Two questions for Arnold Schwarzenegger:
When you said last night that critics of the Bush economy are “girly-men,” did that include all the millions unemployed, underemployed, uninsured, underinsured, or impoverished, or just the ones who are talking about it?
If America has an empidemic of girly men, could it be that the terrorists have a good reason for opposing the liberation of women hich you talked so enthusiastically about?
A few thoughts on the McCain and Giuliani speeches last night:
How exactly has John McCain determined that Al Qaeda was weakened by the War in Iraq? Does he know something the rest of us don’t? Because there’s plenty to indicate that Al Qaeda’s been strengthened by the diversion of resources to Iraq and the gestures towards religious crusade. If McCain can prove the contrary, that would seem to be the kind of information we’d be hearing about at the Convention. I mean, it’s not as if the Bush Administration has been shy about leaking classified information for electoral gain.
It’s always been impressive how Republicans manage to contend on the one hand that they represent decent, faithful, virgin America and defend it against the coarse and the obscene, and on the other hand that they represent common, hard-working, tough America against the lilly-livered elite (Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? has an engaging the discussion of the need for the myth of the liberal elite as an explanatory tool for conservatives to exempt the smut they condemn from the explanations of laissez-faire capitalism they enshrine). But it takes truly stunning rhetorical gymnastics to elide both charges in a few sentences, as Giuliani does in celebrating Bush both for being comfortable with the vulgar language of the common man construction workers and for eschewing the vulgarity of the Democrats.
So Giuliani is opposed to undemocratically elected governments which use external enemies to try to distract their citizens instead of improving healthcare. Who knew?
I’d say Edwards accomplished what he set out to do with his speech: he put forward a broad and attractive plan, shared a set of sympathetic values, and projected energy, confidence, and optimism. No big surprises, but I don’t think there were intended to be (there are all manner of big surprises I would’ve liked to see, generally falling into the category of John Edwards morphing into John Lewis). “Two Americas” works as a unifying theme, contrary to the grousing of the National Review crowd, because it speaks to a reality which most Americans intuitively recognize and implicitly sets forth an ideal most Americans are ready to work and sacrifice for. Glad to see Edwards at least intimating the connections between different forms of social, political, and economic equality in this country – in education, in healthcare, and such. And it was heartening to hear this graph:
We can also do something about 35 million Americans who live in poverty every day. And here’s why we shouldn’t just talk about but do something about the millions of Americans who live in poverty. Because it is wrong. And we have a moral responsibility to lift those families up. I mean the very idea that in a country of our wealth and our prosperity, we have children going to bed hungry. We have children who don’t have the clothes to keep them warm. We have millions of Americans who work full-time every day to support their families, working for minimum wage and still live in poverty. It’s wrong. These are men and women who are living up to their bargain. They’re working hard, they’re supporting their families. Their families are doing their part; it’s time we did our part.
And that’s what we’re going to do, that’s what we’re going to do when John is in the White House. Because we’re going to raise the minimum wage. We’re going to finish the job on welfare reform. And we’re going to bring good paying jobs to the places where we need them the most. . And by doing all those things we’re going to say no forever to any American working full-time and living in poverty. Not in our America, not in our America. Not in our America. Not in our America.
Obviously, it’s urgent to assert that the New Deal is something which creates a middle class, not something which saps it, and certainly anyone running for office in this country should speak to a strategy for expanding and securing the middle class. But that said, the ongoing invisibility of the American poor in Democratic party rhetoric of the past decade is disgraceful. It’s a tragic abdication of the responsibility of a real social contract. As Edwards reminded Kerry during the primary campaign, while Kerry was heading off voluntarily to war, Edwards was trying to figure out how to afford to go to college. And as Sharpton reminded Edwards, not everyone then – or now – could get a job as a mill worker. So the recognition of the plight and the promise of the working poor in the Vice Presidential acceptance speech is a step in the right direction, even if “finishing the job on welfare reform” sounds somewhat macabre. Let’s hear more about the working poor from Kerry tomorrow.
Hope is a winning theme. “Hope is on the way,” is a frustrating formulation though. Some of us who’ve had the pleasure of several rallies with the Rev. Jesse Jackson like to joke about the frequency with which the “Keep hope alive” slogan is repeated, but that’s fundamentally a good slogan because it offers an urgent, achievable imperative. “Hope is on the way” is inherently top down, and Edwards’ use of it – tell each of the beleaguered people you know that hope is on the way – reinforces the idea that the Kerry-Edwards ticket is some sort of superhero flying through the city saving victims. I’d like to hear less about hope being on the way and more about how we’re going to join together to take on the work of bringing it into being.
Matt Yglesias has chosen, in healthcare,a strange example to advance his case for how left-wing Clinton’s policy would have been if not for Republican resistance. True, as Matt observes, he made some significant tactical blunders on the issue, but I’d say Theda Skocpol (no raging socialist she) was right to argue that the most profound and damaging of these was that he proposed a relatively moderate reform thinking it would appease his opponents on the right and in so doing only managed to alienate his allies on the left while earning himself no olive branch from the HMOs and confusing everybody in between with a complicated, uninspiring plan.
Wednesday, I went from a conversation with an 1199 member at Yale – New Haven Hospital to a dinner at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life with Marvin Lender (that’s right – the one with all the bagels), prominent Jewish philanthropist and Chairman of the Board of the Hospital. The topic? Jewish tradition and business ethics.
I showed up with fifteen-some friends eager to discuss, in light of Jewish tradition: the Hospital’s three-year refusal to make a contract offer with across-the-board raises for its unionized food service workers, who’ve now twice gone on strike (although in a meeting with students a few months back, the Hospital’s Vice President for Public Relations claimed that they hadn’t, and he had to be corrected by the Vice President for Labor Relations); the paralyzing, and empirically justified, fear of the Hospital’s non-union workforce, who make significantly less than the Local 34 and 35 members who perform identical work beside them, that discussing organizing will cost them their jobs; and the Hospital’s failure, even after its latest reforms, to formulate a policy which ensures access to healthcare for New Haveners lacking full health insurance.
Lender’s response to the first few questions along these lines have two basic parts. First: He could serve on “any board I wanted to,” but “I chose Yale – New Haven Hospital” because of its work helping people. “My heart goes out” to “those poor people” who work there and “love their jobs” but “are being targeted by the unions.” The Hospital “is too busy helping people” to “get into a – excuse me – a pissing contest with the unions.” Second: Secular organizations, like Yale – New Haven Hospital, “aren’t like Jewish organizations,” in that there’s a rigid structure and so “my job isn’t to tell [Yale – New Haven Hospital President] Joe Zaccanino what to do.” The Board just “hires and fires” him. So “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on specific issues.”
When we questioned Lender’s categorization of a non-profit Hospital’s service to the poor and treatment of its workers as “day-to-day issues,” he became visibly more uncomfortable and markedly more curt. He was relieved to get a question from one of the couple people in the room not there to talk about the hospital, this one about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and spoke sympathetically and articulately about his responsibility, as a confidante and ally of leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations, to pressure them to commit to a two-state solution. So I expressed my agreement with his principle that those in positions of influence over powerful leaders who’ve gone astray have a moral obligation to speak out, cited some sources from Leviticus, Megillat Esther, and Pirkei Avot to that effect, and urged him to push Yale – New Haven Hospital into line with our shared ethical tradition. His response: “Are you trying to tell me that Esther or Mordechai with Chairman of a Board?”
Lender became increasingly rude as Jared Maslin, drawing on his experience at SHOUT helping the poor file applications for Yale – New Haven Hospital’s Free Bed Fund, tried to briefly describe the process to contextualize his question. “Are you going to ask me a question or not?” Lender asked, to which Jared replied that he wanted to make sure everyone in the room could understand the situation, prompting Lender to tell him that that was a waste of time. Jared, taken aback somewhat, suggested that he and Lender could talk about the issue after the dinner, to which Lender responded adamantly, “Now we won’t.” So Jared related that his experience suggests that the application system intentionally erects intimidating and often insurmountable beuracratic boundaries to dissuade those who need assistance from seeking it, and asked Lender what he would think of giving a third-party of some kind oversight over the process. Lender’s response: “It would be inappropriate for me to comment on that ‘yes’ or ‘no.'”
Shaking his head in his hands during questions, Lender announced, in a supreme moment of irony, “I’d didn’t come here to talk about this. I didn’t come here to talk about the Hospital. I came here to talk about business ethics.” That just about said it all. He then accused us of being rude and insisted that he was being “respectful” anyway, and accused us of “wasting the time” of all the people there who didn’t care about the Hospital, a peculiar sentiment given that all but a few of us had come specifically to discuss with one of the most powerful leaders of the Hospital how it’s treatment of the New Haven community clashed with religious and ethical values and what he planned to do about it.
Towards the end, Lender insisted that those who wanted to talk about the Hospital should “send me a letter.” That sounds like an invitation to me.
Over at the New York Times (quasi-)blog, Matt Bai is trying to take a bold stance against conventional wisdom by arguing that Howard Dean’s campaign did not, in fact, leave any lasting legacy for American politics:
Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change. His campaign, as he never tired of reminding us, was about “taking the country back,” which seemed another way of saying it was basically about winning.
It’s a nice try, but in this case the conventional wisdom (if that’s what it is – I thought the conventional wisdom, at least over at the Times, was that Dean was an unstable fanatic leading hordes of dateless college kids) is right. Bai’s basic argument, it seems, is that Dean didn’t run on a signature issue and therefore was only creative tactically but not ideologically. I think he’s wrong on two counts. First, as Dean himself has argued, the seeming unanimity among the Democratic candidates now obscures the fact that a year ago few were arguing that blasting Bush’s broken promises in Iraq, in public schools, and in the workplace was the Democrats’ route to success. Healthcare in particular was an issue that, while urgently important to millions of Americans for decades, Howard Dean put back on the map for a party largely convinced that because a zealous corporate lobby was able to tank a half-hearted moderate healthcare reform ten years ago it was relatively hopeless to try to cover most Americans.
Second, Bai is wrong to argue that Howard Dean’s tactics amounted to nothing more than really wanting to win. The significance of what Dean embarked on is demonstrated, as I argued at the time, by the incredulity of the New York Times magazine in trying to report what was driving his campaign. “Ordinary Americans convinced that there could be a connection between a broken political system and the challenges they’re confronting in their own lives? Must be like of some kind of Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. Why are they talking so much about themselves? Don’t they know only people who run for office are important?” An organizing model, like universal healthcare, is not a new idea. But what they have in common is that the Democratic party of the past couple decades has in large part left them to rust. And Howard Dean, for all his mistakes – like relying on Northeastern college students to canvass in Iowa rather than cultivating a stronger core of organizers from the state – helped bring them back to life.
There’s been a lot of talk recently among Democrats, particularly those committed to John Kerry, about how Howard Dean “brought people into the party.” That’s true, but it’s only half of the story, and in that sense is wishful thinking by those who want the Democratic party to stay the course of the past decade. Howard Dean, despite a conservative record of his own, chose that he could get farthest by being a vessel for a popular movement that existed before him and will continue after him – and in so doing, he took an important step towards bring the Democratic party back to the people.
The Wall Street Journal is closer to the truth than the New York Times on this one: “the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater.”
I thought Howard Dean’s Meet the Press interview this morning was in large part quite good. He was forthright in assessing what went wrong in Iowa and New Hampshire –
We spent a lot of money in Iowa and New Hampshire trying to win. We’re were trying to do essentially what John Kerry is now doing. We were planning on trying to get a huge momentum out of Iowa and it didn’t work…We really wanted to try to capitalize on the momentum that we had. And when things started going south after the campaign got really rough in Iowa, because when you’re the front-runner of course, everybody’s whacking you every day, we got in a fight with Dick Gephardt and we both ended up third and fourth instead of first and second…It was my fault. We knew what we were doing, we took a gamble, and it didn’t pay off.
– and how the campaign lost stream:
There are a lot of analyses of what went wrong in our campaign…The best one, though, was an article in The New York Times which said that the campaign was so much about message that I forgot that it has to be about me, too, that people have to like you if they want to make you president of the United States. And I think there’s some truth to that.
I think Dean’s right that there’s some truth in that – people want a trustee as well as a delegate in Washington. I also think, though, that voters want someone who’ll fight for them, and that just as few organizing conversations are successful if you’re not convinced the organizer is willing to argue with you and change your mind, few candidates win voters’ faith for the general election if they aren’t seen fighting to win the primary.
He also used that moment as a chance to defend the increasing visibility of his wife:
That’s why I asked Judy to come out on the campaign trail, who incidentally had such a good time the other day, yesterday, which was our anniversary, she had volunteered to come again, much to my astonishment. But that’s why I asked Judy to come out, at Senator Harkin’s wife’s suggestion, so that people would get to know me…She’s not a prop. I always said when we first ran, I promised I would never–I mean, I didn’t promise, but I knew I would never use her as a prop, but I do think that people have to know something about Judy to know something about me. It’s the person I married; it’s my life partner…They have to get to know Judy, and I actually think, which is a funny thing to say after two years on the road, that people don’t feel like they know me that well and I’ve got to figure out a way to let them do that more.
I think in large part my feeling on this comes down to agency – is she there because she wants to be? And that, of course, is impossible to assess.
Looks like this will be Dean’s stance on Roy Neel’s corporate background:
First of all–Roy Neel hasn’t been a Washington lobbyist for four years, first of all. Secondly, he was Al Gore’s chief of staff; he was Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and he’s a great organizer and he’s a good guy…[Neel] has not been in the lobbying business for four years. He’s been a college professor. And I think he’s been good for the campaign and he’ll continue to be good for the campaign…He did exactly what he was supposed to do and didn’t break any–not only didn’t break any laws, he didn’t break any ethics guidelines…What I want is a–and what we have–we have not changed what we’re doing in this campaign a bit. We’re getting enormous support still from the grassroots. It does help to have somebody who knows something about how to run campaigns organizing your campaign. It had been my hope that Joe would stay on, because he’s such a brilliant strategist and he built the campaign, and I think that would have been a tremendous team to have Roy running the inside stuff in the campaign, making sure that the trains ran on time, and having Joe’s brilliant strategy from the outside…
Not terribly convincing, but that’s because he’s defending a move that’s quite difficult to come up with a coherent and credible defense for. Someone should definitely tell the Governor to forswear the expression “making sure that the trains run on time” unless he really wants to make us think about the major benefit of fascism. He does make a good case against the current frontrunner:
…that is a very different thing than taking $650,000 of special-interest money after you claim that you don’t and you’re railing against special interests, as Senator Kerry has and as George Bush–what George Bush has done is much, much worse than what Senator Kerry did. The only thing that bothered me about John Kerry is that his whole campaign, which borrowed from me, was “Well, we’re going to get the special interests out of Washington.” Come to find out, he’s taken more special-interest money in the last 15 years than any other senator…We have 11 percent of our contributions of $2,000 checks; 89 percent is less than that, and that’s not true of any other candidate running for the presidency.
Dean also defended his critique of the DLC:
As you know, Tim, I don’t take it lightly when people go after me and eventually I’m going to respond. Look, eventually we’re going to need the Democratic Leadership Council in order to beat George Bush. We’re going to need every single Democrat that we can possibly get. But, you know, I don’t lie down in front of people who want to run me over with a steamroller.
And he slammed Bush on pre-war intelligence:
The president was not truthful with the American people about why we went into Iraq. Now, we don’t know why he wasn’t truthful. We don’t know if he was given bad information which he passed along to the country or if he and the administration at the highest levels decided to manipulate the intelligence reports. We don’t know. But we do know that most of the things the president said about why we were going into Iraq were not true…It is true that Saddam Hussein committed genocide. That was under President Bush the first’s watch…
And he tried to distinguish himself from other candidates as an economic realist:
There was no middle-class tax cut in this country. There was a huge middle-class tax increase because of the fiscal policies of George Bush. So for John Kerry to get upset that I want to get rid of all the Bush tax cuts is ridiculous…You know what I’m going to say? I’m going to say, “Mr. President, most people in this country would gladly pay the same taxes they paid under Bill Clinton if they could only have the same economy they had under Bill Clinton.”
Me, I’d rather have a tax structure, entitlement system, and economy like we had under FDR – or even, say, Nixon.
Dean also argued that voters would accept higher prices at Wal-Mart from fair trade policy:
Well, you know what they get in return? American jobs stop going overseas, illegal immigration is reduced to a trickle because people are going to make money in their own countries instead of having to come here to feed their families. And you get much better world security because you develop middle classes in developing countries. I think that’s a pretty good tradeoff.
And he slammed the jobless recovery:
No jobs. Where are the jobs? The 1,000 jobs created in December? This president is the first president since Herbert Hoover who has a net loss of jobs. You know, you can talk about all the numbers you want on the front page of the newspaper, but until your neighbor has a job, and you’re not worried about losing your health insurance, the economy has not turned up.
He also reminded progressives like myself why we should be anxious about him:
You can have health insurance for every American, which costs exactly the same amount as we’re putting into Iraq every year now. But you cannot have family leave and all this other list of things.
Dean called the leadership of the NRA “nuts” but argued that being endorsed by the NRA for Governor will help him more than it’ll hurt him:
Now, look, I’m not going to get the NRA endorsement [for President] because I do support the assault weapons ban and I do support background checks and extending it to instant background checks to gun shows laws, but nobody is going to be able to push me around and say that I’m for registration or all that stuff which they’re going to do for all the other Democrats because I was endorsed eight times by the National Rifle Association when I was governor of Vermont. That stuff matters. That’s an electability issue.
What I wish he – or any of the Democratic candidates – would say is that guns should be regulated because they’re dangerous, but the way to stop urban crime is through massive investment in jobs, education, and income support. But then again, I’m no fiscal conservative.
Dean handled the “scream” pretty much just right:
I was having a great time. Are you kidding? Look at the expression on my face. I’ve never had so much fun…You know, I never lost my temper once in 12 years at any staff member when I was in the Legislature, although I did blow up at a few legislators from time to time. This is ridiculous.
And he promised to stay in the race as long he’s viable:
I’m not going to do anything that’s going to harm the Democratic Party if we get blown out again and again and again. You know, if somebody else gets more delegates and they clinch it, of course, I’m not going to go all the way to the convention just to prove a point. But I’m going to be in this race as long as I think I can win.
Nathan Newman, who supported the Faustian Prescription Drug Deal, is right to argue that the increase in projected costs presents the Democrats an opportunity to call for the corporate sweetheart deals built into the legislation to be reversed – to make this an object lesson in which party it is that’s breaking the bank, and where the cash is going. Here’s hoping the Democrats indeed take the chance to take a stand. They still would have been better off taking a stand against the damn thing when it was time to vote in the first place.
A few last thoughts on the South Carolina Democratic Debate:
Sharpton is absolutely right to question why for the poor to die for their country abroad is an “honor,” but for the rich to pay taxes is a “burden,” and to call for a less regressive payroll tax.
I’m not sure what Dean was trying to pull off with his critique of Kerry’s failed healthcare bills – it felt overly self-conscious and affected, even grasping. Kerry wasn’t particularly smooth in responding, but came off better over all in that exchange.
I wish I could say that Lieberman’s touting welfare reform as the sort of “bipartisan accomplishment” he’d continue lost him my vote, but clearly he never had it in the first place. I do find it sad that the welfare system has been completely off the radar of these debates.
I was glad to see Kerry get called on what Brooks called the “inner Moynihan” of some of his ’90s rhetoric. He came off quite defensive responding to a statement of his on affirmative action, and preached fealty to the “mend it, don’t end it” stance multiple times without allaying any fears about what kind of mending he plans to do.
Dean did an effective job making the case against the PATRIOT Act but framed in terms of stopping future assaults on civil liberties rather than calling to undo the recent ones. Why isn’t anyone calling Edwards on his role in drafting it?
Glad to see the way the rhetoric within the Democratic party has shifted over the past few years. Part of that, no doubt, is being out of power; part of that is the success of the “anti-globalization” movement in putting the issue, so to speak, on the map. For Dean to say that we’ve given global rights to corporations but not to workers is right on; to describe that as having done half the job but forgotten the other half smacks of a disingenuous attempt to reconcile his stance with his record.
Kucinich laid out the case for single-payer health insurance clearly and sharply (and effectively dismissed the idea that the Clintons had pursued such a plan), and Sharpton made the compelling moral argument for such a system. What’s most interesting to me about the other candidates’ alternatives is that none of them mounted an argument (true, they’re generally not very good ones) against such a system any stronger than Clark’s “Let’s fix the one we have.”
Today’s New York Times carries two related stories – “Health spending at record rate” and “Flu has killed 93 children, but comparisons are difficult.” What’s the connection? Two problems that could be better confronted with a universal single-payer health insurance system. The US spends twice as much per capita on healthcare as Canada, whose single-payer system eliminates the advertising and overhead associated with a system of multiple private insurers. Those convinced that the private sector is more efficient should keep in mind that overhead amounts to half of costs in US private healthcare, as compared to a couple percent of costs in Medicare. Countries with government health insurance also have higher rates of flu innoculation, which is to be expected given that demand for vaccine increases in a system designed to encourage, rather than discourage, visits to the Doctor, and supply increases when the government, which can absorb the costs of purchasing extra vaccine to make sure there’s sufficient supply, is footing the bill.
One of the more interesting moments I caught in the Iowa Debate was the Kucinich-Dean exchange on single-payer universal healthcare. Dean, to his credit, was up front in stating that voters whose primary issue was single-payer should vote for Kucinich, and then touted the virtues of his plan which, Kucinich rightly argued, would maintain the strangehold of the insurance industry on the practice and policy of healthcare. What perhaps was most surprising about Dean’s defense of his plan, however, was its central argument that it was simply the best the Democrats could get away with – that his plan “was written to pass Congress.” Dean cited the failures of the Carter and Clinton healthcare plans to buttress his claim.
I think Michael Tomasky, in Left for Dead, offers a more convincing reading of the Clinton healthcare failure:
…the A.M.A. and the insurance lobbies fought the Clinton proposal with the same intensity they’d have have brought to a fight against single-payer. A political calculation to trim the sails is useful and defensible if, without sacrificing too much in the way of principle, it gets you more votes. The Clinton calculation did not do that. And in this instance, given the number of co-sponsors single-payeralready had in the House of Representatives and the appeal of the plan’s salient features, it may actually have been the case that a single-payer system could have been sold to the public. The seller, though, had to be willing to confront one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies – something the Clintons weren’t up to; but this, too, is something people clearly say they want their leaders to do more of.
Among the people calling on their leaders to do more of that? Howard Dean. Kucinich was right to ask him who, if not the President of the United States, would be in a position to stand up to the insurance industry. Dean, unfortunately for those of us drawn by the strength of his organizing and the clarity of his alternative vision, was left looking not for the first time like what he’s referred to rightly as “the Republican wing of the Democratic party.”
Josh Eidelson 