Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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The Yale Corporation met this weekend and agreed, in response to a sustained mobilization by community members, and a broad coalition of students, to extend its Homebuyer Program to all of Fair Haven, prompting an official announcement yesterday of the policy shift VP Bruce Alexander promised last month. This is a real victory for light and truth at Yale.

The Corporation also appointed its Senior Fellow, John Pepper of Proctor and Gamble, to replace the Vice President for Finance and Administration seat Bob Culver left over the summer. Let’s hope he makes a better effort to respond constructively to the demands of working people than his predecessor. Replacing Culver as Senior Fellow will be long-time GWB friend Roland Betts.

Meanwhile, tonight at 6:30 PM members of Local 34 and GESO will march out of their membership meetings and converge on Cross Campus for a powerful Human Rights Day action demanding change in the University’s policy towards its female workers. Be there. Barbara Ehrenreich will be.

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This NY Times piece – “Mr. Inside Embraces Mr. Outside, and What a Surprise” is one of many analyses that will no doubt proliferate over the next few days trying to explain Gore’s endorsement.

I think Purdum is on the right track in noting Gore’s drastic shift to the left since the 2000 election, as well as his series of strident condemnations of Bush policy over the past months. These have been, by turns, gratifying and maddening, I think it’s safe to say, to those of us who were exasperated with Gore for leaving so little ideological distinction between himself and Bush during the actual campaign. Gore’s piece in the Times after the Enron scandal tying corporate malfeseance to Bush’s corporate politics made the right case – but it’s a case that, contrary to what that piece also said – Gore never made on the campaign trail. Those conservatives who think (occasionally rightly) that they can convince American voters that the main fault line in their politics is between civil and uncivil politicians have tried to use Gore’s move to the left as evidence that he’s bitter and angry at his personal loss. I think it’s much more that Gore, like Clinton and other New Democrats, recognize the appeal of Old Democrat values and so fall back on them once out of office both to bring nobility to their legacy and to convince themselves that they at least lost because they stood for something and not because they didn’t. Dean’s aggressive condemnations of the failings of this administration fit the message that Gore has claimed for himself since 2000. So it’s shouldn’t be surprising to see him endorsing someone who’s ready to carry that message forward – and to see him endorsing the candidate who’s running the kind of campaign now that many wanted him to run four years ago.

What Purdum’s analysis for the Times fails to mention, however, is what may really be the most compelling reason for Gore to endorse Dean now: he’s winning. Gore, in the same way as, say SEIU, gains power from picking late enough to choose the one who’ll win and early enough to be as formative in that victory as possible. Gore specifically, however, has the chance by endorsing Dean to merge their narratives – one populist fighter has the election narrowly stolen but four years later another arises to take it back – and drown out the alternative – the New Democrat establishment fouls up an election and it’s left to a populist outsider to ride in four years later to fix it.

Purdum asks whether this will hurt Gore’s credibility, and I think the answer is no more than Gore’s already hurt his credibility by governing and campaigning from the center and then moving to the left since. More importantly, he asks whether this will hurt Dean’s candidacy, and I don’t think it will measurably. Dean has successfully enough framed himself as an outside-the-beltway candidate, and campaigned that way long enough, that I think this will come off more as the beltway coming around to the Governor of Vermont than the other way around. More fundamentally, I think candidates can be effectively criticized, in extreme cases, for not repudiating deeply objectionable folks who endorse them, but that otherwise criticizing them for who endorses them is difficult to pull off. I think that Al Gore’s endorsement will give Dean’s critics on the left about as much ammunition as Jesse Jackson Jr.’s, Ted Rall’s, Molly Ivins’, William Greider’s, et al gave his critics on the right: not a whole lot, in the long term. Speaking as one of those critics on the left, that Dean got Gore’s endorsement says to me just that he’s an effective organizer. Gore endorsing Dean may give some added momentum and visibility to Sharpton and Kucinich’s campaigns, which could only be good for the Democratic party, but I don’t see any of the other candidates positioned at this point to use it to frame themselves as the independent choice.

What this endorsement does, as I see it, is move a slew of voters to consider Dean – or to consider him seriously – who hadn’t before, and deflate much of the criticism from DLCers and others of Dean as unelectable or out of the mainstream. Much as Jackson’s hashkachah (certification, roughly translated) marks Dean kosher for some to his left, Gore’s will mark him kosher for some to his right. And it may mean that the Democratic establishment is learning not only the lesson of 2002 – what happens when you offer no viable alternative – but also the lesson of 1972 – what happens when the party leadership abandons the party’s candidate.

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Turns out the commitment to democracy and self-determination we’ve been hearing so much about from the Bush Administration doesn’t apply to Taiwan:

…administration officials said there was no change in the fundamental one-China policy that now reaches back three decades. It repeated that China must not “coerce” Taiwan, that any reunification between the two must be peaceful, and that Taiwan must not provoke a crisis.

And what kind of “provocation” are we talking about?

James Moriarty, who runs Asian affairs for the national security council, secretly traveled to Taiwan last week to underscore American opposition to the referendum that Taiwan’s president has proposed. The referendum would amount to a condemnation of China’s missile buildup along its eastern coast, aimed at Taiwan.

So who’s provoking whom?

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Joe Conason argues that the campaign to put Reagan on the dime will force a national discussion of Reagan’s record of the type Republicans have previously labelled inappropriate due to his ailing health – and that his record on terrorism may prove particularly embarrassing. Nancy Reagan, meanwhile, has come out against the project, and says her husband would be as well.

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Another perspective on Yale, class, and the Presidency:

David Wyles, a college roommate, says he and Mr. Lieberman came to Yale from comparable class backgrounds. But Mr. Wyles, a scholarship student, took campus jobs. “Busing dishes for these rich preppies and having them treat me like a servant,” Mr. Wyles says, he became a radical. Mr. Lieberman took another route.

“He saw going into politics as a viable alternative,” Mr. Wyles said. “You know what? It’s not in his nature to be a radical. He’s a balanced person. He listens to people. He rarely goes too far in the pendulum because he’s always thinking about what other people think. Not that he doesn’t have his own moral compass. But he reaches out to other people.

“I think he has a definite sympathy for the underclass, for immigrants, for blacks, for Latinos. But it’s not like he doesn’t relate to insurance executives either. That’s part of buying into the American dream: `We can all become middle class.’ Of course, it’s not true, but he believes it.”

If only David Wyles were the Senator from Connecticut…

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The Yale Daily News magazine tries to put the struggle for a just partnership between Yale and New Haven in a historical perspective:

New Haven, William Pardee explained, was facing the challenges of the “modern city.” Its streets were dirty. As a growing city in a changing economy, it needed new transportation systems, new developments, new ways of growing without becoming dirty or overcrowded.

The city was facing challenges, Pardee told the Economic Club of New Haven on Nov. 9, 1911, and Yale was uniquely positioned to help the Elm City face those difficulties. But, Pardee said, while New Haven had been a “mother” to Yale, nurturing its development since its birth two centuries ago, the University had done little in return to contribute to the community’s health and welfare.

“Sometimes it seems that children grow so great they outgrow their love for their mother and look to the praises and honors of the outer world,” said Pardee, a municipal reformer. “And, sometimes, I think the underlying sentiment of old mother New Haven is that Yale has forgotten home.”

In response, the University — led by its secretary, Anson Phelps Stokes 1896 — released a pamphlet emphasizing Yale’s economic contributions to New Haven…

Of course, it goes back long before that…

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Today marks the debut of the New York Times’ Public Editor. This is a concept with which I think few “small d” democrats could take issue, and I’m curious to see how his eighteen-month term plays out. I think it’s fair, however, to express concern, given the Times’ and the rest of the media establishment’s tendency to lend much more credence to the Times’ critics on the right than to its critics on the left, with whether Okrent’s aspirations

to represent you effectively when you have a complaint about The Times’s integrity

will cover the full spectrum of the Times’ readership. Okrent’s suggestion that the media risks

…the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise…

in journalism – that the media is too muckracking – suggests that the bias of a corporate media establishment too often in bed with a corporate political establishment isn’t the top one on his list.