I am so sick of reading quotes like this:

I am pro-choice, but I must say that with the caveat that I have never had to make that decision, and I don't know if it's a decision I could make myself. It's one of the hardest decisions any woman could ever have to make.

That's Connecticut GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon qualifying her self-description as "pro-choice" by adding that she herself might not choose an abortion if she had the choice. Guess it could be that she says "caveat" to distinguish herself from some abortion-happy pro-choice stereotype she doesn't buy into herself. But the plain reading of her quote is that she's not that pro-choice because she might choose against abortion. Which is bogus. Unfortunately, McMahon's quote echoes the most common media frame on the abortion debate: pro-choicers pushing abortion across the board, anti-choicers pushing back against it, and women somewhere in the middle making hard choices. Meanwhile, back in reality, it's pro-choicers who believe women should be able to make those sometimes hard choices at all. And when the government or the boss tries to force women not to give birth, it's pro-choicers who have those women's backs.

First, the Family Research Council held its "Values Voters Summit" on Rosh HaShanah. Maybe they figured it was a good way to avoid the embarrassment of having any Jews show up because they thought "Values" actually meant "values." Or more likely none of them knew or cared when Rosh HaShanah was. That, or they were looking for a way to keep the liberal media away from their conference.

Now, Glenn Beck is calling for a day of "fast and prayer" on...Yom Kippur? Are the right-wingers trying to win us back?

Wonder what the right-of-right-wingers are cooking up for Sukkot...

In unrelated news, Norman Podhoretz just spent a book puzzling over Why Are Jews Liberals?

Jeff Sessions - who couldn't get his own judicial nomination through a GOP Judiciary Committee even after flip-flopping to the correct position on whether the NAACP or the KKK poses a greater threat to the Republic - is now tying himself in knots over whether he would have a problem with a gay Supreme Court nominee per se, or just with one who believed gay people should have the same rights as everyone else. I'm sure when Strom Thurmond voted against Thurgood Marshall's nomination to the Court, it had nothing to do with him being Black - just with him being a Black man who believed Black people should have their equal protection rights protected.

But while it's funny/ sad/ ridiculous to watch Sessions and Co. squirm in saying first that "identity politics" are bad and then that we should be concerned that a gay nominee would make people "uneasy," or hear the Family Research Council signal openness to a gay nominee without "pro-gay ideology," there's a reason these guys are struggling to say something coherent: Open gay-bashing is becoming less popular in America, but it's hard to explain why LGBT people shouldn't have equal rights if we're not inferior Americans.

It's not by accident that the right-wing opposition to gay equality is a moving target. Anti-gay bigotry is still prevalent in America, and will be no doubt for a long time. But as Americans, including many who are uncomfortable with gay people, become less sympathetic to politicians saying that there are no gay people, that gay people need psychiatric help, that gay people are sinners, etc., Jeff Sessions has to come up with different ways to explain why he opposes the "gay agenda" - just like he had to come up with new ways to explain his animus towards the NAACP a generation ago.

So the issue is: elitist judges trying to tell regular people what to do (this one gets more tenuous now that more people support same-sex marriage than the Republican party); schoolteachers depriving parents of control over how (and whether) their kids learn about sexual orientation; priests getting locked up for not officiating at marriages they don't believe in; now Miss California's Miss America candidacy was judged not just on her body but on (gasp) how she answered a question! Perusing The Corner suggests that National Organization for Marriage President Maggie Gallagher's latest argument for why LGBT people shouldn't be allowed to get married is that opponents of gay rights will face social stigma as soon as gay people escape enshrined legal stigma. In the 90's Mike Huckabee was decrying our culture's decline "from Barney Fife to Barney Frank" - now he's decrying a gay blogger's intolerance towards Miss California.

So as more states and more Americans come out for legal equality, expect conservatives to get that much more creative in explaining their opposition as a defense of the little guy (the teacher, the priest, the voter, the beauty pageant contestant, the law professor), that much more eager to declare themselves tolerant of people with "gay tendencies," and that much more fulsome in their outrage when intolerant liberals suggest they have a problem with gay people.

In making the case for his recovery plan today, Barack Obama quoted the lesson of the Sermon on the Mount that a storm can destroy a house build on sand, but not a house built on a rock.  The way Obama used the quote reminded me of a debate a few years ago between Sojourners' Jim Wallis and Americans United's Barry Lynn where Lynn said the problem with politicians quoting the Bible is that unlike quotes from other literature, quotes from the Bible are appeals to the author's inherent authority rather than to the author's particular insight.  In other words, biblical quotes are used to support your argument based on who said it (God says don't oppress strangers) rather than why they said it (because you yourself have experienced slavery).  I think Lynn is making an insightful distinction, but it cuts against his argument.

Now that the Senate has voted for cloture on the stimulus, I gotta say it's striking how the goalposts have moved in terms of what the media consider a majority out of 100 senators. The dominant sense you'd get from following mainstream media coverage of the debate is that 61 Senators is the cut-off for a Senate majority, and if Obama's initiatives don't make it past that post he hasn't garnered that much support (and he isn't really that bipartisan). That's not how I remember things being covered during the Bush administration, when the same talking heads did their talking about the filibuster as though it was an extreme measure.

Put differently, with a Republican in the White House the onus was on Democrats to justify why anything would be worth a filibuster; with a Democrat in the White House, the onus is on Democrats to scare up 61 votes.

When John Kerry talked about filibustering Sam Alito's Supreme Court nomination (which, compared to the stimulus package, is also far-reaching in impact but most would agree was less time-sensitive to get done), that was covered as an antic from the fringe. But amidst the veneration of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the starting assumption seems to be that the very most moderate members of the Senate GOP Caucus by default will filibuster the President's bill unless they get to rewrite it.

Is this an unfair comparison? And if not, then do we blame the media, or blame the Democrats for having lacked the parliamentary-style party discipline to better control the media narrative?

That said, I don't think there's much evidence that the public cares terribly much about what Nancy Pelosi rightly called "process arguments" - who's obstructing who, who's more bipartisan, etc. And the latest polling suggests that as with the Presidential election, the GOP may be capturing media cycles without capturing voters. Another reason to hope the Conference Committee leaves the Nelson-Snowe crew with a token accomplishment or two but otherwise churns out the bill best designed to actually stimulate the economy - whose success or failure is what voters will actually remember a year from now.

Just finished Buzz Bissinger's A Prayer for the City, which he wrote after shadowing Ed Rendell (and staff) through his first term as Mayor. It's a compelling read and gives an interesting sense of the politics of early '90s Philadelphia and, more than that, of how folks in City Hall go about their jobs and why. The book suffers, though, from the blinders of ideology in a way that maybe only a book by a zealously pragmatic journalist about a zealously pragmatic technocrat can.

In the Philadelphia of Bissinger's book, there is no public policy argument for raising taxes to maintain public services - only the weakness of previous politicians who indulge in tax hikes like heroin. Disability rights activists get a dismissive sentence about how they unreasonably expect the city to spend "money that isn't there" on public services. In Bissinger's Philadelphia, there's little grounds for the skepticism Ed Rendell and his crew face from people in the "Black establishment" or "Hispanic interest groups" - you wouldn't think from the way such folks are described that they really represented anybody, except when Rendell worries if they turn on him they could summon thousands to vote him out of office. The most prolonged, serious engagement with the reality of racism (as supposed to the evils of racial politics) is a discussion of the the devastating legacy of explicitly racist New Deal redlining on the city's neighborhoods, and it segues back into why urban citizens don't trust the federal government rather than why racial distrust might still persist. Bissinger's narrative of the life of an African-American great-grandmother struggling to raise her great-grandkids, like the redlining discussion, is compelling, but essentially divorced from the discussion of racial politics and the book's scorned "Black leaders."

And while a good chunk of the book is built around Rendell's successful campaign to force takeaways in negotiations with the public sector unions, we never get a sympathetic - or even much better than contemptuous - portrayal of anyone who works in one. Bissinger repeatedly mourns, in vividly anthropomorphic terms, the death of middle class manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia (and he talks about service jobs as though they're inherently undignified and inevitably sub-middle class). But he never gives the reader any reason beyond greed that the city's employees, some middle class and some aspiring towards it, might zealously defend the standard they've won. He gives no reason beyond ambition and self-protection that Union leaders would go to the ramparts in that fight. Bissinger is super sympathetic, on the other hand, in describing a fervently anti-government libertarian who comes to work for Rendell on subcontracting out city jobs and ultimately moves first from downtown to gentrified pricey Chestnut Hill and then out to suburbs because of crime and schools. In Philadelphia, Bissinger states flatly, she had "no choice" but to pay for private school education.

I was surprised to see Ezra Klein endorse Nicholas Kristof's column arguing that "the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough." Back in my college Macroeconomics class, this argument was expressed as "They're not poor because they work in sweatshops. They work in sweatshops because they're poor."

Well actually, they're poor because they don't make enough money to support themselves. If the people who hire them paid them enough, they would not be poor. Providing jobs to people who would rather work them than stay unemployed doesn't release whoever provides the job from responsibility for how they treat them, just as saving someone from drowning would not give me any more right to mug that person than I have to mug anyone else.

The Post reported in 2005 that National Labor Committee Head Charles Kernaghan

gets angry when he recalls what a worker told him in Bangladesh: "If we could earn 37 cents an hour, we could live with a little dignity." (As opposed to the 21-cent hourly wage that barely staved off starvation.)

As CAPAF's Sabina Dawan observes, it's not as though the International Labor Organization and allied groups working to close such gaps and to see basic human rights protected in plants that make Western companies so rich are out to drive the people of Cambodia out of their jobs - or as though that's the inevitable result of letting workers go to the bathroom, or leave work to give birth. Does Kristof believe that the Bangladeshi worker Kernaghan references makes 21 cents an hour because at 22 cents his plant would stop making a profit?

As Richard Rothstein wrote in his rejoinder to Kristof:

Read more »

Having spent middle school reading pretty much only the novels of Orson Scott Card, I was as surprised as anyone to see him pop up before the election in 2004 endorsing George Bush and straight-ticket Republican voting because "as a Democrat, what can I say to that except that, because my party has been taken over by an astonishingly self-destructive bunch of lunatics who are so dazzled by Hollywood that they think their ideas make sense, I have to agree that right now, any President but Bush and any Congress but a Republican-dominated one would be disastrous." After the election, Card revealed he'd voted for Bush the first time too. But I can't say I registered the same surprise when Card rose again to call for us to vote Republican in the 2006 midterm elections ("there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war"), or most recently this past October when the self-professed "Moynihan Democrat" endorsed John McCain, with a special dig at the "reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor." You might wonder why Card keeps identifying as a Democrat. Wonder no more: four years after endorsing Bush at Slate, he got himself this press on the same site:

Orson Scott Card, the science-fiction author and registered Democrat, sparked a similar Web backlash when he endorsed McCain just a few weeks before Election Day...For him, national security is paramount.

I bet many of us in college got to meet someone convinced their right-wing views on the issue of the day packed extra punch because they were prefaced with "As a loyal Democrat..." But you can pull off the same trick in the national media too. It seems there are not diminishing returns to self-proclaimed apostasy. Take Tammy Bruce, who years after writing one book taking us "Inside The Left's Assault On Free Speech and Free Minds" and another "Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values," got the San Francisco Chronicle to publish her "Feminist's Argument for McCain's VP" and identify her as a "registered Democrat her entire adult life until February."

Look forward to 2010, when Moynihan Democrat Orson Scott Card announces, more in sadness than in anger, that he must buck the President and Congressional leadership of his own party and endorse a Republican takeover of Congress, for the sake of our children's safety. The column almost writes itself.

At times, this felt like a debate between a stoner and an alcoholic.  Like in the first debate, it was frustrating to see Obama let McCain largely drive the debate and keep Obama on the defensive.  But more so than in the first debate, I think if Obama seemed somewhat too subdued or even sedate, McCain came off as cranky, irritable, and nasty to the point of seeming unpresidential.  McCain did himself no favors by cutting Obama off to bring up Bill Ayers an extra time, or with the endless sarcastic asides.  And I think you look small when you whine on and on about how a civil rights hero was too mean in criticizing the nastiness of your campaign.

As a super-decided voter, it was aggravating to see McCain attack on the first Gulf War without Obama firing back about the current one, and more so to see Obama sounding defensive, reassuring tones about his tax plan without hammering McCain on why now of all times he would want to outdo George Bush in sending more money to the richest among us.  That said, it's not that Barack Obama doesn't know how to go on the attack.  It's just that he's winning, and his strategy in this debate - like the prior two but even more so - was to show himself a steady hand steering the ship of state.  It's hard to find someone not currently receiving checks from the McCain campaign to argue the Obama strategy isn't working.

After watching tonight’s debate, I have all kinds of good news for my friend John McCain (no, not that one - the other one): First, the Treasury Secretary just got the authority you want to give him to renegotiate mortgages - it was included in a bill signed last week you may have heard about - though that was after you un-suspended your campaign.

Second, if you’re all about your collaboration with Ted Kennedy and Joe Lieberman, the bills we used to call McCain-Kennedy and McCain-Lieberman are still out there waiting to be passed, and I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt those bills if you went back to supporting them again (though judging by the bailout bill, who knows).

Third, if you’re really against cutting taxes for rich people, there’s a man running for president right now who wants to cut taxes for the middle class instead - and it looks like he’s going to win!

Can’t say anything tonight changed that. Neither of these guys is a particularly good debater, and despite the hype, neither man took very good advantage of the town hall format tonight. But Obama was crisper and sharper tonight than either of them had been in the last debate, and he came off more comfortable and compelling and denied McCain another opportunity to change the race.

Who won? I’d say scoring the debates on points, McCain came out somewhat ahead. But neither guy really distinguished himself, which is a victory for Obama: going into the debate more people wanted to vote for Obama, foreign policy is supposed to be John McCain’s best chance to get people to vote for him instead, and many of those people just needed Obama to hold his own and show himself a credible commander-in-chief, which he certainly did.

Neither man seemed really comfortable in his own skin, and each smothered some attack lines and one-liners by delivering them in a half-apologetic sounding way. But McCain, as we knew before, is a somewhat better debater. He sounded crisper, and he drove his lines of attack more directly and consistently. Obama went too far out of his way to emphasize where he agrees with McCain, and he didn’t draw on some of the more powerful lines of attack he’s leveraged against McCain in other fora (now that Iraq’s Prime Minister and George Bush have both come out for timetables, John McCain is standing all alone on this issue).

Mostly, Obama seemed eager to correct the record on particular points but once the debate moved from the economy to foreign policy, he offered a lot of good arguments against John McCain but not a unified theory of why he’d be a scary president.

Like George Bush in 2000 responding to Gore’s attack on his actual opposition to the actually-existing Patients’ Bill of Rights Legislation by spewing bipartisan happy-talk, John McCain did a good job of parrying criticism of his actual record with empty words about how he loves the veterans so much and they already know he’ll take care of them (even if he votes against improving the GI Bill) and “no one from Arizona is against solar power” (even though he keeps voting against solar power - maybe because he’s not from Arizona, he just moved there to run for Congress). If the media keeps letting them get away with that stuff, why wouldn’t they keep doing it?

As for the format, the much-hyped interactive format, to Jim Lehrer’s great consternation, mostly just made it clear that neither senator wanted to interact too much with the other. They didn’t respond to too many of each other’s attacks either.

Haven’t waded into the talking heads’ spin yet, but this seemed to me like a debate unlikely to distract attention for too long from the $700 billion bail-out that seems to be coming down the pike or the Bush-McCain record that got us into the mess. Not to worry: John McCain will cut down on our $18 billion in earmarks! (Does that include aid to Israel)

Dahlia Lithwick notes the mendacity of choice language on abortion from anti-choice politicians like McCain and Palin:

...Sarah Palin used this puzzling locution: "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby." Pundits were quick to point out that Bristol's "decision" must have been at least somewhat constrained by her mom's position--as articulated in November 2006--that she would oppose an abortion for her daughters, even if they had been raped...So what exactly, one wonders, was young Bristol permitted to decide?

These rhetorical somersaults are, as Lithwick notes, the same ones John McCain employed in talking about a hypothetical Meghan McCain pregnancy eight years ago.  There's no mystery here: Americans like choice more than they like abortion.

Republicans know this, so they dress up their hard-line anti-choice positions as though they were just about choosing against abortion, while never conceding that there should be a choice at all (in my college days the student anti-choice group was called Choose Life At Yale; they published an ad comparing voting for John Kerry  - who also advocates choosing life but is pro-choice - to voting for Jefferson Davis).  And the media too often plays along, as when the New York Times profiled women in an abortion clinic making painful choices that weighed medical, religious, economic, and social factors; the Times held up these women, who were doing exactly what the pro-choice movement defends women's right to do, as representing a middle ground in the abortion debate.

I'd add that watching Palin's gymnastics on choice is probably the most interesting part of the 2006 gubernatorial debate re-aired on C-SPAN over the weekend.  For someone who wants the government to criminalize a woman's choices about her future, Sarah Palin's rhetoric is awfully "personal."  She answers the first question on choice - about whether as a public official she would attend a public event to publicly support legislation banning abortion - by saying that she's pro-life and "I don't try to hide it and I'm not ashamed of it."  When asked whether a rape victim should be able to choose abortion, she objects that it wouldn't "be up to me as an individual" whether that woman was forced to carry the fetus for nine months - leaving unsaid that if she had her way, it wouldn't be up to the woman as an individual either.  But Palin makes clear that she'd force the rape victim to carry the fetus by specifying only the life of the mother as acceptable grounds for abortion.  Then she answers the follow-up question by saying rape is "a very private matter also, but personally, I would choose life."  The hypocrisy here is glaring: if Sarah Palin indeed wants that woman's choice to be private, she should oppose government outlawing it.  But she doesn't.

So it should come as no surprise a minute later when she addresses euthanasia with the same rhetorical sleight of hand: "This is a very personal and private and sensitive issue and I do respect others' opinions on it, but personally I do believe that no, government should not be sanctioning or assisting taking life."

Whatever Fred Thompson's been doing since he finished pretending to run against John McCain for President, it's sure kept him busy.  Otherwise he surely would have read in the newspaper that John McCain doesn't like too much talk about his POW service.  And you'd think Fred would have been more careful than to say that being a POW doesn't qualify you to be President - must have missed it when Wesley Clark got savaged by Republicans and the media for saying the same thing.

I guess if Fred managed to miss all that, we shouldn't be surprised that he hasn't yet gotten around to reading the Obama speech Fred claims was "designed to appeal to
American critics abroad" in Berlin ("...just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe").

Seems Fred's sure been busy.  Guess it really wasn't fair for anyone to call him lazy after all.

Recently I got the chance to pick up and read Walter Benn Michaels' 2006 book The Trouble With Diversity.  Might as well spoil the suspense and start by saying Benn Michaels didn't convince me when he argues (like Michaels Lind and Tomasky) that left-wing "identity politics" around race and gender stand in the way of a serious left-wing class politics.  The book reminded me at various points of Catherine MacKinnon's argument (in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State) that feminists and Marxists view each other with suspicion because each party could undo one kind of oppression while leaving the other oppression intact.  It's often not clear to whom Benn Michaels, an English professor, is addressing his argument.  He offers criticisms (often clever, always articulate) of some academic arguments about identity, but he doesn't engage with many pivotal ones - like the literature on intersectional (rather than additive) approaches to identity, considering how identities mediate each other - how being identified as a poor Black woman has different social and economics meanings than just being poor plus being Black plus being a woman.  He calls Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States "certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race," but cites only two sentences from it.

If the argument is directed at political practitioners, we're left wondering how he actually pictures the left gaining power and effectiveness by throwing race and gender overboard.  In a telling line criticizing the focus on sexism at Wal-Mart as a distraction from exploitation there, Benn Michaels asserts that "Laws against discrimination by gender are what you go for when you've given up on - or turned against - the idea of a strong labor movement."  Tell that to all the folks in the labor movement and labor-allied groups who've worked to support the Dukes lawsuit and the fight against Wal-Mart's sexism as part of a broad-based critique of a company that helpfully illustrates the connections between conservatism's threat to gender equality, economic justice, environmental sustainability, and other values progressives and most Americans hold dear.  Benn Michaels' approach, which denies that rich people can be victims of oppression or that poor people can be oppressed by more than only poverty, would render the left unable to fully understand, let alone seriously engage, with what Betty Dukes and millions of women like her are facing (see also Whitewashing Race).  As badly as Benn Michaels may wish for a revived labor movement, in advocating a disregard for identity politics he's echoing the disconnection from progressive social movements which contributed the labor movement's decline in the first place.  Those blinders regarding oppressions besides class mirror the blindness to class of too many in, , the pro-choice movement - blindness of which Benn Michaels would be rightly critical.

That said, we needn't accept Benn Michael's arguments about the irrelevance of race- and sex-based politics to appreciate the book's critical insight: that the plutocrats triumph when poverty is understood as an identity to be respected rather than as a problem to be eliminated.  Conservatives, as he argues, have masterfully reframed our class problem as being about the elitists who look down on poor people rather than about the robber barons, de-regulators, and union-busters who make them poor.  Examples abound in conservative literature (Tom Wolfe comes in for some enjoyable criticism in the book), but Benn Michaels is right that seemingly liberal takes on class often suffer from the same problem.  And he's right that conservatives draw on the language we use to talk about race to pull this off.

I was reminded of People Like Us, a very engaging PBS documentary about class in America that explores a series of interesting situations - working-class folks fight with ex-hippies about what kind of supermarket to bring into their neighborhood; tensions within African-American communities about whether Jack and Jill clubs aimed at well-off Black kids are elitist; a daughter's embarrassment about her "trailer park" mom - but all from the perspective of how different classes can get along, not how we can reduce or eliminate class differences.  The least sympathetic characters in the movie are a bunch of snotty high school kids at a mixed-income public school talking in awful terms about why they wouldn't talk to the poor kids they go to school with ("What would we talk to them about?").  It's a good movie.  But you could walk away with the sense that our class problems would be solved if the rich kids would befriend the poor kids.  Which, as Benn Michaels would argue, would be much less expensive or destabilizing for the powers that be than making those kids' families less poor.  As Benn Michaels writes (in one of many paragraphs that makes you wish more political books were written by English professors) about an episode of Wife Swap:

At no time, apparently, did it occur to the makers of the show, the people in it or the people reviewing it, that what the show really demonstrates is how much better it is to be rich than to be poor.  Or perhaps one should say not that the show ignores this point but that it is devoted to denying it, and that it succeeds so completely (this is its brilliance) that we find ourselves believing that run-down shacks in the woods are just as nice as Park Avenue apartments, especially if your husband remembers to thank you for chopping the wood when you get home from driving the bus.  The idea the show likes is the one Tom Wolfe and company like: that the problem with being poor is not having less money than rich people but having rich people "look down" on you.  And the rich husband is bad because he does indeed look down on the poor people, whereas the rich wife (the one who has never done a day's work in her life and who begins the show by celebrating her "me time," shopping, working out, etc.) turns out to be good because she comes to appreciate the poor and even to realize that she can learn from them.  The fault here is not in being rich but in thinking that you have better taste - more generally, in thinking that...you are are a better person.