Little Wild Bouquet

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2008-09-13T21:05:00.002-04:00

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WHOSE CHOICE?

2008-09-09T22:53:00.006-04:00

Dahlia Lithwick notes the mendacity of choice language on abortion from anti-choice politicians like McCain and Palin:

In announcing that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant last week, GOP vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin used this puzzling locution: "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby." Pundits were quick to point out that Bristol's "decision" must have been at least somewhat constrained by her mom's position--as articulated in November 2006--that she would oppose an abortion for her daughters, even if they had been raped...So what exactly, one wonders, was young Bristol permitted to decide?

These rhetorical somersaults are, as Lithwick notes, the same ones John McCain employed in talking about a hypothetical Meghan McCain pregnancy eight years ago. There's no mystery here: Americans like choice more than they like abortion. Republicans know this, so they dress up their hard-line anti-choice positions as though they were just about choosing against abortion, while never conceding that there should be a choice at all (in my college days the student anti-choice group was called Choose Life At Yale; they published an ad comparing voting for John Kerry - who also advocates choosing life but is pro-choice - to voting for Jefferson Davis). And the media too often plays along, as when the New York Times profiled women in an abortion clinic making painful choices that weighed medical, religious, economic, and social factors; the Times held up these women, who were doing exactly what the pro-choice movement defends women's right to do, as representing a middle ground in the abortion debate. I'd add that watching Palin's gymnastics on choice is probably the most interesting part of the 2006 gubernatorial debate re-aired on C-SPAN over the weekend. For someone who wants the government to criminalize a woman's choices about her future, Sarah Palin's rhetoric is awfully "personal." She answers the first question on choice - about whether as a public official she would attend a public event to publicly support legislation banning abortion - by saying that she's pro-life and "I don't try to hide it and I'm not ashamed of it." When asked whether a rape victim should be able to choose abortion, she objects that it wouldn't "be up to me as an individual" whether that woman was forced to carry the fetus for nine months - leaving unsaid that if she had her way, it wouldn't be up to the woman as an individual either. But Palin makes clear that she'd force the rape victim to carry the fetus by specifying only the life of the mother as acceptable grounds for abortion. Then she answers the follow-up question by saying rape is "a very private matter also, but personally, I would choose life." The hypocrisy here is glaring: if Sarah Palin indeed wants that woman's choice to be private, she should oppose government outlawing it. But she doesn't. So it should come as no surprise a minute later when she addresses euthanasia with the same rhetorical sleight of hand: "This is a very personal and private and sensitive issue and I do respect others' opinions on it, but personally I do believe that no, government should not be sanctioning or assisting taking life."

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE RISING OF THE WATERS?

2008-09-04T22:15:00.003-04:00

Last night we learned from Mitt Romney that John McCain is going to make the sun stop rising in the east and start rising in the west. Good thing he's not a messianic elitist like Barack Obama. To be fair, God does make the sun stop so Joshua can beat up the Ammonites, so why shouldn't John McCain expect the same assistance in taking out those dread journalists and community organizers?

SUMMER NON-READING

2008-09-03T01:30:00.005-04:00

Whatever Fred Thompson's been doing since he finished pretending to run against John McCain for President, it's sure kept him busy. Otherwise he surely would have read in the newspaper that John McCain doesn't like too much talk about his POW service. And you'd think Fred would have been more careful than to say that being a POW doesn't qualify you to be President - must have missed it when Wesley Clark got savaged by Republicans and the media for saying the same thing. I guess if Fred managed to miss all that, we shouldn't be surprised that he hasn't yet gotten around to reading the Obama speech Fred claims was "designed to appeal to American critics abroad" in Berlin ("...just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe"). Seems Fred's sure been busy. Guess it really wasn't fair for anyone to call him lazy after all.

FIGHTING WORDS

2008-09-01T16:07:00.002-04:00

Nathan Newman: "Many conservative analysts try to explain the weakness of labor unions and social democracy in the U.S. through a whole range of culturalist explanations about the U.S. working class. Racism is often cited but as Blackmon's book makes clear, one incredibly key but almost completely unmentioned factor is the southern gulag that destroyed free labor in a whole region of the country--with the full cooperation of northern capitalists who recognized the economic and political usefulness of a non-union region of the country to undermine labor in the rest of the nation." Dean Baker: "They are prepared to use the heavy hand of the government to ensure that small meat packers do not win out over bigger more politically powerful meat packers. It is clear that the Bush administration is not prepared to tell the big meat packers that 'you are on your own.'" Ann Friedman: "Their decisions are seen by the antichoice Republican base as affirmation that Palin shares their values. But the underlying message that each woman had a choice is a validation of pro-choice values."

WIFE SWAP CONSERVATISM

2008-08-31T17:12:00.005-04:00

While on vacation out East, I got the chance to pick up and read Walter Benn Michaels' 2006 book The Trouble With Diversity. Might as well spoil the suspense and start by saying Benn Michaels didn't convince me when he argues (like Michaels Lind and Tomasky) that left-wing "identity politics" around race and gender stand in the way of a serious left-wing class politics. The book reminded me at various points of Catherine MacKinnon's argument (in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State) that feminists and Marxists view each other with suspicion because each party could undo one kind of oppression while leaving the other oppression intact. It's often not clear to whom Benn Michaels, an English professor, is addressing his argument. He offers criticisms (often clever, always articulate) of some academic arguments about identity, but he doesn't engage with many pivotal ones - like the literature on intersectional (rather than additive) approaches to identity, considering how identities mediate each other - how being identified as a poor Black woman has different social and economics meanings than just being poor plus being Black plus being a woman. He calls Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States "certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race," but cites only two sentences from it. If the argument is directed at political practitioners, we're left wondering how he actually pictures the left gaining power and effectiveness by throwing race and gender overboard. In a telling line criticizing the focus on sexism at Wal-Mart as a distraction from exploitation there, Benn Michaels asserts that "Laws against discrimination by gender are what you go for when you've given up on - or turned against - the idea of a strong labor movement." Tell that to all the folks in the labor movement and labor-allied groups who've worked to support the Dukes lawsuit and the fight against Wal-Mart's sexism as part of a broad-based critique of a company that helpfully illustrates the connections between conservatism's threat to gender equality, economic justice, environmental sustainability, and other values progressives and most Americans hold dear. Benn Michaels' approach, which denies that rich people can be victims of oppression or that poor people can be oppressed by more than only poverty, would render the left unable to fully understand, let alone seriously engage, with what Betty Dukes and millions of women like her are facing (see also Whitewashing Race). As badly as Benn Michaels may wish for a revived labor movement, in advocating a disregard for identity politics he's echoing the disconnection from progressive social movements which contributed the labor movement's decline in the first place. Those blinders regarding oppressions besides class mirror the blindness to class of too many in, for example, the pro-choice movement - blindness of which Benn Michaels would be rightly critical. That said, we needn't accept Benn Michael's arguments about the irrelevance of race- and sex-based politics to appreciate the book's critical insight: that the plutocrats triumph when poverty is understood as an identity to be respected rather than as a problem to be eliminated. Conservatives, as he argues, have masterfully reframed our class problem as being about the elitists who look down on poor people rather than about the robber barons, de-regulators, and union-busters who make them poor. Examples abound in conservative literature (Tom Wolfe comes in for some enjoyable criticism in The Trouble With Diversity), but Benn Michaels is right that seemingly liberal takes on class often suffer from the same problem. And he's right that conservatives draw on the language we use to talk about race to pull this off. I was reminded of People Like Us, a very engaging PBS documentary about class in America that explores a series of interesting situations - working-class folks fight with ex-hippies about what kind of supermarket to bring into their neighborhood; tensions within African-American communities about whether Jack and Jill clubs aimed at well-off Black kids are elitist; a daughter's embarrassment about her "trailer park" mom - but all from the perspective of how different classes can get along, not how we can reduce or eliminate class differences. The least sympathetic characters in the movie are a bunch of snotty high school kids at a mixed-income public school talking in awful terms about why they wouldn't talk to the poor kids they go to school with ("What would we talk to them about?"). It's a good movie. But you could walk away with the sense that our class problems would be solved if the rich kids would befriend the poor kids. Which, as Benn Michaels would argue, would be much less expensive or destabilizing for the powers that be than making those kids' families less poor. As Benn Michaels writes (in one of many paragraphs that makes you wish more political books were written by English professors) about an episode of Wife Swap:

At no time, apparently, did it occur to the makers of the show, the people in it or the people reviewing it, that what the show really demonstrates is how much better it is to be rich than to be poor. Or perhaps one should say not that the show ignores this point but that it is devoted to denying it, and that it succeeds so completely (this is its brilliance) that we find ourselves believing that run-down shacks in the woods are just as nice as Park Avenue apartments, especially if your husband remembers to thank you for chopping the wood when you get home from driving the bus. The idea the show likes is the one Tom Wolfe and company like: that the problem with being poor is not having less money than rich people but having rich people "look down" on you. And the rich husband is bad because he does indeed look down on the poor people, whereas the rich wife (the one who has never done a day's work in her life and who begins the show by celebrating her "me time," shopping, working out, etc.) turns out to be good because she comes to appreciate the poor and even to realize that she can learn from them. The fault here is not in being rich but in thinking that you have better taste - more generally, in thinking that...you are are a better person.

TAKING A 10% CHANCE ON CHANGE

2008-08-29T23:18:00.005-04:00

Chris Shays is the only Republican congressman left in New England, after the good people of Connecticut ousted the other two remaining faux-moderate GOPers tasked with representing their blue state. Shays is so committed to having it both ways that he recently aired an ad promising "the optimism of Barack Obama" and "the straight talk of John McCain" (maybe he can update it to tout Joe Biden's statesmanship and Sarah Palin's love of tax cuts and mooseburgers). But as the campaign of Chris Shays' opponent - non-profit leader Jim Himes - reminds us, while Chris Shays has cast some votes with the Democrats, he doesn't like to do it when it actually counts: Out of the closest third of the votes in the House, he votes with the GOP 89% of the time. Folks who think believe Connecticut can do better than a "catch-and-release" Congressman can contribute to Jim Himes' campaign in this perpetually-close district here. (Full disclosure: the research here is my brother's baby - which I guess makes me its uncle)

QUICK THOUGHTS ON OBAMA'S SPEECH

2008-08-29T03:37:00.004-04:00

To choose a favorite talking head buzz phrase, I think Barack Obama did what he had to do tonight. And he did it quite well. First, closing a convention that erred too far on the side of nice (that means you, Mark Warner), Barack Obama came out swinging against John McCain, and I think he managed to do it in a way that's hard to characterize as "nasty" or "shrill" or "too angry," unless you're one of the people who characterizes Democrats that way for a living. He crossed that threshold John Kerry or Al Gore never quite did, where you take on political opponents with a toughness that suggests you could take on enemies as President. And he maintained his sense of humor while doing it. Second, Obama also addressed the imaginary lack of specificity in his policy proposals (the only thing more imaginary may be the desire among voters to hear specifics of policy proposals) by laying out a series of them (including improvements to the bankruptcy law that his running mate helped worsen). He had to do it; it's good that he did. But it's an especially silly expectation coming from a press corps that lets John McCain continue praising himself for having championed policies he currently opposes. It's a good sign that the speech gets compared to a State of the Union address (or is that too presumptuous!). Third, Obama talked about his own story, not in the linear way he has in the past and others have at this convention, but by explicitly comparing experiences in his life to experiences of Americans he's met. Of course it's sad that he has a higher bar to clear here than would a White candidate. That said, he did a compelling job connecting Americans' stories and his own and explaining how they inform where he'll take the country. And the uplift was there too. As for the disappointment, of course some of the self-consciously non-that-kind-of-Democrat stuff (are we reinventing government again?) is bothersome. And in a speech that was more aggressive than we've come to expect from Democratic nominees, there was some needless defensiveness. If you're going to talk about the importance of fatherhood, why say it's something we "admit"? Aren't you undercuttng yourself? Why say "Don't tell me Democrats won't defend America," as though you concede that that's the perception - and why respond to the criticism you brought up by naming presidents from forty years ago? Obama seems unable to help himself from rehearsing potential counterarguments in a way that doesn't really help him - as in "Some people will say that this is just a cover for the same liberal etc..." And I think Obama made himself seem a little smaller when he followed talking about the struggles his family has overcome by protesting that he's not a celebrity. Finally, while he effectively seized the high ground on patriotism, it seems overly restrictive for Obama to say he won't suggest that McCain takes his policy positions with any eye to political expediency - I hope he doesn't really mean that part, which would seem to leave John Kerry's "Senator McCain v. Candidate McCain" line of attack off limits.

WHO PLACED WHOSE HANDS?

2008-08-29T00:12:00.005-04:00

Hillary Clinton got some deserved criticism for her lecture about how "it took a President" to pass the Civil Rights Act (didn't Obama prove he values the role of the President when he started running to be the next one?). But Robert Caro's op-ed today reminds us she could have said something worse:

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

This isn't poetic - it's just offensive. Did LBJ tie African-Americans' shoes before they left the house to vote? It should go without saying that African-Americans have been a "true part of American political life" since before the birth of the United States. Among other things, they led a movement which seized the franchise by shifting public opinion and transforming the political landscape. That movement made the difference between the days when LBJ was strategizing against Civil Rights legislation to the days when Jesse Helms must claim to support it. Caro seems smug towards Civil Rights activists who didn't trust Johnson's support until they got it. No doubt which bills Johnson supported, and when he came around to support them, is indeed, as Caro says, some combination of "ambition and compassion." It's short-sighted for historians to lionize Johnson's choices while disparaging the people whose vision, tactics, and courage made it possible for him to wed the two. Of course it makes a huge difference who the President is. But the Great Man Theory that tells us Lincoln freed the slaves and then Johnson gave their descendants the vote is a theory that should be in the dustbin of history by now. Let's remember that as we consider the progress Barack Obama's nomination represents as well as the struggles ahead should there be an Obama presidency.

PARTISAN AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

2008-08-26T00:21:00.004-04:00

Tuned in to Sean Hannity's convention coverage on the radio as he was complaining about the convention's failure to address the "real issues" of the campaign, which apparently are whether America is mean (or just whiny?) and whether Michelle Obama loves America sufficiently. It was just in time to hear him defending John McCain's participation in the Keating Five scandal that ended most participants' careers. The defense? McCain wasn't seen to have broken laws by "partisan Democrat" Bob Bennett. Yes, that's the same Bob Bennett who John McCain recently hired to try to kill a New York Times story suggesting more recent impropriety with a lobbyist.

ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE

2008-08-10T01:45:00.006-04:00

Reviewing Entertainment Weekly interviews with the candidates, Marc Ambinder expresses surprise that

In some ways, Obama has the tastes of a 72 year old man; McCain has the tastes of a 47 year old whippersnapper. Who knew?

At risk of sounding cynical, why should we be surprised when Obama associates himself with Dick Van Dyke and McCain associates himself with Usher? Isn't this what candidates often do in interviews - try to address potential vulnerabilities and convince more people that they're more like them than they realized (that is, when they're not focused on doubling-down on their perceived strengths)? That the guy smeared as a secretly foreign terrorist fist jabber touts an old white guy and the really old white guy who can't use a computer touts a young R & B artist seems to make a lot of sense. Same reason around election time we often hear more from Democrats about their love of guns and Jesus and from Republicans about their love of Black people and the environment. Updated (8/25/08) to correctly identify Usher's musical genre, though not in time to avoid looking to Alek like an elderly white guy.

IN GOOD COMPANY

2008-08-08T00:57:00.004-04:00

McCain's new strategist draws on Barack Obama's supposed smear of Bill Clinton as a racist to attack Barack Obama's supposed smear of John McCain (The Original Maverick!) as a racist (seeing as it's not as though the McCain campaign actually created an ad warning that Barack Obama would put a scary picture of himself on the dollar bill or anything):

"Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton," Schmidt said, "but it's deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based. President Clinton was a force for unity in this country on this subject. Every American should be proud of his record as both a governor and president. But we knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a President of the United State of their own party."

This reminds me of one of the fun angles of a McCain-Romney ticket: The chance to make John McCain eat his words about Mitt Romney being a feckless French surrender monkey for using the word "timetable" once regarding Iraq. The conventional wisdom seems to be that attacks candidate lodge against each other in the primaries don't (with "voodoo economics" as maybe an exception, maybe not) come back to sting them if they end up on a ticket together in the general because voters recognize that that was then and the attacks were just opportunistic. But that's why resurrecting old attack lines could have more sting when targeted against the attacker than the attacked. In other words, voters probably won't think less of Mitt Romney when reminded that John McCain attacked him for harboring plans that "would have led to a victory by Al Qaeda." But that reminder might affect how seriously they take McCain's equally spurious attack on Barack Obama, at least if John McCain turns around and decides to puitch the man he once opportunistically attacked that way to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

A CAMPAIGN ABOUT CHANGE VERSUS A CAMPAIGN ABOUT MCCAIN?

2008-07-24T21:20:00.004-04:00

Reading Michael Crowley's Mark Salter profile in TNR, you wonder how real McCainiacs can really keep a straight face while arguing that the Obama campaign is the one driven by a cult of personality built around a narcissist who feels he's owed the presidency. Salter is apparently livid that Obama has stolen McCain's themes of having matured out of a colorful childhood and been bettered by patriotism and commitment to public service. Did Mark Salter make it through his top perch in John McCain's 2000 campaign without ever listening to a George W. Bush speech? Salter even jokes

"I often regret that we didn't copyright 'serving a cause greater than your self-interest,'" he cracks.

And Barack Obama is supposed to have an arrogance problem? Crowley also resurrects Mark Salter's tirade against a college graduating class whose student speaker had the temerity to criticize McCain before he spoke:

Should you grow up and ever get down to the hard business of making a living and finding a purpose for your lives beyond self-indulgence some of you might then know a happiness far more sublime than the fleeting pleasure of living in an echo chamber. And if you are that fortunate, you might look back on the day of your graduation and your discourtesy to a good and honest man with a little shame and the certain knowledge that it is very unlikely any of you will ever posses one small fraction of the character of John McCain.

This isn't some out of control staffer - this is the guy who survives every McCainland shake-up, ghost-writes everything, conceived, crafts, and protects the McCain mythology, etc. But his comments are striking in part because they echo the ethos that emanates from so much of McCain's campaign: this sense that John McCain deserves the presidency, even if America isn't good enough to deserve John McCain. Who else would put up an internet ad about how the candidate as an elite boarding school student learned the honor code and committed to turn in other boys if they were cheating - and he's applied those values ever since? Or one that just consists of speechifying by their guy and quotes from Teddy Roosevelt? Can you imagine if Barack Obama tried to pull that? Meanwhile McCain's campaign brings up his POW experience at every conceivable opportunity while demanding he be recognized as too modest to talk about it - and how dare Wes Clark question whether it qualifies him to be president? (Remember the attacks on John Kerry for talking too much about his purple hearts) Today Obama is predictably under attack from conservatives for the ostensible arrogance of giving a speech to a big crowd outside the United States. In that speech, Obama talks about his personal story and what he loves about America - echoing, though understandably not repeating his statement in his convention speech that "in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." This is the most common intersection of autobiography and patriotism in an Obama speech: America is a great country which has made so much possible for me. With McCain, the formulation is more often: I love America, and I've sacrificed for America my whole life. McCain is of course entitled to tout his military service, which is certainly more admirable than what he's done in the United States Senate. And his campaign's steady emphasis on McCain's story and character I'm sure is driven in part by recognition that more people cast their votes on such things - ethos rather than logos in Paul Waldman's formulation. But - aside from Crowley's observation that McCain's character appeal seems more attuned to what voters wanted in 2000 than in 2008 - I have to hope that it's not just we "base voters" who find his campaign's sense of entitlement grating. Everyone seems now to agree that McCain's wasn't helped by the speech he gave the night Obama clinched his delegate majority. But it wasn't just the green background - McCain came off like John Lithgow's disapproving father figure in Footloose warning America away from the dangers of Barack Obama's dancing. Or like Gore Vidal's character (the Democrat) lecturing the debate audience not to fall for the titular Republican in Bob Roberts. It seemed like the best case scenario is you walk away convinced that however exciting it would be to vote Obama, you'd really better vote for McCain (and eat your vegetables). That speech brought home a sense of McCain as the candidate of obligation. Salter's screeds bring home the sense that we're doubly obligated to vote for McCain: First, because voting Obama is a risky indulgence. Second, because after all McCain's done for us, we owe it to him. Which came first: the mandate that we have to vote for John McCain, or the low level of enthusiasm (14% in a recent survey) among his supporters? Which is more arrogant and presumptuous: "We are the ones we have been waiting for" or "The American president America has been waiting for"?

CHUCK'S CHANCE

2008-07-05T16:18:00.003-04:00

So Chuck Hagel is saying his ideas are closer to Obama's, but he doesn't plan to endorse either candidate. Could mean he's still trying to negotiate himself a spot on the ticket (seems unlikely), or he doesn't want to offend his friend John McCain or hurt himself further within the GOP, or he wants to burnish his non-partisan credentials by being not even partisan enough to support a presidential candidate. Who knows? But it occurs to me that Hagel could draw some more of the attention he seems to relish, and earn some good will from congressional leadership, if he stays neutral but pipes up every now and then to slap back some of Joe Lieberman's ridiculous attacks on Barack Obama. Picture it: Lieberman pops up to say Obama can't protect us from terrorists because he's a McGovernite, and then Chuck Hagel pops up to steal Lieberman's thunder to declare the comments out of bound, appeal for a politics that elevates us and doesn't appeal to our fears, vouch that both candidates are committed to keep us safe, remind his good friend Joe that such fear-mongering got us into a quagmire in Iraq, etc. - all this coming from a Republican who is so non-partisan he won't endorse a candidate! There's your David Broder headline. I mean, is that any more politically risky than musing about impeachment? And the guy's not running for re-election.

BREAKING: BARACK TRIES TO RECONCILE HOPE, POLICY DIFFERENCES WITH OPPONENT

2008-06-06T21:45:00.004-04:00

This article from the Paper of Record is just silly:

As Mr. Obama stands poised to claim the crown of presumptive Democratic nominee, he is, gingerly, fitting himself with the cloth of a partisan Democrat despite having long proclaimed himself above such politics. That his shift in tone was inevitable and necessary, particularly as Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, slashes at Mr. Obama as weak on Iran and terrorism, does not entirely diminish the cognitive dissonance.

As is unfortunately common with denunciations of partisanship in Washington, you get the sense reading Michael Powell's Times news piece that not only does he see no need to tell you what he means by partisanship, he may not be so sure of it himself. Powell offers not one example of Obama's post-partisan rhetoric against which we might judge his current stump speech (which is not to say there's nothing in that rhetoric some of us - as ideologues more than as partisans - might take issue with). Instead, he just asserts that Obama promised to be a different kind of politician from the partisans we're used to, and now he's criticizing his opponent (without even giving him the benefit of the doubt!). In other words, Obama promised to play nice, and now he's being mean! And how:

“This is a guy who said I have no knowledge of foreign affairs,” Senator Barack Obama says, his voice hitting a high C on the incredulity scale, before he adds: “Well, John McCain was arguing for a war that had nothing to do with 9/11. He was wrong, and he was wrong on the most important subject that confronted our nation.” The crowd rises, clapping and cheering at this pleasing whiff of partisan buckshot.

Judging from the sternly disapproving tone the Times takes, you'd think Obama had said McCain's daughter was ugly because she was the love child of his wife and his (female) Attorney General. But all the guy said was that his opponent had criticized him, his opponent was on the wrong side of an issue, and that issue was really important. What does it even mean to say that this is partisan? Obama criticized co-partisan Hillary Clinton for backing the War in Iraq, so there's nothing about Obama's criticism that depends on party. Is Powell criticizing Obama for being overly issue-oriented? Or just for being overly critical of the man that everyone knows is the Most Principled Man in Washington? But the article wouldn't be complete without some criticism of the Obama campaign for disagreeing with the author's criticism:

Mr. Obama’s advisers argue, gamely if implausibly, that he has not dipped his cup into a partisan well. “I don’t look at it as partisanship,” said Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director. “I look at it as a difference of philosophy.”

We expect this kind of silliness when it's David Broder filling the editorial page with requiems for an imagined non-partisan past, or Unity08-backing celebrities sharing their heartfelt yearnings for politics without politics, or Howard Wolfson asking how Barack Obama can claim to support hope while opposing Hillary Clinton's run for president. But on the news page we should really expect better.

FUN WITH COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

2008-05-30T23:08:00.004-04:00

Kay Steiger, guest-blogging (with Alyssa) at Matt Yglesias' site, considers sexism in "trade professions" and after pointing out that jobs like hair dressing aren't counted as such precisely because women do them, suggests that

What would help is first what these truck mechanics Harding points to are already doing, mentoring young women in non-traditional fields. Secondly, unions that represent those industries need to not only be free of sexism themselves, but aggressively pursue lawsuits that would discourage sexual harassment. This is happening with some larger trade unions already, but it's not as wide as it should be.

I think this really sells short the potential for trade unions to take on discrimination. Any kind of organization with the resources can file a lawsuit - or individuals or groups can do it with no organization at all. In some cases, like the Dukes suit against Wal-Mart (largest class action suit ever in this country), that can contribute greatly to leveraging pressure on a company. But workers with a union can change the behavior of their employer in a slew of other ways. That includes negotiating with them. Union workers can and do win binding contracts obligating companies to take on unequal opportunity by creating training programs, by collaborating with community leaders and/ or non-profits, by submitting to oversight by workers, clergy, politicians, or whoever else to judge progress, to change work rules or job descriptions that create needless barriers for people who could otherwise do the job - and in any number of other ways. And these workers can enforce these commitments, as well as the company's legal obligation not to discriminate, through collective action and through a grievance process that moves faster, cheaper, and more accessibly than a lawsuit. The limits are defined by power on the shop floor and nationally or internationally in the industry. As Thomas Geoghegan wrote last year in his book See You in Court,

a big change has been the way we have moved from contract to tort. For most working Americans, the kind of people I represent, this accounts for the biggest change in the way the law now impacts their lives. In the 1950s and 1960s, up to 35 percent of workers, especially men, were covered by collective bargaining agreements...In the last thirty years, there has been a loss of contract rights - to a job, a pension, or even health care - unlike that in any other developed country. It is really a new legal regime that many Americans experience as infuriating, without being able to express that fury in an appropriate way.

Now the missed opportunities within substantial chunks of the labor movement to link arms as part of movements for sexual and racial inequality in the twentieth century is not unrelated to the steep decline in union power and union membership. But those workers Kay is talking about, who have unions, have an arsenal at their disposal to attack discrimination in the workplace - not only through contract language of course, but also through the kinds of action, client pressure, media strategies, and such that play part in winning recognition and winning contracts - without depending on the prospects of a lawsuit.

YOU'VE GOT TO HIDE YOUR LOVE AWAY

2008-05-27T00:52:00.004-04:00

Jimmy Carter has apparently issued another non-endorsement endorsement of Barack Obama, this time saying that while he "has not yet announced publicly," after June 3 "a lot of the superdelegates will make a decision...announced quite rapidly," and then "it will be time for her to give it up." In other words: I haven't made up my mind, but "my friend" is planning to endorse Obama soon, and when he does Hillary Clinton should concede...Of course the main difference when Carter ends the suspense and makes a "public" endorsement is that that'll be a plum opportunity for John Hagee's friends to call Obama an antisemite. Speaking of hiding your love away, Senator Byrd endorsed Obama a few days after Hillary Clinton's big-though-ultimately-insignificant win in his state. Which is funny only because I don't think anyone doubts that Robert Byrd knew whom he supported before the West Virginia primary, and West Virginians are presumably the Democrats most influenced by a Robert Byrd endorsement. But Byrd and/ or Team Obama must have concluded (correctly) that an Obama endorsement before the WV primary only would have helped Team Clinton by raising expectations for Obama and drawing attention to the state (as well as maybe making Byrd look bad). Which just goes to show yet again how twisted election coverage is. This was also probably the first time in a while that Robert Byrd's seen his former KKK membership touted as a political asset. Maybe Joe Biden can help his veep chances by resurrecting his boast about Delaware being a slave state.

THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTY OF OUTRAGEOUS COMPARISONS

2008-05-24T01:10:00.002-04:00

Question of the day: If (pace Hillary Clinton) Barack Obama is Robert Mugabe because he denies people the right to get their votes counted, and Barack Obama is Bobby Kennedy because he could get shot, does that mean Robert Mugabe is also Bobby Kennedy?

CROSS THAT ONE OFF YOUR READING LIST

2008-05-15T10:51:00.003-04:00

Remember that DoD document dump you just haven't quite found time to read yet? The 8,000 pages of documents on how they prepped army folks to act as outside "military analysts" while laying out the White House line on Iraq? I'm sure you have all 8,000 pages printed out and stacked someplace prominent around the house, ready to read any time now. But have no fear - LWB friend (and one-time guest blogger) Alyssa Rosenberg is reading them so you don't have to. Check it out:

So it's downright creepy to read the anecdotes about women pushed in the DOD talking points released last week--especially when they're interspersed with terse updates on the U.S. military's attempts to rewrite its pathetic sexual assault policies. When it comes to exploiting imagery of Iraqi and Afghan women, the talking points read like a combination of Pippi Longstocking stories and Lifetime movies. In a July 4, 2004 briefing, a group of peppy Afghan schoolgirls buttonhole Donald Rumsfeld on their way to sports camp (can it get any more girl-power than that?): "After being introduced, young Roia wasn't shy about sharing her feelings with the secretary. ‘Mr. Secretary, all the girls we are very, very happy and pleased to be here,' she said through a translator. ‘We have one message for you ... Please don't forget the Afghan girls and Afghan women.' Rumsfeld's answer was simple, but carried a lot of weight. ‘We don't,' he said. ‘You can count on it.'"

NO SURPRISES HERE

2008-03-09T21:27:00.003-04:00

Supposedly liberal Washington Post publishes op-ed about how stupid women are. Supposedly woman-friendly Independent Women's Forum's VP writes of the piece, written by one of IWF's contributors, that she sees the point it was trying to make but hopes it doesn't reinforce the idea that people who think men and smarter than women are sexists.

FIGHTING WORDS (FISA EDITION)

2008-02-15T01:31:00.002-05:00

Matt Yglesias: "It's almost as if the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of large business enterprises and very wealthy individuals, and tends to use national security and cultural anxieties as a kind of political theater aimed at securing votes so that they can better pursue their real agenda of enriching the wealthy and powerful." Russ Feingold: "But, Mr. President, the Senate has once again fallen for Administration tactics that have become so depressingly familiar. “Trust us,” they say. “We don’t need judicial oversight. The courts will just get in our way. You never know when they might tell us that what we’re doing is unconstitutional, and we would prefer to make that decision on our own. Checks and balances, judicial and congressional oversight, will impede our ability to fight terrorism.” And, sadly, these grossly misleading efforts at intimidation have apparently worked." Eve Fairbanks: "It's like writing a story about the Capitol burning down and headlining it, 'Many Cameramen Gather at Capitol.'"

SYMPATHY FOR THE SATYR?

2008-01-23T02:09:00.000-05:00

Our right-wing friends have made outrageous attempts to claim the mantle of MLK an MLK Day tradition. But this attempt by Ron Paul's supporters should still make your blood boil. Makes you wonder whether Ron Paul's 10,000+ MLK Day donors are ignorant that MLK was gunned down marching with sanitation workers striking to demanding a union to win safety on the job when libertarians would tell them to suck it up or go work somewhere else. Makes you wonder whether they're indifferent that MLK faced death threats because he demanded government intervention against bigotry while good libertarians decried civil rights laws as tyranny. It also makes you wonder whether they missed that issue of Ron Paul's newsletter describing Martin Luther King as

the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration...not only a world-class adulterer, he also seduced underage girls and boys...lying socialist satyr...

SOUND BYTE OF THE SEASON

2008-01-17T02:27:00.000-05:00

AFSCME's Political Director explains why they need one staffer for every 30 members in Nevada:

Our goal is to make sure that every member gets touched personally, repeatedly.

THE MEANING OF THE WORD "CRIMINAL"

2007-12-27T15:16:00.000-05:00

Media-appointed populist Mike Huckabee reassures CEOs everywhere that raking in the cash while laying off the workers who made it possible isn't the kind of "criminal" activity that the government should do something about:

In one memorable riff at the Reagan Library early this year, Mr. Huckabee called it “criminal” for corporate CEOs to take fat bonuses while shipping the jobs of ordinary workers overseas, adding “If Republicans don’t stop it, we don’t deserve to win in 2008.” In a Christmas eve interview on CNBC, I asked Mr. Huckabee what he intended to do about it. His answer: nothing soon in the way of new laws or regulations. He said he would use the bully pulpit to shine a spotlight on the practices and seek increased responsibility from corporate boards of directors.

So breathe easy, rich guys: under a Huckabee administration, the only CEOs who get locked up will be the ones with HIV.

META IS AS META DOES

2007-11-22T01:16:00.000-05:00

Am I the only one who'd be more interested in hearing Joe Biden talk about his grand foreign policy strategy than in hearing him talk about how he's talking about a grand foreign policy strategy? Or how nobody else is talking about a grand foreign policy strategy? To be fair, he does helpfully remind us that countries do things that affect each other. I guess that's where that Foreign Relations Committee experience really shines through. And he lets us in on another aspect of his foreign policy strategy: everybody knows that Joe Biden is really, really tough.

PERSONALLY ATTACKED?

2007-11-20T01:24:00.000-05:00

A telling and all too common moment from this week's debate:

EDWARDS:...And the most important issue is she says she will bring change to Washington, while she continues to defend a system that does not work, that is broken, that is rigged and is corrupt; corrupted against the interest of most Americans and corrupted...(APPLAUSE) BLITZER: All right... EDWARDS: ... and corrupted for a very small, very powerful, very well-financed group. BLITZER: We're going to... EDWARDS: So we have fundamental differences. BLITZER: We're going to get to all of these issues, including energy and Iran and everything else. CLINTON: Well, Wolf, I've just been personally attacked again, and I...

Can anybody explain to me what's personal about that attack? Brings me back to a certain incumbent's decision four years ago that every criticism of his record was "political hate speech." And does she disagree with the idea that the system in Washington is broken, or that she's been defending it?

DISTINGUISHING

2007-10-28T16:06:00.000-04:00

I have to believe Frank Rich knows better than this:

Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s.

Look, I like to gloat as much as the next guy, but let's not do it at the expense of reality. And Rudy Giuliani has indeed gotten more traction than many (myself included) thought he ever could, despite James Dobson et al's significant discomfort with him. But he's not a pro-choice candidate (he's not a pro-gay rights or pro-gun control candidate either). He believes abortion is immoral, and he's made it clear to anyone who's paying attention that he'll appoint judges who will make abortion illegal. The intermediate question of whether he has nice things to say about laws banning abortion is a detail (he's also reversing himself on laws that make it more difficult for women to access the right to choose). While the Senate on a good day can hold back particularly crazy nominees, the only people who come their way for confirmation are the ones the president sends over. And in case you haven't noticed, drafting strategies on how to overturn Roe isn't enough to deny you confirmation votes from Democrats.

STAND BY ME

2007-10-14T23:43:00.001-04:00

One of the less than super features of my six years at the high school formerly known as Akiba Hebrew Academy was the seemingly endless succession of assemblies hosting guest speakers from organizations like the ZOA speaking on topics like the caginess of Arabs and the awesomeness of what we've since learned to call "enhanced interrogation techniques." Then my senior year I organized a human rights conference that included Ian Lustick, a Zionist with some concerns about human rights in Israel, and I got called into the Principal's office and told that he didn't like having controversial speakers without counterbalancing speakers there to offer "the other side" (in the end I was able to negotiate a compromise where Lustick would speak alone after an Ahmadinejad-at-Columbia-style introduction from the Headmaster and Lustick and Daniel Pipes would be invited to have a debate at Akiba later on). A couple months later, the Headmaster announced that everyone in the school would be bussed to an "Israel Solidarity Rally" downtown. After a bunch of kids objected to being forced to participate in a rally defending the Likud government from criticism, Akiba agreed to let kids who wanted to skip the rally and stay at school to watch Exodus and think about what they'd done. A couple months after that, Akiba's administration announced at my graduation that everyone in the Class of 2002 would receive a copy in the mail at college of Myths and Facts About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ("Myth: Palestinians. Fact: Israelis."). All this came to mind when I opened my e-mail and saw an e-mail circulating amongst Akiba Alumni to "Seek neutrality on political issues at Akiba." What instigated it? Apparently some of my more right-wing friends were appalled that Akiba sent out an e-mail announcing an event hosted by the insufficiently-Likud-friendly New Israel Fund.

THEY LIKE US, THEY REALLY LIKE US

2007-10-10T02:22:00.000-04:00

In today's GOP debate, Giuliani touts his mom's membership in ILGWU (UNITE), and Mike Huckabee declares his sympathy for hotel workers (HERE). Mitt Romney, on the other hand, praises the Carpenters.

ONE IN THREE, LEAVE HIM BE!

2007-10-08T01:21:00.000-04:00

Contrary to the claims of conservatives trying to save the brand from an unpopular product, George W. Bush is a conservative, no qualifier necessary. He showed off his conservatism last week by vetoing health insurance for more children:

“It is estimated that if this program were to become law, one out of every three persons that would subscribe to the new expanded Schip would leave private insurance,” the president said. “The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children, and the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.”

Leaving aside the speciousness of Bush's statistics, and the spectacular problems with America's system of private insurance, this quote is telling on another level: It's not just that George Bush and the GOP cohort vying to replace him believe freedom is about keeping the government out of providing you insurance more so than keeping sickness away from your child. It's that if there are three kids, George Bush would rather one have private insurance and two be left without health care than that all three have publicly-supported health care. That should come as no surprise from the president who presided over Hurricane Katrina.

THE TIMES GIVETH, AND THE TIMES TAKETH AWAY

2007-10-08T00:44:00.001-04:00

Reading the latest New York Times John McCain puff piece makes you wonder whether the Times and company only started pulling the guy down with McCain deathwatch stories so that they could have the pleasure of building him up all over again:

Between jokes, he is steadfast in his support for the present course in Iraq, his voice hushing to a near-whisper during paeans to the United States military. He is also prone to solemn monologues against the evils of torturing prisoners and the atrocities committed by “those thugs in Burma” against pro-democracy demonstrators, neither of which are top-of-the-agenda issues for most Republican voters. But they are important to John McCain, never mind the polls and focus groups, which are too expensive anyway.

Groan. Mark Leibovich also refers to "his campaign bus, christened the Straight Talk Express during his insurgent presidential campaign of 2000," a weird use of the passive voice that could leave us with the idea that it was so christened by David Broder or Saint Peter and not by John McCain. I guess the myth of McCain is just more fun when he's the underdog.

YES WE CAN

2007-10-02T02:29:00.000-04:00

Considering the amount of money Ron Paul has raised, Glenn Reynolds asks

CAN YOU STILL CALL HIM A MINOR CANDIDATE?

The answer is yes. But apparently libertarians have a lot of money. Go figure. Good thing that, for all the distorting undemocratic influence of money in politics, you can't get elected in America without a bunch of people voting for you.

A SORT OF CONVENTIONAL CAMPAIGN BOOK FROM A LESS CONVENTIONAL SENATOR

2007-09-30T19:12:00.000-04:00

Just finished Paul Wellstone's memoir The Conscience of a Liberal. It reads like a campaign book, which is what it is. Too much of it is taken up with descriptions of how much he respects colleagues who disagree with him, and how impressed they are with his courage. And Wellstone raises and then retires too quickly some questions that could have been the core of a better book - how effectively can electoral politics complement local issues-based organizing; did he vote for DOMA for the sake of re-election; how could Bill Clinton have pushed through more progressive policy. That said, Wellstone offers some telling reminders of the difference between merely opposing a bill and moving heaven and earth to stop it, and between paying lip service to a different kind of campaign and actually running one. And it needn't cost you your job or your usefulness at it.

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY THAT WASN'T

2007-09-23T20:02:00.000-04:00

Had the chance while I was back East for Rosh HaShanah to read George Stephanopoulos' memoir, which I guess is a lot like you'd imagine it to be. Not to give away the ending, but Stephanopoulos closes with the image of Bill Clinton delivering his State of the Union in the thick of impeachment, and his final sentence is:

Wondering what might have been - if only this good president had been a better man.

This perspective on Clinton - that the great potential of his presidency was spoiled by his sex scandal - is pretty popular, but I don't see a lot to support it. What were the big domestic or foreign policy initiatives that Clinton would have been able to push through in the last two-and-a-half years of his presidency if not for Monica Lewinsky? What's the political strategy that would have overcome the hostility of Bob Dole's Senate and Newt Gingrich's House to get them through? Sure, the Lewinsky scandal drew a lot of public, media, and congressional attention. But it's wishful thinking to imagine that otherwise that airtime would have gone to important public policy. Bill Clinton spent much of the time he was being impeached at higher popularity than any of his peers at the same point in office. Like his wife, he did a deft job of parlaying Republican attacks into anti-anti-Clinton feeling. And if not for the impeachment overreach, it seems unlikely that the Democrats would have bucked history in 1998 by taking back House seats. The story of a progressive savior that could have been if not for his adulterous appetites has a fun Greek tragic flair to it, but there's not a lot to back it up. And it has the unfortunate effect of perpetuating the idea that a brilliant politician could have triangulated his way to big progressive reforms if only he'd passed up that blue dress.

WHITHER AMERICAN NATALISM? (OR "DAVID BROOKS' WHITE FERTILITY")

2007-09-14T16:14:00.000-04:00

Kate Sheppard notes the passage of Russia's "Day of Conception:"

Today falls exactly nine months before Russia Day, and as one of Putin's policies to encourage more breeding in his country, he's offered SUVs, refrigerators, and monetary rewards to anyone who gives birth on June 12. So the mayor of Ulyanovsk, a region in central Russia, has given workers there the afternoon off to make with the baby making. Everyone who gives birth is a winner in the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia's Independence Day" contest, but the grand prize winner -- judged on qualities like "respectability" and "commendable parenting" -- gets to take home a UAZ-Patriot, a Russian-made SUV.

This seems like as good an opportunity as I'm likely to get (at least until June 12, which incidentally is the anniversary of two commendable parents I know) to ask why the kinds of natalist appeals and policy justifications that are so widespread in Europe are all but non-existent in the United States. Sure, American politicians seem to be expected to have gobs of kids to demonstrate their family values. But why is it much more common for politicians in Europe to push policies explicitly designed to make people have more kids? Discouraging though it may be, I think the best answer is race. Politicians in Sweden or in Russia or in France get further with calls for the nation to have more babies for the sake of national greatness or national survival because that nation and those babies are imagined to look more the same. Marty Gillens caused a stir with his research suggesting that Americans have negative attitudes towards welfare and its beneficiaries because of their negative views towards the racial groups imagined to benefit (Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote, Simo Virtanen, and Leonie Huddy further explore this). Americans are less inclined to support government spending on social programs, these scholars argue, because they're less likely to imagine those programs benefiting people who look like them. Conversely, Swedes are more content with a robust welfare state because their immigration restrictions keep those benefits away from people of other races. (In 1990, the top country sending immigrants to Sweden was Norway. In 2000, it was Iraq. And the increase in Sweden's foreign-born populations in the 90's roughly equaled the increase from the 70's and 80's combined. There's cause for concern that as immigration to Sweden increases, benefits will decrease or access for immigrants will decrease - a process Swedish conservatives already began in the 1990s.) I don't think you can really explain the lack of natalist rhetoric in the US without similar logic, and particularly confronting animus towards a group Americans can't deny welfare benefits simply by cutting off immigrants: African-Americans. What Ange-Marie Hancock calls "the politics of disgust" heaps shame on imagined "welfare queens" for working too little and birthing too much. In the controversy over the '96 welfare bill, fertility came up plenty, but the imagined problem was too many babies, not too few. Churches and others made what you might consider natalist arguments against the bill, but they didn't get much traction - unlike the GOP Congressman who held up a "Don't feed the alligators" sign. So when David Brooks wrote a paean to natalism in America, he left those hated Black women out. Instead, in a column a month after the '04 election, he cited Steve Sailer (who even John Podhoretz recognizes as a racist) celebrating that "George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates." Brooks' column celebrates these fertile white parents for demonstrating good red-state values:

Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling...The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism.

Can you imagine a prominent right-wing pundit or politician saying such things about a low-income Black family that chose to have more kids? Now some will say that American conservatives are less natalist than their European counterparts because they're more anti-government. Which is a fair point, but I think it's difficult to explain the presence of "Christian Democrat" parties in Europe without considering race. Or you could argue that the natalist push in Europe is based in part in fear of immigration. Which circles back on the same argument: racial fears and prejudices map more easily along lines of citizenship in countries that have historically had fewer non-white citizens. Just as the comparative historical ethnic diversity of the United States plays a role in explaining why our political system has held down benefits for everyone rather than only restricting them to citizens (though we've done that too), it seems like the strongest explanation for why we don't hear lots of appeals for America to have more babies. Is there a better explanation? (This is where those of you who've been kvetching about the paucity of posting should leave comments)

STAND AGAINST GENOCIDE SUNDAY

2007-09-14T14:11:00.000-04:00

This Sunday across from UN Headquarters in New York, 24 Hours for Darfur will host the flagship rally of the Global Day for Darfur. From the press advisory sent along by my brother:

24 Hours for Darfur has collected video messages from concerned citizens around the world urging their political leaders to address the ongoing atrocities occurring in Darfur. Their videos will be projected on a massive LCD screen in front of UN headquarters at the rally, alongside videos from policymakers such as former Senator John Edwards and former UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown, celebrities such as actor-activist Mia Farrow and Olympic Gold Medalist Joey Cheek, and Darfuris such as Daoud Hari, one of three Darfuris granted refugee status in the US in the past four years... At the rally, 24 Hours for Darfur will call on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to send a high-level, full-time diplomatic team to the region to support a real peace process...The rally will also feature speakers from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Genocide Intervention Network, and the ENOUGH Project.

Not to be missed. There will also be a lot of Eidelsons there, myself included. The rally starts at 11 AM at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (47th St. between 1st and 2nd Aves).

FIGHTING WORDS (LARRY CRAIG EDITION)

2007-09-03T17:55:00.000-04:00

Esquivalience: "Given the constant, daily harassment women endure (come on now, don't tune out; stay with me, here) -- harassment that makes us compress our daily activities into daylight hours, that circumscribes where we go, who we go with, and even what we wear; intrusive harassment, ruin-your-day, make-you-feel-powerless/angry/depressed harassment -- the overzealous prosecution of the toe-tapper really pisses me off. It's like those sophomore discussions one has of human trafficking, in which someone invariably says "but what about the men?", and then the rest of the discussion, in some form or another, is overwhelmingly preoccupied with those minority cases." Richard Kim: "I'd love to see Mitt Romney elaborate on what he finds so "disgusting" about "I'm not gay" Craig, or Mitch McConnell explain why admitted john David Vitter is still in the Senate or why crook Ted Stevens hasn't been stripped of his committee assignments. The mutually assured destruction of the party of piety and hypocrisy is the best-case scenario one could hope for here." Hilzoy: "Apparently, Tucker Carlson thinks that when a man grabs him, it's appropriate to shove his head against a bathroom stall, but that when a man harasses a woman it's just good clean fun. Why? Is it that same-sex sexual harassment is icky but heterosexual sexual harassment is fine? Or is it just that sexual harassment is OK as long as he's not the victim?" Jim McGreevey: "I pray that the tide of American history continues to sweep toward the inevitable expansion of freedom that recognizes the worth and dignity of every individual -- and that mine is the last generation that is required to choose between affairs of the heart and elected office."

WORLD'S SHORTEST POLITICAL QUIZ

2007-07-24T23:13:00.000-04:00

Guess where you can read the following political history:

You know, it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head and it's been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.

Is it the pages of Reason Magazine? The declaration of some self-described "classicaly liberal" professor? Nope. Those words were spoken at last night's Democratic Debate by the party's frontrunner. This is what people mean when they complain about the Clintons' much-vaunted triangulation - although this particular argument is really worse than triangulation, in that rather than positioning herself between two bad boogeymen of the hard left and hard right, she's just defining her politics against left-wing "big government" (didn't her husband already declare it over?). And she's defining "individual freedom" against "big government" too. It's not a mystery why she would do this. Conservatives have done an impressive job of convincing people over the past decades that more government means less freedom. That's how they've peddled their attacks on the majority's ability to legislate against plutocracy. It's how they've pushed forward an agenda that leaves Americans less free - prisoners of fear of disaster, dislocation, and disintegration of their communities and their hopes for their families. Democrats have not done a great job over the past few decades of framing the debate in a way that elevates freedom from want and freedom from fear and challenges the idea that we are more economically free if your boss can fire you for being gay or fighting for more money. Right-wing frames are powerful. That means contemporary candidates need to either co-opt them or challenge them. Which choice they make is telling.

A NATION DIVIDED

2007-07-23T03:42:00.000-04:00

I am not being cute when I say that I have no idea how this article made it into the paper of record. It's like someone set out to write a not very relevant or interesting article, lost interest halfway through, and accidentally posted it on the website of the New York Times. Oops. That's the American Dream: Someday you too can become famous enough that when you and someone else famous you're friends with support different primary candidates, that's news - even (maybe especially) if you have no comment on it. What's the story here: That Oprah and Maya Angelou could prefer different politicians? That being friends hasn't swayed one of them to change her endorsement? That making clashing endorsements hasn't ended their friendship?

CINDY SHEEHAN: NOT SO PROGRESSIVE

2007-07-19T02:22:00.000-04:00

More surprising than Cindy Sheehan's return from her ostensible break from activism is her willingness to embrace conservative cant against the income tax:

The Federal Reserve, permanent federal (and unconstitutional) income taxes, Japanese Concentration Camps and, not one, but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan were brought to us via the Democrats.

The 16th amendment empowers the majority to legislate against subjugation and plutocracy. It institutes a critical tool to confront on the badges of slavery abjured in the 13th amendment and realize the equal protection promised in the 14th. Cindy Sheehan's inane legal argument and her outrageous ethical argument against the income tax are disappointing. What's more discouraging is skimming through the comments and realizing that taking on Nancy Pelosi arouses more outrage from DailyKos commenters than taking on the income tax.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

2007-07-01T18:46:00.002-04:00

Given the accolades I get my from my Dad for the general lack of profanity on my blog, I was curious to see how LWB would fare on the "film rating" site that been making its way around the internets. Imagine my surprise at discovering 17 year olds needed to be accompanied by a parent or guardian: Must be punishment, I figured, for invoking the word "bitch" (to flag the sexist undertones of an argument, not to endorse the concept). But no. Apparently, the three offending words that did me in were "gay" "lesbian" and "Dick" (as in Cheney). My friend Zach's unsurprisingly-revived blog, where he borrows liberally from Dick Cheney's vocabulary, scores a PG. Warms the heart to think that students with content blockers installed in libraries across America are being protected from being corrupted by my ramblings about the portrayal of class on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Meanwhile my Dad's blog, Dangerous Ideas, rates a PG because he uses the word "dangerous" too much. Go figure.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON DEMOCRATIC DEBATE NUMBER THREE

2007-07-01T00:04:00.000-04:00

Is it just me, or was the difference between the questions asked and the questions answered more pronounced in this debate than the previous ones? Maybe because the questions asked the candidates to speak about the extent of racism in America or its role in exacerbating social ills. Maybe the most marked contrast was when the candidates were asked why Blacks with high school degrees are less likely to find jobs than Whites without them; most of the answers were about how to get more Blacks high school degrees. The order of the candidates led to the delightful spectacle of Chris Dodd making funny faces every round about having to follow Mike Gravel saying something about how craven and nasty everyone else on stage was. And it gave Barack Obama repeated chances to echo John Edwards, one time even saying he was finishing his sentence - does that mean he doesn't take Edwards seriously as a threat at this point? The biggest revelation of the night though was that Joe Biden organizes rallies for Black men to tell them they can be manly while wearing condoms. When I say progressive masculinity, you say Joe Biden! Where's YouTube when you need it? Someone should name a line of condoms after the guy.

PUT DOWN THE FEMALE CANDIDATE AND NOBODY GETS HURT

2007-06-25T03:26:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites a reader's nasty argument against Hillary Clinton:

If everyone is admitting that a Hillary Clinton's potential nomination to the Democrat Presidential ticket is only fuel for the religious right, then what do you think Senator Clinton's view is on that? Why is it that this either doesn't concern her, or she thinks she can overcome it? If I were in the same position, I would realize that winning the nomination, only to further create a dichotomy between the American politic, would be disastrous for the country.

Now it's one thing to say that Hillary Clinton shouldn't run because she's too unpopular to win the general election (though the polls won't be much help to you there). It's another thing to say that running for president even though a lot of people hate you shows "fathomless narcissism" (Sullivan's phrase). In other words, if you love America, and there are a bunch of people in America who hate you, you shouldn't run for election in America because it will divide America and that's too great a price to pay. There are good reasons not to like Hillary Clinton. Those are not the ones that make her unpopular with the religious right. Hillary Clinton, for all her caution with the personal and the political, is a lightning rod for anti-feminist forces in American politics who don't believe women should exercise power traditionally reserved for men. Andrew Sullivan knows that. It's silly, though all too common, to suggest that the main problem facing this country is a lack of consensus about where it should go or what kind of person should lead it. And it's outrageous, though by no means unusual, to argue that the enlightened response to the troubling views of a certain number of Americans is to accommodate them rather than to engage and challenge them. Some people in this country think Hillary Clinton is a bitch because she wields power and wants more of it. It's a shame to see pundits who should know better suggesting she's a bitch for not acceding to those people's wish that she would disappear.

FIGHTING WORDS

2007-06-21T00:33:00.000-04:00

Heather Boushey:"These stories are not only wrong — the reality is that there is no increase in recent years in women, even women with advanced degrees, choosing to be stay-at-home mothers over working mothers — they also imply that most mothers have a choice to work or not. This couldn't be further from the truth." Matthew Yglesias: "Insofar as the most extreme right-wing views of national security imaginable -- Bill Kristol's apparent belief that the USA should be perpetually at war with whichever country he was asked about most recently -- are treated as respectable elements of the discourse, while the most mild deviations from establishment conventional wisdom are branded as "extremism" then bleating about the need to build bipartisanship in foreign policy only leads us in ever-more-militaristic directions." Mark Weisbrot: "The IMF wrote in their country papers on Bolivia that the country would be hurting itself by raising the royalty rates. They were wrong, as were most of the experts in Washington and the US business press." Ezra Klein: "To put the contrast another way, where Obama promised to radically change our politics, Edwards promised to radically change our policies."

FAINT PRAISE?

2007-06-14T02:07:00.000-04:00

Hillary Clinton's Exploratory Committee links a Daily Kos diary (with a not-so hearty 11 recommenders) that declares:

last night’s debate performance has given me cause to reconsider the depth of my opposition to the likelihood of her nomination,

Time for a raise for Peter Daou?

THIS IS YOUR LIFE

2007-06-08T01:45:00.001-04:00

There were a lot of spooky moments in the two presidential debates this week ("Mitt, you say you'll protect us from the Hispanic invasion, but we caught you talking to Spanish-speakers! How can you defend yourself?"). The most spooky non-substantive part had to have been the moderators describing the "regular people" to themselves: "Your name is Josh Eidelson. You live in Sacramento. You have two siblings. You sometimes will eat a mango, dried mango, and mango sorbet in the same day. Is that right? And I hear you have a question for the candidates about taxes." It was a lot like those Sesame Street episodes where different kind of produce are on a talk show about how they were made.

THUS SPAKE ZACH

2007-05-23T03:12:00.000-04:00

Yale President, self-styled pragmatic Democrat, and Thomas Friedman-inspired global citizen Richard Levin is reportedly on the short list to replace Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. It's times like these you wish Zach would arise from his self-imposed blog hibernation. History suggests it's only a matter of time...

MOTHER'S DAY

2007-05-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

My parents brought me up to believe that Mother's Day was just about selling greeting cards. Turns out, it's also about selling John McCain.

24 HOURS FOR DARFUR

2007-04-23T02:57:00.000-04:00

A novel form of student protest:

400,000 civilians have died in Darfur since 2003. The genocidal campaign led by the government of Sudan the Janjaweed militia continues while the world stands by. It is time we demand that our elected officials redouble their efforts to bring security to the people of Darfur. 24 Hours for Darfur uses video advocacy to insist on action from national governments and international institutions. We will compile 24 hours of continuous footage of people from around the world demanding change - footage that we will then display on the steps of Congress and in front of the UN so that our leaders can no longer turn a blind eye to the devastation in Darfur.

Check it out (complete with abundant Eidelsons in front of the camera as well as behind the scenes). Submit your own video here.

POLITICIZE AWAY

2007-04-21T18:35:00.001-04:00

Of all the tropes trotted out in the wake of the murders at Virginia Tech, perhaps the most grating is the one about how tragedy shouldn't be politicized. The tragedy is already political. It results from the murderous choice of one man. But only some murderous plans are realized. And only some murderous potentials flourish. To honor the dead by eschewing public policy discussions about how to reduce the likelihood of a disturbed student getting a gun and killing dozens of classmates and faculty is a cruel joke. Liberals and others make a mistake when they excoriate the right-wingers proposing sex-segregated housing or mandatory monotheism or concealed weapons for everyone as solutions to this tragedy for "politicizing" the deaths. Instead, let's excoriate them for offering really, really bad ideas, and for blaming the wrong people for something terrible that transpired. Why shouldn't people contending to run the country tell us - as they did with this week's Supreme Court outrage - what it has to do with their plans for our country? We can mourn together with people we disagree with without pretending that those disagreements have no consequences.

YOU'RE SO VAIN, YOU PROBABLY THINK JESUS IS ABOUT YOU

2007-04-08T15:58:00.000-04:00

David Brody, blogger for Pat Robertson's CBN, weighs in on Barack Obama's legitimacy:

He talks about Jesus and how Christ changed his life. But religious conservatives aren't convinced at all and think he's way too liberal to be considered legitimate with his faith talk. I expect the faith discussion about Obama's Christianity to increase as time goes on. Is he genuine or not? If he is, then he'll need to figure out a way to defend certain positions (abortion and marriage) that don't jive with the Bible.

It takes a particular sort of arrogance to take every expression of personal faith by a political candidate as an audition for you and Pat Robertson. And it makes you wonder: How does David Brody know that Barack Obama doesn't share the biblical position that if a man violently causes a woman to miscarriage, he should be held financially culpable? Nothing there that doesn't jive with pro-choice doctrine. This is a good example of why (though contra Rawls, I don't want to force "public reason" on everyone) we should prefer political appeals to the persuasive power of your religious tradition over political appeals to its authority.

MEMO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ET AL

2007-04-08T14:26:00.000-04:00

Rudy Giuliani: not a moderate:

"It's a no-risk society," Giuliani went on. "If we continue with this idea of collective responsibility, we'll become a society that deteriorates. And it's a battle that has to be fought now."

Even if he does seem to recognize a measure of collective responsibility for making it possible for poor women to make their own choice about abortion.

RESISTING THE DRUMS OF WAR

2007-04-05T01:24:00.001-04:00

My Dad makes a splash on YouTube.

SOCIAL CAPITAL

2007-03-31T21:38:00.000-04:00

This past week, TPMCafe brought together some smart folks to talk about whether there's a resurgence of organizing and what to make of it. One of the more interesting contributions was from the woefully-under-appreciated Chris Hayes, who wrote:

The entire Industrial Areas Foundation method (utilized by a young community organizer named Barack Obama while organizing on Chicago's far south side) involved leveraging the social capital of parishes towards achieving the interests of the community members. That's an oversimplification, but it gets at something essential about Alinsky's approach: you find the sources of pre-existing power in a neighborhood and you try to build on them. The $64,000 question is to what degree the internet can instantiate social capital in the very real and immediate way that neighborhood parishes did in the Back of the Yards. Much of the post 1970s decline in organizing (and indeed the fate of the Democratic party and progressives) can be tied, I think, to the unraveling of much of the social capital our constituencies used to have. This process has been documented quite famously by Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol. So can the internet reverse the trend?

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT?

2007-03-19T02:11:00.001-04:00

The cover story in the latest US News and World Report showers the following pearls of wisdom on job-hunting readers: Instead of teaching in a public school, teach in a private school because it's easier and there's less "bureaucracy." If you want to be a school psychologist, the best kind to be is the one who deals with gifted students. Running a non-profit is way less satisfying than just racking up a fortune in the private sector and then making charitable contributions, because in the non-profit sector you have to deal with volunteers who can be unreliable. What adds insult to injury is the magazine's claim that they came to these conclusions after taking into account the sense of meaning and purpose people want out of their jobs. Makes you wonder which people they're talking about.

INSERT SARCASTIC COMMENT ABOUT COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM HERE

2007-03-17T01:12:00.000-04:00

John McCain says he's against our government spending money on making condoms available in Africa - he thinks:

Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?" Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "You've stumped me."

Keep this one in mind next time someone tells you that Democrats lose elections because they're simply outside of the mainstream on "social issues."

POSITIVE PEACE

2007-03-10T01:33:00.000-05:00

In a discussion thread at the New Haven Independent, one of the anti-union posters is invoking Martin Luther King and calling for "a peaceful solution." Fortunately, there's a peaceful solution the Yale - New Haven Hospital could agree to tomorrow: card-check neutrality. Let's keep in mind it was MLK who warned us against seeking "a negative peace which is the absence of tension" rather than "a positive peace which is the presence of justice." He also said: "You see, no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages...if you’re getting a good wage, as I know that through some unions they’ve brought it up...that isn’t menial labor. What makes it menial is the income, the wages.” He wrote the first quote in jail in Birmingham. He said the second one at a rally for SEIU 1199 - his "favorite union" - in 1968.

MY DAD IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

2007-03-07T02:26:00.000-05:00

Check it out:

Previously, this administration viewed the American people and Congress as supportive, or ignorant, or easily bullied into submission. Moving forward, however, the White House may increasingly perceive us as a threatening obstruction or as part of the enemy itself. So, as the president and his team circle the wagons ever more tightly, giving greater power to the few loyalists remaining within, we must be even more alert to potential new transgressions against the law and against the will of the people. In short, we should remember that in the wild there are few creatures more dangerous than a wounded bear.

More of him here. Just remember, Dad: We were your friends before you were a star.

TASTELESS, GODLESS, ETC.

2007-03-06T03:35:00.000-05:00

Amidst heaping scorn on the American people for neither being persuaded by right-wing prescriptions for keeping us safe nor willing to follow them on faith, Jim Geraghty chooses a strange example

Think about it – the Taliban tried to assassinate Cheney yesterday. Could you imagine if that had occurred in 2002? The snarky too-bad-they-missed comments on Huffington Post would be considered too tasteless for public comment.

Funny thing is, they are considered too tasteless for public comment. That's why our right-wing friends trolling about for examples of lefties wishing death on Dick were stuck settling for anonymous comments on the HuffingtonPost. Truth is, wishing death on Dick Cheney isn't the kind of thing you can do and still be praised by people running for president. Not all Republicans are so lucky - just ask John Paul Stevens.

THE DIGNITY OF YOUTH

2007-02-27T01:38:00.001-05:00

I'm no fan of hipsterdom (it says a lot that it takes preppy-ism to make hipsterdom look goood, sort of like it takes feudalism to make laissez-faire capitalism look good). But this David Brooks column railing against hipster parents who dress their kids in hipster outfits is just silly (makes John Tierney look good - almost). To read Brooks, you'd think that the hipsters were the first and only parents to impose their particular culture on their children. Everybody else must just dress their kids in what they'd be wearing in the state of nature, right? What with all the sneering about the counterculture's dupes, he never quite gets around to specifying what that should be - just that it has something to do with "the dignity of youth." I'll take a baby T-shirt that says "My Mom's Blog Is Better Than Your Mom's Blog" over one with a big Nike swoosh any day.

NO CAN DO RIGHT NOW

2007-02-22T02:45:00.000-05:00

Sorry to disappoint whoever it was from Seattle that was feeling lucky while googling narrative poem about barak obama. Put that one on the to do list. On the other hand, I can indeed furnish pictures of Rosa Parks.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEKEND

2007-02-20T02:22:00.000-05:00

Howard Dean + Andy Stern = Howard Stern? Blame Alek.

"SORRY TO ANYONE I HAVE OFFENDED"

2007-02-17T15:56:00.000-05:00

My Dad can vouch that I don't know much about professional sports. But I doubt I'm the only one scratching my head at what's supposed to be meant by Tim Hardaway's apology for his assertions that

I hate gay people. I let it be known I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States sports.

After being clued in to the potential negative consequences of open bigotry for his endorsement deals, Hardaway said Thursday that

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause. I regret and apologize for the statements that I made that have certainly caused the same kinds of feelings and reactions. I especially apologize to my fans, friends and family in Miami and Chicago. I am committed to examining my feelings and will recognize, appreciate and respect the differences among people in our society. I regret any embarrassment I have caused the league on the eve of one of their greatest annual events.

Hardaway seems to be conveniently obliterating the distinction between feelings and beliefs. Nice to know he's examining his feelings, but what of his belief that gay people have no place in professional sports or in the world? He doesn't want to cause people negative feelings. He wishes he hadn't voiced views that could inspire negative feelings. He plans to "appreciate...differences among people in our society." Does that mean that gay people have a place in society, where he just said they didn't? What about the locker room, where he said he doesn't "think [Amaechi] should be"? If he's actually recanting - and not just regretting - his pronouncement that "I am homophobic," why not say it? And if - setting his feelings aside - his beliefs about gay people stand and he's just "sorry to anyone I have offended", why bother with a weasely apology at all? I don't know a thing about sports journalism, but it would seem to me the obvious follow-up question should be: Is there a place for gay people in the world? In the locker room?

OY

2007-02-16T01:31:00.000-05:00

I didn't expect Fox News' attempt to ape The Daily Show to go well. But there's no way I could have expected it to be this bad. Try to laugh. Believe me, I did. Try, that is.

WHOSE UNITY?

2007-02-13T03:21:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hayes on Obama's announcement:

In his speech, Obama recited moments in American history when politics became something more than the mundane mechanics of governing and effected a true transformation of the polity: the civil war, the New Deal, the civil rights movement. But the problem is that those were moments not of unity, but of extreme polarization. The South only granted rights to black citizens under force of arms, armies of unruly war veterans gathered in Washington DC during the Great Depression to demand the government provide them with a safety net, and when Martin Luther King Jr went marching through the South, he was met with batons and firehoses and accusations that he was dividing people and stirring up trouble.

THEY DON'T DO THAT, DO THEY?

2007-02-13T02:51:00.001-05:00

Can anyone offer me an example of a staffer for a right-wing presidential candidate resigning in response to a campaign waged by a relatively low profile left-wing organization whose claims of offense on behalf of a large chunk of the population were repeated loudly and uncritically by the mainstream media without any substantive investigation into the nature of the organization? For that matter, can anyone think up a scenario in which such a thing credibly could take place? Can you see a Mitt Romney staffer leaving as a casualty of a campaign to off him by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund? What are the chances such a campaign would even make it into the New York Times? And if it did, wouldn't it be in an article full of right-wing Mexicans bashing MALDEF as a Democratic Party organ?

HE'S BEEN A WHAT?

2007-02-10T12:23:00.000-05:00

Candy Crowley on Barack Obama yesterday:

He's been a, uh, community developer, um, and going in and organizing communities...

As a community organizer, I can promise you, it's not a job in real estate.

OUT OF THE PICTURE

2007-02-08T00:38:00.000-05:00

I think several generations of Yale activists have had the chance to gather in protest or at least reflect on the outrageousness of the university's top decision-making body gathering beneath a portrait of the university's namesake with a slave. Looks like the next generation will have to come up with a new rite of passage. Yale is finally taking the goddamn thing down. But god forbid you should think that Yale's leaders feel regret about leaving it hanging there the past few decades:

Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

The quote, from Yale's VP and Secretary, leaves you with the sense that Yale is taking down the portrait, which involves adjusting the moldings around the mantelpiece around the painting (the classic explanation of yesteryear for why the thing had to stay up), because it's easier than putting up a plaque explaining that the man was not a slave owner. But it's a portrait designed to honor Elihu Yale by painting a chained Black man at his feet. It honors him with the imagery of White supremacy - an ideology of which the colonial Governor and the university named for him have been no small beneficiaries. It's a painting that belongs in a museum. It has no place hanging over Yale's president as he meets with the Yale Corporation to try to chart a course for the university. It never did. (That's the difference between engaging and exulting the problematic) To suggest that the racist graphic is being taken down to avert misunderstanding is to make abundantly clear that you don't get it.

UM, WHAT?

2007-02-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

This demands an explanation:

Fell asleep reading. Had a strange dream involving Grove Street in New Haven, a non-existent bus station, Josh, one of my high school ethics teachers, and Dee-Lite of "Groove is in the House" fame.

THE MCCAIN STRATEGY

2007-01-31T01:06:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago, the Hotline started trumpeting polling showing that 5% more Americans support a surge in Iraq when it's described as the "McCain strategy" than as the "Bush strategy." Like most political polls, it shows that people think differently than they think that they think - that is, few people like to think that they would come down differently on otherwise identically described plans based on who they were named after. But as a demonstration of the power of the McCain brand, I'd have to say it's underwhelming. John McCain, bearer of the faith of our fathers, guide to a braver life, darling of ostensibly liberal journalists and avowedly partisan Democrats, can only lift the surge from 32% to 37%? Five percent? And that's only three percent over the support it garners with nobody's name stamped on it. Clearly McCain's plan to defend his hawkish stance on the grounds that Bush failed by being insufficiently hawkish is taking a beating as Bush takes a page from his book. Now McCain is left hoping that voters give him points for the courage of his convictions, that they believe that McCain would have done the surge way better than Bush, or that the surge will have Iraqis belatedly throwing rose petals at the feet of American soldiers. Of those possibilities, none is super promising. The first is maybe the most interesting, because it provides an interesting test case on the question of how voters weigh what your issue positions say about you versus how much they agree with yours. Paul Waldman makes a strong case that McCain's advocacy of campaign finance reform shows that, in Mark Schmitt's words, "It's not what you say about the issues - it's what the issues say about you" - that is, that McCain's advocacy of reform is a winner not because people care about the issue one way or the other but because it casts him as a man of integrity. It's an important point that many Democrats with a congenital need to split the difference on issues of the day would do well to remember. On the other hand, the difference between campaign finance reform and escalation in Iraq is that most Americans aren't hell-bent against campaign finance reform - that just don't care that much about it. As for what this means about John McCain's general election chances, I still think he's a formidable opponent, certainly more so than Mitt Romney or Sam Brownback. But as a raft of polls the past few days have confirmed, he can be beaten. Which is all the more reason for progressives to seek out a candidate who would do a great job governing the country.

NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS?

2007-01-25T02:24:00.000-05:00

Well, that marks another year with no update on the progress of Laura Bush's plan to stop gang violence. Here's hoping it's proceeding apace...

(POLITICAL) CHARITY CASE

2007-01-20T02:43:00.000-05:00

Much like a lot of people who opine for reasonably-sized audiences, Cass Sunstein deems Barack Obama and John McCain both more admirable than most US Senators. His reason:

Politicians who show respect--Senator McCain is a good example--tend not to attack the competence, the motivations, or the defining commitments of those who disagree with him. Politicians who show charity as well as respect--Senator Obama is a rare example--tend to put opposing arguments in the best possible form, to praise the motivations of those who offer such arguments, and to seek proposals that specifically accept the defining commitments of all sides.

In other words, McCain shows respect by criticizing just the reasoning and not the character of his opponents; Obama shows the greater virtue of charity by affirming the character of his opponents and stating their arguments in the most generous terms possible. They do? Of course, it would be tacky to just scrounge up a single example of McCain vituperatively attacking the character of an opponent. So let's restrict ourselves to examples of McCain vituperatively attacking the character of the most charitable Senator in America (TM). Maybe this counts:

I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter... I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in political to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble.

As for Obama, he's certainly outspoken on the virtues of granting those you disagree with the benefit of the doubt. After all, that was the principle behind his criticism of liberal advocacy groups that criticized Pat Leahy:

The knee-jerk unbending and what I consider to be unfair attacks on Senator Leahy's motives were unjustified...the same unyielding, unbending, dogmatic approach to judicial confirmation has in large part been responsible for the kind of poisonous atmosphere that exists in this Chamber...These groups on the right and left should not resort to the sort of broad-brush dogmatic attacks that have hampered the process...

Watch as Barack Obama rises to defend the character of someone he disagrees with and - all the better to strike a blow for political charity - calls out the critics for being so "knee-jerk...unyielding, unbending...broad-brush dogmatic..." In his zeal to defend Pat Leahy's honor, you'd almost think he was criticizing the character of those he disagrees with about the appropriate way to criticize Pat Leahy - or at least failing to present their argument in "the best possible form." What was the argument that drove Barack Obama into a fit of political charity? He's too much of a gentleman to name names, but he most quoted criticism of Leahy from the left for voting for Roberts came from People for the American Way:

His decision was inexplicable, and deeply disappointing. When John Roberts becomes Chief Justice and votes to erode or overturn longstanding Supreme Court precedents protecting fundamental civil rights, women’s rights, privacy, religious liberty, reproductive rights and environmental safeguards, Senator Leahy’s support for Roberts will make him complicit in those rulings, and in the retreat from our constitutional rights and liberties.”

I suppose it's unyielding in that PFAW hasn't changed its position on Pat Leahy voting for John Roberts. Knee-jerk? Well, maybe they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they hadn't put together those many-hundred-page reports on the guy. The word "complicit" earned condemnation as "vicious" from the Washington Post. But all it means is he shares some measure of responsibility for the actions on the bench of a man he voted to put there. The more interesting question, perhaps, rather than how well Cass Sunstein's chosen paragons live up to his chosen virtues of political respect and charity is whether these virtues - however commendable in private life - are really virtuous in public life at all. Should people who dislike social darwinism and dislike laissez-faire conservatism call foul when Barack Obama suggests the former is motivating the latter?

OPTIMISM AND OUTRAGE

2007-01-16T01:28:00.000-05:00

From Michael Eric Dyson's I May Not Get There With You:

We have surrendered to romantic images of King at the Lincoln Memorial inspiring America to reach, as he reached with outstretched arms, for a better future. All the while we forget his poignant warning against gradual racial progress and his remarkable threat of revolution should our nation fail to keep its promises. Still, like all other great black orators, King understood the value of understating and implying difficult truths. He knew how to drape hard realities in soaring rhetoric that won the day because it struck the right balance of outrage and optimism. To be sure, we have been long on King's optimism while shortchanging his outrage.

THE THOUGHT POLICE STRIKE AGAIN!

2007-01-15T01:41:00.000-05:00

Check out this graph from the NYT review of 24:

But “24” also jukes to the far side of political correctness and even left-wing paranoia. In two different seasons, the villains seeking to harm the United States are not Middle Eastern terrorists but conspirators directed by wealthy, privileged white Americans: in the second season, oil business tycoons tried to set off a Middle East war, and last year, Russian rebels turned out to be working in cahoots with a cabal of far-right government officials.

Then riddle me this: In how many places in America are you likely to avoid criticism/ seem more enlightened/ charm those hated liberal professors/ earn a glowing profile from those hated liberal journalists/ make friends by suggesting that what look like terrorist attacks by foreign enemies are really engineered by big business and/or the GOP? Not many. Which just goes to show how vapid a term "politically correct" is. It serves two related purposes: first, to reinforce an idea that the left is made up of rigid illiberal thought police; and second, to earn awful ideas consideration from reasonable people on the grounds that to dismiss them out of hand would be politically incorrect. I once watched an episode of Politically Incorrect where someone suggested bombing all the Arab countries in order to scare off terrorists. He then said something like "Don't ignore my idea just because it's not politically correct." The reason to reject that idea is that it would be unjust and calamitous. The irony is that when Politically Incorrect got booted off the air, it wasn't for taking on a sacred cow of the left. The term was popularized in the first place by Dinesh D'Souza. Then he wrote a book arguing that racism is merely "rational discrimination" by whites with a justified fear of "black cultural defects." Then he got hired as a political analyst by the supposedly all-too politically correct CNN. For his next trick, he's written a book arguing that conservatives can best discourage terrorism by allying themselves with radical mullahs against gay parents and women who have abortions. But don't dismiss his ideas out of hand! That would be political correctness.

BIGOTS IN ABUNDANCE?

2007-01-14T22:13:00.000-05:00

James Traub, in his Times Mag piece on ADL head Abe Foxman, notes that

Foxman upset many of his colleagues by extending a welcome to Christian conservatives, whose leaders tended to be strongly pro-Israel even as they spoke in disturbing terms of America’s “Christian” identity.

True that. Brings to mind the Zionist Organization of America's decision to honor Pat Robertson with a "State of Israel Fellowship Award." Abe Foxman at the time demurred that "He's not deserving, but I have no objections to other groups honoring him." This despite Robertson having literally written the book on how Jews conspired with Free Masons and Illuminati to engineer the major wars in American history in order to manipulate the global market (Norman Podhoretz argued at the time that that kind of antisemitism was rendered irrelevant by Robertson's Zionism just as in the Talmud a tiny bit of treif can't render a huge kosher vat no longer kosher). Robertson went on to raise the ire of the ADL, which had previously highlighted some of his rantings with concern, when he suggested that Ariel Sharon's strike was punishment from God. Perhaps the most telling piece of Traub's article is this exchange:

I asked if it was really right to call Carter, the president who negotiated the Camp David accords, an anti-Semite. “I didn’t call him an anti-Semite.” “But you said he was bigoted. Isn’t that the same thing?” “No. ‘Bigoted’ is you have preconceived notions about things.” The argument that the Israel lobby constricted debate was itself bigoted, he said. “But several Jewish officials I’ve talked to say just that.” “They’re wrong.” “Are they bigoted?” Foxman didn’t want to go there. He said that he had never heard any serious person make that claim.

This is the Abe Foxman worldview. Intellectual and/or moral serious equals the belief that the pro-Likud lobbying infrastructure exercises no pressure on the scope of the Israel debate in this country. Concern about the role of that lobby (unlike, say, concern about the role of the NRA) in shaping public perceptions and policy outcomes equals bigotry. And acceptance of Jews equals support for the actions of the current Israeli government. This despite the ADL's own research showing antisemitism declining in Europe at the same time that "anti-Israel" sentiment rises. As my friend Jacob Remes wrote at the time,

Abe Foxman, while hailing European governments that have worked to differentiate Israel from Jews, fails to do so himself and continues to equate the two.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

2007-01-14T15:04:00.000-05:00

This Times piece features a silly and all-too common turn of phrase (emphasis mine):

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who joined the Senate in 2005 and thus escaped the Iraq vote that has come to haunt Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kerry, used the platform of Senate hearings to lacerate the Bush Iraq policy and affirm his own opposition to the war.

Sure, one of the annoying things about being an elected legislator is that along with your deliciously nuanced views on the issues of the day, you need to vote for or against bills you didn't write yourself to say just what you wanted them to. But is there anyone who knew who Barack Obama was in 2002 who didn't know his position on invading Iraq? The man spoke at an anti-war rally and called the proposed invasion "dumb" and an "attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us." Do Adam Nagourney and Patrick Healy really believe that he was hedging on whether or not the bill for the war should pass?

WHITHER THE GROWN-UPS?

2007-01-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

Via Greg Sargent, a quote from Condi Rice that doesn't inspire much confidence:

""It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work."

Of course if it were a prominent liberal saying that about something liberal she were up to, it would prove how liberals are cloudy-headed and un-pragmatic and hopelessly ideological, right?

GOD FORBID

2007-01-10T00:56:00.000-05:00

Just finished David Kuo's Tempting Faith, his account of how he came to doubt George Bush's commitment to making real investments in his much-touted faith based initiatives, on which Kuo had come to work in the White House. The White House approach, Kuo contends, prioritized polarizing votes to discredit opponents over building consensus around fighting poverty. But while Kuo criticizes the White House's use of the faith-based initiatives as a political bludgeon and criticizes the push for discrimination based on religious practice, he is unrepentant in his support for government-subsidized discrimination based on religious identity. My junior year at Yale, Kuo's boss Jim Towey came to campus and pledged that he "strongly believes" in the constitutional separation of church and state. He was working, he pledged, to "end discrimination against faith-based organizations." The next morning, the White House called on the House to stop amendments to the Community Services Block Grants Act, H.R. 3030, which would have required faith-based agencies receiving federal funding to comply with federal civil rights standards. The "Statement of Administration Policy" went so far as to threaten a veto of any bill amended to require federally-funded agencies to obey federal non-discrimination laws. It didn't come to that: all three amendments to ensure that funding from all Americans is tied to equal treatment for all Americans went down to defeat. On the same day Towey was at Yale touting the constitutionality and compassion of the administration's agenda, Kuo's friends at Focus on the Family sent out an activist alert warning that if proposed amendments to H.R. 3030 passed, "Christian charities interested in accepting federal funds would be required to ignore religious conviction in hiring -- even if potential employees practiced Islam, Judaism or no religion at all." God forbid.

YEAR IN REVIEW, 2006

2007-01-05T18:08:00.000-05:00

As has become tradition here, I'm linking below to one post from each month of 2006. And by unpopular request, I've also picked a post from each month of 2003 that posting took place. And by nobody's request at all, I'm pasting the '04 and '05 picks in the middle too. Zach, Ana, Dad, et al: Thanks for reading. January 2003: The Right to Run June 2003: Agape July 2003: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens August 2003: Auth-orial Intent September 2003: American Labor Goes to Yale October 2003: No Guardrails? November 2003: Jews for Justice December 2003: Leering at the Left January 2004: Dean, Clinton, and Healthcare February 2004: Nader and the Democrats March 2004: Barack Obama and the Future of Environmentalism April 2004: The March for Women’s Lives May 2004: Where’s John Kerry When You Need Him? June 2004: Disenfranchised Voters July 2004: The NLRB Turns on Graduate Students August 2004: Anarchists in the Times September 2004: The First Debate October 2004: What’s the Word? November 2004:An Election We Should Have Won December 2004: The Speech We Deserve From the Democrats January 2005: Run Russ Run February 2005: Why We Sat In March 2005: Taking Blacks for Granted April 2005: Neo-Confederate Nostalgia May 2005: The Change to Win Agenda June 2005: Defending Durbin July 2005: The Lochner Litmus Test August 2005: Populism is Not Prejudice September 2005:Career Path to Motherhood? October 2005: Rosa Parks, Misremembered November 2005: Good Labor News December 2005: Democracy in Latin America January 2006: Abramoff Pleads Guilty February 2006: Not a Good Week For Justice March 2006: Brokeback Backlash April 2006: Living on the Wedge May 2006: Deep Freeze June 2006: Anybody Can Serve July 2006: Bill Frist: Nader-Lite? August 2006: Fair Point September 2006: More Than One Way (As Bill Frist Would Say) To Skin a Cat October 2006: Sam Brownback, Call Your Publicist November 2006: Family Matters December 2006: Stop Stepping On My Breakthrough Happy New Year.

GERALD FORD: OUT OF THIS WORLD

2007-01-04T18:00:00.000-05:00

From the New Haven Register's account of locals' memories of Gerald Ford:

Judy Nicolari of Ansonia met Ford when he was vice president in the mid-'70s at a fund-raiser for Republican Ronald Sarasin, who was running for Congress. "We talked about our astrological signs, about horoscopes," Nicolari said. "He was very down to earth."

No pun intended, I'm sure.

WWGD?

2006-12-29T02:46:00.000-05:00

One of the Times' blogs highlights this post from a member of the FireDogLake crew on the posthumous revelation that Ford had his doubts about the Bush Iraq strategy:

But when a reporter is in possession of information that is vital to the country, that might change whether we go to war or whom we elect for president, and the only reason for withholding the information is to protect the person interviewed from embarrassing his own party — well, there must be some other principle that applies, don'tcha think?

This argument is less than persuasive for a couple reasons. First, barring time travel, nothing said in July 2004 could have stopped Bush from invading Iraq in March 2003. Unless Scarecrow is predicting a future War in Iraq fought for lack of candor from Gerald Ford about this one. Or expecting Gerald Ford's criticism of the War in Iraq to keep us out of a war with Iran. Which brings us to the second problem with this argument: Gerald Ford doesn't sway swing voters. If the man had endorsed John Kerry, that would've been big news. Expressing doubts about the Bush plan for Iraq is just what every respectable conservative neither working for George Bush nor running to succeed him nor named Rush Limbaugh was doing two years ago. That includes Paul Bremer. Henry Kissinger, who many more folks credit or blame with the foreign policy of the 1960s than Gerald Ford, expressed concerns at least as strong about the Iraq invasion, and he did it before the invasion happened. And yet it happened anyway. Of course the expectation that ex-Presidents should be elder statesmen in a way that doesn't include weighing in on the performance of current Presidents is silly. And swallowing criticism of your party's nominee in the months before the election is less than courageous (here's looking at you, Christie Todd Whitman). And no story you broke four decades ago is an excuse to cozy up to the President for as long as he remains popular. But did George Bush ride to reelection on the imagined confidence of Gerald Ford? Not so much.

"ANATHEMA TO FREE-MARKET SUPPORTERS"? I'M QUAKING IN MY BOOTS

2006-12-26T23:56:00.000-05:00

From Jon Chait's rebuttal of the aforementioned indecent proposal:

If I understand Lindsey, he is proposing the following bargain: Libertarians will give up their politically hopeless goal of eliminating two wildly popular social programs that represent the core of liberalism's domestic achievements. Liberals, in turn, will agree to simply eviscerate these programs, leaving perhaps some rump version targeted at the poorest of the poor. To be fair, Lindsey offers these ideas only as the basis for negotiation, but the prospects of bridging this gulf seem less than promising.

It's worth noting that even the libertarians at the Cato Institute, in a study Lindsey touts and Chait pokes some holes in, could only come up with 13% of the population to label libertarian. And half of them are already voting for Democrats, despite the "anti-nafta, Wal-Mart-bashing economic populism" that Lindsey warns will be the party's undoing. You wouldn't know it from visiting most elite universities, but libertarianism is not a big hit. That's why Bill Kristol urged congressional Republicans not to go wobbly against the Clinton healthcare plan: Not because an expansion (insufficient and needlessly complex though it was) of the government's role in the healthcare system was contrary to the will of voters, but because if it passed it would cement the popularity of the party that passed it.

STOP STEPPING ON MY BREAKTHROUGH

2006-12-24T03:47:00.000-05:00

Doing his best to sweet-talk electorally-ascendent liberals into hitching their wagon to the libertarian rickshaw, Brink Lindsey offers a list of shared victories in which liberals and libertarians can revel together:

an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era--the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration--were championed by the political left.

If these are victories for libertarians, then this is a better argument for why libertarians should support liberals and leftists - the people who actually won each of these victories - than for why the left should turn libertarian. But it's worth asking whether these markers of social progress even qualify as "libertarian breakthroughs" or "libertarian ends." The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by the elimination of the poll tax, a nasty law which restricts access to a government function to those able to pay for it and rewards those with more money to spend on their politics with more voice in them. What about undoing those laws qualifies as libertarian? The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by anti-discrimination laws that empower government to use regulation to limit the freedom of employers to employ a workforce that looks like themselves. Inflicting government intervention on market transactions is not exactly the libertarian m.o. Neither is government-mandated busing to integrate a public school system that if libertarians had their way wouldn't exist in the first place. Many libertarians no doubt break with Barry Goldwater and support the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But their support for good progressive law doesn't demonstrate a fundamental affinity between liberalism and libertarianism. It simply demonstrates that even its devotees sometimes reject the maxim that "the government is best which governs least" when faced with the liberty-denying consequences of the "free market" whose "relentless dynamism" Lindsey urges liberals to recognize. Libertarians may support freedom of the press from censorship, but they're more likely to fret over how to sell off our publically-owned airwaves than how to ensure airtime for grassroots candidates. They may support a woman's right to choose, but I wouldn't count on their assistance in ensuring that women have the economic means to choose abortion or childbirth, or the educational resources to make informed choices. They may support the rights of the accused to a trial, but they're not the first to line up to be taxed to pay for decent lawyers to represent them (then there are the ones who would like to replace the crimminal justice system with a system of private torts). They may support allowing more immigrants into this country, but if you expect them to face down employers who exploit the fear of deportation to suppress the right to organize, you've got another think coming. And though the Cato Institute won't be joining Rick Santorum's crusade against no-fault divorce any time soon, there's no need for an earnest Ayn Rand devotee to support a right to divorce at all. After all, isn't marriage a binding contract that the parties should know better than to get into lightly? Aside from the reality that it presides over marriage in the first place, why should government have any more right to stop consenting adults from entering contracts for lifelong marriage than it does to bar contracts for human organ sales or pennies-an-hour employment?

BAYH BAILS

2006-12-16T12:52:00.000-05:00

So Evan Bayh has decided he's "just not the right David" to take on the supposed Goliaths in the race for the Presidency. Apparently, membership in 160 facebook groups just isn't enough to build the networks of support to win a presidential campaign. Either that, or Bayh got out of the running for fear his campaign would face a steady drumbeat of questions about his facebook membership in both the "Moderate Democrats Caucus" and the "Liberal News" group, or about his supposed simultaneous membership in the College Democrats of Arkansas, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Montana, North Carolina, South Caraolina, Massachusetts, Oregon State, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Ohio, Minnesota, Hamilton County Indiana, New York, Oregon, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana U, Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, Vermont, California, Tennessee, and "Worchester and Central Massachusetts" (where he's 25% of the membership). Or maybe it was his claimed affiliation with the Party's Hispanic Caucus, Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, "Young Democrats" chapters across the country, and the North Carolina Association of Teen Democrats that was destined to raise eyebrows under the microscope of a Presidential campaign. Thus the race loses the only candidate who could say he was opposed to the Facebook News Feed from the beginning.

And, on a more serious note, we see another nail in the coffin of the scenario where the primary is dominated by Clinton and someone running well to her right (sorry, Joe Biden).

GOTCHA GOTTA GO? NO.

2006-12-09T18:29:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Sam Waterston has ended his much-lamented silence in American political discourse and spoken out to urge his adoring fans to heed the call of the "American idealists" at Unity08. They're the folks who believe that all the scourges of modern American politics - special interest-driven corruption, nasty gotcha politics, the belief that women's rights is a crucial issue - could be beaten back if only there was a presidential ticket composed not of Democrats or Republicans but of one of each, and chosen not by people who turn out in primaries but by people who turn out in primaries held over the internet by "American idealists." For those stubborn folks for whom Sam Waterson having "looked at it closely", isn't sufficient evidence that Unity08 "could save this country we love," some obvious questions present themselves. Well, a lot of obvious questions. Here's one: Would a decline in gotcha politics really go hand in hand with a decline in corruption? The conflation of the two is commonplace in media narratives grasping for any explanation of voter disgust with Congress that doesn't involve the kinds of laws the Congress is passing or isn't. But I think the irony here is that one of few functional bulwarks against rampant corruption in Washington is gotcha politics. If our elected officials were circumspect about not disparaging the character of their counterparts on the other side of the aisle, would the likes of Conrad Burns and Bob Ney have gone down to defeat? Would incoming legislators, new and old, have as much reason to fear following in their footsteps? Quotes from CREW's Melanie Sloan in and of themselves are simply not enough to grab media nad voter attention, let alone overcome all the advantages of incumbency. What helps the charges stick? Relentless criticism from the folks with a chance, at least sometimes, of getting heard: your challenger, and your fellow elected officials. If you don't have to fear getting gotcha-ed, there's more cause to do gotcha-worthy things. Now of course it would be nice to truly venal behavior by elected officials got called out on both sides of the aisle. It's simply not credible to claim, as the Unity08 folks and much of the media do, that both parties have the same track record on this. Compare the treatment of Bill Jefferson (D-LA) and Tom DeLay (R-TX) by their party leaders. One lost his committee chairmanship. The other was positioned for a good stretch to remain Majority Leader. Unfortunately, opinion leaders who can count more adherents than Sam Waterston delight in the myth that the two parties are bearers of equal and opposite corruption, and that that corruption - the reward of money with power and of power with money - has no relationship to ideology. That said, when elected officials do speak in one voice across party lines, it's as often to unite across party lines in defense of questionable congressional practices as in condemnation of them. Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Hastert stood together in a show of bipartisanship to condemn the FBI search of Jefferson's office. Senators and congressmen of both parties stand together to raise their salaries swiftly and quietly. They stand firm in bipartisan defense of gerrymandering congressional districts. That's because no matter how otherwise representative your member of congress is of you, she will always be fundamentally unrepresentative in that she is herself a member of congress. Dave Barry once said the best way to get great Nielson ratings would be to make a sitcom about a Nielson family. Similarly, if you're looking to find policies that members of Congress acorss the political spectrum will support, the right place to start is with policies that make it easier, more enjoyable, and more permanent to be a member of Congress. If you want to see those policies stop, bemoaning gotcha politics is not the place to start.

DUMP DENNIS

2006-12-07T02:40:00.000-05:00

In the wake of Dennis Prager's furious condemnation of Congressman-Elect Keith Ellison's plan to be sworn in on his own holy text - a story Prager described this week as more important to the future of this nation than what we do next in Iraq - the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for his removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. As M.J. Rosenberg notes, President Bush appointed Prager three months ago to the Council, which oversees the Holocaust Museum. That appointment demonstrates that George W. Bush has not fully learned the lessons of the Holocaust. That language bristles no doubt, because there's an unfortunate tendency to see big, dramatic historical events on whose moral character there's a broad consensus - the Civil Rights Movement, the Abolition movement, the Holocaust - as somehow beyond the bounds of politics. But these are all political events. They are seismic moments not because they transcend politics but because they both expose and transform fundamental conflicts between different social visions held by different people and advanced through the exercise of power. The Holocaust was a genocidal murderous enactment of an ideology of racial, religious, and sexual hierarchy and bigotry. It was an act of murder writ large in the name of Aryan heterosexual non-disabled Protestants being more human, having more worth, and possessing more rights than others. There are still those in this country who hold some or all those prejudices. There are some who will say so openly. History does not interpret itself. But it demands meaning-making by responsible citizens. That is not and never has been a process divorced without influence from or impact on our politics. The Holocaust Museum's "primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy." No one espousing the view that the "acceptance" of Judaism "as equal" to other religions "signifies the decline of Western civilization" would have a shot at a spot overseeing the Holocaust Museum. But someone who believes such about homosexuals was appointed to the Board three months ago by the President. That's because the full humanity of Jews is considered a settled question in mainstream American political discourse, and therefore inappropriate to "politicize," while the full humanity of gays is up for debate, and therefore it's inappropriate to judge those bravely taking the "politically incorrect" stance.

THE ART OF COMPROMISE

2006-12-04T00:49:00.000-05:00

As a devoted Hotline TV junkie (seriously, I can't get by without my daily fix), it's "more in sadness than in anger" that I relate a truly weird line from guest host Josh Kraushaar, discussing Rush Holt in Friday's episode on the Intelligence Chair race:

He's sort of someone who kind of works with the progressive members of the Democratic caucus, but he also doesn't have any ethical issues to deal with, so he would be an interesting compromise choice.

A compromise between the people who want a conservative candidate and the people who want a corrupt one?

FAMILY MATTERS

2006-11-28T01:12:00.000-05:00

This article, one of the last by the recently-deceased Ellen Willis, is one of the more articulate, accurate, and biting critiques I've come across of Thomas Frank and What's the Matter With Kansas?, a book many pundits make reference to and few do justice. Willis takes on what I think is the most glaring weakness of Frank's latest book, one which goes totally unaddressed in the full-length reviews and tangential digs bashing him for his supposed elitism: Frank argues that Republicans elected on the basis of their social conservatism don't actually deliver socially conservative policy. As we say in Yiddish, "Halvai" - if only. As Willis notes, conservatives have successfully used the powers of their offices all too successfully to reshape the country's "social policy" more faithful to their dogma - including making it prohibitively difficult for women in large swathes of the country to exercise freedom of choice. Frank is of course right to recognize the Federal Marriage Act as a stunt and a sop, but the unfortunate truth is that many of the right's sops to social conservative activists pack a real punch in diminishing the freedom of the rest of us to access contraception, access knowledge, and access partnership rights. Rejecting Frank's insistence that the social conservative legislative agenda is a chimera doesn't much damage the rest of his argument though. Frank is right to argue that conservatives build a base for right-wing policy based on classed appeals to stick it to elites by fighting social liberalsim, and that that base make possible policies that make elites that much more decadent. And he's right that a progressive politics that speaks to class and is willling to condemn George Bush's congratulating a woman working three jobs as a mark of elitism would do something to sap the power that right-wing aesthetic class warfare has in the absence of the materialist class warfare Lee Attwater rightly rued could bring the left back into electoral power. Willis is right to suggest that that won't be enough, and that progressives need to speak with strength and candor in the culture war rather than simply feinting or punting (and she speaks perceptively to the way we project our owjn ambivalences onto the electorate, which then reflects them). But she's wrong to lump Frank in with Michaels (say, Lind and Tomasky) who are set on shutting feminists up. And of all the charges to level at Thomas Frank, excessive loyalty to the Democratic Party is one of the more inane ones Willis could have chosen. That said, it's a compelling read. Zichronah livrachah.

WASHINGTON ORIGINAL?

2006-11-23T00:57:00.000-05:00

This article strikes me as a good example of why Washington reporters get a bad rap. The big story, apparently, is that Marshall Wittman has worked for a lot of different Washington power brokers who don't get along with each other or often agree (although Caesar and Linda Chavez are somewhat farther off from each other than Ralph and Bruce Reed). Leibovich isn't writing a story about the course of Wittman's evolving political ideology - instead, we learn that Wittman likes interesting people and snappy quotes. He's into McCain! He's into Lieberman! (Not that getting from one's talking points to the other's is a colossal leap) Makes it easy to forget that people's lives are actually affected by politics.

A TASTE OF (GENDERED) TROPES TO COME

2006-11-17T23:58:00.000-05:00

Two choice insights from a minute of talk radio on the Harman v. Hastings face-off for Intelligence Chair: "Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman are in a cat fight." "Nancy Pelosi is like Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde - she just has a thing for gangsters." Just remember kids: W Stands for Women.

RUSS WON'T RUN

2006-11-12T13:33:00.000-05:00

Not a shocker, given that the past year and a half has seen the rise of John Edwards as Un-Hillary lightning rod and intensifying inklings of a run by Barack Obama, who like Feingold vocally opposed the war - and worst of all for Feingold's chances, his second divorce and lack of a third marriage by the midterms (despite the efforts of the erstwhile Committee to Find Russ Feingold a Date). That said, Feingold's popularity in the country's most representative state, which drew him votes from a quarter of Bush voters two years ago and has stayed strong as he talked about running for president and came out for phased withdrawl from Iraq, equal marriage rights, and censuring Bush, should be a lesson for the field of Democratic presidential contenders, and for the primary voters who'll choose among them. You remember them: the ones who cleverly voted for John Kerry because he was the most electable.

SENSE AND SENSITIVITY

2006-11-12T01:28:00.000-05:00

Keith argues that my article is "lacking in coherence" on two grounds: that I should not expect papers to print a word George Allen has not himself admitted to using, and that the choice not to print the word evidences a keen awareness of race and racism that we should approve of. On Keith's first point, I'm not sure why he thinks the certainty of the allegations should determine the specificity with which they're related. Should the acts of admitted murderers, for example, be reported with more gruesome detail than those of alleged murderers? If the allegations weren't newsworthy, they shouldn't have been in the news at all. I'd say they were, since they came from a range of sources with personal interaction with Allen. I doubt they would have sparked the same interest or had the same staying power with reporters or with voters had they not fit into what was perceived as a pattern of troubling behavior on race. If one accepts that the story is newsworthy, the story is worth telling in full. My point was that leaving the speech act itself to be extrapolated by the reader lessens the impact of that news. I don't think that's a courtesy George Allen should expect or deserves. And I don't think the willingness of friends of his to say he never said it, or of certain blacks to endorse Allen anyway, is particularly reassuring. Of course I was glad that papers printed the word "macaca," which they must have done in part because the story would be difficult to tell with allusions, and relatedly, because the word doesn't strike the same chords and isn't on the same list of "epithets" that too many reporters place "nigger" and "shit" together on. My comparison between the reporting on those two words wasn't about the proof of politicians saying them - it was about the use of allusion as if with the former, as with the latter, the problem was the coarseness of the language and not the outrageousness of the sentiment. On Keith's second point, I of course agree that "the n-word" is loaded and provokes strong reactions. Unfortunately, there are a not insignificant number of Americans who speak about it as if it were a matter of rudeness rather than racism. One of the blights on discourse about race in the United States is the confusion of racism and talking about racism (see Ward Connerly's attempts to make it illegal for the government to keep track of racial profiling). That's exemplified in the conflation of using the word "nigger" to refer to blacks and using the word to refer to how racists refer to blacks. The word strikes a chord for a reason. It's a nasty, ugly word. The New York Times doesn't demonstrate it's racial sensitivity to only alluding to that nastiness and ugliness in a story about allegations that a (one-time) presidential aspirant made casual use of it. It just reduces our sense of the story.

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING

2006-11-11T00:58:00.000-05:00

One of the classic and/ or tired debate between the more and less left camps on the left is whether we win elections best by hewing or dashing to the center or by staking out strong left stances that demonstrate vision and courage and bring more people into the process. I think the latter kind of argument is underappreciated by most of the people running editorial pages and congressional campaign committees. But I'd also say that these arguments frequently overstate how much issues really determine how people vote (much as some of us might like it if they did). I think Mark Schmitt got it right when he said "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you." That is, why candidates are perceived to have taken the stances they have and embraced the issues they have often does more to raise them up or bring them down than what those issues and positions are. Another frustration of the debates about whether leftism or centrism will win elections is that it often willfully ducks the question of what policies are actually best for the country. Arguments about what policies win elections and arguments about what policies create better futures masquerade about as one another. Partly because that let's us elide the very real debates amongst those of us to the left of the Republicans about whether three strikes laws or CAFTA or invading Iraq are worthy on the merits. So when we consider the handiwork of those who try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to pick candidates, like a party's Senatorial Campaign Committee, I think a useful question for those of us in what Wellstone first called the Democratic wing of the Democratic party to ask is: Are you putting up the most progressive candidate that could win the election? So here are some, um, general thoughts inspired by recent events: Bad Idea: When the state is pretty red and the most successful Democrats are agrarian populists, backing the guy with more money than god over the farmer. Good Idea: When the state is quite red, finding a candidate who offers conservatism of personal narrative and cultural affectation rather than of contemporary ideology. Bad Idea: When the state is even a little blue, the Republicans and the Congress are wildly unpopular, and the incumbent is the 100th most popular Senator, fielding a candidate who agrees with the Republicans on central issues we'll face in the next couple years. Good Idea: When the state is light red but the ruling party has fallen farther faster there than anywhere else, and the wounds of neoliberalism are particularly keenly felt, taking the chance to run a real progressive.
Bad Idea: When the incumbent sides with the Democrats on key issues in order to stay afloat in a super-blue state, trying to entice a candidate who'll run to his right. Good Idea: When a socialist Independent is the state's most popular pol and he has aspirations for higher office, getting out of his way.

NO OFFENSE: BAD DEFENSE

2006-11-10T02:03:00.000-05:00

In a new piece over at Campus Progress, I ask what the media are protecting us from by only alluding to "epithets" like George Allen's:

Indeed, I doubt many readers were left wondering which anti-black slur Allen had chosen. But the choices reporters and editors make don’t only determine how comprehensible their reporting is; they shape the impact it has on their readers. Alluding to something terrible rather than showing it, be it battlefield carnage or bigoted language, softens its impact.

From the archives: Their media criticism - and ours; vocab; Senators say the darndest things...

I'M NOT AN (INTERNET) BETTING MAN, BUT...

2006-11-03T01:34:00.000-05:00

If I had to guess, I'd say it'll be a twenty-five seat net pick-up in the House, and five seat net pick-up in the Senate. Needless to say, I'd rather be proven wrong in one direction than the other one.

INDUCTIVE REASONING, AS PRACTICED BY BILL O'REILLY

2006-10-31T22:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a basic summary of the argument "No Spin Zone" listeners were treated to on the drive home tonight: Democrats opposed the war in Iraq. Therefore failure in Iraq is good for Democrats. Therefore Democrats support failure in Iraq. Therefore Democrats care more about what's good for Democrats than what's good for America. Therefore Democrats can't be trusted. Any questions?

DUTIFUL DUNCAN

2006-10-31T00:43:00.000-05:00

Apparently at least one guy out there agrees with me that there's something of a vacuum in the Republican field for 2008 for a pro-Rumsfeld, pro-Tancredo, pro-Falwell conservative. And public-spirited chap that he is, he's ambling into it. That vote against CAFTA isn't likely to help there though.

I USED TO THINK

2006-10-23T01:16:00.000-04:00

Anyone who reads the New York Times on-line without a pop-up blocker has been subjected to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison exulting that “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.” Of course he's kidding. But it's not so funny. Leaf through the past few issues of The Economist, and you'll find unsigned articles calling on Lula to cut back pensions, on David Cameron to promise shrinking social spending, and on the Democratic Leadership Council not to go wobbly against organized labor. Then read over this parade of praise for the magazine - as a news source that saves you the time of having to read any of the other ones. Ted Turner draws a favorable contrast with Time Magazine (yes, that Time Magazine), which apparently is "too populist." No need to worry about populism from The Economist. Now if the same roster of CEOs stepped up singing the praises of, say, the Wall Street Journal, heads would turn over why a "conservative" paper's reporting was being taken as holy writ by so many powerful people (never mind that the news section of the paper isn't so different in bent from what you would get in the Times). But when so many in the global overclass quote chapter and verse from a "neoliberal" paper laying down structural adjustment through shrinking spending and shredded security as the best medicine for every situation, that's another story. Or rather, it's not a story.

IT'S HOW YOU PLAY THE GAME

2006-10-18T01:57:00.000-04:00

Last week, the New York Times reported on the move in China to better protect workers' rights, and in so doing stem the tide of rising social inequality. And it discussed the instant blowback from American companies:

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law. The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce -- which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike -- against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party's official union organization...One provision in the proposed law reads, "Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc."

This episode is an object lesson in how corporate-driven globalization works. While orthodox world systems theorists debate when we will shift from an era of American dominance to one of Chinese dominance, and the globalization gurus estimate how long it will take for "open markets" to unleash a new era of liberalism and freedom, corporate-driven globalization is lived by millions as a cudgel wielded not by a national government but by an economic clique, and wielded in the service not of human freedom but of management power. When workers have the freedom to organize without retaliation and bargain collectively for better futures, they win better working conditions for themselves and their families, and they make it harder to treat them as infinitely flexible and fully disposable resources. That increase in the freedom and democracy of the workplace breeds understandable resistance from people who would otherwise get to call all the shots. Without global standards, global markets ease a global race to the bottom. This is easy to lose track of in the bipartisan haze of "competition" and the elite faith that if a given nation just does enough to keep its workers cheap and contingent, it can outdo another nation's efforts at the same. That's a competition most everybody loses.

JACOB WEISBERG, CALL YOUR FACT-CHECKER

2006-10-17T00:42:00.000-04:00

Jacob Weisberg in this month's Men's Vogue:

But even as the Democratic political discussion grows and engulfs him, Obama is engaged in another more personal and historical conversation - with Wright and Ellison, with his parents, and with those two tragic and prophetic figures, Lincoln and King. Obama, of course, would never be so immodest as to compare himself to either of these men. But being clear-eyed, he must see what others do: that among American politicians, he alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath.

Barack Obama in last year's Time magazine:

So when I, a black man with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, it was hard to imagine a less likely scenario than that I would win--except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois' greatest citizen and our nation's greatest President. In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.