Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

RUSS WON’T RUN

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Not a shocker, given that the past year and a half has seen the rise of John Edwards as Un-Hillary lightning rod and intensifying inklings of a run by Barack Obama, who like Feingold vocally opposed the war – and worst of all for Feingold’s chances, his second divorce and lack of a third marriage by the midterms (despite the efforts of the erstwhile Committee to Find Russ Feingold a Date).

That said, Feingold’s popularity in the country’s most representative state, which drew him votes from a quarter of Bush voters two years ago and has stayed strong as he talked about running for president and came out for phased withdrawl from Iraq, equal marriage rights, and censuring Bush, should be a lesson for the field of Democratic presidential contenders, and for the primary voters who’ll choose among them. You remember them: the ones who cleverly voted for John Kerry because he was the most electable.

SENSE AND SENSITIVITY

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Keith argues that my article is “lacking in coherence” on two grounds: that I should not expect papers to print a word George Allen has not himself admitted to using, and that the choice not to print the word evidences a keen awareness of race and racism that we should approve of.

On Keith’s first point, I’m not sure why he thinks the certainty of the allegations should determine the specificity with which they’re related. Should the acts of admitted murderers, for example, be reported with more gruesome detail than those of alleged murderers? If the allegations weren’t newsworthy, they shouldn’t have been in the news at all. I’d say they were, since they came from a range of sources with personal interaction with Allen. I doubt they would have sparked the same interest or had the same staying power with reporters or with voters had they not fit into what was perceived as a pattern of troubling behavior on race. If one accepts that the story is newsworthy, the story is worth telling in full. My point was that leaving the speech act itself to be extrapolated by the reader lessens the impact of that news. I don’t think that’s a courtesy George Allen should expect or deserves. And I don’t think the willingness of friends of his to say he never said it, or of certain blacks to endorse Allen anyway, is particularly reassuring. Of course I was glad that papers printed the word “macaca,” which they must have done in part because the story would be difficult to tell with allusions, and relatedly, because the word doesn’t strike the same chords and isn’t on the same list of “epithets” that too many reporters place “nigger” and “shit” together on. My comparison between the reporting on those two words wasn’t about the proof of politicians saying them – it was about the use of allusion as if with the former, as with the latter, the problem was the coarseness of the language and not the outrageousness of the sentiment.

On Keith’s second point, I of course agree that “the n-word” is loaded and provokes strong reactions. Unfortunately, there are a not insignificant number of Americans who speak about it as if it were a matter of rudeness rather than racism. One of the blights on discourse about race in the United States is the confusion of racism and talking about racism (see Ward Connerly’s attempts to make it illegal for the government to keep track of racial profiling). That’s exemplified in the conflation of using the word “nigger” to refer to blacks and using the word to refer to how racists refer to blacks. The word strikes a chord for a reason. It’s a nasty, ugly word. The New York Times doesn’t demonstrate it’s racial sensitivity to only alluding to that nastiness and ugliness in a story about allegations that a (one-time) presidential aspirant made casual use of it. It just reduces our sense of the story.

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING

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One of the classic and/ or tired debate between the more and less left camps on the left is whether we win elections best by hewing or dashing to the center or by staking out strong left stances that demonstrate vision and courage and bring more people into the process. I think the latter kind of argument is underappreciated by most of the people running editorial pages and congressional campaign committees. But I’d also say that these arguments frequently overstate how much issues really determine how people vote (much as some of us might like it if they did). I think Mark Schmitt got it right when he said “It’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you.” That is, why candidates are perceived to have taken the stances they have and embraced the issues they have often does more to raise them up or bring them down than what those issues and positions are.

Another frustration of the debates about whether leftism or centrism will win elections is that it often willfully ducks the question of what policies are actually best for the country. Arguments about what policies win elections and arguments about what policies create better futures masquerade about as one another. Partly because that let’s us elide the very real debates amongst those of us to the left of the Republicans about whether three strikes laws or CAFTA or invading Iraq are worthy on the merits.

So when we consider the handiwork of those who try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to pick candidates, like a party’s Senatorial Campaign Committee, I think a useful question for those of us in what Wellstone first called the Democratic wing of the Democratic party to ask is: Are you putting up the most progressive candidate that could win the election?

So here are some, um, general thoughts inspired by recent events:

Bad Idea: When the state is pretty red and the most successful Democrats are agrarian populists, backing the guy with more money than god over the farmer.

Good Idea: When the state is quite red, finding a candidate who offers conservatism of personal narrative and cultural affectation rather than of contemporary ideology.

Bad Idea: When the state is even a little blue, the Republicans and the Congress are wildly unpopular, and the incumbent is the 100th most popular Senator, fielding a candidate who agrees with the Republicans on central issues we’ll face in the next couple years.

Good Idea: When the state is light red but the ruling party has fallen farther faster there than anywhere else, and the wounds of neoliberalism are particularly keenly felt, taking the chance to run a real progressive.

Bad Idea: When the incumbent sides with the Democrats on key issues in order to stay afloat in a super-blue state, trying to entice a candidate who’ll run to his right.

Good Idea: When a socialist Independent is the state’s most popular pol and he has aspirations for higher office, getting out of his way.

NO OFFENSE: BAD DEFENSE

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In a new piece over at Campus Progress, I ask what the media are protecting us from by only alluding to “epithets” like George Allen’s:

Indeed, I doubt many readers were left wondering which anti-black slur Allen had chosen. But the choices reporters and editors make don’t only determine how comprehensible their reporting is; they shape the impact it has on their readers. Alluding to something terrible rather than showing it, be it battlefield carnage or bigoted language, softens its impact.

From the archives: Their media criticism – and ours; vocab; Senators say the darndest things…

I’M NOT AN (INTERNET) BETTING MAN, BUT…

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If I had to guess, I’d say it’ll be a twenty-five seat net pick-up in the House, and five seat net pick-up in the Senate.

Needless to say, I’d rather be proven wrong in one direction than the other one.

INDUCTIVE REASONING, AS PRACTICED BY BILL O’REILLY

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Here’s a basic summary of the argument “No Spin Zone” listeners were treated to on the drive home tonight:

Democrats opposed the war in Iraq.

Therefore failure in Iraq is good for Democrats.

Therefore Democrats support failure in Iraq.

Therefore Democrats care more about what’s good for Democrats than what’s good for America.

Therefore Democrats can’t be trusted.

Any questions?

DUTIFUL DUNCAN

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Apparently at least one guy out there agrees with me that there’s something of a vacuum in the Republican field for 2008 for a pro-Rumsfeld, pro-Tancredo, pro-Falwell conservative.

And public-spirited chap that he is, he’s ambling into it.

That vote against CAFTA isn’t likely to help there though.

I USED TO THINK

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Anyone who reads the New York Times on-line without a pop-up blocker has been subjected to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison exulting that “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.”

Of course he’s kidding. But it’s not so funny.

Leaf through the past few issues of The Economist, and you’ll find unsigned articles calling on Lula to cut back pensions, on David Cameron to promise shrinking social spending, and on the Democratic Leadership Council not to go wobbly against organized labor. Then read over this parade of praise for the magazine – as a news source that saves you the time of having to read any of the other ones. Ted Turner draws a favorable contrast with Time Magazine (yes, that Time Magazine), which apparently is “too populist.” No need to worry about populism from The Economist.

Now if the same roster of CEOs stepped up singing the praises of, say, the Wall Street Journal, heads would turn over why a “conservative” paper’s reporting was being taken as holy writ by so many powerful people (never mind that the news section of the paper isn’t so different in bent from what you would get in the Times). But when so many in the global overclass quote chapter and verse from a “neoliberal” paper laying down structural adjustment through shrinking spending and shredded security as the best medicine for every situation, that’s another story. Or rather, it’s not a story.

IT’S HOW YOU PLAY THE GAME

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Last week, the New York Times reported on the move in China to better protect workers’ rights, and in so doing stem the tide of rising social inequality. And it discussed the instant blowback from American companies:

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law. The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization…One provision in the proposed law reads, “Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc.”

This episode is an object lesson in how corporate-driven globalization works. While orthodox world systems theorists debate when we will shift from an era of American dominance to one of Chinese dominance, and the globalization gurus estimate how long it will take for “open markets” to unleash a new era of liberalism and freedom, corporate-driven globalization is lived by millions as a cudgel wielded not by a national government but by an economic clique, and wielded in the service not of human freedom but of management power.

When workers have the freedom to organize without retaliation and bargain collectively for better futures, they win better working conditions for themselves and their families, and they make it harder to treat them as infinitely flexible and fully disposable resources. That increase in the freedom and democracy of the workplace breeds understandable resistance from people who would otherwise get to call all the shots. Without global standards, global markets ease a global race to the bottom.

This is easy to lose track of in the bipartisan haze of “competition” and the elite faith that if a given nation just does enough to keep its workers cheap and contingent, it can outdo another nation’s efforts at the same. That’s a competition most everybody loses.

JACOB WEISBERG, CALL YOUR FACT-CHECKER

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Jacob Weisberg in this month’s Men’s Vogue:

But even as the Democratic political discussion grows and engulfs him, Obama is engaged in another more personal and historical conversation – with Wright and Ellison, with his parents, and with those two tragic and prophetic figures, Lincoln and King. Obama, of course, would never be so immodest as to compare himself to either of these men. But being clear-eyed, he must see what others do: that among American politicians, he alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath.

Barack Obama in last year’s Time magazine:

So when I, a black man with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, it was hard to imagine a less likely scenario than that I would win–except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois’ greatest citizen and our nation’s greatest President. In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat–in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.

WARNER WON’T

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So what does Mark Warner bowing out of the ’08 race mean for the prospects of a left Un-Hillary versus a right Un-Hillary come primary season?

On the one hand, having Warner out of the running allows for a consolidation of the right-of-Hillary forces in the party behind one of the remaining right-of-Hillary candidates – the strongest of whom looks to be Evan Bayh (sorry, Joe). If he isn’t gunning to be on Clinton’s ticket, Warner can take harsher shots at her now that he’s not a candidate himself, and he’s developed something of a base to throw behind Bayh.

On the other hand, Warner was probably the stronger of the right-of-Hillary contenders. Unlike most of the Democrats in contention, his experience is executive rather than legislative, which both builds credibility with a certain crowd and makes it easier to straddle certain ideological razors that Senator Bayh is more likely to slip on. And his business experience helps pry certain networks and wallets open that a right-of-Hillary candidate in particular will depend on. Warner in particular was probably best situated to compete in terms of star power and red state outside the beltway cred with John Edwards, who is gathering more and more of the left-of-Hillary energy behind himself.

So Warner’s exit seems likely to leave the right-of-Hillary crowd more unified but behind a weaker contender. Which in the end I suspect is good news for the left-of-Hillary crowd. And therefore bad news for her. Which in turn is bad news for the other side of the aisle.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: NOT A JEW (AFTER ABRAMOFF, WHAT’D WE DO?)

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Andrew Sullivan probably expected to turn heads with the first paragraph of this TNR piece on the Foley fallout. But perhaps the weirdest sentence is in the second one:

Gay men, of course, went into a defensive crouch. Like Jews watching the Abramoff scandal, we winced at what we knew would be a collective blame-game.

Say what?

I’m all for a good simile. But actual Jews did watch the actual Abramoff scandal, and not only wasn’t there a “collective blame-game” targeting Jews, “we” didn’t brace ourselves for one either. Did we?

Look, I’ll be the first to acknowledge I’ve spent most of my life in parts of the US with disproportionately little antisemitism (maybe excepting the time Sean Hannity’s niece told me Yale “is basically all Jews at this point, right?”). But the idea that Jews as a community saw Jack Abramoff in the news and started worrying about an antisemitic surge is just spurious.

Sure, Abramoff embodies certain hateful stereotypes about Jews, and Foley embodies certain hateful stereotypes about gay men. But the difference is that blatant antisemitism marginalizes you in American public life. Blatant homophobia doesn’t.

I’m sure you could have heard one Jew crouching somewhere over Abramoff in the news. After Jim McGreevey came out and resigned, I remember a few folks I knew worrying that a story about a governor having a same-sex affair with an Israeli would enflame antisemitism across the country. Those were the same ones who got ganza shpilkes whenever a new article came out about the New Jersey Rabbi charged with homicide. But everyone else – Jews included – saw it as a story about closeted married men, corrupt New Jersey politicos, or both.

Consider the press releases put out by major organs of the conservative movement blaming homosexuality for the Foley fracas. Now try to picture such groups putting out a press release blaming Judaism for the Abramoff scandal.

The leaders in the conservative coalition who feel that way do a better job hiding their antisemitism.