Obama and the Lights

Beer-Fueled Diplomacy

For more than a week a debate on racial profiling has raged in American press quarters. Did police mistreat Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed Harvard professor, because he's black? Clearly, it's unclear.

And so, in a move promoting both racial harmony and drinking, President Obama has invited his pal Gates and the arresting officer to the White House to share in a cold one and discuss.

It started out as a casual suggestion: three guys working out their differences over a beer. But President Obama's offer to play host to the cop and the professor entangled in a debate over racial profiling now carries the imprimatur of high-level diplomacy.

--via LATimes, on the so-named "Beer Summit"

Selling Politics

President Calderon's National Action Party

The Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico
for 70 years and is expected to make a comeback.

The Democratic Revolutionary Party

Last month Obama revealed a sexy name and logo for one of his new, decidedly unsexy economic recovery programs: Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER). Mexico's three main political parties, meanwhile, are gearing up for mid-term elections and sticking to a John McCain-like design strategy: boring, dated, safe.

*Update: Looks like somebody's taking a cue from Obama.

Hola, Obama?

President Barack Obama lands in Mexico City today for a day of talks and tours. Four months into his presidency, everyone is wondering how--or whether--his cool, academic approach will change the drug war landscape in Mexico. Will he listen to three former Latin American presidents at the George Soros-funded Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, who advocate for decriminalization of marijuana? Or will he continue along the wrong-headed path that every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has followed?

So far, it doesn't look great. In his first online fireside chat, Obama responded to a thoughtful question about legalizing pot to create a multi-million dollar industry and bouy the flagging economy with a joke. "I don't know what that says about the online audience," he said. "The answer is no, I don't think that's a good strategy to grow our economy." Fine, maybe not. But how about as a way to cut into the profits of Mexico's drug cartels? Surely that would be more effective than the latest effort to unearth and freeze their assets in the United States.

Alma Guillermoprieto nicely lays out the issues of the day in this piece for Foreign Policy. You can hear the chorus now. It's time for new thinking on the drug war:

As U.S. President Barack Obama heads to Mexico, hoping to start a new chapter in the U.S. “war on drugs,” he must understand the limitations of the Balloon Theory. The “war on drugs” has been waged for 40 years. And while the United States invented and encouraged this costly battle, it’s been fought with Latin American blood, on Latin American soil. Simply altering, bolstering, or newly funding the old policies will do nothing. Nothing has worked. Indeed, Obama should realize that the Balloon Theory isn’t powerful enough to express the seriousness of the situation. The drug trade in the Americas is more like the HIV virus: Wherever it is present, it afflicts the body with a deadly disease.

Like a virus, too, it does not respond to conventional force -- no matter how forceful. Take, for example, the case of Colombia, the country perhaps most afflicted by drugs. There, for decades, the government has performed a parallel and coordinated attack on drug traffickers and entrenched guerilla organizations, designed to rout both. Instead, the two main groups forged an unlikely alliance.In 2000 then U.S. President Bill Clinton attempted to alleviate the situation with his $1.3 billion-dollar “Plan Colombia.” The Colombians gratefully received the funds, which have enabled the military to inflict severe damage on the guerillas. But this has done nothing to reduce the overall figures for controlled-substances exports. Indeed, in 1998, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that Colombia shipped around 600 tons of drugs. Ten years later, its output remains exactly the same.