What is the biggest foreign policy challenge for the next president?
The next president is really going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time, because no long-term peace in the Middle East is possible until we get some kind of modus vivendi in the Arab-Israeli situation. And then the singular challenge is being handed two wars, two live battlefields -- and one of them in the heart of the Middle East. It can't be an afterthought as it was in the Bush administration.
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In light of all the questioning of Obama's "experience," you've said he has dirt under his fingernails, and that he would bring a new America to the world. How would he do that?
The idea that he doesn't have experience is nuts to me. He's a constitutional law professor. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document. That's a huge component of being a president when you're combating terrorism and you're trying to restore American values.
The fact that he used to work in the inner city, that's the dirt under his fingernails. If people are an abstraction to you, it's going to show. If you're living with people, if you're working in the inner city, you see the human stakes of it all. He's also worked abroad, so he's comfortable crossing boundaries.
You've said that the Bush administration has diminished the U.S. government's credibility among its own citizens. Can the next president fix that?
I don't think the next president can just show up and have it restored. Whoever wins is probably going to win by a narrow margin. One of the reasons Obama is so appealing to me is that he doesn't take the American people for granted; you don't stop having this conversation when you enter the White House. None of the major foreign policy challenges on the horizon can be tackled if we don't have a thick domestic base. We can't do foreign aid, we can't get out of Iraq, succeed in Afghanistan, close Guantánamo and end torture policy without actually talking to people about the costs of that.
Entire article is at
salon.com (you have to watch a commercial before getting access to read)