Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

From Ruth

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Boldly, the hyper-liberal New York Times takes on one of the most pressing instances of class conflict in America:

When there is a division between the old [money] and the new, it is apt to express itself on the most time-honored of battlefields: the putting green, the tennis court or the marine berth.

The existing clubs are still the preserves of the old wealth, but new clubs are springing up to welcome newcomers, as well as some longtime residents who grew impatient with waiting lists. For years the Sankaty Head Golf Club had a waiting list that seemed to extend for decades. So in 1995, Edmund A. Hajim, an investment banker in Manhattan, and others created the Nantucket Golf Club, assiduously designed to look as if it had been around forever. It became such a hit that its list is now full, too, even at a cost of $325,000 (80 percent reimbursable upon departure), as opposed to the $30,000 it costs to join Sankaty Head.

It sure takes cojones to write about issues this provocative and important. The whole series, of course, not being written from quite the critical, inquiring perspective one might hope for. As the Boston Phoenix accurately observes,

The New York Times is in no position to deliver. In contrast to, say, the paper’s conscientious reporting on the ’60s-era civil-rights movement in the South, its foray into class consciousness suffers from a fatal flaw. Social class is at the core of the Times’ institutional identity, which prevents the paper from offering the sort of dispassionate, critically searching discussion the subject demands…

So the many installments of “Class Matters” — a now nearly completed work in progress — come across less like an authoritative exercise in social criticism than like an oddly anxious series of Tourette’s-style asides, desperately sidestepping the core economic inequities that the Times can never quite afford to mention outright. Getting the New York Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license to explain sex to you: there are simply far too many conflicts that run far too deep to result in any reliable account of how the thing works.

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Thursday while I was on a community service project with Mexican students in Puebla, a few seven year-old boys who I’d been playing with for a while told me matter-of-factly that they didn’t like Americans because we all wanted (loosely translated) “to conquer Mexico.” I suggested that the US in fact had no designs on its southern neighbor, and we discussed the difference between the policies of a country’s government and the sentiments of its people (turns out they’re not big fans of Vicente Fox either). So quick, someone call Karen Hughes and tip her off that it’s not just in the Middle East that they “hate us for our freedoms.” Unless, that is, there may be some other reason that hearts and minds the world over are finding the concept of America as an arrogant imperial power more credible than they might have a few years back.

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Kingspawn faults my letter for conflating opposition to Roe and opposition to the right to choose. But that distinction is exactly why I wrote

As reported nine years ago in The New Republic, whose editors oppose the Roe v. Wade decision, Casey Sr. was not offered a chance to speak at the convention nominating Bill Clinton because he had refused to endorse Bill Clinton

and not “As reported nine years ago in the anti-choice New Republic.” The point of that clause, though I’ll grant it could have been stated more clearly or simply dropped, was that TNR is on the right of most Democratic voters on the issue of choice, and revels in decrying the Democratic party’s supposed deafness and meanness to voters (read: TNR writers) to its right on issues where TNR is to the right of the party (read: everything but equal marriage). So a repudiation of a story about the Democratic party keeping down Democrats in the right wing of the party means more when it’s written by a magazine that lives for righteous denunciations of the Democrats for keeping down the right wing of the party.

As for Roe v. Wade, it’s certainly not the best argued or compellingly written of our legal decisions, but the majority is right to recognize that autonomy in certain intimate situations and spaces is central to liberty. The equal protection argument (as my brother points out, we don’t mandate that men donate, say, their kidneys, a procedure far less cumbersome than nine months of pregnancy, to save what we can all agree to be living human beings in need of organs) absolutely should have been made in Roe as well, and the Casey majority’s time would have been much better spent expounding that than floating a stare decisis argument that privileges the legitimacy of the court over the rightness of its jurisprudence.

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A letter I sent a few days ago:

To the Editor:

I was disappointed to see the Times Magazine (“The Believer,” May 22, 2005) repeat the long-discredited claim that my state’s late Governor Bob Casey “was barred from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his antiabortion views.” As reported nine years ago in The New Republic, whose editors oppose the Roe v. Wade decision, Casey Sr. was not offered a chance to speak at the convention nominating Bill Clinton because he had refused to endorse Bill Clinton. For Democrats to put Casey on the program in 1992 would have made no more sense than for Republicans to include Senator Lincoln Chafee, who refused to endorse George W. Bush for re-election, among the slew of ostensible “moderates” in the spotlight at their convention last year. Democrats who oppose a woman’s fundamental right to choose – including the party’s Senate Leader – are all too prominent, not only in the party’s speaking programs, but in its leadership. And contrary to the myth unfortunately revived this week in the New York Times, the party should be faulted not for alleged hostility to anti-choice voters but for its too-frequent willingness to compromise key values rather than finding more effective ways of making the case for them to those Americans we have not yet persuaded. The party leadership has unfortunately repeated this mistake by throwing its full weight behind the anti-choice Bob Casey Jr. in his Senate primary against Chuck Pennacchio, an inspired progressive better poised to offer Pennsylvanians a real alternative to the radical right-wing record of Rick Santorum.

From Alyssa

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The Boston Globe has an interesting article in its Ideas section today (The section is something the paper adopted a couple of years ago, and tends to include long-form essays on social problems and intellectual trends. It’s worth a check on Sundays.) about the evolution of women’s prisons, focusing on Massachusetts Correctional Institute Framingham, where I volunteered for three and a half years in high school. The piece examines the idea that women were considered unreformable, especially in earlier eras when many of them found themselves in prison for vice crimes, now mostly established. Even in more enlightened eras, and with the appointment of a woman as the head of the corrections system in Massachusetts, there has continued to be criticism of efforts that focus on rehabilitation.

While the time I spent at MCI Framingham, every other Saturday for those three years, was certainly eye-opening, it gives me more hope than the author of this article. I was working with a program called Girl Scouting Behind Bars, a special troop composed of girls from all over the Greater Boston area whose mothers were incarcerated. Our goal was to both give them some support they weren’t getting from foster parents and social workers through typical scouting activities, and to get them in contact with their mothers. The women who participated had to go through extensive detox, job training, and parenting programs before they could start coming to the Saturday meetings with their daughters. I remember them fondly: these women, mostly in prison for prostitution or drug-related crimes, were tough, often intelligent if not highly educated, and determined to turn their lives around. The parternship the Girl Scouts built with the prison was a productive one, at least it seemed that way to me at the time, and was happening in other states as well. Only one mother got out of prison in those three years, but lots more joined the program, and a lot of them told me that it had made them better parents. Obviously, it’s a tragedy that they had to go to prison, and leave their children in the hands of an often brutal state system to come to that realization, but it means that even in these circumstances, we’d found a way to do something right.

Ultimately, I think it’s a false distinction to say that rehabilitation means being soft on crime. I am still upset and angry with the woman whose twelve-year-old daughter, under extreme pressure from older boys in her neighborhood to have sex with a number of them, and trying to protect her younger situation from a less-than-ideal foster system, tried to kill herself. But I’m also still proud of another girl who brought up her grades and got herself into Boston Latin, a pair of sisters whose mother was the first to be released who excelled in school and in activities. If kids can not only survive, but thrive in extraordinary circumstances, maybe we can do some good with their parents as well. It certainly seems like we owe it to the children who will be in their care to focus on rehabilitation rather than on vengeance.

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Bad news for those of us who’ve been rooting for new leadership at the AFL-CIO, as the UAW, one of the crucial remaining swing votes, yesterday endorsed John Sweeney for another term. This leaves little chance of a change in leadership this time around, as Thomas Edsall writes, and is prompting a shift in focus to the next choice the reformers have to make – should they stay or should they go:

While Sweeney, 71, now appears certain to win, the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union, is more likely to follow through on threats to bolt from the AFL-CIO. “The challenge here is to make sure we have a labor movement that can change people’s lives,” said SEIU President Andrew L. Stern, noting that all of his union’s locals are voting on a proposal that would authorize the union to sever its ties to the labor federation…The dissident unions, calling themselves the “Change to Win” coalition, had been counting on the UAW to give them new momentum, and lift the collective membership of their unions to well over 5 million. There are about 13 million members in the 58 unions that make up the AFL-CIO, so it takes unions with a total of 6.5 million members or more to win a leadership fight. At the moment, the dissident unions have just under 5 million members. Stern said beating Sweeney had been a long-shot proposition from the beginning. “It’s always been hard to imagine defeating an incumbent leader,” Stern said. “John Sweeney has probably always had the votes.” Unite Here President John Wilhelm, who was widely viewed as the most likely person to run against Sweeney, contends that winning majority support for restructuring will precede any leadership change. He said he has spent his “entire life in the House of Labor,” but he did not rule out joining Stern and leaving the AFL-CIO.

This a sad development for Americann workers, and it’s a shame that for now, an AFL-CIO guided by a reformist vision of what was the New Unity Partnership and by more inspired leadership has become a much more distant possibility. Hopefully John Sweeney will continue to feel and respond to the pressure to build a federation which leads its member unions to revived power by prioritizing aggressive organizing facilitating effective cooperation, and encouraging tactics which work.

The AFL-CIO, unfortunately, has not been working for a long time, in part because too often its approach has looked more like the narrow approach of the old AFL than the agressive broad-based approach of the CIO. There’s plenty to fear about a potential breakaway from the federation. The kind of union raiding which the reformers have identified as a challenge to labor’s effectiveness could become uglier were some or all of these unions to move outside of the structure of the AFL-CIO. And the red-baiting and purging of early post-war period can be pinned in part on the division between the AFL and the CIO. But that said, the same competition between the federations also sparked a great deal of tremendous organizing which, if not for the CIO’s existence as an independent organization, might very well never have taken place. Unions like SEIU and UNITE HERE have a model which is working, though certainly imperfectly, and it’s a model which has has achieved some impressive successes despite the failure of the federation to effectively serve the functions they’ve rightfully called for it to execute. If pulling out means a renewed ability to marshall resources for maximum efficacy in organizing, to build stronger coalitions with other progressive organizations with shared worldview, to more effectively hold politicians accountable (good cop, bad cop, et al), and to press the AFL-CIO from the outside to reform, it could be more than worthwhile.

The narrow lense through which this has all been read in the Times and Post and such, unfortunately, is “Labor = Democratic Turnout Machine” and ergo “Division in labor = peril for Democrats.” This slant is both short-sighted and wrong-headed. What the Democratic party needs, and should be doing much more to foster, is a reversal of the decline in American union membership. Any change that leads to more effective organizing broadens the Democratic constituency. Internal debate about how to make that happen is certainly healthy; if a split is effective in making union membership a reality for the millions of Americans who want it, then that spells great things for the Democratic party. If it can’t accomplish that, then it’s already a terrible move. But there’s no reason to assume that two federations would be fatally less effective at political turnout than one. The Democratic politicians who really have a reason to be afraid are the ones coasting on their partisan affiliation without keeping promises to American workers. If these newspapers are committed to assessing what a split would mean for the Democratic party, first they’ll need to engage the conversation on what it means for the labor movement.

From Ruth

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A brief aside: Lest anyone missed it, note (belatedly) Gawker’s delicious appraisal of the entire paradox of the New York Times:

Match the excerpt to the source. Half are from from the Times’ current series on class. The others are from from their advertising kit. The results may surprise you — no cheating!

1)”Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced,” Professor Levine said. “Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada.”

2)Affluent U.S. readers of the New York Times are 39% more likely than the average affluent adult to hold a college or postgraduate degree, 90% more likely to have a household income exceeding $150,000 and 46% more likely to be a top manager.

From Alyssa

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I have to admit that Howard Dean’s email today about the pace of fundraising, and what the DNC is doing with that money, got me more excited than I expected. Hearing that the priority is hiring organizers and getting them on the ground in states like Kansas is tremendously encouraging. I don’t recall ever hearing anything like this from Terry McAuliffe, which doesn’t really surprise me, but it’s the right direction to be going. Building power on the ground, and making a long-term committment to organizing is the only way the party is going to recover, and it recognizes a central problem that we had in the last election. The Republicans had people in neighborhoods, and we had MoveOn-organized phoneathons from solid blue states to swing states. I’ve become progressively disillusioned with MoveOn, partially because of the way they spin things (I was especially frustrated with their perception of the fillibuster “victory,” and the lame Star Wars-based ad), and because I thought, even at the time, that it was glaringly obvious that wasting a lot of time, energy, and money on phonebanks was not a winning strategy. As sincere as all of those efforts were, scripts do not convince people to get out and vote particularly well, and can never be subtle enough to make people switch their votes in large numbers.

What organizers can do is far different. There are, and will continue to be, huge limitations to organizers who come in from the outside to organize communities they aren’t from. But they can identify people who have power or contacts and aren’t using them, or aren’t using them effectively enough. They can encourage people who want to get involved to make the jump by providing them with opportunities. There’s a notable passage in Grassroots, a pretty good book about the ’88 New Hampshire primary, where one veteran of ’84 talks about how she considers her box of file cards on her contacts the treasure she can bring to a campaign. The first priority of organizers should be to find people like these, whether they are leaders in quilting and book clubs or in local party organizations, and train them to be leaders. The Democrats will succeed if our new organizers make themselves obsolete. I’d like to think that this can happen; I am wary of what happened to Dean’s “Perfect Storm” in Iowa. In any case, this is an approach very different than purly raising money for ad buys and long distance phonebanks. I’m glad that something different is happening in the party; we needed both the fresh air and the reality check.

From Matt

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Among the immediately tangible benefits of the failure of Bush’s domestic plan for his second term is the growing influence of a centrist bloc in Congress. Most of these people are guys I’d love to knock out of office in 2006, but I’d rather have rational opposition like McCain than our rabid friend Mr. Frist, even if it hurts our chances. It’s a purely visceral reaction: Frist, Delay, they just terrify me. I don’t want them managing my town’s McDonald’s, let alone our government – they’d spit in the fries.

The clearest recent example of the centrist bloc is the much-reported deal on judicial nominees. I have to say that this feels like a loss to me – not as disastrous as the elimination of filibuster rules, certainly, but the precedent of allowing groups to use political leverage to force up-or-down votes has been set.

That said, the <a href=”news’>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7964239/”>news regarding stem cell research is nothing short of astonishing:

Ignoring President Bush’s veto threat, the House voted Tuesday to lift limits on embryonic stem cell research, a measure supporters said could accelerate cures for diseases but opponents viewed as akin to abortion.

I’m trying to be hopeful. It’s a mixed victory, but in a political climate like this people like Santorum are dead in the water.

From Alyssa

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Hey, I’m Alyssa. I’m a veteran of a whole bunch of different blogs; Josh is right that I can’t hold on to one of my own, at least not with school and work, and a life, so I’m thrilled that he’s invited me back. I’m a junior at Yale, and a Humanities major, which means I enjoy geeking out over things like obscure Inquisitorial tribunals and Florentine artistic and political movements. When I reemerge into the real world, I like indie rock, social justice movements of a bunch of different stripes, big American cities and their problems, and writing.

To get started…The New Yorker is bad about keeping their articles online (although with the New York Times taking much of the good stuff electronic, who am I to complain), but Hendrik Hertzberg, who writes the always excellent lead political piece in the beginning of the Talk of Town section, delivers a trenchant analysis of the latest British election in the May 23 issue. He takes on the perception among American liberals that the British system is a lot more democratic (participation, though much higher, slipped in this election). I’m not voicing agreement or disagreement-I simply don’t know enough to do that. But Hertzberg is always worth taking a look at; I think he gets too little attention among bloggers for how good he is. Making sure that people like him, and the New York Times commentators, get excerpted on the net despite not being widely available online (especially in archived form) is going to be important. I think the sentiment that so much is happening on the internet that anything not available online is replacable is sadly mistaken, if only because it sacrifices much of the challenging and interesting style out there.

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So it turns out to be a compromise on judges after all. Hard to know just how to read it, given that with freedom for Democrats to filibuster under “extraordinary circumstances” and for Republicans to nuke if “continuing commitments made in this agreement” are abridged, all it resolves for good is that Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryer, and Priscilla Owen will soon be Circuit Court Judges and William Myers and Henry Saad won’t be. But given that the Democrats’ position on this has, for better or worse (you can guess where I come down on that one), all along been one of extreme willingness to compromise (“We gave you the judge who thinks men should dominate their wives, but do you really need the one who thinks God has veto power over the constitution”), almost any compromise would have been a political victory for the Democrats. Not as big a victory as the one I suspect we could have had tomorrow (in part because I trust John McCain’s political instincts more than, say, Joe Lieberman’s). As compromises go, the word a few days ago was that the major sticking point was GOP resistance to language like this:

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word “Advice” speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President’s power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

So the Dems at least got something out of the negotiations. Today we saw a few Republican Senators buck the Senate leadership and the Senate buck the unilateral impulses of the White House. That counts for something. And the reason it happened is because public opinion has turned rather sharply against the Bush team and their exercise of their ostensible mandate. That’s a trend which should have implications which last much longer than this agreement. But only if the Democrats capitalize on it with a robust and aggressive vision. I’d say cutting this deal was a poor move, but those saying that the party had been taking a firm and principled stand which it undercut tonight forget that when it comes to steadfast refusal to let through extremist unqualified judges, the ship had sailed on that one – and driving it were Randians, theocrats, and Randian-theocrats who have now safely arrived in a court near you. The Democrats’ repreated invocation of outrageous nominees they’d let though, rather than making them seem eminently reasonable, just made them look sort of silly.

Speaking of the future, anyone who still thinks John McCain – in whose office the compromise was apparently signed – isn’t running for President has another think coming. Same goes for anyone arguing that he does whatever’s right regardless of politics. As for Bill Frist, I’m sure he’ll do well on the lecture circuit. Or at least, he has a better shot at it than at a serious run for the GOP nomination. Good news for him: washed up right-wing speakers, unlike sitting Senators, aren’t expected to go into inner cities where they have to worry about being stabbed to death by children of color with pencils. Now, back to spanish conjugations for me.