While Obama might have some hope for an open-minded approach to this issue, based on her campaign, there seems to be little question how a Hillary Clinton presidency would come down on such matters. Indeed, she and her supporters have embraced identity politics with a depressing regularity, from the candidate’s “crying” moment to Susan Estrich’s New Hampshire-eve screed to the disturbing assertion of a posthumous Ann Richards endorsement for Hillary. The campaign’s most recent meme—Hillary as the victim of a misogynist press—fits into this pattern as well; few in the campaign, it seemed, claimed journalistic sexism when Obama trailed by 20 points and these same reporters were hailing Clinton as inevitable.

As Clinton’s support in the African-American community has collapsed, influential black congressional leaders have distanced themselves from her—Charlie Rangel’s wife endorsed Obama, John Lewis has repeatedly hinted that he’s preparing to switch sides. Among African-American House members, Clinton has been left with figures who could be caricatures of the flaws inherent in identity politics—the ethically challenged Emmanuel Cleaver, or the simply embarrassing Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

According to Sean Wilentz, however, this sorry development for the Clinton campaign didn’t result from her flaws as a candidate, or from younger voters’ seeming desire to move beyond identity politics, but from Obama’s having engaged in “cutthroat, fraudulent politics”—indeed, in “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights.”

Wilentz’s exceptionally bitter piece, mentioned below by Ralph, brought to mind the observation of Dana Milbank in yesterday’s Washington Post: the arch-Clintonites seem eager to present “a fascinating tour of an alternate universe.”

Take one example: in dismissing the possibility of a Bradley effect in New Hampshire, for instance, Wilentz writes, “But even on primary night, it was clear that Obama's total--36.4%--was virtually identical to what the polls over the previous three weeks had predicted he would receive. Clinton won because late-deciding voters--and especially college-educated women in their twenties--broke for her by a huge majority.”

They did? According to the New Hampshire exit poll, Clinton won the voters who decided on Election Day by a three-point margin (39 to 36 percent). Obama actually carried those who had decided in the three days before the election (37 to 36 percent). How does Wilentz consider this a “huge majority” for Clinton? He doesn’t say. (His article doesn’t cite any exit poll figures at all.)

Maybe Wilentz is right that there was no Bradley effect in New Hampshire, and that the Obama campaign convinced a media that ignored facts to peddle the storyline. Yet since Wilentz’s own storyline ignored the exit poll figures, his claim is hardly credible.

Wilentz also goes out of his way to defend Bill Clinton’s performance in the South Carolina primary. Wilentz’s long article doesn’t mention Clinton’s pre-primary statement that “as far as I can tell, neither Senator Obama nor Hillary have lost votes because of their race or gender. They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender—that’s why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here.” (By that standard, of course, it would have been hard for Obama to have won anywhere, since women have been a majority in every Democratic primary thus far.) And the Princeton historian pooh-poohs the former President’s post-primary linkage of Obama’s performance with Jesse Jackson’s two victories in the state.

In this respect, Wilentz appears to be more royalist than the king: even most in the Clinton campaign have conceded the harm caused by Bill Clinton’s attacks on Obama.

Portraying Obama as a race-baiter, I fear, will be no more successful than any of the other “kitchen sink” attacks from Clinton supporters in recent days.

You can access Frederick M. Hess's"Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now," American Enterprise Institute, 26 February, which is featured in Sam Dillon,"Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions," NYT, 27 February, and Greg Toppo,"Teens losing touch with common cultural and historical references," USA Today, 26 February.

Drew Hansen,"The rules on plagiarism, (with full credit to MLK)," Houston Chronicle, 24 February, proposes three rules for evaluating charges of plagiarism in public speech. Thanks to David Garrow for the tip. See also: Timothy Noah's"Doris Goodwin on Obama's Borrowings: One of these two people has committed plagiarism, and it isn't Obama," Slate, 26 February.

Jennifer Howard,"Landmark Digital History Monograph Project Goes Open Access," CHE, 26 February (free link to non-subscribers), fleshes out the announcement in Rob Townsend's"Gutenberg-e Books Now Available Open Access and through ACLS Humanities E-Book," AHA Today, 12 February.

Finally, farewell to the late, great George M. Fredrickson. At The Edge of the American West, Eric Rauchway pays fitting tribute to his mentor.

One day in the reading room back in the 1980's, prior to the invention of laptop computers and a set of rules imposed by the Giuliani administration to prevent vagrants from coming to the library in the winter to thaw out, my friend Barbara pointed out a number of people sitting at one of the long tables and said:"Just try to guess which are the historians and which are the homeless." And indeed, each person at the table was wrapped in odd layers of grimy clothing and shuffling index cards and scraps of paper around. Upon closer inspection, some were scholars and others were -- well, just shuffling scraps of paper, trying to find a pattern.

As Eric Rauchway points out, the NYPL, Patience and Fortitude are about to get a facelift; but, twenty years later, I'm still"just shuffling scraps of paper, trying to find a pattern."

12x30.net is a very useful resource for all things calendar. If, like me, you do close research that may require you to know whether 21 February 1848 was a Tuesday, try 12x30.net/anymonth. It works for any month between 1583 CE and 9999 CE.

Holland Cotter,"Looking at You, Looking at Her," NYT, 22 February, reviews"Parmigianino's ‘Antea': A Beautiful Artifice," the exhibit of a single painting at New York's Frick Collection. The identity of the painter and the title of this gorgeous portrait are questionable and its parts aren't obvious fits:

Her head is far too small and delicate for her freakishly slope-shouldered linebacker's body, its bulk reinforced by the nearly full-length standing pose, rare in female portraiture at that time. In addition her left arm, with its huge gloved hand, looks illogically long. It seems to have nothing to do with Antea herself but to belong to a second, larger, encasing body, a kind of silken fat suit, represented by her voluminous coat. So this is an image of the figure as a thing of contradictions, a fictional composite rather than an organic whole.

Brian Phillips,"The Old, Weird Everywhere: Bristol Rovers and ‘Goodnight, Irene'," Pitch Invasion.net, 16 February. I stole this from Rob MacDougall because he finds great stuff! And, congratulations to Rob, whose"Long Lines: AT&T's Long-Distance Network as an Organizational and Political Strategy," Business History Review 80 (Summer 2006): 297-327, has won the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's 2008 Fishel-Calhoun Prize for the best published article by a new scholar on United States history between 1865 and 1917.

Finally, Kevin Levin, David Noon, and Ari Kelman think you need to get a load of this:

Leaves ya sorta speechless, don't it?

William Grimes,"Separating the Mythology From the Raw Politics of a Senate Campaign," NYT, 20 February, reviews Allen Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America.

Adam Kirsch,"Arabian Knights," NY Sun, 20 February, reviews James Barr's Setting the Desert on Fire: T. E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918.

Darryl Pinckney's"Dreams from Obama," NYRB, 6 March, reviews Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

Finally, our colleague, Manan Ahmed, appears on Chicago Public Radio's Worldview to comment on developments after Pakistan's recent national elections; Reihan Salam makes the case that, after Andrew Sullivan, our colleague, Daniel Larison, is America's Greatest Political Blogger; and congratulations to our colleague, Chris Bray, whose daughter, Madeline Eloise Cherkis-Bray, arrived early, on February 18 at 10:27 p.m., weighing 5 lbs. 11 ounces.

In recent decades, these interpretations have come under attack precisely because of their implications for modern politics. Where strong emperors were once lauded as scourges of"feudalism" and fragmentation, some see their concentration of power, their deployment of propaganda and their exercise of control over public life in a more sinister light. Comparisons with the Soviet Union, while overwrought, appear from time to time in important monographs.

The article says:

The television film seems to be in that genre. In it, Father Tikhon is transported in full attire from a snow-swept church to Istanbul and Venice, where he exposes the West as a “genetic” hater of both Byzantium and its spiritual heir: Russia. The Byzantine empire's rich and cultured capital, Constantinople, was the envy of dark and aggressive barbarians from the West, who looted it during the fourth crusade in 1204. Modern Western capitalism, argues Father Tikhon, is built on Byzantine loot and Jewish usury.

In this version, Byzantium's first mistake was to trust the West (represented in the film by a cloaked figure in a sinister, long-nosed Venetian mask) and surrender the commanding heights of the economy—trading and customs collection—to Western entrepreneurs and greedy oligarchs. Using a term from today's Russia, Father Tikhon talks of some “stabilisation fund” when describing the achievements of one Byzantine emperor, Basil II, godfather to Russia's Prince Vladimir, who crushed separatists and sent oligarchs to prison. But even great emperors could have weak successors. (The film was made before Mr Putin chose Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, to be endorsed by voters in the election on March 2nd.)

The film's usage of modern words and imagery is so conspicuous that the moral cannot escape a Russian viewer. Instead of sticking to its traditions, Byzantium tried to reform and modernise, as the West demanded, and it paid the price. Worst of all, the West infiltrated Byzantium with harmful, individualistic ideas, which destroyed the core values of the empire—so the people lost faith in their rulers.

The image of Byzantium presented here is, of course, distorted in important ways, but still draws on classic interpretations that can be found in The History of the Byzantine State by Ostrogorsky. In Ostrogorsky's view, Basil II combated the"powerful" (dynatoi) on behalf of the"poor" (ptochoi) and punished the alienation of revenue-bearing lands to these powerful aristocratic landlords, and he ruled as a military and expansionist emperor. This has a certain obvious appeal to a nationalist authoritarian government that has made a show of reining in its wealthy oligarchs (along with everyone else).

When Ostrogorsky was developing his general theory of the decline of the empire, which he identified as the result of decentralization, loss of lands and revenues to the aristocracy (which he dubbed feudalism), the predominance of Italian mercantile powers and the disappearance of the Byzantine army, consolidating power in the hands of the emperor appeared to be the way to stabilize state institutions. As others have noted since, Ostrogorsky's was a history of the Byzantine state, which led him, as it can lead historians with a focus on institutional history, to valorize the institution-builders and damn those who neglect or undermine institutions. There has since been a backlash against this, and it is perhaps ironic that it was the great Russian Byzantinist Kazhdan, coming out of the Soviet Union, who promoted the critique of this latent admiration for strong emperors and a strong state apparatus. To summarize rather crudely, what Ostrogorsky judged to be prudent reforms of economic and social abuses by the aristocracy could be seen in recent times as the source of arbitrary and repressive government from the center.

Basil II has long been a favorite of modern nationalists and empire-builders. At the time of the Macedonian Struggle and the Balkan Wars, Greek irredentists deployed Basil II ("the Bulgar-slayer") as the exemplar of Greek leadership and victorious military struggle over the Bulgars/Bulgarians. Kostis Palamas, the great demoticist Greek poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, included Basil II in the conclusion of his important work, The king's flute, and Penelope Delta authored a popular history of Basil's reign that identified Basil's victory and the legendary atrocities he carried out against the Bulgar army after Kleidion with the modern Greek cause in Macedonia. In their flight of fancy, some Greek propaganda posters even depicted Constantine I as Bulgaroktonos. By comparison, the current Russian uses of the emperor and Byzantine history more generally are frustrating for those who are trying to emphasize Byzantium's connections with western Europe, but they are also somewhat less threatening.

The greatest irony of the Russian deployment of Byzantine political history is that Russia's period of modern absolutist, centralist rule began with the advent of Westernization in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and has literally nothing to do with Byzantium. The"Caesaropapism" of which Byzantium is sometimes still accused did not exist in the Orthodox world--the closest thing to the caricature of Byzantine church-state relations was the post-Petrine position of the Synod as effectively an arm of the Russian state. It is quite remarkable that the most eloquent proponents of a starkly pro-Orthodox, anti-Western, romantic Russian nationalism of the kind hinted at in the description of the film in question were the Slavophiles of the mid-19th century, who deplored the introduction of absolutist rule and desired the return of a weaker, pre-Petrine monarchy that respected the power of the boyars. Putinism has made a weird fusion of the anti-Western critique of the Slavophiles with a post-Petrine Westernizing centralism, masking the contradiction with the references to the Byzantine past.

Wilentz and Zelizer didn't mention what strikes me as a major shortcoming of the Democrats' process revealed by this campaign—how the excessively anti-majoritarian delegate allocation process affects a two-person race. As anyone following the campaign has come to learn, in congressional districts assigned an even number of delegates, candidates can be separated by as much as 15 percent and still receive the same number of delegates. Though I'm an Obama supporter, I readily concede that this structure has been successfully exploited by the Obama campaign (part of a general pattern of tactical superiority by the Obama forces). The party's disinclination to give a real reward to winners is highly problematic.

Wilentz and Zelizer also largely avoid a critical problem of the current system—the pressure for frontloading caused by the dominance of Iowa and New Hampshire. They speak favorably of the era before primaries played such a large role in the process, but, realistically, we're unlikely to return to such a system.

The recent pattern of nominating contests being decided in the immediate aftermath of Iowa and New Hampshire produced the understandable, if disastrous, decision of Michigan and Florida to violate party rules and move their primaries to January. It also yielded the creation of a mega-Tuesday primary with Illinois, California, New York, Missouri, and New Jersey all moving their primaries to the earliest date allowed by the parties. In retrospect, of course, some if not all of these states would have exercised more influence in this year's race by voting later.

Zelizer and Wilentz make two recommendations dealing with the system as it currently exists. First, they argue for abolishing caucuses. I agree with them that primaries are far preferable to caucuses, if only because primaries provide for the secret ballot.

The decision of many smaller states to choose delegates by caucuses, however, is inextricably linked with the problem of frontloading. Here's a clip, from late 2007, of Hillary Clinton describing the 2008 process.


Clinton, it's worth remembering, was hardly the only person to believe"it's not a very long run; it'll be over by Feb. 5"; it seems as if just about everyone outside of the Obama campaign did.

Put yourself, then, in the position of a state legislator from Maine, or Wyoming, or Nebraska—or even some of the smaller and expected-to-be-overlooked Super Tuesday states, like Kansas, Idaho, or Alaska. If even the party's overwhelming favorite is saying that the outcome will be decided before your state votes, why should you appropriate funds for a primary? The parties, in short, need to give smaller states a reason (i.e., through a system of rotating regional primaries) to fund primaries.

Absent such a change, caucuses seem likely to remain. The traditional argument against them is that, because of low turnouts, they skew toward the ideological extremes. While that's held true on the GOP side in 2008, the story among Democrats has been much different—all Democratic caucuses have had massive increases in turnout, perhaps minimizing the role of the party's far left.

Wilentz and Zelizer don't make this argument against caucuses; instead, they note that caucuses can disenfranchise the working poor. (The Clinton campaign has made a similar claim, although in its case the apparent goal has been to dismiss the candidate's disastrous performance in caucus states; the willingness of Clinton allies to sue to shut down workplace caucus sites in Nevada suggests that concern with the disenfranchisement of the working poor is a recent discovery of the campaign.) Yet if disenfranchisement rather than ideological skewing is the key problem, it can be solved without eliminating caucuses. Instead, the parties could mandate that all caucus states follow the model of the Maine caucuses, which have absentee balloting. Around 4000 people caucused by absentee ballots in the 2008 Maine Democratic caucus.

The most radical recommendation of Wilentz and Zelizer comes in their call to eliminate open primaries. Presidential preference primaries originated as a Progressive Era reform, in states like Wisconsin, North Dakota, and California. The goal was to weaken the power of party bosses by allowing the people (of any party) to vote. The ideal of primaries, in short, envisioned open primaries. Although some states have prevented members of the other party or independents from participating in their primaries, open primaries are still the norm for Democrats (in around two-thirds of states).

Wilentz and Zelizer note,"Open primaries and caucuses (in which anyone can vote, not just registered party members) let voters from the other party cause all sorts of mischief. A Republican convinced that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is too divisive to win in the fall could vote for her in some Democratic contests in the spring, hoping to saddle the Democrats with a losing nominee. Or, as Sen. Barack Obama's campaign did in Nevada, a candidate can openly appeal for votes from people outside his or her party in order to stop a rival. The winners are outsiders hoping to game the system; the losers are rank-and-file party members whose choices count less."

If, in fact, large numbers of Republicans were voting in Democratic primaries with the express purpose of saddling the party with the less electable (according to current polls) Clinton, this would be a serious problem. Yet there's no evidence of any such occurrence: indeed, in state after state, Obama has outperformed Clinton among independents and the small number of Republicans who have voted in Democratic primaries. Making such a radical structural change by abolishing open primaries should require more than a theoretical problem.

Moreover, as Wilentz and Zelizer correctly note,"Primaries tend to favor highly committed voters from the extremes of both parties, who are much more likely to turn up than moderates. So candidates have strong incentives to pander to their extremist flanks, throwing red meat that they may well regret in November or in the White House." By allowing independents—who are disproportionately moderates—to participate, open primaries help minimize this problem.

The current system—the dominance of Iowa and New Hampshire, plus the absolute reliance on primaries and caucuses—dates only from 1976. It is, as Wilentz and Zelizer entitle their op-ed, a"rotten way to pick a President." Unfortunately, though, one lesson of the period since 1968 is that the seemingly quadrennial process of post-election reforms has only succeeded in making a"rotten" system more so.