Barack Obama

The New York Times reports that Secretary of State John Kerry is not pessimistic about the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” In Jerusalem to begin a little shuttle diplomacy between the Israeli capital and Ramallah, he said he hopes that by “being methodical, careful, patient, but detailed and tenacious, that we can lay out a path ahead that could conceivably surprise people.”

To Kerry’s credit, he is not feigning optimism. His words are quite precise in fact. He only hopes that he will succeed in laying out a path that might “surprise people.”

That wouldn’t take much because any movement at all would be a surprise. Merely getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to acknowledge that he hopes that someday there will be peace with the Palestinians would count as a surprise, although it would be meaningless.

But nothing of any significance will be achieved by Kerry’s trip. That is because the “peace process” is about Israel exchanging the West Bank for peace and recognition from the Palestinians.

This exchange was encapsulated in United Nations Resolution 242, passed in 1967 under U.S. sponsorship, which has remained the core of every Middle East peace proposal since.

The “land for peace” exchange has not taken place, and it won’t despite Kerry’s efforts, because Israel intends to keep the West Bank, not only keep it but thoroughly colonize it until it is as Israeli as Tel Aviv.

There are today 350,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank (double the number in 2000). Netanyahu has made clear that those settlers are staying, and that their numbers will grow. Referring to Prime Minister Sharon’s removal of settlements from Gaza, Netanyahu said, “the days of the bulldozers uprooting Jews are behind us, not before us.”

Nothing Netanyahu has done in office indicates that he is being anything other than totally sincere. He intends to keep the land. There will be no Palestinian state there.

That being the case, there really is nothing to negotiate. Yes, Resolution 242 has two parts. One calls for Israel returning the land while the other calls for recognition of Israel and its right to security. Happily, there is no need to negotiate about that second part as the Palestinians, under Yasir Arafat, accepted those conditions in 1993. Although Hamas in Gaza does not recognize Israel, the Palestinian Authority (which controls the West Bank) not only accepts Israel, it essentially patrols the West Bank for Israel. It could not be more accepting of Israel if it adopted Judaism as the religion of any future Palestinian state. And it is the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, with whom Kerry is trying to broker peace.

None of this matters to Netanyahu or the rightists that constitute his governing coalition. Even Israel’s Finance Minister, Yair Lapid, who was elected in January as a moderate, and was always perceived as such, now says that he too wants to hold the West Bank and expand settlements. As for Gaza, nominally free of Israeli control, it is still blockaded by Israel which controls its land, sea and air. And Gaza, according to Israel, is no longer occupied.

As I was writing this, I received an email from J Street, the organization that was set up as the alternative to the pro-Netanyahu Israel lobby. It has been reduced to asking its members to contact Israel’s ambassador to the United States to say the following:

Ambassador Oren, please clarify the recent remarks by members of Knesset that the two-state solution is not the official policy of the Israeli government right away.

Pathetic, isn’t it?

The answer to J Street’s query is, of course, “yes.” The “two-state solution” is the official policy of the Israeli government. It will, however, not be put into effect.

Of course, the United States could change that if President Obama linked the continued provision of aid to Israel to its agreeing to abide by the terms of United Nations Resolution 242 and the other land-for-peace agreements. But he won’t do that. The Democratic Party is too dependent on funding from donors associated with the Israel lobby for that kind of action.

And that is why the Kerry mission is a joke.

It is also why, Obama, Kerry and the rest of the administration should stop even paying lip service to the idea that there is a “peace process.” Pretending it still exists only helps Netanyahu. He can keep all the land, keep expanding settlements and still tell the Israeli people that he is working with the United States to achieve peace. That way he has his cake and eats it too. We are playing his game by his rules.

Enough. There is no “peace process.”

The world’s last remaining superpower has more than met its match.

And it folded.

M.J. Rosenberg is a Special Correspondent for The Washington Spectator. He was most recently a Foreign Policy fellow at Media Matters For America. Previously, he spent 15 years as a Senate and House aide. Early in his career he was editor of AIPAC's newsletter Near East Report. From 1998-2009, he was director of policy at Israel Policy Forum. Follow him @MJayRosenberg and @WashSpec. (Image source: Times of Israel.)

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The president spoke at Morehouse College's commencement on Sunday. He did what he's been doing to black people since 2008 — pathologize black behavior. He said, in part:

Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is, there’s no longer any room for excuses.

After he used the word "excuse" four times, I stopped counting.

Then he goes deeper:

Every one of you has a grandma or an uncle or a parent whose told you at some point in life as an African American you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.

I've heard this "twice as hard" speech a thousand times, but never from a person with the power to change the structural landscape that breeds racial inequality. When an elder gives you the "twice as hard" speech, it makes sense. It's a defense against racism. When the first black president says it, it makes him look like a walking contradiction.

This sort of “tough love” speech is reserved for African-Amerian audiences. In our racialized society, it is assumed there is something inherently backward in black culture. But what's backward is Obama's tacitly acknowledging the racism of "twice as hard" and his refusing to offer a policy prescription for it.

Unless he's willing to improve his own performance, Obama has no right to tell Morehouse graduates to be twice as good. He refuses to discuss issues that disproportionately impact the black community -- such as double-digit unemployment -- for fear of raising the ire of right-wing hacks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. He should fight income inequality so those on the bottom, many of whom are black, can earn a bigger chunk of the pie. That's a policy prescription. Telling black grads to work twice as hard puts the onus on them to right the historical wrong of racial inequality.

When asked by members of the black community to do more to aid blacks during the recession, Obama recoiled, saying he is the president of all of America, not just black America. Fine. If that's the case, Obama should act like it.

If he's not the president of black America, then he shouldn't have brought stories of working "twice as hard" to Morehouse. If Obama can't be a black president all the time, then he shouldn't be a black president part of the time. If he can't be the black president when it's time to help the black community, then he shouldn't be one when it's time to offer black sage wisdom.

Something like Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford would've been much more fitting from our first post-racial president.

Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Yourblackworld. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

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(The Justice Department kept tabs on Associated Press reporters. If President Obama doesn't drop the hubris and show real leadership, says Doug Daniels, the next three and a half years are going to stuffed with congressional hearings and hit-job investigations by giddy Republicans, and we can forgot about advancing any progressive agenda, like gun control. Image source: AP). 

Since Sept. 11, there has been a relentless and predictable attempt, usually from those on the conservative right, to justify the erosion and suspension of constitutional liberties by playing the terrorism card. It was a thin argument then, and it still is today.

Unfortunately, the country has learned once again that the Justice Department has pursued overly intrusive policies and shrouded them in the ever-exploited name of national security. Its seizure of a broad swath of Associated Press phone records from last year has triggered an almost comically hypocritical eruption of outrage from conservatives, who largely cheered during the Bush years as that administration engaged in a tremendous amount of journalistic intimidation and constitutional overreach. But that doesn’t mean their outrage is unfounded.

While the secret subpoenas were not illegal, they stand in stark contradiction to the spirit of a free press, and it’s disingenuous, at best, for the White House to distance itself from the type of policy that has been the hallmark of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department. On the issue of leaks, this administration has crossed the line from thoroughness into zealotry, selectively prosecuting leaks it finds politically damaging, while shrugging off others, (like the one concerning the Bin Laden operation, for instance.) So far during the Obama presidency, six people have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which previously had only been used three times throughout its entire history. Any journalist who has worked in Washington understands the reality of leaks: They are an accepted component of the DC machinery.

The focus in this case has understandably been on the violation of trust between the government and the press. However, reporters from an organization like the AP won’t be intimidated. In fact, they’ll likely become emboldened and more aggressive.

But when it comes to leaks, press intimidation has never been the central objective of this administration; intimidating potential whistle-blowers has.

The Justice Department, of course, insists its actions were entirely necessary for the purposes of national security. But the records were obtained with no prior notification to the AP, and included work and personal phones used by more than 100 reporters over a two month period in multiple states. Obviously many of these conversations were entirely unrelated to the investigation centering on a terror plot out of Yemen. And the AP says it withheld the story in question until they were told there was no longer a national security threat. Even Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, openly expressed his skepticism that the government’s fishing expedition could be justified.

On Wednesday, in a transparent attempt at damage control, the White House instructed its Senate liaison to ask Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to reintroduce his press shield bill that stalled in 2009. The law would be a good first step in protecting journalists and their sources, but it’s unclear whether such a law would have prevented the staggering breadth of the subpoenas in the case of the Associated Press.

Between the AP story and the IRS scandal, reasonable Americans (beyond the Tea Party nihilists and conspiracy theorists) probably aren’t feeling too confident in their government at the moment. The president’s reaction has been far too tepid and detached. It’s time for him to send a very clear message by making heads roll at the IRS and Justice Department. Eric Holder has long-overstayed his welcome and should resign, along with Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who oversaw the AP investigation after Holder recused himself.

But more important than personnel changes, the White House should make it clear these types of policies will not continue, and the president should very aggressively pursue legislation that would make conversations between reporters and sources privileged and not subject to subpoena.

For a president that obsesses over message management, Obama seems oddly content to allow parts of his administration to spiral out of control while he stands on the sidelines. If he doesn’t demonstrate some real leadership and show that the type of hubris on display this week is unacceptable, the rest of his term will be defined by congressional hearings and investigations, not by the progress he could achieve on landmark issues like immigration reform, gun control, and health-care reform, which still has a bumpy road towards implementation.

If the president’s whiny, evasive tone this week is any indication, those of us with hopes for genuine progressive reforms may have a rough three and a half years ahead.

Doug Daniels, a freelance journalist, is a former staff reporter for Campaigns & Elections. He is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sifting Through the Wreckage.

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(In January, Hillary Clinton gave testimoney on the attacks on a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe described the former secretary of state as having a "forceful attitude" that he wasn't accustomed to hearing from women.)

Some Republicans would like us to believe Benghazi is another Watergate. President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton betrayed their oaths of office, they say, and were more concerned with politics than with rescuing besieged personnel at a diplomatic outpost.

A new poll by Public Policy Polling suggests that all this effort to whip up scandal over the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Libya, in which four American diplomats were killed, is not paying off. Instead, the controversy is ending where it began -- as a niche issue for listeners of AM talk radio who already believed it's another Watergate even if they can't quite place Benghazi on the map.

Yet the GOP leadership is persisting with this fetish. Why?

One, Republicans want to repair their reputation as the party of national security. Two, Benghazi is a chance to take aim at Clinton before her presumed run in the 2016 election.

But beneath all this is something uglier, something far more destructive.

They are using Benghazi to undermine the legitimacy of America's first black president.

Note the pattern. Obama is not an American citizen, certainly not "natural born." He's a closet "Muslim" who "hates" white people and attended an "anti-white" church while being mentored by "domestic terrorists." Mitt Romney’s utterly failed election strategy was to mobilize white voters with appeals to racial tribalism and identity politics. He used a mix of dog whistles and overt racial signals to suggest that Obama is a type of political "Other" not to be trusted as president.

Attacks on Clinton originate from similar anxieties, only these are about a country in which a particular type of white masculinity is in peril. In a mirror of the racially tinged attacks on Obama by the right-wing media, Clinton has been described as "angry" and "not knowing her place."

In January hearings on Benghazi, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma channeled this crude sexism when he said: "I think that [Clinton] has gotten by with that type of a forceful attitude, something that’s not normally accustomed — that you don’t hear from women as much as you do men." Clinton is no stranger to such assaults. In the 1990s, conservatives accused her and her husband of committing murder in a long-forgotten scandal that was once known as Whitewater.

As we saw during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, contemporary populist conservatism is nothing if not an exercise in protecting white male privilege vis-a-vis appeals to white victimhood  polarizing rhetoric such as "real America" and "taking our country back."

In this context, a black president and a female secretary of state are potent symbols that arouse hostility and anxiety among many Republicans, especially the Tea Party base of the GOP.

In post-civil rights era America, there has been a retreat from a constructive and critical engagement with how inequalities of race and gender impact social policy and the Good Society.

Moreover, the ethic of “colorblindness” has been reimagined to mean that those who dare discuss systemic, personal, or institutional examples of white racism are maligned as “the real racists.”

This strategy has born fruit: Despite all the available evidence of how racism and racial inequality continues to negatively impact the life chances of people of color, public opinion surveys reveal a significant percentage of white Americans feel "oppressed" and believe that "racism" against white people is a bigger social problem than discrimination against racial minorities.

The Benghazi scandal is the union of two very powerful forces in the age of Obama.

The first, what social scientists have termed “symbolic racism,” is a type of white racial animus that views people of color, and blacks in particular, as not worthy of trust or full citizenship. The second is how movement conservatism's war on women’s reproductive rights, equality, and freedom is predicated on the idea that men are naturally dominant and women naturally subordinate.

A black president and a female secretary of state cannot be reconciled within such a worldview.

Conservatives will predictably respond in a shrill manner to such a suggestion. Yet given the ways in which racism and sexism are dominant landmarks on the cognitive map of contemporary right-wing politics, the synergy of those two social forces are over-determining the Republican Party’s hostility.

The manufactured Benghazi scandal is a perfect storm for a Republican Party wherein racism and sexism are synonymous with contemporary conservatism.

Chauncey DeVega, a pen name, is the founder and editor of We Are Respectable Negroes. His commentary has appeared in Salon, Alternet, the New York Daily News and the BBC. Follow him @chaunceydevega and @WashSpec.

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This article has been updated.

In April, it was revealed that among the advisors to Ron Paul's newly opened Institute for Peace and Prosperity were: an anti-semite; a flake who thinks Abraham Lincoln is one of history’s greatest monsters; a 9-11 conspiracy theorist; and Lew Rockwell.

But that's not why April was a cruel month for Paul.

April saw the price of gold drop to levels unseen since 1980.

Paul invests almost exclusively in gold. His portfolio is "a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds." So when asked if he had second thoughts about his belief that gold is the only secure benchmark of real wealth, Paul said no. Instead, he hinted at a conspiracy by President Obama and Wall Street to slash the price of gold, citing 53,000 gold contracts sold that very day.

As usual, Paul is so very wrong. There is no conspiracy. Gold prices had been plummeting for months -- and the reason for that is simple: Gold is a lousy investment.

Indeed, its value had been soaring since 2008. Panicky investors fell prey to “experts” like Glenn Beck who declared that Obama’s stimulus and the Euro crisis would push gold to $2,000 an ounce—even $10,000 was possible! But the inflation crisis never happened. By the end of February, gold dropped to $300 per ounce.

So much for the stability of gold.

Furthermore, the tiny gold market is conspiracy prone. Rumors that Cyprus might sell its entire reserve of 40 metric tons of gold were another reason for the great April crash.

Forty metric tons: that’s all it took to start a panic. Thus if Obama really wanted to tank the gold market, as Paul hinted that he does, all he had to do was sell off a smidgen of America’s 8,600 metric tons. In fact, the world's entire supply of investment gold is 170,000 metric tons, which would fit into a 14-foot cube.

Consider also the case of the Hunt brothers (they were the Koch brothers of the 1970s) who lost everything when they invested their entire fortune to corner the silver market. They believed hyperinflation would render the world’s currencies worthless. Instead, silver prices crashed and after seeing billions from their accounts disappear, they went bankrupt.

This is why two major 20th-century economists believed that the gold standard was a rotten idea. Liberal John Kenneth Galbraith and libertarian Milton Friedman hated each but knew tying money to a single commodity kills economic growth. Had we been dumb enough to return to the gold standard, the crash of April 18 would have caused a brand-new depression—in spite of recovering financial markets and growing employment.

Let's assume there really was a conspiracy on April 18. If that were true (and it's not), Paul would be tacitly admitting that all its takes  to trigger a meltdown is 53,000 contracts. Let's put that in perspective -- tens of billions of stock shares are traded daily.

Remember that old proverb about who really profits in a gold rush? Not the people who dig for the gold, but the people who sell the shovels. Paul must know that proverb well. Today, he's still earning millions by publishing a newsletter that tells readers to buy gold!

Peter Lindstrom is a political consultant and researcher. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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(The white liberal establishment, says the author, was quiet in the face of Melissa Harris-Perry's baseless accusations of racism in a 2011 column in The Nation.)

The question itself is already a provocation. As I conjure up the words, I envision the Rev. Al Sharpton rousing the peanut gallery, readying himself to shoot me down. What I am about to say runs headlong against everything white liberals have learned about embracing diversity under the big tent of the Democratic Party. So let me just ask.

Why are white liberals so afraid of black liberals?

Black liberals are allowed to meander far and away from core liberal principles, all the while making unsubstantiated protestations, sometimes even going so far as to denigrate their white counterparts without ever having to worry about facing tangible consequences within the mainstream liberal establishment.

In a 2011 column titled "Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama," Melissa Harris-Perry of The Nation castigates the white liberal establishment that gave voice to her so-called authentically black perspective by accusing it of racism. Curiously, she begins by applauding white liberals: “Not only did white Democratic voters prove willing to support a black candidate; they overperformed in their repudiation of naked electoral racism, electing Obama with a higher percentage of white votes than either Kerry or Gore earned.” Then she concludes that white liberals who supported Obama morphed into racists over four years.

Harris-Perry supports her supposition that white liberals are closeted racists with the flimsiest of defenses, speculating that “electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture.” In other words — it's complicated.

The white liberals who took a chance on a young black man with a thin resume and elected him to the highest office in the land were painted with the broadest of racial brushes and offered no defense. In fact, white liberals remained uncharacteristically quiet in the face of Harris-Perry's inflammatory accusations.

Certainly there is nothing odious about exploring the possibility of whether racism would play a role in the reelection of the first black president. She should've explored that topic. She also should've reached a very different conclusion than the one she reached, especially considering the tenuous examples she laid out.

Harris-Perry uses the Clinton administration as a model for unequal racial standards within the liberal body politic, noting that Clinton was unable to pass health care reform but that “progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option.” What is missing from her critique is that Hillary Clinton pushed for universal healthcare, not a hybrid Mitt Romney-endorsed imitation. It is easier though for black liberals to push a racialized assessment of American politics than to get bogged down in the minutia of hard details related to actual policies.

This isn't to say that white liberals can't be racist – or can't align with racist elements in American politics. Blacks didn't gain access to FDR's New Deal until well over a decade after the legislation was passed, mostly due to an unholy alliance between FDR and Southern Democrats. But if those on the white left are willing to allow Harris-Perry to besmirch them as racist, they should at least force her to make an actual case that withstands criticism.

Black liberals like Harris-Perry are quick to use abstract anecdotal interpretations to call into question the progressive bona fides of white liberals, but surprisingly enough, when black liberals pivot to the political right, joining forces with right wingers to attack bedrock liberal agenda issues – such as gay rights and opposition to charter schools – white liberals are reluctant to full throatedly voice justifiable criticism.

Harris-Perry is not alone among black liberals who wield racialized rhetoric as a tool for silencing white liberals. Sharpton, now an MSNBC pundit, co-authored a 2009 op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal titled, "Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap," and has a $500,000 connection to charter schools.

Even if Obama hadn't trounced Romney, there were plenty of legitimate reasons for a principled liberals to renounce support for Obama, the most notable of which are his doubling down on Bush's war policies and embrace of austerity measures. Harris-Perry owes the white left an apology. White liberals should demand it.

Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Yourblackworld. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

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(In a video skit, President Barack Obama played Daniel Day-Lewis playing Obama, reversing the conventions and expectations of the minstrel tradition of "blackface.")

Minstrelsy was America's most popular entertainment for almost two centuries. It involved white men painting their faces "black" with burnt cork or shoe polish. "Blackface" validated white fantasies of blackness. By mocking chattel slavery and lampooning African Americans' ability to be full and equal citizens, race minstrelsy was a lens through which white supremacy reimagined the plantation as idyllic and African Americans as childlike, simple, and stupid.

Blackface also secured the place of white ethnics (and other whites) struggling with industrial capitalism in the American racial hierarchy. Blackface was predicated on reinforcing the inferiority of black Americans. By literally "buying into" white racist norms, newly arrived--and not quite fully "white"--European ethnics took a step toward enfranchised whiteness.

Historian Eric Lott suggests that race minstrelsy involved a mix of "love and theft." Arbitrary categories of racial identity were reinforced culturally and politically to determine the life chances, safety, security, and (quite literally) freedom of human beings. Because it is a quintessentially American cultural practice, blackface is complex, conflicted, and grotesque.

So it should come as no surprise that blackface was and continues to be popular even among African Americans. Tyler Perry and Dirty South rappers like 'Lil Jon find their precursors in race minstrel performers. The intricacies get weirder.African-American vaudevillians would often have to "double cork" -- that is, a black man whose skin was light enough to "pass" as a white man would have to "blacken up" in order to pretend to be a white man in blackface. Limited by the realities of the marketplace and its restraints on black upward mobility, many of these artists made a painful choice to participate in a type of popular entertainment that reinforced the logic of Jim and Jane Crow America.

Double corking highlights the absurdities at the heart of the color line. Blackness was/is a performance. The white gaze reinforced terms of black humanity and made real the fantasy of race minstrelsy. This fantasy helped to legitimate the racial hierarchies of power, privilege, and opportunity that continue even in the era of a post-racial American presidency.

In light of this, it's clear that President Barack Obama's performance at the 2013 Washington Correspondents' Dinner this week was a version of "double corking." In a video clip, in which filmmaker Steven Spielberg talks about following up his film Lincoln with bio-pic of Obama, the president pretends to be actor Daniel Day-Lewis who is pretending to be Obama. It was brilliant turn of "reverse passing" as well as transgressive and revealing in sharp but quiet ways.

Obama chose to be silent on matters of black uplift, yet the radical right viciously savages him whenever it can as a black usurper longing to "oppress" white people. The president can't even make a factual observation about his own racial identity without being attacked for having the poor taste of reminding people that he is an African American.

For this reason, Obama has been limited to symbolic gestures of racial solidarity. He can give a tour to a black "Kid President." He can honor the Tuskegee Airmen. He can put a bust of Dr. King in the Oval Office. But that's it. His "all boats float" approach to public policy has meant that the needs of African Americans have gone unaddressed. The "price of the ticket" (to borrow a phrase from Fredrick Harris Jr.) for black folks' support of Obama has been very high.

Even so, Obama has faced down questions of race on occasion, the most prominent of which was the "race speech" in 2008. That speech was deeply problematic as it tried to assure white voters that he was the "right type of black" who wouldn't hold them accountable for white racism. His speech at the 2013 Washington Correspondents' Dinner was better.

In it, he subtly revealed his deeper thoughts on race and on the white racial hostility of some in the American public toward the twin and interconnected facts of his personhood and legitimacy. But it wasn't Obama saying this. It was Obama in "double cork," reverse passing. Only by pretending to be a white actor who was pretending to be America's first black president was America's first black president free allude to the white stereotype of the "angry black men" that binds him.

For this reason, Obama's minstrel routine is deeply troubling. Despite his seat at the apex of state authority, Obama as Obama is incapable of speaking truth to power. A white president would have more leeway, but a black president like Obama must "blacken up" by putting on the "double cork" if he wants to talk in a truth-telling way about racial justice.

History has weight. It is also beset by many cruel ironies.

Chauncey DeVega, a pen name, is the founder and editor of We Are Respectable Negroes. His commentary has appeared in Salon, Alternet, the New York Daily News and the BBC. Follow him @chaunceydevega and @WashSpec.

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As is well known, the 2012 election saw a national drive to restrict the ability to vote. Citizens fought back. By Election Day, almost every harsh new law was blocked, blunted, postponed, or repealed.

Count that a true win for democracy. But let’s not be satisfied with just winning defensive fights. Instead, we should seize this moment of public attention to press for breakthrough reforms to assure that all eligible citizens can vote in elections that are free and fair.

As a general rule, important decisions—say, for instance, deciding whether or not to invade a Middle Eastern nation—turnout better when they are well-informed. Poorly informed choices tend to end in disaster.

(Click on the image to increase size)

All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “very religious” voted for Mitt Romney in the past election by an average of 58.75 percent of popular vote. All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “not very religious” voted for Barack Obama in the 2012 election by an average of 59.3 percent of the popular vote.

Extremes in religion are almost as precise a predictor as of the presidential vote as Nate Silver’s analytical models, the gold standard in handicapping elections. The country is almost as divided by religion as it is by party, as illustrated by partisan and religious belief in creationism: the idea that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years, rather than evolving from common ancestry over 6 million years. To understand the difference between scientific fact and religious belief, it helps to be Jewish.

Sources: Gallup Politics, Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms, uselectionatlas.org.