“A Different American President”: Willing To Leave The History In The Past And Actually Try To Get Something Done
As the Obama family continues their historic visit to Cuba, Jeffrey Goldberg relates a story from national security advisor Ben Rhodes that might have provided the moment that made the opening between our two countries possible.
“The president was going to the funeral of Nelson Mandela—his personal hero—and I remember on the plane to South Africa I raised with him—we had a list of the leaders who were going to be up on the dais where he’d be speaking—and one was Raul Castro, and I said, ‘Look, inevitably it is going to come up as to whether or not you shake his hand.’”
Obama’s response was not necessarily the response of a typical American president. According to Rhodes, Obama said, “‘Look, the Cubans, given their history with Mandela, with the ANC, they have a place at this event, and I’m not going to, essentially, cause an uncomfortable situation for the Mandela family, for the South African people, by snubbing the president of Cuba who has a right to be on that dais.’” The Cubans were early and ardent supporters of Mandela’s African National Congress party, and were also deeply engaged militarily across southern Africa…
Castro, Rhodes said, was a bit surprised, and perhaps somewhat moved. “What was interesting was, in our subsequent meetings with the Cubans, the atmosphere changed a bit, and the first thing they said to me in the next meeting was how much President Castro appreciated that President Obama had done that, and it kind of established a tone where they understood they were dealing with a different American president—one who is willing to leave the history in the past and actually try to get something done.”
This points to a moment when Cuba was actually on the right side of history while the United States – under President Reagan – was on the wrong side.
Reagan … embraced the South African Apartheid regime. He instituted a policy euphemized as “constructive engagement.” Reagan said that the United States lacked the power to change the internal workings of the Afrikaner government. Not only was the claim false, it contradicted his position on the far more powerful Soviet Union, which was designed precisely to change the evil empire’s internal behavior. Reagan put Mandela on the U.S. terrorist list, a placement that wasn’t removed until 2008, incredibly. This was at a time when the South African civil war was at its peak of violence, with the conflict becoming a global cause.
A young student attending Occidental College at the time was very aware of these events.
The young black university student who walked up to the microphone at an anti-apartheid rally in 1980 was, by his own admission, cynical about the virtues of political activism.
Barack Obama had spent his early years of college submerged in books by African American writers by the likes of James Baldwin, W E B Du Bois and Malcolm X, wrestling with his own mixed racial identity.
But it was the campaign for equality thousands of miles away in South Africa that first spurred Obama, then aged 19, into action: taking part in a divestment rally in his sophomore year at Occidental College in Los Angeles, one of hundreds of similar campaigns sweeping campuses across America.
And so it was thirty years later, on that day in December 2013, that these two leaders – who had very little in common other than their admiration for Nelson Mandela – shook hands and changed the trajectory of the relationship between our two countries. I suspect that Madiba would approve.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 21, 2016
“A Fence That Cannot Be Straddled”: Gingrich’s Praise Of Mandela Rips Open Issue Of Race
Newt Gingrich has been right about very few things during a long political career of hypocrisy, duplicity, narcissism and devotion to the no-holds-barred tactics of bomb-throwing and hyper-partisanship. But ever alert to political trends, he was right about this much: He openly opposed South Africa’s apartheid government back in the 1980s, and he tried to persuade Ronald Reagan to support the stiff sanctions that finally helped to topple the hateful regime.
Gingrich understood that the Republican Party would not be well served if it continued to be identified as a defender of South Africa’s pariah government. When Reagan vetoed legislation that imposed harsh economic penalties against the Pretoria regime, Gingrich helped to lead an effort to override the veto and impose sanctions.
Still, Gingrich has been as guilty as any Republican of using the 21st-century version of the Southern strategy to appeal to the least progressive members of the GOP base. So he shouldn’t be surprised that his recent praise of Nelson Mandela was met with harsh responses by so many of his fans on the right.
The Republican Party has a huge race problem — one that once again broke into the open in the aftermath of the extraordinary South African’s death. American conservatives still find it difficult to celebrate the life of a man who stood against white supremacy. While several Republican politicians were laudatory when reflecting on Mandela’s life, other conservatives were ambivalent.
Bill O’Reilly claimed that Mandela was a “great man” but also insisted he was a “communist.” (South Africa’s economic record under his leadership gives the lie to that.) Similarly, Dick Cheney called Mandela a “great man,” but stubbornly defended his opposition to the sanctions that eventually led to Mandela’s release.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gingrich sparked a firestorm when he released a statement citing Mandela as “one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime.” His Facebook fans unleashed a torrent of hateful comments in response, from chastising Gingrich for supposedly airbrushing Mandela’s past — “Newt, I thought you of all people, a historian, would be true to who this guy really was” — to those more open in their racial antagonism: “He hated America, Newt. Quit pandering to the blacks.”
Gingrich, to his credit, responded with a frank post to conservatives, asking them to consider what they would have done had they been in Mandela’s place. But it hardly quelled the uproar.
For far too long, Republicans have been comfortable playing to the worst instincts of their base, especially those steeped in racial antagonism and uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. It will take years of hard work in the GOP vineyards to rip away all the kudzu of animus and suspicion toward black and brown citizens.
Since Barry Goldwater ran a 1964 presidential campaign on a platform of states’ rights, the Republican Party has honed a strategy of appealing to disaffected whites — stoking their resentments, fueling their fears, marshaling their paranoia. Every GOP presidential candidate since Goldwater has used that strategy because it reliably delivers certain voters to the polls.
In more recent times, GOP leaders have struggled to try to find a way to broaden the party’s appeal to a more diverse constituency while also continuing to win the hearts and minds of disaffected whites. But it’s a fence that cannot be straddled. Too many Republican voters refuse to acknowledge the toll of their country’s racist past. And too many fear a future wherein whites will no longer constitute a majority.
Gingrich knows that all too well because he pandered to those fears in his 2012 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. He labeled President Obama the “food stamp president,” an appellation designed to conjure up images of indolent black voters dependent on government aid.
The appalling comments he drew after he praised Mandela were simply retributive justice. Like other GOP leaders, he has appealed to the worst instincts of many Republican voters when he needed to — a strategy that will continue to haunt the party as it tries to plot a course to the future.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 14, 2013
“Funerals Are Not About The Mourners”: Selfies and Handshakes Shouldn’t Overshadow Remembering Nelson Mandela
Being president or prime minister often involves partaking in such social niceties as handshakes and posing for photographs. And it’s a measure of how obsessed many have become with the style points over the substantive matters of being president that President Obama is being slammed for both.
At Nelson Mandela’s funeral – where Obama gave a very moving and sometimes scolding speech in front of world leaders there to mourn the civil rights leader – the president happened to run by Cuban leader Raul Castro. So he shook his hand. He didn’t embrace him, or hand over the keys to Blair House, or even say, “you’re doing a heckuva job, Castie.” He just shook his hand, which is what you do at such an event, since funerals are not about the mourners but about the deceased person being honored. For that, Obama is being accused of appeasing the Castros or somehow endorsing human rights abuses in Cuba (which indeed is a human rights violator, as are some U.S. allies and major trading partners – the latter status providing some affected blindness to such abuses).
Now, it’s true that handshakes are far more loaded when there’s a presidential hand involved. But so, too, is the pointed absence of any kind of tame expression of greeting. To deliberately rebuff Castro would have been a statement of its own, and not a productive one. Attempting to freeze out Cuba with an embargo and sanctions has done absolutely nothing to improve conditions in that country, which is not subject to a world embargo and (unlike other, bigger nations) is not as dependent on U.S. commerce. Sanctions can work when they are practiced by the world at large and truly damage the regime – they worked in South Africa, and brought Iran to the table for negotiations more recently. With Cuba, it is the U.S. that has isolated itself in imposing restrictions on trade and travel. Engaging with Cuba wouldn’t be an endorsement of human rights abuses there. It would be a way of helping bring about change in the island nation. Repr. James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, sums it up perfectly: The worst thing to happen to the Cuban regime would be Spring Break. Americans can have a much bigger influence in Cuba by showing up than by staying (by law) away. It was only a handshake. But if it’s the first step towards a dialogue, is that something to denounce?
Obama was also criticized for a supposed selfie he took at the funeral with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. There’s a photo of the three, with Thorning-Schmidt holding the phone with both hands, and Obama helping out with one. First lady Michelle Obama is seen looking sternly ahead. The scene – which none of the critics personally witnessed – is being used to depict the president as some sort of misbehaving, self-centered child, and the first lady as peeved over his bad judgment.
Well, maybe she is. Or maybe, she just happened to be looking ahead, thinking about the funeral, or even just really tired after a very long flight. The point is, we don’t know, and it’s absurd to read a major family drama into a photograph.
Secondly, we don’t know Obama was behind the photo-taking. In fact, there’s more evidence that he was not. We’ve already been told that for security reasons, he can’t have an IPhone, only a Blackberry (and the device in question does not look like a Blackberry). And it’s the Danish prime minister’s two hands that are on the phone, suggesting that she was the one who initiated the picture. If that indeed was the case, what was Obama supposed to do – refuse to join in the photo? Tell the teacher? We also don’t know what was happening at the time. Yes, if someone was in the middle of delivering a eulogy, taking a photo of oneself would have been in very bad form. But if it was between speeches, and if people were talking amongst themselves on the floor (which is what it sounded like, even during Obama’s speech), it’s not quite so terrible.
Mandela is dead, and the U.S. and the world have an opportunity to forge the sort of reconciliation the South African leader advocated and practiced. We ought to focus on that, instead of a couple of gestures at the funeral.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 11, 2013
“Reaganites Called Him A Terrorist And A Phony”: All The Terrible Things Republicans Used To Say About Nelson Mandela
Before Congressional Republicans in the U.S. lionized Nelson Mandela, they despised him. And they opposed not just the great freedom fighter himself but the entire anti-apartheid movement. Even worse, they took actions that damaged the cause of equality in South Africa. Not for nothing did Bishop Desmond Tutu call Ronald Reagan’s policy towards the country “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Conservative Americans’ pro-apartheid actions are not just shameful history—they are similar, in some ways, to their actions to rid the world of political Islam.
The Kennedy administration had opposed the Afrikaner government, instituting an arms embargo on the country. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, conversely, muted criticism of the regime and opened channels of communications, in order to defeat the Soviets in the Third World. As part of his human rights-focused foreign policy, Jimmy Carter reversed course, imposed restrictions and sanctions on the apartheid government, which Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, requested.
Reagan not only removed the restrictions; he embraced the South African Apartheid regime. He instituted a policy euphemized as “constructive engagement.” Reagan said that the United States lacked the power to change the internal workings of the Afrikaner government. Not only was the claim false, it contradicted his position on the far more powerful Soviet Union, which was designed precisely to change the evil empire’s internal behavior. Reagan put Mandela on the U.S. terrorist list, a placement that wasn’t removed until 2008, incredibly. This was at a time when the South African civil war was at its peak of violence, with the conflict becoming a global cause.
In 1985, after the South African government committed some of its worst atrocities against blacks, Congress voted to impose sanctions against the country. This was a time when America accounted for about one-fifth of direct foreign investment in South Africa. Reagan vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act, calling it “immoral” and “repugnant.”
When Reagan met with Tutu, it was among the tensest meetings in his entire presidency. Reagan had the gall to tell the bishop that there had been “sizable progress in South Africa because of U.S. policy.” Tutu responded that the victims of Apartheid didn’t quite see that progress. Reagan called the ANC “notorious terrorists,” and, as late as 1988, called apartheid “a tribal policy more than … a racial policy.”
It wasn’t just Reagan. Moral Majority leader Jerry Fallwell called Tutu a “phony” who didn’t speak for South Africans blacks. He even urged Americans to support the Pretoria government. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms filibustered the sanctions bill. Strom Thurmond and Phil Gramm likewise opposed it. And future vice-president Dick Cheney called Mandela a terrorist, saying in 2000 that he didn’t regret his position. Pat Buchanan called Mandela a “train-bomber.” The Heritage Foundation said America should stop calling for Mandela’s release from prison. Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, future Tea Party leaders, and current Republican Senators—all were on the books supporting the Apartheid government. When 35 House Republicans broke with the Reagan administration, the National Review called them “uppity,” and Human Events called them a “lynch mob.”
Most of the opposition was justified on foreign-policy grounds. The Reaganites feared that the Soviet Union would gain from the Afrikaner regime if they alienated it. As Conservative Caucus Foundation Chair Howard Phillips put it, “It’s not just a black-white issue. It’s red versus red, white, and blue.” The man who, outside of Reagan, did more than any other to shape the administration’s pro-apartheid policy was Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, who fashioned the Constructive Engagement policy. Wrote Crocker: “The real choice we will face in southern Africa in the 1980s concerns our readiness to compete with our global adversary in the politics of a changing region who future depends on those who participate in shaping it.” The State Department now says frankly that “Defenders of the Apartheid regime” in the West “had promoted it as a bulwark against communism.”
There were two flaws in this line of thinking. First was the notion that South Africa was an important theatre in the Cold War. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even of secondary importance, as Indochina was. Western Europe and Japan were what always mattered. Then there was the view that any means were justified in defeating the Soviet Union. Apartheid was as hideous a societal construct as existed, but many conservatives praised it just because it was anticommunist.
Both misjudgments are being replicated today. Instead of lasering in on anti-American terrorists, hawks maintain that Islamists anywhere are a threat to America everywhere. The result, if put into practice, would be a foreign policy that enmeshed the United States in unnecessary, damaging wars, sullied the country’s moral character, and caused great harm.
Similarly, with the entire globe being up for grabs in the conflict against radical Islam, all actions are deemed justified. Preventive wars against Iraq and perhaps Iran, torture, endless domestic and international surveillance—all are simply part of the toolkit needed to fight a limitless threat.
Some conservatives now concede they were wrong about Mandela. Perhaps after the threat to America from terrorists recedes, they will admit they were similarly mistaken—and damaging—in their inflation of threats from political Islam across the globe.
By: Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, December 6, 2013
“Oh Ye Of Little Intelligence”: Rick Santorum Wins The Prize For The Worst Nelson Mandela Tribute
ObamaCare is a great injustice, much like the institutionalized racism and segregation of post-colonial South Africa, according to former Pennsylvania senator and failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum (R).
In an appearance on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly Thursday, Santorum likened Mandela’s anti-apartheid crusade to Republicans’ continued efforts to dismantle the president’s health care law.
“He was fighting against some great injustice,” Santorum said, “and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives. And ObamaCare is front and center in that.”
Leaving aside the fact that shanghaiing a world leader’s death to peddle your political beliefs is gross opportunism at its worst, Santorum’s comparison is flawed for another simple reason: Mandela was a prominent proponent of expanding access to health care, especially for the poor and disadvantaged.
From a South African department of health report on the nation’s health care system:
On the 24th of May 1994, President Nelson Mandela announced in his State of the Nation address that all health care for pregnant women and children under the age of 6 years would be provided free to users of public health facilities. The free care policy at primary care level was extended to all users from 1 April 2006. [DOH]
Free public health care? Sounds like socialism to me.
There’s more.
South Africa’s constitution enshrines a “right” to health care in the same subsection that it guarantees the rights to “sufficient food and water.” The Kaiser Family Foundation named an award after Mandela honoring “the efforts of individuals who make extraordinary contributions to improving the health and health care of the most disadvantaged sectors of the population in South Africa and internationally.” And Mandela’s work, both in office and after, laid the groundwork for South Africa’s new universal health care system.
We’re sure Rick Santorum will be issuing a retraction any moment now.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, December 6, 2013
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