Chief Judge Judith Kaye administers the oath of office to Gov. David Paterson at right is Paterson’s son, Alexander (Newsday, J. Conrad Williams Jr. / March 17, 2008)
. . . asked me a question in a comment to my last post. My response:
I have not written much on Eliot Spitzer (I’ve left that to others) and I’ve said even less about David Paterson’s incredible ascension to the governorship. I have been working on a redesign of the website (everyone, keep an eye out for that!) and I’ve been working on a very long post (I am sorry to say that it is very, very boring).
My take on the drip, drip, drip of revelations about Gov. Paterson since he took office is that the media in New York City is probably the most racist in the nation. When the media in the South and other parts of the nation came to terms with their own role in this nation’s history, newspapers and other media outlets in the Northeast never had to.
It was good enough for them to condemn the South without any self-examination.
. . . is what I got after reading this convoluted article by Professor Akhil Reed Amar on how Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, (D-NY), and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), could serve a co-presidents, or something like that.
But which should it be: Clinton-Obama or Obama-Clinton? In fact, voters in November could actually endorse both versions of the ticket—truly, two presidents for the price of one. How? The Constitution’s 25th Amendment allows for a new paradigm of political teamwork: The two Democratic candidates could publicly agree to take turns in the top slot.
Then, at some agreed upon point, the President would cede power to the vice-president and, with Congressional approval, become the vice-president. The same team would then run for re-election four years later and four years after that, after which one of them would have to drop out because they would have been elected president twice. The remaining person could then run for president on his her own power.
Akhil Reed Amar teaches constitutional law at Yale University and he wrote “America’s Constitution: A Biography.” He is also a winner of the American Bar Association’s 2006 Silver Gavel Award. He is, in other words, a very smart guy and he said this could be done.
Whether it should done is, of course, another matter entirely.
Obama addressing a crowd the day after his race speech (Davis Turner/European Pressphoto Agency)
A not-too-bad round-up on the history that led to the Speech Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), gave in Philadelphia last week. The article shows, in some ways, how far we still have to go in our society to get to that bridge called fairness. I mean the place where we could actually be honest and fair and true with each other.
I have read Roger Cohen in The New York Times over the years but began reading him in earnest during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, some op-eds and most often his brilliant blog posts on the matches and the game of soccer. The pieces were elegant and learned, almost too much for the assignment.
The trouble, of course, is that he is published by The International Herald Tribune, not regularly by the Times.
It is a treasure to see him, if not in the pages of the Times, then at least on its website. Today’s piece by him is one of the most graceful I’ve read by him. I would quote him, except I would not know where to begin and Fair Use laws prevents me from plopping the whole piece here.
Let me offer one paragraph. You’ll have to go read the rest:
It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Nicholas Kristof would go back to writing about prostitutes. Better yet, he should leave the country for a long expedition to Asia and Africa, purchasing (and rescuing) every last prostitute he comes across. Until after the election.