Here’s how the script goes:

Republican: I’d like to begin by making an outrageous assertion. It’s obviously false, but boy, is it ever intense.

Democrat: Why, that is clearly untrue! And here’s a list of reasons why…

Republican: Thanks for playing; this is going to be fun!

Just some of the many, many examples we could cite: Obama’s an African-born Muslim! Obamacare means death panels! The administration is full of Marxists! The New Black Panthers are coming! We could go on and on. Because these people are operating on a daily schedule, with hourly updates, 365 days a year. As Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director told Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum recently, “we live in a world where there are so many news cycles that there isn’t a news cycle anymore.”

And with every crazy new claim, if you’re a Democrat, your reaction is probably some version of, “What kind of idiot could believe this crap?” Then you start arguing with it.

And as soon as you do, you lose.

You see, the right wants you to debate stuff they know is untrue. If you win on the merits, and you probably will, they don’t care at all.

They only want two things: one, they want you — and the media — to repeat their talking points, because as we know, a lie repeated often enough starts to feel true. Two, they want you to debate those points. Because it means you’re debating on their terms — and because the sheer act of debating makes you look weak.

Let’s take these one at a time. First, how the right designs talking points that get lots and lots of repetition.

The key is to start with an image that excites intense emotion. You want an image that, once imagined, is very hard to get out of your head — it’s kind of like writing the hook to a pop song. You might choose death panels, Marxists, New Black Panthers, whatever. To make your talking point, simply associate that image with your target. NOTE: If this makes no sense at all, that’s actually better — outrageousness gives your talking point a big extra kick. Start it out on blogs and talk radio. Then put a fig leaf on it by getting it on Fox News. Now the legitimate media have an excuse to run it (and they most certainly will). The final payoff comes when Democrats debate it, thereby repeating it yet more.

Congratulations. You’ve gone viral.

Is this effective? We report, you decide: A recent NY Times/CBS poll shows that 20 percent of Americans think President Obama was born in another country. A Harris Poll finds that 57 percent of Republicans think he’s a Muslim. And 24 percent — one in four! — think he is the anti-Christ.

Now point number two: debate, in and of itself, looks weak. Think about high school for a minute: Who debates? That would be the glasses-wearing nerds of the Debate Club. Republicans, making their bold, false assertions, are the football players shoving those debaters into the lockers. Is this right? Wrong? Who cares? One side of this transaction is shoving, and the other is being shoved. Who looks like they’re in charge? All too often, Democrats are making excellent points, from inside a locker.

As Pfeiffer states, “cable news… doesn’t reward getting things done or working with someone across the aisle. It rewards the single most outrageous thing you possibly can [say].”

What to do? Should Democrats respond in kind? No, and yes. No, we should not start with our own outrageous lies. It would be yet another instance of allowing Republicans to set the terms and, need we say it, it would be wrong. But a big yes to getting better at using emotion.

In his campaign stump speeches, one of the most persuasive “points” Barack Obama made came when he would look off into the future and raise an arm towards it, while speaking in the rhythmic cadences of our greatest orators. He had solid ideas about how we would actually get to that future. But it was the gesture and the rhythm that made your heart rise.

Obama’s lack of interest in cable news sensationalism is a big part of why we supported him in the first place. He is not a talking point. But in order to raise the dialogue — to transcend the chatter — we need to use emotion to show truth. Throughout human history, we haven’t simply stated the results of heroic battles. We’ve sung them as epics. The Democrats have won some heroic battles on issues that matter to millions: health care, financial reform, the environment and more. We need to sing our epics.

Of course, the issue is not so much that the president can’t win credit, it’s that others, including the media, can’t give it to him. The loss of that distinction is in itself a sign of this disconnect.

As with any trend, there is no single cause for this one. Rather, multiple causes come together at the right time and reinforce each other.

Cause number one is simply the economy. Yes, we avoided total collapse. Yes, recovery looks to be well under way. But unemployment is still high, people are still scared and angry, and they blame the person in charge now, instead of those who actually caused the problem in the past.

The second cause is deeply ironic: Obama’s very strength, it turns out, can be a weakness. After his fast rise against enormous odds, many people actually seem to believe that he is superhuman – that he should be able instantly to unite the country, solve unemployment, end wars and terrorism and while he’s at it, fix health care and end pandemics.

This ends up hurting him with both the right and the left. The right thinks he magically concealed his true socialist, terrorist-loving, dictatorial nature and that he is somehow able to “ram” legislation “down our throats.” Meanwhile critics on the left see him as repeatedly falling short of what he could have done if only he had really tried – he’s already one of the most accomplished presidents in history, and yet they think he’s dogging it. For both right and left, the inconvenient truth of democracy gets lost – that you have to have the votes.

The third cause is discipline – too much of it on the right, too little on the left. On the right, we have The Party of No. The GOP appear to be gambling everything on trying to make Obama fail, hoping voters will give him and his party most of the blame. We think this is a shameful disservice to the country. But Democrats could learn something from Republicans’ ability to play on the same team.

Instead, too many Dems leave every huddle criticizing the play instead of forming up to make it work. Take financial reform – the most sweeping such reform since the 1930s. This is how the lead Democratic author, Senator Chris Dodd, described it to the media immediately afterward: “It’s not a perfect bill, but we believe we’ve done the best we could under the circumstances…” Senator Russ Feingold took it a step further. He voted against the bill, as is of course his right. But he also saw fit to state that “It doesn’t do the job, and I’m not going to be part of basically defrauding the American people into thinking it does.” Who needs an opposing team when you play against your own with that kind of commitment?

We saw the same kind of thing with the passage of the greatest health care reform since Medicare, with the economic stimulus, energy reform and more. Of course we should be willing to disagree; openness to debate is part of what makes us Democrats. But being a Democrat is also supposed to mean working together for the common good. Democrats need to start running on pride in their party’s accomplishments, contrasting themselves with the Party of No. As David Plouffe said so cogently, the bedwetting needs to stop.

Accomplishments, no matter how impressive, are not enough. It’s the stories of those accomplishments that move hearts. The Republicans, drawing from a deep well of corporate advertising talent, are expert at telling emotionally powerful stories, often with scant concern for the truth. In response, Democrats present… facts. The facts prove that there aren’t any death panels. But boy, the image of death panels sure sticks in your head, doesn’t it? The facts prove that Obama deserves a whole lot more credit than he’s getting. But the constant narrative to the contrary can make it feel like he doesn’t. And since the media must have stories to hold their audiences, they are all too happy to repeat them. But if we kill the bedwetting, and show the contrasts, the story this November can have a much happier ending.

Imagine, then, the possibilities for a region that combined these assets: world-class academic and defense institutions, excellent infrastructure, a coastal California/Pacific Rim location, some of the most fertile land in the world, a culture of innovation, and a quality of life that attracts talent from all over the planet.

There is such a region: We live in it. The Central Coast is equipped to benefit mightily from the sustainable future  if we recognize the opportunities.

There are already many hopeful signs. Santa Cruz is reinventing itself as a center of design and clean technology. In Salinas, city leaders have committed to an updated vision of the “green gold rush” that made Salinas a world agriculture capital. Many more examples could be cited.

Ironically, though, the sheer number of the sustainable initiatives under way could present an obstacle to their overall success. That’s because of the risk presented by “silos”  vertical
organizational structures that are not connected. Say a large company has brilliant talent in each of its divisions, but those divisions don’t communicate well. That company has a silo problem.

On the Central Coast, we have many smart people working in various parts of the sustainable economy. But many of them are operating in silos. They are not nearly as inter-connected as they could be, and should be.

It was connectedness that led to the rise of Silicon Valley. No one could have planned exactly what happened there, nor should they even have tried. But Silicon Valley was positioned for success by the presence  and connectedness  of a great
university, defense installations, good infrastructure and a culture of innovation.

Sound familiar? Just as those elements made Silicon Valley fertile ground for innovation, so can they here  especially since we have the advantage of still having a lot of actual, not just metaphorical, fertile ground! Given the rapidly growing value of the biotech, biofuels and sustainable agriculture sectors, our natural assets look all the better.

But we are behind the curve on connectedness. And it is to remedy that problem that Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue and I started a group called Imagination Coast. It is designed not to be yet another sustainability organization, but to connect the existing ones.

To that end, Imagination Coast will hold the first in a series of “Future Camps” on Saturday at the Moss Landing Marine Lab. It will be a day of work by knowledgeable people on meeting the challenges of the sustainable future. We believe if all interested parties work together to achieve that goal, we will realize greater benefits than any of us could by working separately.

In the sustainable future, our economy will still have silos  independence, after all, is also a source of innovation. But the silos will be connected.

Spencer Critchley is managing director of Boots Road Group LLC, a marketing and public relations firm.

A thoughtful post, Micah, but I disagree with the assumptions it’s based on, in particular what seems to be an assumption that Barack Obama promised, or could ever deliver, perfection.

Obama has always said that the goal is not perfection but “a more perfect union”. And he has always said that it was going to mean hard work (think back to how many times you’ve heard that phrase from him), not something he would wrap up and deliver to us in the first year.

The Obama campaign was, and the Obama presidency is, part of a great tradition of hard workers that includes the founders, Lincoln, FDR and King. And I would say that the role of the grassroots is disappointing only if you’re dissatisfied with the most grassroots-driven campaign and administration in history.

On the administration, I would start by noting that no entity like Organizing For America has ever before existed. I agree with David Plouffe: Of course you can’t maintain the intensity of a presidential campaign, but at the same time, two million volunteers working to advance legislation is not just very impressive – it’s never happened. And those two million didn’t, as you claim, just “put themselves in motion”. They were organized by OFA, using mybo, email and paid organizers placed in all 50 states – also unprecedented. I’m pretty sure OFA could be doing better. But I’m not shocked by that, and I think I see the path to improvement: stay involved and work with them on it.

OFA is not the end of it, though. As Personal Democracy Forum has chronicled, this administration is enacting the most significant open government effort in history, starting with Obama’s executive orders the day after he was sworn in and borne out by many initiatives since, including data.gov, FOIA reform and the recent Open Government Directive (OGD). In Joseph Tauberer’s summary (cited by you in an earlier post) “The OGD mainly covers two aspects of government transparency: using technology as a tool for data sharing and public participation in agency decision-making. We’ve seen the start of a culture shift this year in the executive branch, in parallel with actual progress throughout the country, and now the OGD outlines and codifies a vision for the next four months and, well, beyond.”

The grassroots are not actually running the government yet; we still do have a cabinet, agencies and departments. Throwing all that over immediately was always impossible – and undesirable, given that no one would know how to do that peacefully or successfully, not to mention democratically. The people who get hired to work in the administration still tend to be people with a lot of experience, expertise, connections and, yes, flaws. Sometimes the best person for the job has also made mistakes at some point in their past. It doesn’t necessarily follow that hiring them implies endorsement of those mistakes, or worse, corruption. Given the many times Obama has made difficult choices for ethical reasons, I think we could give him a little more credit.

You charge that “the special interests–banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex–sat first at the table and wrote the menu.” This is an extreme overstatement, again apparently based on perfectionism.

Yes, lobbyists are still too powerful. For a long time, they have amounted to a third house of Congress. But Obama is the president, not a dictator, so he can’t just make them go away, right now. He can reduce their influence, though, and he is doing that.

Critics say he should have mustered the grassroots to fight them. He did: At the beginning of the health care reform effort, for example, he repeatedly predicted an onslaught from the health insurance lobby, and recruited volunteers to respond. A great many did, and their efforts made an important difference. But that difference, on its own, was never likely to carry the day against such powerful and entrenched opposition.

So Obama took other measures as well. Another of his first actions on taking office was to order the strictest limits ever seen on lobbying an administration. (And remember that back when he won the nomination, one of his first actions had been to end lobbyists’ contributions to the Democratic Party – an expensive decision to make just as a general election was starting.)

Meanwhile, knowing that the health insurers, PhRMA and the AMA had succeeded in killing so many previous reform efforts, Obama took two of them, PhRMA and the AMA, off the battlefield – and made them allies. PhRMA and the AMA ended up joining with the SEIU and others to form Americans for Stable Quality Care, and have invested many millions promoting reform instead of fighting it.

This deal-making involved compromise – as it always does. No one has yet achieved a political system, especially a democratic one, that features no compromise. For example, maybe PhRMA could have given up more than $80 billion in drug discounts. But the goal was very significant progress, which looks like it’s going to be achieved, not perfection, which is impossible.

Turning to the Obama For America campaign: You complain that it “shared tasks with its supporters but didn’t share power”. But it did share power – ask any of the volunteer organizers who created state organizations from scratch before the campaign was able to. Did volunteers get to decide overall strategy? No, but that is another impossible standard, never promised.

Obama For America was not a perfectly flat organization, it was just the most grassroots-driven campaign in history. At the same time, it was directed by a core of only three people: Obama, David Axelrod and Plouffe. This combination of openness and discipline was what won the election.

The volunteers were a critical source of energy, ideas, influence and information (including all-important nightly uploads of voter contact data), but no, they didn’t get to run the campaign. That would have lost the election, as messages and tactics were diffused in thousands of different directions. Even blogs don’t run like that – they don’t spray every random post onto the front page, instead, someone runs the blog and members earn seniority based on their contributions over time. Many campaign volunteers and young staffers are now in positions of great responsibility. An example is Jeremy Bird, whom you mention, who started out in field organizing.

I can attest to the effectiveness of the campaign’s “openness with discipline”. I started as a volunteer on a press team towards the end of the Pennsylvania primary. I reported to the state HQ the evening I arrived. Within about 15 minutes I was at work collecting briefing information for an interview Obama was doing the next day. For the general election, I was invited to join press staffs in Michigan and then Colorado.

In both cases I was given as much responsibility as I could handle – and as would be useful in serving the mission. Did that mean I was invited to start telling Axelrod what I thought his communications strategy should be? Of course not. Not because Axelrod was too grand, but because that would have been a waste of time, both his and mine. That time was better spent doing something that would actually help win. The point wasn’t to keep people down, it was to make the best use of resources for the greater good.

You point out that Obama raised a lot of money from large donors and from the finance industry. But the fact remains that no campaign in history ever raised so much from so many small donors, or did such a good job of including those small donors in other aspects of the campaign. So what do you want? The most inclusive fundraising effort in history, or a perfect transformation of campaign finance, which also could very well have cost the election? I’m satisfied with the best effort in history, one that continues now.

Obama is of course fair game for criticism, as any democratic leader should be. But some critics seem to be complaining that the most grassroots-oriented president in history has not transformed all of American government and politics at a stroke. They shouldn’t blame him for failing to meet an impossible standard that they, not he, laid down.

The change he promised was that we would strive together towards a more perfect union. That’s what he’s delivering. And when I look at health care reform, the rescue of the economy, openness in government, the reform of the Justice Department and our transformed international standing, to name a few, I’d say it’s working.

People have complained about loud TV commercials for years. The response has often been that technically, commercials are no louder than anything else on the air. The FCC even supports this argument is a section of its web site (which they say is being updated – and, I hope, corrected):

Loud Commercials. In surveys and technical studies of broadcast advertising, we have found that loudness is a judgment that varies with each listener and is influenced by many factors (such as an announcement’s content and style). We have also found no evidence that stations deliberately raise audio and modulation levels to emphasize commercial messages.

As whoever wrote this must know, the claim that commercials are not louder is only true in an artificially narrow sense. The peak levels of commercials are no higher than the peak levels of program content. But the average level is way, way higher, and that’s the level your ears care about. If someone sets off a camera flash every now and then it’s one thing; if they aim a steady spot light into your eyes it’s another, even if the peak brightness is no higher.

Quoted at msnbc.com:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/

In the Reader’s Digest:
http://www.rd.com/living-healthy/why-are-tv-commercials-so-loud/article96931.html

And the more detailed original post at O’Reilly Digital Media:
http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2007/01/bless-you-dolby-technology-lim.html

One example: at Imagination Coast, we’ve formed a Data Visualization group to use graphics to help investors and decision-makers understand the challenges and opportunities in the Central Coast’s sustainable economy.

With the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace, I’m exploring similar ideas for coordinating the many government, law enforcement and non-profit organizations involved in the effort to reduce gang violence in Monterey County. For example, a unified client-centered database of at-risk youth and their families, so that we can devote the same level of attention and customization to helping an at-risk youth stay alive as we would lavish on a customer for a new soda pop. This amounts to adapting the practices of Customer Relationship Management to social services.

Thank you for this opportunity to present the civil liberties record of President Obama. I believe that record is already impressive, and I believe it promises to be historic.

Before I begin, let me emphasize that although I worked for President Obama’s election campaign, I do not work for the Obama administration and I speak only for myself here this evening.

When then-Senator Barack Obama was considering whether to run for president, his advisers asked him the simple question that all candidates must be able to answer: “Why should people vote for you?” Part of his answer was this: that on the day he took the oath of office, there would be children all over America who would think differently about what was possible for them.

So let’s begin by recognizing the magnitude of President Obama’s first civil liberties achievement: getting elected.

In hindsight, the success of the Obama campaign can look inevitable. But at the outset, the only thing that looked inevitable to most observers was that it would not succeed, that it was at best a dry run for the future. Well, facing incredibly steep odds, Barack Obama brought the future into the present.

He had some great talent helping him. But I can tell you that there was never any question who was running things, and that was Barack Obama himself.

His success was a fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Obama’s thousands of campaign volunteers and staff looked like America. And they worked their hearts out for him, not because they were the same color as he – most of them were not – but because of the content of his character.

On the morning after the early success in the Iowa caucuses, my friend and former boss Michael Blake was talking with Reverend Joseph Lowery, a co-founder with Dr. King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Reverend Lowery was showing Michael his new iPhone, and marveling over all the things it could do. He said, “Michael, I wish I could use it to call back into the past. I’d call Martin. I’d say, ‘Martin, I’m looking at the front page of a newspaper that says an African-American is the front-runner to be President of the United States.’”

That story reminds me of how unlikely, and how important, President Obama’s election was.

But I know that this evening what we’re most interested in is what the president has done since he was elected.

What he has been doing is fulfilling his promises, as quickly as he can, and more quickly than many of us would ever have thought possible.

For this early part of his term, President Obama has had four top domestic priorities and two top international priorities. The domestic priorities are the economy, health care, energy and education. The international priorities are restoring our international standing and withdrawing our troops from Iraq, while refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Why these priorities?

As we know too well, when Obama took office, the economy worldwide was in a state of crisis, teetering on the edge of collapse. Clearly that had to be priority number one.

Our health care system threatens us with another economic crisis in the not too distant future. Right now it leads to unnecessary bankruptcies, illnesses and deaths.

Energy must be a priority because our reliance on fossil fuel distorts our foreign policy, threatens our security, pollutes our environment and is raising the risk of a climate catastrophe.

We must address education because it is the foundation of our prosperity and our freedom, and that foundation is in disrepair.

Our international standing was deeply damaged by the actions of the previous administration. These included an unnecessary war, the sanctioning of torture, the neglect of the Middle East and a generally aggressive, unilateral posture in international relations.

And finally the war of choice in Iraq, coupled with the neglect of Afghanistan and Pakistan, has resulted in terrible losses of life and treasure while making America and the world less secure.

Clearly, these are top priorities for all of us. And yet we might ask, “Where in that list are civil liberties?” The answer is that they are woven into the very fabric of the president’s priorities.

Domestically, when the economy declines, minorities and the poor are the first to suffer. When health care is inadequate, they feel more of the pain. The economic and environmental costs of our energy policies fall most heavily on them. When schools fail, it is most often in minority and poor communities.

Internationally, both our greatest asset and our greatest protection is other people’s faith in our democratic values. President Obama knows that while we have by far the world’s most powerful armed forces, more powerful still are the civil liberties those forces are charged with protecting.

So where are we now on these top priorities? Here is just some of what President Obama has done in the past ten months and two weeks:

His economic stimulus has rescued the world economy from collapse, avoiding the risk of a second Great Depression. He has led us to the verge of passing the most significant health care reform in 50 years. On energy, he has increased fuel efficiency standards, directed billions of dollars in stimulus investments to alternative energy and is about to lead the way on Cap and Trade legislation to control carbon. On education he is pursuing a range of proven innovations and has invested many billions of stimulus dollars in educational reform.

He is on schedule to remove American troops from Iraq and has refocused military and aid-based efforts on the now hugely difficult situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With his speech in Cairo and other actions, he has transformed relations with the Arab world. He is reaching out to other countries across the globe, notably long-neglected Latin American nations at the Summit of the Americas. On his Asian tour, the president has promoted mutual respect with advocacy for universal human rights, the resumption of talks between China and the Dalai Lama and the release by Myanmar of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Because of Barack Obama’s efforts, the United States has already regained its standing as the most respected country in the world, after falling far down the list during the previous eight years.

I’d say that’s not a bad record for ten months and a couple of weeks.

But it’s only part of what President Obama has done and is doing.

On January 21st, the day after he was sworn in, the president revoked an executive order by President Bush that had severely restricted access to presidential records. The same day, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Open Government. This has shifted all government operations towards transparency, and led to innovations such as Data.gov, a website that for the first time makes huge amounts of detailed government information accessible online, for free. Also on January 21st, the president signed ordered the highest-ever standard to control influence on his administration by lobbyists.

The next day saw executive orders for the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year, a comprehensive review of detention policies, and a ban on the use of torture.

On January 29th, the president signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which removed a statute of limitations on equal-pay lawsuits, thereby helping ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work.

The following day he signed three executive orders strengthening protections for the rights of employees under federal contracts.

In February, he created the White House Office of Urban Affairs Policy, with the goal of reversing decades of inattention to cities.

In March, he created the White House Council on Women and Girls, whose cabinet-level appointees are charged with ensuring that the federal government accounts for how its actions affect women and families.

More recently, the Federal Communications Commission has begun writing regulations that will give net neutrality the force of law, requiring Internet access companies to treat all data the same.

On October 28th, the president signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Named for the victims of two horrendous murders, this act expands hate crime laws to cover gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

During the campaign, candidate Obama called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, which among other things defines marriage as between a man and a woman. As is usual, President Obama’s Justice Department has continued to enforce this existing law while it is still on the books. But the president and Attorney General Eric Holder have stated clearly that the administration disagrees with this law, and that the president will sign a repeal as soon as Congress passes it.

President Obama is strongly supporting the Employee Non-Discrimination Act and it looks likely that it can pass the Congress too.

Candidate Obama promised the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said the repeal will likely happen in the coming year.

Also expected in 2010 is comprehensive immigration reform. This reform will include a path to legal status for undocumented workers who are here now, and related protections for the wages of legal residents.

This is some of the progress we’ve seen in policies and laws, either accomplished or in progress. But a president also has influence through the appointments he makes. Let’s take a look at some of this president’s appointments.

Most notable so far is the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina ever to serve on the Supreme Court.

President Obama’s diverse range of appointees also includes Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Kathleen Sibelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security, Susan Rice as United Nations Ambassador, Eric Holder as Attorney General and Dawn Johnsen, formerly of the ACLU and NARAL, as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC. Ms. Johnsen was a leading critic of the Bush administration’s OLC over the authorization of waterboarding and other forms of torture. Her confirmation is being held up by Republicans in Congress, who are also stalling on a list of other nominees.

At the Department of Justice, Attorney General Holder has been working hard to repair the damage done by the previous administration’s placement of politics above the law. As part of this repair, he has restored the Civil Rights Division to its intended role.

Under the Bush administration, career civil rights lawyers were replaced by political hires with little relevant experience, or by people whose experience was in defending against civil rights enforcement. The new head of the Civil Rights Division, sworn in last month, is Tom Perez. Wade Henderson, the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, calls Mr. Perez “arguably the most well-qualified individual ever nominated for the position.”

Among Attorney General Holder’s other actions have been the release of the torture memos written by the Bush administration’s OLC, and the recent decision to try five of the most important Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian court. This latter decision was described by ACLU executive director Anthony Romero as “an enormous victory and an enormous step forward restoring the rule of law”.

But impressive as all of this is – and I think it is strikingly impressive – I know that neither Mr. Romero, the ACLU, nor in fact any of us is 100% satisfied with President Obama’s achievements so far. I don’t think I’m going very far out on a limb to guess that President Obama is not 100% satisfied.

Let me introduce those “difficult constraints” mentioned in my topic.

The first constraint among all others is one that I think a surprising number of us forget: We did not elect a dictator or a god-king. He’s the president. And as powerful as the president of this country is, he cannot just snap his fingers and change the law or change reality.

I’ll grant you though that the previous vice president gave both of those a good try.

Let’s look at one of the areas where ACLU director Romero feels President Obama has fallen short: closing down Guantanamo and giving detainees fair trials. Although the president signed that executive order in January calling for the closure of Guantanamo within one year, there is now concern that that deadline will be missed. And on the detainee trials, while I believe it is both politically brave and ethically right to try those five detainees in civilian court, it looks likely that some others will go before military tribunals, and some may continue to be detained indefinitely with no trial.

Let’s look at these one at a time.

Why hasn’t Obama simply closed Guantanamo, with no delay? One big obstacle is that the people currently in Guantanamo have to go somewhere. Last spring the administration sought 80 million dollars from Congress to pay for transferring Guantanamo detainees to maximum security prisons in the United States. The Senate voted 90 to 6 against it. Part of that may have been because White House staff could have done a better job of addressing Congress members’ concerns about how the transfer would be handled. But some of it was just fear, and Republicans used the vote as an opportunity for politically motivated fear-mongering.

Meanwhile almost no other countries will accept detainees from Guantanamo either.

So closing Guantanamo is taking longer than planned. But the Obama administration has kept working to move things forward. On October 21st, Congress finally approved nearly 43 million dollars to pay for transfers, so that detainees can be tried on US soil – but imprisoning them here after trial is still forbidden. Work continues.

What about those military tribunals? Why hasn’t Obama committed to trying all the detainees in civilian court? If we don’t do that, how can we claim that we really do offer justice for all?

The president’s first responsibility is to protect the American people. He is also sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Thanks to the abuses committed by the Bush administration, dealing with the detainees put these two fundamental responsibilities into conflict. President Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, knows this all too well. And, unlike the previous administration he does not intend to sacrifice one in favor of the other. In his major speech on National Security on May 21st of this year, he said, “…I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we… cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.”

The president believes that our security – his first responsibility – requires that some of the detainees’ cases be heard by military tribunals. Trying these detainees in court might expose intelligence methods or sources, expose trial participants to risk, or disallow evidence that would convict them, but which is tainted because of torture or other abuses.

Now, under President Bush, Barack Obama and many of us found the use of tribunals unacceptable. Why should we accept them now?

Because we can make them better. The president is committed to establishing “a legitimate legal framework with the kind of meaningful due process rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.” The president said, “We will no longer permit the use of evidence… that [has] been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods. We will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay. And we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel, and more protections if they refuse to testify. These reforms, among others, will make our military commissions a more credible and effective means of administering justice, and I will work with Congress and members of both parties, as well as legal authorities across the political spectrum, on legislation to ensure that these commissions are fair, legitimate, and effective.”

So, we will make the tribunals better. Not perfect, but better. Perfect is not available here.

Now we turn to those detainees who may be detained without trial, for we don’t know how long.

In his speech, Obama called this the toughest single issue in connection with detainees.

Many find it shocking that the United States would consider indefinitely detaining anyone without trial.

And many – including me – are skeptical of the whole idea of a “war on terror”, because it sounds potentially unbounded in scope or duration.

The fact remains, though, that there are people who are at war with the United States, who were captured on a field of battle. They are prisoners of war, and prisoners of war are detained – if they haven’t been killed.

But here too, Obama is pursuing what he calls “clear, defensible, and lawful standards.”

In his National Security speech he said, “In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight… my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.”

In trying to clean up this horrendous legal, political and diplomatic mess left by his predecessor, President Obama must deal with understandable suspicion from those who recognize how often national security has been used as an excuse to violate civil liberties.

But just because this happens, it does not mean that it has to happen. And it does not mean that there is no such thing as a legitimate national security risk.

As you listen to what Obama says and watch what he does, you will notice how closely he hews to the concept of legitimacy, meaning action that is based in the law.

We are a nation of laws. And Obama shows his belief in that principle by his actions. Faced with reconciling his fundamental responsibilities to the people’s safety and to their rights, at every step he is ensuring that he himself will be governed by the law, as every president and every American must be.

There are other examples we can discuss wherein Obama has faced great difficulties while defending civil liberties. We could talk about the coming end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, or the difficult decision on the release of the torture photos. In the interest of time, I will leave those for later in the debate.

Lately the story has taken hold in some circles that the president who made so many promises as a candidate has yet to achieve much in office. I find that version of reality astounding.

Think about what I’ve recounted this evening – saving the world economy, on the verge of the greatest health care reform in 50 years, reviving the Department of Justice, and on and on. Imagine accomplishing all that in less than a year – and bear in mind that I’ve had to leave out a great deal for brevity’s sake. Go to barackobama.com and look up the list of Obama’s campaign promises, which is still there. You’ll see that President Obama has been doing what he said he would do, working his way down the list.

On the Obama campaign, one of the highest forms of praise was to be told you were “gettin’ it done”. On civil liberties, as on so many other critically important priorities, President Obama is gettin’ it done.

Continuing my effort to spare newcomers to Drupal from falling into this powerful content management system’s most common traps, this time I look at a frequent cause of white screens – the sudden and scary devolution of a previously healthy Drupal site into a blank browser window.

This can be caused by coding mistakes, such as neglecting to conclude a line of custom PHP with a semicolon.

But white screens often happen to new Drupal admins who haven’t yet come near any custom PHP. The typical story is that you install a new module and suddenly – poof, there goes the site. You might assume that the new module is buggy or incompatible with your site.

But the cause is often simply that your web server has run out of memory for executing PHP. Since at heart Drupal runs on PHP interacting with an SQL database, your site can’t bootstrap to begin writing any html pages.

Under many web hosting accounts, the default setting for memory allocated to PHP is quite low – on mine, it’s 8 MegaBytes. But it’s not uncommon for a Drupal site with extra modules installed to require 96 MB or more.

In order to increase PHP’s memory allocation, you need access to your web server’s PHP initialization file, which is called php.ini. (You won’t have this access with web hosting plans that restrict you to the site’s home directory, since php.ini is typically found higher up the directory tree, such as in the /etc folder if you’re using Apache.)

When setting up a new Drupal site to which you plan to add extra modules, find your server’s php.ini file, open it and search for this line:

memory_limit = xM

…where “x” is some integer, such as 8. If it’s a small number like that, replace it with something more appropriate. Some Drupal modules will give you guidance on this in their documentation. I’ve found that 96 MB is a good starting point.

Save the newly edited php.ini file, and you should now be safe from memory-related white screens.

But whatever the cause of a particular problem, all of them are arguments for routinely backing up a Drupal site and its database, and/or for trying out significant changes on a test site before deploying them to the public site.

From the ACLU: “Each speaker will have opportunities to stake out their positions, to rebut their opponent’s statements, and to offer a final conclusion. Following the debate, the floor will be opened for questions and comments from the audience.”

This is part of our Training For Change series for Monterey County Democrats volunteers.