Covering Up The Story About The Cover-Up!

Obama's legacy will soon begin and what he can do to save and further Capitalism will play a sgignificant part. (See 1 below.)

George Friedman revisits the role of "Deep Throat" and what keeping the wraps on the FBI's spying role on the White House means to journalism. The story about the story has relevance because the cover up source also became covered up! (See 2 below.)

Israel - no good options. Another analysis of Hamas and Gaza. (See 3 below.)

Barak defends his view of what can be done about Hamas and concludes you cannot destroy an ideology. A weak excuse - a failed policy. Is Barak an Archie Moore who often stood their taking blows as he covered himself? (See 4 below.)

Appointing Caroline tells more about ourselves than about her according to Victor Davis Hanson. (See 5 below.)

Has Russia's announced supplying of sophisticated air defense systems presented Obama with his first foreign policy challenge? Is Russia testing Obama's mettle as Kruschev did Kennedy? (See 6 below.)

Off to Costa Rica for an extended holiday so this is the last memo until Jan 4 or later. To all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, A Happy Channukah and all best wishes for a year of peace and good health.

Dick

1) The new U.S. president will be judged by whether he can save capitalism.
By Fareed Zakaria

The great sociologist Max Weber described the power of charisma as "a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities." Some of Barack Obama's supporters have at times sounded as if they saw "the One" in these terms. His birth, background and eloquence, they believe, give him almost magical qualities. There's no doubt that Obama is intensely charismatic and that it provides him with unusual political capital.

But very soon—say on Jan. 20, 2009—his powers will start to mutate, and they will derive less from his persona and more from his office. He will shift, in Weber's terminology, from wielding charismatic authority to legal authority.

In January, Obama will gain the authority to run the government of the United States of America, and that is why he sits atop this list. No matter how charismatic, were he the president of Kenya, he would not be in this position (or, like the real president of Kenya, not even on this list). For all its problems, for all the battering it has taken, the United States remains the single most important country in the world—able to exercise influence in every realm and on every continent in a way that no other major power can. It remains, in the words of the German writer Josef Joffe, "the default superpower." Add to this Obama's special qualities, and the relief much of the rest of the world feels at seeing the end of the Bush administration, and you have a heady combination.

But presidents cannot simply remain charismatic symbols. They are forced to tackle the problems at hand, and their influence then grows— or ebbs—based on how they handle those challenges. However impressive they were as human beings, it was not in being but in doing that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt built their enormous reputations. Whatever Obama may have thought when he began this journey, at a time when the war in Iraq was foremost in many voters' minds, whatever his campaign promises, his presidency will be judged on how he handles the economic crisis that now envelops the United States and the world. For Obama to be remembered as a great president, he has to do nothing less than rescue capitalism.

The first task is perhaps the most difficult: to restore confidence to Americans, and indeed to the world. While there has been much elation over Obama's election, there remains a deep pessimism across the country that is having adverse effects on the economy. People and corporations are still not doing much by way of buying, borrowing or lending —the heartbeats of modern capitalism. The political system has moved on to the automobile bailouts and the fiscal stimulus, but the original problem of trust in the financial system has still not been fixed. "Credit markets are still fundamentally broken," says David Swensen, chief investment officer of Yale University.

How to restore confidence? It's not as easy as it sounds. After all, George W. Bush has pretty consistently projected an air of confidence, one that tends to get people even more worried than they need to be. Perhaps this is because Bush's calm often seems utterly disconnected from the realities around him; he appears thoroughly unaware of the facts on the ground, whether in Iraq, Louisiana or Afghanistan. Like Bush, Franklin Roosevelt also projected optimism, but he took great pains to recognize and describe the depth of the difficulties the country faced. In his first fireside chat, Roosevelt explained the basics of banking to the American people and then asked for their help in getting the system working again. "It is your problem no less than mine," he said, enlisting them in the cause at hand.

The next step is to give people a sense that the financial system is stable and predictable. Swensen, who after Warren Buffett is perhaps the most successful investor in recent decades, argues that this has been the crucial flaw in the Bush administration's actions. "Markets need certainty and predictability," he says. "And the administration's actions have actually increased uncertainty and unpredictability. Its measures have been ad hoc, its response to each institution has been different, its reasoning has been opaque—all this creates confusion, and that drives capital away." Swensen's own solution is a simple and systemic one: have the government guarantee all money-market funds, with no limits, for six months. He argues that the government has to eliminate some degree of risk in order to get people to borrow and lend again. "Right now the government is not facilitating private capital flows; it is substituting for private capital flows. That doesn't solve anything."

The final way that Obama can create confidence is to reform the system itself. His administration will inherit a government that has taken on an extraordinary set of obligations in the private sector—ownership in banks, guarantees of commercial debts, loans to the automobile industry. Carefully retreating from these obligations to restore a market economy will be as complex an exit strategy as the one from Iraq. But if Obama is able to reform government rules and regulation—and thus the American economy—it will give people around the world renewed confidence in the American system. It was only after Japan was able to put in place a new system of tough auditing, after all, that its own banking crisis abated.

Obama will find many dire challenges in his inbox, but none—not Iraq, not Russia, not Pakistan, China, Afghanistan—is as important as this one huge task: to restore confidence, certainty and reform to America. It's a lot easier said than done. But if he manages to pull it off, people might well start wondering whether Barack Obama has some supernatural powers after all.

2) The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism
By George Friedman

Mark Felt died last week at the age of 95. For those who don’t recognize that name, Felt was the “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame. It was Felt who provided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post with a flow of leaks about what had happened, how it happened and where to look for further corroboration on the break-in, the cover-up, and the financing of wrongdoing in the Nixon administration. Woodward and Bernstein’s exposé of Watergate has been seen as a high point of journalism, and their unwillingness to reveal Felt’s identity until he revealed it himself three years ago has been seen as symbolic of the moral rectitude demanded of journalists.

In reality, the revelation of who Felt was raised serious questions about the accomplishments of Woodward and Bernstein, the actual price we all pay for journalistic ethics, and how for many years we did not know a critical dimension of the Watergate crisis. At a time when newspapers are in financial crisis and journalism is facing serious existential issues, Watergate always has been held up as a symbol of what journalism means for a democracy, revealing truths that others were unwilling to uncover and grapple with. There is truth to this vision of journalism, but there is also a deep ambiguity, all built around Felt’s role. This is therefore not an excursion into ancient history, but a consideration of two things. The first is how journalists become tools of various factions in political disputes. The second is the relationship between security and intelligence organizations and governments in a Democratic society.

Watergate was about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. The break-in was carried out by a group of former CIA operatives controlled by individuals leading back to the White House. It was never proven that then-U.S. President Richard Nixon knew of the break-in, but we find it difficult to imagine that he didn’t. In any case, the issue went beyond the break-in. It went to the cover-up of the break-in and, more importantly, to the uses of money that financed the break-in and other activities. Numerous aides, including the attorney general of the United States, went to prison. Woodward and Bernstein, and their newspaper, The Washington Post, aggressively pursued the story from the summer of 1972 until Nixon’s resignation. The episode has been seen as one of journalism’s finest moments. It may have been, but that cannot be concluded until we consider Deep Throat more carefully.

Deep Throat Reconsidered

Mark Felt was deputy associate director of the FBI (No. 3 in bureau hierarchy) in May 1972, when longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died. Upon Hoover’s death, Felt was second to Clyde Tolson, the longtime deputy and close friend to Hoover who by then was in failing health himself. Days after Hoover’s death, Tolson left the bureau.

Felt expected to be named Hoover’s successor, but Nixon passed him over, appointing L. Patrick Gray instead. In selecting Gray, Nixon was reaching outside the FBI for the first time in the 48 years since Hoover had taken over. But while Gray was formally acting director, the Senate never confirmed him, and as an outsider, he never really took effective control of the FBI. In a practical sense, Felt was in operational control of the FBI from the break-in at the Watergate in August 1972 until June 1973.

Nixon’s motives in appointing Gray certainly involved increasing his control of the FBI, but several presidents before him had wanted this, too, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Both of these presidents wanted Hoover gone for the same reason they were afraid to remove him: He knew too much. In Washington, as in every capital, knowing the weaknesses of powerful people is itself power — and Hoover made it a point to know the weaknesses of everyone. He also made it a point to be useful to the powerful, increasing his overall value and his knowledge of the vulnerabilities of the powerful.

Hoover’s death achieved what Kennedy and Johnson couldn’t do. Nixon had no intention of allowing the FBI to continue as a self-enclosed organization outside the control of the presidency and everyone else. Thus, the idea that Mark Felt, a man completely loyal to Hoover and his legacy, would be selected to succeed Hoover is in retrospect the most unlikely outcome imaginable.

Felt saw Gray’s selection as an unwelcome politicization of the FBI (by placing it under direct presidential control), an assault on the traditions created by Hoover and an insult to his memory, and a massive personal disappointment. Felt was thus a disgruntled employee at the highest level. He was also a senior official in an organization that traditionally had protected its interests in predictable ways. (By then formally the No. 2 figure in FBI, Felt effectively controlled the agency given Gray’s inexperience and outsider status.) The FBI identified its enemies, then used its vast knowledge of its enemies’ wrongdoings in press leaks designed to be as devastating as possible. While carefully hiding the source of the information, it then watched the victim — who was usually guilty as sin — crumble. Felt, who himself was later convicted and pardoned for illegal wiretaps and break-ins, was not nearly as appalled by Nixon’s crimes as by Nixon’s decision to pass him over as head of the FBI. He merely set Hoover’s playbook in motion.

Woodward and Bernstein were on the city desk of The Washington Post at the time. They were young (29 and 28), inexperienced and hungry. We do not know why Felt decided to use them as his conduit for leaks, but we would guess he sought these three characteristics — as well as a newspaper with sufficient gravitas to gain notice. Felt obviously knew the two had been assigned to a local burglary, and he decided to leak what he knew to lead them where he wanted them to go. He used his knowledge to guide, and therefore control, their investigation.

Systematic Spying on the President

And now we come to the major point. For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters’ investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post’s coverage.

Instead of passing what he knew to professional prosecutors at the Justice Department — or if he did not trust them, to the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing — Felt chose to leak the information to The Washington Post. He bet, or knew, that Post editor Ben Bradlee would allow Woodward and Bernstein to play the role Felt had selected for them. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee all knew who Deep Throat was. They worked with the operational head of the FBI to destroy Nixon, and then protected Felt and the FBI until Felt came forward.

In our view, Nixon was as guilty as sin of more things than were ever proven. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. The FBI was carrying out espionage against the president of the United States, not for any later prosecution of Nixon for a specific crime (the spying had to have been going on well before the break-in), but to increase the FBI’s control over Nixon. Woodward, Bernstein and above all, Bradlee, knew what was going on. Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover’s jilted heir.

This was enormously important news. The Washington Post decided not to report it. The story of Deep Throat was well-known, but what lurked behind the identity of Deep Throat was not. This was not a lone whistle-blower being protected by a courageous news organization; rather, it was a news organization being used by the FBI against the president, and a news organization that knew perfectly well that it was being used against the president. Protecting Deep Throat concealed not only an individual, but also the story of the FBI’s role in destroying Nixon.

Again, Nixon’s guilt is not in question. And the argument can be made that given John Mitchell’s control of the Justice Department, Felt thought that going through channels was impossible (although the FBI was more intimidating to Mitchell than the other way around). But the fact remains that Deep Throat was the heir apparent to Hoover — a man not averse to breaking the law in covert operations — and Deep Throat clearly was drawing on broader resources in the FBI, resources that had to have been in place before Hoover’s death and continued operating afterward.

Burying a Story to Get a Story

Until Felt came forward in 2005, not only were these things unknown, but The Washington Post was protecting them. Admittedly, the Post was in a difficult position. Without Felt’s help, it would not have gotten the story. But the terms Felt set required that a huge piece of the story not be told. The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn’t what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat’s identity.

Journalists have celebrated the Post’s role in bringing down the president for a generation. Even after the revelation of Deep Throat’s identity in 2005, there was no serious soul-searching on the omission from the historical record. Without understanding the role played by Felt and the FBI in bringing Nixon down, Watergate cannot be understood completely. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were willingly used by Felt to destroy Nixon. The three acknowledged a secret source, but they did not reveal that the secret source was in operational control of the FBI. They did not reveal that the FBI was passing on the fruits of surveillance of the White House. They did not reveal the genesis of the fall of Nixon. They accepted the accolades while withholding an extraordinarily important fact, elevating their own role in the episode while distorting the actual dynamic of Nixon’s fall.

Absent any widespread reconsideration of the Post’s actions during Watergate in the three years since Felt’s identity became known, the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers’ motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events — especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.

The Felt experience is part of an ongoing story in which journalists’ guarantees of anonymity to sources allow leakers to control the news process. Protecting Deep Throat’s identity kept us from understanding the full dynamic of Watergate. We did not know that Deep Throat was running the FBI, we did not know the FBI was conducting surveillance on the White House, and we did not know that the Watergate scandal emerged not by dint of enterprising journalism, but because Felt had selected Woodward and Bernstein as his vehicle to bring Nixon down. And we did not know that the editor of The Washington Post allowed this to happen. We had a profoundly defective picture of the situation, as defective as the idea that Bob Woodward looks like Robert Redford.

Finding the truth of events containing secrets is always difficult, as we know all too well. There is no simple solution to this quandary. In intelligence, we dream of the well-placed source who will reveal important things to us. But we also are aware that the information provided is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story involves the source’s motivation, and frequently that motivation is more important than the information provided. Understanding a source’s motivation is essential both to good intelligence and to journalism. In this case, keeping secret the source kept an entire — and critical — dimension of Watergate hidden for a generation. Whatever crimes Nixon committed, the FBI had spied on the president and leaked what it knew to The Washington Post in order to destroy him. The editor of The Washington Post knew that, as did Woodward and Bernstein. We do not begrudge them their prizes and accolades, but it would have been useful to know who handed them the story. In many ways, that story is as interesting as the one about all the president’s men.

3) No good options
By Gerald M. Steinberg

The on-again, off-again, coordinated but unwritten ceasefire or temporary truce between Israel and Hamas may or may not be over for now. With such a thin foundation, no direct communications between leaders and divisions among factions within both the Hamas and Israeli leaderships, the uncertainty and confusion is understandable.

Beyond the fiery threats from Hamas leaders and the brutal psychodramas focusing on kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, as well as Israeli election rhetoric, this quasi-truce has served the interests of both sides. The rocket and mortar attacks during the previous year had brought the Israeli town of Sderot and its neighbors to the breaking point and perhaps beyond. In Gaza, Israel's responses were causing damage to Hamas. There were good reasons for a brief respite.

But this truce was also problematic. Hamas, as a revolutionary fundamentalist group linked to the Iranian agenda, has placed itself on the front lines. If it were to reach a long-term accommodation, tacit or more formalized, Hamas would be ideologically or politically indistinguishable from Fatah.

From the Israeli perspective, the Gazan version of Hizballah, with similar weapons and strategy, is also viewed as highly threatening. Israel depends on deterrence through the threat of effective response to attack, and in this regard the 2006 Lebanon campaign was not successful. Allowing Hamas to acquire a supply of rockets with increasing range has exacerbated this weakness. In addition, the failure to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit as part of the original ceasefire is subject to increasing criticism among the Israeli public, and has become an election issue for Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Indeed, the Olmert government's strategy toward Gaza following the latter's coup against the Palestinian Authority and Fatah is generally seen as a failure. The policy of isolation and blockade did not lead to a collapse, as had been hoped. And following Arafat's lead, the Hamas leadership did not start to act "responsibly" and take the welfare of its citizens into account after it took power. In addition, Israeli reliance on Egypt also failed as Cairo proved too weak to stop the flow of arms and explosives or influence the Hamas leadership.

On this basis, for many Israeli decision-makers the argument for a large-scale ground operation to disarm Hamas and destroy its leadership has become stronger, particularly as Sderot is again being bombarded and Ashkelon is likely to follow. If an IDF incursion is necessary, it is better to get it over with earlier, including likely military and civilian casualties as well as international condemnations, rather than waiting for Hamas to accrue even more deadly missiles. Since there are political costs in waiting until the Obama presidency begins, such an operation may come before January 20. And if it is successful, a greatly weakened Hamas will also help President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority regain power in Gaza.

But those who urge caution note the potential for major Israeli casualties and the absence of an exit strategy. Israeli re-occupation of Gaza would be very costly diplomatically, militarily and economically, while a quick exit would be seen as a victory for Hamas. In other words, if Israel launches a major operation to end the missile attacks it will need a clear-cut success and will have to accept the accompanying costs.

As an alternative, some analysts have suggested that an international force be sent to keep the peace in Gaza. But this is highly unrealistic: any foreign "peacekeepers" would quickly become targets for terror attacks as well as for political manipulation. Here again, the Lebanon example is instructive--the "new and improved" UNIFIL, operating under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and European command, is no more capable than the pre-2006 model. Furthermore, in discussing international forces in Gaza the Palestinians and their allies would insist on including the West Bank in this mandate, thereby creating a conflict with Israel.

A few other participants in this debate continue to call for "talks" and negotiations with Hamas, citing the progress in relations between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or between China and Taiwan. But these cases do not involve radical Islamist factions: the nature of the core conflict is very different, as is the regional environment. The governments of the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom cooperated to bring about negotiated settlement, but in the Middle East most of the outside governments, such as Iran, Syria and Libya, are part of the conflict.

The bottom line is that there are no good options. But if Hamas remains undeterred and the rocket attacks continue, Israeli leaders will have to choose a military scenario, with the hope that their objectives can be achieved.-Published 22/12/2008 © bitterlemons.org

4) Analysis: Barak maneuvering between Cairo and Livni
By Yaakov Katz

Hamas on Monday proved what the IDF has been saying for the past three-and-a-half years since the disengagement from the Gaza Strip - that all terror attacks from Gaza are under Hamas's auspices and control.

Since the cease-fire collapsed in November, several groups have been behind the rocket fire into Israel - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees.

Each group had its own interests; some just wanted to terrorize Israel and others didn't want the crossings to open and take away business from the lucrative smuggling industry along the Philadelphi Corridor.

But on Monday, Hamas showed the world it was in charge.

After a barrage of close to 20 projectiles on Sunday and some 30 over the weekend, by Monday night only a handful of Kassams and mortars had fallen in Israel.

The lull had come at the behest of Egypt, which is playing a fascinating role in the current round between Israel and Hamas.

Last week, in private talks between Israel and Egypt, Cairo told Israel that it was willing to turn a blind eye to an IDF operation in the Gaza Strip. On Sunday, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry sent a different message, publicly warning Israel against massive military action against Hamas.

Also on Sunday, the Egyptian consul-general in Tel Aviv, Sameh Nabil, surprised the Defense Ministry when he asked Defense Minister Ehud Barak to grant a personal request from Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak, and enable an Egyptian humanitarian shipment into Gaza.

On Monday, Egypt warned Hamas that if it didn't stop the rocket attacks, Israel would embark on an assassination campaign against all the terror chieftains in Gaza.

"Egypt is trying to play both sides of the fence in Gaza - attempting to help Israel and Hamas at the same time," one senior defense official explained Monday.

"Ultimately though, what motivates Egypt is one thing - the interest of Egypt."

In the midst of all of this, Barak is playing an interesting role himself. In his public appearances, Barak is trying to distinguish himself as the elder and responsible statesman among politicians all vying for the title of "most aggressive" by issuing daily calls to topple the Hamas regime by conquering the Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu visited Sderot and laid out his plan for what needed to be done to stop Hamas. On Monday, Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni convened a forum, called "Kadima's Security Forum," to discuss the situation in Gaza.

One politician who particularly raised the ire of Barak's office was Vice Premier Haim Ramon, who called on the defense minister to "wake up from an illusion that the cease-fire is good for Israel."

With elections exactly 50 days away, all of these statements need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are mostly campaign slogans.

As revealed on Sunday, Barak and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have already decided on extensive military action in Gaza. The question left undecided is the timing of the operation.

One factor is the weather; thick clouds over Gaza impair the IAF's ability to strike at targets and provide air support for ground forces.

Barak does not believe that it is possible to "topple the Hamas regime." It may be possible to severely weaken the group's military capability, but an ideology cannot be destroyed. Defense officials fear an Israeli operation might only help Hamas tighten its grip on Gaza.

As a result, what is most likely is an operation that will return the situation in Gaza to what it was for the majority of the cease-fire, before it began to collapse following an IDF operation in Gaza in November.

There is no one way to make this happen, but one thing is for certain in the IDF - Israel needs to be allowed to strike back.

5) Desperately Seeking Caroline
By Victor Davis Hanson



The probable appointment of Caroline Kennedy, the 51-year-old daughter of former President John Kennedy, to fill Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat is both laughable and yet a parable for our bankrupt times.

Consider aristocratic entitlement. Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha's Vineyard. She has had no real experience with the ordinary lives of New Yorkers, either a few dozen blocks away in Harlem (despite a sudden ad hoc lunch last week with the Rev. Sharpton at a soul food diner) or the state's rural towns to the north.

Ms. Kennedy is about as undiverse as one could imagine. She was educated at exclusively private schools among those of her like race and class. Her financial security is due to either inheritance or marriage; there is no evidence of a self-employed stellar legal or business career. But there is plenty of evidence that Ms. Kennedy reflects the current Democratic Party's obsession with celebrity and Hollywood-like imagery--as we see from the recent politicking of everyone from Oprah to Sean Penn, the Senate run of comedian Al Franken, and the messianic cult that surrounds Barack Obama, from his vero possumus Latin seal to his mass rallies with Greek temple backdrops.

Press reports suggest that the current political junkie Ms. Kennedy was an erratic voter in the past. In any case, her positions on both state and national issues are perhaps doctrinaire liberal in the Kenndyesque sense. But we can only assume, rather than know, that, since she has not in the past voiced any strong views about anything in any detail. Unlike dozens of veteran, hard-working and savvy New York state and federal office-holders in the Democratic Party, who would be both qualified and happy to serve out Sen. Clinton's term, Ms. Kennedy has never run for, or held, public office. Her only prerequisites for Senator are her pedigree from her father and her purported celebrity mystique passed on from her mother Jackie. She certainly has shown none of Hillary Clinton's grittiness, traipsing over the rural haunts of America in a bright blue pantsuit, quaffing boilermakers at biker bars and reinventing herself as a sort of Annie Oakley everywoman, clinging to guns and religion.

In 2007 Ms. Kennedy was, in fact, a strong Hillary Clinton donor and supporter, but jumped ship and joined Obama once he surged in the polls at the beginning of the year, when the national media and the fossilized icons of the Democratic Party underwent some sort of ecstatic catharsis and mass hysteria akin to what Euripides's Bacchants experienced on Mt. Kithairon.

That savvy metamorphosis into an Obamiac explains Ms. Kennedy's sudden me-too piggy-backing into national politics. Indeed, her current newfound political zeal seems predicated on the larger Obamania craze, a sort of brand name groupthink in which romantic liberals imagine a return of JFK's lost Camelot.

Her supporters shrug and in embarrassment cite the similar political dynasties of the Bushes or Clintons, and, mindlessly, point to other familial connections that helped jumpstart contemporary careers as diverse as those of Andrew Cuomo, Richard Daley, or Mitt Romney. But all of these scions of well-connected or famous fathers ran for office, met the public, endured the press corps, and for years lost and won elections--something that heretofore Ms. Kennedy has not yet attempted.

Then there is the problem of pretension. Kennedy's Harvard and Columbia educations are cited as proof of her qualifications, as well as her authorship of a variety of edited and co-authored books. But there is no reason to believe that her attendance at the Ivy League was any less facilitated by the powers that be than was the caricatured academic career of the similarly well-connected George Bush, likewise a child of a President. And so just as few in the media cited George Bush's Ivy League degrees as proof of his erudition, why should we do anything different with Ms. Kennedy about whom we know far less than the former successful two-term Texas Governor (who held his own with, or bested, in six televised debates Ivy Leaguers Al Gore and John Kerry?

None of the Kennedy books are works of real scholarship or originality; most instead draw on her family name and reflect insider connections within New York publishing. Her coauthored books with Ellen Alderman on the law are reminiscent of her father's Profiles in Courage--and the inordinate contributions of Theodore Sorensen in that murky shared endeavor.

Much is recently made of Barack Obama's evocation of the 'Best and Brightest' Kennedy coterie, as he draws heavily on so-called "smart" people from the Ivy League. But the media's current heavies in the financial meltdown--President George Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, SEC head Chris Cox, former director of Fannie Mae Franklin Rains, and Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank all have in common only Harvard degrees, which apparently are requisites to have overseen financial disaster rather than tools to have prevented it.

Finally, there is the third charge of hypocrisy. George Bush, we were told ad nauseam was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple. But when it comes to Ms. Kennedy, her liberal lineage and assumed charisma weirdly nullified the same tired media charges of entitlement that have been customarily leveled against almost every affluent, well-connected Republican politician from Mitt Romney to George Bush.

There were also several liberal media complaints against Gov. Sarah Palin, most prominently three--that she lacked experience for high federal office; that she avoided the media whenever possible; and that she either would not or could not opine on world affairs.

But Gov. Palin had been an elected official for some sixteen years, winning and losing elections until assuming the governorship--always at odds with an entrenched male hierarchy that had run Alaska for years. Through it all, Palin mothered five children without either capital or connections. She endured at the very beginning of her national run a vicious press as interested in ridiculing her as a rube in fancy store-bought clothes as it is catching a glimpse of Caroline's glitzy labels.

We know in our hearts that Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, who mercilessly grilled pro-life, Christian Sarah Palin with the poor white twang, would pull in their talons--if given the chance to dialogue with Caroline. Yet there is no evidence that Caroline Kennedy knows any more about Waziristan than did Sarah Palin; there is a great deal of evidence that it is far more difficult for a nobody mom of five to make it through the electoral process into national politics from Alaska than it is for a Kennedy daughter of a President to be appointed from the Upper East Side to fill a liberal New York Senate Seat.

Caroline Kennedy is no doubt a fine individual who by all accounts has led an exemplary life. But her proposed appointment to the US Senate is a rare reflection of ourselves--the glittering of the aristocracy in the left's vision of an otherwise egalitarian America, the notion that blue-chip certification conveys status and wisdom rather than proven excellence through the life-school of hard knocks, and the ethical bankruptcy of the media that has no principled notion of disinterested inquiry, but now serves as an fawning appendage of the Left.

In short, appointing Caroline Kennedy to the Senate from New York tells us a lot more about ourselves than it does even her.

6) That first foreign challenge


DURING the fall campaign, Joe Biden ruminated aloud about a foreign policy challenge that a President Obama would have to confront early on. That challenge has come even sooner than Biden anticipated. To test Barack Obama's intentions, if not his mettle, Russia recently announced it plans to go forward with the on-again off-again sale of an advanced air defense system to Iran.

The military purpose of the S-300 air defense system would be to hinder the United States or Israel from setting back Iran's nuclear program with an air assault on Iranian nuclear sites. Russia has no interest in helping Iran obtain nuclear weapons, but President Dmitry Medvedev and his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, may want to lay down a marker even before Obama takes up his responsibilities in the Oval Office.

They want to show Obama they have valuable cards to play. If he wants their cooperation on Iran, they want some quid pro quos. They want the cancellation of President Bush's plan to deploy a dubious missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. They are no less adamant in opposing Bush proposals for NATO expansion that would include Georgia and Ukraine.

The Russians are also eager to reach agreement on three arms-control treaties signed during the Cold War or in its immediate aftermath. The Bush administration has been reluctant to renew the START I agreement on reducing strategic nuclear weapons. That agreement is set to expire next Dec. 5, and Russia wants a follow-up treaty.

The Kremlin also wants to revise the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Since many of its former satellites are now in the Western camp, the numbers of permitted weapons have tilted against Russia. And the Russians dislike the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty because it bans the cheaper, shorter-range ballistic missiles that balance America's long-range arsenal.

A good augury for Obama's early Kremlin challenge is that both Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Henry Kissinger visited Moscow this month for high-level discussions. Lugar met with a counterpart in the Russian Duma, and Kissinger held talks with Medvedev and Putin.

These two go-betweens may bring Obama a message about the Kremlin's terms for repairing a relationship that deteriorated dangerously under Bush. Because the missile defense system is flawed and because key European allies already oppose NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, Obama will have a chance to trade low-value cards inherited from Bush for crucial Russian cooperation on proliferation, terrorism, and energy security. Obama has the cards. Now he has to play them right.