First posting

I’ve just returned to Eurphoric State University from several days in Washington D.C. Delighted to be back here. Washington continues to be a self-important echo chamber in which tens of thousands of people listen happily to the sounds of their own voices confirm the correctness of their views. I met George Allen, who, for those of you in the real world who may not keep track of these things, is a Senator from Virginia who is now assumed to be a Republican presidential candidate for 2008. He struck me as a nice man, large and buoyant like a Frat-house president, with good political smarts, a mediocre mind, and Stone Age views about the country. I was a panelist on George Stephanapoulos’s Sunday show where Allen was a guest. He staked out a position to the right of Bush on immigration, in order to inspire the Republican nativist base. So right now it looks like Allen versus John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination, with Mitt Romney – an empty suit with bright white teeth – positioning himself for the vice-presidential slot.

When friends in Washington talk about the Democratic nominee for 2008 they invariably lower their voices, as if they’re frightened of being heard, and say Hillary has the nomination locked up but will surely lose the general election. Then they get a “what the hell can I do about it?” look on their faces, hold their palms up, and change the subject. Hillary is one of the smartest people I know and she’d make a better president than her husband. But I worry that no one around her is willing to tell her the truth – that her movement to the right, her caution to avoid saying anything at all controversial, her unwillingness to say what everyone (Republican as well as Democrat) knows about the War in Iraq (that we have to get out as fast as possible, John Murtha was absolutely right), and about the economy (that corporate profits have nearly doubled since 2000 but paychecks for most workers have gone nowhere), and her huge embryonic but intimidating campaign fund – is a giant albatros around the neck of the Democratic Party. I wish it weren’t so, but the odds of her winning the presidency in 2008 are one in a hundred. Yes, I know, three years is an infinite amount of time in political history and she just might pull it off. But the chances are so low, and her political timidity so damaging at a time when Democrats should be yelling from the roofs about the devastating failure of Iraq and the wild, unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at home, that I wish she’d either step aside or show some genuine outrage.

Today’s immigration bill that seems to have broken the Senate’s logjam is another exercise in cynicism. Can you actuallly imagine someone who’s been here illegally for four years saying “oh, yes, of course, I’ll just go back home now and wait in line and maybe, in twenty years, I can come back to a good job and my wife and kids”? And it lets employers off the hook, of course. Unless or until employers face huge penalties for hiring people who are here illegally, and unless or until there’s some sort of tamper-proof identity card, this whole exercise is silly. If jobs in the US pay lots more than jobs south of the border, hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, as well as Southeast Asia, are going to get here somehow. Many will risk their lives getting here. And the majority of them will, eventually, contribute more to America than they take from America. That’s been the story of immigrants for two hundred years. They wouldn’t come here if they weren’t ambitious to make new lives for themselves, and ambition is the most essential precondition of success in America.

Okay, so I’m blogging and blathering. I never thought it would come to this. But there’s no other way to tell the whole truth. I don’t know if anyone will read this blog, but it’s worth a try. Until tomorrow …