Slobodan Milosevic was committing an act of genocide – driving out a whole people, committing barbarities along the way.

Leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of the word “genocide,” Avnery describes things accurately enough.  In his book, Kosovo: War and Revenge, journalist Tim Judah wrote:

In the end almost 850,000 were either deported or fled Kosovo and hundreds of thousands were displaced inside.

The problem is that Judah here describes events that actually happened after the start of the NATO bombing campaign that Avnery thinks was aimed at stopping them.

I know from personal experience that Avnery is not the only one with an inverted time line of the period.  A couple of years ago, a friend of mine described an article he was planning to write accusing Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein of dogmatism.  While I was in no way sympathetic to his point of view and ultimately thought that it was his article rather than its targets that was dogmatic, I nonetheless thought I’d save him from a bit of embarrassment by pointing out that the Kosovo bombing campaign he considered the “right thing” to do (while Chomsky hadn’t) had preceded the displacement campaign his memory told him had come first.

It’s not the case that these folks are recovering these memories out of thin air, though. There were Kosovars displaced before that. Judah again:

By the 3 August (1998) the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was estimating that 200,000 Kosovars had been displaced by the fighting.

But the chronology is not the only aspect of the Kosovo War that has been distorted – there were two sides to it and neither covered itself with glory. Slobodan Milosevic, leader of what was then still officially Yugoslavia, is accurately remembered as a war criminal.  But less well remembered is the fact that earlier that year, the U.S. State Department had branded the principle force fighting Milosevic’s government, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a “terrorist organization.” (While I personally do not place great stock in State Department “terrorist lists,” I had thought that the State Department did.)  At one point the organization threatened death to any ethnic-Albanian Kosovar leaders who might sign onto a pact for autonomy within Yugoslavia. The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke thought the KLA was “taking very provocative steps in order to draw the west into the crisis.”

None of this is meant to whitewash either Milosevic, the disproportionate force employed by his government, or the fear at the time that something like the massacre of 8,000-10,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces four years before could be repeated in Kosovo.  But neither should we forget that Yugoslavia had allowed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to station 2,000 monitors in the province in the midst of the fighting.  The monitors were removed when NATO began its bombing – against the wishes of Yugoslavia.

Only after the start of that 78-day campaign (which included the use both of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions and the bombing of a Belgrade television station that killed eighteen) did Yugoslav forces drive Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population out.

(BBC’s official timeline of the conflict: 1999 March – Internationally-brokered peace talks fail. Nato launches air strikes against Yugoslavia lasting 78 days before Belgrade yields. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees pour into neighbouring countries, telling of massacres and forced expulsions which followed the start of the Nato campaign.)

But in his column on the Gush Shalom website Avnery writes:

When there was a worldwide outcry, President Bill Clinton decided to bomb installations in Serbia in order to induce Milosevic to desist. Nominally, it was a NATO action. It achieved its goal, the Kosovars returned to their homeland, and today we have the independent republic of Kosovo.

Judah, in fact, considered Yugoslavia’s responding to the bombing by driving the Albanian Kosovars out to be what ultimately undid it.  Absent that, the story the outside world saw was all about the bombing of Serbia.  “If this situation had continued for much longer,” he thought, “there is little doubt that uproar would have ensued.  The question would have been asked, ‘How can we bomb a small country – whatever we think of its government – because it refuses to sign an agreement about the future of part of its own territory?’”

In retrospect, one of the more significant aspects of NATO’s Yugoslavia bombing campaign has proved to be that it was the point at which many liberals “got over” Vietnam and came to like war again.  Avnery continues:

At the time, I applauded publicly, to the dismay of many of my leftist friends at home and all over the world. They insisted that the bombing campaign was a crime, particularly since it was conducted by NATO, which for them is an instrument of the devil.  My answer was that in order to prevent genocide, I am ready to make a pact even with the devil.

Or at least to lose his memory, apparently.

Some who do remember the chronology correctly still maintain that an effect of the bombing campaign was somehow actually its cause. As Noam Chomsky commented:

The logic, widely accepted, is intriguing. Uncontroversially, the vast crimes took place after the bombing began: they were not a cause but a consequence. It requires considerable audacity, therefore, to take the crimes to provide retrospective justification for the actions that contributed to inciting them.

We will surely not all agree on the future military interventions the U.S. will undoubtedly enter into, but if we could at least agree on the facts of the interventions of the past, we might have a firmer basis for discussing them.

So went the American response to Pakistan’s complaint that our drone-launched missiles killed mostly “peaceful citizens, including elders of the area” in an attack last week. Now, a decade of explanations that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan were a regrettable (but inevitable) part of our War on Terror have pretty well inured me to government mendacity. But somehow, this one – well you know, it took the cake. “A bake sale” – No, they probably weren’t there for a bake sale. Bake sales are what they hold here in America to run the schools we don’t have enough money for. Making new enemies for this country is pretty expensive you know.

The story this time is that the missiles apparently killed 26 of 32 participants in a “jirga” called to settle a local dispute between two tribes in North Waziristan over the operation of the chromium mine. Their target was the local Taliban officials expected there to mediate in their role as the de facto local government. Pakistan’s Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani called the attack “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life,” reporting that there were, in fact, 13 Taliban present, but 15 of those killed were not Taliban. Some locals claimed a death toll as high as 40. And the U.S. response was anonymous because officially we have never launched a missile into Pakistan. We’re not at war there, so that would be illegal. And the CIA would never do anything illegal.

If the military hasn’t yet created a decoration for arrogance, they should. Otherwise, a lot of lot of spectacular efforts – such as this one – will go unrewarded. Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

There may be no better measure of just how far this country has gone down the road of trying to bomb its way to peace and friendship in the Muslim and Arab worlds than our current decision to bomb another Muslim and Arab country. The proposition that Libya could do better than Muammar Gaddafi will get no argument here, nor will I try to predict the future. But consider the arrogance that it takes for us to decide that this latest attack constitutes a sensible American response to the situation.

The U.S. still maintains an occupying force of 50,000 troops in Iraq as a result of a war launched on grounds now generally conceded to have been fraudulent. A military force of over 100,000 is currently deployed in Afghanistan, even as the Secretary of Defense says that anyone who’d recommend an operation like that should “have his head examined.” As mentioned above, we are also waging undeclared war in Pakistan – and in Yemen, too, in similar fashion.

In the current political upheavals in the Middle East, American allies in the governments of Yemen and Bahrain have killed unarmed civilians – in the case of Bahrain with the aid of another ally – Saudi Arabia – none of which has moved our government to action. But when France and the United Kingdom, the former colonial powers in the oil-rich area, declare the need to aid a military uprising in Libya – obviously not an ally – why, the U.S. is right there.

Unfortunately, one of the most accurate reactions to recent events was probably that of the unnamed Pakistani resident who said of the missile attack on his region:

It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, they might want to get to minting those Presidential Medals of Arrogance.

The Honorable Mark Ciavarella, it seems, was a seriously committed privatizer.  According to prosecutors, the former judge (he and a co-defendant left the bench after charges were filed), engineered the closure of a county-operated juvenile detention center and helped steer an eight figure contract to a private facility called Pennsylvania Child Care, operated by a friend of his.  What could be wrong with a place called Pennsylvania Child Care?  Well, it seems that in order to fill his friend’s facility – and justify the awarding of the state contract – the judge pretty much started acting the role of the boogeyman some parents used to threaten their kids with:  Play with fire and you know what’ll happen to you?  You’ll go to jail for arson. And indeed Ciavarella sent a 10 year old girl to “Child Care” when she accidentally set her room on fire.  Along with the one who gave a cop the finger.  And the one who made fun of the assistant principal on MySpace.

For the most part, the judge doesn’t actually dispute that the money passed into his hands.  Says he considered it a “finder’s fee.”  Says, “I was told it was legal money. I was told it was something that I was entitled to.”  Most likely he got that opinion from another judge, I’d guess.

No, not that Gipper!

So what’s all this got to do with the Great Communicator?  Well, if you’re old enough to remember his presidency, you may also remember that when he took office this story couldn’t have happened because private prisons were something out of history.  To the extent that Americans knew anything about them it was from movies about the Confederacy and the Reconstruction Era South.  Again, Reagan himself had nothing personally to do with the first modern private prison takeover in Hamilton County, Tennessee in 1984, but it’s no accident that it happened on his watch.

First off, Reagan was also a seriously committed privatizer, although in his case the commitment was based on ideology rather than personal profit.  Taking the lead from his friend, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan established the first White House Office of Privatization.  He also set up a Commission on Privatization whose list of 78 recommendations included contracting out the management of prisons, jails and detention centers.

Probably of equal importance to our current story, however, was the boost Reagan gave the War on Drugs.  He may not have been the one to first declare it (Richard Nixon did that) but it was he who established the Office of National Drug Control Policy and his White House rallied the troops in that “War” on a level not seen in any other administration.  Remember Nancy Reagan and “Just say no”?

Predictably, the escalation of the War on Drugs brought an increase in the number of prisoners taken.  There were about half a million total in the correctional system when Reagan took office.  But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that he signed in 1986 brought on mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and soon the number jailed would start to exceed the capacity of the nation’s existing criminal justice system.  And since the Reagan Administration railed against government spending in general, when prison capacity was exceeded, rather than engage in raising the money required to build new facilities, some governmental entities started turning to the private sector to build them – just as the Reagan’s people said they should.  Today private corporations manage about 200,000 prisoners, nearly ten percent of the total prison and jail populations that are now four times what they were when he took office.

As we have seen, Judge Ciavarella’s continuing legal education seems not to have been up to snuff, so he may well not be up on his history either and may not have been grateful to the Gipper for the “finder’s fees” he was pocketing – but he should have been.

Given that candidate Obama was so widely seen as a man of “new thinking,” one to deliver the country from tired old debates and morasses, one hoped President Obama would listen hard to what Mikhail Gorbachev had to say about the damage that a fruitless nine-years-plus war in Afghanistan can do to a country.  But if so, no evidence yet.

Mikhail was anything but smiles on the topic of Afghanistan

It probably didn’t help that the former President of the former Soviet Union was also impolitic enough to add that “We had hoped America would abide by the agreement that we reached that Afghanistan should be a neutral, democratic country, that would have good relations with its neighbors and with both the US and the USSR.  The Americans always said they supported this, but at the same time they were training militants – the same ones who today are terrorizing Afghanistan and more and more of Pakistan.”

Well, you know how policymakers in Washington hate being lectured on history — when you’re in the White House, you don’t read history, you make it.  Besides, by now we’ve been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were anyhow – so why should we listen to them?

U.S. media: Hamid who? Bristol was dancing!

So far as Hamid Karzai’s statement goes, the most remarkable aspect might not be the Afghan President actually telling the U.S. “the time has come to reduce military operations,” but just how little attention his remarks drew.  This is, after all, a man who owes his very political existence to the U.S. invasion.  At the very least it seems fair to say that the American news media would have given a lot more play to remarks like his had they come from the head of the Afghan “puppet” regime back in the days when the Soviet Union was the occupying power.  Of course, you could argue they are being nothing but realistic in giving Karzai short shrift since everybody knows the president of Afghanistan does not call the shots (literally) in his own country.

Karzai’s problem might be that he’s taking American intelligence reports too seriously: When CIA director Leon Panetta was asked earlier this year to assess Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan – the prime justification for sending 97,000 U.S. and 48,800 other foreign troops there – he put it at “maybe 50 to 100, maybe less.”  You can see then how Karzai might get to saying that the U.S. was still in his country because “they like to conduct this thing that they call the war on terror, which we don’t call that anymore in Afghanistan. Because in my opinion and in the opinion of the absolute majority of the Afghan people, the war on terror cannot be conducted in Afghanistan because that isn’t here. It is somewhere else. We are only reaping the consequences of it here.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

And then besides the troops, there’s the additional 26,000 private security employees there, 90 percent of whom work for the U.S., directly or indirectly.  Some of them even provide security for the U.S. military.  And some of them also appear to work directly or indirectly for the Taliban as well.

Afghanistan: Stranger than any Tarantino film.

By now we’re mostly past the initial surprise of learning that someone else besides the American military would be providing its security – it used to be considered pretty much what they did, after all.  So the nation appeared to pretty much take it in stride when it learned that in one case our leaner, meaner, partly privatized military had contracted with two Afghans it knew only as Mr. White and Mr. Pink – monikers taken from characters in the Quentin Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs – to provide security for an American military base.

The real life Mr. White and Mr. Pink had a falling out, though, and Mr. Pink killed Mr. White, at which point he lined up with the Taliban for protection against Mr. White’s outraged relatives.  The U.S. military decided to keep him on, however, notwithstanding his new alliance with the principal force fighting the U.S. and its allies.

But while Mr. Pink unfortunately turned out to have Taliban connections, Mullah Mansour unfortunately did not – or at least the guy who said he was Mullah Mansour didn’t have quite the connections our side thought he did.
Talks involving the U.S., the Karzai government and the Taliban were officially secret, although U.S. General David Petraeus had actually publicly proclaimed their existence as evidence of the pressure the Taliban was feeling due to his forces’ recent increased military success.  After all, the talks were going particularly well in that the three-man Taliban delegation was demanding neither withdrawal of foreign forces nor a share of government power – things the Taliban had always insisted on in the past.  The White House even prevailed upon the New York Times to withhold the identity of the man leading the delegation – Mansour, widely assumed to be the Taliban’s number two man –  so as not to jeopardize them – until it was discovered that it wasn’t actually Mansour in the negotiations.

To be fair, we don’t actually know that the individual who led the talks on the Taliban side doesn’t have connections with the organization.  After the fraud was revealed, all one anonymous diplomat seemed to know for sure was “It’s not him.  And we gave him a lot of money.”   Call him Mr. Blue, maybe.  Names out of Reservoir Dogs; plot out of Clueless.

AND WE’RE THERE , WHY?

At this point, it seems hard to resist the conclusion that we are in Afghanistan simply because we have been there.  If it made sense to be there last year, or nine years ago, then it must still make sense to be there now, since we obviously still haven’t won.

The good news, however, is that there is a straightforward solution – withdraw outside troops, as Karzai and Gorbachev suggest, and deal with what emerges.  Yes, the results may not be to our liking.  But is there anything else we could possibly do that would enhance the Taliban’s popularity more that providing them the leading role in resisting yet another outside invasion of Afghanistan – as we are currently doing?  Besides, the powers in Washington have already acknowledged that this is precisely the outcome they anticipate.  In the words of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.”

So why not just get on with it?  So far as Congress goes, the House of Representatives already has legislation in place to bring the war to a prompt end: H. R. 6045, filed by Barbara Lee (D – CA), would restrict the use of “funds for operations of the Armed Forces in Afghanistan” to “purposes of providing for the safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan of all members of the Armed Forces and Department of Defense contractor personnel.”  The Senate still needs someone to step forward to file a parallel bill, but when it comes to the White House, the route to ending the war is simplest of all – the President can just stop it.

And the chances of that happening?  Well, obviously neither the current White House nor Pentagon leadership wants to admit that not only can’t the U.S. win this war, but at this point it’s hard to realistically imagine what “winning” a war in Afghanistan would even look like.  What they do know is that facing reality would surely mean being denounced as defeatists.  So lives will continue to be lost, amazing amounts of money squandered (it costs about a million dollars to maintain an American soldier for a year in Afghanistan), but face must be saved.

Back when he was running, Barack Obama used to say “We are the change we have been waiting for.”  Unfortunately, when it comes to Afghanistan, he does not count as one of the “we,” so the “we” who remain can expect no help from that quarter. Since it appears that the president is moved neither by the advice of foreign leaders, the logic of the situation, nor the feelings of his own base (Democrats oppose his Afghanistan policy by a 62-33 margin according to a November Quinnipiac poll), the only possibility for changing course lies in altering the domestic political equation, that is to say turning the status quo into a negative and making support for immediate withdrawal a positive.  And in the case of a sitting first term president, the most direct– and perhaps only way to do that seems to be a 2012 primary challenge.

October 15, 2008: John McCain's Minsky Moment?

The most interesting economic concept to emerge from recent obscurity is the “Minsky Moment,” Hyman Minsky having been an economist who described a type of social amnesia that occurs as people will themselves into believing that business cycles are things of the past as they engage in riskier and riskier financial activity.  Admirers of Minsky, who died in 1997, named the point when the dream comes crashing down into the nightmare of the next financial crisis after him.  Minsky saw several stages to the process, as gradual societal memory loss of past depressions and recessions leads to something of a state of euphoria when we may hear arguments, such as heard only a few years ago, that transformative innovations like computerization and the Internet have created a “new economy” of permanent prosperity.

Looking at the course of American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the current day, it is hard to miss a similar dream cycle playing out there.  After Vietnam, a new sense of modesty came over American foreign policy.  Yes, our military could unleash destruction upon southeast Asia that was in some respects unmatched in world history.  And, yes, we might be able to keep it up indefinitely – we would not be “defeated” in the conventional sense.  But the ultimate message of that war was No: No matter what our military might, we could not impose our will on a country that did not wish to have its system dictated by foreign armies from halfway around the world.

Not every one approved of this national dose of humility, of course.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” was roundly denounced in interventionist circles, as the new reticence toward foreign military intervention steered policymakers toward subversion rather than invasion.  Nicaragua can probably thank the Vietnam Syndrome for the fact that Ronald Reagan merely funded its government’s  political and military opposition rather than engaging in full scale invasion.

But slowly the memories faded and were replaced with new ones.  The first George Bush’s Gulf War did not turn into a quagmire. And Bill Clinton’s bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia sort of returned the country to its old habits. The euphoria stage surely arrived with the second George Bush when a senior adviser to the President could inform a reporter that he was merely ”in what we call the reality-based community” who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” while the White House recognized that ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

We have left that stage, clearly. A statement like the above now seems as unimaginable as it did in the first decades after the Vietnam War.  Yet the turnaround is obviously far from completed; the country has not really shed the omnipotence illusion.  For, while the rationale for the Iraq War may now be widely understood as farcical, the Afghanistan War remains on the upswing.

Every war is different, to be sure, and at one point the Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars appeared to have little more in common than the fact that they were on the same continent.  After all, who could be further apart than the communist Viet Cong and the fundamentalist Taliban?  But as time has passed an overwhelming resemblance has come to the fore: Both wars are attempts to “create our own reality” in countries that have many times demonstrated that they will not allow this to happen.

Our foreign policy Minsky Moment, if there is to be one, will certainly not originate in the White House or the Pentagon, though. The White House would be too afraid of the political consequences of facing the facts and the Pentagon would be too embarrassed to do so. We will have to figure out how some other way to wake the country from its dreams.

The policy did note the exception of “outliers” which were identical to the “rogue states” referred to by the Bush administration. At the time of the document’s release, Gates told a press conference, “There is a message for Iran and North Korea here…if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.” North Korea is known to have nuclear weapons and Iran is widely thought to be in active pursuit of a nuclear capability.

"Oops! I'd like to clarify..."

Now Gates has amended that list, noting that “upon careful consideration we have decided that a realistic appraisal of the situation requires that we acknowledge the existence of another nation widely believed not to be in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty – Israel.” President Obama himself immediately asserted that what he called a “simple policy clarification” implied no change in United States policy toward its closest Middle East ally, saying this “in no way alters America’s commitment to the existence and security of Israel.” The addition, he said, “should not lead anyone to believe that hostilities with our great friend are even remotely anticipated.” He described it rather as a “signal” that his Administration considered it “important to convey to all parties in the region that we see the situation as it really is, not as we might wish to see it.”

Although the President steered clear of further detail, this first American acknowledgment that Israel, a non-signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty, has amassed a nuclear weapons arsenal is seen by many Middle East analysts as representing a potentially tectonic shift in world politics. Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been an open secret for decades. Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in prison for telling the British press details of the nuclear weapons program in 1986. At the time, London’s Sunday Times estimated its production to be in excess of 100 weapons.

Israel’s first warhead is thought to have been produced in the late 1960’s. The country is also believed by many to have collaborated with South Africa in that country’s development of nuclear arms, before its force was dismantled in 1989 on the eve of the nation’s transition to majority rule. Current estimates put Israel’s warhead numbers at anywhere from 75 to 400; the high figure would likely make the country the world’s third largest nuclear power – after the United States and Russia. Israel’s official policy is to offer no comment on the matter.

Observers attributed this astounding “policy clarification” to delayed effects of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s surprising decision to name the President as the award’s recipient during his first year in office. One White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “As you know, the President in no way sought the Prize. In fact, a lot of people around him urged him to decline, thinking that it would place too high a burden of expectation around his future policies. But you see, the thing is the award seems to have gotten under his skin – to the point where he appears to have decided that if he’s ever going to play any kind of role in bringing peace to the Middle East, both sides have got to see him as being reality-based.”

Other sources noted that Gates was considered the right choice to be the messenger of such a bold policy alteration since he has altered it in the past – it is less than two years since the Defense Secretary declared that the U.S. would not forswear first use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for chemical or biological attacks upon the US or its allies, a policy that the new Review repudiates. At the time of his earlier statement, Gates was serving in his current position in George W. Bush’s Cabinet. One CIA source thought it would take several days for world opinion “to sort itself out over this shocking outbreak of candor.”

Okay, so Gates and Obama didn’t actually say anything about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the way it might make the highly touted new Nuclear Posture Review seem hypocritical. But since the new policy was unveiled in early April, we could hardly wait until next April Fool’s Day to satirize it, now could we? The point of this little thought experiment in candor is not to suggest that any of the actual nuclear policy changes Obama is currently making or proposing are in any way wrong or useless. It is rather to illustrate just how much further the U.S. would need to go in order to actually be seen as “reality-based” in many parts of the world.
Domestically, the current administration is widely viewed as relatively “dovish” on matters relating to nuclear weaponry – at least in comparison to its predecessor. Likewise, the idea of dissuading Iran from joining the world’s nuclear powers is hardly a controversial one here at home. But the presumption that our government therefore enjoys worldwide credibility in these matters runs up against some harsh perceptions: For much of the world, the global campaign to prevent Iran from getting what Israel already has seems to indicate only that the one nation to have ever used nuclear weapons has no immediate plans to change its policies in any serious way.

When the legal system fails to provide Kleist’s protagonist (based on a real life figure of 250 years earlier) with proper redress after he is wronged by a minor noble, Kohlhaas decides to take matters into his own hands. Eventually he will burn the noble’s house down and raise a private army to repeatedly attack the city of Wittenberg in his attempt to capture the man. His wife will die of injuries sustained in the pursuit of his goal and Martin Luther and the Kaiser in Vienna will become personally involved in the matter. At the very end, he does find that some measure of justice has been done. Unfortunately, that realization comes as he is being led to his beheading.

There was a point when Brinkley, a former New York Times writer now teaching journalism at Stanford, would have raised few eyebrows in writing, “Right now, the most effective thing the United States could do to turn the tide in the so-called war on terror is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorists’ shining symbol.” But that point was eight years, two wars, ten of thousands of casualties, and a trillion dollars ago. Today, such writing conveys the obsession of a real-life Michael Kohlhaas who wants to go on and on and on in pursuit of his concept of justice. Of bin Laden he writes, “We know where he is, more or less [sic],” but “Pakistan refuses to go after him.” His solution?  “I’m not talking about an invasion. Infiltrate the region with special-operations forces.”

How many countries can there be, I wondered, where a journalist writing that sending armed personnel into another country does not constitute an invasion will not be asked to seek professional help? But at least Brinkley does recognize that the Pakistanis might see things a little differently: “Let them scream,” he writes, “Over almost a decade, we have given Pakistan every chance to do the job. Now it’s time to do it ourselves.”

What seems to bother Brinkley most is that “Today, bin Laden must wake up every morning with a smile on his face for all he has inspired.” This he may well do, but probably not quite for the reasons Brinkley thinks.  Bin Laden’s stated goal, let us remember, it to maneuver the United States into a global war against Islam that will spiral out of control. So he’d have every reason to smile if he read an article like Brinkley’s. Ultimately, it’s not columnists like Brinkley who matter, though, but the Kohlhaasian spirit that seems to drive our foreign policy.  After all, while much of the country once dismissed George W. Bush as a hopeless, misguided warmonger and embraced Barack Obama as a peace candidate, this second post-9/11 President appears at least as committed to globalizing this war as his predecessor, if perhaps in somewhat different directions.  From the point of view of tying the U.S. down in endless war, what’s not to like?

Kafka: An inspiration for US foreign policy?

But if the strategy of that war seem like something Kleist might have imagined, the tactics bring to mind a far better remembered German writer – Franz Kafka, the rare author influential enough to have his name turned into an adjective. While there are probably as many different definitions of “Kafkaesque” as there are readers of Kafka – and maybe more – “incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” will probably do as well as any.  But whatever your personal definition of Kafkaesque may be, American military operations in and over Pakistan will probably fit it.

The current centerpiece of that campaign appears to be a program of missile strikes aimed at “terrorist leaders” from unmanned “Predator” drone planes flying above the country. Officially, though, there is no such program and as a spokesperson for the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

The New York Times reports the strikes are “carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia.”  The government of Pakistan regularly denounces them as a violation of its sovereignty. Unnamed U.S. officials claim there is an understanding under which the Pakistani government allows the U.S. to carry out the strikes while the U.S. allows the Pakistanis to publicly denounce the attacks. The government of Pakistan denies this.

Unnamed U.S. intelligence officials frequently name figures they claim have been killed in the strikes. A recent target was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom, the Washington Post says, “a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” called “one of the worst people on the planet.”  As you might expect, this non-existent program is rather unpopular among the people of the country where its targets live: a Gallup Pakistan poll found it with 9 percent support among the Pakistani population.

The uncertain level of civilian casualties is a growing concern. A United Nations rights investigator complains that “the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” Unnamed sources within the U.S. government privately assure reporters that civilian deaths are lower than reported. One unnamed government official told the New York Times that the drone strikes are “the purest form of self-defense.”  The C.I.A. had no comment on a report that the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe Services LLC – was involved in the work of actually placing the bombs on the drones.  An unnamed defense official denied it to The Nation magazine – “on background.”

In response to repeated questions about the unacknowledged drone strike campaign at a press conference in Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would only say that “there is a war going on.” She did not specify to which war she referred. The United States Government acknowledges being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. Appearing at a memorial service for seven CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan, some of whom were thought to be involved in the planning of the Pakistan drone strikes, President Barack Obama exhorted hundreds of their colleagues “to win this war.”  He also did not specify of which war he was speaking.

In regard to the acknowledged war in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.” He did not say at exactly which point this recognition occurred; the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government eight years ago and has been at war with the organization ever since. Gates went on to say that “The question is whether they are prepared to play a legitimate role in the political fabric of Afghanistan going forward, meaning participating in elections, meaning not assassinating local officials and killing families.” He did not say whether a simple denial of involvement in assassinations and other killings – on or off the record – would suffice in place of an actual cessation of such activities. Nor did he speak to the question as to when various Taliban officials might be removed from the United Nations “terrorist blacklist” that currently prohibits the Afghanistan government from negotiating with them.

I have to think Kleist and Kafka would have loved this material.

No, I am not a handwriting analyst, a historian of ancient writing, or a translator of foreign languages. I am a medical student, simply trying to read the paper progress note of another physician or resident in attempt to figure out what happened to my patient during his visit two months ago. This frustration contrasts to a recent gig at a VA hospital whose medical records and charts are completely computerized; a model system where I was able to breezily click through the past medical history of my patients. As an incoming medical professional in an already digitized world, I am constantly disgusted at the inefficiencies and difficulties that arise from using paper charts.

How Common are EHR’s?

Electronic medical record is one of the current buzz words in the health care field. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past spring found that only 1.5% of hospitals have a comprehensive-electronic record system present in all units . Other recent studies have found that a small percentage of physicians’ practices currently utilize electronic health record (EHR) system or CPOE (computerized provider order entry) at all practice locations, leaving a larger majority of our hospitals and health care providers to sift through endless piles of paper every day to learn about their patients.

Costs and Benefits

Those who doubt the inherent benefits of comprehensive EHR implementation put forth the financial objection that estimates over hundreds of thousands of dollars for many physician practices to implement and maintain such a system. However, some studies show that the costs to the health care system created by the problems using paper charts have the potential to outweigh the costs of an EHR in the long-run. More importantly, even if ultimately shown to be cost neutral, effective use of electronic health records have been shown to improve quality and save lives. Many of these quality gains are realized with robust systems that include evidence-based decision support tools to providers.

The Scary Truth

The old joke of physicians having illegible handwriting holds true in my experience: for the majority of physician providers, their writing is difficult to read at best. At worst, it is plain illegible. This creates a multitude of problems in our health care system that is a huge detriment to the efficiency, safety, and the economics and structure of the health care system. The most obvious and feared complications of simple bad handwriting are huge mistakes that can needlessly cost a life.

In its landmark report, to Err is Human, the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 98,000 lives are lost every year from medical errors.  Not surprisingly, one study found that approximately 90% of  inpatient medication errors occur at either the ordering or transcribing stage.  I see nearly every day how easy it can be to make a mistake with a life-or-death magnitude simply by misinterpreting the wrong word or number from a chart leading to a dangerous drug reaction or an incorrect treatment. Even if I finally correctly translate all of the scribbled notes in the paper chart, it will have taken me five times as long to treat my patient, increasing the time it takes to treat the patient and increasing the chance of an adverse outcome. Talk about inefficiency in health care!

Aside from the danger and inefficiency, medical errors due to paper charts can wreak havoc on many other players in the health care system by causing a high number of lawsuits. When a physician is sued due to a medical error, it drives up the cost of the already sky-high malpractice insurance that all physicians have to pay. While it may seem to the general public that all doctors are rich and live to play golf, many have high debts from school, don’t make the big bucks, and work horrendous hours. Add high malpractice insurance, and this causes financial difficulty for physicians in certain specialties that can cause shortages of some primary care doctors such as obstetricians.

Alternatively, physicians might be forced to cherry pick their patients, only accepting Medicare and private insurance patients, causing uninsured and Medicaid patients to use the ER as their only health care venue, thus shifting the burden of cost to taxpayer’s wallets in the form of hidden hospital fees to compensate for many cases of avoidable uncompensated care. Many critics of EHR within medical field fail to realize that in improving the efficiency and safety of medical records translates far down the line to many aspects of the health care system. Indeed, in a time of health care reform, the transition of paper charts to electronic medical records will play a large role in improving the health care system.

Reason for Hope?

Through the ARRA EHR stimulus, part of the larger stimulus bill, Congress recently set aside $19 billion dollars, or the equivalent of over $40,000 per physician in a practice, to assist in implementing electronic health records (EHR) that meet meaningful use definitions (e.g., CPOE). This is a huge step forward in the attempt to computerize medical records across the country.

As a health care professional, I am excited to see the dedication to the improvement in health care of the current administration and frankly shocked at those who refusal to consider any reform to this health care system that is so obviously inefficient, expensive, and backward compared to any other developed industrialized nation. An entire overhaul of our health care system is required, in which EHR are only one part. However, the same critics of implementing EHR because it is “too expensive” are focused on the short term in all areas of health care reform, battling reform not because they have a better idea, but because they have no idea. I challenge any EHR or health care reform naysayer to step into my shoes for a day to read handwritten patient notes in a paper chart and to make a life or death decision based on an illegible scrawl. Our patients deserve better.

Inequalities by race persist at all age levels

Inequity in schools and school achievement limit the opportunities students have to achieve equality in the economy at large as unequal preparation and access determines future positions in the work force. Real differences in resources (i.e., good teachers, computer access, private tutoring, material parts of schools) impact and skew the education system in an obvious and measurable way but are not completely at fault for unequal outcomes.  I often wonder and am even more frequently asked what other factors help explain low achievement, school misconduct, and other social problems in urban schools.

As a society and as learning communities, we’ve grown from the days where we quoted bogus studies about brain-size and differently structured DNA to explain differences in school achievement levels. Work in the sociology of education field rationalizes the achievement gap and school failure by mostly Black and Latino students by pointing to culture, politics, economics, and other social circumstances to explain real differences in educational outcomes. The schools we build and run are not necessarily neutral settings where information and rewards are equally accessible to all students. Social interaction between groups and individuals defines many of the outcomes available to students and the processes that lead to those outcomes. Expectations that schools, teachers, and families place on students are heavily influenced by the achievement gap statistics and attitudes we have related to poverty.

Rationalizations for the achievement gap such as the increasingly popular culture-of-poverty explanations by sociologists affect our schools and teachers as they walk into classrooms every day. [For a discussion on the Culture of Poverty and education and an interview with William Julius Wilson, please see “Thoughts on Education Policy.”] These rationalizations for failure are interestingly challenged through Sociology of Education expert Pedro Noguera’s work at Berkeley High School. The Diversity Project he spearheaded worked to accomplish something we should replicate throughout our failing schools; they worked on “Making the Familiar Strange.” These effects were exceptionally clear to me as I walked into an all-too-familiar parent-teacher night at the school that I work at in New York City.

Parent Teacher Night at Brandeis

I work as a tutor at Brandeis High School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, serving a group of 42 students to succeed academically any way I can. On the surface, it simply involves preparing them for any test that will occur within the next five periods, but I actually spend most of my day being an advocate for them with their teachers.  When some of my students shared with me that they would have liked their parents to come to last week’s parent-teacher conference day – which they couldn’t attend due to work obligations – I stepped in and tried to see as many teachers as I could. No teacher I spoke with at Brandeis wants the students to fail at school or at life, and I’m certain they wish the kids nothing but the best.  However, the ways that a few teachers that I talked with explain failure is exemplary of how the culture of poverty discourse and the expectations that it reinforces are hurting the students it aims to help. The discussion I had with some teachers in some classrooms sometimes turned rapidly to socioeconomic or cultural issues that supposedly preconditioned the students for failure.  When I pressed a foreign-language teacher for examples of shortcomings or specific areas where the student could improve, the teacher insisted that the student had other siblings that had dropped out of Brandeis and that the student should probably be tested for something. Some teachers were sometimes incredibly aware of the existence of problems in the students’ home lives, but were often unsure what problems they were, using the information only as an explanation for their failure in class.

In support of my informal findings in a limited context at Brandeis, sociologist Martin Haberman’s writes in Pedagogy of Poverty: “[R]ecord-keeping is the systematic maintenance of a paper trail to protect the school against any future legal action by its clients. Special classes, referrals, test scores, disciplinary actions, and analysis by specialists must be carefully recorded.” The path of least resistance for the student in school is an unstructured and unchallenging classroom where teachers can create an impossibility for real failure since the expectation of success never exists. The teacher may be compliant because compliance means order and peace of mind within the classroom. And, I should add, because that expectation of success may never exist in the teacher. Haberman argues that unless the definition of good teaching (or even just teaching) is challenged and changed, nothing will improve for struggling urban students. “In the present system, teachers are accountable only for engaging in the limited set of behaviors commonly regarded as acts of teaching in urban schools – that is, the pedagogy of poverty.”

Expanding the argument of how the expectations on minority students ultimately affect their school outcomes, educator Joe Nocera talks about “White Flight” from urban schools. Over the past half century, middle-class parents all across the United States have abandoned the public school system in the big city because of diminished expectations of the schooling offered. Nocera details his own experience and outlines the fears that middle class parents have of the peer group their children will be involved with in high minority urban schools. The school-abandoning phenomenon – which is also practiced by Black middle-class parents – has drained voices and resources from the public school and reinforced the low expectations placed upon it. Prospective public-school middle-class families have bought into the idea of a culture of poverty and frightened of the consequences of negative outcomes for their children have taken them to private school or relocated the whole family to put them in public schools elsewhere.

Making the Familiar Strange – Pedro Noguera and BHS

Pedro Noguera

As mentioned earlier, Pedro Noguera, cognizant of the implicit adherence to this culture of failure by the teachers and school itself at Berkeley High School,  sought out to “make the familiar seem strange and problematic” as part of the Diversity Project. The taskforce was charged with improving the school. In one of their initial meetings Noguera writes that they “understood that the biggest obstacle to be overcome involved the explanations and rationalizations of this phenomenon that already existed in the minds of most people. Data on the attrition of minority students and on their performance in academic classes had been publicized and made available to the entire school and community for many years.” In order to make the school realize what it was doing, Noguera and the Project challenged the teachers to question their assumptions on why the students were succeeding and why they were failing. One of the first activities of the Diversity Project took the teachers through the neighborhoods where most of their students lived. The cultural and community resources embedded in these neighborhoods had been previously ignored. Even teachers that grew up in those very neighborhoods now saw them as breeding grounds for academic failure! The Diversity Project asked the teachers to look at these neighborhoods and their denizens in a different way.

Another interesting activity accomplished by the Diversity Project was to divide the teachers into four rooms that challenged “familiar” concepts within their schools and forced them to understand them as “strange” outcomes. One such strange concept was published in national newspapers because of both how familiar and strange it was.

The analysis of 9th grader GPA by zip code and median household income (shown below) shows the shockingly straightforward relationship between household income and mean GPA. The more the 9th graders family earned at home, the better the grades he or she received at school. Other room presentations showed teachers the frequency of minority students in remedial classes, the racial differences in choosing extracurricular and after-school activities. (White students were disproportionately represented in activities that could enhance one’s academic performance, i.e., debating team or academic clubs.)

Berkeley, California

While the research conducted in the definition of the culture of poverty highlights some important issues needed to reconstruct confidence and reinform minority students, the realities of expectations that teachers and school systems have on the students shaped by belief in this culture of poverty or belief in insurmountable obstacles is also often at play in the classroom. Noguera’s work shows the value in working with the schools to transform their expectations and make them appreciate their current role in the reproduction of inequality and the opportunities accessible through change.

From my own experience, I have learned that when the hopes of teachers are encouraged and transformed into real actions for improving the quality of teaching, the possibility of bringing about substantial change in schools can be realized.

Conclusions

The “Culture of Poverty” and lower expectations may have affected some City teachers for decades. For some teachers, their understanding of achievement gap research informs their idea of where “urban students” come from and leads to generalizations that end up damaging student opportunities and academic outcomes.

Recommended reading for the Education Policy wonks among us

One of the important lessons here is that systemic reaction to research is an important consideration in publishing. Education policy needs to be informed by great research in education, and the achievement gap is certainly an issue that needs that kind of focus and exploration. However, realizing the crucial role that expectations play in the classroom education policy should also work to condition teachers to use this research as a rallying call against racial injustice and not as an excuse for continuing failure. Pedro Noguera’s goal of “making the familiar strange” should serve as a fine example for all teachers and administrators on how to properly react to familiar, pervasive failure.

In this light, I decided that I would take a deeper look into a recent poll that was conducted by Gallup that found changing attitudes toward abortion in the US. Gallup’s results showed that for the first time since they began polling the issue 14 years ago,  more Americans identify themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice”.  According to this new poll, virtually all movement in public attitudes toward the pro-life position has occurred within the past year.  After reading about these results, I had several questions, including:

1. The dramatic shift in the past year looked a bit odd to me.  Could Gallup expand upon the bottom-line reasoning from their reporting?
2. What was the party breakdown of the poll? It doesn’t mention weighting, but perhaps they did weight. (If I remembered correctly from the Presidential tracking polls in 2008, one of the big differences between Gallup and Rasmussen was that Rasmussen weighted and Gallup did not, leading to more swings in the Gallup tracker.) My concerns here were that a smaller, more extremist Republican tent, could indicate a misleading swing if they were still weighted at their 2008 levels.
3. Relating to #2, I recently read that Gallup had nearly a 50/50 split in Party ID in this poll. Was this correct?
   

Thanks to my former graduate school classmate, Cynthia English, a Gallup writer and researcher, I had the honor of having my questions answered by Lydia Saad, a Senior Editor at Gallup who worked on this poll. Ms. Saad gave very thoughtful answers to my questions and went above and beyond what I expected. Here are some of Ms. Saad’s responses:

• Kevin’s memory is correct; we do not weight our surveys by Party ID. Although some pollsters do it, weighting by Party ID is not the standard in national RDD surveys. Party ID is essentially a political attitude like every other that we measure; and while it is generally stable from one survey to the next, it does change over time and is susceptible to survey-to-survey variation due to the content of a given survey. Weighting by party ID on election polls, for example, can be problematic since it’s asked after the candidate preference ballot, and therefore largely mirrors the ballot. To weight by party ID on these surveys is to essentially weight by the ballot.

• We did obtain a near 50-50 split in leaned party ID on the 2009 May Values survey. Because this was unusual, we did two things to check the validity of the data. We re-ran the abortion questions on the G1K track two days later, and obtained nearly the same results. That survey had a 10-point advantage for the Democrats on leaned party ID. We also did a post hoc reweighting of the data by party ID, using targets giving Democrats/Dem leaners a 14-point advantage (typical of what we’ve been getting on recent stand-alone polls) and re-ran the survey results . (This was for internal analysis only; we are not publishing the reweighted figures.) The figures changed by only 1-2 points in most cases – indicating that the party distribution of the sample did not account for all or even much of the change seen in the abortion trends. However, as noted in point A, we don’t consider the party ID distribution we obtained in the survey “wrong” just because it was different from what we obtain on other surveys. Thus, we stand behind the published figures based on our standard Census-based demographic targets.

• As highlighted in the story, and expanded on in the “bottom line” analysis, the major change in abortion attitudes over the past year was seen among Republicans and independents who lean Republican. Thus, even if we were to hold party ID constant across the two surveys, attitudes would have become less friendly to abortion rights because Republicans moved to the right, while Democrats stayed the same. The question is, why did Republicans become more conservative in their views on abortion? The “pro-life” side has been eager to attribute it to the “success of their efforts” on the issue. I’m dubious about that. Without a high profile “pro-life” campaign over the past year to attribute this to (which I can’t),  I would expect to see that sort of attitudinal change happen more gradually. This was abrupt. The major change that’s happened is that Obama was elected, and since he is “pro-choice” and those views have been forefront in the news over the Notre Dame flap, I think it’s reasonable to hypothesize that this has compelled some.

• The external validation component is very important. We are not alone in showing a shift toward the “pro-life” position (or anti-abortion position, in the case of legality questions). Aside from Gallup, four other organizations have come out with abortion data in recent weeks, and all of them show a more “pro-life” stance than they did in their last measurement in 2008 (all pre-election).

• “PRO-LIFE” V “PRO-CHOICE”
  Gallup Values survey shows a 7 point increase in “pro-life” and an 8 point decline in “pro-choice” (May 08 vs. May 09) SWING=15 POINTS.    Gallup G1K survey shows a 6 point increase in “pro-life” and a 7 point decline in “pro-choice” (May 08 vs. May 09) SWING=13 POINTS.    Fox News shows an 8 point increase in “pro-life” and 6 point decline in “pro-choice” (September 08 vs. May 09) SWING = 14 POINTS.    CNN shows a 1 point increase in “pro-life” and a 4 point decline in “pro-choice” (Aug 08 vs. April 09) SWING=5 POINTS.

• LEGAL/ILLEGAL
  Gallup Values survey shows a 3 point increase in “legal in only a few/illegal in all” and a 4 point decrease in “legal in all/most” SWING=7 POINTS.    Gallup G1K survey shows a 5 point increase in “legal in only a few/illegal in all” and a 6 point decrease in “legal in all/most” SWING=11 POINTS.    Quinnipiac shows a 3 point increase in “always/usually illegal” and a 5 point decline in “always/usually legal.” (July 08 vs. April 09) SWING=8 POINTS.    Pew shows a 3 point increase in “always/usually illegal” and an 8 point decline in “always/usually legal” (Aug 09 vs. Apr 09) SWING=11 POINTS.

Given these responses, I think it is fair to say that Gallup and others are on to something. There does seem to be a change, albeit possibly temporary, in attitudes toward abortion. Given this change, several questions come to mind:

1. Is reporting about abortion with only two binary options the most appropriate way of showing public opinion? What are some other options to polling about abortion?
2. Will this change be permanent or just a temporary blip in public opinion due to reasons that Gallup points out?

As far as reporting such polling results as binary options (”pro-choice” v. “pro-life” or always/sometimes legal vs. always/sometimes illegal), Gallup also thankfully breaks down its legal/illegal question into four categories. Granted, opinion on abortion is probably more nuanced than four categories, but it is encouraging that Gallup offers these details:

• Legal under any circumstance (change from 2008 to 2009):  -6 points
• Legal under most circumstances: +2 points
• Illegal under most circumstances: – 3 points
• Illegal under all circumstances: +6 points

While it is possible and in fact likely that many Republicans who once had a nuanced position on abortion now identify themselves in the extreme given the polarization of the GOP tent and the fear of an “abortion-loving president” from the talk radio set, the movement away from the “legal under any circumstances” category is still a bit  perplexing by the “Republican Party being more extreme” movement theory.  Are there really many Republicans who just one year ago thought abortion should be legal under any circumstance who now are 1.) Still Republicans AND 2.) No longer hold this position?  It’s possible, but definitely not as likely or as easily explainable as the movement toward the “illegal under any circumstances” camp.  Perhaps this cross-tabulation is just random noise, which wouldn’t be surprising since the margin of error is going to be much higher among these subgroups.

What are some other approaches for asking about abortion?

While I commend Gallup for asking about this question in more than a strictly binary fashion, it’s important to point out that there are other possible ways of asking about abortion that could possibly lead to very different baseline conclusions.  Paul Rosenberg does a nice job of summarizing the findings of the General Population Survey (GPS), which gives survey respondents three different abortion scenarios and asks them to indicate whether they think abortion should be illegal in:

1. None of these cases
2. One of these cases
3. Two of these cases
4. All of these cases

Since many people may have a hard time defining exactly what “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are (Gallup admits that it doesn’t necessarily endorse these terms, and hence uses them in quotes), this approach is nice because it conceptualizes the issue in three nuanced situations, ranging in acceptability.  By using this approach, the GPS finds that only 9% of respondents believe that abortion should be illegal in all three given cases.  This is not to say that this bottom-line result is more accurate than other polls, as it is  asking about slightly different things. (It’s also important to note that these numbers are not meant to in any way dispute Gallup’s trend, but rather to show that a different interpretation of baseline values could be made by using a slightly different methodology.)

What does this mean?

The book Myth of a Polarized America further explores some these issues and argues that most of the “pro-choice” versus “pro-life” debate is in fact media driven and that most Americans actually lie somewhere in the middle, holding a nuanced opinion about abortion and other social issues.  In this light, is it possible that media reports that only repeat binary results of such wedge-issue polls encourage the narrative of a divided, polarized America?

Although recent right-wing extremism may be afoot, it is important to remember that most of those that are pro-life are anything but extremists.  Despite what they may tell pollsters, one can legitimately argue that most Americans hold nuanced views that deserve nuanced reporting that respects the complexities that are inherent in such social issues. Given the apparent sudden change in attitudes, it will be interesting to look at this issue again in five or six months or in a year to see whether this is a short-term blip in response to the first brand-new Democratic President in 16 years or a sudden, sustainable change in public opinion.  The best period to which to compare this recent movement would be 1993, when President Clinton first took office. Unfortunately, 1993 was two years before Gallup began polling this issue.

Bottom Line

I applaud Gallup and others for looking in-depth at these issues and hope that the mainstream media can begin to report such public attitudes and beliefs with the nuance and respectful tone that they deserve.  Like most things in life, abortion does not involve mutually exclusive sets of ideas and values for most individuals.