Trade aside, so far I've yet to see many actual policy proposals from the McCain camp. Mostly I've seen attempts to signal that they won't do anything too offensive to the party's right wing. Very few of these trial balloons seem to be ideas that McCain had expressed much previous loyalty to. I don't even think we should be analyzing these statements as policy proposals. We should be wondering why the Republican Party has given up on the idea of policy proposals.
Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum each take on this question but don't note the fundamental issue at stake here: when your political ideology is premised on discrediting the notion that government can do good, of course policy is going to suffer. As Greg Anrig noted in his TAP online piece today, professional conservatives have been trained in this fashion for the better part of 30 years, and the Republicans they help elect toe the ideological line, so the result has been a proliferation of conservative activists and politicians who are incompetents -- they don't actually know how to run a government or generate good public policy. And Republicans who did (or do) compromise with liberals end up being loathed by conservatives.
John McCain seems to be a special case. Clearly he was never a movement conservative, so his lack of interest in policy isn't the product of ideological preference. Yet McCain's reputation -- he gets stuff done in Congress and is independent of special interests -- is precisely the opposite of reality, which is why he is so dangerous. This is the reason we have been exploring McCain's foreign and domesticpolicy on TAP Online this week -- because it isn't being scrutinized forcefully enough elsewhere. After Iraq and Katrina, I don't think the public needs to be convinced of the link between conservatism the failure of government. But I do think the public needs to link John McCain with conservatism if they wish to avoid a third term of Bush.
There's plenty of good quotes in this NY Times piece about rising oil prices, but I think the key is this one:
“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”
Right. When people dismiss the peak oil thesis, they tend to demonstrate their ignorance of it. Peak oil doesn't say that the supply is going to dry up, but rather that production will peak and then decline, while demand continues to increase, overtaking production. We'll never actually run out of oil, rather it will simply become more and more expensive to the point where demand for it will have to lessen (as it has in the United States recently, the story notes, precisely because of the economic slowdown). One hopes an alternative to the oil-based economy will present itself by then, but as the Times story illustrates, the Chinas and Indias of the world aren't exactly setting a good example. We might also wonder why the United States is not taking the initiative on evolving beyond the carbon era.
Could be, writes Greg Anrig (who also has an article in TAP Online today) in a wonderful Washington Monthly essay on the history of the private school voucher movement and its utter failure to accomplish its goals. The problem with American urban schools, Anrig writes, isn't bureaucracy (as voucher proponents claim), but rather that they're largely segregated by race and class. Voucher programs don't fix this because, as I wrote yesterday in my piece on John McCain's education platform, they provide only enough tuition assistance for at-risk kids to attend poverty-stricken inner city parochial schools. Let's not fool ourselves: Voucher recipients aren't enjoying what Dalton or the University of Chicago Lab School have to offer. Here's how Anrig puts it:
Ultimately, the voucher experiments confirmed what their critics had asserted all along. The heart of the problem with our urban schools is neither the education bureaucracies nor teachers unions, as Chubb, Moe, and many other voucher advocates have contended, flawed though those institutions may be. Instead, as the sociologist James S. Coleman found in the 1960s, a student's family's income and the collective social and economic background of his classmates are by far the most important influences on his academic future. Not only do lower-income students tend to score relatively poorly, children of any background who attend high-poverty schools are far more likely to produce worse test results than they would in schools with primarily middle-class students. America's urban school systems remain almost universally dysfunctional, primarily because the country as a whole is about as segregated by race and income as at any time since the civil rights revolution.
So how do we integrate our schools? By instituting public school choice and charters that keep more involved, affluent parents in the system; by regionalizing school districts to the extent possible; and by creating urban magnet schools and suburban transfer programs that move kids across race and class boundaries.
I've heard that Nixonland can be a depressing book -- it does describe the spectacle of a certain political party whose name begins with a "D" tearing itself to shreds in divisive presidential primary fights and then nominating sweet-tempered goo-goos who get rolled over by a Republican mountebank who'll say anything to win. That selfsame mountebank outright robs the mantle of populism from the Party of the People by somehow saddling the Democrats for a generation or more with the label elitist. As I said, depressing.
Well, like old Tony Grasci used to say down by the docks, "pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will" -- there's never been any other option for champions of ordinary people who wish to keep on keepin' on in the often thankless struggle to wrestle power from the privileged.
But there's hope in Nixonland, too. I pointed to some of that yesterday when I printedEdmund Muskie's great November 2, 1970 nationally televised speech calling an electorate to, when they went to the polls the next day, turn from Republicans calls to hatred and fear and to join him in casting the lever -- and they listened! -- that dares to believe, "The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped by the will of men."
I promised, too, a second great Democratic speech that somehow has never made it in at any kind of length onto the vast, howling wilderness of the Internet. Francis Wilkinson wrote about it eloquently two years ago in the Prospect on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary. Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, the ballsy bastard, delivered it on the first anniversary of another famous Vietnam speech, when 60 million Americans watched President Lyndon Johnson tell them on TV "we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny" -- even as as, according to a memo filed by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton a month earlier, 70 percent of the reason we were in Vietnam was "to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat." Helping the people of South Vietnam shape their own destiny he listed at 10 percent.
LBJ delivered that speech at Johns Hopkins University. Fulbright, the ballsy bastard, delivered his legendary address at the very same place. Typing it up this morning, my offering via the Great Gods of Google to any future soul who should ever searchs for the words "Arrogance of Power," I misted up just a little bit that such wisdom can survive in dark times. (I love typing up great speeches word-for-word; it's like prayer to me.) Let me know how you respond; too isolationist for your own taste?
Optimism of the will. Optimism of the will. Optimism of the will.
--Rick Perlstein
America is the most fortunate of nations -- fortunate in her rich territory, fortunate in having had a century of relative peace in which to develop that territory, fortunate in her diverse and talented population, fortunate in the institutions devised by the founding fathers and in the wisdom of those who have adapted those institutions to a changing world.
For the most part America has had made good use of her blessings, especially in her internal life but also in her foreign relations. Having done so much and succeeded so well, America is now at that historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it. Other great nations, reaching this critical juncture, have aspired to too much, and by overextension of effort have declined and then fallen.
The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work. The Lord, after all, surely would not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to do His will. German soldiers in the First World War wore belt buckles imprinted with the words "Gott mit uns." It was approximately under this kind of infatuation -- an exaggerated sense of power and an imaginary sense of mission -- that the Athenians attacked Syracuse, and Napoleon and then Hitler invaded Russia. In plain words, they overextended their commitments and they came to grief.
I do not think for a moment that America, with her deeply rooted democratic traditions, is likely to embark upon a campaign to dominate the world in the manner of a Hitler or Napoleon. What I do fear is that she may be drifting into commitments which, though generous and benevolent in intent, are so far-reaching as to exceed even America's great capacities. At the same time, it is my hope -- and I emphasize it because it underlies all of the criticisms and proposals to be made [here] that America will escape those fatal temptations of power which have ruined other great nations and will instead confine herself to doing only that good in the world which she can do, both by direct effort and the force of her own example.
The stakes are high indeed: they include not only America's continued greatness but nothing less than the survival of the human race in an era when, for the first time in human history, a living generation has the power of veto over the survival of the next....
When the abstractions and subtleties of political science have been exhausted, there remain the most basic unanswered questions about war and peace and why nations contest the issues they contest and why they even care about them.....
Many of the wars fought by man -- I am tempted to say most -- have been fought over such abstractions. The more I puzzle over the great wars of history, the more I am inclined to the view that the cause attributed to them -- territory, markets, resources, the defense or perpetuation of great principles -- were not the root causes at all but rather explanations or excuses for certain unfathomable drives of human nature. For a lack of a clear and precise understanding of exactly what these motives are, I refer to them as the "arrogance of power" -- as a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations. Implicit in this drive is the assumption, even on the part of normally peaceful nations that force is the ultimate proof of superiority -- that when a nation shows that it has the strongest army, it is also proving that it has better people, better institutions, better principles, and, in general, a better civilization.
Evidence for my proposition is found in the remarkable discrepancy between the apparent and hidden causes of some modern wars and the discrepancy between their causes and ultimate consequences....
We are engaged in a war to "defend freedom" in South Vietnam. Unlike the Republic of Korea, South Vietnam has an army which fights without notable success and a weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people. The official war aims of the United States government, as I understand them, are to defeat what is regarded as North Vietnamese aggression, to demonstrate the futility of what the communists call "wars of national liberation," and to create conditions under which the South Vietnamese people will be able freely to determine their own future....
In the spring of 1966 demonstrators in Saigon burned American jeeps, tried to assault American soldiers, and marched through the streets shouting "Down with American imperialists," while a Buddhist leader made a speech equating the United States with the communists as a threat to South Vietnamese independence. Most Americans are understandably shocked and angered to encounter expressions of hostility from people who would long since have been under the rule of the Viet Cong but for the sacrifice of American lives and money. Why, we may ask, are they so shockingly ungrateful? Surely they must know that their very right to parade and protest and demonstrate depends on the Americans who are defending them.
The answer, I think, is that "fatal impact" of the rich and strong on the poor and weak. Dependent on it though the Vietnamese are, American strength is a reproach to their weakness, American wealth a mockery of their poverty, American success a reminder of their failures. What they resent is the disruptive effect of our strong culture upon their fragile one, an effect which we can no more avoid having than a man can help being bigger than a child. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact....
One wonders how much the American commitment to Vietnamese freedom is also a commitment to American pride -- the two seem to have become part of the same package. When we talk about the freedom of South Vietnam, we may be thinking about how disagreeable it would be to accept a solution short of victory; we may be thinking about how our pride would be injured if we settled for less than we set out to achieve; we may be thinking about our reputation as a great power, fearing that a compromise settlement would shame us before the world, making us a second-rate people with flagging courage and determination....
The cause of our difficulties in Southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power, which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends. We are still acting like Boy Scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across streets they do not want to cross. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders....
If America has a service to perform in the world -- and I believe she has -- it is in large part the service of her own example. In our excessive involvement of the in the affairs of other countries we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources, we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
The missionary instinct in foreign affairs may, in a cautious way, reflect a deficiency rather than an excess of self-confidence. In America's case the evidence of a lack of self-confidence is our apparent need for constant proof and reassurance, our nagging desire for popularity, our bitterness and confusion when foreigners fail to appreciate our generosity and good intentions. Lacking an appreciation of the dimensions of our own power, we fail to understand our enormous and disruptive impact on the world; we fail to understand that no matter how good our intentions—and they are, in most cases, decent enough -- other nations are alarmed by the very existence of such great power, which, whatever its benevolence, cannot help but remind them of their own helplessness before it.
Those who lack self-assurance are also likely to lack magnanimity, because the one is the condition of the other. Only a nation at peace with itself, with its transgressions as well as its achievements, is capable of a generous understanding of others. Only when we Americans can acknowledge our own past aggressive behavior -- in such instances, for example, as the Indian wars and the wars against Mexico and Spain -- will we acquire some perspective on the aggressive behavior or others; only when we can understand the human implications of the chasm between American affluence and the poverty of most of the rest of mankind will we be able to understand why the American "way of life" which is so dear to us has few lessons and limited appeal to the poverty-stricken majority of the human race.
It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission. When a nation is very powerful but lacking in self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner dangerous to itself and others. Felling the need to prove what is obvious to everyone else, it begins to confuse great power with unlimited power and great responsibility with total responsibility; it can admit of no error; it must win every argument, no matter how trivial. For lack of appreciation of how truly powerful it is, the nation begins to lose wisdom and perspective and, with them, the strength and understanding that it takes to be magnanimous and smaller and weaker nations.
Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened, and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world. The measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty to dissent.
At first, to me, the above graph appears counterintuitive. Since Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper has actually featured more coverage of foreign policy, U.S. politics, and government and less coverage of business. But keep in mind that this is just a tally of stories, and says nothing about their content. I'd like to know whether that 15-point jump in elections coverage is just straight horse-race campaign news or whether it is in the style of the NY Post, Fox News and the Sun. Not surprisingly, Murdoch has a larger target in sight:
Ever since Murdoch first evinced interest in the Journal, much has been made of his apparent desire to revamp the paper in order to more directly challenge the New York Times. (A recent Newsweek story on Murdoch reported that he sent Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. a letter declaring "Let the battle begin.")
So how does the news agenda of Murdoch's Journal compare with that of the Times? An analysis of both papers' front pages from Dec. 13--March 13 reveals that they are not the same, certainly not yet. When it comes to politics, the Journal, with 18% of the newshole devoted to the topic, has moved much closer to its possible new rival. But it has not caught up with the Times, which filled 27% of its newshole with politics in those four months.
I wonder, however, whether Murdoch's goal is really to best the Times, or if he instead intends to overwhelm it by dominating the market.
Like Glenn Greenwald, I'm a wee bit sick of hearing about Jeremiah Wright. But if liberal bloggers find themselves absolutelycompelledtocontinuediscussingObama's pastor, the least they can do is ensure every Wright post includes a mention of McCain's cozy relationship with John Hagee.
While Wright asserts that God condemns the death and destruction wrought by war, Hagee thinks that God just might condemn avoiding war. In his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee wrote that God would curse America if it stood by as Iran attacked Israel. This is not some random, taken-out-of-context quote. He wrote a whole book on this, preached about it, and founded an organization called Christians United for Israel to mobilize grassroots political support for his ideas. He gets private meetings with members of the president's national security staff, presents former CIA director James Woolsey as a speaker at his "Middle East Intelligence Briefing" (held at his church), and sits down with congressional leaders of both parties to talk about foreign policy. But don't worry, McCain's never even been to Hagee's church!
[...]
Keep in mind that McCain says his association with Hagee is different from Obama's association with Wright because he doesn't go to Hagee's church -- he just likes Hagee's politics on Israel. Doesn't that make you feel better?
To reinforce Dana's point about the excerpt from Nixonland on the main site, the idea that Republicans have been running Nixon's 1972 campaign for 35 years isn't some lefty polemic -- even conservatives basically admit it: From a review of David Frum's new book I wrote a little while back:
[Frum writes that] “Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of century,” but that it won't work any more. Fewer Americans get off on beating up on hippies these days and Republicans aren't doing as well as they used to. Frum asks “how many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale?”
Frum thinks the answer is not that many, though he does want to extend the life of hippie-beating as a viable political strategy by excluding as many non-white people from citizenship as possible in order to extend the political dominance of the white working class.
I really recommend you read the excerpt from Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland on the main site today. It describes the so-called “Hard Hat Riot” of May 8, 1970, in which hundreds of New York City construction workers, organized by the AFL-CIO, brutally attacked students protesting the killings at Kent State University. President Nixon seized upon the flags plus hard hats imagery of the event as a way for the Republican Party to win over traditionally Democratic union voters. Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman wrote in a note to himself, “Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed. … Then no one would be a Democrat anymore.”
Ah, yes. The genesis of a thousand George W. Bush and John McCain campaign advertisements. And also the genesis of Democratic paroxysms over the Jeremiah Wright controversy and Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments. But how instructive is the hard hat riot today? For starters, it’s difficult to imagine contemporary union members whipped up into such a violent frenzy, and we know that union members continue to vote Democratic in presidential elections.
As for the voting patterns of white, working class men at large, political scientist Larry Bartels has proven that their decline in support for the Democratic Party is due almost entirely to shifting allegiances in the South, which, with the exception of a few outlier states, is highly unlikely to support either Obama or Hillary Clinton in the general election. That’s not to say that cultural issues have no salience in Northern states — of course they do. But the swing voters Democrats should be looking toward today aren’t primarily working class white men, who have declined sharply as a proportion of the electorate. The Nixon coalition was so effective in 1972 because there were just a lot more white working class voters back then.
One group, incidentally, that has replaced the hard hats is married white women. They supported Bush by 11 points in 2004, but have since turned strongly against the war. In the 2006 midterms, they favored the GOP by only 2 percent.
—Dana Goldstein
Update: Rick comments below that the hard hat riot was likely spontaneous. Indeed, there's been historical debate on the topic. I regret the error.
Jack Balkin makes an excellent point here. Supporters of the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Indiana voter ID law (see myearlier posts and Dana's) claim that the requirement will somehow be part of a political bargain to improve access to voting, but there's no evidence whatsoever of such a bargain in Indiana. What's more there's also not evidence that erroneous perceptions of voter fraud stand in the way of increasing voter access if the legislature wants to do it. (Indiana made no effort to respond to actual abuses of absentee balloting, because that increased access benefits Republicans.)
Crawford is a case where modest judicial review would actually facilitate democracy: broadening access of powerless groups to the political process is where judicial review is at its most defensible. Souter and Breyer's dissents properly did not rule out Voter ID laws regardless of the context. If the restrictions were actually tied to efforts to increase voter access, or there were actual evidence that in-person vote fraud was a problem, this would be a different case. But, absent such balancing state interests, permitting Indiana to lessen the ability of the most powerless people in the state to vote is bad for democracy.
Claiming, as supporters of the ruling sometimes do, that the fact that only a relatively small (and especially politically powerless) class of people lack access to photo IDs justifies upholding the law is rather strange. As I've said with respect to similar arguments made to justify arbitrary limitations on a woman's right to choose, this logic makes "inequitable effects an argument in favor of the constitutionality of such regulations." This argument seems to stand Carolone Products on its head: burdens on fundamental rights are more acceptable as long as only discrete and insular minorities are affected. This is, to put it mildly, an unattractive conception of the role of judicial review.
With 16,000 new HIV infections worldwide each day and scientists predicting it will be 10 to 20 years before we have an effective vaccine, here's something new to worry about: Global warming and the growing food crisis will likely make the AIDS epidemic even worse. That was the consensus at an HIV/AIDS forum held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia yesterday. The Age reports:
Prominent HIV scientist Professor David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, agreed environmental change would have a negative impact on HIV sufferers.
"Climate change will lead to food scarcity and poorer nutrition, putting people with perilous immune systems at more risk of dying of HIV, as well as contracting and transmitting new and unusual infections," Prof Cooper said.
I'd add that as food becomes scarcer and more expensive, more women will be forced into prostitution to provide for themselves and their families. When prostitution becomes more prevalent, entire populations are at greater risk for contracting the disease. It's all connected.
Curious about this Nixonland book our guest blogger Rick Perlstein keeps talking about? Well then go read an excerpt from it on the main site:
The Democratic Party: enemy of the working man. It was the political version of that New York Times photograph of the stockbroker and the pie fitter joined in solidarity in the act of clobbering a hippie -- their common weapon the American flag. That white men in ties and white men in hard hats were radically opposed to one another was a foundational left-wing idea. But as a Republican state senator from Orange County observed, "Every time they burn another building, Republican registration goes up." Nixon told his team to get to work putting the Rosow Report's insights, "even if only symbolic," into action. Peter Brennan, and Thomas Gleason of the International Longshoremen's Association, vice president of the AFL-CIO executive committee, were summoned to the White House on May 26 -- the day the Dow reached a new yearly low, nine days after the Cooper-Church amendment passed a Senate committee. Brennan presented the president with an honorary hard hat reading commander in chief and left a four-star hard hat to present to General Creighton Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam, and promised continued patriotic marches: "The hard hat will stand as a symbol along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country." Nixon eventually made Brennan secretary of labor. One member of the delegation said, "If someone would have had the courage to go into Cambodia, they might have captured the bullet that took my son's life." The president choked up. Sweet triumph: who could be more Democratic than union leaders?
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Greg Anrig explains what Obama should have said when asked whether Republicans have good ideas:
In an interview on Sunday on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked Barack Obama to "name a hot button issue" where "Republicans have a better idea." Obama replied, "Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea." That response echoed his comment back in January that Republicans have been "the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time." Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and much of the liberal blogosphere piled on Obama then for seeming to endorse what Ronald Reagan unleashed.
Obama's remarks were clearly intended to reach beyond the Democratic base and demonstrate his openness to policies that appeal to independents and conservatives. But he could have done so much more effectively -- and without alienating members of his own party -- by distinguishing between traditional conservatism's legitimate concerns about the unintended consequences of public policies and the modern right-wing's deep-seated hostility toward government.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law that requires all voters to present an in-state driver's license or other official photo ID featuring their current address. Chris Rabb writes at Afro-Netizen:
On the surface, it seems like a pretty reasonable ruling: folks need to prove who they are when they go to vote to avoid potential voter fraud. The reality is that what is reasonable for many white collar and blue collar voters is not so reasonable for those invisible Americans who have not earned that amorphous moniker of "middle class".
These invisible souls are our country's poorest citizens who do not travel internationally (and thus, do no have passports) and who often cannot afford to own cars, the insurance on them or the gas in them (and thus, are far less likely to have a driver's license).
Indeed. And as Ben Adler reports at Politico, the ruling also hurts voters under 30, about 19 percent of whom do not have a photo ID listing their current address. That number spikes considerably among young people of color; in one Wisconsin survey, "nearly three-quarters of African Americans and fully two-thirds of Hispanics aged 18 to 24 did not have a valid driver’s license."
With Indiana's primary in less than a week, the Court has guaranteed that many young adults there will be rendered ineligible to vote. Another late-breaking development that hurts Barack Obama. Elsewhere on TAPPED Scott has more.
This puts the American left--and indeed, the American public--at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)--rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with. ...
Yet American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review -- and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean. Unfortunately, whenever anyone does try to read up about the conservative movement, he is inevitably handed Kirk's book--along, perhaps, with a copy of Patrick Buchanan's A Republic, Not An Empire, or something similarly misleading -- and hustled off to learn nothing about his intended subject.
I am largely in agreement with this sentiment but I'm not sure what the canon of conservative literature to be taught is, exactly. I don't think the conservative intelligentsia knows, either. One thing you'd have to think about in designing a "conservatism 101" course would be how to reconcile the different factions that went into "the movement" in those early years. The best book on this subject, by the way, is George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a hefty volume to be sure, but absolutely indispensable for understanding the subject. Nash contends that postwar conservatives came broadly in two flavors -- unrepentant individualist libertarians and aristocratic traditionalists -- who were bound by a loathing of the New Deal welfare state, the destructiveness of the Second World War, and horrified at international communism's march.
National Review brought these disparate figures under one roof, though not without sparks (Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk hated each other) which allowed these ideas to be explored in one place, with an eventual consensus being reached. That consensus, "fusionism," was in reality a victory for Meyer's libertarians but the argument ended, I would argue, because the intellectual movement had begun to influence a rising conservative political movement to the point where such philosophical debates took a back seat to an emergent conservative populism that could be harnessed under anti-communism and the collapse of liberal hegemony in the wake of Vietnam and the excesses of the 60s (and demonstrated brilliantly by Rick Perlstein in Before the Storm). By the time Reagan was elected president, I think few in the movement cared whether Kirk or Meyer was the best expression of conservatism. They had a country to run into the ground, after all.
TPMtv shows once again that McCain really did say we should stay in Iraq for 100 years.
Obamamakes another statement about Wright, and isn't nearly as sympathetic as he was in his last speech on the topic (he says he is "outraged" and "saddened" by the "spectacle" of Wright's comments).
The RNC is now threatening television stations that air the DNC's ad about McCain's 100-years-in-Iraq comment. Given how laughable their legal case is (they accuse the DNC of coordination because some candidates have mentioned the same statements) their threats are just so much contemptible bullying (whatever the AP may think).
Doing my research for Nixonland, I was dismayed to learn to that two of the greatest Democratic speeches are nowhere to be found across the entire howling wilderness of the Internet.
The first was delivered by Edmund Muskie on November 2, 1970. Richard Nixon was placing enormous stock for the Republicans in the 1970 congressional elections, and for good reason: the country seemed to be falling into chaos, and both he and Vice President Spiro Agnew had spent all spring, summer, and fall in an apparently successful effort to link the wellsprings of the chaos to the Democratic Party. Come November, however, the Republicans had their asses handed to them. (For instsance, George H.W. Bush, promised that the only way Lloyd Bentsen could outflank him from the right was to "drop off the face of the earth"--and lost.)
Why? These things are complicated; they always are. Over two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the President's handling of the economy, as the Democrats were hammering Nixon for stubbornly citing conservative principle (he would get over that experiment with principle soon enough) and refusing to impose wage and price controls, . One Teamster interviewed in Akron, Ohio by the New York Times explained that the National Guardsmen were "100 percent right in Kent State," but that "this summer only 10 out of 40 guys were working because of the slowdown in the construction industry"-- so he was voting Democrat.
Another reason Democrats did well, frankly, was that many of them effectively coopted Nixon-Agnew law-and-order rhetoric. Adlai Stevenson III, for example, son of the two-time Democratic presidential nominee, campaigned for U.S. Senate in Illinois side by side with the prosecutor of the Chicago 7, Thomas Aquinas Foran, who famously announced to a booster club rally at a parochial high school after the trial, that "we've lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution."
But according to many of the pundits, a lion's share of the credit for the Democrats' strong showing belonged to Muskie's national televised address on election eve: calm, cool, collected, and fearless, at a moment when it seemed like the Republican strategy of fear and smear had it all in the bad. It's a great Democratic speech (written, to give credit where credit is due, by Ted Sorensen) and it immediately rocketed Hubert Humphrey's 1968 running-mate to front-runner status for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. Anyway, it strikes me as pretty damned timeless. Maybe either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton should take inspiration from it when one introduces the other this August at the Democratic National Convention this August. Or maybe it's too goo-goo; I don't know. What do you think? Full text after the jump.
--Rick Perlstein
<blockquote>I
am speaking from Cape Elizabeth,
Maine, to discuss with you the
election campiagn which is coming to a close.
In the
heat of our campaigns, we have all become accustomed to a little anger and
exaggeration. Yet, on the whole, our polical process has served us well,
presenting for your judgment a range of answers to the country's problems and a
choice between men who seek the honor of public service.
That is
our system. It has worked for almost 200 years, longer than any other political
system in the world. And it still works.
But in
these elections of 1970, something has gone wrong. There has been name calling
and deception of almost unprecedented volume. Honorable men have been
slandered. Faithful servants of the country have had their motives questioned
and their patriotism doubted.
This
attack is not simply the overzealousness of a few local leaders. It has been
led, inspired, and guided from the highest offices in the land.
The
danger from this assault is not that a few more Democrats might be
defeated--the country can survive that. The true danger is that tAmerican
people will have been deprived of that public debate, that opportunity for fair
judgement, which is the heartbeat of the democratic process. And that is
something the country cannot afford.
Let me
try to bring some clarity to this deliberate confusion. Let me begin with those
issues of law and order, of violence and unrest, which have pervaded the rhetoric
of this campaign.
I believe
that any person who violates the law should be apprehended, prosecuted, and
punished, if found guilty. So does every candidate of both parties. And nearly
all Americans agree.
I believe
everyone has the right to feel secure, on the streets of his city and in the
buildings where he works or studies. So does every candidate for office of both
parties. And nearly all Americans agree. Therefore, there is no issue of law
and order, or of violence. There is only a problem. There is no disagreement
about what we want. There are only different approaches to getting it. And the
harsh and uncomfortable fact is that no one, in either party, has the final
answer.
For four
years, a conservative Republican has been governor of California. Yet there is no more law and
order in California
than when he took office.
President
Nixon, like President Johnson before him, has taken a firm stand. A Democratic
Congress has passed sweeping legislation. Yet America is no more orderly or
lawful nor its streets more safe than was the case two years ago, or four or
six.
We must
deal with symptoms, strive to prevent crime, halt violence, and punish the
wrongdoer.
But we
must also look for the deeper causes in the structure of our society.
If one of
your loved ones is sick, you do not think it is soft or undisciplined of a
doctor to try and discover the agents of illness. But you would soon discard a
doctor who thought it enough to stand by the bed and righteoughly curse the
disease.
Yet there
are those who seek to turn our common distress to partisan advantages, not by
offering better solutions but with empty threat and malicious slander.
They
imply that Democratic candidates for high office in Texas and California, in
Illinois and Tennessee, in Utah and Maryland, and among my New England
neighborods from Vermont and Connecticut, men who have courageously pursued
their convictions in the service of the republic in war and peace, that these
men actually favor violence and champion the wrongdoer.
That is a
lie. And the American people know it is a lie.
What what
are we to think when men in positions of public trust openly declare:
-That the
party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, which led us out of depression
and to victory over international barbarism;
-The
party of John Kennedy, who was slain in the service of the country he inspired;
-The
party of Lyndon Johnson, who wishstood the fury of countless demonstrations in
order to pursue a course he believed in;
-The
party of Robert Kennedy, murdered on the eve of his greatest triumphs;
How dare
they tell us that this party is less devoted or less courageous in maintaining
American principles and values then they are themselves.
This is
nonsense. And we all know it is nonsense.
These
attacks are dangerous in a more important sense, for they keep us from dealing
with our problems.
Names and
threats will not end the shame of ghettos and racial injustice, restore a
degraded environment, or end a long and bloody war.
Slogans
and television commercials will not bring the working man that assurance of a
constantly rising standard of living which was his only a few years ago and
which has been cruelly snatched away.
No
administration can be expected to solve the difficulties of American in two
years. But we can fairly ask two things--that a start be made and that the
nation be insilled with a sense of forward movement, of high purpose. This has
not been done.
Let us
look, for example, at the effort to halt inflation. We all agree that inflation
must be arrested. This administration has decided it could keep prices down by
withdrawing money from the economy. Now I do not think they will ever control
inflation this way.
But even
if their policy was sound, the money had to come from someone. And who did they
pick to pay? It was the working man, the consumer, the middle-class American.
There are
only two kinds of politics. They are not radical or reactionary, or
conservative and liberal, or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the
politics of fear and the politics of trust.
One says:
You are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom that we
may protect you.
The other
says: The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped by the
will of men.
Ordinarily
that division is not between parties, but between men and ideas. But this year
the leaders of the Republican Party have intentionally made that line a party
line. They have confronted you with exactly that choice.
Thus, in
voting for the Democratic party tomorrow, you cast your vote for trust, not
just in leaders or policies, but for trusting your fellow citizens, in the
anciety tradition of this home for freedom and, most of all, for trust in
yourself.</blockquote>
Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy adviser to John McCain, recently gave an interview with RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty that should put to rest any fantastical notions that a McCain administration would be more diplomatic than George Bush's (see Matt's piece for more on this). Even Donald "Old Europe" Rumsfeld would have thought twice before saying this: "traditionally, we have seen that the Russians will push and push until they meet opposition. And what they need to understand is that all European countries and the United States are united in opposing the latest Russian moves, which is really the culmination of years of what they've been doing". Or this: "I think first of all the administration has said very clearly and publicly that there will be no trade-offs. Trade-offs like that are kind of a relic of a bygone era of power politics."
Whoa daddy. McCain's got another thing coming if he thinks Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev and Zangief are just going to roll over the in the face of some tough Euro-American talk. Rather, they'll more closer to China and Iran and anyone else who will consider their interests. And since America needs them all to counter terrorism and WMDs, we might be rather upset when all of them don't help us out. And why should they help us? After all, trade-offs are just a thing of the past.
Well, there you have it, remarkably counterintuitive, and you are reading it right. Gary McCullough, who runs the Christian Newswire, a press release service whose clients (and proprietor) are conservative, sent out a release of his own this morning, arguing that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" statement is not different from the statements of pro-life pastors who claim that God's judgment will come down on America for allowing abortion:
As a strident anti-abortion activist, I have listened to countless sermons that have included the speakers commenting on God's judgment of America for the destruction of innocent life. So when I first heard Wright's "most popular" quote, "God bless America ... No! ... God damn America ... for killing innocent people ... for treating her citizens as less than human," I said to myself, "Obama's pastor sounds like he is pro-life."
Monday at the National Press Club Rev. Wright pointed out an indispensable foundation for the attacks he is receiving -- the misunderstanding of the style of prayer and preaching used in black churches today.
Can I hear an Amen?
I caught up with McCullough this afternoon, and he told me that although he has issues with other statements Wright has made, and realizes that Wright was not talking about abortion in the damning sermon, he has found himself defending Wright for the "God damn America" comment, and also defending Barack Obama's "bitter" comment to his conservative friends. "Never," said McCullough, "did I think that he [Wright] was anti-American. ... God, who is the creator of the world, has the right to punish the world if he wants to, or to judge the world, or to damn the world. Most white guy Protestants don't use that word, but he was saying something that I've heard so many times, just with a little different phrasing."
As far as Obama's "clinging to guns and religion" remark, McCullough characterized it as Obama being descriptive of people's "condition and their soul. About them and their attitude about society . . . . I didn't think of it at all as a put-down of middle America or Joe Religious Person." How did his conservative friends and colleagues react when he defended Obama? "Nobody argues with me. I think people have come to realize that's just the way it goes. You say something that can be used against you, and you're going to get hit over the head, and that's just the way it goes. If it happens to someone on the other side, you figure, what the heck, it's not my guy."
The Wall St. Journal has an informative article today (with a chart!) about Obama being poised to surpass Hillary Clinton in superdelegate endorsements sooner than later:
When the year began, about 200 of the superdelegates had taken sides, most for Sen. Clinton. Her campaign, including Mr. Clinton, had quickly signed up Clinton-administration veterans, others on the DNC and elected officials in Arkansas and New York, so that she initially led Sen. Obama by more than 100.
But the Obama campaign correctly figured that she had gotten the easy pickings and that the rest were up for grabs. Once he began winning more states than she did, her endorsements slowed to a trickle, and her lead eroded to less than two dozen now.
Clinton or Obama partisans are quick to point out that a superdelegate endorsement is non-binding, and they can change their mind at the convention. About 200 endorsed Hillary right away, but after that she picked up new superdelegates only slowly. Obama, meanwhile, has picked up endorsement after endorsement and now is only 20 behind Clinton. If superdelegates are going to suddenly jump ship, they're not likely to do so en masse unless there actually is a "superdelegate convention" that compels them to.
Since Clinton was only able to increase her super count by about 25 percent since January, I find it unlikely that the remaining undeclared supers are suddenly going to endorse her as a group. And since being in the lead doesn't seem to have much of an effect, I find it just as unlikely that supers will go over to Obama as a group. In short, there's no compelling reason to see superdelegates ending the contest decisively before the convention because they appear structurally incapable of making a mass decision unless there actually is concerted effort on their behalf to choose. Until then it's just a slow bleed until Denver.
Yes, this is real. Tony Zirkle, an Indianapolis lawyer running for Congress as a Republican, spoke at a neo-Nazi event commemorating Hitler's birthday, appearing in front of a portrait of Hitler and alongside former German SS Officer Theo Junker and Bill White, Commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party. At the event, Zirkle, whose campaign website is bizarrely fixated on porn, said Jewish pornographers and book store owners are responsible for the sexual exploitation of "white people." The sexually transmitted infection HPV is "a genocide directed at the white race," he said. Audience members at the event wore swastika arm bands.
When the local newspaper confronted Zirkle, he likened speaking at the Hitler birthday party to speaking on mainstream African American radio. "I'll speak before any group that invites me," he said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta." This isn't the first time Zirkle has deeply offended. Earlier this year, he suggested that white and black people should live in separate states.
This is Zirkle's second primary campaign for Congress. In 2006, he won 30 percent of the vote. Here's the video of this travesty:
James Fallows, while commenting on Elizabeth Edwards' op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times, says:
The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians -- Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse. (emphasis mine)
Indeed, that one line is the take-home point of Fallow's oft-linked 1996 essay, "Why Americans Hate the Media," and it is just as salient today as it was ten years ago. But what I'm finding increasingly intriguing is the press' conception of what it thinks the public wants or thinks about matters such as, say Jeremiah Wright. Tellingly, the only story able to compete with the Wright coverage in terms of sheer outrage this week is this tabloid nonsense about a fifteen year old girl being photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
There isn't an equivalence between these stories in terms of content but in terms of why they are considered newsworthy. In both cases the presumption is protection of the public -- by informing them -- from religious figures and tasteful photographs which can be interpreted as controversial. It doesn't matter if apologies are issued. It doesn't matter if denouncements are made. The story still exists. And why? Because someone made an editorial decision to keep it alive because they assume that's what the public wants.
Here's another way to think about it. Perhaps you've seen this obnoxious Nextel advertisement that features a quorum of firefighters getting stuff done in Congress. You see, these American heroes simply look at an issue -- say, "clean water" -- and vote for it. Wouldn't it be great if legislating bodies actually worked this way! Joking aside, my point is that whoever made this ad was making an assumption about the public. They were assuming that a) Americans believe Congress doesn't get anything done because they are incapable of making decisions, b) firefighters make quick decisions all the time. If they don't, people die, so c) firefighters would make great legislators. I'm not sure what is more insulting, the degradation of democratic deliberation or the cynical use of public frustration to sell phones.
But what's crystal clear is that Nextel knows this isn't what's wrong with Congress works (I assume they have an army of lobbyists on the hill), but is betting that this is how the public thinks Congress works. Just like media elites deciding what stories live and die based on presumption of public demand, business elites make those same presumptions to sell products. And God forbid a Democratic politician tells other elites what the public thinks in rural America -- that would be elitism!
Over at Beat the Press, Dean Baker parses this New York Times article on Clinton's support for the federal gas tax holiday, and Obama's opposition to it. The article states:
While Mr. Obama’s view is shared by environmentalists and many independent energy analysts, his position allowed Mrs. Clinton to draw a contrast with her opponent in appealing to the hard-hit middle-class families and older Americans who have proven to be the bedrock of her support.
And here's Dean:
Actually, almost all economists would agree that the tax cut proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain would save consumers nothing. With the supply of gas largely fixed by the capacity of the oil industry (they claim to be running their refineries at full capacity), the price will not change in response to the elimination of the tax. The only difference will be that money that used to go to the government in tax revenues will instead go to the oil industry as higher profits.
If Senator Clinton is able to use this proposal to draw a contrast with Senator Obama in expressing concern for middle-class families it could only be attributable to the extraordinary incompetence of the reporters who are covering the campaign.
The UK Daily Telegraph, which last year named Rudy Giuliani America's most influential conservative and Bill Clinton our most influential liberal, this week comes out with a ranking of the top American political pundits. So far 31-50 are available, and there are some strange choices. Paul Krugman is all the way back at #48 -- surely too low for any New York Times columnist. Figures such as Dee Dee Meyers and Paul Begala earn higher rankings, though they've both receded in influence along with that of the Clinton machine. Any predictions of who will come out on top, or who should? My guess is Rush Limbaugh, with Keith Olbermann as the most influential liberal pundit.
Pre-school funding, that's what. And that's a shame because currently, less than 20 percent of American 4-year olds have access to free, public education. Christina Satkowski writes at Early Ed Watch:
This is the first time in four years...that the number of governors recommending pre-k spending increases has declined. Four governors have balked at red lines on their balance sheets and proposed decreasing funding for pre-k. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) made an across-the-board cut of 10 percent to all government agencies, including a $28.5 million cut to the state's struggling preschool program.
Even some governors in states with rosier budget scenarios are still turning their backs on deserving preschoolers. Montana this year has a budget surplus of $125 million--more than enough to provide pre-k for every three- and four-year-old in the state. Yet instead of using this money to invest in early education, Montana and Wyoming (another state with a healthy surplus) will remain among the twelve states that have no pre-k program.
The most aggressive governors when it comes to increasing pre-k funding are Alabama's Bob Riley (R) and Massachusetts' Deval Patrick (D). But legislators in those states are trying to scale back gubernatorial pre-k initiatives in the face of state budget deficits. What's the solution?
First, as Satkowski writes, states can include pre-k funding in their K-12 education budgets. That makes sense both in terms of the legislative process and in terms of what educational research tells us about how young children learn -- namely that pre-k should be viewed as part of the kindergarten through third grade continuum. Secondly, the federal government can play a much larger role. Hillary Clinton's national pre-k program would provide states with federal funds to create universal schooling for 4-year olds. Tuition would be free for low income and English-language-learner students. Barack Obama's plan would also provide states with federal funding and encourage them to build pre-k programs around the Illinois model, which provides voluntary public schooling for "at risk" 3-year olds and all 4-year olds in the state.
In case you missed the inaugural day of our John McCain awareness week, check out Matt Yglesias on McCain's startlingly familiar (and dangerous) foreign policy, Mark Schmitt on the Washington-manufactured Maverick myth and Harold Meyerson on McCain's emphasis on his biography over any particular ideology.
Not really. Despite the hype, Obama's still ahead by at least 10 points in most polls. But the state's governor, Mike Easley, endorsed Clinton today. Pertinent facts about Easley? Education, particularly pre-k, has been his primary issue in office. He's North Carolina's second Catholic governor, and is said to have vice presidential ambitions. Easley, of course, had backed John Edwards before he dropped out of the race, so just about every news story out there is wondering if the Man Himself will be the next to endorse.
I'm gonna go ahead and predict a big NO on that one. John Edwards will not endorse any candidate between now and next week's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. If he was planning on endorsing before the voting is over, he would've done so long ago.
Over at my home base at Campaign for America's Future we've been pursuing a project, and would love to bring TAPPED's readers onboard for the fun. I made the observation that Ronald Reaganused to quip, "Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not so much that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so." Like all of Reagan's most brilliant quips it was designed to absolve him from having to take a substantive position—in this case so, when he made up lies about how liberals were lying (in this case about Social Security's fiscal health; what goes around comes around), he could say he never called anyone a "liar."
It's actually, however, a handy construction when thinking about conservatives, because it is indeed so hard to know, and so rhetorically disruptive, whether the conservative you're debating is in fact lying, or is instead merely ignorant, or is guilty of some opportunistic combination of both.
With that in mind, I coined the term "NotSo's" to describe habitually false utterances by conservatives that may or may not be the product of actual fraud.
Wow, you know the Missouri state legislature's latest round of "if you choose to get an abortion, you must be an irrational, hysterical woman" regulations are bad when even Will Saletan can see through them. This may be too optimistic, but the only potential good thing to come out of Kennedy's openly sexist opinion in Carhart II is that it may have given away the show to at least some mushy abortion centrists.
Regular readers know I am liberal journalism's foremost defender of Jenna Bush. You know, that's the quality you can expect from TAPPED: Rick Perlstein, nationally-recognized expert on the Nixon presidency! Dana Goldstein, Jenna Bush fan-girl! In any case, I'm of course elated to see that Jenna is saying she may not vote for John McCain in November. Here's the video, from Larry King. Note Laura gritting her teeth through her smile. She's thinking, "Wait till we get back to the green room so I can knock some sense into that girl!"
Last week a judge acquitted the three NYPD officers who fired 50 shots into an unarmed man, Sean Bell, outside a Queens nightclub in 2006. Over the weekend, the New York Timesran a story about how some black New Yorkers "saw the case through a prism not of race, but of police conduct." The article quotes a few different people who say this is different than other high-profile cases of police violence against unarmed black men, such as when cops fired 41 shots at an unarmed Amadou Diallo as he stood in his doorway in 1999. This isn't Giuliani's New York any more, they say, things are different now.
Here's Ta-Nehisi Coatesreacting to the Times article:
I make no brief for the cops in the Sean Bell case here, but we have to acknowledge that, as tragic this was, as stupid and incredibly incompetent as the cops behaved, this isn't the same town, and this isn't the same sort of incident. But that doesn't mean that there is no price to be paid. I just wonder--as the judge argued--whether the court was the place to deal with that.
Then there's the fact that two of the three officers involved in the shooting are black men. I'll defer to dnA on this one:
I'm sure there are more than a few people out there who would argue that black officers pulling the trigger proves that the incident wasn't racially motivated.
Sadly, that's just not the case
The racist attitudes of a police department can and do affect black officers almost as much as they do white officers. The reason for that doesn't really have anything to do with self-hatred on the part of the black officers, or at least in many cases I don't think it does. The fundamental root of the issue isn't so much a departmental policy that says that white people are good and black people are bad as it is a departmental policy that says that young black males are a problem to be contained. A threat to be aware of, and to be neutralized if necessary.
Of course, I'm speaking as a white woman who doesn't live in New York, but this seems spot-on to me. Yeah, the NYPD may have undergone some changes since the Giuliani years. Yeah, two of the three cops were black. But the Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo cases don't seem to be worlds apart.
Back in 2004, there was a lot of talk about getting out the youth vote with the implicit assumption being that young people automatically vote for Democrats. It's true that younger people do tend to vote Democratic, but only marginally so, and hardly in numbers that could easily decide an election. Now from Pew, we're seeing that this might be changing, and changing big. In 2004, Democrats only held an 11-point advantage over Republicans in party ID. By 2008, that figure has shot to 25 points. To put another way, in 2004 54 percent of 18-29 year-olds voted for Kerry, 45 percent for Bush. That's within 4 points of the party ID figures. In 2004, 18-29 year-olds made up 17 percent of the voting population, casting over 20 million votes, 11 million of which went to Kerry.
Now, if we assume that 18-29 year olds make up the same percentage of the population in 2008 as they did in 2004, and give them a seven point bump, then that means 61 percent of 18-29 year-olds will vote Democratic, netting over 12 million votes. What does an additional 1 million votes get you? If this were the 2004 election, all else being equal, that's brings the popular vote to within 1-1.5 percentage points instead of 3. I'd call that significant.
Jeremiah Wright doesn't seem to be doing much to help Obama out.
Kevin Drum points out how little we know about John McCain's assets and how absurd it is to ignore Cindy McCain's assets. Drum asks if the press is really going to let McCain get away with this. My guess? Yes.
David CorngetsTerry McAuliffe to promise the nomination fight will be over by June 15. I think that, whatever McAuliffe does, he'll be proven right since the already immense pressure on super delegates to endorse will increase about a thousandfold after the last primary on June 3. Howard Deanconcurs (though his date is the end of June).
Obama makes a statement that leaves open a tiny hole for opponents to claim he said they could criticize him about Wright. John McCain jumps right for it ... and, to my mind anyway, gets stuck.
Meet Obama's new stump speech, (mostly) the same as his old stump speech.
Bloomberg's Christopher Sternpoints out that Obama will derive enormous power from his massive database no matter what the outcome of the primary.
Alan Keyescan't even get the nomination of the Constitution Party.
Finally, one way you can tell how scared Republicans are of Democrats using McCain's "100 years" comment is to listen to how much they whine when it's used. Their complaints, by the way, are without merit. Sure McCain did stipulate that our 100 years in Iraq would be peaceful like our occupation of Korea, but, since that seems about as likely as McCain publicly converting to Islam, McCain's comments are indeed an endorsement of perpetual war. If the interpretation really was unfair he'd be able to explain what he actually believes instead of repeatedly complaining that use of the comment is "unfair" and "taken out of context." He hasn't refuted the Democratic interpretation because it accurately reflects his beliefs.
When Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in June 1967, it was treated by some as a hippie apotheosis; theater critic Kenneth Tynan called it “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” It’s not that I necessarily disagree (just the other day a baby boomer friend of mine who never listens to rock music reciting the running order of the entire album, strictly on the basis of how many times he heard it wafting through the walls of the dorm of his Ivy League schools), it’s that Sgt. Pepper was not great art because it represented a marker in some generational war; it was great art because it staged that war within itself.
Exhibit A: the loveliest moment on the record, the song “She’s Leaving Home,” a haunting cry of sympathy for the Depression generation parents who wished nothing more than to love their children, and whose alienated children’s thanks was to run away—perhaps to a place like Haight-Ashbury, the hippie Mecca in San Francisco, or New York’s East Village, where indeed, the NYPD maintained a 20-man undercover detail to help terrified parents find runaways, and where the New York Times’ J. Anthony Lukas reported a Pulitzer Prize-winnig story about the supposedly cheerful and well-mannered debutante from Greenwich, Connecticut who turned up dead in an East Village boiler room, the capstone to a brief career picking up, according to her rooming house’s desk clerk, “anybody off the street—the dirtiest bearded hippies she could find”
You won’t find the lyrics from “She’s Leaving Home” in Nixonland. But you can read (some of) them on TAPPED!
She (We never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (Never a thought for ourselves)
She’s leaving home after living alone
For so many years (Bye, bye)”
Next comes a gem from 1971. Eighteen million Reader’s Digest subscribers received detachable flag decals inside the special February 1969 “America In Transition” issue. Thirty one million more wrote in to request one. The hit film Patton, from spring of 1970 — Richard Nixon’s favorite movie—began with the legendary gentleman delivering a stirring speech in front of a gargantuan American flag. The same spring when 15,000 gathered on the New Haven Green in support of a group of imprisoned Black Panthers, city fathers arranged for the 60 foot flagpole above the World War I memorial to be slathered with grease (the flag in front of Center Church had already been replaced by a Yippie banner).
In Silver Spring, Maryland, at the high school Allison Krause had attended, left-wing students commandeered the PA system and demanded the flag be lowered. An argument broke out: “People talking about this chick who was killed at Kent. Two GIs from this school have been killed in Vietnam. Why didn’t we lower the flag for them?” The school had two flagpoles, so the principal devised a compromise: one flag was raised all the way, the other halfway. Compromise didn’t work. Right-wing students pulled down the flag memorializing Allison and burned it in a trash can.
At Northwestern, students carried a flag upside down, the symbol for distress. “A hefty man in work clothes,” according to Time, tried to grab it: “That’s my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it!” The kids started arguing. “There are millions of people like me,” the man responded. “We’re fed up with your movement. You’re forcing us into it. We’ll have to kill you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing a chance I never had.” The next week, several hundred New York construction workers marched to a memory of the four slain students from Kent State. They marched bearing American flags of the sort that top off construction sites. Then they began beating the demonstrators nearly to death with their hard hats, because they believed one had desecrated an America
flag (“He was variously reported as blowing his nose in the flag, tearing the flag with his teeth, and eating the flag,” ran the police report.)
The left-wing folk singer John Prine responded in song:
That song, however, didn’t sell nearly copies as the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley, which described the cold-blooded massacre at My Lai of hundreds of women and children this way, to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:
While we were fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat As we go marching on…
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun And the great commander asks me, ‘Did you fight or did you run? I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood
We took the jungle village exactly like they said We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had And when the smoke had cleared away a hundred souls lay dead.
Sir, the soldier that’s alive is the only one can fight There’s no other way to wage a war when the only one in sight That you’re sure is not a VC is your buddy on the right.
Radio stations in the South played it in nonstop rotation, interrupted only by calls for donations to Calley’s defense fund. Welcome to Nixonland!
In light of Scaliaonce again dismissing those who consider Bush v. Gore less than a noble application of constitutional principle, this passage from his concurrence in Crawford can only be read as black comedy:
That sort of detailed judicial supervision of the election process would flout the Constitution’s express commitment of the task to the States. It is for state legislatures to weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class. Judicial review of their handiwork must apply an objective, uniform standard that will enable them to determine, ex ante, whether the burden they impose is too severe.
Yes, how outrageous and inconsistent with federalism it would be for the Supreme Court to use the equal protection clause to engage in the ad hoc supervision of state election procedures, without anything resembling an "objective, unifrom standard!" Note: this principle void if it can put a Republican president in the White House.
The prince of darkness is going after the princes of the Church. In his syndicated column today, Robert Novak lambastes the prelates of Washington, D.C. (Archbishop Donald Wuerl) and New York (Cardinal Edward Egan) for allowing prominent pro-choice pols (Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senators Kennedy, Kerry and Dodd in D.C. and ex-Hizzoner Rudy Giulilani in New York) to receive communion during Pope Benedict’s recent visit. (Giuliani, as Novak acknowledges, poses a special case, since he’s on to his third marriage without ever having gotten his second one annulled.)
The truly faithful bishop, Novak argues, is St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, who refuses communion to pro-choice electeds. To proffer the wafer runs counter to Benedict’s dictat since, Novak writes, “Vatican sources say the pope has not retreated from his long-held position that pro-choice politicans should be deprived of Communion, but the decisions in Washington and New York were not his. The effect,” Novak continues, “was to dull the pope’s messages of faith, obligation and compassion.”
The theological Novak is a relatively new creation; he converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1996. Now, however, he has anointed himself Protector of the Faith, while functionally, he is becoming the op-ed-page version of the Grand Inquisitor. Where heretics lurk, there Novak shall follow, with column, kindling and a matchbox.
For at least five or six years now I've been emailing with the same small group of conservatives, a diverse group that includes an erudite bookworm, a citizen of the Free Republic, and a professional conservative publicist.
As you can imagine, things have gotten awful strange over the years. But never quite as strange as this. All three seem to be convinced that the Democrats are headed for a historic rout by the Republicans this November.
One, under the subject heading, "When It Rains, It Pours," links to a "a photo of Obama 'bundler' and Code Pink operative Jodie Evans arm-in-arm with Hugo Chavez."
Goodness. How could John McCain lose?
Next up, the publicist sends an analysis from the Wall Street Journal on the return of Silvio Berlusconi entitled "The 'Waterloo' of Italian Communism." The left, you understand, is in retreat all over the world. And the Democrats are acting like they can still keep Congress?
Next, the same correspondant sends John Judis's New Republicanalysis of Obama's apparent troubles among white working class voters under the heading, "I hear the fat lady...."
Next, however, comes my favorite. The Free Republican avers, "I hate to be Master of the Obvious here, but Obama was never a serious candidate. At most...at most he's supposed to appear so radical as to do Hillary the favor of making her look somewhat 'centrist' and normal."
He then makes the following prediction:
"Ditto for benefitting Gore or Kerry, should a Denver Dem Convention Coup be in the making."
If you've been following the story of the 437 children removed by the state of Texas from a breakaway, fundamentalist Mormon community in Eldorado, you know things are more complicated than they initially appeared: Police raided the compound after they received a call from a woman who said she was a 16-year girl who'd been sexually assaulted there. Now authorities believe those calls were actually placed by a Colorado woman with a history of making false police reports. Yet a Court chose to keep the children, even breast-feeding infants, away from their families and in foster homes, at least for the time-being. It is known that the sect forces girls in early puberty into marriages with older men, and that girls as young as 13 years old were pregnant or already mothers when the community was raided. A powerful argument can be made that when a community of adults forces children to conform to such a misogynist, violent, and abusive ideology, it is in their children's best interest to be raised by adults outside of that community.
Yet voices are beginning to raise in protest of the removal. Warren Binford, a children's rights expert, writes in the Oregon Statesman Journal:
If these teenage girls are being sexually abused, they should be in protective custody — absolutely. However, most of the children in custody are boys and young children, and thus, not at imminent risk of the abuse alleged.
All children have the right to remain with their families unless and until there is substantial proof of imminent risk of serious harm to that specific child. Due process rights entitle each and every child to individualized findings of harm or serious risk of harm.
It is sensible to assume that, especially for girls, being raised in an environment of sexual coercion has a profoundly negative psychological impact well before the actual acts of physical abuse take place. Still, Binford's point is well taken; removing young children from their parents abruptly may be equally traumatic. Indeed, there is no way for society to root out every family subjecting their children to such ideas and put those kids into an already over-burdened foster care system. So policy and legal solutions to these problems are unclear. Readers, what do you think? Is Texas right to keep the FLDS children in state custody?
The Supreme Court's decision upholding Indiana's vote ID law was unable to secure 5 votes for a single rationale. Stevens, in an opinion joined by Kennedy and Roberts, rejected the facial challenge to the law but left open the possibility of future litigation if it was proven to be an undue burden. Scalia, in a concurrence joined by Thomas and reasonable, moderate Samuel Alito wanted to foreclose future litigation. (I assume Stevens may have joined the majority partly to keep Kennedy and Roberts on board with a more minimalist opinion.)
The key problem with the decision to uphold the statute is summed up in Souter's dissent: "a State may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate, see ante, at 7–13, or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediments it has imposed. The State has made no such justification here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried." Consider this remarkable passage from the Stevens opinion:
The only kind of voter fraud that SEA 483 addresses is in-person voter impersonation at polling places. The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history. Moreover, petitioners argue that provisions of the Indiana Criminal Code punishing such conduct as a felony provide adequate protection against the risk that such conduct will occur in the future. It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years, and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor—though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud—demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.
So the only type of fraud shown to have occurred in Indiana history is a type the statute specifically doesn't address, and as it happens this apparently irrational choice happens to coincide with the partisan interests of the legislators who enacted the statute. This really isn't good enough if you want to burden the fundamental right to vote.
The other thing to mention is that the "as-applied" challenge is problematic in the context of elections, because there generally isn't a good remedy. It's unlikely in the extreme that if the burdens imposed by the statute were decisive that the election would be run again. The better option would have been to strike the legislation and invite the legislature to craft legislation more closely tailored to its asserted interests.
Hamid Karzai's would-be assassins on Sunday penetrated 18 security rings to get at the Afghan president according to the Asia Times. Even getting within range of Karzai, let alone within 65 feet of the VIP viewing stand, would seem to suggest the Taliban is right claim that it has infiltrated the government security forces.
If and when the US leaves Iraq, it is going to find itself in a familiar situation in Afghanistan: bogged down in a war in a Muslim country, from which it seemingly cannot extricate itself.
It's with a great deal of sadness that the Prospect bids farewell to Kate Sheppard who is moving on to be Grist's one-woman DC bureau. We're all excited to see what she does there, but we'll miss her, especially on TAPPED.
Until new writing fellows are hired (there's still a few days left to apply!), we'll be featuring a new guest blogger every week. Look for a mix of established journalists, academics, and independent bloggers we think deserve a bigger audience.
This week, we're joined by Rick Perlstein, author of the forthcomingNixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, blogger for the Campaign for America's Future, and all-around sage of American politics. We're thrilled to have him.
Today the Senate is debating a non-binding resolution to settle the status of John McCain's citizenship -- the Arizona Senator was born in the Panama Canal Zone -- to clarify whether he is eligible under the Constitution to serve as President. Now, I don't think McCain's eligibility is any more in question than Clinton's (just because the Constitution specifies "he" instead of more gender-neutral terminology isn't a disqualification, to my mind) but this is nonetheless an interesting legal question.
Citizenship is conferred by place of birth, yet people are born over international waters, in military zones, etc. all the time. Does McCain's status ultimately depend on U.S. law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice or does it fall under the jurisdiction of the host country of the military base? There are previous examples of this being an issue, notably Barry Goldwater, who was born in Arizona territory and George Romney, who was born in Mexico, but it has never been clarified. I turn this open question over to our more legally-inclined readers to debate, but it would be nice if Congress simply made clear by statute the ambiguous "natural born" language of the Constitution.
Last week I noticed that Time Magazine's latest cover bore a striking resemblance to recent covers of The Prospect and The New Republic. But it turns out the homage runs deeper. I don't pay much attention to advertisements on television, and don't really watch NBA basketball until the playoffs, but I did watch the Phoenix Suns' game four comeback from death yesterday, and I saw a series of ads that all used the same split-screen technique to demonstrate "that there can only be one" (several examples can be found here). So it turns out that Time was less ripping off other political magazines are they were ripping off the NBA and perhaps ABC, which is broadcasting the playoffs.
Trend story alert! The New York Times Sunday Style section yesterday proclaimed a new habit among young professionals: Openly discussing salaries. For what it's worth, I think it's accurate to say that workers under 30 today are much comfortable than our parents were in disclosing how much we earn. I, for one, know the approximate salaries of most of my friends and many of my acquaintances. But rather than attribute this to generational openness thanks to MySpace and Facebook (as many of the Times' sources do), I'd say the key factor is that we live in extremely uncertain economic times in which most employees have no representation or support at work. In a unionized workplace, there is a publicized pay scale and an organization on your side when you enter into negotiations. But the vast majority of us today are standing alone. Knowing what colleagues or competitors earn is one of the only ways to effectively advocate for yourself. As the Times reports:
Janet Polli, 32, who lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, works in sales and marketing for a nonprofit organization. A few years ago, she and a colleague were both selected for a promotion at a nonprofit, and Ms. Polli suggested they share salary information as a negotiating tool.
“I wanted to be open, like a union,” she recalled. “We would get more if we were together.”
But the other woman “was very secretive in her negotiations,” she said. “In the end, neither of us did very well.”
That's why effective fair pay legislation would not only make it easier for workers to file pay discrimination claims, but would also stop employers from penalizing workers for sharing salary information. Lily Ledbetter, for example, had to rely upon an anonymous tipster to learn that the men at her level at Goodyear Tire were earning far more than she was for the same work. Keeping salary information under tabs most often benefits not workers, but employers.
It's worth noting, in light of this MSNBC post that asks whether Indiana could go blue this year, that of the remaining primary states, only two have voted for Democratic presidential candidate since the 1970s, Oregon and Kentucky. The rest haven't supported a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, and, although North Carolina went for Jimmy Carter in '76, I think we can safely consider that an aberration (before that it was 1964 as well). Now it's true that voters are registering Democratic in record numbers in places like North Carolina, but this doesn't necessarily point to a red-blue shift in these states. Rather, it seems that Democrats, or Democatic-leaning voters are excited about their choice, and that means high turnout and registration. But the jury's still out on whether all these new potential Democratic votes will be enough to flip these states in the general election. Also read Holly Yeager's take from last week on the main site.
Over the weekend, the NY Timesran a story about how the financial plans of each of the three candidates held one thing in common: each would raise the budget deficit by "trillions of dollars." What's odd, other than the Times' newfound interest in avoiding budget deficits, is how they don't pass judgment on the substance of how each candidate will put us in the red -- it's all bad.
For instance, they provide a little chart with the "highlights" of each plan, broken down by "costs" and "savings." Virtually all of John McCain's costs are revenue-starving measures -- eliminating the AMT, cutting the corporate tax rate, and doubling the personal exemptions for dependents. For both Democrats, the costs are entirely new expenditures: mandatory health insurance, developing alternative sources of energy, matching savings in government-created retirement accounts, expanding foreign aide, and increased education spending.
Now these are the "highlights" I'm focusing on, and surely the full financial picture is more complex, but isn't the implication that these are the biggest features of each candidate's respective budget plan? Why would anything with a higher price tag be left off a list of "highlights?" I bring this up because when you add up the costs and savings for each candidate, they aren't particularly equal. McCain leaves us $15 billion in the red, Hillary puts us $8 billion in the black, and Obama leaves us with a $33 billion deficit. Moreover, some of these plans are incomplete. Both McCain and Obama have "cut wasteful programs" on their savings list, without further specification, and only McCain's is given a dollar value ($65 billion). McCain also has "generate economic growth ($20 billion)" listed as a saving, but without more specifics we'll have to assume this growth is generated by magic. Obama has three items without dollar amounts attached to them -- savings from ending the Iraq War, auctioning permits for greenhouse gases and the afore-mentioned wasteful programs cut -- which makes it difficult to put together a real financial picture.
I was left more confused than informed by the piece. The impression it gives is that McCain's huge tax cuts are just as bad as spending on education, health care and alternative energy; this despite lines in the article like
With the national debt soaring to $9.1 trillion from $5.6 trillion at the start of 2001, in part because of the Iraq war and Mr. Bush’s tax cuts, a crucial question about the candidates to succeed him is “whether they are helping to fill the hole or make it deeper,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates deficit reduction. “With the proposals they have on the table, it looks to me like all three would make it deeper.”
And
Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.
So, war spending and tax cuts are bad, right? Doesn't that make McCain's plan seem especially irresponsible, given that all his costs are in precisely in those two areas, again, according to the highlights chart? And McCain will put us deeper in the red than the Democrats, according to the CBO (whose report isn't even linked to in the piece) -- do I have that right? I'm not clear why the Times went to all the trouble to find equivalence in these plans where there really is none.
Eleanor Clift writes a bizarre, Godfather-inspired column suggesting that if Hillary Clinton eventually does win the White House, it won't be business, but personal.
Bill Clinton appears to be campaigning harder for Hillary than Hillary herself, pushing hard for debates in Oregon.
Steve Clemons has the transcript from the "'background briefing' with Senior US officials on Syria's alleged nuclear program."
So you're running for president and you're running low on transportation funds -- what do you do? If you're John McCain, you just hitch a free ride on your wife's corporate jet for a few months.
M. LeBlancfindsObama using some wishy-washy rhetoric about parental involvement laws. I do think her headline is a little unfair; the closest to an outright endorsement is "possibly for extremely young teens, i.e., 12- or 13-year-olds." This is pretty silly -- on the question of whether public policy should be designed to use state coercion to produce more 12-year old mothers, I vote "no" -- but the statement is both equivocal and doesn't reflect any legislation actually likely to be passed.
Discussing the need for bypass provisions reminds me of the bit in Ball Four where the general manager tells a player with pride that the team will generously agree to raise his salary to the league minimum; the Supreme Court has effectively required bypass provisions already. But bringing it up is a dodge, not an actual endorsement of legislation. Like Clinton, his rhetoric is evasive but unlikely to result in support for any actual legislation; this isn't my optimal position but I can live with it.
I know there are political realities here; these laws, while awful public policy, are also very popular. But I wish Obama, Clinton and other pro-choice Democrats when possible would answer the question this way:
"Of course, the best situation is for a pregnant young woman to discuss the situation with loved ones she can trust and who will give her sound advice. But the problem is that young women in that position are very likely to do so without needing to get the state involved. And by using state coercion you also pull into the net young women in dysfunctional family relationships who have very good reasons not to share their thoughts and decision with. In other words, when they would do the most good the regulations are superfluous, and when they're most necessary they're likely to lead to an increase in physical and emotional abuse rather than lead to a better decision-making process. I can understand the goal here, but legislation just isn't a good way of achieving it.
I know that one way around this dilemma the Supreme Court has embraced is to allow a bypass for young women in difficult family situations. That might sound good on paper, but in practice it just doesn't work. The young women must likely to need to apply for a bypass are usually the least well-positioned to obtain one, and determinations about who should be granted one are inevitably made according to arbitrary standards applied by judges who may be very hostile to reproductive rights. We should keep the state out of family affairs in this instance. And we should also focus on policies, like rational sex ed. and access to contraceptives, that might reduce teenage pregnancies rather than using state coercion to create more 13-year old mothers. We should increase support services for young women who choose to give birth too. But parental involvement requirements just aren't a good means of pursuing any worthwhile objective."
Someday, maybe we can get something like that in a questionnaire from a national politician...
As Katereported earlier, Obama today launched a 50-state voter registration drive in a joint fund raising partnership with the DNC. It’ll be interesting to see if he really does push hard in all 50 states or if that’s window dressing. So far though, his campaign is insisting they mean it.
Noam Scheiberexplains why Indiana’s status as a red state helps Obama.
I’m sure you were all dying to know that the three guys in Abercrombie & Fitch shirts behind Obama when he gave his concession speech on Tuesday were not deliberately placed there.
Yargh!!! Did two reasonable, intelligent people really write an article with the thesis that, if Obama wins Indiana by even one point he’ll have successfully demonstrated an ability to win working-class white voters, but, if he loses by even one point, he’ll have permanently damaged his campaign? Really? We all know roughly what the outcome will be -- Clinton or Obama will win in the low single digits and delegates will be roughly split. The idea that a few thousand votes are the best test of who better appeals to a whole demographic is preposterous. Sure, who wins will affect perceptions, but that’s no reason to pretend it actually tells us anything about the relative strengths of the candidates.
Obama is now on the air in every remaining state and Puerto Rico.
Switching sides when you’re a superdelegate is one thing, but this guy raised $500,000 for Clinton before joining Obama’s finance team. I bet he feels dumb.
Somehow, the North Carolina GOP is withstanding the massive moral and political pressure John McCain is bringing to bear on them to take down their controversial anti-Obama ad. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he wasn’t trying. (Note that this means he’s either completely without power in his own party or a liar.)
On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, chaired by Henry Waxman held an oversight hearing on the effectiveness of abstinence-only education programs. Shelby Knox, the young woman who was featured in the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox about growing up a conservative Southern Baptist in Texas before becoming an advocate for comprehensive sex education, was on hand to testify about the ineffectiveness of the programs. She blogged about her testimony afterwards:
What did the secularized abstinence-only program for students in my school district look like? Well, it was taught by the same pastor who officiated at my religious purity pledge ceremony. Many of the students were already having sex and needed information to protect their health. But our teacher only mentioned condoms to talk lengthily, and inaccurately, about their alleged "ineffectiveness," explaining in graphic detail, and with even more graphic pictures, the sexually transmitted diseases students could get if we trusted our health to a "flimsy piece of latex."
It was only later in my life that I learned that latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing pregnancy, HIV transmission, and several STDs. In fact, research by Dr. John Sanitelli, who also testified before the panel yesterday, and has a great blog up, suggests that 86 percent of the decline in teen pregnancy rates among 15-19 year olds between 1995 and 2002 was the result of improved contraceptive use. But back in my high school class, where we were all too intimidated or embarrassed to ask for clarification, it seemed as if sex with a condom was equivalent to sex without one.
This is no big surprise to people who care about reproductive rights. But here's the shocker: this was their first hearing of its kind abstinence-only education. Ever. After more than 12 years and $1.3 billion in funding.The Washington Independenthas more on the hearing. Let's hope some honest conversation about it means it will soon be on the way out.
I'm a bit surprised the SAT essay section has proven to be so predictive. The topics students are asked to write about on the exam do not at all reflect the typical college assignment. The SAT prompts personal essays on broad, amorphous topics, not exercises in building an argument through carefully engaging with competing evidence....
But most students will write about friendships, relationships on athletic teams, and other examples of loyalty in their personal lives. If they do so grammatically, include an introduction and conclusion, and begin their paragraphs with topic sentences, they will potentially ace this section of the exam. The sad fact is, most American high school students can't do even that. And that's not a problem, of course, that can be solved at the college level.
I guess that I'm not so surprised. As a teacher of college courses which do not focus on learning the basic skills of writing (the grammar, introduction, conclusion, etc) but that nevertheless include a significant writing component, I can say that argument building and engagement with competing evidence is *much* easier to teach than those basics. Students who have a mastery of how to put an understandable essay together have an enormous advantage over those who don't. Even professors who don't spend their time painting student papers with red ink because of grammatical problems will typically swoon over an essay that's understandable, even if fails to grapple some of the major analytic points. Indeed, while I enjoy teaching undergraduate courses, one of the nicest things about working in a graduate program is that nearly all of the students can string together sentences and paragraphs.
Locally funded needle exchange is officially returning to Washington. Dr. Shannon Hader, the District's HIV/AIDS czar, yesterday named the four groups who will share $494,000 in funding. The majority of the funding is slated for PreventionWorks!, the only organization in D.C. that was doing needle exchange during a decade-long, federally imposed funding ban specifically targeting the nation's capital. For the other three groups, the funding will allow them to incorporate needle exchange into their existing programs.
Though the funding amount is less than the $650,000 Mayor Adrian Fenty announced in a January press conference, the announcement is still a relief following rumors that few agencies in the District were prepared to take on needle exchange.
The services could be critical in D.C. as the city attempts to combat a reemergence of HIV/AIDS, while successful implementation could spur policymakers to finally lift the broader federal funding ban, as well.
As I just mentioned, the Obama campaign held a press conference this afternoon about a new voter registration drive they're kicking off on May 10. "Vote for Change" will be a 50 state national registration driv to train volunteers and send them out to register voters. Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand was sure to emphasize that this "not just a one day deal... it's a sustained six month campaign."
So what makes this newsworthy? Well, it makes it clear that Obama's not worrying too much about whether he'll win the primary. They seem to be assuming that they will, and are proceeding as such. It's also interesting because they don't seem to be targeting any particular states, which they emphasized. They're putting as much emphasis on Wyoming as they are on Ohio, it would seem. This "will be more of an advantage to Democratic nominee .... "People are going to say why are you doing this in states that might not be critical battlegrounds in the general election ... This is not dividing them out red and blue. This is important across the nation," said Hildebrand.
More importantly though, since we're talking about voter registration, one thought that came to mind during the call was that perhaps this drawn-out primary will be really, really good for Democrats, especially in purple states. They cited the 200,000 newly registered Democrats in Pennsylvania, and the 165,000 new Dems in North Carolina (out of 178,000 total new registered voters). The primary is getting more voters out earlier, and since the Dems are the only contest in town, the candidates getting a lot more attention in these states, too.
N.C. Rep. G.K. Butterfield was also on the call, and he mentioned the effect the primary is having there, a state that many write off as red and stuck that way. "I want to dispel that rumor ... This is not a red state or blue state. This is a toss up state that if the proper message is presented to the voters, that candidate will will."
The same reporter follows with a question about Obama's recent talk about special interests: "Could you give us the name of who those special interests are?" I think it's fair enough to ask about the senator's comments, but what is the point of this question? What does she want, a list or something? As in, "Here are the names and addresses of every special interest, ever."
More importantly, not a single question thus far has had anything to do with voter registration, the ostensible topic of the call. The Obama folks are starting to get annoyed: "You have plenty of access to the campaign to ask all the questions in the world. If you want to ask questions about voter registration, that would be great."
While high school grades remain the single best indicator of how successful a student will be in college, a new study finds that of all the sections on the SAT, the writing section is the best predictor of academic success. The College Board decided in 2002 to roll what used to be the SAT II writing subject test into the SAT I, which now contains both an essay and a multiple choice grammar review.
I am a total writing triumphalist, but I'm a bit surprised the SAT essay section has proven to be so predictive. The topics students are asked to write about on the exam do not at all reflect the typical college assignment. The SAT prompts personal essays on broad, amorphous topics, not exercises in building an argument through carefully engaging with competing evidence. That's why I've always been a fan of the "Document Based Question," which New York State uses on its Regents examinations. Those essays give students a number of primary sources around which to build an argument. For comparison's sake, here's an example of an SAT writing prompt:
Being loyal—faithful or dedicated to someone or something—is not always easy. People often have conflicting loyalties, and there are no guidelines that help them decide to what or whom they should be loyal. Moreover, people are often loyal to something bad. Still, loyalty is one of the essential attributes a person must have and must demand of others.
Adapted from James Carville, Stickin': The Case for Loyalty
Assignment: Should people always be loyal? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Now a really engaged (and privileged) high school kid, one who might even know who James Carville is, could use this prompt to write about the presidential race. But most students will write about friendships, relationships on athletic teams, and other examples of loyalty in their personal lives. If they do so grammatically, include an introduction and conclusion, and begin their paragraphs with topic sentences, they will potentially ace this section of the exam. The sad fact is, most American high school students can't do even that. And that's not a problem, of course, that can be solved at the college level.
Chris Bowers is worried about Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance this weekend on Fox News Sunday. I was a bit skeptical myself about the decision until TPM’s Greg Sargent reported that a top Obama campaign official told him that Obama will "take on" Fox, whatever that means. Here’s what the adviser told Sargent:
“We are clear-eyed about Fox's role in the dissemination and amplification of Republican talking points this election. They have been the tip of the spear when it comes to repeatedly broadcasting some of the most specious of rumors about Obama. He is going on their Sunday show to take Fox on, not because we have any illusion about their motives or politics in this election."
That sounds worthy. But on second thought, I’m still skeptical about this move. First, Obama’s appearance could prove especially interesting given that the Fox folks now know they may be getting more than they bargained for and will thus be on high alert. But second, because this might be an attempt by Obama to curry favor with Democratic primary voters, it is still a bit puzzling because it seems to me that the kind of voters Obama might woo but dressing down Fox News for how it comports itself are already the types of Democrats backing him.
Oh, well. I guess it will make for good television---which, of course, is ultimately what the bean counters at Fox care about.
Today the Senate is celebrating passing (by a 95-0 vote) the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The bill, which President Bush supports and is expected to quickly pass in the House, would make it a crime for health insurers and employers to discriminate based upon genetic tests showing an individual is susceptible to a particular disease or condition. Sen. Ted Kennedy hailed the legislation yesterday as "the first major new civil rights bill of the new century."
Indeed, after failing to pass the Equal Pay Act earlier this week, GINDA is a real accomplishment. No one deserves to have their insurance premiums raised, or to be denied coverage, because they carry the breast cancer gene, or because they are genetically susceptible to illnesses that can be aggravated by work, such as carpal tunnel syndrome. But the bill makes absolutely certain to preserve insurers' rights to discriminate once those diseases have actually presented themselves. In other words, discriminating on the basis of a "pre-existing condition" continues to be perfectly fine, even though discriminating on the basis of genetic susceptibility to a condition will likely soon be against the law.
As an ideology undergirding our health care system, you can see how this is inconsistent. Either human beings deserve affordable medical care regardless of the diseases they have, or they don't. The sad truth is, protecting the basic for-profit nature of American health care (read: the right of insurers to deny coverage) is what's needed to attract Republican Congressional support to any reform bill. And that's why, despite Ezra's protestations, I'm inclined to woefully nod in agreement when Congressional Democrats throw water on hopes for universal health care in 2009.
The transcript isn't up yet, but on Hardball last night, Chris Matthews' roundtable (consisting of Tucker Carlson, Margaret Carlson, and Michelle Bernard) concluded that the Bill Moyers interview of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was very, very bad for Obama. (And they hadn't even seen the whole thing!) Matthews, in his inimitably clueless way, called the Wright "flap" "Obama's Iraq," as if sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians to their deaths was comparable.
The political panel concluded that Wright had dug a "deeper hole" for Obama and had in fact "thrown Obama under the bus" when he said, as Kate quoted below, that Obama had said what he had to say as a politician, and that he would say what he has to say as a pastor, and everyone hates politicians. Because people might have otherwise forgotten that Obama is a politician.
A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released yesterday found an increase in carbon dioxide emissions in 2007. Emissions were 19 billion tonnes higher than 2006, and have been increasing ever-faster since 2000. This is especially important in light of George Bush's climate speech last week, in which he claimed, "I have put our nation on a path to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of our greenhouse gas emissions."
Of course, he often emphasizes slowing our "greenhouse gas intensity," which is quite different than curbing our "greenhouse gas emissions." Intensity is the amount of emissions per unit of economic output, and that's been declining 1-2 percent per year on its own as our economy moves from manufacturing to largely service-based. But since our economy has continued to grow a rate faster than carbon intensity has declined, our emissions have increased. So when Bush claimed success last week in achieving the goal he set in 2002 of reducing America's greenhouse gas intensity by 18 percent by 2012, it wasn't due to anything he'd actually done -- the 1.8 percent decline per year would have happened anyway.
So Bush's claim last week that "we remain on track to meet this goal even as our economy has grown 17 percent" is entirely false in light of these latest figures from NOAA. Not to mention the fact that these numbers make it increasing clear how dangerous it is that the plan Bush outlined last week calls for "halting the growth" of U.S. emissions by 2025. Not only does this not include a plan for mandatory cuts or enforcement mechanisms, but it also means 17 more years of unfettered emissions -- emissions that are increasing rapidly.
Walter Shapiroasks "Whose fault is the Clinton-Obama stalemate?" The article then more or less argues that although Clinton's campaign has been egregiously incompetent, Obama's campaign has also had a significant share of "substantial misadventures." But shouldn't we consider the possibility that the race has reached a quasi-equilibrium with Obama in a relatively narrow but decisive lead because both of the candidates are really, really impressive? That the core supporters of both aren't moving because they, I dunno, really like their preferred candidate? Doesn't this seem considerably more likely?
This is especially true since the examples Shaprio offers are either trivial (anyone want to make a case that the race would be significantly different if Clinton kept the same slogan?) or projection (I certainly think it's outrageous to push to try to seat delegates based on a straw poll with one major candidate on the ballot, but I'd love to see evidence that this has been a factor for a significant number of actual primary voters.) Even the one really consequential Clinton blunder that Shapiro identifies -- allowing Obama to run the table in the February caucuses with nearly token opposition -- was the outgrowth of a strategy that was reasonable (invest resources to end it on Super Tuesday) that just didn't work out.
I know we're trained to be cynical, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that the race has gone on because the Democrats have two broadly ideologically similar candidates with, in different ways, formidable political skills. All campaigns make mistakes, but that's the key dynamic here; the race wouldn't be close for so long if both candidates didn't have a lot of strongly committed supporters.
As Think Progress documented on Wednesday, John Hagee, in an interview with conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, reiterated his belief that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on the city of New Orleans for a gay pride parade. MoveOn protested and called on McCain to reject Hagee's endorsement. All McCain would do was call Hagee's statements "nonsense."
But the problem with Hagee's statements is not that they're nonsensical (although they are). The problem with Hagee, as Pastor Dan so eloquently put it, is that he's a "disgusting, hateful homophobe." The conservative evangelical obsession with the "sin" of homosexuality, which leads to harassment and abuse (both verbal and physical) and the psychologically and emotionally catastrophic movement to "convert" LGBTQ people to heterosexuality, should cause all the leaders of the emerging evangelical center to bow their heads in shame. They claim they won't tolerate the sort of gay-bashing political agenda of the old religious right. But the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) maintains its official view that homosexuality is sin, and that it's the right and duty of all Christians to recruit LGBTQ people for the straight team.
Surely there's some, albeit achingly slow, movement to get evangelicals to emerge from the dark ages. David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, recently penned an op-ed for the Associated Baptist Press entitled "On Homosexuality: Can We At Least Talk About It?" In evangelical circles, this was a radical move, which met with public condemnation of Gushee in a conservative Baptist magazine. Gushee, who has also been at the forefront of a religiously-based movement to pressure the Bush administration to end torture, wrote that "In light of the hatred, mockery, loathing, fear and rejection directed at homosexuals in our society -- and in our churches -- I hope to God that I am not and never have been a perpetrator. But I fear I have indeed been a bystander. I am trying to figure out what it might mean to be a rescuer." Gushee called on his fellow Christians to, among other very basic requests, completely reject "a heart attitude of hatred, loathing, and fear toward homosexuals," "any form of bullying directed against homosexuals or those thought to be homosexuals," and "political demagoguery in which homosexuals are scapegoated for our nation’s social ills and used as tools for partisan politics."
McCain calling Hagee's statements "nonsense" is not exactly
condemning them. He's really saying that it's nonsense to think that
God brings hurricanes because of gay pride parades. McCain's not really
creating any daylight between himself and Hagee's homophobia.
(Incidentally, it's similarly "nonsense" that Armageddon is God's plan for Israel, but McCain still maintains that he admires Hagee's "support" of Israel.)
Real pressure could be put on McCain not by MoveOn, whose
constituency matters not one whit to McCain or his base, but by
evangelicals who want to distance themselves from Hagee's retrograde
bigotry. Similar to how the Rev. Ron Sider of
Evangelicals for Social Action and others have publicly rejected
Hagee's views on Middle East policy, particularly his opposition to a
two-state solution (again, Hagee's positions on Israel are informed
exclusively by his view of "God's plan"), evangelicals have an enormous
opportunity here. They could simultaneously stake out their ground as
leaders of a new and more inclusive evangelical movement shifting away
from the religious right, and demonstrate to McCain that, although he
appears to have not gotten the memo yet, the old GOP playbook on
appealing to evangelical voters is out of date.
Granted, evangelicals still have a long way to go on this issue.
Sider, who's been a leading evangelical counterweight to Hagee's
bible-based saber-rattling on Middle East issues, supports a
constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage because he believes, like
many evangelicals, that "God's design for marriage" is between a man
and a woman. (The NAE position
is also based on the "God's design" for marriage argument.) But, as
Gushee's piece demonstrates, sentiment is slowly shifting, particularly
among younger evangelicals. There's a real leadership opportunity for
evangelicals to show courage, self-reflection, and honesty on this
issue. Who's game?
I know we're all just about ready to put the controversy over Aliza Shvarts' "abortion-inducing" art project behind us, but at the Guardian, Kriston Cappssays out loud something I've been thinking to myself since this story broke: As potentially ridiculous, hackneyed, and counterproductive as Shvarts' project was, Yale was absolutely wrong to censor her work because she refused to verify its inauthenticity. (Shvarts was asked to state unequivocally that she did not really induce abortions, and she refused.) The University said, "Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns." But as Kriston writes:
Yale calls into doubt its stated support for performance art by appealing to a set of unstated "basic ethical standards". Worse still, the university's statement - cast before faculty within the department in question had spoken - seems to undercut the autonomy of and confidence in that department. If, as [Yale spokeswoman Helaine] Klasky claims, the project is a fiction, then why has the university disciplined two faculty members (School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman and School of Art director of undergraduate studies Henk van Assen)?
Indeed, wasn't Yale's censoring reaction to the project in large part due to the public scrutiny it received? And didn't the project receive that level of scrutiny only because it was about abortion, one of the most divisive topics in the American discourse? The role of the university should be less about declaring whether or not art is in good enough taste to be shown, and more about evaluating the work of young artists and helping them to grow. As Kriston writes, after all, "They can give her a failing grade."
Bill Moyers has an exclusive interview with Jeremiah Wright that will air tonight on PBS. It's Wright's first television interview since the controversy over his remarks, and In These Timeshas posted some excerpts from the transcript. Finally, an insightful conversation about the substance of the issue rather than another shallow reference to the "controversy"! I found this part particularly interesting:
The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly.
When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That’s not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a "wackadoodle."
It's to paint me as something: "Something's wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with this country…for its policies. We’re perfect. Our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them.” That’s not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.
Indeed, I think the most disturbing element of the controversy over the Wright's remarks was that the journalists and networks rehashing it over and over again never attempted to address the fact that there were some very legitimate gripes included in there, however you may feel about his choice of words. The coverage instead became an opportunity for white America to feign outrage and pretend that there was absolutely no validity to what he said. It became about white America once again denying wrongdoing, while at the same time implying that black America is angry and unreasonable.
This part is good too:
BILL MOYERS: In the 20 years that you’ve been his pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?
REVEREND WRIGHT: No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don’t talk to him about politics. And so he had a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.
Because yes, it is possible for some people to separate their political beliefs and their religious beliefs.
Clinton really did raise $10 million yesterday online.
This awesome flowchart shows how to predict whether a county will vote for Obama or Clinton based on its demographics.
Karen Tumultyably describes three likely ends for the Democratic primary. Though of the three, I'd guess a fight all the way to Denver is actually less likely than an end she doesn't mention, i.e. enough superdelegates endorsing in May to end the race.
Taegan Goddardexpands on a point Kate made yesterday -- even though Clinton won more delegates than Obama in the PA race, she actually needs a greater percentage of the remaining delegates than she did before.
Matt Yglesias, Noam Scheiber, and Mori all have good posts pointing out how flawed much of the discussion about primary results and electability is. Also see a list of metaphorical approaches at Slate.
Some ads paid for by Freedom's Watch are essentially direct copies of ads paid for by the NRCC which is potentially illegal.
Indiana is demographically equally favorable for both Clinton and Obama.
To further clarify what Rob Farleywrote earlier, Matt Ygelsias writes that Clinton doesn't actually support a gas tax holiday, she has just cleverly tricked people into thinking she does without actually lying. Neat trick that.
There's an unusual hero emerging from the morass that is contemporary Zimbabwe: Jacob Zuma.
The president of South Africa's African National Congress party, and presidential heir apparent, this week stepped up his criticism of the Zimbabwean government and President Robert Mugabe, calling for the release of results from last month's presidential election.
Zuma as hero is something of a role reversal. Headlines in the past have dwelt on his ridiculous - and dangerous - understanding of HIV transmission and his questionable ethics. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see at least one member of the ANC's current crop of leaders willing to call to account the dictatorial regime to their north.
Christopher Hitchens does an excellent job of explaining why members of the ANC have been loath to speak out against Mugabe. But while President Thabo Mbeki and Co. held their tongues, Zimbabwe went over the edge. The economy tanked, democratic processes were stifled (often violently), and citizens starved. The recent election fiasco is only the latest episode in an increasingly tragic situation.
Mugabe has come in for much international criticism since the election, but given the outsized influence South Africa has on Zimbabwe, Zuma's comments could go further than most in convincing Mugabe that it's time to step aside. Meanwhile, it's refreshing to see at least one South African figure - even if it is Zuma - who is willing to seize the leadership mantle.
2,741,165 people voted for John Kerry in Ohio in 2004 to Bush's 2,859,764 -- a difference of 118,599. Leaving aside questions of vote fraud (these are, after all, the only numbers we have to work with) why did Kerry lose to Bush in a state with very similar constituents to a state Kerry won, Pennsylvania? Kerry won 16 counties to Bush's 72, including the populous (i.e., urban) counties of Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Franklin (Columbus). Yet even with a total of 734,304 votes in these two counties to Bush's 458,853, Kerry still lost statewide to Bush by 118,599 votes. There are three reasons for this: 1) Kerry's win margin in the largest county (Cuyahoga) did not exceed his total in the other 15 counties he won, Which proved decisive for his win in Pennsylvania. 2) Kerry failed to win the third largest county in Ohio, Hamilton (Cincinnati), losing to Bush 222,616 to 199,679 (22,937 votes). 3) Kerry only won about 18.2 percent of the counties in Ohio compared to 17.6 in Pennsylvania. Those extra counties -- and votes -- in Ohio gave Bush his margin.
What does all this have to do with 2008? If either Clinton or Obama are to outperform Kerry, they'll need to increase their margins in these big counties, for starters. Obama won Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties on Tuesday and the total vote in those counties between him and Clinton totaled 676,991 (Kerry won 933,983). This is, in short, a strong base of support that can be built upon by either candidate in a general election against John McCain. Clinton will argue that her victories over Obama everywhere else (he only won five counties statewide) demonstrates that she's better equipped to win Ohio in a general election. But as we saw from the Pennsylvania example, Kerry's victory came from winning Philadelphia county, and winning it big. That margin alone overshadowed his victories elsewhere.
Increasingly, Clinton seems to be making an electability argument that is counterintuitive to the Democrats' strengths. Instead of focusing on urban centers of strength, she is (most likely) taking them for granted and saying she can win over the white working class voters -- Reagan Democrats -- that have previously been out of reach. Of course a primary election doesn't demonstrate that at all -- it only shows that those voters prefer her to Obama, not necessarily a Republican to a Democrat. It might be true that Obama has a problem with expanding his base, but it's also true that he has polled better against McCain than Clinton in previously uncompetitive states like Nevada, Virginia, and Colorado. Whether this appeal will last until November is difficult to say but it holds great potential for widening the Democrats' appeal countrywide, while Clinton seems content to fight over a constituency whose allegiances once belonged to the 40th president.
Haaretzreports today on the latest leaks about the potential for Syrian-Israeli talks, and then hoses down the sparks of hopes with these paragraphs:
Following contacts between Israel and Syria, officials say significant U.S. involvement will probably be necessary for negotiations to move ahead, and that Syria is still demanding such involvement.
Both Israeli and foreign experts on Syria told Haaretz on Wednesday that a change in the American position was not on the horizon…
In short, Ehud Olmert may be ready to make the grand trade; Bashar al-Assad wants to dicker; and Washington refuses to remove its veto.
According to Alon Liel, the former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who conducted back channel negotiations with Syria, Damascus understands that the price of a deal is dropping its alliance with Iran and Hizballah and realigning with the West. Cutting such a deal, it appears, will have to wait for a new US president -- one who is willing to take an entirely new approach to the Mideast. Here's a clue: It won't help if his initials are JM.
Politico's Ben Adler looks at a surprising break-out from the Pennsylvania exit poll that hasn't gotten any attention: Barack Obama lost among white voters under 30, which is highly unusual for him. Generally he has lost that demographic only in states such as Arkansas, where Clinton's margin of victory was much larger than 10 points. Ben reports that Pennsylvania Democrats are chalking it up to racism and tensions between college-educated and working class young people:
“He’s black. It doesn’t matter that he is biracial, the simple fact of the matter is that young white people in Pennsylvania have a certain prejudice against black people,” said a young African-American woman from Pennsylvania who is active in Democratic youth politics, and asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.
She also noted that socially conservative white voters in Pennsylvania are more likely to be Democrats than they are in Southern states, where they tend to vote Republican. ...
Democratic youth political blogger Mike Connery also noted that Pennsylvania’s population skews old, in part because so many young people move away for jobs. And those who leave are more likely to have college degrees—the very supporters on whom Obama has counted.
It's hard to know what implications Obama's lack of support among working-class whites under 30 would have in the general election. Young voters are trending more and more Democratic, and that demographic appears poised to support whoever the Dem nominee is -- especially the single women among the group. Still, it's not difficult to imagine that working class white males under 30 will be quite sympathetic to John McCain.
Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee filed a motion (PDF file) against current and former Bush administration figures in civil court, with the limited aims of securing testimony and documents regarding the firings of nine U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department under the watch of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Acting on White House orders, both White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers have refused to comply with the committee's subpoenas. And Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently blocked the Justice Department from prosecuting the White House staff members for criminal contempt of Congress. This means it's up to the House of Representatives to pursue the contempt citations, which could set a legal precedent that would make it more difficult for future presidents to defy the will of Congress.
When the full House votes to issue statutory contempt citations against individuals who impede congressional investigations, the criminal charges are usually referred to, and prosecuted by, the Justice Department. But the Justice Department, like all executive branch agencies, is ultimately controlled by the president and his appointees, and this time around, with current and former federal officials under the microscope, the White House is refusing to abide by the rules. The House Judiciary Committee's attempt to have its case heard in civil court, bypassing the Justice Department, marks a departure from past practice -- but the maneuver could provide Congress with a new recourse in any future attempt by the executive branch to stymie congressional oversight.
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Prospect fearless leader Harold Meyerson writes about the possibility of Democrats overcoming their longstanding internal divisions:
The fault lines of the '60s persisted for decades, not least because the linchpin of Republican electoral strategy since 1968 has been to paint the Democrats as peaceniks of questionable patriotism and as cultural elitists indifferent if not hostile to the white working class. The divisions also resurfaced in the party's own presidential primaries, where candidates staked out their turf either on the side of such working-class concerns as protecting industry or expanding health care (as did Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt and Tom Harkin) or on the side of the foreign policy and environmental concerns presumably more dear to the party's upscale professionals (as did Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley).
As the '60s grew smaller in the rearview mirror, however, the actual differences among the Democratic contenders grew smaller, too. Between Al Gore and Bill Bradley in 2000, or John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004, the differences in policy were minor compared with the competing views of America in the world that had divided, say, George McGovern and Scoop Jackson in the early 1970s. And as 2008 loomed, Democrats had every reason to think that this year's contest would be smoother yet. The multiple disasters of the Bush presidency had unified the Democrats around a more populist, activist economics at home and a more prudential, multilateral foreign policy abroad. .
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Earlier this week, Reps. Ed Markey, Henry Waxman, Jay Inslee released
their Principles for Global Warming Legislation, which are intended to be a framework framework for Congress to produce legislation establishing an economy-wide, mandatory program of emissions cuts. The principles:
1) Reduce emissions to avoid dangerous global warming;
2) Transition America to a clean energy economy;
3) Recognize and minimize any economic impacts from global warming legislation; and
4) Aid communities and ecosystems vulnerable to harm from global warming.
On first read, these seem like pretty general and easily agreed upon principles. They even seem in line with the basics of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which is the climate bill most likely to pass this year. But then they go further, also calling for:
[S]trong science-based targets for near-term and long-term emissions reductions; auctioning emissions allowances rather than giving them to polluting industries; investing auction revenues in clean energy technologies; returning auction proceeds to consumers, workers, and communities to offset any economic impacts; and dedicating a portion of auction proceeds to help states, communities, vulnerable developing countries, and ecosystems address harm from the degree of global warming that is now unavoidable.
This is important, because many of these things are elements not included in Lieberman-Warner. Notably, L-W would hand out $2 trillion in pollution credits, rather than auctioning them off, and without that auction, wouldn’t raise the proceeds necessary for investment in adaptation strategies. The emissions cuts proposed in L-W also fall short of current scientific recommendations in both the short- and long-term.
I wrote about division among environmentalists on this bill several months ago, but these principles seem to raise questions as to whether Markey, Inslee, and Waxman would support a bill that falls short in those areas. There’s an important debate going on about the political strategy that should be deployed here – pass something half-decent now and hope for something better later, or simply wait until next year when something tougher stands a chance of passing on the first try. I’m guessing, though, that if these Markey, Inslee, and Waxman -- some of the biggest environmental champions in Congress -- don’t stand behind L-W, it doesn’t stand a chance of making it this year.
Over the cubicle walls, dear Ezra wants to know what I think of the idea of Hillary Clinton on the Supreme Court. In short, I think she'd be just as good at that job as she would be as Governor of New York, since both positions would take full advantage of her hard-working wonk tendencies and her interest in domestic policy issues. And goodness knows, we could use another female, pro-choice justice.
But like Ezra's commenter "g," I'd be concerned Hillary as a justice would begin a trend of even further politicizing the Court by opening it up to career politicians. Granted, the Court is already totally politicized. But at least now it has less the appearance of being that way.
Katelinked to this Ryan Aventpost on why the McCain "gas tax" proposal is so idiotic; long story short, it doesn't help consumers and it actively hurts the environment. Apparently, however, Senator Clintondidn't get the memo:
Sen. McCain last week called for Congress to suspend the 18.4-cent federal gas tax and 24.4-cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The Arizona senator has moved aggressively in recent weeks to rebut Democrats' criticism that he is out of touch with voters' economic concerns.
Earlier Monday at a town-hall forum on economic issues, Sen. Obama rejected the proposal. "I've said I think John McCain's proposal for a three-month tax holiday is a bad idea," Sen. Obama said, warning consumers that any price cut would be short-lived before costs jump again.
Speaking on CNN Monday night, New York's Sen. Clinton outlined a series of steps to address gas prices, including the release of oil from the country's strategic reserves. She said she would "also consider a gas-tax holiday, if we could make up the lost revenues from the Highway Trust Fund," which the federal gas tax supports. She didn't specify how those lost revenues would be recovered.
It's not just about the lost revenue; the holiday would have no effect on the very problem it proposes to solve.
Hillary Clinton, as quoted in the NY Times: “I won the states that we have to win -- Ohio, now Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Clinton said on CNN about her successes over Senator Barack Obama, in one of her six appearances on morning news shows. “It’s very hard to imagine a Democrat getting to the White House without winning those states.”
Conversely, we saw a case of a Democrat winning Pennsylvania, John Kerry, who still went on to (narrowly) lose the White House. But Clinton is suggesting that Obama can't win Pennsylvania or Ohio -- states that are critically needed victories. The Times piece disagrees:
Yet for all of her primary night celebrations in the populous states, exit polling and independent political analysts offer evidence that Mr. Obama could do just as well as Mrs. Clinton among blocs of voters with whom he now runs behind. Obama advisers say he also appears well-positioned to win swing states and believe he would have a strong shot at winning traditional Republican states like Virginia.
According to surveys of Pennsylvania voters leaving the polls on Tuesday, Mr. Obama would draw majorities of support from lower-income voters and less-educated ones -- just as Mrs. Clinton would against Mr. McCain, even though those voters have favored her over Mr. Obama in the primaries.
And national polls suggest Mr. Obama would also do slightly better among groups that have gravitated to Republican in the past, like men, the more affluent and independents, while she would do slightly better among women.
Here, again, I think it is useful to look at the Bush-Kerry Pennsylvania matchup in 2004. Kerry won 12 counties to Bush's 56, although arguably what pushed him over the line was his huge margin over Bush in Philadelphia county. There, Kerry picked up 542,205 votes to Bush's 130,099 -- a difference of 412,106 -- which was more than Kerry's margin over Bush in every other county he won combined.
Last Tuesday, Obama won Philadelphia county 280,423 to Clinton's 149,719 -- together they pulled in 430,142 primary votes. Does anyone really believe that McCain will be able to do better than Bush in PA -- that is, win so decisively in every county in PA other than Philly -- and beat Barack Obama? I'm not saying it won't be close, but let's be clear about what Clinton is arguing: she will do as good as -- if not better than -- Kerry in 2004. And she's arguing that Obama won't. I find that difficult to believe.
Even though her Pennsylvania win is arguably Hillary Clinton's biggest since New Hampshire -- especially given the gobs of cash she’s raised since Tuesday night -- the fact is that the chances of a Clinton comeback, though better now than they were Monday, are still slim. And so, though some folks are going to find my column today in the Baltimore Sun a bit premature, and maybe very presumptuous, the issue of her departure from the race will need to be addressed. A quick sample:
A year ago -- heck, even five months ago -- Mrs. Clinton's nomination was generally viewed as certain. Compounding the jarring effect of her transformation from inevitable winner into underachieving runner-up is the lost opportunity of her nomination as a potentially historic moment.
The combined effect will make Mrs. Clinton's defeat a tougher pill to swallow - for her, for her supporters and for other key elements of the Democratic coalition, especially women, who cast a majority of votes in the country and an even larger share of Democratic votes.
Had Mrs. Clinton been a long-shot candidate with a limited following who fell far short and quickly slinked away - think Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. or Sen. Christopher J. Dodd - her defeat wouldn't matter all that much.
But we're not even talking here about Al Gore managing Bill Bradley or John Kerry dealing with Howard Dean. We're talking about Hillary - former first lady, first woman to make a strong bid for a major-party nomination for president, such an iconic figure that she is known by her first name alone. And so, Team Obama will need to manage her transition from pathbreaker to runner-up with the delicate care of a watchmaker and the cool precision of a bomb squad.
"I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems," the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. "This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system."
In other words, McCain favors women's rights...as long as they can't actually sue to enforce them. People who, affected by the bitterness of the primary, are tempted to think that the parties are indistinguishable may want to consider the votes in both the Senate and on the Supreme Court.
In the absence of other things to say about the primary, the MSM has resorted to repeating reports along the "Oh noooez the Democrats are going to eat each other alive" storyline. Case in point: this story in today's Post titled "Continuing Battle Divides Democrats." Funny thing is, when you actually read the article, few of the individuals quoted seem to strike the same terrified tone as the headline would have you believe. But that reality doesn't feed the MSM's hunger for chaos and confusion I guess.
Obama's difficulties and the prolongation of the Clinton-Obama confrontation have lifted Republicans from their slough of despondence to optimism about the presidential election. The transformation from deep pessimism to overriding optimism is such that McCain is privately warning supporters that once the nomination is decided and supporters of the losing Democratic candidate return to the fold, he will fall behind badly (though, McCain hopes, temporarily).
So perhaps all this hand-wringing about the Democratic Party is worth it if it's making the GOP complacent.
With the next primaries taking place in Indiana and North Carolina, that's highly unlikely. But as Harry Moroz writes at the Drum Major Institute blog, it's past time time a debate was city-themed, or at least contained a section on the policy challenges facing urban areas. The entire Iowa caucus process was a referendum on rural and agricultural issues. And as I wrote Tuesday, most of the rest of our national political conversation is calibrated to appeal to swing voters in the 'burbs. But what about the cities? You know, where 75 percent of our GDP is produced, yet inequality is highest? Where's the love?
Back in my undergraduate days at Brown University, I was always sort of embarrassed when my fellow students chose to express their disagreement with a speaker not by asking tough questions, but by disruptive protest that drowned out the individual's message. From my perspective, it was an appropriate protest when Richard Perle was confronted with a banner, silently unfurled during his lecture, reading, "You're a war criminal, Mr. Perle." But it was annoying when members of the local International Socialist Organization attempted to shout down Hillary Clinton as she gave a talk on women's leadership.
As for throwing a pie in Thomas Friedman's face -- I know, I'm giggling too -- I have to say, poor guy, bad Brown student. I remember hearing Friedman speak during college, attempting to justify his support for the Iraq war. I disagreed with him, but he was a good natured guy honestly enthusiastic about engaging in debate with college students. And now some wacky kids serve him up two pies in the face. Yes, there's a video. The Brown Daily Herald reports:
A female audience member ran on stage last night and threw a green pie at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who had just begun a lecture on environmentalism in Salomon 101. The woman had been sitting in the south side of the auditorium's front row when she pulled the pie out of a Brown Bookstore plastic bag that had been tucked in a red backpack and leapt out of her seat.
At the same time the woman threw the pie, a male accomplice seated a few rows back ran down the aisle and onto the stage, throwing small pamphlets explaining the actions into the crowd.
After the pie hit Friedman and splattered on his face and torso, the two jumped offstage and ran out of the southeast exit of the building, followed closely by a man trying to catch them. A police officer also ran toward the exit but stayed inside.
The thrower was eventually caught by police, who detained her in Salomon's lobby before moving her elsewhere.
The pamphlet accused Friedman of being too much of a capitalism-triumphalist to truly be "green," and featured a negative review of one of Friedman's books published in the journal Revolution, "The Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA."
As Tomnoted yesterday, it's the white women, not men, who sealed the deal for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania. This is, I would venture, in large part because of the so-called "Wal-Mart Women" demographic, which is particularly strong in places like Pennsylvania. White women in general were 47 percent of the Democratic electorate in PA, the biggest race/gender demographic in the state. Clinton won them by more than 30 points, 66 percent to 34 percent. But here's where Tom's post didn't go far enough: it's not just one state and one day. The same was true in Ohio, where she won this group 67 percent to 31 percent. And since women vote in much higher numbers than men, this is a crucial demographic across the country and in the general election.
According to a study by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 44 states have considered immigration in one form or another this year. That's all but one of the state legislatures that are actually in session. The most common bills seek to ban driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, and some of the most restrictive require employers to check potential workers' immigration status in a computer database. New Mexico passed legislation enacting tough penalties for human trafficking. Other states limited immigrants' access to higher education, while a few made it easier for them to take English classes. So despite its limited relevance in the presidential race, immigration is still very much alive as an issue nationwide.
In this week's edition Dean Baker tells us about McCain's economic illiteracy:
What was Senator McCain thinking when he recently boasted about the "economic progress" that we have seen over the last seven years?
It's not clear what "progress" Senator McCain had in mind, but it's hard to find data that would support his case. Start with the unemployment rate. It has risen from 4.2 percent when President Bush took office in 2001 to 5.1 percent and rising today. Even more striking, in 2001 64.4 percent of the population was employed, but, by March of this year, employment had fallen to 62.6 percent. Four million fewer people are employed today than in 2001.
Bush's odd inability to recognize a recession:
President Bush says that the economy is not in a recession. He's wrong. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has lost jobs for three consecutive months while the private sector has lost jobs for four consecutive months. This has never happened except in periods associated with recessions. The private sector has now lost 320,000 jobs since November.
And a massive new foundation that will push conservative economic policies:
The budget wonks can, however, take heart now that Peter G. Peterson, investment banker and Commerce Secretary under President Nixon, has founded the Peter G. Peterson foundation which he promises to fund with $1 billion of his own money over the next several years. The foundation will, among other things, advocate for cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
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Strange but true: if you promise lots of big tax cuts, and no new taxes, and a balanced budget, you're almost certainly lying about something. John McCain apparently doesn't realize that saying 1 - 1 = 2 is not straight talk.
The North Carolina GOP is running an an ad against two Democratic candidates in the state who have endorsed Obama using footage of Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" sermon. The ad is pretty much what you'd expect: OMG! Barack Obama like totally "SAT IN HIS PEW!!!" while some black dude said some bad things about America. He clearly is a terrorist!!! Except that he wasn't actually in the church when the clip the ad uses was recorded. As Kevin Drumpointed out, John McCain and the national RNC chairman Mike Duncan are so outraged that they ... sent an email and left a polite voice mail message respectively. Feel the fury! I'm sure with this kind of strong response we won't see these sorts of tactics in the general election.
Marc Ambindermakes a weirdly compelling, though ultimately unconvincing, case that Obama's loss in Pennsylvania might actually make superdelegates more likely to endorse him than they would have been had he lost more narrowly. Still, even if this isn't completely right, it still suggests that the effect of Pennsylvania is more complicated than we realize.
Christopher Beammakes an under-appreciated point: We have no idea what the actual popular vote is because there's just no way to know how many people caucused in caucus states and, anyway, caucus turnout isn't comparable to primary turnout.
The Clinton campaign looks likely to raise $10 million today.
Tomexplains how Clinton's victory is due to her mad skillz with white women.
Jonathan Cohn has a great post which points out that, despite two months of Wrightgate, bittergate, Tuzlagate, etc., Obama and Clinton have maintained a steady tie with McCain in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups. That suggests that there's a ceiling on McCain's support of 45 percent and that once the general election actually starts, whoever takes the Democratic nomination will take the lead.
I have mad respect for Tom Edsall, truly, but he’s just plain wrong in his new HuffPo piece about how the white male voter just must be crucial (as ever...yawn) to all things electoral in American politics. And invoking the Pennsylvania primary as a case in point was not the way to go.
Computing the crosstabs from last night's results (see page 6 of 7 of exits here), I have Hillary Clinton earning a net advantage of 16.6% from her support among white women, because she won them 68-32% and they constitute 46% of all voters. By contrast, she netted just 4.6% from white men, because she won them more narrowly (57-43%) and they were a much smaller share of the electorate (33% of voters statewide). Overall, then, her total net white advantage was 21.2%. Barack Obama won blacks overwhelmingly, giving him about 12% statewide overall margin from their votes, thereby producing the final statewide margin of 9 percent.
Clinton thus produced almost four-fifths of that advantage among whites from women, with the remaining fifth coming from men. Put in another and more telling way, had she broken even among white women and carried white men 57-43, she would have lost PA by roughly the margin she won it. On the other hand, had she split the white male vote evenly but still carried women by 68-32, she would still have beaten Obama, if only by half as much. You talk about a pivotal difference: White women were it, and kudos to Chuck Todd and the folks at MSNBC’s First Read for making that point straight off the top in in their wrap-up released this morning.
Granted, this was a Democratic primary where women (of all colors) outvote men by even wider margins than they do in general elections. But still: White boys can't jump (start) a Clinton revival. White women can--and did, at least for one day in one state.
So, David Sirota is correct again about the curious, but entirely logical u-shaped relationship between states' black population share and Barack Obama’s performance. Obama does well where the black population is low (and therefore racial polarization is low as well) or high (black votes swamp out polarizing effects). Hillary Clinton wins the states with medium-sized black populations where polarization is strong enough to overwhelm the black voting base.
This is why Obama should do well in North Carolina and Indiana should be competitive -- just as the polls as of now suggest.
Via Newsweek, I've just been alerted to a dust-up in the world of upper middle class parenting: Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, penned a column in early April describing why she allowed her 9-year old son to travel by himself from Bloomingdale's department store on Manhattan's Upper East Side to their home in Midtown West. (It's not a very long trip.) She wrote, "[F]or weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call. ... Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence."
Predictably, this anecdote garnered joyous cries of support, as well as rabid calls for Skenazy's head. The writer appeared on television and radio to defend herself against cries of "bad mother!" and even coined a catchphrase for the kind of parenting she supports: "Free Range Kids" -- complete with a new blog, of course. At first, I figured the backlash was in part suburban and exurban parents' horror at the idea of allowing a child to roam New York City alone. People don't realize that New York's crime rate is similar to that of Boise, Idaho and that New York ranks number 136 in crime among the nation's 182 cities with populations over 100,000.
But in a follow-up column and podcast, Skenazy recounted her correspondence with parents nationwide, which proved that hovercraft parenting knows no geographical boundaries. A dad in Park Slope, Brooklyn won't let his 9-year old cross the street to go to the playground. An Atlanta mother doesn't allow her daughter to walk alone from the front door to the mailbox. A suburban lawyer makes his 11-year old call home immediately after walking one block from her own home to a friend's house. All this despite the fact that we now know "stranger danger" pales in comparison to the violence and sexual and emotional abuse too many children suffer at the hands of adult family members or acquaintances. And that the number of child abductions has been falling steadily for years.
I'm only 23 and my own childhood was quite different. My friends and I wandered our safe (but unfortunately sidewalk-less) neighborhood after school until dusk. We walked to the local Carvel ice cream shop. We rode our bikes to the library, where I once went wearing mismatched sneakers. We played in the woods. A good time was had by all.
There is simply no way for us to protect our loved ones from every tragedy that might befall them. Many of us learn this lesson in the most difficult way. But it's sad to think that American childhood has become a time of anxiety, instead of a period of exploration. To the parents out there -- do you think Lenore Skenazy is a heroine, or is she misguided?
Overwhelmingly white and male that is (I guess that isn't very surprising really), at least according to this article in Dissent which Kay called my attention to.
I'm talking about a new breed of liberal writers who have emerged on the web—a network of writers who are bringing together reformism and idealism in a way we haven't seen in many years. I'm thinking of people like Joshua Micah Marshall (the man behind Talking Points Memo); Eric Alterman, the Nation columnist, author of many books, and blogger for Media Matters for America; Ezra Klein (The American Prospect); Kevin Drum (the Washington Monthly); Glenn Greenwald (Salon); Matthew Yglesias (the Atlantic); Bob Somerby (the Daily Howler); Rick Perlstein (the Campaign for America's Future); and the writer who goes by the name of Digby who blogs for her own website, digbysblog. I think of Paul Krugman and Harold Meyerson as two of the spiritual godfathers of this kind of politics. Meyerson has edited some of these writers at the American Prospect; and Krugman makes frequent reference to their work in his columns and on his New York Times blog.
Ok, sorry, my bad. The New New Left is actually white men ... and digby. (Oh, and there's great diversity when it comes to age, as Kevin Drumpoints out.)
Lately I've been getting a lot of e-mail from conservative Christians and organizations lambasting what they believe are the Christ-denying evils of Oprah Winfrey's obsession with A New Earth author Eckhart Tolle. I'm not familiar with Tolle or his books, some of which have sat atop best-seller lists for months (thanks, undoubtedly, to being Oprah book club picks) but I wasn't surprised by the objections, given that his work appears to be new-agey, inclusive, and universalist. I wasn't paying that much attention -- is it surprising that conservative Christians find this sort of thing heretical and cult-like? But after watching the leading anti-Oprah YouTube video, which has been viewed more than five million times, I see that it's not just about Oprah. It's about Obama.
Most of the video was what you'd expect -- she denies that Jesus is the son of God, questions whether there's a hell, participates in deep-breathing and visualization exercises with Tolle, and recounts how she began to doubt the doctrine of her Baptist church. (The pastor described God as "jealous.") OK, this seems like a classic spat between theological orthodoxy and new age babble, right? But at the end, the video plugs the book by fundamentalist Christian writer Carrington Steele, Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult, and suggests that Winfrey's endorsement of Obama is part of a grander plan to lead Christians astray from biblical teaching. Another video (both are available on Steele's web site) goes even further, intimating that Winfrey, Tolle and/or Obama are the Anti-Christ, brainwashing the American public into following a false prophet. "The pieces of the puzzle are coming together," the video concludes. "Christians are being deceived."
Two weeks ago when he testified in front of Congress, Gen. David Petraeus claimed he couldn't answer questions about the Iraq war's draining effect on the United States' efforts in Afghanistan because other parts of the Middle East were "outside of my command." Well, if Petraeus really knows nothing about these interrelated topics, he'll have to study up quickly: He's been nominated to lead the United States Central Command for the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Quick takeaways: The Bush administration has no intention of shifting Iraq from its place as the hallmark of American foreign policy, or significantly changing our mission there (duh). And Petraeus' loyalty to President Bush's escalation of the war and bellicose talk on Iran has been rewarded. Is he moving toward a career in politics?
Business Week argues that it's not about the white men this election, but rather lower-middle-class white women, the "Wal-Mart Women" as they call the demographic. These are the nearly 20 percent of American women who shop at Wal-Mart once a week or more, and they are, for the most part, a solid swing voting demographic. Forty-one percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers make less than $35,000 a year, (compared to 25 percent of the general population), and 39 percent have a high school education or less. We talk about the soccer mom vote, which is wealthier and more educated, and we talk about the blue-collar male vote. But the importance of "Wal-Mart Women" in the general election is often overlooked.
It's clear now that this demographic helpedHillary Clinton in Pennsylvania yesterday. In national match-ups, Clinton beats John McCain 50 percent to 44 percent in this demographic, but in a McCain-Obama race, McCain wins 51 percent to 41 percent. These are women worried about jobs, health care, the economy, and education, and many of them, despite voting for George Bush in 2004, are dissatisfied with the Republican Party. Whether or not Democrats will be able to care them this year is an important question too often overlooked in the battle to carry their male counterparts.
Ezra Klein's Pennsylvania postmortem explores the reality behind Sen. Clinton's adopted campaign alter ego:
Some laughed when Clinton compared herself to Rocky: She is, after all, the anointed leader of the most powerful family and political organization in Democratic politics. But the analogy appears more apt than she knew. Rocky, after all, did not beat Apollo Creed, not in that movie. Rather, at the end of his match, when he slurred "I did it!" to Adrian, he was exulting in having gone the full 15 rounds before he lost. This looks to be Clinton's strategy as well. Behind on points, she can only fight to hang on. These days, it's Clinton, more than Obama, who's reliant on the "politics of hope" -- hoping that she'll land a lucky punch, or her opponent will suffer an unexpected disqualification, or possibly be brained by an improperly secured spotlight tumbling from the arena roof. These, however, are not factors within her control. They cannot be willed into being by a disciplined campaign or a retooled message. And so Clinton must hang on, ensuring that she's positioned to take advantage of any gifts providence might see fit to send her way. ...
There is nothing wrong, of course, with winning on points. But it is an exhausting, brutal, and dangerous way to finish a match. It is, in short, the worst way for Obama to win. It is the path that will leave the media and the voters with the most questions as to his viability in the general election. This is particularly true in light of the increasingly vicious campaign Clinton is running, where every word and deed is meant to convey why Obama either can't win (his preacher, his weakness among downscale whites) or why he shouldn't (elitism, "just words," inexperience).
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Sarah Posner on the religious right: Kenneth Copeland Ministries continues its battle against Sen. Chuck Grassley, arguing that it's a matter of religious freedom. John McCain begins to shore up his support with the religious right, tapping into Mike Huckabee's newfound influence. And the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network goes up against Mission America, a coalition of groups attempting to raise awareness about homosexual "indoctrination" in public schools.
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Conversation topic of the day: has anything changed since Ohio and Texas? Is anything at all more clear because of yesterday's vote in Pennsylvania? Despite winning yesterday, Clinton's chances of winning the nomination have steadily declined, as the margins between her and Obama have held constant, and the pool of available super- and pledged delegates has shrunk considerably. The arguments about arguments about the superdelegates, fundraising, etc. will inevitably continue, but has anything really changed in the past month and a half? I open it to you, dear readers.
Ann Friedman interviews the former Goodyear employee on gender-based pay discrimination and her losing case before the Roberts-led Supreme Court:
How did you finally find out how much your male co-workers were making?
The only way that I really knew was that someone left an anonymous note in my mailbox showing my pay and the pay for the three males who were doing the same job, just on different shifts. Until then, I had no proof. I'd hear people talking about how much they were making when that individual and myself were splitting someone else's shift, and I knew mine wasn't near theirs, but I had no proof. Until I got that scrap of paper. And I went immediately to EEOC.
What advice would you give working women when it comes to getting the wages they deserve?
It's a very difficult thing to do anything about. For one thing, if you're one of very few women working in a job, if you rock the boat or ask a question, they say you're a troublemaker. I'd been in meetings where higher people in my plant would say, "We don't need women in this factory," but they knew the law required them to have some. I sat through those meetings, and I was discriminated against because I did my job and I liked my job, and I was good at it.
Women need to observe, pay attention, be alert. And if possible, have a mentor to help them along the way. If they get any written proof of discrimination, they need to hold onto it. But it's difficult if a corporation goes into it knowing they're going to discriminate.
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That's the title of Matt Taibbi'slatest dispatch in Rolling Stone, based on his undercover visit to an "Encounter" weekend organized by John Hagee's Cornerstone Church, and held at a church-owned retreat in Tarpley, Texas. (It's excerpted from Taibbi's forthcoming book, The Great Derangement.) In his inimitable style, Taibbi manages to capture the desperation of Encounter participants, the authoritarianism of the Encounter leader, Phil Fortenberry (a Promise Keeper alum), the absurdity of what is essentially a vapid, watered-down 12-step program masquerading as religion, and how all of that converges to exert a powerful hold on the participants -- even Taibbi himself.
Taibbi recounts how the participants were asked to confess their "wounds" -- events from their past in which they were physically, psychologically, or spiritually harmed by a family member or close relationship. Taibbi, on the spot, makes up a story about how his "father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes." He was then forced to stick with the story for the rest of the weekend and went on to describe for the group how his father quit the clown business to hand out fliers at a Carvel ice cream store. He added, "I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands." All of this passes as Matt's "wounds" with nary a look askance from his fellow wounded.
I know people who used to belong to Hagee's church, and who used to go to these retreats. They see how bogus it is now, but at the time, they were damaged, abused, ashamed, and -- as evidenced by their belief in the healing power of such retreats -- enormously suggestible, as Taibbi describes in the piece. And the real attendees aren't the only suggestible ones; even Taibbi himself starts to feel the power:
Here I have a confession to make. It's not something that's
easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant
religious instruction, songs, worship and praise -- two days that for me
meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses -- a funny thing
started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in
these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout
out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes,
telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of
mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even
if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and
busting on the whole scene -- even if you're intellectually enraged by
the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a
terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry -- outwardly you're swaying
to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those
outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at
the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole
spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest -- in my case checking out
into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the
"work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the
real you?
You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to
notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through
his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting
moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy
enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer
Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go
through all the motions, no one will care who you really are
underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the
motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an
incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time
I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be
anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my
normal.
I have to admit I know what he means. I've never been to one of
these Encounter weekends, and in all my coverage of similar events I've
never pretended to be an active participant, only an observer. But many
times I've witnessed the overwhelming group-think that materializes,
resulting from both positive and negative reinforcement. One former
member of Hagee's church told me she pretended to speak in
tongues for years because if she didn't, it meant Satan must possess
her instead of Jesus. If you do participate, this woman and another
former Hagee church member told me, then you're welcomed into a
"family," something that was very important to both of these women
(both of whom were or had been in abusive relationships).
I've had
plenty of people looking at me funny when I don't dance, sing, speak in
tongues, or shudder from the presence of the Holy Spirit in my bones.
But if you do all of those things, you're doing it with a few thousand
fellow human beings, so there's some sort of endorphin rush or feeling
of communion or combination of those that make you feel like you
belong, you're wanted -- not just by Jesus, but by your "family" of
fellow believers, with whom you've collectively fought off Satan.
Out of this, Taibbi draws a spot-on conclusion:
By the end of the weekend, I realized how quaint was the
mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be
rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq
War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this —
once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely
the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of
homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the
issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind
the mental process that a person would need to form an independent
opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to
experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a
roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them,
you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
Indeed. Which of course is what John McCain was banking on when he
decided that getting Hagee's endorsement was an excellent idea.
Indeed, stay-at-homes moms save the state's highway infrastructure from meltdown, especially since a "nanny" often drives to the working mom's house, putting three cars on the road where otherwise one would do.
Homeschooling moms further ease the strain on the ecosystem by keeping their kids off the road. The California judged who ruled that "parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children" obviously did not prepare an environmental impact statement before doing so.
That's right. Women should be staying home so they can conserve gasoline! He goes on to say that divorce creates a need for more houses, therefore also increasing the use of resources, yet another environmentally-damaging effect of women's liberation. So I guess the obvious next logical leap is that we're all intentionally warming the planet in order to justify a few more abortions. How else would we bring our master plan to fruition?
Today, the Senate will vote on the Fair Pay Act, which would overturn the Supreme Court's disastrous decision last year severely limiting workers' rights to sue for pay discrimination. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, a 5-4 majority of the Court ruled that a pay discrimination complaint must be filed within 180 days of an employee's salary being set. The Fair Pay Act would side with lower courts in reversing that decision and viewing each paycheck as a new act of discrimination with its own statue of limitations . After all, it can take years for workers to learn that colleagues are unfairly making more money than they are.
But the Fair Pay Act, which has already passed the House, will likely fail to earn the votes of a veto-proof majority in the Senate. What's saddest about that is how modest a piece of legislation it truly is. Hillary Clinton last year introduced a much more aggressive bill called the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would make it easier for women and minorities to bring class action lawsuits against discriminatory employers, and would require firms to keep detailed statistics correlating pay with gender, race, and national origin. It would also stop employers from penalizing workers who share salary information with one another. Those are the steps truly needed to close the pay gap.
Also see Ann's interview with Lilly Ledbetter on the main site.
Six weeks ago, I tried to calculate the odds of Senator Clinton catching up to Senator Obama in the total popular vote, which at the time Clinton's surrogates were suggesting was possible and should be the benchmark that superdelegates should consider.
Without getting back into those weeds, I had argued that Clinton would have to get at least a net gain of 200,000 votes out of Pennsylvania, similar to her gain from Ohio, because after that there aren't any other states big enough to close the gap. And I tried to figure out what kind of margin she would need to get that number.
I looked at 2004, when 770,000 people voted in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. Then I took the increase in Ohio between 2004 and 2008, which was about 50%, and rounded up, up, up to guess that the maximum turnout would be about 1.2 million. Unlike Ohio, which was an open primary and any independent or Republican could participate, Pennsylvania's is closed, so the potential for increasing turnout was much more limited. And 1.2 million had been the turnout in the colossal 2002 gubernatorial primary between Ed Rendell and Bob Casey, Jr.
Based on that reasonable-sounding estimate, I figured that Clinton would need close to a 60-40, twenty-point win to net 200,000 votes.
In fact, Clinton fell just short of a net gain of 200,000 votes, even though she won by eight points, rather than twenty. Why? Because participation didn't increase by half from 2004, it didn't almost double as I speculated -- it tripled. That messed up my math.
I think the real story that some of us Obama-admirers are missing is that in fact both candidates are attracting enthusiastic supporters and new Democrats, although perhaps for different reasons. Nothing in the Clinton strategy was built to deal with the possibility that two-thirds of the Democratic primary electorate in a key state would be people who probably had never voted in a Democratic primary, and yet her campaign figured out -- finally -- how to embrace the current political opportunity, rather than play 1996 all over again. Her performance in the Philadelphia suburban counties, particularly Montgomery and Bucks, is far more revealing of this achievement than her predictable success in blue-collar base communities like her own new hometown of Scranton.
It is too late, though. And she did need more than 200,000.
The NY Times, which endorsed Clinton in February, today runs an editorial calling on superdelegates to settle the race now, rather than let it continue producing elections that are unable to change the status quo.
It seems both candidates are raising money off of last night's contest. Clinton pulled in a reported $2.5 million, while Obama has sent out a mailer that argues his ability to close the gap in a state that was heavily favored for his opponent is a sign that he has almost locked this thing up.
Indeed on this last point, Marc Ambinder pointed out last night that only one metric matters: money. "If she can't raise money off of her margin, then her supporters are resigned to her defeat. She needs money to continue. If she runs out of money, she won't be able to continue." Samalluded to this last night as well and this would appear to be the metric to watch. Clinton campaign is currently in the red.
Meanwhile, it seems that Obama, having weathered this contest, is beginning to shift to a more general election mode, coming out againstJohn McCain in force.
Turning our eyes from the primary, via Matt, Kevin Carey brings us a much-deserved takedown of last weekend's "Education Life" supplement in the Times on the recent moves by elite universities to offer more financial aid to low- and middle-income students. It's not about getting them more money, says Carey, it's about getting them into these institutions in the first place:
The problem with this narrative is the implication that the socioeconomic makeup of a given college is primarily a function of who chooses to apply to go there. It's not. It's a function of who the college chooses to let in. This is not to say that these programs aren't a step in the right direction, in and of themselves -- they are. And all else being equal, they've probably had some effect on increasing the economic diversity of the applicant pool -- although it would be nice to see some hard numbers to back this up.
The unfortunate reality is that students from lower socio-economic groups are far less likely to get into the schools in the first place, whether they can afford to go there or not. Unless big institutions do away with legacy admissions or policies that admit students based on "merits" usually associated with higher socio-economic standing (like the ability to participate in numerous extracurriculars, attend fancy summer enrichment programs, or take that extra test-prep course), increasing financial aid isn't going to help. We need to provide better access to better schools well before a student even considers applying to college. If institutions of higher education really care about equity, they should be investing those funds in public schools that need it, or creating summer programs for disadvantaged middle schoolers, or, if you really want to take on the problem of educational disparity at its root, creating pre-kindergarten programs.
"I love you back" Obama says to an adoring fan. Also, do you really, you want to give John Mellencamp the first shoutout?
Meanwhile, Obama has substituted an Abercrombie and Fitch ad for boxing gloves. His background is dominated by three young dudes in various A&F gear including one with "Fitch" in giant sideways letters. Even worse, one of the three guys can't stand still, and another keeps smirking.
It's another great speech. His main theme is changing politics and focusing on issues over pettyness -- an able dig at the recent obsession with scandals surrounding him. Lots of digs at McCain and descriptions of him as representing four more years of Bush. A good line: "the question is not whether the other party will bring about change in Washington -- we know they won't -- the question is will we?"
Clinton's speech raises one question for me: Why is that guy behind her wearing boxing gloves?
More seriously, this is one of the best speeches I've heard her give, in delivery if not in content.
The dominant theme seems to be that Obama can't manage to knock her out of the race despite outspending her, but she doesn't really explain how she's actually going to, you know, win the nomination.
At the end she riffs off "yes we can" with "yes we will."
While making a vapid point based on the assumption that Obama hasn't campaigned hard on change (really!) Chris Mathews describes Obama's message as "too debonair, too Fred Astaire."
There are no demographic surprises in the Pennsylvania exit polls, but here are a few interesting points:
For all the hand-wringing over Obama's "bitter cling" comments, he did well among voters who attend church more than once a week, and beat Clinton among Protestants. Where Clinton cleaned up was among the 36 percent of the electorate who were Catholic, winning 68 percent of their vote. Among the 7 percent of the electorate who were Jewish, she beat Obama by 10 points. As for guns, thirty-six percent of the Democratic voters owned them, and Clinton won 60 percent of their votes.
The shift of voters' interest from Iraq to the economy is not favorable to Obama. The 55 percent of the electorate who ranked the economy as the most important issue favored Clinton 56-44. She also won among the 14 percent of health care voters. Obama, on the other hand, beat Clinton 56-44 among the 28 percent of voters who ranked Iraq as the nation's number one concern.
No matter what economists say, 89 percent of Democratic primary voters believe we're already in a recession.
Clinton won union households, 58 percent to Obama's 42 percent.
MSNBC has called it. The more interesting question, however, is by how much. After all, a win by 2 points would still be fairly damaging to her.
Update: Her margin of victory, I should say, is going to effect the decisions of many superdelegates and whether she can improve her fundraising (she's currently broke).
Chris Matthews wonders what happened to the honest days of yore when campaign strategists worked for canidates they believed in and didn't ask for large sums of money. Say what?
On the plus side, the conventional wisdom seems to have shifted to the position that Mark Penn was a disastrous waste of money.
Howard Fineman, meanwhile, argues that Obama will win in the end using an incredibly complicated Monopoly metaphor.
Now MSNBC is saying that it is "too early to call" the race but "Clinton is in the lead."
Update: Forgot to mention that Fineman made a very good point which is that Obama has successfully forced Clinton to spend all her money to stay competitive in Pennsylvania.
He's now insisting (with the help of Harold Ford Jr.) that Obama "can't win the big contests." Which is true, if you define "big contests" as "states won by Hillary Clinton." Never mind that Obama has won Illinois, Wisconsin, Georgia, Washington and Virginia, all among the top 15 states in population.
Thinking about doing something to honor Earth Day today? Well, don't forget that environmentalism is a giant plot by those pro-abortionists. Good thing the Family Research Council is here to remind us, via email:
Today isn't just another reminder to use recycled paper or drive energy-efficient cars. It's a calculated attack on the sanctity of human life. Population control is inextricably linked to the environmental and abortion movements. [...] The crisis du jour is global warming, but even that is just another excuse to fund "Planet" Parenthood and similar groups.
So yeah, don't go out and do anything brash like recycle today; you'd be supporting the population-controlling master plan. I mean, I pretty much have that thought every morning as I bike to work: "This sure is good for the planet, but wouldn't it be better if I were aborting some fetuses right now?"
Finally, after six long weeks of pointless scandals, commentary, meta-commentary, and meta-meta-commentary, we're actually going to have a result. Of course, it's unlikely to end the primary, but it will end some of the speculation. Slate's Chadwick Matlin has a good summary of what effect various vote percentages are likely to have. Also see Mori, Tom, and Holly Yeager on turnout.
It appears that, as in many other states, Obama will do better in terms of delegates than his popular vote percentage would suggest.
Much is being made of Clinton's claims that she'll stay in the nomination until the status of Florida and Michigan is resolved and possibly until the convention. That's silly. Of course she's saying that -- to do otherwise would be to admit how unlikely a victory for her is. It's like Wile E. Coyote -- he only falls when he realizes there's no ground underneath him.
As Danareported earlier, all three candidates have spread false and dangerous information about a mythical link between vaccines and autism.
Clinton's favorablity is lower than Obama and McCain's in New York. Ouch.
Bill Clinton, meanwhile, bizarrely accusedthe Obama campaign of playing the race card against him and then angrily attacked a reporter for saying he'd said it (even though he actually did).
As Tom pointed out, this independent anti-Obama ad is a disgusting bit of fear-mongering, but it also strikes me as laughably incoherent. The narrator solemnly intones the details of the deaths of various people -- building up suspense about what exactly they have in common besides gang violence -- and then ends anticlimactically with the fact that Obama voted against the death penalty for certain gang related crimes.
McCain, the man who showily refuses to use the Phoenix-Washington nonstop flight he helped create, isn't troubled by helping a wealthy friend make millions of dollars at taxpayer expense in return for donations (the friend in question says this explicitly). McCain is very big on displays of ethical self-flagellation, but he's so convinced of his own rectitude that when he actually does face an ethical dilemma he completely flubs it.
Finally, if you're distressed about Obama's "bitter" comments, take comfort in the fact that it could be worse: he could have called migrant farmworkers "illiterate peasants," like a Colorado state legislator did. (No word on whether the legislator then ordered them to bring him more grapes and keep the palm-frond fans moving.)
To follow up on what Holly Yeager and Tom Schaller have already noted, I find that anecdotal evidence like this certainly strengthens the argument that the drawn-out primary has been good for Democratic turnout:
“Let’s just say it’s very busy,” said Joseph Passarella, the director of voter services for Montgomery County, sounding a little harried. “Our phones have been ringing since 6:15 this morning and have been ringing nonstop. We’ve never had a primary election this busy.” ...
“We’re predicting at least double the turnout of 2004,” he said. “This is the first time we’ve been major players in the presidential primary since 1976.” ...
Stacy Sterner, the chief clerk in Lehigh County, compared the turnout so far to that of a general election. On election day in November of 2004, Pennsylvania saw a 73 percent turnout.
“It’s a crazy day,” Ms. Sterner said. “If I didn’t know better, I would think it was November.”
In November 2004, nearly 5.8 million people voted in Pennsylvania, 2,938,095 of them for John Kerry. If today's turnout really does resemble that of 2004, then the benchmark to look for will be how close today's total comes to Kerry's vote total. If it is close, that would be rather amazing considering turnout for the 2004 primary was only 26 percent.
Max Bootmanages the nice feat of getting two things wrong in a single blog post. First, he snidely refers to Jimmy Carter as a "peacemaker extraordinaire (at least in his own mind)". Well, if Carter's peacemaker image is in his mind, then the rest of the world must be telepathic. The 1978 Camp David Accords overseen by Carter directly led to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel the following year--a treaty that, for all its flaws, has prevented war between the two countries for 30 years.
Boot is also wrong in his more substantive claim that "if Carter is to believed, Hamas is happy to set itself on an entirely different course–if only Israel and the United States would engage in direct negotiations with it. This is the kind of thing that, well, only Jimmy Carter could possibly believe."
Well Jimmy carter and most of Israel, but who's counting? 64 percent of Israelis say the government should host one-on-one talks with Hamas, according to a June poll in Ha'aretz. Since it's unlikely that 64 percent of Israelis would want to negotiate with an implacable terrorist group devoted to their destruction, I think it's fair to assume that most Israelis have, like TAP's Gershom Gorenberg, concluded that Hamas is more flexible than its charter would seem to indicate.
The Supreme Court heard arguments today in the "Millionaire's Amendment" case, a challenge to a provision in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that allows a candidate whose opponent spends large amounts of his or her own funds to accept contributions of up to three times the normal limit, currently $2,300. You might remember that this provision helped bring about the election of the likely keynote speaker at the Republican convention, Joe Lieberman, who was able to collect contributions of $12,600 ($6,300 for the primary and again for the general election) from lobbyists and Wall Street, because Ned Lamont, getting little help from the Democratic establishment spent some of his personal wealth. In Joe's honor, I have renamed this provision the "Lieberman Loophole."
The traditional campaign finance groups and their friends on the editorialpages have unsurprisingly weighed in in favor of the Lieberman Loophole, with a lot of words that basically come down to the view that all of McCain-Feingold is sacred writ and no part of it may be altered, and the simple-minded slogan that rich people shouldn't be able to buy an election.
The defense of the Lieberman Loophole as policy, as expressed in the amicus brief of the Brennan Center and other reform groups is that the higher contribution limit "expands, and does not restrict, the opportunities for speech in the political process." I should be all for that -- after all, I've argued that we should have a campaign finance system that is based on expanding voice rather than on limits, and I think that reducing corruption should not be the only rationale for campaign finance regulation or public financing. (The reason that self-financed candidates cannot be limited, in theory, is that there is no risk of corruption in paying for your own campaign. As they sometimes say, they are "too rich to be bought.")
The problem is that this provision expands speech in only one limited situation, which will almost always be one where an incumbent faces a self-financed challenger. As the political scientist Jennifer Steen has shown, very few wealthy office-holders use their own funds for reelection, since once elected they have access to the usual fundraising channels. And as Steen's research also shows, self-financed candidates lose as often as they win, so the problem of "buying seats" is not one that cries out for an urgent solution. The real problem is that the financial and other advantages of incumbency are so great that very often a self-financed candidate is the only one who can run a credible challenge. This provision makes the advantages of incumbency even greater. (While a number of incumbents have triggered the provision, allowing their opponents to exceed the limits, challengers are usually unable to take advantage of it because they don't have many backers who can give them $6,900.)
The candidates' whose speech needs to be expanded are not incumbents, but people like Jon Laesch, who challenged the incumbent House Speaker Dennis Hastert in 2006 and was outspent by $300,000 to Hastert's $5.2 million. (Hastert then resigned, and a Democrat won the open seat.) A provision that raised contribution limits uniformly for candidates who are massively outspent might be reasonable, or a public financing system with some flexibility for outspent candidates, but not one that focused exclusively on one situation.
The New York Times says, "This should not be a close case," and declares that the only reason the Court might overturn the provision is because it is "unduly hostile to campaign finance laws." That's nonsense. It's not an easy case at all. On one hand, there's the reasonable legal argument that the Court should generally defer to Congress's judgment on the structure of contribution limits. Also, as the transcript shows, this is an awkward case because the plaintiff wasn't actually affected by the provision. On the other hand, there's the fact that the Lieberman Loophole calls into doubt the entire anti-corruption logic of the system. If Congress decides contribution limits of $2,300 are needed to eliminate potential corruption, why does that not apply when a candidate faces a certain kind of opponent? If Lieberman was not corrupted by contributions of $6,300 or more, why would Laesch or Donna Edwards be corrupted?
It's a complicated legal case only because of the argument for deference; as policy the Lieberman Loophole is simply indefensible, and the campaign finance reform community's compulsion to defense of it is further evidence that the whole campaign finance system is "collapsing," "unraveling" and needs "rethinking."
A few weeks ago, NBC/National Journal’sMatthew Berger reported that there were 101,499 new Democratic applications and 132,688 others who switched to the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania since January 1, compared to just 32,191 new Republican registrants and 13,937 switchers. Overall, these increases boosted the Democrats to a 900,000-voter registration advantage (4.1 million v. 3.2 million), an almost 50 percent increase over the 630,000-plus advantage Democrats enjoyed as recently as November 2007, according to the Pennsylvania secretary of state's office.
So that bodes well for the Democrats in November, a point Holly Yeager makes quite convincing and eloquently in her online piece for the Prospect. But what, if anything, do the registration trends tell us about what’s going to happen tonight in the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?
Nobody can be sure, and without seeing the county-by-county numbers the following is entirely speculative. But, as a general rule, I think it's fair to say that the conventional wisdom is that a rise in new registrants should tend to favor Obama. Pennsylvania has a closed primary and so Clinton is depending upon support from core Democrats. New registrants are by definition new converts rather than longstanding Democrats. Furthermore, whatever the trends in the polls (which have narrowed during the past six weeks) new registrants are likely to be missed or screened out by likely-voter polling samples.
Clinton is favored to win today and I think she probably will. But if she doesn’t the reason is that, for the first time since January, the candidates had significant time to campaign as if this were the general election and change the composition of the electorate by registering new voters. Obama and his advisers argue incessantly that when and where he has the resources to engage in an all-out campaign to register and mobilize voters, they do well. Today will be a great test of that premise.
Pharmaceutical companies spend millions market-testing the retail names for their prescription drug products (they’ve got the dough), and apparently names that include z’s and x’s for some reason create a soothing effect: Xanax, Zoloft, etc.
But these new television ads (Jezebel caught this yesterday and has the video) for Aciphex—a drug that helps reduce acid reflux—are a bit disturbing. In the ads, the pronunciation is perilously close to “ass effects.” (Yes, I confess to having my ears perk up while otherwise ignoring the commercial.) Is that really the best name the folks at Ortho-McNeil-Janssen could dream up? It sounds more fitting for a Guantanamo torture procedure or a north New Jersey strip club. (Bada Bing!) I gather they were trying to work the word “acid” into the name in some way, but Nexium and Zantac are much smarter and safer alternatives. I mean, does anyone want to walk into the CVS and proclaim to the pharmacist, “I’m here to pick up my Aciphex”?
And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion—about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance—but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons.
So when Maverick McStraightTalk suddenly decided to switch course and embrace a symbol of treason in defense of slavery and lawlessness in defense of apartheid, he did it for "understandable" reasons! And to pick a more recent and important example, presumably when he decided to stop worrying and love George Bush's massive upper-class tax cuts while also supporting enormously expensive perpetual war, this was understandable! And if sure this is true for all of his flip-flops!
What these "understandable" reasons are, of course, Cohen doesn't share. As near as I can tell, McCain's "fudging" and "swallowing the truth" is "understandable" because ... he was trying to win elections. How this makes him different from Hillary Clinton -- who Cohen savages while giving McCain a free pass -- I certainly can't tell you.
Advocacy groups that work on behalf of children with autism and their families are engaged in a legal battle in which they're asking for billions of dollars in damages due to an alleged link between thimerosal, a mercury preservative found in childhood vaccines, and autism. But at least five major medical studies have found no link between autism and childhood vaccines. As Washington Post "Fact Checker" Michael Dobbswrites, many doctors believe the so-called "link" between autism and vaccines is simply a matter of autism presenting during the same period of a child's life -- between the ages of 1 and 2 -- that most vaccines are administered. Desperate parents have thus drawn conclusions about the causes of the disease that are, at least so far, scientifically unsound.
Given those facts, the liberal blogosphere was in a tizzy several weeks ago about John McCain's statement that there is "strong evidence" connecting the rise in autism rates to vaccines. But now it seems that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have signaled some acceptance of the theory, as well. Yesterday at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Obama stated, "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it." And in response to a questionnaire distributed by the group Advocates for Children's Health Affected by Mercury Poisoning, Clinton wrote, "I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines." Oddly, Obama's answers to the questionnaire are actually more circumspect than Clinton's, despite his public comments.
Of course, just because vaccines probably aren't the cause of autism doesn't mean there aren't other environmental factors at play. As Clinton wrote on the questionnaire, "I am very concerned about the possible links between autism, the environment and other chronic diseases." Both Democratic candidates have promised to fund research on the role of heavy metals in autism. Still, it's concerning that leading politicians are promulgating the scientifically-unsound idea that routine childhood vaccinations cause a feared disease. That could dissuade parents from vaccinating their children, which would be a serious public health risk.
He has purchasedNewsday, the voice of Long Island, which used to also have a venerable Manhattan-based Metro desk, but which has scaled back there in recent years. Newsday would share content with Murdoch's New York Post, which would significantly change the tenor of its coverage, pushing it to the right. So let's review New York's daily print media. Right of center: the Daily News, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, and now Newsday. Left of center: the New York Times.
Though the Hillary ad I mentioned below is not, in my view, offsides in its invocation of terrorism, this repellent and highly misleading ad produced by a conservative 527 group is clearly out of bounds. It is amazing, but never surprising, just how low the conservative movement will stoop -- particularly in their use of fear and hate -- to motivate people to vote against things. I hesitated to add the link, but you really have to see it to understand.
There are plenty of people and sources to blame for the general apathy and widespread cynicism Americans feel toward politics and their government. But conservatives deserve the lion’s share; their entire project is based on appealing to our worst and lowest sentiments: hate and fear. It’s really maddening, and ads like these remind us what’s at stake -- not just policies, and not even offices and elections, but the quality of discourse in this democracy which, ironically, conservatives hold up as a beacon to the rest of the world while they obscure and dim the light that beacon might otherwise emit.
Back in 1991, nearly a decade before the Enron scandal broke, Kenneth Lay donated $1.1 million to his (and my) alma mater, the University of Missouri, to endow a chair in economics in his name. After many years and a legal battle (in which he tried to get the money back to pay his legal fees), the university has finally found a professor to fill the Kenneth Lay Chair in Economics.
Professor Emeritus Haskell Hinnant was one of the faculty members to speak out [against the chair] , but now thinks that Lay’s stigma is fading with time and the greater issue is MU’s difficulty filling the position.
“It’s a little embarrassing that they weren’t able to fill it with an outside person,” Hinnant said. “But the university has other embarrassments, too.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday the Air Force is not doing enough to help in the Iraq and Afghanistan war effort, complaining that some military leaders are "stuck in old ways of doing business."
Gates said in a speech at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., that getting the Air Force to send more surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft to Iraq and Afghanistan has been "like pulling teeth."
Addressing officer students at the Air Force's Air University, the Pentagon chief praised the Air Force for its overall contributions but made a point of urging it to do more and to undertake new and creative ways of thinking about helping the war effort instead of focusing mainly on future threats.
"In my view we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," he said. "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield."
In part this is a call for more UAV activity over Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's also clearly an attack on the USAF's focus on the F-22 and other advanced combat systems. These systems are typically being justified by the potential of war with China, and likely wouldn't contribute significantly to the wars we're already in.
Christian at Defense Tech thinks that this is an unfair line of attack, and suggests that the Air Force has, in fact, been pretty agile. I agree with Christian up to a point; in spite of the various tomfoolery of Charles Dunlap and all of the complaints about insufficient numbers of F-22s, the Air Force has done almost all of what has been asked of it. To the extent that the use of airpower has been insufficient to the task, the flaw isn't predominantly within the USAF itself, but rather with the larger strategic plan and institutional structure. But then I suspect that what SecDef Gates is really calling for here is that the Air Force act more like the Navy. The Navy want expensive, high tech weapons that will be useless in Iraq, but it has been much quieter than the Air Force in its pursuit of these weapons. The Navy has also worked hard to develop for itself a peacetime mission that doesn't concentrate on preparing for or fighting a high intensity war with China.
So, what I think Gates is really suggesting is that the Air Force should manage its outbursts, rather than that it has done a particularly poor job at the task at hand.
Bill Clinton: "If we were under the Republican system, which is more like the Electoral College, she'd have a 300-delegate lead here."
First of all, as Kate noted, the Republican system is actually a great deal more complex, but just for the sake of argument, let's assume that Bill was talking about a winner-take-all system for all 50 states (and territories). Using the data at CNN's election web site, I recompiled all of the states that have voted, generating a winner-take-all system based on the winner of the popular vote. This excludes Florida and Michigan, which still wouldn't have delegates regardless of what system was being used.
The verdict? Clinton holds a 112 delegate lead over Obama, 1576-1464. Now obviously there are different ways of compiling this data (namely whether to include superdelegates) and the order in which these states vote matters a great deal, but the take-home point from this rough analysis is that the race would still be quite close even if it didn't use a proportional allocation system. I suppose Bill Clinton is assuming that Florida and Michigan count, and that Hillary Clinton's highly likely win today in Pennsylvania would give her a much more commanding lead under a winner-take-all system. But as fun as this exercise is, the fact is we don't have that system, and thus Pennsylvania will decide nothing.
Yesterday I asserted that it wasn't all that big of a mystery why young voters, including young women, prefer Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. I offered four explanations why. (Resenting their mothers, or feminism, has little or nothing to do with it.) Today, the New York Times reminds us that Pennsylvania is the state with the second largest population over 65 in the nation (after Florida), and that age has been one of the biggest predictors of voting habits in this Democratic primary. The only stronger predictor is being African American. Indeed, today's vote will probably reinforce the idea that demographics are destiny in 2008. But what will be the long-term effect of viewing Democratic politics through that lens?
Paul Waldman performs an autopsy on the media reaction to last week’s debate and finds a cancer within:
Brooks’ justification of the ABC personalities’ shark-jumping performance was emblematic of the press’ self-conception, the exaltation of the passive voice. “Issues” like flag pins “will be important.” And how will this happen? From whence will this importance come? Will the heavens open, trumpets blare and God himself command in a booming voice that reporters shall write about flag pins, no matter what their better natures and their obligations to the public might dictate?
Of course not. Reporters will choose to write about flag pins. They will choose to write about whether some catastrophic, heretofore hidden character flaw has been revealed by a comment a candidate made, or by a comment somebody who knows the candidate made.. They are not merely conduits for the campaign’s discourse, they create the campaign’s discourse, as much as the candidates themselves. …
To many in the press corps, Obama is just naive for characterizeing things like flag pins, the patriotism of his former pastor, and subversive activities committed 40 years ago by a guy he sort of knows as “distractions.” When he noted that the debate was nearly half over before an actual policy issue was mentioned, they were dismissive.. Appearing on MSNBC the next day, Julie Mason of the Houston Chronicle said with a mocking tone, “It seems like he wants to live in this sort of perfect, high-minded political world where things like flag pins don’t matter, but they really do. These things create perceptions. Everyone is saying he didn’t do well. I have to agree. I don’t think he did much for himself at all.” The “everyone” to whom she was referring was no doubt the rest of the political reporters.
Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to TAP’s article feed here to get all our articles as soon as they're published.
The Spanish are sending their own frigate to the area, but as Galrahn notes the hostage situation will probably be resolved by the paying of a substantial ransom. The Spanish, like the French, could crush the particular pirates involved, but as long as naval force remains relatively scarce in the area and Somalia remains a failed state, these kinds of attacks will continue. The oil tanker attack is mildly distressing; what were they planning to do with it if they had seized it?
This story, in addition to having the most obvious headline I've seen yet this campaign, should be frustrating for a lot of Democrats. Bill Clinton is now alleging that it's because Democrats like to do democratic things like represent voters proportionately that his wife hasn’t won the primary already. If the Democrats had the Republican system, she's already be the nominee:
"If we were under the Republican system, which is more like the Electoral College, she'd have a 300-delegate lead here," he said. "I mean, Senator McCain is already the nominee because they chose a system to produce that result, and we don't have a nominee here, because the Democrats chose a system that prevents that result."
Yes, it would appear as if he’s saying the Republican primary system is superior and less disenfranchising than the Democratic system. The Democratic system, which was revamped in 2006, awards delegates proportionally to any candidate who receives more than 15 percent. The Republicans still operate under a system in which many states are winner-take-all statewide, like New York and Florida, or district-level winner-take-all, like California. This means that those who voted for the candidate who didn’t carry the majority essentially are not represented in the delegate count at all. I think we can all agree that both systems are unecessarily complex and fairly screwed up. But Clinton’s got to be kidding. The Democratic delegate allocation is set up precisely so that people’s votes are actually represented fairly and systematically. And if you don’t like that, I guess you could always try running as a Republican.
Holly Yeager sees a silver lining in the drawn-out Democratic nomination battle:
There is good news in the prolonged battle for the nomination, too. Democratic registration rolls have swelled and voters in states that normally don't get a say in the primary process are welcoming the attention. But there is another, often overlooked, benefit of the long march to the 2008 nomination. As the contest moves from state to state, and canvassers knock on doors and make telephone calls, the campaigns are collecting valuable information about likely voters and laying essential groundwork for November. ...
Even as he frets about avoiding a dramatic showdown at the party convention this August in Denver, Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, agrees that there is a big upside to the drawn-out primary contest. "I take issue with all of the hand-wringing that goes on in the 24-hour cable cycle about how the Democrats are beating each other up," Dean said. "That's a short-term problem." ...
The information -- everything from a voter's cell phone number and e-mail address to voting intentions and top issues, from newly registered Democrats and long-time voters -- is being channeled back into a central voter file organized by the Democratic National Committee. "We know where all the people we are going to have to get out in November are, now," Dean said. With John McCain's claim on the GOP nomination cemented back in February, Republicans can't say the same thing.
Read the details of the GOTV effort and comment here. Get all articles on TAP online as soon as they're published by subscribing to our articles RSS feed here.
There isn't much at all to say about the Pennsylvania primary as we all twiddle our respective thumbs awaiting an outcome after all these weeks. But I'm up in rural New Jersey today in the town I grew up in, which is within the Philadelphia media market. And the hot disscussion here isn't who will triumph -- in the primary that is. The buzz on local radio last night was about the candidates' appearance on World Wrestling Entertainment's "Monday Night RAW." Just to put things in perspective for all of us sitting around contemplating margins and superdelegates.
I really don’t see what the fuss is about Hillary Clinton’s new ad that features—very briefly and as part of a larger montage of images—a brief shot of Osama bin Laden. So what? It’s not like the guy who masterminded the September 11 attacks and is still at-large is not an issue. He is. We should be trying to capture or kill him. Terrorist threats won’t end on January 20.
The ad’s use of bin Laden’s image was neither gratuitous nor scare-mongering. The music wasn’t menacing. In fact, the first time they ran it on CNN, after some television pundit promised a controversial new ad, I actually thought the producers queued up the wrong spot. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about, other than perhaps that, after six weeks of trying to find new and fresh angles to cover this interminable Pennsylvania primary (and you thought the run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire was bad!) non-controversies must somehow be elevated to controversies.
If there is anything controversial about the ad, it’s Clinton’s invocation of Harry Truman’s famed “can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” line. This, from the candidate who voted reacted to President Bush’s pressure to invade Iraq by voting to give him the authority to do so, and has bristled at taking the heat for it ever since.
In a Politicocolumn, Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic caucus, identifies a swing demographic based not on sex, race, ethnicity, or age, but geography: residents of the suburbs and exurbs. Am I missing something here, or is this pretty obvious? We all know urban areas are heavily Democratic and rural areas are heavily Republican. So yes, those folks in the suburbs and exurbs do, in large part, decide our national elections.
If there's any significance to this, it is in a broad kind of pandering to the middle class, as opposed to tackling issues of poverty more straight-forwardly. And it means clinging for dear life to the myth that home-ownership is the be-all, end-all of the American dream, despite a mortgage crisis that indicates exactly the opposite.
I don't think there's anything objectionable in this Clinton ad, but I also don't see how it's going to convince anyone to vote for Clinton. I mean, doesn't everyone know that the stakes are high? I guess the idea is to scare people into making what they think of as the safe choice (Clinton), but it just doesn't seem scary enough to accomplish that.
The Clinton campaign is theoretically in the red, but, since the debt is not due immediately, practically has enough money to keep going.
Ron Paul is starring in a video game, or at least that's what this ad which is airing on television in Pennsylvania suggests to me (while he hasn't officially dropped out, this independent effort probably has more to do with some supporters' desire for a third-party run).
As Dana wrote, Clinton derided the Democratic party's activist base at a private fundraiser. I bring this up not because of what it says about Clinton, but because it's a remarkable contrast with the reaction to the "bitter" comments -- and an example of how acceptable it is to the media to speak ill of people who, whatever you may think of their methods or beliefs, are trying hard to improve the country.
The moderators at the ABC debate actually did ask more scandal-related questions than were asked at any other debate.
A Pennsylvania pledged delegate tries to figure out whether she actually has to vote for Obama at the DNC and finds that ... nobody really knows.
The McCain campaign again delays the release of his medical records.
The odd thing about the media's love for McCain is that he's really bad at articulating an actual message. I suspect that'll start to catch up to him pretty soon ...
Grist political guru David Robertsinterviews McCain climate guru Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
I've admired Linda Hirshman's work in the past, but her recent Slatecolumn accusing young female Obama supporters -- including TAP online contributor Courtney Martin -- of having "Mommy issues" is terribly reductionist. You can read Martin's response here, in which she thoughtfully points out that like men, women (even feminist women) are a diverse group who will never vote as a single bloc. But I really think the intergenerational divide between liberal women when it comes to these two Democratic candidates is rather simple to explain. Here are a few substantive explanations with which Hirshman and others who advance her argument should grapple:
1. Young, politically-engaged women are more likely to have been against the Iraq war since 2002 than older women are. And polls show that those young, single women who initially supported the war were among the first Americans to turn against it. Barack Obama has been consistent since the invasion in his opposition to war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton continues to refuse to apologize for her war authorization vote.
2. Generation Y is the most multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial demographic in American history. In Barack Obama, who is biracial and has written about his personal struggle with identity politics, many young voters see themselves -- or an idealized version of themselves.
3. Obama's campaign excites young activists in part because it's a campaign about organizing. Indeed, Obama's career began as an inner city community organizer, and his campaign today is offering a summer organizing fellowship.
4. There's no denying that Obama is the new, fresh face in this campaign, and that young people like that sort of thing. 'Nuff said.
In short, feminism is important to many young women who are sympathetic to Obama. Feministing, for example, a website for which the Obama-supporting Martin writes, also features a regular "Hillary Sexism Watch," which defends the Senator from misogynist attacks. Hirshman should realize that when a young woman votes for Obama, it isn't necessarily an anti-Hillary vote -- and certainly probably isn't an anti-woman, anti-feminist, anti-mom vote.
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