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Sex in the Capital City

President Obama has vowed to find common ground on reproductive health issues. Good luck!

By: Kai Wright

Think it’s hard to talk honestly about sex in your own social circle? Try doing it with a bunch of legislators and TV-news types. President Obama has his work cut out for him if he’s going to fulfill his vow to bring some sense to our long, tortured national debate over sexual and reproductive health.  

To make the point, you needn’t look much further than the furor over the size of Obama’s stimulus package. (OK, stop giggling. This is a story about sex, but not everything is a pun!) Over the weekend, House GOP leader John Boehner was groping for an excuse to reject the stimulus bill. Ultimately, he reached for a battle-tested red herring: anti-choice, sex-panic rhetoric. Boehner dug through $825 billon and found a lousy $200 million in family-planning money to demonstrate that the bill is “bloated.” 

The press ate it up. George Stephanopoulos grilled Nancy Pelosi on “controversial spending” proposals, like “hundreds of millions” on family planning. The New York Times reported on “such controversial pieces as millions in spending for family-planning initiatives.” Chris Matthews wondered aloud whether the Democrats are aiming to recreate China’s one-child policy. Seriously. 

Nancy Pelosi tried cooling the boys down. The money is a small slice of $87 billion meant to help states deal with Medicaid costs that are breaking their banks, she explained. It will ultimately save cash by preventing costly maternity care for unintended pregnancies. And by the way, it’s just money for birth control—a far cry from one-child rules or abortion.  

But whatever. All those facts were too little, too late. Obama reportedly demanded the House take the birth control money out of the bill, and it got yanked.

There’s hope for the great unifier’s ambitions, though. After all, this is a man who, remarkably, turned the political quagmire of reproductive rights into one of his best jabs during the campaign. In the final debate with John McCain, Obama answered a question about Supreme Court nominations with unapologetic support for Roe v. Wade. When McCain pressed, Obama rope-a-doped him with an utterly reasonable rejoinder.  

“Look, it divides us,” he conceded. “But there surely is some common ground when both those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, ‘We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies.’” 

It was one of several exchanges in which Obama made McCain look petty while earning himself the pragmatic laurels he’s now wearing. He used the same rhetorical maneuver when jumping into one of Washington’s longest-running, abortion ping-pong matches in the opening hours of his administration. 

Last Friday, on Day 3 in office, Obama dutifully kept with tradition by making a show of knocking down the “global gag rule.” The less-partisan name for the rule is the Mexico City Policy, which Ronald Reagan created by executive order in 1984. It cuts off U.S. foreign aid to all organizations or clinics that “perform or actively promote” abortion.  

Grand White Party

Can Republicans get down with the brown?

By: Dayo Olopade

The GOP has a problem. Well, two. One of them has just been inaugurated with an approval rating near 70 percent—but the other is going to be just as hard to fight. You see, as former Bush speechwriter David Frum put it on NPR, the Republican Party is the “party of white America.” And in Barack Obama’s colorful new Washington, that’s just not going to cut it.

As Republicans begin their cold sojourn out of power, it’s hard to feel sorry for them. In recent years, the GOP has blocked attempts to protect civil rights and fund early childhood education, health care and urban development. Katrina ravaged on its watch. Republican power brokers have a history of exploiting racial and ethnic divides for electoral benefit. And of the 247 members of the congressional Republican caucus, none are African-American and just five are Hispanic. Similarly, at the 2008 Republican convention, just 2 percent of the delegates were black.

But, this Friday, when the Republican National Committee gathers for a vote on its next four years of leadership, members will have the chance to make their own kind of racial history, as former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, both of whom are black, compete for party chair.

The attempt at a new look couldn’t come a moment too soon. The 2008 election sent a message that the GOP’s 1950s decision to become the party of racial backlash is not only a moral offense, but it’s also a strategic blunder. People of color are at the heart of the predicted  “emerging democratic majority.” The GOP’s slice of the black vote was pitifully small in 2008. Republicans hemorrhaged Latino support as well, losing Hispanics of all ages by a disappointing 2-to-1 margin. And Obama’s popularity with the under 30 set has meant that even the white vote can’t be taken for granted. Bloomberg’s Al Hunt surmised that “old white people are their strongest bloc, and young white people are their weakest.” The demographics will only get tougher as the McCain-Palin campaign’s favored “small town,” “real America” becomes an ever-shrinking part of the electorate.

So a mild anguish was on display at a post-election event in Virginia, held by the America’s Future Foundation (AFF), a libertarian-conservative coalition that seeks to raise a new class of Republican leaders. The December gathering of about 50 young people, mainly white men, in a private, wood-paneled room, featured bow ties, wingtips and flag pins, and was dedicated to the question: “Now What?”

The first step to recovery, of course, is realizing you have a problem. Virginia state senator and Attorney General candidate Ken Cuccinelli, speaking to the AFF crowd, didn’t have much of a strategy. But any Republican acknowledgment of the deficiency when it comes to race is welcome—as when Colin Powell announced that changing demographics will require the GOP to listen to minority communities, rather than “shouting” at them with “loaded statements” and “Republican principles and dogma.”

The New Black Manhood

Imagine how black boys must see their futures now. Imagine how the dire statistics might change.

By: Marjorie Valbrun |

Many Americans have undoubtedly had an Obama Meltdown Moment by now. It’s that instance when the unimaginable hugeness of the past year, the past few months and the past few days suddenly hits you and you say to yourself, “Oh my God, we have a black president.” 

Unlike my friends who cried while watching Barack Obama give his acceptance speech on Nov. 4, or while watching him give his inaugural address last week, my meltdown occurred while I was watching CNN a day after the election. On the screen was a grade-school classroom of black boys discussing Obama’s victory. One after another, each student stood up to speak—backs straight, crisp white shirts tucked neatly in their belted pants—to tell their classmates what Obama’s election meant to them. 

One boy tried three times to put his feelings into words, but he just could not get a full sentence out. On the fourth try, he put his head down on his desk and began to cry. His classmates crowded around to comfort him. Some put their arms around his shoulders; others patted his back.  

It’s OK, they gently told him. It’s OK, man. 

Tears welled in the eyes of their teacher, a young white man clearly proud of his young charges at this all-black, all-boy, public charter school. The CNN correspondent reporting the story was also visibly moved. I cried, too.  

I wanted to hug those boys and was grateful to have witnessed such a poignant moment. And each time I recounted the story to friends and family, I cried again, not just for the boys at the school but for every black boy in this country, because I knew that as wonderful as Obama’s election was for all Americans, it was a special gift to them.  

That scene in the classroom was compelling not just because it was so moving, but because it was so telling. It spoke volumes about how black boys—this supposed endangered species, these future men whose futures, we are repeatedly told, have a better chance of being marred by bleak social realities than graced by educational and economic opportunities—will now see themselves. 

The boy who cried about Obama’s election may not have been able to articulate this, but he had to understand on some level the significance of the moment: If Obama can become president, maybe I can do something big with my life, too. I wonder how many black boys, and black girls, too, are now thinking along those lines. 

Harlem's Man With the Plan (Harlem' Childrens Zone)

News: Obama's the first president in 50 years to prioritize fighting poverty. Meet the man who showed him how.

By Paul Tough

Harlem on election night was, predictably, a little nuts. At 11 p.m., when the networks declared that Barack Obama would be the next president, church bells rang and champagne flowed. Old women hollered. Young men wept. There was, quite literally, dancing in the streets. Among the people parading down 125th Street that night, Obama's victory was seen as a deliverance, not just for the nation but for the neighborhood as well.

And Harlem has long needed delivering. Poverty has always been a fact of life in the United States, but the concentrated urban poverty that Harlem—along with sections of every American city—has experienced in the past half-century is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class blacks, less constrained by restrictions on where they could live, began to move out of neighborhoods like Harlem in great numbers. At the same time, the postwar decline of the country's manufacturing economy deprived the urban African American families who remained of the jobs that had sustained them. As a result, the number of poor people living in neighborhoods with at least a 40 percent poverty rate almost tripled during the 1970s in the five largest American cities. These areas became a brand-new kind of urban ghetto, almost all poor and all black.

The hope spilling out along 125th Street on the night of November 4 was for change of all kinds, from a more productive economy to a more benign foreign policy. But it was also a hope that President-elect Obama would be able, finally, to find a lasting solution to the kind of entrenched urban poverty that has engulfed Harlem and neighborhoods like it for decades.

During the Democratic primaries, Obama didn't talk about poverty as much as John Edwards did. And in the general election, it was John McCain, not Obama, who took a weeklong "poverty tour" of blighted cities like New Orleans and Youngstown, Ohio. But Obama's unique background—food stamps as a child, community organizing as a young man—seems to have given him an unusually sophisticated understanding of poverty's causes and potential solutions. His poverty plan includes some basic Democratic solutions, like raising the minimum wage and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. But Obama has also proposed more targeted policies: guaranteed sick days to protect low-wage workers, for whom a bad cold can often lead directly to a pink slip; transportation subsidies to help inner-city workers get to better-paying jobs in the suburbs; child care programs to make it easier for single parents to hold down a job.

Beyond those more short-term measures, Obama promises an ambitious suite of pro­grams intended to attack the deeper roots of inner-city poverty. The dismal employment situation in neighborhoods like Harlem doesn't only have to do with the lack of good jobs. It also has to do with the fact that many poor people lack the skills necessary to get and keep those jobs, everything from basic math and reading ability to more subtle noncognitive skills, like patience and perseverance. Some of those deficits can be filled in through job training programs like Job Corps—but many of them cannot. In recent years, economists, social scientists, and neurologists have shown that the skills gap between rich kids and poor kids opens up very early, and the later you wait to address those deficits, the harder it becomes to turn things around.

At Last (Beyonce) Barack and Michelle's First Dance

Since this video of the First Dance hit YouTube and The Daily Beast, it's been on repeat all day. If you haven't seen it twenty times, stop what you're doing and watch the electricity between our president and first lady.

All in attendance at the Neighborhood Ball were awe-struck and millions watching the event at home were glued to the television. Even Beyonce got emotional once she finished serenading the couple. Today, celebrity sites like Perez Hilton and The Insider can't stop chatting about that intimate moment between Michelle and Barack. News and local publications such as New York Magazine, Newsday and Examiner.com can't help but get sentimental, too.

King and Obama

How the prophet paved the way for the politician.

By: Michael Eric Dyson

On what would have been his 80th birthday, Martin Luther King Jr. must be smiling from whatever heavenly vista he was rewarded for giving his life for black justice and American freedom. Forty years after King was gunned down in Memphis, Barack Obama rode the promise of change into the White House. It’s as if Malcolm X’s choice of the ballot or the bullet as the means to revolution has now been resolved into a seamless juxtaposition that bookends our modern struggle for black progress. King’s bullet, Obama’s ballot: These paraphernalia of fate symbolize our tragedy and triumph; they capture Moses dying and Joshua rising. In many ways, such a story rings true.

The millions of T-shirts with images of King and Obama steamed side-by-side were hawked by street vendors even before Obama claimed the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. King's appearance on the chests of millions salutes his iconic status as arguably the greatest American we've seen, and surely as the Great Black Man. His words are the measure of our deep yearning to live free of the weight of race; his heroic action is the engine of our protest and survival. King's blood mixed with American soil and from it sprouted new life, new possibilities and a new future.

Obama sprang from King's sacrifice. Without the bullet King took, Obama may have never secured a place on the ballot. Obama cut his rhetorical teeth on King's eloquence, fashioning his words to reflect the gravity of King's moral universe. Since Obama didn't grow up in a traditional black American home, he worked hard to appreciate the logic and emotion of black existence. King's words—and those of preachers in the black church—were the touchstone of Obama's eager embrace of the complicated roots from which he drank.

Like King's martyrdom, Obama's presidency is a talisman of racial possibility, a sign of what may spring from an event whose meaning continues to grow. Both King and Obama charted unlikely paths to cultural and political power: King as a young preacher thrust into international fame as he combated the forces of hate, Obama as a former community organizer who seized the reins of power because that hate had been largely defeated.

But if King and Obama mirror each other as twins of destiny, their divergent roles shatter easy assumptions of their common vocation. Prophets and politicians often collide as they orbit the same world with different social interests and moral purposes.

Prophets thunder difficult truths that shake the culture to its core. "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword," Jesus proclaimed of his duty to disturb the social order. That same duty fell to King as he angered millions of whites—and scared many blacks—in challenging the white supremacy that was the lifeblood of social inequality. Even though King lashed out at injustice in love, he was widely viewed as a pariah who undercut democracy and disturbed the racial peace. But King believed that any peace that rested on injustice was false and fleeting.

Politicians, on the other hand, often aim to quell social disturbance and keep the peace at nearly all costs. Their function is to preserve as much as possible the smooth operation of society and to make the machinery of governance effective. Politicians seek to unite disparate concerns in a manner that balances group interests and the greater good.

Still, political calculations of what's good for society often shred the interests of the most vulnerable and powerless—those for whom prophets speak. Obama's pledge to respect such folk in his presidential tenure drew millions to his historic campaign. But unavoidable tensions rise in the effort to appease all sides in bringing together groups with competing moral interests.

We got a glimpse of this when Obama invited Pastor Rick Warren to offer the inaugural prayer, angering gays and lesbians, and their allies, who criticized Obama and objected to Warren's homophobic beliefs. Unlike politicians, prophets feel compelled to fearlessly identify with the constituencies they believe to be mistreated and aggrieved.

Prophets also take up unpopular causes and cast caution to the wind—think of King speaking out against the war in Vietnam, angering President Johnson and alienating him from most civil rights leadership. Or think of King's valiant defense of the poor even as much of the nation ignored their plight. King pledged support to the Poor People's Campaign, and to the sanitation worker's strike in Memphis, even as his staff expressed profound misgivings about his direction. King was unrelenting in his assault on poverty, war and racism, believing they were intertwined in a vicious strand of suffering.

Prophets must also wrestle with the ugly evident and the invisible fatal. Open, upfront bigotry is the ugly evident; subtle, underground racism is the invisible fatal. Prophets must call attention to both as they war against the scourge of oppression in face and skin, and in structure and system. King did this with extraordinary intelligence and valor.

Obama has elected a different route: As a pioneering political figure who has sought to serve in the mainstream, he has bravely pledged to move beyond the poisonous prejudice of the past. As America made history by making Obama president, it proved that it was willing to offer Obama the chance to implement his goal of racial healing.

Some have mistakenly assumed that such a gesture proves we are post-racial, a term Obama has never used. Post-racial impulses seek to eradicate—not persistent racism per say—but the memory and history of racism as the predicate of social progress. Post-racism requires a great deal of denial, pretension and amnesia; it sees progress in the repression, not the uprooting, of race.

Post-racism also demands the avoidance of race—confusing the positive recognition and affirmation of racial identity with the paralyzing preoccupation with racial privilege and hierarchy. Thus all signs of race are viewed as symptoms of racism. Blackness, for example, becomes a problematic identity because it resonates in the realm of race as a marker of difference. The post-racial quest is to deny difference; the result is sad: It reinforces a racial status quo that already undermines black folk, especially the middle classes and the poor.

Obama's success should not move us toward a post-racial society, but it should move us toward a post-racist society. A post-racist society aims for racial justice and harmony by removing racial impediments and social obstacles that prevent folk from flourishing. A post-racist society creates opportunity for all people to realize their ambitions and goals without unjust restraints and unfair barriers.

King and Obama—the prophet and politician—have much in common: the racial roots they share and mending the nation's tattered racial history. But King's voice rang as a trumpet against injustice by challenging society in civil disobedience and in breaking unjust laws. As president, Obama is the most powerful man in the world, sworn to uphold the laws of the land and bring prosperity to its citizens.

Barack Obama may be the realization of King’s dream, but he is not the extension of King's prophetic ministry. Neither should he be expected to carry that mantle. As the first president who is black, Obama has made millions of black hearts, including mine, swell with pride. But he is a politician, not a prophet, and should be judged as a political figure. It may be on King's shoulders that Obama has climbed to reach farther than any other black person before him, but it is King's vision and work that made his efforts possible. The prophetic and the political are both crucial elements of our success, and survival, as a people.

Class Is the New Black

News: How I had to look beyond race and learn to love equality.

 

By Debra J. Dickerson

The Onion summed it up best: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." So many daunting challenges face President Obama that it's hard to know on which to offer him my unsolicited advice first. It's a crapshoot as to whether any president could heal our bedridden economy, guide us out of Iraq, end our petro dependence, save the environment, and convince the world that the last eight years were an aberration of which we are ashamed. Only Obama, however, gives us any reason to hope that we can begin to bridge the divide between the races, so I'll leave those other issues to, well, other journalists.

America's election of its first black president has to be followed by a demonstrated and pragmatic drive to improve race relations, or we'll have fallen prey to the biggest delusion in world history. For all the racial ugliness this campaign has exposed, though, and for all that will no doubt follow, it's not only whites who will imperil this process. Obama will have to lead both races in redefining blacks in the American mindset. Unless I'm much mistaken, blacks will face the greater crisis of imagination.

Now that a black man is president, and could not have been made so without the efforts of millions of whites, the temptation for them to run out of patience with blacks' continued complaints will be tremendous. Simultaneously, millions of blacks woke up on November 5 with yet another buppie made better off on their backs while they remain jobless in dangerous neighborhoods, their immediate futures no brighter for knowing that cornbread may start appearing at the White House Thanksgiving table. When we all stop weepily singing "We Are the World" and emailing each other about what Great-Aunt Bessie would say now if she weren't dead, we'll find that race is still a festering wound. A wound believed to be self-inflicted on one side, daily resalted on the other. It was distressing to hear John McCain, in his otherwise gracious concession speech, invoke "the special significance [Obama's win] has for African Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight." The pride is America's, not blacks' for finally winning one for their side. Our new president must constantly require us to work for "country first"—not for our individual factions.

Here's the minefield that Obama will be forced to navigate: making whites understand that racism didn't die the moment cnn called the election (an Oval Office Negro won't make a convicted felon any more employable) and helping blacks remain patient with the slow pace of racial progress (an Oval Office Negro won't make the Sean Hannitys of the world any more receptive to racial appeals). As always, blacks have the harder row to hoe. They have to believe, truly believe, that America finally means to do the right thing. That means accepting that what exactly "the right thing" is will be damnably difficult to sort out, and that demands have to be couched in the language of national progress and unity. However justified blacks feel in a demand for redress, read my lips: It. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. It shouldn't, because then change won't be perceived as an investment in a precious and underdeveloped resource, but as charity. Don't believe it? Take this classic reaction to blacks' traditional cries for a war on poverty from the fall 2008 City Journal, a thinking conservative's magazine:

"Do our cities need another War on Poverty? Barack Obama thinks so...The [nation's] mayors, joined by many newspaper editorial pages, have echoed Obama in calling for vast new federal spending on cities. All of this has helped rejuvenate the old argument that America's urban areas are victims of Washington's neglect and that it's up to the rest of the country (even though most Americans are now metro-dwellers) to bail them out. Nothing could be more misguided than to renew this 'tin-cup urbanism.'"

To this callous "let them eat cake" sentiment, true racial progressives must fashion a pragmatic response, one that turns the temperature down, allows white America to save face...and allows whites to benefit. Two generations of emotional appeals about the legacy of slavery have taken us only so far; pointing out that a 35 percent high school dropout rate for blacks in my town—Albany, New York—is not only bad for Albany, but bad for America, is a different kind of argument. It's a defusing and diffusing argument, one that shifts the burden to its opponents. It also forces America to deal with blacks as Americans, not as a perennial problem, like a tumor that must be constantly worried over. How many unemployed rock slingers could be teachers? How many welfare moms could be doctors? And how easily would the investments in them be repaid? For all that that argument leaves out, it's one that allows others to do the right thing for the wrong, but patriotic, reason.

Whites, meanwhile, will have to process black demands in this same vein: not as a call for handouts, but as a necessary reallocation of national resources that has the added bonus of unofficial apology. And both groups will have to reimagine the role of blacks in American life, not as losers begging to be saved, but as citizens who lack only the investment of their fellow countrymen to make America better.

The "us against them" attitude must be lovingly confronted at every turn. Blacks (forgive me for ignoring everyone else for purposes of this argument) must learn to guilelessly ask questions like, "Wouldn't it be cheaper, and a better strategy, to sentence nonviolent, first-time, low-level offenders to substantive community service in the neighborhoods they harmed with their behavior—rather than burdening our overloaded criminal justice system with knuckleheads whose futures will thus be derailed?" It will be up to Obama to parse both the demands and the responses, to separate the progressives from the unreconstructed on both sides.

To move us all ahead on the road to racial harmony, Obama will have to teach America to see blacks differently, and (here's the hardest part) blacks will have to behave differently. That doesn't mean less flamboyant names for kids, an end to purple hair extensions, or buying belts and pants that fit. It means accepting that racial progress must now, God help me for saying this, be melded into overall social progress. To my own great surprise, I'm arguing for a reorientation from race-based remedies to class- and problem-based ones.

Why "God help me"? Because reparation, in the form of a concerted program of inner-city uplift, an overhaul of the criminal justice system, a reengineering of education, and the like, is the minimum that justice requires. There's no mystery as to why the black underclass is exactly that. But the difficulty I had in writing this essay revealed something to me that I was loath to accept. I've long argued that because blacks are Americans, nothing can be good for black America that is bad for America and vice versa. Well, the logical conclusion of that argument, much as I don't want to go there, is that "black" must be taken out of that sentence and replaced with "any underperforming, underutilized segment."

Descended from a long line of nameless slave field hands and Jim Crow sharecroppers, I'm bitter and angry at this realization, but both morality and practicality require it. In my soul I want America to take responsibility and atone for what it's done and continues to do to my people. I want to stage a one-woman race riot when I read statements like these, written within days of Obama's win: "The vast majority of Americans have nothing to apologize about when it comes to race relations" (City Journal), and "We are free at last from the tedium of the preoccupation with skin pigmentation" (Boston Herald).

But two facts make inescapable for me this new way forward. First, it's immoral to ignore the suffering of other groups languishing on the nation's margins. Second, many whites will remain unmoved by appeals for racio-social uplift unless they believe they will benefit from it. Whatever must be done to help black America can only be accomplished in the same way that Obama wove together Southern evangelicals, apolitical white college kids, and black grandmas into a grassroots tsunami—by focusing on what's best for America. You can't argue that urban zip code x needs investment without arguing that working-class white zip code y does, too, not when their problems (e.g. educational underachievement) are equally severe.

Here's another postelection Onion headline that makes this point tidily: "Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress." Given the abysmal condition we find ourselves in, the bulk of both races have more in common—utter instability—than ever before. I am, by definition, elite. Harvard Law, national talking head, successful author. I'm also self-employed, and so, after years of paying $1,000 per month for health care the only way I could—plastic—I found myself applying for poor people's health insurance. My pampered kids and I sat in a grim social services office dreading the government bureaucrats I assumed would humiliate me. With a seven-page CV, I felt powerless and terrified that I'd leave that place with no way to safeguard my children's health. Treated with nothing but kindness, I nonetheless witnessed firsthand the leveling effect of a health care system made incompetent by greed. However much blacks lack health care, the crisis affects all but the very rich. However often blacks face foreclosure, the crisis affects all but the very rich. On a sinking ship, everyone is equal except those who own all the lifeboats.

Only the twin conditions of a nation near rock bottom and a black politician who all but walks on water could have brought Americans together. All the traditional coalitions and alliances are offline. So let's refashion them from the ground up. Let's talk class, not race. Problem areas, not the pigment of those living within them. Because in the end, what hurts one hurts us all. If Obama can't make America understand that, no one can.

Debra J. Dickerson, a former Air Force intelligence officer, is a MoJo columnist and the coeditor of 2009's Best African American Essays.

Illustration: Guy Billout

Greening the Ghetto

Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?

by Elizabeth Kolbert 

A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of a group called Green for All, went to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop of the day was the public library, where someone had assembled an audience of about thirty high-school dropouts. They leaned back in their chairs, hands in the pockets of their oversized sweatshirts. A few appeared to be stoned.

Jones, who is forty, is tall and imposing, with a shaved head and a patchy goatee. He wears rimless glasses and favors dark clothing. On this particular day, he was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, black boots, and a charcoal jacket. He was introduced by a community organizer and aspiring rapper, who described him as “a leader with answers,” a “genius from the hood, similar to our own,” and a youthful version of Barack Obama. When it was his turn to speak, Jones rejected the lectern that had been set up for him, saying that it reminded him too much of college.

“I love Barack Obama,” he said. “I’d pay money just to shine the brother’s shoes. But I’ll tell you this. Do you hear me? One man is not going to save us. I don’t care who that man is. He’s not going to save us. And, in fact, if you want to be real about this—can y’all take it? I’m going to be real with y’all. Not only is Barack Obama not going to be able to save you—you are going to have to save Barack Obama.”

Jones went on to discuss the crisis on Wall Street, the federal budget deficit—“We’re going broke by the second”—and how annoying it can be to listen to people who use a lot of fancy words. “People who know a lot talk weird,” he said. “So you can spend a lot of time listening to people who are educated, and all you get is frustrated, because what they’re saying doesn’t actually land with you. Well, boohoo. Get over it.”

A hundred and fifty years ago, New Bedford was the whaling capital of the world. “Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford,” Melville wrote. Today, the town is filled with empty factories. Its long list of problems—failing schools, high unemployment, gang violence—make it just the sort of place Jones likes to work in. The logo of Green for All, which is based in Oakland, California, is a sun rising over a crowded cityscape. The group’s goal is to broaden the appeal of the environmental movement and, at the same time, bring jobs to poor neighborhoods. Jones often says that he is trying to “green the ghetto.”

In the library, a few of the kids had started to lean forward in their seats. Others had taken their hands out of their pockets. Some were still staring, dazedly, into the middle distance. Jones brought his talk around to the subject of energy.

“I don’t want to offend anybody. I might be too radical for you. Are you with me?” he asked.

“Just being real,” a young woman called out.

“They can now put up wind turbines—almost like a windmill, but this is not your mama’s windmill, it’s like a big jet engine sitting up there—and make power,” Jones said. “Somebody’s going to make a billion dollars deploying that technology. I think it should be you.

Burris may return to demand seat

By JOHN BRESNAHAN |

Roland Burris may return to Washington next week to demand that he be accepted as the legitimate Senate appointee to replace President-elect Barack Obama and be sworn into office, according to a Burris adviser.

If Burris' appointment is not accepted, he will file a lawsuit challenging Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership's refusal to seat him, the adviser said.

"Unlike last time, there's now a sense that we've been forced into a corner and must be more direct with Senate leaders," the adviser said. "They're breaking the law and act as if they have the upper hand and can dictate terms for an entire state. There is nothing left to negotiate; they must seat the legally appointed senator."

Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have refused to seat Burris, arguing that his appointment by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was not certified by Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White.

But on Friday night, White submitted a document to the Senate certifying Burris' appointment. White's action followed an earlier decision by the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled that Blagojevich's approval alone was all that was needed for Burris to take the seat.

Reid's office said that the Democratic leadership was consulting with its own legal team and made no decision yet on its response to this latest development.

Durbin told reporters on Friday, before news of White's certification broke, that it would be best if impeachment of Blagojevich moves forward in the Illinois Senate, the governor is removed from office, and then Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn appoints Obama's replacement. The Blagojevich impeachment proceedings are not expected to be completed until mid-February. The Illinois House voted by a 114-1 margin on Friday to oust Blagojevich.

It is unclear if Quinn would back Burris as the Obama replacement, which may be driving Burris to be seated as soon as possible.

Burris and his advisers, armed with both the Blagojevich appointment and White's certification, are refusing to back down in their dispute with the Senate leadership, and they now want to increase the pressure on Reid and Durbin to accept him as the newest senator from Illinois.

"We are frustrated after doing everything we could to cooperate and to help diffuse this unfortunate situation," said the Burris adviser. "We made a genuine effort to be respectful and to minimize our level of confrontation. But Reid and Durbin have forced our hands and have called into question their own credibility to be trusted as honest negotiators. They're now nearly guaranteeing that there will be a direct confrontation on the week of inaugural."

The adviser also said that having Quinn appoint an Obama successor is illegal and that Blagojevich's appointment must stand.
 
"The option to have Quinn make a Senate appointment is not legal," the adviser said. "The governor's appointment can't be retroactively revoked. Illinois already has two senators."

Democrats Retreat on Burris

President-Elect, Senators Signal They're Ready to Seat Appointee

By NAFTALI BENDAVID and BRAD HAYNES

Getty Images

DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES: Illinois Senate appointee Roland Burris, left, meets with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a day after being refused admission to the Senate swearing-in ceremony.

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama and Senate Democrats backed down Wednesday from an embarrassing political fight with the man appointed by accused Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill Mr. Obama's Senate seat.

The reversal came days after Democratic leaders said they would refuse to seat Roland Burris -- a former state attorney general -- because of corruption allegations against the governor. Federal prosecutors last month accused Mr. Blagojevich of influence peddling, including the sale of the president-elect's Senate seat, which the governor has denied.

But the political terrain shifted rapidly this week, marked by the nationally televised scene of Mr. Burris huddling in the rain Tuesday after federal officials turned him away from the Senate swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Obama -- who originally opposed seating any Blagojevich appointee -- personally signaled to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that he wanted the matter resolved, when the two party leaders met privately earlier this week, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Democrats are now worried less by the prospect of being associated with a tainted governor than the danger that a prolonged fight could overshadow their attempts to tackle the economy and other pressing issues during Mr. Obama's first months in office.

The dispute coincided with the arrival Monday of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington. They'd hoped this week would be dominated by symbols of a new activist regime in town. While it is hardly a major setback, triumphant party leaders were instead outflanked by an accused governor and his 71-year-old appointee.

After a 45-minute meeting with Mr. Burris on Wednesday morning, Mr. Reid laid out a path for him to take office. "There's going to come a time when the entire Senate is going to have to act on this," Mr. Reid said. "And that day I hope would come sooner rather than later."

Mr. Burris is scheduled to testify Thursday before the Illinois legislature and offer assurances he didn't engage in any deals with Mr. Blagojevich to gain the Senate seat. The state legislature is considering Mr. Blagojevich's impeachment, and Mr. Reid wants to wait for Mr. Burris's testimony before moving forward.

Reuters

Federal officials turned Mr. Burris away from the Senate swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill.