Rustbelt Intellectual

Class-based liberalism vs. Minority rights liberalism

2011-07-03T12:29:00.002-04:00

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post has penned a very interesting analysis of the state of contemporary liberalism ("The rise of zombie liberalism: Half-dead, half-alive"), where he argues there are successes in defending minority rights (racial minorities, women, and most recently and prominently, gays and lesbians). At the same time, unions are in retreat and the American welfare state under renewed attack. What explains the different levels of success?

Leaving aside the fact that America is still marked by severe racial and gender inequality (MacGillis wisely includes a quote from Barney Frank regarding the recent shift to support for gay rights in public opinion is very specific to that group and marks a generational shift), MacGillis offers a simple explanation: wealthy individuals have backed campaigns for gay rights, and specifically the recent New York vote on gay marriage, and at the same time, wealthy individuals (including some of the same folks who supported gay rights) have backed campaigns to retrench the welfare state, keep taxes on the rich low, and keep Wall Street unregulated.

I think that money is a part of it, though in a way that MacGillis doesn't really address. Passing laws to give equal rights for minorities does not cost much. Regulations that say you can't discriminate against some people, or opening up marriage opportunities, simply do not take much from the treasury, whereas laws, policies and programs to deal with income inequality or union organizing either cost a lot from the treasury or limit employer profits. Policy success is always going to be easier when the resistance against it is cultural or moral rather than money.

Immigration reform: Learning from Utah

2011-05-16T19:53:00.005-04:00

Progressives: You can learn from Utah. Really.

Re-posting from my recent piece at _The Hill_.

Critics on both the left and the right are dismissing President Obama’s recent call for immigration reform, saying he offered nothing new. However, his El Paso speech on Tuesday, and recent events in some states gave hints of a possible winning strategy. Ironically, Obama may claim victory if conservative groups are at the forefront of the change—but reformers will have to scale back their ambitions to make it happen.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/campaign/161445-immigration-reform-from-distrust-to-direction

A new number one

2010-10-14T00:01:00.003-04:00

In this PBS "Need to Know" podcast, my fellow rustbelt intellectual, Rick Karr, explores the reasoning behind Washington Monthly's university rankings and the meaning of American meritocracy.

The Washington Monthly approach rewards universities that give a lot back to the taxpayer, and are a sharp contrast to the US News and World Report rankings which focus on selectivity, SAT scores, and perceptions of prestige. Whereas the US News ranking typically puts Harvard University at #1, the Washington Monthly ranking finds that University of California-San Diego is the best university in America. Rick talks to Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris, and then talks to me about some of the differences between the 2 number 1s: Harvard (where I received my PhD) and UC-San Diego (where I now teach).

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/audio-a-new-number-one/4134/

Too Little, Too Late?

2010-09-26T10:07:00.002-04:00

Today's Times has a front-page story about attack ads now, finally being launched by Democratic Congressional candidates. It seems that these campaigns have finally recognized that many of the Republicans running against them are sleazy, corrupt, tools of big business, or out 'n out lunatics.

The question, of course, is whether it is too late to alter the dynamics of these races. Had they been run right after Labor Day, perhaps; in the last week of September, I dunno.

At the risk of stating what is so obvious it is cliche, the issue now is voter turnout. There is no question who the angry motivated voters are: they are the roughly 30% of Americans who are, in their own way, fascists. I don't use that term glibbly - we ought to be forthright that a sizable portion of the tea baggers, the Palinites, the Bachmann-ites, were they a political movement in a European country, would be described as "far-right" "ultra-nationalist" and "neo-fascist." Like the National Front in the UK or the Le Pen movement in France. In this country, however, we call them a major and respectable political party.

So will these ads wake up the rest of us and get us out to the polls? It is too late to change minds, I suspect, but it isn't too late to turn out voters.

Choose Your Narrative

2010-09-21T13:40:00.005-04:00

For six or more months now the political story line playing in the media has been the crumbling of the Democratic party and the newly resurgent and confident conservatives, embodied by the Tea Partiers. We've all accepted this story more or less and as a consequence in the run-up to the midterm elections the question being debated is only whether the Democrats will suffer a defeat like they did in 1994 or will it be worse?

There has been another version of events out there, needless to say, and only in the week or so has it started to appear in the mainstream. Rather than witnessing a conservative revival, we are actually watching the implosion of the Republican party as it eats its own young.

The recent Republican primaries in New York and Delaware were the events that put this narrative on the media radar screen, but the story has been out there ever since Rand Paul won his Republican primary in Kentucky, and Earl Grey Aficionado Angle won in Nevada. While all politics is indeed local, taken together this Republican primary season demonstrates that the party has been hijacked not simply by its very right wing - which is true - but by its genuinely lunatic fringe.

As a result, the Republican mayor of Reno, Nevada has announced that he will be supported Harry Reid; Charlie Crist is running as an Independent for Senate in Florida and has a good chance of winning; the right-wing vote for governor in Colorado is deeply divided now that former Congressman Tom Tancredo - a nut of the highest order - is running on the American Constitution Party ticket; and most recently Lisa Murkowski has announced her write-in campaign for Senate in Alaska, after she lost to a right-wing Tea Bagger in the primary.

All of which is good news for Democrats - or it ought to be. What confuses me is why Democrats seem so beaten and dispirited right now. And, more to the point, why the predictions are that they won't turn out to vote. President Obama has scored more major legislative victories in his first 18 months than all but a handful of presidents and we have our tails between our legs.

Republicans will always have the advantage of money, and of a party discipline that Leonid Brezhnev would have envied. But the opportunities right now not simply to retain control of the House and the Senate, and to strangle the Tea Party in its crib strike me as quite good.

So c'mon folks - the only way to ensure that my second narrative, the story of GOP self-destruction, prevails is we all energize and turn out the vote to repudiate the Tea Party.

Tea Drinking and the Ironies of History

2010-08-31T16:34:00.002-04:00

Whatever else the tea drinkers who assembled in Washington on August 28 might have accomplished, they did manage to turn the National Mall into an irony-free zone, at least for an afternoon.

They certainly seemed oblivious to the obvious ironies of the day. Like the fact that even as the tea party movement was portraying itself as a “grassroots” upwelling from the people, the New York Times and the New Yorker were running big stories about the right-wing billionaires who are funding the whole show. I’d like to get me some of that “populism.”

Nor did they seem fazed that featured speaker Glenn Beck - former shock-jock, now Messiah Complex victim - was exhorting the nation to return to “traditional values.” Beck has made his career playing so fast and loose with the facts that he no longer knows when he is lying and when he’s not. This is the guy, after all, who lied to the ladies on “The View.” How low can you sink?!

Many people got upset that the event took place on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, at the same location where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.” You could see that this would make some people touchy since the tea partiers want to re-open debates most of us thought were settled long ago, like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 14th amendment, which was passed in 1868. Ironic for sure.

Personally, I got the biggest giggle being lectured at by Sarah Palin about “character.” When the going got tough up there in Alaska, not only did Governor Palin quit her job in order to cash out, but she gave one of the most memorably bizarre speeches ever delivered by an American politician who wasn’t drunk. A model for any of us facing tough times.

The biggest irony of the day, however, came from Abe Lincoln, whose memorial was appropriated for this tea party.

Lincoln, if memory serves, was the president who prosecuted the Civil War against the southern confederacy. He fought the war for two reasons: first, to preserve the Union; second, to end slavery in the United States. When he promised, in the Gettysburg Address, a “new birth of freedom” he wasn’t talking about the freedom of the wealthy to get richer, which is what the tea drinkers seem to have in mind, but about removing the stain of slavery from the fabric of the nation.

In order to achieve those goals Lincoln engineered the largest expansion of the Federal government and of Federal power to that point in our history. He instituted the nation’s first military draft; he suspended habeas corpus rights. Most importantly, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which was viewed by slave owners as an outrageous infringement of private property rights. Abe Lincoln was arguably the first “big government” president.

He did all this over the yapping objections of those who insisted on “states rights” because he knew that only through the actions of the Federal government would the institution of slavery be crushed and freedom granted to roughly 4 million enslaved Southerners.

Had Lincoln left the question of slavery to the Southern states, how much longer would that human tragedy have endured? Hard to say, but the Confederate Constitution, the legal framework for the nation Southerners fought to establish is pretty clear about this. It reads: “no law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

And yet there they were, thousands of tea drinkers standing in front of Lincoln talking about the evils of the Federal government and the need to return to states rights. All with straight faces. Martin Luther King might have been spinning in his grave, but I think I saw Abraham Lincoln roll his marble eyes in disgust during those speeches.

So the next time you want to have a little fun, ask one of these Earl Grey aficionados about Abe “Big Government” Lincoln. Ask them which side was right during the Civil War. And since the “states rights” position was on the wrong side of history about slavery, and about segregation, ask them why they think they think they’re on the right side now? You’re liable to get some rambling, semi-coherent answer that will be positively Palin-esque.

Baghdad Goodbye

2010-08-19T16:57:00.004-04:00

Today the last American combat troops left Iraq, nearly 7.5 years after Bush/Cheney launched this military fiasco. There is no measure of this war that makes anything other than an unalloyed disaster with few parallels in American history - not the number of deaths and injuries, the $2 trillion spent on it, nor the way it has weakened the American position in the region and the world.

The Obama Administration deserves - and will surely not get - a great deal of credit for fulfilling this campaign promise. After all, even as Obama may be sinking us deeper in Afghani quicksand, he resisted calls to abandon his original timeline in Iraq.

Violence has subsided in Iraq and a measure of stability has returned, but in fact the country remains a basket case and will be that way for some time. The troop escalation - the so-called "surge" - led by Gen. David Petreaus (to whom George Bush more or less abdicated his role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in 2007) deserves some credit for this.

But the surge was always intended to create enough safe space for the Iraqis to come up with a long-term political resolution to the civil war of 2004-07. That, clearly, has not yet happened. Politics has ground to a halt in Iraq months now after the elections. There is still no real government now in Baghdad, and none on the horizon.

Some while ago I suggested the right analogy for the Iraq war was not Vietnam, but Cambodia. There, after the United States contributed to the destablization of the country, the country descended into a fratricidal, genocidal civil war, brought to an end - ironies of ironies - when the Vietnamese invaded and restored some order.

American combat troops are not necessary for whatever may happen in Iraq going forward and it is long past time for them to come home. Let's hope Obama is demonstrates similar resolution with his timetable to get American troops out of Afghanistan.

Xenophobia I Can Believe In

2010-08-02T20:18:00.004-04:00

Not too long ago I attempt a little piece of research. I wanted to know how many military bases the United States maintained overseas. Answer?

Classified.

Suffice it to say that the number runs well into the many dozens if not several hundreds. They range from the venerable and infamous, like Guantanamo Bay, to the much more recent and volatile, like the staging areas in several of the 'Stans that the military has used for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bulk are left over from the Cold War when the United States established this global military presence to counter the Soviet threat.

Last time I checked, however, the Cold War is over. In fact, the college students I now teach were all born after the end of the Cold War. For them it might as well be ancient history, like the Victorians, or the War of 1812. And yet we remain saddled with this Cold War military infrastructure. Tens of thousands of soldiers in places all over the world, costing us hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

The bloated Pentagon budget has been the budgetary elephant in the room as Congress frets about deficits, debt and spending cuts. Nor is that obese budget liable to be put on a serious diet, given how geographically spread out military spending is, and how important it is to the economy of the those red states whose politicians complain loudest about government spending.

Yet surely the vast number of overseas installations is an easy place to start the slashing. What possible justification can there be, after all, for keeping 65,000 troops in Germany?! Or even in South Korea, whose own military is now one of the most advanced in the world?

Surely there must be a way to tap into the nativism and xenophobia currently abroad in the land and turn it toward a movement to bring our troops home from these far flung places. Americans are famously suspicious of foreign places and we don't like foreigners. So can't we put those forces to work for good instead of evil and use it to shrink the American military presence around the world?

PS. After I wrote this little essay I picked up the NY Times Magazine and found Deborah Solomon's interview with Barney Frank. It seems that he and Ron Paul have found some common ground on this very issue!

Still Biden His Time

2010-07-30T16:39:00.005-04:00

Almost exactly two years ago (??!!) I wrote a piece here complaining about Barack Obama's decision to make Senator Joe Biden his running mate. I argued that it was a safe, reassuring choice rather than one that carried any real political juice. A senior, well-respected senator; strong on foreign policy issues; no wacky skeletons in his closet., bringing with him ALL of Delaware's electoral votes.

Two years later, and 18 months into the Obama Administration, I want to reiterate my complaints. Biden may well provide the President with all sorts of useful advice on all sorts of matters. Indeed, from what I have read, his may be the sanest voice on Afghanistan, insisting that our best strategy is to neutralize Al Qaeda and, more or less, leave.

He has also served the useful function of being the butt of the jokes made by late-night TV hosts against the administration. People in the mainstream may still be a tad nervous about laughing at the President, but Biden provides as least one punch-line a week.

But for a long time now the office of Vice President has required another task as well: attack dog for the President. Spiro Agnew may have set the mold; Dick Cheney raised it to an apotheosis. Biden has avoided it.

The President is not supposed to engage in partisan bickering, nor is he supposed to score cheap political points. He is supposed to remain above the fray - at least publicly. The Vice President is supposed to be out there flogging the political opposition, rallying the base, and getting angry at all the things which demand anger. Biden hasn't done those things.

So for all of us who are baffled at the way the administration has allowed the message to spun by the rabid right-wing without offering any significant defense (to say nothing of an attack to put the Republican party on the defensive) I remind you: that isn't the President's job (and given all we know about this President, it simply isn't in his temperment). It's the job of the VP.

And Biden isn't rising to the challenge.

Immigration reform: Start with small steps

2010-07-28T18:25:00.002-04:00

Another player has entered the immigration battle as the Justice Department sues Arizona over its new immigration law. And the reason the fight is centered in Arizona is that reform has failed in Washington.

Like the characters in "Hot Tub Time Machine," reformers are stuck in 1986. That's when Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which married border control and the legalization of millions of illegal immigrants.

Reformers today are misguided to seek a similar "grand bargain" on immigration. History shows 1986 was an anomaly, and the desire to get everything for a controversial group typically gets nothing. But there's hope: A few in the movement have begun to see that getting meaningful action will require small steps and "mini-bargains."...

To read the rest of this post (written before today's big court decision), please click here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/13/skrentny.immigration/index.html

The Executioner's (Happy) Song

2010-04-26T20:08:00.004-04:00

It's one of the thorniest aspects of the capital punishment issue. And yet we rarely talk about it, hiding our heads in shame, hoping it will go away.

I'm not talking about the legal niceties here, not about what might or might not be cruel and unusual. Ethics schmethics. I'm talking about the "image problem" state-sanctioned killing causes. We all have to be conscious of our image in this Facebook-saturated, twittering society, and governments who kill people are no different. They worry about their image too.

Take, for example, the problem one Ronnie Lee Gardner has caused the good folks in Utah. Gardner was sentenced to death in Utah in 1985. Back then, death-row prisoners got to choose the method of their own execution (hey, it was a more permissive time) and Ronnie Lee chose the old-fashioned firing squad. Fast forward 25 years, and now Utahans (Utah-ites?) don't want to load up the 30-30s "because of the media attention and bad image" they feel firing squads bring to their state. (Quoted NY Times, 4/24) They would prefer that he be strapped to a gurney and pumped full of chemicals. (The NRA, which funds much of Utah politics, has objected strenuously to "this blatent assault on the 2nd ammendment." "Guns are how we've always killed people," an NRA spokeman said, "Not just in Utah, but in every damn state in the nation. Shooting people with guns is one of our most deeply cherished American traditions.")

Or look at the problem the Saudis are now confronting. The Saudis want to kill Ali Hussain Sibat because he was convicted of "sorcery" for, among other things, predicting the future. (Presumably, not his own, or not very successfully). Being a less enlightened society than Utah, Saudi Arabia prefers to execute people by chopping their heads off with a long, curved sword. But you see the problem: doing so would make Saudi Arabia look like the sort of country that would, well, chop off someone's head with a long, curved sword. How is the Riyadh Tourist and Convention Bureau supposed to do market that!? (The SLCSA - Saudi Long Curved Sword Assocation - has objected strenuously to the delay in this execution. "Long curved swords are how we've always killed people," an SLCSA spokeman said, "Chopping off heads with long curved swords is as Saudi as stoning women for adultery.")

So I say to Utah: shoot Ronnie Lee and do so proudly. Don't worry that this public execution might become a public spectacle. It won't harm your state's image one whit. In fact, why not use it as the basis of a PR campaign: "Utah - XXX days since a botched execution. We're much better than Ohio!" or "Utah: We'll shoot you if you if you ask real nice!"

Who Speaks for the Banks??!!

2010-04-17T19:18:00.003-04:00

What do you see when you look at Mitch McConnell?

I know. You see a shriveled old white guy, the sort of guy whose sagging face screams "restricted country club!" You see a face - nay, a person - of the sort that Grant Wood used to paint. Kentucky Gothic.

But I'll tell you what I see as I look into those doleful eyes. I see vulnerability. I see pathos. I see loneliness. I see the Lorax, with a southern drawl.

You remember the Lorax, right? The Dr. Seuss book? He was the fuzzy little creature who tried all by himself to defend the forest against the ravages of industry. He famously took his solitary and courageous stand: "I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I'm asking you sir, at the top of my lungs - that thing! That horrible thing that I see! What's that thing you've made out of my truffula tree?"

That's Mitch McConnell. Mitch "The Lorax" McConnell has taken on the loneliest cause of righteousness in our country today: Defending Ginormo Wall Street Banks from any sort of reform.

Sure, it's easy to pick on the banks and the bankers. It's easy to blame them for, well, everything they screwed up for the rest of us. Fish in a barrel easy. And all this anger about how we had to bail them out? Well, that has really brought out our uncharitable side, hasn't it. They needed our help - when your neighbor comes over for a cup of sugar, you don't hold it against them for the rest of eternity, do you? Are you proud of yourself for all that anger?

Mitch "The Lorax" McConnell is defending the banks as a way of appealing to the better angels of our nature, and progressive people ought to applaud his lonely work. After all, he is the Senate Minority Leader, and aren't we progressives always trying to champion the interests of minorities? Likewise, The Louisville Lorax is simply trying to protect this tiny number of bankers from the bullying of a great mob. There are so many of us, and so few of them - they need someone to stick up for them, and Mitch "The Lorax" McConnell has taken on that job.

So the next time you see The Louisville Lorax on TV, or hear him deliver his talking points in that weird way where he repeats everything he says three times but doesn't actually say anything, or at least anything that Frank Luntz didn't write for him because that's all he really knows how to read, don't get angry. Repeat after me:

"I speak for the banks, for the banks have no tongues (Note: strictly speaking they have dozens and dozens of high-paid lobbyists who function as their tongues). And I'm asking you Sir (presumably here President Obama, who Mitch would never call "sir" but probably "boy") at the top of my lungs - that reform. That horrible reform that I see. What's that reform you've made out of my truffala tree?"

The Civil War - Now 100% Slavery-Free!

2010-04-13T21:07:00.009-04:00

Let me start by saying that I wrote the last essay before I learned that the Republican Governor of Virginia had declared a "Confederate History Month" purged of any mention of slavery. I confess as well that as a history professor - you know, a PhD in history, lots of courses in history, lots of courses I've taught, yadda yadda - I always thought the the Civil War was really fought over the issue of slavery. So I thank the Honorable Governor for setting me straight on this.

But it got me to thinking. If I've so completely misunderstood the Civil War, then perhaps I've misunderstood lots of other things about Southern history too. And if its time to celebrate the Confederacy, then why not party over those other things as well. Why stop at Confederate History Month in Virginia?! Here are some ideas for other celebrations we should mark throughout the calendar:

Segregation Appreciation Days! - Let's take a week and turn back the clock, back past 1954 (Brown v. Board) all the way back to 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson). For this week, let's bring back the rich traditions of segregation to the South. You know, like separate water fountains. Denny's Restaurants could refuse to serve black patrons and NOT have to worry about being sued. Because after all, segregation was really about "states' rights" - not about keeping negroes in their place.

Plantation Days! - Not too many people in the South actually own plantations any more, but we can update those good old days can't we? The plantations may be gone, but lots of white folks in the South have lawns right? And those lawns are often cared for by landscaping companies that employ Mexicans. So during Plantation Days, just don't pay them. Threaten to call the immigration authorities if they make a stink about it. They'll get back to mulching right quick I reckon. I'm thinking sometime in the spring when the magnolias are blooming for this.

Gov. Orval Faubus Week! - During the first week of the new school year let's honor the great states' rights champion, Arkansas' own Orval Faubus, by standing in the doorway of our local schools and refusing entrance to any non-white kids. Especially the Asians, who work harder than our kids and are getting better grades and going to better colleges. I hate that.

Secession Summertime! - All that talk by Gov. Rick Perry and others about seceding from the Union is just hot air. Southern states don't want to leave America - they can't afford it. Not with the balance of payments being what they are. Geez, if the South really did try to form its own country (again), its social statistics would resemble Nicaragua's, only without the charm and with much worse food. But during Secession Summertime all those Yankee tourists could be treated like foreign visitors, forced to show ID papers or passports, shaken down for cash at the border. That sort of thing. Who knows? maybe that would raise enough money to ease that balance of payments.

The Klan Kat Walk! - Let's face it: One of the reasons the Klan has dwindled of late is the fashion. Very few of us look all that good in nothing but white, the cuts on the robes and hoods aren't flattering and it's really tough to get the barbeque stains out. Why not put a little hipster edge into the ol' KKK by sponsoring some Klan fashion shows? See what creative variations on the old standard can be. Could be a way to promote young, up-and-coming designers, maybe raise a little money for the local John Birch Society. Just because you're going to a cross burning doesn't mean you have to look frumpy.

The Holiday Book Burning! - The Republican majority on the Texas State Board of Education pointed us in the right direction with their recent decision to re-write American history to make it more, well, Republican. So let's close out the year by having big book burnings around the South to celebrate the Christmas holiday. Preferably near one of those 10 commandments monuments. What a spectacular way to honor the baby Jesus, watching all those books about slavery, reconstruction, segregation and lynching go up in flames. Jesus doesn't want us to read those books, he wants us to handle snakes and watch preachers on the TV. Who doesn't love an old-fashioned book burning?

It's time to stop being ashamed of all that history. Embrace it, hold it, cherish it, and in so doing, make it up, ignore it and lie about it. After all, if the Confederacy had won the war, we'd all be a lot whiter, wouldn't we?

The General Vanishes?

2010-04-05T14:43:00.001-04:00

Poor Ulysses S. Grant.

Saving the Union by defeating the Confederate army and being elected twice to the Presidency is no longer good enough to secure a place for posterity. Republicans, led by Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, want to take the portrait of Grant off the $50 bill and replace it with one of Ronald Reagan. I had forgotten that Grant graces the $50, but Republicans handle a lot more those bills than I do, and apparently they want to see Reagan’s face every time they slap one down at a West Hollywood club.

No disrespect to General and President Grant, these Republicans insist, just time to honor Reagan. Again. And they’re right, at one level. This isn’t really about Grant or his bearded face. It is part of a much larger Republican project of re-writing the history of their own party to expunge it of anything that doesn’t conform to their current, hard-Right agenda.

Sixteen Republican presidents have occupied the Oval Office since the first, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in 1860. Now, like the relatives nobody wants at Thanksgiving, Republicans don’t want much to do with most of them any more. Of course, some of them we would all like to forget – like the disgraced Richard Nixon, and “Uncle Warren” Harding, and “Rutherfraud” B. Hayes. But when was the last time you heard some Republican politician singing the praises of Dwight Eisenhower or even Teddy Roosevelt?

They don’t want to acknowledge that Eisenhower was perfectly content with most of FDR’s New Deal, or that Teddy Roosevelt was a champion of environmental conservation. They certainly don’t want to be reminded that Richard Nixon tried to create a national health care system.

No, the current Republican Party wants to forget about its own past so it can trace its origins exactly as far back as Ronald Reagan. And over the last twenty years the Party has, in an almost Vatican-like fashion, mounted a campaign to have Reagan canonized as St. Ronald. The Party regards his presidency as nothing short of immaculate and miraculous. During a 2007 debate, Republican presidential candidates brought up Reagan nineteen different times when answering questions; George W. Bush, the sitting Republican president at the time, came up exactly once.

Still, this current effort to replace Grant with Reagan on the fifty seems particularly perverse and particularly telling. As Lincoln’s general, Grant took what was a faltering Union military effort and turned it around. His campaign was as grim as it was inexorable, and he was determined that the Union army would triumph over the rebellious Confederacy. It does not exaggerate too much to say that without Grant there very well might not be a United States of America.

In the current political climate, however, this is the history that the Republican party wants to repudiate. Tea partiers fulminating about “state’s rights” and Republican politicians, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, who talk casually these days about seceding from the Union, aren’t sure that the right side won the Civil War and certainly don’t want any part of Grant’s legacy.

Likewise, this effort to dump Grant off the fifty represents a symbolic piece of the Republican Party’s “southern strategy,” using race as a wedge issue to attract white voters.

As late as the 1930s Republicans campaigned proudly on their history as the party that ended slavery. In the 1950s, Eisenhower’s Justice Department helped move the civil rights agenda ahead.

Then the Republican Party decided to turn its back on racial progress and cast its future with the bigots and Confederate flag-wavers. Nixon was the first Republican to capitalize on the southern strategy, but not the last. Reagan sneered at the “welfare queen” though it turned out she was fictitious; George Bush I used Willie Horton to strike terror in the hearts of white voters. And so it has gone.

The lily-white Republican party of 2010 wants nothing to do with the man who defeated the Confederacy, and who, as President, oversaw efforts to “reconstruct” a more equitable South.

During the Cold War, experts who watched the Kremlin used to study photographs of official Soviet events to see which Communist Party members were visible and which had been “erased” because they had fallen out of favor. (I've stolen the title of this post from a terrifically fun book about this phenomenon called "The Commissar Vanishes.") Not content to submit its current members and candidates to ideological purity tests it has decided that the past too must be purged of all but the true believers.

I wonder if poor Ulysses S. Grant would really want to be a member of party that no longer wants him as a member.

Feeling Better Already

2010-03-25T14:02:00.002-04:00

Joe Biden was right the other day. The Health Bill is a big f!@#$ deal.

It is far from perfect and the process of getting it passed confirmed all your worst instincts about the American political system. But it did pass, and as a consequence the lives of real people - lots of them - will be made better. It may be early to say such things, but nonetheless: thisbill may well rank along with Social Security and Medicare as the most significant piece of social legislation in the nation's history. We have become so accustomed to the over-use of the word "historic" by an adjectivally-challenged media that we not quite recognize real "historic" when we see it. But this is the genuine article.

It is a victory and should be celebrated as such. Go ahead: cheer, fist-bump, pop a cork. As they say in sports, a win is a win.

And as with all victories, there must be losers and so let me introduce you to Team GOP - nickname "The Bund" - who threw everything they had, no matter how vile, foul, or dishonest at this bill and came up short.

Team GOP refuses to accept that they have lost (in fact, many who live in their particular flat earth refuse to admit they lost the election of 2008) and so they have simply doubled-down on their opposition, vowing to repeal the bill, or vowing to stall it forever in the Senate, or vowing to block it in the courts etc etc.

This is a losing strategy for Team GOP, though probably not for the individual members who come from safe districts and retrograde states. But the spectacle of Tea Partiers defending their Constitutional freedom to spit on Congressmen while some of the Bundies cheered them on may prove one of those "have you no decency?" moments. The polls are already showing increased support for health care package now that its specifics are being rolled out for people. Come the fall elections, Team GOP will campaign on the opposition to kids with chronic diseases and tax credits for small businesses. Doesn't sound like a winner to me.

Unless, of course, they stake their next "Waterloo" moment on defeat the banking reforms. Then they can campaign on their defense of un-regulated plutocratic bankers. That should go over well.

So Obama just won the policy battle and the political battle. Feeling better?

Take a Deep Breath

2010-03-15T09:43:00.003-04:00

The Obama Presidency has failed.

14 months into it, that's the only conclusion you would draw based on the way the press has reported it. And I'm not talking about the vast right-wing noise apparatus. Listen to NPR or pick up any issue of the NY Times, and that's what they're reporting. The latest exhibit in this litany of doomsaying is yesterday's (Sunday) Times Magazine whose cover story is about the failure of Rahm Emmanuel to get anything done. (The Times, for its part, still cowers in fear from being slapped around by Dick Cheney for 8 years. I think they've changed their famous motto on the banner to read: "All the news we're not scared to print." )

But even given the cravenness of the mainstream press, someone ought to mention that this story line of failure and inaction is simply wrong. Obama passed an enormous stimulus bill, whose effects are now beginning to be felt (out here in Ohio we may even get passenger rail service because of it!); he has in fact ramped down the war in Iraq even as he has ramped up the war in Afghanistan, both exactly what he campaigned to do; he has signed a number of important Executive Orders which would have gotten my attention if not for the other larger issues. (I'll mention only that he did away with Bush Administration restrictions on stem cell research).

How soon we forget! And now there is serious movement on a financial reform bill, a real chance of fundamental change in the student loan system (those of us involved in higher ed ought to be cheering loudly about this one), and last week Obama launched an effort to re-write No Child Left Behind, which comes up for re-authorization this spring.

Oh yeah, and health insurance reform. Obama is right that we have never been as close as we are right now to getting a health insurance reform bill - never.

There are plenty of reasons to complain about the particulars of any of these. I certainly don't think the financial reform bill, as it currently stands, goes far enough, nor do I have any enthusiasm for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But a year into this administration and the economic arrows are starting, tentatively to point in the right direction and even the Pakistanis are now arresting terrorists.

Failure and inaction?

And while we're at it, let's put this in some historical context: no American president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, inherited as many messes as Obama has. The economy may well have been worse in 1933 when FDR took office, but he had few foreign policy issues to worry about (he didn't pay much attention to Europe for several years), much less two bungled and mis-managed wars; Vietnam was certainly a larger mess than Iraq in 1968 but the economy was still humming when Nixon took office. While we're at, for another point of comparison, George Bush II inherited a balanced budget, a budget surplus and a nation at peace. Heckuva job Georgie.

And remember too that when Abraham Lincoln took office the entire Southern congressional delegation left - Obama has accomplished what he has in the face of the most vicious, partisan and obstructionist opposition in American history.

The Times may well be hopelessly craven, but why are the rest of walking around with such a feeling of dread, convinced that a collection of aging white tea-partiers and Palin-ites will take over Washington in November? Let's all take a deep breath, realize how far we've come in the past year, and put the gloves back on. We should all be relishing the opportunity to take on the Party of No and hold them accountable for holding the nation back.

The God That Failed

2010-02-26T09:21:00.003-05:00

When I was growing up, one of the feeble responses made by those who still clung to the hope that communism might still triumph as a system of political economy, in the face of all the evidence that it wouldn't, was to insist that it hadn't really been tried. That in the Soviet Union and in China (and in North Korea and Cambodia too I suppose) the real utopian dreams of communism had been perverted into the dystopian nightmares of the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution.

Those late-night dorm-room debates came back to me yesterday as I listened to Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (and to every other Republican who said anything) at the health care summit at Blair House. There they sat telling us the free market would really work, it really would fix the disaster that is our health insurance system. Really. See, the free market in health insurance hasn't really been tried, just like communism in China. There they sat, praying to the god that has failed so abjectly and insisting that the rest of us do the same.

These are free- market fundamentalists, after all, and like true-believers of any sort to acknowledge that something might be wrong with their world-view would be to have the whole edifice come crumbling down. And just like Mao's apologists a generation ago, these people will never permit reality to intrude on that world-view.

The fact that we already have a market (and profit) driven health insurance system and the fact that it has failed is beside the point. Since the free market must always generate the best outcome, the state of our health insurance system must be our fault, not the fault of the models that get generated by free market fundamentalist economists.

President Obama deserves credit for taking what looked like a piece of pure political theater and attempting to turn into something more substantive. And it certainly did make clear that the substance of the Republican position is to obstruct, to object, to critique and to put nothing of substance on the table.

So yesterday's event has left us exactly where we have been for some time. Bi-partisan compromise on health insurance reform was never a live option. Two questions remain. First, will Democrats, who enjoy bigger majorities than George Bush ever did in both houses, straighten up and fly right on this issue? And second, will the White House turn the health insurance issue to its political advantage as the November elections approach. At the moment, I don't feel good about either of those things.

The impossible contradiction that is the Democratic president

2009-11-04T12:00:00.004-05:00

It took almost a year, but we now are hearing the conservative critique of Obama that he "dithers," that he waffles, that he wavers, that he is not quite a real man because he does not show convictions. Of course, we've heard the "waffle" epithet thrown at other Democratic presidents, especially Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. And you don't have to be Democratic president to be called a dithering, waffling unmanly man. Just ask John Kerry.

What is remarkable about these charges is not that they are made: critics know we want a strong leader (that phrase is almost redundant). What is remarkable is that the charge is made at the same time as the opposite charge: that Obama (or fill in the name of a Democratic presidential candidate) is a megalomaniac bent on using the government to fulfill--you guessed it--his horrifying liberal convictions. In other words, Obama is a waffle with a fascist's mustache.

One of these may be true. He may be the waffle or the mustache. But not both.

To be fair, conservatives have had to deal with Republican presidents facing their own familiar from the Left: that they are stupid. Now they are even facing social scientists who try to prove it. George W. Bush faced this charge throughout his presidency, but so did Reagan. Republican vice presidents have faced it (remember Dan Quayle) and of course Republican vice presidential candidates (Sarah Palin). At the same time, liberals have painted Republican presidents, despite their supposed stupidity, as scheming to destroy all that is good. The threat is real enough to earn them the fascist mustache on protesters' placards. The contradiction here is slightly less pronounced, because liberals can point to a Rasputin-like team of advisers who tell the supposedly-dumb president what to do (that logic works less well for Republicans attacking a Democrat because the Democratic president would not waffle if they had an analogous team of scheming liberal advisers).

While there may be a grain of truth to these stereotypes (that Democratic presidents are more deliberate and Republican presidents more un-nuanced in their assessments of issues), the media are probably responding to what psychologists have identified as a kind of cognitive confirmation bias: we start with a meaning of a thing, and then we notice everything that conforms to that meaning, and ignore that which does not. We can hold only one meaning of a thing at a time (either waffler *or* liberal schemer), and bias our interpretations based on that.

Not Ready for Democracy

2009-09-11T14:32:00.002-04:00

While the rest of the nation expressed shock at Republican Congressman Joe Wilson and his “You lie!” outburst at President Obama, South Carolinians doubtless recognized it for what it was: the latest in a long, distinguished history of not-ready-for-democracy political behavior.

In fact, Wilson has got nothing on his predecessor Preston Brooks. Brooks was also a Congressman from the great state of South Carolina. Like Wilson, Brooks let his emotions get the better of him. So much so that on May 22, 1856, Brooks approached Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, seated at his desk on the floor of the Senate, and beat him savagely with a cane. Sumner collapsed unconscious, but Brooks kept flailing away.

Several other Senators tried to help their colleague but were held at bay by Laurence Keitt, another South Carolina politician, who pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. This is why it is so important that people be allowed to carry firearms: to prevent good Samaritans from intervening when your friend wants to beat someone up. Keitt was censured by Congress, which is probably one reason the NRA was founded.

The reason Sumner deserved his beating, as far as the good folks from the Palmetto State were concerned, was that Sumner was an abolitionist and he went to Harvard.

Brooks was right about Sumner, which puts him one up on Wilson, who got it wrong about health care for illegal immigrant. Sumner wanted slavery ended and he pulled no rhetorical punches on the floor of the Senate, though as far as I know he never actually punched anyone. He really was a threat to slavery.

South Carolina was home to some of the biggest, nastiest slave plantations in the Old South, and South Carolinians so loved their slave system that they were the very first to secede from the Union. Edmund Ruffin, a transplant to South Carolina from Virginia claimed to have fired the first shot on Fort Sumter, precipitating the Civil War. He would have bragged about that to his South Carolina neighbors for the rest of his natural days but he shot himself in the head after the South lost the war.

The most beloved South Carolina politician of the more recent past was Strom Thurmond, segregationist, bigot and all-around standard-bearer for South Carolina. Among his many accomplishments, Thurmond holds the record for conducting the longest filibuster in Senate history. He went on and on for 24 hours and 18 minutes to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1957. When Thurmond wasn’t busy defending segregation and opposing civil rights for African Americans, he found time to father a child with a black maid. And South Carolina voters so loved the original “Dixiecrat” that they elected him governor and then Senator eight times – 48 years.

Then, of course, there is Appalachian Trail-enthusiast Mark Sanford, the current governor. In a political landscape filled with narcissists and hypocrites Sanford has risen high above the crowd. Even in South Carolina’s illustrious political history, one is hard pressed to think of another politician who combines self-aggrandizing self-indulgence with a limitless sanctimoniousness in such generous portions. To announce to the world that his Argentine squeeze was his “soul-mate” (eeww!) but he was going to return to his wife anyway took a particularly kind of political courage.

So by comparison, Joe Wilson’s outburst seems pretty timid. Disappointing, really, by South Carolina standards. And Wilson got it wrong. His wimpy little yelp during the President’s health care speech has given analysts an excuse to point out how wrong he was. He should have caned an illegal immigrant instead.

Still, one wonders what it is about South Carolina that is seems to produce a disproportionate number of political socio-paths. And why do South Carolina voters keep elected them?

The only answer I can come up with is that Edmund Ruffin was right. South Carolinians don’t really want to be part of the United States, and they don’t have any use for the political rules and processes the rest of us pretty much agree to. Like civil rights, civil debate and keeping your soul-mates to yourself.

I suppose we should be happy that Hapless Joe Wilson didn’t get up to try to cane the President while Lindsay Graham fought off the Secret Service. But why don’t we finally give South Carolinians what they really want. Let them secede and form their own nation: The White People’s Republic of Upper Georgia, or some such.

Let’s wave farewell to South Carolina. Before some else gets caned.

What's in a Name?

2009-09-07T13:16:00.004-04:00

Labor Day and summer is over. This means the real fights over health care reform begin in earnest. The Glenn Beck-sponsored nonsense of the last few weeks was merely cable TV filler during the slow summer weeks. Now things get serious.

So in anticipation of that, let me offer a small suggestion. Let's stop talking about "health care" reform. No one, in fact, is talking about reforming health care - the experience patients have with their doctors. The real issue is how we pay for our health care, not the care itself. So let's call this issue what it really is: "health insurance" reform.

Semantics to be sure, but debates are about language as much as they are about ideas and the semantics matter. Very few Americans actually want their "care" reformed - or put slightly differently, at a moment when houses are being foreclosed and jobs being lost, they are terrified by anything that sounds like it might interfere with their doctor's visit.

At the same time, few Americans care much about protecting the bloated profits of the health insurance industry. Most Americans want easier access, lower costs, and most, I suspect, would enjoy not having their legitimate claims routinely denied by their insurance carriers. These are the problems that need reforming, not what goes on in the doctor's exam room.

And as we have seen during those farcical "town meetings," talking about "health care" reform is too easily hijacked and is really only a distraction. Let's start talking about "health insurance" reform instead; let's force the Republican Rump to defend the health insurance industry to the nation. Let's make it easier and clearer for Americans to focus on the real issue here.

Not the Summer of Love

2009-08-12T14:50:00.003-04:00

Summer 1993.

Team Clinton was trying to reform the nation's health care system and things were already starting to look grim. The forces of Gingrich darkness were gathering strength. Scary ads were running on TV.

Late that summer I joined roughly 500,000 fellow progressives on the Mall in DC for one of the largest demonstrations in American history. As Clintoncare was beginning its slow death, we marched in Washington to demand. . .that gays and lesbians be allowed to serve in the military.

One result of that demonstration was the heavily triangulated and patently absurd "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Another result was the defeat of health care reform. After 1994 health-care reform vanished from the national agenda until 2008.

Never mind how inept the Clinton people were in trying to reform health care, and how much blame they deserve. They got no help from people on the left, most of whom were still in the thrall of indentity based politics. For their part, the Gingrich crowd recognized that they could occupy with left with any number of battles in the culture wars. They were thus able to win the real fights of the decade without much opposition (like tanking the health care plan, for example). In 1993 what put progressives in the streets - forget the irony of it all - was gays in the military, not health care reform, welfare reform, or a host of other things.

I've been thinking about that demonstration as I've watched the "town hall" meetings on health care being hijacked by screaming loonies. I have no doubt (though I also have no real evidence) that these "spontaneous" expressions of grassroots anger at health-care reform are in fact carefully orchestrated recitations of Republican party talking points. It hardly matters one way or the other - at the moment, the Republican party has successfully framed the debate about health care and stolen most of the national headlines.

Part of this is the fault of the Obama administration which has not yet made the case for reform as effectively as it could or as it needs to. Part of the fault, however, lies with us. There has been no groundswell of support for health care reform to match the screamers at the recent town hall meetings. No one has yet organized a big march in Washington to demand that all Americans - gays and straights, wise Latinas and dumb white guys - have access to health care.

There is much to dislike about the current proposals to be sure, but that is beside the point. Some health care reform is vastly better than no health care reform, and not just for the health of the nation. Remember that in 1994, emboldened by their defeat of the Clinton health bill, the Gingrich lunatics took over Congress and turned it into their asylum.

The question this time around is whether progressives are prepared to march for health care, or whether Joe the Plumber and all his cousins will be allowed to defeat it again.

Time for Hearings

2009-07-27T13:46:00.004-04:00

Hear that sound? something between a buzz and a whine? That's the sound of the finance industry lobby revving its engines (and mobilizing its membership) to kill the Obama administration's ambitious plan to overhaul how the industry is regulated.

This legislation has been flying under the proverbial radar to a certain extent because of the even more contentious battle over health care reform. While our health care system is certainly broken beyond the point of applying band-aids, it was not responsible for the economic mess we are now in (and will be in for some time). The banking/investment industry was, and bringing it to heel must be the centerpiece of an economic recovery.

It comes as no surprise that the banks and the hedge-funds would oppose any effort to regulate their behavior - though doing so requires them to deny that anything has gone wrong, that they bear any responsibility for what has happened, or that the Federal government has an obligation to protect the vast majority of Americans who aren't investors in hedge fund from their greed, dishonesty and down-right stupidity. Despite all this, they remain a powerful and effective lobby - especially with craven Congresspeople - and they have no counterweight on the Hill.

Which is why I think Congress needs to hold hearings on the financial collapse of 2008. Congress needs to investigate what happened and who was responsible for it, not so there can be indictments and trials and jail terms (though I would sorely love to see all of that). Rather, hearings are necessary to create a narrative through which the Treasury's plans for regulation can be understood by the public.

The banking industry has already framed the issue in a way which it feels will kill it: a few bad apples; don't stiffle financial innovation; regulation is unnecessary interference in the free market. The Obama administration, therefore, needs to offer a different frame: bankers and investment houses got fabulously rich at the expense of the rest of us; much of what they did was unethical; markets work best with clear and effective rules. Hearings are a way to establish that frame and to write that narrative. In other words, hearings may be the best way to generate the public anger necessary to overcome the influence of the banking lobby.

Instead, roughly 200 members of Congress have signed on to a petition (authored by -who else - Ron Paul) to create a congressional audit of the Federal Reserve. That may or may not be a fine idea, but the notion that the Fed is responsible for the Great Recession, rather than AIG, Countrywide, BoA etc, is patently absurd. Instead of directing its anger at the Fed, Congress needs to direct it those private sector players who are really to blame.

We won't get serious reform of the financial sector without public anger to support it. And if we don't get it, we can all look forward to more of the credit-default-swapping, mortgage-backed-securitizing, derivative-selling shenanigans that landed us where we are now.

What Happened to 55?

2009-07-21T15:28:00.003-04:00

Buried in the "Science" section of today's Times is a squib reporting a new study in the current American Journal of Public Health. The study looked at highway deaths since the repeal of the national 55mph speed limit and concluded that the "failed policy of increased speed limits" accounted for an estimated 12,500 unnecessary deaths over a ten-year period. This despite all the safetly improvements that have been made in cars which should have brought the death rate down. (No word, at least in this summary, on how many non-fatal injuries could be attributed to increased speed).

When Congress imposed 55mph on the nation in 1974, car crashes weren't its primary concern. Rather, Congress wanted us all to drive more slowly as a way of burning gasoline more efficiently. During that first energy crisis, with an OPEC oil embargo, rising gas prices etc, this seemed like an easy and sensible way to help ease our dependence on imported oil.

Repealing that speed limit, which began in 1987 and was complete by 1995, was a pure piece of Reaganite political symbolism. After all, Americans have a constitutional right to drive at 65 don't we? and a 55mph speed limit was an onerous regulation imposed by pointed-headed Democrats who wanted to deprive us of our freedom. I think the speed limit in the Soviet Union was 55mph wasn't it?

So, one new energy crisis and 12,500 additional deaths later, why aren't we talking about bringing back the 55mph speed limit? Even President Obama, who has more or less mandated that the American auto industry produce more fuel-efficient cars in the future, hasn't suggested we drive at 55mph to get better mileage in the cars we are already driving.

The reason, I think, is that higher speed limits not only burned more gas and killed more drivers, but it profoundly re-shaped the American landscape. During the decade or between the elimination of 55 and the collapse of the real estate market, exurban sprawl was a major driver of the American economy. Chester county, Pennsylvania, Delaware county, Ohio, Lake county Illinois, all on the far edges of metropolitan areas, grew at astonishing rates during those boom years, as did dozens of other exurban places.

To live out on the exurban frontier doesn't simply require a car - though it obviously does. The distances between home, work, school, shopping, city culture have become so attenuated that life requires a car driven at high speeds. In this sense, 65mph help make exurbia possible.

Conversely, lowering the speed limit back to 55 would increase the time exurbanites spend in their cars by over 15% (roughly), a significant amount given how much time they already spend there. Many Americans, therefore, simply cannot fathom driving any slower, regardless of how much money they might save at the pump, or how many lives they might save.

And herein lies the double-edged nature of more fuel efficient cars: on the one hand, there is no question that we ought to have cars that get better mileage. On the other, this will simply encourage people to drive more, and will provide an impetus to sprawl, which is also environmentally destructive. The answer to this dilemma, obviously, is fuel efficient cars driven through more densely-built towns and cities, and, needless to say, that is far easier said than done. The question, therefore, is whether the rising costs of exurban life in the coming years pressure people back toward the center, toward shorter drives, better access to mass transit, and even to places where walking and biking is possible.

There are plenty of ways policy might encourage that, but speed limits are certainly one place to start.

Lost in the Sunbelt: Notes from Southern California

2009-07-18T16:56:00.006-04:00

Rather than the usual coherent essay-style posting, I'm presenting today just a few notes in easily digestible form about life in the fiscal disaster that is California.

1. Who would have thought that in a time of financial crisis, the faculty of the UC system would be looking with envy at our Rustbelt colleagues? We are in a fiscal crisis of unprecedented depth and severity, and every day or two we receive a new email telling us how bad it is or what new calamity awaits next week. And what of the flagship university in the state hit hardest by the financial crisis? The University of Michigan is in a state where at least one city, Michael Moore's hometown of Flint, is actually debating shrinking itself and giving back whole sections of the city to nature. And yet the University of Michigan is doing fine. I would like to blame our misery on Wall Street, but clearly, the system in California needs to be redesigned (either the ways we tax and spend in Sacramento or the way we finance the whole university enterprise or both) and perhaps the Rustbelt can give us a model.

2. Am I the only person who sees what seem to be obvious examples of unnecessary spending at the local level despite the crisis? Gilman Drive, the road I take to UC-San Diego when I drive, has for a decade been a bumpy, crumbling mess. But someone picked this year to pave it--beautifully, I might add. Smooth as satin. Recall that San Diego is a city that a few months ago considered closing several libraries, and has numerous other fiscal debacles to worry about. Is this all about "use it or lose it" funding rules for government institutions?

My hometown of Highland, IN closed its public library this year, but this fiscal juggernaut did it to renovate, not to save money. Perhaps this is a mini-version of the financially sound University of Michigan.

My pet peeve wasteful spending (I actually love the new Gilman Drive) is that the University of California still prints a campus phone book for every faculty member and office. Who uses phone books anymore? Everything has been on the web for more than a decade. I'm guessing the cost of those phone books would keep at least a few staff people employed for a year or more.

3. Unrelated: Is it time to rethink the political strategy of incrementalism, at least in the culture wars? I've always thought that progressive change on cultural and regulatory issues comes best from expanding on small victories. And so, for example, advocates for gay rights should focus on the simple things, like having the Civil Rights Act of 1964 amended to ban discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation. Small changes like this do not challenge deeply held beliefs (and yes, it's still legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians on the job).

In this view, the focus of gay rights advocates on the hot button issue of gay marriage is totally misguided. Why mobilize your enemies by going after marriage rights before employment nondiscrimination rights?

But perhaps this is wrong. Note that the year 2000's Prop 22 in California, creating a statute that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, passed with 61% of the vote. In 2008, the California Supreme Court struck down Prop 22. But the voters went and reversed, passing Prop 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a woman and a man. What is interesting here is that this time the idea only won over 52% of the voters.

The trend for gay rights in general is toward increasing acceptance. Was the mobilizing for the right to marry by advocates for gays and lesbians the best PR campaign ever run? Unlike so many public portrayals of gays and lesbians (who can forget the story in _The Onion_ reporting that the flamboyant antics of a gay pride parade set the movement back 50 years?), the struggle for the right to marry re-brands this group as just regular folks, no different from anyone else, on the central institution of family life. Even if the right to marry fails, it may actually make all of the other nondiscrimination rights easier.

4. If America is ever again going to see economic populism, now should be the time: the Wall Street firms we all just bailed out with our tax dollars are now posting record profits and will begin to reward themselves handsomely very soon with bonuses--while contributing no visible benefits to the country. My guess is that the financial crisis is more likely to generate an anti-immigrant backlash than anti-Wall Street populism. Perhaps it is time to re-read Michael Kazin's excellent book, The Populist Persuasion, and search for lessons.

Why Not "Government Motors?"

2009-06-07T12:44:00.004-04:00

The Federal Government - that is to say, you and I - now own an astonishingly large piece of General Motors. In the long run, this may or may not prove to be a good deal for the public and the American auto industry. Of course, in the long run, as Keynes famously said, we're all dead, so who can say?

Still, critics of the government's role in GM's bankruptcy seem to take it as an article of faith that the government should not step in to take over a failing industry, like car production, because governments have no business operating in the private sector.

As GM's bankruptcy approached, I heard and read several versions of the story of the British car industry in the 1970s: collapsing of its own inefficiencies and ineptitudes, it was taken over by the Labor Government and consolidated into one, enormous entity. Which then failed even further, causing a huge loss of taxpayer money. Moral of story? Government should not dictate what private companies do.

The British story is certainly a cautionary tale, but at roughly the same moment much of the American railroad industry was also collapsing. It was taken over by the government and turned into Consolidated Rail. Conrail managed to stabilize the American freight railroad system, and modernize it to some extent. Indeed, Conrail was successful enough that it was broken up and sold back to the private sector (CSX, in particular, benefitted magnificently from Conrail's breakup, thus from the public investment in it). Conrail's story would seem to offer a different lesson for GM, though we've heard less about that.

Indeed, as many commentators have noted, GM's operations in emerging markets are doing better than its domestic operations. In China particularly GM is making and selling lots of cars. Of course, in China GM operates in a roughly 50-50 partnership with the government. It seems to work there.

I don't mean to argue that the government take over is either good or bad, though it was probably necessary and unavoidable. (The government may not be able to save GM, but it can hardly do any worse than GM's own management and board have already done.) But as we contemplate the changed economic landscape that will emerge after our current economic mess we need to dispense with the dogma that government ipso facto is incapable of partnering with industry. We need to stop genuflecting at the altar of the MBA as the source of all wisdom about our economy. We need to recognize that the private sector has public responsibilities and that government's job is to protect our interests and enforce those responsibilities.

A Court that Looks Like Us?

2009-06-04T15:37:00.003-04:00

It has been hysterical to watch the Republican Bund react, hysterically, to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Newt, Pat Buchanan, Bill O'Reilly, Rush, and not a few Republican Senators behind the scenes - all in a foaming lather over the prospect of a woman and a Hispanic. Or is it a Hispanic and a woman??!! Watch their eyes rotate in different directions.

There is another piece of Sotomayor's identity, however, that is apparently off-limits even to those who would de-rail her nomination at any cost: she was raised Catholic. If she is confirmed - and I certainly expect she will be - she will join Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and Roberts as the 6th Catholic sitting on the bench. Should that trouble us? Should the question of religious affiliation be a matter of public scrutiny during nomination hearings?

Joyce Appleby, a distinguished professor of history at UCLA, has just written a brave op-ed piece for the History News Service, in which she says: yes. The whole piece is available at http://www.h-net.org/~hns/ (full disclosure: I write pretty regularly for HNS), but let me quote from it here:

"In truth, religion is not a factor in the majority of decisions that the court will make each year. It might not be relevant at all had not the Catholic Church, with some other denominations, taken public stands on issues of great political significance today.

Abortion comes immediately to mind, but it's not the only constitutional matter where religion and politics clash. This past week two eminent lawyers, David Boies and Theodore Olson, filed a law suit in Federal District Court in San Francisco as co-counsel for two gay couples challenging California's Proposition 8. The California juarSupreme Court's upholding of the proposition's ban on same-sex marriages triggered the action, which seeks relief for gay couples under the Constitution's protection of equal rights.

The case could go all the way to the Supreme Court, raising questions about the vigorous opposition to same-sex marriages by the church to which five, and possibly six, justices will belong. The death penalty, which the Catholic Church also opposes, is another.

Recusal sounds like a radical measure, but we require judges to withdraw from deliberations whenever a personal interest is involved. Surely ingrained convictions exert more power on judgment than mere financial gain. Many will counter that views on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty are profound moral commitments, not political opinions. Yet who will argue that religious beliefs and the authority of the Catholic Church will have no bearing on the justices when presented with cases touching these powerful concerns?"

The Catholic Church in this country over the last generation, but particulary in the last 8 years, has injected itself more and more intrusively into our politics, precisely in areas like gay marriage and abortion. Should we be concerned that while less than 30% of American citizens come from Catholic backgrounds but soon 2/3rds of our Supreme Court justices do?

More Dreams Deferred

2009-05-31T16:36:00.004-04:00

Over the last decade or so, the courts have chipped away at affirmative action programs in a whole host of areas. The cases which have gotten the most attention have been those which involve college admissions. This is no surprise, since no country places a greater faith in the power of educational opportunity than this one.

Using race/ethnicity as one among several criteria for college admissions became a way of leveling the educational playing field for under-represented groups on campus. It acknowledged that certain groups of people faced steeper obstacles getting into college than others. The courts, however, began more and more to disagree with that rationale.

So ten years ago, officials in Texas came up with an interesting solution to the dilemma. They created a mechanism through which the top 10% of the graduating class from every Texas high school would, more or less, be guaranteed a spot in one of the state's Tier 1 institutions. Underneath this entirely race-blind quota system was the deeply unhappy truth that public education is so thoroughly segregated in Texas that the enrollment of minorities in those Tier 1 universities would go up dramatically.

And it did, and the Texas model seemed to offer a way of providing access to higher education while neatly skirting the increasingly sticky discussion of race and affirmative action.

Until now. The Times reports today that legislation pending in Austin will terminate the experiment. Surburban legislators have been furious that some of their (largely white and above-average income) constituents' kids are being denied entrance into Tier 1 schools in favor of poor kids (black, hispanic and white) from urban and rural districts. Now they apparently have enough votes to end the program. (In fairness, they are being aided in this by the colleges and universities involved who find the quota system restrictive to their own admission plans).

There are several obvious ironies to observe here, not the least of which is the spectacle of a nation telling poor kids to get ahead by getting an education and then refusing in every conceivable way to make that possible. But what struck me was that this news underscores the way suburban school districts were pitted against urban and rural ones. The same was true some years ago in Ohio when a collection of urban and rural districts sued the state, claiming the way schools were being funded was unconstitutional. (They won; but the state was firmly in the grip of Republicans and the legislature simply refused to address the court's ruling).

This is really myopic, since more and more we are recognizing the way metropolitan regions share interests and problems across the urban/suburban/rural divide. Questions like transportation, open-space preservation, food production, clean air and water, and economic development, transcend political and demographic boundaries, and the places that deal effectively with these issues will be those places that recognize that fact. In Texas, alas, suburbanites still don't seem to realize that the whole state has a vested interest in giving better educational access to all its kids.

The Ol' College Try

2009-05-19T09:57:00.005-04:00

President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame, and Notre Dame deserves credit for inviting him. It is an example of the kind of civility that we have missed for the last eight years. (Full disclosure: my employer, Ohio State University, invited George Bush to commencement in June, 2002. After students and family filed into the stadium for the event, the stadium was put under lock-down and student protesters were arrested. Several spent up to 72 hours in jail for carrying signs or for turning their backs on Bush when he spoke).

The President addressed the issue that made his appearence controversial head-on: abortion rights. By drawing an analogy to the issue of civil rights in the 1950s, he suggested that people could find common ground on this thorny question.

On one level, the President simply acknowledged what has been true already in this country for about a generation. In survey after survey, a majority of Americans support access to abortion, though most favor certain kinds of restriction on that access. A majority of Americans, in other words, have already reached that common ground, though we haven't quite had the courage yet to admit this fully and out loud.

But at another level, of course, the President searched for a middle ground in vain. For those - and as it turns out there weren't really that many of them - who turned out to protest Obama's speech, abortion can only be discussed in absolutist terms. Any abortion under any circumstance ought to be criminalized. No quarter given; no half-way measures. We might dismiss these people as a small minority of zealots except for the fact that they exercise of outsized influence on our politics, and indeed, on the culture as a whole. The multi-millionaire founder of Dominos pizza, for example, has contributed heavily to anti-choice causes and the founder of Curves, the chain of women's gyms, posts on his website his desire to "destroy" Planned Parenthood.

This single-minded opposition to abortion masks other agendas, as many have pointed out. The issue, for some, isn't really about unborn children but about controlling women. The Catholic church, after all, is probably the world's largest institution predicated on the discrimination of women. For others, the fixation on fetuses is a proxy for an attack on sexuality more broadly. When the President suggested that we might find common ground by finding ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies, he did not mention Texas where high schoolers are only given abstinance education and which, surprise surprise, now has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation.

Right as those explanations surely are, behind them looms a particular christian theology that we need to understand. For fundamentalist Protestants and their Catholic allies, the important lesson of the Gospels did not come from the Sermon on the Mount, but from the events on Calvary. They aren't interested in messages of compassion, love, of lasts being first, but rather in the passion and the crucifixion. (Remember fundamentalist Catholic Mel Gibson's bizarre movie which some dubbed "The Jesus Chain Saw Massacre??) In this view of the world, suffering and pain are the only roads to redemption.

At its root, the fetish of the fetus isn't about the "sanctity of life" but rather about the importance of suffering. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, therefore, offers an opportunity for that redemptive suffering. And since the goal of these fundamentalists is that we all be saved according to their formula, forcing women to have these babies makes perfect sense.

Perhaps a better way to understand the theology of anti-choice fundamentalism is remember the circus that erupted during the Terry Schiavo fiasco. The very same crowd the pickets in front of Planned Parenthood turned their energy and resources to keeping the vegetative Schiavo alive not despite the fact that she would never recover, but precisely because she never would. She suffered; her husband suffered; it was all good for them.

And if those protesters who greeted President Obama in South Bend have their way, we'd all suffer too.

A Surge of Magical Thinking

2009-04-28T13:26:00.003-04:00

Perhaps it is too early to declare the much-vaunted troop escalation in Iraq (dubbed by George Bush the peppier-sounding "surge" which has been dutifully parroted by the press) a failure. But that judgement is no more precipitous than the near-immediate declarations of "success!" made by virtually everyone.

The troop escalation has been called a success because it has been credited with bringing about a dramatic drop in violence in Iraq. Because of this, the troop escalation has been just about the last thing Bush loyalists and Iraq war cheerleaders can hang onto. They have so desperately wanted something here to work in what has otherwise been an abject failure that they almost immediately seized on the troop escalation, and its architect, David Petreaus. Chirpy Republican apologist David Brooks recently called the troop escalation Bush's signature success and one of the most courageous decisions made by any president.

We should acknowledge, however, that correlation is not necessarily causation - Iraq had descended into what should have been called a civil war; civil wars have their own gruesome dynamics and the decrease in violence may also correspond to the exhaustion of warring parties; and despite the troop escalation, Iraq remains one of the most violent, dangerous places in the world. And, of course, many of the warring parties in Iraq put down their weapons because the US Army paid them to - once the money stops, who knows what will happen?

The larger point is that reducing violence was never supposed to be the goal of the escalation. Getting the violence under control was a means to an end. It was supposed to create the space for the political process to work. And the results here, while perhaps not yet a failure, surely don't look like success.

In the past week, Prime Minister Maliki seems more and more like he is consolidating power in purely sectarian ways, shutting out other players, who, in turn, have access to fighters and weapons. And a new round of bombings have been deadly enough to land on the front page of the papers, rather than in the middle. Iraq, to judge by the news coming out of there right now, seems no closer to peace and stability than it was a year ago.

Many people have made the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam, and there are haunting similarities. But it has always seemed to me that the better, and even more horrifying, analogy is Cambodia. Once a prosperous and stable country - in the 1960s it was a net exporter of food - Cambodia was brought to ruin once the Richard Nixon and Henry Kissenger orchestrated secret (and illegal) bombings in their pursuit of North Vietnamese soldiers. Just as Iraq was turned into a proxy in the "war of terrorism," Cambodia was the collateral damage of our feckless Vietnam adventure.

Once American troops left Southeast Asia in 1975 Cambodia descended into a fratricidal civil war which ended with the triumph of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodians thus went from bombing raids, to civil war to genocide in just under a decade. It has not really recovered in the thirty years since (it still must import food each year, for example).

American troops must be withdrawn from Iraq. But as we prepare to pull them out, we ought to use the remaining time there to push for political solutions rather than simply congratulating ourselves on the "success" of the troop escalation. No one can envision where Iraq might be in 30 years, but then no one envisioned what became of Cambodia either. Perhaps we can learn something from that tragedy.

"Experts Agree. . ."

2009-04-23T12:19:00.007-04:00

"Ed Meese is a pig."

More than twenty years ago that pithy little phrase made its way onto buttons and t-shirts. A bicycle messenger in DC happened to be wearing such a shirt when he made a delivery to the Justice Department. He was promptly arrested. Such was the nature of the First Ammendment under Attorney General Edwin Meese.

You remember Ed Meese right? The pudgy, not-the-brightest-bulb-in-the-chandelier that Reagan made Attorney General? Long before Alberto Gonzalez stained the Justice Dept. Ed Meese served as a Reagan's friend and ally during the Iran-Contra scandal and subjected Justice Department employees to ideological litmus tests.

Meese's legacy has been much in evidence these past few weeks as the Obama Administration has released the torture memos. These memos have removed whatever doubt might have remained about the brutalities committed by the Bush Barbarians. We tortured. We did it repeatedly. We invented legal excuses to justify those act that makes the reasoning of the Spanish Inquisition look positively profound.

Perhaps Meese's most famous utterance (or maybe it's just the one I remember most bitterly) was his pronouncement that anyone arrested by the police is almost surely guilty. He had little patience for the notion that one is innocent until proven guilty. That was just liberal nonsense. The ethos embodied by Meese drove Americans into a get-tough-on-crime frenzy. Three strikes and you're out. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. After a generation of Meesian-style justice, the United States now leads the world in incarcerations.

Senator Jim Webb, for one, thinks it's time we re-examined our entire penal system. And increasing numbers of states are finding that they simply can't afford to pay for what many have called "the prison-industrial complex."

Those who still defend torture have essentially invoked Meese's principle. If you've been arrested and thrown into Guantanimo or some black site somewhere you are probably guilty of something. Or will be guilty of something in the future. So we can torture you. Phil Musser, for one, recently insisted that he walked through Guantanimo and could just tell these were guilty people.

The scandal of torture has specific roots in the Bush administration's key players and in their response to 9/11. But those roots grew in a cultural soil tilled by Ed Meese: the comtempt for due process, the impatience with things like habeus corpus, the presumption of guilt before innocence, the substitution of politics for the law.

For a generation now, the Meesian "you can't ever be tough enough on crime" position has been hugely successful politically. I suspect that as we now confront the fact that we tortured people, defenders of torture - like virtually all House republicans - will move from definitional squabbles and term-parsing (what we did wasn't really torture, it was something else) to embracing torture as perfectly justified, just like throwing people in jail for life for minor drug possession. After all, you can't be too tough on terrorists. Even if you torture them.

REQUIEM FOR A CITY

2009-04-23T08:36:00.002-04:00

Kevin Boyle, one of the great historians of his generation (his book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award in 2004), is also a native Detroiter and a true Rustbelt Intellectual. He grew up on Chatsworth Street, on the city's East Side during the 1960s and 1970s, and witnessed the dramatic racial and economic transformations that left Detroit--and so many other cities like it--ravaged by disinvestment.

In this moving article, Boyle revisits his childhood neighborhood where today, you can buy a single-family detached house for about $5,000 more than what his parents paid nearly fifty years ago. Boyle offers a subtle reflection on the intersection between memory and history. It's one of the most powerful, personal meditations on urban change that I have read--and a rare one that evokes childhood memories without slipping into maudlin nostalgia.

WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US?

2009-04-15T10:15:00.002-04:00

I've taken the liberty of reprinting this post from tax day last year.

This morning, I walked down to the corner, put my children onto their school bus, and then made a quick stop at the mailbox. In my hand were three envelopes containing checks to the Internal Revenue Service, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the city of Philadelphia. I don't want to sound hokey, but I feel a sense of pride every April 15. I am fulfilling one of the central responsibilties of citizenship. My checks will provide some of the funds to pay for my children's trip to school (part of the way on a road that is being rebuilt with federal funds). And more importantly, my modest tax payments will help other people's children, and their parents, and grandparents too.

For those of us who groan and moan that our tax dollars are being wasted, watch this classic scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Even if our tax dollars are sometimes wasted or misdirected, it’s time to talk about what our local, state, and federal governments are doing right. What has Uncle Sam ever done for us? Social Security. OK, but other than Social Security? Subsidized medical research...OK, but other than subsidized medical and scientific research and Social Security? Well we have the National Park system. Other than Social Security, medical research, and National Parks? Well you get the idea. I could go on.

It will forever bar me from running for political office to say this: We don’t pay enough. Our infrastructure is collapsing. Our schools, especially those in inner cities and declining Rustbelt towns, are struggling with budget cutbacks when they need more to recruit and retain teachers and serve some of the country’s most disadvantaged students. Our public transportation systems deliver a lot, especially given how underfunded they are, but for those of us who depend on regional rail and Amtrak, the consequences of funding cuts have been devastating. And, yes, the National Institute for Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes for Medicine underwrite a lot of critical research. But we’ve allowed too much of our scientific and medical agendas to be dictated by the private sector. And don’t get me going about what our taxes aren’t going to, including an inclusive health care system, better environmental and workplace safety regulation, and urban redevelopment.

It is a cliche to say that anti-tax sentiment as an essential part of the American political tradition. It is, but not in the way that we usually think. American Revolutionaries railed against “taxation without representation.” We pay a lot of attention to the first word, but not as much to the second two. The protestors who joined the Boston Tea Party didn’t throw the principle of taxation into Boston Harbor. They demanded more democracy, the freedom to determine the fair rates of taxation and the uses to which tax dollars would be put.

Berkeley historian Robin Einhorn has written a brilliant study of the origins of Americans’ aversion to high taxes. I recommend reading her book, American Taxation, American Slavery. Here are some of her insights:

Americans are right to think that our antitax and antigovernment attitudes have deep historical roots. Our mistake is to dig for them in Boston. We should be digging in Virginia and South Carolina rather than in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, because the origins of these attitudes have more to do with the history of American slavery than the history of American freedom. They have more to do with protections for entrenched wealth than with promises of opportunity, and more to do with the demands of privileged elites than with the strivings of the common man. Instead of reflecting a heritage that valued liberty over all other concerns, they are part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition.

America's anti-tax tradition, she argues, is one of slavery's many strange fruits.

[S]laveholders had different priorities than other people—and special reasons to be afraid of taxes. Slaveholders had little need for transportation improvements (since their land was often already on good transportation links such as rivers) and hardly any interest in an educated workforce (it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write because slaveholders thought education would help African Americans seize their freedom). Slaveholders wanted the military, not least to promote the westward expansion of slavery, and they also wanted local police forces ("slave patrols") to protect them against rebellious slaves. They wanted all manner of government action to protect slavery, while they tended to dismiss everything else as wasteful government spending.

Her sobering conclusion:

The irony is that the slaveholding elites of early American history have come down to us as the champions of liberty and democracy. In a political campaign whose audacity we can only admire, charismatic slaveholders persuaded many of their contemporaries—and then generations of historians looking back—that the elites who threatened American liberty in their era were the nonslaveholders! Today, this brand of politics looks eerily familiar. We have experience with political parties that attack "elites" in order to rally voters behind policies that benefit elites. This is what the slaveholders did in early American history, and they did it very well. Expansions of slavery became expansions of "liberty," constitutional limitations on democratic self-government became defenses of "equal rights," and the power of slaveholding elites became the power of the "common man." In the topsy-turvy political world we have inherited from the age of slavery, the power of the majority to decide how to tax became the power of an alien "government" to oppress "the people."

If we throw off the yoke of slavery, we might recover the lost promise of the Boston Tea Party: that taxation and liberty are fundamentally compatible.

You Get What You Pay For: An April 15 Meditation

2009-04-14T16:18:00.005-04:00

I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last generation or two Americans began to think of themselves less and less as "citizens" and more and more as "taxpayers." The implications of that subtle shift of identity have been enormous at all levels of government. In a nutshell, Americans have been persuaded that we pay too much in taxes; that taxes should always be reduced; and that government spending of our taxes is wasteful. A shrunken sense of shared obligation, an inflated sense of righteous entitlement.

The debate over taxes has been framed this way, and those on the liberal and left side of it have been reduced to saying, in effect, Americans don't really pay that much - not as compared to Western European countries for examples. It hasn't been a compelling argument.

But this is exactly the wrong way to think about taxes. We don't pay "too much" or "too little" in any absolute sense, of course, but only in relation to what we expect those taxes to do for us. In fact, Americans - especially those in the tax-cutting Red states - have made steadily more demands on the public purse even while insisting that they shouldn't have to pay for those things (see: the Federal balance of payments). If we want our roads paved, our police to show up when we call, our food safety monitored (and we do), then we have to fund those things. Americans consistently report that they want Cadillac schools for their kids, but they want them at Hyundai prices. The first rule of economics is: you get what you pay for.

Looked at this way, I do think we are paying too much in taxes - because what we get in return for them, more than anything else, is the Defense Dept. Since the end of WWII year in and year out roughly 50 cents out of every dollar of Federal discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon. Which means that the other 50 cents has to pay for everything else. And let's face it, most of us don't get that much for all that military spending - not better roads, not better schools, not better health care or cleaner air etc. etc.

The easiest (and I realize that it is anything but easy) way for us to pay for the ambitious programs this nation so desperately needs - from health care to public transportation - is to hack the Defense budget mercilessly. Shrink it to even twice the percentage of the British or the French and we'd be rolling in cash to pay for more useful things.

As it happens, I'm writing this from Washington, DC, a city whose cultural magnificence is available to me for free (thanks to taxes). I'm sitting in the glorious Main Reading room at the Library of Congress (more tax dollars at work) and thinking that we really can get great things for our society if we re-order the priorities of how we spend our taxes.

State of the Ward

2009-04-11T12:36:00.005-04:00

Academic life provides an almost bottomless reservoir of shenanigans of the sort that keep novelists from Vladimir Nabokov to David Lodge employed. Usually this stuff is interesting only to academics - for a while there was even a journal devoted to academic gossip, the short-lived, much-missed Lingua Franca. Occasionally, however, one of these stories breaks through to the national news. And this past week the Strange Career of Ward Churchill became such a case.

For those who have better things to do than follow the tawdry details of this episode, a quick recap: Ward Churchill, a professor of "ethnic studies" at the University of Colorado, was fired from his tenured position by a committee of faculty and administrators after they determined the he had engaged in a variety of academic frauds - plagiarism and dishonest scholarship among them, though there were also questions about the legitimacy of his academic degrees as well.

Churchill had labored in academic obscurity, publishing largely in the field of Native American studies, until he published an essay in which he called the victims of September 11 "little Eichmanns," asserting that they, and America generally, essentially got what what we all deserved.

That essay was merely stupid, and alas "dumb" is not necessarily a disqualifier in academia. But the essay was incendiary and circulated widely on the web. At that point the University of Colorado began to examine Prof. Churchill's record. What they found, as I mentioned, got him fired.

Churchill, in turn, sued the university in civil court claiming that he had been fired for that essay, and thus for exercising his first amendment rights. This week a jury agreed. And didn't. They found in favor of Churchill, but then awarded him damages of exactly $1.

Churchill, for his part, offered a remarkable defense: the university only discovered the academic fraud, he has basically insisted, because of that Sept 11 essay. No one would have noticed otherwise. Thus, he was being fired for having written it.

And the sad part is: he is largely right. Churchill apparently got tenure at Colorado without serious vetting - no one there seems to have paid much attention at all to this scholarly snake-oil salesman until some of his embarrassing writing briefly escaped the hot-house world of academia and appeared to a larger public.

There are only two conclusions I can draw from this silly bit of business from Boulder, neither of them good. Either the system for evaluating scholarship at the University of Colorado was so badly broken that faculty were too negligent to examine Churchill's publications with a critical eye. Or we have gotten to a point in humanities scholarship where claims to authority and truth can be made without any real rigor at all. Assertion substitutes for evidence; passion and feeling substitute for reason and argument.

If this latter is the case - an academic version of "I'm ok, you're ok" - then what the case of Ward Churchill reveals is a practice of the humanities that has lost any self-confidence. Believing that nothing can be known with any certainty, many in the humanities have decided that therefore all assertions must be equally valid and they need not be defended in any systematic way, because after all, that system is part of the problem in the first place. In such a world, Churchill's fabrications are no different than any other scholarship, which relies on real evidence and proper citation. Liberation through increased ignorance!

Scientists, of course, laugh at the humanities for this and other reasons. But our collective lack of self-confidence also explains why those of us in the humanities have had so little impact on the debates that have really mattered over the last 30 years. Playing post-structuralist parlor games, those in the humanities have largely ignored our responsibility to speak with authority and truth to the pressing questions of the day. We've been afraid to do so.

Ironically, the jury in Colorado deliberated just as the great historian John Hope Franklin passed away. It's a wonderful compare/contrast exercise: On the one hand, Franklin, a scholar of impeccible standards who devoted his life to the humanities in the fullest and richest sense, a man who repeatedly put his scholarship in the service of a political goal, but who always insisted on the difference between scholarship and politicis. On the other, Churchill demanding his job back because he was fired for being a fraud, and calling this a brave political act.

Does the Treasury Department need a Rustbelt Intellectual?

2009-04-06T16:11:00.003-04:00

The demands of the new quarter require this post to be brief, but I wanted to highlight what I think are some interesting and important dilemmas faced by the Obama administration in the current economic crisis.

Two main observations: 1) America appears to be experiencing the first significant wave of economic populism in many decades; 2) Obama's Treasury Department policymakers and staff of economic advisers appear to be unaware of this or to understand what it means (see Tom's post of February 10).

A series of Frank Rich columns in the New York Times over the past several weeks brilliantly exposed this political blindness or insensitivity. And the Times is still hammering home the basic point--a story from yesterday showed the troubling ties that Lawrence Summers (never known for his political acumen) has to hedge funds.

Watching the political missteps leads me to believe that the Obama administration needs a Rustbelt Intellectual at Treasury or on the staff of economic advisers. I use that term to refer to the spirit of this blog's many posts and reader comments--as a shorthand to mean only that the administration economic policy needs a voice from someone---anyone--who can truly empathize with the common American, with the working and middle classes.

Yet the story on Summers indicates the difficulties that Obama faces in balancing politics and policy. How can we reconcile the interests and concerns of the common American with the arcane world of 21st-century finance?

Given the highly technical nature of our current financial crisis, does Obama have any other choice than to hand over the keys to the policymaking to folks who presided over and arguably contributed to the crash? Would providing a seat at the table for a spokesperson for the middle and working classes simply put that person in over their head? Are the concerns of working families hopelessly naive and likely to worsen the crisis if made a driving force in policy? In other words, would a Rustbelt Intellectual just mess everything up?

In the short term, it appears that handing economic policy over to technocrats is politically risky. In the long term, it may be our only option: Americans may just have to hold their noses and hope the Wall Street tycoons both in the Obama administration and on Wall Street can save the nation.

Fear and Loathing at 30,000 feet

2009-04-03T14:22:00.004-04:00

Recently I was stuck in airport purgatory, thanks to USAir's inability to keep track of its planes, its crews or its schedules (and I didn't even check any bags). So with unending amounts of time to kill, I spent much of it perusing the book sellers in two different airports.

Featured are several of the latest titles from the cast of Fox News and Friends: Hannity, Coulter and several others. They all have "books" out just at the moment (I'm reminded of a sneer that Gore Vidal, or was it Truman Capote, made toward another author's book: "That isn't writing; it's typing.") I didn't actually touch any other them for fear of getting some dreadful (anti)social disease. But the titles are revealing.

They all use the Manichean language of freedom and tyranny; liberty and war.

I'm not particularly interested in what these books say - all one needs to do is read is the title and you get the punchline - nor do I think most Americans care either. Ann Coulter, after all, has given dumb blondes a bad name. These are books which will be advertised as "best-sellers" and then sent straight to pulp.

Nor I am surprised about that language: Republicans for a generation now have been wrapping their looting of American society as super-patriotism or as god's work, or both.

What confuses is me is why we don't call this rhetorical posturing what it really is: American fascism.

Pretend for a moment that a far-right political party emerged in France or England. It claimed that the interest of the state and the interest of the party were identical; it insisted that any opposition to that party was a form of treason; it drew thinly-veiled racial distinctions between the "real" French and those others; it fulminated that those others were responsible for the decline of everything good and right. What would you call such a party?

Of course, you'd call it a fascist party, and we have seen exactly such politics in England with the National Front and in France with the Le Pen movement.

But the examples I've cited above all come from the last 15 years of the Republican party - from Sarah Palin's "Real Americans" speech to Newt Gingrich's 1995 declaration that Democrats were ipso facto traitors. And as we've seen since January, the notion of a loyal opposition has been perverted by Republicans to mean only opposition to Obama and loyalty only to the party.

So let's start calling these people what they are: American fascists. They appeal to a substantial percentage of the population for sure - I remind students that the closest we've come to electoral unity in a presidential election was 61% - which means 39% voted for the other guy (Alf Landon in 1936; Barry Goldwater in 1964). But we should at least be forthright about what we're now dealing with.

Steele's Choice

2009-03-12T14:32:00.005-04:00

There he goes again. Michael Steele, who was supposed to be the GOP's Magic Negro, has put his foot back in his mouth with the social conservatives that constitute what remains of the Republican Party. In an interview with GQ he was quoted as saying that he believes abortion is "an individual choice." Cue the howls of protest from the drooling, knuckle-dragging mob.

Lest you are inclined to give Steele some credit for standing up on this particular issue, however, make sure you get the quote in its full context. What Steele went on to say was that this "individual choice" should be left up to the states.

Forget for moment the logic problem inherent in Steele's reasoning - hey, he wasn't hired because he's a deep thinker! Steele's comments are simply a re-tread of Ronald Reagan's, who argued that reproductive choice was a matter best handled by the states, not protected nationally by the Federal government. In that sense, while Steele may have offended the embryo fetishists, his comments put him squarely in the GOP's old-time misogynist tradition.

The conservative obsession with reproductive issues is part of the backlash against the feminist movement of the 1960s and '70s. It has nothing to do with the "sanctity of life" and all to do with regulating women. In no other matter of health does the state intrude as much as it does with questions of contraception and abortion - imagine that after being diagnosed with cancer, you were forced by the state to endure a 24 hour waiting period while you considered the potential bad side-effects of chemotherapy.

Imagine further that your chemo options varied wildly depending on which state you happened to live in when you were diagnosed. In some states you might be given access to the best treatments; in other states you might be told to drink herbal tea and pray a lot. So it has become with women's health.

Misogyny masked as federalism.

Over the course of American history "states rights" has been invoked largely to defend the oppression of the weak by the bigoted. Southern states defended slavery under the banner of "states rights" - and you will still hear some insist that the Confederacy was really about constitutional issues, not about keeping African Americans enslaved. "States rights" became the rallying cry of Southerners when they fought against desegregation and civil rights - no! they feigned, it isn't that we want to keep these people as second class citizens, we just want to defend the principle of states rights.

And in the last thirty years, "states rights" has become the excuse states have used to restrict basic medical treatments for women. Michael Steele may have infuriated the GOP base - and they are base indeed - but his comments in GQ suggest he's just as much of a misogynist as the rest of them.

Reid My Lips

2009-03-10T16:13:00.004-04:00

I've just been hit up - again - for money from the Democratic Senate Campaign, or whatever it is they call themselves. This time the appeal came with a big picture of fat ol' Rush Limbaugh and told me how Rush was going to derail the Obama administration. It went on to tell me how important my contribution would be to get a 60 vote majority in the Senate in 2010.

I'm not giving a dime and not just because I want the Rush Limbaugh Follies to go on and on. Between Rush and Michael Steele the Wingnut Party just gets better and better. And after you've caught those acts, you can tune into the Bobby Jindal show! Too funny.

I'm not poney-ing up any money because right now the biggest obstacle to getting bills through the Senate is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I complained about Reid some weeks ago in a post here and nothing that has happened since has given me any more confidence. Indeed, Reid's failure to get the votes in order for the big omnibus spending bill - a virtual no brainer - suggests that I was too kind about the Senator from the great state of Nevada.

Let's be clear: 60 votes are necessary to close off a filibuster. To date, Senate Republicans have only hinted that they might, perhaps maybe filibuster certain bills or nominees. They have, in fact, initiated exactly zero filibusters. Yet those threats have been enough to put Reid in a tizzy and driven Democratic operatives to dream about a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

The solution to the filibuster - and I'm certainly not the first or only person to say this - is for Reid to call the bluff. Give the minority party, the party of flat-earthers and Limbaugh-lovers, the opportunity to stall the business of the nation even as the economy goes down the drain. Poll numbers don't go as low as the Republicans would sink.

If he forced an actual showdown, Reid might discover A) that he gets the few votes he needs from Republicans like Arlen Specter, Jim Bunning and Olympia Snow who are terrified about their re-election or B) that the Republican threat is simply empty noise. Like everything else about the Republicans at the moment.

So until Reid gets his Senate in order, I'm not giving him any money.

OBAMA MUST RISE TO URBAN CHALLENGE

2009-02-24T14:04:00.002-05:00

This op-ed, from Sunday's Detroit Free Press should be of interest to Rustbelt Intellectual readers.

Obama Must Rise to Urban Challenge
Thomas J. Sugrue

For the first time in three decades, we have a president who has pledged to put urban and metropolitan issues at the forefront of the national political agenda. Given the current economic crisis, and its devastating impact on metro Detroit, it's not a moment too soon.

For the past three decades, American urban policy has been a shambles. Beginning in the Reagan years, the federal government steadily cut spending on cities, while industry fled, infrastructure crumbled and populations grew poorer. Federal tax, housing and transit policies subsidized helter-skelter suburban growth, leading to the loss of farms, forests and wetlands, and to the rise of costly long-distance commuting. Meanwhile, cities were left to fend for themselves.

Without government support, cities turned to the private sector to address the most pressing urban problems. Urban development took two paths. One was splashy downtown revitalization geared to tourists, professionals, artists and well-to-do empty-nesters that gave downtowns a new lease on life. But the benefits of upscale development did not trickle down to the working-class majority of city dwellers. And the downtown bubble burst in cities from Las Vegas to Detroit, leaving an aftermath of vacancies and foreclosures.

The other path was forged by small-scale community development organizations, which grew out of the civil rights and black power battles of the 1960s and 1970s. With foundation grants and government support, they built affordable housing, community centers and, occasionally, stores. But overall, they did not transform the city. Community groups had the will but not the capacity to stem the massive urban disinvestment and depopulation.

Barack Obama -- the first president from a big city in more than a century -- comes to the White House with hands-on experience in urban issues. As a community organizer on Chicago's ravaged South Side, he saw the possibilities of community participation and empowerment, but the limitations of small-scale redevelopment.

As a budding politician, he attended fund-raisers in the city's gentrified North Side neighborhoods and worked closely with major downtown developers. And as a resident of one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, he saw the corrosive effects of the balkanization of Chicagoland into two metros: one mostly white, with good schools and public services, the other mostly minority, with failing schools, a decaying infrastructure and rising taxes.

President Obama's first urban policy steps have been promising. He announced the creation of a White House Office of Urban Policy, a signal that cities will be a federal priority for the first time in decades. The nearly $800-billion fiscal stimulus package does not target cities specifically, but provides funding for school renovation and infrastructure improvements, public transit improvements and disadvantaged students and workers. The stimulus will certainly provide much needed jobs and help cash-strapped municipalities deal with years' worth of deferred maintenance.

And, though it has not been heralded as an urban program, the stimulus package's $3-billion appropriation for medical research will provide a lifeline for the research and teaching hospitals whose viability is essential to city economies. Detroit, like Obama's Chicago and nearly every other old industrial city, depends on its "meds and eds" -- that is, hospitals, universities and schools -- as an alternative to lost manufacturing jobs. They are the bulwark of today's urban economies.

But the success of the Obama administration's urban policy won't simply rest on its ability to solve the economic crisis. American cities and metropolitan areas are at a crossroads. Obama's urban policy has the potential to do much more than bail out cash-strapped municipalities. The new administration has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvent cities and metropolitan areas.

That will require thinking outside the box. Downtown redevelopment has a place -- but it cannot be the cornerstone of a new urban policy, unless it is directly tied to job creation. Community economic development is crucial, but it needs to be done on a much larger scale -- and must include building affordable housing where the jobs are -- in the suburbs.

And, most important, planning needs to be regional, not just local. So long as neighborhoods compete with downtowns, cities compete with suburbs, and suburbs compete with each other for scarce resources, our metropolitan areas will remain divided by class and race and be economically inefficient.

The federal government has the power to provide incentives for regional collaboration. President Obama has long talked about unity -- about transcending the divisions that separate Americans by race, religion and party. It is time to include our metropolitan areas in that vision of unity.

The current crisis is a metropolitan one -- and the solution will come in policies that are appropriate to the scope and scale of the economic and social problems that we all face together.

Kyoto On My Mind

2009-02-21T13:13:00.003-05:00

The little town of Yellow Springs, out here in rural Ohio, is a pretty funky place and it is filled with some pretty progressive people. A friend of mine is expanding his small electronics company and doubling the size of his building. The addition is going to be so energy efficient that even with twice the square-footage, his energy bills will remain the same.

He is following some of the super-tight building designs that have been developed in Germany. And as he has worked on this project he has had to buy many of his materials - super-efficient windows, for example - from Canada. It's become a familiar story. Indeed, the Times ran a story today noting that roughly 70% of the wind turbines and solar cells in use in the US today are imported.

And as my Yellow Springs friend pointed out, this situation is the result of our refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocols.

Roughly a decade ago, the world came together to draft this international environmental treaty. The Clinton administration participated in the process and signed the document, but the Senate refused to ratify it. Under the Bush regime, needless to say, the treaty languished entirely.

The press largely covered the treaty's headline goals: targets for emissions reductions, carbon trading and so forth. Those targets were ridiculed for being unrealistic - and they probably are. The Senate and the Bush administration insisted that strict limits on emissions would kill the American economy and cost Americans jobs. Our economy burns fossil fuels, dammit, and putting less carbon in the atmosphere means less economic activity

But what politicians and the press failed to notice was that abiding by the protocols has been a stimulus to new industries, like making solar cells, and the high efficiency, triple-paned, solar-sensitive windows my friend now has to buy from Ottawa. So our refusal to ratify Kyoto resulted in the loss of future jobs. And that future has now arrived. Many of us are ready to embrace alternative energy in our homes and businesses, and at least at the moment, we will have to rely on imported technology to do it.

Over the last ten years, thanks to our inaction on Kyoto, European and Canadian companies have taken the lead in alternative-energy manufucturing while American manufacturers kept adding cup-holders to SUVs. Ten years ago, Americans laughed and sneered at the pie-in-the-sky-ism of Kyoto, but now that Canadian window company is having the last laugh.

Happy Birthday Charles and Abe

2009-02-12T06:31:00.005-05:00

Ok,

This is cheating a bit. The following post is an op-ed that has appeared in several newspapers around the country, but on the occasion of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln I thought I'd share it here. Think of it as a form of recycling. So on their birthdays lift a glass to the two great emancipators of the 19th century.

Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, has been much on our minds recently as Barack Obama moved into the White House. Exactly 200 years after Lincoln's birth, Obama's presidency is one fulfillment of the work Lincoln started.

Lincoln shares his birthday with Charles Darwin, the other Great Emancipator of the 19th century. Though in different ways, each liberated us from the traditions of the past.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were exact contemporaries. Both were born on February 12, 1809 -- Darwin into a comfortable family in Shropshire, England, Lincoln into humble circumstances on the American frontier.

They also came to international attention at virtually the same moment. Darwin published his epochal book, "On the Origin of Species," in 1859. The following year, Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States, and in that very year Harvard botanist Asa Gray wrote the first review of Darwin's book to appear in the United States.

They initiated twin revolutions: one brought by Lincoln -- the Civil War and the emancipation of roughly four million African American slaves; the other initiated by Darwin's explanation of the natural world through the mechanism of natural selection.

Lincoln's Civil War transformed the social, political and racial landscape in ways which continue to play out. Darwin transformed our understanding of biology, thus paving the way for countless advances in science, especially in medicine. With this powerful scientific explanation of the origins of species, Darwin dispensed with the pseudoscientific assertions of African American inferiority.

In this way, Darwin provided the scientific legitimacy for Lincoln's political and moral actions.
Both revolutions share a commitment to the same proposition: that all human beings are fundamentally equal. In this sense, both Lincoln and Darwin deserve credit for emancipating us from the political and intellectual rationales that justified slavery.

For Lincoln, this was a political principle and a moral imperative. He was deeply ambivalent about the institution of slavery. As the war began, Lincoln believed that saving the Union, not abolishing slavery, was the cause worth fighting for.

As the war ground gruesomely on, Lincoln began to see that ending slavery was the only way to save the Union without making a mockery of the nation's founding ideals. This is what he meant in his address at Gettysburg in 1863 when he promised that the war would bring "a new birth of freedom"; he was even more emphatic about it in his second inaugural address in 1865. Slavery could not be permitted to exist in a nation founded on the belief that we are all created equal.

For his part, Darwin was a deeply committed abolitionist from a family of deeply committed abolitionists. Exposed to slavery during his trip to South America, Darwin wrote, "It makes one's blood boil." He called abolishing slavery his "sacred cause." In some of his first notes about evolution he railed against the idea that slaves were somehow less than human beings.

For Darwin, our shared humanity was simply a biological fact. Whatever variations exist among the human species -- what we call "races" -- are simply the natural variations that occur within all species. Like it or not, in a Darwinian world we are all members of one human family. This truth lay at the center of Darwin's science and at the center of his abolitionism.

That understanding of human equality, arrived at from different directions and for different reasons, helps explain the opposition to the revolutions unleashed by Lincoln and Darwin, and why many Americans, alone in the developed world, continue to deny Darwinian science.

For their part, many white Southerners never accepted Lincoln's basic proposition about the political equality of black Americans. In the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction they set up the brutally baroque structures and rituals of segregation. All the elaborate laws, customs and violence of the segregated South served to deny the basic truth that all Americans are created equal. For their part, most Northerners didn't care all that much about the "southern problem."

No wonder, then, that many Americans simply rejected Darwin's insights out of hand. Slavery and segregation rested on the assumption that black Americans were not fully human. Yet Darwinian science put the lie to all that.

Lincoln insisted on equality as a political fact. Darwin demonstrated it as a biological fact. In their shared commitment to human equality these two Great Emancipators, each in their own realm, helped us to break free from the shackles of the past.

BARF: OR CHANGE WE CAN'T BELIEVE IN

2009-02-10T13:54:00.004-05:00

President Obama swept into office three weeks ago with a swell of good will. And he spared not a minute in addressing the major issue of the day, the economic crisis. We now have a weak stimulus package, garnished with lavish tax cuts that will have little direct effect on the economy. The stimulus package also includes a shockingly generous and costly give-away to wealthy homeowners, a $15,000 tax credit for people who flip their houses. In the meantime the stimulus package has been shorn of funds for smart programs that provide jobs and improve infrastructure (and lift the financial burden of cash-strapped states and localities) like rebuilding schools.

Why? Because President Obama has a faith-based delusion that he can somehow overcome the partisan divide and, in the process, heal America. Obama's belief in unity makes sense when it comes to the divisions of race, religion, and ethnicity. But it makes no sense when it comes to partisan politics. Bringing together Democrats and Republicans in a Kumbaya moment isn't going to happen. Invitations to the White House aren't going to soften Republican resolve. A few cookies won't do the trick. Only hard ball politics will.

And now we have Part II of the Bush administration's bank bailout, which James Galbraith has aptly named BARF--the Bad Assets Relief Fund. Give the banks bags of taxpayer dollars but with few strings attached. This too is the result of a failure of leadership. President Obama has surrounded himself with neoliberal economists, beginning with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who are steeped in the very culture of the big banks that they are now bailing out. Read this, from today's New York Times:

As intended largely by Geithner, the plan stops short of intruding too significantly into bankers' affairs even as they come onto the public dole.

The $500,000 pay cap for executives at companies receiving assistance, for instance, applies only to very senior executives. Some officials argued for caps that applied to every employee at institutions that received taxpayer money.

Abandoning any pretense about limiting the moral hazards at companies that made foolhardy investments, the plan also will not require shareholders of companies receiving significant assistance to lose most or all of their investment.

In other words, ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you. This is not change that we can believe in.

Dr. No(hio)

2009-01-29T18:01:00.006-05:00

In 2004 the state of Ohio disgraced itself by voting for Bush, thus giving Bush the election. In November, 2008 Ohio voters redeemed themselves, and I didn't have to field angry phone calls from all my friends who blamed me for the results like I did in '04.

But this week we were all reminded that the Axis of Republican Evil still runs straight through the Buckeye State - more specifically through its 8th Congressional district. This week we got to see John Boehner in full.

Boehner certainly looks the part of the polyester politician - I'm not sure I could tell him apart from Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. But he demonstrated this week that his well and truly the ringmaster of the Republican House circus and that he will have those clowns goosestepping in unison in a way that would make John Cleese proud.

As an Ohio voter, I decided to call the Congressman's office before the vote on the stimulus package. I spoke to a very polite young man, who was clearly weary of fielding calls like mine but whose politeness never wavered. I wanted to know what Congressional Republicans, with Boehner at their head, were offering as an alternative to the stimulus package. I wanted to know just exactly how yet more tax cuts would pay for the estimated $2.2 trillion necessary to rebuild our failing infrastructure.

Young Staffer had no answers for me but assured me that they were all there at Boehner's website. That's when my day brightened.

The first giggle came when I discovered that Boehner's website is called "Republican Leader." Just made me laugh that this puffed up buffoon now calls himself "Republican Leader." Try saying it a deep, James Earl Jones voice and looking at his picture. Then I cracked up when I saw the ominous banner "Economists Agree: We Can't Borrow and Spend Our Way Out of Recession." Boehner should know - after all, he was one of those Republican Leaders (deep voice) who borrowed and spent our way into this recession.

I must admit to disappointment after that. Young Staffer led me to believe I would find Republican solutions to our economic mess. Like public prayer for more jobs. Or intelligently designed public works spending. But no, all Republican Leader has to offer is: tax cuts.

But I encourage all of you to call the office - the staff really are friendly. 202-225-6205.

THE LIMITS OF BIPARTISANSHIP

2009-01-29T11:46:00.003-05:00

Whatever utility the rhetoric of bipartisanship had for Barack Obama during the campaign, it's now time for the president and the Democratic leadership to let it go. As political historian Allen Lichtman argued at TPM last week, the most effective presidents "don't move to the middle; they move the middle to them."

The GOP unequivocally rejected bipartisanship, when yesterday not a single House Republican voted for the economic stimulus package. And this was a package that the Democrats weakened considerably--by incorporating tax giveaways in capitulation to GOP demands. Republicans have chiseled away at other elements of the stimulus package such as Medicaid funding for family planning. All but the most conservative economists concur that the economic benefits of tax cuts will be minor compared to the jolt of increased spending on public works, unemployment benefits, health care, and public transit. But for Republicans, the efficacy of tax cuts--just like the evil and wastefulness of family planning--are a matter of faith.

Some argue that Obama's bipartisanship gives him the moral high ground: he looks statesmanlike, while the GOP appears truculent and uncompromising. Maybe, but does impression management matter in this moment of grave economic crisis? Why concede to the Republicans on what will arguably be the most important legislation of the Obama years? And why continue to give life to the failed Republican tax policies that have contributed mightily to the current crisis?

Others contend that bipartisanship will help Obama and the Democratic leadership shepherd the stimulus package through the Senate. It is true that to have a filibuster-proof majority, Obama needs to win a few moderate Republicans to his side, but squandering one third of the stimulus to appease the right seems a very high price to pay to win over Olympia Snowe and a few others.

The stimulus package, even in its weakened form, is a step in the right direction. But it may well prove to be too small. If it fails to turn the economic tides, pandering to the GOP in the name of a bipartisanship will be a large part of the reason.

One Size Fits All Economics

2009-01-28T08:40:00.004-05:00

Remember when people called the Republican Party "the party of ideas"?! It never was, really, (list 5 important "ideas" the Republicans have generated in since 1995 when Newt Gingrich, the "big thinker" took over - go ahead, I dare you) but through much of the last 10 or 15 years it was a great marketing slogan. Branding, I think they call it.

Still, it is stunning that in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression that the Congressional Republicans have only one thing to say. Like that weird section of the Beatles' "Revolution #9" which just keeps repeating "#9," Republicans keep whining: tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.

This isn't only a measure of the complete poverty of ideas that the Republican Bund suffers, though it certainly is that. Instead, it is an honest reminder of what economic policy means for Republicans. Most of us, I suspect, think of economic policy as a way to pursue the common good - we might debate what that means and how best to achieve it, but we probably agree that economic policy should be shaped to foster those goals.

The goal for Republicans since 1981 has been single-minded: transfer money from the middle class to the rich. Contrary to what you hear from the Cato Institute and other right-wing assisted living centers, Republicans aren't interested in small government, or even free markets. Not when big government and manipulated markets have proven so much more effective at shifting wealth to the top.

And the fastest, easiest, most politically successful way to do that is through tax cuts of the sort that Reagan and Bush II enacted. (That so many Joe-the-Plumbers, who would have done better personally under Democratic tax plans, went along for the ride measures poverty of a different sort).

Go back to those bygone days of 2000. Remember the balanced budget? Remember the budget surplus? As a candidate, Bush sold his big "soak the middle class" tax cuts as a moral imperative: the government shouldn't keep a budget surplus - we had to give it back! As president, when the dot com bubble burst and the nation slipped into the first Bush recession, he announced that those very same tax cuts were the only thing that would stimulate the economy.

So no matter what the economic climate, no matter what the social problem, tax cuts are the solution to everything. Don't have health care? How about a tax cut! Schools are failing - cut taxes! Got male-pattern baldness - you need a tax cut!

In fairness, Republican tax cuts have been successful at making the rich richer. But speaking about the Great Depression - which resulted from Republican economic policies that look awfully familiar - Roosevelt was right in 1936 when he called Republicans "economic royalists." The only question worth asking, as Bob Herbert did in his Times column yesterday, is: why should we bother listening to Republicans who can only say #9, #9, #9, #9. . .

DETROIT SOLD FOR SCRAP

2009-01-27T09:09:00.006-05:00

Three years ago, the Onion ran a perversely funny story, "Detroit Sold for Scrap." Now farce has become tragedy.

Last year, I visited the site of Detroit's long-abandoned and much picked over Packard Plant with a film crew from Britain. A half block away was a roving maintenance crew from Detroit Edison, replacing a hundred feet of power lines that had been stolen the night before by scavengers.

It's a sign of the times that scrap metal theft (even through metal prices have fallen in recent months) has become a boom business in inner cities. For a time here in Philadelphia, enterprising recyclers began stealing manhole covers--hundreds of them in a few months. Detroit, once the Motor City, is quickly becoming the Scrap Metal City. Everything is ripe for the plundering in a place with a record number of abandoned houses, skyrocketing unemployment, widespread poverty, and a thriving drug trade.

The metal theft business is not simply an urban problem. Like so many other social problems, it's rapidly suburbanizing. In 2008 alone, there were 145,000 foreclosures in Michigan, many in Detroit's suburbs. Thousands more houses are vacant, unsold in the bleak real estate market. Leftover suburban houses are a treasure chest of steel, copper, and aluminum. Air conditioners, gutters, doors, wiring, and plumbing fixtures are disappearing.

Chris McCarus, a Lansing-based journalist, recently ran an excellent three-part series on copper theft on his radio program Michigan Now. The epidemic of copper theft is a vivid example of the everyday devastation wrought by the current economic crisis.

UNDERSTIMULATION WATCH: PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION LEFT BEHIND

2009-01-26T14:03:00.004-05:00

I'm worried about the economic stimulus package. For one, it may well be too small to provide the necessary jolt to our struggling economy. For another, it's short shrifting public transit. Over the last few years, across the country, public transit use has skyrocketed. On the heavily-traveled East Coast corridor, ridership is up on regional rail and on Amtrak, despite the fact that both have struggled to survive on a starvation diet. High gas prices have led commuters are seeking alternatives to high gas prices and to the hassle of air travel. In our sprawling metros, buses are a crucial link between people and jobs. In many smaller cities, where airlines have axed service, buses and sometimes trains are the only alternative to long-distance driving.

Our public transportation infrastructure is often dreadful. Train stations are decrepit, many of our buses aren't deploying new smart technologies and could be greener, and service is spotty, even in high demand areas. Two weeks ago, I had a speaking gig in Charlottesville, Virginia. Flying from Philadelphia via US Air was exorbitantly expensive, but Amtrak, which only runs a few trains to Charlottesville per day, was completely sold out. I had to drive, adding to the East Coast congestion, spewing exhaust into the atmosphere, and relying on fossil fuel. My regional rail in Philadelphia is more crowded than ever--on peak trains, I often can't find a seat. But SEPTA (southeast PA's regional transportation authority) has not modified its schedules to meet increased demand. It can't afford to. Bus transit is even worse. On a bitterly cold day last week, I stood on a shelter-less corner, waiting forever for a local bus. For the tens of thousands of working people who don't own cars, a bus ticket is a ticket to jobs and economic security.

Public transportation creates jobs. It sustains the economy. It's good for the environment. And it's woefully underfunded. Democrats (and a few GOP allies): expand transit funding in the stimulus package.

Bourne Supremacy

2009-01-25T12:16:00.005-05:00

Of all the reportorial puffery that accompanied the inauguration, I enjoyed the lengthy piece in the Times on Obama's extended family the most. Extended and how! It includes relatives from Kenya to Indonesia, a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law (related to a Canadian??!! Wow!) and an African American convert to judaism who is now a rabbi. His experience of family resonates in a small way with my own, which includes a French Jewish uncle in his 70s who literally ran across the border into Switzerland to escape the Nazis and a 7 year old nephew whose parents are Korean and Columbian.

We have often asked for a government that "looks like America," and now we have a family that truly does. I confess, I teared up a bit.

Obama's candidacy and now his election have occasioned a great deal of discussion - ranging from the exuberant to the suspicious - about the state of American race relations. I doubt I have anything new or different to add to that except to say that Obama's election certainly confounds many of the easy truisms we have in this country about race and tolerance and the fluid, contingent nature of those things. Much of our discussion about race, like so many other things, got locked into stale frameworks left over from 1968. At the very least, the Obama phenomenon does not fit easily into those, and so we will have to develop new ones.

In the midst of all this, I have found myself thinking about Randolph Bourne. Bourne has been dead for 90 years now, but in 1916 he wrote an essay for the Atlantic which was just about the first, and still just about the best, expression of what we call diversity and multi-culturalism, long before those words were in wide use. (And there is no better critique of Bush's Iraq Folly than Bourne's 1918 essay "War is the Health of the State.")

Bourne wrote his celebration of "Trans-National America" against a rising tide of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and in the midst of World War I. He was unequivocal in his hope that a multi-ethnic America could save the world from the kind of butchery in which the nations of Europe - great civilizations all! - were engaged.

The so-called "melting pot" has happily failed, Bourne wrote, and he called the "English-American conservatism" which would demand it the "chief obstacle to social advance." Without the cultural variety brought by immigrants, Bourne insisted, America was doomed to stagnation.
So let me offer some bits of that essay as my reflection on Obama and the meaning of race in America:

Bourne's rejection of the "melting pot": "What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities [of immigrants] should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity. . . .The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation. "

On the meaning of American nationalism: "America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism,—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe,—is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations."

On "trans-national" America: "Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American—and in this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. "

In some ways, that "cosmopolitan vision" just moved into the White House, and I suspect that looking down from philosopher heaven, Randolph Bourne is smiling.

A Boy Doing a Man's Job?

2009-01-23T18:38:00.005-05:00

72 hours into the Obama Administration and two things are already clear:

1) The remaining Congressional Republicans really are the true-believing, kool-aid drinking partisan zealots we thought they were. Their actions in this short legislative week suggest that they would burn the village rather than save it. Holding up cabinet nominees, rattling sabers about legislation that hasn't even arrived yet. These are ugly people who plan to play even uglier.

2) In the Senate, where because of byzantine rules the few can hold up the will of the many, Harry Reid is not up to the task of leading Obama's agenda past Mitch McConnell and the drooling dogs in his party.

I have never been particularly impressed with Reid. He deserves some credit for taking over the Democratic Senatorial leadership at a low-water mark. But since becoming Majority leader in 2007 he has struck me as not having much of a vision, nor the political skills to turn that vision into successful legislation. Even with a majority, Reid couldn't stop most of Bush's agenda, though at that point there was nothing to be gained in cooperating with the president.

Shortly after the November election, I thought I heard a rumor that someone else might run against him for Majority leader. Either that rumor was simply blogosphere vapor, or Democrats decided that a fight over Reid was not worth having. Whatever the case, the future of Obama's agenda now rests in the hands of Harry Reid.

Unless I'm missing something here, this does not fill me with confidence. Obama will have a long honeymoon period with the public and the press I suspect, but it is clear that all his bipartisan gesturing will amount to very little with Congressional Republicans for whom "bipartisanship" is even more anathema than "gay marriage" or "Darwinian evolution."

Which makes it even more urgent that those of us who helped put Obama in the White House now turn our energy to lobbying those Republicans who stand in the way of making this a better country.

Reid is no Lyndon Johnson, who bent the Senate to his will with astonishing effectiveness. But unless he can begin to channel his inner LBJ, this brand new day we all felt on Tuesday may cloud over very quickly.

ECONOMIC STIMULUS FOR ACADEMICS

2009-01-23T10:03:00.004-05:00

The economic crisis is hitting home, even at rich universities like mine. My department is replacing three full-time, tenure line positions in modern American history with one non-tenure line two-year lectureship. Harvard's School of Arts and Sciences has announced, in classic Harvard fashion, a "hiring pause." (The usual and customary phrase "hiring freeze" is, I guess, too cold, given that even after a devastating hit by the market, Harvard still has a $27 billion dollar endowment). Many universities have canceled searches altogether. By the best estimate, in my primary field, history, fifteen percent of faculty searches this year were canceled nationwide. Grim indeed.

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, education historian and op-ed writer par excellence, Jon Zimmerman makes a persuasive case that the economic stimulus package should include doctorates. He looks to the New Deal's creation of jobs for newly minted Ph.Ds and underemployed professors in the arts, historical preservation and research, archiving, and national parks. The whole piece is worth a read.

When asked why the government should sponsor artists and writers, New Deal official Harry Hopkins responded, "Hell, they've got to eat like other people." Hopkins' quip reminds me of a sign that a job seeker carried at a recent conference of historians: "Will Teach 20th Century U.S. For Food."

But he probably won't - at least not at the university level. That's why we need to design other jobs, to put his skills to good use.

After all, our society has already invested untold sums in educating young scholars. And "investment" is the mantra of the day. As Obama keeps reminding us, his goal is not simply to put people to work. It's to invest in a better future, by making improvements in infrastructure, renewable energy and, yes, education.

For our underemployed academics, of course, the investment has already happened. The only question is whether we will save it, or squander it, and how.

One point to add to Zimmerman's argument. The economic engine of dying rustbelt cities for the last forty years has been "meds and eds"--that is hospitals and higher education. As those sectors contract, the economic effects go well beyond a few underemployed Ph.D.s to the whole metropolitan economy. Stimulate education!

RACE, EQUALITY, COMMUNITY

2009-01-22T08:41:00.006-05:00

I've been blogging away this week over at Talking Points Memo, part of a discussion on "Obama's America." Orlando Patterson, Olati Johnson, Rick Kahlenberg, Jim Sleeper, Scott Winship, Jedediah Purdy, and I have had a lively exchange on race, integration, and equality. I have to commend the editors of Democracy Journal for pulling together a heterogeneous mix, and for bringing me aboard--for I'm not part of the cast of usual suspects. Also at TPM this week is a discussion that I wish I could join, on Tony Badger's new book on FDR's first one hundred days.

Although I have had differences with Kahlenberg and Sleeper in particular, we also find some common ground (more with Kahlenberg, who thoughtfully reflects on integration, less with Sleeper, who is still fighting the battles of the late 80s and early 90s against media-created black militants). Check it out--and jump in on the comments section if you are moved.

Inaugural Thoughts

2009-01-20T15:12:00.007-05:00

It's cold out here on the edge of the prairie today - much colder than it is in Washington. But at the Emporium in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the coffee shop cum wine bar cum village meeting place dozens of my neighbors gathered to watch the inauguration and it was warm indeed. Joy, applause, cheers, tears, disbelief, relief, happiness. (The free wine Kurt provided certainly didn't hurt!)

So a few quick observations: Obama's speech was very good overall but I noticed several things in particular. First, while the campaign turned out to be largely a referendum on the economy, some of Obama's sharpest and most damning words were about the conduct of American foreign policy. This is certainly exciting - joined with Eric Holder's unequivocal rejection of torture during his confirmation hearings, and other statements coming from the new administration. At one point, in the middle of Obama's remarks about foreign policy, the camera panned to Bush, who looked even smaller, more dyspeptic and more trivial than usual.

Second, the line unuttered but hanging in the air was Kennedy's: the torch really has been passed to a new generation. As I watched Dick Cheney being wheeled off in his wheel chair (he pulled a back muscle moving boxes??!! Really??!!) I can begin to believe that we may finally have left 1968 behind us.

Third, I was personally touched to be included in the litany of American diversity - Obama talked about us a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus. And non-believers. Whoohooo! A hearty thanks from all us secular humanists and happy heathens who grow weary of the relentless religiousity of this country.

And speaking of that, I had my fingers stuck in my ears during the Rick Warren invocation so perhaps I missed something important. What struck me, however, was how singularly unimpressive he was - dull, predictable, uninspiring. I've never been to a big-box mega-church, but apparently it doesn't take all that much talent to become the head of one.

Finally, watching all this pomp and circumstance, I couldn't help but wonder whether we were a bit precipitous back in 1776. If we don't want a monarch, exactly, we surely love a coronation. That's the function inaugurations obviously serve for us, complete with honor guards, artillery firing, and endless comment on how the important women are dressed. Compare this to the transition from one leader to another in any European country and it is clear that whatever may divide us, Americans do love a parade.

THE RISING

2009-01-19T12:25:00.006-05:00

While I am mostly skeptical about the hype about a new post-racial America, we are definitely entering post-Bush America. Moments like this give me hope.

Follow up 1/20: a new version of this recording is up and running.

A REFLECTION ON KING DAY

2009-01-18T19:53:00.007-05:00

I'm taking the liberty of reprinting one of my earliest posts, from April 4, 2008, the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. It seems just as timely today. I will also be blogging this week at TPM Cafe at Talking Points Memo on Obama's America. May you spend MLK day--and the next year--engaged in King's still unfinished struggles for justice.

RESTORING KING

Every year, in January and April, we commemorate the extraordinary career of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. There is probably no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted, whose message more bowdlerized, whose powerful words are more drained of content than King.

Last week, in preparation for a public lecture on 1968, I re-read the most important book on King and his politics to come out in the last decade: Thomas F. Jackson’s From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Jackson, a former researcher with the King Papers project at Stanford, has read King’s every last sermon, speech, book, article, and letter. What Jackson finds is that from the beginning of his ministry, King was far more radical, especially on matters of labor, poverty, and economic justice than we remember. In media accounts, King was quickly labeled the “Apostle of Non-Violence,” and, by the mid-1960s, portrayed as the antithesis to Malcolm X. While King adhered to nonviolence for his entire career, the single-minded focus of the media on the horse race between Malcolm and Martin led reporters to ignore King’s more radical pronouncements. They simply didn’t fit into the developing story line. Black power advocates also distorted King, focusing on his ministerial style and arrogance (members of SNCC called him “de Lawd”). They branded King as hopelessly bourgeois, a detriment rather than a positive force in the black freedom struggle. White liberals, fearful of black unrest, embraced King as a voice of moderation, hoping that he could stem the rising tide of black discontent that exploded in the long hot summers of the mid- sixties. The representation of King as mainstream left observers unable to make sense out of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, his call for an interracial Poor People’s Movement, and his increasingly vocal denuciations of class inequality in America. King, they contended, had been radicalized or, perhaps, was more calculating in his leftward move, changing his rhetoric to remain a legitimate leader in the eyes of younger, angrier blacks. But as Jackson shows, King was anything but a milquetoast racial liberal or a radical-come-lately. Through a close reading of King’s work, Jackson finds deep currents of anti-imperialism running through King’s thought, going all the way back to his days as a student. He finds a consistent thread of anticapitalism in King’s speeches. And he finds that King was building alliances with the left-wing of the labor movement and allying himself with activists who called for structural change in the economy. King, in other words, was a radical well before he offered his prophetic denunciation of the Vietnam War in 1967 or joined the Memphis sanitation workers on strike in 1968.

King’s radicalism is lost to the obfuscating fog of memory. In American culture today, we have several Martin Luther King, Jrs: the Commemorative King, the Therapeutic King, the Conservative King, and the Commodified King. Each of these Kings competes for our attention, but each of them represents a vision of King that he himself would not have recognized.

First is the commemorative King. Only fifteen years after his death, King won an extraordinary recognition---he became the only individual (unless you count Presidents Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays have been unceremoniously consolidated into President's Day) with his own national holiday. That a man who was berated as un-American, hounded by the FBI, arrested and jailed numerous times, was recognized by a national holiday is nothing short of amazing. To be sure, the King holiday met with significant opposition, particularly from southerners like Jesse Helms, who contended that King was a tool of the Communist Party, and from John McCain, Evan Mecham, and other conservative Arizonans. But the King Holiday legislation was signed into law after overwhelming congressional approval by none other than President Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and who repeated his act by launching his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi, a tiny place whose only claim to fame was that three young civil rights activists had been murdered there twenty years earlier. But if there was anything at all subversive in King's life, it is lost in the feel good celebrations of King Day, which has become a day for picking up litter and painting school classrooms. Not that community service is a bad thing, but it's a long, long way from King's vision for social change.

The Therapeutic King: In American iconography, King is the great healer, the man who called America to be true to its “creed” of equality and opportunity. King’s message, bereft of its hard-hitting political content, is so anoydyne that we can all support it, Republican and Democrat alike. The feel good, inspirational message of King’s life has moved front and center in our memories of King. A popular school curriculum intended to build student self-esteem, for example, calls for children to express their dreams. King's message is to hold hands and join our voices together, ebony and ivory, in perfect harmony.

The conservative King: Devoid of the political content that drove his message, King has also become an icon of racial conservatism. Today's most unlikely King acolytes are critics of civil rights policies such as affirmative action. King is the prophet of meritocratic individualism. The most articulate proponent of this version of King (and there are many) is Ward Connerly, the leader of nationwide anti-affirmative action campaign who drew from King's own words to call for a dismantling of race-sensitive admissions. Only one King speech—King’s address to the 1963 March on Washington, matters to Connerly-type conservatives. And only one line in that speech matters: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King speeches should be judged by their content. And there’s a lot in the “I Have a Dream” speech that would make McCain and Connerly squirm. King celebrated the “the marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.” And, speaking of the “fierce urgency of Now,” he encouraged the 250,000 strong gathered on the Mall to take more aggressive action. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” At a moment when conservatives (and many liberals) were denouncing the movement for going “too far, too fast,” King sent a clear message. Go further, faster. King went on to support aggressive enfocement of civil rights laws including affirmative action itself. And more than that, he demanded the fundamental reordering of the American economy.

Finally, in perhaps the most American of twists, we have the commodified King---efforts in the last decade, largely spearheaded by the King family itself--to market the words and image of the Reverend King. In classic American fashion, Martin Luther King, Jr. has become a consumer good. King's family has engaged in an aggressive effort to market the image of the Reverend King, including a multi-million dollar deal with Time Warner for the rights to King's speeches, writings, and recordings. The King family sued to prevent companies from using King's image on refrigerator magnets, switchblades, and on "I have a Dream" ice cream cones. But they quickly turned to their own business in King kitsch. In the mid-90s, the Reverend King's son Dexter King, who administered the King estate, took a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of another King, “THE KING,” Elvis at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee to pick up some marketing lessons. Since the mid-1990s, King's estate has authorized, among other things, commemorative pins for the Atlanta Summer Olympics with the likeness of Martin Luther King Jr., porcelain statuettes of King, and, my favorite, checkbooks bearing King's likeness.

Whether commodity or conservative icon, suffice it to say that each of these visions of King is flawed. The commemorative King, celebrates heroism and courage, but risks the creation of a one-dimensional character that glosses over King's subversive, challenging, and upsetting messages. The therapeutic King stands in sharp contrast to a political strategy that demanded the overthrow of American apartheid and demanded great sacrifices from blacks and whites alike. The conservative King is based on a very selective appropriation of King's words--largely from a single speech--in service of a cause that King found abhorrent. And the commodified King creates comforting images that are wholly drained of their ability to provoke and challenge---and, moreover, stand in sharp juxtaposition to King's penetrating critique of American capitalism and his deep-rooted anti-materialism. Above all, King's contribution was to unsettle power, to challenge the status quo, something that a porcelain statuette or an Olympic pin or an anti-affirmative action law will never do.

We the People. . .were right

2009-01-16T14:15:00.007-05:00

Way back in 2000, George Bush told reporters that he wasn't much interested in studying history, didn't care much about the past, didn't read any history books. Oh! how 8 disastrous years, and truly "historic" poll numbers will change a man.

There is no question that the orgy of exit interviews W has been giving over his last few weeks - equal parts self-congratulation and self-pity - are an appeal to Clio, that fickle muse of history. He wants history to remember him well, even if the rest of us who have lived through this nightmare are nothing but callow ingrates.

Nor is there any question that he needn't bother with all this. He already is, and will be for the rest of my natural days, the worst president in American history (not to mention a despicable human being). I can say this with a certain confidence. "History," after all, doesn't make judgments - historians do. And I am one of those who spends my time analyzing the past for a living. We professional historians - most of us anyway - need no further evidence, nor any more time to deliberate: worst ever.

But what strikes me about W's hail-mary pass to posterity is that he, and the press at whom he has been shoveling this manure, take as a given that the Bush presidency started on September 11, 2001. So, for example: He has kept us safe for 7 years, goes the official line, oblivious to the specious logic of that claim and to the fact that, therefore, he didn't keep us safe for those first 9 months of his presidency.

This post-dated Bush presidency has also made it easier to see his worst instincts and practices as somehow a response to the crisis of 9/11. In fact, there was plenty of evidence by September 10 that Bush would govern as a far right, bitterly partisan president who treated the Congress and the Constitution with contempt, and for whom ideological purity trumped all other considerations. Exhibit A: the appointment of John Ashcroft to be Attorney General. 'Nuf said. Exhibit B: Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont. In 2000, Jeffords was a Republican, but a dangerously moderate one. Bush staffers treated him so badly in those first days of 2001 that he left the party to become an independent. Exhibit C: a small trickle of senior military staff leaving the Pentagon because of their unhappiness with Donald Rumsfeld. That trickle would grow as Rumsfeld ran roughshod over the armed forces. Exhibit D: by August, 2001, Bush's poll numbers were already tanking. And on I could go.

These things are important to remember as we evaluate the full 8 years of Bush's presidency, but perhaps they don't rise to the level of major importance. What does, however, is the election of 2000 itself, which gets conveniently ignored by all those who pretend Bush moved into the White House on September 11.

As this administration comes at last to its end, let us never forget the foundational and fundamental facts of the Bush presidency:

He didn't win the election in 2000.

He was installed by what would be described if it had happened in any other country as a coup d'etat.

The will of the American people was deliberately subverted by partisans on the Supreme Court.

A majority of Americans voted for Al Gore; a majority of Floridians woke up on election day intending to vote for Al Gore, though we may never now exactly how many had their votes stolen or suppressed.

George W Bush was a squatter in the White House.

In this sense, 9/11 was the best thing that happened to George W. Bush, politically speaking, and Bush's White House never spoke any other language. Without 9/11 I have no doubt that Bush would have been a one-term squatter.

We need to say these things because they remind us that our system can be subverted by a carefully coordinated, well-funded cabal. The election of 2000 reminds us that our democracy really is fragile. And - perhaps because I am feeling good and expansive now that my Bush countdown clock really is approaching zero - I believe that we need to remind ourselves that in 2000, the American people were right.

All Pennsylvanians Calling

2009-01-07T11:08:00.006-05:00

I can date precisely the moment when I became disgusted with Pennsylvania Arlen Specter. April, 20, 1985. On that day, I was in DC as part of a national student lobby effort for nuclear disarmament. About 50 of us Pennsylvanians had scheduled an appointment to discuss things like MX and Cruise missiles with Specter. Specter thought the office was too crowded and invited us outside for the meeting.

Except that he had no intention of meeting with us. Once out on the Capitol steps, he tried to arrange us all in a group for a photo (the photographer was waiting for us outside). We didn't cooperate, insisting instead that we talk about the issues. He tried several times to herd us into his photo op and each time we refused. Finally, he walked away, leaving us to talk with an aide. (By way of contrast, I should add, the late Senator John Heinz did meet with us and was thoroughly honest and forthright, though we disagreed over nearly everything).

It has proved to be typical of a man who has carefully crafted a public persona as an "independent" and "moderate" Republican, while voting far more often than not to hold the Republican party line.

Which brings us to today's Times. On the first day of the new legislative session (and still 2.5 weeks from the inauguration) Specter launched an aggressive, saber-rattling rant about Obama's nomination of Eric Holder to be Attorney General. Shady things must be thoroughly investigated, Specter intoned. Full and frank disclosure, said the Senator. This would only be so much Senatorial hot air were it not for the fact that Specter is the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee and is thus in a position to block, stall or otherwise bollocks the nomination.

But what is even more galling about Specter's comments today is his recent record on the Judiciary Committee. He expressed all sorts of grave concerns about the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez - and then promptly greased the wheels to get his nomination approved. As far as I am concerned, Specter wrote his own obituary when he gave a spirited defense of habeus corpus rights on the floor of the Senate, and then voted against them under pressure from the Bush Administration.

(For those of you with longer memories, you will recall the central role Specter played in getting Clarence Thomas approved to the Supreme Court by leading the scurrilous campaign against Anita Hill. More recently, Specter has expressed "grave concerns" over some of Thomas' rulings).

Specter won't damage Holder's nomination, I suspect. To listen to him, Specter has a great many convictions. To look at his voting record, he has the courage of few of them, and he won't risk the wrath of Philadelphia-area voters by sticking his neck out over Holder. Still, I'd like to invite all you Pennsylvanians reading this to call Specter's office and let him know that his craven capitulation to the Bush Administration and his duplicitous record in the Senate have not gone unnoticed. For those of you who don't already have it on speed-dial, the Capitol switchboard can be reached at: 202-224-3121.

ANOTHER NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

2009-01-01T20:49:00.003-05:00

My New Year's resolution: to dissent, when necessary, from the politics of the new administration. Steve's "New Year's Resolution" post paints dissent and protest with too broad a brush. I agree that leftist protest is often ineffective and sometimes tragically so. I have long been a skeptic of the perfectionism that animates many leftist activists. Politics entails compromise. What we need this new year--and this new administration--is an effective left that uses its clout, like it did during the New Deal and the Johnson administration, to shape the direction of public policy. We need a courageous left that stands up to the administration and demand that it be better (it's unrealistic to expect "best" all the time). That means wiping the stars from our eyes, getting over the celebratory evocations of change, and putting pressure on Washington. The selection of Rick Warren as the nation's pastor is one such moment. There is little to gain by courting Warren. The Billy Graham comparison is most apt: what did Graham ever do for the Democrats anyhow? Warren's fellow travelers aren't suddenly going to turn Democratic because he's on the stage with Obama. But the peddlers of homophobia will be able to celebrate with a high-level endorsement. That we should fight.

New Year's Resolution for Progressives

2008-12-31T17:05:00.007-05:00

My father has told me for years that the history of the American Left amounts to this: Whenever the left decides to form a firing squad, it stands in a circle. It's hard to disagree.

I thought about that adage watching the reaction to Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural convocation. The whole episode, I suspect, will pass after January 20, but the teapot tempest the selection has created among "progressives" does not do us much credit. It suggests that some, at least, on the left are simply going to recourse to the old habits rather than embrace the opportunity we have to change the direction of the country.

A quick, potted history: Since the late 1960s the American left has been defined by two commitments. On the one hand, a politics of personal identity - identity being defined largely on the basis of biological essentialism (race, gender, sexual orientation); on the other, opposition and critique rather than the exercise of real political power. The left fell in love with losing, felt comforted by it, addicted to it. (Winning, after all, suggests power and power corrupts). Not coincidentally, the left has been largely irrelevant to American politics for a generation. (Todd Gitlin, among others, has written quite perceptively about all this).

This was the left I grew up in, through the late 1970s and 1980s, and it all came home to me early in the Clinton administration. As the Clinton health-care plan died an agonizing Congressional death, as welfare "reform" was fought, as Newt Gingrich closed the government not once but twice, and as Congressional Republicans attempted a coup d'etat by impeaching Clinton over a tawdry sexual affair (yes, Hillary was right - it was a vast, right-wing conspiracy) this issue that most motivated grass-roots progressives was. . .gays in the military!

To the best of my recollection, the largest public demonstration to take place during the Clinton years was 1993's gay rights march which was designed, among other things, to generate support for permitting gay Americans to serve openly in the military. I was at that rally - along with several hundred thousand of my closest friends - and I remember having a queasy feeling.

As a kid, I grew up in the anti-Vietnam, anti-military left. I grew up believing that the Pentagon was the problem (I still believe that) and that it needed to be shrunk, not expanded (I still believe that too). I spent my college years talking people of all kinds out of joining up, and yet here I was on the mall with people who wanted in. Meanwhile, health care reform vanished, and Newt Gingrich took out a contract on America.

The lesson of the Clinton years for me was this: Clinton was no progressive, but he was certainly better than the alternative and he got precious little support from us. After 12 years of Reagan-Bush, we had a chance to get some of what we wanted, but we didn't know what to do.

The reaction to Rick Warren feels a bit like that 1993 rally to me. Angry opposition based on the easy reflex to the old identity politics. For the record, I'm disgusted by Rick Warren too, not simply because of his vile homophobia, but because I resent bitterly any intrusion of religion into our public life - whether it is Warren's brand of feel-good ol time Christianity, Lieberman's Judiasm or Scalia's catholicism. Why do we need a religious invocation at all??!!

So here we are, after 8 years that have made the Reagan-Bush years look positively utopian and how will we respond? The question I pose here is not whether Obama will disappoint some on the left - he will. Rather, I wonder if what constitutes the left is prepared to trade purity for victory, compromised accomplishment for lost causes.

I propose this New Year's Resolution for progressives. Say it out loud with me: In 2009 I will not pit "better" against "best." I will concede some in order to achieve more. I will not fall on my sword just because some piece of legislation or some presidential appointment does not score 100% on my ideological purity test. I will enjoy winning, even if the victory is incomplete.

Change was the mantra of the Obama campaign. Were progressives listening? Are we prepared to change as well?

London Calling, Again

2008-12-22T14:07:00.005-05:00

Winding up my visit here with a few more observations:

Over the last 10-15 years, London has been blanketed by CCTV cameras. They are almost literally everywhere, and thus it is nearly impossible to walk, or to take the Tube, or to drive without being spied on camera at least once during your journey.

It is a level of surveillance that makes many Americans (including this one) uncomfortable. But it also underscores a real difference between American and Europeans about how the best social order is to be achieved.

Americans profess - Dick Cheney notwithstanding - a deep commitment to individual rights. The rights of individuals trump, in the minds of many Americans, any notion of collective rights, or collective responsibilities. Europeans, on the other hand, have had a more highly developed sense of the common good, and individual liberties have often been asked to take a back seat to it.

The notion of individual freedom hardly needs defending, but perhaps we ought to look at the costs we pay for our commitment to those freedoms. Economically, we view ourselves purely as individuals operating in the market place. When any one of us doesn't succeed in that market, we have always viewed the failure as individual rather than structural: it's my fault that I can't find a job. Government policies for the unemployed and poor have tended to agree.

Likewise, we treat health care as an individual proposition rather than a collective right. The notion that in America one's health is tied so directly to one's employment (and wealth) strikes Europeans as just short of barbaric.

Most absurdly, the Supreme Court has ruled - willfully ignoring all the historical evidence to the contrary - that gun ownership is an individual right, just like the right to speech, not a collective right that can be effectively regulated through the political process. (For more on the history of the 2nd amendment see my colleague Saul Cornell's book A Well Regulated Militia).

In Europe, where collective responsibilities compete more equally with individual rights, the result has been a more lively urban realm - measured by the life on the streets and in the parks and in cultural venues of all sorts. It can't simply be a coincidence that as Americans venerate individual rights, we have retreated further and further from public life - into "gated communities," private transportation, and on and on. We are scared of each other to a dispiriting extent, and for a generation have not been able even to discuss the idea of a commonweal.

Massaging the balance between public and private, between the individual and the group is the very essence of what urbanism means. Cities, after all, are where people come together to pursue their private dreams, but in a way which makes it possible for others to pursue theirs as well. No one in a city gets to do anything s/he wants at whatever time s/he wants precisely in order that we can all do much of what we want to do most of the time.

Londoners have given up some measure of their individual freedom as CCTV cameras have proliferated across the city. The thousands of them that crowd the streets and shops and parks and paths, making this one of the most energetic urban spaces on the planet, don't seem to mind too much.

London Calling

2008-12-19T16:38:00.004-05:00

Greetings from London! where I've snuck off for two weeks.

There is nothing so tedious as Americans who come back from Europe moaning about how much better things are there than they are in the United States. So with that by way of begging your pardon, here I go.

I haven't been here in two years, and I'm struck particularly that England is moving so much faster in directions to deal with environmental issues, urban questions, and sustainability than we are in the US.

Take public transportation (which I have been taking since I got here): it isn't simply that the trains, buses and subways are so crowded with users, or that they run so much better than they do almost anywhere in America - that much has been true for a while. But it is clear that in London, the rest of Great Britain (and in Germany where I spent 3 days last week) governments and the private sector are aggressively investing to make these systems even better. Modern buses and bus stops (that tell you what bus is due to arrive when); sleek modern train cars; and most of all speed. London to Paris now in 2hrs 15 min.

By comparison, Amtrak looks positively shabby. When I heard that Barak Obama will travel from Philadelphia to DC for the inauguration, I joked that the inauguration would probably be delayed for several hours because of an Amtrak breakdown. American railroad track can't accommodate high-speed trains, and no one has bothered to invest in upgrading most of that track in about half a century.

Likewise food production. Stop into any ordinary supermarket in London and you will find that locally (or regionally) produced food, organic food, free range meat etc are widely available. What is still largely a boutique niche in the United States is entirely common and mainstream here.

Climate change is an accepted fact here - not something with scare quotes around it as in America - and so the discussion is not whether to act, but how. The winner of the design competition for the next generation of double-decker buses for London, announced today, will be hydrogen-powered. And thanks to the "congestion fee" which charges people who drive private cars in central London, the buses make it around town more efficiently than they used to.

All of which is to say that being here, I can't help but feel in a more palpable way that America no longer leads the world, not at least on these critical issues. We look dated, backward, and thoroughly mid-twentieth century, not twenty-first. When I first came to London in the 1970s it felt quaint and old-fashioned, like it hadn't quite emerged out of the trauma of WWII. Now I wonder if English people feel the same way when they come to the United States. What was it that Ezra Pound wrote about Western civilization in 1920? an old bitch, gone in the teeth.

The Abdication of George II

2008-12-03T18:43:00.005-05:00

I won't claim that we have been witnessing something unprecedented, but I'm hard pressed to think of any analogy. We have had presidents die in office, one who resigned in disgrace, but I don't know that we've ever had a president who simply abdicated the way George Bush has. More than that, I'm not sure we've ever had such a shirking of responsibility that has gone without much of an outcry.

George began checking out of the White House, without actually leaving it, after the elections of 2006. After the troop escalation in Iraq early in 2007 he simply referred matters concerning the war to General David Petreaus. Nothing could be debated, discussed or assessed without Petreaus weighing in. For most of 2007, the Decider simply deferred to the General. In other countries they have a phrase to describe what happens in an alleged democracy when a General really runs the show.

A year later, after the economy began to tank, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson assumed the job of day-to-day president. He briefed the press and hectored Congress. He became the public face of the administration trying to deal with the collapse of markets. W was replaced with Hank.

In his first address after winning the presidency, Barack Obama reminded the nation that we only have one president at a time. He's quite right, but apparently someone forgot to tell Bush. He has blithely punted all the problems he created to the new administration weeks before that administration actually has the power to enact policy.

There is no question that the nation is sick of and embarrassed by George Bush. The Washington press corps left the White House press room for Capitol Hill after the 2006 midterms, and took much of the nation's attention with it. This accounts, I think, for the fact that the 2008 election cycle began so early - we were all so desperate to be done with the Bush fiasco that we wanted to start thinking about his replacement as soon as possible.

Still, Bush's abdication of his job - he was elected for a four-year term after all - verges on dereliction of duty, a Constitutional crisis, small by the standards of the others he has created, but a crisis nonetheless. The nation does only have one president at a time, after all, but now we effectively have none.

Changing the Cabinetry

2008-11-29T15:58:00.005-05:00

Fifteen or so years ago, as a new Russia emerged for the wreckage of the old Soviet Union, the American news media used to report of this or that Russian political figure that he "was a former Communist." It was always delivered ominously, in somber tones meant to chill, and to suggest that really the old evil empire crowd had not gone away.

Of course, most in the media failed to recognize or acknowledge that running a country the size and complexity of Russia requires people with some level of experience. In the early 1990s the only people in Russia with that experience were, ipso facto, former Communists. In fact, virtually everyone, except those in the gulag, was a former Communist.

I've been remembering that episode of obtuseness as I've listened to certain of the chatter that has greeted President Obama's (and let's just call him president shall we? He is certainly carrying out the job with more energy than the guy still eating dinner in the White House) cabinet picks: Wait! These people have connections to the Clinton Administration! Obama is abandoning his promise of change because he's bringing to the White House people who already know their way around!

The charge is absurd on its face, and plenty of people have pointed that out. Americans may say they want people "outside the Beltway" but those people tend not to be very effective once they get to DC. Jimmy Carter was elected because a nation hung-over from Watergate wanted someone with no Washington connections. Carter didn't do so well translating that outsider status into effective governing.

But rather than rehearse the obvious need for experienced people, especially at a moment of crisis, let me offer another way to measure change: Compare these nominations with George Bush's eight years ago.

Bush's top picks revealed the extent to which we were all trapped inside the Bush Family Dysfunctional Thanksgiving Dinner. Colin Powell and Condi Rice were selected precisely because of their connections to dad and were designed to bring back dad's friends to the White House. The picks which proved most consequential - Rumsfeld and Cheney - took us even further back, all the way to the Ford Administration, where Cheney helped kill Ford's energy plan among other things.

But perhaps the nomination which best demonstrated just how inept this administration would prove to be was John Ashcroft. You will recall that Ashcroft got the job of running the Justice Department because he lost his Senate seat in the 2000 election. To a dead man. The reward for failing to beat the deceased Mel Carnahan was the job of Attorney General. It was the first example of what became all too common: for Bush, our MBA president, no failure is so great that it doesn't deserve a promotion. (And at the very end of his administration he continues to operate in exactly the same way, giving bailout money to the bank executives who got us in this mess in the first place).

Ashcroft's nomination told us all we needed to know about the coming administration - its contempt for brains, for integrity, for competence, its true-believing zealotry. By comparison, Obama's selections represent an dramatic and welcome change indeed.

Gates Keeper?

2008-11-23T19:40:00.004-05:00

As Barack Obama's cabinet has been shaping up, rumors circulate that he may keep current Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his position. More than anything else, Obama has demonstrated a desire to have smart, competent and pragamatic people around him and Gates may be all those things. Many in the media and in Congress have given him high marks for his work at the Pentagon, though honestly, after Donald Rumsfeld a crash-test dummy would have been an improvement.

Keeping Gates in the job would also allow Obama to make real his promise to put aside partisanship in favor of effectiveness, demonstrating to Republicans his willingness to bring them into his process of governing. (Caution here: Bill Clinton made a similar gesture when he made Republican William Cohen Secretary of Defense. That certainly didn't curb the rabid, drooling Republicans on Capitol Hill any.)

What troubles me about keeping Gates on in his current job, however, is precisely this: by keeping a Republican holdover in the Pentagon, Obama would tacitly concede the assertion that Republicans are "stronger" on national security and defense issues. This was the one issue area where McShame held any advantage in most polling. It remains the most stubborn myth of the Republican Party.

In fact, of course, by any and all measures we have, the Bush/McShame foreign and military policy has been a disaster for American security and our global position. We didn't get a chance to talk about this much during the fall campaign, because national security issues - and the war in Iraq - disappeared from discussion, were understandably buried under the collapsing economy.

Just as it is clear that a 21st century Democratic New Deal must come to the rescue of an economy ruined by 30 years of Republican Free Market Fundamentalism, so too we need to have a dramatically new approach to military policy. Robert Gates might well execute such a policy, but Democrats need to take charge of this in order to finally kill the idea that Republicans have kept us safer.

GM, We Told You So

2008-11-15T12:57:00.005-05:00

Most observers agree that the age of Free Market Fundamentalism is now over. With the swirl of events leading up the election, we didn't take the time to pause long enough over Alan Greenspan's Oscar-worthy performance in front of Congress where he did a remarkable imitation of the police lieutenant Louie in Casablanca: He was shocked, SHOCKED that bankers could behave this way.

During the reign of the Fundamentalists, not only were the unregulated markets supposed to solve all our problems - that didn't work out so well actually - but we assumed that the private sector was the source of all wisdom. About everything. The best the benighted public sector might hope for over the last generation was to enter into a "public-private partnership" through which private enterprise would share all its experience, sound judgment and good leadership with the otherwise hapless public realm.

With this in mind, I point out this small irony to GM's Rick Wagoner, and the other auto executives currently shuffling around Washington looking for a bailout handout:

Let's start by giving GM credit for some success. While GM and the others have failed to keep up with the competition from Honda and Toyota in the business of making cars, they have succeeded in lobbying Congress and the Bush administration to keep fuel efficiency standards low. The auto industry couldn't afford that kind of regulation, Congress was told, and Congress has no business telling GM how to run its business anyway.

So now it turns out that no one wants to buy GM's over-sized SUVs and GM doesn't have fuel-efficient alternatives to offer consumers. How 'bout that. Follow this with me. If GM had embraced higher fuel standards, rather than lobby to defeat them, they might have been forced to make better cars? And if they had been forced to make better cars, perhaps they would be better positioned in the current marketplace? And if they had better cars to sell right now, perhaps their financial situation would not be so dire?

I wonder if Rick, hat in hand, now laments those lost opportunities.

The Big 3 may in fact be too big to fail - too many Americans might well suffer if they went out of business. The Big 3 may have to be bailed out in some way. But perhaps we should conclude from this that maybe, just maybe the public has not only the right to regulate the market in ways that advance the common good, but also a wisdom that GM and the others clearly don't. Maybe it is time to recognize that businessmen can learn a few things from the public sector too. Perhaps it is time to say to GM (and AIG, and all the rest): we told you so.

Faithful Citizens? Papal Politics, 2008

2008-11-11T08:51:00.007-05:00

Over the course of its nearly 2000 year history, the Catholic church is certainly no stranger to hypocrisy. To review that litany here would take up far too much space, but I think Daniel Goldhagen, in an essay some years ago in the New York Review of Books, explained the source of that hypocrisy persuasively.

The Catholic church occupies a unique position in the world as both a major religion and a nation-state. In the former role, it offers moral prescriptions - or threats - to adherents; in the latter role, it must move in the world of politics and power.

Dancing between these two roles has enabled the church to defend its hypocrisy in one arena by justifying it in the other. So, for example, when people have asked how Pope Pius XII could have, in good conscience, sat on his hands while jews were deported to the camps during World War II, his defenders have insisted that the Pope had an obligation to protect the institution of the Vatican, which might have been destroyed had the Pope spoken out. When, on the other, many wondered what business some bishops had inserting themselves so aggressively into the 2004 presidential campaign by denouncing John Kerry's pro-choice position, the bishops insisted that they had a moral duty to speak out. And so it has gone, deflecting criticism on one front by retreating to the other.

Which may help explain what the Times reports today. Among those already lining up to attack the Obama administration - along with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and John Boehner - are Catholic bishops. Never mind that the administration is still two months away from moving into office.

The issue, naturally, is abortion, and more immediately the likelihood that President Obama will reverse the Bush ban on stem cell research. (Note: I can't resist pointing out this particular feculant hypocrisy. The bishops believe that to use stems cells in medical research is to destroy a human life. Catholics have always had a testy relationship with scientific research - the Vatican finally repealed its Inquisition ruling against Galileo in 1992! When couples pursue IVF procedures, however, lots of eggs get fertilized and only a few implanted - the rest wind up destroyed. No public call yet from the bishops to close down these "baby-killing" clinics).

In its 2007 voter's guide, "Faithful Citizenship," the church suggests that there are a number of issues, in addition to abortion, that ought shape a good Catholic's vote: poverty, the degraded environment, torture. But abortion trumps them all, and many Catholic bishops instructed their flocks this way.

The Catholic church has become a single-issue operation not, I suspect, because of a moral calculation, but rather because of a political one. The Church in the United States - or at least much of it - has decided to be vocal about abortion because it can make common political cause with conservative Protestants for whom abortion is also the one and true issue. If Church leaders were actually to speak out about the Iraq War, for example, they would risk alienating those Baptists and Pentacostals and Whatever-It-Is-Church that Sarah Palin belongs to.

By fixating on abortion to the exclusion of every other issue of social justice, the American Church made a choice to tether itself to the Republican Party. In so doing, it believed it would have a seat at the table for the Thousand Year Rovian Reich that the Republican Party promised. And now, like the Republican Party, it now finds itself with eggs on its mitre. Catholics voted for Obama by 54%; Hispanic Catholics by an even larger margin.

So the fighting among the Bishops now meeting in Baltimore to plot their attacks on the Obama Administration looks much like the civil war erupting among angry Republicans. Should the Church double-down on its bad bet, threatening even more divine retribution for anyone who supports abortion rights and family planning? Or should it try to soften its position to appeal to alienated parishoners/voters?

Either way, the choice will be a political calculus masquerading as moral certitude.

Buckeye Blue(s)

2008-11-06T19:30:00.003-05:00

Ohio was called early on Tuesday night! Most of us assumed we'd be waiting until midnight to figure out just how many ballots the state GOP had stolen. But the race turned out to be less close than some polls predicted - 4 points. A convincing and triumphant performance, and a relief to those of us who have felt like pariahs for the last four years, being personally blamed for the 2004 results.

That all said, a few other things to notice: Buckeyes bucked the national trend and turned out in lower numbers than they did last time. Strange because the weather was stunningly beautiful all across the state and in 2004 it was 48* and rainy all day.

In a post here some weeks ago I suggested that the turn-out key might be not how many Obama voters came out but how many Republicans stayed home. That seems to have been the case. Obama got about as many votes as Kerry did -roughly 2.5 million though this time that amount to 51% of the total. What that also means that McShame's 2.5 million was nearly 350,000 votes less than Bush got.

Obama clearly did well in the urban areas of Columbus, Toledo and Cleveland. Most stunning, he took Hamilton County in the southwest corner of the state. Hamilton includes Cincinnati, but is otherwise deeply conservative. Bush won the county with 52.5%; Obama won it with 52.1%. That may be the most dramatic percentage switch of any county. Likewise, Obama nibbled away at the margins in some rural areas as well. These counties are filled with Pavlov's Republicans - Heinrich Himmler could run as a Republican in these area and be guaranteed about 55%.

Yet, even in this I suspect that Obama ate into these margins largely because Republicans stayed home. Here in Greene County Bush won with 61%; McShame with 58%. That's three points. But Bush got about 45,000 votes here; McShame got 39,000. Kerry got 29,000; Obama 27,000. I haven't looked at too many other counties yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if this pattern repeated itself in several other places. The punch line, I think, is that we have a rare instance when a lower voter turn-out helped the Democrat.

I bring all this up because I think it raises an interesting question about campaign organization. There is no question that Obama built an amazing machine even in these parts of the state. I was a part of it and it was truly inspiring. We also know that Kerry built very little and relied on a slap-dash effort by Move-On. Yet, at least in Greene County Kerry got more votes. I'm not sure what to conclude from this except perhaps to say that Ohio may still be an essentially Republican state, despite the 2006 elections and the triumph of Tuesday night. They just didn't want to vote for McShame.

In other news, the state flipped 2 House seats, which is a major accomplishment given the near-perfect gerrymandering engineered by the GOP in the last round. In a previous post I suggested people watch the OH-7 where I thought Sharen Neuhardt had a chance to win a seat vacated by a long-time Republican incumbent. David Hobson was sent to Washington for 18 years and made absolutely no impression there at all. Neuhardt lost - big - to a Steve Austria who had been term-limited out of the State Senate. He was described by a local paper as never having had an idea that didn't come straight from the GOP headquarters. He is now Congressman Austria. Ah well.

So perhaps the most interesting news of the election here is that the Democrats took control, just barely, of the State House. The districts get re-drawn in 2 years with a Democratic governor and a Democratic House. It's gerrymandering time!!

Parents Beware! You May Regret Obama

2008-11-05T08:59:00.003-05:00

Much has been made of the youth vote, which turned out in big numbers for Obama. Less has been made of the youth vote of those too young to vote. Like my children.

My 9yr old daughter was the first in our household to get on the Obama bandwagon. Back in February, well before the Ohio primary, she posted a sign on her bedroom door anouncing that no one could enter unless they supported Obama. She was joined shortly - about 15 minutes later - by her younger brother.

This posed problems for their mother since she was still leaning to Hillary. Undecided still, I kept my mouth shut, and my daughter went to sleep every night in Obama Pyjamas provided by her grandparents.

All seemed fine through the summer and fall as all four of us worked hard for Obama. My children turn out to be very effective door-to-door canvassers. I woke my daughter up late last night so she could see Obama's speech, which moved both her parents to tears.

Then this morning I began to see it all going bad. I was greeted by several requests - demands really - involving candy, parties and puppies and each punctuated with "Yes We Can!" I could only counter with: "No you can't!" which really doesn't have the same bumper-sticker resonance.

Parents beware: Obama's election has created empowerment run amok, at least on this domestic front. The rebellion has begun here - it must be squashed.

The Power of the Conservative Brand, or A Glass Half Empty

2008-11-04T01:39:00.003-05:00

It's the day before the election, Obama is still up in the polls, and he even made a Halloween visit to my hometown (Highland) in the really-red Rust Belt state of Indiana. (This was big news--the last president or presidential candidate to come to Highland was Calvin Coolidge.) But it is not difficult to see the glass as half empty. No matter what happens tomorrow, I can't help but think, the Democrats have already lost.

How can one be so glum in this time of potentially historic victory? Because the Left still seems to be losing the branding battle. What is astonishing about this election and these past few years is that "conservative" is still a label of pride in mainstream American politics--and "liberal" remains a pejorative. That this is so remains a testament to the power of Republican marketing and branding.

Consider this: it is certainly not difficult to make the case that a (neo)conservative ideology led to a war in Iraq that was (by the standards of the war's early advocates) a colossal failure and managed to destroy America's standing in the world. This debacle could have banished conservatism to the sidelines of American politics for a generation. But it hasn't.

Consider also that it is not difficult to make the case that conservative principles have not only wrecked the nation's foreign policy, but have also brought the nation's economy to its knees. A de-regulated market preceded a credit crisis and conditions that many are comparing to the Great Depression.

And yet conservatism remains, for the most part, untainted.

Don't believe me? Look at the presidential debate transcripts. Yes, it is true that McCain has run from the Republican party, and has emphasized his past bipartisanship. The "Republican" brand has suffered greatly from the damage to the foreign policy and especially the economy.

But in the debate, McCain could still believe he was scoring political points by calling Obama a "liberal." And Obama defended himself by saying--proudly--that he has worked with Tom Coburn, who Obama bragged was "one of the most conservative Republicans."

In other words, the economy is in ruin and we are bogged down in an endless war (or at least an apparently endless nation-building project), but Obama is up only 7 points--and the "conservative" brand remains popular and amazingly blemish-free.

If Obama wins on Tuesday, I will certainly celebrate. But I'll also be thinking about the remaining battle: a re-branding effort for liberalism so that a destroyed economy and/or a disastrous war are no longer necessary for a Democratic victory in a presidential campaign.

Obama the Mugwump

2008-10-30T13:24:00.007-04:00

As I have listened to McShame/Moosehead (Geezer/Dingbat in a yard sign I saw recently) attack Barack Obama for being a closet socialist something didn't seem quite right. No, it isn't that the charge is ludicrous on its face - what, after all, does one expect from a woman who has said that god wants to us to build more pipelines in Alaska (god is so mavericky, isn't she??!!)

Rather, I found myself asking: Is this the same Barack Obama that McShame accused of being a secret Hooverite in the second presidential debate?? How did the man compared to Herbert Hoover, who staunchly defended his vision of free-market, "associative" capitalism even as it spiraled down the drain, suddenly become the love-child of Che Guevara?

Perhaps McShame has spotted something here the rest of us have missed? Perhaps Obama really can contain the contradictions of being both Herbert Hoover and Eugene V. Debs? Does this mean that under an Obama administration we will get capitalistic socialism? or socialized capitatlism? Gads!

Or does it really mean that the McShame/Moosehead campaign has fallen so far off the rails that they can't even keep their sleazy smearing "on message." I understand that over the weekend McShame will accuse Obama of being a Dreyfusard. Or a Jacobin, I can't remember which. And neither can he.

THAT SOUTHERN THING

2008-10-29T11:20:00.005-04:00

The 2008 election has messed with the conventional wisdom on race and American politics. The photo above, taken in Martinsville, Indiana, a longtime stronghold of the KKK, is a sign of how the times are a' changing. At least some white voters, who have a distaste for African Americans, who don't live or work near them, and who romanticize the old Confederacy will nonetheless be pulling the lever for the first time for a black candidate.

For at least some voters, interest trumps identity.

H/t to Rustbelt reader Bryant for this one.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

2008-10-27T12:56:00.003-04:00

Sometimes common sense trumps all. While some voters continue to be attracted to Sarah Palin because of her "aw shucks," if expensively coiffed, persona, Joe Plumber types just aren't buying it. Listen to one western Pennsylvania white voter, quoted in today's New York Times.

“She’s always talking about the ‘Average Joe,’ ” Jeremy Long said. “Average me! I don’t want myself in the Oval Office. I want someone smarter.”

Even though the Times finds a lot of voters out in Pennsylvania steel country who are uncomfortable with Obama because he's black, they also respect that he's smart. And for once, brains seem to be trumping race.

Voting and American Decline

2008-10-25T14:25:00.007-04:00

It has become an increasingly common topic of conversation: Are we watching the end of the American Century? Is this what the collapse of empire feels like? Several recent books address this notion directly or indirectly -- Alan Ryan reviewed five of them in the October 23 issue of the New York Review of Books (good essay). A colleague of mine who specializes in Roman history nods his head sagely and says: Yes, this is Rome in the late days, complete with the beer and circus that has characterized so much of our politics over the last generation.

These conversations tend to focus on The Big Picture: American geo-military position after the Iraq debacle; the rise of emerging economies; the consequences of borrowing so much money from China; the failure of the United States to respond to the climate crisis.

As the election enters its final (thank god) week, however, I'm struck by a smaller but no less dispiriting symptom of American decline. More and more of us, to judge by what I'm reading, hearing on the streets, and watching on the internet, simply assume that our elections are corrupt and dishonest. When early voting in Florida began, one late-night comedian quipped: "Early voting has begun in Florida. You know what that means? Florida has probably already screwed up the election and we won't know it until November 4." Scroll down here and you'll see that Tom posted a funny Simpson's clip. When Homer tries to vote for Obama and he registers six votes for McCain instead. Funny stuff.

And as Homer said once, in another cartoon context: It's funny because its true. Or true enough. There is no question that the 2000 election was stolen; there is compelling evidence that the 2004 election in Ohio - at least - was also swiped. And by god if there aren't reports of voting problems already in Florida.

This all went under-reported in the press, and Americans largely shrugged their collective shoulders and took it for granted. It is a sorry commentary on the state of The Greatest Democracy on Earth that we are largely resigned to stolen elections.

We should be clear. American elections have always been two parts democratic process and one part three-card monte game. The wonderful painting by George Caleb Bingham of the "County Election" from the 1850s is enough to dispel the idea that our elections were once pure. (The painting features drunkenness, debauchery and voter intimidation.) For several generations black Americans had their votes taken from them for the crime of being black; women couldn't vote at all until 1920. American elections have never been models of democratic probity.

Still, rather than cracking jokes, we should be demanding better. The first responsibility of any real democracy - before invading other countries, or bailing out its investment banks - is to make sure the democratic process works. That citizens are permitted to vote, and that each and every vote is counted honestly. It is a fundamental failure of our democracy, therefore, that we can't provide enough ballots or machines that work, that we can't keep polling places open so that working people can vote, that people wait in lines so long that they look like the third world simply to exercise their most basic right in our society.

It has become the stuff of jokes of the sort we used to make about banana republics. Now, however, we are laughing at ourselves.

Day Late, Dollar Short

2008-10-19T14:42:00.006-04:00

For this year's F. Scott Fitzgerald "There Are No Second Acts In American Life Award," I nominate. . . Colin Powell!!

Powell, of course, endorsed Barack Obama for president a few days ago. Rumors had been swirling as long ago as February that Powell would make this endorsement - now that Obama is up by double-digits in some major polls, I guess the former general felt the time was finally right to shock and awe us with his official blessing.

I'm delighted that Obama has received this endorsement, and I hope it has some effect on people's perceptions of Obama's foreign and military policy cred. Perhaps it might even prompt the press to notice that John McShame served as Enabler-in-Chief in the Senate for the Bush foreign policy, arguably the most disastrous in American history. I suspect, though, it won't matter much beyond the Sunday morning network bloviators.

But we should be clear: this endorsement is not so much about Obama as it is about Powell trying to rehabilitate himself -- re-positioning himself for some sort of second act, after the self-imposed exile he has been in since the debacle of his career in the Bush White House. This endorsement marks Powell's official re-entry into American political life.

Powell had his moment. Several of them, in fact, when his opinion might have mattered, might have made an important difference. Let's review: After stealing the 2000 election, Bush chose Powell to be his Secretary of State. Powell was universally respected and admired. His choice served, more than any other cabinet appointment, to give legitimacy to an otherwise illegitimate administration. Powell could have said "no" to being used in this way, but he didn't.

Then Powell allowed himself to be used again when he gave that now-infamous speech to the United Nations justifying the invasion of Iraq. Once it became clear just how badly he had been used, Powell said nothing. He might have resigned before the 2004 election; indeed, he might have endorsed John Kerry exactly four years ago. Either act might have changed the outcome four years ago. But Powell said nothing. Hell! He even could have challenged Bush in the Republican primary in 2004, which would have left him as the odds-on favorite this year. Instead, channeling his inner Hamlet, he skulked quietly out of power, and did not even have the courage to join the chorus of critics of the war.

Who knows whether Powell's authoritative voice could have helped changed the direction of policy over the last 4-5 years? We do know what happened without that voice, however, and Powell stands guilty of silence when silence was unacceptable. The pattern repeats itself even with this endorsement. If Powell's benediction matters at all, it would have mattered a lot more in August or September, not two weeks before the election. Imagine what impact it would have had if it had come in Denver?

Like Robert McNamara a generation ago, Powell wants us to forgive him the dreadful mistakes he made without ever really having to admit that he made them. By jumping on the Obama band-wagon so late in the game, Powell hopes that he can resume the role of elder-statesman he seemed destined to play before he let his loyalty to the Bush family supercede his loyalty to the nation, leaving him in utter disgrace.

THE REAL AMERICA

2008-10-19T10:42:00.004-04:00

A recurring theme in the Republican end-of-days campaign is that the GOP base represents "real America." As candidate Palin put it in Greensboro, North Carolina:

We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

Statistical whiz kid and political analyst Nate Silver offers this graphic insight into the "real America" that the McCain/Palin campaign is mobilizing. It's a very, very white place, much like the Republican Party itself. The above chart, which Silver assembled, lists the 44 cities where Sarah Palin has held rallies and their racial composition. America's population is 72 percent white; the "wonderful little pockets," by contrast are 83.3 percent white. It's no surprise that in these homogeneous places, the angry Republican base has let loose with accusations that Obama is a terrorist, a Muslim, and a radical who will bring Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Jeremiah Wright into his cabinet.

Directly above is Silver's chart of the cities where Obama has held rallies. Not surprisingly, they are, in the aggregate significantly more diverse. The average white population in Obama rally towns is almost 70 percent, fairly close to the national figures. But Obama is also rallying in places with larger black populations than the national average. Here we can see a glimpse into the two-pronged Democratic strategy: to drive up turnout among African American voters, while appealing to the independent, white swing voters who are essential to victory. The strategy seems to be working.

FDR AND LBJ AGAIN?

2008-10-17T17:23:00.003-04:00

It's not often that a Wall Street Journal editorial is worth reprinting in its entirety. But this one is. The WSJ editors are convinced that America is about to enter a New New Deal or another Great Society. I will calm the WSJ's fears by noting that there is not a particularly vigorous left flank in the Democratic Party as there was in 1933 or 1964. It will take more than just an Obama presidency and a sizeable Democratic majority in the House and Senate to accomplish real change. The Social Security Act of 1935 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to name two landmark pieces of legislation, resulted from a combination of legislative and bureaucratic innovation and grassroots pressure. If the WSJ is right and we have a Democratic supermajority in place in January, it will up to those of us on the left to do what our predecessors in the Great Depression and in the 1960s did best: to put pressure, pressure, and more pressure on the new administration and congressional majority.

But if half of what the WSJ fears comes to pass, America will be in better shape than we have been in decades.

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
[Review & Outlook]

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.

The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.

- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.

The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.

- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.

- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.

- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.

Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.

- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.

It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

To the Wall Street Journal editors: Amen!

NATIONAL REVIEW DEATH WATCH

2008-10-17T14:07:00.005-04:00

The wingnutty declension of the National Review continues. In response to Barack Obama's defense of reproductive freedom, NR blogger Ed Whelan suggests that the Democratic candidate (whom he calls a "former fetus") would have been aborted had he been born twelve years later, after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Such bizarre counterfactual history is yet more evidence that the right-wing intellectual is an endangered species.

JOE THE PLUMBER

2008-10-16T16:45:00.004-04:00

Joe Wurzelbacher is now America's most famous working-class guy. The 34-year old plumber from northern Ohio is enjoying his Warholian fifteen minutes. Fox News is doing an exclusive interview with him tomorrow night.

I'm not sure what Joe makes, but it's surely nowhere close to $250,000, although plumbers are among the best paid construction workers, in part because nearly one third of them belong to trade unions.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides detailed data on plumbers in its annual occupational employment statistics report. "Median hourly earnings of wage and salary plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters were $20.56," reports the BLS. The middle 50 percent earned between $15.62 and $27.54. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $12.30, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $34.79. The annual median wage for plumbers in the Toledo area is $62,070. Not bad, but nowhere close to the Obama tax threshold of a quarter million. And he probably never will be. There aren't many plumbers making hefty six digit salaries.

But even if Joe makes $62,070 (and he probably does not, because his company isn't unionized, he doesn't have a plumbing license, and he does mostly small home repair jobs), what's clear is that Joe's taxes are not going up in the next four years, unless John McCain taxes his health insurance benefits.

The Republican tactic has long been to play to people's fears--and that's just what's going on with Joe. The poor guy, whatever his politics are, is becoming a tool of the right-wing. But whether or not the now-famous Ohio plumber supports McCain or Obama or even bothers to vote, let's hope that the rest of the electorate gives the Republican ticket the flush.

THE END OF THE SIXTIES

2008-10-15T09:11:00.002-04:00

For forty years, our national elections have been referendums on 1968. The first campaign against 1968 began in 1968, when Richard Nixon exploited fears of urban riots, countercultural love fests, and campus disorder to win the hearts and minds of the Silent Majority. Nixon ramped up the efforts in 1972, when he managed to paint relatively strait-laced George McGovern as the candidate of acid, amnesty, and abortion. In 1976, both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford ran against the 1960s. And in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to make America great again by rolling the clock back to the antediluvian 1950s.

As the 1960s grew more distant, the period remained a useful political foil. George H.W. Bush promised to undo the "Vietnam syndrome," and marketed the Persian Gulf war, complete with its careful stage-management of news reporting from the battlefront, as the anti-Vietnam War. In 1992 and 1996, Republicans lambasted the moderate Bill Clinton as a "counterculture McGovernik" who joined anti-American protests, smoked pot, and lived the Dionysian life of the love-ins right up through Gennifer and Monica. Even Al Gore and John Kerry, both of whom actually served in the military during the Vietnam War, faced accusations of 60s-ish treason, despite the fact that their Republican opponent and his running mate both dodged the draft and avoided service in the quagmire of Southeast Asia.

This year, the Republicans have once again played the Sixties card--in fact they has played the whole Sixties deck. Remember McCain's advertisement "Love," which introduced McCain's love of country motif with stark contrasts between hippies and the captive Vietnam veteran? Remember McCain's humorous jibe about "being a little tied up" when Woodstock happened? And now it's all Ayers all the time. Fox has become the Weathermen Channel.

McCain's evocation of the "bad 1960s" has utterly failed. For one, a rapidly dwindling segment of the population was even sentient during the Summer of Love. Think about this: graduates of the class of 1968 are 62 years old. McCain's reprisal of the debates of the 1960s might still be meaningful to the population of aging boomers, but for younger voters (especially from my age on downward), the 60s are history, not memory. The McCain campaign's obsession with the Weather Underground, a group about which few Americans know anything anymore, is a reminder of the Republican candidate's age. Only the wingnuts can (dangerously) envision Barack Obama plotting to blow up the Pentagon or holding up a Brinks armored car. The association is preposterous.

Voters, even those with a strong sense of history, are more concerned with the here and now. And those without a strong sense of history have been won over by a campaign that is talkin' about their generation. The 1960s, my friends, are over.

THE PITBULL ON THIN ICE

2008-10-12T10:18:00.004-04:00

I've never been much of a hockey fan, despite my Midwestern heritage. Everything about hockey is white: the season, the players, the fans, the culture.

When Ed Snider, the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers invited Sarah Palin to drop the first puck at last night's Flyers-Rangers game, Republicans and Democrats alike assumed that this would be a celebratory moment for the Pitbull with Lipstick to rally her Rustbelt white middle-class base.

Instead, the Flyers fans booed. (The Republicans should have known that Philly sports fans are infamously hostile, especially when they smell blood.)

It was a proud moment for this adopted Philadelphian. The pitbull with lipstick has been defanged by her own kind, hockey moms and hockey dads. If the GOP can't win them, their effort to take the White House is on thin ice.

Kooks 'r Us

2008-10-12T09:35:00.007-04:00

In an essay posted recently on The Daily Beast, Christopher Buckley -of the Connecticut Buckleys - announced that he is voting for Barack Obama. The essay is engaging and, at a stretch, even thoughtful.

In the essay, Buckley fils quotes Buckley pere who once told him: “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” It's a good line, and it serves to encapsulate Buckley's change of electoral heart.

The problem with it, as a piece of political analysis, is that it is a classic example of creating a distinction without a real difference. Kooks - and by kooks I think we mean zealots, demogogues, fanatical true-believers etc - have been at the center of the Republican party for about half a century now.

In the 1950s, the Republican establishment, embodied by figures like Senators Robert Taft and Prescott Bush, found Joe McCarthy distasteful and vulgar. But they also found him very useful. They did little to stop the McCarthy phenomenon until McCarthy accused the Army of harboring communists and President (formerly General) Eisenhower decided enough was enough.

In the 1960s, as the Republican party wandered the electoral wilderness, the Southern racists, especially in the Senate, began their migration to the Republican party. By the 1970s the Republican party counted among its most powerful and senior leaders Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms. They don't come any kookier (or nastier and more bigoted) than that. In 1968, of course, Nixon chose the raving Spiro Agnew to be his Vice President. Spiro brought his own particular brand of hate-mongering to the national stage.

All the while, the Republican establishment - the Wills and the Buckleys - fooled themselves into believing that they could keep these attacks dogs on a short leash, that they could trot the kooks out when needed but otherwise keep them under control.

By the 1980s, however, that was no longer true. Dog and master had traded places. Reagan - a kook in his own right - cemented the deal that put the Religious Right at the heart of the Republican party. Jerry Falwell became a trusted White House advisor, and the Republican party became hopelessly addicted to the votes of the religious nutjobs. Reagan's geniality made it easy for some people to ignore that, like they ignored Reagan's reliance on Nancy's astrologer for foreign policy advice.

Reagan also chucked the core principles of the Right establishment, though they could never really bring themselves to admit it. Reagan turned out to be a buster of budgets, a ballooner of deficits, a big-time, big-government conservative.

Some of the Right breathed a sigh of relief when George I took over - how good it must have felt to those guys from Connecticut to have a guy named "Poppy" back in charge. But George I won that election largely because of Lee Atwater. Shortly after that election Atwater contracted some gruesome cancer and spent the last few months of his life on a mea-culpa tour, apologizing for all the terrible things he had done. George I, it should be noted, never apologized for Willie Horton.

And so it has gone. The Republican party is now the party where Rick Santorum can rise to be the #3 guy in the Senate, where James Dobson is regarded as a king-maker, and where Sarah Palin could be plucked from tundra obscurity by none other than William Kristol, another of those "up by your bootstraps lad!" conservatives who inherited it all from his dad.

The vicious Brown-shirt displays we have seen in the last week at the McShame/Moosehead rallies aren't the kooks; it is the Republican party - heart and soul - unabashed, unashamed, unhinged. It may make it easier for dyed-in-the-wool Republicans like Buckley to vote for Obama if they tell themselves that their party has been hijacked by the kooks. In fact, the Republican party has been the party of kooks for a long time.

THE PALINIFICATION OF THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLIGENTSIA, OR THERE'S A RED UNDER YOUR BED! AND HE'S BLACK!

2008-10-09T09:38:00.004-04:00

The Republicans are whipping their wingnut base into a frenzy about Barack Obama and his scary otherness. The results are not pretty. But Obamaphobia has reached new levels of absurdity among the once formidable conservative intelligentsia. For the last few days, they have wrangled over whether Obama is a Maoist, a Stalinist, or a Democratic Socialist. The discussion is truly absurd.

The correct answer for you students of American political history: none of the above. Obama is a neoliberal on economic policy. He favors the public-private partnerships that have been the staple of bipartisan governance for the last forty years. There is nary a whiff of socialism among the Democratic candidate's advisors. Obama's foreign policy toward Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and Russia is, in every respect, mainstream. Were Dwight Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy to return in 2008, they would find little to challenge in Obama's resolutely centrist views on American international relations.

If you have the stomach for it, or if you want a good laugh, check out the lengthy exchange on Obama's supposed leftism at the Power Line and the National Review Online. William F. Buckley, Jr. would, no doubt, be appalled at the intellectual degradation of the journal that he founded, the National Review. Usually dead wrong, but often very smart in its heyday, the NR has fallen into an abyss of partisan foolishness. Rather than standing athwart history and yelling stop, as Buckley once described the conservative intellectual mission, the National Review's current stable of hacks, and their counterparts in the wingnutty blogosphere, are stuck in the mud. Let's call it the "Palinification" of the G.O.P., a substitution of bilious sloganeering for intelligent, if dangerously wrongheaded analysis. For those of us on the political left, the disappearance of an intellectually rigorous right wing is a good thing over the long run. But listening to wingnuts hurling spurious charges of terrorism, treason, and leftism is excruciating in the short run.

CAMILLE LOVES SARAH, THE SEQUEL

2008-10-08T10:33:00.003-04:00

Salon has given the chronically vapid Camille Paglia thousands of words to pontificate on all sorts of issues that she knows nothing about, such as Obama's views on foreign policy. Paglia argues somehow that Obama's resolutely centrist foreign policy is rooted in campus radicalism. "The university culture at Columbia and Harvard through which Obama passed has been drenched in a reflexive anti-Americanism for several decades. Armchair blame-America-first leftism is the default mode. Disdain for the military is rampant, and conservative voices are rarely heard." Had Paglia actually read Obama's foreign policy statements and had she actually examined Obama's by now well-known record at Columbia and Harvard...but well that would actually require fifteen minutes of research. For Paglia, logorrhea substitutes for logic.

But that's not the worst of it. Paglia continues her month-long swoon over Sarah Palin. And she reveals a new infatuation with Todd. She hails the Alaskan couple as Sarah "powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism." Here's the clincher: "That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism." If only Paglia had watched the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican convention, she would have observed a fascinating bit of political theater playing out. Bristol Palin (whose shotgun wedding Paglia would surely manage to interpret as a step forward for feminism) was the primary caretaker for little Trig. Cindy McCain rocked the sleeping child for a few minutes, no doubt in an effort to soften her sharp edges. But then, when the prime time cameras came on, Todd took over. Until the cameras were on, the baby got passed about among the womenfolk. As a feminist dad, I can say that my "cred" came from cradling my babies out of the limelight at two in the morning. A few minutes of theatrical parenting on prime time TV is not a blow for equal parenting. And anyhow, who watches the Palin clan when Todd is zipping about the tundra on his snowmobile?

To top it all off, Paglia throws in a good dollop of racial essentialism. "When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior!" So gushes Paglia, as her analysis degrades even further. She goes on: "the questions that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked."

And finally, Paglia defends Palin against charges that she's a dim bulb: "On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it..." Palin as empty verbal vessel waiting to be filled by Republican policy knowledge. Hmm. I'll leave it to my friends in cultural studies to interpret that one.

Two pieces of advice: Salon, it's time to can Paglia. And America, it's time to can Palin.

TAXES AND PATRIOTISM

2008-10-07T09:02:00.004-04:00

Joe Biden is right. Paying taxes is patriotic. For speaking an unpopular truth--indeed for being a true maverick--Biden has taken flak from the wannabe mavericks Senator McCain and Governor Palin. Our tax dollars support infrastructure improvements, medical care for the disabled and elderly, public education, national parks and recreation, and much more. Sometimes that money is misspent: I don't like how my tax dollars have been used in Iraq. Along with every other American citizen, about ten cents of my federal tax dollars went to pay for a recreation center in Wasilla, Alaska, that Sarah Palin funded through earmarks. A waste of my money--perhaps. But my responsibility as a voter and as an engaged citizen is to challenge elected officials to spend my money more effectively--not to dodge my responsibility and evade paying my taxes. (For those of you who weren't reading this blog back in April, check out my post on taxation, published on April 15.)

Unfortunately, Sarah Palin has shirked her responsibilities as a tax-paying citizen. To put it most bluntly, she and Todd Palin are tax dodgers. I can think of few less patriotic acts than that. Tax attorneys have been poring over Palin's tax returns for the last two years. They are not pretty. Palin did not pay taxes on $43,490 that the state of Alaska gave the family to cover travel expenses for Mr. Palin and the Palin children. I travel a lot for work--and like most who do, I get my legitimate business expenses reimbursed or deduct them on my taxes. As much as I would love to bring my wife and kids with me on speaking gigs, their presence is not a legitimate business expense. Palin owes taxes on that unreported income (not to mention on her dubious state per diem payments for working at home). This is not a technical matter or an accounting glitch. It gets to the core of Palin's sense of duty and responsibility. It gets to her character. And that character is, as revealed on the tax returns, deeply flawed. And it gets to one of the core ideological flaws of the anti-tax philosophy of the Republican Party: they want the benefits of government--such as a strong military, Social Security, and pothole free highways--but without paying for them.

The South Rising Again

2008-10-06T16:45:00.005-04:00

I'd like to tag-team with John's excellent essay on the "southernification" (huh?) of American politics. There is no question that southern-ness has expanded well beyond the borders of the Old South, and it has re-shaped American politics from the presidential level down to the level of local school-board elections.

Some of this, I believe, is demographic. While much has been made over the last generation of northerners moving to the Sunbelt, less has been reported about Southerners moving North. In a post a few weeks ago, I pegged the new Mason-Dixon line at I-70 - which runs across the middle of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois on its way to Denver.

They came - late as it turned out - for jobs in those Northern factories. They kept coming even after those jobs disappeared to occupy the lowest rungs of the low-wage service sector economy. In Columbus, OH the person checking you out at the supermarket, or drawing your blood at the doctor's office, or cleaning your office late at night is probably from West Virginia, Kentucky or Tennessee. Dayton, though the factories are all closed, remains a hot-bed of bluegrass music.

Likewise, I-75, a boulevard of broken dreams if ever there was one, connects what was once the center of the auto industry with much of the south. Follow it south from Detroit, through Toledo, Lima and Dayton and eventually to the Gulf side of Florida. The traffic between the south and the rustbelt is heavy on this road.

But it is more than demographics. This phenomenon is sadder, in its own way, and deeper.

In the first episode of Ken Burns' series on the Civil War, novelist and historian Shelby Foote tells a story about General Patton. Exhorting his troops during some battle during WWII, Patton reminds the troops that Americans have never lost a war. At that point Foote smiles and says: Southerners know what it means to lose a war.

But almost immediately, and certainly by the turn of the twentieth century, that defeat had been recast as noble. The Glorious Lost Cause. Defeat turned, like straw into gold, into some kind of victory. And that continues right to the present moment. Americans remain fascinated by the southern side of the Civil War - at battle re-enactments it is not uncommon that twice as many people show up portraying Confederates than show up to play Union soldiers. We still use words like "honor" and "valiant" to describe soldiers who, when all is said and done, were fighting to keep 4 million people enslaved.

That cultural memory of the Civil War, I think, and the valorization of the Confederacy helps explain the Stars 'n Bars that John (and I) have seen across the midwest. Those white working class (especially) men whose horizons have shrunk with their non-union wages are the losers in our Darwinian economic struggles. Their hold on the American dream grows ever more tenuous and they know it. Waving the Confederate flag allows people both to reject the America that has rejected them, and to identify with a different, more genuine America.

Theirs is a sense of failure, not necessarily of oppression, and for that reason their politics tends toward the bitter rather than the aspirational. Some of them may not vote for Obama for purely racist reasons. In fact, I suspect, they didn't vote for Kerry either (or for Gore).

Rather, Democrats make them angry because Democrats tend to remind them of the things that hurt the most - their lack of good jobs, their lack of health care, the lousy education their kids are getting. Republicans, on the other hand, work to deflect their anger at scapegoats and trivialities. In that way, in much the same way that big plantation owners convinced poor farmers to fight for slavery, Republicans allow the white working class to identify with the losers out of whom our culture has made the biggest heroes: Johnny Reb and his brothers.

The Southernization of the White Working Class?

2008-10-04T19:47:00.003-04:00

(This essay was originally published the San Diego Union-Tribune on October 1.)

The current battle between the presidential candidates for the votes of the white working-class requires an understanding of the culture of these voters. There are signs of a decline of an old Rust Belt culture, and the adoption of Southern culture – and both campaigns are responding.

The changes first struck me in an unforgettable moment several months ago when I saw what had become of the Rust Belt, white working-class voter. I was standing on the platform of the East Chicago, Ind., station for the local commuter train to Chicago. It was chilly, and the young man near me was wearing a jacket with a union local's name emblazoned on the back and above the left breast. But what he had on his head surprised me: he also wore a black baseball cap with the flag of the Confederacy on it.

Several months later, in a visit to my hometown of hyper-segregated Highland, Ind. – a neighbor of majority-black Gary – I witnessed a large Ford pickup truck cruising through what is left of our old downtown. And there it was again: flying proudly from the rear corners of the truck were a pair of Confederate flags.

These are only two simple observations, but both, I believe, are indicative of major changes taking place in the culture and identities of white working-class voters in the urban north.

The novelist and essayist Dave Eggers – himself a product of the Chicago suburbs – once wrote that the Midwest can be found 25 miles outside of any American city. But I think what is happening, and it is something with important implications for American politics, is that we are finding the American South all over the country. There is a “Southernization” of American politics.

Consider the ways that politicians used to court the white working class in the Rust Belt. The Nixon administration, which pioneered the strand of Republican populism that we see today, sought to appeal to them in three different ways.

First, it sought to “cultivate” (its word) relationships with union leaders. It would not do much for union workers economically, but it would stroke its union identities through words and deeds such as the appointment of Peter J. Brennan, head of the New York Building Trades Council, as secretary of Labor.

Second, it would appeal to working-class voters' identities as Catholics. The way to do this was to laud their institutions, particularly parochial schools.

Third, it celebrated these workers' ethnicity. The Nixon team fanned out across the Rust Belt and made appearances at Polish Pride Parades, Italian American Picnics and Serbfests.

Do we see any of these strategies today? Hardly – and with good reason. The work force in the still-unionized steel mills of Gary is only about a quarter of what it was in its heyday. It just does not make as much sense for the Republicans to tap pride in union membership. Appeals to Catholics are still common, but they come in a very different form. Rather than talking about what is distinctive about Catholics, Republicans appeal to what Catholic conservatives share with evangelicals: opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Religious conservatives of many different faiths, as James Davison Hunter pointed out in “Culture Wars,” share more in common with each other than with the liberal wings of their own faiths. And rather than appeal to these voters'identities as Poles or Italians or Irish, they appeal to the cultural symbols of the American South.

And this strategy makes sense. The sociologist Richard Alba noted years ago that white ethnicity was being severely attenuated by intermarriage and migration to the suburbs. But what may be happening now is that the working-class voters across the country – even in Alaska – are gravitating not toward some bland or empty “whiteness,” but toward the cultural symbols of the South.

Of course, even Nixon used “Southern strategies” to appeal to the Rust Belt. But now these Southern-style appeals are all that are left. In 2008, Republicans appeal to the white working class across the country by stoking and responding to fears of racial change. According to The Washington Post, this year the Republicans' convention reversed its convention trend toward celebrations of diversity and hosted the fewest black delegates (36 out of 2,380) since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began keeping track. And we hear tough talk appealing to nationalism and insecurities about American power, we have a vice presidential candidate who is an avid hunter and gun owner (and who is culturally a snow-bound Southerner), and we hear strong defenses of Christian values.

This is a trend in the wider culture – not just politics. The death-knell for the distinctiveness of the old Rust Belt working class may have sounded when comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a native of Georgia wildly successful for his “you know you're a redneck when – ” comedy theme, appropriated the phrase “blue collar” for a show about the zany antics of himself and some other wacky hillbillies. “Blue Collar TV,” as it is called, is not about unions or white ethnics.

The Southernization of the working class is a perilous trend for Democrats. Obama chose an old-school Catholic, Joe Biden, for his running mate, ignoring the fact that the Democrats have not won the White House without a Southerner on the ticket since FDR. But they at least seem to be cognizant of the trend and are being strategic. For example, Barack Obama ended his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention as Brooks & Dunn's country music smash, “Only in America,” played triumphantly. The Obama campaign can only hope that the Rust Belt voters took note.

***

ADDENDUM

My former classmate, fellow Rustbelt Intellectual, and NPR/PBS reporter Rick Karr sent me the following after reading the above piece:

One small empirical quibble: Since WWII, in particular, the (Northwest Indiana) Region has been heavy with migrants from the Deep South. Your comment on hyper-segregated Highland takes on another meaning in this context: Those southerners tended to live in places like Griffith, Calumet Township, outlying and unincorporated Gary (Black Oak, e.g.), and in South County -- Cedar Lake and so on.

Note the socioeconomic correlation: Highland High "ranked" higher than any of those schools, though not as high as Munster, where, iirc, very few southern migrants lived.

And I recall strong anti-souther bias in my extended family -- the only word used more derisively than "Czarny" ("blacks" in Polish, spat out with the vehemence of "nigger") was "hillbilly". When my family lived in a mixed working-class and lower-middle class neighborhood, many of the neighbors (the Bashums, the Stewarts, the Cartwrights -- note the names) were denigrated as "hillbillies" -- not only by my parents, but also by the Zemkoskys, Suklaks, and so on. Oh, and my family loathed Bill Clinton -- not because of his politics alone, but because, according to my mother, he "looks like a hillbilly".

Seems to me it's a classic migration pattern: We Eastern Europeans got their first, so we disdained those who followed us during and immediately after WWII.

Indiana as a whole has also long had a strong affinity for southern symbolism and politics -- moreso, I think, than the surrounding north-of-the-Ohio states. Neither Illinois nor Ohio ever sent a Grand Dragon of the Klan to the U.S. Senate.

Bottom line: Your conclusion feels sound to me, though citing the Region as evidence seems odd.

Rick is certainly right--and those folks displaying Confederate flags I witnessed could have easily been transplanted Southerners rather than culturally lost ethnic Catholics. I would still maintain, however, that the old political appeals to Rust Belt working class voters emphasizing union membership, Catholic institutions and white ethnicity have mostly disappeared, leaving only Southern-style political appeals in their place.

WELCOME: THE ORIGINAL RUSTBELT INTELLECTUAL, JOHN SKRENTNY

2008-10-04T10:40:00.010-04:00

I'm thrilled to introduce the newest contributor to Rustbelt Intellectual, John David Skrentny. John is currently professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, but don't let the fact that he grades papers and writes lectures sitting in a lawn chair under the bright blue skies of the Torrey Pines delude you into thinking that he's not a Rustbelt Intellectual through and through.

In fact, John is the original Rustbelt Intellectual. A native of Highland, Indiana, a near suburb of Gary, John grew up driving past the steel mills along Cline Avenue, fishing in the befouled waters of Lake Calumet, and visiting his grandparents in Gary's old Hungarian neighborhood (pictured above). Nearly twenty years ago, when John left his home state to attend graduate school at Harvard, he found himself in the orbit of the last great New York Intellectuals, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell, who had taken up residence in leafy Cambridge. The children and grandchildren of immigrants, the New York Intellectuals grew up in the heady but intensely fractious world of the city's Jewish socialists, where apartment buildings were controlled by one or another leftist sect and where arguments over Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were as common as street brawls and fought with the same intensity. But by the late 1980s, many the surviving New York Intellectuals, still brilliant and argumentative, had moved to the political right.

John and I attended Harvard at the same time and, after the fact, we discovered that we had many friends in common and even attended a few memorable parties together. But we never met there--or if we did, neither of us remember. It wasn't until we were both assistant professors at another Ivy League institution that we found that our shared Rustbelt roots gave us a shared perspective on politics didn't quite fit in with the elitism of many of our East Coast colleagues.

Attracted by the cosmopolitanism of the urban East Coast, but repelled by its pretensions (what we called the "Harvard-o-centric view of the universe"), we found ourselves having to explain the quirky politics of our families, our relatives, our neighbors, the people we grew up with to our East Coast friends. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Midwestern "Reagan Democrats," a term that described many of our relatives, became the subject of intense scrutiny by pollsters, pundits, and political scientists--and derision in our own circles. But so many of those commentators treated blue-collar and middle-class Midwesterners as an exotic species. John and I found ourselves having to explain the politics of race, rights, and justice--the everyday notions of fairness and difference--that shaped and sometimes distorted the politics of people like those in our extended families.

Back then, in the self-satisfied precincts of Harvard Square, John rebelliously coined the term "Rustbelt Intellectual," describing an identity that captured the two-ness of coming from modest Midwestern origins but finding ourselves in the self-proclaimed (if greatly exaggerated) Athens of America. Like the New York intellectuals, we were products of the disputatious politics of our white ethnic families. Just as the New York Intellectuals leaned right, away from their socialist backgrounds, we Rustbelt Intellectuals leaned left, away from our Reagan Democrat roots. And just as the New York Intellectuals could never fully escape their origins in Brooklyn and the Bronx, even as they thrived in the goyische precincts of Cambridge, so too were we the products of Gary and Detroit, shaped by the Catholic sensibilities of our families, deeply tied to our troubled home towns, attracted by the economic populism of some of the Rustbelt's more compelling political figures, and, at the same time, battling against the demons of race and unacknowledged white identity politics that colored the politics of Michigan and Indiana.

I hope you find John's distinctive political voice a refreshing addition to this blog. We don't always agree politically, but John is one of the most thoughtful analysts of contemporary American politics and culture. It's great to have him aboard as an occasional contributor.

Talkin' 'bout their generation

2008-10-04T08:40:00.005-04:00

Last week my wife got an email from Orrin. You know, Orrin Hatch rabid right-winger from Utah. She gets a lot of emails from his these days - she's apparently his new BFF.

This one was tagged "Hanoi Jane" and warned her that "Hanoi Jane is out stumping for liberal Democratic senate candidates." She - and they - must be stopped.

Poor Orrin, I thought, this is the best you can do? Hanoi Jane? Who remembers Hanoi Jane anymore? Who cares? More people probably remember Jane Fonda for that old exercise video than for her politics. The whole thing had the whiff of desperation.

Then I pick up the Times this morning (why, I don't know) and the lead story is about Obama's having crossed paths with Bill Ayers. You know, the guy who founded the Weathermen and spent a decade living underground.

Fewer people remember Bill Ayers -or the Weather Underground for that matter - than remember Hanoi Jane (and in the great sweep of American history both are about as trivial) but the Times apparently felt this was the most important story we needed to know here in 2008.

On September 12, 2001 a wise friend of mine said to me: Well, at least the 1960s will finally be over - this means we have to move on from that into a new world.

Sadly, he was wrong. The last seven years have been nothing if not a re-hash of the politics of Vietnam. McSame has made his years as a POW a central part of his campaign - asked recently about the health care crisis, he responded that he didn't have any health care in prison.

Obama, of course, post-dates the 1960s. He was about 8 in 1968 so he doesn't have a personal connection to (or perhaps any stake in) the tired political fights of that era. And so it is that Orrin Hatch dredges up "Hanoi Jane" and the Times resurrects Bill Ayers. The babyboomers in the media and elsewhere want to continue fighting those fights, and they need to link Obama to them somehow, however absurdly. You could tell how good it made BFF Orrin feel to use the phrase "Hanoi Jane" - like a smoker who hasn't had a puff in a while taking a long, slow drag.

I was 2 when the Democratic convention in Chicago exploded in 1968. My memories of it are foggy, but I don't recall that people spent too much time re-visiting the political intrigues of 1928. I don't think the ghost of Al Smith visited the scene very often. Yet here we are forty years after all that and people won't let go. I suspect that political debates in 1968 focused on the chaotic present and the uncertain future; in 2008 we keep one nostalgic eye firmly on the past.

D'OH

2008-10-03T12:50:00.004-04:00

Homer's plight at the ballot box offers a humorous riff on a deadly serious issue. Voter intimidation is not a joke this year. As the Republicans grow increasingly desperate to win a majority in swing states, we can expect attempts to violate voting rights. The Michigan GOP (at least before McCain decided to throw in the towel there) promised to disenfranchise foreclosed homeowners. Similar plans are afoot in Ohio, thanks to the Buckeye State's Republican Party.

And this week, flyers have been circulating in North and West Philadelphia attempting to intimidate voters by stating that those who have outstanding arrest warrants or unpaid traffic tickets may be arrested at the polls on Election Day.

Expect to see a lot more of this activity, especially in swing states where a large black turnout might be enough to defeat McCain and Palin.

SARAH PALIN FOR POET LAUREATE

2008-10-02T14:23:00.003-04:00

I have long loved poetry. My tastes are quite diverse, ranging from the Rustbelt intellectual Philip Levine to the ruminative Susan Stewart. I am now reading the extraordinary experimental, lyric reflection on Detroit, The Straits, by the immensely talented Kristin Palm. And I encourage you to visit Mirabile Dictu, the brilliantly polymathic Canadian blogger and poet, who intersperses verses with informative posts on feminism, human rights, and politics.

After reading this piece by Hart Seely at Slate, I am now convinced that Sarah Palin is America's most innovative poet. Step aside Levine and Stewart. What I thought were rambling, inarticulate answers on foreign and domestic policy are actually powerful examples of what Seely calls an "arctic-fresh voice" who composes "intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra."

I have taken the liberty of posting Seely's transcriptions of Palin's extraordinary verse:

"On Good and Evil"

It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.

That's not a good guy.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

"You Can't Blink"

You can't blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we're on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can't blink.

So I didn't blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

"Haiku"

These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)

"Befoulers of the Verbiage"

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)

"Secret Conversation"

I asked President Karzai:

"Is that what you are seeking, also?
"That strategy that has worked in Iraq?
"That John McCain had pushed for?
"More troops?
"A counterinsurgency strategy?"

And he said, "Yes."

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

"Outside"

I am a Washington outsider.
I mean,
Look at where you are.
I'm a Washington outsider.

I do not have those allegiances
To the power brokers,
To the lobbyists.
We need someone like that.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

COURTING DISASTER

2008-10-01T20:48:00.005-04:00

The next administration may have the occasion to nominate as many as four Supreme Court justices according to the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network. So as a warning to America, they have put together a bland ad that provides judicial cover for hurling the mud of "God damn America," the Weathermen, and a corrupt developer back into the public sphere. After a few days respite from wingnut slime attacks, we are back to the dubious politics of character assassination and guilt by association.

What is missing from the ad is an evaluation of the sophisticated legal mind that McCain has chosen as his running mate. We now know that he regularly consults her for foreign policy advice, so it's likely that he'll also tap her for her legal acumen, on display in all of its glory here.

Whose Supreme Court justices do you want?

EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK --NOT

2008-10-01T16:50:00.004-04:00

The self-proclaimed feminist from Wasilla has now allied with John McCain and most of the Republican Party in opposing the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Equal pay for equal work, still a pipe dream for most women workers, will only become a reality if it can be enforced. In her interview with Katie Couric, Palin raises the bogeyman of trial lawyers manipulating guileless women into filing costly lawsuits against employers. She scores cheap political points by pointing her accustory finger against the very lawyers whose knowledge of the law, negotiating skills, and courtroom strategies are essential to fighting workplace discrimination. The threat of litigation is an important tool in holding discriminatory employers responsible for their actions--and in deterring them from creating two-tiered workplaces.

In a particularly inarticulate sentence, Palin states: "Again, thankfully with the existing laws we have on the books, they better be enforced." But who will do the enforcing? And what happens to women like Lily Ledbetter who didn't learn of their bosses' discriminatory policies until it was too late to sue? They are screwed--and the discriminators are rewarded.

Palin's position here represents the essentially symbolic nature of conservative anti-discrimination policies. Denounce discrimination but offer toothless remedies. Why? Because in the end, the interests of business trump all.

Here's Palin's squirrelly response to Katie Couric's questions on fair pay:

Couric: Where do you stand on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

Palin: I’m absolutely for equal pay for equal work. The Ledbetter pay act - it was gonna turn into a boon for trial lawyers who, I believe, could have taken advantage of women who were many, many years ago who would allege some kind of discrimination. Thankfully, there are laws on the books, there have been since 1963, that no woman could be discriminated against in the workplace in terms of anything, but especially in terms of pay. So, thankfully we have the laws on the books and they better be enforced.

Couric: The Ledbetter act sort of lengthens the time a woman can sue her company if she's not getting equal pay for equal work. Why should a fear of lawsuits trump a woman's ability to do something about the fact that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. And that's today.

Palin: There should be no fear of a lawsuit prohibiting a woman from making sure that the laws that are on the books today are enforced. I know in a McCain-Palin administration we will not stand for any measure that would result in a woman being paid less than a man for equal work.

Couric: Why shouldn’t the Ledbetter act be in place? You think it would result in lawsuits brought by women years and years ago. Is that your main problem with it?

Palin: It would have turned into a boon for trial lawyers. Again, thankfully with the existing laws we have on the books, they better be enforced. We won't stand for anything but that. We won't stand for any discrimination in the workplace - that there isn't any discrimination in America.

h/t to Kathy G.

The Original Prince of Darkness

2008-10-01T09:31:00.005-04:00

One of the first complete sentences my parents taught me to say as a small child was: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal.

Perhaps that explains much of my subsequent history, but I found myself uttering the sentence again last week when Sarah Did New York. While much of the press coverage focused - quite rightly - on her bottomless ignorance and ineptitude, I saw no comment on the absurdity that Kissinger remains an obligatory stop on the "Bone Up On Foreign Policy Tour." There Gov. Moosehead sat, smiling for the photo-op, with a man who should have been tried and convicted of war crimes.

Kissinger's sins and wrong-doings have been thoroughly documented - from the October Surprise of 1968 to his dirty wars in places like Chile - and I won't rehearse them all here. Suffice it to say that nearly forty years after Kissinger (and Nixon) began bombing and de-stabilizing Cambodia in 1970, Cambodia still has not recovered. (For those who haven't read it, William Shawcross's book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia is well worth it).

Much of the rest of the world certainly recognizes Kissinger's criminalities. He can no longer travel freely in much of Europe and Latin America because of indictments, pending indictments and police investigations.

Yet here in the United States he has assumed the role of elder statesman and foreign policy wizard. When you want international relations gravitas, you go to Kissinger. Getting Kissinger's blessing is the mark that you are a serious player in the foreign relations game, though why that should be so, given Kissinger's record, simply baffles me.

When Bush finally agreed to set up a September 11 Commission (you'll remember that he and Dick Cheney vigorously opposed the idea; and you'll note that the administration has still not implemented many of its recommendations), he tapped Kissinger to be its Chair. When families of 9/11 victims - not the Administration mind you - asked him to specify his relationships -personal and business - with the Bin Laden Family, Kissinger, coward as he is, exited the Commission job by a back door.

I'm delighted that this past week or so the press finally woken up to the prospect of Gov. Moosehead as Vice President. But while they were launching their attacks against her failings, I wish they had found a moment to mention that my parents were right: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal.

Voter Turn-off

2008-09-30T09:11:00.006-04:00

My math skills aren't great. I read polling data for the punch-line, not the methodology. But I do know how to read yard signs and bumperstickers, and so let me offer my own "polling" analysis based on my extensive "research" in southwestern Ohio.

McSame may really be in trouble.

This part of Ohio is Republican country. From Cincinnati (arguably the most politically conservative big city in the United States) to the south end of Columbus, politics has been shaped by Southern-style religion and racial attitudes, and Northern-style de-industrialized economics. Lots of angry white voters for whom gay-bashing is what you do in between gun shows.

Take the small city of Lancaster, located about half-way between Columbus and Athens: Lancaster's most famous native son was one William Tecumseh Sherman. The city only got around to acknowledging this with a memorial in the year 2000. Most folks in Lancaster were rooting for the other side.

In 2000 and 2004 this region of Ohio was Bush country. You could see it driving around. The yard signs, the bumperstickers, the banners hung from silos and barns. People here supported the Republicans. I told people just before the 2004 election that I thought Ohio would go to Bush; I wasn't surprised when it did. You could feel it here.

This year, however, you see much less enthusiasm for McSame on people's front yards or on the back of their cars. There are more Obama signs up around these parts, but far fewer McSame signs than one might expect. As a symbol of the McSame campaign's lack of self-confidence, it sells a bumperstick so small - about four postage-stamps in area - that it can't really be read unless you are standing next to the car. Even the people who are voting McSame are somehow reluctant to advertise it.

Which doesn't mean McSame won't win this part of Ohio, or indeed the whole state. As far as I'm concerned H. L. Mencken remains the most astute analyst of the American electorate. But it does mean that some number of those Republican voters are deeply ambivalant about McSame; they will go to the polls holding their noses.

All elections ultimately come down to voter turn-out. My bumpersticker survey suggests that for the Obama campaign the key to winning in Ohio may be both to turn out its own voters and to undermine Republicans' faith in McSame to such an extent that they stay home. Voters in suburban Cincinnati, for example, are probably never going to be persuaded to vote for Obama (they didn't vote for Kerry or Gore either). But they might be persuaded to stay away entirely.

To judge from the tepid support McSame seems to be generating in my neck of Ohio, that task might be quite feasible.

A SHOUT OUT FROM THE POST-RUSTBELT

2008-09-29T17:54:00.003-04:00

Loyal readers of Rustbelt Intellectual, I'm still alive but maddeningly busy. It's the time of year when I have a zillion letters of recommendation, several tenure reviews, and lots of other obligations. Throw in two back-to-back conferences, a whole new lecture course to write, and a once-weekly day-and-a-half long trip to Beantown, where I'm teaching a course on urban planning, and my free time gone the way of the industrial economy of Detroit: dwindling fast.

But I do have to put in a few words from Boston. In the early 1970s, Boston ranked up there by every measure as one of the handful of most distressed cities in the United States, right along with Gary, Newark, St. Louis, and Detroit. Boston's manufacturing base had been declining since the 1920s. Its working-class white population was relatively immobile and very turf-conscious. The city was wracked with racial tumult over neighborhood change and especially busing. Its harbor was as polluted as Lake Erie and if it weren't replenished by the tide, it would have probably burned like the Cuyahoga River. To top that off, its housing stock was (and is) pretty lousy. Lots of cheaply built wood frame houses and the vernacular "triple-decker"--one family per floor don't make for a vital urban housing market.

Yet in just a few decades, Boston turned around. Its prominence as an educational center (Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Boston College, among others) positioned it well to take advantage of the new economy. The universities provided seed money for high tech and biotech industries that lifted it high (other Rustbelt cities rely heavily on meds and eds, but few have such a deep base in research and development). Its old neighborhoods, only partially plundered by urban renewal, appealed to historic preservationists and gentrifiers. And, while Boston was ravaged by racial tensions, it's a much whiter city than many of its northeastern and midwestern counterparts. That has ultimately made it more appealing for commercial investors and real estate developers. Together, all of these factors, along with good infrastructure (especially an excellent public transit system), gave Boston a base for revitalization.

There's one lesson for those who look with despair onto decaying Rustbelt cities. All are not without hope. The ups and downs of metropolitan America cannot be predicted with certainty. If you had asked any well-informed urbanist in 1970 whether Boston would be one of the most prosperous metros in the US in the early 21st century, he or she would have dismissed your question out-of-hand with a sneer.

Off to the airport (not one of the better airports in the US, especially for a city of Boston's importance). But I get to travel underground, through the massively expensive, corruption-riddled, and sometimes dangerous, but still truly fabulous tunnels of the "Big Dig," a reminder that even with unexpected twists and turns, big city construction projects can really work--and can really make a big difference in improving urban life.

BLARNEY

2008-09-25T13:57:00.004-04:00

Tomorrow night, should John McCain prove himself able to multi-task and the first presidential debate goes on, Sarah Palin will step once again onto the faux populist stage. Just ten blocks from my office, Palin will sidle up to the bar, have a beer and shot, and cheer on McSame with a rowdy crowd of handpicked Republican supporters. The campaign has chosen a symoblic watering hole: a woodpaneled place called the Irish Pub, where my people (or rather people pretending to be my people) can get a pint of Guinness on tap and pretend that they are back on the old sod of the Emerald Isle.

Alas, there's not much Irish about the Irish Pub other than the beer, a couple of Irish flags, and a bunch of Celtic tchotschkes. It's a corporate sort of place, one that caters to the after-work crowd in Center City Philly on weeknights and fills up with frat boys and Wharton students who, no doubt, will be drowning their sorrows now that Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch won't be lavishing them with lucrative job offers.

The faux populism of watching the debate in a faux Irish pub would not be lost on the Irish people whom I knew best. Grandma and Grandpa S, who immigrated from Ireland to the United States in the early 1920s, became die-hard Democrats when they moved to the U.S. My grandfather, a city bus driver and lifelong union member, and my grandmother, who took care of her four children and various folks in the extended family, were the sort of commonsense, working-class people who supported political candidates for bread and butter reasons. They voted for politicians who promised to protect their jobs and economic security--not candidates who pretended to be like them while representing the interests of stock brokers and CEOs. Grandma and Grandpa S owed a lot to the party of FDR, especially their monthly Social Security and union pension checks. They kept their savings in a bank regulated by the FDIC. They could have cared less about capital gains tax reductions and corporate bailouts.

I'm hoping that enough voters, especially in Rustbelt swing states, share my grandparents' simple wisdom and resist the sham populism of McCain and Palin. Pretending to be one of the people makes for fine symbolic politics but, after eight years of government under the guy you could drink a beer with, it's time to move on. We don't need any more drinking buddies in the White House. This week's polls, the best for Obama/Biden in a while, suggest that the direction of the campaign might be changing. Still, we should expect the Republicans to cling to their blarney. John McCain will keep fulminating against the Wall Street honchos whose fortunes he protected from regulation for the last quarter century. Sarah Palin doesn't have much to pitch, other than herself as a small-town, anti-elitist of the God, Guns, and Guts variety, minus the bitterness but also minus the brains.

So tomorrow night, if the debate goes on, I'll be watching in my neighborhood watering hole, owned by the son of Irish immigrants and probably the most racially diverse bar in the city. And I'll hoist a pint in honor of my grandparents and the politics that their grandchildren's children deserve.

Small Town Blues

2008-09-24T06:33:00.006-04:00

I'd like to tag-team with Tom's post from his visit to Newark, Ohio, home of the Newark Mounds, an ancient Native American site recently listed with the United Nations, and home of the Longaberger Basket headquarters which is itself a breathtaking architectural achievement and worthy of a visit all on its own. Let's take another visit to the small town.

In the 1920s Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature by savagely ridiculing small town America. In novels like Main Street (set in the semi-fictional town of Gopher Prairie, MN) and Babbitt Lewis skewered the small town as a place of small people with small minds. A place where the lucky escaped and the unlucky were trapped.

When he wrote, the midwestern small town was at its apex, and to visit any of them today you can see the evidence of that prosperity and pride in what remains of the architecture - an imposing court house or city hall; a town square (usually with a Civil War memorial); a block or two of fine commercial buildings facing the square; elegant residential streets just off the square.

By the 1920s the midwestern small town had also fixed itself in the American imagination as the embodiment of what was quintessentially American; indeed, by the 1920s the midwest itself had fixed itself in the American imagination as the American "heartland." It managed to balance industry and agriculture, city and country, "native" and immigrant. And it prided itself on a certain kind of progressivism - the midwest, after all, produced the American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs (Indiana), Fightin' Bob LaFollette, governor of Wisconsin, the skyscraper (born in Chicago) and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Nearly one hundred years later, the midwestern small town is an endangered species. To drive across Ohio, or Indiana, or Illinois is to come through dozens of these places that are shells of their former selves. The court house is still there; the commercial district is now 1/3 vacant; what remains tends to thrift shops and social service agencies; many of the houses are ill-maintained and several are empty altogether.

In some ways, what has happened to the small town is exactly what has happened to the big rust belt cities, only in microcosm. The town's one big employer - maybe a grain elevator or a small manufacturing operation - closes and leaves; a bypass around the town gets built in the name of traffic efficiency and "progress"; then a shopping center, complete with a big box store opens at one end, the "downtown" is drained of its economic life; people move out to the "suburbs" near the bypass - often a small subdevelopment or trailer park; and voila! mini urban decay.

Historian Richard Davies has written a lovely little book about this called Main Street Blues - a history of Camden, Ohio, the town where he grew up. As it happens, it was also the home of Sherwood Anderson, the first American novelist to write about the dark side of American small-town life.

Because the small town as a living entity is disappearing, we cling to its symbolism even more tenaciously. This is what the McSame campaign is tapping into - a yearning on the part of many people who live in anonymous apartment complexes (of the sort where my daughter and I went door-to-door last weekend) or equally anonymous housing developments whose major advantage is easy access to an on-ramp. Demographically speaking, a small fraction of Americans actually live in small towns; a much larger percentage wish they did.

A final thought for now about the small town. Last year the Times published some numbers about Iraq war casualties. I don't remember them precisely, but the upshot of the piece was that a hugely disproportionate number of casualties come for towns of 10,000 and smaller. If Vietnam was fought disproportionately by African Americans from the city, then this is a small-town war. That alone is a sad commentary on the opportuntities facing 18yr olds graduating from under-funded high schools in small towns today.

But perhaps that also explains why there has been so little public outcry about it. We love the idea of the small town, but we don't really want to live there, facing a choice between the night shift at Wal-Mart and the army. The war is being fought by people from those places we invoke as part of our national mythology but whose reality we have otherwise largely forgotten. Places we barely notice as we zip by on the bypass.

UPDATE: For those architect wannabes, I've added a photo of the Longaberger HQ above. Tom S.

Markets Schmarkets

2008-09-20T14:36:00.005-04:00

I write this post over the drone of chainsaws and big chipper machines which have been steadily at work since Monday. As I mentioned previously, Ohio was slammed by the tail-end of Hurricane Ike (how bitterly ironic: here I am 600 miles from an ocean and yet still being slammed by hurricanes!). The result was a major disaster. By anyone's best guess, over 1 million Ohioans lost power. Some were dark for only a day or two; over 100,000 are still without power today. Schools were closed, in some places water emergencies were declared; food was in short supply in others.

And as far as I can tell, most of the country didn't hear about this. And that's fair enough - bigger stories to report. How often do world financial markets meltdown almost completely, after all??!!

So let me put these two things together in a crassly political way: You didn't hear much about our troubles, and at the same time, we didn't hear much about the market meltdown. Some local Ohio papers in small and mid-markets couldn't even publish on Monday or Tues; they didn't get around to putting the market news on the front page until Friday. And that's fair enough too, given all the chaos in Dayton, Columbus and points in between.

But as a result, the biggest crisis of this election cycle happened without Ohio noticing it much. By the time the sawdust settles, so too will this particular phase of our economic crisis. The story will be spun that the Fed intervened, Bush called for a bailout to rescue the market, and all will now be right with the world. Until the next bank needs a bailout, which may or may not happen by November. Even had the story not had to compete with the weather, news of Wall Street's collapse was liable to feel very remote to voters in Ohio. As it is, the worst week in recent American financial history will hardly register I suspect.

In other words, McSame and the Republicans dodged a major bullet in Ohio. Rather than focusing on the failure of Republican economics, and on McSame's staunch resistance to regulating the financial sector, Ohioans had to focus on their spoiling food and their neighbors who needed help. Rather than putting this economic disaster front and center, the Ohio media put local news on center stage.

If this election really is like 1992 when it was the economy, stupid, then the Obama campaign had a real opportunity blown away by Ike's 75mph winds.

SMALL TOWN AMERICA

2008-09-19T09:27:00.004-04:00

An oft-repeated theme in this year's election is the virtue of small-town Americans. One of oldest themes in American political and cultural history, the notion that small towns are repositories of all that is good, true, moral, and American continues to resonate. Echoing Richard Nixon's pitch to small-town voters in his "silent majority" campaign (Nixon himself was a product of little Whittier, California), John McCain and Sarah Palin have touted "small town values" on the campaign trail. As Palin stated in her acceptance speech: "'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity.' I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America ... who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars." (Note to reader: big cities = lazy, consumers not producers, shirkers not workers, naysayers not patriots).

I thought of Palin's speech this morning as I spent an hour walking the streets of Newark, Ohio, the county seat of Licking County, a town of about 47,000 people that has seen better days. Founded in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Newark's architecture reflects its late nineteenth and early twentieth century prosperity. Among the town's real treasures, The Home Building Association, a jewel box of bank (now vacant) built by the great architect Louis Sullivan in 1914.

The Louis Sullivan building is one reminder of how the Republican tribunes of small-town glory have it wrong. They emphasize the virtues of small rather than the virtues of town. The Home Building Association building reflects the cosmopolitan aspirations of small-town America, the attempt to be something greater than itself. Nearly a century ago, Newarkers were proud to imagine themselves as a city.

But life in small-town America today is less. There is an anomie in many of the small towns I have visited in the Midwest and Pennsylvania. These are places that have lost population and jobs, whose downtowns have been gutted by the expansion of Walmarts and suburban shopping centers, and where politics can be narrow and nasty. (The stories of Palin's reign in Wasilla give the lie to the images of small town politics as uplifting). One of the synomyms for small is petty. And there is a pettiness, a parochial localism, in small towns that gets lost in our romantic evocations of Elm Street.

Newark is one of those towns that has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Like many Rustbelt towns, its economy is dependent on manufacturing, but it has been hit badly in recent years. Licking County is not one of Ohio's worst-off areas: its current unemployment rate is 6.6 percent. But you can see the effects of the downturn in the shabby houses along the once-grand Hudson Street just a short walk from downtown. It's the sort of place where the Democrats should find a ready audience among folks burned by declining incomes, the stagnant housing market, rising gas prices, and insecurity.

But Licking County is a solidly Republican place: its voters pulled the lever by large margins for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. As I walked past the Newark Republican Party headquarters this morning, the McCain/Palin signs dimmed my morning cheer. Their campaign represents the worst of small-town politics: narrowly-defined local interest and the sanctimony of the small. And it doesn't offer much to small-town residents other than a boost of self-esteem that the candidates "know them" and "are one of them." And it doesn't offer much for the Newarks of America, big or small, that are the places left behind in the global economy. It's time to think big.