Obama's Binds

He wanted it to be New Politics vs. Old Politics but, as the states dwindle down to a precious few, Barack Obama is being tied in political knots by ancient divisions of race, culture and social class that are being exploited by the Clinton campaign, with some unexpected help from Obama's former spiritual adviser.

You can dress up the differences, as David Brooks does, in new demographic garb, as the educated/less-educated divide, but that only puts a new gloss on the resentment and mistrust that have always fueled have-not hatred of those perceived to be privileged.

Half a century ago, the war hero known as Ike twice defeated the "egghead" Adlai Stevenson, so called because he spoke in coherent sentences. JFK barely beat Nixon, who was born wearing a jacket and tie, but LBJ's disastrous Vietnam war gave the Uriah Heep of presidents new life to act humble and "Bring Us Together" against the voluble Hubert Humphrey and then the cerebral George McGovern.

Ronald Reagan made an art form out of folksy to wipe out Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and, with an intermission for Bill Clinton's down-home act, we got the man you would like to have a beer with, George Bush, over the wonkish Al Gore and the stiff John Kerry.

So Barrack Obama's dilemma is nothing new in American politics, except for the piquant touch of a self-made man of mixed race being eliticized by a former First Lady and an Admiral's son with a very rich wife.

"You can't beat brains," JFK liked to say, but to get to the White House, you are well-advised to hide them. If he can survive his current ordeal of being bitten by demographic ducks, Obama would bring something to the presidency that hasn't been seen much lately.

After Bush, do we really want another jerk running the country?

The Desecration of Alistair Cooke

Crimes against humanity come large now--wars, holocausts, ethnic cleansing--but sometimes a small horror rises from the past and pierces the heart. Such is the case of a man convicted last week of harvesting and selling body parts, including those of the most civilized man I ever knew.

For several generations of Americans, Alistair Cooke was the Englishman who loved America, writing about life here for the Manchester Guardian, doing "Letter From America" radio broadcasts that were heard around the world and finally sitting in an armchair in front of Public TV cameras as the cultivated host of "Masterpiece Theater."

I interviewed him in 1953 when he was doing a CBS TV venture into culture, a short-lived series called "Omnibus," which was shown on Sunday afternoons when nobody would watch. Undaunted, Cooke introduced opera, ballet and dramatic performances with suave charm. As I followed him through a maze of narrow sets, he told me, "It's like making movies in an iron lung."

He had become a naturalized citizen only days before Pearl Harbor, and he loved his new country as only someone who volunteered to live here could. He spent his life answering what he called the "slanders" of those who looked down their British noses at American culture:

"It will be a great day when you ask an Englishman what comes to mind at the mention of America and he replies, 'The beautiful white villages of New England, the neighborly warmth of Midwesterners, the great contributions of American scholarship, the outdoor life of California, the fine style of modern American architecture, the God-given glory of Bryce Canyon, the man-made marvel of Boulder Dam."

He died in 2004 at the age of 95, and when American ghouls dug up his body and sold the parts for organ transplants, they lied about his age and the cancer that killed him.

"He was a reporter," Cooke's daughter said last week. "I have no doubt he would have written about this." And he wouldn't have made it an indictment of American greed.