The court’s minor procedural decision is long forgotten, but Reagan was able to realize his ambition to transform the Supreme Court. During his two terms as president, he appointed three new justices — Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy — and elevated William H. Rehnquist to chief justice. Reagan’s picks often strayed from Republican orthodoxy, but he tipped the court in a conservative direction for a generation.

Barack Obama might have as much power to shape a new court as Reagan. Like Reagan, Obama could appoint as many as three justices before Inauguration Day 2013. John Paul Stevens, 88, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 75, are of retirement age, and Ginsburg is a colon cancer survivor. David Souter, 69, has reportedly expressed an interest in returning to his home in New Hampshire. (Kennedy, who has twice had minor heart procedures, is 72, as is Scalia.)

So will an Obama presidency usher in a new liberal era on the court? The short answer: probably not (and not just because the president-elect’s apparent choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, is one more sign that he does not fear the taint of Clintonism). Since the justices most likely to retire are from the court’s liberal wing, Obama will have less of an opportunity to tilt the court’s ideological orientation. Currently, the court has a rough balance of power, with four conservative justices, four liberal and a swing vote in Justice Kennedy.

Recent history suggests the paths Obama might follow. President George W. Bush appointed two solidly conservative justices in John Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, which excited his base. President Clinton took a different tack: He appointed two moderate liberals — Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — in order to avoid a bruising confirmation battle.

“The real question is: Is Obama going to appoint significantly more liberal judges than President Clinton did? or appoint justices that are center-left like Ginsburg and Breyer?” said Thomas Goldstein, head of the Supreme Court practice for the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

Obama has not tipped his hand in this regard, but the Senate’s second-most-powerful Republican, John Kyl of Arizona, promised earlier this month to filibuster any Supreme Court nominee that Republicans deem too liberal. (Of course, that assumes Democrats won’t reach a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. Currently, they have 57 votes, but the final outcomes of three close elections remain up in the air.) Obama may also want to avoid confirmation fights to preserve his political capital for the many other pressing issues on his agenda, from healthcare to global warming.

The president-elect has given a few hints about what he is looking for in a justice. Not surprisingly, he opposed George W. Bush’s nomination of Roberts and Alito to the nation’s highest court. Obama has praised former Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was instrumental in ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and current moderate to liberal justices such as Breyer and Souter. Last year, Obama spoke before a Planned Parenthood conference about his judicial philosophy.

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,” Obama said. “The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criterion by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Salon talked with a handful of attorneys and legal scholars to get a sense of who might be nominated to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. A couple of common themes emerged: Many felt that Obama would be inclined to appoint a woman or a minority to increase the diversity of the court and that he was likely to select a younger nominee to balance out the appointments of conservatives Alito and Roberts, who are 58 and 53, respectively.

Obama will probably take an extraordinary role in the selection process, given his background as a constitutional law scholar, said panelist Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor and an informal Obama advisor.

“He would be involved in this in as personal a way as any president could be,” Sunstein said. “This is something he knows.”

Salon’s panel:

Thomas Goldstein, head of the Supreme Court practice for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld

David Yalof, associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut

Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor and Obama advisor

Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School professor and Obama advisor

Lucas A. Powe Jr., Supreme Court historian at the University of Texas School of Law

Robert A. Levy, chair of the Cato Institute

(Sunstein and Ogletree spoke about the characteristics that Obama might seek in a potential Supreme Court nominee, but they declined to provide the names of any individuals Obama might pick, since they advised his campaign.)

Sonia Sotomayor, 54 — After growing up in a Bronx housing project, Sotomayor has risen to become a judge on one of the most powerful courts in the land: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. As a Hispanic woman, Sotomayor would make an attractive candidate if Obama is looking to diversify the court. There has never been a Hispanic on the Supreme Court, and there is only one woman currently on the bench, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sotomayor might also have bipartisan appeal. She is politically moderate, and President George H.W. Bush appointed her to her first judgeship.

Deval Patrick, 52 — As the first African-American governor of Massachusetts and a friend of Barack Obama’s, Patrick is often mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee. Patrick would bring something that is in short supply on the court: executive experience. But he would also bring a major risk: He has never served in the judiciary. Despite that gap in his résumé, he has some background in the law. Before he was governor, Patrick was a lawyer and President Clinton appointed him the assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1994 — the nation’s highest civil rights position. Patrick is solidly liberal and supports a number of positions, such as same-sex marriage, that could make him a target for Republicans during the confirmation process.

Elena Kagan, 48 — Few names have been floated as often as a potential Obama nominee as Kagan, the dean of the Harvard Law School — Obama’s alma mater. Like Obama, she also taught at the University of Chicago. Kagan served in Clinton’s White House as an associate counsel and domestic policy advisor. Clinton nominated her for a position on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but Republicans stalled her approval. Kagan clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Merrick Garland, 56 — President Clinton appointed Garland to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1997. Garland also served in the Department of Justice during the Clinton administration; as an associate deputy attorney general he oversaw the Oklahoma City bombing and Unabomber cases. Garland was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. This impressive résumé makes him one of the most experienced of Obama’s potential nominees. Recently, Garland joined two other judges in throwing out the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” designation for a Chinese Muslim held at Guantánamo Bay. He is considered politically moderate.

Cass Sunstein, 54 — A preeminent and prolific law scholar and an advisor to Obama’s presidential campaign, Sunstein was a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago and now teaches at Harvard Law School. Sunstein has decried the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices, including Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. He calls them judicial fundamentalists who have advocated “earthquake-like” changes in the law. Sunstein argues for a minimalist approach to jurisprudence. He believes justices’ decisions should be narrowly tailored to the case at hand and should lean heavily on precedent. Sunstein has said minimalists believe “the Supreme Court is not our national policy maker.”

Diane P. Wood, 58 — Like Sunstein, Wood is a distinguished law academic. President Clinton nominated Wood to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 1995 after she worked in his Department of Justice. She is also a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School  and was also a lawyer in private practice. She started her law career as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. She is considered somewhat liberal.

Jennifer Granholm, 49 — The governor of Michigan and that state’s former attorney general, Granholm has many of the strengths and weaknesses that Deval Patrick has. She would bring executive experience, but she has also never served in the judiciary. Granholm backed Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primary, but she stumped for Obama during the general election and is serving on his economic transition team. She also stood in for Sarah Palin during Joe Biden’s preparation for the vice-presidential debate.

Leah Ward Sears, 53 — She is the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, but that is hardly Sears’ only trailblazing achievement. She was the first woman and the youngest person ever to serve on the court when Gov. Zell Miller appointed her in 1992. She was also the first African-American to serve on a Georgia superior court. Sears, like Sotomayor, will present an attractive pick for Obama if he looks to increase the diversity of the U.S. Supreme Court. Sears plans to step down from the Georgia Supreme Court in June 2009. She describes herself as a moderate, but she has often been targeted by Georgia’s conservatives.

Harold Hongju Koh, 53 — The dean of Yale Law School is a Korean-American and an expert on international law and human rights. From 1998 to 2001, he served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under President Clinton. He also worked in the Department of Justice. Koh is considered a staunch liberal. He has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He said in an interview with the Yale newspaper that gay rights are especially important to him. Koh also served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

Ruben Castillo, 54 — A United States District Court judge in Chicago, Castillo was appointed by President Clinton in 1994. The judge is the son of a Mexican immigrant father and a Puerto Rican mother, and he was the first member of his family to graduate from college. After starting his career in private practice, Castillo became an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. During one of Castillo’s prosecutions, a drug kingpin took out a contract on his life, and Castillo and his family had to be placed in police protective custody. Castillo also served as the director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Senate

Alaska
Incumbent Republican senator-for-life and convicted felon Ted Stevens leads Democratic challenger Mark Begich by about 3,200 votes. Fully 30 percent of Alaska’s total votes, however, in the form of 90,000 early and absentee ballots, remain uncounted. The counting begins at noon Alaska time Wednesday. Analyst Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com says that since the vast majority of votes left to be counted are early and absentee, that should favor the Democrat. Since Silver is always right, we believe him.

Winner: Begich

The actual result will be known when?
Barring a recount, the results of the race should be announced by Nov. 19.

Georgia
Incumbent Saxby Chambliss, a Republican, narrowly missed the 50 percent plus one threshold needed to win this race outright against Democrat Jim Martin, who received 47 percent of the vote. Under Georgia law, the two highest vote getters, Chambliss and Martin, must face each other in a runoff, scheduled for Dec. 2. The odds favor a Chambliss victory in the runoff. There will be no Barack Obama on the ballot to pump up African-American turnout, and overall turnout figures for runoffs are generally lower anyway. Both factors should help Chambliss. Georgia Democrats will remember that in 1992, one-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler won a plurality of votes on Election Night, only to lose the subsequent runoff to Republican Mack Mattingly. As in 1992, the first round of voting featured a Libertarian who will be absent in the runoff. Sixteen years ago, those Libertarian votes seemed to end up in the R column in Round 2.

Winner: Chambliss

The actual result will be known when?
Probably before midnight on Dec. 2.

Minnesota
Norm Coleman, an incumbent Republican, leads Democratic challenger Al Franken by 206 votes. Since the margin between the candidates is so small, the race appears to be headed to an automatic retally. Coleman’s lead has slowly dwindled since Election Day and the all-knowing Silver gives Franken a slight advantage in a recount. In the state’s 2006 Senate race, which was not close, final adjustments in vote totals for Democrat Amy Klobuchar (the winner) and Republican Mark Kennedy added a net gain of 2,100 (to be fair, both lost votes in the recount, but Kennedy lost 2,100 more, so Klobuchar added 2,100 to her total) to Klobuchar’s tally, suggesting that another close accounting might help the Democrat close the gap. However, the clearest signal that Franken might be headed for a win is the preemptive howling from the right that Minnesota’s Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is about to steal one for his team.

Winner: Franken

The actual result will be known when?
The recount should be completed by Dec. 19.

House

According to our math, Democrats are set to pick up a total of 27 House seats in this election, to just four for Republicans, giving Democrats a net gain of 23 seats. Democrats would thus control 259 seats overall in the House.

Alaska, at-large congressional district
Incumbent Republican Don Young led Democrat Ethan Berkowitz by a healthy 52 to 44 percent margin after Election Day, even though Young had enough ethical issues of his own that his  party tried unsuccessfully to take him out in the primary. Alaskan officials will begin tallying a massive trove of uncounted ballots on Wednesday (see Stevens v. Begich, above), but his lead over Berkowitz is so substantial that he will probably survive.

Winner: Young

The actual result will be known when?
Nov. 19.

California, 4th District
Republican Tom McClintock leads Democrat Charlie Brown by 1,092 votes. There are still nearly 43,000 votes to be counted in this race, so it’s really too difficult to call. That won’t stop us. Given that Republicans have a 15-point registration advantage in the district, it should be an easy win for McClintock, who is also a hero of the conservative wing of California’s GOP. But Brown, who nearly won this seat two years ago, seems to have the advantage when it comes to the votes left to be counted — more votes are outstanding in places where he is doing well or splitting the vote with McClintock, specifically Nevada and Placer counties. Brown won Nevada County in 2006 in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent John Doolittle, who retired rather than run again. In addition, McClintock is an outsider, having moved to the Northern California district from the L.A. exurbs to run, and Doolittle retired under an Abramoff-related ethical cloud.

Winner: It’s a tossup, but we’re going to give it to Brown.

The actual result will be known when?
Barring a recount, around Nov. 25.

Louisiana, 4th District
Hurricane Gustav may have cost Democrat Paul J. Carmouche his best shot to win this open seat, vacated by retiring Republican Jim McCrery. Carmouche is battling Republican John Fleming, but now, Carmouche won’t benefit from Obama’s Nov. 4 coattails, which were nonexistent in Louisiana anyway. Though the district has a significant black population, McCrery won easily in past contests. Republicans picked up a seat in Louisiana on Election Night, when Bill Cassidy beat Democrat Don Cazayoux in the state’s 6th Congressional District.

Winner: Fleming

The actual result will be known when?
Dec. 6.

Louisiana, 2nd District
If allegedly stashing cash in a freezer didn’t hurt incumbent Democrat William Jefferson, what power does a hurricane have? Like the 4th District contest, the 2nd District tilt was delayed by Gustav. Jefferson will face a runoff against Republican Joseph Cao on Dec. 6. Though Jefferson faces federal corruption charges, he remains popular in his heavily black New Orleans district and history is decidedly on his side. A Democrat has held the seat since 1924.

Winner: Jefferson

The actual result will be known when?
Dec. 6.

Ohio, 15th District
Republican Steven Stivers holds a 149-vote edge over Democrat Mary Joe Kilroy. Sure Stivers leads, but probably not for long. Thousands of provisional ballots and some absentee ballots are left to count. The provisional ballots, which in Ohio are usually cast by new residents and the young, should favor the Democrat.

Winner: Kilroy

The actual result will be known when?
Barring a recount, the winner should be known by Nov. 19.

Virginia, 5th District
Democrat Tom Perriello holds a 745-vote lead over Republican incumbent Virgil H. Goode Jr., squeaking past the incumbent thanks to an extra dollop of votes from African-Americans and liberals (and college students) in Charlottesville. Some locals may also have been embarrassed by Goode’s loutish comments about Muslims. Virtually all the votes in the race have been counted, so Goode’s only path for overtaking Perriello appears to be a recount.

Winner: Perriello

The actual result will be known when?
Though Goode can call for a new tally, the election will be certified on Nov. 24.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in his column Tuesday that Palin supporters shouted obscenities at a camera crew during a Clearwater, Fla., rally. The vice-presidential candidate blamed Katie Couric’s questions for her fumbling performance in her infamous CBS interview. Another backer hurled a racial insult at an African-American sound man and said, “Sit down, boy.”

At another point, Palin mentioned Bill Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground turned Chicago fixture, whom McCain is desperately trying to tie Obama to. Palin said about Ayers, “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol.’”

“Kill him!” yelled one man in the audience.

And at a Palin rally in Jacksonville, Fla., a member of the crowd screamed, “Treason!” when Palin said “[Obama] said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are ‘air raiding villages and killing civilians.’” (Palin took Obama’s quote out of context. In a speech at a 2007 rally in New Hampshire, Obama was actually arguing for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, so they didn’t have to rely on imprecise tactics like air raids.)

In a few destructive hours on Sept. 11, he writes, the groups went from being just another set of minorities in our multicultural patchwork to “dangerous outsiders” in many Americans’ eyes. Hate crimes spiked 1,700 percent against Arabs and Muslims in the months after the terrorist attacks and thousands were detained, questioned and deported. A 2006 USA Today/Gallup poll found 39 percent of Americans believed all Muslims –including U.S. citizens — should carry special IDs.

“We’re the new blacks,” a Palestinian-American in his 20s tells Bayoumi as the young man puffs on apple-flavored tobacco in a hookah lounge. “You know that, right?”

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” DuBois aimed to pull back “the veil” separating whites and blacks by presenting a full view of black life. In his new book, Bayoumi gives us seven richly observed vignettes of the lives of young American Arabs and Muslims who live in Brooklyn; he hopes to cut through the suspicion and fear they face as they navigate post-Sept. 11 America and come of age.

Bayoumi’s subjects are more ordinary than extraordinary, but that is precisely the point. In the war on terror, he argues, Arabs and Muslims have been reduced to two types: the exceptional, assimilated immigrant and the violent fundamentalist. Bayoumi hopes to humanize, as well as complicate, our view of Muslims by presenting his subjects in the texture of their daily lives with all of the attendant humor, boredom, messiness and small victories and defeats. That does not mean the book is prosaic — suspicion, fear and being different create roadblocks and tough choices in every chapter.

Among the stories Bayoumi tells are those of Sami, a U.S. Marine who is deeply angered by Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq; Rasha, a college student whose entire family is jailed on immigration charges; Yasmin, a high school student who wants to serve on the student council, but faces challenges because of her religion; and Akram, a Palestinian-American who wants to leave the country in which his father worked so hard to build a life.

Bayoumi, whose work has appeared in the Nation and the London Review of Books and who co-edited “The Edward Said Reader,” spoke to Salon by phone.

What do you mean when you say young Arabs and Muslims are the new “problem” in American society?

Everybody has an opinion about what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim. Young Arabs and Muslims are the ones most feared by the culture at large, so it was very important for me to excavate the stories I found to illustrate the realities and tempos of real life during the age of terror.

In the wake of Sept. 11, thousands of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians were arrested and detained for weeks or months on immigration charges. You open the book with the story of Rasha, a 19-year-old college student whose family was rounded up in a raid. What happened to her?

Rasha has lived in the United States for almost the entirety of her life, even though she was born in Syria. She came as a youngster after her family was granted a tourist visa. Her family applied for asylum status after leaving behind a very brutal regime in Syria. Asylum claims take a very, very — almost inhumanely — long time to adjudicate, so they lived in this kind of in-between zone where many people live. They’re not quite legal. They’re not quite illegal. This made them very vulnerable, as it made a lot of people vulnerable after Sept. 11.

She was one of thousands of people that were rounded up in these mass arrests in the months after Sept. 11 precisely because of the vulnerability of her immigration status. She also suspects her family was reported to the government by a snitch in the community. Regardless, she spent three months of her life in prison, which she felt was a great injustice. She thought she would never be in prison unless she had done something wrong here.

Her entire family was rounded up in the middle of the night.

They were woken up in the middle of the night. The street was blocked off. They were put in shackles, especially her brother, who spoke back to one of the officials. The official then said to him something to the effect of “Put your hands together, like when you pray.” The whole family was really traumatized by the horror of the whole ordeal. It lasted several months and involved several different prison institutions. She got an education in what the prison system means. Immigration and criminal detainees are often held in the same place. Her mother was incarcerated with her, as was her sister. The two daughters were trying to make this ordeal as easy as possible on their mother. She’s really come through it as a much stronger person. [Rasha's family was eventually released from prison, but the immigration case against them is still pending].

There is an interesting dynamic at work with one of your other subjects, Akram. His father is a Palestinian who immigrated to America and built a life with a mom-and-pop grocery store in Brooklyn. Akram, on the other hand, is disenchanted with America’s treatment of Muslims and wants to move to Dubai to teach English. Is this part of a wider trend?

Yes. Akram’s story is not exceptional. The Gulf as a whole and Dubai in particular have an allure to this younger generation for many complicated reasons. One of which is there seems to be a growing hostility to all things Muslim in the United States. They think if they go to the Gulf they can escape a lot of that. Then there’s the role of globalization. Dubai is now seen as a hot spot — it’s where the action is. It’s interesting to me because this earlier generation, his father’s generation, believed that about the United States. They could come to the United States and fulfill all of their potential. Now, in a lot of ways, their children feel that way about a place like Dubai.

Despite all the coverage of Muslims and Arabs after Sept. 11, you write they remain “curiously unknown” to many of their neighbors. Why does this ignorance persist?

I think a lot of the coverage seems to be driven by reporters looking for a particular answer. If you want to find the exceptional immigrant who’s going to prove to you how easy it is to live in the United States even as an Arab or Muslim, you will find him. If you want to get the hothead who says something that’s extreme, or is interpreted as extreme, that’s not a problem either. I was really looking for how people were actually living their lives. A lot of non-Arab and Muslim Americans are surprised at the range of religiosity, for example, within the community. Most people think that all Muslims are very religious — and that’s just not the case.

Through connections you made reporting this book, you were able to sit in on a revealing closed-door meeting between the Muslim community in Brooklyn and the FBI. The meeting, as you describe it, is surreal: The FBI agents demand community members condemn terrorism in front of them. The agents also say they are there “to instill a sense of love for our precious freedoms.” The FBI’s attitude toward the community seems the opposite of how you would go about forging a productive relationship. Overall, how successfully have law enforcement officials engaged the Muslim community after Sept. 11?

I don’t think they’ve done a good job of building bridges and reaching out to the community. There have been probably hundreds if not thousands of meetings, between different communities in the United States and law enforcement officials. It’s almost become a sort of routine thing where the law enforcement officials will speak a few words of Arabic. They learn a couple of facts about Islam. The community leaders speak. They have a nice meeting, but nothing really changes as far as I can see.

One of your other subjects, Sami, a Christian whose mother is Egyptian and father Palestinian, is a Marine who fights in the Iraq war. Shortly before shipping out, he makes an appointment with his commanding officers. “I have a conflict of interest,” he says. “I’m Arab, and I can’t fight against my own people.”

He was on an overnight bus down to his basic training when Sept. 11 happened. All the soldiers knew that this was not what they had signed up for. They would have to face actual military conflict. That meant for him — and I’m sure a whole lot of people — that they had to find a lot of courage where they may not have looked before. He tried to find ways initially to not go to war, even though he never had a very strong allegiance to his Arab identity prior to shipping off to Iraq. While he was there, he starts to engage the translators who are there — some of the locals, but mainly people from stateside who are translating for the military. These deep links of kinship are awakened in him. Sami has a complicated story to tell about his relationship to war and to identity and his own Arab-ness.

Is there a thread that connects each of these stories?

All of these people are working out who they are in a difficult time without a hint of self-pity. It’s not a maudlin book at all. For the most part, too, they are pretty optimistic about their own futures and, really, the future of the country.

Has the experience of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 changed the community’s approach to politics or spurred more political engagement?

I think there’s no question that it has. The community has always been to some degree political. The politics that it had been concerned about prior to Sept. 11 were primarily overseas. After Sept. 11, that was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. Your concerns had to be on the domestic side of things and on foreign policy. You have the growth of certain organizations. They speak in a much more American idiom. They are learning very quickly about making alliances with other groups. I think on the whole the community has been more politicized and, on the whole, it is working toward a more progressive agenda.

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate with significant ties to the Muslim world. However, the New York Times recently ran an article saying some Muslims feel snubbed by Obama’s campaign.

There was a time when Obama really electrified the young Arab and Muslim Americans that I know. They felt really optimistic about him because he seemed to have a really different kind of politics. You could trace that all the way back to the speech he gave at the Democratic Convention in 2004, when he said something to the effect of “If an Arab-American family is rounded up without due process that threatens my civil rights as well.” In the Arab and Muslim community, he was seen as someone that could really achieve change, especially after the Bush administration.

But what happened since then is a shift to the center. The sense we could expect a more even-handed policy when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — that now seems naive. His stand on withdrawing troops from Iraq seems harder to get a hold on. There are several other things, including the level of symbolic policy. It seems that his campaign feels the idea that people associate him with being a Muslim as a smear.

How do you think Obama should deal with the rumors that he is a Muslim?

He should adopt a “Seinfeld” response — even though he’s not a Muslim, there isn’t anything wrong with being a Muslim. Obama is continually running away from it. Actually, he’s just come out with something in the last few weeks — that Muslims are proud members of the human family like everyone else. There should be more of that.

Has there been any silver lining to the experience of Arabs and Muslims over the last six or seven years?

I think that multiculturalism is a much harder project than recognition, tolerance and acknowledgment. Multiculturalism means dealing with a large group of people that have different ideas about different things — even within different communities. The United States is in some ways grappling with that question, and grappling with it more profoundly in the wake of Sept. 11. It could potentially change not just how things are run in the United States, but how the United States relates to the rest of the world. To me, if the future is going to hold anything, it’s got to hold a “we’re all in this together” kind of thing. In a way, the best parts of the response to Sept. 11 indicate that as well.