama “worked closely” with terrorists, which even sitting senators in his own party have said are unethical and must be stopped, and has even defended them as accurate and principled.

Sen. Obama’s vision of leadership is very different from that sort of gutter politics, and it is a major national asset to have a leader who can campaign in the midst of such vitriol and contempt, who can face such smears with aplomb, and say that “I can take three more weeks of John McCain’s attacks, but what this country can’t afford is four more years of failed economic policies.”

He has his finger on the pulse of the nation’s needs and values, and his campaign is about that. His campaign has persuaded millions of small donors to give what they can, and in the month of September, he raised $150 million, campaigning ethically, laying out his vision, and traveling to even remote areas of supposedly hopeless “red states”. That speaks volumes about the quality of leadership we can expect of such a candidate.

So, with all this in mind, having weighed the real options, having searched for the old John McCain, at least as a counterweight to what seems the spirit of the times, a period of reform and renewal under Obama’s leadership, I have come to the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s vision is the one we need to embrace as a nation. He will be a transformative president in a time of transformation, and he provides the opportunity for citizens to collaborate in the shaping of the future of this nation, a democratic leader to restore democracy to our process and prosperity to our communities.

• Originally published 21 October 2008, at CafeSentido.com