There the debate rested. Then Romney hit the campaign trail, and the pendulum swung decisively toward those who held that he was constructed out of high-impact plastic. Even the skeptics admitted that Romney’s “personality” did not appear to be of organic origin. He seemed uncomfortable in his own skin (which of course would make sense if he did not have actual skin), and did not know how to tell jokes (humor is notoriously difficult to program). Even the words he used to describe himself sounded like they were auto-imported from a slightly archaic database, as when he oddly described himself as “severely conservative.”

But the clearest sign that Romney had fiber optic cable coiled in his midriff was the bizarrely smug and clumsy way in which he constantly referred to his plutocratic lifestyle. When asked at the Daytona 500 whether he followed NASCAR closely, Romney completely failed to take advantage of this traditional GOP opportunity to demonstrate the common touch. He replied, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans, but I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” Two weeks later, in an interview about the NFL, Romney again went out of his way to affirm his membership in a tiny fraternity of disliked multimillionaires, saying, “I’ve got a lot of good friends – the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets – both owners are friends of mine.”

The subject of money, in particular, seemed to produce continual script errors, including inappropriate answers, dead-end loops and other rudimentary programming flaws. In Detroit, Romney boasted that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs” – the political equivalent of showing up for a photo op at a diner wearing an ascot and a monocle. He casually challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet during a debate, an unforced error that evoked vote-losing images of Fortune 500 CEOs snapping towels at each other in the sauna. But that weird glitch was dwarfed by a statement Romney made a month later. His hard drive apparently malfunctioning after his tax returns were revealed, Romney referred to the $370,000 he had earned giving speeches one year — an amount it would take the average American worker 14 years to make — as “not very much.” In short, Romney came across not only as an obscenely rich person, but as an obscenely rich person from another planet.

At this point, some leading technology analysts had begun to openly accuse whoever programmed Romney of gross incompetence. But others defended the unknown scriptwriter, pointing out that the Republican Party’s worship of plutocrats as emblems of “aspirational” capitalism made it impossible to for even the best programmer to write a coherent GOP script about wealth.

Romney’s performance in the primary debates also provided strong empirical support for the Mitt-is-a-cyborg thesis. For the entity claiming to be “Mitt Romney” that appeared onstage bore no resemblance to the Romney-like entity Americans had come to know in previous years. The moderate, conciliatory governor of Massachusetts was gone, his place taken by a strange, harsh figure who appeared to have been programmed by a disciple of Torquemada. Romney Version One had strongly supported a healthcare plan identical to Obama’s; Romney Version Two denounced “Obamacare” as opening the door to socialism. Beta Romney, who had defended a woman’s right to choose, had been replaced by an updated model that, like a doll that speaks a few simple phrases when its bottom is squeezed, intoned “abortion is immoral” again and again.

Different observers had different explanations for this strange phenomenon. Some maintained that “Mitt Romney” had been originally programmed in the factory to flip-flop when politically necessary. Others held that the earlier version had been surreptitiously refurbished, or possibly completely replaced.

Since he clinched the GOP nomination, Romney’s behavior has become even less recognizably human. Following his mechanical move to the far right during the primary season, his even more mechanical attempt to move back to the center has made it appear increasingly likely that he was assembled by nano-machines. His victory speech in New Hampshire was a tape loop of Reagan-like platitudes about free enterprise and Reagan-like blasts at the apocalyptic evil posed by Big Government, topped off with a weird, casuistic attempt to claim that his laissez-faire, I’ve-got-mine-Jack ideology was “fairer” than Obama’s attempt to shrink the increasing gap between rich and poor. Instead of the Great Communicator, Romney came off like a Frankenstein monster, cobbled together out of various right-wing bits and pieces, trying simultaneously to appease Tea Party extremists and clank back to the middle, all while smiling a big, artificially-whitened smile.

His inability to impersonate a human being poses severe political problems for Romney. But the worst is yet to come. Republican strategists are now advising Romney to stop attacking Obama and offer a “positive vision.” Most experts believe this simply cannot be done. Romney’s CPU, set up to defend cutthroat capitalism, destroy his opponents, and present the innocuous centrist Barack Obama as the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin, cannot accommodate the impossible demand that he suddenly become “human.” No one knows whether he will literally melt down in public with smoke pouring out of his eye sockets, or will simply begin regurgitating meaningless phrases about an “opportunity society,” like the unplugged super-computer HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But sooner or later, Romney is doomed to a fatal system error.

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator,” Romney is about to be turned into scrap metal. But there is still time for him to save his campaign. If Mitt Romney wants to be president, he must appear before the American people on prime-time TV and admit that he is a robot.

With this one bold stroke, Romney would dispel all questions about his authenticity. After all, unlike human beings, robots are not expected to demonstrate consistency in their beliefs and actions. They do not have “selves,” only circuits that react in programmed ways to new situations. The instant Romney shows the nation the power cable hidden in his posterior, his self-contradictory positions and blatant pandering will cease to be seen as a cynical grab for power. Instead, they will become the visible manifestations of an advanced Google-like algorithm, inspiring technological interest and respect.

A frank confession that Romney plugs himself into a socket in his garage every night would also end the criticism of his wooden demeanor. “Star Wars,” “Mystery Science 3000,” “The Terminator” and other pop-culture hits have popularized lovable, wisecracking, helpful robots. Romney would be far better served if he was seen as C3PO, rather than a stilted, fake-Tea-Party plutocrat boasting about his friendships with other plutocrats.

Moreover, by forthrightly admitting that his head swivels around on a titanium base, Romney would instantly wipe out Obama’s advantage among young voters. Tech-savvy young Americans prefer Facebook, Tumblr, Zynga, smartphones and iPods to reality anyway, and would jump at the chance to make their generational mark by electing a president who is one of them (and can be easily disassembled and shipped back to the factory for repair.)

Finally, if Romney were to stand before the American people, remove his head and forthrightly admit that he is a robot, he would get rid of the biggest albatross around his nonexistent neck: his leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As a human being, Romney cannot justify the rapacious, job-destroying actions engaged in by Bain. When critics – including his GOP rivals – rightfully accused him of practicing “vulture capitalism,” all Romney could say was “In the free economy, in the private sector, sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.” Coming from a human, this answer is heartless. Coming from a robot, it feels almost cuddly.

Which points to the real reason Romney should admit to being a robot – whether he is one or not. As a human being, Mitt Romney is a flop. But as a robot, he’s positively human.

There is a very good chance that this slow-motion blood bath could go on for years. And at the end, Assad could still be in power.

As this dreadful situation festers, calls for America to arm the opposition are growing louder. And they are not only coming from neocons, neo-imperialists and warmongers, proxy warriors for whom defeating Assad is part of a Great Game whose real goal is defeating Iran. No one is surprised that neocons like Joe Lieberman, for whom America’s foreign policy comes down to “Is it good for Israel?” or his chest-beating partner in imperialist Islamophobia, John McCain, want the U.S. to arm the Syrian opposition. Nor is it surprising that Elliott Abrams, Fox News or the Washington Post editorial board have beat the war drums. But these predictable hawks have been joined by an increasing number of liberals and humanitarians who have no ideological ax to grind.

Saying “the basis for any settlement must be a rough equality of forces,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen called for the U.S. to arm the Syrian opposition. Analyst James Traub similarly called for the U.S. to back what he called a “neo-mujahadeen strategy.” Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall blasted Obama’s refusal to get the U.S. more involved, saying that the world had a “moral imperative” to intervene. “A shoulder shrug will just not cut it any more,” Tisdall wrote. In a column titled “Syria is not Iraq. And it is not always wrong to intervene,” Tisdall’s Guardian colleague Jonathan Freedland denounced facile left-wing opposition to Western intervention in Syria, writing, “we must not make the people of Homs pay the price for the mistake we made in Baghdad.” Oxford economist Paul Collier argued in the Financial Times that Assad’s regime was doomed and arming the opposition would push it over the edge.

None of these commentators are neoconservatives or proxy warriors, fans of the “War on Terror,” the Bush Doctrine or the unbridled use of American force. In their different ways, they are driven by simple, and legitimate, moral outrage. That outrage was expressed in its purest form by the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile whose powerful indictment of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny played a large role in convincing liberals like George Packer and Paul Berman to support the Iraq War. In a largely pro-intervention symposium posted recently by the New Republic, Makiya wrote, “I don’t really think there is any kind of a reasonable argument against intervention in Syria. Quite the opposite: There is a moral and a human imperative to act that is larger than any nation’s interests and larger than any strategic calculation. That is so obvious it is an embarrassment to have to say it. This is how I thought about intervention in Iraq 20 years ago and it is how I think about what needs to be done in Syria today.”

To their credit, most of these observers recognize that their call for the West in general and America in particular to support the Syrian opposition holds considerable risks. For example, after acknowledging the murky and disorganized nature of the Syrian opposition, the looming possibility of sectarian massacres, and the unhappy outcome of America’s mujahedin experiment in Afghanistan, Traub writes,  “[T]here are no good solutions; only less bad ones … I’m open to a better suggestion.”

So these commentators deserve respect for their intellectual integrity, their good intentions and their moral outrage. All of them find the unfolding carnage in Syria unbearable to behold, and anyone with a conscience would agree.

And yet, we must bear it. For the worst thing that America and the rest of the world could do is to arm the opposition.

This is not a knee-jerk left-wing response. It has nothing to do with Iraq. Nor does it have anything to do with the proxy war between the U.S. and its allies and Iran and its allies. It is not driven by pacifism or opposition to all war. All U.S. wars are not axiomatically foolish, evil or driven by brutal self-interest (although most of them since World War II have been). The airstrikes on Kosovo and the Libya campaign were justified (although the jury is still out on the latter intervention). If arming the Syrian opposition would result in fewer deaths and a faster transition to a peaceful, open, democratic society, we should arm them.

Every situation is different: There is no one-size-fits-all template for foreign affairs. And in Syria, the truth is that further militarizing the conflict will likely cause it to spiral out of control. Moral outrage alone is not enough. It must be tethered to a coldly rational analysis.

That analysis has been provided by a number of in-depth reports, most notably a new study by the International Crisis Group, as well as the excellent on-the-ground reporting of Nir Rosen for Al-Jazeera. The bottom line is simple. The war has become a zero-sum game for Assad. If he loses, he dies. But the only way he can lose is if he is abandoned by his crucial external patron, Russia, which is extremely unlikely to happen absent some slaughter so egregious that Moscow feels it has to cut ties with him. Assad has sufficient domestic support to hold on for a long time, and a huge army that is not likely to defect en masse. Under these circumstances, giving arms to the rebels, however much it may make conscience-stricken Western observers feel better, will simply make the civil war much bloodier and its outcome even more chaotic and dangerous.

The key point concerns Assad’s domestic support. Contrary to the widely held belief that most Syrians support the opposition and are opposed to the Assad regime, Syrians are in fact deeply divided. The country’s minorities – the ruling Alawites, Christians and Druze – tend to support the regime, if only because they fear what will follow its downfall. (The grocery on my corner in San Francisco is owned by a Christian Syrian from a village outside Damascus. When I asked him what he thought about what was going on in his country, he said, “It’s not like what you see on TV. Assad is a nice guy. He’s trying to do the right thing.”) As Rosen makes clear, Syria’s ruling Alawite minority is the key to Assad’s survival: Absent an outside invasion, the regime will not fall unless the Alawites turn on it. But the Alawites fear reprisals if the Sunni-dominated opposition, some of whose members have threatened to “exterminate the Alawites,” defeats the Assad regime. The fear of a sectarian war, exacerbated by the murky and incoherent nature of the opposition, means that the minorities are unlikely to join the opposition in large numbers.

As for the opposition, it has suffered too many losses to stop fighting.

What this means is that neither side has any reason to stop pursuing its present course, and short of a U.S. or NATO invasion – which only barking-mad neocons are suggesting we embark on – the regime will be able to hold on for years. The longer the struggle goes on, Rosen notes, the more radicalized and Islamist the opposition will become. As Rosen gloomily writes, “Syria is crumbling before our eyes, and a thoroughly modern nation is likely to be set back many decades.”

The International Crisis Group report argues that America’s current posture of talking about arming the opposition while simultaneously pursuing a diplomatic track is a mistake.

“In the meantime this dual U.S. and Arab approach – on the one hand, proclaiming support for Annan and for a diplomatic resolution; on the other, toying with greater militarization of the opposition – arguably is a strategy at war with itself and one that could readily backfire. Some argue that only by dangling the prospect of a stronger rebel force might Assad be persuaded to give in. But a different scenario is more likely: The regime will point to any decision to arm the opposition as a breach of the Annan plan and use it as a reason not to comply and to reinvigorate its own offensive; meanwhile, the military half-measures on behalf of the opposition might satisfy the urge to ‘do something’ – but these will be woefully inadequate to beat back a regime offensive.”

The ICG report recommends “a more pragmatic, consensual approach, a controlled, negotiated transition that would spare the country additional bloodshed … a middle course between chaos without the regime and chaos with it – a controlled transition that preserves state institutions, thoroughly reforms the security services and puts squarely on the table the issue of unaccountable family rule.” To get there, it suggests strengthening some of mediator Kofi Annan’s general ideas, including a monitoring mechanism to ensure that cease-fires are not violated, freezing of weapons smuggling across the border, and a pragmatic compromise on demonstrations that would allow them but not in the center of Damascus, where they would become Tahrir Square-style mass movements that would topple the regime. In the long run, the radioactive issue of the Assad family’s rule and legitimacy and the sectarian makeup of the security forces would have to be addressed. But in the short term, Assad would remain in power.

An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by two law professors, Asli Bali and Aziz F. Rana, made the same point: The most humane thing for the Syrian people, the authors argue, would be to engage with Assad – which means leaving him, at least for now, in power.

This means that the best-case scenario is that the fighting winds down, the opposition eventually gives up the armed struggle, contents itself with whatever crumbs Assad throws it, and waits for the political winds to shift enough so that real change can start taking place.

For this, thousands of men, women and children gave their lives?

Such an outcome seems morally outrageous. It’s unthinkable. But the alternative – an all-out sectarian civil war between evenly matched adversaries, both of them fighting to the death – is even more unthinkable.

What America and the world are faced with in Syria, in short, is nothing less than a tragedy. And we are not good at dealing with tragedy.

Americans are not a tragic people. We do not understand tragedy, and we instinctively resist it. Our history has insulated us from it. American exceptionalism, the belief that we are qualitatively different from all other nations and immune to the woes that afflict them, goes back to the Puritans. No American president can avoid paying lip service to it. The Republican Party’s foreign policy consists almost entirely of endless variations on it. It is in our national DNA.

The American belief that we live in a city on a hill, that we are immune from tragedy, has not only molded our national character, it has shaped our relations with the rest of the world. Some of its influence has been positive. Optimism and generosity, the benign face of American exceptionalism, drove epochal achievements like the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt a shattered Europe after World War II.  That altruistic, engaged approach to the world known as “Wilsonian idealism” or “liberal interventionism” has resulted in some notable achievements, including the ouster of Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic and the toppling of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. A foreign policy that does not have a moral component, a purely Machiavellian approach to the world, is soulless. Realism is essential, but  realism without compassion is deadly.

But America’s belief that it is inherently a force for good, that American interventions always have positive results, and that we can shape the world at will, have led us to make a number of appalling foreign policy decisions – ones that not only failed to advance our own interests, but that harmed the very people and causes we were allegedly trying to help. Vietnam and Afghanistan, our two longest wars, were both driven partly by altruistic motives – and both proved to be disastrous quagmires. George W. Bush’s Iraq War was motivated by a bizarre mixture of factors – Zimmerman-style vigilante vengeance for 9/11, a half-baked “grand strategy” to remake the Middle East for U.S. and Israel, a feckless and puerile president’s desire to play the he-man – but lurking among them was a myopic, almost drugged belief that because we were the ones dropping the bombs, and God was on our side, everything was going to be OK in the end. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead American and coalition troops and a wrecked country later, everything did not turn out to be OK.

Our national instinct is to come riding to the rescue. It goes against our character to simply sit on our hands.  Our sincere, naive and self-centered belief that America can fix everything, and our equally sincere, naive and self-centered belief that moral outrage justifies intervention, is a powerful tide, pulling us toward getting directly involved in Syria’s civil war.

But in the real world, we cannot always come riding to the rescue. Sometimes, we have no choice but to watch tragedy unfold, because anything we do will create an even bigger tragedy.

America is going to have to come to terms with this painful truth, and a lot of similar ones, in the years ahead. We’re going to have to accept that Obama’s drone war is creating more enemies than it kills and shut it down, even if that means some potential terrorists get away. We’re going to have to accept that Afghanistan and Iraq may end up as basket cases, even failed states. We’re going to have to learn to live with an Egypt run by Islamists, and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that can no longer be solved with a two-state solution. We’re going to have to give up on the dream of perfect safety from terrorism.

After too many childish illusions, and childish wars that killed too many people, it’s time for us to grow up.

To realize those totalitarian ambitions, China’s authorities, with Bain Capital’s help, are expanding the country’s already vast network of surveillance cameras. The city of Chongqing is spending $4.2 billion for a network of 500,000 cameras, Guangdong Province is installing a million cameras, and Beijing is planning to put cameras in all entertainment venues, the Times reported.

The authorities use these cameras, along with Internet monitoring and cellphone surveillance, to monitor as much of the entire population as possible. But they are particularly interested in keeping a permanent eye on democracy advocates, intellectuals, religious figures and other people they deem dangerous. For example, police used a surveillance camera to record a human rights lawyer named Li Tiantian entering a hotel with men other than her boyfriend, then taunted her about her sex life and threatened to show the tape to her boyfriend. “The scale of intrusion into people’s private lives is unprecedented,” Li told the Times. “Now when I walk on the street, I feel so vulnerable, like the police are watching me all the time.”

But the whining of Li and her troublemaking ilk are of no concern to the patriotic Uniview. In its promotional materials, the company chirps, “Social management and society building pose new demands for surveillance and control systems.”

Bain is also untroubled by the fact that it owns a company dedicated to re-creating the unique societal ambience of George Orwell’s “1984.” It stressed to the Times that Uniview’s products “were advertised” as tools to fight crime, not to monitor dissidents, and that only one-third of Uniview’s sales were to public security bureaus.

Ah, because Uniview advertised that its surveillance cameras were only used to fight crime, it’s OK for Bain to own them. Thanks for clearing that up, Bain! (I take the liberty of addressing you as Bain because, as the Supreme Court has ruled and the GOP believes, corporations are people.)

Speaking of which, Bain, I would be remiss to your investors if I did not draw your attention to an excellent opportunity to acquire a leading Rwandan firm, the Tutsi Machete Co. The Tutsi Machete Co. is a perfect target for you. It is underperforming, has a weak management structure and is ripe for a leveraged buyout. Some have claimed that TMC provides hundreds of thousands of machetes to frenzied genocidal mobs, but that is not a concern: The company ran an ad claiming that their machetes were only used to fight crime. Making the optics even stronger, only one-third of the machetes were given to frenzied genocidal mobs. With a significant downsizing of its workforce – which can be accomplished using the company’s own products, thus ensuring significant additional savings – TMC’s profits should increase by 300 percent. Recommendation: Buy.

Romney and his wife earned at least $5.6 million from their Bain holdings, the Times reported. But according to the person who manages their trusts, the Romneys had nothing to do with the decision to invest in Uniview. All they did was pocket the money.

Owning a piece of the Great Eye of Sauron Company is probably too much even for the free-market-worshiping Romney. He will probably get out of the trust, and it won’t be surprising if Bain suddenly decides to unload Uniview. But that won’t solve the real problem, which this grotesque episode highlights. The real problem is untrammeled capitalism, at whose coldblooded shrine he and the rest of the GOP worship. And that problem won’t go away if Romney washes his hands of Uniview, any more than Pontius Pilate was able to wash away his responsibility for crucifying Jesus.

For the almighty market has no conscience. Private equity firms like Bain are sharks. They were created to maximize profits for their investors – nothing more, nothing less. Buying Uniview was egregious, but firms like Bain buy slightly less nasty versions of Uniview every day. Until they stop making decisions solely based on the bottom line, the same issues will keep coming up.

The same thing applies to the free-market mantra constantly repeated by companies like Bain and their defenders — “improving corporate performance.” “Improving corporate performance” really means “maximizing profits for shareholders.” Sure, it sometimes works out well for everyone, workers and investors alike. But the point is, that isn’t its goal. The fate of human beings is not important. If tens of thousands of workers get dumped along the way, they’re just collateral damage, road kill along the great haj to honor Adam Smith.

Early in the primary campaign, in a desperate attempt to wound Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich both channeled their inner Marx and made this exact charge against Romney and Bain. When Romney fired back that they were “putting free enterprise on trial,” and GOP ideologues tut-tutted, Twinkle Dumb and Twinkle Me realized that they had gone too far off the reservation and changed the subject. But they were right.

As a liberal, I’d like to be able to cite this story as an example of the perfidy of the American right and the internal contradictions of an ideology that exalts “freedom” but somehow leads to totalitarianism. Unfortunately, the Democrats are virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans on this issue. Bain Capital, in all its creepiness, is as American as apple pie.

Bain is doing two things with Uniview. It is helping an authoritarian regime keep an eternal eye on its citizens, and it is doing so for the same reason it does everything: to maximize its profits. The Democrats are marginally better than the Republicans when it comes to the latter issue: they at least pay lip service to the workers who are “downsized” by firms like Bain. But the differences are cosmetic: they, too, have essentially bought the gospel of greed. And both parties have signed off on the Surveillance Society.

It was President George W. Bush who created the Patriot Act. But in 2011, it was President Obama who asked Congress to extend its surveillance powers. It was Obama who signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows indefinite detention and essentially declares that the “war on terror” is permanent. And it was Obama who decided that it was OK to launch drones at will around the world, and assassinate American citizens without trial.

After all, those who are innocent have nothing to fear.

So there’s no reason to worry about the millions of surveillance cameras being deployed all over China. Big Brother is already watching us. Why shouldn’t he watch some other people too?

The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.

As the video opens, Obama says, “And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first-year black law students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front and not giving us a lecture, but engaging us in conversation. And speaking the truth.”

Here Obama says something indecipherable; there may be a gap or edit in the video. Then, after apparently praising Bell’s achievements, Obama goes on to rhetorically ask, “How did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn’t done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure. He hasn’t done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” After loud applause, there is another apparent gap or edit in the video. Obama’s final words are “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”

Before he died, Breitbart claimed that this video would show “why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” Sure enough, right-wingers have seized upon it to portray Obama as a race-card player and friend of white-hating academic extremists. It’s this year’s version of the Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “scandals,” in which Obama was accused of playing footsie with, respectively, a radical Weatherman, a Palestinian academic and an incendiary black clergyman.

Obama’s association with Derrick Bell will turn out to be even more of a non-event than those fizzled bombshells. But the story does shed some light – for better and for worse — on Obama’s temperament, his intellectual style and his racial politics.

To understand the video, one must understand the context. Academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was roiled by an enormous controversy over “multiculturalism.” The debate took many forms. In the humanities, multiculturalists argued that works by minorities, women and gays had been systematically excluded and devalued by institutions of higher learning, and that it was time to change the canon to end the hegemony of “dead white males.” Students at Stanford marched through campus chanting “Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Activists demanded that campuses create Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies departments, and hire more minority faculty members. The conflict was bitter, long-lasting and spawned an enormous literature.

Perhaps the most extreme variant of multiculturalism was found in law schools. Called “Critical Legal Studies,” this movement asserted that law was essentially political and served the hegemony of the white racist power structure. As one of its leading figures, Derrick Bell argued that racism was intractable and permanent and that minority professors were systematically excluded simply because of that racism. He further argued that minority professors, by virtue of the oppression and discrimination they allegedly experienced, possessed unique talents and perspectives not available to white professors, and should be hired on that basis alone.

Bell was given to writing in “non-traditional” forms, like science fiction, and argued that narratives and the like should have the same academic standing as footnoted, peer-reviewed papers. In one such story, “Space Traders,” Bell imagined that a group of spacemen had come to earth and offered to remove all of America’s black people, in exchange for vast wealth and other benefits.

The leaders of America agree, and all of America’s blacks are sold into slavery.

In another allegorical fable, “The Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action: The Chronicle of the DeVine Gift,” Bell imagines how an elite law school would react to the hiring of a super-qualified African-American candidate who, if hired, would increase the faculty’s minority percentage to 25 percent. The white dean in Bell’s parable refuses, saying that doing so would change the racial character of the school to an intolerable degree. The hiring would “threaten, at some deep-seated level, the white faculty members’ sense of ideological hegemony.”

In a devastating critique of Critical Legal Studies in the June 1989 Harvard Law Review (available online via many public libraries), Randall Kennedy demolished the arguments of Bell and two other leading CLS scholars, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda.

“Stated bluntly, they fail to support persuasively their claims of racial exclusion or their claims that legal academic scholars of color produce a racially distinctive brand of valuable scholarship,” Kennedy wrote, and then proceeded to back his argument up in detail. For example, he noted that Bell refused to even engage with the obvious reason that there were so few minority candidates, namely that not enough were qualified. Instead, Bell simply asserted that the criteria of judgment was flawed in some nameless way. Bell was clearly only interested in the outcome, not the process. If it took putting a thumb on the scales to get more black people hired, so be it. The scales were rigged anyway.

What Kennedy wrote of Matsuda was equally true of Bell: By claiming that being a member of a minority group automatically connotes a certain and superior worldview, he argued, she “stereotypes scholars.” The CLS racialism simply inverted pernicious white stereotypes about black people: Instead of being inherently inferior, they were inherently superior.

Kennedy also noted that various CLS supporters came to him (he doesn’t say it, but Bell was among them) and urged him not to publish his piece because it would hurt the movement – behavior more befitting members of a Communist cell than scholars interested in dispassionate inquiry. Of Kennedy, Bell said, “the cause of diversity is not served by someone who looks black and thinks white.”

In short, Bell was a crude racial essentialist. He believed there was such a thing as “thinking white” and “thinking black.” As James Traub noted in a New Republic piece, he was so afraid of giving aid and comfort to white people, and causing harm to blacks, that he refused to condemn the abhorrent anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

As befit his racialist ideology, Bell was also a consummate race-card player. His academic career consisted of a long series of racial confrontations with the institutions he worked for. After being hired as an avowed racial token at Harvard, Bell left for Oregon, where he became the first black dean of a non-black school. But he resigned his deanship when the faculty voted against giving tenure to an Asian woman. He then went to Stanford, where a bizarre incident unfolded. Many of the students in his constitutional law course complained about his teaching, saying it was disorganized and excessively politicized. Some began to audit other courses. In possibly the most impolitic move in the history of academia, the university then set up a parallel series of lectures, which were designed to “supplement” Bell’s courses. When black law students protested, the parallel series was canceled.

Bell then returned to Harvard, where he staged a five-day sit-in to protest the school’s failure to hire two radical CLS faculty members, both white. This led a faculty member to say, “This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South.”

The episode that led to Obama’s involvement started in April 1990, when Bell announced that he would leave Harvard if a black woman was not hired. He demanded that Harvard hire Regina Austin, a visiting professor from the University of Pennsylvania. But – in a real-world demonstration of one of the problems Kennedy criticized – Bell was unable to defend her credentials, which made her look like a token. When Austin was predictably and summarily rejected – the appointments committee refused even to vote on her candidacy –Bell took heat from feminists for chauvinism. Austin never forgave Bell for the public humiliation she endured.

Enter Obama

This is where Barack Obama, second-year law student, came in. According to Thomas J. Sugrue’s 2010 book “Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race,” “the Black Law Students Association (of which Obama was a  member) accused the law school dean of racism, railed against the fact that Harvard had no tenured black women and only a handful of nonwhite faculty members, and led a series of teach-ins and protests … to demand the diversification of the law school.” The debate was bitter, with both sides claiming the mantle of the civil rights movement.

Obama took part in the protests. At one rally, according to Sugrue, he even compared Bell to Rosa Parks. But – and this is the key point – Obama tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute. It is worth quoting the relevant passage from Sugrue at length:

Despite his sympathies with Austin and Bell, Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”

Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.

Sugrue concludes that “Obama’s experience at Harvard tempered his sympathy for the race-conscious politics of the black freedom struggle.”

The entire episode is vintage Obama. It shows off his strengths: ability to conciliate, open-mindedness, tactfulness, pragmatism. But it also shows off his weaknesses: weakness, indecisiveness, wishful thinking, pragmatism.

Anyone who has read Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,”  in which Obama grapples with the long-standing tension in the black community between colorblind universalism and Black Power-tinged separatism, will realize that the Bell case put Obama in a difficult situation. As a member of the Black Law Students Association, for him to have sat this dispute out would have been extremely difficult. It was a mom and apple pie issue. He would have come across as a race traitor. (It should also be noted that Bell, whatever his shortcomings as a scholar and thinker about race, was praised as a fine mentor to black students.)

At the same time, Obama was not a racial bomb-thrower. As Sugrue notes, Obama’s racial views were not yet fully formed, but Obama never subscribed to Bell’s crude racial essentialism and guilt-card playing. If he had been forced to openly state whether he agreed with Bell’s racialist theories, he would have been caught in a bind, trapped between the racial solidarity that was expected of him and the universalism he was inwardly inclined toward. But he was not forced to. He was able to live to fight another day by mouthing bland generalities about how Bell’s scholarship “opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.” In short, he displayed the chameleonic abilities of a future politician.

In his 2008 book “A Bound Man,” Shelby Steele argues that Obama’s Achilles’ heel is precisely his attempt to have it racially both ways. For Steele, Obama is trapped by his need to simultaneously assert black solidarity and a universal identity. The Bell case is a small example of this double bind in action.

Does it matter? At the political level, no. This isn’t a scandal. Who cares if a young law student went racially along to get along? Besides, Obama was just demonstrating for “diversity,” an anodyne goal that has now received a quasi-official societal imprimatur as well as an explicit legal one. (Much as I hate to agree with Justice Scalia about anything, there is a connection between Bell’s crude racial essentialism and the Supreme Court’s 2003 pro-“diversity” ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.)

Nor does it matter at a personal level. I don’t think that America cares that much about whatever convoluted Hegelian racial dialectic Barack Obama may have gone through in the course of creating his identity.

But it may matter at another level. Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to – and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness. The big question, if he is elected for a second term, is whether he is capable of unifying the opposite strands of his character, forging a single identity. That would mean letting the chips fall where they may, and living up to his promise to transform America by finding within himself the only attribute he has so far lacked: courage.

This year the stakes were higher than ever. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby, of which AIPAC is the biggest and most formidable arm, were beating the drums for war with Iran. AIPAC had already successfully lobbied for a draconian and ineffective sanctions bill, opposed by Obama, which resulted in a 13 percent spike in gas prices, to their highest ever at this time of the year. The Senate passed the bill 100-0. With hypocrisy that would be breathtaking if it weren’t an everyday event, Obama’s warmongering GOP opponents seized upon the high gas prices to attack Obama.

The Republican strategy was to paint him as an insufficiently ardent supporter of Israel (notwithstanding the fact that he had quietly accepted repeated humiliations by Netanyahu, completely abandoned the Palestinian issue, and gave Israel everything it wanted every time it asked, including vetoing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements that simply repeated an official U.S. position) and a cowardly appeaser on Iran. By so doing, they hoped to peel away crucial Jewish votes in swing states like Florida, and dry up the vast campaign contributions (by some estimates as much as half) made by Jews to the Democratic Party.

Obama had to thread the needle. He, along with America’s military and intelligence agencies, knew that a war with Iran would have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. and the world. But he could not say that explicitly.

He had to engage instead in a kind of Kabuki dance, making just enough warlike gestures to placate Israel’s supporters while furtively signaling, with almost imperceptible movements, that he meant the exact opposite.

The first step was to stake out the most aggressive possible position on Iran, short of actual war. He chose the recipient of this message carefully: Jeffrey Goldberg, a hawkish mainstream journalist with credibility among Obama’s target audience, right-leaning Democratic American Jews. Making like Dirty Harry and saying, “I don’t bluff,” Obama told Goldberg that preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb was not only in Israel’s interest, but in America’s. He then laid out the usual reasons: Iran might give the bomb to terrorists, it would feel emboldened to make trouble, and its possession of the bomb would spur a destabilizing arms race.

Whether or not Obama actually believed what he told Goldberg is unclear. (In fact, the arguments he used are weak and unconvincing, as this definitive piece by Paul Pillar shows.) But that was irrelevant, because Obama had and has no intention of starting a war with Iran. All that was necessary was that he cover his flank with Israel’s amen corner.

Then Obama had to meet with Netanyahu. This could not have been pleasant. The two men do not like each other. Obama knew that the far-right Israeli leader wants to see a Republican elected president. He was forced to watch helplessly as Netanyahu went behind his back to Congress, garnering endless standing ovations in a display so egregious that it led the ultimate establishment columnist, the Times’ Thomas Friedman, to use the expression “the Israel lobby” – vindicating the courageous academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who a few years earlier were smeared as anti-Semites for using the same expression. But Obama played his role flawlessly, making all the right noises about America’s undying support for Israel – even using the folksy “we’ve got your back” – while quietly rejecting Netanyahu’s demand that America abandon diplomacy and attack Iran.

But it was in his press conference after addressing AIPAC that Obama demonstrated his mastery of political judo. By attacking those who were “beating the drums of war,” he simultaneously painted his GOP rivals as irresponsible lightweights and fired a warning shot across Netanyahu’s bow.

Even more significant was his statement, “It’s also not just an issue of consequences for Israel if action is taken prematurely. There are consequences to the United States as well.” By drawing a subtle but clear distinction between Israel and the United States, Obama threw down the gantlet to Netanyahu and to his American supporters: If Israel attacks Iran, the United States is not going to fall on its sword for you. It isn’t going to be 1973, when we came riding to your rescue, or your 2008 slaughter in Gaza, which we ignored. It’s going to be Suez in 1956. And you aren’t going to like it.

Obama felt emboldened to confront Israel and its American supporters for three reasons. First and foremost, he knew Americans do not want another ruinous Mideast war. Second, he correctly assessed that most American Jews would vote for him and continue to give him money even if he refused to be Netanyahu’s hand puppet. And third, by turning the war into a partisan issue, Netanyahu and the Israel lobby left Obama no choice but to punch back. And once he did, he fundamentally shifted the terms of the debate.

It’s hard to say whether Netanyahu, the GOP or the Israel lobby is the biggest loser here. Netanyahu might be. As Aluf Benn, editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz noted, by invoking Auschwitz, Netanyahu moved closer than ever before to committing himself to attacking Iran. But because Obama outmuscled him, Netanyahu now faces an excruciating choice: do nothing and stand revealed as a Neville Chamberlain, or attack Iran and risk destroying the “special relationship” with America that is Israel’s strategic cornerstone. The true significance of Obama’s subtle marginalizing of the Israel lobby is that it puts enormous pressure on Netanyahu not to attack.

The GOP is not feeling too chipper today either. Normally, the War Party could count on there being no downside to urging war, especially if it involved “defending” Israel. But Iraq and Afghanistan have changed that. The American people have no stomach to fight yet another war in the Middle East. And they definitely have no stomach to fight a war for Israel.

Which takes us to the lobby. By demanding a war with Iran that Israel wants, and that President Obama and the American people do not, it committed the two unforgivable sins: It made it clear that Israel and America’s interests do not always coincide, and it took Israel’s side over America’s. That was bad enough, and the embrace of the GOP’s dreadful candidates was the final straw. AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby are now locked in a steamy ménage a trois with Netanyahu and the GOP. For Democrats, proponents of peace, and those who desire justice in the Middle East, it’s a match made in heaven.