-
sponsorship
Numbers are supposed to explain everything that happens in the economy, and there are numbers that can help illustrate why a couple thousand people assembled in a Long Island parking lot were so hellbent on out-consuming one another that they were not above stepping on a thirtysomething overnight stock worker named Jdimytai Damour as he literally lay dying. While same-store sales are projected to fall nearly 7% this year from
last across America's retailers, Wal-Mart is expected to outperform its
peers by 9 percentage points. While the end result for Wal-Mart is only a 2% gain over last year's sales, the trajectory, relative to the rest of retail-land, and the rest of the economy, and the plunging net worths of everyone with a house or a retirement plan, and the general sense that those trends can only over the next few quarters and years continue, is impressive. Here is how impressive: many Wal-Marts reportedly ran out of cash to make change before banks opened! Cash, which people are using allegedly because the credit crisis has cut off people from debt -- but have these people never heard of debit cards? Are they so overstretched that their bank accounts have been snowed under by dozens of overdraft fees? (Hey, I've been there!) But if that's the case, what the hell, in this economy, are they doing buying anything -- much less leaving the house after a 3,000 calorie meal to line up in the cold for twelve hours to buy it?
I have been on the Black Friday beat before, when I covered retail for the Wall Street Journal, and my sense was always that people shopped on Black Friday because it was Black Friday. It was, like holidays and sporting events, a tradition. The sales were often no better than they were in the desperate days before Christmas, days which are sure to be direly desperate this year. Truly price-sensitive consumers often found better deals on the internet, and anyway, truly rational price-sensitive consumers recognize the opportunity cost of all that sitting out in a cold exurban parking lots is way too steep when considered against those same hours spent working time and a half. Nope, it was tradition -- a distinctly so-grotesque-as-to-have-become-a-parody-of-itself one, like eating contests or bull fights or American Idol auditions, perhaps, but a tradition nonetheless. And traditions, while comfortable, are in no way rational. The populace will take much longer to discard them than is necessarily efficient.
Which underscores a larger point about this sickening tragedy, and sales. Retailers and the market shy away from making grand pronouncements on the basis of isolated events, but maybe here our lawmakers can show leadership: maybe ban Black Friday -- by forcing retailers to make all Black Friday prices, or all prices selling merchandise below wholesale cost, available on the internet, since all these hard-core "loss-leader" tactics to drive traffic to stores only really serves to whip shoppers into an irrational frenzy which is only dubiously justified by any profit it generates. I would venture not a single person working in retail anywhere on the totem pole really likes Black Friday for anything other than psycho-sentimental reasons. It's a pain, it's cutthroat, it's subject to an absurd degree of Wall Street scrutiny and you end up losing money on the vast majority of the products whose prices you slash only to pray you make it back before December 24. It is, in other words, irrational, and by extension inefficient.
Until recently sales were highly regulated in much of Europe, confined to certain seasons, something American retail executives found socialistic but which actually had the effect of minimizing waste, creating retailers like H&M that controlled their inventory tightly and were capable of delivering merchandise on an as-needed "just in time" regular replenishment schedule, so that no one got stuck trying to offload 16,000 green checked leotards that bombed on the store shelves or whatever. As a result of these laws and other factors, consumption culture in Europe was and remains comparatively civil. And while there are many things the world needs now, civility is not a bad start.
-
sponsorship
The economy is on life support, yesterday's bloodbath in Bombay has thrust terrorism suddenly back to the forefront of the international agenda, a record number of Americans are on food stamps…well, here is something I for which I am thankful: that I am not Lois Feldman of Carroll, Iowa. Who says she does not recall stumbling drunkenly into the men's room during a football game at the University of Minnesota Metrodome last weekend, having sex with a stranger 12 years her junior in a stall as a crowd assembled to watch and cheer or even being subsequently arrested by the police, to whom she could not even recall her correct middle name, for indecent exposure. "What Lois Feldman, 38, will remember," writes the Des Moines Register, "is the humiliation afterward." She's been prank-called by all manner of trolls and fired from her job as a receptionist, but credits her husband Kelly, who regrets not accompanying her to the bathroom, for being "supportive."
Uhhhh, yeah, maybe he's supportive because it sounds like she was…raped? Not that Feldman is using that term. Nor does she seem like the, er, "type." Nor is it clear just how drunk her partner in misdemeanor crime, Ross Walsh -- who came to the game with his girlfriend, for Chrissakes -- was when Mrs. Feldman showed up in his stall, or however it happened.
But I'll be interested to see how this news plays out on the feminist blogosphere, which does not seem to have yet seized upon it. Because it's possible Feldman was the victim of what Cosmo last year controversially termed gray rape -- a term I halfheartedly endorsed, because I think it captures the fogginess of circumstance that enables people on both sides of an unintentional incident to understand, make sense of and ultimately get past what happened.
It's also possible, of course, that she was the victim of a predatory overgrown frat boy with serious mental issues. I don't know, and I don't have a strong view on this; my inclination is to hope it's the former, and that one day the Feldmans can joke about their Larry Craig incident -- but either way, she doesn't remember. What is true is that it wasn't so much the event that traumatized her: it was the aftermath. And while it is clear that whatever the case, Feldman was the victim of a lot more than her own inebriation, her own employers won't stand by her. It's sickeningly reminiscient of a depressing Modern Love last year written by a woman who'd been publicly date raped by a frat boy her freshman year, only to find herself a pariah in her own sorority, an event she blamed for turning her into a misogynist. Ugh. Well, the bad news is that crap like this doesn't stop happening after one deactivates from one's sorority. The good news is that Feldman, a married mother of three, is courageous enough to tell the media exactly what happened. She has nothing to be ashamed about, of course -- beyond being a lightweight, which I find admirable -- but there a lot of societies that don't see it that way.
-
sponsorship
News from the trial of Lori Drew, the mother whose MySpace hoax allegedly led her 13-year-old daughter's friend Megan Meier to commit suicide: Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor charges of accessing computers without authorization but not the more serious charge of conspiracy.
Drew apparently set up the fictional "Josh" profile that became a conduit through which her daughter, a teenage employee, and others sent cruel messages to Megan, including one that said, "The world would be a better place without you." That final message, which apparently directly preceded Megan's suicide, is said to have been typed by Drew's employee Ashley Grills.
I'm not familiar enough with the laws to know whether this trial should have happened in the first place or ended appropriately—though it does seem like a slightly overreaching attempt to wring justice out of a heartbreaking scenario. But Drew is without a doubt guilty of stupendous, mind-boggling stupidity and poor judgment. She was apparently inspired to set up the profile out of a desire to protect her daughter, who had a sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy relationship with Megan. Though it contradicts the morals of the innumerable trend articles, news segments, and cautionary Law & Order: SVU story lines, maybe it's best to leave the Wild West of social networking to the kids. Obviously, some controls on kids' Internet use are important. But attempting to co-opt their means of communication and socializing without understanding the rules and the potential for abuse can be disastrous. Drew gave her daughter, her daughter's friends, and Grills the means to torture a depressed girl. They could've done it without Drew (I'm sure "Josh" isn't the first fake profile ever set up to toy with targeted girl's emotions), but having a mother involved legitimized behavior that most kids try to hide from the parental units.
I am eternally grateful that the pinnacle of Internet communication was IMing when I was in high school.
-
sponsorship
Melinda,
Thanks for sharing news of Laura Bush's memoir. I'll admit, I've always liked Laura. I don't think it's fair to project our hopes and dreams onto another woman just because she's married to the president. (Meghan's excellent post about Michelle Obama sums up my feelings well.) Yes, it's a position that offers much power, but if a first lady is not comfortable doing big things in the glare of such a bright spotlight, she's not going to be very good at it. Her more traditional first lady role of working to improve literacy and raising awareness on breast cancer and heart disease might not be world-changing, but it suits her.
As for her book, well, I rarely buy memoirs. I find them generally self-indulgent and not terribly revealing. Did we get all the dirt on Bill and Monica in his memoir? Doubtful. If there's anything to be said about Laura's stated intention to write a book that is "positive ... with a minimum of criticism," it's that, well, the honesty is refreshing. So, no, I won't buy it. The vast majority of the reading I do these days is children's picture books, but, if I have energy enough at the end of the day to do more than curl up with my remote and whatever's on the DVR, I'm going to sit down with a novel. (I figure I'm only two or three years behind on the NYT best-seller list.) Would I love to know what life was like in the White House for Laura, and for George, the last eight years? Sure. But I would never expect it to come from Laura.
-
sponsorship
Our enigmatic current first lady is ready to write a memoir, and has reportedly promised to refrain from revealing anything at all in it; is that supposed to be reverse-psychology PR? According to the AP, Laura Bush has "vowed to write a positive book, with a minimum of criticism.'' So Rachael, would you buy that book? If she called it, I Read, I Smoke, and I Admire, though, I would pay full price. And for What Was I Thinking? I would pre-order.
-
sponsorship
Apologies for the caps, but this NINETY EIGHT POINT FONT Drudge EXCLUSIVE about the prediction of one Igor Panarin that the United States was going to collapse and break into six separate nation-states (not including Alaska, which he advises Putin to annex) DEMANDS TO BE READ if you haven't done so already. Who is Igor Panarin? I'm not entirely sure, I'm on an iffy internet bus connection and lacking the instawisdom I might gain from a Nexis search. But if you Google him the Facebook page of a guy named Igor Panarin leaning down and holding his mouth to a watermelon will appear on the first search page. I don't think that guy is him, but it's symbolic. Because it's pretty silly! As is the thought of China and Russia becoming the world's regulators and standard-bearers or that the Pacific Coast secession will be led by its "growing Chinese population."
The big failure of Igor's logic, I know you'll be eager to hear because his case is so convincing, is that while he is right to point out that the people who have all the money control what happens in the world, they did not get that way -- not Putin nor the Chinese Communist Party nor the handful of plutocrats who profited off the mushrooming of that risk shift I was talking about -- by pretending they were Genghis Khan. They all have some interest in that money not suddenly turning out to be worthless. They do not think anarchy is that cool. I was looking for something to be thankful for!
-
sponsorship
Meghan, I think I agree with your diagnosis but perhaps not your prescription. It’s true that every woman in the public eye in America is instantly run through the sum-of-her-choices machine and found wanting. From Sarah Palin to Angelina Jolie, it seems nobody has calibrated her responsibilities to her job and her family in ways the rest of us can applaud. It’s also true that as women we run ourselves through the sum-of-our-choices machine on pretty much a daily basis. (This morning my 3-year-old’s preschool teacher handed me a laminated book of Our Feelings, in which my son is featured in a desolate-looking photo with the caption “I am sad when my mommy goes for walks and leaves me alone.” Awesome. Immortalized for life as the Mommy Who Ditches.)
I agree that any story about women and choices is mommy catnip, a way for us to check our own bargains and compromises against everyone else’s, which really increases our efficiency by allowing us to beat up on ourselves and others at the same time. But I wonder what’s required to, as you put it, “break free.” I don’t know if it requires reconciling ourselves to the choices we have made or fighting harder for better, fuller choices for women. For Michelle Obama that might mean redefining the role of first lady as something more substantial than Traister imagines. For the rest of us, it may require giving up on the idea that if we take turns in our marriages, the choices for women will get easier or better. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her.
-
sponsorship
Ann, I have long been creeped out by the endless sex advice doled out by Christian ministries. This practice began in the '70s by none other than Tim LaHaye, of Left Behind fame, who wrote a very explicit guide to what he then called "the marital act." What began as a slightly squeamish enterprise has now turned into a publishing and preaching empire, with hundreds of guides and manuals extolling the joys of "Christian sex." (Dagmar Herzog chronicles the history of this genre in this book I reviewed for the Times.) Many of the books seem like thin excuses for Christian authors to titillate their readers with so called "morality tales," a la Daniel Defoe. All of them leave teens with a confusing message: Sex is dangerous; it could leave you emotionally scarred, sick, even kill you. Until you get married, and then it's godly and awesome.
-
sponsorship
Ladies, gentlemen: Are any of you, like me, getting tired of all the discussion surrounding Michelle Obama's "choices"? Yesterday in the New York Times: a long piece about women worrying whether Michelle "will become a pioneer or a dispiriting symbol of the limitations of modern working motherhood." And last night on CNN: a spiraling segment about Michelle and what she "represents" to all the “little girls out there.” So here’s a woman who has a powerful job and decided to give it up to support her husband when he became president. Does that really send such a terrible message? Or is the terrible message our obsession with scrutinizing her choices and finding fault? Rebecca Traister recently wrote a good piece about the "momification" of Michelle, critiquing the fact that the media spend so much time on her role as a mother. But I think the problem is more complicated: The media know that all they have to do is utter the words "work" and "mother" and "choice" and everyone gets all frothed up, like Pavlov’s dogs at the dinner bell.
To me, the real difficulty in being a professional woman today is that no matter what you do—whether you make the decision to stay at home or go to work, to take time off to help a sick parent or to stay focused on your work—someone criticizes it. Often, you yourself criticize it. You spend lots of (otherwise useful) energy wondering if you’re doing "the right thing." At this point in time, women are called on to be both individuals and symbols—and they treat one another that way. And sure, symbolism is important: I’m a poet, for god’s sake; I get it. But if women are going to push forward toward further equality, the media has to let go of our obsession with turning powerful women’s choices into representative dramas—from Hillary to Michelle to Sarah Palin. Because this psychological wheel-spinning is starting to hold us back, I think—it’s the kind of obsessive "should we, shouldn’t we" that happens when you’re at the end of a relationship and can’t figure out whether to break free.
So, let’s break free. As Michelle herself has said, being first lady is a powerful platform. And the modern professional marriage, for better or for worse, usually requires some alternating in who gets to take the professional lead (that is, if you want your kids to get any attention). It’s too bad, sure, that there aren’t more men stepping up to support their wives—but it’s not as though that’s not happening in our political culture. (Hi there, Todd Palin!) The best way Michelle Obama can act as a role model for women right now is not by making the decision any one of us would make (because we’d all make different decisions), but by reminding us that life is fleeting, and we ought to immerse ourselves in the opportunities and joys of our own life as it exists. Not as it might exist.
Oh, but also this, Michelle: In eight years, tell your husband it’s your turn.
-
sponsorship
Hanna and Melinda, did you read the Times article yesterday about the evangelical approach to marital sex? In mid-November, the Rev. Ed Young, pastor of the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, was up in the pulpit, urging his flock to fortify their unions with Seven Days of Sex. "A sexperiment," he called it as he sermonized in front of a big bed to an audience presumed to be not getting nearly enough of it. In my uptight, blue state way, I found myself wondering about the kids ("a word that Mr. Young told church members stands for ‘keeping intimacy at a distance successfully' ")—particularly teenagers.
Talk about a sex-ed message that seems tone deaf to adolescents, no matter how you slice it. For any teens who might have been in the congregation listening to the exhortations to parental "whoopee," can you think of any greater gross out? And if they could bring themselves to think about it, the reverend's diagnosis of sex-starved couples undermined the promises preached to youth: These teens are being told to save themselves, the better to enjoy the bliss that arrives with marriage. I wish I thought the spectacle of their elders' confusion could help kids see what a complicated business sex can be, but somehow I don't think that's what sinks in.
-
sponsorship
Oy. All due respect, et cetera. True love does not wait. True love necks, cops a feel. True love tries to put off the inevitable and distracts itself giving a blow job. True love gags a little bit, momentarily forgets it is true love, re-evaluates itself—if this does not feel particularly loving, does my selfless dedication to this higher purpose at least underscore its truth?—oh crap here come the Park Police …
Now, I speak as an avowed nonbeliever in the sacredness of sex. I have committed the act hundreds of times, not always under the influence of alcohol, and never once felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.* And I am one of those heathens who has run the numbers on America's Gross National Sin way too many times to be particularly inclined to get up in the morning if not for some deeply-ingrained irrational hope that some savior, perhaps under the guise of a cleverly formulated stimulus package designed amid a powerful resurgence of cultural humanism, might descend and forgive the bulk of them. I feel the Holy Spirit all the time, at the deli and the movies and sometimes even looking at pictures of children that light up when they call their parents' iPhones.
You never hit "ignore" on your kid. That feels like a sin. And adultery—not redefined Clintonesquely to include premarital sex, but full-on cheating— feels like a sin. Merely flirting with cheating generally feels bad enough to deter wusses like me, and maybe that is why I haven't married, but anyway, the point of this is that the older I get the more confounded I am that so many Americans strive so hard to ask our kids—who are, to be sure, the byproducts of our screwing but we hopefully weren't thinking of them at the time—to take sex seriously as a sin.
I grew up the eldest child in a very conservative Catholic family (whose conservatism has basically been all but decimated by time and events and exposure to the Simpsons, thank Jesus or this week would be painful). Growing up, I thought premarital sex was sinful. But I had spent a few formative years during the first Bush administration in China, a society that had declared an entirely different battery of activities to be sinful: reading, expressing opinions, owning stuff—especially if it in any way acknowledged the past—failing to renounce one's parents if they happened to be bourgeois counterrevolutionary running dogs, etc. etc. Even at 12, it occurred to me that (protected) sex, if one could find a place to have some, might be the one uncorrupted joy experienced in the lifetimes of most of the dreary-faced adults I saw (bicycling, very mirthlessly, to work each day) on the street. I remember feeling so awful for them. I remember feeling terribly sinful that I could not, or didn't want to, give anyone "half" of what I had, as Jesus would have, not that there was any real practical way of doing that, which, by the way, is a big reason communism didn't work out.
But anyway, the point is that I never felt remotely that sinful about sex. I think most of the guilt that we feel about sex has to do with confusion we've created by dubbing it a "sin." Of the various reasons I've felt guilty about honest, unadulterated sex—does he think I am his girlfriend now? why did I watch that porn?—it always seems to go back to fundamental dishonesty. Elevating sex to sin, that is to say, was the original sin.
*Ha ha, boner joke optional here.
(And P.S., any future kids of mine who might ever stumble across this blog post or anything else I've ever written on the subject, there are a LOT of conditions, footnotes, and appendices to all this and by the way, I was nearly 19 when I lost my virginity, and as far as I'm concerned, you can wait that long, too.)
-
sponsorship
Not sure this is a liberal-vs.-conservative divide exactly, Hanna, or even a religious-vs.-secular one, though that's probably closer to the mark. It's definitely not only in red states that parents would prefer that their kids delay having sex. How to communicate that while also teaching them about birth control—does the one message undercut the other?—is an old, old problem. And because people being people it's not always communicated perfectly or received gladly doesn't mean there's no point in trying.
At a meeting on sex ed in Sunday school at our church last spring, one of the other parents remarked that even those of us who don't believe everything the church teaches about sex want our kids to believe it, and everybody laughed. Only, when it came down to actually talking to my kids, I felt compelled to explain both the church teaching on birth control and why I see it more as an ideal than an absolute. Did I worry about this obviously mixed message? Yes. Do I get the appeal of a more clear-cut approach in either direction? You betcha. But I see risk in punting on either the moral or the practical dimension of sexuality, and in the end, that's a line every parent has to locate for himself. One of my many hopes for Obamamerica is that we will no longer see "red state sex'' as a distinct phenomenon.
-
sponsorship
Melinda, it’s a fine idea to tell teenagers to wait. Except that it really doesn’t work. This is not liberal wishful thinking. Researchers have pried into the sex lives of abstinence-pledgers and discovered that at best, taking the pledge delays sex by 18 months. But it also encourages more of them to have unprotected sex. (See my review of the book, Forbidden Fruit, for Slate.) Teens who have pledged don’t really admit they are having sex until they’ve already had it, which is kind of too late for the condom (Witness Bristol. Also read Margaret Talbot on the messy realities of red state sex.) My other favorite sexy virgin of the screen is Lyla Garrity, the True Love Waits hottie on Friday Night Lights. For the first couple of episodes, she is snuggling with her boyfriend and dreaming about their wedding. Then she stumbles into an accidental kiss with her boyfriend’s best friend, and one scene later we see her getting up from his couch, pulling on her underwear. This is reality. It’s only in the vampire version that what the preacher said comes true: Go beyond the kiss, and you’re risking your life.
-
sponsorship
Emily, Larry Kudlow and I don't agree on much, but we seem for now to be equally satisfied with the appointment of Christina Romer to chair the Council of Economic Advisers. Larry—and yes, the CNBC is still on; it's gotten to the point where I feel anxious when it's not on—is convinced on the basis of Romer's critiques of the New Deal that she is a "secret supply-sider" who believes cutting taxes, not using them to fund public programs that create jobs, is the way out of recession. I like her because of what she told the Times last month about the distinctly horrifying nature of this particular credit crisis: "If you told me we were spending like crazy to build schools and send everyone to college," she said, "that would have infinitely different implications than borrowing like crazy to finance current consumption.” Hmmm, interesting thought!
I'm pretty sure Kudlow's honeymoon with Romer will be short-lived unless he's intellectually honest enough—"audacious" thought but one can hope!—to recognize that while federal debt as a percentage of the GDP has shrunk steadily and considerably since the post-Depression era, consumer debt has rocketed from the mid-single digits in 1943 to 250 percent today in a phenomenon wonks call the Great Risk Shift that, along with the fact that "tax hikes on the rich" under FDR meant a 90 percent tax bracket, render most cautionary fiscal policy tales learned during the New Deal sort of completely nonapplicable.
I take these statistics, incidentally, from a Carlyle Group Power Point presentation forwarded to me by an i-banker friend; Wall Street recognizes this stuff—that's why they're so scared. Yesterday I was flipping through old clips from the Korean economic crisis in the late '90s to see if there wasn't anything America —or its auto companies—might learn from that country's astounding bounce back from a devastating nearly 7 percent GDP contraction it sustained in 1996, a recovery that, among many other things, catapulted ailing Hyundai Motors to bona fide auto brand greatness. And … not much, it looks like! Korea had sort of the opposite problems as us. Like … a fundamentally robust manufacturing sector that just needed a little fiscal discipline applied to it. And a somewhat stodgy cluelessness about marketing, design and other things "cool." And … too many households saving too much money.
Those problems, mercifully enough for the Koreans, turned out not to be insurmountable! I am happy to say I do not worry that Christina Romer would be so glib in describing ours. That is about the only thing I'm happy about.
-
sponsorship
Welcome, Moe, and a question: Last week, Megan McArdle of the Atlantic expressed furious dismay that Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist and former Slate columnist, would not be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers because the Obama team wanted a woman in the post instead. McArdle was worried because she thought Cecelia Rouse was going to get the job, aruging that as a labor economist, Rouse was the wrong speciality. Maybe this is moot because, as you say, it's Christina Romer of UC-Berkeley who's chairing the CEA instead. Her expertise looks all too relevant: It includes "identification of monetary shocks" and "causes of the Great Depression." Meanwhile, Goolsbee has been out in front plenty for Obama, I'm glad to see, for one thing, because I had a great time editing him when he wrote for Slate.
So to get to my question, can we simply revel in the well-deserved rise of women to the top of Obama's economic heap, or do we have to worry that Romer leapfrogged there?
-
sponsorship
Good afternoon, XX-ers! I am Moe, and I come to you today from my couch in New York's Lower East Side, where I am watching CNBC as usual, because nothing is more uplifting to the recently downsized employee than frenetic up-to-the-minute coverage of the collapse of the American economy! The big story today is the Treasury Department's massive bailout of Citigroup, about which I don't have much of an opinion, other than it seems more specific and tailored toward protecting the taxpayer than previous massive bailouts. This is no thanks, I presume, to our lame-duck president (who just actually managed to fail, during his brief statement on the matter, to correctly identify the bank whose $300 billion worth of assets his administration just guaranteed, stumbling over the word "Citigroup" and finally, lamely, sputtering "Citicorp.") But it most assuredly did involve the one unimpeachably capable Bush appointee that has been involved in this disaster: FDIC chairman Sheila Bair. Sheila Bair was Barney Frank's recommendation for the role of Obama's treasury secretary, and if nothing else we can be fairly assured she didn't get to be his favorite regulator by flirting with him, which is to get to the point I'm trying to get to: Sheila Bair is a woman! So, as it happens, is the newly appointed chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Berkeley prof Christina Roma, and the (superpretty) Princeton labor economist pictured here, Cecilia Rouse, reportedly a shoe-in for a CEA spot, along with alleged solicitor general shoe-in Preeta Bansal. Not to mention hedge fund manager Sandra Manske, who just wrote an angry e-mail excoriating the greed of her peers in the industry, many of whom have closed down their funds or suspended redemptions altogether while pocketing huge fees and passing the losses on to their investors.
Women, in other words, are a lot more visible in the job of cleaning up the disasters of the past 10 years than they were perpetuating and profiting from it. Certain women are outraged that this appears to be by design. This woman is not. But this week I'll shine my Google search field on the careers and personalities of some of the women likely to play major roles restoring our capitalism/democracy to working order and try to assess there gender has been a help/hindrance to their missions.
-
sponsorship
True Love Waits (and waits and waits) was also the theme of my favorite show as a kid: Dark Shadows, starring the tortured, sorta good-guy vampire Barnabas Collins, who loved eyeliner, juggled relationships, and mostly kept his baser instincts in check. His girlfriends included trashy fellow bloodsucker Angelique—see what giving in got her?—and Josette, the love of his 18th-century life, who had only one dress and it was white; get it? Though long dead, Josette did sometimes walk out of her portrait to hang out with Barnabas. He was also much taken with, but never put the bite on, her modern-day doppelganger, Victoria WInters, the governess at Collinwood—played by Alexandra Isles, for whom I named my dolly in the first grade. (Sadly, Alexandra's later career included a real-life stint as Klaus von Bulow's mistress; Victoria would have known better.) Did the True Love Waits abstinence movement really fail, though, Hanna? Or is it more like AA, which doesn't work all that reliably but is still the best option we've got? Not saying sexuality is a medical condition, but if these programs help kids wait even a while, until they're maybe not ready but readier, isn't that a good thing?
-
sponsorship
Hanna, I haven't seen Twilight, but I confess I'm dying to. I heard about the books for the first time this summer. A few 13-year-old girls I was around were obsessively devouring them, lounging on one another and gasping periodically. I asked them what made the Twilight saga good; they liked the story, they said. The marketing must have helped too: Target had HEAPS of the books on sale for a sticker price of $9.99. (Now it's on sale for $6.04.) I probably will see the movie, if for no other reason than to have a séance with a previous self—all those shots of pale, earnest teenagers in the preview sent me right back to yesteryear's adolescent yearning.
More meaningfully, I am struck by how many vampire-related cultural artifacts are cropping up around us, from Twlight to True Blood and more. Why? Your theory—that Twilight paradoxically advocates for safe sex by describing dangerous sex—is ingenious. But to me, the trend in vampires also has something to do with what I take to be a broad cultural anxiety about sex. Namely, this: Are we reaching a kind of sexual end point—a point of total saturation? At this point, our screen culture is so oversexed that liberals and conservatives alike are getting fed up with it. Turn on the TV, open a magazine, or take a walk, and you'll find that sex is everywhere. So what makes it sexy? (The other day a friend and I passed a subway ad that read "Bad Girls" and featured a clutch of skinny girls wearing cheap satin dresses. My friend rolled his eyes and said, "Bad girls are such a cliché—they're not bad anymore.")
I also wonder, though, if True Blood and Twilight might be read as an economic metaphor. Like Twilight, the vampires in True Blood mostly drink nonhuman blood (synthetic, in this case). But they still have to exercise a hell of a lot of restraint. Is there some coded message here about Americans and decadent materialism? It's as if the shows secretly convey some note to self: Too much appetite will get you fleeced. What looks sexy (a great mortgage) is actually deadly. I don't mean it's that literal, of course; but the subterranean anxiety of True Blood does seem to me to be as cultural as it is sexual.
-
sponsorship
I have to say, I never saw the appeal of vampire cinema. Classic Dracula lit, steeped in metaphor, or even Anne Rice variations on a theme, OK, but I missed the cultural wave of Buffy and never saw the draw of bloodsucking dudes on-screen, even cute ones. Hanna's observation that the movie Twilight, a giant hit, by the way, is a template for Christian tenets of sexual abstinence, has changed my perspective. For sexually developing young women of all religious persuasions, timid about the physical and emotional risks of early sex, I suddenly see the allure of a nice safe vegetarian vampire.
-
sponsorship
I know none of you are 13-year-old girls, but did any of you see Twilight this weekend? It's a movie about vampire love based on the Harry Potter-for-girls blockbuster series by Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon mom. I loved it, but what struck me most is how much it's an advertisement for the True Love Waits movement. High-schooler Bella Swan falls in love with Edward Cullen, who it turns out is a vampire. He thirsts for her blood, gives her desperate yearning looks. But he controls himself. He is part of a clan of "vegetarian" vampires who have taught themselves to live on animal blood and pass in the human world. In one amazing erotic scene, he shows up in her bedroom and says he will kiss her if she holds really, really still, because if she moves he won't be able to control himself. (By which he means kill her.) They kiss once, and then spend the night talking and snuggling in her room. The problem the True Love Waits movement could never solve is how to get teens to stop after one kiss. This is why the movement failed, except among a small minority of the super committed, who saved even the first kiss until after marriage. The answer, which never seems to have occurred to conservative Christians, is to date a vampire.
-
sponsorship
I hate to say this, but I'm not a fan of a key piece of the challenge to Proposition 8 that same-sex marriage advocates are bringing in the California Supreme Court. By all means, ask the court to recognize the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed since it ushered in legalization last June. Laws shouldn't change retroactively, with marriages approved by the state one day and shunned the next. It's true that this case doesn't fit perfectly into the constitutional doctrine based on what's called the ex post facto clause, which prevents laws from changing up on people after the fact. (That's because traditionally, ex post facto applies to criminal laws.) But if ever there was a time for expanding that doctrine, for fairness' sake, this is it.
The part of the court challenge that makes me skittish is the claim that Prop 8 is simply unconstitutional because it's a major revision to California's constitution, instead of just an amendment, and so the legislature has to separately approve it. This sounds like legal jabber (a revision vs. an amendment--huh?), and I fear that the political price for a ruling like this would be too high. Last summer, the state supreme court took a big step by legalizing same-sex marriage. Now, like it or not, the voters have rejected that ruling. I'm not a fan of state referenda--they make it way too easy to pass bad laws, and California has suffered from them in the past. (Remember Prop 13, which decimated school funding?) But if you have a referendum system, you have to live with it. Or at least you don't turn to the branch of government farthest from the will of the electorate to overturn a law born of the process that's closest to the will of the government. To get out of the Prop 8 fix, California needs another amendment that reverses it. The current challenge is the right battle, but the wrong tactic.
-
sponsorship
Everyone lusts after stories of bad mothers—the worse, the juicier. As you might recall, in the late 1990s, at the peak of the Clinton-era culture wars, a moral panic arose over "dumpster" or "toilet" babies—infants abandoned by panicked, often teenage moms who had told no one they were expecting a child. In the spring of 1997, the nation was riveted by an especially horrific case. In New Jersey, 18-year old Melissa Drexler gave birth to a baby boy at the senior prom, stuffed the child into a trash bin, and returned to the dance floor.The baby died, and Drexler served three years in prison.
"Safe haven" or "baby Moses" laws emerged as a response to such crimes. They allowed parents to abandon their children to the state at designated locations without being charged with a crime. The pro-life movement, which heartily supported the laws, contended that baby abandonment was on the rise because Roe v. Wade had eroded the "culture of life." That is doubtful at best—the abandonment of disabled, weak, and, in many cultures, female newborns has taken place throughout human history. Nevertheless, it's a good thing to provide a safe, anonymous way for struggling parents to turn an infant over to the state. Though safe havens are used extremely rarely, there's no reason for them not to be there.
But these laws had unintended consequences. As the New York Times reported last month, after Nebraska passed a safe haven law in July, officials were shocked that parents were abandoning children as old as 17. Sometimes the parents were suffering from mental illness; often the children were. Many of the families were uninsured or underinsured. But whatever the cause, in the midst of a financial crisis, and in a state with some of the lowest spending on mental health and child welfare services, dozens of parents seemed so unable to cope that they were ready to abandon their kids.
Today, Nebraska responded by amending the safe haven law to apply only to babies younger than 30 days old. And while that will prevent these other families in crisis from coming out of the woodwork, it will do nothing to address the underlying problems of poverty and health care. Just a reminder that while we obsess about freakish stories in our fervor for identifying society's "worst mothers," bigger problems are often hidden in plain sight.
-
sponsorship
XX Factor contributors Emily Bazelon and Melinda Henneberger appear on Bloggingheads.tv today to discuss all things Obama and Hillary and also talk a little about abortion.
In this first clip, Emily and Melinda talk about whether Hillary might be too much of a neocon to be President Obama's secretary of state, and how unfortunate it would be if Bill Clinton's finances torpedoed his wife's shot at the job.
And here, Emily and Melinda discuss the seemingly outlandish claim that Catholic hospitals would be forced to shut down under Obama, if the Freedom of Choice Act passes. But Melinda's done some digging, and the act could require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. And she says that church leaders could decide to shutter the hospitals rather than sell them.
-
sponsorship
You have got to watch this. So she is going on..."values...convictions...policies...blah blah blah," Starbucks in hand, while that dude in the background is killing the turkey. I kid you not.
I can't decide if the video looks more like a) performance art b) fetish film or c) an Onion video.
Her last words; "I'll be in charge of the turkey."
Yeah, I bet you will.
-
sponsorship
It's heartening to hear that Janet Napolitano is most likely Obama's pick as secretary of Homeland Security. I profiled Napolitano for The American Prospect in July and spent some time with her in Phoenix. She's really smart, tough, and funny, dropping Monty Python lines in official meetings. A cabinet with both Napolitano and Hillary Clinton in it would be chock-full of female power.
A former prosecutor, Napolitano is vocally pro-choice, pro-death penalty, and a moderate on immigration, which serves her well in Arizona's libertarian political climate. She was the first governor to dispatch the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border, and the Bush administration followed her lead on the issue.
But what many don't know about Napolitano—or don't remember—is that she first came onto the national stage in 1991 as an attorney representing Anita Hill during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on Clarence Thomas. (Joe Biden chaired the committee at that time and is remembered for his ham-handedness in dealing with the sensitive topic of sexual harassment.) Napolitano was in charge of preparing the testimonies of Hill's supporting witnesses, and she credits her involvement in the case with deepening her commitment to electoral politics. "It really did bring home how issues of women really didn't have an avenue to be heard at that time," Napolitano told me during our May interview. "I think that from Professor Hill's standpoint, that experience cost her a lot personally. But I think she should have a satisfaction in knowing, but for that experience, the fact that women need to be treated fairly and are entitled to go to work without being harassed—when they're in the workplace trying to earn a living—would never have gained the prominence it did and all the protections we now have."
When Bill Clinton appointed Napolitano U.S. Attorney for Arizona in 1993, Senate Republicans held up her nomination for more than a year, in large part because of lingering resentments over the Thomas-Hill case. So it'll be interesting to see if the issue resurfaces for Napolitano this time around—or if, 17 years later, the infamous episode has lost its power as a political and cultural touchstone.
-
sponsorship
So as I'm reading how Bill Clinton is making himself all kinds of amenable so that Hillary can say yes to running the State Department, it at long last occurs to me that Obama's job offer to her might not be the total madness I took it for: See here in the New York Times, where it quotes former Clinton White House counsel and Obama supporter Abner Mikva? The way Mikva puts it is that for this thing to go forward, "There would have to be FULL [caps mine] disclosure as to who ALL [me again] were contributors to his library and foundation." Which is not quite the same as the former president's reported willingness to "release the names of some major donors,'' is it? So maybe Obama has reason to believe that in the end, Hubby Bubba can't open all the books for all the world to see? And if that's the case, then instead of being a chump he's making the world's most magnanimous gesture at absolutely no cost to himself or the country.
-
sponsorship
With a very serious op-ed on financial regulation in last Sunday's Washington Post, Eliot Spitzer clearly sees the economic crisis as an opportunity to rehabilitate his reputation, trotting out some pretty powerful "I told you sos" from his New York state attorney general days. Spitzer says he rang the warning bell about subprime mortgages and accounting irregularities at AIG but was rebuffed by the Bush administration. Only in the last paragraph does he deal with the elephant—cough, prostitution-ring scandal—in the room:
Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past, I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.
A few bloggers were so impressed by Spitzer's essay that they called on the Obama administration to offer him a job. "Do we have to exclude Spitzer from addressing the issues on which he has considerable expertise? Issues that have nothing to do with an unrelated sex scandal?" mused Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly. "Is there a better pick in mind for the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission?"
Anonymous Liberal agreed, writing: "The argument is simple. When you're really sick, you hire the best doctor you can. You don't care about his/her personal life." Politico's Ben Smith floated Spitzer's name as a replacement for Hillary Clinton in the Senate should she become secretary of state.
If you're raising your eyebrows, you're not the only one. The way I see it, the No Drama Obama team has enough trouble on their hands incorporating the Clintons into the fold. Do we really expect Obama to embrace a man who broke multiple laws by contracting a prostitute across state lines? And there's no indication that Ashley Dupre, the call girl in question, is planning on helpfully fading into the night. On Friday she will appear with Diane Sawyer on 20/20, and she has granted an interview to People magazine. Her words to Silda Wall Spitzer? "I'm sorry for your pain."
Even if you're willing to forgive Eliot Spitzer's slimeball behavior, there's the inconvenient truth that despite his Wall Street expertise and reputation as a corporate ball buster, Spitzer's governorship was rife with scandal and intrigue from day one. He used the state police to spy on his political opponents. He was so obnoxious to the state Legislature that even his allies feared his liberal policy agenda would erupt in flames. A good fit for Obama? No way. Eliot Spitzer: Not the change we need.
-
sponsorship
And now on to a different Obama Cabinet post: At Newsweek, Michael Issikoff is reporting that Eric Holder will be tapped as Obama's attorney general, assuming he vets well. What I like about this choice is that it's bold but not crazy bold. The strike against Holder is that he signed off on Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, a crackup wherever you are on the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, Holder has a solid-to-gold reputation as a federal prosecutor. And he served as a not-fancy judge in the District of Columbia's Superior Court. When the right tried to tar him with the Rich screw up when he was on Obama's vice-president selection team, it didn't much stick--at least, not enough to fell him. The Obama folks must be making a similar calculation here.
I don't know enough about Holder's particular role in the Rich episode to know for sure whether they're right to look beyond it, but taken as a whole, Holder's record shows that he knows his stuff and should be able to run the Justice Department well. On national security, his rep is not hard left. That's of a piece with the move to the center that Obama made on wiretapping by the National Security Agency over the summer. It could mean that he's going to disappoint liberals who want to rip up every Bush administration DoJ order. This is the test of governing as opposed to criticizing from the outside. The Democrats are about to own the war on terror. Holder will be nothing like Alberto Gonzales; that I think we can count on. It's harder to know how many degrees apart he will be from the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who was sent in to clean up the Gonzales mess. For example, what will Holder do with Mukasey's recent order expanding the FBI's powers to infiltrate and investigate? May the tests begin.
-
sponsorship
At this point, I think we are arguing just to keep our skills up, because Hillary as Madame Secretary seems to be a done deal. But, my mother always said I would rather argue than eat, so: Whoa, Hanna, how is it that "in every way it is petty to want to deny her" the top foreign policy job when her views on foreign policy are not compatible with Obama's. (At least, that was my understanding when I voted for him.) As McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb says in a post for the Weekly Standard, "On the issues, Clinton's a hawk ... Clinton flipped on the war, but as the nomination slipped out of her reach last spring she spoke of the threats this country faces, and of the prescriptions offered by Obama, in language that would warm the hearts of neoconservatives. ... She threatened to 'obliterate' Iran in response to unprovoked aggression against Israel, she spoke of unconditional meetings with the leaders of rogue states as 'irresponsible and, frankly, naive,' and she castigated Obama's transparent saber-rattling on Pakistan. ... On matters of diplomacy, Clinton's views are not so different from those held by John McCain and most Republicans [big fat bold letters mine]—and they are certainly well to the right of Obama.''
I fail to see why it is "right-minded, in a feminist way'' to appoint someone whose views were rejected by the majority of Americans. And though I understand the impulse to aw, just go ahead and give it to her, this job is too important to be anybody's consolation prize, and that she has suffered does not mean she has earned it. To me, her trippy Tuzla flashbacks, or whatever those were, do not suggest a firm grasp of even her own life. Emily B., you imagine that though she's been a lousy manager in the past, she's "too smart not to figure out (finally) how to successfully delegate the management of this'' State Department. But isn't history a better predictor than IQ?
-
sponsorship
My fellow Emily, as usual I read your acerbic post and find myself about to disavow my own previously held views. Why did I find myself aflutter over the prospect of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again? Oh right: She could ace this job! You are right that she has not proved herself as an administrator. But here are three quick retorts: That is only part of the state job, three's the charm, and she is too smart not to figure out (finally) how to successfully delegate the management of this. Plus the bonus: She must be through with some of her worst campaign managers. On the soap opera front, for once I don't want Bill drama to disqualify her. I hated the idea of the retread of the two of them back in the White House. But this would be her work, her office, and I can't believe the Obama people haven't made it clear that Bill's role should be limited to the cheery star-power glad-handing he is so good at. If they think that they can work with her, then like Hanna says, I'm ready to trust them. Also, I want the Democrats' rival houses to come together this way. This president is taking over with all the world in economic shambles. It's the right time for putting aside past differences, for our most prominent politicians to act like their biggest and best selves. That's what Secretary Hillary would signify to me, on both sides of the détente.
Also, while I resist the idea that Hillary Clinton deserves this, in the sense that no one deserves any incredibly prestigious plum of an office, the Tracy Flick fan in me wants her to have it. And wants her to shine. Yes, she could also just go on being a good senator. But this gives her the opportunity for a grander next act. I want her to keep the pantsuits and the toughness but lose the brittle edge of her image that the campaign left us with. She should be the bitch who gets stuff done, as Tina Fey put it, but less bitchy.
-
sponsorship
Dana, I second Hanna's welcome, but I can't agree with either of you on Hillary. There's a lot to admire about her, but can't we just all admire Sen. Clinton? The two times she has run large organizations—health care reform and her campaign—she has shown herself to be a execrable administrator. And I can't see how having the Clintons back (How do you separate out his foreign activities from hers?) will do anything but create drama and distraction. Talk about As the World Turns! I agree with both of you about Obama making international women's rights a priority, but he doesn't need Hillary to do that. I listened to the campaign interview you linked to Dana, in which Hillary goes on and on about her unfair treatment. You quote her remark, "Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal." It sounded more to me like what she really meant was, "Oppression of woman and discrimination against woman is universal." What a bunch of Clintonian self-pity for her to compare her experience in what I think was a surprisingly unsexist presidential campaign to the lives of women who in some parts of the world can't show their faces or choose who they marry.
-
sponsorship
Dana, welcome. I accept your scolding. In every way it is petty to want to deny Hillary this opportunity. It's right-minded, in a feminist way, not just because of her fabulous speech in Beijing but also because Hillary could rewrite the job to her own qualifications. For long it's been a job that, if not quite symbolic, was awarded to women who would be loyal seconds (Condi, Madeline Albright). Hillary is a person with stronger, surer instincts on foreign policy than her boss (see Jeff Goldberg's analysis in The New Yorker). And Obama is a person who, one imagines, would allow her to shine. Rethinking my earlier complaint: The Clintonites would do the most damage on domestic policy, where the country has moved far past 1992. So let's just feed the beast and give them this one, and then maybe they'll stop angling for everything else.
-
sponsorship
Yes, the Bill factor is irritating. But this story about forced abortion in China reminds me why it might be pretty neat to have Hillary as secretary of state—despite Emily, Hanna, and Melinda's convincing articulations of Clinton fatigue. Arzigul Tursun is a Muslim Uighur woman living in rural western China. A mother of two, Arzigul and her husband fled their village after learning she was again pregnant, in violation of Chinese law. When government officials threatened to seize their home unless Arzigul submitted to an abortion, the Tursuns returned. Due to international outcry, the situation is now in deadlock, with the 26-week pregnant Arzigul currently under watch at a municipal hospital.
So what does this have to do with Hillary Clinton? In short, with sexual and gender oppression at the root of so many global conflicts, I'd welcome a secretary of state not only aware of these problems, but with a history of speaking out on them. One of Hillary's most famous speeches as first lady was at the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she declared "human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights." On the campaign trail in July 2007, Clinton said, "When I traveled to China in 1995 ... I thought it was absolutely essential that I speak out against the practice in China of one child per one family. Because what that meant for women's lives was often forced sterilization and forced abortion."
Of course, we have a female secretary of state currently, and we've had one in the past. But Condi Rice has hardly pursued a feminist agenda, and Madeleine Albright, though she had a history of working on women's issues, didn't come with the platform and celebrity Hillary would bring to the job. If anything, Hillary became more comfortable with playing the role of feminist icon over the course of the long 2008 campaign. Partly, that was a purely political choice; she learned after that choked-up moment in New Hampshire that appealing to women delivered more votes than some of her more hawkish advisers had assumed. But only her fiercest critics could accuse Clinton of not having real feminist convictions. In a Washington Post interview as her primary campaign faltered, Clinton said, "Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal."
As secretary of state, Hillary would be Obama's chief diplomat. And indeed, it would be strange to see her directing negotiations with Iran, for example, after harshly attacking Obama for wanting to speak directly to that nation's leaders. But if Obama gave Hillary some latitude to develop a platform on international women's issues, it would send a powerful message. Maybe that doesn't outweigh all that Clinton fatigue—but it's at least something to consider.
-
sponsorship
Yes, it is embarrassing, but I am going to say it, anyway: How glorious to have a president I can not only stand to see on television, but would have watched over Desperate Housewives, had it come to that. I kept trying to think of the last time such a thing had occurred—is it time yet? the president's going to be on!—but the answer is: never. ("For the first time in my adult life ...") A year from now, Obama will no doubt have to do more than show up and say true things grammatically, absent any mugging or winking. But tonight, he had me at "America doesn't torture.'' And when he declined to place sole blame for deregulation on Republicans. And when he said he was not very interested in having the same old tired left-right tug-of-war. So for as long as this lasts, I'm going with it.
I was a little surprised that he put Eisenhower up there with FDR and Lincoln on his list of presidential greats; Was this post-partisan politesse, or was it Eisenhower's lack of drama he admires? His warning about the military-industrial complex, maybe? Or the taste and vision of his granddaughter?
It also came as news that the first couple's 60 Minutes interviewer, Steve Kroft, was such a T-Rex: "So, you have a new dog and your mother-in-law's moving in?'' (Right, it stinks to be Obama.) But 44 put the kibosh on that and on Kroft's suggestion that Michelle's whole mom-in-chief routine is going to get old in a hurry when she's "knocking around that big house'' on Pennsylvania Avenue. "Here's one thing I know about Michelle,'' the president-elect informed him. "She's serious when she talks about being a mom; that's why our girls are so wonderful.'' It doesn't happen by accident, in other words, or in five-minute snatches of quality time. So we shouldn't judge low-income families by one standard (stay home and read aloud all day; turn off that TV!) and Ivy League graduates by another (you're home with your kids? gosh, sorry to hear that). If parenting is so important, how come Kroft and Traister and maybe most of us at some point act as if no one who could get a decent job would spend their days doing it? Obama seems proud of his wife's accomplishments as a mother, among other things—and why wouldn't he be?
-
sponsorship
My dread about the Hillary revival is more general. All of a sudden the Clintonites are everywhere—on TV, in the papers, at all the Washington parties. It's as if they've been hiding out for the last eight years, planning their private-school auctions, and now they're ready to take over again. One brave, path-breaking Hillary rewarded for a lifetime of hard work and suffering, I can handle. But the whole lot of them colonizing the transition is too much. The Clintonites are not dreamers. They came to power during a Republican era and have a constricted view of what they can accomplish. Over the years, they have lost whatever blue-sky instincts they once had and have turned into schemers and professionals. I can see what's going on, from Obama's point of view. He is above these sorts of staffing details. His vision goes right over John Podesta's head, straight to the heart of the problem. Still, it's making me nervous.
-
sponsorship
Ann, don't you love how we've all turned into headhunters for Hillary, eager to pitch in and help her locate just the right job? State wouldn't be the best possible platform for her diplomatic and managerial skill set. But Hillary as war czar isn't quite the ticket, either. (Because nearly everything reminds me of a scene from a musical, what I'm thinking is "May God bless and keep the czar ... far away from us.'' In the Senate, for example.) Obama has created a problem for himself by dangling a major cabinet post as an option; if he doesn't offer it to her now, her partisans won't be happy. But it would be even worse to begin his bright new day in Washington with a confirmation hearing starring all the ghosts of Clinton scandals past. And Defense doesn't work as a Hillary landing pad any better than State does; her initial and lingering poor judgment on Iraq wasn't a plus in any way. Where did rewarding those who were wrong about the war ever get us? Truly, I never followed the '04 reasoning of those who argued that since Bush made the mess, he should be the guy on cleanup. During the run-up to the war, I remember talking to a top Clinton foreign policy person who patiently explained to me that, in fact, the Clinton and Bush administration's views vis-à-vis Saddam and invading and coalition-building were just not that different: "Together if we can, alone if we must.'' Which is why Clinton at DoD would not be different enough for me.
-
sponsorship
Melinda and Emily, you're probably right that somebody should have whispered to Obama, "Wait, you'll be sorry," before he summoned Clinton for a Chicago chat about the State department slot. But either no one did, or he didn't listen, so now what's he going to do? Offer her secretary of Defense. The cons are all the same (and who knows, he may be counting on her to consider the prospect of filling out all those forms, and decline). But here are some fresh pros. For him: It wouldn't hurt to have someone who voted for the Iraq war in charge of handling the withdrawal, and she's been a member of the Armed Services Committee for years. He wouldn't be unleashing another globe-trotting Clinton when Bill is already out there, and it would ratchet down her hobnobbing with world leaders. Pros for her: Here's Clinton's chance to be a first and break the brass ceiling. State would be so been-there-done-that.
-
sponsorship
Melinda, I wonder if the Obama administration would waive the 63-item questionnaire all potential administration officials are required to fill out before naming Hillary secretary of state. There are so many questions that might be troublesome, from No. 6, concerning "whether you or your spouse" ever received money from any foreign entities (See Bill's amazing Kazakhstan adventure), to No. 8, asking for a description of the "most controversial matters you have ever been involved in," to No. 12, "Please identify all speeches you have given" to my favorite, No. 13, in which the candidate is asked to describe any electronic communication they have ever sent that might be "a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect." There isn't enough bandwith in the world for Hillary to attach all the documents that answer these questions. The larger issue is that it would be kind of nutty for Obama to appoint her. He surely doesn't need her sucking away attention and power. He surely would like to avoid the daily conflicts of interest inherent in Bill's international business and philanthropic activies. And wouldn't Hillary be happier and more effective building her own power base in the Senate?
-
sponsorship
No doubt Hillary Clinton could fill Condi's high-heel boots and still have time left over to advise Michelle on what not to do as first lady. (Remember when Rice took the job almost four years ago and described her mission as building on the foreign policy achievements of the previous four? Quick work, when you think about it; wonder what she turned to after lunch?) Only, if America wanted a third Clinton administration, wouldn't it have gone for the real thing? I get that in tapping some of these Clinton folks for his transition team and new administration Obama is trying to avoid some of the mistakes the Clintons themselves made when they blew into town with their Arkansas friends and '92 campaign team and made clear they didn't need anybody to show them around or tell them anything. But at what point does this "new'' team start to seem a little too familiar with the way things have always worked and a little too much like the "old Washington'' that Obama campaigned against? I hope he doesn't forget that in both the primary and the general, voters saw experience as less important than a new direction and a new way of doing business.
-
sponsorship
Here’s Sarah Palin at today’s press conference at the Republican Governor's Association in Miami. It’s Palin minus the sass. But plus the gravitas. Minus the “betchas” and “atchas” and “gotchas.” But plus the edgy new slouch. But also minus the wink (Thank God).
If anything, Palin looks like she’s playing Tina Fey at a mob funeral in New Jersey.
Putting aside the absurdity that she’s finally giving her first national press conference because “the campaign is over,” I find her almost totally unrecognizable. I have one foot in the Sara Mosle camp (brilliant post!) and am desperate to put her behind us. My other foot is in the Andrew Sullivan/Anonymous Liberal/Kevin Drum camp: Covering her as though she is a serious politician with serious things to say is folly. But whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her performance today had none of the “charm” of the last two months, but weirdly, held none of the terror. Turns out Palin playing Palin isn’t very interesting at all.
-
sponsorship
Did I say Palin in '12? Correction: Palin in '09. And did I say she'd be back? Wrong-o; she shows no sign of going away.
As for Michelle Obama, my beef with that Rebecca Traister piece about the "momification" of the next first lady is that Traister supposes Obama is in mourning for her career in hospital administration. But based on what? She likewise assumes that Obama's emphasis on her duties as mom-in-chief were hoked up only to help her hubby get elected. In her view, the only reason Obama hasn't dropped the whole schtick now that the coast is clear is that she can't risk looking like a Hillary Clinton as first lady.
Only, Michelle Obama isn't Hillary Clinton; for one thing, I believe her when she says she has no political ambitions. Not that there would be anything wrong with it if she did have, and if she changes her mind later, she's got my vote. But why is a focus on her role as a wife and mother assumed to be just for show? Is she required to regard being a hands-on mom and first spouse as small potatoes just because she's in every way an equal partner to the president-elect and attended schmantzy schools?
As satisfying as running PR and community outreach and volunteer programs for the University of Chicago Hospitals no doubt was, like Emily I have a hard time seeing the White House as a step down. Is there a woman (or man) alive who wouldn't gladly take a few years off to advise and support the president?
Can smart, strong women not choose traditional roles? Everything I know about Michelle Obama tells me that this really is her choice, not her consolation prize. And if we're not OK with that (can you say projection?) I'm not sure it's her problem.
-
sponsorship
I'm intrigued by today's story in the New York Times about Washington, D.C.'s, reform-minded superintendent, Michelle Rhee, wanting to end tenure for public school teachers in the district. Let me begin by saying that I've always been a skeptic of the ever-popular scapegoating of teachers' unions as the sole cause of poor performance in inner-city schools. That's not to say that unions, or at least some of their members, aren't occasionally a big problem. (Even Albert Shanker, the late head of the United Federation of Teachers, used to concede as much.) But they aren't the only problem, or even, always, the main problem.
At the impoverished, inner-city public school where I taught third grade in the early 1990s, there were indisputably some bad actors who desperately needed to be shown the door. But the same could be said of a lot of workplaces where unions don't exist. (Were this not the case, a TV show like The Office would have no resonance.) These few unproductive or inefficient teachers typically paled against the other problems the school faced: gross overcrowding, no supplies (I had to buy my own chalk), an endless stream of incoherent educational fads foisted on teachers from district headquarters, and students who couldn't be sweeter (third graders still want to hold your hand) but who were desperately poor and often saddled, through no fault of their own, with dysfunctional or absentee parents.
The union, in fact, was often one of the few forces maintaining minimal conditions at my school. I have no doubt but that for the union, my already overcrowded, third-grade class—it had 34 kids, the legal limit at the time under the teachers' contract—would have had dozens more students. And we all know of superb suburban public schools that manage to succeed despite the presence of organized labor. Obviously, labor, alone, isn't the crucial difference.
Indeed, one of the biggest problems in poor districts is that a school is often the only decent employer. Given that school board members are typically elected and the high turnover rate among superintendents, it's easy for such schools, over time, to become patronage mills. In such an environment, job protection really is a legitimate concern. There's no guarantee that those who’ll be fired will be the right ones or that they will be replaced by anyone better. One district head tried to fire me because I'd written an article that he found embarrassing to the school system; what saved my job was the union contract. Then again, the person who apparently urged him to give me the ax was the likewise-offended union rep at my school. In sum, unions aren't all good or all bad; like most institutions in American life, they're typically something of a mixed bag but one teachers have tended to prefer rather than not.
I'm also impatient with Rhee's charge that teachers' unions are only about adults and their concerns, not the kids. So what? This could be said about the compensation package at almost any job. Few people, for example, expect pilots to forgo their union just to help out the frequent flier in Seat 3A (even if that passenger is an innocent, chubby-cheeked child). Or for the UPS driver to give up his union contract just because the packages he delivers are for a kid's birthday. Why, then, are teachers, alone among the nation’s professionals, expected to labor selflessly with no regard for their own self-interests? (After all, self-interest is "market forces" at work—something many school reformers are forever touting.) The attitude that teachers should labor solely for love, not money, strikes me as a carryover from a time when teaching was seen as "women’s work"—and thus not really worthy of pay. One of the many reforms Shanker ushered in was to equalize pay between women, who were typically given the lowest-paying jobs in elementary schools (as the assignment was regarded as akin to motherhood), and men, who were disproportionately awarded higher school positions because these were regarded as "real" jobs.
The above said, unions' complaint that Rhee doesn't properly regard teaching as a lifelong profession strikes me as outdated. This idea might have made sense 50 years ago (when schools benefited from a captive employment pool of talented women and blacks, who had few other professional options). Nowadays, the labor force is far more mobile. Few people stay in one job their entire careers. Today’s selfless community organizer might be tomorrow’s president of the United States. In this environment, Rhee is right, I think, to insist that schools must be able to look beyond career educators to train and attract talent.
What's potentially promising about Rhee’s approach, I think, is that she is at least offering teachers a carrot instead of just a stick. She wants to significantly boost salaries (by as much as $30,000 a year) for all those (not just the few in "combat" positions) who are willing to voluntarily forgo tenure. To foot this bill, Rhee isn’t relying on taxes but on charitable donations. That brings up the question of whether these pay increases will be permanent or just an elaborate bait and switch. (Unions have reasons to worry: Rhee's eventual successor might have entirely different priorities.) But given that many school system heads want to abolish tenure without offering teachers anything in return, this at least seems like a step toward a more genuine compromise. In the meantime, Rhee would do well to remember that teachers unions are powerful not because they're inherently malign but because, in many ways, they continue to represent teachers' interests. I, for one, don’t begrudge these teachers, like any other workers, negotiating for the best contract.
-
sponsorship
I am trying to decide why I don't share the distress that Rebecca Traister expresses on Salon in her thought-provoking essay about the "momification" of Michelle Obama. Traister criticizes the press for covering not her departure from her former job at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but her clothes and her kid-piloting and her propensity for domestic-art shortcuts. Traister blames the media for its lack of curiosity about what it's costing Michelle to become "an extension of her husband" and for assuming that she, not he, is the one sheperding her family through their actual move. Michelle Obama, Traister concludes, "will come to stand in more prominently than anyone could have imagined for the shortcomings of feminism."
For a bunch of reasons, this seems more off-base than on-target to me—and also premature. First of all, I don't buy the reflexive blaming of the media. Michelle Obama is putting her own motherhood and sisterhood and wifely virtue front and center. She did that in her speech at the Democratic Convention, she did it during the campaign, and she's doing it now. You can wish she didn't feel like she has to, but she surely knows what she's doing. To wit, Michelle Obama can't risk repeating Hillary Clinton's rocky first lady performance. And so she won't. The media is merely following her lead. To be fair, Traister acknowledges some of this. But she soft pedals Obama's own choices while kicking the press, which is a little convenient.
Also, don't we imagine that the Obamas made their bargain about their roles a while ago? Didn't Michelle Obama effectively stop working at her hospital job long before now? That is a real sacrifice, don't get me wrong, but on the other hand, her husband is president. That is an accomplishment with its own set of rules. It's also one that requires a team effort, and that gives Michelle Obama, as crack defensive end aka first lady, enormous power. A weird and retro form of power, to be sure, but power nonetheless. Before we knock all of that, let's give her a chance to wield it. She is promising to focus on the concerns of working women. Amen and hallelujah: If she does it and gets somewhere, that will be concretely groundbreaking in a way that all this image-obsession never is, and she'll come to represent not the shortcomings of feminism, but its strengths. Maybe Michelle Obama is the woman to channel Eleanor Roosevelt (without the misery of marital infidelity, of course).
And in the meantime, yes, she is the one honcho-ing their physical move, or at least whom to delegate it to. I hope so! Because I want my president-elect working on other pressing matters like our economic crisis. I am glad Traister reminded us that the Obamas used to have a different kind of partnership and that Michelle Obama had to work hard to make her peace with her current role. But hey, when quitting your day job gets you to the White House, how much can the rest of us rue the trade-off?
-
sponsorship
Forgive me, but I can't be bothered with Palin anymore. I want to linger with the victor. As I've thought about Obama's speech on election night, and his demeanor since, the word that has stayed with me most isn't the names of the groups he said he hoped to unite (blacks, whites, gays, straights, etc.) or the particular policy proposals he reiterated. Rather, it's the name of one of the temptations he hopes we'll avoid as a nation going forward: "immaturity."
It's a striking word for a politician to use (along with the more customary "partisanship" and "pettiness" ). Reading the Newsweek series about the campaign, I was less interested in the latest revelations about Palin's wardrobe than those about the sheer childishness of the Hillary and McCain camps: the toddlerlike tantrums, the puerile infighting, the impulsiveness, the adolescent refusal to accept responsibility for anything that went wrong. Many commentators, of course, have noted Obama's self-containment, his self-discipline, his unflappability. His campaign's motto was No-Drama Obama (i.e., no teenage theatrics). But isn't this just another way of saying that Obama is that rare thing in recent American politics: a grown-up as opposed to a mere adult?
By contrast, Bush, McCain and Hillary remain, quite literally, children. One or both of their parents are remarkably still alive. Indeed, what struck me most about Obama on election night was how alone he was on that stage, except for his own wife and children. (Even an aged Biden could hold his mother's hand.) And I wonder if, even more than race, this unusual parentlessness for a man Obama's age hasn’t contributed to what I regard as his singular strength and virtue in our youth-obsessed culture: his maturity. Yes, McCain was older and more experienced, but in this election, he actually came across as less mature. The youth vote went for the grown-up.
Obama's election may have finally closed the chapter on the 1960s, by which most people mean the debates over Vietnam. But born as he was at the tail end of the baby boomers, Obama, I think, may have also turned the page on the extended adolescence of his generation. In many ways, the last eight years have felt like one of those teenage parties where the grown-ups are absent and things have spiraled dangerously out of control. Countries, like kids, need and want limits. So, while I've been overjoyed this last week as I've watched a confident and competent Obama begin to assume power, what I've felt most, I've suddenly realized, is sheer relief: A responsible adult has finally showed up to shepherd everyone home.
-
sponsorship
There was a fascinating story in the NYT science section yesterday that I didn't fully understand. It presents a new genetic theory of major mental illness as being caused by a battle between the father's sperm and the mother's egg. The idea is that in the fetus' brain something goes wrong with children who develop either autism disorders on one end of the spectrum or mood disorders and psychosis on the other (everything from bipolar illness to schizophrenia). The researchers say these seemingly unrelated disorders are just different expressions of the same genetic glitch. If the father's contribution wins, the child will have autism: "a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development." If the mother wins, the child's brain will be wired toward "the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others'." This theory leaves me confused about people who inherit, say, bipolar disorder from their father. But more than that, it feels strangely reductive: Fathers convey an obsession with objects and systems; mothers make you hysterical.
-
sponsorship
My dad, who died one year and five days ago, was a Korean War vet; he volunteered for the Navy at 16, lying about his age. It was not something he ever mentioned. He once told me that talking about war inevitably glorifies it, and that he refused to do. But he always carefully displayed the flag on days that honored the nation—Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and, of course, Inauguration Day (even for Richard Nixon, whom he loathed).
While he was dying, brutally and painfully and slowly, of bladder cancer, a consequence of the nicotine addiction he had kicked more than 30 years before (lungs recover from smoking but not the bladder—who knew?), we spent a lot of time just sitting around together in front of the TV. That’s when I found out that, every day, my father made sure that we listened in silence when names of the American soldiers who had died in Iraq were read aloud. If we missed it on TV, he himself would read it aloud from the paper. He hated the Iraq war, believing it was wasteful and destructive, both of their (the Iraqis’) country and of ours; he despised Bush for getting us into it, and for many other things. But we had to stop in quiet respect for those who had lost their lives in their country’s employ.
After he died, my stepmother pulled out a box of his medals—maybe a dozen, carefully displayed under glass. My three sibs and I were shocked. We had been given no hint that these existed. He wouldn’t tell her what some of them were for. We tried looking them up on the Web. Maybe he’d been downed in a top-secret mission behind North Korean lines. Or maybe he just wouldn’t talk about those medals lest doing so would glorify war.
-
sponsorship
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard a case about the reach of the Federal Gun Control Act and whether it includes someone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence. The case was less about the Second Amendment than how to read a badly drafted 1996 law that tried to take guns out of the hands of domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence as opposed to violent felonies. Courtesy of the LA Times' David Savage, here’s a report of oral argument, which evidently went poorly for the proponents of disarming wife beaters. Of note in the transcript is the following exchange between Justice Antonin Scalia and Nicole Saharsky, the Justice Department lawyer arguing for the stricter interpretation of the law.
JUSTICE SCALIA: And this was misdemeanor assault and battery, wasn't it?
MS. SAHARSKY: Yes, that's right. I mean, I really—
JUSTICE SCALIA: So it's not that serious an offense. That's why we call it a misdemeanor.
MS. SAHARSKY: Well, I mean, certainly the offense is this particular case was serious. The charging document reflects that Respondent hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body, kicked here in the ribs—
JUSTICE SCALIA: Then he should have been charged with a felony, but he wasn't. He was charged with a misdemeanor.
-
sponsorship
Marjorie, as for whether Sarah Palin believed Africa was a country not a continent, no I don't have any concrete evidence. Since she was so new to the national scene in August, Google isn't exactly bursting with transcripts of her speaking about Africa. But the only "evidence" we have that she did think Africa was a country was an unnamed source who spoke out in the aftermath of a painful election loss, a loss about which the finger-pointing started before the votes were counted. And please don't pillory me for bringing up Elaine Lafferty again, but Lafferty in this interview says that Palin had an in-depth knowledge of Afghanistan and the Taliban, showing a level of thought that doesn't mesh well with thinking Africa is a country. Rich Lowry at the National Review quotes Steve Biegun, who briefed Palin on foreign policy and who was part of the conversation that led to the NAFTA crack, and Biegun sticks up for Palin.
As for the clothes, the first nasty leak we heard was that she was told to leave her clothing at home in Wasilla because it was unsuitable. Now, when the election is over and someone wants to make her look bad, we hear that she was instructed to buy three suits for the convention and nothing more and that she was a "hillbilly looting Neiman Marcus." Both can't be true, so which is it? If she was dressing herself like this before the campaign, how did she become such an expert on fashion overnight? And for her personal preferences, she came out of the voting booth last Tuesday wearing a jacket that I'd expect to find at Cabela's, not Nordstrom or Saks.
From the moment she was announced as the GOP veep candidate, critics were only too quick to believe everything negative about her, true or not, and cite it as gospel. As Palin herself said, someone accused her of trying to ban Harry Potter when the book wasn't written yet. The New York Times printed as fact that she charged victims for their rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla, even though the city looked back through its records and found no evidence to the claim. So pardon me for not jumping to assume the worst in this instance, either.
I understand that she did not appeal to everyone, and I certainly understand why. And I'm sure there are many people who hope she's gone back to Alaska never to be heard from again. Personally, I'm still waiting to see what comes out of all the introspection and self-critiquing that conservatives have spent the last week engaging in before I start thinking about 2012, or even 2010. I don't know that having Palin on a national ticket in 2012 would be wise or helpful. But I don't want her to go away entirely. For whatever she lacks, she brings energy to a party that it is sorely lacking. She has moves, as Melinda put it, and I don't think we should underestimate her.
-
sponsorship
There's something a little too poor-little-match-girlish about this image of Gov. Palin sorting through stacks of clothing for a family of seven figuring out what part of the inventory belongs to the RNC. If I were the returning governor, I'd be designating piles Be My Guest (watchout for the spitup); Stuff I'll Just Have To Replace (who doesn't get a good bra and new underwear before trying on a bunch of new clothes?); and (sigh) Maybe the Designer Would Sell Me Another Just Like It at Cost (that shantung silk jacket is practically a Palin icon).
-
sponsorship
Just a year ago, the burning questions before us were whether we as a nation were ready to elect a black president, and whether we were ready for a woman in the White House. And in a sense, what we learned since then was yes and yes. Because even though Hillary Clinton didn't win the election, her supporters so clearly saw her gender as a plus that it would be hard to argue that she would have won had she been a man.
But in a larger sense, I think what we learned is that these weren't ever the right questions, because it's only when the right person shows up, at the right time, that we're ever ready to elect him or her. Just like that's when we're ready to marry. (And yes, I do see everything relationally; you were expecting maybe a sports analogy?) You know that guy you dated for 8 years who just wasn't ready to commit -- until three minutes after you broke up? On paper, Americans were never going to be ready for a Democrat without a hint of a southern accent whose middle name was Hussein. But then we met him, got to know him, and found to our own surprise that we felt differently; it was a go after all.
That's how it will happen with a woman, and an Indian-American, and any other person of hyphenated heritage. (Maybe someday, we will even fall for one of those Godless Americans Elizabeth Dole referred to in her final campaign ad.) We prefer to look at candidates as the sum of their policy priorities; to do otherwise would be to suggest that voters are what Rachel Maddow would call ‘post-rational.' But voting for president is a decision of the heart as much as the head - a reality that Republicans seized on long ago, and that Democrats - or one Democrat, anyway -- now seem to understand, too.
-
sponsorship
In the spirit of post-election adventure, Slate is starting to work on a new Web magazine: Double X. A magazine by women but not just for women, Double X will spin off from our "XX Factor" blog, where we've started a conversation among women—about politics, sex, and culture—that both men and women enjoy listening in on. The new site will do all this and more. It will take the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and apply it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We'll tackle subjects high and low with an approach that's unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending. The blog will be at the heart of the site, but we'll also publish essays, reporting, and other features.
We believe this is the right moment to launch a women's magazine that doesn't resemble any other in existence. The new site will tap into a crossroads moment in feminism, when the 1970s are firmly behind us but no one knows what's next. (Generational cross-fighting, post-feminist indifference, proof of biological sex differences?) We invite you to help us work out the new dispensation and to have fun doing it. At the moment, we're looking for ideas and writers and also for a managing editor. If you're interested, please send us a note at doublex.slate@gmail.com. And if you'd like to sign up to get e-mails about our launch this spring, please send a note to the same address.
We look forward to hearing from you.
-
sponsorship
Juliet, Melinda, Lauren, and Rachael, I'm perplexed by your certainty that Sarah Palin did indeed know that Africa was a continent not a country. On what are you basing this assumption? Sarah Palin's denials? Forgive me if I find her credibility lacking. This is the same woman who said she never wanted all those expensive clothes purchased for her by the RNC and insisted she would gladly go back to wearing her own clothes. Now we learn that the price tag for those Neiman/Nordstrom's duds was even higher than the $150,000 originally reported and that the RNC had to dispatch someone to Alaska to retrieve the clothing from Palin.
We have no information to indicate or prove that Palin knew the difference between a country and a continent, but we have plenty of well-documented news stories and televisions interviews showing how little she knows about geography and how little interest she has about the rest of the world. Remember that she could not name a newspaper she reads and that she shamelessly revels in a "real America" type of anti-intellectualism. (And by the way, she's not the first person to make this mistake. I've heard other Americans refer to Africa as one country.) I also believe she really did not know the NAFTA signatory countries.
Melinda, you characterized my past criticisms of Palin's intellectual challenges as elitism, but as the New York Times' Judith Warner recently correctly noted, there are plenty of Americans "who respect intelligence and good grammar." They also believe their president and vice president should be smarter, better-informed, and more versed in international affairs than the average American. This does not make them elitists; it makes them pragmatists. I still believe that Palin was woefully unqualified for the job and apparently so did millions of other voters who rejected the McCain-Palin ticket because they were insulted that McCain tried to pass her off as his, and Obama's, intellectual equal. I'm pretty well-informed and well-educated—and I can even speak in full sentences—but I still don't believe I'm qualified to be vice president or president. Knowing one's limitations is a sign of intelligence. That's honesty, not elitism.
I, for one, am very glad to see Palin leave the national stage, at least for now, and heartened that the voting public saw through her fake heartland authenticity. Apparently, I'm not alone. Check out this ode to Sarah.
-
sponsorship
I am…
Wondering why it takes a week to count fewer than 350,000 votes in Alaska.
Anticipating D.C. getting its party plans on for our own version of Grant Park on Jan. 20.
Witnessing spontaneous conversations in public places between white people and people of color. (See Chris B. and Chris W.’s hilarious instructions for white people in The Root.)
Reassured by the assembling and assessing of financial experts to FIX IT!
Enjoying the inside-baseball gossip, mentioning, and positioning for the plum assignments.
Picturing Malia and Sasha playing with their puppy in the White House and appreciating hope and change.
Weeping at the Civil Rights images every time I look at them.
-
sponsorship
Do you mean, Maureen, that women in politics may have to be nine times nuttier and more narcissistic than even your average hey-look-at-me male of the species, just to get elected? Not sure I'm with you on that, having known some really menschy women officeholders. (And I know you're not saying there aren't any.) But maybe I would be with you if I'd had the job you had and seen all you have, right? What your post did make me think: We have no idea whether these stories about Sarah Palin throwing fits and clueless about whole continents are true; we weren't there. I've had two batshit bananas bosses in my life, one a he and one a she, and I almost never talk about either one of them—not because I am so nice, but because it's such crazyola stuff I don't think anyone would believe it. (Plus, even I don't want to hear it.) So maybe that's what Palin's aide Nicolle Wallace, or whoever the source was for this stuff, is learning, too: Sometimes, even the truth can splash back quite nastily. But if that were the case, it would certainly be an ironic coda to a deeply dishonest campaign.
Update: Sarah speaks, denies divadom. "I never asked for anything more than maybe a Diet Dr Pepper once in a while," she told reporters. She also disputed tales that she didn't know Africa was a continent and couldn't name the signatories of NAFTA: "That's cruel. It's mean-spirited. It's immature. It's unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away with it, taking things out of context [from debate prep], and then tried to spread something on national news. It's not fair and it's not right."
"This is Barack Obama's time right now, and this is an historic moment in our nation and this can be a shining moment for America and our history, and look what we're talking about. Again, we're talking about my shoes and belts and skirts. It's ridiculous." I've said it before: This woman has some moves, and might not be so easily written off. The fact that Hillary came as far as she did with so much baggage -- and that Sarah came as far as she did with almost none -- means that we are not just ready for a woman in the White House, but ready to overlook a lot to put a woman there.
As McCain's running mate says, this is Barack Obama's time right now. But women in general were not "rejected'' because he won. And catchy book titles aside, I'll bet Anne Kornblut doesn't think they were, either.
-
sponsorship
Going back to the discussion of yesterday, and at the risk of sounding like a sexist myself, I'm wondering if we can find a diva equivalent of Sarah Palin in a male politician. Palin is not alone in this type of tantrum/staff abuse behavior among female politicians (nor is it confined to her side of the aisle). While I haven't heard first-hand of female elected officials throwing things, it wouldn't surprise me at all. I once worked for a high-level woman who famously asked another staffer, on the way to a fundraiser, what dressing would be on the salad at the dinner. (And let me tell you, when you're fundraising, that's the last detail you're struggling to keep track of—and the last one she needs to be concerned about.) A friend worked for a high-level female politician who used to insist that her event information be presented in a specific-color folder, or there was definitely hell to pay. In neither instance is the rejoinder "I'm not sure" or "I can't guarantee that" something you'd counter with if you intended to stick around long.
So Sarah Palin is not the only diva out there. I'm not saying this is acceptable political behavior, and I certainly do expect the runner-up leader of the free world to know that Africa is a continent. But I'm wondering if all this diva-labeling is truly sexist, or are we just calling a spade a spade? I wonder if female politicians act out in ways that are particularly feminine and unpleasant. And I'm hard-pressed to think of a story of a male politician behaving this way from friends who've worked for high-profile ones, these kind of grande dame demands that make the average Jane think, "What??" I'm just wondering: Do we not hear about men throwing things in a rage because there's a sexist tendency to point such ticks out only among women or because women are the only ones who indulge in such extreme behavior?
I do think that anyone running for public office—male or female—has to be massively overconfident to be able to stand up to thousands or millions and say, "Vote for me; I know what's right for you." It's the nature of the beast. And I think women, since they still have to work harder than men to get as far in politics, have to be even more overconfident, to the point of being a little nuts. So maybe, sexist or not, we shouldn't excuse such diva behavior, but we shouldn't blame them either. How else would these women do a job that requires brass balls if they weren't a little imperious themselves?
-
sponsorship
Emily, I'm with you. This campaign was about the right leader at the right time: It's really only been since we went to the polls that breaking the racial barrier has become the euphoric narrative of the election. Exit polls and popular discourse suggested that most people checked the "content of his character" box, not the "color of his skin" box, after all. And that's just how Obama geared his campaign. Race was not a major topic during this infinite run, except for when our next president could no longer avoid it after the Wright sinkhole opened. (Obama addressed race full-on in that landmark speech back in March and basically never returned to the topic.) If we had a woman candidate who so captured the public and seemed to represent a new direction that the country craved, this might be a different historic first. Identity politics only rules this election in hindsight. The issue with Hillary was never her sex. Unlike Obama, she simply wasn't the right leader at the right time, and that's what it takes.
But then there's the question of right leader to whom? Forty-eight percent of the country went for the white guy who had rebranded himself a social conservative for the sake of the campaign. (Though I suspect that many of those people have risen to the historic occasion: Even Murdoch's NYPost was capable of seeing the bigger picture on Election Day.) With that population in mind, Dana, I wouldn't pack up our designer Palin bags yet, I'm sorry to say. It remains to be seen just how the GOP will define itself after these years of splintering and self-immolation. Palin was included on the ticket not just for her sex but for her appeal to the Evangelical base. And while plenty of people thought that young Christians would go Obama in great numbers, or older ones might merely sit this one out, in fact, they voted the same way they did last time. Evangelicals couldn't swing the vote this time because of record turnout in other demographics. But should apathy return to our nation in the challenging years ahead, that still-organized and still-tenacious base may outlast this moment. And should Republicans decide Evangelicals butter their GOP bread best, instead of going, say, the Romney route, you betcha we'll be returning to our regularly scheduled culture wars—likely with Palin in a starring role, no matter how the campaign may be damning her today.
-
sponsorship
The Washington Post's excellent Anne Kornblut is writing a book about the campaign titled (for now at least) Rejection: Why America Isn't Ready for a Woman President. If her thesis truly is that Hillary Clinton lost the nomination because the country was ready for a black man but not a woman, I reject it. Tuesday night I was trying to imagine whether if the victory speech was being given by Clinton would there have been as many tears and spontaneous demonstrations of joy. Certainly there would be some—for the end of the Bush era, for the first woman president—but I think it would have been tempered because of that nagging, dragging sense of "We're BAACCKKK!" Yes, Hillary's gender would have been a break with the past, but everything else would have felt like back to the future. The country was ready to elect a black man because of the black man who put himself forward to be elected. I have no doubt the same thing will happen when the right woman runs.
-
sponsorship
Thank God our country now has bigger and better things to think about than calculating the precise degree of Sarah Palin’s venality, ignorance, and greed. Did she bilk the RNC of $150,000 in her shopping sprees, or was it tens of thousands more? (The paper trail will eventually emerge on that one, now that lawyers are descending on Alaska to confiscate the gladrags.) Is she so dim she doesn’t know Africa is a continent, or only so dim she can’t name a single newspaper or magazine she’s ever read? Did she violate ethics laws in pursuing the firing of her ex-brother-in-law, or did her petty, nepotistic despotism remain within perfectly legal bounds? Guess what: We no longer have to care! To paraphrase Jon Stewart talking about Karl Rove the other night: Sarah Palin can’t hurt me anymore.
Unless … can’t you see Palin emerging as the leader of a splinter hard-right group, possibly even a third party? A perverse part of me—the part that enjoyed this endless campaign’s operatic grotesquerie–sort of wishes she would run in ’12, because if she did manage to get the nomination (which, as Anne observes, good friggin’ luck), she would have to debate Barack Obama, which would make for one of the most entertaining spectacles American politics has ever seen.
-
sponsorship
In all the idle chatter I picked up today about which private school the Obama girls might attend (see this New York Times story for the first guesses), one thing was absent: any hint of the gossipy, snarky tone that usually descends on a first family as soon as they step foot in this insular town (especially when discussing something so ripe with humor as progressive private schools jockeying for their attention).
It's not surpising, I suppose, given the general goodwill toward them. But it does make me wonder exactly what political species they will fall into. Messiah implies eventual disappointment. He is more like a benevolent king. He has an almost old-fashioned, regal gift of making the nation's destiny seem in line with his own. Usually, when politicians give us all the credit, we see this as faux humility padding their own ambition. But when Obama repeats, over and over, "this is your victory," or "this victory belongs to you," we believe him.
-
sponsorship
I don't believe for a second that Sarah Palin wasn't aware of the fact that Africa is a continent, not a single country. If there's even a grain of truth to this rumor, I suspect it's that she referred to South Africa as a "region," and that led her aides—who already had a low opinion of her—to assume the worst. I'd also like to point out that none other than George W. Bush once referred to Africa as a "nation." After meeting with E.U. leaders in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2001, he said: "We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease."
-
sponsorship
Thank you, Melinda and Lauren, for saying what I wanted to say but was avoiding since I've largely been our lone Sarah Palin defender. Saying that Palin doesn't know that Africa is a continent sounds like something you'd say about your ex after a bitter breakup (which is perhaps what this is). It sounds far more sarcastic and bitter than serious, and it says more about the speaker than the target.
John McCain might not have been able to win even if he'd put God himself on the ticket, given the standing of the Republican Party right now. And Palin surely didn't help him pull in as many women as he'd hoped. But still, as Chris Beam points out in Slate, he didn't have a lot of good choices (or rather, left himself with few good choices because of his rumored stubborn insistence on Joe Lieberman). I kind of wish in hindsight that it had been Mitt Romney, because he'd have brought credibility on the economic front. But the narrative would have been about their contentious primary. And I liked Tim Pawlenty, once I'd heard of him, but Chris is right that you would have been able to hear crickets chirping at rallies. And Joe Lieberman? Worse than crickets. The networks would have had to find a way to silence the echoes in the convention center during the acceptance speeches while the conventioneers were out at bars drowning their sorrows. Heck, I would have voted for Obama if he picked Lieberman. (No offense, Joe.) So, it seems a little unfair for all the blame to fall on Sarah Palin. McCain was trailing, he threw a Hail Mary, and it fell short. It's not like he was leading by 10 points and then she brought down the whole campaign.
Like Anne says, whether Palin is that dumb or not, this says something bad about the McCain campaign. The candidate himself gave a gracious concession speech Tuesday night. It's too bad his staffers don't have the same amount of class.
-
sponsorship
Jodi Kantor has a piece in the Times today examining our first family-elect's "acute awareness" that everything they do "will brim with symbolic value." She's mainly talking about what they will represent racially, of course. But that's not the whole story: I can't stop thinking about Michelle Obama's declaration last week that her plan was to become "mom in chief." I get that ensuring her kids have a semi-normal life inside the White House will be consuming. And I have no issue with her decision to leave her job, saying that all the attention paid and access granted to a first lady can help her accomplish more than her job could. She's right, though I did love the idea of a first lady with a full-time job—but, I admit, only for its "symbolic value." What I don't get is why, if she's aware of what she represents, and if her chief interest is helping working parents, this mom-in-chief title is acceptable.
The accepted wisdom that she had to soften her career-dynamo image to reach voters angered me. I don't think for a moment that Michelle's high-powered-working-mother story would have broken this election. Furthermore, these sorts of political trade-offs perpetuate the perception that this nation can't handle the notion of women whose work has major value, just as their parenting does. Now that Obama has won, will Michelle, aware of all she represents, choose to portray her successful career as something to celebrate, or as a dirty secret? She can be so much more than just a fashion icon if she gives up the "Mom" label and instead chooses to be the woman I fell for before the primary season stripped her of the identity. "When people ask Michelle Obama to describe herself, she doesn't hesitate. First and foremost, she is Malia and Sasha's mom," the campaign Web site says. Now that this election is over, I hope once again we'll get to see her as so much more.
-
sponsorship
Sounds like those McCain aides are fast-tracking their guy's return to pariah—I mean, maverick—status by alienating every last conservative who voted for him with their mean, sexist, and derriere-covering hooey about Sarah Palin. I'm sorry, but I do not for one second believe that she did not know Africa was a continent. If she threw those poor foot soldiers for democracy into a panic by appearing at her hotel-room door "essentially ... wrapped in a bathrobe''—grow up, people; it's not the first time a candidate has finished dressing on the run. And from what I saw of the crack McCain-Palin organization, somebody needed to engage in the dreaded "throwing of paperwork and things of that nature.'' I see this as the jump-start of her rehab with women voters: diva, shopaholic, temptress, hmmm. Keep up the women-hating insults, McCainiacs, and it'll be Palin in '12.
-
sponsorship
I, too, am fascinated by all of this postgame revelation, Anne and Emily. I'm having a hard time believing, though, that Palin—the governor of an American state surrounded by Canada—did not know what NAFTA was, nor that Africa wasn't a country. She's literate; her parents were teachers. It sounds to me like a sarcastic comment was taken as fact. That said, it's insane that we can even be discussing this; crazier still how O'Reilly leapt to her defense. As if the campaign didn't feel like satire to begin with.
Dahlia, while the diva-branding is surely sexist (like the c-word, there's no male equivalent), I'm not sure that the towel talk is, too. The fact that, as Newsweek has reported, when McCain's top strategists arrived at her hotel room to brief her for for the convention, she appeared wrapped only in a towel—well, that's pretty revelatory about how this woman uses her sex appeal as power in the most egregiously inappropriate circumstances. I admit that I love the idea of such palling around with major governmental figures—if, say, we learned that Angela Merkel hangs with longtime advisers in her bathrobe, I'd feel giddy fondness. But this is another story, and if we're going to looking at a future in which Palin continues to sear our consciousness, I want to know how she plays her game.
-
sponsorship
Anne and Emily: I was as riveted as you by Carl Cameron’s breathless dishing—as well as by O’Reilly's almost palpable desire to smash him in the face on live television—but I couldn’t help but balk a little at the substance of the McCain campaign's criticisms: Palin is described as colossally stupid. And a diva (prone to tantrums and throwing things). And someone who opens her hotel room door in just a bathrobe (inappropriately sexual) and also a shopaholic who already had far too many clothes to begin with. Just wondering if the sexism threaded through all that doesn’t make it a little less juicy and a lot more worrisome?
-
sponsorship
Agreed, Emily: If it's true that Palin knows less geography than most fifth graders, that says something rather awful about the McCain campaign. If it's not true, and if McCain staffers are spreading that rumor anyway, that says something rather awful about the McCain campaign too...
-
sponsorship
I agree, Anne, that the gleeful details being spread by McCain’s staff about Sarah Palin’s Ali G-like geographical bewilderment, her temper tantrums, and refusal to accept interview preparation are particularly juicy. Let's accept all this is true—aren't McCain’s own people making the argument for why McCain deserved to lose? Their guy, who is 72 and has had melanoma almost as many times as Larry King has been married, picked Palin after a couple of brief conversations. The staff's “now it can be told” eviscerating of her actually makes the campaign look as if it was trying to perpetrate a fraud on the public.
-
sponsorship
For those who haven’t seen it yet, this clip of Fox News political correspondent Carl Cameron talking to Bill O'Reilly is rather extraordinary, and not only for what it reveals about Sarah Palin. Cameron reports that McCain campaign insiders have told him that Palin was unaware that Africa is a continent, not a single country; that she could not name the three signatories of the North American Free Trade Agreement; and that she had refused point-blank to prepare for those infamous Katie Couric interviews.
But O’Reilly’s reaction is even more gripping than these revelations. Even as Cameron—a Fox reporter!—is talking, he keeps grasping wildly at the “all-criticism-of-Palin-is-snobbery” narrative. “She could be tutored!” he says at one point and gets Cameron agree that the real problem with the Couric interviews was the way the elite liberal media spun them afterward. My prediction: If the Republican Party and its pundits sticks to this interpretation of Palin’s performance, they’ll be out of the White House for the next decade, if not longer.
-
sponsorship
Meghan: I hadn't noticed that in his opening catalogue of binary-distinctions-beyond-which-we-must-move, Obama didn't mention that most primal of all binaries: men and women! That does seem like an extraordinary omission, one that I'd almost think was an accidentally skipped line (was he reading from a teleprompter there in Grant Park?) if it weren't for the ultra-precise and carefully calibrated delivery of the entire speech. Obviously Obama is, ideologically speaking, a feminist, but it's odd that rift in the electorate--which defined his primary campaign as much as any other factor--didn't spring more immediately to mind.
But how incredible that you got to be standing in Grant Park with all the other men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights, etc., on that historic night. The frisson of awed patriotism you describe is exactly the mood evoked by this Whitman quote, from Leaves of Grass, sent to me the morning of election day by a friend who has a way of finding the perfect poem for every occasion:
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor Mississippi's stream:
This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still small voice vibrating - America's choosing day...
-
sponsorship
Dana, I also noticed the lack of any mention of Hillary in Barack's speech. There was another notable absence, too. Early in the speech, Barack spoke about how last night's results were an "answer" to those who doubted America's democracy. He then said: "It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled." Well, hello. How odd not to mention "women and men" in this list, since that division speaks to the only other historically significant part of this election year: Namely, a woman almost became the presidential nominee. Granted, Obama later spoke about Ann Nixon Cooper's having borne witness to not only the advent of civil rights but the suffrage of women. Still, I wished that he had given a nod to women in that early part of the speech—especially since his message all along has been about unity and healing.
That's the only kvetching I'll do. Last night, I stood in Grant Park with hundreds of thousands of other Americans and found myself experiencing a wave of patriotism and pride as never before. When CNN announced Obama had won, strangers hugged and kissed; black men and white men shook hands; and when the speech was over the crowd rolled down Michigan Avenue, slightly dazed and narcotized with joy. Spontaneous cheers broke out ever few minutes, whenever an El train went by, with the energetic unity Whitman described in his healing paean to democracy, Song of Myself, a poem written at a moment of cultural divisiveness rivaling the one we just lived through.
-
sponsorship
Did anyone else notice that Obama’s victory speech last night (which started out a little stiff and stump-speech-y, I thought, then soared to the firmament with that Ann Nixon Cooper kicker) never mentioned Hillary Clinton? Believe me, this isn't PUMA resentment speaking—he was by no means obligated to mention the woman who ran a fierce, interminable, and at times dirty campaign against him, and he may well have had good political reasons for not doing so. I just don’t understand what those reasons were. After all, it was a speech about getting past the old resentments and limitations, and as Obama pointed out, the 106-year-old Cooper was born disenfranchised for two reasons: She was black and a woman. After the rhetorical valentine he'd just sent out to McCain, who spent the past two months framing him as a shady, dangerously naive socialist, why not reach out to Hillary supporters with an acknowledgement of the politician who tempered his campaigning steel in the primaries? Was it just a matter of keeping any hint of old-school Clinton politics at bay?
-
sponsorship
The first thing my son (who is so not a morning person) said when he woke up today, with the biggest smile on his face, was President Obama! I don't think he could have been any happier if Steven Spielberg had dropped by to talk shop. But have you noticed the number of (much) older Obama supporters who are relieved, awed, exhausted, and proud, but also unexpectedly ... quiet? As if after years of outrage, it's going to take a minute to register the enormity and import of what just happened; how is it one behaves, again, when the country appears to be setting off on the right track? When negative campaigning is not rewarded and baser instincts resisted from sea to sea? A pal with whom I've been watching election returns since our supersized shoulder-pad days came over last night, as per tradition. And this is someone who not only gave to Obama until it hurt but had been out door-knocking for him, in Virginia, every weekend for months. Yet when Ohio told the tale, we were so stunned, we never did open the vintage Dom she'd brought over. Another friend who's been working for Democratic candidates and causes his entire adult life just called to say he is wandering around in a park somewhere, not knowing what to call the way he is feeling: "I've waited so long ...'' Oh, we'll process this, I'm confident, but who knew winning wouldn't automatically compute? Maybe if I hadn't been a Cubs fan, too?
-
sponsorship
Last night I woke my 9-month-old baby—fast asleep in her Obama shirt—to watch the acceptance speech. My computer cord shorted out in a giant tumbler of champagne. I wept, and then wept again, and then wept again; Jesse Jackson's tears jerked my own the hardest. For the first time in my life, people took to the streets in celebration of something good, something I believe. If the adage is true that we get the government we deserve, then we have made ourselves, finally, to be something deserving, after all. It is the first time in my life I believe in my country. Barack Obama made me, and millions of us, do that.
"It's been a long time coming," he said last night. Those words lead off the refrain to Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," which has been playing in my head since, as I check and recheck the headlines to convince myself that this is history, not reverie. The song has sounded like a dream ever-deferred. Today, it feels more like a lyrical journey to what led us here and a reminder that just as we've crossed that distance, so we might advance more, after all this time moving backward. Holding my baby on my lap last night, I was most particularly moved, like Dahlia, by Obama's account of the century Ann Nixon Cooper has witnessed in her 106-year march to yesterday's vote.
I have no doubt that Obama has the deepest regard for the shoulders that he stands upon today. But if this is going to be a true victory for all of us, he must summon that regard not just to the black America that has endured a painful journey, from slave auctions, to the bullets that ricocheted through the Audubon ballroom, to this day. He'll have to address the continued erosion of civil and human rights. In the same country that has elected this extraordinary man, African-Americans constitute 49 percent of our prison population (compared with 13 percent of our total population). More black men are incarcerated than are in college. The average black life expectancy has declined to what it was in 1970. A recent study on the housing crisis concludes that "the subprime lending debacle has caused the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history." Obama did not campaign on these issues, but to make good on the moral promise of his presidency and not just the symbolic one, he will need to focus on the specific challenges to African-Americans as well as all Americans.
The New York Times says today, "No Time for Laurels; Now the Hard Part"; I say this is a moment to bask in what we have delivered unto ourselves. I plan to keep crying and playing Sam Cooke for my baby for at least another few days. But in listening to Cooke's words, I must remember that this election hasn't closed the book. Rather, by turning the page, we're still pushing through the same narrative, chapter by chapter.
-
sponsorship
Despite all else—the good news, for instance, that South Dakotans rejected harsh restrictions on women's uteri, and Colorado laughed at the idea that a fertilized egg is a person—let me just add how deeply sad I am that in Proposition 8, California's 38 million people decided, 52 percent to 48 percent, that two women or two men should not have their marriages recognized by the law. In the last few weeks, when the polls got close, I was extremely worried. The much-discussed Bradley effect may not actually exist, but a "homo effect" does. When LGBT issues go up for a popular vote, that vote has usually run about four points more against us than pollsters predict. The (barely) good news is that the effect has shrunk: The result was only 2 percent worse than predicted. But a loss is still a loss.
There's lots to say, and maybe I will pull out of my sadness and say it another time. Important to remember that California is an enormous and complicated state, more populous than Canada, as diverse as the nation politically. For instance, it has the largest Mormon population outside Utah and a large evangelical megachurch base. Its vast poor and rural stretches have opinions that differ greatly from those of San Franciscan liberals. And so while some counties went overwhelmingly in favor of retaining same-sex marriage, the more conservative counties went overwhelmingly against. Men were against same-sex marriage while women were 50-50; younger people were (overwhelmingly) for same-sex marriage while older people were against.
I am sad even though I know that, in 20 years, that vote will go the other way—maybe even in 10. Much sooner than that, I believe, some other American state will join Massachusetts and Connecticut (and Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain—and, as of last spring, Norway) in opening up the M-word to same-sex pairs. And I am sad even though this wasn't a total rejection of same-sex unions: California's domestic partnership law is the equivalent of Vermont's civil unions, as comprehensive a set of recognitions and protections as you can get, short of the M-word itself—and California voters have let that stand.
Still, it stings to be told that your ability to love is not worthy of the word marriage. You can commit yourself for life, raise children together, pray over your sick beloved's body in the ER, or have the same argument for years about whose relatives you visit on Thanksgiving, but get the state's recognition that it's a real marriage? Nope. It's painful.
Guess I'm staying in Massachusetts—where my neighbors are still overwhelmingly proud to be first—after all.
-
sponsorship
It wasn't at the top of my mind, but I did wonder how the incumbent would respond last night—just as I've found myself wondering over the last two months what it could possibly feel like to be a sitting president whose eight years are now almost universally prefaced by the adjective "disastrous." Bush's opponents use it, and so do his supporters, and even if he never reads any newspapers—and seems barricaded out of sight these days—it's hard to believe he has been insulated from the devastating verdict.
Yet to carry on, I suppose he has to be, on some level, deaf to it and to the drama of a succession that is about, front and center, his own failure. Certainly his congratulatory message to Obama last night sounded singularly out of tune—and not just because it was a night on which the candidates themselves so eloquently captured the spirit of historic significance. "What an awesome night for you, your family, and your supporters. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations and go enjoy yourself.'' From the adolescent "awesome" to the self-actualizing bromides to the flippant "go enjoy yourself" (what phrase did he really have mind?), the well-wishing was unsettlingly off-pitch. So off-pitch that I wonder if we could be hearing the deep bitterness of a man belatedly aware of how derailed his own journey has been.
But-how disorienting is this: We don't have to think about him anymore.
-
sponsorship
Some small observations in the spirit of Melinda’s post on Elizabeth Dole: Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., is out. Virgil Goode, R-Va., looks to have lost in a squeaker. That last-ditch attack ad flopped. South Dakotans defeated Measure 11, which would have prohibited abortions except in absurdly limited cases and was meant as a test rocket to take down Roe v Wade.
Maybe we really can bend the arc of history.
My favorite part of Obama’s speech tonight was the guided tour through the amazing 106-year lifetime of Ann Nixon Cooper. It forced me to catch up with so many of you who were already seeing this election through the eyes of your children. It made me see that the world in which my sons will grow to adulthood will be unrecognizable to me. Just as Ann Nixon Cooper moved from a time before cars to voting on a touch screen, my kids are going to look back at the ways we have talked about race and gender and class and geography this year and laugh. Probably as they speed off on their X-wing starfighters. And the part I have yet to fully absorb? It's not just that, as Obama said tonight, “America can change.” It’s that my kids will wake up tomorrow morning in a fundamentally different world than the one they went to sleep in.
-
sponsorship
Oprah cried, Jesse Jackson cried, and John Lewis said he had no tears left. Our next first lady whispered, "I love you" to her husband, who didn't seem to want to let her go even when it was time to leave the stage. Michelle Obama's mom, Marion Robinson, was kvelling for all of them. And our next president was appropriately sober; bringing us together is going to be hard. But a little easier because the crowd that came to hear President-Elect Obama cheered readily at his bow to John McCain. When he spoke of moving people "to put their hand on the arc of history and bend it once more to the hope of a better day," I really could dare to hope that even people who can't look at him without shouting at the television might take a breath and give him a chance.
-
sponsorship
And I have tears in my eyes, too, watching Barack Obama and Michelle and their two beautiful little girls walk out there in Grant Park. And I'm glad my own little girls spent this morning knocking on doors here in Virginia, helping to get out the vote.
-
sponsorship
John McCain went beyond where he had to go with the speech he just gave, pretty much all but begging his supporters to please forget everything his campaign has been suggesting about Barack Obama and instead hear this: "I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him but in offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together. ... Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans, and please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.'' I do believe him. And not only am I proud of President-Elect Obama, but it's good to have John McCain back as well. At the end, when he complained that his campaign "at times seemed to be the most challenged campaign in modern times,'' he seemed more comfortable than he had in months.
-
sponsorship
CNN is reporting that Obama received 60 percent to McCain's 38 percent of the female vote with just less than 50 percent of national precincts reporting. This 22-point margin is much higher than polls predicted.
Adding Sarah Palin to the ballot didn't attract the women vote as McCain and the Republicans might have hoped. After picking Palin as a running mate, many speculated that Clinton supporters would flock to the McCain-Palin ticket. These early results don't show that to be the case.
-
sponsorship
On the positive side for Elizabeth Dole, she never again has to endure being called "Liddy," a nickname she's been trying to shed at least as far back as the first story I ever read about her, in which I distinctly remember her being referred to as "still turning heads at 43.'' Unfortunately, her new name is "the former senator'' of North Carolina. And though I've always liked her, she earned it the old-fashioned way, by working hard to disregard her better instincts with ads that accused her Democratic opponent, former Sunday-school teacher Kay Hagan, of palling around with "Godless Americans.'' Sitting here with my own team of analysts—including my door-knocking 12-year-old daughter, who just yawned, "There's a surprise," when Georgia was called for McCain—it occurs to me that I am not so much after a repudiation of conservatism as I am an end to meanness. And the ad that ended Dole's career? That was just ungodly.
-
sponsorship
If you've already voted and already memorized the Slate tipsheet for tonight's returns, you may be feeling like I am: anxious, restless, hovering uncertainly in the intense stillness before this evening's big noise. Futile attempts at normalcy shut down at least an hour ago. If you're unable to rip yourself from your laptop, scroll through this terrific visual summary of all we have weathered to get here. (Sinbad and the Snipers of Tuzla!) It should help get you closer to Indiana o'clock--I mean 6 p.m. Eastern.
-
sponsorship
I‘m afraid I hear “Sarah Palin’s not going anywhere” as more of a threat than a promise. But I’m with both Rachael and E.J. when it comes to the glory of voting. In fact, after casting a ballot at my local public school (which had a Sesame Street-level vibe of picturesque diversity and neighborly goodwill), I walked to a nearby hospital and gave blood, just to keep that vaguely civic buzz going.
And as long as we’re pitching cornballs, Melinda, I might as well hurl this one out: Now that I’m a parent—and this is my first presidential election since becoming one—I have a whole new investment in this process (like I’m voting for two now, and whoever wins had better goddamned well not wreck the future for my kid). I also, to my surprise, find myself identifying less with the candidates on this excruciating last day than with their mothers. (This happened during the Olympic Games, too; I’d see Nastia Liukin’s mother watching from the stands and nearly faint from anxiety.) Can you imagine the pride, the love, the fear (for their physical safety), and the sickening suspense you’d feel if it was your kid occupying this role on the public stage (even if that “kid” was 72 years old)? It occurred to me when Obama’s grandmother died that, of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Obama is the only one without a living mother, someone to cast her vote for him, hold his hand if he loses, and kvell like nobody’s business if he wins. The fact that his grandmother, who played that role in his life for so many years, missed this election by a matter of hours will surely be a sorrow he’ll carry forever. If my daughter ever runs for president, I’d drive a bargain with the devil to be there to see her win or lose.
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
Thanks for your post on Sarah Palin. It's funny: I was at the polls today, doing my mundane but important civic duty, coloring in all the circles completely like a student taking a standardized test and reading the language of all the amendments and issues carefully to make sure a "yes" was a yes and a "no" was a no. But as I was going over my ballot (before feeding it into a box that looked mysteriously like a paper shredder), I paused on Sarah Palin's name right there under John McCain's, and just a bit of emotion welled up in me. There was a spring in my step as I walked back to my car. After all my doubts and confusion, I was excited and a little proud to be voting for her.
Believe me, I'm someone who abhorred the "PC tokenist ‘90s," and god knows that I would never vote for a woman just because of her gender. I don't know what tonight will bring, and I'm not overly optimistic. But I think that you're exactly right that she's bigger than some of her low moments and bigger than the wardrobe. Maybe even bigger than the campaign. If she and McCain lose tonight, she might take some hits for a while. But there will be a lot of blame to go around, and she won't get all of it. And, like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin said on Saturday Night Live in that QVC skit, "I'm not going anywhere." Speaking of which, where can I get one of those "Palin in 2012" T-shirts?
-
sponsorship
Ah, the irony of the sexy librarian inquiring whether it's legal to ban books.
What I was initially getting at was less how Sarah Palin defines herself and more how our culture has responded to those definitions. For example, in all the McCain blame-game conversations that are emerging in the press today--like this one by Slate's Christopher Beam--there's a total absence of hand-wringing of the were we ready for a female VP? variety. Of course, had Palin been more prepared for the job, that conversation may be a different one: Her inexperience and incuriousity have been a great leveler.
I'm happy that the McCain flame-out discussion doesn't imply we wait another 24 years for a female candidate, as we have since Ferraro. Hanna suggests, and I agree, that Palin will gain mastery in the political game--at least as it plays out in mass culture if not in policy discussion. But the specter of a post-Palin America, as Hanna put it, with our most famous Alaskan annointed as the lone figure to be reckoned with? That strikes me as just the sort of future celebrity candidacy Obama unfairly had to shake. Normalizing the concept of women in our highest offices? It's about time. Normalizing Palin as the best shot at female leadership? Thanks but no thanks.
Perhaps before I get all worked up about 2012, I should get through tonight. But it's certainly intriguing to consider what this two-year campaign has laid out for the road ahead. Looking at the ballot in my polling booth this morning, I flashed back to the beginning of this relentless, seemingly endless trip. Back then I wouldn't have believed the choices we have had the opportunity to make today.
-
sponsorship
Oh my gosh, how I love to vote! I stood in line for two hours this morning in a dense urban area right outside Boston waiting to vote. The lines were literally around the block and then another block back—hundreds of people, maybe more than 400 in line at a time. It's a bright, chilly day up here; when we turned the corner onto a windy street, my fingers went numb and didn't fully stop tingling until an hour after I'd voted. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Mine is a mixed-class, mixed-age neighborhood, and it sure did look like everyone in town was in line: white working-class (especially Portuguese and Italian, who used to be called "ethnics" only a generation ago), college students, parents (some brave souls with babies or toddlers in tow), elderly folks, and Certified Liberal Elites (professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and the like). I did get some use out of the time in line: The preschool teacher behind me gave me some suggestions for managing a child's tantrums—very useful, since I am spending more and more time with a 5-year-old. Then the 80-year-old woman in front of me insisted that I vote ahead of her since she didn't have to go to work and I did, so that cut a minute off my time. The cheerful line was still curled around the block when I left at 11 a.m., all happy at being part of democracy.
I suspect I wasn't the only one who felt especially virtuous because of the wait. Social science suggests that yes, in presidential elections, people vote as much for that feeling of moral virtue as for a sense of affecting the outcome—and that people tend to value something more highly or believe in it more firmly if they had to work harder to get it. Here in the Boston area, the sense of cheerfulness and friendliness in line could be linked to the probability that most people were voting for a candidate they believed would win—and felt that they were accompanied by those who agreed with them. Like Emily, I am giddy with relief that this 100-year campaign is almost over. But for today, whatever the outcome, I just love that feeling of having my say in hiring our commander in chief. Voting makes me especially love my country!!
-
sponsorship
I think we're talking about some quality of Palin's we haven't pinned down yet. I've talked to some women who thought her performance on the prank call, and then on SNL last night, made her seem small, and defeated. And that they felt sorry for her. I felt just the opposite. I thought she sounded almost regally bored on the phone call, and poised on the SNL clip in a way that suggested she has already figured out every part of the game - the irony, the self mockery, the great American path to fame. Under the normal rules, Palin's future is punching bag for the Republican Party, the McCain campaign has already started some of that finger-pointing. But you sense that she'll resist it and make her own rules. They wanted her to be a token and she stole the show. In that way, she is post-feminist, shoving hidebound politics past the PC, tokenist '90s and straight into 2008. Even if they do lose, she still feels larger than the prank call, larger than the wardrobe controversy, larger than the campaign. Yes, her wink-wink, ain't I pretty thing has been central, but I bet as an icon of the right, she'll transcend that without quite shedding it, in the way Nina describes.
-
sponsorship
There have been times, yes, when I've felt like the corniest living American. But, oh, this is not one of those times. Suddenly, here come e-mails even from normally non-woo-woo quarters, sharing Obama-related stories of people coming together and feeling great about it, like they were not only thirsty but had forgotten what water was. My favorite: A gentlemanly McCain supporter in Ohio offers his XL Dale Earnhardt jacket to three XS elderly Jewish ladies so they can vote despite having shown up in forbidden Obama T-shirts—and they not only bond but win his vote without ever asking for it. Others tell of African-Americans taking photos of their deceased parents into the booth with them, and a former Freedom Rider who cannot believe this day has come. In Santa Monica, my friend who is wearing her lucky Indiana Motor Speedway shirt while dialing undecided Hoosiers reports enjoying even those "long, cordial conversations'' that do not end in conversion experiences. A certain husband who in 24 years has never sniffled at anything other than my Amex bill is beyond misty that Obama's grandma didn't live one more day. And my hands-down most levelheaded friend, Rose, who is a teacher (but no, she's not that "Rose the teacher") writes, "I see a new day dawning after today.'' McCainiacs, beware, or you just might get hugged into submission; we needed this, bless our hearts.
-
sponsorship
I don't have anything to add to Lauren's post about Obama's grandmother, or John Dickerson's lovely piece. But this sentiment from Yale law professor Judith Resnik seemed worth sharing:
As I reflected on the poignancy of the timing of the death of Obama's grandmother, I thought, may this be the day that so many of us think
-- would that our parents or grandparents had lived to see this. And may it also be the day that our children and grandchildren will
come to take for granted, to assume its naturalness as if it
was always obvious that it would come to pass.
Maybe the symbolic part of this sentiment is one that people can share, however they voted.
-
sponsorship
Welcome, Lauren, and thanks to you and Nina for starting to puzzle over these identity implications of the campaign, which will be with us long after the polls close today. (Oh, what a glorious phrase: The polls will actually close.) If post-gender means that you don't run away from the female part of candidate but you don't lead with your mother or sexy librarian side, either, then I'm with Nina: Palin isn't there. For that matter, Hillary wasn't quite either, because at key moments she appealed to women by reminding us of her own victimhood. On the other hand, she did get us past the commander in chief bar. My own fear has been that Palin ran right back into it. But that's not because she's a woman or even because she winks and flirts with her audience. It's because she has shown us that she knows little where a vice-presidential candidate should know a lot. So maybe we are at the point at which the next woman with serious qualifications will indeed mount a post-gender candidacy. And maybe Palin helps bring that about, too, in the sense that Michael Kinsley writes about today: Because of her and Obama (and I'd add, Hillary), he argues, it's "hard to imagine" that future pictures of the two presidential candidates with their VP picks will show us four white men. Actually, that seems a bit aspirational to me: I can imagine plenty such pictures. But are they less likely than they were before? Yes.
-
sponsorship
Lauren, your post about Palin and Obama got me thinking. As I’ve always understood the concept of “post-race,” it isn’t really about being past race. Race isn’t something you can transcend. But it is something you can bend and complicate—especially if you’re as charismatic and talented as Obama is.
I remember first hearing the term “post-black” in 2001, when Thelma Golden curated Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring artists who were, in Golden’s words, “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” That was the same year that Rolling Stone published the article “To Be Gay at Yale,” in which many of my classmates spoke about how their queer identity had become “backgrounded”—i.e., it was still an important part of how they conceived of themselves, but it was no longer necessarily the most important part. They were, in a word, post-gay.
Ever since then I’ve found the phrase “post-race” to be a useful one, personally. I’m a biracial woman who’s very attached to the immigrant communities I grew up in—someone who thinks about race a lot—but my skin color is not always in the forefront of my mind when I interact with the world.
So to me, Obama is absolutely a post-race candidate. He’s the quintessential post-race candidate, even! Here’s a man with roots in Kenya and Indonesia, in Hawaii and South Side Chicago, and though by all accounts his sense of himself has evolved over time (“struggled with his identity”—ick, I hate that phrase), he now seems totally at ease with his complicated self. Being post-race, to me, means wearing yourself a little more lightly.
So is Sarah Palin post-gender? I’m not entirely sure, but my instinct says no. Too much of her public persona seems to rotate between performances rooted in gender roles—the flirt with the high heels or the über-mom, as you point out, or the Ann Coulter-style mean girl or the sexy Puritan, as other Slate writers have noted. Is it the calculatedness I’m responding to? Her eagerness to put on a show for us? I was going to say that it’s because she was chosen for the ticket simply because she’s a woman, but that’s not quite right since she’s obviously proven to be a charismatic, electrifying politician, as well. I confess I’m stumped.
-
sponsorship
I was saddened this evening to read about the death of Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or as anyone who has read Dreams From My Father might remember her, "Toot." Toot was an ordinary woman who raised an extraordinary family and who increasingly lived race in America in a way few have. Living in Texas after the war, Toot shooed her daughter and a black playmate inside the house when children screamed "nigger lover" outside her picket fence; in Hawaii, she opened her heart to an African son-in-law, when intermarriage was still illegal in more than half the country. As we all know, she went on to raise an African-American grandson who was to become the first black nominee for president of the United States. Toot became a symbol of race's emotional complexities—and a literal embodiment, some thought, of selling one's own grandmother for political gain—when, in his speech on race, Obama discussed her discomfort with black people who were not her grandson. She died on the eve of what may well be his election. Regardless of its outcome, I, for one, feel bereft that she will not get to see tomorrow.
-
sponsorship
Update: Well, now I know what to think of the blog claiming Joe Wurzelbacher was life of the Saturday Night Live after-party this weekend. The poster is a hoaxster, and I got punk'd.
The blogger, called Marty Eisenstadt, claims he and the iconic plumber were "downing shots of Makers Mark" at the party following John and Cindy McCain's guest appearance this weekend and that Joe "got some ‘quality' alone time with a certain female cast member." An SNL press manager wrote to say that Eisenstadt's post was "completely untrue." Although Eisenstadt blogged that John and Cindy McCain were at the after-party, "they most certainly were not," according to the NBC e-mail, and "more importantly -- neither of my female cast members ‘hooked up' with Mr. Wurzelbacher."
As further proof of my own gullibility, I submit this alert I subsequently found on Sourcewatch.org advising that Eisenstadt doesn't exist. I'm beginning to think Wurzelbacher doesn't either.
-
sponsorship
My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
-
sponsorship
This weekend, I ran partway through Brooklyn along the marathon route with my brother (who was actually running all 26-plus miles, unlike me). Much of the route is crowded with cheering spectators. But I've run this section a few years and every time I'm struck by the relative emptiness of the streets in Bed-Stuy (a lower-income neighborhood that's mostly African American) and the section heading into Williamsburg where a lot of Hasidic Jews live. The sudden emptiness of the streets is one of those profound reminders of class divisions -- how different a few miles can make in the social geography a city. This year, though, something different took place. There was a group of spectators in Bed-Stuy who avidly cheered on a subsection ofmarathon runners: Those wearing Obama stickers and buttons. "OBAMA!" rung out over and over. I've lived in Brooklyn a long time but I've never seen such a sense of connection across class and race in this area as I did yesterday, for those few moments.
-
sponsorship
Jumping in on Rachael's and Melinda's discussion about negative campaigning, the example of Pennsylvania Jewish voters being told Obama will bring on a Holocaust and Sen. Elizabeth Dole's swipe at opponent Kay Hagen's Christianity remind me of the 1990 Minnesota Senate race between GOP Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and college professor Paul Wellstone. Both candidates happened to be Jewish, but the Saturday before the election Sen. Boschwitz sent out a direct-mail letter to "Friends in the Minnesota Jewish Community," accusing Wellstone of having "no connection whatsoever with the Jewish community." While Boschwitz was proudly "known as 'the Rabbi of the Senate,' " the letter said, Wellstone was married to a shiksa (Wellstone's wife Sheila was a Southern Baptist), and their "children were brought up as non-Jews."
Wellstone held a press conference decrying Boschwitz's apparent problem with Christians and "the way my wife and I have decided to raise our children." Three days later, Boschwitz was the only Republican incumbent senator defeated in that election.
-
sponsorship
This weekend it came to light that in January Barack Obama, during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said that in order to combat global warming he favored a cap and trade system that would be so punitive to industries releasing carbon dioxide that it would "bankrupt" anyone attemping to build a new coal-powered plant. Can't he leave the pushing of a San Francisco-style national agenda to Nancy Pelosi? Obama needs to stay so far away from anything San Franciscan that he refuses even to eat Rice-a-Roni. It was at a San Francisco fundraiser that he gave his infamous, almost campaign-sinking sociological insights that the losers of small-town Pennsylvania "cling to guns or religion." Surely when in San Francisco it sounds perfectly reasonable to say that in an Obama administration there will be no future for nasty, dirty coal. But such a promise probably doesn't sound so good to "cling" voters in the coal-mining swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Nor does it sound good to anyone interested in this country's need to reduce our reliance on imported oil. It doesn't help that running mate Joe Biden recently remarked that he wants, "No coal plants here in America." At least you've got to give Joe credit for blurting this out in Ohio.
-
sponsorship
I don't know what to make of this McCain strategist's report of witnessing "canoodling" between Joe (who has apparently joined the McCain entourage) and a Saturday Night Live cast member at the after-party this weekend.
-
sponsorship
Wow, even the McCain camp is turning blue. Or at least that's the way I read this McCain aide's reaction to the Doonesbury cartoon predicting an Obama victory on Tuesday: "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.