Losing Latin Am: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?

[magbana]

Losing Latin America: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?
By Greg Grandin

June 8, 2008 Tom Dispatch

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174941/greg_grandin_is_the_monroe_doctrine_really_dead_

Google "neglect," "Washington," and "Latin America,"
and you will be led to thousands of hand-wringing calls
from politicians and pundits for Washington to "pay
more attention" to the region. True, Richard Nixon once
said that "people don't give one shit" about the place.
And his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger
quipped that Latin America is a "dagger pointed at the
heart of Antarctica." But Kissinger also made that same
joke about Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand -- and, of
the three countries, only the latter didn't suffer
widespread political murder as a result of his
policies, a high price to pay for such a reportedly
inconsequential place.

Latin America, in fact, has been indispensable in the
evolution of U.S. diplomacy. The region is often
referred to as America's "backyard," but a better
metaphor might be Washington's "strategic reserve," the
place where ascendant foreign-policy coalitions regroup
and redraw the outlines of U.S. power, following
moments of global crisis.

When the Great Depression had the U.S. on the ropes,
for example, it was in Latin America that New Deal
diplomats worked out the foundations of liberal
multilateralism, a diplomatic framework that Washington
would put into place with much success elsewhere after
World War II.

In the 1980s, the first generation of neocons turned to
Latin America to play out their "rollback" fantasies --
not just against Communism, but against a tottering
multilateralist foreign-policy. It was largely in a
Central America roiled by left-wing insurgencies that
the New Right first worked out the foundational
principles of what, after 9/11, came to be known as the
Bush Doctrine: the right to wage war unilaterally in
highly moralistic terms.

We are once again at a historic crossroads. An ebbing
of U.S. power -- this time caused, in part, by military
overreach -- faces a mobilized Latin America; and, on
the eve of regime change at home, with George W. Bush's
neoconservative coalition in ruins after eight years of
disastrous rule, would-be foreign policy makers are
once again looking south.

Goodbye to All That

"The era of the United States as the dominant influence
in Latin America is over," says the Council on Foreign
Relations, in a new report filled with sober policy
suggestions for ways the U.S. can recoup its waning
influence in a region it has long claimed as its own.

Latin America is now mostly governed by left or center-
left governments that differ in policy and style --
from the populism of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the
reformism of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and
Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Yet all share a common
goal: asserting greater autonomy from the United
States.

Latin Americans are now courting investment from China,
opening markets in Europe, dissenting from Bush's War
on Terror, stalling the Free Trade Agreement of the
Americas, and sidelining the International Monetary
Fund which, over the last couple of decades, has served
as a stalking horse for Wall Street and the Treasury
Department.

And they are electing presidents like Ecuador's Rafael
Correa, who recently announced that his government
would not renew the soon-to-expire lease on Manta Air
Field, the most prominent U.S. military base in South
America. Correa had previously suggested that, if
Ecuador could set up its own base in Florida, he would
consider extending the lease. When Washington balked,
he offered Manta to a Chinese concession, suggesting
that the airfield be turned into "China's gateway to
Latin America."

In the past, such cheek would have been taken as a
clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in
1823 by President James Monroe, who declared that
Washington would not permit Europe to recolonize any
part of the Americas. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt
updated the doctrine to justify a series of Caribbean
invasions and occupations. And Presidents Dwight
Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan invoked it to validate
Cold War CIA-orchestrated coups and other covert
operations.

But things have changed. "Latin America is not
Washington's to lose," the Council on Foreign Relations
report says, "nor is it Washington's to save." The
Monroe Doctrine, it declares, is "obsolete."

Good news for Latin America, one would think. But the
last time someone from the Council on Foreign
Relations, which since its founding in 1921 has
represented mainstream foreign-policy opinion, declared
the Monroe Doctrine defunct, the result was genocide.

Enter the Liberal Establishment

That would be Sol Linowitz who, in 1975, as chair of
the Commission on United States-Latin American
Relations, said that the Monroe Doctrine was
"inappropriate and irrelevant to the changed realities
and trends of the future."

The little-remembered Linowitz Commission was made up
of respected scholars and businessmen from what was
then called the "liberal establishment." It was but one
part of a broader attempt by America's foreign-policy
elite to respond to the cascading crises of the 1970s
-- defeat in Vietnam, rising third-world nationalism,
Asian and European competition, skyrocketing energy
prices, a falling dollar, the Watergate scandal, and
domestic dissent. Confronted with a precipitous
collapse of America's global legitimacy, the Council on
Foreign Relations, along with other mainline think
tanks like the Brookings Institute and the newly formed
Trilateral Commission, offered a series of proposals
that might help the U.S. stabilize its authority, while
allowing for "a smooth and peaceful evolution of the
global system."

There was widespread consensus among the intellectuals
and corporate leaders affiliated with these
institutions that the kind of anticommunist zeal that
had marched the U.S. into the disaster in Vietnam
needed to be tamped down, and that "new forms of common
management" between Washington, Europe, and Japan had
to be worked out. Advocates for a calmer world order
came from the same corporate bloc that underwrote the
Democratic Party and the Rockefeller-wing of the
Republican Party.

They hoped that a normalization of global politics
would halt, if not reverse, the erosion of the U.S.
economic position. Military de-escalation would free up
public revenue for productive investment, while
containing inflationary pressures (which scared the
bond managers of multinational banks). Improved
relations with the Communist bloc would open the USSR,
Eastern Europe, and China to trade and investment.
There was also general agreement that Washington should
stop viewing Third World socialism through the prism of
the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

At that moment throughout Latin America, leftists and
nationalists were -- as they are now -- demanding a
more equitable distribution of global wealth. Lest
radicalization spread, the Trilateral Commission's
executive director Zbignew Brzezinski, soon to be
President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor,
argued that it would be "wise for the United States to
make an explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine."
The Linowitz Commission agreed and offered a series of
recommendations to that effect -- including the return
of the Panama Canal to Panama and a decrease in U.S.
military aid to the region -- that would largely define
Carter's Latin American policy.

Exit the Liberal Establishment

Of course, it was not corporate liberalism but rather a
resurgent and revanchist militarism from the Right that
turned out to offer the most cohesive and, for a time,
successful solution to the crises of the 1970s.

Uniting a gathering coalition of old-school law-and-
order anticommunists, first generation
neoconservatives, and newly empowered evangelicals, the
New Right organized an ever metastasizing set of
committees, foundations, institutes, and magazines that
focused on specific issues -- the SALT II nuclear
disarmament negotiations, the Panama Canal Treaty, and
the proposed MX missile system, as well as U.S. policy
in Cuba, South Africa, Rhodesia, Israel, Taiwan,
Afghanistan, and Central America. All of them were
broadly committed to avenging defeat in Vietnam (and
the "stab in the back" by the liberal media and the
public at home). They were also intent on restoring
righteous purpose to American diplomacy.

As had corporate liberals, so, now, neoconservative
intellectuals looked to Latin America to hone their
ideas. President Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, focused mainly on
Latin America in laying out the foundational principles
of modern neoconservative thought. She was particularly
hard on Linowitz, who, she said, represented the
"disinterested internationalist spirit" of
"appeasement" -- a word back with us again. His report,
she insisted, meant "abandoning the strategic
perspective which has shaped U.S. policy from the
Monroe Doctrine down to the eve of the Carter
administration, at the center of which was a conception
of the national interest and a belief in the moral
legitimacy of its defense."

At first, Brookings, the Council on Foreign Affairs,
and the Trilateral Commission, as well as the Business
Roundtable, founded in 1972 by the creme de la CEO
creme, opposed the push to remilitarize American
society; but, by the late 1970s, it was clear that
"normalization" had failed to solve the global economic
crisis. Europe and Japan were not cooperating in
stabilizing the dollar, and the economies of Eastern
Europe, the USSR, and China were too anemic to absorb
sufficient amounts of U.S. capital or serve as
profitable trading partners. Throughout the 1970s,
financial houses like the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan
Bank had become engorged with petrodollars deposited by
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other oil-exporting
nations. They needed to do something with all that
money, yet the U.S. economy remained sluggish, and much
of the Third World off limits.

So, after Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential victory,
mainstream policymakers and intellectuals, many of them
self-described liberals, increasingly came to back the
Reagan Revolution's domestic and foreign agenda:
gutting the welfare state, ramping up defense spending,
opening up the Third World to U.S. capital, and
jumpstarting the Cold War.

A decade after the Linowitz Commission proclaimed the
Monroe Doctrine no longer viable, Ronald Reagan invoked
it to justify his administration's patronage of
murderous anti-communists in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
El Salvador. A few years after Jimmy Carter announced
that the U.S. had broken "free of that inordinate fear
of communism," Reagan quoted John F. Kennedy saying,
"Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be
negotiated."

Reagan's illegal patronage of the Contras -- those
murderers he hailed as the "moral equivalent of
America's founding fathers" and deployed to destabilize
Nicaragua's Sandinista government -- and his
administration's funding of death squads in El Salvador
and Guatemala brought together, for the first time, the
New Right's two main constituencies. Neoconservatives
provided Reagan's revival of the imperial presidency
with legal and intellectual justification, while the
religious Right backed up the new militarism with
grassroots energy.

This partnership was first built -- just as it has more
recently been continued in Iraq -- on a mountain of
mutilated corpses: 40,000 Nicaraguans and 70,000 El
Salvadorans killed by U.S. allies; 200,000 Guatemalans,
many of them Mayan peasants, victimized in a scorched-
earth campaign the UN would rule to be genocidal.

The End of the Neocon Holiday from History

The recent Council on Foreign Relations report on Latin
America, arriving as it does in another moment of
imperial decline, seems once again to signal a new
emerging consensus, one similar in tone to that of the
post-Vietnam 1970s. In every dimension other than
military, Newsweek editor Fareed Zacharia argues in his
new book, The Post-American World, "the distribution of
power is shifting, moving away from American
dominance." (Never mind that, just five years ago, on
the eve of the invasion of Iraq, he was insisting on
the exact opposite -- that we now lived in a "unipolar
world" where America's position was, and would be,
"unprecedented.")

To borrow a phrase from their own lexicon, the neocons'
"holiday from history" is over. The fiasco in Iraq, the
fall in the value of the dollar, the rise of India and
China as new industrial and commercial powerhouses, and
of Russia as an energy superpower, the failure to
secure the Middle East, soaring oil and gas prices (as
well as skyrocketing prices for other key raw materials
and basic foodstuffs), and the consolidation of a
prosperous Europe have all brought their dreams of
global supremacy crashing down.

Barack Obama is obviously the candidate best positioned
to walk the U.S. back from the edge of irrelevance.
Though no one hoping for a job in his White House would
put it in such defeatist terms, the historic task of
the next president will not be to win this president's
Global War on Terror, but to negotiate America's
reentry into a community of nations.

Parag Khanna, an Obama advisor, recently argued that,
by maximizing its cultural and technological advantage,
the U.S. can, with a little luck, perhaps secure a
position as third partner in a new tripartite global
order in which Europe and Asia would have equal shares,
a distinct echo of the trilateralist position of the
1970s. (Forget those Munich analogies, if the U.S.
electorate were more historically literate, Republicans
would get better mileage out of branding Obama not
Neville Chamberlain, but Spain's Fernando VII or
Britain's Clement Richard Attlee, each of whom presided
over his country's imperial decline.)

So it has to be asked: If Obama wins in November and
tries to implement a more rational, less ideologically
incandescent deployment of American power -- perhaps
using Latin America as a staging ground for a new
policy -- would it once again provoke the kind of
nationalist backlash that purged Rockefellerism from
the Republican Party, swept Jimmy Carter out of the
White House, and armed the death squads in Central
America?

Certainly, there are already plenty of feverish
conservative think tanks, from the Hudson Institute to
the Heritage Foundation, that would double down on
Bush's crusades as a way out of the current mess. But
in the 1970s, the New Right was in ascendance; today,
it is visibly decomposing. Then, it could lay
responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis that
gripped the United States at the feet of the
"establishment," while offering solutions -- an arms
build-up, a renewed push into the Third World, and
free-market fundamentalism -- that drew much of that
establishment into its orbit.

Today, the Right wholly owns the current crisis, along
with its most immediate cause, the Iraq War. Even if
John McCain were able to squeak out a win in November,
he would be the functional equivalent not of Reagan,
who embodied a movement on the march, but of Jimmy
Carter, trying desperately to hold a fraying coalition
together.

The Right's decay as an intellectual force is nowhere
more evident than in the fits it throws in the face of
the Left's -- or China's -- advances in Latin America.
The self-confidant vitality with which Jeane
Kirkpatrick used Latin America to skewer the Carter
administration has been replaced with the tinny,
desperate shrill of despair. "Who lost Latin America?"
asks the Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney --
of pretty much everyone he meets. The region, he says,
is now a "magnet for Islamist terrorists and a breeding
ground for hostile political movements... The key leader
is Chavez, the billionaire dictator of Venezuela who
has declared a Latino jihad against the United States."

Scare-Quote Diplomacy

But just because the Right is unlikely to unfurl its
banner over Latin America again soon doesn't mean that
U.S. hemispheric diplomacy will be demilitarized. After
all, it was Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who, at
the behest of Lockheed Martin in 1997, reversed a
Carter administration ban (based on Linowitz report
recommendations) on the sale of high-tech weaponry to
Latin America. That, in turn, kicked off a reckless and
wasteful Southern Cone arms race. And it was Clinton,
not Bush, who dramatically increased military aid to
the murderous Colombian government and to corporate
mercenaries like Blackwater and Dyncorp, further
escalating the misguided U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin
America.

In fact, a quick comparison between the Linowitz report
and the new Council on Foreign Relations study on Latin
America provides a sobering way of measuring just how
far right the "liberal establishment" has shifted over
the last three decades. The Council does admirably
advise Washington to normalize relations with Cuba and
engage with Venezuela, while downplaying the
possibility of "Islamic terrorists" using the area as a
staging ground -- a longstanding fantasy of the
neocons. (Douglas Feith, former Pentagon
undersecretary, suggested that, after 9/11, the U.S.
hold off invading Afghanistan and instead bomb
Paraguay, which has a large Shi'ite community, just to
"surprise" the Sunni al-Qaeda.)

Yet, where the Linowitz report provoked the ire of the
likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick by writing that the U.S.
should not try to "define the limits of ideological
diversity for other nations" and that Latin Americans
"can and will assess for themselves the merits and
disadvantages of the Cuban approach," the Council is
much less open-minded. It insists on presenting
Venezuela as a problem the U.S. needs to address --
even though the government in Caracas is recognized as
legitimate by all and is considered an ally, even a
close one, by most Latin American countries. Latin
Americans may "know what is best for themselves," as
the new report concedes, yet Washington still knows
better, and so should back "social justice" issues as a
means to win Venezuelans and other Latin Americans away
from Chavez.

That the Council report regularly places "social
justice" between scare quotes suggests that the phrase
is used more as a marketing ploy -- kind of like "New
Coke" -- than to signal that U.S. banks and
corporations are willing to make substantive
concessions to Latin American nationalists. Seven
decades ago, Franklin Roosevelt supported the right of
Latin American countries to nationalize U.S. interests,
including Standard Oil holdings in Bolivia and Mexico,
saying it was time for others in the hemisphere to get
their "fair share." Three decades ago, the Linowitz
Commission recommended the establishment of a "code of
conduct" defining the responsibilities of foreign
corporations in the region and recognizing the right of
governments to nationalize industries and resources.

The Council, in contrast, sneers at Chavez's far milder
efforts to create joint ventures with oil
multinationals, while offering nothing but pablum in
its place. Its centerpiece recommendation -- aimed at
cultivating Brazil as a potential anchor of a post-
Bush, post-Chavez hemispheric order -- urges the
abolition of subsidies and tariffs protecting U.S.
agro-industry in order to advance a "Biofuel
Partnership" with Brazil's own behemoth agricultural
sector. This would be an environmental disaster,
pushing large, mechanized plantations ever deeper into
the Amazon basin, while doing nothing to generate
decent jobs or distribute wealth more fairly.

Dominated by representatives from the finance sector of
the U.S. economy, the Council recommends little beyond
continuing the failed corporate "free trade" policies
of the last twenty years -- and, in this case, those
scare quotes are justified because what they're
advocating is about as free as corporate "social
justice" is just.

An Obama Doctrine?

So far, Barack Obama promises little better. A few
weeks ago, he traveled to Miami and gave a major
address on Latin America to the Cuban American National
Foundation. It was hardly an auspicious venue for a
speech that promised to "engage the people of the
region with the respect owed to a partner."

Surely, the priorities for humane engagement would have
been different had he been addressing not wealthy
right-wing Cuban exiles but an audience, say, of the
kinds of Latino migrants in Los Angeles who have
revitalized the U.S. labor movement, or of Central
American families in Postville, Iowa, where immigration
and Justice Department authorities recently staged a
massive raid on a meatpacking plant, arresting as many
as 700 undocumented workers. Obama did call for
comprehensive immigration reform and promised to
fulfill Franklin Roosevelt's 68 year-old Four Freedoms
agenda, including the social-democratic "freedom from
want." Yet he spent much of his speech throwing red
meat to his Cuban audience.

Ignoring the not-exactly-radical advice of the Council
on Foreign Relations, the candidate pledged to maintain
the embargo on Cuba. And then he went further. Sounding
a bit like Frank Gaffney, he all but accused the Bush
administration of "losing Latin America" and allowing
China, Europe, and "demagogues like Hugo Chavez" to
step "into the vacuum." He even raised the specter of
Iranian influence in the region, pointing out that
"just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint
bank with their windfall oil profits."

Whatever one's opinion on Hugo Chavez, any diplomacy
that claims to take Latin American opinion seriously
has to acknowledge one thing: Most of the region's
leaders not only don't see him as a "problem," but have
joined him on major economic and political initiatives
like the Bank of the South, an alternative to the
International Monetary Fund and the Union of South
American Nations, modeled on the European Union,
established just two weeks ago. And any U.S. president
who is sincere in wanting to help Latin Americans
liberate themselves from "want" will have to work with
the Latin American left -- in all its varieties.

But more ominous than Obama's posturing on Venezuela is
his position on Colombia. Critics have long pointed out
that the billions of dollars in military aid provided
to the Colombian security forces to defeat the FARC
insurgency and curtail cocaine production would
discourage a negotiated end to the civil war in that
country and potentially provoke its escalation into
neighboring Andean lands. That's exactly what happened
last March, when Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe
ordered the bombing of a rebel camp located in Ecuador
(possibly with U.S. logistical support supplied from
Manta Air Force Base, which gives you an idea of why
Correa wants to give it to China). To justify the raid,
Uribe explicitly invoked the Bush Doctrine's right of
preemptive, unilateral action. In response, Ecuador and
Venezuela began to mobilize troops along their border
with Colombia, bringing the region to the precipice of
war.

Most interestingly, in that conflict, an overwhelming
majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries
sided with Venezuela and Ecuador, categorically
condemning the Colombian raid and reaffirming the
sovereignty of individual nations recognized by
Franklin Roosevelt long ago. Not Obama, however. He
essentially endorsed the Bush administration's drive to
transform Colombia's relations with its Andean
neighbors into the one Israel has with most of the
Middle East. In his Miami speech, he swore that he
would "support Colombia's right to strike terrorists
who seek safe-havens across its borders."

Equally troublesome has been Obama's endorsement of the
controversial Merida Initiative, which human rights
groups like Amnesty International have condemned as an
application of the "Colombian solution" to Mexico and
Central America, providing their militaries and police
with a massive infusion of money to combat drugs and
gangs. Crime is indeed a serious problem in these
countries, and deserves considered attention. It's
chilling, however, to have Colombia -- where death-
squads now have infiltrated every level of government,
and where union and other political activists are
executed on a regular basis -- held up as a model for
other parts of Latin America.

Obama, however, not only supports the initiative, but
wants to expand it beyond Mexico and Central America.
"We must press further south as well," he said in
Miami.

It seems that once again that, as in the 1970s, reports
of the death of the Monroe Doctrine are greatly
exaggerated.

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He
is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the
United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and
The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold
War.

Copyright 2008 Greg Grandin

[Bacchus39]

1. you've seen his speech in Miami, there you go

Democrats for Obama!!!!

[Judi Lynn]

2. Super quote for us Democrats, from F.D.R. appears in your post:

"Franklin Roosevelt supported the right of Latin American countries to nationalize U.S. interests, including Standard Oil holdings in Bolivia and Mexico, saying it was time for others in the hemisphere to get their "fair share." Three decades ago, the Linowitz Commission recommended the establishment of a "code of conduct" defining the responsibilities of foreign corporations in the region and recognizing the right of governments to nationalize industries and resources."

Also:

Whatever one's opinion on Hugo Chávez, any diplomacy that claims to take Latin American opinion seriously has to acknowledge one thing: Most of the region's leaders not only don't see him as a "problem," but have joined him on major economic and political initiatives like the Bank of the South, an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the Union of South American Nations, modeled on the European Union, established just two weeks ago. And any U.S. president who is sincere in wanting to help Latin Americans liberate themselves from "want" will have to work with the Latin American left -- in all its varieties.

This is a tremendous examination of what we're seeing. I hope the candidate will prove us wrong by backing away from his pro-asshole remarks in Miami.

THANKS, MAGBANA, for a great article.

[Bacchus39]

3. I am confident Obama will do what is in the US's interests (which is what you oppose)

and bitch slap Chavez whenever necessary.

One typically supports a candidate and party based on his/her/its views. where does that leave you?

[magbana]

6. "Bitch Slap" Bacchus??

Jeez, I don't think I have said anything as stupid and vulgar about Luis Posada Carriles. Your analysis is fascinating. and increasingly amusing.

[Bacchus39]

10. thanks, you are entertaining too

although its usually inadvertent.

[Judi Lynn]

7. How amazingly odd, and childish.

Are you sure this is the forum you need to grace?

Many Democrats believe in what's going on in Venezuela and most of Latin America already, including blocking the FTA with Colombia.
That's why the FTA is still not going anywhere.

By the way, you might want to read this, Mr. Uribe supporter:

April 2, 2008, 10:29 am
Obama Vows Opposition to Colombia Trade Deal
Nick Timiraos reports from Philadelphia, Pa. on the presidential race.

Sen. Barack Obama promised to stand firm in his opposition to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday–days after President Bush asked Congress to quickly pass the trade deal–in a speech to rally the union vote at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO’s annual convention.

The Illinois senator said he would oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

Unions have lobbied hard against the measure in part because of concerns of the deaths of trade unionists in Colombia. Congress passed a similar free trade deal with Peru in December. Obama and rival Sen. Hillary Clinton supported the deal but were not present to vote on it.

Obama told the union assembly that he was tired of unions “playing defense,” but he also looked to set himself apart from Clinton, who spoke before the convention yesterday and compared herself to the fictional Philadelphia fighter Rocky Balboa.
“Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people,” Clinton said Tuesday.

More:
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/04/02/obama-vows-opposition-to-colombia-trade-deal/?mod=WSJBlog

~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Wall Street Journal had to print it. Bet that chapped their asses.

[Bacchus39]

9. yes, I know because I've actually have read Obama's position

and am NOT disappointed with it as so many "Democrats" who post in the Latin American forum are.

[magbana]

4. Yes, Judi, I thought this was a good article as well . . .

This is the kind of article to keep in a file and use at any opportunity to talk to others about.

[Bacchus39]

5. here is another article to keep on file

http://www.barackobama.com/2008/05/23/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_68.php

[Judi Lynn]

8. Exactly right! n/t