Heidi Li's Potpourri

In 1984, a great Democrat used the opportunity to address the Party and the Country about the Equal Rights Amendment

Today we have a Democratic President who is not a progressive, who is not, in my opinion, a liberal. He has expressed his admiration for Ronald Reagan. Thinking about our current president made me nostalgic for a time when a major Democratic Party player refused to play at wasteful bipartisan brinksmanship or speak of a fuzzy post-partisan era. Mario Cuomo spoke of unity, spoke of bringing the party together - but not just for the sake of collapsing the country into one politically mediocre middlism. He believed that Democratic unity - liberal unity - was what would bring our country prosperity and justice.

When Mario Cuomo spoke we on the left who did not have his platform knew we could outright criticize military adventures and trickle-down economic theories; we could demand that we take care of the old and the less well-abled; we could care about all races and orientations; and and treat women equally under our constitution. The 1980s were a lousy time for those of us on the left as they were so much the Reagan years. But at least we had leaders like Mario Cuomo who would speak out, publicly and courageously in the name of all these things, but even - oh my - the E.R.A.

Listen to Cuomo's speech here. My paraphrasing or even a reading of the text does not do it justice. Listen to it if you can.

Pay special attention to this passage:

"We speak -- We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple [applause, chanting] --I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A." [chanting, chanting]

It is over 20 years since Mario Cuomo dared to spell it out in three letters: E.R.A  -- while a convention hall full of Democratic delegates roared those letters back at him.

Can you imagine now a Democratic Party shining on the hill introducing the Equal Rights Amendment or fighting for the three state strategy or fighting, state by state - including all those supposedly newly blue ones - for its passage?

I confess I cannot imagine today's Democratic Party doing this. But may I be wrong. May the Democratic party wake up from its mediocre middlism and go to the mat for the majority, for the 51 percent of Americans who are not guaranteed the highest protection of their equality under the law.

E...R...A.....E...R...A......E...R...A.....E...R...A.

No wonder everybody thinks all politicians turn out to be crooks and liars

As various chapters in the Roland Burris saga unfold, all I keep thinking is how totally unsurprising it is that there are all sorts of problems with his various testimony to various tribunals, all adding up to the fact that Burris is not a person of good character, at least if being of good character includes not dissembling to the public when you want to serve in a position of public trust. The latest is that Burris, an attorney, lied to the Illinois Supreme Court, putting his law license at risk. Call me formalistic if you like, but the bottom line is that lawyers' codes of professional responsibility require them to be candid with tribunals, particularly courts. Candid. Not just honest, but forthcoming and open. Whatever else Roland Burris has or has not been, he most definitely has not been candid throughout the process of finagling his way into the U.S. Senate. He has dissembled, race-baited, played the victim: you name it, if it served his goal he did it. He even tried to pay to play, but just happened not to succeed.

Coming on the heels of tax evader Timothy Geithner and just generally evasive Bill Richardson and slippery Tom Daschle, it is a miracle that anybody in the country ever gets behind any politician. But the Burris situation is one of those that really makes an ordinary citizen shake her or his head in wonder. Why did anybody - including Reid and Barack Obama - bother saying anything positive about Burris when the obvious thing to do would be to say nothing at all, given the odds that somebody who would accept an appointment to the U.S. Senate from somebody as apparently corrupt as Rod Blagojevich, would be unlikely to be a particularly truthful person?

Meanwhile, some federal legislators are trying to force more candor from the executive with legislation meant to limit the "state secrets doctrine." Learn more here.

Political integrity, professionalism, and plain manners in a time where it feels unsafe to speak one's mind

Note: this is a revised version of an earlier post.

The comment, which was directed to this earlier post on this blog:

....

I don't really know or care what your formalistic obsession with DNC Convention rules are, and I doubt other GULC professors will care either. If you want to have a serious conversation about the role of sexism in the campaign, I suspect you might find some Obama supporters who are willing to have that conversation. But if you start by telling your other profs that they supported Obama because he's black, or because he's a man, or because he is hip, they won't respect you and they won't listen to anything else you have to say.

My reply, with identification of the alum redacted:

Dear Mr. G.

Because you did not comment anonymously and shared your views frankly, I am taking the time to to let you know that I have read and considered them. Of course I disagree with your perspective on my position on President Obama: I believe I have criticized him when it is merited, not demonized him. But as you note, beginning  by telling somebody something they are not likely to agree with is not a very engaging way to begin a dialogue.

So, let me just say that the most interesting point you raise, in my opinion - lawyer to lawyer - is whether or not my expectation that the DNC abide by its own rules (which would have included not awarding any of Florida's or Michigan's delegates to then-Senator Obama, which meant he would not have entered  the roll call ahead in the pledged delegate count or the popular vote count) is "formalistic". Legal formalism has a number of meanings; it is a contested term. One of the things it means is applying rules as if the substantive results are politically irrelevant. Since legal rules often have political impact, to do this with legal rules is sometimes criticized as missing that point, the point about the overlap between law and politics (how tight that linkage is or should be is another contested point.That point is not relevant to the DNC's conduct. The DNC is a political institution, and nobody I know would deny the link between the Democratic Party and politics. The problem is that the Democratic Party acted, for whatever reason, without political integrity, comparably to FDR when he attempted his Supreme Court packing scheme. Let us assume that both FDR and the DNC acted from good intentions: each believing that if they changed established rules in order to get particular results this would be justified because the results would be good. The problem with what FDR did was that it showed an unwillingness to win his case for the New Deal through politics and suggested a profound disrespect for those who disagreed with him politically. The problem with what the DNC did is that it showed an unwillingness to allow the delegates to the convention choose the Democratic nominee and a profound disrespect for the millions of primary voters who did not share the DNC establshment's preference for a candidate.

These elitist, authoritarian measures violate the spirit of liberal politics, which actually depends upon self-commitment to norms interpreted non-instrumentally so as to make politics more than a game of might makes right. In the long run, I believe right makes an political institution mightier and might makes right weakens political institutions. FDR's courtpacking move brought in the original vogue for laws institutionalizing term limits. I believe these laws to be undemocratic, preferring, for political reasons, a self-enforced political-cultural norm about the number of terms that is appropriate. Likewise, I believe that ultimately the current Democratic Party has marred itself by showing that it is as unwilling to respect the franchise as it was during Jim Crow days or the Republican Party was in 2000.

Note to readers: Many have sent comments or private emails to lend moral support and advice about taking care about running against the majority view in the workplace, especially around this election. I believe I was misleading in my original post. I will only comment on the election and its meaning for the law school if I can do so courteously and if it seems at all worthwhile. But I appreciate, greatly every message of support and solidarity. Camaraderie among dissidents is alive and well.

As for the morning session of the faculty retreat ... I made the choice to, in the words of the Beatles, let it be. The panel includes two of three colleagues who will work in the new administration in high positions. One will be working specifically on climate change, two others in the department of justice. These colleagues are liberals and not among those who chilled the atmosphere of the law center during the election season. They would have worked in a Clinton administration and will do good and important work no matter what. Today is not the day to distract from their aspirations. There will be better occasions to raise the issues that distress me.

"Official ceremony" but with authenticity: warm friendship and real respect from Vice President Biden, two generations of maternal kvelling, acknowledgment of life's complexities by Secretary of State Clinton

If you can watch this - one of the rare times when seeing and hearing an "official ceremony" provides information the transcript alone cannot.

One rare occasion where the obvious respect and friendship of those onstage comes through. A display by Secretary of State Clinton of the poise, graciousness, intelligence and humor to which I aspire. Vice-President Biden set the tone. Secretary Clinton's family warmed to it.

Oh, about that double standard when it comes to tax evaders...

About that double standard (discussed at the end of previous post)...the news speaks for itself:

• Obama's Choice for Chief Performance Officer Withdraws Name
• Performance Czar Killefer Withdraws Candidacy

• Commentary here.

The point is NOT that Killefer should have been appointed; the point is that Daschle should not be; and Geithner should resign.

The trouble with appointing tax evaders to high positions in government: its a rule of law thing

I wish people would stop telling me to be relieved that President Obama is not President Bush. I detested President Bush, and I detested him from the moment he arrived on the national scene, from the way he ran his campaign which led us to the debacle of an election stolen in Florida (decided by 547 votes in the state George's brother was then Governor; and a long-time Bush supporter designed a confusing ballot and refused to go through the sort of recount that Al Franken is now having to endure); a campaign filled with bait and switch promises (viz: local control over schools, only to be followed by the No Child Left Behind Act: one of the greatest federal government takeovers of local affairs in recent memory.) But these bad-faith measures were just the prelude to an administration that pursued an agenda of putting the President and the executive branch above the law: George W. Bush personally committed war crimes, had his administration engage in illegal surveillance of American citizens, directed his Justice department to come up with justifications for U.S. violations of international law, tolerated or encouraged a host of troubling cronyistic contacts and relationships between his vice-president and members of the energy industries, tolerated or encouraged his justice department to go after government lawyers for their political positions, encouraged the expansion of executive privilege to cover the the office of the vice-president in unprecedented ways, and used various suspect methods (e.g. substituting executive regulation for legislation) to flout the separation of powers and checks and balances built in to the structure of the U.S. Constitution. George W. Bush was shady and underhanded, rivaled in recent times only by Richard M. Nixon, who was literally a crook.

I have no idea whether Barack H. Obama will turn out to be more or less unscrupulous than George W. Bush, more or less interested in the rule of law, and the place of the executive branch in American constitutional democracy. But less than a month into the new administration and, sure, I'm relieved that Obama isn't Bush, but I am not at all persuaded that he is going to be qualitatively more honest, in better faith, and more sensitive to the ideal of a government of laws rather than persons.

Coming into his presidency, Barack H. Obama showed a willingness to bend rules to gain office, and not just when he accepted 20 delegates from a state in which he never even ran, but going all the way back to Chicago. ("As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers." (source)) So far, his vetting failed to catch problems with at least three high level appointments (Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle) and even when ethical concerns have arisen about others (Jon Favreau) he's done nothing.

Obama's treatment of Geithner and Daschle particularly distresses me. Both are sophisticated, well-educated people, people who know when to get tax advice, people who understand the distinction between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion and presumably how to work with an accountant to make sure that they are erring, if err they must, on the side of an abundance of law-abidingness. Both have had held fiscal policy-making positions. Each was found to have broken the tax laws. The Geithner strategy  - apologize, act contrite, claim embarrassment, apologize some more - is now being used by Daschle (go here for a round-up  of media reaction), who we are assured has not only the solid backing of Senate Democrats but enjoys President Obama's absolute support, as of today, Monday, February 2.

Now, I am happy to remark that the Obama administration has taken steps to bring the U.S. more in line with international law. But President Obama's consistent support for would-be office-holders who engage in inappropriate, unethical, illegal conduct does not bode well for those of us who really did want a different kind of politics in this country. I simply do not believe that there is nobody else who could head the Department of Health and Human Services other than somebody who evaded paying over $100,000 in taxes.

Oh, and yes, I do think there is a double standard at work here. Secretary of State Clinton was incredibly wise and politically adept to start early in working out disclosure arrangements regarding President Clinton's Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. But note: she anticipated the problems and questions and dealt with them beforehand, knowing that the boys' club was unlikely to close ranks around her had she not handled the issues forthrightly and adroitly. Meanwhile, for Daschle and Geithner the treatment is like that of small boys caught with their hand in the cookie jar: the men of Washington - and note the it is the men of the Senate, especially Harry Reid, and the man who is President, Barack Obama - who are quick to say of Geithner and Daschle the equivalent of "boys will be boys":  these guys are good guys. Yes, tax evasion is bad (Reid and Obama cannot seem to quite bring themselves to say "illegal") but as long as Geithner and Daschle know how to act contrite and express embarrassment, they really ought to get the jobs they want. But this is no way to create a sense of respect for the rule of law, that respect that George W. Bush never displayed. To restore respect is a tough task and it requires demonstrating little tolerance for those who break laws directly relevant to the responsibilities of the offices they seek.

Question: If Barack Obama reminds you of Richard Nixon...

then who does Timothy Geithner remind you of?

Spiro Agnew, anyone?

On October 10, 1973, Spiro "Ted" Agnew became the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace. His resignation was part of an agreement with the Justice Department in which he pleaded no contest to income tax evasion charges stemming from contract kickbacks received while he was governor of Maryland and vice president. Fined $10,000, Agnew was placed on three years' probation. (source)

More on Agnew:

After Nixon and Agnew were elected to a second term, Agnew became the focus of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office in Maryland for financial irregularities while he held state office. Rather than face trial, Agnew resigned and entered a plea of no contest to charges of evading income tax. He was sentenced to three years probation and fined $10,000. After he left office Agnew avoided publicity and went into business as an international broker. In 1981 he was ordered by a Maryland court to repay more than $248,000 to cover bribes he took while in state office. (source)

I know, I know it is early days to be noting the resemblance.  Geithner has not held elected office, and he's already admitted to dodging the tax man. Difference from Agnew noted: Agnew didn't pay up until investigated by DOJ and sued in Maryland. Yes, yes, Geithner paid up before a court ordered him to do so or a DOJ settlement has become necessary, but Geithner waited to pay his taxes until he got caught. Indeed he waited twice: first he paid up only upon an IRS audit; then he paid up again when it looked like this gig he wanted - Secretary of the United States Treasury - might be in the offing. (For clear reporting on the nature of Geithner's failure to pay taxes - which types he did not pay, for example - go here.) And yes, I do understand that Agnew was a tax evader who did not claim any special expertise on financial matters, which makes him very different indeed from Timothy Geithner, somebody currently aspiring to be Secretary of the Treasury. If he does get the nod, I am sure that whoever becomes Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service - a post whose occupant reports directly to the Secretary of the Treasury - will gladly note all of these dissimilarities.

So let the record reflect: I am not saying that Timothy Geithner is as corrupt as Spiro Agnew proved to be or as unfit for the office to which he, Geithner, aims. It would be far too premature to make these claims.

Barack Obama Martin Luther King Jr.; and the rest of us

I was asked today if I did not think I should be happy about President-elect Obama's election because he will be our first black president. My questioner was somebody who clearly is happy about President-elect Obama's presidency for precisely this reason. According to him Martin Luther King, Jr. would be similarly pleased.

Furthermore, according to my questioner, it is insulting to Dr. King's memory that I regard Dr. King as a teacher in my own quest to resist peer pressure, mobocracy, and authoritarianism in my own small, nascent efforts to seriously fight for the full civic and social standing of women in America and elsewhere.

In my conversation, I explained that I am extremely happy for those people of color, particularly black Americans, who feel more fully validated as Americans by living in a country led by a black person. (This post - just like the conversation - does not present an occasion to debate who counts as black or a person of color; such distinctions were out of order in the conversation. They would have been insulting to my questioner, who is black and would rightly point out that in most of this country most people have no problem saying who counts as such, despite the complex ways that individuals come to be seen as black or brown or white or whatever. I mean that: please do not use this post as an occasion to debate what it means to be black.) I then explained that beyond this very great happiness, the color of Mr. Obama's skin has nothing to do with whether the prospect of his presidency pleases me or dismays me. That was all that time permitted in this brief interlude of discussion during the day. But I have thought further on the matter.

With regard to Martin Luther King, Jr. I would not presume to surmise how he would have reacted to Mr. Obama. Dr. King was sometimes critical of other black leaders and nothing in his writings suggests that all black people are superior to all white people. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of a type of equality, a society in which the color of one's skin was neither cause for shame or pride and where people, including his own children, were judged by the content of their character. As Dr. King so famously noted this dream is an American dream, not a black dream or a white dream.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

To the extent that Barack Obama's election represents the realization of Dr. King's dream, his election is an awesome, mighty event.

Yet Dr. King was, as we all are, a person of his time. So in this speech, given in 1963, he does not single out women as group separate from men who need to be included in the new age of equality that he envisioned. He refers over and over to men, not to people, but that again was the language of his time. Confusing language, but the language of the time. King knew of hatred between black men and white men, between Jews and Gentiles, and between Protestants and Catholics, knew all too well how this hatred was so often used to justify inegalitarian treatment by one group toward the other. King rejected the hatred that drove such inegalitarianism.

I share with King a delight in the idea of a day when people will be judged by the content of their characters. I dream of a day that may come as more people come to realize that nobody has championed the cause of full civic and social standing for women in the face of hatred against them, a day when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the kind of genitalia they possess.

In 2008, I saw a man stand idly by en route to his winning the White House while his supporters called women who ran against him or on a ticket against him, "ho" and "c*nt". He stood idly by while members of the press intimated that the adult daughter of one his opponents was prostituting herself by campaigning for her mother. That he stood by so idly had nothing to with the color of his skin. Plenty of white men in positions of political power or prestige also stood idly by while this went on. Some women of all colors stood idly by as well.

I have gone on to see the man who won the White House include in his inauguration another man, one who preaches hatred of gay people, the doctrine of wifely submission, and the comparison of the exercise of a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion to an act of Nazism. I have seen him refuse to disassociate himself from a speechwriter who, however stupidly, evidently had a great time pretending to cop a feel of the future Secretary of State - something he would not have done, I suspect, were she a man whose cardboard cutout just happened to be at the party he was attending. Both the preacher and the speechwriter are men, white men, so skin color does not come into the hatred and disrespect of women indicated by either man's words or gestures.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, as we all are, a person of his time. So I do not presume to know what he would make of a man who stood idly by while women who ran against him or his ticket were exposed to hate speech; or what he would make of the inclusion of a woman-bashing preacher in a Presidential inauguration; or the retention of a sophomorically sexist speechwriter on a President's staff. But I find nothing in King's life or writing that suggests I as a woman am in any way disrespecting him when I take him as a model of a person who staunchly refused to accept arbitrary inegalitarianism and saw it as an obstacle to liberty, particularly liberty as understood in the American tradition. So far, I have not seen from Barack Obama a commitment to the elimination of the arbitrary inegalitarianism in the way men and women, boys and girls, are treated in America or indeed the world today. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama has not made the cornerstone of his life or his political career the elimination of arbitrary inegalitarianism of the sort that makes the legitimate pursuit of liberty impossible. So Barack Obama does not provide me with a model for how to fight the fights I think need fighting: the overcoming of hatred of women, the effort to have people see women as people deserving of their full and rightful place in American society and around the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr. does.

Mr. Obama, why not change your mind? It is your party, disinvite Rick Warren.

Frank Rich, an entrenched New York Times columnist, finally decided to publish a wee bit of criticism directed a President Elect Obama just today, December 28. Just a tad of critique because, according to Rich, "for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month." As one  who has not been laboring under Obama reveries and who began trying to figure out whether he reminded me more of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush as far back as the fall of 2007, the this late faint awakening from a journalist of many year's experience seems peculiar, to say the least. I know that coming out of a pleasant reverie must be difficult, but Rich is barely awake and certainly not likable enough given the narrow basis for his creeping concerns about Mr. Obama. Rich's main beef is that Mr. Obama has displayed "his own brand of hubris and arrogance" by expending an amount of "political capital" that Rich considers "small change" because, according to Rich, most Americans who know about  Rick Warren like him.

Indeed, Rich himself kind of likes Rick Warren because: "His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change." Sure, Warren "is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama." (Note to Mr Rich: there is some scary circularity in the logic here.  It is no sign of acceptability of any kind that "almost every top-tier national politician" and Rich Warren are on the same side of any given issue.) With regard to Warren's hatred of gays, Rich cannot even be bothered by anything other than Warren's "defamation" of gays. So he apparently is not bothered by Warren's comparison of women who exercise their right to abortion to Nazis or his assertion of the propriety of wifely submission.

(What is it with these men who comment on Warren? They object to his treatment of group that includes men (gays) but they cannot even note Warren's misogynistic worldview, one in which all wives are second-class to all husbands and women exercising their constitutional rights to bodily self-determination are put on the same moral plane as Nazis. (If you are bothered by this consistent blindspot, you may be interested in 51 Percent.)

Rich confidently writes of Obama "he’s not about to rescind the invitation." I assume that Rich is confident of that because he does note Obama's "cockiness" - which Rich ultimately excuses, writing "By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history."

I wholeheartedly agree that the decision to have Rick Warren bless his inauguration is no Bay of Pigs. But Frank Rich just can't quite pull himself out of his reverie if he calls the Warren invitation and Warren's role in the event an "asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black President." Having a bigoted, homophophic, misogynistic cleric headline your inaugural is likely to render the event anything but joyous for millions of Americans. What Rich regards as an asterisk, they recognize as the sharp elbow to the ribs.

Why doesn't Mr. Obama simply rescind the invitation? It was a bad idea to extend it and the incoming President of the United States does not have to stick with bad ideas, just like he does not have to retain staff members who engage in boorish bigoted conduct (vide Jon Favreau). Mr Rich urges "humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top." Mr. Obama has a wonderful opportunity to display both qualities immediately. Instead of hiding from the press in Hawaii, he could set up a microphone and say:

"I made a poor decision when I invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.  It is difficult to withdraw the invitation now without embarrassing Mr. Warren, but I must take full responsibility for my own mistake in extending the invitation in the first place. I apologize wholeheartedly for having created this awkward situation which does, I realize embarrass Mr. Warren. But Mr. Warren's pride is not most important thing at stake here. My own insensitivity to the concerns of gays and women led me to make a poor decision, one that is ruining the inauguration for many people who voted for me in the first place. I want to be the first to show that I can, calmly and with equanimity, change my mind when I know I have made a poor choice."

In the alternative, if Mr. Obama cannot bear to embarrass Rick Warren by disinviting him, he can have invite a second cleric or other leader with rather different views than Mr. Warren's regarding gays and women to stand right beside Mr. Warren and give a co-invocation.

Precisely because this is no Bay of Pigs, Mr. Obama can do something about the situation before he goes through with a bad choice. The inauguration has not happened yet. Nobody's life depends on Mr. Obama sticking with a plan that once made might be risky to change. But a lot of people's opinion of Mr. Obama rides on what he does about the current situation; could be that much more than "small change" is at stake. Finally, setting aside political calculus, it might be nice to have the incoming President distinguish himself from the outgoing one by demonstrating that he has the guts to recognize his own mistakes and to ameliorate or correct them for himself when he has the opportunity.

It is hard for an empty suit to take a stand - or perhaps even to understand what it means to take a stand

Richard Cohen's sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama's taking the office of the Presidency of the United State. According to her brother's column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama's choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren's views about gays and lesbians. I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen's view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season. I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama's equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama's inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a "homo" - maybe then Richard Cohen's sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama's inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen's sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen's sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen's sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: "The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something."

Aye, there's the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party's poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an "empty suit".

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an "empty suit" is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an "empty suit" is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one's position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an "empty suit" is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush's legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen's sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party - the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party - probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one - who is what Obama's supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.