Back Down the Rabbit Hole

I guess I must have repressed my memories of the Republican opposition to the Clinton administration. It required too much suspension of disbelief even for a long-time Coleridge fan. Reminds me of the time I tried to turn my experiences running a legal aid office in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago into a series of short stories. The one that finally ended that career detour was the two kids I interviewed about their juvenile court case, who told me they had run away from home because their parents were practicing black magic.* I realized, as I reviewed my notes, that there was no way I was going to be able to make truth as believable as fiction, and I might as well go back to writing briefs and memoranda.

So here we go again, with the MSM trying to make the opposition loonies as believable as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Remember poor Vince Foster, supposedly murdered by White House operatives because he Knew Too Much? Nobody could ever enunciate just what he knew too much about, but si non é vero, é ben trovato. And the apocryphal Secret Service agent whose job was to recruit lesbian bimbos for Hillary? Lesbian bimbos? Gimme a break. The scandalized reporters who discovered that Hillary, in her brief forays into the investment market, had actually made money? Omigod. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (sorry, I know I’ve used that before, I just can’t find anything more apt.)

Some saner conservatives are pointing out that the loonies are raising some valid points, such as the proper role and size of government, which deserve a serious debate. Some liberals have pointed out that we just had that debate, which, in this great country of ours, is called an election, and our guy won. Some other liberal commentators suspect that the reason the loonies can’t accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency is that he’s Black. Obviously, they have the same trouble I did remembering the Clinton administration, which the loonies also never accepted as legitimate, even though Bill is at least as pale as I am, and Hillary is a good deal more so. They just started with the axiom that the Clintons had somehow snuck in under cover of darkness and then changed the locks on the White House. Color was never an issue. The issue is, and has always been, who qualifies as a Real American. A few Blacks and Hispanics (especially Cubans**) actually do. But anybody who believes the government has a valid role providing help for non-rich Americans really doesn’t qualify.

Remember the New Deal?*** FDR made it happen by making a deal with the Devil, or rather, the Dixiecrats, that would guarantee that none of its benefits would extend to Black people. Social Security and Unemployment Compensation specifically didn’t cover agricultural and domestic workers, who made up the majority of employed African-Americans at the time. Black sharecroppers didn’t count as “farmers” for purposes of the New Deal agricultural programs. Aid to Dependent Families was off limits for Black single mothers, because it was too easy to prove them “morally unfit,” unlike White widows, or to show that, unlike White women, they could never qualify because they always had a way to support their children, namely domestic labor. And so on. Well, what the loonies are looking for this time around is a guarantee that Obama’s health care reform won’t just exclude illegal immigrants from coverage, but will guarantee that they can never, ever, get treatment for any medical problem in any medical facility that receives federal funds, or from any doctor or nurse whose education was paid for with federal grants and loans. Anything less than that will forfeit all support from that side of the aisle.

But everybody in this particular controversy, on all sides, seems to have forgotten that, unlike FDR, Obama doesn’t need the support of the loonies to get his program passed. Yes, it would be nice to end the LaRouchie/teabagger/loony-sponsored sniping and become One Nation. But every time Obama extends a hand across the aisle, somebody cuts off one of his fingers. Now, apparently, he has only one left. Let’s hope it’s the one he needs for the appropriate gesture.

Red Emma

* In fact, what the parents were doing was Santeria, which most people at the time didn’t know about, and which the kids didn’t know about because their parents had always told them “We’re Catholic,” until the kids came home from school early one day and found their parents and some friends in the basement doing stuff Sister had never taught them. The solution, as in most juvenile runaway cases, was to encourage better parent-child communication.

** In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m Cuban, but like many second or third generation Cuban- Americans, I do not consider Castro the AntiChrist.

*** See Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White for the best historical treatment of this era.

Update from Illinois

Here’s an update for those of you who do not enjoy the benefits of living in Illinois.  The last anybody heard (http://wiredsisters.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/2009-update-what-is-it-about-illinois/), our august former governor had just appointed Roland Burris to fill the US Senate seat  vacated by Barack Obama when he was elected president, and everybody was deploring this move.  Well, since then, the governor has been impeached, and replaced by his lieutenant governor, Pat Quinn.  And Burris is being investigated on suspicion of having bought, or tried to buy, the senate seat our former governor is accused of having sold, or tried to sell.  There seems to be universal agreement, both in Washington and in Springfield, that Burris should not have accepted the office when Blagojevich offered it.  People seem to have suffered a wave of even stronger revulsion upon finding out that Burris had actually initiated a communication with the governor or his henchpeople indicating that he was interested in the appointment. So now everybody, in DC and Springfield alike, is saying Burris should step down, the Illinois legislature should change the law to provide for a special election rather than gubernatorial appointment when a senate seat becomes unexpectedly vacant in mid-term, and then we should  have a special election and put somebody else in Obama’s senate seat.

Well, not quite everybody. Not me, for instance.  I just don’t believe this sudden mania for political cleanliness in Springfield.  Its primary sponsor and beneficiary, Mike Madigan, the majority leader in the state senate, is no Mr. Clean himself, though he has so far avoided criminal investigation or charges.  The two other prime movers in this scenario, State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, the head of the Impeachment Committee (who, in the spirit of full disclosure, is the state rep. of the neighborhood in which the Wired family lives, and the recipient of their votes for decades now) and the new governor, Pat Quinn, have long been viewed as squeaky clean reformers of the sort normally derided in Illinois as Goo-goos (short for “good government.”)  Now I’m not quite sure whether their motives can be trusted, or whether they are, as some local commentators have suggested, in Madigan’s pocket.

I have no such reservations about Madigan. I know he is no reformer.  If Illinois law had given him the power to appoint Obama’s successor, I am quite sure that (a) he would do it, rather than change the law to establish a special election, and (b) the person he appointed would be either himself or some other politician friendly to him and with no particular claim to integrity.  I am also quite sure that if Burris does for some reason or other cease to be senator and his successor is the victor in a special election, Madigan will do everything he can to make sure that the people of Illinois elect either himself, his daughter (Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan), or one of his political cronies.  [BTW, I don’t mean to imply that Lisa is less than squeaky clean. So far as I can tell, she is at least as clean as Burris, and apparently doesn’t get along that well with her father.]

I wasn’t all that comfortable with Blagojevich’s impeachment, based on evidence which the public was mostly not allowed to hear, and which obviously didn’t rise to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  But Illinois law doesn’t require proof of a criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt. The law just says impeachment has to be “for cause.”  So far as anyone can tell, that could be mere Rogaine ™ abuse.
What’s happening to Burris is, I think, even worse.  Okay, more full disclosure here—back 20+ years ago, Burris endorsed me when I was running for office. My contact with Burris was kind of at third hand, and I don’t exactly remember all the links in the chain now, but I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew him and said it wouldn’t hurt to approach him, so I did, and he was distant but decent.  Also, many years later, I flunked his niece for plagiarism and she called up her Powerful Uncle to complain and he, I gather, told her to get lost. (What the niece did was copy a Roger Ebert movie review for an assignment.  Just happened that when I graded her paper, I had just a couple of hours earlier read the Ebert review in the paper and had no trouble tracking it down.)

Aside from all that, Burris has had the reputation over the years of being pretty clean and competent as Illinois politicians go.  Even the people who don’t like him admit they can’t prove he paid for the senate seat in even the most metaphorical way, and in fact believe he probably didn’t.  At best, they may be able to prove he wasn’t entirely truthful in his written responses to interrogatories.  Sorry, I do not believe in any obligation to absolute truthfulness–it certainly isn’t part of the Jewish tradition.  And for most people, even pretty honest people, absolute truthfulness is almost impossible unless one becomes totally obnoxious about it. If he lied ( or more likely, just didn’t tell the whole truth) it apparently wasn’t about any smoking gun that would result in anybody being convicted for bribery or corruption.

Most of the people who want Burris gone just object in principle to the governor–this particular governor–having appointed him.  Never mind that Illinois law says that’s how you fill a suddenly vacated senate seat–now all of a sudden they want a special election that was “too expensive” three months ago when we had (or thought we had) more money than we do now.  They think Burris should never have accepted the office, and certainly shouldn’t have intimated to the governor or his pals that he was interested in it–that he just wasn’t being classy enough.

I can sort of, just barely, believe that the Democrats in Washington really do care about the principle of the thing, or at least the appearance of principle.  I can’t believe that either the Springfield Democrats or the Republicans anywhere give a rat’s patootie about principles. They just want a shot at filling the senate seat with their own person, and above all, a chance to throw their weight around in very public ways.  And I for sure don’t believe that Burris’ replacement, however s/he gets into office, will be any cleaner than Burris or Madigan. [I did think the governor missed a chance at a classy and clever gesture by not appointing Barbara Flynn Currie, which would have simultaneously transcended any possibility of scandal AND deprived the impeachment committee of their chair in the middle of their deliberations.]

Then there’s the criminal investigation process, as it affects both Blagojevich and Burris.  Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in charge of it, has generally shown himself to be both competent and non-partisan on political corruption cases. His last big win put the last Illinois governor, Republican George Ryan, behind bars. But unlike a lot of people, I don’t automatically consider prosecutors–even competent and serious prosecutors–to be Good Guys.  I particularly don’t like prosecutors (like Ken Starr, may his name be blotted out) who, instead of starting with a crime and asking, “Who did this, and how can we convict him?”, start with somebody they just “know” is a bad guy, and ask, “I know he’s dirty–what can we convict him of?” I think that’s what Fitzgerald was doing in this case, though I don’t think he used entrapment or outrageous deals with other defendants to accomplish it, unlike a lot of prosecutors.

Admittedly, I started my legal career defending alleged draft dodgers and AWOLs, and I have a very deep-set pro-defendant bias.  My ex-boss at the Federal Defender pointed out, in a training lecture once, that a prosecutor is supposed to feel s/he has “won” if justice is done, regardless of whether that results in a conviction. Unfortunately, I know of very few prosecutors who fit that model (there was one in the Rolando Cruz case, who lost her job for refusing to prosecute him on what she felt was inadequate and concocted evidence. She turned out to be right. So far as I know, she didn’t get her job back when somebody else confessed to the murder in question.) Mostly they figure anybody who attracts the attention of the police has to be guilty of something, and the prosecutor’s job is to define the crime to fit the evidence, if any. I cut my legal teeth believing everybody is innocent of something. I think the Bill of Rights is based on the same presumption.

Last fall, along with all the major federal, state, and local offices, the people of Illinois had a chance to vote in a referendum on holding a constitutional convention to redraft our 30-year-old state constitution. I now suspect that those of us (like me) who voted against a Constitutional Convention in the referendum last fall goofed big time, and that we should probably try to get another vote on it now, to deal with both explicit standards for impeachment and the process of filling a suddenly vacated senate seat. I haven’t yet researched the possibility of a do-over of that vote, but it would sure be a good idea.

Jane Grey

High Noon in DC

The Inauguration was impressive, even on the left-hand half of my computer monitor. High points: the John Williams piece (not quite as good as Copeland on the same theme, but good, and very well-performed. Nice to watch Yitzhak Perlman’s grin.) Lowery’s prayer (basically, Isaiah’s greatest hits. Stealing from the best.) Gene Robinson’s prayer, which I really liked. The crowd, all one million plus of them, not counting the poor guys who had tickets but never made it onto the Mall. The First Kids—the older one with her omnipresent camera (obviously it never occurred to her that now anybody in the world would send her an autographed picture if she asked for it), the younger one with her thumbs-up as First Dad went to do the oath.

Human-but-not-high points: the presidential oath, which the Chief Justice and Obama between them finally got right. The poem (YMMV, obviously.) The address—from Obama we have come to expect real barn-burners, and this was not one of those. It hit all the right notes, as if written to a checklist, which it probably was. Mr. Wired says he should have let his star writers do it, instead of insisting on doing it himself. But apparently the writers did at least have a hand in it. It wasn’t Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, which is probably the best of its kind ever. But it wasn’t bad. Rick Warren’s prayer.

What I liked most of all was something a lot of people probably missed altogether. Last night at one of the broadcasts from the various Balls, Beyoncé, after doing a quite creditable version of “At Last” for the First Couple to dance to, tried to relate her emotions to an interviewer backstage without utterly dissolving into tears, and, in one of her attempts, said, “He makes me want to be smarter.”

HE MAKES ME WANT TO BE SMARTER.

Sidney Harris, the late columnist, once said that, while he had heard lots of people say they would like to be better-looking or richer or in better physical shape or healthier, he had never heard anybody say they would like to be more intelligent. I pointed out in a response which I don’t know that he ever saw, that religious Jews pray for more intelligence every morning. But that was pretty esoteric, compared with Beyoncé saying, on national TV, coast to coast before untold millions of viewers, that Obama, and his inauguration, make her want to be smarter. I am overwhelmed with delight and hope at this. After decades of very smart politicians diligently hiding their IQ under very large bushel baskets rather than intimidate the presumably dumb but sensitive average voter, it is finally okay to be intelligent, and to value intelligence. I have absolutely no idea how smart Beyoncé already is, which tells you something right there. But I wish her well in her pursuit of more smarts, and hope she continues to encourage the rest of us in sharing that pursuit.

Jane Grey

An End to Privatization?

For the past 28 years, Americans on all political sides have considered privatization the best solution to almost every problem.  Government, we keep being told, can’t do anything right.  The past three Republican presidents have, of course, gone out of their way to prove this, in a way they should logically never have been allowed to do.  (“If elected head of this government, which should do as little as possible, I promise I will do as little as possible.”  Gimme a break.)  Government, we are told, should not be allowed to run profit-making enterprises, like Conrail, because then it competes unfairly with private-sector markets. And of course it should not be allowed to operate at a loss, as with Amtrak, because then it is wasting the people’s money. All of its operations are full of waste, fraud, and abuse, except, I suppose, those that manage to exactly break even.

What are the supposed advantages of private-sector over government operations? These days, government often contracts with corporations to handle its dirty work, whether collecting office trash or driving trucks over the IED Highway in Iraq.  Most private corporations these days are not unionized, and are therefore able to pay their rank-and-file workers less in monetary compensation and benefits than government workers (or unionized private-sector workers) get.  In addition, private corporations can and often do save money by playing fast and loose with various governmental regulations in ways the government itself obviously can’t get away with.

But on the other hand, corporations by definition contain one more level of costs than government—stockholder dividends.  And they are subject to the whims of private executive management, including outrageous levels of compensation utterly unrelated to any kind of track record.

The major difference between governmental and corporate operations, however, is rarely even mentioned on either side of the political divide.  The ordinary citizen has no input into the selection of corporate management, except perhaps in one or two corporations in which s/he gets an occasional proxy, courtesy of a 401(k) or an IRA.  We all get to vote for the management of the entire government.  Reasonable people can differ about the ultimate efficacy of those votes, but there can be absolutely no question that the ordinary citizen-voter has a lot more effect on the government than the ordinary citizen-stockholder in one or two corporations has on the private market as a whole.

So let’s use this new beginning to start mentioning the unmentionable. Let’s get the government off the privatizing track, and back into hiring its own—make that our own—workers to do our work at wages and benefits we would consider adequate.  The corporate executives won’t suffer.  They will, as usual, land on their feet.  If being head honcho of a major corporation doesn’t buy you exemption from the struggles of ordinary people, whatever else it does buy you isn’t worth the trouble of going to Board meetings. I don’t want the people’s business done by minimum-wage no-benefit “part-time” workers contracted by overpaid private corporate executives.  Save that for the private sector.

Red Emma

2009 Update–What Is It About Illinois?

Sorry, no catchy titles, no earthshaking ideas.  My computer has finally been rejiggered and is back at work, thanks to the wonders of the barter economy.  Chicago is cold but the skies and streets are clear.

And Illinois is in the middle of yet another political crisis.  Our probably-soon-to-be-ex-governor has appointed Roland Burris to fill Obama’s senatorial seat, and all kinds of people are refusing to accept this decision.  The Illinois Secretary of State doesn’t want to sign the papers he is required to sign, indicating that Burris has been appointed by the governor, even though that signature is an utterly insignificant ministerial act.  The Senate Democrats are promising to refuse to seat Burris, even though the Supreme Court made it absolutely clear several decades back that they have no choice in the matter.  (That was back in the days of Adam  Clayton Powell, whose district kept re-electing him while Congress kept unseating him.)  Okay, I think the appointment was a bad move on the governor’s part, and accepting it was an even worse move on Burris’ part.  What the governor should have done was named Barbara Flynn Currie (who is, incidentally, the Wired Family’s state rep.), a perfectly qualified person who also happens to be the head of the State House committee on impeachment.  Which would have thrown the impeachment process into a cocked hat, while making nobody mad.  But Burris is reasonably honest and competent (and, full disclosure here, once endorsed me when I was running for office in 1984.)  He is perfectly qualified, and nobody has any legal grounds for refusing him the senate seat.  These theatrics are nothing but a waste of time, money, and attention.  Enough already.

Meantime, Bill Richardson has withdrawn his name from consideration for Secretary of Commerce because he’s being investigated back home.  Which I guess is classier than what Burris is doing.

Which brings me back to our original question: what is it about Illinois?  Five governors indicted within my lifetime (one acquitted, one not yet tried, the others jailed for various terms. And that’s not counting two others who left office just ahead of the sheriff and are now posing as Messers. Clean while pronouncing on the current incumbent’s sins.)  The lowest ratio of spending on social needs to per capita income in the country.  School spending only slightly higher per capita than that of Mississippi, and actually lower than Alabama’s.

As the Blog Which Shall Not Be Named points out, we certainly aren’t unique–there’s always Louisiana.

Maybe what we should be asking is: what is it about voters?  A friend of mine was declaiming vigorously the other day about why our governor was allowed to appoint the new senator in the first place, rather than having a special election.  I pointed out that Illinois law, unlike that of some other states, doesn’t provide for that.  I then pointed out that it might not have helped much anyway—who, after all, put the governor in office in the first place?  Us, the voters, that’s who.  Why do we keep electing these guys?

Which brings us back to the electoral process and how voters use it:

We vote for the lesser evil.

Or we vote for the person we know the fewest bad things about.

Or we vote for the person we know anything about.

Or we vote for the person who seems to resemble us in some important way, like race, or gender, or religion, or subcultural preferences.

Or we vote for the person whom we could imagine liking, if we ever met in person.

Or we vote for the person from the party we have always voted for.

In Illinois, we not only elect our governor, senators, representatives, and sheriffs, we also elect about half of our judges.  Our ballots, as a result, are long enough to trip over on the way out of the booth, and most voters know absolutely nothing about more than 75% of the candidates.  As a lawyer, I know something about several of the judicial candidates, having practiced in front of them.  I occasionally have input into the judicial evaluations of the various bar associations, and in general I think the evaluators know what they’re doing.  So, by voting the bar association lists except where my personal experience disagrees with them, I’m doing a much better job than most voters.  Like most lawyers I know, I get asked for information before elections by many of my friends.  Maybe that helps the process too.

But this was not what the Founders had in mind.  It is also not what communitarians and Catholic advocates of “subsidiarity” have in mind.  What they were looking for, I think, was an electoral process that starts among the 500 or so people any individual voter is likely to be personally acquainted with, and works its way up through “captains of tens” and “captains of hundreds” and “captains of thousands” and so on, as originally suggested in the Jewish scriptures.  Not unlike the precinct captain-based organization of the old Chicago Machine or Tammany Hall, when you think about it.  Which was certainly no model of good government.  In fact, corruption, cronyism, and wrongheadedness seem to cluster at the levels of government most beloved of the communitarians and subsidiarists, when you think about it.  This is getting too complex for me, and it’s dinner time.  We welcome suggestions.

CynThesis

Captain Ahab and the Search for the Great Whitewater

The Republican National Committee is apparently prepared to pursue the possibility that the President-Elect, or at least somebody on his staff, at some point indicated a willingness to pay to play with the Illinois governor over filling Obama’s now-vacant Senate seat. The Constitution does not seem to provide for the impeachment of a federal official before he actually takes office, which is probably okay with the RNC, because their real goal is to make it impossible for Obama to govern after taking office, since they have failed to steal the election from him. Never mind that our governor was recorded by the feds calling Obama and his people [bleeps] for offering him “nothing but appreciation” for the Senate seat (“[bleep} them”), a testimonial of innocence that goes far beyond the mere raising of reasonable doubt. Never mind that, if God’s Own Party were serious about keeping the White House clean, they would have seen to it that the issue was raised by some legislator or other, rather than the leadership of the political party as such (which just makes the whole thing look, ummm, partisan.)

Our hope for effective governance after January 20 is twofold: that the people, including Republican and independent voters, will rise up in outrage at any attempt to hamstring government at a time when its operations are so necessary, and that the Supreme Court, having learned its lesson last time around, will decide that any legal questions about the President’s pre-election conduct have to be postponed, and the statute of limitations tolled, until after he leaves office.

Aside from that—am I embarrassed to live in Illinois? Well, not really. This is my third “home state” (I note with approval the fact that, during this last presidential campaign, everybody seemed to accept without boggling the fact that a person can have more than one home state these days), and the other two (Florida and Massachusetts) were no great shakes on political integrity either. (You may wish to google those state names along with the term “political corruption” and see what pops up.) I do however feel sorry for the lawyers who wrote this year’s version of the Chicago Bar Association’s annual Christmas Spirits musical comedy/political satire production, who probably had to stay up all night finding a rhyme for Blagojevich. (One of our office staff went to the show Friday night—I will have to ask her whether they succeeded.)

Red Emma

The Search for the Promised Landslide

We’re hearing a lot these days about Obama’s “landslide victory.” We need to be more cautious in using the term. Yes, in terms of the Electoral College, Obama’s victory really was a landslide—338 votes, versus 127 for McCain. But in terms of the popular vote, it was only slightly better than a squeaker—51% for Obama, versus 47%for McCain.

History provides us with some real popular vote landslides: Theodore Roosevelt’s 56.4% to Alton B. Parker’s 37.6% in 1904; Warren Harding’s 60.3% to James Cox’s 34.1% in 1920 ; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 60.8% to Alf Landon’s 36.5% in 1936; Lyndon Johnson’s 61.1% to Barry Goldwater’s 38.5% in 1964 ; Richard Nixon’s 60.7% to George McGovern’s 37.5% in 1972; and Ronald Reagan’s 58.8% to Walter Mondale’s 40.6% in 1984.

No election since 1984 has been anywhere near that lopsided. Since then, both parties have shaped their campaign strategies by the Electoral College vote, with varying degrees of success, and the popular votes have been really close. This time, the Democrats succeeded big time in getting an Electoral College landslide and a popular vote squeaker. I will be really disappointed in them if they merely rest on this somewhat dubious victory, instead of attacking its premise.

We need to face the fact that we have been, for several decades now, a closely divided nation. Those of us who take our politics seriously may also need to accept the fact that our fondest dream may be the worst nightmare of nearly half of our compatriots. Regardless of the Electoral College numbers, this election was no landslide. Obama’s repeated theme of creating unity had better be more serious than the rhetoric of Nixon’s “bring us together again” in 1972. Our party will rule by a narrow margin, just as the other party has for the last 8 years. Neither can afford to throw its weight around, and, given our current economic and international disarray, our country cannot afford to spend the next four years in internecine bickering.

I would like to see the Democrats do two very important things: not brag about this election as a Dem landslide (which will only falsify the history that matters, exacerbate the GOP’s sense of grievance, and make political coexistence impossible), and advocate a bipartisan campaign to improve our electoral system and get rid of the Electoral College. We can’t afford not to, given the mess we’re all in right now.

Jane Grey

An Open Letter to Sarah Palin

A guest post from Mr. Wired:

We found the vice-presidential debate last week to be interesting and even refreshing.  We liked the respect and liking the candidates exhibited toward each other.  We were impressed by the values of the Abrahamic religions the candidates shared.  The debate left us relieved that, no matter who wins the election, the country will be in good hands.

 

And then we heard Governor Palin’s accusations against Senator Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”  To see someone who so publicly and emphatically espouses biblical values to stamp the Ninth Commandment into the dirt was a serious disappointment.  Governor Palin knows that the relationship between Obama and Professor William Ayres arose from common membership on the board of directors of a community organization.  She knows that Professor Ayres’ SDS days were over long before Obama was out of grade school.  But she nonetheless says “it’s an issue that’s fair to talk about.”  She has moved beyond the bounds of political civility, turning an opponent into an enemy. 

 

In previous elections, candidates left this kind of behavior to their “independent committees.”  For a candidate personally to engage in such personal attacks tells us that the McCain campaign is getting desperate.  Unfortunately, in the process, this behavior can only give that campaign more good reason for that desperation. 

 

 

 

Prior to Changing Events

Heard something this morning on NPR that I really liked—right before a talk show was aired, the announcer warned us, “This show was taped prior to changing events.”  I didn’t actually hear anything on the show that warranted that warning, but then I wasn’t really listening that carefully. I just like the warning that almost all “news” is subject to being pre-empted by even newer news.

 

Anyway, that sort of raises the issue of Palin’s latest attack on Obama as hanging out with “domestic terrorists.”  She was talking about Bill Ayres, with whom Obama served on the board of a public interest organization.  Ayres used to belong to the Weather Underground, back well before Obama was born.  In that capacity, he is believed to have been involved in a bombing of the US Capitol Building, which resulted in damage to some plumbing in a men’s room there. No one was killed or injured.  Currently, Ayres is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

 

This is neo-McCarthyism, although Palin undoubtedly wouldn’t recognize the word, the concept, or its eponym.  Guilt by the most remote and long-past association.  The fact that Palin’s husband was once a member of, and Palin herself once spoke before, an organization supporting the secession of Alaska from the United States, apparently doesn’t rate the same level of attention. (Umm, isn’t secession treason?) 

 

Lots of currently respectable people have disreputable pasts.  Most of the leaders of the post-colonial states of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East had previously done time in British jails, under “terrorism” charges.  Many of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have done time for similar reasons. 

 

Many of the most successful Oscar-winning film writers and directors were members of, or closely associated with, the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the purge of communists from the movie industry.  Did Palin ever see the movie “Spartacus”?  It’s from a book written by a communist, and a screenplay by one of the Hollywood Ten.  Does that make her an associate of reds?  Did Palin ever watch the tv horror series “Svengoolie”?  The first Svengoolie was Jerry G. Bishop, whose mother was a communist.  I know—I’ve met her.  Did Palin ever see “The Maltese Falcon”?  It’s from a book written by Dashiell Hammet, who did time for refusing to testify before a red-baiting congressional committee.  You get the picture (so to speak.)

 

In previous elections, candidates left such sleaze-peddling tactics to their “independent committees.”  It’s a bad sign, or at any rate a sign of McCain’s increasing desperation, that this year, one of the candidates is doing it hands-on.  One can only hope that we are not in for a decade of making “the children of the 60s” and their younger associates sit in the stocks repenting for some of the best things they have ever thought, said, and done.

 

Red Emma

The Politics of Mistaken Identity

 

Sarah Palin has us all thinking about identity politics these days.  My godson has Down Syndrome, and his mother, my dearest friend, says people keep saying things to her like “of course you’re going to vote for McCain, since Sarah Palin has a child with Down Syndrome.”  She finds this terrifically offensive, and has no intention whatever of voting for McCain.  She says, not only does she not share an identity with Palin by virtue of having a child with Down Syndrome, but her child does not share an identity with Palin’s child by virtue of having Down Syndrome. 

 

And an increasing number of women are saying that their gender does not make them any more likely to vote for McCain now than they would have before he picked Palin for a running mate.  Would African-Americans have voted for Condi Rice if she were running?  Would Hispanics have voted for Alberto Gonzales?  One suspects not.

 

I think identity politics works only for people with very uncomplicated identities.  For that reason, I’m surprised that it has caught on as well as it has in the US, and I suspect it may not last much longer here.  The identities of most Americans are anything but uncomplicated. 

 

Sample case—me:  my biological ancestry is Sefardic Jewish, highland Scot/US redneck, with dashes of Dutch and Italian.  My cultural ancestry is British, Hispanic, and New England.  I am Jewish by religion, but my parents were Catholic, several of my uncles and cousins were/are Christian Scientist, one of my other cousins is Buddhist, and my brother characterizes himself as a Reform Druid.  By education and occupation, I am an overeducated professional; by income I am working-class.  My personal life is a model of traditional family values, except that I spent my late college and early grad school years as a hippie of sorts, and I now hang out with a congregation most of whose members are gay and lesbian.  Politically, I consider myself a radical, but since most of the people who ask me these days don’t remember the word, I call myself a liberal. I can still remember when liberal was a synonym for wishy-washy. For many years, I was part of a Jewish collective that spent a great deal of time discussing the relationship between their Jewishness and their leftist/feminist politics.  I have inclinations toward communitarianism and socialism, but also toward anarchism and libertarianism.   If I were to try to practice identity politics, i.e., to find a candidate enough like me that that would be sufficient reason to vote for her (obviously it would have to be a her), the search would exhaust all of my political energy, and I would probably never get around to voting at all.

 

This situation raises a serious philosophical problem: What is it we want our elected representatives to represent? Are we, increasingly, accepting the proposition that African-American voters can be represented only by African-American representatives, and Hispanics by Hispanics?  If so, does it follow that Italian-Americans can be represented only by Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans by Polish-Americans, and so on?  And does that in turn mean that ethnicity is the most important characteristic of the voter or candidate?  Or should Episcopalians vote only for Episcopalians, football fans for fellow fans, and free-lance writers only for their own kind?  Where do we draw the line? Is it a line that should properly be drawn at all?

 

This is a triple issue: First, do we believe that a citizen can be effectively represented only by a representative who shares with the citizen some important defining characteristic? Second, if so, must that defining characteristic be ethnicity? And third, whatever that defining characteristic may be, what does it do to our current system of  legally defining a constituency by geographical residency for purposes of political representation?

           

There was a time when representative government meant electing someone whose integrity and judgment you trusted, and then leaving him alone to be guided by that judgment and restrained by that integrity.  This was pretty much what the Framers of the constitution had in mind (except for the more cynical Madison.) When American politicians turned out to be as human as anybody else, that model fell out of fashion.

 

For a while afterward, the elected representative’s job was defined as representing the obvious interests and expressed desires of his constituency (or at least its most vocal components.)  This might be done through the mechanism of the political party, which was expected to take a particular set of ideological positions. The voter voted for the candidate of the party that most nearly represented his positions.  It didn’t matter who the representative was or what he personally believed. His job was to do what his constituency wanted. If he failed to do it, he was unlikely to be re-elected.

 

Now, apparently, we are not willing to trust our elected officials even to that limited extent.  I can trust my representative to represent his own interests. That’s human nature, after all.  So I had better make sure his interests are the same as mine (a  thoroughly Madisonian position.)  Which means he has to be like me in some way that shapes his interests, as it shapes mine.

 

The persisting realities of racial segregation do make a powerful argument that race has a stronger effect on a person’s interest than many other components of personal identity. Conveniently, that same racial segregation results in geographical agglomerations of African-American voters easily large enough to constitute legislative districts. Does this mean the geographic district is still a reliable way to organize political representation? Is where I live a reliable index to my most important interests and concerns?

 

On the micro-district level–for instance, wards and precincts–it appears to be all too reliable. Our metropolitan areas are segregated not only by race but even more rigidly by income (this is assured by the real estate market and zoning codes) and by age and family status (assured by the kind of housing available, as well as its price.) Singles congregate in certain urban neighborhoods and suburban complexes, young married couples with children in the less pricey suburbs and outer city neighborhoods, senior citizens in their public and private housing developments, and so on. Geography is a remarkably useful tool for organizing political representation on this level.

 

The problems arise in macro-districting, and still more in at-large, statewide, or nationwide elections, in which the electorate, of necessity, consists of a widely diverse assortment of micro-districts.  Who, if anyone, does a senator represent? The interest of the nation as a whole, as seen by the senator (and, perhaps, by her party?) That was pretty much what the Founders had in mind.  The predominant economic interest of her state (tobacco, or coal, or tourism, or whatever?) Historically, most senators try to represent both. A senator, who, on top of these delicately balanced considerations, is a member of some group which is sparsely represented in the upper reaches of government–women, gays, people of color, Vietnam veterans, people with disabilities, or whatever–is also likely to become the de facto representative of that group, even if most of its members live in various other states and are in no position to vote for her or him.

 

And finally, what kind of representation can legitimately be demanded by a white voter who happens to reside in a mostly African-American district with an African-American representative (or vice versa)?  Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once suggested a system in which, instead of election by geographical district, representatives were chosen by petition.  If a person could collect enough signatures from whatever constituency s/he chose to appeal to, s/he could represent them.  So there could be no sore losers, since every citizen could choose whose petition to sign, and every representative by definition represented only his/her supporters.  This still doesn’t solve the problem of citizens with such complex and idiosyncratic identities that there aren’t enough of them to elect anybody, but it’s a start, and a whole lot better than what we have now.

 

CynThesis