There came a point early in Bill Clinton’s presidency when he realized that there was no chance of governing from the center. In other words, there was no chance of reaching a consensus between a majority of Republicans and Democrats in order to shape American society.

There was no clean way to do good.

Long before the 1994 midterm elections robbed him of his Congressional majorities, Clinton had been robbed of his initiatives regarding gays in the military and health care reform. He would spend his entire administration being rebuffed regarding climate change mitigation. In short, almost everything Clinton considered important never came to pass.

And yet, he will certainly go down in history as a better, more effective president than were either of the George Bush’s, and unless he learns the hard lessons of the Clinton era, more effective than Barack Obama.

Tavis Smiley famously said to Skip Gates, “I think America is ready for a black man to be president, I’m just not sure this is the black man.”

What did Mr. Smiley mean? I believe he meant that Obama was too much of an idealist. One thing we learned from the excellent documentary “Stand” was that Rev. Martin Luther King was a realist. He knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and he knew that not only would many resist his message, they would be galvanized into heated rejection of that message. King accepted those terms and forged on.

I think what Tavis meant was, could Obama learn those lessons? I have accused Obama of thinking of himself as the “National Professor”, whose job it is to teach us how to think more rationally and work together toward the best solutions.

Nice try.

How much more does Obama need in order to understand that his blackness did not end political bickering in Washington? The Republican party is not in awe of his blackness. Social conservatives are not in awe of his blackness. Many fellow Democrats and social progressives are surely not in awe of his blackness. In his effort to remain steadfastly himself, Obama is succeeding at pleasing nobody.

His mantra is “We’ll keep telling the truth until it stops working.” Wouldn’t it have to start working first?

I said before that you can tell a lot about a president’s style and his likely prospects for success by what happens in his first 100 days. Obama may be - and needs to be - an exception to that, much as Clinton was before him. Americans have a way of sending to the presidency men who don’t really have much experience at the matters he will be facing. It’s a sign of our deep distrust of those who may have too much inside knowledge. The disadvantage is that these men have a lot of learning to do. Each of the last three presidents had no national experience. Each had to mount an enormous learning curve. Until 9/11 galvanized his presidency, Bush 43 was also flailing aimlessly through his first year.

Obama may be too bright for his own good. He knows what’s right; can he accept what’s possible? Does he know when to fight to the finish and count the bodies later? Does he understand that watered-down health reform that only kicks the can down the street will be seen as a resounding failure? When has a better chance to make real reform come along? When is it likely to again?

As the old saying goes: “If not us, who? If not now. when?”

One must wonder if Obama understands that the promise of his presidency was vested in him by his populism. He asked us to hope and to dream and to trust and to persevere. Now, seven months into his first and perhaps only term, he has yet to spend even a small dose of his political capital on the issues he’s asked others to care so deeply about, when in fact the reason he is in the oval office at all is because he stirred those passions at the ballot box.

In other words, we sent him there to do the things he promised to do. It’s just that simple.

All the time Obama wastes seeking consensus is being utilized by his opponents to build a better steamroller. Does he realize that? Does he understand that he must get his hands dirty? Does he understand that his great triumph in becoming the first black president in the nation’s history did not change how the game is played?

I can tell you this: his opponents have not been wrong so far in concluding that there’s no fight in this dog.

Do you suppose that’s what Tavis was getting at?

By now you know about Diane Schuler. If you don’t, just google and start reading. She’s the woman who wiped out herself and seven others on the Taconic Parkway in New York on July 26.

It was determined through toxicology tests that she had drunk the equivalent of ten shots of vodka, so recently that some of it had yet to metabolize. She’d been drinking while driving her two children and her brother’s three daughters home from summer camp.

Something very disturbing turned up yesterday, and it makes one thing clear: from the first moment of this tragedy, the family has been orchestrating a cover-up.

The only question is: Why? What do they know that they don’t want us to know?

Here’s the proof: From the very start, Schuler’s brother and the father of the three lost daughters, Warren Hance, told police and the media that his sister had called him from the road, complaining that she was disoriented and could not say where she was, and that he had told her to wait for him to come and get everybody.

We of course know that she failed to heed that advice, that in fact her cellphone was found discarded near the area where the call had been made.

And, as of yesterday, we know that the initial contact was a phone call from Hance’s daughter:

Emma Hance called her father at 12:58 p.m. and said, “Daddy, there is something wrong with Aunt Diane and she is having trouble seeing and she is talking funny, she is slurring,” Mr. Ruskin said. That call was dropped after three minutes and Mr. Hance called back at 1:01 p.m., in a conversation that lasted nine minutes.

Kind of a hard detail to overlook, wouldn’t you say?

So, the chronology now looks like this:

9:30 AM - Schuler and the children leave the campground in Schuler’s Ford Windstar minivan.

10:00 AM - Schuler stops at McDonalds.

10:30 AM - Schuler leaves McDonalds.

11:37 AM - Schuler calls her brother to say that the trip has been delayed by traffic, but that she should have the daughters home in time for a rehearsal later that day.

12:08 PM - Schuler received a call. It is not yet known from whom.

12:58 PM - Emma Hance calls her father to discuss Aunt Diane’s condition. The call lasts three minutes.

1:02 PM - Hance calls Schuler. The call lasts nine minutes.

1:15 PM - Schuler’s phone, now apparently discarded, begins to log missed calls.

1:35 PM - Schuler, having turned onto an exit ramp of the Taconic Parkway two miles back, slams head-on into a Chevrolet Trailblazer in the passing lane, killing all three occupants of the truck as well as herself, her daughter and her three nieces. Her five year old son survives with critical injuries.

And by sheer logic, Schuler had been sipping from the vodka bottle the entire time.

She had also recently smoked marijuana. The toxicology report indicates that the level of the active ingredient in marijuana was sufficient to suggest recent use.

Anybody want to guess what a combination of vodka and pot will do to your senses? Especially a high level of vodka.

There has been rampant speculation that Schuler must be an alcoholic, and that her family must have known. I don’t see enough evidence, yet, to support that logic. If Schuler was indeed an alcoholic, she was clearly a functioning alcoholic. Functioning alcoholics are experts in not only hiding, but regulating their intake. Schuler went on a binge. If she was indeed used to drinking such a quantity of alcohol, then doing so on this day would not have been especially disorienting. If, however, this was an unusual amount for her to ingest, then it wasn’t the act of an alcoholic so much as it was the act of a person trying to get quick results.

And why would a seemingly normal suburban mother be looking to get drunk quick?

The early reports of her condition mentioned that Schuler had an untreated abcess in her mouth.

Well, that might do it. I think if I had an abscess in my mouth, I might be looking to kill the pain, especially with a car full of kids.

Some disturbing things, though: that’s a lot of alcohol, and Schuler had to be conscious of what she was doing while she was doing it. That suggests a reckless streak that, one would think, would be known to her closest associates.

And, of course, the fact that her brother did not admit, at first, that his daughter called him out of concern for Schuler’s condition. Why leave that detail out?

The implication is that Hance knew very well that his sister was drinking and probably drunk, and he was desperate for her to just pull over and let him come get them. One can only surmise that Schuler did not intend to let her brother rescue her from herself. One can only wonder if this scene had been acted out before.

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Are Netbooks the next big thing?

Maybe.

Woot was selling them pretty cheap recently so I ordered one. The thing’s about the size of a hardcover notebook, you know, the paper kind. The screen is incredibly small; mine’s about 8 inches. The system comes with Linux installed with a GUI interface and a set of applications, including Firefox. It’s not very peppy, but the theory goes that all we intend to use if for is internet related activity, so who needs much power?

In other words, is this the future? Small devices that get us online quickly and cheaply?

I say it is. There are so many advantages to being online instead of pinned to a specific computer, such as:

- any work I do is right where I left it
- a disk crash is not the end of my world
- I can use any internet-capable device to do my thing; if my device breaks, just replace it

Here’s the thing: souped-up PCs cost a bundle, as do full-power laptops. If it breaks or gets stolen, you’re out a chunk of dough. If the hard drive crashes, your world sucks. And you have to be where it is, or it has to be with you. Laptops are not small.

On the other hand, there is middle age.

Forget about reading the screen without magnification in the form of reading glasses. My fingers always seem to hit 3 keys at once. And after a lifetime of this key being here and that key being there, a netbook keyboard is a combination rubik’s cube and jigsaw puzzle. Function-Control-Down Arrow is “End”? Likewise for “Home” and almost any other function you can think of. So for a guy like me, it is a big step down or backward or whatever, but just plain frustrating. Everything takes too long.

So it’s not for me.

But how about the kids? I have five of them, from age 11 through age 19, and the 19-year old won’t touch it (same issues that I have except the eyesight problem), but the younger ones love it. It’s cute, it’s portable and it does what they need it to do.

So, the future? I say, based on my observations, that it is definitely the future, and the future is here. You can get a nice netbook for under $200.

So ask the kid: You want a PSP or a netbook? You might be surprised at the answer.

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I will give the last word on this topic to actor Joseph C. Phillips.

He gets it.

Bob Herbert writes an opinion column for the NY Times. Herbert, a black man, routinely comments on racial matters, so it is no surprise that he has weighed in on GatesGate.

Sadly I note, it is also not surprising, though quite disappointing that he does not get it.

Herbert wrote:

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

He’s just plain wrong. Disobeying a police order is a crime. Disorderly conduct is a crime. Disturbing the peace is a crime. The police arrest people every day whose only crime is disrespecting the police.

Bob, if disrespecting the police were not a crime, please imagine the chaos which would ensue.

Herbert wrote:

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.

…

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.

And that’s all I’ll quote so as not to run afoul of fair use.

But look at the point Herbert is trying to make: Because some peaceful kids got arrested and hassled by the police, Gates and other blacks have the right to “roar out their anger”; in the context of this discussion, he can only mean that it is acceptable and necessary to roar out in anger at an individual policeman doing his job, and that this is not a crime.

Preposterous.

Bob, what was so offensive about being approached by a police officer investigating a reported break-in, and being asked to step outside so the officer could do his job?

And Bob, what gave Gates the right to call Crowley a “racist” based on that single interaction? Would you have responded the same way that Gates did? Would you have felt justified in doing so? Would you have been surprised that, after telling you three times to calm down, the officer finally arrested you in mid-yell?

Bob, what sort of America do you wish to live in? And how do you propose we get from here to there?

Please be specific.

One last note: Herbert says that “Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems”. He has no way to know that. But one thing is true: We would much rather discuss solutions. And those of us who take this subject seriously and actually want better days, we deserve not to be made fools of.

As I commented elsewhere: “Heads it’s racism, tails it’s racial insensitivity? In other words, it’s never about the conditioning and predispositions of the black person?”

Is that your argument too, Bob? “Angry while black?” Are you serious?

Herbert seems to be taking the extreme position that Gates did nothing wrong, and that Crowley did. That is almost certainly completely backward.

Herbert is giving not the slightest ground to the police. There is no justification, in his mind, for the arrest.

Why, one would think he had actually been there and can state for certain that Gates did not go too far, and that Crowley over-reacted.

I wonder how he would explain that stance to General Powell?

Or perhaps, Herbert has as little use for the military as he has for the police?