Comments on the debates and/or the election by Bernard Avishai, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Carmelita Estrellita, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Allison Hantschel, Casey Hayden, Christopher Hayes, Bob Levin, Barack Obama, Jedediah Purdy, Theodore Putala, James Rosen, Nick Salvatore, Aram Saroyan, Frederick Smoler, Scott Spencer & Patricia Williams.
Of Debatable Significance
By Bob Levin
The author sent in this (prophetic) comment a few hours before the second debate.
Barack Obama’s sleepwalk through the first debate left me recalling Jimmy Carter. That’s Jimmy Carter, the lightweight champ, not Jimmy Carter, the president. Back in the 1950s, when boxing was in the grimy hands of James D. Norris’s IBC and Frankie Carbo and the Mob, Carter displayed a virtuosic genius for losing his crown to meatloafs, whom he would have for dinner in the pre-negotiated, mandatory rematch, thus insuring those savvy enough to bet the longshot the first time out one big payday and himself two checks for a single, pulse-elevating effort. (Two of Carter’s performances were sufficiently masterful to be voted “Upset of the Year,” with him as Upsettee – and that didn’t include the non-title, road show try-out he managed to drop to one Johnny Cunningham, a pugilist who had previously managed – in the verbs originated by Red Smith – to overwhelm eight opponents, underwhelm twenty-four, and whelm three.)
So all I could figure was Obama went in the tank under the nefarious influence of the League of Women Voters or some slipped-him Super-PAC enrichments from the networks. Sure, as conspiracy theories goes, this lacks the elegant knottiness lurking behind grassy knolls and Reichstaag fires; but think it over. If the pres. had countered Man Mountain Mitt’s statistics with statistics of his own – and there are always contrary statistics; any twelve-year-old know that – or if he had hung a haymaker on The Stormin’ Mormon for that 47% crap or his not paying taxes – I think we can take Harry Reid to the bank on this one – or if he’d managed a simple – okay, borderline below the belt – “Tell me again about the Angel Moroni handing golden tablets to Joe Smith (the anointed one, not the NBA forward),” do you think anyone would be watching the rest of this series? C’mon, its Nielson numbers would be deeper in the toilet than if “The Killing” had fingered Rosie Larson’s killer from jump street.
To be honest, this whole debate thing burns my ass. I mean, aside from Richard Nixon’s sweat – or maybe Gerry Ford tripping over Poland – has anything in any of them meant a demitasse of cat whiz? But every four years we are head-banged, as if by rubber hoses, to turn-on, tune-in, and risk cerebral blow-outs blithering obscenities at the tube. This year, good citizenship requires us to even trip on Paul Ryan, whom a civilized society would have already chained off the midway between the Borneo Wild Man and Jojo the Dog Faced Boy. We have to tolerate newspapers screaming about “Momentum” and pundits hollering about “Renewed energy,” when, left to our druthers, we would settle down with a relaxing cool one to watch Justin Verlander whiff Yankees. Even though the swing state polls still give the chief the comfortable nod, we are driven to cuticle-gnawed, eyeball-inflamed, short-breathed agony, poised to believe that the fate of civilization will be determined Tuesday night – LIVE, from New York City – based on whether Mitt Romney turns out to be Susie Creamcheese or Dick the Bruiser.
Maybe it’s my Lexapro talking, but I’m picking Obama, easy. Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.
Talking Points
By Robert Chametzky
The author laid down points for “POTUS BHO” in advance of the final debates.
Mr. Romney’s tax return, as with the 1% generally, shows that he lives largely, almost entirely, on “unearned income.” This is a point to be made in passing, but to be made again and again; if Willard takes it up, so much the better. He could try to say that the $ is something he earned, something he worked for, whatever – but if he does, then the trap is sprung. If it is “earned,” then either massive tax fraud, Willard not paying the rate that is required of earned income, or Willard apparently believes that such $ should be classified as “earned income,” hence subject to the higher rates – he is, so it would seem, not in favor of distinguishing capital gains etc. from “earned income.” Or perhaps instead Willard gets into trying to explain (and justify) the tax code distinction between “earned income” and capital gains etc. Not a winning move on many fronts. POTUS can say that, yes, well, this is the sort of distinction that basically affects the rest of us 99% by creating $ shortages for important and popular government programs . . .
Mr. Romney, as he often tells us, is an immensely successful businessman – he became quite rich in business; as he less often remarks, he is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School. We as a nation have gone down each of these roads before in the 20th Century. We’ve had a Harvard Business School alumnus in the White House: George W. Bush. And we’ve also had an immensely successful businessman who became quite rich: Herbert Hoover. What have these presidents got in common? They were Republicans, and, oh, yes, they gave us the two biggest economic disasters of the 20th century. Now we have a Republican who combines the pre presidential achievements of his predecessors; surely we neither need nor want to inflict a combination of their presidential actions on ourselves. Learning about and succeeding in business is simply not preparation for the presidency in a democracy. We do not elect a boss.
Talking Points II
By Bernard Avishai
This commentary on the “Libya ‘Debacle’?”, which the author posted at “Open Zion” right after the Biden/Ryan debate, remains on point in the run-up to the final presidential debate on foreign policy.
The Biden/Ryan debate started off, as the presidential one on foreign policy assuredly will, with a hard question about the administration’s handling of Libya, where “hard” means presumptuous and “handling” means schmoozing the press. I can hear it already: “Mr. President, why didn’t you tell us this was a terrorist attack!” This chorus has been mounting so quickly that the ever transcendent David Brooks calls the event, without explanation, a “debacle.”
As if the administration “fails” any time an American diplomat is murdered; as if what the Islamic world is missing is another president who thinks foreign policy can be learned in a high-school gym. As if the president had any interest in holding back information about the attack in Benghazi and was so intent on apologizing to the Islamic street for YouTube and “Western values” that he overlooked the obvious.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the administration’s response has been that it entertains questions like this in the first place. The late Hitchens once said, “America is the only place in the world where someone says, ‘You’re history,’ and they’re insulting you.” Can we not remember how Ambassador Stevens got to Libya in the first place?
There is a Libyan government to work with and ask questions about because of a lonely presidential decision to save Benghazi from its maniac dictator, and a patient year-long struggle to support insurgents, with air cover among other things, while Republicans aimed to discredit him. Obama’s alliance worked so well, and gained so much popular support in Libya, that Stevens’ killers were spontaneously run out of town.
Criticizing Obama’s foreign policy for a “debacle” in Libya would be like criticizing him for economic incompetence after the next GM recall. “Mr. President, when did you know those brake-cylinders might leak fluid?” Brooks says that our generation of thinkers, like Ryan, stay cool and excellent at “demonstrating policy professionalism.” After last night, can he not hear the laughter?
JOBS!
By Nick Salvatore
A contentious dispute over the number of jobs created, persistent unemployment, and the right policy for recovery drew the attention of both presidential candidates during their first two debates. Mitt Romney was on the attack, citing 23 million unemployed, rising poverty figures, and the President’s failed policies. Barack Obama, in turn, claimed Romney’s figures were wrong, that his own policies have produced real advances against the disastrous conditions he inherited and promised even greater results in a second term. Yet, in a profound way, each of them is wrong. While they wrangle over the role of government in this difficult economy, neither candidate has been frank with voters about the deeper reality facing the nation’s workforce. Oddly enough, the only major political figure to do so was Senator John McCain when he ran for president in 2008. Responding to a question in Michigan about restoring manufacturing jobs, he stated: “Those jobs will not come back.”
Four years later the evidence is even more pronounced that McCain’s burst of honesty (to my knowledge never repeated) was accurate. A recent report from the National Employment Law Project makes the point directly. Using Labor Department data, the report analyzed 366 occupations in three equal groups by median hourly wages: high – $21.14-$54.55; middle – $13.84-$21.13; and low – $7.69-$13.83. The middle third, representing wage earners in construction, manufacturing, and information, accounted for 60% of the job losses between 2008-early 2010, but only 22% of total job growth since. In contrast, the high wage category declined by 19%, and gained 20%; while the bottom third lost 21% and gained 58% of all job growth in the recovery. As Harold Meyerson recently remarked in The American Prospect, “In short, shit jobs abound.”
While corporate avarice is real, as are both legal barriers to union organizing and the strength of belief in the free market among Americans of all classes, we are, nonetheless, in a profound structural transformation that few candidates for political office dare mention. It is marked by the development of a global market for both producing goods and for export more comprehensive than ever before. In the 1970s, when (arguably) this process began, we called it deindustrialization, and often thought of it as temporary and correctible. Now, although we understand better the world-wide force it represents, many in America yet think of it as “off-shoring” of jobs that rightly belong here, at home. This is an understandable reaction, but one that hinders the development of a viable policy toward the political economy that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation. Between 1979 and 2011, for example, the United Auto Workers membership declined by 76%, as production plants closed and much of the parts supply chain moved abroad. Yet, following the auto bailout of 2009, the Big Three auto producers (Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler) have regained high levels of productivity and remained unionized, although the UAW had to accept serious concessions. The situation in auto is one example among many of the face of our future.
While off-shoring affects especially manufacturing of all kinds, a second aspect of this transformation has an even wider reach. Much has been made of Apple’s Foxconn plant in China, particularly noting the corporation’s exporting of some 850,000 jobs to that one plant alone. But less well known is the fact that, as John Markoff noted recently in the New York Times, Apple has plans to install more than a million robots “to supplement its work force in China.” How many workers will lose their jobs in unclear, but Foxconn’s chairman, Terry Gou, revealed his approach to the issue when speaking of his workforce: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.” Few corporate leaders are as blunt as Terry Gou in public, but across the world they pursue similar policies. Robotics has and will further transform work; it is currently revolutionizing the non-manufacturing sectors of the domestic economy. You can’t send wholesale grocery distributers abroad, nor place Fed Ex or UPS distribution plants for American customers in Bangladesh. You can install robots that profoundly transform both the size and the work patterns of an ever-shrinking middle and low range work force.
In 1952, while touring a new Ford plant, a company executive quipped to Walter Reuther, then president of the UAW, as they observed the newly installed technology: “You know, Walter, not one of these machines pays union dues.” To which Reuther retorted, as his biographer Nelson Lichtenstein noted, “And not one of them buys new Ford cars, either.” Neither man could realistically envision a world without unions or without an enormous industrial work force. Sixty years later, both scenarios are more than possible, and we still lack a sustained political discussion in this current campaign about the consequences implied in Reuther’s comment and the economic future of a fast-growing number of Americans.
ABC of Idiocy
By Allison Hantschel
Walmart Moms, guys [http://news.yahoo.com/walmart-moms-obama-won-not-much-042256521–abc-news-politics.html]:
Undecided “Walmart moms” in Milwaukee, Wis., gave the presidential debate win to President Obama by a narrow margin – but they’re not sold yet.
What are “Walmart Moms,” you guys?
In a bipartisan focus group conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Momentum Analysis and sponsored by Walmart, a group of undecided female voters were asked to vote for who they thought won the second presidential debate. Five women in the group said Obama, three said Mitt Romney, and two said they thought it was tie.
Emphasis because YOU DON’T FUCKIN’ SAY.
It couldn’t possibly have been designed to get Walmart’s name in the headlines, could it have? Because that would never work. Very serious journalists who are the guardians of our democracy would never fall for such an obvious marketing ploy.
They certainly wouldn’t fall for it twice[http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/10/how-did-voters-react-to-the-debate/].
And you know, I’m sure some defenders will say the disclosure makes it okay. It doesn’t. This is about story selection and agenda-pushing, and allowing Walmart this much of the national conversation is still letting them get away with something, even if you point out in paragraph one or two that you’re letting them get away with it.
The Insulted & Injured
By Scott Spencer
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME! There has not been a national election in the past fifty years in which the candidates did not insist that the fate and future of our Republic rested on their own election. Every four years we are told that we are at the crossroads and if we head in the wrong direction incalculable harm will come to our country, our communities, our families, and ourselves. Every four years we are informed that the choices before us could not be clearer. Along with proudly and humbly accepting the nomination of our party, reminding an apparently A.D.D. God to bless America, the candidates assure us that the choices before us could not be clearer, and have never been clearer.
And every four years we believe them.
And then the living embodiments of the clear choices before us stand on a stage and debate their differences. Thirty six hours after the historic confrontation, here is what we ponder: who brought their A-game, who was rude, who was likeable, who looked tired, who invaded whose personal space, does “terror” imply “terrorism” and why did Romney need to send out a search party to locate a woman capable of working for him while he was governing Massachusetts. The take-aways from the first debate involved Obama’s sleepy demeanor and Romney’s threat to fire Big Bird. You would think that a country spending the last three weeks before an election discussing the fate of a puppet or the body language of its leaders must be in pretty fine shape.
Gentlemen on the stage! Ladies and gentlemen of the press who seek to frame the national conversation! These trivialities are an insult to our suffering.
16 Points of Light
By Carmelita Estrellita
can I outlive Medicaid
if I promise to live real fast
can I count on the 99%
to help me come in last
that’s no intern
under the republican desk
that’s my future and I’m
saving the dress
will I survive disability
until I’m in with the elderly
because the government’s the only family I have
to keep me company
touch the hem of your government
wave the flag of the free
please accept my thanks and a million others
for taking care of people like me
when we all get up to heaven
you’ll be glad I’m around
until then we’re all gonna have chicken on Sundays
when the president comes to town
P.S. Aloha…The only coverage I saw much of was the Dem convention. Michelle Obama’s speech was the proudest moment I’ve ever felt at any convention in my lifetime. Whereas the Republicans focus on being a success, revel in it (they don’t seem to have many successful black people on view), Michelle Obama said it’s great to open the door of opportunity, but you don’t turn your back on those behind you. You hold the door open for them too. It’s generative success, not solipsism. No matter what happens in November, I’ll always have that moment, in which I was never more proud to be a woman and an American. Holding the door open for others is the American Dream to me.
I sent her a thank you note, and she responded nicely. I’d vote for her for president in a heartbeat!!
The Stakes (and Ohio)
By Christopher Hayes
Hayes commented on the election at a New School forum on October 17th.
When I think about the stakes of the election, I keep coming back to the question of the millions of people who are going to get or not get Medicaid. Though maybe with the Senate in Democratic hands the Affordable Care Act subsidies and Affordable Care Act survive. But if Romney’s president, the assault on Medicaid is going to be sustained and vicious right off the bat – the people who are going to be thrown on the sacrificial altar first are the poor. That’s going to be the bargaining chip. It’s much easier to start trading away Medicaid than Medicare and Social Security. Entitlements and social insurance for the middle class and seniors are much more politically difficult to go after. What’s going to go first are the Medicaid add-ons and subsidies which are the lynch pins of getting those 30,000,000 people into the system. 15,000,000 of them through Medicaid; 15,000,000 of them through subsidies.
But aside from that. The one thing I’ll say is: the reputation of liberal governance is on the table. If Barack Obama loses it’s…
We tried to do liberal governance and it was a massive epochal failure. Let’s never do that again.
You can see the writing on the wall. Particularly if you look at consumer confidence data and household deleveraging – which is proceeding apace – and housing starts. You’re beginning to see the contours of a sustained, robust economic recovery. If that comes on the heels of the election of Mitt Romney, it will be taken as historic confirmation of the failure of the Recovery Act, the failure of National Social Insurance in the Affordable Care Act, the failure of everything the Center Left and the Democratic Party and liberal governance stand for. It will be taken as evidence that liberals killed the recovery, cost jobs, stood in the way of America becoming itself in full entrepreneurial flourish. A recovery under Romney will be seen by the chattering classes, by the elites, and by historians who are going to fight over the legacy of this time as a final rendering of judgment. It will be extremely difficult to recover from that for a generation.
Editor’s note: Later in the evening Hayes offered what amounted to an addendum to a plaint – “Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer” – he’d made on MSNBC after the second debate. Hayes began by making a case for direct action, urging those locked on global warming to “forget the Senate and House – go directly after the industries that are putting carbon in the air…” Then he went on to speak to a quandary faced by Obama’s advisors:
Let me say this – if anyone in this room was sitting in Chicago or doing debate prep in Williamsburg where the President was, I sincerely believe it would be malpractice for you to give him advice other than the advice he got. They are not wrong about the politics of the issue. Not at this moment when Southeastern Ohio is coal country and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people whose livelihoods are in coal. And those people are swing voters in Ohio. So it’s not crazy. It’s not ridiculous, or vindictive. They are reading public opinion correctly. And you can cite any poll you want showing that 60% of people worry about global warming…Bullshit! It’s the difference between preference and intensity. If you are working in coal country in Southeastern Ohio, than you CARE about whether coal is going to be there. If you’re someone who gets a call from some pollster like IPSOS and you say “Yeah, yeah, I worry about global warming”… you don’t care. You don’t care! That’s the problem. There’s this asymmetry between those who are ready to do whatever it takes because this is an intensely felt issue and those who will tell a pollster “I care about this issue.” And the only way to resolve that asymmetry is for people who claim to care about climate change to prove it through direct action.
Left Lean
By Barack Obama
Christopher Hayes’ invocation of “coal country” above put us in mind of Obama’s remarks at the April 2010 memorial service for 29 workers who died in the Montcoal mine disaster. Here’s an excerpt.
Even as we mourn 29 lives lost, we also remember 29 lives lived. Up at 4:30 a.m., 5:00 in the morning at the latest, they began their day, as they worked, in darkness. In coveralls and hard-toe boots, a hardhat over their heads, they would sit quietly for their hour-long journey, five miles into a mountain, the only light the lamp on their caps, or the glow from the mantrip they rode in.
Day after day, they would burrow into the coal, the fruits of their labor, what so often we take for granted: the electricity that lights up a convention center; that lights up our church or our home, our school, our office; the energy that powers our country; the energy that powers the world.
And most days they’d emerge from the dark mine, squinting at the light. Most days, they’d emerge, sweaty and dirty and dusted from coal. Most days, they’d come home. But not that day.
These men – these husbands, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, sons, uncles, nephews – they did not take on their job unaware of the perils. Some of them had already been injured; some of them had seen a friend get hurt. So they understood there were risks. And their families did, too. They knew their kids would say a prayer at night before they left. They knew their wives would wait for a call when their shift ended saying everything was okay. They knew their parents felt a pang of fear every time a breaking news alert came on, or the radio cut in.
But they left for the mines anyway – some, having waited all their lives to be miners; having longed to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and their grandfathers. And yet, none of them did it for themselves alone.
All that hard work, all that hardship, all the time spent underground, it was all for the families. It was all for you. For a car in the driveway, a roof overhead. For a chance to give their kids opportunities that they would never know, and enjoy retirement with their spouses. It was all in the hopes of something better. And so these miners lived – as they died – in pursuit of the American Dream.
There, in the mines, for their families, they became a family themselves – sharing birthdays, relaxing together, watching Mountaineers football or basketball together, spending days off together, hunting or fishing. They may not have always loved what they did, said a sister, but they loved doing it together. They loved doing it as a family. They loved doing it as a community.
That’s a spirit that’s reflected in a song that almost every American knows. But it’s a song most people, I think, would be surprised to learn was actually written by a coal miner’s son about this town, Beckley, about the people of West Virginia. It’s the song, “Lean on Me” – an anthem of friendship, but also an anthem of community, of coming together.
That community was revealed for all to see in the minutes, and hours, and days after the tragedy. Rescuers, risking their own safety, scouring narrow tunnels saturated with methane and carbon monoxide, hoping against hope they might find a survivor. Friends keeping porch lights on in a nightly vigil; hanging up homemade signs that read, “Pray for our miners, and their families.” Neighbors consoling each other, and supporting each other and leaning on one another.
I’ve seen it, the strength of that community. In the days that followed the disaster, emails and letters poured into the White House. Postmarked from different places across the country, they often began the same way: “I am proud to be from a family of miners.” “I am the son of a coal miner.” “I am proud to be a coal miner’s daughter.” They were always proud, and they asked me to keep our miners in my thoughts, in my prayers. Never forget, they say, miners keep America’s lights on. And then in these letters, they make a simple plea: Don’t let this happen again. Don’t let this happen again.
How can we fail them? How can a nation that relies on its miners not do everything in its power to protect them? How can we let anyone in this country put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work; by simply pursuing the American Dream?
We cannot bring back the 29 men we lost. They are with the Lord now. Our task, here on Earth, is to save lives from being lost in another such tragedy; to do what must be done, individually and collectively, to assure safe conditions underground – to treat our miners like they treat each other – like a family. Because we are all family and we are all Americans. And we have to lean on one another, and look out for one another, and love one another, and pray for one another…
Universal Conversation
By Casey Hayden
I have voted for Obama because the other guys are crazy. I don’t expect much from party politics. The collapse of ecosystems, oceans, species, the coming end of the cheap energy, and our unconscious grief and fear about all that are the universals of our time. We are mostly too self-centered as a species to recognize what’s really going on that matters, and popular politics really can’t recognize it, much less respond. I think we need to lower expectations in that arena, and talk to each other more.
Good and Hard
By Fredric Smoler
First’s Editor solicited contributions for a roundtable on the second presidential debate with the following observation: “A number of pundits worry the ‘whole liberal project’ is in danger now. If Obama loses, universal health insurance and progressive taxation will go down with him. Given the realities of Senate/House (redistricting favored GOP etc.), the Democrats will likely be playing a weak hand for years to come.” Well, the debate is over, with the President having done pretty well, but it is not clear that this has changed the probable outcome too much. According to Nate Silver, one of the more thoughtful analysts of polling statistics, Obama’s chances of winning the election today hover around two out of three, which is where they were before last evening’s debate, and possibly not too far from where they were before the first debate. In other words, the race is more stable than it looks, and Obama has the edge.
But what if Obama had done a bit worse in the second debate? What if, unlike almost all other Presidential debates, the 2012 debates even cost him the election? Would “the whole liberal project be in danger”? Given the facts that a)the Democrats look more and more likely to hold the Senate and pick up some seats in the House, and that b)American taxation is (alas) no longer particularly progressive, the darker views expressed by these liberal pundits seem to me to be particularly unlikely. Large electoral and demographic trends all seem to be running against the Republicans: they are too male, too rural, too white, too old, too given to the politics of cultural panic, and their nativism too irritating to Hispanic voters. Their primary electorate pushes their candidates farther and farther to the hard Right, and what success Romney has had has followed his very tardy scramble back to the center. He nonetheless has an excellent chance of losing an election to a President who has presided over four years of a wretched economy while apparently losing two wars. The American people do not yet seem particularly grateful for President Obama’s signature health care legislation, and sometimes strikingly cynical Republican obstructionism has denied him many other achievements. If Romney can’t win this year, his party looks far more doomed than does American liberalism. And the odds are against him.
From this distance – I am in London, and have been here since early September – this sort of panic over the first debate seemed implausible. Debates are thought to have decided only two of the last thirteen elections, and in any case recent Republican political successes flow not from electoral strength in presidential years, which looks anything but overwhelming, but from a new and nasty recent habit of requiring supermajorities for almost any legislation or confirmation proceeding, and also reliance on extremely interventionist elements within the judiciary, which is the tactic of the electorally weak, not the electorally strong. Dominant Republican economic ideas look more and more absurd, and the miseries those ideas fail to address more and more pressing. Romney seems to think his only hope is to persuade people that bad and multiply-failed policies will somehow work this time, which to my mind means that if he wins this election he is unlikely to win the next one. Mencken, whom I nowadays find a much less appealing person than I did when I was sixteen, defined democracy as the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. But even Mencken didn’t think that ordinary people wanted it good and hard with no variation, time after time after time. If we imagine that a majority of our fellow citizens will always choose to be ruled by predatory charlatans, in what sense of the words are we American liberals?
Close Imagining
By Benj DeMott
I appreciate Fredric Smoler’s critique of my Call for this roundtable. I surely don’t want to run with the kind of leftists who write the apocalyptic book every-day. (You know the one, The Audacity of Despair.) But I’m not sure Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight forecasts provide quite as much support for Smoler’s opening argument as he thinks. A day before the first debate, Silver gave Obama an 86% chance of winning the election. After Romney’s win, Obama’s percentages fell sharply and steadily into the low 60’s. A day or two before the second debate, Silver allowed Romney was on the verge of reaching the 40% threshold and making the race a “toss-up.” In the wake of the second debate, Silver has Obama back up to 70%. But it’s facts of feeling not hard data that make Smoler’s take from London on the last month of the campaign seem too far gone to me.
The morning after the first debate, I called a mentor – an elderly white southerner who was all up in the Civil Rights Movement in Texas and North Carolina. He loves to talk politics – and our conversations typically range from the state of Obama’s ground game to history and theory of democracy. (I listen and learn.) But on that morning after, my friend could hardly speak. He’s an old man – as he says – but he didn’t just seem old; he sounded like he was at death’s door.
My friend might disavow his doomy response now. But he had his reasons then. As did members of the African American nation. Ta-Nehishi Coates has evoked how Obama’s debate performances demoralized and then revitalized the president’s base by recalling movements of mind sparked by Joe Louis’s fights with Max Schmeling http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/the-burden-of-a-black-president/263775/. Coates’s ender might help Smoler cotton on to the felt consequences of what’s going on in this campaign:
When you are deemed a “credit to your race,” as Joe Louis so often was, the weight can be crushing. But it also can be the source of great power. In championing the reviled, the battle-weary, the low, you champion something greater than yourself. Wherever you fight, you are always fighting for your hometown. You trade the aspect of the lone wolf, for that of the wounded bear with rearing up in defense of her cubs…Thus it was with little surprise (though some small thrill) that I watched Barack Obama maul Mitt Romney last night, much as Louis mauled Schmeling in the rematch all those years ago. Unlike Louis, Obama’s bout continues on. But should he lose the election it will not be in the shameful manner which, to some, appeared imminent…He will not go out confirming the warped logic http://www.mediaite.com/tv/andrea-mitchell-visibly-shocked-after-sununu-calls-obama-lazy-asks-him-if-he-would-take-it-back/ of those who hate him and the community in which he is rooted. He represents too much.
Coates knows it’s no fun being a representative man. And there’s always a danger in conflating public roles with private lives. But Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair profile of Obama implies the private Obama is the real Obama. His case that Obama’s politics are authentic rests on his account of the decision to intervene in Libya. Lewis reveals Obama pressed beyond nada options offered up by European allies, the Pentagon and his Cabinet. Lewis describes meetings in which Obama subverted “status structures,” looking for input from staffers beneath the principals and generals in the Situation Room. With his subalterns’ help he made (from the ground up?) policy that averted a genocidal attack on Benghazi and (eventually) liberated Libya.
Lewis’s profile is likely to further stoke fears of rightists who already see Obama as a sort of Lord of Misrule. I’m reminded of a Fox News host who complained during the U.S. bombing of Libya that Obama had thrown another ally under the bus and the perplexed guest who tried to get his mind around how that Foxy lady had suddenly mutated into a friend of Muammar Gaddafi. (Pace Richard Torres.)
The paranoid style of American rightists has become particularly unhinged in the Age of Obama. As Mark Lilla noted in a sharp Times essay, even formerly sober-minded conservatives have been driven out of their heads. Lilla loses traction, though, when he places himself as a center left pragmatist looking down on beamish types who bought Obama’s rhetoric of hope. I’m tempted to tell him: “Wake up white person.” Obama’s grounded persona matters most not to starry-eyed liberals or mad rightists, but to African Americans and down home white allies who have lived the Southern dream of freedom. (Lilla might try on Ta-Nehishi Coates’s posts over the past few years to see what the presence of Obama and his family in the White House means to countless black folks.)
White guys from Up South like me (and Lilla and Smoler?) will always be a little removed from the deepest emotions evoked by Obama’s way. OTOH, at the risk of coming on as the Constant Wigger, I’ll admit the pres has been a source of soul and inspiration in my house for years now. While I care more about his policies than his tastes, I’ve surely felt the pleasure Obama takes in singing Al Green, shooting hoops, and reading…Salvage the Bones.
It was a kick to find out last month (from a Time Magazine report) Obama had been looking into Jesmyn Ward’s novel about motherless black children surviving rural poverty and Katrina with their daddy (and pit bulls). I cop to fantasizing First’s reprint of Ms. Ward’s piece on the deep Southern meaning of Obama’s 2008 campaign, “Blood Dread,” https://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2012/01/blood_dread.html might have helped draw his attention to her work. (Not that she needed First‘s poor help – Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award.) Ms. Ward explained in that piece how she’d beat her own demons – ghosts of white supremacy – to get to “yes we can.” And she also noted Obama was not your classic inspirational figure but a nerd. Michael Lewis gets even more specific on that score. His Obama is that most particular sort of nerd – a writer. His piece, which includes an account of how Obama composed his Nobel Prize speech (and a passage of his precise spoken word on a blue sky Hawaii day), ends with an image of Obama rapt up in front of a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, which is on permanent, private exhibit at the White House: “Now he looked down and read the words of another president, who also understood the peculiar power, even over one’s self, that comes from putting your thoughts into them.”
My late pop was a writer who exercised that “peculiar power” for 50 years. Back when John Kennedy was killed, he wrote a piece suggesting the assassination might be a heavy blow to mind in America since Kennedy was one of those very few figures in public life with the reflective inclinations to bridge the gap between thinkers and doers. It’s no wonder my pop was taken with Obama early on. (“He’s going all the way,” he told me right after the 2004 Convention speech.) Forgive this familial turn, but Obama’s various shots at reviving – and refining – liberalism often remind me of the argument my pop made for the party of hope during the 60s. My dad never wanted to damp down radical imperatives, but he was convinced imagination was (always) the best alternative to the machine of things-as-they-are and the terrible beauty of extremism. A sample of his advice to “leaders” intent on achieving a more perfect union in 1970:
Leadership should seek to move Americans on from the jail of the single perspective. It should develop means of combating the trivialization of difference in American society… The key to this effort is a constant pressing for openings through which to show forth the genesis of conflicting views – the origins and patterns of development of the furies now tearing men apart. Leadership must teach once again how to see with other men’s eyes.
My pop, to borrow Obama’s phrase, believed his own bullshit. And he realized you didn’t have to go big. Folks can be moved not only by perceptions of huge injustice or grand possibility, but by small inklings as well – intensely felt, momentary penetrations into the dailiness of a fellow human creature. Obama, of course, has a clue too. (Check what he said above on the work and days of those miners he memorialized back in 2010.) Let’s pray we’ll still have his imagination to lean on after November.
Rhetoric and Its Limits
By Jedediah Purdy
It’s time to fight like hell for the party of the center-right, represented by Barack Obama, against the party of the far right. There is no alternative.
I believed in 2008 that an Obama presidency might reincarnate the exhausted politics of fairness and solidarity, the idea that some of social policy stems from what we owe one another, from the fact that we are in this together. I believed this because part of what makes a politics is its poetry, the weave that binds policy to feeling and imagination, and Obama, at his best, said things about looking out for one another, and tied them to government’s role, as no one of his stature had done for a long time. I believed it also because of the movement Obama inspired. Remember: we were in the streets for months and months. We gave money we didn’t have. We took the nomination away from an anointed, supposedly untouchable candidate, Hillary Clinton, because we wanted to do more than win by the rules someone else had handed down. We wanted to remember, by doing, that all democratic power comes from the people, who from time to time change the rules of the game.
I point this out because it’s now ordinary to say that no one should have believed that hope and change stuff in the first place. To which I say, bullshit, and double bullshit for being all superior and pseudo-smart. Talking about the Obama presidency without that stuff is like discussing the Civil War with reference to neither union nor freedom. Take out what people are working, fighting, sacrificing for, and you might be mapping the movements of an anthill.
Yes, we have been disappointed. Why? Because the poetry of health care came in late and weak, even though it is the issue God seems to have meant Obama to explain to Americans in moral terms, having designed the President’s life and training accordingly. Because the governing strategy has been as cautious and deferential to established rules – Congressional, financial, etc. – as the campaign was – okay, I’m all in anyway – audacious. Because this liberal lawyer’s procedures for killing Americans and his other legal innovations in the massive, global anti-terror campaign may end up being nearly as bad as some of the Bush policies and also more durable because smarter and more careful.
Basically, I think we have been disappointed because we halfway fooled ourselves, imagining that the substance of political transformation could come from the rhetoric and the sentiment. Generalizations are kind of foolish in this area, but I’m now inclined to the more conventional view that, first, you have to be fighting for things – concrete things – and that the poetry and feeling grow up around them. Or, at least, the power is much greater then. In this way, there was something strange in the campaign: we marched largely on sentiment, on trust, without a map toward the horizon where we thought we saw light. After the election, who was there to keep Obama honest on how to approach Wall Street, how to preserve civil liberties and due process, how to lay down a marker of universal coverage at the very beginning of the health-care fight and try to move the dial of political pressure on some senators accordingly? We had built no institutions to make sure the president would be the candidate we thought we were supporting. The other guys had not been neglecting institutional development over the years.
Having said that, I now say to myself, come on. The disappointment honors what we hoped for and why we worked in 2008, but it can be way too much. This administration has done things that need defending. The Affordable Care Act is a major moral achievement, easily the biggest in national politics in decades. This should be clear to anyone who cares about anyone without insurance, with a pre-existing condition, stuck in a job to keep coverage, the whole monstrous litany that the insurance industry’s free-market bureaucracy has produced. For that matter, it should be clear to anyone who makes the minimum effort of moral imagination to consider the situation of tens of millions of Americans who are actively, poignantly, trying to play by the rules and do the right thing, and are made vulnerable by explicit decisions to freeze them out of care – decisions not “in our name” only because we have handed them off to companies.
That kind of imagination, by the way, is what Barack Obama in 2008 was offering to help cultivate. It has been one of the great styles of rhetorical leadership in presidents, notably in Lincoln, who worked heroically to achieve just a little of the impossible, to bring divided people to see through one another’s ideas. It may be one of the really tragic lessons of the last four years that, in the present state of national politics, there is no space for that kind of moral imagination, that, instead, everything gets immediately dragged into the trench warfare of slur and counter-slur, accusation and counter-accusation. The president’s diffidence about this chest-beating and finger-pointing style of politics, which still might cost him the election (if we say it is part of what came through in the first debate), is closely connected with what got him elected four years ago: the wish for a better condition of American political community. He acts, sometimes, as if he thought he were too good for this nonsensical, pandering pseudo-argument. Aren’t we all? If we dislike his diffidence, isn’t that at least a little because it justly accuses us of forgetting ourselves?
But never mind. If he doesn’t win, things will get worse. The White House will spend four years eroding implementation of the Affordable Care Act, even if Congress can’t repeal it. Environmental protection will be out the window. The next Supreme Court will be staffed with people who would have invalidated the health-care law outright, and, by the way, love Citizens United and money in politics generally. People who think we aren’t fighting enough wars will have President Romney’s ear.
I don’t know whether Benj DeMott et al. are right that an Obama defeat will crush liberalism for a generation or the more sanguine respondents are right that long-term demographic trends will doom any Republican reaction. I tend more to DeMott’s view because demographic trends will always let you down as prophecy: people change, parties change, and there’s nothing about the relative decline of rural, white men that protects the country from become more mutually indifferent, fragmented, and unconnected by policies or institutions that treat us as parts of a single community – or, for that matter, against continuing to run deficit-financed wars. But I don’t tend very hard because the future is guaranteed to be surprising. Remember that George W. Bush was widely expected to be an easygoing moderate who would bring the country together and bring the Republican party into the post-Clinton policy consensus.
But, again, never mind. These efforts to see the sweep of things clearly are important, as well as engaging, but they are uncertain by their nature. What’s certain is that it’s time to march again, though we are fewer and tired, toward the horizon where the darkness seems the least impassable.
The Presidential Debates and the Media
By Eugene Goodheart
The debates between the presidential candidates are filtered through the media. The television camera moves to the faces of the candidates, noticing that one candidate has his head down or a smirk on his face while the other is speaking. The camera catches the stridency of a gesture, the awkwardness of a bodily movement, the effect of which is to distract from what is being said. Compare the experience of watching the first debate between Obama and Romney on television and listening to it on the radio. On television Obama appeared diffident, retiring and ineffectual, on the radio the voice of reason; Romney’s presence on the televised stage was forceful and fluent, on the radio the sound was strident, the speech a series of unargued and repetitious assertions, “I know how to grow the economy, I know how to create jobs” – needless, to say, my somewhat biased experience of the seeing and the hearing. But the real culprit is what happens immediately after the debate, the commentary of the pundits, who have a large role in determining how the electorate understands and responds to its experience of watching and listening. It is like reading scripture and commentary simultaneously or commentary on commentary as the pundit speaks with an eye on Twitter, which registers the unreflective moment-to-moment responses of spectators as the debate unfolds.
When Lincoln and Douglas debated, each had the opportunity to speak without interruption for an hour. The debate format in our time is consistent with our sound bite culture. A speaker cannot be allowed or expected to hold the continuous attention of an audience on any subject for more than 2 minutes. And this applies to the commentators as well.
What is the quality of the commentary? Generally deplorable, I regret to say. In the first debate Romney was obsessively praised for his presentation as “masterful.” It is true that Obama was a weak presence on the stage and deserves the severe criticism he received from his own side in not being sufficiently prepared. He did not rise to the occasion of exposing Romney blatant falsehoods and flip flops. Examples: assertions that a 5 trillion dollar tax reduction will not raise the deficit, that under the health plan he advocates insurance companies will cover pre-existing conditions, and that he favors regulating the financial sector, even to the point of supporting some provisions in Dodd-Frank. In contrast, Obama was careful to speak the truth, though with insufficient energy and attention to what his rival was saying. “Masterful” may be plausible in characterizing the theatrics of Romney’s performance, but hardly does justice to the content of his assertions. If Obama did not rise to the occasion in the first debate, neither did the media in the way it distributed or failed to distribute attention between the manner and matter of what was said.. There was little difference between Romney’s performances in the two debates, only that the deviousness and emptiness of both performances became visible in the second debate, because Obama effectively exposed them. Paul Krugman was an exception to most punditry after the first debate in leaving “theater criticism” to others while focusing on the shoddiness of the content of Romney’s agenda.
After the second debate in which Obama clearly outclassed Romney in truth telling, composure and graceful forcefulness, the media faulted both equally for bad aggressive behavior. How else could Obama have responded to Romney’s interrupting in your face rudeness: “answer my question, answer my question?” More distressing, however, are media expectations of the two candidates. Romney succeeds when he points out that Obama has failed to deliver on certain promises. Little is said about the promises he has fulfilled or the reasons that other promises could not be kept (Republican obstructionism and circumstances like the Euro crisis abroad). Again little attention is paid to the vacuity of Romney’s positive agenda. (Exception: Romney’s proposed tax reform does not add up.) In contrast, Obama is faulted for not offering a new vision of what he would do during the next 4 years. What would satisfy, promises that he could not keep? (My own view is that candidates should speak in the language of aspiration and not of promise, because our system does not empower the executive to legislate fundamental change.) Moreover, what could and should Obama be proposing different from what he has already proposed and partially enacted: stimulating the economy through rebuilding our infrastructure, helping states meet their needs, investing in education (hiring thousands of teachers), strengthening community colleges, regulating the financial system so as to prevent another crisis, and addressing the debt problem by a balanced approach of raising revenue and carefully cutting spending while preserving the safety net. I have not heard a single suggestion from a pundit about a new grand plan for the future, simply a demand that something new and different be proposed from on top. In a democratic society, one expects the commentariat, indeed the people, to be also the source of new ideas and practices.
Let us assume that Obama is reelected and that the composition of Congress remains the same. The chances of gridlock continuing are strong. Isn’t that an argument for a new dispensation with a Republican president and a supportive Republican Congress? The chances of a filibuster proof Senate on either side are virtually nil, so gridlock would probably persist. But even if, miracle of miracles, a filibuster proof Senate emerged, we would be better off with a gridlocked Obama presidency than a Romney Administration with a free hand to undo Obamacare, financial regulation, the safety net and with the power to appoint Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Scalia. Given Romney’s willingness to say or do anything to be elected, maybe hope against hope, the moderate Governor of Massachusetts will reemerge once in office. It’s doubtful, however, that his party as it is now constituted would let him. In any event, why would anyone want to elect someone so untrustworthy? Is there a pundit prepared to say something so outrageous?
Family Values
By Patricia Williams
Williams commented on the election at a New School forum on October 17th.
There’s been a consistency in the response that you get in the debates to questions of women’s rights, African American rights, immigration rights etc. The answer is that everything depends upon strong families. It comes up in every one of these debates because it is an ultra-libertarian notion that a strong family – the little herd you create for yourself – is the only protection in a nasty, brutish jungleland. Given that system of thought, it’s a rational response. It really is helpful in these times to read Ayn Rand. She wrote a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. It’s a small book. Don’t read the novels. They’re waste of time and they get you all caught up in a plot, giving you the illusion there’s a life for this ideology. But when she puts it down straight: everything can be explained by finding your family – even if it’s not your real family – those you can bunker down with. Bunkering down is the response to absolutely everything. And, of course, it’s a denial of public resources, of the res publica, of the common good. Which includes the funding of public schools, the funding of public health, and even the commerce clause that underwrites the entire civil rights movement. All that is entailed in those responses that invoke the family. The notion is that if you get together in a household, you’ll have more money and guns to protect yourself. That’s what that’s all about.
We’re Here
By Ty Geltmaker & James Rosen
We are two gay Americans of the Left, identified over many years in Italy with il Manifesto group and partito Radicale within the broader Eurocommunist structure of the PCI, in the same way we have always practiced our U.S. politics both outside of and inside of the Democratic Party. Our involvement with grassroots activist organizations such as ACT UP has never precluded our participation in Democratic Party politics, the latter also never precluding electoral support for independent and even write-in challengers to the so-called two-party system in more than one presidential election (George McGovern’s and Jesse Jackson’s 80s runs, for example). We agree with Green Party spokesperson Scott McClarty’s condemnation of the exclusion of Greens and others from the televised Presidential “debates,” if such events even merit the term. We cannot, however, allow it to be said unchecked that participating in this current structure amounts to “acquiescence” and that “acquiescence is collaboration,” as we have heard from one critic in the blog “Open Letter.” This assertion is not only not true, but more dangerously resurrects a tradition of vilification of leftists who participate in imperfect democratic systems as “collaborationists.” Modern world history since the French Revolution is replete with examples of demagogic reaction and even terror visited upon those within the Left deemed by self-appointed purists to have been not sufficiently anti-establishment in their politics. We reject such inflammatory language as not just ethically wrong but politically suicidal and an affront to progressives who choose to work within an imperfect world. And as “collaborationists” we look forward to facing our accusers in their tribunals, even if – to cite Anatole France – The Gods Will Have Blood.
Obama was never Messiah; just a vehicle to push. The two of us (one HIV+) pay more than 12 thousand dollars a year in PPO health insurance, just barely making it, and with deductibles above 5 thousand each, not counting meds. To those who call people in our still relatively privileged position still supporting Obama and our superb local Congressional candidate Raul Ruiz sell-outs guilty of “collaboration,” we welcome the charge. We, and our moms in their 80s, live here and now, not in someone else’s present fantasy or utopian future.
Ego Music
By Theodore Putala
Gov. Romney with his firm sense of himself, “I’ve worked in the private sector, I’ll get this country’s economy going again, I know how to do it,” channels the soft assuring sound of Reagan glory. Mr. Romney knows how he will, for instance, deal with the issue of Russia, boiling all its complexities down to one word, “Putin,” promising to be tough. Perhaps this is why, to some, he looks “Presidential,” as he is so sure of himself, looking the part. Well, having an oversized GOP Ego in Washington is not uncommon.
In contrast to Gov. R., the President is bringing something new, again, to American politics: “doing the right thing.” Yes, it might be easy to lose heart in him, for not being an LBJ able to persuade the recalcitrant, for not putting it more to Wall Street (appropriate given fears of total meltdown?), but that new approach (such as targeting the actual terrorists rather than stirring up the Muslim world by going after Saddam) is promising, exciting and invigorating to a hurting nation and its work force. Obama, in contrast to the Big Egos, is calling for a return of the great opportunities (in keeping with the inexpensive higher education of the old G.I. Bill) – the promise of accessible health care, a rebuilt infrastructure and putting working people – teachers, firemen, cops, road construction crews – back to work. Even though it might seem expensive, it is doing the right thing by giving people work to do. Where Romney is stiff and assured and all-knowing; Obama is flexible and astute and responsive (as he was in the last debate).
In comparison with the Romney vision with its pat answers and plans, Obama’s vision is freer, to the extent that he can be in such an office, of the delusions of ego. One path proposes a heightening of ego, a subtle support of the kinds of things that got us into the mess we’re in. The other proposes a rebirth, a continuing of the liberal vision, a resurrection once we are through the hard times of the financial crisis and the slow recovery. Once the storm is weathered, it will be – and feel like (since we have by now forgotten the sensation of hope in 2008) – a new world.
You’ve Got My Back, Barack
By Aram Saroyan
So much seems to be riding on this election. It was good to see Barack with his game back Tuesday night.
From October, 2012