Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

YEAR IN REVIEW, 2006

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As has become tradition here, I’m linking below to one post from each month of 2006. And by unpopular request, I’ve also picked a post from each month of 2003 that posting took place. And by nobody’s request at all, I’m pasting the ’04 and ’05 picks in the middle too.

Zach, Ana, Dad, et al: Thanks for reading.

January 2003: The Right to Run
June 2003: Agape
July 2003: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
August 2003: Auth-orial Intent
September 2003: American Labor Goes to Yale
October 2003: No Guardrails?
November 2003: Jews for Justice
December 2003: Leering at the Left

January 2004: Dean, Clinton, and Healthcare
February 2004: Nader and the Democrats
March 2004: Barack Obama and the Future of Environmentalism
April 2004: The March for Women’s Lives
May 2004: Where’s John Kerry When You Need Him?
June 2004: Disenfranchised Voters
July 2004: The NLRB Turns on Graduate Students
August 2004: Anarchists in the Times
September 2004: The First Debate
October 2004: What’s the Word?
November 2004:An Election We Should Have Won
December 2004: The Speech We Deserve From the Democrats

January 2005: Run Russ Run
February 2005: Why We Sat In
March 2005: Taking Blacks for Granted
April 2005: Neo-Confederate Nostalgia
May 2005: The Change to Win Agenda
June 2005: Defending Durbin
July 2005: The Lochner Litmus Test
August 2005: Populism is Not Prejudice
September 2005:Career Path to Motherhood?
October 2005: Rosa Parks, Misremembered
November 2005: Good Labor News
December 2005: Democracy in Latin America

January 2006: Abramoff Pleads Guilty
February 2006: Not a Good Week For Justice
March 2006: Brokeback Backlash
April 2006: Living on the Wedge
May 2006: Deep Freeze
June 2006: Anybody Can Serve
July 2006: Bill Frist: Nader-Lite?
August 2006: Fair Point
September 2006: More Than One Way (As Bill Frist Would Say) To Skin a Cat
October 2006: Sam Brownback, Call Your Publicist
November 2006: Family Matters
December 2006: Stop Stepping On My Breakthrough

Happy New Year.

GERALD FORD: OUT OF THIS WORLD

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From the New Haven Register’s account of locals’ memories of Gerald Ford:

Judy Nicolari of Ansonia met Ford when he was vice president in the mid-’70s at a fund-raiser for Republican Ronald Sarasin, who was running for Congress. “We talked about our astrological signs, about horoscopes,” Nicolari said. “He was very down to earth.”

No pun intended, I’m sure.

WWGD?

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One of the Times’ blogs highlights this post from a member of the FireDogLake crew on the posthumous revelation that Ford had his doubts about the Bush Iraq strategy:

But when a reporter is in possession of information that is vital to the country, that might change whether we go to war or whom we elect for president, and the only reason for withholding the information is to protect the person interviewed from embarrassing his own party — well, there must be some other principle that applies, don’tcha think?

This argument is less than persuasive for a couple reasons. First, barring time travel, nothing said in July 2004 could have stopped Bush from invading Iraq in March 2003. Unless Scarecrow is predicting a future War in Iraq fought for lack of candor from Gerald Ford about this one. Or expecting Gerald Ford’s criticism of the War in Iraq to keep us out of a war with Iran.

Which brings us to the second problem with this argument: Gerald Ford doesn’t sway swing voters. If the man had endorsed John Kerry, that would’ve been big news. Expressing doubts about the Bush plan for Iraq is just what every respectable conservative neither working for George Bush nor running to succeed him nor named Rush Limbaugh was doing two years ago. That includes Paul Bremer.

Henry Kissinger, who many more folks credit or blame with the foreign policy of the 1960s than Gerald Ford, expressed concerns at least as strong about the Iraq invasion, and he did it before the invasion happened. And yet it happened anyway.

Of course the expectation that ex-Presidents should be elder statesmen in a way that doesn’t include weighing in on the performance of current Presidents is silly. And swallowing criticism of your party’s nominee in the months before the election is less than courageous (here’s looking at you, Christie Todd Whitman). And no story you broke four decades ago is an excuse to cozy up to the President for as long as he remains popular. But did George Bush ride to reelection on the imagined confidence of Gerald Ford? Not so much.

"ANATHEMA TO FREE-MARKET SUPPORTERS"? I’M QUAKING IN MY BOOTS

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From Jon Chait’s rebuttal of the aforementioned indecent proposal:

If I understand Lindsey, he is proposing the following bargain: Libertarians will give up their politically hopeless goal of eliminating two wildly popular social programs that represent the core of liberalism’s domestic achievements. Liberals, in turn, will agree to simply eviscerate these programs, leaving perhaps some rump version targeted at the poorest of the poor. To be fair, Lindsey offers these ideas only as the basis for negotiation, but the prospects of bridging this gulf seem less than promising.

It’s worth noting that even the libertarians at the Cato Institute, in a study Lindsey touts and Chait pokes some holes in, could only come up with 13% of the population to label libertarian. And half of them are already voting for Democrats, despite the “anti-nafta, Wal-Mart-bashing economic populism” that Lindsey warns will be the party’s undoing. You wouldn’t know it from visiting most elite universities, but libertarianism is not a big hit. That’s why Bill Kristol urged congressional Republicans not to go wobbly against the Clinton healthcare plan: Not because an expansion (insufficient and needlessly complex though it was) of the government’s role in the healthcare system was contrary to the will of voters, but because if it passed it would cement the popularity of the party that passed it.

STOP STEPPING ON MY BREAKTHROUGH

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Doing his best to sweet-talk electorally-ascendent liberals into hitching their wagon to the libertarian rickshaw, Brink Lindsey offers a list of shared victories in which liberals and libertarians can revel together:

an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era–the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration–were championed by the political left.

If these are victories for libertarians, then this is a better argument for why libertarians should support liberals and leftists – the people who actually won each of these victories – than for why the left should turn libertarian. But it’s worth asking whether these markers of social progress even qualify as “libertarian breakthroughs” or “libertarian ends.”

The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by the elimination of the poll tax, a nasty law which restricts access to a government function to those able to pay for it and rewards those with more money to spend on their politics with more voice in them. What about undoing those laws qualifies as libertarian? The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by anti-discrimination laws that empower government to use regulation to limit the freedom of employers to employ a workforce that looks like themselves. Inflicting government intervention on market transactions is not exactly the libertarian m.o. Neither is government-mandated busing to integrate a public school system that if libertarians had their way wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Many libertarians no doubt break with Barry Goldwater and support the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But their support for good progressive law doesn’t demonstrate a fundamental affinity between liberalism and libertarianism. It simply demonstrates that even its devotees sometimes reject the maxim that “the government is best which governs least” when faced with the liberty-denying consequences of the “free market” whose “relentless dynamism” Lindsey urges liberals to recognize.

Libertarians may support freedom of the press from censorship, but they’re more likely to fret over how to sell off our publically-owned airwaves than how to ensure airtime for grassroots candidates. They may support a woman’s right to choose, but I wouldn’t count on their assistance in ensuring that women have the economic means to choose abortion or childbirth, or the educational resources to make informed choices. They may support the rights of the accused to a trial, but they’re not the first to line up to be taxed to pay for decent lawyers to represent them (then there are the ones who would like to replace the criminal justice system with a system of private torts). They may support allowing more immigrants into this country, but if you expect them to face down employers who exploit the fear of deportation to suppress the right to organize, you’ve got another think coming.

And though the Cato Institute won’t be joining Rick Santorum’s crusade against no-fault divorce any time soon, there’s no need for an earnest Ayn Rand devotee to support a right to divorce at all. After all, isn’t marriage a binding contract that the parties should know better than to get into lightly? Aside from the reality that it presides over marriage in the first place, why should government have any more right to stop consenting adults from entering contracts for lifelong marriage than it does to bar contracts for human organ sales or pennies-an-hour employment?

BAYH BAILS

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So Evan Bayh has decided he’s “just not the right David” to take on the supposed Goliaths in the race for the Presidency. Apparently, membership in 160 facebook groups just isn’t enough to build the networks of support to win a presidential campaign. Either that, or Bayh got out of the running for fear his campaign would face a steady drumbeat of questions about his facebook membership in both the “Moderate Democrats Caucus” and the “Liberal News” group, or about his supposed simultaneous membership in the College Democrats of Arkansas, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Montana, North Carolina, South Caraolina, Massachusetts, Oregon State, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Ohio, Minnesota, Hamilton County Indiana, New York, Oregon, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana U, Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, Vermont, California, Tennessee, and “Worchester and Central Massachusetts” (where he’s 25% of the membership). Or maybe it was his claimed affiliation with the Party’s Hispanic Caucus, Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, “Young Democrats” chapters across the country, and the North Carolina Association of Teen Democrats that was destined to raise eyebrows under the microscope of a Presidential campaign. Thus the race loses the only candidate who could say he was opposed to the Facebook News Feed from the beginning.

And, on a more serious note, we see another nail in the coffin of the scenario where the primary is dominated by Clinton and someone running well to her right (sorry, Joe Biden).

GOTCHA GOTTA GO? NO.

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Apparently, Sam Waterston has ended his much-lamented silence in American political discourse and spoken out to urge his adoring fans to heed the call of the “American idealists” at Unity08. They’re the folks who believe that all the scourges of modern American politics – special interest-driven corruption, nasty gotcha politics, the belief that women’s rights is a crucial issue – could be beaten back if only there was a presidential ticket composed not of Democrats or Republicans but of one of each, and chosen not by people who turn out in primaries but by people who turn out in primaries held over the internet by “American idealists.”

For those stubborn folks for whom Sam Waterson having “looked at it closely”, isn’t sufficient evidence that Unity08 “could save this country we love,” some obvious questions present themselves. Well, a lot of obvious questions.

Here’s one: Would a decline in gotcha politics really go hand in hand with a decline in corruption?

The conflation of the two is commonplace in media narratives grasping for any explanation of voter disgust with Congress that doesn’t involve the kinds of laws the Congress is passing or isn’t. But I think the irony here is that one of few functional bulwarks against rampant corruption in Washington is gotcha politics.

If our elected officials were circumspect about not disparaging the character of their counterparts on the other side of the aisle, would the likes of Conrad Burns and Bob Ney have gone down to defeat? Would incoming legislators, new and old, have as much reason to fear following in their footsteps? Quotes from CREW’s Melanie Sloan in and of themselves are simply not enough to grab media and voter attention, let alone overcome all the advantages of incumbency. What helps the charges stick? Relentless criticism from the folks with a chance, at least sometimes, of getting heard: your challenger, and your fellow elected officials. If you don’t have to fear getting gotcha-ed, there’s more cause to do gotcha-worthy things.

Now of course it would be nice to truly venal behavior by elected officials got called out on both sides of the aisle. It’s simply not credible to claim, as the Unity08 folks and much of the media do, that both parties have the same track record on this. Compare the treatment of Bill Jefferson (D-LA) and Tom DeLay (R-TX) by their party leaders. One lost his committee chairmanship. The other was positioned for a good stretch to remain Majority Leader. Unfortunately, opinion leaders who can count more adherents than Sam Waterston delight in the myth that the two parties are bearers of equal and opposite corruption, and that that corruption – the reward of money with power and of power with money – has no relationship to ideology.

That said, when elected officials do speak in one voice across party lines, it’s as often to unite across party lines in defense of questionable congressional practices as in condemnation of them. Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Hastert stood together in a show of bipartisanship to condemn the FBI search of Jefferson’s office. Senators and congressmen of both parties stand together to raise their salaries swiftly and quietly. They stand firm in bipartisan defense of gerrymandering congressional districts. That’s because no matter how otherwise representative your member of congress is of you, she will always be fundamentally unrepresentative in that she is herself a member of congress. Dave Barry once said the best way to get great Nielson ratings would be to make a sitcom about a Nielson family. Similarly, if you’re looking to find policies that members of Congress acorss the political spectrum will support, the right place to start is with policies that make it easier, more enjoyable, and more permanent to be a member of Congress. If you want to see those policies stop, bemoaning gotcha politics is not the place to start.

DUMP DENNIS

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In the wake of Dennis Prager’s furious condemnation of Congressman-Elect Keith Ellison’s plan to be sworn in on his own holy text – a story Prager described this week as more important to the future of this nation than what we do next in Iraq – the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for his removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. As M.J. Rosenberg notes, President Bush appointed Prager three months ago to the Council, which oversees the Holocaust Museum.

That appointment demonstrates that George W. Bush has not fully learned the lessons of the Holocaust.

That language bristles no doubt, because there’s an unfortunate tendency to see big, dramatic historical events on whose moral character there’s a broad consensus – the Civil Rights Movement, the Abolition movement, the Holocaust – as somehow beyond the bounds of politics. But these are all political events. They are seismic moments not because they transcend politics but because they both expose and transform fundamental conflicts between different social visions held by different people and advanced through the exercise of power.

The Holocaust was a genocidal murderous enactment of an ideology of racial, religious, and sexual hierarchy and bigotry. It was an act of murder writ large in the name of Aryan heterosexual non-disabled Protestants being more human, having more worth, and possessing more rights than others. There are still those in this country who hold some or all those prejudices. There are some who will say so openly.

History does not interpret itself. But it demands meaning-making by responsible citizens.
That is not and never has been a process divorced without influence from or impact on our politics.

The Holocaust Museum’s “primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.”

No one espousing the view that the “acceptance” of Judaism “as equal” to other religions “signifies the decline of Western civilization” would have a shot at a spot overseeing the Holocaust Museum. But someone who believes such about homosexuals was appointed to the Board three months ago by the President. That’s because the full humanity of Jews is considered a settled question in mainstream American political discourse, and therefore inappropriate to “politicize,” while the full humanity of gays is up for debate, and therefore it’s inappropriate to judge those bravely taking the “politically incorrect” stance.

THE ART OF COMPROMISE

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As a devoted Hotline TV junkie (seriously, I can’t get by without my daily fix), it’s “more in sadness than in anger” that I relate a truly weird line from guest host Josh Kraushaar, discussing Rush Holt in Friday’s episode on the Intelligence Chair race:

He’s sort of someone who kind of works with the progressive members of the Democratic caucus, but he also doesn’t have any ethical issues to deal with, so he would be an interesting compromise choice.

A compromise between the people who want a conservative candidate and the people who want a corrupt one?

FAMILY MATTERS

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This article, one of the last by the recently-deceased Ellen Willis, is one of the more articulate, accurate, and biting critiques I’ve come across of Thomas Frank and What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a book many pundits make reference to and few do justice.

Willis takes on what I think is the most glaring weakness of Frank’s latest book, one which goes totally unaddressed in the full-length reviews and tangential digs bashing him for his supposed elitism: Frank argues that Republicans elected on the basis of their social conservatism don’t actually deliver socially conservative policy. As we say in Yiddish, “Halvai” – if only. As Willis notes, conservatives have successfully used the powers of their offices all too successfully to reshape the country’s “social policy” more faithful to their dogma – including making it prohibitively difficult for women in large swathes of the country to exercise freedom of choice. Frank is of course right to recognize the Federal Marriage Act as a stunt and a sop, but the unfortunate truth is that many of the right’s sops to social conservative activists pack a real punch in diminishing the freedom of the rest of us to access contraception, access knowledge, and access partnership rights.

Rejecting Frank’s insistence that the social conservative legislative agenda is a chimera doesn’t much damage the rest of his argument though. Frank is right to argue that conservatives build a base for right-wing policy based on classed appeals to stick it to elites by fighting social liberalsim, and that that base make possible policies that make elites that much more decadent. And he’s right that a progressive politics that speaks to class and is willling to condemn George Bush’s congratulating a woman working three jobs as a mark of elitism would do something to sap the power that right-wing aesthetic class warfare has in the absence of the materialist class warfare Lee Attwater rightly rued could bring the left back into electoral power.

Willis is right to suggest that that won’t be enough, and that progressives need to speak with strength and candor in the culture war rather than simply feinting or punting (and she speaks perceptively to the way we project our owjn ambivalences onto the electorate, which then reflects them). But she’s wrong to lump Frank in with Michaels (say, Lind and Tomasky) who are set on shutting feminists up.

And of all the charges to level at Thomas Frank, excessive loyalty to the Democratic Party is one of the more inane ones Willis could have chosen. That said, it’s a compelling read.

Zichronah livrachah.

WASHINGTON ORIGINAL?

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This article strikes me as a good example of why Washington reporters get a bad rap. The big story, apparently, is that Marshall Wittman has worked for a lot of different Washington power brokers who don’t get along with each other or often agree (although Caesar and Linda Chavez are somewhat farther off from each other than Ralph and Bruce Reed). Leibovich isn’t writing a story about the course of Wittman’s evolving political ideology – instead, we learn that Wittman likes interesting people and snappy quotes. He’s into McCain! He’s into Lieberman! (Not that getting from one’s talking points to the other’s is a colossal leap) Makes it easy to forget that people’s lives are actually affected by politics.

A TASTE OF (GENDERED) TROPES TO COME

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Two choice insights from a minute of talk radio on the Harman v. Hastings face-off for Intelligence Chair:

“Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman are in a cat fight.”

“Nancy Pelosi is like Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde – she just has a thing for gangsters.”

Just remember kids: W Stands for Women.