I watch a lot of MSNBC. I watch Morning Joe every morning as I wake up and get my work day started at home, and the channel runs (usually on mute) non-stop in front of me at the office. On election nights (which seem to come a few times a week these days), it's usually on with volume for a few hours. I've watched hundreds of hours of MSNBC in the last few months.
So I say this with some level of expertise: David Shuster is the least of our problems.
The good news in this campaign is that most Americans, including pundits and political analysts, seem to feel it is socially unacceptable to use overtly racist stereotypes or innuendo against Barack Obama. Though I still believe that racism is pandemic in American society, people appear to keep their beliefs and feelings about the color of Barack Obama's skin to themselves. At least, so far.
Restraint against making sexist comments, by contrast, is not yet apparent. Fortunately, the outcry from both men and women has been loud enough to force Chris Mathews to apologize for implying that Clinton would never be a candidate if her husband hadn't messed around in the White House. I'm also delighted that MSNBC's David Shuster has both apologized and been suspended for asking a guest if Chelsea Clinton was "being pimped out in some weird sort of way" by the Clinton campaign?
These are only two of a long list of sexist comments noted by Media Matters, feminist scholars and activists across the country. This list would bore you.
But the one moment that sill sticks in my throat happened quite a while ago. On November 12, 2007, a McCain supporter asked, "How do we beat the bitch?" Laughter erupted among the crowd and McCain joined in. After a few moments, he replied, "That is an excellent question." Then, he went on to say that he respected Senator Clinton.
Oh really?
During the months to come, it will please Republicans if their Dear Leader vanishes from the media, the better not to upset independents with delicate constitutions. McCain will leapfrog Bush and embrace the ghost of Reagan. There will be much talk of a post-Bush era even as New Leader McCain dances his tightrope dance. McCain is already running commercials in which he claims to have "enlisted as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution" while he was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese--at a time when Reagan was governing California, not commanding the national revolution. Movement conservatives will chalk up the disasters of recent years to Bush's not having been sufficiently conservative. George who?
But never forget that leaders come and go while the bulldozer of movement conservatism rolls on. So tune up your memories with this poster that needs no words:
Old-timers will recall the 1972 Warhol poster of a fangy looking Nixon adorned with these words only: VOTE MCGOVERN.
"Doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?" mused David Shuster on MSNBC last night, opining about Chelsea Clinton calling celebrities in behalf of her mother.
"To the extent that people feel that I was being pejorative about the actions of Chelsea Clinton making these phone calls, to the extent that people feel that I was being pejorative, I apologize for that," Shuster added today.
Don't you think that the General Electric network is unlikely to feature anybody referring to Cindy McCain's campaign appearances as pimp-out sessions?
Don't you think that women wig these guys out in some weird sort of way?
Listening to the speeches that John McCain and Mitt Romney delivered to the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, and the generally enthusiastic whoops and cheers that most of their remarks received, an outsider could get the impression that everyone in the room was celebrating a vindication of their belief system. It was as if absolutely nothing had gone wrong during the past eight years, when a conservative president and conservative Congress pursued largely the same conservative agenda that McCain and Romney proclaimed as the path to a stronger, safer, freer, more prosperous America. Romney never even uttered the name “Bush.” McCain did so only in vowing to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, notwithstanding their failure to produce any of the multitude of promised benefits for average Americans. The past eight years of conservative rule didn’t happen.
First of all, I want to say that I have no proof to support the rumors that economic policy is designed by mindless zombies who habitually repeat what they heard “experts” say. However, the shape of the final stimulus package may provide evidence for this proposition.
The basic story is that we get a bit more than $100 billion in tax breaks for individuals and about $40 billion for businesses. There is nothing by way of infrastructure and certainly nothing green. (Anyone in this town hear of “global warming?)
Perhaps half of the individual tax breaks will be spent by the end of the year, and maybe a fifth of the business tax breaks. That gives us about $60 billion in spending to counteract the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble.
The economists who missed the housing bubble (EWMHB) have given us a weak unimaginative stimulus package.
George Bush went to CPAC this morning and declared Dick Cheney the best Vice President in American history. Ummm, yeah.
Anyway, that reminded me that I just watched Frontline's "Cheney's Law," a disturbing look at the Veep's long-running opposition to the United States Constitution, and wanted to pass it along. Enjoy.
In light of Senator Barack Obama’s victories Tuesday in places like Idaho, there is a lot of talk about a Brokeback Mountain election. A charismatic young male candidate and the white men in red states. The Governor of Arizona hoping Obama will beat John McCain in his home state. Southern Democrats who don't whistle. Well, what happens when a Democrat goes up against the inexorable mathematics of the Electoral College? Remember, in the general election, it’s winner take all.
Here’s the math.
Word is the Senate has agreed on an economic stimulus package worth around $150 billion that is essentially the House plan with low-income seniors thrown in. The House and the White House are supposedly on board, meaning the bill is likely to pass quickly.
It's both good news and a missed opportunity to craft a much more effective package.
On the plus side, those who said the political system was too clogged with partisanship to get this out the door quickly are proved wrong. The package is also much improved from the White House's first pass, which excluded low-income families and about 20 million elderly persons.
This week's military budget is a post-World War II record -- $611 billion without counting the full costs of the war in Iraq. Yet none of the candidates for president are talking about it.
Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the most likely critics of at least some aspects of the Pentagon's bloated budget, have remained silent. In fact, they would like to increase it, in large part to make way for their respective proposals to add tens of thousands of troops to the Army and Marine Corps.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Michael Mullen have gone even further, proposing a "floor" on mililtary spending of 4% of GDP (the equivalent of current levels) even after the end of the war in Iraq.
Lately, there's been a strange little scuffle about whether a woman who decides to vote for Barack instead of Hillary can really be a feminist, or is perhaps a self-hating oppression-internalizing traitor to all womankind, and probably stomps on puppies for fun. (Okay, so I'm exaggerating just a teeeeensy bit for amusing rhetorical effect.)
I am still undecided on the candidates themselves: on the SuperDay, I voted for one and immediately wished I had voted for the other.
But I am more than a little peeved at the proposed anatomical litmus test for feminism. It's flat-out cheating to demand that the belief that women are people (to quote the bumper sticker) can only be endorsed by voting for one of those people. We've had this debate before, and it is deadly. I reject the theology that feminism is a tribal religion, and that we can only trust the members of our own tribe. Identity politics is a stagnant pool, leading nowhere. I prefer to see feminism as just another current in the mainstream American belief in truth, fairness, and justice for all. I belong to too many groups -- some visible, some invisible, some intellectual -- to allocate my vote based on one membership. Who looks most like me? is not a good way to answer the big question: Who will be best for my country?
After the jump I'll list links to a couple of interesting essays on the subject. Please add more.
*title stolen from Adele Stan.
I just got back home from a quick business trip to Israel, and literally arrived at JFK at 6am this morning to learn all of the results from the Uber-Tuesday primaries. So forgive me if this post seems like it was written at 35,000 feet. But I think if we take a step back from the state-by-state results and look at the broader picture, I think a bold statement is in order.
If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly.
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By far the most important warning I heard here at TPMCafe last night came from Ken Baer:
We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent -- at times -- majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans..."
Obama must have been making that same observation while watching the returns, for his own exhortation of the night turned on a moving account of his early commitment, as a community organizer, to fight for low-income people. Yet precisely because it came from his personal experience on Chicago's poor, black Southside, it underscored Ken's caution about who Obama's strongest constituencies are. Those of us who are old enough can remember that liberal Democrats have been here before, and paid dearly for it.
That's the headline from the Christian pollster, The Barna Group. Whether you're fretting or glowing over tonight's returns, take a moment to gladden your Democratic heart:
In the 2000 election, the born again constituency gave Republican nominee George W. Bush a resounding 57% to 42% margin over Democratic challenger Al Gore. In 2004, the born again segment again sided with George W. Bush, giving him a lopsided 62% to 38% preference over Democratic hopeful John Kerry.In the past couple of elections, the born again vote represented about half of the total number of votes cast in the U.S. Given the razor thin margin of victory achieved by President Bush in 2000, and the close tally in 2004, the born again vote was vital in both of the Bush victories.
A quick take: this is a very, very big night for Hillary Clinton. Yesterday, this morning even, no one in the chattering class thought she would have much of a prayer. The polls were trending toward Obama; the exit polls earlier this evening seemed to confirm it. Those in my office heard me too start speculating that Obama may even pull off a huge night. But Clinton surprised, at this point, winning the key states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Arizona, Missouri, and California.
True, delegates are what matters, and tonight, we are getting the most likely outcome expected from about a week ago: a virtual tie. Nevertheless, Clinton deserves a huge amount of credit – especially from the press corps. Tonight should be a wake-up call: We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent – at times – majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans (one could say that, caucuses aside, when he can run like Bill Bradley, he loses; when he can run like Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, he wins).
So how might McCain fare against HRC or Obama on what voters tell us is their #1 issue: the economy?
I think he's a got a problem...a big one.
What comes to mind when you think about McCain's economic program...how about health care...middle-class squeeze...housing meltdown? Nothing much, right?
In fact, he apparently has said a) he's not much on matters economic--more of a foreign policy guy (more on that below), and b) he's going to change that and get serious about economic policy in the next few weeks. That's not an enviable position to be in, but it gets worse.
There are really too many states. My head hurts from trying to keep track of all of this.
Help me.
Update: By the way, anyone able to find any data on Ken's "Security Vote"? If you haven't read the post, it's worth checking out. He basically argues that we should look out for Dem performance in the suburban areas around NYC where 9/11 led to big gains for the GOP. Progress there would mean progress in rolling back the Fear Vote.
Should you care about the flap over healthcare “mandates”? Does it really tell us anything about whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is more likely to deliver healthcare reform?
In yesterday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman said “Yes.” He pointed out that Clinton’s plan favors mandates that would require everyone who can afford the premiums to sign up for healthcare insurance. Low-income and lower-middle income Americans who cannot afford the premiums would receive subsidies from the government, just as they do in Massachusetts. There, a single person earning less than $31,000 is eligible for a subsidy --as is a family of four earning less than $64,000. (There are still serious problems with the Massachusetts plan, but it offers a useful real-world examples of who would receive subsidies.)
One thing to look for in the results tonight is which Democrat carries the Ground Zero belt. By that, I don’t mean the southern Manhattan district where the Twin Towers once stood, but the congressional districts in the outer boroughs and suburban New Jersey and Connecticut that were most directly affected by the attacks of September 11.
These districts – especially in New Jersey and Connecticut – contain huge pockets of Democratic voters and could determine who wins these important states. And they’re important not just in delegate count (New Jersey has the third-highest total), but also in symbolism: if Hillary Clinton can’t carry her state’s largest media market, then big questions about her viability will be asked.
But these CD’s are particularly interesting because it’s these districts that could give us a clue as to how the terrorism issue will cut, and security voters will vote, come November.
Now that an extended Democratic nomination contest appears almost certain, there's been an explosion of renewed interest in the "brokered convention" scenario, which really just means a nomination that's in doubt after the primaries and caucuses are over. The big topics (explored especially well at OpenLeft.com) have been the battle over the 796 superdelegates, who are not bound by election results, and the possibility of a pre-convention or convention credentials fight over the Michigan and Florida delegations, who currently have no seats (or even hotel rooms) in Denver.
There's a more mundane but still significant problem with the situation: who will plan and execute the convention itself in the absence of a putative nominee?
Though my first choice for president was John Edwards, today I voted for Barack Obama. He's not perfect, but he's a good progressive and unlike Hillary Clinton, he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. As a constituent of his while he was a state senator, I remember very clearly that he was an outspoken opponent of the war at a time when most others in public life were running scared. And, unlike Hillary Clinton, he didn't stand and applaud when Bush said the surge was working.
That said, I'm getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama's supporters.
Some people are stunned that I have already voted for Barack Obama and that I signed a "Feminists for Obama" statement which now includes over a thousand rather distinguished names. They know I've been involved in the women's movement since 1967 and have spent my life teaching and writing about the history of women and gender ever since. So why, they ask, didn't I cast a vote for Hillary Clinton?
Am I filled with self-hatred as a woman? No. In fact, there is nothing I'd rather do than vote for the first female presidential candidate. I still remember hearing--on a remote Greek island--that the Democratic party had chosen Geraldine Ferraro as a vice-presidential candidate. To my great surprise, tears flooded my face.
So why haven't I cast this historic vote?
Since elections don't have anything to do with how many votes or delegates you win and everything to do with whether or not you under or over-perform expectations, I thought we should get started early molding the media narrative.
As Josh explained in yesterday's episode of TPMtv, polling (as good as it can be) seems to be pointing to a big day for John McCain (with the exception of a handful of states) and a photo finish on the Democratic side. Both nationally and in California, some polls show Clinton up a few points, others Obama. The key thing we're looking at here is that the oldest are good for Clinton, the newest for Obama. That being said, as Eric Kleefeld noted yesterday at Election Central, "Your guess is really as good as ours about what's going to happen."
So what's your guess?
A few links to good reader posts after the break.
The blogosphere and the cable channels are filled with news of Barack Obama's "surge" especially in California. Although you would never know it to listen to MSNBC, almost without exception, the support for Obama taking California rests on the findings of a single pollster, the Zogby organization. All the other polls since Edwards dropped out range from a single point distinction to a twelve point advantage for Hillary Clinton. Why is Zogby so far from all the other polls?
Perhaps because the Zogby samples are 52% female.
Note: we're having significant server problems, so please be patient while we sort them out. For now, reader blog posts and comments may not appear on the site immediately.
Update: the servers are better now. Comment/post to your heart's content. (fingers crossed)
Bugs aside, for a second, one of our goals in designing this new Cafe was to get you all more involved in producing content by offering you greater access to audience. We're happy to see that, so far, that seems to be working. A few highlights from the last 24 hrs:
FlyOnTneWall has a great piece on the "Five Myths About Super Tuesday" and a Monday Morning Polling Wrap-Up.As you can see on the right there's much more than that, so check out what folks are talking about, recommend the posts you like, and contribute some of your own. A few notes on bugs after the break.fairandbalanced wonders whether the Obama campaign fits into a series of global mainstream revolutions enabled by new media technologies.
Tom Wright argues that it's really moving Congress that matters for the next president's ability to make the so-loved "change."
A couple of weeks ago, I was still agonizing, though leaning Obama. The New Republic asked me to tell a waiting world where I was going. At that point, I celebrated the dawn of each new day with a ride on the roller coaster. Well, a few days later, by the time my little piece came out, I'd tilted. For what it's worth, the path of my pilgrim's progress might be of interest to other wobblers.
Here was my reasoning on Jan. 21:
"Between Clinton and Obama, on paper, not much daylight shines through....On positions, totting up the apples and oranges as best I can, it’s Clinton on points, though not a knockout....Then, the question of governing method....If nothing else, the egregious Bush years ought to instruct us that it matters hugely how the president thinks, or fails to think; whom he or she consults with. On foreign policy, each would be far better than the simple absence of Bush, splendid as that would be, but I prefer Obama’s Brzezinski and Samantha Powers to Clinton’s Albright and Holbrooke. (On domestic matters, which of course aren’t strictly domestic, I’m rather tired of Robert Rubin.)"A big question, then, was what kind of governing will these candidates do?
It’s not often that I take issue with Paul Krugman’s economics (at least not recently), but he does misrepresent the issues in going after Obama on health insurance mandates.
The simple story is that any effort to establish national
health insurance will require some anti-free loader mechanism to
prevent gaming. The logic is straightforward. Everyone agrees that we
want to get
rid of the current practice under which insurers are allowed to charge
fees
based on people’s health. Under this system, people with serious
illnesses either must pay exorbitant fees or will be unable to get insurance altogether.
(Insurance
companies lose money if they insure people with high bills.)
Statistics can be powerful. That's why I was struck to see a new study reporting that low income families do better in states that permit payday lending. If families can't get short term cash, says the study, they are more likely to encounter other expenses like bounced checks. So swallow hard and let payday lenders charge 400% interest rates, because in the long run people will be better off. Wow.
The only problem is that the numbers are wrong. A report from the Center for Responsible Lending points out that the study's claim is based on the rate of bounced checks, but the study mixed togethercustomers from states that permitted payday lending and states that prohibited it. That makes the data useless for testing the effects of payday lending. But that doesn't stop the payday lenders from cranking up the press machine.
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