It’s good news for Venezuela and good news for the general sanity of outside commentary on Venezuela that the constitutional referendum in Venezuela did not pass.  Perhaps now we can start to shelve silly talk about the “Cold War’s return”?  As Alex Massie notes, this was an unexpected outcome.  I certainly expected the referendum to pass.  I assumed that if Chavez could do one thing right, it would be to rig his own power-enhancing referendum to make sure that he wins the chance to keep being re-elected (and that those “re-elections” would also be thoroughly rigged).  However, I had to remind myself, as I have written in the past, that Venezuela really is a democracy.  Unlike some, I do not bestow this label as a form of praise, but as a description.  Venezuela is a populist, illiberal democracy, but a democracy all the same.  Sometimes demagogues and populists overreach and do not receive the popular support they expect, and this seems to be one of those times. 

I would add that this makes the prospects of the Venezuelan-Bolivian military threat to Argentina and the rest of South America, feared by some, less likely, but I suppose there isn’t much point in discussing the changing likelihood of an impossibility.

On the surface of it, Romney shouldn’t have to give a Mormon speech any more than Obama should have to give a Muslim speech. ~Patrick Ruffini

Except for the small matter that Obama isn’t a Muslim.  The remarkable thing is that Obama has spoken more openly and directly about his experience living among Muslims and about his Muslim ancestors, while Romney has avoided discussing his religion whenever possible.  The perceived connection between Obama and Islam is probably far more damaging to him than Romney’s Mormonism is (because public opposition to a Muslim presidential candidate is even greater), but he and his supporters keep talking up his time in Indonesia, apparently oblivious that every time someone mentions Indonesia and his great understanding of the “Islamic world” many voters hear, “Obama is a Muslim.”  One tries in vain to explain to these people that he lived there, but did not actually convert.  I attempted to explain the facts at a recent Thanksgiving gathering, but the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is already becoming engrained.  They know that he lived in some Muslim country “over there” and that is enough to confirm their worst suspicions. 

Besides, wo we really think, given the state of affairs and the public mood, that if a presidential candidate were a Muslim that he wouldn’t have to address it publicly in some way?  Of course he would.  The perception that both candidates belong to non-Christian religions are clearly political liabilities, as poll after poll on Muslim and Mormon presidential candidates shows, but the difference is that the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is a lie, while Romney is something like a fifth-generation Mormon and proud of it.  Obama shouldn’t have to give a major speech to debunk unfounded rumours.  If Romney wants to be competitive, not just in the primaries but also for the general election, he needs to confront the reality, troubling as he and others may find it, that at least a quarter of the electorate is currently opposed to considering voting for him for no other reason than his religion.  As polling on this reveals, this sentiment is more or less evenly spread across the political spectrum. 

Ruffini adds in an update:

The anti-Mormon bigots and the anti-Muslim rumormongers seem to exist on about the same level — and neither candidate should let these fringe elements define their campaign.

Well, if you want to define somewhere between 25-43% of the electorate as “fringe elements,” I guess you can do so, but I’m not sure how someone wins an election by ignoring such huge levels of built-in opposition.

As you may have noticed, I have had a few things to say about Romney and the “Mormon factor” in this election, so I suppose I should comment on the news (via Noam Scheiber) that Romney will be giving the long-awaited speech that is aimed at allaying fears and doubts about his religion.  I have noted before that Romney has an impossible balancing act to maintain when he addresses this question, which may be why he has carefully evaded it for months, but it is also the case that Romney cannot keep evading the issue so long as he wishes to define his campaign and his “values” in terms of being a “person of faith.”  The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy.  Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept).  His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

I agree that the timing of this couldn’t be worse, but I wonder whether the timing makes that much difference.  The extensive opposition to a Mormon candidate wouldn’t have disappeared had he given the speech earlier.  However, by giving the speech now he may be exacerbating what is already a bad situation for himself.  Had he done it three or four months ago and laid the issue to rest, at least as much as he could, he could have reduced the publicity surrounding the speech and tried to contain the damage.  Now that there is just a month left until the caucuses, he is using valuable time and exposing himself to the backlash that we knew was coming at a time when he cannot afford to shed any more support.  In the end, Romney has always been in an impossible position: a sizeable percentage of his own party will never vote for someone of his religion, and these are the same people he needed to win over to become the unchallenged social conservative consensus candidate, which is why Romney’s campaign has always been a fool’s errand as I’ve said from the beginning.  My guess is that Romney gives the speech on Thursday and his campaign in Iowa begins to implode, as his shallow support there evaporates.

Rod wrote:

Yesterday over lunch, a (white) Republican friend and I were talking about how much we like Barack Obama as a political figure, even though we don’t like his politics much. My friend said he thought it was depressing how more black voters say they’re for Hillary than Obama. To him, it’s a sign that they’d rather stick with a Democrat who can be relied upon to mouth the same old liberal lines on race, rather than go with a black candidate who promises to move the national conversation forward. I told him that I saw the reticence of black voters to go for Obama over a white candidate a sign of political maturity, i.e., that they’ll chose a candidate based on his or her positions, not skin color. But I think my friend had the more interesting point.

I think Rod has the better of the argument here, not least since it isn’t clear as a matter of policy where Obama sharply differs from Clinton with respect to those “same old liberal lines on race” and it also isn’t clear that huge numbers of black Democratic voters are as tired of the “same old liberal lines on race” as white Republicans and conservatives are.  Obama does have a different rhetorical style from most other black politicians when it comes to matters of race, as Shelby Steele has described here, but I submit that this style is part of the reason why Obama is an appealing figure to Rod and Rod’s friend (and many other whites around the country) and why he fares worse among black Democratic voters than you might expect, given that he does have the best chance of being a major party nominee for President of any black candidate in history.  Besides the voters’ own preferences, there are complicating factors of Obama’s perceived unelectability on account of his race (an issue that bothers the campaign enough to have Obama’s wife address it publicly) or the anxiety among some black voters that he would be targeted by assassins.  For this latter group, Obama’s problem, ironically, is that he is too viable of a candidate to “risk” supporting, because that would expose him to the presumed backlash that these voters fear.  Added to these things has to be Obama’s professorial, high-minded style and the more limited support Obama has among blue-collar voters, combined with the aversion of Democratic constituencies (shared by most constituencies of either party) to politicians who aren’t interested in winning spoils for their side but who want to “fix” politics all together and cooperate with the other party.  For a Democratic Party base that is, not surprisingly, quite angry about the last few years, Obama’s desire to transcend the “smallness of our politics” sounds like another way of saying that he won’t fight.  Top that off with his lack of experience fighting close or competitive major elections, which suggests that he isn’t prepared to fight a general election even if he were willing to be more combative, and you can see why Obama struggles to get a majority of black voters behind him.   

Another element would have to be the well-known sense of affection for, and political loyalty to, former President Clinton among most black Democrats, which ends up benefiting his wife.  I suspect that one of the many reasons why Obama is so intent on stopping Clinton from appropriating the mantle of the Clinton Administration is that most black Democratic voters probably view that period favourably, so he has to sever the connection between her and any perceived accomplishments of the administration while tying her to the political fights of the past that Obama and some of his supporters believe the public doesn’t want to relive.  Generally, I think this assumption that Democratic voters don’t want a symbolic return to the ’90s is mistaken.  As much as the Clinton era disappointed progressives, and even though the decade did see the rise  of the Republican majority in Congress, it was the only time in the last sixty years when a Democrat won two presidential terms in his own right.  I think Democratic voters as a whole are ultimately going to look favourably on the chance for a “second” Clinton presidency, even if it means ignoring their doubts and reservations about this Clinton, in exchange for the chance at another eight years of controlling the White House.  (In this respect, the Democratic response to Clinton is similar, though not identical, to the lemming-like consensus that built up around George W. Bush in 1999-2000 that was only briefly challenged by McCain, and McCain’s fate that year is telling for Obama’s hopes.)  If most black voters don’t have doubts and reservations about Clinton in the first place, it makes that much more sense that they would end up supporting her.  In this, they are responding like most other Democratic voters. 

P.S.  There is probably also a question in the minds of many voters, and not just black Democrats, about what Obama’s “moving the national conversation forward” would actually mean.  If it is nothing more than bloviating about unity, I think most people will find that unsatisfying.  Unless there is some significant difference in policy, it seems to me that this “compliment” for Obama is a concession that one of the chief reasons to prefer him is the difference in his style of rhetoric.  In the end, the complaint or expectation that black Democratic voters should respond more favourably to what is basically a rhetorical smokescreen to cover up for the candidate’s lack of preparation for the office he is seeking gives these voters even less credit.

Keeping Alex Massie’s caveats about Economist editorials in mind, this part of the latest Lexington column on Obama seems right to me:

He sometimes looks more like the junior professor he once was than a political heavyweight, and his policies are sometimes half-baked, as when he contemplated sending troops into Pakistan, a sovereign state, and a particularly fragile one, to kill or capture al-Qaeda chieftains [bold mine-DL].

My view is that most of his foreign policy is half-baked, and even when it is complete it is filled with all manner of unappetising ingredients.

Yglesias captures the frustration with Hagel quite well:

But of course he is a Senator from Nebraska, and instead of finding myself admiring his work in that capacity I find myself thinking that Hagel would make a damn good “reasonable conservative” blogger.

In the past, I have been pretty relentless and unforgiving in my criticism of Hagel’s relative inaction.  Certainly, for the first three years of the war he was far too complacent.  But I think that both Hagel’s boosters and his critics, including myself, have invested the man with much more power and influence than he really has as a Senator.  Granted, he could have probably done more than he has, and he could have at least stayed for one more term, and he could have followed through on his criticisms of the plan to invade Iraq and voted against the authorisation resolution, but even if he were doing more than he is doing there is painfully little that he can do so long as the Senate Republican caucus remains wedded to the perpetuation of the war and the general deformation of U.S. foreign policy.  On most things pertaining to Iraq, Hagel has voted with the Democratic majority, and he has publicly said fairly intelligent things about negotiating with Iran.  If the Democratic majority in the Senate has been unable to move antiwar legislation, the blame cannot be laid at Hagel’s door.  Calling on him to run for President, as many did, was always bound to end in disappointment one way or another.  If he did run as an independent, he would get little traction with Republicans disaffected over the war, because he has never been unambiguously against the war despite having foreseen so many of the calamities that have happened, and he has voted with the White House so often in the last several years that he could not credibly represent an alternatve to Bushism as a whole, much less be a “more credible version” of Ron Paul. 

Yglesias refers to Hagel’s missed opportunity “to offer the country a more credible version of Ron Paul’s efforts to break the Bushist orthodoxy,” but on so many of the things that conservatives and independents find offensive about “Bushist orthodoxy” Hagel has generally been right alongside the President.  Opponents of Bush shower Hagel with praise because he, too, is an opponent of the President in a few very select areas–this is unfortunately a mirror image of the way that Republicans shower Lieberman with praise because he agrees with them in a few very select areas.  There are worse things to be than the anti-Lieberman, but this is not the basis for a “more credible version” of an effort to break Bushism.

Hagel is a “more credible” anti-Bush than Paul in the way that establishment figures dub various experts or politicians “serious” more or less arbitrarily: Hagel is “more credible” as an anti-Bush figure, but he is, in fact, very rarely anti-Bush and very rarely anti-Bushist.  If we measure credibility in this way, Michael O’Hanlon is a “more credible” antiwar voice than people who actually oppose the war and Rudy Giuliani is a “more credible” opponent of abortion than the pro-life candidates.  That is, someone is dubbed credible when he is actually quite content with the status quo in most respects and is sufficiently unthreatening that he is considered the acceptable face of opposition or criticism.

Mr. Thompson’s performance at the debate capped a weeklong period in which he held only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” rally last Saturday in a small room at the back of Sticky Fingers, a barbecue restaurant in Summerville, S.C. There was no music or food. There were not even chairs, and so some 100 voters there to see him had to stand for three hours before he arrived.

After brief remarks in which he cited the broad conservative principles that he said guided him, he took just a half-dozen questions. The appearance lasted less than 30 minutes, and he left without mingling with customers elsewhere in the restaurant. ~The New York Times

Perhaps this is a calculated gambit on the part of the Thompson campaign.  After all, the more people see of Fred, the less interested they become.  It follows that you should hide the candidate from as many voters as possible, and when you expose him to a few you should make it extremely brief and uninformative.  Perhaps the plan is to keep the voters hungry–literally and figuratively (which explains the lack of food at campaign events).  Fred was never so popular as when he was not officially running, so maybe he is passively trying to reclaim those magic moments of summer when he wasn’t campaigning at all, but was widely beloved by an electorate completely ignorant of who he was.  I think he hopes that his poll numbers will soar as his actual campaigning time approaches zero.  Soon enough, in another bold move, he will eventually drop out of the race in a cunning attempt to win the nomination by unanimous acclamation.

Ross worries because his McCain-Huckabee speculation has been adopted by Broder, but it is not the idea itself that is necessarily terrible–it is the classic Broderian way in which Broder advances the proposal that guarantees that it becomes unspeakably bad (rather like his previous applause for Bloomberg-Hagel).  The theme of the column is supposed to be principles.  The idea is that McCain and Huckabee have principles, Romney and Giuliani don’t (he may have a point there), and the rest of the field doesn’t matter.   Better than that, you see, they have “clarity, character and, yes, simple humanity.”  This is just another version of Broder’s endless praise for politicians who oppose their own party’s voters on major policy issues, and who do so in such a way that they agree with David Broder and thus prove themselves members of what I’m sure he thinks is the “reasonable center” of politics.  What is Broder really getting at?  Well, he makes it clear soon enough: McCain and Huckabee have bucked the opposition to illegal immigration in their party and don’t take their “rhetorical cues” from Tancredo.  That is apparently the main thing that matters in making them worthy nominees. 

Ross’ original, brief proposal was much more interesting.  Ross was making a case for the viability of such a ticket in the general election, and there is something to this.  In theory, they should be able to hold down the social conservative base of the party, satisfy war supporters and offer themselves up as two men with extensive experience in government.  They might bring in 45-46% of the vote that way, which could be the best the GOP can hope for this cycle.  (In a typically lower turnout election last year, Republicans saw their share of the popular vote drop by five points from ’04 and ’02, which is especially remarkable for a midterm vote and suggests continued weakness in next year’s election when there will be much higher Democratic turnout than last year.)  I think their immigration view will still be a millstone around their necks, and not just among Republican voters.  If illegal immigration really was as much of an issue in MA-05 this fall as I and some others believe it was, a candidate who supported border security and interior enforcement without amnesty provisions might be slightly more competitive in more parts of the country than supposedy more “moderate” and “centrist” Republicans such as McCain and Huckabee.  (As Ogonowski’s defeat and the results of the Virginia elections show, this issue isn’t enough on its own to propel the GOP to victory, but those who calculate that it actually hurts the GOP electorally are mistaken.)  There was tremendous opposition to “comprehensive” immigration legislation from virtually all quarters, and it isn’t clear that the GOP wins back independents and “Perot voters” and the like by putting forward some of their most liberal, pro-immigration members as nominees.  In any case, I think Ross and everyone else understands that it is exactly Huckabee and McCain’s immigration views that will continue to hold them back in the primaries.  Why else would Broder say that the GOP would have to “grit its teeth” to nominate them, except that they are profoundly unrepresentative of what a large part of the party believes on immigration?  The strange thing is that immigration is probably one of the few issues where the GOP is much closer to the views of the majority of the country, and it is one of the few on which it is still trusted more than the Democrats, so the last candidates you would want to nominate are those who are known for their sharp disagreements with the rest of the party on this very question.   

Then again, as long as the war remains as unpopular as it is, any Republican nominee dedicated to staying in Iraq will drag the party down, which makes discussions of GOP competitiveness in the general election somewhat moot.  Bearing all that in mind, this idea might have some potential*.  Even so, we can be pretty sure it isn’t going to happen, and not just because of immigration.  According to this, McCain’s opposition to torture apparently also scores poorly with at least one GOP focus group, so if Huckabee is accepting at least part of McCain’s position on torture he may become almost as unpopular in the party as McCain in the end. 

*I am speaking here purely in terms of electoral calculation.  I can think of few things more terrifying from a policy perspective than the prospect of another administration that marries aggressive hegemonic foreign policy with saccharine moralising pseudo-piety and policies that encourage mass immigration.

P.S.  Much of what I said above can also be said about a Giuliani-Huckabee combination, which is slightly less implausible politically given the current polls, but it is even less likely to prevail in the general election.

Someone had mentioned the following in a recent conversation, so I tracked down a source for it:

Huckabee is described by one national conservative leader as a member of the “Christian left.”

This reminded me that the very next day after Novak related this piece of information, Gerson wrote his column praising Huckabee.  The description of Huckabee as a member of the Christian left and the critique of Gerson as essentially being a left-evangelical who happens to be Republican fit together very well.  The connection between Gerson’s center-left, weepy “heroic conservatism” and Huckabee’s saccharine, “kill them but cry about it” (to use Michael’s celebrated phrase) mentality was clear even before Gerson’s column, and it probably became even more clear in recent weeks and especially after this week’s debate.  The description of Huckabee as being on the Christian left also reminded me of two goodreviews of Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism.  Now I haven’t read the book, but I have read and heard enough of Gerson’s work (as well as interviews he has given) to get a sense of what he thinks this “heroic conservatism” (which James has brilliantly renamedhelpy heroism) is supposed to mean. 

First, let’s go back and see what TAC‘s Kara Hopkins had to say about Gerson and the book in the latest issue:

He’s also an unlikely conservative: his earliest political experience was representing Jimmy Carter in a high school debate, and, when asked by the New Yorker to name his favorite president, he praised FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Wilson before mentioning Reagan—“to some extent.”

This fits with the picture of Gerson Matthew Scully gave in his takedown article for The Atlantic, in which Scully described how Gerson routinely looked to old FDR and Kennedy speeches for inspiration in writing war and foreign policy speeches for Bush:

Some moments seem ludicrous only in retrospect, as when we wrote the speech that Bush would give on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, on May 1, 2003—remembered now for the “Mission Accomplished” banner. As usual, Mike had come in with a grand, historic vision for the effort—along with a literary antecedent to imitate. This was another habit of his, and with each speech you could always predict which models he would turn to. When it was a speech on race, in would come Mike with a sheaf of heavily underlined Martin Luther King Jr. speeches. For speeches on poverty, it was time for more compassionate-conservative fervor, drawn secondhand from the addresses of Robert F. Kennedy. For updates on the war against terrorism, we could expect to see Mike’s well-worn copies of JFK and FDR speeches plopped on the table for instruction, and for imitation that when unchecked (as in the second inaugural) could slip perilously close to copying.

Kara continues:

But that is what heroic conservatism is about: moral fervor meets global ambition. Perhaps the former senses its prickliness—its tendency to joyless parochialism—and longs to widen its confines. The latter may perceive instability in its enthusiasm and want a tether. Together they make a potent pair—and a dangerous one.

It certainly is dangerous, and perhaps nowhere more so than in its capacity to dress up injustice as the height of morality.  One reason for this moral confusion is that Gerson has adopted utopian ideals, which invariably excuse and accept excesses in the name of greater goods:

But then he takes a decidedly radical turn, for the “moral ideals” Gerson has in mind—“liberty, tolerance, and equality”—echo the Jacobins’ own, and our pact appears to be with every inhabitant of the planet. “Our nation cherishes freedom, but we do not own it,” he wrote in a text Bush delivered from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan. “While it is the birthright of every American, it is also the equal promise of the religious believer in Southern Sudan, or an Iraqi farmer in the Tigris Valley, or of a child born in China today.”

Thus the villains in Gerson’s morality play aren’t liberals, for whom government programs are only improved by global scope, but realists. He condemns them for “offer[ing] no millennial goal to pursue in foreign policy—neither international order, nor democratic peace.” But he sees their stock falling. With the zeal of a man who has found his moment, he exults, “After the shock of 9/11, the Republican Party—the party of realism and caution—had become the party of idealism, action, and risk.”

Those wild tendencies allowed the war on terror its global reach, but it was Gerson’s brush that simultaneously made it a study in black and white. The worst of worlds combined. Where the exercise of force should have been constrained, we got a crusade, unchecked by just-war dictates or historical implausibility. And where the shadowland of conflicting interests and ancient grievance should have been afforded wide estate, we drew rigid dichotomy instead.

Obviously, it is a very odd sort of conservative who seeks any millennial goals whatever, whether in foreign policy or elsewhere, and in fact this is proof of a lack of conservatism.  It is typical of Gerson’s worldview that his criticisms of others are actually the highest compliments they could receive: realists can take some consolation that they disappoint the fantastical ambition of Michael Gerson, since no one should want to satisfy him.  God shall usher in the millennium at a time when He wills.  It is our task to preserve what has been entrusted to us until the Kingdom comes, and efforts to hasten its coming or establish it here below are as impious as they are bound to fail.   

Ross is more sympathetic to some of what Gerson proposes (and is therefore that much more devastating in rejecting Gerson’s prescriptions):

Particularly since Gerson’s central argument is basically correct: American conservatism needs to stand for something besides government-cutting if it hopes to regain the majority that George W. Bush won (and quickly lost).

Perhaps that is right.  As a matter of electoral politics, it is hard to disagree with this, though I wonder whether American conservatism should trouble itself quite so much with winning Republican majorities.  It seems to me that part of the woes of the current conservative movement stem from spending rather too much time worrying about that majority and not enough considering the most wise and prudent courses of action to pursue.  That’s a debate for another day.   Nonetheless, it seems clear that regaining the  Republican majority will not come about by embracing the ideas that helped to lose it. 

Ross adds:

If Gerson’s diagnosis is largely correct, however, his proposed remedy—the “heroic conservatism” of the title—seems more likely to kill the patient than to save it. Standing amid the rubble of an administration that promised (often in his own flowery prose) far more than it delivered, Gerson summons the GOP to a still-more-ambitious set of foreign and domestic crusades. For a “heroic conservative,” transforming the Middle East is only the beginning: In place of the cramped anti-government vision of a Dick Armey or a Phil Gramm, a Gersonized GOP would set the federal government to work lifting up all the wretched of the earth, whether they’re death-penalty defendants and teenage runaways at home or Darfuri refugees and Chinese dissidents abroad.

I would part with Ross, not surprisingly, in the description of the anti-government, or more accurately smaller government, vision as “cramped,” since there is nothing more narrow, dogmatic and limited than the fanatical idea that the problems of the entire world are ours to solve through the efforts of the U.S. government.  The goals of small government conservatives are necessarily limited, as they believe government must be, but their vision is, in fact, an expansive and broad one that seeks to allow the widest latitudes of a free society.  It is the Gersons and Huckabees who are constantly hectoring us to save the world and lose weight at the same time, all the while either pouting (Gerson) or smiling in blatant attempts to manipulate us emotionally into accepting their misguided policy proposals.  Gerson appropriates the word heroic for his program, but ignores that heroism is the province of individual heroes, rather than the result of collective efforts or the product of state programs. 

Huckabee is the closest thing to Gerson’s ideal candidate in this race, which we really have to hope means that Huckabee is doomed to fail.  He is someone who provides the “bleeding-heart conservative” alternative combined with an openness to the expansion of government (rhetoric about the Fair Tax notwithstanding), a steady dose of moralising in support of questionable policies on immigration and no particularly strong opposition to intervention overseas.  He lacks Brownback’s record of “compassionate conservatism” abroad, but he gives every indication that he would be more than glad to pursue a Brownbackian agenda in foreign policy.  Should he prevail, and should Gersonism receive a new lease on life in the GOP, we should understand at that point that, in some real sense, the GOP will have been taken over by the Christian Left. 

Take notes, Obama: Condi Rice dug deep into her bag of tricks and…recycled her “childhood in Birmingham as source of foreign policy insight” argument that she has used far too many timesalready:

Rice began by saying she did not want to draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective [bold mine-DL], but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Ala., “at a time of separation and tension.”

She noted that a local church was bombed by white separatists, killing four girls, including a classmate of hers.

“Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church,” she said.

But, she added, as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

“I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian,” she said. “I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness.”  

“There is pain on both sides,” Rice concluded. “This has gone on too long.”

She knows what it is like to hear that you “can’t go through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian”?  Did she have trouble making it through checkpoints on the interstate?  What is she talking about?  She says she doesn’t want to “draw historical parallels or be too self-reflective” right before she draws historical parallels and reflects on her own childhood as a window onto the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  Does this mean, despite her insistence that she wasn’t drawing historical parallels, that she was making a comparison between segregation and the treatment of the Palestinians?  Was she (gasp!) implying that there is some kind of apartheid system over there?