Obama Sends Vice President to Build Bridges

US Vice President Joe Biden is the star guest at the Munich Security Conference this weekend. His speech on Saturday is supposed to form the basis of the new trans-Atlantic partnership. Instead of concrete pledges, experts await a bid to mend ties between Europe and the US.

It’s been little over three weeks since Joe Biden became deputy to the most powerful man in the world and he still hasn’t grown into his new role. The former senator can be seen at the State Department discussing foreign policy or dining with President Barack Obama in the White House. Sometimes he presents himself as a champion of the middle classes, at other times he appears in shirtsleeves at on a railway platform pleading for investment in infrastructure. “It is hard now,” he admitted in a recent TV interview. “What I have to think now is, everything I say, I am the vice president. I am not the president. So everything I say reflects directly on the administration.”

REUTERS

US President Barack Obama (L) and Vice President Joe Biden.

This Saturday Biden will be speaking explicitly on behalf of the United States. His speech at the Munich Security Conference will be the vice president’s first major international appearance — and the Bavarian capital is rolling out the red carpet for him. The conference organizers promise that his speech will provide the impetus for a new start in trans-Atlantic relations.

What are the expectations for the speech? “The tone is the message,” Laurie Dundon, who previously worked with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and is now at the Bertelsmann Foundation in Washington, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The right words would define the parameters for future cooperation, just as preparations are being made for Obama’s Europe trip at the beginning of April to the G-20 summit in London and the NATO summit in Kehl and Strasbourg.”

COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE…

Biden at the Munich Security Conference: Obama Sends Vice President to Build Bridges – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

A Harvard scholar takes a look at the Great Emancipator

Racial jokes? Shipping freed slaves to Africa? These aren’t the sorts of things most people generally associate with Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday is on Feb. 12. In a new book, “Lincoln on Race & Slavery,” and a new series airing Feb. 11 on PBS, “Looking for Lincoln,” Harvard professor and documentary filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes a fresh look at the 16th president. (For more on Lincoln, see Dorothy Rabinowitz’s television review and the book review.)

PBS

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Wall Street Journal: There have been 14,000 books written about Lincoln, according to you, more than any other American. Isn’t that enough?

Mr. Gates: The only person who has received more attention in print is Jesus, which is astonishing. But, no one has done a book or film from my particular perspective.

Which is?

Here’s the complicated truth: Lincoln was always opposed to slavery as an institution, [but] he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people. He gave a speech [in 1858] in Charleston, Ill., in which he said he was opposed to interracial marriage, opposed to blacks serving on juries or serving in the military and said the difference between the white and black races was permanent and fixed by nature. This is a long way from being the Great Emancipator, man. He had a penchant for the n-word [before 1860] and he proposed a constitutional amendment funding the colonization of the freed slaves.

Yet you grew to like him even more after delving into his racial attitudes, correct?

The difference between Lincoln and everybody else is that he had a capacity to grow. In the last speech of his life, Lincoln said for the first time in the American presidency: “I want to give the right to vote to [a few] black men.” He thought the Declaration of Independence included black men. Thomas Jefferson didn’t do that.

We’re in the midst of a Lincoln revival. Steven Spielberg is in the process of doing a Lincoln movie with a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Barack Obama has been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln’s cabinet. Why is he so enduringly popular?

There’s a Lincoln for all seasons in America. There are dozens of Lincolns. There’s Lincoln the atheist, the Northern Lincoln, the Confederate Lincoln, Lincoln the war criminal, Lincoln the savior of the union, Lincoln the humorous, Lincoln the melancholy. One guy wrote a book about Lincoln as gay, another of Lincoln the heterosexual lover. Lincoln the white supremacist; Lincoln the Great Emancipator…

In the film you criss-cross America, visiting a high-school class in downtown Chicago, the Ford Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated, and the Harlem office of President Bill Clinton. In Lincoln’s New Salem, Ill., a recreated town inhabited by Lincoln devotees, a woman threatened to eject you for hinting that Lincoln had an affair with Ann Rutledge. Were you surprised?

New Salem is all reconstructed log cabins and [its people] are dedicated to protecting the myth of Abraham Lincoln — the idea that he did no wrong. I find it charming, but as a scholar, it’s ridiculous.

Barack Obama swore the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible and references Lincoln frequently in speeches.

Barack Obama is the logical extension of Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery in the South and his embrace of black rights at the end of his life. Also, Lincoln was the Great Reconciliator “with malice toward none”: That’s Barack Obama.

In the film you show “Abraham Obama,” a work by street artist Ron English that melds Lincoln and Obama’s faces into a single image. Do you think the comparison is appropriate?

When we filmed they gave me a poster. I’m looking forward to having Abraham Obama sign it.

—Christina S.N. Lewis

Henry Louis Gates Jr. Takes a Look at Lincoln in His New Book and PBS Series – WSJ.com.

The Obama administration wants to spend up to $100 billion on efforts to help homeowners, especially those facing foreclosure. But one of the leading ideas on how to do that — rewriting home loans to make mortgages affordable to struggling borrowers — is based on a startling lack of data about what works, and early evidence suggests that many lenders aren’t going to make substantial changes without serious strong-arming.

There are various ideas being bandied about, but the goal is common: to entice mortgages servicers, whether lenders themselves or third parties acting on behalf of investors, to rewrite the terms of loans so that people behind on payments might be able to keep their homes. (Read the four steps to ending the foreclosure crisis.)

One way being discussed to do that is for the government to share in the losses if a servicer modifies a mortgage and the homeowner again defaults. Another approach is to directly help pay for the cost of the modification. The servicer might cut monthly payments to 38% of a borrower’s income with the government chipping in to reduce the payment down to 31%, a presumably more sustainable level. Either tactic could be combined with a direct payment — $1,000 is a figure often mentioned — to incentivize servicers to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how much a homeowner can truly afford and recrafting his mortgage to match.

To a homeowner who has always made mortgage payments on time, perhaps by sacrificing spending elsewhere, the whole concept may seem grossly unfair. But society’s problems are unfortunately often our own. As the foreclosure rate has skyrocketed, and loan defaults have rippled from subprime mortgages into ones made to prime and near-prime borrowers, property values in many parts of the country have been pounded. There is an unavoidable correction going on in house prices, that much is true, but the swoon has caused additional

Reviving the Housing Market: Will Loan Modifications Work? – TIME.

More from Facebook’s Schroepfer:

The future of an open and social web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect.

There’s even an OpenID design summit being planned for next week, to be hosted (where else?) at Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, California.

Facebook Throws its Weight Behind OpenID | Epicenter from Wired.com.