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David Brooks raises an excellent question in his column today about demographics and the Democrats: I understand why affluent, college educated voters are drawn to Barack Obama, but how did Hillary Clinton become the candidate of the working class voter? She went to Wellesley and Yale Law School. People in Arkansas found her snooty and bizarre. She didn't shop at Wal-Mart, she served on the board. There was the "cookie baking" flap. In the years since the White House she and her husband have taken in more than $100 million and their best friends are billionaires. Brooks offers only, "Clinton's talk of fighting and resilience plays well down market", but is that it? Whatever it is, Hillary has wrought an absolutely extraordinary political transformation.
And what is everyone thinking about Obama's tepid response to Jeremiah Wright's "throw Obama under the bus" tour? Is Obama right to simply say, "He does not speak for me He does not speak for the campaign. He may make statements in the future that don't reflect my values or concerns. I think certainly what the last three days indicate is that we're not coordinating with him, right?" and just hope Wright burns himself out. Or does he have to make a stronger, more specific statement saying that while he still has love for the Rev. Wright and appreciation for the role he has played in his life, he is filled with sorrow over the ugly, damning, just plain wrong things he has been saying, etc.—which runs the risk of looking like he is getting into an under-the-bus throwing contest with his pastor and which might offend some black voters?
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Depressing findings from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Even though well-off colleges say they're trying hard to recruit low-income students, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. At the 75 schools with endowments over $500 million, the share of students who received Pell grants, which means they come from families that make less than $40,000 a year, dipped from 14.3 percent in 2004-05 to 13.1 percent in 2006-07. The trend is the same at the 39 tippy-top richest schools: 19.6 percent of students there were low-income in 2004-05, compared with 18 percent two years later.
The time frame under study is short, to be sure. But it also matches a period in which colleges have been talking up class diversity, and in which the idea has been floated as an alternative to race-based affirmative action. The falling numbers show that well-qualified poor applicants don't submit applications in droves to the well-endowed schools, and that the schools haven't really figured out yet how to find them. A few campuses have shown that it's possible to improve at that task. The Chronicle noted schools that are exceptions to the rule because they have posted small gains: Amherst, Holy Cross, Williams, Princeton, and the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin. At Smith, 25 percent-plus students are low-income; at UCLA, 35 percent. What are those schools doing differently?
That's the big question, I think. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts, but my own sense is that the answer is not the big feel-good initiative that Harvard and Yale announced this winter: expanding financial aid so that it covers families that earn up to $180,000 or $200,000 a year. As this persuasive NYT op-ed points out, most schools don't have the money to give aid to upper-middle-class families (I hope that $200,000 a year still gets you into that category) as well as truly needy ones. And so, as the op-ed by former Columbia Dean Roger Lehecka points out, the Harvard and Yale move "sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified." So forget Harvard and Yale—among the private colleges, what's Smith doing? Or Princeton or Williams or Holy Cross or Amherst?
(Cross-posted at Convictions.)
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I sympathize with Hanna's request that Miley Cyrus put on a robe, but I have lower expectations for magic in the Magic Kingdom. With no children or grandchildren in the Miley Cyrus target demographic, I nearly missed the Hannah Montana phenomenon except for the unavoidable Disney juggernaut marketing of former country singer Billy Ray Cyrus’ offspring. (I am reminded that "Achy Breaky Heart" was a hit in 1992.) To me the come-hither Miley VF shots seem relatively tame and designed to widen the teenager’s fan base. (The pictures of Miley with her boyfriend don’t look any more provocative than photos any 15-year-old with a boyfriend might post on MySpace.) I was more annoyed to see the spin obliquely blames the 15-year-old's semi-nude Vanity Fair exposure on photographer Annie Leibovitz, a professional who has been coaxing photography subjects since Mick Jagger was a boy. The story reminded me of the February Lindsay Lohan photo spread in New York magazine where the Disney Parent Trap star (and more recently rehab darling) replicated Marilyn Monroe's famous 1962 “boozy nudes.” When she was criticized, Lohan publicists hinted photographer Bert Stern, who shot both the original Monroe and Lohan re-creation sessions, was to blame.
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I am about to enter into the realm I never imagined I'd find myself, the parental equivalent of the liberal being mugged. In this case, the mugger is Miley Cyrus, or maybe Disney, or Vanity Fair—whoever is most responsible for that photo of a topless 15-year old Cyrus barely holding the bedsheets up. Which is actually less off-putting than the recently leaked photo of her slithering around with her boyfriend. Or BBF, or FWB, or whatever.
Here's my problem with the phenomenon. Yes, teenage starlets burn this way. But don't they usually do it in stages? In my memory, the Olsen twins were innocent child stars and then they slowly morphed into tabloid fodder. This seems the natural sexual-awareness trajectory of anyone their age, only somewhat exaggerated. Now there are shows we all consider clean: Hannah Montana and High School Musical, for example. And by any watchdog's standards they are: no sex, no exposed flesh, no cursing. This ensures that children as young as 6 or 7(such as my daughter) will know all about them and love them. She doesn't see anything bad. She just listens to lots of teenagers sing and dance and go on and on about who's dating whom and who's in love and who broke up, etc. They are innocent and knowing at the same time. I can't easily say to her: Don't watch that, you don't want to be like that underage sexpot, do you? Because the actors look as cute and innocent as the Teletubbies. But something about all this sanitized high school chatter leaves me uneasy. Why does a 6-year old need to know so much about dating and breaking up?
I can anticipate the objections to this argument: Americans are always fetishizing childhood innocence. They need to imagine their children as clean and gossamer-white in order to protect them. And there is an element of truth in this. I read that popular Lin Burress blog on this subject which was quoted in the New York Times and it made me cringe. (She complains about 5-year olds trying on make-up. Who could read anything dirty in that?)
So I guess, as a parent, I'm just begging for less confusion. When I was a pre-teen in the '70s, the culture was probably more sexed up. I was a little younger than Miley Cyrus when I saw Fame. That was probably about as much bare flesh as I could handle. But it seemed distant and dangerous to me. The actors who played high school kids back then looked practically as old as my parents, or at least my uncle. There was no confusing them with my (relatively) squeaky clean schoolmates.
Late breaking news. Cyrus has now apologized for the photos, calling them "inappropriate" and "silly," See, there she goes again: "Silly?" What 15-year-old uses the word "silly?" That's a 6-year-old pander for sure.
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OK, I'm going to wade into the hornet's nest on the equal-pay bill. Before I begin, let me say that I actually tried to read the Senate bill and have now decided to give up my dream of running for legislative office someday, because it's hard to decipher the gibberish without reading 20 other pieces of legislation.
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act does does seem "mild," as Richard Ford puts it so well (and this post explains it quite well, for the nonlawyers among us), though I do think it would probably lead to more lawsuits, not fewer. But I think there are multiple and complex reasons besides plain old discrimination that women make less than men, and not only does this bill not address these, but they aren't necessarily problems that can be fixed by any legislation. For example, how many of us take jobs that might be less financially rewarding but allow for flexibility so that we can be home when our kids need us or so that we can dash out for the 3 p.m. piano recital? How many women choose to take a few years off to spend time with their kids while they are young? That inevitably leads to situations in which 40-year-old men are making more money than 40-year-old women doing the same job, because they have more experience. Clearly, if the situation is reversed, and a man has taken a few years off to stay at home, his female co-worker who hired a nanny and slogged through 50-hour work weeks should be making the bigger salary.
I look at how the business world has changed since I was a kid watching my parents hard at work, and I think one of the great improvements that women (with the help of technology) have brought to the workforce is a better grasp of work-life balance. Would men have figured out the benefits of telecommuting on their own? Or flexible scheduling or job sharing? Maybe, maybe not. We have a long, long way to go, and pay equity is an enormous part of that. But I think the solutions are more likely to come from within—more women executives, more women running businesses—than to come from on high by government decree.
Lastly, I don't want to get to a place in our society where the government is deciding what jobs are worthy of what wages (and, yes, I know this bill doesn't do that), because I think one of the costs would be that employers would respond to that infringement on their rights by becoming less accommodating of their employees. And that would be giving up a whole lot of what we've worked for.
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Over on "Convictions," Richard Ford elaborates on our objections to McCain's opposition to the Equal Pay Bill. Here's the full post. He concludes:
I have to say it’s hard for me to believe that anyone who is really committed to equal pay would oppose this mild and sensible piece of legislation—it doesn't open us up to lawsuits for "all kinds of problems"—only for the problem of discriminatory pay. Opposition suggests that McCain is most concerned with reducing the absolute number of cases filed—whether or not they have merit.
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I want to say amen to your excellent post about McCain and equal pay, Emily. The only thing I'd add is this: I found McCain's comments about the bill particularly dismaying because he invoked an old canard—that women are less qualified than their male peers, and that (by implication) is mainly what keeps their pay low—instead of dealing with the possiblity that discrimination exists. While campaigning in Kentucky, the AP reported, McCain expressed his oppposition to the equal pay bill by noting that what women need is more training:
"They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else," McCain said. "And it's hard for them to leave their families when they don't have somebody to take care of them.
"It's a vicious cycle that's affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least," he said.
Now, to be fair, this quote is taken out of context and I don't know what he said before it. But as a sentiment, this simply doesn't deal with the reality of gender discrimination in our country. Nor will more training help any woman who is being paid less than she should be because of it. McCain's proposal is not a viable alternative, in other words; it's a form of putting one's head in the sand and redirecting voters away from the real, if vexed, issue: that sexism still exists, and we need to find a thoughtful legal way of dealing with it.
Read the rest of the equal-pay conversation on XX Factor.
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I've got more to complain about: Last night, Senate Republicans killed the Equal Pay Bill, which would have undone the Supreme Court's bad deed in a case last term called Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. Lily Ledbetter sued Goodyear for sex discrimination because she earned less than men in similar positions—a fact she proved in court. But on appeal, the Supreme Court found that Ledbetter's suit was too late, by setting the clock according to Ledbetter's first unfairly low pay check, rather than the ongoing low salary she continued to receive years later. It didn't matter when she found out she was being shortchanged—only when Goodyear started doing so.
John McCain said Wednesday that he supports "pay equity for women" but opposes the fix for Ledbetter's plight in the Equal Pay Bill because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." That has a nice anti-litigation ring, but does it make sense? As Rich Ford pointed out in Slate after the Supreme Court's decision, the clear lesson the case holds for employees is, "Sue early and often. If you suspect your boss might be discriminating with regard to your pay, you can't afford to wait around until you're sure." The Equal Pay Bill might give rise to more meritorious law suits. But couldn't it also stave off some losers? And what does it mean to be for pay equity for women while opposing what's on offer to actually help achieve it?
(Cross-posted on Slate's legal blog, "Convictions.")
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A couple of years ago, my son remarked that President Bush seemed to think every day was Opposites Day, which would explain how he always wound up listening to the wrong people and giving the best ideas the boot. That's how I feel now, listening to Hillary's down-is-up take on why Obama can't win in November. And I am so invigorated by—which on Opposites Day means weary of—hearing her describe his greatest strength as his biggest liability.
No question he's made mistakes. But his fatal flaw, according to her, is that he is not as skilled as she in answering Republican attacks (with more of the same). Watch her gleefully practice on her fellow Democrat, with Republican-style ads evoking such GOP golden oldies as the red phone, Pearl Harbor, and, OMG, Khrushchev? I never expected her to be leading the proverbial Million Mom March, but doesn't it bother any of these old-school feminists to see her painting her rival as the girl in this race—yes, as if that were a bad thing—just as every Republican since Richard Nixon has done to every Democrat since Adlai Stevenson? No doubt the former Goldwater Girl will never be outdone on the mushroom-cloud front. But at what point does one turn into what one fears? If I wanted Karl Rove for president, I would have voted for him the first time.
To me, Obama's appeal is rooted in his view that we have more in common than we might realize—and can't afford to go on tearing each other to shreds in this polarized, cartoon world where if your views are two degrees north or south of mine, then U R evil and must die. It was his refusal to play the same old zero-sum game that got him where he is today—ahead by every measure and, barring the kind of collapse that won't happen unless he betrays his own best instincts, on his way to becoming the nominee.
So, why can't Obama close the deal? In a way, it's his strength in November that is his highest hurdle now. I always thought he would have a harder time winning the nomination than the general, because the Clintons have defined and dominated the Democratic Party for a long, long time. And it's the very same "Let's stand on common ground, together'' appeal—which will win him the support of independents and Republicans in the fall—that makes him so suspect to Democrats who don't want to stand anywhere with those people; they want payback for the Bush years. And while that's understandable, it's not a way to win. Even Bill Clinton, with all his superior political skills and peekaboo triangulating and solemn vows not to act like a real Democrat, would not have won without Ross Perot in the mix. We can't get there on our own —which, again, is Obama's message.
Another reason he can't close the deal: We are never satisfied! Republicans settle for the good-enough candidate, go on about their lives, and show up on Election Day, but not us. I took my children to an Obama rally where people were screaming and swooning and speaking in tongues they were so excited—and on the way home, my daughter sniffs and says she wonders if he's focused enough on global warming. And what can I do but swell with pride? My baby really is a Democrat.
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Ann, a question triggered by your great post this morning: What is the opposite of hope and civility? Is it honesty and candor about the toughness of this race, as you suggest? Is it being “mean and irrational” as Gail Collins argues? Or is it specificity and detail as Joan Walsh implies? From the outset, Obama critics have always conflated his tone with his politics—arguing that all this optimism and coalition-fostering was either empty rhetoric that masked a lack of substance, or that his only end game is to repair politics as it is practiced.
I think that mistake sometimes leads commentators to confuse Clinton’s substance with Obama’s style. When she wins on substance, the problem must be his style. And it leads them to conclude that he has to drop all the sunny optimism and civility in order to be substantial or rigorous or detailed or honest. Substance, rigor, detail, and honesty are not the opposite of civility. Obama can crank up the former without sacrificing the latter. Or at least he can try before hauling out the chainsaw and the flaming torches.
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Ann, your smart post tees me up to protest one particular pander: the candidates' unwillingess to speak the scientific truth that there is no evidence of a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. McCain is the worst on this. From the Washington Post, quoting McCain at a February town hall meeting: "It's indisputable that (autism) is on the rise among children, the question is what's causing it. And we go back and forth and there's strong evidence that indicates it's got to do with a preservative in vaccines."
Obama isn't much better. His quote from a Pennsylvania rally this week, also in the Post: "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it." The Post has video showing that Obama pointed to someone in the crowd when he said "this person included," so he wasn't talking about himself. Still, there is nothing inconclusive about the science on the autism-vaccines link.
Hillary doesn't slam the door shut on the myth-makers, either. Asked what she would do to protect against "exposure to mercury through vaccines," she said, "I will ensure that all vaccines are as safe as possible for our children by working to ensure that Thimerosal and mercury are removed from vaccines." This is nonsensical, since the government took thimerosal out of vaccines in 1999 (because of other concerns about mercury, though not the kind of mercury in thimerosal, and not related to autism).
As Slate's health editor, I've run so many pieces that patiently debunk the claim that vaccines cause autism that the last time the controversy cropped up, I couldn't bear to assign a new one. Here's how the CDC puts it, "there's no convincing scientific evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines." Here's the latest study knocking down this ever-persistent claim. Here's a good explanation about why the myth won't die. Why, then, are the candidates blithely skipping down this pander path? I haven't heard back from the McCain camp. When I asked the Obama campaign, I got no direct answer but rather a pointed mention of the many many e-mails that parents devoted to this myth send. Which of course is the answer: On one side of this dispute is an extremely impassioned and devoted band of adherents who are deserving of sympathy: parents of autistic children. On the other side is scientific truth—cold, abstract, and apparently not a vote getter. But as our colleague Will Saletan points out, how can Democrats complain about the fake denials of global warming and evolution while practicing the exact same pandering over autism? Gross.
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Here's my two-days-after two-cents. Obama may be feeling weary, but it seems to me he should be feeling he's been remarkably successful at changing the standards of conduct for campaigning, if not yet for governing. But won't it be ironic if the norm-shift to niceness ends up serving neither him, nor the Democratic Party, very well in the end? Our threshold for sustained competition, with any level of conflict in it, seems to have become very low, thanks not least to Obama's invocation of a more harmonious ethos—with the result that his candidacy risks looking hamstrung and a little hapless: The nice-guy stuff would have looked great if he'd won quickly. Since he hasn't, the above-the-fray mentality itself tends to get the blame, fueling fears that its limitations may be more glaring when it comes to real governing. Meanwhile, Clinton looks more like a down-in-the-mud caricature than she would otherwise, and Democratic behavior in general looks dysfunctionally divisive—and inspires gloom-and-doom about November.
But by pre-Obama standards, it seems to me Democrats might be battling on without feeling so bitter and disappointed in each other. Should we be feeling so chagrined that he's facing up to how tough it is to forge broad coalitions, and that she's getting whacked daily for her win-at-all-costs approach? Should we be so panicked they'll tear each other to pieces? And not to be too cynical, but as Gail Collins suggests in her column today, there's a downside to the purportedly high road of just talking positively and peacefully about the issues: It's an invitation to start pandering shamelessly (and all but identically) to the voters. After lots of talk about hope and experience, it surely doesn't hurt either candidates or voters to get some lessons in patience and resilience.
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Melinda, your observations last night seem to have foreshadowed much of today’s postmorteming: Everyone now agrees it’s all about the bitterness. The only point of contention is whether all this spluttering rage indeed motivates voters—as you suggest—or pisses them off—as this Times op-ed insists. (Tuesday’s result was “even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work.”)
More and more I see this as liberals foreshadowing their own November defeat. Everyone is so damn terrified of the inevitable, invincible, candidate-crushing Republican Attack Machine that the only metric left to us is which candidate can survive it. If that’s all we care about, we should probably just nominate Karl Rove to run against McCain in November. And here’s the kicker: It feeds on itself. Your angry Clinton supporters read this morning’s Times op-ed about bitterness, and it makes them even more bitter. (“She can’t catch a break. Everyone in the media is in the tank for Obama. Even when she wins, she loses. ...”) Whereas the pacifist Obama-cats like myself read that their guy is poised to take the gloves off, and it mostly just makes us want to stay home.
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The most important split among Democratic voters this year may not be based on race, gender, age, or even whether or not you think bitter is a bad word; I look at the exit polling tonight and wonder if the defining difference isn't one of temperament, with angrier voters not only favoring the angrier candidate but guaranteeing that this race isn't going to be over anytime soon.
I say that because according to the exit polls, Clinton voters are significantly more likely to vote Republican or stay home on Election Day if they don't get their way in the primary. (Sixty-two percent would be dissatisfied with Obama as the nominee, and maybe that's no big whoop; dissatisfaction is a vague word, and a mewling little feeling that fades. But only about half of Hillary's supporters in Pennsylvania would vote for Obama in the fall? Now you have my attention. Fully a quarter of them would rather see John McCain in the White House than the Brand X Democrat—and nearly 1 out of 5 say they'd take their toys and stay home.) It makes sense that Clinton's angrier backers like that their candidate is that way, too; they seem to think it is a good thing that she is mad at the competition and the activists and the press -- and good that she won't quit no matter what. For her supporters, this shows the backbone that's been lacking in some other Democrats we could name—and she has named them. To them, it means she'd be harder to swift-boat. It means she wouldn't wimp out and put the country's interests first in a recount -- how weak is that? -- or work with the opposition once elected.
Obama supporters, on the other hand, are the dreaded Kumbaya types who will not go home mad if their guy is not the guy—and that's to their clear disadvantage. (Only 52 percent of them could whip up even dissatisfaction if they don't get their way; 16 percent say they'd go for McCain and 13 percent would stay home.) The obvious problem for Obama is that his chilled-out supporters like him that way, too; his ability to make good on Bush's broken promise to be a uniter, not a divider, is so central to his appeal that if he followed the advice of all those people who want him to "close the deal'' the old-fashioned way, he would lose what sets him apart.
Angry doesn't win general elections. It doesn't entice new voters into the process or beguile independents or heaven knows, invite Republican defections. But by definition, it has enormous negative power. And in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see how angry Hillary and her supporters really are.
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Here’s a thoughtful piece from Courtney E. Martin at the American Prospect responding to Linda Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece from last Friday about the ways in which young feminists resent Hillary Clinton out of a semi-Freudian need to destroy their mothers. For those scoring along at home, Debra Dickerson fires off a round for Hirshman’s team here at Mother Jones.
Anyone but me find it hilarious that every feminist writer of every generation evidently comes to this battle with claims that they are interested in pursuing a deeper, more nuanced conversation about gender, just before they let loose with the scattershot accusations about the other side? Martin accuses some “older women” of dismissing women’s body issues, for instance, as “frivolous.” While Dickerson takes aim at “young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty.” I get it that Martin’s criticism is couched in a larger discussing about the need to learn from one another and that Dickerson’s going for comedic effect. But their continued talking past each other raises the question about what a “nuanced” conversation about our differences can possibly look like, if every assertion about those differences—be it from Hirshman, Martin, or your mamma—is instantly disparaged as peddling in reductive stereotypes.
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After we toast Danica, let's raise a glass (of milk, in case anyone's watching) to welcome Cynthia Sommer home from jail. As far as I can tell, Sommer spent 2½ years in lockup for getting breast implants and hanging out in bars. A San Diego jury heard a lot about what a tramp she supposedly was; Sommer even started dating again after her husband died! Then, they found her guilty of murdering him. According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors presented 34-year-old Sommer as an older woman (OK, it's Southern California, but still) who offed the 23-year-old Marine "to collect on his $250,000 life insurance policy and begin a new, fun-filled life'' in Florida, with new boobs and multiple boyfriends. Only—their bad—it turns out Sommer "was jailed 876 days for an arsenic-poisoning murder that prosecutors now say didn't occur.''
If only she'd been thinking ahead, she would have saved her pennies for a better attorney, because the first knucklehead she hired opened the door to a description of her "lifestyle'' that was so inflammatory the judge ruled she'd been deprived of a fair trial. He overturned her conviction for murder with special circumstances, which carries a mandatory life sentence. "The evidence about her breasts, drinking and sexual activity 'became like an overwhelming cloud that covered everything,' " her new defense attorney, Allen Bloom, told the Times. Yet Sommer was kept in jail—and separated from her four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 16—while waiting for a retrial. Until last week, when new tests showed no evidence of arsenic in her husband's tissue samples. Bloom had already lined up experts who were going to testify that Todd Sommer's death could have been caused by the diet pills he'd been taking. And prosecutors were still interviewing the neighbors, hoping to find some additional dirt on Sommer. Maybe, while she's deciding whether to sue them, each prosecutor should be made to wear a big A pinned to his or her chest, like Hester Prynne in the Scarlet Letter. Except in that case, of course, the A stood for adulterer.
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Emily, your exegesis of Obama as Joshua to MLK's Moses, leading the people to the promised land, was inspiring, but it would have been laughed off the table at a Seder I attended this past weekend—also in the Philadelphia area—where three separate attendees announced their decision to change their vote in tomorrow's primary from Obama to either Hillary or (in the case of one intractable Hillary-hater) not to vote at all. Their decision was based entirely on the Jeremiah Wright dustup. In their eyes, voting for Obama would now constitute an irredeemably anti-Semitic act, presumably because of Wright's ties to Farrakhan (all the recent combing of his sermons for offensive material didn't turn up any anti-Semitic rants, did it?). Mind you, these were not hardcore Zionists whose only voting issue is Israel's security—they were middle-class, center-left Jews who agreed with Obama on the war and most social issues and who would have placed themselves firmly, if not passionately, in his camp six weeks ago. Of course, this is just one anecdotal example, but it made me wonder how many Jewish votes Obama lost in that whole Wright flap, and whether, if he does become the candidate in the general, those lost votes will wander across the desert to McCain.
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Speaking of Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, at our family seder in Philadelphia over the weekend, my mother pointed out that just as 40 years elapsed before the Israelites made it to the Promised Land, so 40 years have passed since the assassination of MLK in April 1968 and this contest, with Barack Obama's candidacy. He may be down in the polls statewide, but in my parents' corner of northwest Philadelphia, Obama signs bloomed in many a yard (even on streets near the home of Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton diehard). If MLK plays the role of Moses in this analogy, then Obama is Joshua—of a generation one step removed from the past (civil rights-era leaders like Jeremiah Wright come to mind). It's the Joshua-vintage leader who gets to lead his people into the new land. All very biblical and sweeping and moving—even if you're right, Hanna, and tomorrow Obama doesn't yet pull it off.
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I've been to only a handful of car races in my life, all on a two-bit track in Manasses, so I shouldn't have much of a stake in the triumph of Danica Patrick. This weekend, the 26-year-old became the first woman to win an Indy car race, defeating a two-time Indy 500 champion by six seconds. But here is why I find this victory so sweet. For as long as man has known how to inflate rubber, there have been men (and particularly middle-aged men) who brag that they could beat any female college pro in a one-on-one. In his book about sports stunts, Todd Gallagher has a chapter called, "How Big Is the Gap Between Male and Female Athletes." The chapter begins with the anecdote of a 39-year-old overweight alcoholic who came within one basket of beating a professional women's basketball player in a one-on-one. Gallagher's conclusion is that the gap between male and female professional athletes is "much wider than the general public understands," and he has all sorts of graphs and charts to prove that. My husband, who plays on both a soccer and basketball team, keeps this book in our bathroom. You are beginning to see where my resentment comes in. Whether or not Gallagher is right, men are permitted to keep this fantasy alive becaue it's hardly ever tested. In professional sports, in the Olympics, there are few co-ed sports.* Even in non-team sports (gymnastics, weight-lifting) men and women usually compete separately. Car racing is a rare exception, probably because there aren't enough women interested. And Danica took advantage of that. What makes it sweeter is, Danica is no tomboy, playing by the men's rules. Before winning this weekend, she was most famous for posing in various Paris Hilton-like poses in her bikini. So before we lapse into our postfeminist sulk tomorrow night (when Hillary wins Pennsylvania), let us all toast Danica and her fabulous legs.
*Correction, April 22: The post originally said that there are no co-ed professional or Olympic sports. However, men and women do compete against one another in Olympic equestrian and sailing events.
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Well, I probably should have known that something was fishy when the Yale Daily News reported that “[f]ew people outside of Yale's undergraduate art department have heard about Shvarts' exhibition.” Yale’s not a big campus: When I was there, we all knew that some girl was keeping live crabs from a Chinatown grocery store in her bathtub; I’m sure that, if someone was regularly “making art” in hers, people would be talking about it.
Dana, you asked if the artwork was successful or not, given what we know now. I think that, based on the criteria I mentioned in my last post, the answer is no. I still don’t get the sense that Shvarts had a compelling—or coherent—message to impart. What does it mean to “draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body”? That’s like a horrible parody of art school speak. What does it even mean? OK, “function” I sort of get: She’s giving a big middle finger to the patriarchal-hegemonic-essentialist-traditionalist view of women as vessels for childbearing. Very Handmaid’s Tale. But where does “form” come in? What—or whose—“ambiguity” is she referring to? Maybe we’ll get a clearer thesis when Shvarts formally presents the work next week.
NB: According to the official Yale statement, the project includes “visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.” (Emphasis added.)
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Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?
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OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)
And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.
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Bloggers are expressing shock, disgust, and outrage at this Yale Daily News article, which describes one Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project: “a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ‘as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages.” The exhibition itself consists of video recordings of her “experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub” and a large cube featuring samples of her uterine blood pressed between layers of plastic sheeting.
Weird and gross, granted. (Go walk it off if you need to.) But as a piece of agitprop shock art, it treads some familiar Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe-esque ground, which as we all know is candy for the undergrad art crowd.
When I was at Yale, I heard about a student who had sex with her boyfriend while menstruating, then hung up the bloody sheet as part of an art-department exhibition. And one year, I participated in a friend’s performance art project about “the seven stages of women”—I was lucky (I got “sickness”), but the girl who got cast as “puberty” had to spend three hours in a huge box of tampons while fake blood made from baby shampoo dripped all over her. Now, this is why Yale is actually a great place for young artists, particularly young female artists: They’re encouraged to take themselves, and their work, very, very seriously. Of course, that means you get a lot of juvenile stunts (though that performance art piece, as a whole, was pretty moving), but if you’re not going to take your work seriously, why even bother doing it? I’m glad Yale inculcates that kind of earnestness, and I believe Shvarts when she says that she wanted to “inspire some kind of discourse.” But I don’t think she gave much thought to what, exactly, the “message” of her piece was supposed to be—though she claims that it does, in fact, have one. Is that cube a shrine? A cautionary tale? A memento mori? I don’t know, and I’d be surprised if Shvarts knew, either. Muddled thinking usually leads to boring art.
All that being said, plenty of people—including many of the women at Slate—think the whole thing might have been staged. First of all, artificial insemination isn’t that easy—or cheap. And what are these “herbal” drugs Shvarts claims to have taken? But even more damning: How could her adviser have possibly sanctioned this project, much less given Shvarts the green light to go ahead without a doctor’s supervision? Doesn’t that seem like grounds for an immediate dismissal, or at least a tenure reassessment? Call me naive, but I have a little more faith in that professor’s common sense—she must be in on the joke. Right? Right?
Read the rest of the Aliza Shvarts conversation on XX Factor.
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On today's episode of Hey, a Girl Can Dream, my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. The high court is a short walk from the White House, where the president told the pope that Americans "need your message that all of life is sacred.'' And what better way to get that message out?
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So of course I plugged my stats into the handy-dandy wage gap calculator that Trailhead mentioned, which the Clinton campaign has posted on its Web site in honor of Equal Pay Day (April 22, in case you haven't pencilled it in yet) and the results were predictable. Some hypothetical man of my age and race would earn about one-third more than I do, at least according to Clinton's software program, whose calculations seem rather vague and ballparky, to put it mildly. I know this disparity should make me angry, and I guess, in a hypothetical kind of way, it does. But what really irritates me is something else; before Equal Pay Day comes today, which is Tax Day, and despite the fact that I mailed out a check just this morning to cover the taxes on the salary that I do get, the government persists in refusing to call me a taxpayer. No. My husband, according to the IRS, is the only "taxpayer" in our household. I am the "spouse." So for that matter is Hillary Clinton: Sccording to their jointly filed 2006 tax return, H.R Clinton, whose occupation is listed as U.S. senator, signs on the line for "spouse," while William J. Clinton, whose occupation is listed as "speaking and writing," is the official household taxpayer.
It's a little thing, I know, but it drives me crazy, once a year, that the IRS does not update its forms to acknowledge that women, though our salaries may or may not still be lower than men's, do in fact work hard for the money we get; do in fact have payroll taxes deducted, Social Security, etc. We feel like taxpayers, look like taxpayers—are, in fact, paying taxes, but are not considered bona fide taxpayers, unless we make a big deal about it and force our husbands to take on the "spouse" designation. (Actually, the reverse happened in our household: For a few years after we were married, and both making about $2 a year, I somehow was the taxpayer and my husband the spouse, which we both thought was fine, but then one tax preparer found this so disconcerting that he actually filled out the paperwork to have the titles reversed.) The thing is, how hard would it be for the government to move into the late 20th century, if not the early 21st, and change the form to have a Taxpayer A and Taxpayer B? I know that there are lots of important things the next administration will have to fix—the economy, the war, the mortgage debacle—but I hope that somebody, someday will get around to updating this throwback to an era when wives' earnings were considered to be little more than pin money.
And if I'm not a taxpayer, could I have back, like, you know, all those taxes I paid?
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A guest post from Barbara Ehrenreich:
I spent an hour yesterday trying to persuade Tom Frank, author of What's the Mater with Kansas? and the apparent intellectual source of Obama's remark on white working class "bitterness," to weigh in with an op-ed somewhere. Unfortunately, he'd already had 20 calls before mine on the same theme, so our conversation moved on quickly to the Disney Princess Cult and its pernicious influence on 3-year-olds. Although all this was off the record, I do not think I am betraying a confidence by revealing that Frank judged Bittergate to be "silly."
Because, of course, a lot of people, and not only in the white working class, are bitter, though "pissed off" might have been a better choice of words. Real wages have been stagnant or falling for years; fuel and now food prices are going through the roof; the repo guy is picking at the locks. Sticking to that most exotic of all demographics—white working-class men—and drawing entirely on my own circle of relatives and friends, I can confirm Obama's observation.
There's my old friend Trice, for example, a flight attendant who's bitter that his company's top executives are about to pamper themselves with fresh bonuses while he's taken a 30 percent pay cut in recent years. There's my nephew Shannon, a former delivery-truck driver who's bitter because he's discovered that his recently acquired college education in computer networking gets him only low-paid, short-term, contract work. And then there are the owner-operator truck drivers I've just gotten to know in the course of interviewing them about their nationwide slowdowns to protest $4-a-gallon diesel oil. Actually, they're not "bitter" so much as righteously up in arms because they, and so many other people, can no longer make ends meet.
Where both Obama and Clinton have gone wrong is in their stereotypes of white working class men-involving guns, religion, and now, in Clinton's case, boilermakers. There is no known correlation between the size of one's arsenal and the degree of one's bitterness; and the same goes for religiosity. It should be noted, in fact, that both the Christian Right and the sport of hunting are in precipitous decline. For what it's worth, the most heavily armed white guy I know is a vegan and animal-rights crusader who's always on my case about cheeseburgers.
As for boilermakers: The drink apparently originated among the copper miners of my native city of Butte, Mont., and it is by no means universal, as I discovered when I ordered one a couple of years ago in a Holiday Inn lounge in rural Ohio. I did not order it for purposes of pandering to the construction workers at the bar, but because I'd had a long, hard day at the podium. It turned out that my bar-mates found my choice of beverage so fascinating that I could not drink in peace. They'd never heard of the drink, so I had to explain, with increasing clarity as the drink went down, that where I come from, boilermakers are a comfort food.
When they either pander to or attempt to analyze white working-class men, the candidates risk tripping over some nasty stereotypes—as in, hard-drinking, white-bread-eating, gun-bearing bigots. When I blogged about the truck drivers' protests last week, I got comments complaining about my sympathy for "rednecks." This is class prejudice, and it is just as ugly as misogyny or racism.
The only thing you can say for sure about the white—or black or brown—working class is that it is being driven ever further down into poverty. Other than that, no generalizations, please—either from the $10-million-a-year Clinton or from the merely upper-middle-class Obama.
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Rachael, I wholly agree with 50 percent of what you say. Obama’s message about our tendency to hunker down behind extreme identity differences (religious, ideological, racial) would have been better delivered directly to the group he was addressing. Just as U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., might have been better off talking to the 3Ls at Harvard when he said of Obama at a fundraiser last Saturday night, “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” Davis went on to compare Obama to a “snake oil salesman” who “probably doesn’t understand normal Americans” because he went to Harvard. (Hat tip to Steve Benen.) (Davis has since apologized.)
It can’t possibly be true that Obama’s biggest sin—like Davis’—was simply that he addressed a like-minded audience. Unlike Davis, whose audience evidently LOVED his insights about out-of-touch private-school liberals, Obama is being clobbered for the extra sin of elitism. That’s because it’s only condescension when liberal intellectuals reduce groups to stereotypes. When salt-of-the-earth blue-collar Americans like Davis or Bill Kristol or Rush Limbaugh skewer Harvard grads, it’s heroic anti-intellectualism. Me, I’d rather live in a world where we stop caricaturing both pro-gun groups and pro-choice groups. But my point is that it’s equally reductive and mean-spirited in both directions, and whether you choose to call it “condescension” or “sham populism,” it’s still just misdirection.
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Until he walked into a manhole with his remarks about bitter bumpkins, the genius of the Obama campaign was in throwing away the playbook. He regularly violated the time-honored wisdom of Rules #1 (Treat voters like idiots at all times.) and #2 (When all else fails, almost any diversion will do: "Look, it's an immigrant; run for your lives!'') Instead—not always, but often enough to make him at least a potential Real Deal—Obama went with what he'd learned as a community organizer: Real change cannot be imposed, or come from some think tank; it can only happen from the inside out and come from the bottom up. Which is radical, of course. And not something he got from David Axelrod.
I'm in California this week, and yesterday was talking about Obama's woes (is there any other subject?) with my friend Robert Tobin, who runs transitional housing programs for (formerly) homeless people in Sacramento. He says the reason they have so many success stories—ex-cons and addicts turned homeowners with stable jobs—is that the "participants''—not recipients—are treated like and then become responsible people who make hiring and firing decisions, enforce the rules, and hold down jobs while they work on whatever landed them on the street in the first place. And from one Alinsky-inspired Chicago boy to another, here's Robert's way-out-there thought for Obama:
He shouldn't go by the playbook he threw away, or resort to whining "Hillary and John McCain are even worse.'' What if he was just honest and said that we're all a product of this society of -isms, a society that needs to be changed. We all have unconscious biases, and they won't go away by magic; we've all got to do better, myself included. I've inadvertently, and yes, regrettably, stumbled onto a teachable moment here (and Alinksy says that's the moment of opportunity). So let's not waste it; let's learn from my mistake.
I told you it was radical. A conversation on class, anyone?
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Dahlia, I think there's one important difference between Rush and Barack (well, one difference relevant to this conversation): location, location, location. Rush Limbaugh might be a kajillionaire immune to any economic downturn, but he's gotten that way by understanding his audience. He's in his listeners' living room or driving down the street with them, albeit virtually, listening to what they have to say and commiserating with them. Obama was talking at, and talking down to, working-class voters, from a room full of rich people in San Francisco.
Can you picture Obama uttering those same words while speaking to the monthly meeting of the Rotary Club, or at smoke-filled VFW hall? The thing is, what Obama said last week was not altogether different from a point that he made in his speech on race, when he said that "resentment builds over time" when whites "are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed." But in that speech, he was talking to all of us at the same time, and he was trying to mend our differences. In San Francisco, he came across as making assumptions about a group of people that probably almost no one in attendance could relate to.
Of course people should be able to, and should be encouraged to, weigh in on issues they haven't experienced. But if we're going to stop talking past one another, like you say, well, first we have to start talking to one another. I don't think there were too many union laborers or laid-off factory workers at that San Francisco fundraiser.
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Just to be clear then: When Barack Obama dares ponder the sources of small-town America’s bitterness, he’s an elitist snob. But when Rush Limbaugh devotes his every waking breath to ranting about it, well, he’s speaking truth to power.
I’m not saying Obama’s “cling” comment was smart. It wasn’t. But his real mistake lay in violating the cardinal rule of American political discourse: Thou shalt not proclaim upon any group of which thou art not a member. Nobody may voice an opinion about anything she hasn’t personally experienced without being in peril of that worst sin: condescension. No wonder liberals and conservatives just keep talking past each other. All we’re allowed to reflect upon is ourselves. Obama can wail, weep, and emote exclusively on the topic of Harvard-educated liberal elite bitterness. Dare to speculate about the sources of anger in any other group and you have become “supercilious” “elitist” and “condescending.”
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This "cling" flap just keeps getting worse. I was expecting some Obama redemption at the Christian school forum last night in Grantham, where each of the candidates had the chance to talk about their faith. Maybe not as moving as the Jeremiah Wright speech but something that felt at least a little real and helped us recalibrate what he'd said in San Francisco. Instead, we got just a lot of faith babble, mindless clichés that could have come from John McCain or Howard Dean or the president of Georgetown or anyone who's evading uncomfortable stares from true believers: "Religion is a bulwark, a foundation"; "trials and tribulations"; "I was in no way demeaning a faith." Blah, blah, blah. Answers like these suggest either great guilt or great arrogance. He either recognizes that he insulted wide swaths of people and feels badly about it, or he doesn't even see it yet, in which case we're in real trouble.
Hillary, meanwhile, is unbelievable. Her whole strategy at the moment seems to be Message: I Care, and a particularly cold, impatient form of it. "I went to church on Easter. I mean, so?" I mean, so? Is she high? Even Miss Jew here recognizes that so? and the resurrection of Jesus don't belong in the same sentence. And just to dissect further: “We have been working very hard to make it clear that we have millions of Democrats who are church-going and gun-owning,” she said. “And we are tired of having Republicans, or frankly our own Democrats, give any ammunition to Republicans because what happens then is Republicans take advantage of the situation.”
Note the: "We have been working very hard." In other words, none of this is natural. All this stuff I've said about my father taking me hunting and going to church is a political strategy, intended to keep ammunition away from the Republicans, and has nothing to do with what I actually care about or believe.
After Tim Kaine won the Virginia governor's race. I really thought the Democrats were starting to get their act together. Not that they were pretending to be religious, the way Howard Dean did, but that they were finding a way to integrate sincere religious narratives with what they actually believe. Obama has more potential to make this real than almost anyone. My true hope was that if he pulled it off, religion would sort of fade away as an election issue. It would no longer be an absolute requirement for candidates to bludgeon each other with the sincerity of their testimonies. And how they worshipped would no longer be a proxy for anything else. It would be possible to be devoutly Catholic and pro-choice, or an environmentalist evangelical. This is the way religion is headed anyway. And this might have the added benefit of making both San Francisco and Grantham, Pa., feel included. Let's hope Obama figures that out—quickly.
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Great framing, Rachael, and evidence that the real beneficiary of Obama's comment will be not Hillary but McCain, for whom it is a bag of bonbons to be snacked on all fall. Part of what's prompting the wincing and deep doubts, I think, is that Obama sounded like an anthropologist talking about objects of study to an audience that he assumed has the same disassociated point of view. He'd never have talked that way to a group of actual angry, gun-toting churchgoers, it's safe to say. The generous interpretation of his remark is that he can easily slip into the shoes of whomever he is talking to. The ungenerous one, courtesy Bill Kristol this morning, is that his mask slipped, and he revealed his inner patronizing elitist. My guess is some of both. I know all of this matters in terms of getting elected. I wonder, though, how much it matters in terms of how he would govern. What does it reveal on that front? I'm not sure much.
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Wow, Melinda, I don't think I could have put it any better. Like you, I hail from a small town whose most vibrant days are well in the past. Downtown was on life support long before Wal-Mart came to town seven or eight years ago; the schools aren't what they used to be; and the factories are gone, but the payday-loan industry appears to be thriving. Whatever else people in such communities might have lost, they still retain their pride and their self-respect. And so, no, they don't take kindly to a slick politician talking down to them from San Francisco, of all places. (There's a reason this South Park episode makes me laugh harder than most others.) A while back, I wrote that one of my biggest problems with Hillary Clinton is that she acts like she's knows what's best for us, and "we'll like it whether we like it or not." It's only a mite less annoying when a politician tries to explain to people why they hold the "mistaken" beliefs they do, and does so with a condescending little pat on the head.
But now, on to Hillary's response. When I saw the headline "Clinton Portrays Herself as a Pro-Gun Churchgoer," I thought, "Wait, doesn't that make her the kind of person Obama was just talking about?" And then I read that yes, that actually was the impression she was going for. Not a bad ploy, I suppose. But now that she's followed up by saying that it's not relevant when she last went to church or fired a gun, my BS detectors are buzzing loudly. Yes, it's possible for someone to believe the Second Amendment applies to individuals and shouldn't be messed with lightly even if they aren't a veteran hunter (I fall into that category myself), and no, candidates shouldn't have to release their church attendance records along with their 1040s. But, come on. You have to try a little harder.
So, voters in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and elsewhere now have an important choice to make. Is it going to be the condescender, or the panderer?
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Yes, it is galling to be tagged as out of touch by Hillary "Is that sniper fire I hear?' Clinton. Only, she happens to be right: Barack Obama's suggestion that economically suffering small-town Americans are haters who cling to God and guns out of bitterness is a way bigger deal than he seems to realize, even now. Five years into an unpopular war, and with the economy tanking, the widely held and absolutely poisonous perception that Democrats tend to look down on Mr. and Mrs. Middle America—and on their religious faith in particular—may be the most serious obstacle to the party's presidential hopes this year. Yet here's Obama not apologizing: "If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that," he told the Winston-Salem Journal. Poor wording was not the problem; on the contrary, it was his precision that was so unfortunate, and his ability to pack half a dozen unintended insults into a single sentence uncanny. And in San Francisco, no less? Roger Ailes couldn't have planned it better, unless he'd maybe followed up the event with some impromptu windsurfing in the bay. Here's what preceded the problem sentence:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not.
With this, who could argue? So far, so good. But then, straight into the ditch:
"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter,'' (Angry, OK, but bitter? I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe someone they liked that way.)
"they cling to guns'' (If they had jobs, maybe they wouldn't be gun nuts?)
"or religion'' (Or religious nuts, either? This is an especially weird conclusion since Obama himself is a devout Christian; was he pandering to the segment of the party that does see believers that way?)
"or antipathy to people who aren't like them'' (So no wonder such a lot of them are haters?)
"or anti-immigrant sentiment'' (Who blame their troubles on people who'll live in concrete-block squalor while picking fruit for next to nothing.)
"or anti-trade sentiment'' (And don't see the big picture on globalization and free trade like you Davos-goers do.)
"as a way to explain their frustrations.'' (In lieu of a Harvard Law degree.)
I grew up in the kind of town Obama is talking about and went back there to talk to people about their political motivations for my book about women voters in pockets of the country where, as Obama says, the factories have closed, the jobs have gone away, and people see scant evidence that anyone in either party actually gives a hoot. As I wrote in the book, my hometown of Mount Carmel, Ill., population 8,000, sits on a bluff overlooking the Wabash River. It's a pretty little farm town—or was, before the Target moved in, wiped out Market Street, and then moved on, like a bad storm. When I brought my New Yorker husband home for the holidays for the first time 20 years ago, he couldn't believe how long it took us to run a couple of errands on our bustling main street; compact as it was, we stopped so often to talk that he said he felt like he'd wandered onto the set of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life, with a crowd of neighbors yoo-hooing, "Merry Christmas, George!'' But these days, whole minutes can go by in which nothing moves on Market Street; social services are the only growth industry, and the traffic lights only blink now, instead of changing from red to green, so you don't have to sit there waiting when there's no other car in sight. The tool factory that had been a major employer since the 1930s closed a few years back, and my best friend from high school finally had to move away just last fall, after the coal mine where her husband worked shut down.
When I went back there, and visited similar small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, one thing I heard over and over—from registered Democrats!—was that their national party leaders were elitists who couldn't seem to relate to their struggles. Again and again, they brought up Kerry's windsurfing and polyglot wife and Hollywood friends and brand spanking new hunting attire as proof positive of the kind of elitism that was turning them into Republicans. Perhaps worst of all in their eyes was his habit of mocking Bush's intelligence; every time Kerry laughed about how dumb the president supposedly was, they assumed he thought the same of them. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Here's how a high-school teacher in Fairfield, Ill., put it: "I used to be a Democrat, and I'm still very much independent. I voted for Clinton [in '92 and '96]. I'm religious but not a fanatic; I see a lot of gray. My mother has Alzheimer's, so I'm for stem-cell research, and I'm not against people's right to an abortion.'' But Kerry "just struck me as arrogant,'' while Bush inspired "the feeling that this was a more open person who would not be "I'm important and you're not.' '' And yes, Fox News exists to whip up such sentiments, but it only works when Democrats foolishly hand them fresh material. I don't for a second doubt that Obama genuinely cares about the people he just put down -- or question whether it's his party's policies that would help low-income Americans more. Which makes this Democratic penchant for cultural condescension all the more baffling and inexcusable.
Sure, many Americans in places like my hometown are angry and they do "cling'' to guns and God, though not in that order. It's connecting the two that's belittling in the extreme to the "typical white person''—to cite a phrase I chose to overlook at the time. Now, if Obama is sticking by the essence of what he said out of stubbornness or arrogance, that's one kind of problem. But if he really doesn't see why this could be a game-changer, that's worse. And though I've been pretty unrelievedly positive about the guy, it's the first thing he's said that's made me question his ability to win.
Read more XX Factor posts on Obama's "bitter" comments.
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Sorry to be so late to the party on Slate V's Bonking, but oh my, what's next on Slate After Hours? (Or our spinoff site, Slate Blue?) OK, maybe aspirations of primness run in my family; my dad took that Kinsey class at Indiana University where they were assigned to do field work asking couples about their sex lives, and he swears that a lot of them made up stuff up to avoid the embarrassment of doing the interviews. (Never was clear on why a history major had to take this class, however, hmm...) But while we're on such XXX-y topics as grandma hookers having career-enhancing plastic surgery, can you think of anything more embarrassing than death by liposuction? And re: Emily B.'s story about the prisoner with untreated penile cancer, I once saw a guy interviewed on Oprah who had had his penis removed by accident. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment; why oh why would this poor man have put himself through the humiliation of chatting about this on national television? From Roseanne talking about her vaginal rejuvenation surgery to the furious national conversation over whether kids need any sex ed beyond "Just Say No,' this moment in our culture is one strange combo of exhibitionism and Puritanism, which I guess are two sides of the same coin. What ever happened to the happy medium?
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Two items today that should go to the top of the "Clinton fatigue" greatest hits. First is Hillary laughing at a reporter's question about Bill getting paid $800,000 to speak at a group that supports the Colombia free-trade agreement (that the Democrats have taken a ridiculous anti-free-trade stand is another issue). The reporter asks if there is a conflict since Hillary has made a personal loan to her campaign, money that might be tainted by Bill's pro-free trade payments. She hoots at the question as if she's never heard anything more ludicrous. What's so funny? This is an issue at the heart of a potential third Clinton administration. It's vital to find out both where Bill's personal and presidential library money is from, and to have Hillary explain how her administration would keep him from going around the world getting paid for speeches (or even raising money for his charities) from groups or governments whose policies are in opposition to hers. That's not about perception of conflict of interest, that's about actual conflict of interest.
The second item is Bill's defense (now that the issue is finally dying down) of Hillary's description of the landing in Tuzla. He says her characterization of it was essentially correct—which is odd since she was forced to say she "misspoke." Then he says she may not have been completely accurate because she spoke late at night (wrong) and she's 60 years old and was exhausted. That's the way to get your wife elected president! (His behavior is consistent with my view that he doesn't want there to be another President Clinton.) The "she's old and tired" argument is perhaps not the strongest one to make especially since she's released two recent ads showing that a President Hillary Clinton will constantly be up at 3 a.m. taking calls about national security and home foreclosures.
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Emily, I agree with you that Mark Gimein's "eligible bachelor" theory, while intriguing to contemplate, doesn't quite explain the end result of who ends up with whom—and who ends up alone. It just seems too pat. I switched from my intended economics major way too early to feign any sort of an expertise in game theory, so I'll stick with the supply and demand I remember from Econ 101.
Gimein's theory might completely hold water if dating actually were a pure auction, like eBay—where you can have your purchase shipped anywhere. But in real life, people plunk themselves down in certain cities for lots of different reasons and aren't always ready to ship their goods elsewhere. To Gimein, a "New York-based writer," the scarcity of eligible men is a "a truth universally acknowledged." That's because, for whatever combination of reasons, more women than men find New York an appealing place to live. But over in, say, Portland, Ore., there are more men than women who choose to call it home, and it might not be such a universally acknowledged truth (and maybe even less so in the broad nonurban swaths of the country that very seldom get addressed in debates like this). So if you've picked New York for certain cultural reasons, you're probably also looking for someone who values those same things. Leisure preferences are a shallow but convenient illustration of preferences that probably run a lot deeper.
The issue of what's considered "eligible" is a much more complicated one than Gimein's article lets on, full of value judgments and innate prejudices. It's also probably informed by the same values that helped you pick a city. So, maybe it's simply that there are fewer men who choose the sort of lifestyle that might make them seem eligible in the eyes of Gimien and others who inhabit his very particular social mien. Those who are constitutionally or circumstantially inclined to get married earlier do so, leaving behind a proportionately smaller pool in estrogen-heavy cities. So, even if the "8's marry 8's," however you happened to count to 8, there are more of them left over on the women's side in certain areas, including Gimein's hometown. Supply and demand.
This, of course, is before you factor in studies that show men consistently prefer women who make less money and wield less power than they do (and it's not imprudent to assume that a 35-year-old woman has moved up the career ladder ). Add the fact that it's frowned upon for women to date younger men. So, the male dating pool widens as the female one narrows, ensuring that those "eligible" bachelors get more hands to play even as women get less. Hardly news, but it also turns the "women choose" assumption on its head and makes it even harder for me to go along with the premise Gimein sets up.
I'm not sure it's fair to apply a quantitative model to such a complicated qualitative search, even though it's great fun to do so. Yes, Gimien is probably right about decisiveness being a key factor if you want to get married—but only to a point, and hopefully that point doesn't bring you to Lori Gottleib levels.
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This excessive Botoxing and retouching has something to do with the collapse of the classes, or at least the shifting in what used to define the super-rich. "The 'luxury' experience has become thoroughly middle-class, even prole (two words: 'Gucci T-shirt')," Sandra Tsing Loh wrote a few years ago in the Atlantic, in a rare book review that did not reference her children's school. When I was in my 20s, my dermatologist was a product peddler, but in a sad pushcart kind of way, selling some kind of skin cream only he could provide (now Clinique sells it). I remember my mother once took me to Georgette Klinger, and I felt like I was in the Trump penthouse, and I in fact was so uncomfortable among the minks and lapdogs that I had to leave. Now Georgette Klinger is like the MacDonald's of spas; the super-rich go to these souped up urban spas where you can color your hair and get a face-lift in one session. I went with my post-mastectomy friend to the plastic surgeon once, and it was just how Melinda described—two doctors who looked identical, with absurd winter tans and actual golf ties. The place was gleaming, and they had their own chocolates! To me, the blending of boob job and cancer was very jarring. But they clearly considered both just facts of middle-class life. And they were just here to serve.
I'm sure there is no connection here, but since this is my latest obsession, I will try it out. If all classes have gotten bumped up a grade, does this explain why prostitutes are so middle-class now? In the escort service trial now unfolding in D.C., the latest call girl on the witness stand had a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and held clinical and academic positions all over the world. She started working for the escort service when she was 56. Not a typo. She was caught serving a john at 63. Surely she must have had some work done.
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I'm afraid that blogging on "women's content" might bring out the bitch in me. After a Fray poster linked to the wowowow.com Web site in response to Rachael's Shine comments earlier this week, I cattily e-mailed my fellow XXers about Wowowow's co-founder Mary Wells, whom I have never met. I said, "she is probably a creative genius and model for women in the work place. but this helpful list of service providers (limousine drivers on St. Tropez and doctors in South of France) ... posted for fellow Mediterranean habitués makes it really hard [for me] to like her." I'm sure I was a bit jealous—not of the glam lifestyle, as frankly I would find her A-list activities exhausting—but I may have negatively overreacted to Wells' unrealistically glamorous bio photo.
With a Diane Sawyer kickoff on Good Morning America (Disclaimer: I once worked as a producer for Primetime Live when Diane was one of the show's anchors), Wowowow, a Web site for women over 40, launched a month ago. I am firmly in the site's target demographic, having been "over 40" for 18 years. In addition to posts written by the five over-50 Wowowow founders, Liz Smith, Joni Evans, Peggy Noonan, Leslie Stahl, and Wells (Liz Smith's memorial tribute to her lifelong friend Gov. Ann Richards is touching, but left me wondering if they had been a couple), we hear from their impressive group of women friends: Joan Ganz Cooney, Judith Martin, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Marlo Thomas, and, in a bit of women's-content overkill, The View co-host Whoppi Goldberg. These dames are all innovators, stars in their fields, and potential role models for my cohort of women now attempting to grow old elegantly.
Wells was already famous when I was in high school in 1966 for having the brilliant idea for Braniff Airlines to paint their silver plane exteriors in orange, yellow, and red. Which brings me back to her bio photo. Botox aside, Mary Wells' online portrait is so art directed and expertly lit that the talented, accomplished former CEO, though beautiful, doesn't look like a real woman of any age. As a TV producer, I quickly learned the value of a good lighting director when filming older-than-40 correspondents. But as part of my aging-gracefully agenda, I have been working on being less judgmental and more compassionate. And so I must note that Wells' photo reflects her particular history. After a lifetime in advertising, why not give herself awesome lighting? In her sneakers, I probably would, too. Also, reading her bio, I see she's a widow and may well have collected those French medical contact numbers because someone in her family was very ill, and I regret my snotty e-mail remark.
Wells calls her new venture "a rare and exciting place to meet and talk to women who know the answers." I'm glad to see the former copywriter "helps women with problems to overcome them." She's already helped me.
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Ah, yes, the unsolicited-Botox pitch. My experience wasn't nearly so harrowing or prolonged as Melinda's, but a couple of years ago I went to a dermatologist for a small, straightforward medical matter. It was hard not to notice the large photo on his examining room wall, showing him on vacation, trekking someplace exotic. At the end of our appointment, he took my file and looked at my birth date. "You're over 40," he pointed out, gratuitously. "Want to try some Botox?"
This was a mainstream medical doctor, seeing a patient for a medical matter, and here he was, peddling a pricey cosmetic sideline, doubtless as a way of paying his next sherpa. I declined his offer. He shrugged and assumed I was just offended. And in a way, I was; it's hard not to feel self-concious about your forehead when your doctor offers to correct some aspect of it. But mostly, I was shocked. I'd never had a doctor try to sell me something. It was no big deal to him. Some women resent the suggestion, he confided, but others don't. For that reason, he said, it's hard to know the best way to make the pitch. Next patient!
Cosmetic surgeons may be hurting in the current economy, but the pressures of managed care are also inspiring some some regular practioners to seek ways to augment their own income by performing—and proferring—cosmetic procedures. I was chatting about this recently with Kathryn Hinsch, founder of the Women's Bioethics Project, who has lots of concerns about physicians dabbling in lucrative cosmetic enhancements. The problems are manifold: It's cheesy, it commercializes medicine, and most of all, it corrupts doctor-patient trust. Hinsch pointed out in our conversation that general practitioners, family practitioners, and ob-gyns are all cashing in on the trend. And who are their primary targets? Well, women contribute by far the majority of cosmetic-procedure revenue.
And how are we paying for these procedures? On another topic, Melinda, just to tie up one loose end: That data set I mentioned last week, showing that one-third of all wives earn more than their husband? This may be a violation of the blogging ethos, but after your entry, I felt curious and made a call, to the Labor Department, to see if there were any caveats or backstory. It turns out that this statistic does not include families where the wife does not work. (The WSJ article was a little misleading that way.) But in families where the wife earns a paycheck, one third of the time she makes more than her husband. So she has even more $$$ with which to pay her GP for that liposuction!
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Elsewhere on Slate, Mark Gimein offers an intriguing theory to explain the seeming shortage of attractive, socially adept, well-employed, single, thirtysomething men—the class eligible-bachelor problem. The gist is that decisive women in their 20s snap up many of the best male prospects—even if the women aren't as hot as those men. These decisive women may be "weak bidders," in auction-theory lingo, in terms of their attributes. But because they know their relative weaknesses, they don't hold out, the men they want fall into line, and the apparent stronger women bidders end up with slim pickings. Interesting. But I'm not convinced, because I can't think of more than a few couples I know that feature a drab (if decisive) woman and a far suaver man. As a colleague puts it, 5s tend to marry 5s, and 8s tend to marry 8s. Whereas if Mark is right, wouldn't there be a lot of 5 women married to 7 and 8 men, and vice versa, eventually? Does anyone have a pet alternative explanation?
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Will's excellent tale of nip and tuck—about those poor plastic surgeons whose business in butt-lifts was not quite as recession-proof as they thought—has made my day, mean thing that I am. And if these lean times force a few more of these specialists to focus on the patients who need them most, it will make a lot of women's day.
(Disclaimer: As I explained to the judge who wanted to seat me on a med-mal jury, I am the sort of person who took one look at the plaintiff and barely managed not to yell, "You go, girl!'' Some practitioners may think they are God, but the distinction is not lost on me. I'll skip the tick-tock on how this became so clear, other than to reiterate that you should always, always—no matter how dismissive your doctor is—always biopsy a palpable lump. And if they later go to the opposite extreme and tell you you're dying? You might not be.)
My problem with the whole plastic surgery industry, in any case, is that it's focused on cosmetic enhancements to the detriment of patients in need of upgrades that are not quite so elective. I learned this a little over a year after my initial cancer diagnosis, when I again had to insist on having some new breast changes biopsied. Just before they wheeled me into surgery, my doctor half-jokingly complained to my husband that I was an awfully interactive patient: "Your wife has been reading again,'' he told him. They found only pre-cancer that time, but the safest course was still a mastectomy, and the reconstruction was going to be more complicated because I'd already had radiation. So now, I had to navigate a whole new corner of the medical world, where health concerns often seemed beside the point.
The first plastic surgeon my doctor referred me to was a highly regarded guy whose waiting room was filled with black marble and nurses who greeted me by name, in a whisper. I knew going in that he did mostly elective work, because even before my visit, I'd been sent literature describing the full array of available services. (A little eye job, perhaps, with my mastectomy?) Still, I was floored by how little he seemed to understand about my options, because implants under radiated skin are iffy. When I asked about the possibility of transplanting abdominal tissue, he said I wasn't a candidate for that procedure because I didn't have enough padding to spare. (And no, sadly, bulking up like Renee Zellweger for her role in Bridget Jones would not have worked; those fat cells are smart little buggers.) To underscore his point, he reached over and pinched my belly. "Do you want a breast that looks like this?'' Uh, not really, I said. But could what I wanted have been any more irrelevant? While mentally strangling him with the jaunty little golf tie he was wearing, I asked if he had ever operated on anyone in my situation. Surely he had, he said, but he couldn't really remember.
Next, I sought the advice of two top surgeons at a teaching hospital, who do the procedure I "wanted,'' a procedure known as the free flap. They said I could expect to lose maybe a third of my abdominal strength after they cut into my rectus muscle. "But you don't look like a rock climber to me,'' one of them added cheerfully, so I'd hardly notice. I wasn't so sure. Doesn't abdominal muscle support the back? And come in handy for exotic pursuits like hoisting groceries and children, or throwing a suitcase into the overhead bin? How about that new muscle-sparing version of the procedure I'd been reading about? Not an option, they said.
In frustration, I hauled out my well-worn copy of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, and found her reference to a doctor at UCLA who had done some pioneering work with the free flap. Though he had since retired, I located a young doctor who had trained with him and regularly performs a muscle-sparing version of the free flap, the deep interior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap. And he had the answers I'd been looking for: "There's never any reason to take the abdominal muscle,'' he told me, "except to add volume to the breast.'' (How much is enough? Shouldn't that, if nothing else, be left up to us?) Finally, I asked him why the DIEP flap was not more widely available. "To be honest? Because it's hard to do and it takes all day. You could do two facelifts and be on the golf course'' in half the time, with twice the profit.
But vanity, too, can survive cancer. As I left his office after my first post-op follow-up, he dashed through the waiting room after me, and right there in front of Jesus and half of Santa Monica said he had some Botox left over at the end of the day, and would I like to try some at no extra cost? I love this guy, so not all doctors deserve the booby prize, so to speak. And you gotta, gotta, gotta love L.A.
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Two things dominated my psyche yesterday: that excruciating Max Moseley video showing the famous son of Nazis engaging in some concentration camp orgy, and Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens, which I am currently reading. Coll's book is like an epic Russian novel you can't help but follow to its tragic end. The book is amazing for many reasons, and one is the way in which it describes Osama Bin Laden in terms of his lifelong search for a father figure to replace his own father, who died when he was young. Jacob Weisberg's book, "The Bush Tragedy," takes a similar approach, exploring Bush's personality as a reaction to his distant, waspish father. This triumvurate of seemingly unrelated psychological probings, plus an offhand comment from Tim Noah, led me to an insight about great men and the burdens they inherit through the paternal line: Osama's daddy complex led him to blow up the World Trade Center, and Bush's led him to launch the Iraq war. Compared to that, Moseley's method of working out his Oedipal issues seems pretty harmless.
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Reading about the current trial of civil rights leader James Bevel, I am experiencing the same conundrum I've always felt about Bill Clinton's piggish behavior toward his wife. Bevel was a companion of Martin Luther King and helped organize the Freedom Ride in 1960. Bevel's significant role in the movement, with his wife Diane Nash, was beautifully documented in Taylor Branch's biographies of Dr. King. But, according to trial testimony yesterday in rural Virginia, Bevel repeatedly sexually abused at least one of his nine daughters for many years. Bill Brubaker wrote in the Washington Post today, "The incest charge was prompted by a discussion some of his grown daughters had at a family reunion about experiences with their father when they were younger." The man was a hero but if the allegations are true, his personal acts are unforgivable. Apparently, at least one of his daughters finally agrees.
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Actually, Emily—didn't Hillary get the idea that it would be OK to complain about her hair from none other than Mike Kinsley himself? Last week, he pointed out (in his Slate column, of course) that male candidates can sleep a whole extra half-hour every night because they don't have to primp. The article was frighteningly similar to Hillary's comments several days later.
Not suggesting Hillary reads Kinsley every week (though who knows!), but I'd be pretty surprised if someone on her staff didn't notice that article. Although it's not Tuzla II (or even another Northern Ireland fib), there was something rather phony about Hillary's out-of-the-blue lament. Would it have occurred to her to complain in public about "the time it takes to get ready," unless an important (male) columnist had not suggested it first?
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While everyone has been busy analyzing the campaign of the first viable female presidential candidate and gossiping about rumors of a possible female vice presidential candidate; while we've got women running the House of Representatives and telling John McCain what to do about the economy, Yahoo has been cooking up a site that focuses on our interests: Yahoo for Chix. I mean, "Shine." And all I can say is, "Wow." I mean, "Ewww."
I admit, I read the occasional InStyle, if only to look at what clothes I'd buy if still in possession of my pre-childbearing waistline (slimmer) and budget (fatter). And I am, after all, writing from Slate's very own no-boys-allowed blog. But the problem with women's-only content is not the concept. It's the execution. And Shine comes off looking like all women care about is sex, shoes, and "surprisingly cute wall decals."
I don't come to women-focused media outlets necessarily looking for the latest on Iraq. And sure, I like sex, and I like shoes. But there's an enormous middle ground that sites like Shine don't make use of. Rising food prices affect every trip I make to the grocery store. The housing crisis has me worried about my home's value. How the hell did no one notice that hundreds of women and children were being treated like chattel in Texas? You can take almost any front-page story and cast it in a way that's meaningful to women.
But at least the site doesn't totally ignore the news of the world. There is a tiny area that links to news headlines, and it's called the "Cheat Sheet." In essence, "We know you are too dumb to care what's going on in the world, so here's some news to help you carry on a conversation with your husband when he tires of hearing you talk about Rob Lowe's nanny."
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I realize this isn't up there with Tuzla and utter delusion, but am I picking on Hillary to bring up this self-pitying joke she made, at a town hall meeting in Missoula, Mont., about her looks and her hair? From CNN's political blog, "And that is another difference, you know how long it takes me to get ready than my two opponents — I mean really just think about it," she joked. "I think I should get points for working as hard as I do plus the time it takes to get ready."
Is this really a smart way for a female candidate to go? I know other women will identify with her—even I do, and my hair is an inevitable mess. But isn't she awfully quick to move from difference to inequity and persecution, in order to make a cheap bid for sympathy? Though of course, that's hardly a cardinal political sin. So maybe the real question here is whether I'm being hard on her for no good reason, as opposed to not getting the joke or shrugging it off.
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As we look to November, surely we can agree that the last thing we need in the Oval Office is another escapee from the reality-based community. The various misstatements each of the presidential candidates has made lately are instructive and ought not to be lumped in together: They all lie and so are all alike? No, because they lie differently.
John McCain keeps saying—three times and counting—that Iran is arming al-Qaida, though there is no connection we know of between the Shiite country and the Sunni terrorist group. Which is worrying as a practical matter; if national security is McCain's strong suit, and he can't keep this straight, that's way more unfortunate than a derriere-covering fib about whether he really meant we might be fighting in Iraq 100 years from now.
In much the same way, Barack Obama seems to have been protecting his backside in initially suggesting that some of his longtime preacher's more objectionable rants were news to him. He was also busted recently for claiming that he owes his very existence to the Kennedys, who at one point financially supported the program that brought his Kenyan father to the United States. When I heard Obama say that in Selma, Ala., last year, it seemed such a reach that it never even occurred to me that he meant it literally. And sure enough, by the time the Kennedys became benefactors of the program, Obama Sr. was already living in Hawaii.
As for that uninsured pregnant woman who Hillary Clinton kept saying died after she was refused medical care? Turns out she was insured and was not turned away. Now, that's credulous and predictable and incredibly bad staff work—modern parables require fact-checking, people!—but it's more embarrassing than disqualifying. As is Clinton's insistence that she spoke out against the war before Obama did in 2005. This is incorrect and hard to see as anything other than an attempt to one-up her rival. But it doesn't bother me nearly as much as the tall tale from Tuzla that she did seem to believe.
I say this because I cannot for the life of me imagine why any presidential candidate would knowingly cook up such a doozy of a drama about dodging a sniper's bullets in Bosnia—given that she was accompanied on this trip by a planeload of reporters. (Who, alas, left it to the comedian Sinbad to correct the record. But she couldn't have counted on that, could she?) No, I think she must have bought into her own imagined heroics—and might be still. Her suggestion on Leno—"This has been such a mismatch of words and actions"—that she's been in so many war zones she's lost track not only doesn't add up but makes things worse, not better. As Christopher Hitchens noted, running across a tarmac in fear for your life is not an experience anyone could ever forget. (And if it did happen elsewhere, then where?) Her Tuzla fantasy still ought to be a deal-breaker, though. Because if anything, it's even more serious if she did believe her own story -- in keeping, I'm afraid, with her whole history of improving upon the truth of her difficult childhood, her difficult marriage, and now, her difficult candidacy. Hillary has famously said that there are worse things than adultery, and there are worse things than lying, too. Like not knowing when you aren't telling the truth.
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Wow, Liza, fully a third of women make more than their husbands? That's way higher than I would have guessed and especially impressive given how many young women are unsalaried while their kids are little. When you factor in all the older women who never worked outside the home and thus draw no pension, that figure seems almost as unbelievable as the report that one in four teenaged girls has an STD. Elaine Chao wouldn't steer us wrong, would she?
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Also appropos of prominent women and the men who love them, or leave them, or both: The Wall Street Journal had a revealing piece this week about how more men not only are taking alimony from their higher-earning ex-wives but are willing to admit it. Exhibit A is a former soap opera star who is not embarrassed to say he gets $9,000 a month from the TV producer he was married to. Also featured are men who argue that they've moved for their wives' jobs, dialed back their hours for the sake of the kids, and made all those other concessions that women have gotten pretty used to. The ex-wives who are quoted tend to resent the payments; the former wife of the former soap star said she used to spit on the check before she mailed it. (She does not say why she stopped.) But perhaps the most striking detail was a figure from the U.S. Labor Department showing that 33 percent of wives earn more than their mates, a percentage that has been rising steadily. I have to confess, one-third is a higher figure than I would have guessed. It reminds us that we need to recalibrate our thinking: Guys whose wives are more powerful, or more public, or simply better-paid are not outliers—they are part of the norm.
Less upbeat, the WSJ had a related story on a study by a Washington & Lee University law school professor who found that women MBAs are more likely to be divorced than their male counterparts. The prof, Robin Fretwell Wilson, posits that high-powered women (who tend to marry equally driven men) aren't able to give their hubbies the attention and TLC these men may still expect them to bring home, along with their paychecks. A somewhat dreary reminder that it's not always women who expect to have it all.
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Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. I mean, McCain’s out there boasting about his demerits at the Naval Academy, even as Maureen Dowd makes Barack sound like a sissy compared to Hillary. It’s not just that he abstains from chocolate (shades of Harvard’s head virgin, who forgoes dessert, too, as Melinda noted). He can’t bowl, and “genteely” sips beer from a bottle. On top of that, he’s got that Times article—the one speculating that he was actually a much tamer teenager than his memoir suggests—to live down. The obvious tough-guy image enhancer is out of bounds: Obama can’t come out swinging at the former goody-goody girl who lately seems more macho than he does, without appearing a hypocrite. But hey, a real alpha male sticks to his gentlemanly guns, right? A drawn-out primary can at least prove his endurance.
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When Brad and Jen broke up, I started finding US Weekly around the house. Finally, mystery solved: My husband, as is turns out, just cannot read enough about Angelina's humanitarian efforts on behalf of children around the world! (Here, included in the magazine's 24/7 coverage of her, is a recent story about her buying her son a bag of Cheetos.) Maybe there is no surplus of Brad Pitts out there—although if we asked Jen, she might say even one was one too many. But I'm not sure there's a shortage of men who are proud of their big-deal wives, even in Hollywood; off the top of my head, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and J Lo are all in marriages with less prominent men. And unless you're Norman Maine or something, wouldn't it be a career-booster to have a famous mate in the movie business? In any business, come to think of it. Plus, I don't think we should assume those Oscar-winners who divorced three minutes after saying they couldn't have done it without their mister's love and support—Kim Basinger is another—got left by jealous men; maybe it's the women who were trading up.
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Hillary Clinton has another "It's 3:00 a.m and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone ringing in the White House" ad. This time, it's not about national security, but housing foreclosures, and Clinton is awake and fresh-looking, taking the call. That must be some housing crisis for the government to be releasing new figures at 3:00 a.m.! Since Clinton said the reason she "misspoke" about her false memory of landing under sniper in fire in Bosnia was that she was sleep-deprived, does she really want to make people think that her plan as president is to be up all night, every night, awaiting unemployment numbers and dodging imaginary bullets?
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I hear you, Hanna, and I've sometimes thought about the downside of success for Hollywood women when their marriages fall apart. Cases in point: Hilary Swank wins an Oscar. She and her husband break up. Reese Witherspoon wins an Oscar. She and her husband break up. These are my only two examples, so perhaps I'm being too simplistic about it. Or do men really have a hard time when their wives are more successful than them? Then again, Brad Pitt doesn't seem to mind living in the shadow of Angelina Jolie (probably not many men would mind living anywhere in the vicinity of her shadow), but the paint hasn't dried yet on that relationship.
And two more examples. Why do even some of the most beautiful women in the world get screwed around on? Cases in point: Halle Berry and Elizabeth Hurley.
And the final case in point: Bill and Hillary Clinton. I think he's going mad that she can run for president this year and he can't ever again!
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So here's a question to the men out there: Do we think this story will get less play because of an undercurrent of pity for Thomas Athans; i.e., Men who are married to more powerful women are justified in their straying, to satisfy their sense of manhood? Michael Lewis once wrote a sort-of-but-not-really joking column in the Los Angeles Times about how the mark of a great man these days was marrying a woman more famous than he was and then destroying her career. Sir Denis Thatcher was always a figure of some fun in Great Britain, endlessly spoofed in Private Eye, known for calling his wife "The Boss," and subject of cuckold jokes featuring Ronald Reagan.
As for starting a new XX Top 10 List of Pols Who Don't Cheat: The only problem with that is, it will lead us to glorify the overly ascetic types, such as the latest incarnation of Barack Obama, as portrayed in Maureen Dowd's column this morning: no chocolate, no chocolate cake, no white-chocolate frosting, ("too decadent for me"). Affairs, presumably, also fall into that category.
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No, not the politicians' spouses who can't keep away from prostitutes .... Before it gets forgotten in a flood of Big Beaver jokes, I wanted to pick up on what Juliet wrote:
I saw that BBC poll about world-perceptions-of-America too, and reckoned it was interesting only because it reinforces something I know from observation and anecdote: That this year's U.S. election campaign has had a stunning, transformative, whatever-adjective-you-want impact on foreign perceptions of the United States. Partly this is because the process has been so genuinely surprising, unlike, say, the Russian process—or indeed the British process—in which the leader annoints his successor. Also, I've recently become aware that most of the world thinks segregation still exists in the United States—this despite Powell, Condi, four decades of post-civil-rights-movement politics etc. Whether he wins or not, Obama's candidacy has done more to change that view than any amount of public diplomacy money ever could.
As for the world liking Germany and Japan more than us, or hating us more than Russia, I wouldn't worry about it: Most people in most countries simply know a lot more—a LOT more—about the U.S. and U.S. politics than they do about, say, Russia and Russian politics, so they have strong opinions. Maybe we should sponsor more tourism there (Siberia in January?) as an antidote. And we could send Debbie Stabenow's husband too.
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The good news is, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow did not hold a news conference to say she was sticking by her hubby of five years after he confessed to police that he'd been with a prostitute. On the contrary, after the news came out, Stabenow didn't show up at a previously schedule press availability; instead, she put out a compact, two-sentence statement calling her mate's behavior "very disturbing and serious.''
The bad news, beyond the obvious: The hooker was arrested, but the john wasn't? What kind of nonsense is that, that he gets off with only a ticket for driving with a suspended license? Post-9/11, cops are seriously staking out the hotel rooms of prostitutes-in-training? And post-this latest spate of sex scandals, readers still see this sort of story in a partisan light? Most shocking to me were the comments appended to the story in today's Detroit Free Press -- from Democrats saying hey, at least he's not a toe-tapper like that Republican hypocrite Larry Craig. And from Republicans and even some Obama supporters laughing it up that this somehow shows the moral superiority of their team: "Obama is getting more and more supers to rally behind him,'' one poster said. "But the ones Billary have sewn up are the adulterers and their spouses.'' Jeez, can't we at least admit that human failings are bipartisan? Though the Free Press story notes portentously that Hillary Clinton once attended a fundraiser for the former employer of this doofus, I don't see how voters could possibly conclude that this has anything to do with anything.
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From Cullen Seltzer, a lawyer in Richmond, Va., who has written for Slate, on the tenacious hold of the billable hour:
Here's the rub and why the billable hour will always be a relevant factor in legal work: The only thing lawyers have to sell is their time. We don't make anything. We can spend months, or even years, of very successful lawyering and, at the end of the engagement, have only an abstraction (vindication of a right, an entitlement to property) to show for the work. Our most eloquent arguments are ephemeral and, when the case is over, valueless. So when our firm quotes a flat fee, we do some very rudimentary math. We figure, as best we can at the very beginning of a case, how long it will take us, working efficiently, to do the legal work the client requests. We then multiply those hours by the hourly rate that we hope to collect. That rate, by the way, is a function of what we need to bill to keep the lights on plus the profit we think we reasonably deserve for our work which is, in turn, at least in part a function of what we think the market will bear. Then we add 10% to account for unknowns.
After all that, we explain that calculus to clients. More often than not, clients opt to pay by the billable hour. They correctly understand that paying lawyers for the time they actually expend is fairest to all concerned. Now, do we compete on the basis of our rates? Of course. And not just that, we compete on the basis of our experience, training, and substantive knowledge. We try to explain that we are not just advocates but counselors. Those aren't just the ethical demands of our profession; they are the essence of what people hire lawyers to do. Some will say that lawyers who bill by the hour have an incentive to work more slowly and less efficiently. There is a term for lawyers who indulge that temptation. Thieves. No tinkering with billing schemes or revolution in accounting will solve that problem.
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I thought this factoid from the article was striking, too, and sad. Of the 20-year-old prostitute: "She told police she had only been working as a prostitute for about a week and didn’t know how many men had visited her the day she was arrested, according to the report."
Let's see, four men an hour ... an eight-hour day, or whatever ... ugh.
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Last week I proposed gelding politicians. This week, I propose gelding their spouses. U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow's husband, Thomas Athans, was just caught in a prostitution sting. Some choice quotes from the Detroit Free Press:
"Athans was pulled over by police on I-75 minutes after leaving the Residence Inn on Livernois, just east of I-75 and south of Big Beaver, the evening of Feb. 26."
[...]
"On further questioning, he acknowledged he had paid the woman $150 for sex."
[...]
"Police went to the hotel after a detective working on Internet-based prostitution at hotels in the city came across a solicitation for sex on a Web site, backpage.com. Plainclothes detectives went to the hotel and set up a surveillance and watched Athans drive up, go inside and then leave about 15 minutes later."
So Athans is cheap, fast, and knows a punch line when he sees one.
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When I saw the headline "America's Global Image Stops Sinking in a Poll" on the New York Times Lede blog, I clicked on it eagerly, expecting (because I'm gullible) some moderate to good news. Sadly, the poll—a worldwide survey conducted by the BBC and GlobeScan—isn't very comforting.
On the plus side, America's reputation abroad has actually improved over the past year in 11 of 23 countries and worsened in just three. But 47 percent of responders still think the U.S. has a negative influence in the world, and just 35 percent think the U.S. has a positive influence.
Also, the world hates America more than it hates Russia, which is pretty amazing. We've only managed to stay ahead of four countries in favorability ratings—North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and Israel, which isn't much to brag about.
The Axis powers, meanwhile, are doing great: Germany and Japan are at the top of the "mainly positive influence" list. So stop yourself before trying the old "you'd be speaking German if it weren't for us" line on your anti-American friends in Europe.
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Last weekend, I finally got the chance to finish watching Frontline's excellent two-part, four-hour series, "Bush's War," which recounts in excruciating detail the events leading up to the Iraq war and the events of the war itself. I'm sure some will dismiss the series as radical, far-left propaganda.
But can someone please remind me why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the lot of them aren't in prison?
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Emily, Hanna:
Two points.
are showing that men, too--maybe not those at the crazy-competitive high end of the spectrum, but still, a lot of them--want to spend more time with their children, but feel forced not to by the current order of things. They work in offices that value inputs not outputs, to use the language of economics. Or they support wives who don't work because (they feel) they've been forced out by professions that do the same. Or they just can't manage their anxiety about whether they're masculine enough. Whatever. A workplace in which it was considered desirable for employees to be good parents--perhaps such a workplace would only exist if created by government regulation, but it could exist--might protect such men from themselves.
2. I take
your point, Hanna, though it seems to me that you don't need to have a single person working a story for hours at a time, no matter how fast-breaking it is. There's no reason not to put teams of people on a story, and indeed, I see more and more joint bylines, which strike me as a good thing, a humane thing. The real problem in journalism, from the point of view of labor, is the move to the Web and the sweatshop ethos that it engenders, in which you the writer and you the editor (more and more the same person) have to post and edit seven million times a day. This is not a professional issue. It's a money issue. You Slatesters are absurdly overburdened, keeping up with a magazine that gets more and more bloggy and podcasty and video-based, because the Washington Post Company still isn't sure which aspect of the publication will take off, and they aren't going to invest huge sums of money while they find out. We won't discover the way out of this trap until our bosses figure out how to turn a profit at this thing, which could take a while.
But that's no reason to despair. What if the way to make money on the web turns out to be providing value-added specialized information, rather than glorified newswire copy or know-nothing bloviating, such as I'm engaging in now? Then we'd see less reliance on general-assignment reporters and pundits and more reliance on reporters and writers with expertise. This is already true to a certain extent. I can already imagine several stories in which you simply have to have, say, Dafna Linzer or Hanna Rosin, despite their nannys' deadlines, because they know more about Middle East weaponry or evangelicals or what have you than anyone else on staff. A focus on conceptual scoops over plain-vanilla news scoops would do wonders for the flex-time crowd. I realize that this doesn't make life easier for the junior metro reporter, and that the more journalism is a commodified object rather than a specialized, artisanal product, the worse off she is, which is to say, this is a class issue more than a gender issue, but hey. Maybe she can put in her time before she has kids.
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I realize this is a problem most relevant to those enslaved to billable hours. But it is ringing my bell, too.
Remember, from nearly a decade ago, the name Joyce Purnick. She is the New York Times metro editor who caused an uproar by saying that female reporters with kids didn't perform nearly as well as the childless. Actually, that's not what she said. What she actually said was, that she didnt think she could have risen that far if she'd had a family. She was candid and wistful, about being 52 and childless. Still, that wasn't enough to keep the mothers from coming down on her head. Now, I didn't have kids at the time and didn't work at a newspaper, but even then this struck me as perfectly logical. Once I did start working at a a newspaper, and then had kids, it struck me as undeniably true. Newspapers don't have billable hours, but they run on a clock. What matters is not the pointless Japanese concept of face time but actual availability. News breaks at all hours (and most often later in the day). The more time you have to report, the better your story. If I were an editor looking at a big, complicated, breaking story, I would think twice before assigning it to someone who had to worry about relieving their nanny at 6. I imagine this is true if you're a manager at a graphic design firm facing a deadline, a surgeon, a salesman, all manner of professions that don't begin and end at a fixed time.
What's interesting to me about Susan Pinker is that she loves Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and yet has come back around to some modified version of biology is, in fact, destiny. She has not had some conservative conversion or disowned feminism, she has just arrived at what feels like the obvious. Pinker is a child psychologist, and her starting point is all the boys she saw in her practice who were obsessive, anti-social, mildly autistic. Then, 20 years later, she began to see these same boys showing up in the newspaper as successful entrepreuneurs and writers and lawyers. It turned out that these same traits that seemed to doom them in youth turned out to be helpful later on, by making them more prone to risktaking and singular focus. She then compared them with girls who'd started out with all the best grades, the best skills, the most promise. This pairing fascinates me because it happens to mimic exactly my household constellation. But also because it's a very clever way to structure the argument. By interviewing groups of such people, she finds that women, faced with the same opportunities and more, still make very different choices than men do. That all the years of gender-equity legislation haven't led to equal results. That men succeed at the extremes, both high and low, while women tend to moderate. She even gives some props to (gasp!) Larry Summers, whose views about women in science her research confirms. She writes in a voice that seems outside both the gender wars and cold science. Somehow, it hit home with me.
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Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)
One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.
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Dear Emily,
Once, at a dinner party honoring the retirement of a friend of my father-in-law, I sat next to the law firm's former managing partner. You would have heard of the firm; it's one of those with huge offices in New York and Washington and all over the world. And perhaps because this man was himself retired, he was unusually frank about things. One thing he was frank about was the way law firms treat women.
He wasn't going to talk to me about sexism or harassment or anything like that, he said. His complaint was a structural one. Given that half the graduating classes of the top law schools are women, he said, and that as many women rank at the top of their classes as men, law firms that want to stay competitive in their recruiting have to figure out how to make their workplaces more appealing to women. I was thrilled to hear that the young women he had been interviewing had been very clear about wanting to have families and very forward-thinking in the way they negotiated before they even took a job. I don't remember my generation—my college classmates—being so realistic. We were going to muddle through, and in the end vast numbers of us dropped out. Young men were also asking about the firm's family policies, he said. They saw their female counterparts negotiating deals that would let them spend more time with their children, and they wanted deals like that, too.
But, my friend said, law firms are never going to be able to keep their promises not to discriminate against lawyers who turn into caregivers, are never going make their workplaces truly family-friendly, unless they change the way they do business. The billable hour, he said: That's the problem. As long as the measure of productivity is the billable hour, lawyers fighting to get home to their children will always look less productive than lawyers who can work all night. Said my friend the managing partner: We all know lawyers who can get twice as much done in the same time as other lawyers, but those lawyers are not rewarded for their efficiency, or, at least, they're not rewarded enough—because they're not bringing in money. And we all know women who become twice as productive in the same time after they've had children, because they know they've got no slack at the end of the day. They're not rewarded, either. To take an obvious example of how status is allotted to the lawyer with the most available hours, he said, imagine you're a partner who has to pick someone to head up an important case. You are never going to chose someone who goes home at 5 p.m. Your team leader will to be a person who can put in as many hours as it takes, both to keep the client happy and to keep the firm's bill as high as it can be.
In other words, he said, in the through-the-looking-glass economy of the law firm, efficiency is a lesser criterion than availability. The irony of this upside-down ethos, my friend observed, is that it costs clients quite a lot of money. Imagine, he said, that law firms billed by the project, rather than by the hour, and that they bid against each other for projects. And now imagine how much lower a bid a firm could make if it rewarded its lawyers for working quickly rather than giving them incentives to work slowly. Clients would save money, law firms would be more competitive, and efficient lawyers would advance to the heads of their firms. All this is quite obvious to everyone involved in managing a law firm, he said. But for reasons too complicated to get into here—though the word "inertia" appears in each of them—no one wants to change the way things are done. Or maybe they don't want to be the first to do so. And yet until they do, he said, the needs of law firms and the needs of families will always be at odds with each another.
Now that's just one man's rant, of course. But it struck me as worth repeating.
Best,
Judith