Of Mousavi, security and negative capability

Always balanced, always informed, always worth reading: Gideon Rachman weighs the odds of successful revolution in Iran, adapting and expanding a checklist developed by Economist reporter Andrew Miller, "who witnessed the colour revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgystan."

The one factor missing so far: weak or divided security services.

Also worth reading: Andrew Miller's response to Rachman (unfortunately, neither links to the original Miller checklist):

The post-Soviet lesson is that the real or realised threat of serious violence is likely to prevent or at least forestall popular revolution—by inhibiting people from coming onto the streets or coming back again if they do.

And in an aside from Miller: an arresting formula for a successful leader of popular revolt:

Incidentally, a comment to my earlier post raised an interesting question about the leaders of revolutions, and whether they need to be more charismatic and galvanising than those in Iran seem to be. In fact the experience of Ukraine, at least, is that they don't. Viktor Yushchenko was positively boring throughout most of the orange revolution. His speeches in Independence Square in Kiev were keenly anticipated, but a few minutes after he began talking, after he had started rambling on about Seneca or bee-keeping or whatever, people generally began chatting among themselves. The point about Mr Yushchenko was that he was, or seemed, honest (much more so than some of his fellow revolutionaries, who subsequently joined him in government). On the basis of Ukraine the conclusion might be that a revolutionary leader needs to have what you might call "negative capability": a persona blank, clean and undivisive enough to command the trust of the diverse constituencies that it takes to bring about change; a persona onto which the various elements of the revolutionary coaltion can project their own goals and grievances.

Negative capability? Really? Aside from Yushchenko, how often does that work?

I guess Vaclav Havel had a negative capability of a different kind - the kind originally defined by Keats.

Incidentally, Miller's checklist is worth laying beside a more data-based but less empirical "extreme bounds analysis" study by ETH Switzerland and Georgetown University.

Early prophets of Obama victory

Andrew Sullivan is having fun unearthing predictions that Barack Obama could never win the Presidency. As a kinder, gentler blogger, I'm having fun locating those who expressed faith early that yes, he could.

Where are the words of the prophets written? Lo, in college newspapers, and local writeups of college rallies. Just about everyone I found on LexisNexis who said unequivocally before November 2007, "Obama can win" or "Obama will win" was under the age of 23. All of them spoke of hope, vision, change.

Starting with the most recent and moving backwards: an Oct. 2, 2007, Cornell Daily Sun account of an Obama rally. Among the speakers were Eronmonsele Elens-Eigbokhan '09, president of Cornell Students for Barack Obama, and co-founder Tim Krueger. First, Elens-Eigbokhan:

"In Barack Obama we've got hope. We've become bound in partisan politics ... but we know Barack Obama brings people together," he said.

Krueger began his speech by alerting the crowd that he did not intend to talk about why Obama should win, but rather why he would win. He then laid out the reasons why he thought this was the case.

"First Barack Obama will win ... for his capacity to articulate a vision to an extent that other candidates cannot," he said.

Lastly, Elens-Eigbokhan himself stood up and delivered a passionate speech about how important it is to still believe in the power of the people and our ability to elicit change.

"[Barack Obama] told us that at every juncture in American history, American people who love America have changed it," he said. "It's very easy for us to say that nothing's going to change ... but if that's what people had said throughout history, then we wouldn't be where we are today."

Seven months earlier the Modesto Bee caught up on Feb. 27, 2007 with a certain Josh Franco, who had recently been appointed statewide coordinator in CA of Students for Barack Obama. Here's Franco to the Bee:

"I think students play a vital role in providing the energy and enthusiasm behind campaigns," Franco said.

Franco said he's convinced that Obama can win in 2008.

"Because he speaks of hope, that's why I gravitate towards him," Franco said.

And on Feb. 15, 2007, writing in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, Matt Giancola caught the zeitgeist:

There is only one candidate who is capturing the minds of the public, who has the vision to lead the United States away from the failed policies that President Bush led us into, and can win both the primary and general election.

That candidate is Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, is vulnerable on a number of fronts. Her support for the Iraq War has hurt among party activists. She still will not apologize for her vote to authorize the President to take us into this bloody and unnecessary war. Though Obama was not in the Senate when the votes for the war were cast, he has been against the war from the beginning...

It is not simply his foreign policy that makes him an attractive candidate to Democrats. His message of hope and overcoming obstacles that keep our nation down is a message that we have been in dire need of. Yes, he is the first African-American to have a real chance at winning the election, but his attractiveness is in his words, not his skin color.

He speaks to the best in people, to bringing the country together. In his electrifying 2004 Democratic Keynote Address, he stated, "Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: in the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead." ...

We need to move away from bungling Republican rule; Senator Obama represents
the hope that resides in us all - that better days are ahead.

Perhaps it's not remarkable that the youngest voters would tune in. What's truly astounding is that they pulled the rest of us along.

You must become as little children...

Vaclav Havel, addressing the newly self-liberated Czechoslovaks at his inaugural on Jan. 1, 1990, was speaking to a nation in circumstances very different from those of the U.S. today. But his wonderment that a nation steeped for decades in a "contaminated moral environment" could renew itself comes to mind again and again as election day approaches:

Where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered lost -- joined them?

By way of more prosaic explanation, an early prophet of this election cycle (who from the wilderness has willed himself to support McCain), David Frum, wrote in the Financial Times on February 6, 2008:

If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today's 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s.

Democracy, thy name is self-correction. Repentence. Atonement. Throw the bums out.

Digging deeper, into American history for an explanation, The New Yorker dared this comparison and its dangerously great expectations:

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

Last word to Obama (Jan. 5, ABC debate), daring us to hope:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Audacity of The New Yorker: Comparing Obama and Lincoln

The editors of the New Yorker, in the best retrospective of this endless campaign and the Bush Administration that I've read anywhere, have expressed in a couple of sentences what I've been trying to get across about Obama for the better part of a year (e..g., here and here):

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

As Obama himself put it in the January 5 ABC debate:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Do we still have that democratic capacity to sell-correct? Arguably, people always do.In his inaugural address to the (then) Czechoslovakian nation on Jan. 1, 1990, Vaclav Havel told his people that after 40-plus years of Communism

we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.

Later in the same speech, though, he acknowledged the miracle of the velvet revolution:

Where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered lost -- joined them?

The U.S. moral environment has been tainted by an eight-year binge of preemptive war, relentless lying on the part of leaders, the shredding of civil liberties, the institutionalization of torture, not say by a binge of deregulation, tax cutting and credit run wild. Just 53% of Americans now think that torture is never justified -- the lowest percentage among developed nations, lower than that of the Chinese, who live under an authoritarian regime. A people can be corrupted from above, by their leaders and by media controlled by their leaders, e.g. Fox and its beloved torture-glorifying "24."

But democracy in America ain't dead yet. It may seem ridiculously starry-eyed to hope that Obama, like Lincoln before him, can win over the electorate by sheer force of ideas, by articulation of American ideals and of policies designed to give them new life -- and to hope further that he can execute those policies with some success if elected. Maybe those of us who buy in are Charlie Brown running for another kick of the football. But that's -- oh, the fear of looking foolish by quoting a politician's keynote! -- the audacity of hope.