Over the last eight years, many of the Bush administration's major political decisions, a disturbing number of their appointments, in fact a great share of the administration's public policy was engineered simply to give the finger to their enemies (and the rest of us). In a similar way, by appointing Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's seat, Illinois' disgraced but unrepentant governor, Rod Blagojevich, just told everyone to f-off. There was a moment during his announcement that he was appointing Burris to fill Obama's seat when Blagojevich couldn't contain himself. After saying, "This man actually once was an opponent of mine for governor," Blagojevich paused, smirked, and licked his lips. It was unmistakable: he was flipping us off. He was saying: try to stop me from doing this.
Any policy (or appointment) made simply to demonstrate contempt for the process, or the people, or to tell opponents or the public to f-off, is bad public policy. There is a reason we call our elected officials public servants. Because, ideally, they are elected to serve our interests. When George Bush proposes Harriet Miers for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, or Blagojevich appoints Burris to fill Obama's seat, we should see the choices as they were intended, as an insult. As an expression of bitterness or hubristic presumption. A poke in the eye. No one should be suprised that Bush and Blagojevich think and act this way. Or that they place themselves - rather than the public - at the center of all policy choices they make. Over their years in their current offices, they have demonstrated that they are enormous, unapologetic assholes.
Which brings me to Roland Burris and Bobby Rush. It turns out they are a-holes too. That's a bit more of a surprise. It seems clear that Burris is along for the ride because he wants to claim an office that fits with his exaggerated view of his own worth. At 71, he is likely thinking about his legacy. And looking back at three failed attempts to become governor, one failed run at the Senate, and a failed effort to become Mayor of Chicago, Burris grabbed the chance to be handed an office he could have never won on his own. Sad? Maybe a little. But, in the framework of the conversation we just had, he's clearly a poor choice for public service. He wants the office for entirely personal reasons. For his own self-aggrandizement, or fame, or as a prize for years spent laboring in low-visibility offices. He can't possibly believe he can actually make a contribution to public policy or to the citizens of Illinois. Only a deeply, deeply deluded politician could believe he could accomplish anything under the cloud of suspicion that would undoubtedly darken any appointment made by Blagojevich.
And Bobby Rush - my god - he is a champion arse-hole. Still mad that Obama challenged him for his congressional seat eight years ago, and obviously angry that Obama has rolled a series of doubles and jumped far, far ahead of him on the gameboard of life, Rush showed up alongside Blagojevich to preemptively paint opposition to Burris as a "lynching." Not content with that, he went on the morning news shows today to suggest opposition to Burris' appointment was analogous to the work of those who stood up to defend segregation in the Jim Crow South. There is no way to rationally make this claim. Rush was deliberately and self-servingly positioning this fight as a continuation of the civil rights struggle. Among the many misguided things Rush might be aiming to achieve, one, I am certain, is to portray Obama's principled opposition to Blagojevich's nomination of Burris as a betrayal. As he did in 2000, when Obama ran against him in the contest to retain his seat in Congress, Rush wants to depict Obama as insufficiently Black or worse, as an Uncle Tom, helping delay the advancement of the African American community.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Intolerance at the Inauguration
There has been a firestorm over Barack Obama's invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Warren's conservative evangelical faith - and his homophobia - has caused many of us who supported Obama to blink, or in some cases to rage.
But, let's pause a second. The very idea that we have a prayer before we swear in our President is profoundly misguided. Offering a prayer before an important civic ceremony like this is offensive, to those who don't have religious beliefs, to those whose commitment to faith takes a non-traditional form, and to those who firmly believe, as I do, that government should be free from religious vestments.
Realistically, we are not at a place in our collective life where the invocation can be dropped. So somebody has to do it. I wish it could have been my friend Alison Boden, formerly the chaplain at the University of Chicago, and now Dean of Religious Life at Princeton. Alison practices a humane and inclusive version of Christianity. But politics being what it is - Will Rogers once referred to politics as applesauce - it was necessary to pick someone who had majority appeal. And Warren seems to have that. Author of the best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren is about as mainstream as you get. For a generation, America's Presidents called Billy Graham to deliver the inaugural invocation. And Warren is, in many respects, a natural heir to Billy Graham. The Purpose-Driven Life is still a top-selling book, even six years after its publication. And when someone somewhere decided that Obama and John McCain needed to hold a dialogue on religion this autumn, Warren seemed like the most likely host.
Politics - and perhaps Obama's own Christian faith - compelled him to pick a pastor to deliver the invocation. From a political perspective, Warren was the obvious choice. Of course it could have been more courageous to pick an imam, at this moment in our collective life when Islam is distrusted and misunderstood. But if the choice is principally a political choice, then courageousness isn't really what we are concerned with. Politics is the art of the possible - assembling necessary numbers to win votes, pushing through measures, even watered-down measures, when one can, waiting until the opportunity is right to push through more ambitious policy shifts. Smart politics is characterized by caution, not courage. It's about reading the winds, not plowing forward into the perfect storm no matter what. Selecting an imam to deliver the invocation would have been impossible for Obama - a large part of the country still is unsure whether he is a muslim or not. Picking an imam to lead prayers at his inauguration would have triggered a flood of right wing emails - each one starting with "I told you so."
Let's say something here that perhaps needs to be said: for all of you who believed that Obama was going to end politics, it's time to wake up and reconnect with the facts on the ground. Politics still matters. It always will. Politics is the machinery we have - the process we employ - to pick leaders and build consensus (or at least support) for what those leaders choose to do. What matters, though, is law and policy. Will Obama embrace progressive policies? Will he nominate progressive judges? Will he reengineer our policy-making process - in so far as he can - so lobbyists don't determine our national agenda and kill policies we need (to build greener industries and to achieve meaningful change in the delivery of health care, to name two priorities). Will he map out approaches to move the country toward ambitious changes that are unimaginable now?
Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is applesauce - to borrow Will Rogers' characterization. The meat and potatoes is the policy agenda that follows the inaugural festivities. Is Warren intolerant? Yes he is. As is the vast majority of America. The good news is that anti-gay bigotry is dying, and Warren's views won't matter 25 years from now. He is on the losing side of the issue. The success of supporters of Proposition 8 is a last gasp. This form of discrimination, this particular expression of intolerance, will be swept away when the generation that still holds anti-gay views are displaced in the political landscape by the young voters who overwhelmingly support gay rights. I'm not saying we should wait for that day. What I am saying is this: political choices like picking Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration have no lasting consequence, what matters is the laws we pass and the judges we pick to interpret those laws. The insult is the passage of Proposition 8, and overturning it should be a priority. Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is just politics. It is treading water, while we wait for the opportunity to steer the country forward.
But, let's pause a second. The very idea that we have a prayer before we swear in our President is profoundly misguided. Offering a prayer before an important civic ceremony like this is offensive, to those who don't have religious beliefs, to those whose commitment to faith takes a non-traditional form, and to those who firmly believe, as I do, that government should be free from religious vestments.
Realistically, we are not at a place in our collective life where the invocation can be dropped. So somebody has to do it. I wish it could have been my friend Alison Boden, formerly the chaplain at the University of Chicago, and now Dean of Religious Life at Princeton. Alison practices a humane and inclusive version of Christianity. But politics being what it is - Will Rogers once referred to politics as applesauce - it was necessary to pick someone who had majority appeal. And Warren seems to have that. Author of the best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life, Warren is about as mainstream as you get. For a generation, America's Presidents called Billy Graham to deliver the inaugural invocation. And Warren is, in many respects, a natural heir to Billy Graham. The Purpose-Driven Life is still a top-selling book, even six years after its publication. And when someone somewhere decided that Obama and John McCain needed to hold a dialogue on religion this autumn, Warren seemed like the most likely host.
Politics - and perhaps Obama's own Christian faith - compelled him to pick a pastor to deliver the invocation. From a political perspective, Warren was the obvious choice. Of course it could have been more courageous to pick an imam, at this moment in our collective life when Islam is distrusted and misunderstood. But if the choice is principally a political choice, then courageousness isn't really what we are concerned with. Politics is the art of the possible - assembling necessary numbers to win votes, pushing through measures, even watered-down measures, when one can, waiting until the opportunity is right to push through more ambitious policy shifts. Smart politics is characterized by caution, not courage. It's about reading the winds, not plowing forward into the perfect storm no matter what. Selecting an imam to deliver the invocation would have been impossible for Obama - a large part of the country still is unsure whether he is a muslim or not. Picking an imam to lead prayers at his inauguration would have triggered a flood of right wing emails - each one starting with "I told you so."
Let's say something here that perhaps needs to be said: for all of you who believed that Obama was going to end politics, it's time to wake up and reconnect with the facts on the ground. Politics still matters. It always will. Politics is the machinery we have - the process we employ - to pick leaders and build consensus (or at least support) for what those leaders choose to do. What matters, though, is law and policy. Will Obama embrace progressive policies? Will he nominate progressive judges? Will he reengineer our policy-making process - in so far as he can - so lobbyists don't determine our national agenda and kill policies we need (to build greener industries and to achieve meaningful change in the delivery of health care, to name two priorities). Will he map out approaches to move the country toward ambitious changes that are unimaginable now?
Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is applesauce - to borrow Will Rogers' characterization. The meat and potatoes is the policy agenda that follows the inaugural festivities. Is Warren intolerant? Yes he is. As is the vast majority of America. The good news is that anti-gay bigotry is dying, and Warren's views won't matter 25 years from now. He is on the losing side of the issue. The success of supporters of Proposition 8 is a last gasp. This form of discrimination, this particular expression of intolerance, will be swept away when the generation that still holds anti-gay views are displaced in the political landscape by the young voters who overwhelmingly support gay rights. I'm not saying we should wait for that day. What I am saying is this: political choices like picking Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama's inauguration have no lasting consequence, what matters is the laws we pass and the judges we pick to interpret those laws. The insult is the passage of Proposition 8, and overturning it should be a priority. Picking Warren to deliver the invocation is just politics. It is treading water, while we wait for the opportunity to steer the country forward.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Obligatory shout-out from the other side of the world
Rod Blagojevich. I don't know where to begin. The more we learn about the depths of my governor's malfeasance the more my mind reels. The guy is like the Charles Manson of political corruption. He is awful. He has managed to contaminate the Obama transition, ended the political career of Jesse Jackson, Jr., may end up derailing Rahm Emanual's brief - hell, anticipated - tenure as Chief of Staff, and almost assuredly cost Chicago the 2016 Olympics. Okay, maybe it's a good thing he spoiled Chicago's Olympic bid.
I'm typing this up while sitting in the airport in Seoul, waiting for a flight to Hong Kong. On the way over here I watched The Dark Knight on the plane. The Dark Knight was filmed in Chicago, but takes a detour to visit Hong Kong. Seoul hosted an Olympics, Chicago is trying to. In my sleepy head, all of these things are tied up together in a mysterious web of significance. The Dark Knight is about the societal cost of corruption and bad government (and, as all the critics pointed out, also about terrorism). In the end, it seems to argue, we need public servants who are selfless, who devote their lives to serve us. While everyone was going on and on about how the movie parallels our current faustian bargain in the "war on terror" - the way we have embraced torture and vigilanteism (I mean, what else is Blackwater but a professional vigilante force) - the movie is also about bad government. Forget what I said about Blagojevich being Charles Manson. He's the Joker.
I'm typing this up while sitting in the airport in Seoul, waiting for a flight to Hong Kong. On the way over here I watched The Dark Knight on the plane. The Dark Knight was filmed in Chicago, but takes a detour to visit Hong Kong. Seoul hosted an Olympics, Chicago is trying to. In my sleepy head, all of these things are tied up together in a mysterious web of significance. The Dark Knight is about the societal cost of corruption and bad government (and, as all the critics pointed out, also about terrorism). In the end, it seems to argue, we need public servants who are selfless, who devote their lives to serve us. While everyone was going on and on about how the movie parallels our current faustian bargain in the "war on terror" - the way we have embraced torture and vigilanteism (I mean, what else is Blackwater but a professional vigilante force) - the movie is also about bad government. Forget what I said about Blagojevich being Charles Manson. He's the Joker.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tall? Wide? Spherical?
My friend over at St. Scobie's pointed me to an essay on the Harvard Business Review site that unpacks Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. She's left scratching her head at the article's use of biz-speak. I agree. "Explode your sense of purpose?" Why does anyone write that way?
The thing St. Scobie didn't mention: the essay just seems to be wrong in many, many ways. The essay's author, Umair Haque, calls McCain's campaign a traditional "command-and-control" organization. That's wrong. It was a freakin' mess. With people coming and going, exiled and rehabilitated, swerving off-message, speaking at cross-purposes, hell, in Sarah Palin's case, speaking in tongues. McCain's campaign had neither anyone in command nor any capacity to exert control over events. It collapsed into a blur of near-daily tactical and strategic shifts and ended in infighting and finger-pointing. Obama, on the other hand, Haque claims, succeeded because his organization was "spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers." True, but why wouldn't an organization of the type Haque describes derail due to an inability to discipline volunteers and control the organization's message? His suggestion is that Obama's organization was all about passion, and discipline and coordination were tossed aside. That is obviously wrong. Obama won because he (or at least key actors within his organization) understood that they could trust volunteers if the campaign engineered the tools and the messages volunteers employed. Campaign supporters shared postings, YouTube videos, and talking-points manufactured by the Obama campaign. Volunteers broadcasted what the Obama campaign wanted them to broadcast. If we want to use Haque's image - of Obama's organization as a sphere - the orb the campaign most resembles is the sun, where everything is generated in the core, and the remaining structure (the radiative zone, the convective zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona, for you sun worshippers) merely functions to transmit the energy manufactured within the astral core.
Another thing Haque seems utterly wrong about: he claims that Obama succeeded because he "dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning." Huh? The more I watched the Obama campaign, the more I was convinced they were masters of gamesmanship and positioning and shaping the news cycle. The thing that really brought this into focus for me happened back during the closing days of the primaries. On May 13th, Hillary won West Virginia by 30 points - taking 67% of the vote to Obama's 26%. For a day, the media commentators were talking about Hillary's win as proof that Obama couldn't succeed with working-class white voters. Then, on May 15th, Obama appeared with John Edwards in Michigan to claim Edwards' endorsement. Which, of course, in retrospect, with Edwards wandering in the political wilderness, now seems meaningless. However, at the time, it was a perfectly played card. The Obama campaign most certainly had that endorsement in their pocket for some time, but they waited until the West Virginia primary - which they clearly knew they would lose - to publicize the endorsement, and in the process took the headlines away from Hillary.
The thing St. Scobie didn't mention: the essay just seems to be wrong in many, many ways. The essay's author, Umair Haque, calls McCain's campaign a traditional "command-and-control" organization. That's wrong. It was a freakin' mess. With people coming and going, exiled and rehabilitated, swerving off-message, speaking at cross-purposes, hell, in Sarah Palin's case, speaking in tongues. McCain's campaign had neither anyone in command nor any capacity to exert control over events. It collapsed into a blur of near-daily tactical and strategic shifts and ended in infighting and finger-pointing. Obama, on the other hand, Haque claims, succeeded because his organization was "spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers." True, but why wouldn't an organization of the type Haque describes derail due to an inability to discipline volunteers and control the organization's message? His suggestion is that Obama's organization was all about passion, and discipline and coordination were tossed aside. That is obviously wrong. Obama won because he (or at least key actors within his organization) understood that they could trust volunteers if the campaign engineered the tools and the messages volunteers employed. Campaign supporters shared postings, YouTube videos, and talking-points manufactured by the Obama campaign. Volunteers broadcasted what the Obama campaign wanted them to broadcast. If we want to use Haque's image - of Obama's organization as a sphere - the orb the campaign most resembles is the sun, where everything is generated in the core, and the remaining structure (the radiative zone, the convective zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona, for you sun worshippers) merely functions to transmit the energy manufactured within the astral core.
Another thing Haque seems utterly wrong about: he claims that Obama succeeded because he "dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning." Huh? The more I watched the Obama campaign, the more I was convinced they were masters of gamesmanship and positioning and shaping the news cycle. The thing that really brought this into focus for me happened back during the closing days of the primaries. On May 13th, Hillary won West Virginia by 30 points - taking 67% of the vote to Obama's 26%. For a day, the media commentators were talking about Hillary's win as proof that Obama couldn't succeed with working-class white voters. Then, on May 15th, Obama appeared with John Edwards in Michigan to claim Edwards' endorsement. Which, of course, in retrospect, with Edwards wandering in the political wilderness, now seems meaningless. However, at the time, it was a perfectly played card. The Obama campaign most certainly had that endorsement in their pocket for some time, but they waited until the West Virginia primary - which they clearly knew they would lose - to publicize the endorsement, and in the process took the headlines away from Hillary.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Joe Lieberman is Peter Pettigrew
To start with, as a note of clarification to my mother-in-law: I don't think Barack Obama is the Chosen One. She thinks we have all bought into some idea that Obama is the Messiah. But I am as secular as anyone can be. I don't believe anyone will be delivered from the heavens to save us from immorality and violence and despair. And I certainly would never believe that Harvard Law School, of all places, could produce a savior. Oberlin maybe. But then there's Michelle Malkin to account for. I guess there is no place unsullied by evil. No citadel where decency and tolerance are preserved.
Anyway, my goal here is to offer a basic primer for understanding why Barack Obama wants to save Joe Lieberman from the wrath of the Democratic party. I want to make this so simple anyone can get it.
We know that Obama is a Harry Potter fan, and has read all seven books with his daughters. He has to be aware of the fate of Peter Pettigrew, otherwise known as Wormtail, the shape-shifting wizard who possesses the ability to transform into a rat. The resemblence to Lieberman is hard to miss.
We learn in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Order of the Phoenix, the forces of tolerance and decency, to side with the evil Lord Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters. When Voldemort was unable to eliminate Harry, and in the process was instead transformed into a mere shadow, Pettigrew slinked away and concealed himself for years, disguised as a rat. When Harry and Wormtail's paths crossed again, Harry's friends, angered by Wormtail's betrayal, sought revenge. Just to be clear, Sirius Black wanted to do more than relieve Wormtail of a few Committee Chairmanships and kick him out of the caucus. He wanted to kill Wormtail. By comparison, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is exercising restraint.
But, to get to the point, Harry intervened and saved Wormtail, earning, in the process, a life debt, forging an obligation on Wormtail's part. It wasn't clear at the time what the result would be. But, years later, in the book that wraps up Harry's story, we learn that Wormtail's magical debt is paid when he hesitates to deliver Harry back into the clutches of Voldemort. At precisely the moment when Harry was trapped and it looked like the forces of evil would triumph, Pettigrew delays, allowing Harry to escape.
Obama knows the dark forces have merely been driven into the shadows. They will do all they can to destroy him and regain power. But at some point, perhaps in the closing days of his first term, when he needs a legislative victory to survive, Lieberman will be obligated to step in and help. When he does, I suspect Lieberman will learn, as Wormtail did, that the dark forces are far less forgiving.
Anyway, my goal here is to offer a basic primer for understanding why Barack Obama wants to save Joe Lieberman from the wrath of the Democratic party. I want to make this so simple anyone can get it.
We know that Obama is a Harry Potter fan, and has read all seven books with his daughters. He has to be aware of the fate of Peter Pettigrew, otherwise known as Wormtail, the shape-shifting wizard who possesses the ability to transform into a rat. The resemblence to Lieberman is hard to miss.
We learn in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Order of the Phoenix, the forces of tolerance and decency, to side with the evil Lord Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters. When Voldemort was unable to eliminate Harry, and in the process was instead transformed into a mere shadow, Pettigrew slinked away and concealed himself for years, disguised as a rat. When Harry and Wormtail's paths crossed again, Harry's friends, angered by Wormtail's betrayal, sought revenge. Just to be clear, Sirius Black wanted to do more than relieve Wormtail of a few Committee Chairmanships and kick him out of the caucus. He wanted to kill Wormtail. By comparison, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is exercising restraint.
But, to get to the point, Harry intervened and saved Wormtail, earning, in the process, a life debt, forging an obligation on Wormtail's part. It wasn't clear at the time what the result would be. But, years later, in the book that wraps up Harry's story, we learn that Wormtail's magical debt is paid when he hesitates to deliver Harry back into the clutches of Voldemort. At precisely the moment when Harry was trapped and it looked like the forces of evil would triumph, Pettigrew delays, allowing Harry to escape.
Obama knows the dark forces have merely been driven into the shadows. They will do all they can to destroy him and regain power. But at some point, perhaps in the closing days of his first term, when he needs a legislative victory to survive, Lieberman will be obligated to step in and help. When he does, I suspect Lieberman will learn, as Wormtail did, that the dark forces are far less forgiving.
Friday, November 7, 2008
The selling of Brand Obama
Barack Obama's campaign should be used as a case study in classrooms across the country. The Obama campaign made unprecedented use of social network sites and used existing web tools in exceptionally saavy ways to understand his supporters and shape and position messages to influence them. They employed some of the best talent in the field - including Joe Rospars, who managed Howard Dean's internet presence in 2004, and Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook - and gave them the support and latitude to accomplish what they were brought in to do. There was an impressive degree of integration across the different dimensions of the campaign. When television ads were launched in battleground states, they were also posted on YouTube and displayed on the campaign's Facebook page, where they were picked up by Obama's 2.8 million Facebook friends and shared with others. Any gaffe by John McCain was similarly broadcast across the wide internet landscape, which the campaign understood better than their rival did.
The Obama campaign understood that "people influence people." Every time a new supporter signed up to be one of Obama's Facebook friends, that supporter's new affiliation was automatically broadcast to all of his or her Facebook friends. On average, each Facebook user has 150 "friends" plugged into his or her network, some have as many as 600, a few have many more. Of course, many of these "friends" already share political leanings, and many may also be part of Obama's Facebook community. Still, doing the math, we're talking about a potential social network of 367 million people - greater than the entire population of the U.S.* I wish I had better tools to estimate the likely number of distinct individuals pulled in as friends of the 2.8 million Obama supporters on Facebook. It's big. Let's leave it at that.
Many of these supporters also set up their own accounts on My.BarackObama.com, where they could blog about their own campaigning and canvassing efforts, post photos, and set up their own fundraising pages with their own messages. As people registered on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign gathered information about them. Some of this information was volunteered - name, address, email, cell number - but the campaign also deposited a cookie on each vistor's web browser, allowing the campaign to track where that supporter went after he or she left the site. This allowed the campaign to know where the supporter was getting his or her news and entertainment, helping to craft advertising plans.
Ultimately, every registered supporter was recruited, by carefully targeted emails, to donate, or volunteer at phone banks, or contribute to canvassing and get out the vote efforts. When volunteers showed up at campaign headquarters, they were given lists that were made more precise by the campaign's capability to gather information from its web-based resources. All of these campaign offices, set up across the country, even in states Democrats often skipped, were financed by the unrivalled web-based fund-raising accomplished by the campaign. Some estimates suggest the campaign raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million dollars.
In the end, of course, Obama won the race and in the process captured 7.7 million of the 11.7 million voters under 29 who cast a ballot. The number of voters under 29 was greater than the number of senior citizens who voted. It will take some time to fully understand the numbers, and grasp what motivated voters and which messages caught their attention. But there seems broad consenus that Obama's bet on younger voters paid off, and his use of the web and the power of social networking sites generated armies of volunteers and helped generate unimagined financial support.
Obama's campaign had the insight to see the web as a campaign tool with impressive reach, and, more so than any political campaign before, they grasped the utility of social networking sites to connect with people (and connect people to people). They brought in the talent to give shape and form to their ambitions. Furthermore - and this is a powerful lesson for future campaigns and social movements - they trusted millions of supporters to do a great deal of the work, downloading videos and passing them around, creating their own content and sharing it. This might seem like a risky move for a campaign so focused on communicating a carefully scripted message - emphasizing the candidate's commitment to change, while backgrounding discussions of race - but the campaign was counting on a preexisting set of practices it understood very well. Or rather, that Chris Hughes knew well. From his work on Facebook, Hughes knew that most supporters would share videos and other content crafted by the campaign. What the campaign counted on was that their message would be passed hand-to-hand, shared among "friends."
The Obama campaign was confronted with a workplace extending across the full landscape of the United States, and had to deploy "workers" who were unpaid and had no formal position within the organization. Yet, for their model to work, they needed to trust these supporters to broadcast their message and carry out the groundwork necessary to get out the vote. This, it seems to me, is a quintessentially progressive impulse - Obama trusted us to help him do the work that was necessary to seize the White House. But he's also no fool, he wasn't going to put all his money on us going out there and building buzz on blogs and capturing the look and feel of his campaign with our clumsy photos. He gave the professionals some work to do, and then asked us to pitch in. Seems like a model for government too, doesn't it?
* My own imperfect research shows that 2 Facebook friends probably have 37 other friends in common, assuming they have 150 friends each.
The Obama campaign understood that "people influence people." Every time a new supporter signed up to be one of Obama's Facebook friends, that supporter's new affiliation was automatically broadcast to all of his or her Facebook friends. On average, each Facebook user has 150 "friends" plugged into his or her network, some have as many as 600, a few have many more. Of course, many of these "friends" already share political leanings, and many may also be part of Obama's Facebook community. Still, doing the math, we're talking about a potential social network of 367 million people - greater than the entire population of the U.S.* I wish I had better tools to estimate the likely number of distinct individuals pulled in as friends of the 2.8 million Obama supporters on Facebook. It's big. Let's leave it at that.
Many of these supporters also set up their own accounts on My.BarackObama.com, where they could blog about their own campaigning and canvassing efforts, post photos, and set up their own fundraising pages with their own messages. As people registered on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign gathered information about them. Some of this information was volunteered - name, address, email, cell number - but the campaign also deposited a cookie on each vistor's web browser, allowing the campaign to track where that supporter went after he or she left the site. This allowed the campaign to know where the supporter was getting his or her news and entertainment, helping to craft advertising plans.
Ultimately, every registered supporter was recruited, by carefully targeted emails, to donate, or volunteer at phone banks, or contribute to canvassing and get out the vote efforts. When volunteers showed up at campaign headquarters, they were given lists that were made more precise by the campaign's capability to gather information from its web-based resources. All of these campaign offices, set up across the country, even in states Democrats often skipped, were financed by the unrivalled web-based fund-raising accomplished by the campaign. Some estimates suggest the campaign raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million dollars.
In the end, of course, Obama won the race and in the process captured 7.7 million of the 11.7 million voters under 29 who cast a ballot. The number of voters under 29 was greater than the number of senior citizens who voted. It will take some time to fully understand the numbers, and grasp what motivated voters and which messages caught their attention. But there seems broad consenus that Obama's bet on younger voters paid off, and his use of the web and the power of social networking sites generated armies of volunteers and helped generate unimagined financial support.
Obama's campaign had the insight to see the web as a campaign tool with impressive reach, and, more so than any political campaign before, they grasped the utility of social networking sites to connect with people (and connect people to people). They brought in the talent to give shape and form to their ambitions. Furthermore - and this is a powerful lesson for future campaigns and social movements - they trusted millions of supporters to do a great deal of the work, downloading videos and passing them around, creating their own content and sharing it. This might seem like a risky move for a campaign so focused on communicating a carefully scripted message - emphasizing the candidate's commitment to change, while backgrounding discussions of race - but the campaign was counting on a preexisting set of practices it understood very well. Or rather, that Chris Hughes knew well. From his work on Facebook, Hughes knew that most supporters would share videos and other content crafted by the campaign. What the campaign counted on was that their message would be passed hand-to-hand, shared among "friends."
The Obama campaign was confronted with a workplace extending across the full landscape of the United States, and had to deploy "workers" who were unpaid and had no formal position within the organization. Yet, for their model to work, they needed to trust these supporters to broadcast their message and carry out the groundwork necessary to get out the vote. This, it seems to me, is a quintessentially progressive impulse - Obama trusted us to help him do the work that was necessary to seize the White House. But he's also no fool, he wasn't going to put all his money on us going out there and building buzz on blogs and capturing the look and feel of his campaign with our clumsy photos. He gave the professionals some work to do, and then asked us to pitch in. Seems like a model for government too, doesn't it?
* My own imperfect research shows that 2 Facebook friends probably have 37 other friends in common, assuming they have 150 friends each.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Blue America
Republicans haven’t yet grasped the enormity of their failure or the resounding rejection of their governmental ideology. But as we sift through the data, and more importantly, assess the meaning of this election, it will become clear that Americans have rejected the idea that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money. We can’t sit by while a major American city disappears under flood waters we knew were coming. Government should facilitate scientific research, not suppress it. It should hold our soldiers back, until all efforts to avoid conflict have failed, and never throw them into a slow-motion massacre in pursuit of oil or to establish the validity of a new strategic blueprint. All of this – all of this – was rejected on Tuesday. So don’t believe conservatives who blame “this President” or “the financial crisis” or “their candidate.” This was a repudiation of conservative principles. Look at the map above. It is a graphic representation of some remarkable data. The darker the blue, the greater the shift in voters’ preferences toward the Democratic party. The paler blue hues show a less dramatic shift. The rose colored counties became even more Republican this year. Don’t misunderstand this, we are nor looking at a Democratic Idaho, but compared to 2004, more voters in
I can't help but think that we have witnessed the beginning of a sea-change in American politics. Voters under 24 voted for Obama, even in deeply, deeply red counties. In
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Hyde Park = the sun
My neighborhood in
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Citizen army
One of the consequences of Obama's victory, I hope and I anticipate, will be a new generation of young people who will take an active - by that I mean participatory - role in the political life of the nation. I volunteered in Hammond, Indiana today, knocking on doors and helping get the vote out. A union hall full of teenagers, in many cases too young to vote, took part. If Obama wins Indiana, and it looks like he will, teenagers and college kids and field directors not much older did it. The trick for the Democratic party is to translate this new citizen army into a force that helps guarantee Democratic wins 2 years from now, and 4 years from now. And, more importantly, the party needs to invite this segment of the population to transform our public and civic life. Draw on their enthusiasm to teach in our schools, perform public service, take part in community organizing. And fight discrimination.
One sad, sad result in tonight's otherwise happy political news: Voters in Arizona, Florida, and California voted to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. In Arkansas, they voted to deny gays the right to adopt children. But if you dig into the numbers, discriminatory attitudes are confined to old people. In California, 67% of voters between 18 and 24 voted against the ban. Imagine combining the Obama campaign's gift for bringing young voters into the process - and giving them real responsibilities in organizing and operating the machinery of the campaign - with the attitudinal shift represented by those numbers from California. The result would be a citizen corps that would sweep away discrimination and intolerance.
One sad, sad result in tonight's otherwise happy political news: Voters in Arizona, Florida, and California voted to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. In Arkansas, they voted to deny gays the right to adopt children. But if you dig into the numbers, discriminatory attitudes are confined to old people. In California, 67% of voters between 18 and 24 voted against the ban. Imagine combining the Obama campaign's gift for bringing young voters into the process - and giving them real responsibilities in organizing and operating the machinery of the campaign - with the attitudinal shift represented by those numbers from California. The result would be a citizen corps that would sweep away discrimination and intolerance.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Undecideds
This is my pat on the back posting. My effort to cheer you up. Remember that I offered some assurances recently that Obama would win this race, even though the numbers will tighten, and it might look like McCain is catching up. My argument - well, really Nate Silver's argument - was that Obama had reached all the persuadable undecided voters he could reach, and the remaining undecided voters would either break for McCain or stay home.
It appears that I failed to capture the complexity of racism in America. My racist was a guy who believed in the superiority of the white race. Picture a Klansman without the robe. Or maybe Bob Ewell, Mayella's hated-filled father from To Kill a Mockingbird, who attacks Jem and Scout after the school pagent and breaks Jem's arm. What do I know? I don't know these people. I was sketching out something blind. It turns out there is a range of racial biases. Let's turn to science for something more accurate.
Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com - who happens to be a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin - crunches some numbers and finds the undecideds will break about 50/50 between McCain and Obama. Three different polls have recently included the following question in their presidential campaign polling:
Okay, we can argue whether or not this digs deep enough to reveal racial animosity. The problem, of course, is if you ask someone if they hate blacks, they might very well deny it, even if they harbor animosities and fears and resentments that we would call, by almost any objective definition, racist. What is nice about this question is that we are asking respondents to characterize blacks, not themselves, but in the process we get a glimpse at respondents' attitudes. Franklin's finding is fascinating, and undercuts Silver's (and my) argument: among undecided voters, 27% strongly agree and 32% somewhat agree that African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing." Among the wider public, 26% of the nation strongly believes African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing" and 32% somewhat believe so. In other words, undecided voters don't appear to be different from the public at large in their racial attitudes. About a quarter of the nation evidences a strong racial bias, and the group of voters who remain undecided mirror this.
So, as things tighten up, take courage. I may have been wrong, and my earlier reassurances may not have been strong enough. Looking at polls might give us a good sense of what the final outcome will be, and undecided voters are not going to spoil the party.
Another source of anxiety related to polls: McCain and his spokesmen keep saying things about how unreliable polls are. Their argument seems to be that the polls are all over the place - some show McCain pulling closer in battleground states, others don't, some show the national race a tie, others give Obama a ten-point advantage. Polls, they are saying, can't be trusted. Okay. Take a breath. The polling numbers you see on Pollster or Fivethirtyeight are aggregates, reaching into the many, many polls taken, inputting some well-thought-out trend adjustments and other carefully applied statistical tunings. So the variations the McCain campaign is pointing to have already been addressed in the final numbers spit out by Charles Franklin, Mark Blumenthal, and Nate Silver. You can make an argument about their methods and the choices they make to weigh different factors - and lots of numbers geeks do, contributing to lengthy discussions on both sites. But in the end, there seems to be a high-level of confidence in their results.
Why would you be accepting any assessment of scientific findings from a Republican anyway? Think about it. This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Their approach to sowing doubt about global warming and evolution is the same method the McCain campaign is using now. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans (and the McCain campaign) is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.
It reminds me a little bit of my two-year-old. When all evidence available tells us that he is tired and should go to bed, he resists, offering spirited arguments, usually using claims that have nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence. But Daddy I want to watch Caillou. I'm hungry. Can I have a bar? I want to play with my cars. Then some nights he has a tantrum. But he is just postponing the inevitable. The McCain campaign is doing the same thing - offering arguments unrelated to the evidence, throwing a tantrum, and postponing the inevitable.
I'm still left scratching my head over these undecideds. What are they waiting for? How can they be confused about their choice. David Sedaris has a funny observation in the New Yorker:
It appears that I failed to capture the complexity of racism in America. My racist was a guy who believed in the superiority of the white race. Picture a Klansman without the robe. Or maybe Bob Ewell, Mayella's hated-filled father from To Kill a Mockingbird, who attacks Jem and Scout after the school pagent and breaks Jem's arm. What do I know? I don't know these people. I was sketching out something blind. It turns out there is a range of racial biases. Let's turn to science for something more accurate.
Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com - who happens to be a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin - crunches some numbers and finds the undecideds will break about 50/50 between McCain and Obama. Three different polls have recently included the following question in their presidential campaign polling:
I'd like you to tell me whether you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: African Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing.
Okay, we can argue whether or not this digs deep enough to reveal racial animosity. The problem, of course, is if you ask someone if they hate blacks, they might very well deny it, even if they harbor animosities and fears and resentments that we would call, by almost any objective definition, racist. What is nice about this question is that we are asking respondents to characterize blacks, not themselves, but in the process we get a glimpse at respondents' attitudes. Franklin's finding is fascinating, and undercuts Silver's (and my) argument: among undecided voters, 27% strongly agree and 32% somewhat agree that African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing." Among the wider public, 26% of the nation strongly believes African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing" and 32% somewhat believe so. In other words, undecided voters don't appear to be different from the public at large in their racial attitudes. About a quarter of the nation evidences a strong racial bias, and the group of voters who remain undecided mirror this.
So, as things tighten up, take courage. I may have been wrong, and my earlier reassurances may not have been strong enough. Looking at polls might give us a good sense of what the final outcome will be, and undecided voters are not going to spoil the party.
Another source of anxiety related to polls: McCain and his spokesmen keep saying things about how unreliable polls are. Their argument seems to be that the polls are all over the place - some show McCain pulling closer in battleground states, others don't, some show the national race a tie, others give Obama a ten-point advantage. Polls, they are saying, can't be trusted. Okay. Take a breath. The polling numbers you see on Pollster or Fivethirtyeight are aggregates, reaching into the many, many polls taken, inputting some well-thought-out trend adjustments and other carefully applied statistical tunings. So the variations the McCain campaign is pointing to have already been addressed in the final numbers spit out by Charles Franklin, Mark Blumenthal, and Nate Silver. You can make an argument about their methods and the choices they make to weigh different factors - and lots of numbers geeks do, contributing to lengthy discussions on both sites. But in the end, there seems to be a high-level of confidence in their results.
Why would you be accepting any assessment of scientific findings from a Republican anyway? Think about it. This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Their approach to sowing doubt about global warming and evolution is the same method the McCain campaign is using now. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans (and the McCain campaign) is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.
It reminds me a little bit of my two-year-old. When all evidence available tells us that he is tired and should go to bed, he resists, offering spirited arguments, usually using claims that have nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence. But Daddy I want to watch Caillou. I'm hungry. Can I have a bar? I want to play with my cars. Then some nights he has a tantrum. But he is just postponing the inevitable. The McCain campaign is doing the same thing - offering arguments unrelated to the evidence, throwing a tantrum, and postponing the inevitable.
I'm still left scratching my head over these undecideds. What are they waiting for? How can they be confused about their choice. David Sedaris has a funny observation in the New Yorker:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Ashley Todd and Donald Segretti
The media will sell you the story that Ashley Todd, the young College Republican who faked her own attack and sexual assault and blamed it on a six foot four African American thug who became infuriated when he discovered she was a McCain supporter, is just a troubled girl. We should allow her to get the help that she needs. Clearly, a woman who fakes an attack and falsely claims to be sexually assaulted is troubled. But she is also part of an organization that celebrates dirty tricks and pranks and provocation. College Republicans are the Delta Tau Chi's of the political world. Whether that is a good thing - and you argue they are just having fun - or a bad thing is a matter of opinion.
Part of the legacy of Watergate is the role young saboteurs can play in presidential elections. One of the minor players in the Watergate scandal was Donald Segretti, a young Republican lawyer who did some nasty things but, in the end, really didn't threaten the Constitution the way the major conspirators did. He was just a punk with a really long leash and $500,000 in Republican campaign funds. Segretti engaged in what he called "ratfucking", which involved, in his case, trying to smear candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1971. He did this, for example, by stealing some letterhead from Edmund Muskie's campaign office, and circulating letters on that letterhead offering false details about Scoop Jackson's sexual preferences. He may have been engaged in a plot to get a black prostitute to seduce Jackson so the Republicans could snap photos. In the end he served four and a half months in federal prison for his misbehavior.
Segretti learned to be a political saboteur while a student at the University of Southern California and, in the process, created the template for similar-minded campus provocateurs everywhere. Their job is to stir the pot, create outrage on campus, poke fun at liberals, annoy people. And, more importantly, learn dirty tricks and pranks and the political value of provocation, so they can carry these lessons into their work as young operatives in the party's machinery. Fascinatingly, Segretti was the California co-chair of John McCain's ill-fated 2000 run for the presidency. You know, the campaign that was derailed by Karl Rove's success in circulating a story in South Carolina that said that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate biological daughter, the product of an adulterous affair with a black woman. In a weird twist, one of the stories Segretti tried to drop into the 1972 presidential race - one of the things he was sent to jail for - was a tale about Scoop Jackson's taste for young black prostitutes. Now Ashley Todd floats the story that a black man attacked her and assaulted her because she was a McCain supporter.
What do all of these stories have in common? Republicans seem to believe that African Americans, dropped deliberately into a smear campaign - cast in the roles of young seductresses, prostitutes, and street criminals - can derail opponents' campaigns. Lee Atwater derailed Michael Dukakis' campaign with Willie Horton, playing on white America's fear of black crime. This is exactly what Ashley was trying to do. She may be a troubled girl, but she is part of a long troubled history.
[Update 10/27: Nate Silver, over at Fivethirtyeight.com, has an essay about Ashley Todd, linking her story with other stories to reveal the play of responses to Obama's candidacy. Ashley Todd's response - to script a bit of fraudulent street theater designed to remind white voters that blacks are dangerous - is, as Silver carefully argues, directly connected to McCain's efforts to create an "emotional backlash against black people and against Barack Obama." McCain's closing argument is that you can't trust Obama, in part because he is black. I know some of you don't buy this. But consider something that happened yesterday at a rally in Iowa. Sarah Palin had just finished saying:
Part of the legacy of Watergate is the role young saboteurs can play in presidential elections. One of the minor players in the Watergate scandal was Donald Segretti, a young Republican lawyer who did some nasty things but, in the end, really didn't threaten the Constitution the way the major conspirators did. He was just a punk with a really long leash and $500,000 in Republican campaign funds. Segretti engaged in what he called "ratfucking", which involved, in his case, trying to smear candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1971. He did this, for example, by stealing some letterhead from Edmund Muskie's campaign office, and circulating letters on that letterhead offering false details about Scoop Jackson's sexual preferences. He may have been engaged in a plot to get a black prostitute to seduce Jackson so the Republicans could snap photos. In the end he served four and a half months in federal prison for his misbehavior.
Segretti learned to be a political saboteur while a student at the University of Southern California and, in the process, created the template for similar-minded campus provocateurs everywhere. Their job is to stir the pot, create outrage on campus, poke fun at liberals, annoy people. And, more importantly, learn dirty tricks and pranks and the political value of provocation, so they can carry these lessons into their work as young operatives in the party's machinery. Fascinatingly, Segretti was the California co-chair of John McCain's ill-fated 2000 run for the presidency. You know, the campaign that was derailed by Karl Rove's success in circulating a story in South Carolina that said that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate biological daughter, the product of an adulterous affair with a black woman. In a weird twist, one of the stories Segretti tried to drop into the 1972 presidential race - one of the things he was sent to jail for - was a tale about Scoop Jackson's taste for young black prostitutes. Now Ashley Todd floats the story that a black man attacked her and assaulted her because she was a McCain supporter.
What do all of these stories have in common? Republicans seem to believe that African Americans, dropped deliberately into a smear campaign - cast in the roles of young seductresses, prostitutes, and street criminals - can derail opponents' campaigns. Lee Atwater derailed Michael Dukakis' campaign with Willie Horton, playing on white America's fear of black crime. This is exactly what Ashley was trying to do. She may be a troubled girl, but she is part of a long troubled history.
[Update 10/27: Nate Silver, over at Fivethirtyeight.com, has an essay about Ashley Todd, linking her story with other stories to reveal the play of responses to Obama's candidacy. Ashley Todd's response - to script a bit of fraudulent street theater designed to remind white voters that blacks are dangerous - is, as Silver carefully argues, directly connected to McCain's efforts to create an "emotional backlash against black people and against Barack Obama." McCain's closing argument is that you can't trust Obama, in part because he is black. I know some of you don't buy this. But consider something that happened yesterday at a rally in Iowa. Sarah Palin had just finished saying:
The lessons I believe we have taught our kids would start to erode. Those
lessons about work ethic, hard work being rewarded and productivity being
rewarded.
Someone from the audienced yelled "And he's a nigger." Why that reminder at that point in the speech? Because, for the fraction of the American public Palin was speaking to, African Americans are imagined to be lazy, living off welfare rather than working, like the rest of us do. We don't want, in Palin's phrasing, "our kids" to start living like they do. Electing Obama would contaminate our culture. We would all become welfare leeches if Obama wins, because his inner-city culture - the culture of black America - would befoul our farmlands and small-towns, the "real" America Palin celebrates. It's the McCain campaign blowing the dog-whistle again, communicating coded messages we don't hear, but racists - like that woman in the audience - do hear and respond to.]
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
John McCain: "That one is just off the boat"
In his stump speech, McCain has taken to saying:
I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her.
This refers to the fact that McCain's dad and grandfather were both admirals in the U.S. Navy. Taken at face value, it is standard political rhetoric, designed to position McCain as a patriot. But he could say that, and has said that, without reference to his heritage. In fact, in the same speech, he said:
I've been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it.
Great! I'm sold! He had me at hello. McCain is a patriot! And, oh yeah, he managed to remind me he was a POW too. Bang! A lot of ground covered in a sentence. So why bring his father and grandfather into this? It's that dog whistle he's been blowing lately. To racist and xenophobic audiences, McCain is saying: Obama doesn't come from a long line of patriotic Americans. His dad wasn't born here. He wasn't like you and me. His dad was foreign. And, embedded in McCain's comment, and clearly relevant to his audience, is the idea that you can't be certain that Obama will fight for America because he is not fully one of us. He isn't part of our narrative, our collective struggles. He's new here. It's a racist and xenophopic wrinkle on the experience angle: Not only is Obama not as experienced in government as McCain, but he is insufficiently experienced as an American.
This builds on claims that surrogates and other fringe wackos have been making for a long time. It plays on the idea that the longer your family is in America- the more immersed you are in the culture, the more you and your ancestors have been nourished by its soil - the more American you are.
It's time for someone to say to McCain: That's offensive! That's racist! That's unamerican!
I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her.
This refers to the fact that McCain's dad and grandfather were both admirals in the U.S. Navy. Taken at face value, it is standard political rhetoric, designed to position McCain as a patriot. But he could say that, and has said that, without reference to his heritage. In fact, in the same speech, he said:
I've been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it.
Great! I'm sold! He had me at hello. McCain is a patriot! And, oh yeah, he managed to remind me he was a POW too. Bang! A lot of ground covered in a sentence. So why bring his father and grandfather into this? It's that dog whistle he's been blowing lately. To racist and xenophobic audiences, McCain is saying: Obama doesn't come from a long line of patriotic Americans. His dad wasn't born here. He wasn't like you and me. His dad was foreign. And, embedded in McCain's comment, and clearly relevant to his audience, is the idea that you can't be certain that Obama will fight for America because he is not fully one of us. He isn't part of our narrative, our collective struggles. He's new here. It's a racist and xenophopic wrinkle on the experience angle: Not only is Obama not as experienced in government as McCain, but he is insufficiently experienced as an American.
This builds on claims that surrogates and other fringe wackos have been making for a long time. It plays on the idea that the longer your family is in America- the more immersed you are in the culture, the more you and your ancestors have been nourished by its soil - the more American you are.
It's time for someone to say to McCain: That's offensive! That's racist! That's unamerican!
Friday, October 10, 2008
How do blacks win? The McCain campaign's answer: they cheat
Today it became clear that the McCain campaign is launching a "How could it be?" strategy. The goal is to speak to racists who find it unfathomable that a black man could be running away with this election.
Typical of those opposed to affirmative action is the idea that African Americans could never succeed without unfair advantages - quotas in schools, preferential hiring, our liberal embrace of multiculturalism and diversity. Blacks' success over, in their eyes, obviously more qualified white applicants can only be explained by cheating. On a level playing field, blacks could never, ever, ever get the better of a white candidate.
So how do you explain the enormous lead that Obama has built in national tracking polls and, more importantly, the projections that show a near landslide win in the electoral college? It's the liberal media, helping Obama cheat by not asking the right questions, or investigating his past associations. The suggestion is: if the media was doing its job instead of following its liberal inclination to give a break to the black man, Obama would be losing to McCain by double-digits. And what about the explosion of newly registered Democrats, even in traditionally red states like Colorado and North Carolina? More cheating. It's ACORN and other liberal organizations inundating local authorities with fraudulent registrations. And what about all of Obama's money? Where is he getting all that money to run his campaign? Hollywood liberals of course. But also, maybe, radicals who want to bring down America.
OK. OK. I know some of you are saying: I'm not convinced this is racist. This is just the crap that Republicans always blather on about. Alright, I'll let you believe that. I don't have any internal McCain memos or anything that prove my point. But I will offer this line of evidence: 1. Throughout the suburbs and rural towns that make up much of the swing state territory McCain and Palin have been campaigning through, the hatred of affirmative action is powerful and unshakable. It's the same sentiment that Hillary Clinton was trying to employ in her primary fight with Obama. Like Hillary, what the McCain campaign and their supportive commentators are employing are the phrasings and issue framings that communicate to racists the way a dog whistle calls a hound. We might not hear it, but they sure do. Geraldine Ferraro used the same code words and messages, but did so so awkwardly and obviously that she blew it, and had to be sent home by the Clinton campaign. 2. This strategy has emerged at precisely the same moment McCain has been rolling out an effort to turn his rallies into ugly mob scenes with coded language emphasizing Obama's "difference." Suggesting that Obama has a lead in the race he doesn't deserve and is explained only by cheating and unfair advantages is the other side of this strategy. McCain is saying to racists in his party: Do you really want a black man to be President? Well he will be if we let him (and his liberal pals) steal this election.
Typical of those opposed to affirmative action is the idea that African Americans could never succeed without unfair advantages - quotas in schools, preferential hiring, our liberal embrace of multiculturalism and diversity. Blacks' success over, in their eyes, obviously more qualified white applicants can only be explained by cheating. On a level playing field, blacks could never, ever, ever get the better of a white candidate.
So how do you explain the enormous lead that Obama has built in national tracking polls and, more importantly, the projections that show a near landslide win in the electoral college? It's the liberal media, helping Obama cheat by not asking the right questions, or investigating his past associations. The suggestion is: if the media was doing its job instead of following its liberal inclination to give a break to the black man, Obama would be losing to McCain by double-digits. And what about the explosion of newly registered Democrats, even in traditionally red states like Colorado and North Carolina? More cheating. It's ACORN and other liberal organizations inundating local authorities with fraudulent registrations. And what about all of Obama's money? Where is he getting all that money to run his campaign? Hollywood liberals of course. But also, maybe, radicals who want to bring down America.
OK. OK. I know some of you are saying: I'm not convinced this is racist. This is just the crap that Republicans always blather on about. Alright, I'll let you believe that. I don't have any internal McCain memos or anything that prove my point. But I will offer this line of evidence: 1. Throughout the suburbs and rural towns that make up much of the swing state territory McCain and Palin have been campaigning through, the hatred of affirmative action is powerful and unshakable. It's the same sentiment that Hillary Clinton was trying to employ in her primary fight with Obama. Like Hillary, what the McCain campaign and their supportive commentators are employing are the phrasings and issue framings that communicate to racists the way a dog whistle calls a hound. We might not hear it, but they sure do. Geraldine Ferraro used the same code words and messages, but did so so awkwardly and obviously that she blew it, and had to be sent home by the Clinton campaign. 2. This strategy has emerged at precisely the same moment McCain has been rolling out an effort to turn his rallies into ugly mob scenes with coded language emphasizing Obama's "difference." Suggesting that Obama has a lead in the race he doesn't deserve and is explained only by cheating and unfair advantages is the other side of this strategy. McCain is saying to racists in his party: Do you really want a black man to be President? Well he will be if we let him (and his liberal pals) steal this election.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
The daily "Huh?"
This is either a new feature or a one time venture. I constantly see the McCain campaign saying things that make me say: "Huh?" I thought I should try to document some of them.
Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman, today complained about Obama's "run-with-the-herd mentality" and, in the same sentence, his "radical associations." Wait. Let's look in the dictionary. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines radical as “marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional” and “disposed to make extreme changes.” So, it seems to me, it would be difficult to both "run with the herd" and be "radical."
I thought I should, while I was at it, look up another word the Palin/McCain team uses a lot. Merriam-Webster defines maverick as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party." Kind of like a radical, I guess. But maybe less extreme. Sort of radical-lite.
Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman, today complained about Obama's "run-with-the-herd mentality" and, in the same sentence, his "radical associations." Wait. Let's look in the dictionary. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines radical as “marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional” and “disposed to make extreme changes.” So, it seems to me, it would be difficult to both "run with the herd" and be "radical."
I thought I should, while I was at it, look up another word the Palin/McCain team uses a lot. Merriam-Webster defines maverick as “an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party." Kind of like a radical, I guess. But maybe less extreme. Sort of radical-lite.
As good as he'll get
A while ago, imagining a world where everyone loves their kids as much as I do, I positioned the possibility that even unreformed racists might go into the voting booth and pull the lever for Obama because they want a better future for their kids. Another possibility is that pure self-interest - the realization that Republican economic dogma is bankrupt and unsupportable - might lead racists to bite down hard and vote for Obama. A persuasive posting on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com argues otherwise. And, for your sanity as an Obama supporter, it might make sense to listen. Silver's argument is that many of the remaining undecideds out there are fully aware that McCain's economic proposals, in so far as they are fleshed out, will only prolong financial chaos, deepen the country's economic crisis, and result in more pain, dislocation, and hopelessness for the working class. But voting for Obama would require them to overcome a deeply rooted intrinsic racial prejudice. It would mean putting aside a worldview, held for their entirely lives, and perhaps handed down to them by their parents, that explains events in history, and their own poverty and powerlessness, as the product of conspirators or misguided do-gooders, who have created a world out of balance, in which inferior races have contaminated and dragged down America.
It seems unlikely that anyone who views the world this way will ever walk into a voting booth and cast a vote for Obama. These voters will either stay at home or vote for McCain. It might be that Obama has persuaded everyone he can persuade, so the gap between Obama and McCain will narrow as the few remaining undecided voters reluctantly drift toward McCain. They really have no other choice, because voting for Obama would invalidate their core beliefs and require them to reconstruct the world from the ground up.
The goal for Obama, then, is to register new voters and to convince wallflowers - all those registered voters who too often sit out elections - to get off their butts and vote, and the campaign knows this and has assembled a ground game to try to accomplish it.
So when the polls tighten between now and election day, and you imagine the sky falling (or, if you are like me, and see us fumbling the ball away at the 2 yard line), take a breath. Remember I told you this was going to happen. And take heart that Obama's campaign is ready for it. Oh, and get your ass off the couch and be part of that campaign.
It seems unlikely that anyone who views the world this way will ever walk into a voting booth and cast a vote for Obama. These voters will either stay at home or vote for McCain. It might be that Obama has persuaded everyone he can persuade, so the gap between Obama and McCain will narrow as the few remaining undecided voters reluctantly drift toward McCain. They really have no other choice, because voting for Obama would invalidate their core beliefs and require them to reconstruct the world from the ground up.
The goal for Obama, then, is to register new voters and to convince wallflowers - all those registered voters who too often sit out elections - to get off their butts and vote, and the campaign knows this and has assembled a ground game to try to accomplish it.
So when the polls tighten between now and election day, and you imagine the sky falling (or, if you are like me, and see us fumbling the ball away at the 2 yard line), take a breath. Remember I told you this was going to happen. And take heart that Obama's campaign is ready for it. Oh, and get your ass off the couch and be part of that campaign.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Obligatory post-debate post
Oh. God. Andrew Halcro was right. Andrew Halcro ran against Sarah Palin in the race to be Governor of Alaska. He described her as the "master of the nonanswer" and adept at "glittering generality." With Gwen Ifell asleep at the moderator's desk, and repeatedly failing to push for more specificity, we were left with a lot of empty rhetoric from Palin that really no one could disagree with. For example, here are 10 things she is for:
2. Convince people that Obama will raise their taxes. If Obama can enact his tax plans (and it is a big if, given our economic meltdown and the obligations the Federal government is taking on), most people will actually see their taxes cut. Yet, Palin (like McCain) continues to shout her claim that Obama will boost taxes. Over and over again last night, Biden attempted to correct the record and beat back Palin's misstatements. Different media sources have tried to set the record straight. A visit to Obama's website tells the story, there is even a calculator online that let's you calculate your own "Obama Tax Cut." Yet McCain and Palin's claims still seem to have the ear of a majority of Americans. A friend last night asked: How can this be? My answer: people are more likely to believe a claim - even an untrue one - if it corresponds with some preexisting narrative or conventional wisdom. In this case, the American people are predisposed to believe Obama is a "tax and spend" Democrat, because conventional wisdom holds that Democrats tax (and Republicans cut taxes). But, again, like the energy issue, I don't think Americans care. In many, many studies, Americans have been found to be willing to pay higher taxes IF they value the public benefits they receive in return and they TRUST that these goods will be delivered. The goal for Obama, then, needs to be to continue to publicize the facts of his tax plan while also convincing the American people that his policies promise real benefits and he is a trustworthy public ally. In the end, even if he can't displace the widespread perception that Democrats are addicted to taxes, he can still win the argument that his policies are better for the majority of Americans and he is more trustworthy than John McCain.
1. The American workforce
2. A heck of a lot of good lessons
3. Energy
4. Marriage
5. A little bit of reality from
6. Freedom
7. Third graders at
8. The kitchen table
9. Kids heading off to college
10. Living in
If you're going to do any harm and mandate more things on me and take more of my money and income tax and business taxes, you're going to have a choice in just a few weeks here on either supporting a ticket that wants to create jobs and bolster our economy and win the war or you're going to be supporting a ticket that wants to increase taxes, which ultimately kills jobs, and is going to hurt our economy.
Also, John McCain's maverick position that he's in, that's really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has.
or:
Certainly, accounting for different conditions in that different country and conditions are certainly different.
Some of you are going to say: "Now you're just being mean." No. My point is to encourage you to look at her rhetoric. There is no "there there." No policy position. No logic. You can argue, as some have, that Palin talks this way because she doesn't know anything. But I don't think that's true. She employs this approach to political discourse and dialogue because she thinks it helps recruit support. On one hand, her meandering phrasing makes it difficult to know exactly what she is saying. Take this example:
Who's been there and he's faced challenges and he knows what evil is and knows what it takes to overcome the challenges here with our military.
She's talking about John McCain and his position on a draw down of troops in Iraq. But what she says has no meaning. It says nothing about McCain's policy. So how can you argue with it? Your own views can be mapped on to this string of words, giving meaning to a statement that can't otherwise stand on its own.
This is her other trick: if she voices solidarity with a lot of things we can't possibly disagree with, she believes we will be drawn in and take her side. Here is what she hopes the conversation inside our head looks like:
Sarah likes kids! So do I! She has some differences of opinion in her family! So do I! We are so much alike, I think I'll back her!
She talks this way because it works. If no one pushes back. I can't decide if Ifell is just incapable of taking control of a debate or, in the wake of the phony outrage about her upcoming book on race and politics, she was just afraid of looking pro-Obama if she called Palin on her hazy generalities and deliberate evasions.
But, out of all of her nonsensical and noncommittal blah, blah, blah, two strategies for shaping the remaining days of this race came through:
1. This race is about energy independence. And McCain and Palin, because of their commitment to drilling and Palin's "experience" with energy issues as Alaska's governor, are more likely than Obama to lead us forward into the day when all of our energy needs are met through fossil fuels we pump out of America's soil or dig out of America's mountains. The thing she said over and over: McCain/Palin are for an "all of the above" energy policy. What is appealing about this, for voters who don't look very hard, is the suggestion that we can get there without government spending and without asking for sacrifices - like conservation or smaller vehicles or excise taxes on fuel. It's a fantasy and, I think, largely beside the point in most voters' minds. People are worried about the economy, and unless McCain/Palin are prepared to contruct a more elaborately architectural argument that ties energy issues to the collapse on Wall Street and economic woes on Main Street, energy issues will remain a sideshow. One thing I heard from Palin - a claim that East Coasters are out of touch with folks in the West who want to profit from pumping out fossil fuels - may have relevance in some Western states, like California, Alaska, and Texas, but these states aren't really in play anyway.2. Convince people that Obama will raise their taxes. If Obama can enact his tax plans (and it is a big if, given our economic meltdown and the obligations the Federal government is taking on), most people will actually see their taxes cut. Yet, Palin (like McCain) continues to shout her claim that Obama will boost taxes. Over and over again last night, Biden attempted to correct the record and beat back Palin's misstatements. Different media sources have tried to set the record straight. A visit to Obama's website tells the story, there is even a calculator online that let's you calculate your own "Obama Tax Cut." Yet McCain and Palin's claims still seem to have the ear of a majority of Americans. A friend last night asked: How can this be? My answer: people are more likely to believe a claim - even an untrue one - if it corresponds with some preexisting narrative or conventional wisdom. In this case, the American people are predisposed to believe Obama is a "tax and spend" Democrat, because conventional wisdom holds that Democrats tax (and Republicans cut taxes). But, again, like the energy issue, I don't think Americans care. In many, many studies, Americans have been found to be willing to pay higher taxes IF they value the public benefits they receive in return and they TRUST that these goods will be delivered. The goal for Obama, then, needs to be to continue to publicize the facts of his tax plan while also convincing the American people that his policies promise real benefits and he is a trustworthy public ally. In the end, even if he can't displace the widespread perception that Democrats are addicted to taxes, he can still win the argument that his policies are better for the majority of Americans and he is more trustworthy than John McCain.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Okay, debate among yourselves
So John McCain has gone all wobbly-legged and won't debate Obama now. If he doesn't show up Friday, I want that guy from SNL who impersonates McCain to be invited to give McCain’s answers. That would be great. Here’s a sample.
Moderator: Senator Obama, what is at stake in this economic crisis?
Obama: It's been four decades since Bobby Kennedy crouched in a shack along the Mississippi Delta and looked into the wide, listless eyes of a hungry child. Again and again he tried to talk to this child, but each time his efforts were met with only a blank stare of desperation. And when Kennedy turned to the reporters traveling with him, with tears in his eyes he asked a single question about poverty in
Moderator: Senator McCain?
Darryl Hammonds as John McCain: I drive a Maverick. It’s an awful car. And rusty. It’s that color of yellow orange that
Moderator: But that’s clearly not true.
Darryl Hammonds as John McCain: I was a POW. I was in a North Vietnamese prison camp. One day I was in the prison yard and a North Vietnamese guard—we called them gooks or slants—came up to me and drew an image of a dollar sign at our feet with the bayonet at the end of his rifle. For a moment, we were just two guys who wanted a little money in our pockets so we could buy some whores. I’ll never forget that moment. Even though it never happened.
Moderator: Uh.......
Friday, September 19, 2008
One nation, divisible
By now, the Republican strategy for this November's election is clearly mapped out and, not surprisingly, resembles the strategies Republicans have relied on for the last decade. The goal is to divide and subdivide America into demographic camps, and employ differences - in cultural backgrounds, in religious persuasion, in race and national origin, and in sexual identity and orientation - to construct "us versus them" dichotomies. The hard-working, down-to-earth values of small-town voters are celebrated, while urbanites are portrayed as lazy or "elitist" and (according to Rudy Giuliani) "cosmopolitan."* The enormous complexity of religious belief is reduced to a distinction between "Christians" and everyone else. And our historical tradition of "melting pot" nationalism, or multi-cultural "mosaic" nationalism, where a single people is assembled out of the many, many cultural communities that make up the vast population of America, is discarded, replaced with a much older, and more restrictive definition of citizenship, which extends full membership in the collectivity only to those who are "white Christians."
This strategy - divide and conquer - aims at assembling just enough votes in the right selection of states to put the Republican nominee over the threshold in the Electoral College. The two principle tactics - culture war rhetoric and vote caging - work in parallel, to mobilize a wave of voters who feel their "values" and "traditions" are under attack, while obliterating as many Democrat-leaning voters (African American, Latinos, the unemployed, and, new this year, those who have lost their homes in foreclosures) as possible.
This practice of dumping registered voters from the registration lists - because they moved or can't be located - is a tactic Republicans have used for a generation. Republican operatives send mail to targeted neighborhoods where the majority of voters are Democrats. When a letter is returned as undeliverable, perhaps because the resident has moved, or maybe because the address was wrong, or the post office made a mistake, the local Republican party (or, in some cases, public officials) records the voter's name, and adds it to a list they deliver to the local election board, asking to have the voter removed from the system. The justification they use - that they are fighting vote fraud by catching people who aren't properly registered - seems plausible enough to make the practice seem valid. But all evidence points to the contrary. Improperly registered voters, or voters who vote multiple times because they are registered in multiple jurisdictions, or voters impersonating registered voters who have moved or passed away don't make any difference in electoral outcomes. Other related practices - sending misinformation about the hours polls are open; sending information about how to register, after registration deadlines have passed, to mislead registered voters into thinking they aren't registered; requiring ID's to vote, when it is disproportionately likely that the poor, the unemployed, and recent immigrants won't have ID's - aim to do the same thing, restrict turnout among voters likely to vote for Democrats.
All of this is distressing not only because it makes it less likely that Democrats will win, but because it undermines cherished hopes for our society and democratic processes. The ideal of the American "nation" has always had at its core the belief that it isn't common blood that joins us (although White supremacists might argue otherwise), or even a common language (although those campaigning to make English our official language might disagree), but a shared commitment to defend a common homeland, and to preserve an institutionalized tradition of representative democracy, and to contribute to a two- to three-hundred year-old national narrative. This idea that Republicans are offering, that Americans - true Americans - look a certain way, and speak a certain language, and worship a particular God, is a betrayal of this tradition. I'm not a utopianist, I know the reality was never as comfortable as the image I sketch out. African Americans were denied full citizenship and equal voting rights, Japanese Americans were gathered up and held in camps, many other groups have been targeted or marginalized. But these violations of civil rights - these efforts to exclude entire groups of citizens from the full protection of our laws - were later acknowledged and, if not remedied, became inserted into our national narrative as regretable chapters, stumbles in our collective pilgrimage toward a freer and more equal society.
The efforts to disenfranchise voters are, similarly, a step backward. It is a reversal of a generations long effort to guarantee the vote to women, and Blacks, and immigrants, through law, and the power of the courts, and the elimination of barriers, like poll taxes, and literacy tests, and other obstacles.
In order to win an election, despite their comprehensive failure to offer anything resembling good government, Republicans deliberately dismantle institutions and practices designed to preserve a place for the most vulnerable in our national life, and they roll back accomplishments in expanding voting rights. In the process, they thumb their noses at those who sacrificed their lives to secure these advancements and defend these institutions.
* Note: "cosmopolitan" is designed to suggest "probably gay and from somewhere else."
This strategy - divide and conquer - aims at assembling just enough votes in the right selection of states to put the Republican nominee over the threshold in the Electoral College. The two principle tactics - culture war rhetoric and vote caging - work in parallel, to mobilize a wave of voters who feel their "values" and "traditions" are under attack, while obliterating as many Democrat-leaning voters (African American, Latinos, the unemployed, and, new this year, those who have lost their homes in foreclosures) as possible.
This practice of dumping registered voters from the registration lists - because they moved or can't be located - is a tactic Republicans have used for a generation. Republican operatives send mail to targeted neighborhoods where the majority of voters are Democrats. When a letter is returned as undeliverable, perhaps because the resident has moved, or maybe because the address was wrong, or the post office made a mistake, the local Republican party (or, in some cases, public officials) records the voter's name, and adds it to a list they deliver to the local election board, asking to have the voter removed from the system. The justification they use - that they are fighting vote fraud by catching people who aren't properly registered - seems plausible enough to make the practice seem valid. But all evidence points to the contrary. Improperly registered voters, or voters who vote multiple times because they are registered in multiple jurisdictions, or voters impersonating registered voters who have moved or passed away don't make any difference in electoral outcomes. Other related practices - sending misinformation about the hours polls are open; sending information about how to register, after registration deadlines have passed, to mislead registered voters into thinking they aren't registered; requiring ID's to vote, when it is disproportionately likely that the poor, the unemployed, and recent immigrants won't have ID's - aim to do the same thing, restrict turnout among voters likely to vote for Democrats.
All of this is distressing not only because it makes it less likely that Democrats will win, but because it undermines cherished hopes for our society and democratic processes. The ideal of the American "nation" has always had at its core the belief that it isn't common blood that joins us (although White supremacists might argue otherwise), or even a common language (although those campaigning to make English our official language might disagree), but a shared commitment to defend a common homeland, and to preserve an institutionalized tradition of representative democracy, and to contribute to a two- to three-hundred year-old national narrative. This idea that Republicans are offering, that Americans - true Americans - look a certain way, and speak a certain language, and worship a particular God, is a betrayal of this tradition. I'm not a utopianist, I know the reality was never as comfortable as the image I sketch out. African Americans were denied full citizenship and equal voting rights, Japanese Americans were gathered up and held in camps, many other groups have been targeted or marginalized. But these violations of civil rights - these efforts to exclude entire groups of citizens from the full protection of our laws - were later acknowledged and, if not remedied, became inserted into our national narrative as regretable chapters, stumbles in our collective pilgrimage toward a freer and more equal society.
The efforts to disenfranchise voters are, similarly, a step backward. It is a reversal of a generations long effort to guarantee the vote to women, and Blacks, and immigrants, through law, and the power of the courts, and the elimination of barriers, like poll taxes, and literacy tests, and other obstacles.
In order to win an election, despite their comprehensive failure to offer anything resembling good government, Republicans deliberately dismantle institutions and practices designed to preserve a place for the most vulnerable in our national life, and they roll back accomplishments in expanding voting rights. In the process, they thumb their noses at those who sacrificed their lives to secure these advancements and defend these institutions.
* Note: "cosmopolitan" is designed to suggest "probably gay and from somewhere else."
Saturday, September 13, 2008
The czarina
Sarah Palin can see Russia from her back porch. Maybe that's how she became gun-tottin', holy-roller Catherine the Great of the 21st Century. Several days ago I posted a brief essay on what bothered me about Sarah Palin - I mean, the thing that bothered me the most about Sarah Palin. What I said was that we should be disturbed that this little dictator rolled into her small town - her meaningless little suburban spot on the frozen landscape - and shoved abortion and God into a campaign where neither of those things belonged, and then, when she won, fired everyone she thought was disloyal. She continued this pattern of dismissive governance as governor. Now, the New York Times broadens the story. We now know she hired friends without relevant experience and gave them high paying jobs for which they were not qualified. She concealed scientific findings paid for by taxpayers because the results would upset the people she really served, the oil companies who didn't want a finding that global warming was killing off polar bears made public.
Doesn't all of this - the disdain for truth and transparency, the contempt for science, the dismissal of any sense that government should serve public purposes, and the use of government payrolls to hire unqualified friends and political allies - sound remarkably like the past eight years. How could anyone dismayed by the Bush record - the drafting of energy policy by the oil companies in secret meetings, the dismissal of intelligence that didn't square with their needs, the hiring of horse-show CEOs to run crucial agencies - vote for John McCain and Palin?
And for all those women I see on TV saying they'll vote for McCain because Palin is "just like them," I say: she's not. She is the girl these women remember from high school, the one who was popular but mean. She's the evil coniving boss everyone hates. The rat who gets what she wants by manipulation and lies, and then shit cans others who earned their positions through effort and preparation. She's not the American dream, she's the hateful executive who axes good people on a whim, condemning those she fires to a nightmare of uncertainty and unpaid bills.
Doesn't all of this - the disdain for truth and transparency, the contempt for science, the dismissal of any sense that government should serve public purposes, and the use of government payrolls to hire unqualified friends and political allies - sound remarkably like the past eight years. How could anyone dismayed by the Bush record - the drafting of energy policy by the oil companies in secret meetings, the dismissal of intelligence that didn't square with their needs, the hiring of horse-show CEOs to run crucial agencies - vote for John McCain and Palin?
And for all those women I see on TV saying they'll vote for McCain because Palin is "just like them," I say: she's not. She is the girl these women remember from high school, the one who was popular but mean. She's the evil coniving boss everyone hates. The rat who gets what she wants by manipulation and lies, and then shit cans others who earned their positions through effort and preparation. She's not the American dream, she's the hateful executive who axes good people on a whim, condemning those she fires to a nightmare of uncertainty and unpaid bills.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Is this blog Rolling Stone or something? I mean, geez!
OK. So my main affection - rock and roll - or rather, my 2nd ranked affection, behind my family, has overtaken common sense and discretion. This is my second rock and roll themed posting in quick succession. Well, not really, since I didn't post during the long period between when Obama locked up the nomination and yesterday's Sarah Palin inspired finger wagging. But still, my point is, this is another posting linked to a song I love.
Joel R.L. Phelps was in the band Silkworm when that well-loved band first made its debut. Then he went solo. I guess that makes him a maverick. I listen to his Blackbird album all the time, and the song I like best on it is a cover of a song by the Comsat Angels called Lost Continent. Damn is that recording great. It builds from a quiet intro featuring just the drums, then soars in a non-anthemic way that makes the song feel cautiously hopeful, but not triumphant, the way, say, arena-designed stuff might. It feels fragile, yet has enough bounce to make you believe that the uncertain hope isn't misplaced.
You know where this is going. Like Fourth of July by X, it makes me think of this moment in our collective political life, where the Obama candidacy opens up a chance to hope for something bigger, wonderful, and transformative. Here are the lyrics, with the chorus removed because, I admit, it is nothing but corny rock and roll poetry. But, it works for me.
Lost Continent
Don't say you've seen and heard it all before
That all of this is nothing new
Don't try and tell me that I am off course
I'm looking for the same thing as you
That all of this is nothing new
Don't try and tell me that I am off course
I'm looking for the same thing as you
There's something here that I don't understand
you search for signs like some crusade
when one seems to point to that promised land
why do you always turn away
you search for signs like some crusade
when one seems to point to that promised land
why do you always turn away
You say you think you'd better let it go
you don't take chances anymore
if you don't take it you may never know
what it's like to be walking on that shore
you don't take chances anymore
if you don't take it you may never know
what it's like to be walking on that shore
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Cronies and the Imperial Mayor
Here's the problem with Sarah Palin. It's not her politics, although those are wrong. It's not her lack of meaningful experience, although it is jaw-dropping how unready she is. The greatest difficulty, for me, is that she practices the same politics of cronyism and corruption and bait and switch and division and deception that George Bush has practiced for eight years. When she first ran to become mayor of Wasilla, she sought to paint her opponent as a poor candidate, because he wasn't a born again Christian, and put her opposition to abortion and support for gun rights at the center of the campaign. Keep in mind, this was for a job where those issues were irrelevant to the responsibilities of the office. She brought them up to divide people and distract them.
When the town librarian wouldn't take some books off the shelf because Palin objected to them, she fired her (although public outrage led her to be rehired). She also fired the town's police chief because he had been a loyal supporter of the previous mayor. These loyalty tests, and the tendency to inject politics into aspects of governmental affairs that had never previously been politicized, echo the last eight years in Washington.
When the town librarian wouldn't take some books off the shelf because Palin objected to them, she fired her (although public outrage led her to be rehired). She also fired the town's police chief because he had been a loyal supporter of the previous mayor. These loyalty tests, and the tendency to inject politics into aspects of governmental affairs that had never previously been politicized, echo the last eight years in Washington.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
X's 4th of July
One of my very favorite songs of all time is X's 4th of July from their great album See How We Are. One truth about me that only my wife knows--certain songs make me tear up, when I hear them or even just when I talk about them. And they aren't sweet, achy love songs. Songs grab me when someone gets something so right that it overwhelms me. X's 4th of July is like that. Every time I hear it--and I play it all the time (and EVERY independence day)--I get weepy.
The song is about redemption. At a more intimate level it is about the redemption of a relationship that has fallen into disrepair and hopelessness. It is clear that the lovers in the song still love each other, whatever that means, and I think it means something different for each couple. But life and unspoken betrayals or disappointments have left the couple disconsolate. They have lost that sense of intimacy, the shared space, that couples have. But the fourth of July provides, unexpectedly, an opportunity for reconnection. It offers a chance to step outside of their lives, in part because it is a holiday and the swift current of their other obligations has receded for the moment, but also because the fourth of July, in the characters' lives, as in so many other lives, carries deep-rooted memories of the joy of a summer day, and the wide-openness that a seemingly endless summer day appears to promise. The reconnection between the couple is voiced simply:
As I listened to the song this independence day, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were at a crossroads in our collective tale, that Obama's candidacy is the sound of fireworks out on the sidewalk, reminding us of our promises, our threadbare and uncertain affection for one another, our hope for better things. Let's reconcile. Let's restore what has been lost.
The song is about redemption. At a more intimate level it is about the redemption of a relationship that has fallen into disrepair and hopelessness. It is clear that the lovers in the song still love each other, whatever that means, and I think it means something different for each couple. But life and unspoken betrayals or disappointments have left the couple disconsolate. They have lost that sense of intimacy, the shared space, that couples have. But the fourth of July provides, unexpectedly, an opportunity for reconnection. It offers a chance to step outside of their lives, in part because it is a holiday and the swift current of their other obligations has receded for the moment, but also because the fourth of July, in the characters' lives, as in so many other lives, carries deep-rooted memories of the joy of a summer day, and the wide-openness that a seemingly endless summer day appears to promise. The reconnection between the couple is voiced simply:
What ever happened I
apologize
so dry your tears and baby
walk outside, it's the Fourth of July.
apologize
so dry your tears and baby
walk outside, it's the Fourth of July.
Simple words, but when John Doe sings them, he invests an emotional uplift that is unmistakable. This is an opportunity for the couple to redeem their love and restore their relationship.
But the song is also about the redemption of America. And, like the relationship at the center of the song's tale, it's clear that, from Dave Alvin's view, America is a fucking mess. We have betrayed promises we have made one another. We are separated by a seemingly uncrossable distance. We are profoundly hopeless, and can't envision an escape. But the song locates redemption and rehabilitation in an inspired place: the children of immigrants. It is the celebration of mexican-american kids, shooting off fireworks on the sidewalk outside the narrator's apartment building "on the lost side of town" that reminds us that it is the fourth of July. Their exuberance and joy, their celebration of independence day, opens a window for the couple to find their redemptive moment. And these kids, too, represent, from the song's perspective, the source of our own collective redemption. By keeping our promises to them, by finding our way to walk alongside them, by drawing on their still vibrant, untrampled hopefulness, we can start again. Just as the couple will. And in this new beginning, we can find our chance to restore what we have lost.As I listened to the song this independence day, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were at a crossroads in our collective tale, that Obama's candidacy is the sound of fireworks out on the sidewalk, reminding us of our promises, our threadbare and uncertain affection for one another, our hope for better things. Let's reconcile. Let's restore what has been lost.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
What unites us
I find it extraordinary that 2008 will be the year that an African American became President and gay marriage was given legal status. The scenes from California are so encouraging and, in my mind, link with the Obama candidacy. In Obama's campaign we find the claim that we are all united in wanting the same things--a good education for our children, fair pay, forward-looking public policy, and a government that is responsive and focused on the needs of the wide majority, not the privileged and the wealthy. And in the celebration of gay marriage we find something similar--a recognition that we all deserve the opportunity to establish a home with the person we love, and to raise children, if we choose to, and to have our union be part of the public record so we can count on the protections that the law promises to married couples.
Update (6/19): My friend over at St. Scobie's offered a great perspective on gay marriage. She points out that her marriage (and my marriage, and in fact all marriages) are stronger when we permit gays to marry because we eliminate the rottenness at the foundation of the institution. At one time it was illegal in much of America for whites and African-Americans to marry. Then Loving v. Virginia swept away anti-miscegenation laws, stating:
Update (6/19): My friend over at St. Scobie's offered a great perspective on gay marriage. She points out that her marriage (and my marriage, and in fact all marriages) are stronger when we permit gays to marry because we eliminate the rottenness at the foundation of the institution. At one time it was illegal in much of America for whites and African-Americans to marry. Then Loving v. Virginia swept away anti-miscegenation laws, stating:
Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
This seems so clear to us now, and, one day, so too will the idea that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry. In the Loving decision, the Supreme Court said anti-miscegenation laws were "subversive to the principle of equality," and so too are laws or efforts to erect laws that deny marriage to same-sex couples. In short, viewed through Scobie's eyes, marriage remains a subversive institution, blind to our commitment to equality, as long as gays are denied the right to marry. Thanks to events in California, her marriage, and my marriage, and the institution of marriage is stronger because it is freed from this blind disregard for a portion of our population.
By the way, if you don't read St. Scobie's on a regular basis, you should. She is funny and smart and all over the place.
An Open Letter to Jewish Voters Who are Threatening to Withhold Support From Barack Obama in November
I’ve heard a lot of talk about Jews who plan to vote for John McCain in November because they: a) believe he will be a stronger supporter of Israel; b) are concerned that Obama will be overly sympathetic to Islamic and Arab states in the Middle East, which is essentially the flip side of the preceding; c) hear that Israelis don’t like or trust Obama; d) aren’t certain Obama has the experience to do the job; e) think Obama has “Muslim blood” and was educated at a madrassa; f) are certain, in any event, that Obama has been influenced by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.
I don’t want to unpack all of these wildly off the mark beliefs and take them on one by one. Although, if you insist that I have to, call me up and I’ll do just that. You have to promise to be civil, though, and not rant, and bring evidence to support your claims.
My approach, for the moment, in the space I have available, will be to draw your attention to the forms of rhetoric and the tools of persuasion that the Republicans (and other shadowy forces of division) are using to shape your opinions. Additionally, I want to remind you of some history and some reasons to be in solidarity with Obama and his political movement.
First of all, don’t you recognize when Republicans and conservative commentators and unidentified bloviators use Fox News and blog postings and e-mails from unnamed “friends of friends” to position the claim that Obama might not have been born in the U.S. (and that his birth certificate has been faked), or that his original faith may have been Islam (and has left a lasting disfiguring impression on him), or that he took his oath of office on the Koran, not the Bible (and prioritizes his faith to Islam above his role as an elected official), that this is exactly the type of scurrilous and hateful rhetoric that was once circulated about Jews. The methods have changed—we have twenty-four hour cable news and the web and e-mail, while Jews were targeted in pamphlets and handbills and by word of mouth. But the objective and the methods are the same—to imply, by suggestion and misrepresentation and innuendo and outright fabrication, that Obama isn’t entirely trustworthy, that he is impure, and that he is part of some conspiracy to dominate the world. Why allow yourself to be persuaded by a campaign of lies that resembles in so many ways the type of hateful crusade that was carried out (in fact, continues to be carried out) against Jews? Shouldn’t we, as targets of this sort of innuendo and hatred, have a higher obligation to demand evidence, to examine that evidence, to push back? When you swallow these claims without requiring evidence and without demanding accountability, you are doing so not because the claims are persuasive, but because you are hoping for a reason to discredit Obama. It is convenient for you to believe this campaign of lies. Out of convenience—because you don’t want to confront your own racism, perhaps—you are countenancing (and forwarding!) smears and distortions and inflammatory falsehoods.
Second, why can’t you see that you should be shaking with rage when someone makes the claim that Obama, whatever faith he practices, or despite the things he claims, and the evidence of his life and the choices he makes, is Muslim because it is in his blood. As a Jew who bends toward the Reform end of the spectrum, I believe we are Jews because of the choice we make to be Jewish. There is a long history of assessing membership in the Jewish community through matrilineal descent. If you require me to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish, then I’m not a Jew. I think I am, because I have been converted, and have committed to raise my children in a Jewish home, and we maintain a kosher kitchen, and I embrace the moral requirements of Judaism—in Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel's words, "justice, truth, and peace" (and, I would add, benevolence and charity). Let’s set aside our intramural debate about what makes a Jew a Jew. Instead, let’s acknowledge something indisputable. At the center of this attack on Obama is the idea that he is marked—tainted—by his father’s faith. And, these attackers imply, there is something wrong with that faith. Obama cannot be imagined to be, as a result, trusted to be loyal to the
Given this history, how can you not challenge and repudiate emails that claim that Obama’s heritage makes him an unacceptable candidate. At the core of Jewish life is the idea that Jews are a chosen people not because we are beloved by God, but because our worldview, our belief system, is worthy of emulation. The central feature of that worldview is a commitment to doing good works, to healing the world. This translates, very easily, into a fundamental truth that shapes my (and many Jews’) moral vision: We should be measured by the actions we take, by our commitment to be fair and generous and charitable. It isn’t our blood—an unbroken line of inheritance that connects us with Abraham—that makes us special, but our choices and conduct. I challenge you to employ the same standard: If you want to evaluate Obama’s candidacy, consider his conduct and his actions.
Now some of you might say: that’s what we’re doing. And Obama’s conduct falls short of what we would demand from a presidential candidate. He sat for twenty years, you say, as others have, in a church where hate was preached. Let me agree with you: I wish Obama hadn’t. But religion is, too often, contaminated by hateful ideas. Millions of Americans attend evangelical churches that teach the idea that some people are saved and others are damned, and the damned will suffer, and deserve to suffer. And millions of Americans attend churches where homosexuals and unwed mothers and women who chose abortion are denounced and condemned. And the Republican party has committed itself, has built its electoral strategy on winning over these voters and the party’s candidates seek out endorsements from ministers who lead these flocks, as a way of securing their votes. In short, let’s look forward to a day when religion is removed from our politics, but until that day, let’s not pretend that Obama’s minister preached anything worse than that preached by religious leaders, like John Hagee, affiliated with McCain. On the question that it is hard to accept that Obama sat there for twenty years, I think it is easy to argue, and can be confirmed with evidence, that many Americans sit through sermons they disagree with, and swallow claims they are uncomfortable with, and turn their heads and ignore doctrine they can’t accept. They don’t do this because they are weak, but because their church is charitable at the same time it is narrow-minded. So many churches, like
And on that measure, how can there be a contest between Barack Obama and John McCain? When I converted to Judaism, the most appealing idea in Jewish life was this: we can heal the world by performing acts of charity and justice. We are active agents in making the world a better place. It isn’t through prayer, or by divine intervention, or through the delivery of a savior that our world will be healed, it is through our efforts and by our example. This, too, is inescapably part of Obama’s message. Want to read something that will reawaken your commitment to social justice? Read Obama’s speech on urban poverty, given last year in
Finally, in my preceding comments I urged you, on the basis of our history, to be more demanding, to reject baseless, unsupported claims designed to amplify hatred and distrust and to incite, not inform. In the history of the Jews we find evidence that bias and prejudice is destructive. It is this experience—of enslavement and discrimination and marginalization—that has been part of the history of solidarity between Jews and African-Americans. Jews and African Americans struggled side by side, and died together, to fight for civil rights. Solidarity with Obama makes sense in part because of this shared history of suffering, but also because any struggle of this type, to champion social justice, to elevate the downtrodden, to heal, is our struggle. It is what makes us Jews. These concerns are the core elements of our moral vision as Jews. While I might urge you to support Obama because his candidacy represents an achievement in the struggle for civil rights, I would argue more forcefully that you should stand with him because his political and moral message is in tune with our collective hopes for the world. This is true especially in comparison to McCain’s views, which are loathsome to most Jews. McCain continues the long Republican commitment to narrow conservative principles and the perpetuation of the advantages of wealth and privilege. And, at least as far as his campaign has provided us a glimpse into his governing style and decision-making, McCain, too, shares the Bush administration’s disinterest in inquiry and disdain for science and evidence-based claims and dismissiveness toward engagement and dialogue. We are, in our study of Torah and our Talmudic tradition, a scholarly community. The Jewish rabbinical tradition rests on the idea that truth comes from reasoned inquiry, careful (although admittedly creative) use of evidence, and dialogue and disputation. In all of these areas—in his embrace of tolerance and accommodation, in his commitment to social justice, in his openness to debate and dialogue—Obama, not McCain, is the closest thing Jews could find to a kindred spirit.
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