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That's the sight that greeted me when I went, on rising this morning, into my parents' kitchen to see whether any of my father's first pot of coffee was still stewing. (It was. The man can't ride a roller coaster without going green, but his stomach can handle coffee that's been on the hot plate so long it's turned to crankcase oil.)
Good morning, Kitty. If you're going to ambush me from up there, could you please at least wait until I and put on my eye gel? I have this vague idea that well-hydrated skin heals more quickly when torn.
You all know about my ability to charm small pure-bred animals by this point. My parents' cats are no exception. Bear in mind, Ludwig, above, is the friendly one. Romeo, his father, is more beige and more crabby. Whenever I come home, he spends my entire visit--no joke--glaring at me with undisguised antipathy, as if I were going to make off with the silver unless under continuous surveillance.
Thanks to everyone who's asked after me since I haven't posted for a month; I'm grateful. Yes, things are fine. I doubt that I'm entirely adjusted to life back in New York even now, but coming home was the right decision. Without really planning it, I kind of took a rest from following news--either here or in Japan--to closely. I imagine I'll be posting more regularly soon.
For now, I'm being true to my Lehigh Valley roots and eating cake for breakfast. (How do people do this every day?) Tomorrow, I'm seeing some friends from high school for dinner and drinks--the sort of invitation I would have flung myself headlong in the opposite direction from up to a few years ago. Now, I'm kind of looking forward to it. Everyone seems well, and for the first time in twelve years, I'm not going to be the person coming from farthest away to the gathering.
In between, it's Christmas. Have a happy one, everyone.
My blog friend Sarah Hoyt is a sci-fi author, so she does a lot of thinking about social issues and the evolution of institutions. She has a post up about her support for gay marriage that takes what is, I think, the best tack possible: arguing that institutions such as marriage exist at least partially to push people toward beneficial behavior and away from destructive behavior that other around them may end up picking up after. I don't know that I'm entirely convinced, but she goes far beyond the soundbites along the lines of "But my partner and I love each other just as much as straight couples do" or "Well, gee, why shouldn't our gay friends have the same rights as my wife and I do?"
Sarah also brings the perspective of someone reared in a country that was not the States:
A law might be able to institute a system like the one in Portugal – and please, those of you who know me, engrave this in stone, because it’s the one time in my life where I’ll say something is better in Portugal – where you have to get a "legal" marriage before the religious one. The legal one is a right, (though I don't think they have gay marriage, before anyone jumps on me) the religious one isn't. In fact, the religious one isn't needed. It is between you and your G-d. The legal is usually done quietly and not celebrated by those people who intend to have a religious ceremony later. (In Dan’s and my case we had our civil ceremony in South Carolina in July, then went to Portugal for the religious wedding in December after I got my green card. It gives us two anniversaries.) At any rate a law could spell out that no religion will be forced to perform unions that offend its tenets or beliefs.
I know at this point my gay friends – or their sympathizers – reading this are groaning and saying that the law will never come because look at all the defense of marriage stuff going on. Well... a properly written law might have a better chance. It might calm a lot of the fears.
She may be right about that, though one of the problems is that so many of the most voluble proponents of gay marriage are too wrapped up in using it to get approval from all quarters. I'm not so sure they could be trusted to lay off the churches in exchange for marriage performed by a justice of the peace.
*******
Speaking of fabulously opinionated pro-SSM blog friends, Virginia Postrelappeared on PJTV to discuss the problems that Obama's glamour might pose when he actually tries to carry out his duties as president. It turns out that her chemotherapy, in addition to helping beat her cancer into remission, has given her a Marcel wave. Do we live in an age of wonders, or what?
Thanks to those who e-mailed to ask what I thought about California's Proposition 8 and its aftermath. I didn't post anything largely because I thought I'd said what I had to say about the gay marriage debate many times over.
I still do. But Caltechgirl, whose blog I haven't visited nearly often enough in the last several months, hit many of the important points:
For the record, I voted NO on Prop 8, folks.
Now that THAT's out of the way, let me get to my point. Last night's protest rallies in West Hollywood and elsewhere did NOTHING to help the No on 8 cause.
Sitting in a busy intersection, holding up traffic and waving signs from an election that's past now doesn't make people want to support you. It makes people think you are a bunch of whiny crybabies with nothing better to do than to hold them up in traffic. Which, as we LA folks ALL know, is sh***y without protesters blocking up the main intersections.
So get over it. Wipe your tears. Get up and fight back. The RIGHT way. The SMART way. Don't make your opponents so upset that they resent you. That's no way to "win friends and influence people."
You looked like a bunch of sissies in front of a big bully last night. Seriously. Do you WANT to play to stereotypes? Do you think that's anyway to bring people to your cause? Sure it rallies people who agree with you, but the majority of Californians (at least according to the vote) probably thought it was pathetic and predictable from a "bunch of whiny sissies"...
Last night's protest here in New York appears to have been more dignified, but several essential problems remain:
Mitchell Stout, 41, an actor from the Upper West Side, said, "We want to have the freedom and liberty to express our love for our partners the same way any American has."
One of the most pervasive beliefs about gays and lesbians is that we all suffer from arrested development and are driven by unexamined and unchecked emotions--we can't deal with being told no by Daddy (either literally or as embodied by the state), and we deal with everything based on what feels good. When our most politically active men and women appear in public this way, all they do is reinforce that crap.
Increased gay visibility was accomplished in the context of the late '60s and early '70s, when reflexive posturing against The Man was the order of the day among trendy liberals. Unfortunately, like other leftists--gay, straight, male, female, white, black, yellow, other--the loudest gay activists seem to be stuck in that mindset.
Gays did not invent the entitlement mentality, we didn't set it loose in the land, and given how many people just voted in Obama under the apparent assumption that he would make their kitchen-table problems disappear, we can hardly be considered its most egregious proponents. It may not be fair that we should have to work extra hard to combat that image, but it is a fact that any sensible, even-keeled person with a modicum of political savvy is aware of, even in California.
Along the same lines, I have my doubts about targeting religious organizations in these contexts. Yes, the Mormons contributed a lot of money to supporting Proposition 8, and they probably seem like a good target for gay opprobrium because a lot of Americans regard them as a bit weird. And not nice to women. Still, such demonstrations have a way of looking like protests against the moral and spiritual ordering power of religion in the abstract, an effect that's hardly counteracted by appeals to the Mormon history of polygamy (where are people's heads?) and soppy invocations of a government-sanctioned contract as an "expres[sion of] love."
Once, convincing people that gay men and lesbians really did fall in love and form life-long partnerships was a real victory in and of itself, but the argument over marriage has evolved far beyond that point by now. As long as those against gay marriage are advancing sophisticated arguments about child-rearing and community building, its proponents are going to keep getting trounced when all they do is come back with effusions about love, prejudice, and ever-expanding rights.
Of course, it's possible that I should be grateful that the pro-SSM activists at least seem to inhabit Planet Earth, Year 2008. Eric posts about a group of gay anarchists who are operating in such a fantasy land it's almost touching. Almost. Eric realizes that Bash Back is not representative of the gay mainstream, but his point--that tactics that alienate Middle Americans are a great way to foment a backlash--is well taken.
Added later: I hadn't noticed that Dale Carpenter had, naturally, posted about the first protests almost a week ago, too:
Here's my advice to righteously furious gay-marriage supporters: Stop the focus on the Mormon Church. Stop it now. We just lost a ballot fight in which we were falsely but effectively portrayed as attacking religion. So now some of us attack a religion? People were warned that churches would lose their tax-exempt status, which was untrue. So now we have (frivolous) calls for the Mormon Church to lose its tax-exempt status? It's rather selective indignation, anyway, since lots of demographic groups gave us Prop 8 in different ways — some with money and others with votes. I understand the frustration, but this particular expression of it is wrong and counter-productive.
Public protest against a constitutional ban on marriage for gay families is entirely justified. More than a mere vote, protests communicate intensity of feelings. They're valuable in a democracy. Something incredibly precious was lost on Tuesday. Those who lost it should not be expected to go back quietly to producing great art and show tunes for everybody's amusement.
That via Jonathan Rauch at IGF, who wonders whether the protests aren't nevertheless an encouraging sign.
Added on 14 November while dressing for dinner: Have I linked enough people yet? Of course not! Robbie at The Malcontent weighed in several days ago:
What is required in these protests is a target. But the very nature of identity politics precludes the two most obvious demographics who voted for the initiative - Hispanics and African-Americans. Could anyone imagine a parade of mostly white gays and lesbians descending on black communities and churches in protest? No, and those pushing the protests know that tactic would never fly in America.
Why not go after Catholics, a demographic that supported the proposition with both cash and votes? First, because Catholics comprise roughly 25% of the American population. In addition, California is a heavily hispanic state, and hispanics are overwhelming Catholic. Would any smart GLBT organizer have their activists and supporters declare war on the Catholic Church and expect support from hispanics and a large portion of white voters? No, not even in that liberal state.
This leaves us with the Mormons, the red-headed stepchild of American religion. Secularists think they're crazy, and other Christian denominations believe they’re a strange, deviant cult. We need look no further than the Republican primary to see that liberals and conservatives strangely converge when it comes to a low opinion of the Mormon religion. Right out of the gate, the protesters have a target that will be left wanting of defenders. Furthermore, the actual numbers of Mormons in this country is rather low.
They're the safe target. The only target. The one target that invites almost no recrimination among a large swath of conservatives, liberals, the religiously devout, and atheists.
What these protesters should be asking is how a small, out-of-state religious denomination blew them out of the water when the media, history, every celebrity living and dead, and the demographic majority was soundly on their side. What these protesters should be asking is what went so wrong with their campaign and message that they could barely corral even their fellow gays into the voting booths.
I don't know that I entirely agree about the Catholic part; anti-RC animus hardly goes unexpressed in gay circles, though it hasn't really flared up since the AIDS protests a few decades ago. OTOH, this was a special case, given the California demographics Robbie cites. Happily, the demonstrations planned for tomorrow target political institutions.
Thanks to all our veterans today. It would be lovely if prosperity and peaceful business within a free society translated into prosperity and peaceful business all around. Unfortunately, it doesn't. There will always be threats that need to be dealt with decisively; our gratitude to those who make it their business to handle doing so.
The Nikkeigives the Aso administration's reaction to the election results:
On 5 November, Prime Minister Taro Aso, having received word that Democratic candidate Obama had won the U.S. presidential election, stated, "The most important thing is to maintain, in cooperation with the new president, the relationship that Japan and the United States have both cultivated through more than fifty years."
Regarding discussions with Mr. Obama, he stated, "It's not as if there were any need to meet with him immediately. It's President Bush until 20 January of next year. I think this is a topic for after the president officially changes." He was responding to the press corps at the prime minister's residence.
The same day, the prime minister released a statement: "I send my heartfelt congratulations. In cooperation with the next president, I want to strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance even further, and exert all possible efforts toward solving issues that affect the whole of the global community, such as the global economy, terrorism, and the environment.
Japan is officially in favor of peace and diplomacy and the Kyoto Protocols, and there's been a lot of controversy over our military presence. I'm still not sure Tokyo is going to be all that happy if Obama's preference for soothing diplomacy and cutting "wasteful" spending on defense involves going soft on China. Or Russia or North Korea.
I'm a libertarian; I'm used to being unsatisfied with election results, even when the candidates I voted for win.
I did not vote for Obama. I don't agree with his policies, and I don't sympathize with his view of the world. But most politicians, no matter what you think of them while they're campaigning, have a way of turning into windsocks once elected. Time will tell what he does with the office. In a few months, he'll be our president, and I wish him the best.
Added on 5 November: I'm glad to see Connie and Dean posting them, but do people really need to be told these things? Reading the comments here, I guess so.
A related point: I'm disturbed at the complaints that seem to imply that Obama was elected because of the media or his cult-creating mind rays. Yes, the media were shilling for him shamelessly. Yes, a lot of his most fervent admirers seemed to be working themselves into the sort of ecstasies that have no business surfacing anywhere outside church or a performance at the opera.
But it's our job as citizens to seek out information. Ours. Those who wanted to read his memoirs critically were able to do so. Those who wanted to find information about Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were able to do so. Those who wanted to know what the historical record says about social-democratic policy were able to do so. I'm not absolving CNN of its transgressions, only saying that it demeans our fellow citizens to imply that they needed to be spoonfed the truth. Some people are fully aware that Obama's longer on charisma than on policy, and they hope that's enough because they recognize that a lot of the most pressing issues of the day are going to have to go through congress anyway. Others decided that he would be the less deleterious choice in the long run despite disliking quite a bit of what he stands for. And finally, some people persist in believing that the Third Way will somehow work if we get it right this (twelve millionth) try.
I don't agree, but that doesn't mean that large segments of the electorate were brainwashed by Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell. If we're going to argue that people should be expected to earn their own way in society, surely we can expect them to use Google, on a terminal at the public library if necessary.
Having now criticized my own side a bit, let me get back to the more fun project of criticizing the opposition. I agree that the election of a black president is a moving, historic moment. It was one thing to know that it was theoretically possible, because we all said that we were worried about policy and character and not skin tone. It's another thing entirely to see America actually show that someone's non-whiteness would not prevent his being voted in. It's the difference between the hopeful belief that you're good enough for your beloved and actually having your marriage proposal accepted. I get it. In and of itself, that's a good thing. And this is an American election. so of course it's American racial history that we're using as context to judge it.
At the same time, could we just every once in a while show some knowledge of the wider world here? Racism and ethnocentrism are the norm in human history, not some rebarbative Yankee aberration. The United States did not invent ethnic tensions, and it was not even the last country to outlaw slavery. To outsiders from nations that have traditionally been more ethnically homogeneous, our noisy, front-and-center conversation on race looks like unrest and a chronic inability to get along, but that's exactly backwards. In America, arguing is what we do. Our periods of glazed-over gentility such as the 1950s tend to arise from external circumstances and be short-lived. American mouthiness and rough-and-tumble debate cause more immediate bruising, but they've helped us to advance organically through our racial and ethnic problems much better than the Europeans, Asians, and Africans that so many left-of-center people think we should be genuflecting to.
Just voted for the first time in twelve years that I didn't use an absentee ballot--very exciting. I was in line by 6:05 and out of the booth by 6:30, but there were already signs that the monitors and police were surprised by the crowds. (Things were a bit confusing, but I don't really blame them. The space is tight, and it was probably hard to work out exactly what traffic flows would be until they started.) This is probably familiar to anyone who hasn't lived abroad for a while, but I found it oddly touching to be standing in line to vote in a school corridor, harangued from all sides by posters about punctuality and attendance and ordering class rings.
Like a lot of people, my first experience of democracy was our mock vote in first grade for governor of Pennsylvania, complete with cigar box and squares of lined paper. (Dick Thornburgh was running against some guy named...Flaherty? Flannery?) I hope Miss Cramer's happy that the lesson stuck. The church I was brought up in--if I haven't mentioned this--frowned on voting in national elections. God has plans for the United States and the world, see, and you could be voting against Him.
Just imagine trying to explain your way out of that one on Judgment Day.
Polls are often wrong, but if they're right, I won't be happy with the results today. That's the way these things go. Both viable presidential tickets well and truly bit this year, but fortunately, Washington is not largely controlled by the president alone, and the states are not largely controlled by Washington alone. Whoever wins is unlikely to wreck the republic. It just remains to see who it is.
I'm late on this, having spent the last day or so with the stomach flu, trying to edge ginger ale and saltines down my throat unnoticed.
Anyway, Reason has a round-up of thoughts by libertarian thinkers on the Obama candidacy. (I'm sure a parallel post about McCain is coming today.) While I have to say that Deirdre McCloskey gets off the best line...
Since I live in Chicago, and anyway am a rational economist, I'm going to vote Libertarian, as usual. After all, why throw away my vote?
...it will doubtless shock you to hear that I most like Virginia Postrel's take. How felicitous for her that the Obama campaign came along not long after she'd turned her culture-critic's eye to the workings of glamour!
If elected, [Obama] will have not a policy mandate but an emotional one: to make Americans feel proud of their country, optimistic about the future, and warmly included, regardless of background, in the American story.
A President Obama could deliver just the opposite. He might stumble badly abroad, projecting weakness that invites aggression (think Jimmy Carter) or involving America in a humanitarian-driven war at least as long and bloody as Iraq (think Sudan). As for inclusiveness, you can get it two ways: by respecting individual differences—-however eccentric, offensive, or hard to control—-or by jamming everyone into a conformist collective. Obama's New Frontier-style rhetoric has a decidedly collectivist cast. NASA is great, prizes for private space flight are stupid, and what can we make you do for your country? A guy who thinks like that will not worry about what his health care plan might do to pharmaceutical research or physicians' incentives.
Obama's campaign draws enormous power from his rhetoric of optimism-"hope," "change," and "Yes, we can." But the candidate's memoir betrays a tragic vision. In Dreams from My Father, almost everyone winds up disappointed: Obama's father, his stepfather, his grandparents, the people he meets in Chicago. Only his naive and distant mother keeps on pursuing happiness. Then she dies of cancer. ... Hope is audacious because, at least in this world, it's futile and absurd. Faceless "power" is always waiting to crush your dreams.
Before anyone starts screeching that McCain also has Daddy issues and that he's also obsessed with strong-arming people into "national service" and that Obama has too proposed specific policies--yes, I know. So does Virginia, whose piece about McCain is likely, if anything, to be even more cutting when it appears.
The things she's talking about still matter. Obama talks a lot about hope, but his view of America is actually pretty dour: we need to be shaken from our complacency (by him and his fellow travelers) and change our ways--not because we're a society made up of human beings that doesn't always get it right, but because we've got loads of fundamental sins to atone for. As Melanie Phillips wrote last week:
[T]he only way to assess their position is to look at each man in the round, at what his general attitude is towards war and self-defence, aggression and appeasement, the values of the west and those of its enemies and – perhaps most crucially of all – the nature of the advisers and associates to whom he is listening. As I have said before, I do not trust McCain; I think his judgment is erratic and impetuous, and sometimes wrong. But on the big picture, he gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.
Here's why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America's original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.
Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west's fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That's why he believes in 'soft power' — diplomacy, aid, rectifying 'grievances' (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America's defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will 'cut investments in unproven missile defense systems'; he will 'not weaponize space'; he will 'slow our development of future combat systems'; and he will also 'not develop nuclear weapons,' pledging to seek 'deep cuts' in America's arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.
My biggest problem with Obama is his instincts. I don't think that he hates classical liberals (via Eric), any more than I think Sarah Palin hates those of us who live in blue cities.
What I do think is that he believes, like a lot of liberals who approach things from an academic background, that human relations can be fixed in some ultimate way. We talk until we find common ground, we all make some compromises, and then we all go home partially happy and make the best of it. That means that those of us who believe that ideological conflict is inevitable, that in some conflicts there will inevitably be distinct winners and losers, and that competition among ideas is not only inevitable but frequently salutary, are spoiling the party. As Virginia implies, it's hard to champion both conflict-avoidance and "diversity."
Hold a chicken in the air / Stick a deck chair up your nose
Eric and M. Simon link to this masterwork of scintillating ninnyism by, not to put too fine a point on it, the sort of person I vowed I would never, ever become when I left the Lehigh Valley. I will leave aside the ha-ha-but-I-really-kind-of-mean-it argument that white people should be banned from voting. Whatever thesis it was in service of, Jonathan Valania's conclusion would be an insult to everyone referred to:
By this point, you either think I am joking or are calling me an elitist. I assure you I am neither. OK, maybe a little of both. But it wasn't always like this. I come from the Coal Belt, from that Alabamian hinterland between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as per James Carville's famous formulation.
I am, in fact, just two generations out of the coal mines that blackened the lungs of my grandfather, leaving him disabled, despondent and, finally, dead at the ripe old age of 54.
So, understand that I am saying all this for the good of the country and, in fact, for the good of those hard-working white people that Hillary used to pander to.
I know those people, I come from them. They are not some shameful abstract demographic to be brushed under the rug of euphemism by Wolf Blitzer and his ilk.
I have broken kielbasa with those people. I went to school with their children. I have gone to Sunday Mass with a deer-hunter hangover with those people. They are bitter with good reason, and they are armed because they are scared. They mean well, but they are easily spooked.
I fear for what is to become of them after the campaigns leave town for the last time, and Scranton and Allentown and Carlisle go back to being the long dark chicken dance of the national soul they were before the media showed up.
I am, in fact, just one generation away from the steel mills of Bethlehem that sent my father to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns one day when I was a child, have chronically aggravated his psoriasis, and have dinged him up with joint problems.
But you know something? Much as I adore my parents and many of my elder relatives, I have no idea what it's like to be a plant worker. Therefore, when the discussion turns to their lives, I generally trust them to know themselves at least as well as I do.
That's not to say that I don't disagree with them on policy frequently...though my disagreement, I imagine, runs in the opposite direction from Valania's. To my mind, people who claim not to need the government to take care of them are far too ready to embrace further distortions of economic decision-making through changes to the tax code, protectionism, and support for national health care--as long as they're pitched as "relief for Pennsylvania families." I think they're wrong to support such policies, and I wish they didn't. But no one is required to adhere to my wishes when prioritizing which political values they're going to use their vote to optimize. If a free society is to work, we have to be ready to accept other people's choices even if we think they're bad.
I'm not trying to dodge the simple fact that people often make judgments based on prejudice; my point is just that you can't tell from someone's ballot how he or she decided whom to vote for. We're a gigantic country in a gigantic global economy, and all of us deal with daily torrents of signals. Not even trained social scientists concur on policy, for heaven's sake, and they're the ones who spend their working lives poring over the data. How difficult should it be to accept that ordinary citizens, trying to make the most sense of the fragmentary information they have, don't all agree with you or your candidate? (It might also be pointed out that Allentown is in the 15th Congressional District, which went for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Yes, it's a notorious swing district, and the margins were narrow; and as a registered Republican, I'm not pointing these things out as some kind of point of pride. I just think that someone who's going to bitch about white people's voting the wrong person into office in one paragraph and then cite Allentown in another should have a surer hand with the numbers.)
Middle PA has its fair share of born hotheads and sourpusses, but so do Tokyo and New York. What does that prove? I have relatives who hunt. They like hunting, and they like guns. They go to church regularly and like the people in their congregations. Most of them take pride in their jobs, even if everyone has plenty of stories about being screwed by bureaucratic bossiness or the idiot colleague everyone else has to carry. The economic dislocations of the last few decades have been painful, and people can certainly get riled up over what they see as betrayal by the government. But bitter in the all-around sense? I just don't see it. And if you want to see easily spooked, just try announcing in a group of gay guys here in New York that you're voting for McCain.
BOO!
I know that this is not a new point, but the best way to approach people with opposing beliefs is to argue with them. Maybe you have something to teach them, or maybe they know as much as you do but have drawn different conclusions. Vigorous disagreement is built into the American experiment, but it can't work if we're all busy accusing each other of voting based on our hang-ups.
...
Oh, and I'm not even going to go after that "broken kielbasa" nonsense. Well, except to say that, as an incoherent metaphor and in combination with the reference to the chicken dance, it put me in mind of "The Chicken Song," which, while no more logical than Valania's piece, at least is as funny as it intends to be.
Added on 29 October: Happy Diwali (that's the greeting?) to our Indian friends. And thanks to Eric for the link and the kind words as always.
Added on 30 October: Thanks to Eric for pointing out that Valania's confirmation bias and lefty-from-central-casting cultural and economic illiteracy go back at least a half-decade. Check out this piece that, among other things, contrasts two Philadelphia-based businesses that are owned by former partners. The founder of Urban Outfitters is now, at least to a degree, a conservative. His retail chain is described like this:
The interior of the flagship store at 17th and Walnut streets is stylized to evoke what can only be described as janitorial chic: exposed brick, scraped plaster walls and low-hanging ventilation ducts. Everything is illuminated by the soft glow of warehouse loft light fixtures. All the merchandise is displayed against pegboard backdrops faintly reminiscent of ye olde family rec room or dad's workshop. And piped in over the sound system is the jarring electro clatter of Peanut Butter Wolf's oh-so-appropriately titled album Badmeaningood.
His former paramour is still gratifyingly liberal, so her enterprises are characterized thus:
"Hi, this is Judy in the woods," says the voice on the answering machine at the Poconos summer home of Judy Wicks, owner and operator of the White Dog Cafe, a homey restaurant/bar in University City, and of the adjoining artsy gift shop called the Black Cat. Wicks is a prominent local businesswoman and a diehard liberal activist.
...
Judy went on to open the highly successful White Dog Cafe, where she would host and coordinate countless social and community activist campaigns, while Dick went on to build the Urban Outfitters empire out of the humble beginnings of Free People.
If you don't know Philadelphia, you may not know how laugh-aloud hilarious it is to see the White Dog depicted as "homey." I don't think that there's anything inherently wrong with its carefully cultivated shabby-genteel atmosphere, but it's a joke to try to argue that the place is any less pretentious than, like, Le Bec Fin. (That goes double for the bibelots at the Black Cat.) Here's an item from the White Dog's current dinner menu:
Pulled Duck Confit on Chickpea Panella
coco agro-dolce and an arugula, radish, and zucchini flower salad
Just like Mom used to make, huh?
As I say, I think it's great that Wicks found a marketable business model that helps fund causes she supports. There's nothing immoral about combining peasant-y ingredients in a fashion formulated to appeal to the Mother Jones set, but I don't see how it's any more inherently forthright an enterprise than Urban Outfitters. And Valania never seems to get around to noting that Richard Hayne's company, having grown so large, has helped create wealth and employment across the globe. (He's busy decrying "sweatshops" while giving short shrift to potential arguments about what their employees' lives would be like if factory work weren't an alternative.)
Heather MacDonald has a characteristically smart piece in City Journal about Sarah Palin (via Amy Alkon).
I know, it's elitist to expect a candidate for president or vice president to speak like an adult. Sure, there are parents out there battling the "like" epidemic who might not appreciate having someone in the White House validating their 15-year-olds' speech habits. But, hey: "Total role reversal here." (Palin, of course, can sound adolescent even when she uses the right verbs, as when she disingenuously denied her snarky put-down of Joe Biden's age while lauding herself as "you know, . . . the new energy, the new face, the new ideas.") It's even more elitist to expect a vice president to put together sentences that cohere into a minimally logical progression of thought. There was a time, however, when conservatives upheld adult standards—such as clarity of speech and thought—without apology, even in the face of the relentless downward pull of adolescent culture. But now, when a vice-presidential candidate talks like a teenager, mugs like an American Idol contestant, and traffics in syntactical dead-ends and non sequiturs, we are supposed to find her charming and authentic.
...
Nevertheless, Palin's verbal hodgepodge may say nothing about her qualifications for the vice presidency. Judgment and political acumen could well rest on different mental capacities than the ability to order thoughts into smooth sentences. But the inability to answer a straightforward question about economic policy without becoming tangled in words suggests either ignorance about the subject matter or a difficulty connecting between ideas. Neither explanation is reassuring.
The Palin nomination has unleashed among Republican pundits and voters a great roar of pent-up rage against liberal elites, much of it warranted. But the conservative embrace of Palin comes at considerable cost to conservative principles. The populist identity politics that Republicans are now playing with such gusto may come back to haunt them in the future.
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Liberal hypocrisy on Palin's family dilemmas has matched the conservative turnaround with perfect symmetry, of course. And perhaps both sides will blithely and unapologetically switch places yet again as soon as circumstances allow. Still, the conservative position on the family happens to be the right one. So, too, was the erstwhile conservative defense of articulateness, knowledge, and uncommon achievement. It's a shame to have sacrificed these ideas, even temporarily, in the quest for political advantage.
I, too, wonder how the backing and filling is going to play out when Republicans start making rigorous classical standards of education one of their favorite topics again. I'm a bookish man who gravitates toward bookish people and lives in a bookish city, but I recognize that Palin has good instincts and has held her own in terms of hands-on achievement in office.
What worries me is that she doesn't give any indication of having been exposed to Matthew Arnold's "the best that has been thought and written," which you can do at the University of Idaho as surely as you can at Amherst if you're of a mind to. I spent the first half of the '90s as a comparative literature major at Penn, so believe me, I am well aware of the limits of cutesy verbal game-playing. That she's not more honey-tongued in the lawyerly sense we've gotten used to since the Clintons is not something I hold against her.
But that doesn't change the fact that much of the history of mankind is stored in language, and Palin doesn't seem to think or talk like someone who's been absorbing the lessons of the past from the Founding Fathers or Orwell or even Margaret Thatcher. Palin's "you know" and "like" don't bother me as much as the fact that her phrasing makes ideas squishy and the connections between them unclear. Isn't the point of exalting folksiness usually to prize blunt, fearless truth-telling?
Well, I was all set to post a translation of an autumn poem; then I did a search on a hunch and--naturally--I'd already posted it a few years ago. Darn. Guess I'll just have to hunt high and low for some other Japanese poem about autumn.
Okay, I've put up a bunch of poems by Saigyō, but I don't think I've gotten around to this one. When I was in grad school and we got to this one, Donald Keene (whose Shinkokin-shu seminar I was fortunate enough to be able to take) broke into a broad, frank grin: "It's rare and moving to see Saigyō write a poem with such warmth and humor."
小山田の庵近く鳴く鹿の音におどろかされておどろかすかな
西行法師
oyamada no/iho chikaku naku/shika no ne ni/odorokasarete/odorokasu kana
saigyou houshi
Just outside my hut
nestled in a mountain field
the cry of a deer
has jolted me right awake
I think I'll jolt him right back
The Priest Saigyō
"See how he likes it!" the sleepy Saigyō seems to say. The notes from my edition say that his plan is likely to use a clapper or noisemaker, rather than to lean out the door and tell the deer to shut up already so decent folk can get some sleep. Deer make disconsolate noises that are considered fundamental to the lonely, aching beauty of autumn.
Added on 25 October: I think I'm a moron, but (unusually) it's not entirely certain. I took 小山田 as a place name and had in some shadowy, inaccessible synapse a memory of having been instructed to render it thus twelve years ago; however, the edition I use almost invariably gives a note for each place referred to that tells where it would be in contemporary Japan, and there's nothing like that here. Also, 山田 can just mean "mountain paddy," anyway. So I'm playing Ministry of Truth (真実省? But at this point it probably would have merged with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in the 2001 restructuring, so maybe...okay, focus, Sean) and changing it above.
Today's lead editorial in the Nikkei is headlined "Accounting improprieties by regional governments cause trouble with separation of powers."
After the Board of Audit conducted a nationwide investigation of 12 prefectures, it came to light that federal subsidies exceeding 500 million yen had been used improperly. Cases in which slush funds were eked out through fabricated orders to suppliers were also discovered. Each entity should, at the same time as it returns the misappopriated portion of funds to the federal government, do its own thorough investigation that includes how the slush funds were used.
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The accounting improprieties indicated by the Board of Audit are largely of two types. One was the MO of "deposit," in which orders for purchasees of office supplies and things were fraudulently generated, and the capital accumulated in the account of the relevant supplier. Because subsidy money left over must be returned to Tokyo, the method was to move it into suppliers' accounts at the end of the fiscal year, and from the next year on, to make payments from that account when goods were actually purchased.
Another was the allocation of subsidies. There were cases in which temporary employees hired for the work of allocating subsidy money were rotated to other jobs, and funds for their business travel were obtained from subsidies that were unrelated to it.
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Increasing the transparency of administration and use of public funds is one of the minimum conditions for moving forward with regional separation of powers. Even those entities that were not subjects of the current investigation should do their own investigations and clear out all the corruption ["drain out all the pus," in the evocative Japanese phrasing--SRK].
That accounting improprieties were left unattended in each prefecture until the Board of Audit pointed them out is also a problem. Even if we allow that the tricks used were clever, what on earth were the prefectural assemblies and the auditing committees, which were supposed to verify budgeting and book-closing, doing? We call on everyone from the employees of the regional entities to the audit committees to do some hard soul-searching.
Aichi Prefecture apparently took (the biggest slice of) the cake, with diverted subsidies and dodgy expenditures totaling 130 million yen. Bear in mind that only a quarter of Japan's prefectures were studied, too.
The "separation of powers" part is, of course, the long-standing argument over what and how much Tokyo should be giving back to prefectural (and municipal) governments. I can see the point that giving more power to regional governments that are busy creating slush funds is a bad idea. On the other hand, the sense of assurance that Tokyo is far, far away and not looking too hard makes it easier to get crafty. And pouring so much tax and revenue from around Japan into one federal pool makes the resulting funds seem to come from big, abstract Tokyo rather than living, breathing taxpayers in local officials' own communities. It's inexcusable that they regard the subsidy system as an open tap, but it's not really hard to see how they get that way.
"DO EITHER OF YOU THINK YOU CAN BALANCE THE FEDERAL BUDGET?"
Yes, because I also know which pronouns are singular and plural.
And they complain about Sarah Palin's intelligence.
Added at 21:26: "Are each of you willing to...?"
Added at 23:00: May I just say...I will never agree with Hillary Clinton on policy, but she's come a long way in terms of her public persona. Good on her.
Wow. Looks like a fire behind our building--on 39th, I think, just east of Park. There's been smoke pouring out of a building for the last twenty minutes. Murray Hill's mostly residential, especially on the Streets (as opposed to the Aves.), so the probability is well over 50% that it's someone's house or apartments...though it's close enough to 100 Park that I can't tell. Here's hoping there are no injuries and that property damage is minimized. FDNY seems to be there.
Eric links to this post by Bill Whittle about Barack Obama's assertion that citizens have a right to health care in the debate the other night. Eric says,
[H]ealth care is not a right. Certainly not a right in the way our country has always defined rights, for if there is an obligation for other people to pay for it, it becomes not a right but a duty, to the government, by other people — duties to the government being the antithesis of rights.
Having lived in Japan for twelve years and had several friends who (unlike me) work in health care, I had a lot of lively discussions about the relative merits of socialized medicine. What always drove me crazy was when people talked as if the money for health care weren't going to have to come from somewhere. There's plenty of great health care available in Japan, but stories have surfaced recently about patients' being turned away or dumped by hospitals, and about desperate Japanese who travel to China for organ transplants. One doesn't want to be like the NYT Style Section and inflate every clutch of three colorful anecdotes into a Major Trend, but the aging society does mean that there will be fewer workers supporting more geriatric patients in short order. Everyone is worried.
Of course, that's a practical, not philosophical, problem. Whittle writes,
Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.
But these new so-called "rights" are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin.
And, of course, when the government is in charge of giving out goodies, it gets to set priorities and trade-offs for individuals. Is your need for a procedure "urgent"? What's an acceptable minimum for "quality of life"? Would you prefer to buy less health coverage and more of something else you value more highly? What happens when functionaries start telling fat people they don't deserve bypass surgery because they've spent their lives tunneling through five Entenmann's cakes a week?
Not, I hasten to add, that the current American system is anywhere near perfect...but then, neither is it a free-market system. Former AIG executive (!) Jon Basil Utley wrote the following in Reason a few months ago:
So why isn't all this being debated in the presidential campaign? For one, some of the richest and most powerful lobbies in Washington are run by the medical and pharmaceutical establishments. They don't want a competitive system. Democrats do propose forcing everyone to "buy" high-cost insurance, while continuing with the current system, and then have taxpayers subsidize premiums for the poor. But they also oppose tort reform which would hurt their trial lawyer political allies. Many Republican congressmen, meanwhile, also benefit from the lobbies and don't want to rock the boat. After eight years in power, they don't want to take criticism for having made little reform.
Medical cost reform is just one of many areas where Washington is corrupt and paralyzed, in particular because of the gerrymandered power structure, whereby sitting congressmen are almost invulnerable to defeat. They then legally collect millions in "campaign contributions" from the lobbies. Reform will only come about if Americans become better informed, yet most of the media is ignorant about health costs. Reform depends also upon major corporations attacking the current system, such as Wal-Mart has started to do with its in-store clinics. But most companies are silent and afraid to tackle the medical power structure. The Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Businesses seem reluctant to challenge both the monopolies and the current system. Lessons from the experiences of other nations are certainly available, but most Americans are ignorant of them and still believe claims that "our system is the best." It may be "best" for Medicare, some Medicaid recipients, congressmen, state and federal government employees, and the military, but then they already have "socialized" medicine; they just don't pay most of the costs.
I'm not sure exactly what can be done about the current mess. Public policy that enshrines health care as a right does not seem like a great plan, though. It would further separate the health-care payments citizens make from the goods and services meted out, muffling useful price signals. And it would further insulate government officials controlling the goodies from competition, feedback, and new ideas. That always works out well, huh?
I watched the debate with my buddy, a few friends of his, and some friends of theirs. I was pretty much the only right-of-center person in the room, but I feel safe in saying that we all had more pointed, concrete things to say about The Issues than either man in the hot seat tonight. (And Tom Brokaw seriously needs a different surgeon.) I'm still voting McCain--at this point, nothing would make me trust Obama with the presidency--but between the jabbering about ending dependency on foreign oil and the nattering about using federal power to play Mr. Fix-it with the economy, I was (even more) glad (than usual) for the nectar of the grape. Ugh.
Holy god there is nothing more important than not trading with foreigners for energy. Double the Peace Corps, so we can renew America, because there is no non-state way to do that.
Ann Althouse takes issue with Andrew Sullivan's sardonic comments about Sarah Palin's winking during the debate. Althouse specifically tackles this Rich Lowry post, in which he admits to finding Sarah Palin sexy. Althouse makes a good point, but she doesn't seem to remember this post by Sullivan himself a few years ago. About a VP candidate. In a debate.
Well, I could easily be wrong, but I have a feeling Cheney will crush Edwards tonight. The format is God's gift to Daddy. They'll both be seated at a table, immediately allowing Cheney to do his assured, paternal, man-of-the-world schtick that makes me roll on my back and ask to have my tummy scratched. (Yes, I do think that Cheney is way sexier than Edwards. Not that you asked or anything.)
Your day's complete now, right?
Personally, I don't see why we shouldn't take note of a politician who's unusually hot; it's not as if Washington were so chock-a-block with irresistible sexpots that we'd run the risk of being distracted indefinitely from economic, geopolitical, and energy policy. Corn subsidies are at least as sexy as the average member of congress.
Eric, BTW, notes that Palin's winking is not exactly precedent-setting.
I didn't go into the debate thinking Sarah Palin was either (1) the august Saint Jane of Sixpack, whose Middle-American horse sense is worth ten times its weight in Yale degrees and who has the stuff to remake Washington completely while one hand dandles a baby and the other cleans a rifle or (2) the dumbest religious-rightest bitch ever nominated for anything ever who can't even make sentences and OMG have you seen those glasses and what does she think this is a Pantene commercial and that Valley-Girl-from-the-North-Country accent gives me hives and AAARRRGGGGGGHHHH?!
I like Palin. I think she's shrewd and grounded. I like that she loves her country without qualification. I have the same problems with her that I do with all politicians: I wish she weren't an economics moron, and I wish her political compromises indicated a more consistent way of prioritizing principles and goods. And there are some more specific problems with her individually: shrewdness and cockiness are not substitutes for being informed, and there is, in fact, nothing elitist about deploying good grammar/usage/mechanics off the cuff. I was never persuaded that Palin was lacking in intelligence, but I'm still not persuaded that she has the hunger for knowledge or conceptual framework for driving policy effectively.
That said, she did well last night. She appeared to believe what she was saying, and there were few "How's that again?" sentence constructions. Biden's been around for ages, so I have a difficult time assessing what the debate itself really made me think of him. He seemed more lizardly than usual, though he never acted like a jerk.
8:16 - Biden: Barack Obama will never raise taxes on anyone ever. Almost. McCain is middle-class-hating shill for megawealthy.
8:18 - Palin: Higher taxes not patriotic, Biden. Government off our snow machines! I did a good job remembering talking points about McCain's health care tax credit plan! Budget-neutral: I can say it!
8:19 - Biden: Scranton, reprezent. Redistribution isn't if you don’t call it that. Fairness! Health care, blah blah Bridge to Nowhere.
8:21 - Biden: How to save? Screw foreign assistance, tax cuts for rich, can’t "slow up on" stuff that's the "engine", like subsidies for the energy companies we’re not going to give tax cuts to. Tax havens unpatriotic!
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8:31 - Palin: Extemp grammar weird. Global warming. Yeah, we've got glaciers in Alaska, so we need to pay more for energy by subsidizing the same energy companies I had to wrestle like polar bears.
8:32 - Biden: Global warming totally manmade. I know. I made it. By Talking. BO likes clean coal and safe nuclear. China: Dirty dirty coal. Give em our tech. McCain hates environment because he opposes causing hunger in third world children by subsidizing corn. Drilling won't get us anywhere until 10 years, as if prices don't reflect expectations of future production.
My biggest worry last night was that if Palin crashed and burned, she would not only discredit the McCain campaign but also the idea that bringing outsiders ("non-professionals") into DC politics is a good one. She held her own and seems to be learning her lessons. That's not major praise, but considering whom she's running with and against, and considering her own very, very iffy performance over the last several weeks, it's enough.
It looks as if our debate-watching party will take place at home rather than at a friend's place as planned. For the five of you who may care, be it known that
I will not be live-blogging. At least, not the whole thing. I may be moved to reach for the laptop to comment in real time if anything seems particularly noteworthy, but I'll have guests, and my first responsibility will be to see to their comfort while punching the sofa cushions hard every time someone on television says something dumb. (NB: I actually do that, even when there are other people around.)
Don't bother looking to me for a drinking game. The only drinking game I ever play has the following rules:
Whenever you want a gulp, take one. Then take one more.
The host or hostess loses if the alcohol runs out before everyone's sated. (No household of mine has ever lost, I'll have you know.)
Otherwise, everyone wins...you know, as in those new non-competitive versions of tag they play on playgrounds so every participant gets to feel equally special. But more fun.
My friend Portia, whom you may know as a commenter at Eric's, pretty much sums up what I'm thinking going in.
Right now I'm waiting for the debate to see how she performs. NOT to make up my mind. As I said, it's pretty much get drunk and vote for McCain and I'd have done it even if he picked Romney. (If he picked Huckabee I had plans to find a lone island and hide out to wait for the end of the world.) I don't like McCain, but I'm back in the familiar situation of the seventies, where I have to pick between those who will get me and my family killed and those who MIGHT allow us to live another four years.
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There are other reasons to vote for McCain, including that the press wants us to vote for Obama and I don't like being told what to do.
But I hope and pray I'm right and that there is a "there" there when it comes to Palin. Because if McCain wins, and croaks, I don't want her playing sweet little girl to Putin, heaven help us all. Perhaps not as bad as Obama would be, but six of one, half a dozen of the other.
On experience — not too fussed, provided McCain doesn't die first day in office — PROVIDED SHE KICKS OFF "good little girl" mode. I'm hoping it happens sometime. Can't promise, because it depends on McCain's attitude, too.
Look, everyone knew going into this that Palin was going to be under a microscope. She said she accepted the slot without hesitation. Great. Now give us reason to be glad for that. And bear in mind, a lot of us remember Margaret Thatcher.
I don't happen to think the whole Palin thing is all that hard to understand--whether you do or do not want to support her. The original argument from the McCain campaign was that it didn't matter that she didn't have impressive academic credentials or a history of grooming herself for national politics; she had the knowledge and skill sets to get the job done well. The initial protests from the more hysterical corners of the left that she was a rube with outdated hair and a degree from Nowheresville State and too many kids and guns and a history of sportscasting were therefore petty and irrelevant. Unfortunately, many on the right are still responding as if those were the issues at hand. They are not. The issue still is, can she get the job done well?
Rachel Lucas is another person who's getting it from right-leaning commenters about criticizing Palin, and she responds perfectly sensibly:
So I watched the Couric interview of Palin clips late on a Friday afternoon and blogged that I thought she sounded like a fool. Didn't say she is a fool, or stupid, just that she didn't sound like she knew what she was talking about and that if she were on "the other side," I would mock her with verbatim transcripts and most of my readers would laugh and mock along with me.
IT’S TRUE AND YOU KNOW IT.
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This isn't the Washington Post you know. I'm not Charles Freakin' Krauthammer. But most of all, I refuse to be a hypocrite and it kinda pisses me off, not a lot but kinda, that so few others on "my side" don't see how hypocritical it is to say that you wouldn't tear her up all over the place if she were a Democrat, wouldn't say that she sounded like a complete and total moron in those interviews if she were a liberal. She did sound like that, editing or not. You do realize that half the time I or any other blogger or right-leaning writer mocks the intelligence of Democrats, we're doing that selectively, too?
Along the same lines, my friend Zak zeroes in on a major issue, though I think he mischaracterizes it:
The thing is, it's almost impossible to talk about these things when someone who has risen up from truly humble roots through his own abilities is branded "elite," while the guy who got into Annapolis because his dad was an Admiral and then married an heiress is somehow salt of the earth.
In the end, it's now a nonsense word, and just means "a liberal I dislike."
I DO think there is a serious current of anti-intellectualism in America these days, though. There always has been, but I think it's been cresting.
To start with...look, this is probably about the thousandth time I've linked this post by Megan McCardle, but it really does help illuminate things, so here it is:
What is true is that Democrats, right now, have more ability to insulate themselves from being confronted with the views of the other side. Geographically, they can isolate themselves into coastal cities, which is why I never met any Republicans except my grandparents until I went to business school. And informationally, provided that they don't watch Fox news, don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and keep the radio tuned to NPR, they can keep from ever hearing if the other side has a good argument.
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This is why the Democrats at that luncheon were so shocked and hurt. Not because they are stupid, or venal, or arrogant. But because they live in a bubble, and thus are genuinely not aware that the other side may occasionally have the better of the argument. The New Republic is about as far right as your average New Yorker generally goes, publication-wise — and I am acquainted with a number of people who have dropped it because it's too right-wing these days. If the only explanation of conservatives beliefs you ever hear comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, it is indeed incomprehensible that people out there could actually embrace such twaddle. I'd be looking under the couch for the Vast Right Wing conspiracy too.
The main distinction that needs to be made here is between eliteness (being privileged) and elitism (the state of mind, the worldview, the 主義 that one is superior to others and, in this context, can govern them effectively without learning from them). I've never heard the argument advanced that McCain is not an elite, in the sense of coming from a powerful insider family and therefore being in a better position to snag an heiress. I have seen people occasionally use Obama's grandmother's job as a bank vice-president as grounds for arguing that his background was more elite than we're given to understand, but most of his detractors that I know of accept that his family was pretty non-descript middle-class.
The argument that McCain, despite his background, is not an elitist is based on his perceived willingness to get his hands dirty, which is predicated on the belief that he's no better than anyone he's serving. He went to Vietnam and withstood imprisonment and torture. He's spent his career in the senate pursuing bipartisan cooperation. His wife doesn't inform voters that her husband is going to shake them up, because his position is not that they've chosen to live their lives in ways that need to be reformed by do-gooder technocrats. He tells them that they have every right to love America as it is and that their existing values are worthwhile.
The argument that Obama, despite his background, is an elitist is based on his perceived belief that he's destined to fulfill the role of an enlightened political leader, a high-status charity worker who ladles goodness onto his constituents from on high because they don't know what's good for them. He explained the values of small-town and rural voters as resulting from the failure of presidential administrations to engineer the economy to make them happy. He sucks up to European social democrats and acts as if we needed to be more like them. He's still against the surge even though he acknowledges that it's worked. He started running for president practically from the moment he was elected to the senate.
My point is not that either extreme is entirely true, only that it's about more than just deciding based on upbringing who's elitist and who is not.
Regarding Sarah Palin, the questions seem to revolve more around eliteness of achievement than around elitism of beliefs. There seems to be little evidence that she's tried to use the coercive power of her government position to push others to live her way. There is, however, evidence that she's out of her depth as a contender for the vice-presidency. It's not conclusive evidence, so I'm happy to humor conservatives who maintain that she's saving up all her killer lines and dazzling political insights for the debate Thursday. We'll know soon enough, after all. But the contention that anyone who questions her possible relationship to the Peter principle is a tool of the Obama left is ridiculous. I'm as unmoved by that as I am by the contention that anyone who votes against Obama is a racist.
I think the left is more frequently guilty than the right of shrill, emotionally charged reactions when their sacred cows are criticized, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly on the practice. Bridget Johnson posted this on PJM about whether Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal might not have made a better choice for McCain's VP than Sarah Palin:
Considering the excessive media tear against Palin, as opposed to the kid-gloves treatment afforded Barack Obama, it was no surprise that anyone in the media who questioned the selection of Palin — regardless of whether he or she fell on the right of left side of the aisle, or somewhere in between — was regarded as having nefarious ulterior motives by fans of the newly created ticket.
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[A]s soon as I blogged on the possibility that storm season could show Jindal may have been the smarter choice, commenters in conservative forums were calling me a Marxist mainstream media louse who was surely making the suggestion to sabotage a right-wing dream ticket (though, it should be said, McCain was in the not-too-distant past considered a poseur Republican, and any pundit who pitched him in the primary over Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee was roundly castigated). Never mind that I was suggesting another Reagan Republican as McCain's ideal running mate.
If you want to see what she's talking about, just look at the comments. Enough of them gainsay her argument without giving a good reason that I had to stop reading halfway through. Johnson must have expected that, and good on her for writing what she believes anyway.
From the opposite side of the political spectrum, friends of mine, such as Zak in a comment the other day, have been asking why I'm not flipping out over Palin as much as they are:
I think Palin appeals to the ignorant because they can sense that she is exactly as ignorant as they. I can't figure out why you aren't appalled about her candidacy, though, because you clearly don't fit into this group.
I seriously doubt there are many people who support Palin because she seems dumb enough to be unthreatening and easy to relate to. I do think there are a lot of smart, experienced people who've followed politics for years, were excited at the potential ascent of a genuine outsider such as Palin, and have been bending over backwards to put the best face on her performance since her convention speech because they really, really want her to do well. And McCain to win.
Palin hasn't said anything egregiously, quotably stupid, which is good; but she has settled into a pattern of giving obtuse responses to questions that leave a strong impression that she just doesn't really know what she's talking about. The line about this among fans is that the McCain campaign is micro-managing her self-presentation, and that she is therefore displaying the discomfort of someone trying to play a role she's pledged to but doesn't really want.
That all sounds very sympathetic, but weren't we told, expressly, that Palin's a good choice because she has a solid core of conviction and principle and doesn't let people push her around? I have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, but in public Palin is looking less steady and spunky as things wear on. She's nearly lost a lot of us, and if she's saving herself up for her debate performance (which I find possible but not really likely), she's running a terrible risk.
And can we please stop it with the crap about how any criticism of Palin is based on snobbery and is practically prima facie evidence of a desire for Obama to win? Anti-elitism is not supposed to mean lowering standards. Just because a lot of blowhards went to Harvard, that doesn't mean that going to a state school is a sign of shrewdness. Palin's convention speech was a great start and suggested that she might be one of those smart, talented people whose path happened not to pass through an elite university. I can't see anything inherently snobbish about pointing out that she hasn't done much to develop since then.
McCain (you'll have heard this?) wants to postpone the debate to do an ostentatiously public-spirited confab in Washington about the bailout plan:
Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain announced Wednesday that he is suspending his campaign to return to Washington and focus on the "historic" crisis facing the U.S. economy.
McCain said it was time for both parties to come together to solve economic crisis.
Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama said at a news conference later Wednesday that he and McCain had spoken by phone and had agreed to issue a joint statement about shared principles in the approach to resolving the economic crisis.
But he disagreed with McCain's call for postponing Friday's first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi.
"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president," Obama said in Clearwater, Florida. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."
That's a pretty fair observation; I'm not sure I buy the subsequent line about not wanting to "infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics," though, given the way members of both parties opportunistically point fingers at executive and legislative officials alike when trying to convince voters that the other side sucks.
I've heard lefty friends suggest that McCain is doing this as a gimmick to worm his way out of the debate. My own instinct says that McCain is (1) indeed doing this as a gimmick but (2) not to buy time to prep more for the debate (or whatever it is his detractors think he needs time to do). McCain has long made a show of his ability to work with people across party lines. Note that I do not see the results as an alloyed good.
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The belief that the McCain campaign is going to try to leverage American racism to win against Obama is being further developed, and Eric looks at some of its components:
The way things are going with these endless charges of "racism," I think it's more likely to be a referendum on the intractability of the imputation of racism. Which of course the imputers would claim proves their point. That's because when an issue -- dishonest or not -- is injected into a campaign as relentlessly as "racism" is being injected into this campaign, it's there, and it won't go away easily. The old "try not to think about elephants" routine. American voters are being inundated -- on a daily basis now -- with the following, deeply ugly, message: if you're white and you don't vote for Obama it's because you're a racist.
The only people who have any hope of a defense are Republican stalwarts. They can say "I just voted the Party line as I always do." Not so for Democrats and independents. If they vote for McCain, they will have to live with the unsettling knowledge that post-election inquisitors will always be able to ask them who they voted for in 2008, and if they answer McCain, it will be seen as suspect. And even if they say, "It's my business who I voted for!" leftie McCarthyites will take that as a tacit admission that they voted for McCain. And either way, they're obviously racists, right?
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I got a message from a reader the other day that reminded me of something Ross Douthat had written, which I'd been meaning to cite (emphasis mine):
And even if you agree [with the prior point that Mike Huckabee was able to take on a suitably presidential mien despite being an outsider who hadn't lusted after the job since kindergarten, while Palin has not], you may say that the comparison is unfair - first, because Huckabee was unusually glib and charming, as politicians go, and second because he had a long primary season, much of it spent in relative obscurity, to achieve this effect, whereas Palin has only two months, all of them spent in the full-on glare of an obsessed and hostile press corps. Which is true enough! But Palin is where she is, and eight weeks is all she gets: The fact that she has a tougher challenge than Huckabee doesn't absolve her from the obligation to rise to meet it, and thus far she has not. I'm more inclined to reserve judgment on her present (and future) prospects than the disillusioned Noah Millman, whose reasons for being initially enthusiastic about her almost precisely match my own, and more likely to place the responsibility for the way she has been used to date with the uninspired, trench-warfare-plus-nothing McCain campaign. But the fact remains that she has given one fine speech, and two lackluster interviews, and has otherwise dodged the sort of rough-and-tumble venues and conversations that Huckabee welcomed, and which he used to make his candidacy for president seem more plausible than it initially appeared. Palin needs to at least approach the standard Huckabee set; she hasn't yet; and that failure is showing up in her approval ratings. There's still time for her to turn it around, and as you might expect, I'm pulling for her to do it. But at this point, there's an awful lot riding on that one vice-presidential debate.
Palin has said that she didn't hesitate when McCain tapped her as his running mate, because she knew she could be ready. Right, then--show us some ready. I don't entirely blame her and the campaign brain trust for limiting her interaction with the media, which any moron can see are out to find dirt on her in a way that they are not with Obama and Biden. But like it or not, it's 2008, and the ability to work the media without getting worked over is an indispensable political skill, certainly at the level of the vice-presidency.
One of those links above goes to this piece by Noah Millman, in which he says:
Based on her performance on the campaign trail so far, she's a shallow and demagogic politician. And if, on the off chance, that's not who she is, then it's instructive that the McCain campaign seems to be eager to have her play this particular character.
Palin still strikes me as the least demagogic of the four candidates this year, and depending on how we're definining shallowness, I don't think she looks so bad comparatively, either. On the other hand, "not as shallow and demagogic as most of Washington" is not exactly what one would call high praise.
I've been following the reactions to the Sarah Palin candidacy without reading too much into every word and gesture. She's a new figure as a national politician, and while the frenzy to find out about and create a convenient persona for her is tiresome, it was also predictable.
But things got out of hand very quickly. Eric says,
Considering the way the vicious attacks on Sarah Palin generated sympathy for her (with a resultant backlash reflected in earlier polls), I would have thought that her attackers would by now have learned to control themselves, at least for the few weeks that remain in this increasingly ugly campaign.
...
It is amazing that Sarah Palin is continuing to cause so many people on the left to miscalculate on such a grand scale, but for a lot of reasons, she is. The disinvition to an Ahmadinejad protest is proof that she triggers an emotional reaction which her enemies cannot control — even when (as here) she agrees with them! Incredible.
Once again, they really can't help it.
For those of us who are trying to evaluate Palin as seriously as possible as a candidate, this state of affairs is really annoying. She's being (ahem) given the opportunity to demonstrate grace under fire, but it's a general sort of grace in response to general nastiness. I think most people figured she was capable of that already, and those who didn't now have all the reason they need to see her as practically a martyr to lefty outrage. The hysterical detractors are succeeding admirably--if that's the word--at getting the public to associate opposition to Palin with derangement.
Meanwhile, the tough, useful questions that are being asked are being drowned out. Victor Davis Hanson has put the best possible face on what we know about Palin to date:
I am not calling for yokelism, or a proponent of false-populism. Rather, I wish to remind everyone that there are two fonts of wisdom: formal education, and the tragic world of physical challenge and ordeal. Both are necessary to be broadly educated. Familiarity with Proust or Kant is impressive, but not more impressive than the ability to wire your house or unclog the labyrinth of pipes beneath it.
In this regard, I think Palin can speak, and reason, and navigate with bureaucrats and lawyers as well as can Obama; but he surely cannot understand hunters, and mechanics and carpenters like she can. And a Putin or a Chavez or a Wall-Street speculator that runs a leverage brokerage house is more a hunter than a professor or community organizer. Harvard Law School is not as valuable a touchstone to human nature as raising five children in Alaska while going toe-to-toe with pretty tough, hard-nose Alaskan males.
I understand what Hanson's saying here, but I still think it would be nice to see some real scrutiny given to what she's reading (Proust or otherwise) and whom she's relying on to get her up to speed. Palin's alert and inquisitive and has a forceful personality--great. It's reasonable to say that her practical knowledge will give her good perspective. Or to note that her unimpressive college record doesn't stack up too badly against, say, dropping out of Vanderbilt Law School (and, IIRC, basically flunking out of the divinity school). A love of ideas without regard for their consequences is bad; I still don't know whether Palin has the love of ideas with regard for their consequences that's good, and it's getting harder, not easier, to assess that.
