Hating Good Government

Liberal Opinion
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Week
Vol. 26 NO.5 February 4, 2015
Paul Krugman
Hating Good Government
It’s now official: 2014
was the warmest year on
record. You might expect
this to be a politically
important milestone. After
all, climate change deniers
have long used the blip of
1998 - an unusually hot year,
mainly due to an upwelling
of warm water in the Pacific
- to claim that the planet
has stopped warming. This
claim involves a complete
misunderstanding of how
one goes about identifying
underlying trends. (Hint:
Don’t cherry-pick your
observations.) But now
even that bogus argument
has collapsed. So will the
deniers now concede that
climate change is real?
Of course not. Evidence
doesn’t matter for the
“debate” over climate policy,
where I put scare quotes
around “debate” because,
given the obvious irrelevance of
logic and evidence, it’s not really
a debate in any normal sense. And
this situation is by no means unique.
Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think
of a major policy dispute where facts
actually do matter; it’s unshakable
dogma, across the board. And the
real question is why.
Before I get into that, let me
remind you of some other news that
won’t matter.
First, consider the Kansas
experiment. Back in 2012 Sam
Brownback, the state’s right-wing
governor, went all in on supply-side
economics: He drastically cut taxes,
assuring everyone that the resulting
boom would make up for the initial
loss in revenues. Unfortunately for
his constituents, his experiment
has been a resounding failure.
The economy of Kansas, far from
booming, has lagged the economies
of neighboring states, and Kansas
is now in fiscal crisis.
So will we see conservatives
scaling back their claims about
the magical efficacy of tax cuts as
a form of economic stimulus? Of
course not. If evidence mattered,
supply-side economics would have
faded into obscurity decades ago.
Instead, it has only strengthened its
grip on the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, the news on health
reform keeps coming in, and it
keeps being more favorable than
even the supporters expected. We
already knew that the number of
Americans without insurance is
dropping fast, even as the growth in
health care costs moderates. Now
we have evidence that the number
of Americans experiencing financial
distress due to medical expenses is
also dropping fast.
All this is utterly at odds with dire
predictions that reform would lead
to declining coverage and soaring
costs. So will we see any of the
people claiming that Obamacare is
doomed to utter failure revising their
position? You know the answer.
And the list goes on. On issues
that range from monetary policy to
the control of infectious disease, a
big chunk of America’s body politic
holds views that are completely
at odds with, and completely
unmovable by, actual experience.
And no matter the issue, it’s the
same chunk. If you’ve gotten
involved in any of these debates,
you know that these people aren’t
happy warriors; they’re red-faced
angry, with special rage directed
at know-it-alls who snootily point
out that the facts don’t support their
position.
immovable position in each
of these cases is bound up
with rejecting any role for
government that serves the
public interest. If you don’t
want the government to
impose controls or fees on
polluters, you want to deny
that there is any reason to
limit emissions. If you don’t
want the combination of
regulation, mandates and
subsidies that is needed
to extend coverage to the
uninsured, you want to deny
that expanding coverage is
even possible. And claims
about the magical powers
of tax cuts are often little
more than a mask for the
real agenda of crippling
government by starving it of
revenue.
And why this hatred
of government in the
public interest? Well, the
political scientist Corey
Robin argues that most selfproclaimed
conservatives
are
actually reactionaries. That is,
they’re defenders of traditional
hierarchy - the kind of hierarchy
that is threatened by any expansion
of government, even (or perhaps
especially) when that expansion
makes the lives of ordinary citizens
better and more secure. I’m partial
to that story, partly because it helps
explain why climate science and
health economics inspire so much
rage.
Whether this is the right
explanation or not, the fact is that
we’re living in a political era in
which facts don’t matter. This
doesn’t mean that those of us who
care about evidence should stop
seeking it out. But we should be
realistic in our expectations, and
not expect even the most decisive
evidence to make much difference.
The question, as I said at
the beginning, is why. Why the
dogmatism? Why the rage? And
why do these issues go together,
with the set of people insisting
that climate change is a hoax
pretty much the same as the set of
people insisting that any attempt at
providing universal health insurance c.2015 New York Times News Service
must lead to disaster and tyranny?
15-1-18
Well, it strikes me that the
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Frank Bruni
Cradle to Ivory Tower
Leaving aside all of the
other good arguments both for
and against it, I have one big
problem with the proposal for free
community college that President
Barack Obama recently outlined
and will surely describe anew in
his State of the Union address on
Tuesday night.
It’s awfully late in the game.
I don’t mean that he should
have moved on it earlier in his
presidency. I mean that our focus on
getting kids to and through higher
education cannot be separated
from, or supplant, our focus on
making sure that they’re prepared
for it. And we have a painfully
long way to go in that regard.
College is somehow tidier to
talk about; I talk about it quite a bit
myself. It’s an attractive subject
for several reasons. There’s a
particular mythology and romance
to college, a way in which it’s
synonymous with the passage into
adulthood and with a lofty altitude
of competence, knowledge and
intellectual refinement.
It’s totemic. And it comes
with handy metrics: specifically,
data showing that the acquisition
of a college degree translates
into various benefits over the
course of a lifetime, including
higher earnings. So we look to,
and lean on, college as a way to
increase social mobility and push
back against middle-class wage
stagnation.
That’s important context for not
only Obama’s frequent invocations
of college but also for a new report,
“Expectations and Reality,” by
America Achieves, a nonprofit
organization that does educational
research, policy development and
advocacy. I was given an advance
copy.
It demonstrates, for starters,
that while hope may spring eternal,
it springs in error where college
is concerned. Using a survey of
hundreds of parents and looking
at college graduation rates, the
report concludes that middle-class
parents who expect their kids to
finish four-year college degrees are
wrong more than half the time.
The same survey, conducted
by the Benenson Strategy Group
for America Achieves, revealed
some cold-eyed realism amid that
unwarranted optimism. More than
70 percent of parents expressed
the worry that their children’s
chances of achieving a middleclass lifestyle would be diminished
if their grade-school education
didn’t become more challenging.
They’re right. We need to raise
standards. That’s in fact what the
Common Core is ideally about,
and that’s why the education
secretary, Arne Duncan, under
Opinion
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harsh attack, remains wedded to
a certain amount of testing. High
standards without monitoring and
accountability are no standards at
all.
The goal is to lift children
from all income groups up - and to
maximize their chances of success
with higher education. Their failure
to complete higher education
isn’t just a function of financial
hardships and related stresses,
though those are primary reasons.
Academic readiness factors in.
Jon Schnur, the executive
chairman of America Achieves,
said that there’s a significant
difference in graduation rates
between students who need
remediation after they’ve enrolled
and those who don’t. The failures of
elementary, middle and secondary
schools shadow them.
Those failures persist, and
they’re demonstrated every three
years when PISA tests - which
compare 15-year-olds in countries
around the world - are done.
American kids tend to perform in
the middle of the heap.
The America Achieves report,
looking at PISA results from 2003
to 2012, which is when the tests
were last administered, had a bit
of good news. While American
kids from middle-class families
haven’t markedly improved their
international standing in math and
science over recent years, kids
from poorer families have done
precisely that.
Poverty may well make
educational advancement much
harder, but doesn’t prohibit it. If
we take the right steps - including
more aggressive recruitment and
rewarding of exemplary teachers
and the continued implementation
of higher standards - we can help
kids at every rung of the economic
ladder.
“All of these need to be backed
by funding,” Schnur, who has
advised the Obama administration
on education, told me. “There are
great examples of what works,
such as quality preschool and
early learning for low-income
children.”
In the State of the Union both last
year and the year before it, Obama
called for universal preschool
(to no avail). Some studies have
shown that disadvantaged children
start falling behind even before
that point.
The moral is this: Education is
a continuous concern and must be
a continuous investment, cradle to
Ivory Tower. If we don’t recognize
and act on that, our reality will
never meet our expectations.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
15-1-20
Reference Guide
Government
Government
Government
National
1 Krugman
2 Bruni
3 Marcus
4 Witcover
4 Carlson
5 Nocera
6 Crook
6 Greco
7 Kristof
8 Collins
8 Press
9 Egan
10 Witcover
10 Hunt
11 Dowd
12 Dionne
12 Waldman
13 Wilkinson
14 Robinson
14 Gadebusch
15 Collins
18 Estrich
18 Robinson
19 Marcus
20 Page
20 Witcover
21 Estrich
22 Meyerson
26 Blow
26 Pizzigati
27 Dvorak
28 Kristof
State of the Union
Republicans
16-17 Liberal
Delineations
Democrats
Obamacare
23 Young
Guantanamo
23 Nocera
International
Economy
Race
28 Blow
29 Lane
Youth
Middle East
30 Harrop
Boko Haram
30 Bruni
France
31 Lyons
24 Friedman
Religion
24 King
Relationships
25 Page
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Ruth Marcus
A Tale of Two Policies
This is a tale of two policies
promoted by President Obama: one
to make community college free,
the other to provide for paid sick
leave and parental leave. Both are
well-intentioned efforts to address
fundamental,
economic-based
inequities. Only one -- the leave policy
-- should be adopted.
It’s worth examining the two
proposals, not just because they are
important on their own, but because
they reflect a continuing tension
between the allure of programs that
provide a universal benefit and those
that are more targeted toward a specific
population in need.
The president’s community college
proposal sounds great. A high school
diploma alone no longer suffices;
the income gap between those with
a college degree and those without
is staggering. So why not expand the
K-12 entitlement through community
colleges, “essential pathways to the
middle class,” as Obama describes
them?
Well, because need-based Pell
Grants already make community
college basically free for poor and
working-class students. This year, the
grants cover up to $5,730 in college
costs, while the average community
college tuition runs about $3,800.
This is not to say that Obama’s plan
would provide no additional benefit
to Pell Grant recipients: Community
college tuition would be free, and
students could use their Pell Grants
to cover additional expenses, such as
textbooks and room and board.
Still, much of the daunting cost
-- in total, $60 billion over 10 years
-- would go to subsidize community
college for those who can already
afford it. This makes little sense in
a time of limited federal and state
resources. (The Obama plan would
require participating states to pick
up a quarter of the tab.) Instead,
policymakers should concentrate on
ensuring that students don’t just make
it to community college but end up
graduating.
The community college discussion
parallels the even more impassioned
debate over universal pre-K,
something Obama has previously
proposed. Early childhood education
is essential; it should be guaranteed.
But, again, does it make sense for the
government to pay for preschool for
the children of those who can afford
it, and are already footing the bill?
In the case of early childhood
education, the equities, and political
reality, may nonetheless tilt in favor
of universality. Attracting political
support for publicly funded pre-K,
and avoiding having the programs
become ghettoized services solely for
lower-income children, may require
the trade-off of subsidized preschool
for families that would otherwise pay
for it on their own.
Community
colleges,
by
comparison, already exist to serve
a general population; so does the
mechanism (Pell Grants) for ensuring
access. In this context, creating a
universal entitlement seems less
essential.
workers -- nearly four in 10 -- have
no paid sick days. You can guess who:
According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 84 percent of private-sector
employees with pay in the top quarter
are entitled to paid sick leave, compared
with 30 percent of those with pay in
the bottom quarter. In other words,
those who can least afford taking time
off for illness are least entitled to it.
The situation is similar in terms
of paid leave to care for a new child
or sick family member. The United
States is the only advanced economy
that does not guarantee maternity
leave. According to a report by the
White House Council of Economic
Advisers, “college-educated workers
are twice as likely to have access to
paid leave as workers without a high
By contrast with his community school degree (72 percent versus 35
college plan, Obama’s push for percent).”
paid sick days and family leave
makes sense, however dim its actual This situation is not just unfair prospects. They are the converse of the - it’s counterproductive. Workers with
community college proposal -- taking access to paid leave are healthier and
what is now effectively an upper- more productive. Mothers with paid
middle-class entitlement and making maternity leave are more likely to
it universal.
return to the workforce.
Currently, 43 million American Obama urged Congress to pass the
Healthy Families Act, which would
guarantee seven days of sick leave
annually; he proposed $2 billion to
encourage states to develop paid
family and medical leave programs.
Businesses argue that paid leave
would force them to cut jobs or reduce
wages. Yet evidence from states and
cities that have adopted paid sick
leave and family leave policies does
not support such claims.
Government’s job isn’t to distribute
ever-increasing benefits to all. Rather,
it’s to ensure that the distribution of
benefits and opportunities -- whether
a college education or time off to
care for a sick parent -- is as equal as
reasonably possible.
--------------------------------------------- Great news: Virginia Gov. Terry
McAuliffe has granted a conditional
pardon to Reginald “Neli” Latson, a
23-year-old man with autism and an
IQ of 69.Ê McAuliffe’s action will
allow Latson to get the treatment he
needs at a facility in Florida.
Ruth Marcus’ email address is
ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
(c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group
15-1-21
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Jules Witcover
‘Class War’ Themes Resurface In Party Rhetoric
There’s
something
eminently
straightforward about President Obama’s State
of the Union proposal to raise taxes on the richest
Americans and boost income for the middle
class. Robin Hood had the same idea, and the
Republican Party has endlessly declared it “class
warfare.”
In a way, the attempt reflects Obama’s hour of
distress in having to deal with a Congress in GOP
hands in both the House and Senate. He is striving
now to change the national conversation from the
stalled economy of the previous six years of his
presidency to the encouraging signs of job and
investment growth that are only now appearing.
His message is a retread of liberal Democratic
efforts to place income inequality on the front
burner of political debate that failed to gain
traction in November’s midterm congressional
elections. Aware that the Republican majorities
in each house of Congress will suffocate this
old baby in its crib, Obama will press on with
it to underscore the clinging GOP image of
obstructionism on Capitol Hill.
While both sides may offer gestures of
bipartisanship, the strengthened Republicans will
roll out legislative initiatives to demonstrate that
they mean to govern, and Obama will finally take
his veto pen out of mothballs to show the lame
duck is not yet irrelevant.
The likely outcome is a scrubbed-up resurrection
of the old debate over activist vs. caretaker
government. Obama and supportive Democrats
will continue trying to even the economic scales
through executive power, while the Republican
opposition cries abuse of it by a stymied chief
executive.
No matter how each wraps its package, the
stereotype of the Democratic Party will be one of
embracing government as an engine of social and
economic change, the champion of the little guy
and the working stiff. And the Republican Party,
the champion of Wall Street and big business,
will widely dismiss government as an intruder
into the marketplace.
If anything, the latest Obama proposals to
raise capital gains taxes and provide more
help to the middle class through such things as
free community college for qualified students
provides an easy target for the opposition party
in the argument waged since the birth of FDR’s
New Deal 80 years ago.
Its seeds can be traced back to the Gilded Age
of what Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican turned
Progressive, later called the “malefactors of great
wealth” in the industrial boom of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. The resultant emergence
of the organized labor movement hardened the
partisan lines through the Great Depression, and
they endured long afterward.
Through all that time, with the arguable
exception of the World War II years, class warfare
survived in the rhetoric of both parties. During
the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Republicans
seized on the anticommunism of the time to raise In 2008, Obama didn’t have to resort the
the banner.
that kind of hard class-warfare pitch to win
election, though it did surface in 2012 when the
But with the erosion of the labor movement’s conspicuously wealthy Mitt Romney invited
membership and political clout, and the the old debate by kissing off “the 47 percent of
revitalization of the Republican brand under Americans” on the public dole he said wouldn’t
Ronald Reagan, the Grand Old Party managed vote for him.
to soft-pedal the argument over class. Reagan Now, Obama is playing the class card in the
Democrats in industrial strongholds like Michigan cause of combatting the huge income inequality
crossed over in the party line in droves.
that now exists during a time of a stock-market
In the 1990s, Democrat Bill Clinton was boom. It will probably take much more than a
able to arrest that trend somewhat, but his vice State of the Union focus to achieve that particular
president, Al Gore, was accused in 2000 by his objective.
running mate, Joseph Lieberman, of losing their Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American
race against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,”
playing the class-warfare card. Lieberman later published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond
argued that the Democratic ticket lost because to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.
Gore campaigned on the slogan: “They’re for the (C) 2014 Tribune Content Agency, llc.
powerful, we’re for the people.”
15-1-21
Margaret Carlson
Comedian Ventures Where Obama
Won’t On Race
President Barack Obama’s sixth State of
the Union address turned out to be pretty much
as previewed in a series of strategic spoilers
doled out over the past few days: an interesting
but doomed populist manifesto of tax cuts for the
middle class, tax increases for those who collect
much of their income from investments, paid sick
leave and community college for all.
He was playing jazz, going off prompter,
riffing, flashing a smile at the idea that, at the
very least, Republicans will have to defend the
reality that Warren Buffet pays taxes at a lower
rate than his secretary.
One place the president didn’t venture was into
the darkness that has haunted the country for the
last year: How to resolve the conflict between
often largely white police forces and the urban
population they sometimes fail to protect, with
deadly consequences.
No topic got shorter shrift. We may have
different takes on the events of Ferguson,
Missouri, and New York, Obama said, but “surely
we can understand a father who fears his son
can’t walk home without being harassed.” Did he
mean shot? By the police?
“Surely we can understand the wife who won’t
rest until the police officer she married walks
through the front door at the end of his shift,” he
added. Of course, we can. Yet this equivalence is
something of an evasion. And that was the end of
it. Shouldn’t we expect more from Obama?
A study by Daniel Gillion, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania, found that Obama
talked about race less in his first two years of
office than any Democratic president since John
F. Kennedy. Tuesday night was no departure. His
remarks were consistent with his comments about
the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown
and Eric Garner, which boil down to: Don’t give
in to anger and violence; nothing is accomplished
by striking out, and understand that progress has
been made, which should give us hope that we
can make even more progress.
Obama’s demurral was all the more
striking as it coincided with the debut this week
of the late-night talk show hosted by the black
comedian Larry Wilmore. His “Nightly Show”
has taken over the coveted 11:30 p.m. time slot
-- immediately after Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show”
-- that was vacated by Stephen Colbert, who
replaced David Letterman at CBS.
Wilmore may do more to help us understand
black America than Obama will ever do. What
we know from his first broadcast on Martin
Luther King Day (“I have a job,” the comedian
intoned in a preacher’s voice) is that Wilmore
will go where Obama fears to tread. As the quietly
hilarious “senior black correspondent” on “The
Daily Show,” he had a light, penetrating touch.
He opened with what could have been a preview
of Obama’s speech the following night. Wilmore
said he wished he had the show a year ago:
“All the good bad race stuff happened already.
Seriously, there’s nothing left. We’re done.”
Just kidding. From there, it was a marathon
of jokes that highlighted uncomfortable truths.
He gets why Obama doesn’t dwell on race, but
doesn’t give him a pass.
In looking for the “perfect stereotype to bring
down the president,” he said Republicans harp on
“how much he likes basketball,” and call his 50th
birthday party a “hip-hop barbecue.” Wilmore
Carlson continued on page 5
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Joe Nocera
Don’t Blame NAFTA
On Wednesday, the day after
President Barack Obama’s State
of the Union address, a handful of
Democratic House members, along
with one senator, Bernie Sanders of
Vermont, held a news conference
to denounce one of the very few
proposals the president put forward
that actually has a chance of passage.
The objects of their displeasure were
the new trade agreements being
negotiated by the administration.
“Since I’ve been in Congress, I’ve
never seen a trade bill that in any
way benefited U.S. manufacturers
and workers,” said Rep. Louise
Slaughter, who has represented
the Rochester, New York, area for
28 years. She pointed to Kodak as
an example of a company harmed
by trade accords, especially the
landmark North American Free
Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Since
the deal involving the U.S., Canada
and Mexico went into effect in 1994,
Kodak’s Rochester workforce has
shrunk to 2,300 from 39,300.
“We are fighting for the future of
middle-class families,” said Rep.
Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.
“These trade deals make it much
easier for corporations to send
American jobs overseas.” Over the
past 20 years, Connecticut has lost
more than 96,000 manufacturing
jobs, she said, because of agreements
that failed to protect U.S. workers.
Sanders told the assembled media
that while he liked the president’s
speech, “he was wrong on one major
issue, and that is the Trans-Pacific
Partnership.” He added, “I do not
believe that continuing a set of bad
policies, policies that have failed,
makes any sense at all.”
Carlson continued from page 4
to waste, particularly when we still
struggle with the reality that some
citizens sometimes need protection
from the protectors. The closest
Obama ever came to taking this
on was his touching observation
that if he had a son, he would look
like Trayvon, the Florida teenager
slain in 2012 by the neighborhood
watchman George Zimmerman,
who was acquitted.
Obama finally has a cushion
to speak truth to power: His
disapproval rating is below 50
percent for the first time in two
years; 45 percent of Americans say
they’re satisfied with the economy,
the highest number in 11 years,
and his job-approval number is 46
percent, the highest since the 2013
government shutdown. Medical
costs are growing at the slowest
rate in 50 years, retirement benefits
are up, thanks to the booming stock
market; gas prices are way down.
The president deserved to take a
bow Tuesday night. But he should
have used the opportunity to remind
us that blacks still get killed by white
asked his guest, Sen. Cory Booker,
the former mayor of Newark, if he
still scares people.
“You look good in a suit, but are
you a hoodie away from being facedown on the street?”
A few minutes into the show,
Wilmore joked that the Oscar
nominations were “so white, a grand
jury has decided not to indict them”
and yearned for someone who could
help “Selma” get some respect.
Up popped a clip of Al Sharpton
doing just that. “Sharpton? Again?
I mean no one else can represent?”
Wilmore said. “Slow down, man.
You don’t have to respond to every
black emergency. You’re not black
Batman.”
On Sharpton’s new muchslighter girth, “you’re literally
stretching yourself thin,” Wilmore
said. “Al, you need to eat food, not
just airtime.”
Sure, Obama can’t go there, but
he could do better. Being the first
black president is a terrible thing
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
is a trade agreement being negotiated
among 12 countries, including Japan,
Canada, Vietnam, Mexico, Australia
and Peru; the countries involved in
the negotiations represent nearly
40 percent of global gross domestic
product. It is as complex as it is
ambitious.
Yet, while the Republican
leadership has vowed to work
with Obama on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (as well as on another
deal being negotiated with the
European Union), the Democrats
have been vocal in their opposition.
In the short term, they don’t want
to give the president so-called fasttrack authority, which would allow
the administration to negotiate
the deal and then hand Congress a
finalized agreement that it could
only vote up or down, with no
amendments. (Fast-track procedures
have been used to conclude 14 trade
agreements since 1974.)
You’d need a heart of stone not
to be sympathetic to the concerns
of the Democrats. Over the past two
decades, lots of manufacturing jobs
have vanished in the United States,
inflicting a great deal of pain on
workers. During those same 20 years,
NAFTA has been in force. Linking
those job losses to the existence of
NAFTA is a leap the Democrats and progressives in general - have
made.
The question that needs to be
asked, however, is whether that
link is justified. “I am skeptical of
definitive judgments on NAFTA,”
said Edward Alden, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“We started offshoring television
assembly in the 1960s” - decades
before NAFTA. Yes, many assembly
plants have been built in Mexico
since NAFTA went into effect.
But China, where millions more
manufacturing jobs have migrated and with which we have a huge trade
deficit - doesn’t even have a trade
agreement with the United States.
Edward Gresser, the executive
director of Progressive Economy,
policemen, who aren’t indicted for
it. Instead, he served up his message
of economic populism: A rising tide
lifts all boats, white and black.
After Obama hugged the hall
and Sen. Joni Ernst, the newly
elected veteran, mom and bacon
enthusiast from Iowa, delivered the
Republican response, it was time
for Wilmore again. He devoted his
second show to Bill Cosby and the
tsunami of accusations of sexual
assault, a subject almost as fraught
with anguish as watching Eric
Garner gasping “I can’t breathe.”
Wilmore dispensed with the
court of law in favor of “the court
of common sense.”
“I’m sorry, he’s guilty,” he said.
“We don’t have to turn off our
brains.” He invited Cosby to come
on his show.
Imagine Obama going there.
There’s always his next State of the
Union. But don’t hold your breath.
Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg
View columnist
(c) 2015, Bloomberg News
15-1-21
a left-leaning think tank, noted
that other factors were taking
place at the same time as NAFTA:
the growth of container ships, the
lowering cost of communications,
the rise of global industries. With or
without trade deals, globalization is
an unstoppable force. What NAFTA
really is, Gresser told me, is a proxy
for globalization.
One mistake the NAFTA
negotiators made more than two
decades ago was taking worker
rights and environmental protections
out of the agreement itself and
putting them into a side letter. They
were never effectively enforced.
Those negotiating the Trans-Pacific
Partnership expect to rectify that
error this go-round. They are also
aiming to pry open the Japanese
auto and agricultural markets to U.S.
producers and include protections
for a free and open Internet. It has,
in other words, a lot more potential
to do good than harm.
When I spoke to Slaughter
on Thursday afternoon, she was
still riled up. “These crazy trade
agreements,” she called them at one
point. She added, “Rochester really
suffered.”
She told me about all the jobs lost
at Kodak. “I think NAFTA brought
down Kodak,” she said. But of course
it didn’t. Kodak’s problems came
about because digital photography
made film unnecessary and Kodak
didn’t shift course in time. She was
blaming NAFTA for Kodak’s selfinflicted wounds.
But then her tone brightened. She
told me about all the new companies
- 55 in all, she said - that had taken
space in the old Kodak buildings.
Some were even run by former
Kodak engineers.
Which, of course, is precisely the
way globalization is supposed to
work.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
15-1-23
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Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Clive Crook
Obama’s Pitch On Tax Reform Is A Missed Opportunity
Many of the tax proposals in the White
House plan released this week make good sense
-- and you don’t need to be a liberal to think
so. President Barack Obama could easily have
pitched them in a way that appealed to fiscal
conservatives. He pitched them, instead, in a
way that can only have been calculated to offend
the opposition.
Since Republicans now control both chambers
of Congress, you’re forced to conclude that he
either doesn’t care whether his ideas get taken
up or actually wants to see them fail.
The single best idea in Obama’s plan is the
proposal to bring unrealized capital gains more
fully into the tax base. Under current law, vast
fortunes comprising unrealized capital gains can
escape income tax altogether. That’s because
heirs benefit from “step-up basis” relief.
Take a moment to understand just how absurd
this idea is. Under any plausible definition,
unrealized capital gains are “income.” Since
we tax income, the question is not whether
unrealized capital gains should be taxed but
when and how. No question of principle arises;
it’s a practical matter. The simplest way would
be to treat the gains as realized on the death of
the owner.
This isn’t what happens. Suppose your
father has stocks worth a billion dollars,
acquired decades earlier for a fraction of their
current value. If he sells them before he dies, the
gains will face capital-gains tax, and you and his
other heirs stand to inherit the net proceeds. If
he doesn’t sell them, the assets are passed down
with the value stepped up to the current price.
(The estate tax would then apply in either case.)
Hey presto: For income-tax purposes, gains
accumulated over the years simply disappear.
This indefensible provision is not just
enormously unfair, it’s also enormously
inefficient -- because other kinds of income, such
as wages, must be taxed more heavily to make up
the difference. The step-up rule, according to the
White House, shrinks the tax base by hundreds
of billions of dollars each year. That forgone
revenue could buy a lot of income-tax reduction
for ordinary wage-earners. It could and should
be used to make feasible a comprehensive, progrowth simplification of the entire tax code.
At any rate, progressives and conservatives
ought to be able to agree on closing the so-called
angel of death loophole. Obama chose to make
that hard if not impossible, by embedding the
idea in a broader and stridently partisan tax-andspend agenda.
To be sure, other parts of the president’s tax
plan also make sense -- doing more to help
ordinary wage-earners save for retirement,
for instance. But he hasn’t proposed anything
approaching a comprehensive tax reform; taken
together, his proposals would further complicate
an insanely complex tax code; and, above all,
the packaging was gratuitously offensive to the
new Congress. Its basic theme is about righting
the wrongs of the capitalist system, raiding
the undeserving rich, and financing a big new
program of public investment.
agreement.
Obama’s pitch on capital-gains tax deliberately
taints a good idea, and diminishes the prospects
for a broader reform package. Thanks for
nothing, Mr. President.
Putting the merits of this worldview to Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist
one side, you could understand the president’s and a member of the Bloomberg View editorial
approach if Democrats controlled Congress. Has board.
it escaped Obama’s attention that they don’t? (c) 2015, Bloomberg News
If anything is to be achieved during the next 15-1-21
two years, it will have to command Republican
Emily Schwartz Greco
Obama Tips His Hat To FDR
Whatever happens over the next two years,
you can bet that 22nd century school children will
know more about President Barack Obama than
kids learn today about, say, Calvin Coolidge. He
made history just by being the first non-white
man to occupy the White House.
What else will tomorrow’s kids learn about
Obama?
Sure, the Affordable Care Act has delivered
health coverage to millions of Americans
who needed it, shrinking the uninsured rate to
less than 13 percent. Yet that law didn’t heal
enough of what ails the nation’s health care
system. Compared with Social Security, one of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest
achievements, it’s no big deal.
The ACA’s shortcomings are symptomatic
of the first six years of Obama’s presidency.
He doled out one concession after another to
ungrateful Republican lawmakers.
Then the drubbing Democrats took in
November’s midterm elections knocked some
sense into him. Or he realized that he had
nothing to lose. Or maybe he traveled in a time
machine.
For now, Obama is channeling his inner FDR.
What would FDR say about today’s growing
inequality and stagnant wages? Something like
this:
“The test of our progress is not whether we
add more to the abundance of those who have
much,” Roosevelt declared during his second
inaugural address. “It is whether we provide
enough for those who have too little.”
Sound familiar? Obama echoed that sentiment
in his State of the Union address when he
asked:
“Will we accept an economy where only a few
of us do spectacularly well, or will we commit
ourselves to an economy that generates rising
incomes and chances for everyone who makes
the effort?”
As FDR declared in 1937: “Government is
competent when all who compose it work as
trustees for the whole people.”
Obama’s says this more conversationally:
“This country does best when everyone gets
their fair shot, everyone does their fair share,
and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
With his bundle of proposed tax tweaks
slated to raise an estimated $320 billion in
revenue and bring relief to millions of exhausted
American families, Obama’s “middle class
economics” is forcing GOP lawmakers into an
awkward corner.
Take Mitt Romney. He derided the public’s
growing concern about inequality as “envy”
and “class warfare” during his losing 2012
presidential campaign.
Now that he’s mulling another White House
bid, Romney sounds different.
“Under President Obama, the rich have gotten
richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and
there are more people in poverty in American
than ever before,” the once and future candidate
declared at a recent Republican gathering in San
Diego.
It will take more than mouthing the word
“inequality” to rebrand Mr. 47 percent.
Meanwhile, ponder FDR’s words: “In our
personal ambitions we are individualists. But in
our seeking for economic and political progress
as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down,
as one people.”
And another thing Obama just said:
“Will we allow ourselves to be sorted into
factions and turned against one another — or
will we recapture the sense of common purpose
that has always propelled America forward?”
As a progressive, I’m still disappointed. I can’t
stomach Obama’s addiction to drones, domestic
snooping, and crummy trade deals. I wish he’d
spoken more directly about enacting stronger
gun laws and locking up fewer Americans — and uttered the word “racism.”
As an environmentalist, I appreciate his tough
climate talk. But I wish he’d fall out of love with
fracking and start opposing the construction of
new nuclear reactors.
Yet most modern progressives revere
Roosevelt despite the creation of nuclear bombs
and the internment of Japanese Americans on
his watch.
And instead of being remembered for being
Greco continued on page 7
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Nicholas Kristof
Reagan, Obama, and Inequality
Since the end of the 1970s,
something has gone profoundly
wrong in America.
Inequality has soared. Educational
progress slowed. Incarceration rates
quintupled. Family breakdown
accelerated. Median household
income stagnated.
“It’s morning again in America”
- that was a campaign slogan by
President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
But, in retrospect, the average
American has been stuck since the
Reagan era in a predawn darkness
of stagnation and inequality, and we
still haven’t shaken it off, particularly
since 2000. Inequality has increased
further under President Barack
Obama.
That’s the context for Obama’s
call, in his State of the Union address,
for greater economic fairness. But
first, the caveats. His proposals
are dead on arrival in Congress.
They won’t be implemented and
probably won’t change the public’s
thinking: Research by George C.
Edwards, a political scientist, finds
that presidential speeches rarely
persuade the public much.
Remember the 2014 State of the
Union address? Of course not. Of
18 proposals in it, there was action
on two, according to PBS. Or
Obama’s passionate call in his 2013
State of the Union for measures to
reduce gun violence? Nothing much
resulted, and the word “guns” didn’t
even pass his lips this time.
Yet the bully pulpit still can shape
the national agenda and nag at the
American conscience. I don’t fully
agree with Obama’s solutions - how
could he skip over early-childhood
interventions?! - but he’s exactly
right in the way he framed the
Greco continued from page 6
the first president in a wheelchair,
FDR is that guy who left the
Depression in the dust.
That’s why it’s good to see that
after years of riling his base instead
of rallying it, Obama is rising
above Washington’s gridlock.
He has nothing to fear except…
well, you know.
Columnist Emily Schwartz
Greco is the managing editor of
OtherWords, a non-profit national
editorial service run by the
Institute for Policy Studies.
OtherWords.org.
15-1-21
inequality issue: “Will we accept an
economy where only a few of us do
spectacularly well?”
Some background. Even with
the global Great Depression, the
United States performed brilliantly
in the first three-quarters of the 20th
century, with incomes and education
mostly rising and inequality flat or
falling - and gains were broadly
shared by poor and rich alike. High
school graduation rates surged, GI’s
went to college, and the United
States led the world in educational
attainment.
And, in part of this remarkable
era, the top federal income tax rate
exceeded 90 percent. Republicans
might remember that point when
they warn that Obama’s proposals
for modestly higher taxes would
savage the American economy.
Then, for average Americans,
the roof fell in around the end of
the 1970s. The ‘70s were “the end
of normal,” the economist James K.
Galbraith argues in a new book of
that title. Afterward, the economy
continued to grow overall, but the
spoils went to the wealthy and the
bottom 90 percent barely benefited.
Median household income is little
greater today than it was in 1979.
Today, the typical family in Canada
appears better off than the typical
American family.
By some measures, education
- our seed corn for the future - has
pretty much stalled. More young
American men today have less
education than their parents (29
percent) than have more education
(20 percent). Among industrialized
countries as a whole, 70 percent of
3-year-olds go to preschool; in the
United States, 38 percent do.
agenda is mostly for show, expansion
of preschool could actually occur at
least at the state level.
Obama rightly heralded the fall in
teenage pregnancy rates. But he had
little to do with it (although the MTV
show “16 and Pregnant” played
a role!), and about 30 percent of
American girls still get pregnant by
age 19. Making reliable birth control
available to at-risk teenagers would
help them, reduce abortion rates and
even pay for itself in reduced social
spending later.
In America, we have subsidized
private jets, big banks and hedge
fund managers. Wouldn’t it make
more sense to subsidize kids? So if
higher capital gains taxes can pay
for better education, infrastructure
and jobs, of course that trade-off is
worthwhile.
Congressional Republicans seem
focused on a pipeline that isn’t even
economically viable at today’s oil
prices. Let’s hope that the national
agenda can broaden along the lines
that Obama suggests, so that the
last 35 years become an aberration
rather than a bellwether.
Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/
Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or
by mail at The New York Times, 620
Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.
I wonder if the celebration of
unfettered capitalism and “greed is
good” since the Reagan era didn’t
help shape social mores in ways that
accelerated inequality.
In any case, Reagan was right on
one point - “the best social program
is a productive job” - and Obama
offered sound proposals to increase
incentives for work. Better childcare and sick-leave policies would
also make work more feasible. The
United States is the only country
among the 34 in the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and
Development that provides no paid
maternity leave.
Oddly, Obama didn’t push earlychildhood initiatives, focused on kids
from newborns to 5 years old, that
have a particularly strong evidence
base for creating opportunity.
Early-education initiatives poll
well, and some of the leaders in c.2015 New York Times News Service
programming have been red states 15-1-21
like Oklahoma. So while the Obama
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Gail Collins
Where The Road Meets The Walrus
Let’s raise the gas tax.
There are several reasons we need to discuss
this now. One is that plummeting gasoline prices
make the idea very timely. Also, people will
be asking you this week what you thought of
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union
address. Even though he did not mention the gas
tax, bringing it up will allow you to avoid having
an opinion on whether it’s time to close the capital
gains stepped-up-basis loophole.
The gas tax raises much-needed money for
roads and mass transit. Our roads, you may have
noticed, are falling apart. Every time you hit a
pothole, yell: “Raise the gas tax!”
Even more important, it encourages Americans
to use fuel-efficient cars. While we’re all happy
as clams about falling gas prices, every gallon
produces more than 19 pounds of planet-warming
emissions. We just had the hottest year on record.
The ice floes are melting. Walruses keep piling
up along the Alaskan shore, where the babies can
get squashed.
Raise the gas tax and remember the walruses.
Plus, it’s not really a tax! Or at least not
necessarily. Just ask Ronald Reagan. When he
entered office, Reagan said he didn’t see the
likelihood of a gas tax increase “unless there’s a
palace coup.” But then, you know, stuff happened
and The Great Communicator discovered that a
levy on gasoline wasn’t really a tax but merely
a “user fee.” So no problem at all, and under
his administration the, um, fee was more than
doubled.
Ah, Ronald Reagan. Perhaps you noticed,
during the State of the Union, that Obama was
urging Congress to bring the capital gains tax back
up to Reagan-era levels? Who’d have thought?
We live in ironic times, people.
But about the gas tax. It was also raised under
George H.W. (The Good One) Bush, and then
again under Bill Clinton. Remember Al Gore
breaking the tie in the Senate? Ah, Al Gore.
And that was it. The federal gas tax, currently
18.4 cents a gallon, is not indexed for inflation,
and it has not gone up since 1993. The Highway
Trust Fund, which pays for the federal highway
construction program, keeps falling deeper into
the red. It’s scheduled to implode sometime this
spring.
The White House has been very clear about its
lack of enthusiasm for solving the problem with
a gas tax increase. Mainly, the objection is that
if Congress wouldn’t pass Obama’s proposal to
pay for early education with a tobacco tax, it’s
not going to fund road repair with a gas tax. This
is a pretty good point. However, deeply cynical
souls could also argue that the current majority
likes road construction more than preschool.
During the State of the Union, Obama made
his pitch for another idea: reform the tax on
overseas business profits, creating a one-timeonly windfall of revenue for the government to
use in a mega-road-building spree.
Three reasons the gas tax is a better idea:
1) Walruses.
2) Half the members of Congress are eyeing
that very same windfall to pay for their own pet
programs.
3) Only works once. “It’s just a coward’s way
out,” says Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Genuine
fiscal conservatives hate the idea of paying for
permanent ongoing programs with one-shot
revenues. Corker has been known to complain that
he’s been in the Senate for eight years and never
saw Congress permanently solve a problem.
Last year Corker and Sen. Chris Murphy, DConn., floated the idea of raising the gas tax 12
cents over two years. “Our bet when we went out
on a limb last year was that we could position it
as a topic for serious discussion this year, and I
hope it’s going to pay off,” Murphy said.
And it’s working, sort of. A number of prominent
Republicans have been muttering things like
“nothing is off the table.” Sen. James Inhofe,
R-Okla., the new chairman of the Environment
and Public Works Committee, and a man whose
position on global warming makes him an enemy
to walruses everywhere, has said a gas tax is “one
of the options.” An option that is not off the table!
Truly, the worm has turned.
On the other hand, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.,
the new chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee, recently announced: “We won’t pass
a gas tax.” That would seem to be somewhat
discouraging, but there are still these gleams of
hope that Republicans might come around since:
- You can call it a user fee. (Ask Reagan)
- Obama doesn’t like it.
- Compromise is possible. Many conservatives
hate the fact that the Highway Trust Fund also
helps support mass transit and invests in things
like highway beautification and bike paths. There
might be some room for give here. Let’s throw
something in the fund under the proverbial bus. I
nominate “transportation museums.”
Walrus seconds the motion.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
15-1-21
Bill Press
Obama Establishes Middle-Class
Agenda For 2016
Poor President Obama. Did you catch his
State of the Union address? How embarrassing.
Somebody forgot to tell him he’s a lame duck.
Instead of doing what everybody expected
him to do, instead of appearing with his tail
between his legs, acknowledging how badly
Democrats got crushed in the midterm elections,
and congratulating new Senate leader Mitch
McConnell, Obama acted like he owned the
place, which, in many respects, he still does.
Showing more backbone than we’ve seen
in the last six years, Obama’s cocky, unspoken
message to congressional Republicans was: I’m
still president of the United States. You can’t get
anything done without me. So we might as well
work together. Here’s what our priorities should
be. Now, stop playing silly political games and
get to work.
With that, President Obama gave his best State
of the Union speech to date and, by far, the most
populist. Indeed, if you missed the speech, you
missed an historic event: Barack Obama came out
of the closet -- as a progressive! During most of it,
if you closed your eyes, you might have thought
it was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren giving
the speech.
Having clawed our way out of the recession,
Obama argued, we are once again on solid
ground. The economy is strong. We are now
free “to write our own future.” And we should
do that based on a whole new set of priorities:
Over the last six years, the top 1 percent has done
very well. Now it’s time to help the 99 percent
-- according to what the president, coining a new
phrase for income inequality, calls “middle-class
economics.”
Just look at what he proposed as the agenda
for the next two years in order to boost the middle
class: two free years of community college for
every high school graduate; six weeks of paid
maternity leave and seven days of paid sick leave
for every American worker; raising the minimum
wage; paying women as much as men for the
same job; expanding early childhood education;
creating thousands of jobs by rebuilding America’s
infrastructure; and raising taxes on the 1 percent
in order to give the 99 percent a big tax cut.
At the same time, President Obama reaffirmed
his commitment to close Gitmo, renewed his call
on Congress to end the embargo against Cuba, and
actually asked Congress for a new authorization
of force agreement for the war against ISIS. He
closed with a strong pitch for action on global
warming, expressing the hope that “this year,
the world will finally reach an agreement to
protect the one planet we’ve got.” If that’s not a
progressive agenda, I don’t know what is.
Immediately, naysayers dumped on the
president’s plan, pointing out how unlikely it was
that any of his proposals would win the support
of the 114th Congress, which happens to be true.
Congressional Republicans are so out of touch
with the real world they continue to oppose
raising the minimum wage, which is supported
Press continued on page 9
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Timothy Egan
It’s How You Finish
As the world contemplates the
deflated football scandal in Boston
- ballghazi - please allow me one
last moment of undiluted sports
delirium. I live in Seattle, where, at
least for a while, the sky is always
blue, trees are blossoming early,
all children are not only above
average but get into the college
of their choice, free. We are a city
transfixed, rhapsodically floating,
after the most are-you-kidding-me
experience my hometown has ever
been through.
To recap: With a little more than
three minutes to go in last Sunday’s
NFC championship game, the
Seattle Seahawks were trailing
Green Bay 19 to 7. At that point,
according to the odds crunchers,
the team had a 1 percent chance of
winning - 1 percent!
The Seahawks promptly scored
two touchdowns in 44 seconds.
They recovered an onside kick,
converted a two-point Hail Mary,
won the coin toss to get the ball
first in overtime, and scored to put
them in the Super Bowl.
Sports metaphors crowd the
language of politics, usually for
the worse. John McCain’s pick of
an uninformed demagogue, Sarah
Press continued from page 8
by 73 percent of Americans in the
latest Pew Research Center poll,
or Obama’s plan to offer two free
years of community college -- with
a 60 percent approval rating in last
week’s Huffington Post survey.
Palin, was supposed to be a “game
changer.” Desperate campaigns
look for a “knockout punch,” or
make a “swing for the fences.”
My favorite is President Barack
Obama’s description of Joe Biden’s
endorsement of gay marriage ahead
of his boss - he “got out a little bit
over his skis.”
But back to the miracle finish last
Sunday, and the lesson beyond pro
football: It’s not about the miracle,
it’s about the finish. Obama has
been sleepwalking through the
middle part of his presidency. The
brutal midterm electoral crushing,
with Republicans gaining their
largest House majority since
Herbert Hoover, slapped him from
his stupor.
No longer does he care about
pleasing the insiders, or playing nice
with the opposition, or conforming
to the expectations of a lame duck.
He said it’s the fourth quarter of
his presidency, “and I’m going to
play offense.” He’s decided to be
Russell Wilson after throwing four
interceptions.
Many have written him off.
The reliably dyspeptic Charles
Krauthammer said the epitaph of
recognize that. In his remarks to the
RNC last weekend, Mitt Romney
lamented: “The rich have gotten
richer, income inequality has gotten
worse, and there are more people
in poverty than ever before.” And
Jeb Bush said the purpose of his
new PAC was “to support leaders,
ideas and policies that will expand
opportunity and prosperity for all
Americans.”
Thanks to President Obama,
from now through 2016, the new
question is: Who do you stand with
-- the 1 percent or the 99 percent?
That’s a tough question for most
Republicans to answer.
Bill Press is host of a nationallysyndicated radio show, the host of
“Full Court Press” on Current TV
and the author of a new book, “The
Obama Hate Machine,” which is
available in bookstores now. You
can hear “The Bill Press Show” at
his website: billpressshow.com. His
email address is: bill@billpress.
com.
But focusing on dim prospects
in Congress, no matter how true,
misses the point. President Obama
was doing something much more
meaningful than just putting a set
of proposals before this hostile
Congress. He was laying out a bold
populist agenda that will dominate
political debate for the next few
years -- all the way through the 2016
elections and beyond. He set out to
change the political landscape. And
he’s already done so.
Overnight,
fretting
over
the Keystone Pipeline, Mitch
McConnell’s pet issue, seems
trivial by comparison. Nobody’s
talking about that anymore.
President Obama has raised the
stakes. The new issue is middleclass economics. Even leading (c) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Republicans outside of Washington 15-1-22
the Obama presidency would be:
“He couldn’t govern, but he sure
knew how to campaign.” And yes,
little of what Obama proposed in
his State of the Union address will
find its way out of the dead zone
of Congress. Just 5 percent of his
2013 proposals became law - and
that was before Republicans gained
the Senate.
The president’s proposals “are
so out of touch you have to ask if
there’s any point to the speech,”
said Reince Priebus, chairman of the
Republican National Committee.
But if you look beyond capital
gasbags, and consider the big ideas
in Obama’s speech, you can see the
inevitability of his philosophy. His
proposals - raising the minimum
wage, paid maternity leave, making
college more affordable and the
tax system more fair - are popular
across the political divide. They’re
mainstream anywhere but the
fundraisers Reince Priebus presides
over.
him to Hitler. But it did not escape
notice that his motorcade passed a
Shell station selling regular gasoline
for $1.77 a gallon.
To the west, in the eastern
Washington district of Rep.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers, people
represented by this robotically
doctrinaire leader of the Republican
House have signed up for
Obamacare coverage at a rate far
beyond the national average.
To the east, Gov. John Kasich
of Ohio told a group of Montana
Republicans last week that they
would be crazy not to embrace
the president’s program of health
coverage for the poor. “I gotta tell
you, turning down your money back
to Montana on an ideological basis,
when people can lose their lives
because they get no help, doesn’t
make a lot of sense to me,” he said,
in remarks reported by the Great
Falls Tribune.
Nearly every proposal in the State
of the Union address polls with
majority approval, nationwide. The
great issue of the early 21st century
is how to elevate a stagnant middle
class. When 80 people hold the same
amount of wealth as 3.6 billion of
the world’s poorest, that equation
of inequality can catch the attention
of even the most heartless.
So, to the end game, in Idaho,
Kansas and beyond. “It’s amazing
what you can bounce back from
when you have to,” Obama said
last week. He was quoting from a
Minneapolis woman, invited to the
speech, but it sounded like a motto
for his last two years in office.
The president is playing for a
legacy. He won’t get much of it this
year, or even next. But eventually, if
Obama’s finish matches the flourish
of the last two months, the United
States will resemble the country
he envisioned Tuesday night. Long
odds make for better endings.
Obama has changed health care
in a country that lags far behind the
rest of the world in access. He’s
overseen an economic recovery
that defied all the apocalyptic
predictions of his enemies, and
would be the envy of any European
country - let alone one governed
by Mitt Romney, who’d be taking
a victory lap with the kind of
numbers Obama has generated on
his watch.
Consider Idaho, arguably the
reddest state in the union, where
Republicans control everything but
a handful of latte stands. After much
bluster and protest, Idaho politicians
caved and set up a state health care
exchange under Obamacare. To the
surprise of the experts, Idahoans
have embraced the private coverage
available under the Affordable Care
Act - “one of the most successful
enrollments of any state,” as Kaiser
Health News reported.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
Obama was in Boise on 15-1-24
Wednesday, speaking to a crowd of
more than 6,000 people at an event
Online Subscription
where all tickets were gone within
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an hour. “Now there are 10 black
people in Idaho” was one of the
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The president was fully energized,
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jocular, primed for a strong finish.
A handful of protesters held up the
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10
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Jules Witcover
Obama Faces Reality
Perhaps six years too late, President
Obama gave strong indications in his State of
the Union address that he’s finally bought into
Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the
same thing over and over against and expecting
different results.
Putting aside any optimism that the Republicans
in Congress would somehow be afflicted with
sweet reasonableness now that they hold the
majority in both houses, he has signaled that in
his last two years in office he will more fully
embrace the liberal Democratic agenda.
While this attitude will almost certainly
guarantee more head-knocking legislative
stalemate, it will have the virtue of restoring
much of the good will within his own party that
put him in the Oval Office in the first place in
2009.
Rhetorically, Obama did continue to pay lip
service to conciliation and compromise, but
the opportunities for such are narrow and small
bore. Wisely, he tiptoed by his major proposal to
dig into the deep pockets of the rich to bring a
modicum of income equality to the middle class.
The Republican response to his speech, given
by freshman Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, meanwhile,
offered construction of the Keystone oil pipeline
that Obama has pledged to veto, along with the
old turkey of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Nothing much different there either.
Although the State of the Union address has
been cemented as an annual report to Congress
and the American people beyond, this one
essentially was made to the recently lukewarm
Democratic faithful, with Obama accentuating
the newly emerging positives about the state of
the economy.
More than anything heard on either side of the
aisle in the House chamber was the thunderous
silence among the stone-faced Republicans, as
they listened to the Democratic president reciting
the rise in employment and the stock market,
countering their disbelief.
On the Democratic side, no legislator was more
visibly enthusiastic and supportive of Obama’s
recitation than freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts, who stood and zestfully applauded
as she heard her own populist advocacy coming
from his lips. Many of the faithful obviously wish
she would run to succeed him, but she insists she
is not ... not just now anyway.
In focusing heavily on the economy that, after
six years, seems to be emerging from the Great
Recession, Obama told Congress and the country
that “the shadow of crisis has passed.” But if so,
the claim can be applied only to the domestic
arena.
His boast that he had ended the two “long and
costly wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq required
turning a blind eye to the thousands of American
forces left in those places, and to the additional
forces being sent to deal with as the new terrorist
threat of the Islamic State. The ferocity and
territorial gains of that terrorist group challenge
Obama’s insistence that there will be no more
U.S. combat boots on the ground in the Middle
East.
choir that lustily greeted his assessment of what
needs to be done in his two lame duck years.
While as he noted, he has run his last presidential
race, how he fares in the time left to him in the
Oval Office may well determine whether the
Democratic banner will be worth carrying into the
2016 campaign, regardless of who is its standardbearer. So in that sense, he is still campaigning,
but for his party as well as for his own political
legacy.
Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American
Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,”
published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond
to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.
While the public may well share the president’s
yearning to get America off a permanent wartime
footing, the resolve in Congress to stand up to
terrorism remains strong and bipartisan. So the
chances are good that one area of cooperation
should be Obama’s call for a new authorization
of use of military force to continue his current
efforts against the old and new threats in the
Middle East.
But in sum, the president has used his latest (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, llc.
State of the Union speech principally as a pep talk 15-1-23
and assurance of allegiance to the Democratic
Albert Hunt
Here Come The ‘Class Warfare’
Attacks On Obama
Sen. Orrin Hatch is correct: Washington
is engaged in class warfare and a battle over
redistribution of income. The Utah Republican
just has the details backwards.
Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee, leveled the “class warfare” charge in
describing President Barack Obama’s proposed
tax hikes on wealthy Americans, which the White
House says would generate $320 billion over 10
years to pay for middle class tax cuts and other
benefits. In the past, charges of “class warfare”
and “punishing success” have helped to thwart
quasi-populist initiatives.
It’s highly unlikely that a Republican Congress
will enact much, or perhaps any, of the economic
initiatives Obama announced in his State of the
Union address last night. But this debate with
Republicans will extend through the 2016 election,
and Obama clearly holds the upper hand: Many
Americans sense that the middle class is being
left behind while the rich get richer.
It’s a long-term trend. Former Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers this week noted
that if the U.S. had the same income distribution
today that it had in 1979, the bottom 80 percent of
income earners would have $1 trillion -- $11,000
per family -- more. The top 1 percent, meanwhile,
would have $1 trillion -- $750,000 per family -less.
Many Americans understand, and resent, the
redistribution from the middle class to upperincome earners. Polls show strong support for
higher taxes on the wealthy.
Obama’s proposals deserve scrutiny, but
Republican attacks have a hollow ring. As
Obama noted, increasing the top rate on capital
gains and some dividends from 23.8 percent to
28 percent would take it to the same level applied
when President Ronald Reagan left office. (What
Obama didn’t say is that, under Reagan, middleclass tax cuts were financed by higher corporate
taxes.)
A stronger economy today enables Obama
to make a better case for what he describes as
“middle-class economics.” With his proposals,
Obama also set the political table for Hillary
Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential
nominee in 2016.
The rise of inequality, and Obama’s new focus
on it, poses difficult challenges for Republicans.
But Republicans from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio
to former presidential nominee Mitt Romney are
talking about addressing poverty in America.
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Paul
Ryan could be a central figure in any legislative
effort to address it. In any case, Republicans
certainly won’t cede “middle class economics” to
Obama and the Democrats. But that will make it
harder for them to keep trotting out the familiar
“class warfare” charge.
Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg columnist.
(c) 2015, Bloomberg News
15-1-21
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11
Maureen Dowd
Running For Daylight (Obama, Not Brady)
The talk up in Boston is all about
deflation while the talk down here is
all about inflation.
Our sleek, techie president, whose
battery dies faster than an iPhone’s,
was fully charged Tuesday night for
the State of the Union.
He was so puffed up, with such
a bristling sense of self, that it was
hard to believe this was the same
guy who spent the last year clenched
like a fist, beset by Islamic State
beheadings and Ebola, shunned by
his own party and slammed by the
other party in the fall election.
The murmur went up from grateful
Democrats gathered at the Capitol:
“Wow, he’s got a pulse.”
Proving once again that he is a
different kind of cat, Barack Obama
is oddly pumped by his party’s
defeat. Even in the House chamber,
surrounded by hundreds of people
and watched by millions, he seemed
to delight in his detachment as he
laid down his own markers to drive
up his own numbers.
He doesn’t mind splendid
isolation. He really thinks it’s
splendid. He’s free to revert to
being the consummate outsider who
doesn’t see himself in the context of
a system.
He likes the game better when
he’s up against an opposing team.
To him, Harry Reid was as big a
problem as Mitch McConnell.
Now it’s easier for him to see
who he is and where he stands visà-vis the Republicans because he
doesn’t have to make intellectual
compromises or negotiate the jagged
shoals of the old-school Democratic
Party. Now he can define himself
against modern conservatives such
as Rand Paul and Scott Walker.
Obama feels he will be able
to finally float above it all, more
singular and more interesting and
more separate, debating enlightened
progressive topics like criminal
justice reform and child care
infrastructure while those off-kilter
conservatives fight it out for 2016.
Unlike FDR, Obama was not
determined to give Americans
heart and courage at times of crisis.
Instead, his White House tended to
take on the coloration of his funks
and the clouds spread worldwide.
He only began to really brag on the
economy Tuesday night, when he felt
certain of the numbers, rather than
before the midterms, when it might
have helped his party. He could have
done a better job all along explaining
where we stood and where we were
hopefully headed. As one top White
House official says about the Obama
inner circle, “They’d rather be right
than win.”
He’s alone on the stage - always
his preferred setting. As an isolato,
he can say what he thinks and define
himself on his own terms. He can
ascend to the mountaintop and
ignore us when we pester him to
come down.
He doesn’t have to negotiate
with Republicans anymore. He
doesn’t have to stroke Democrats
anymore. He doesn’t have to hawk
himself to voters anymore. He isn’t
concerned about Hillary, as he yanks
the party to the left. He has forged
no lasting links to foreign leaders.
And he can have the “vacation from
the press” that he told NBC News’s
Chuck Todd he yearns for.
“Barry got his groove back,” as
Larry Wilmore, the droll host of
Comedy Central’s “The Nightly
Show,” put it.
We got the guy we’ve been
yearning for only when he was able
to blow us all off. He can finally do
and say whatever he wants.
One Democrat who saw Obama in
the White House said the president
was so buoyant he had an air of
“senioritis.”
It seemed a shame, the Democrat
said, that Obama couldn’t have a
third term, now that he was, at long
last, fired up and ready to go. Of
course, if there was a third term, he
would be waiting another four years
to show the mojo.
Thrilled to sidestep the press,
he felt liberated enough, even as
Yemen spiraled, to go on YouTube
and make his case to the appealing
GloZell Green, a YouTube star
wearing glowing green lipstick who
got famous eating cereal out of a
bathtub.
Remarkably, The One has ended
up in the same place the unpopular
W. found himself at the end of his
two terms: casting his lot with
history.
Anyone expecting Clintonesque
triangulation or even a conciliatory
nod to the winning team Tuesday
night was disappointed. Instead,
they got the State of the Veto Threat
Address. The president goaded
Republicans, who chortled when
he reminded them he was done
running for office. He shot back
with his favorite snarky rejoinder to
Republicans: I won.
Obama won the presidency by
creating a magnetic narrative. But
then, oddly, he lost the thread of
his story and began drifting. He
didn’t get to the point Bill Clinton
did, where he had to insist he was
relevant, though last summer, some
of his frustrated hopey-changey
acolytes talked about having an
intervention with the rudderless
president. But others argued against
it, pointing out that, while Obama
might not have the presidency that
was giddily anticipated, during the
2009 tulip-craze phase, he was doing
what he wanted.
When the public was jittery about
ISIS, Ebola and Ferguson, Obama
responded like a law professor. He
made a stunning speech on race to
save his 2008 campaign, but he has
stayed largely detached from the
roiling race drama that stretched
from St. Louis to New York.
In Year 7, when everyone else
has started focusing on 2016, he
suddenly popped up with a fullthroated narrative and rationale for
his presidency: It is time for the
middle class to share the wealth and
the Republicans are still protecting
the rich.
The State of the Union was not so
much “too little, too late,” as “too
much, too late.”
Republicans said Obama was
in “Fantasyland.” While free
community college educations,
money for child care, new roads,
new taxes on the rich, initiatives
on climate change and partying
in Cuba are all feel-good ideas for
Democrats, a lot of that isn’t going
to happen and he knows it.
Though the president’s numbers
are up, the results are likely to be
pretty meager. When he trolled
Republicans in his speech, it felt
good to him and Democrats jumped
for joy. But Republicans will
have their revenge - and not just
Netanyahu’s visit.
In the end, the speech told us less
about the state of the union than the
state of Obama. The state of Obama
is strong, if solitary.
He wanted to do what he saw
as right and have the public and the
pols come along simply because he
said it was right.
But when the Potomac didn’t part
when he was elected, he got grumpy
and decided not to play the game.
As David Axelrod said, and as
Obama concurred, the president
was resistant to the symbolism
and theatrical aspect of his office.
Now that it’s all about him, he He never got it that the emotional
doesn’t get languid and reflective. He component of the presidency is real, c.2015 New York Times News Service
rolls up his sleeves and crisscrosses whether it’s wooing lawmakers or 15-1-24
the country.
comforting the nation.
12
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Culture Wars, Old and New
The old culture war politics is dying but
new culture wars are gathering force. The
transformation of the battlefield will change our
public life.
The idea of a “culture war” was popularized
by Pat Buchanan in his joyfully incendiary 1992
Republican National Convention speech, but it
was introduced into the public argument a year
earlier by James Davison Hunter, a thoughtful
University of Virginia sociologist.
In his 1991 book “Culture Wars: The Struggle
to Define America,” Hunter described a raging
battle between the orthodox, committed to “an
external, definable and transcendent authority,”
and progressives, who could be “defined by the
spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism
and subjectivism.”
It was a fight, in other words, between those
whose deepest commitments were to God
and the sacred, and those who believed that
human beings evolved their own value systems
through a process of steady enlightenment. The
first group feared we were moving away from
commitments that made us decent and human.
The second welcomed more open attitudes
on questions ranging from sexuality to racial
equality to women’s rights.
This culture war created the religious
right and also a backlash among more secular
Americans -- who happen to be one of the fastest
growing groups in the country. Their skirmishes
focused especially on the legality of abortion,
society’s view of homosexuality and, more
generally, the public role of religion.
That this culture war is receding is most
obvious in our rapidly changing responses to
gays and lesbians. The turnaround in public
opinion on gay marriage is breathtaking.
According to the Pew Research Center, only 27
percent of Americans favored gay marriage in
1996; by 2014, that proportion had doubled, to
54 percent.
Not for nothing did President Obama declare
in his State of the Union address last week:
“I’ve seen something like gay marriage go from
a wedge issue used to drive us apart to a story of
freedom across our country.”
Abortion is a different matter because public
opinion on the question has been quite stable.
Over recent decades, Americans have generally
supported abortion rights by margins of between
5-to-4 and 3-to-2. And many hold somewhat
ambivalent views, resisting black-and-white
certainty. Rachel Laser, a close student of the
issue, has called these middle-grounders the
“Abortion Grays.”
But the politics of abortion have become
more complicated for its opponents. This was
evidenced by the decision of House Republicans
to pull a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks
because the exception for rape victims -- it
required them to report the crime to the police
-- was seen as far too onerous. A group of House
Republican women forced the bill off the floor.
and virtues: Why is the hard work of the many,
those who labor primarily for wages and salaries,
rewarded with increasingly less generosity than
the activities of those who make money from
investments and capital?
Politically, this could be explosive. What is at
heart a moral battle could rip apart old coalitions,
since many working-class and middle-class
social conservatives are angry about our shifting
structures of reward. If issues such as abortion
and gay rights split the New Deal coalition, this
emerging issue could divide the conservative
coalition. The rise of Pope Francis could hasten
the scrambling of the moral debate, since he
links his opposition to abortion with powerful
calls for economic justice and compassion
toward immigrants.
Politicians, like generals, often fight the
old wars. (So, by the way, do columnists.)
Recognizing how the theater of combat is
changing is the first step toward mastering it.
E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@
washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.
Notice, however, that House Republicans
were able to pass without much difficulty a
remarkably restrictive bill that would overturn
Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
It was aimed not only at his measures to keep
families together but also at a highly popular
provision for the “Dreamers” brought to the
United States as children.
This is the new culture war. It is about
national identity rather than religion and
“transcendent authority.” It focuses on which
groups the United States will formally admit
to residence and citizenship. It asks the same
question as the old culture war: “Who are we?”
But the earlier query was primarily about how
we define ourselves morally. The new question
is about how we define ourselves ethnically,
racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of
the oldest questions in our history, going back to
our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and
1850s.
The other issue gaining resonance is often (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group
cast as economic, but it is really about values 15-1-26
Paul Waldman
Republicans Befuddled By Obama
Plan To Cut Middle-Class Taxes
Even President Barack Obama’s most
fervent opponents must acknowledge that
he’s getting quite good at putting them on the
defensive. Facing a Republican Congress and
with only two years remaining in his presidency,
he seems to come up with a new idea every couple
of weeks to drive them up a wall. So he certainly
wasn’t going to let the State of the Union address
go by without using the opportunity - days of preand post-speech commentary, plus an audience
in the tens of millions - to its utmost.
At Tuesday’s speech, Obama will announce
a series of proposals meant to aid middle class
and poor Americans and address inequality, most
particularly an increase in the child care credit
and a $500 tax credit for working couples. To pay
for it, investment and inheritance taxes on the
wealthy would be increased and some loopholes
that small numbers of the super-rich (like one
Willard Romney) exploit will be closed. While
the SOTU is often the occasion for dramatic
announcements that are soon forgotten, this one
lands in the center a debate that is looking like
it will shape the upcoming presidential race.
Naturally, Republicans are not pleased.
But if you listen carefully to what they’re
saying, you’ll notice that they are barely
mentioning the proposals for middle-class tax
breaks which are supposed to be the whole
purpose of this initiative; instead, all their focus
is on the increases America’s noble job creators
would have to endure in order to pay for it.
“Slapping American small businesses, savers
and investors with more tax hikes only negates
the benefits of the tax policies that have been
successful in helping to expand the economy,
promote savings, and create jobs,” said Orrin
Hatch. “More Washington tax hikes and spending
is the same, old top-down approach we’ve come
to expect from President Obama that hasn’t
worked,” said John Boehner’s spokesperson.
“This is not a serious proposal,” said Paul
Ryan’s flak. “We lift families up and grow the
economy with a simpler, flatter tax code, not
big tax increases to pay for more Washington
spending.” For the record, a “flatter” tax system
means either the poor paying more or the rich
paying less, though Republicans never say
which they prefer.
Marco Rubio was on the same page.
“Raising taxes on people that are successful is
not going to make people that are struggling more
successful,” he said on Face the Nation. “The
good news about free enterprise is that everyone
can succeed without punishing anyone.” That
was about as close as any Republican came to
actually talking about the tax cuts Obama is
proposing (though this National Review editorial
does discuss them, by arguing that it’s an attack
on motherhood). That’s probably because
Waldman continued on page 13
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
13
Francis Wilkinson
Could A Romney Run Make Jeb Bush A Winner?
He didn’t mean to. Mitt
Romney’s tentative entry into the
2016 Republican presidential fray
was intended to stop Jeb Bush
in his tracks, freezing the drift
toward Bush by the Republican
establishment-donor-class-realistpragmatists or whatever you want to
call the guys accustomed to calling
the party’s shots. Instead, it’s more
likely that Romney has done Bush
a big favor.
Bush has a couple sets of political
problems, those of his own making
and those he can’t help. The selfmanufactured problems include his
lack of rage toward undocumented
immigrants, the federal government
and President Barack Obama. A
modicum of rage is now the price
of entry to Republican primaries,
yet Bush has so far refused to pay it.
Worse, Bush has refused to modify
his policy views on Common
Core (in favor) and undocumented
immigrants (empathetic), which
are out of step -- perhaps by two or
three or four steps -- with the party
base. He’s not only running as a
sensible conservative, but also as
a sensitive one. The base distrusts
both qualities.
Bush’s other main basket of
problems concerns his very being.
Waldman continued from page 12
Republicans been in favor of ideas
like them in the recent past.
While Obama does want to
provide new funds to make
community college free to anyone
who wants it, most of his proposals
in this round use the tax code to help
people of modest means, which is
exactly what Republicans usually
suggest when they’re forced to
come up with an idea to help the
poor or middle class. Since they
believe that government programs
to help ordinary people are useless
almost by definition, the only way
to give anyone a hand is with a tax
cut. And yes, the hand they usually
extend is toward the wealthy,
whose burdens are so crushing that
justice demands that lawmakers
not rest until they can be afforded
relief. But tax cuts are so magical
they can help anyone, which is
why Republicans been in favor of
expanding the Earned Income Tax
Credit and the child care tax credit
before.
But paying for it by increasing
He is a figure from the past, having
left office eight years ago -- before
the Republican retreat into massive
resistance against the federal
government. He’s the brother of
a president who waged failure- two hapless, meandering wars, a
near-Depression, budget deficits - on a historic scale. And he’s the
son of another president whose
name is Republican shorthand for
“sellout.”
If Bush and Romney both stay
in the race there will be competition
for donors and for ideological
terrain. But as Philip Klein pointed
out in the Washington Examiner,
that doesn’t necessarily mean that
Bush and Romney will destroy
each other, as some conservatives
hope. It more likely means that one
will vanquish the other and emerge
strengthened -- the better to grind
down the base’s underfinanced
favorites in a second round.
Meanwhile,
Romney
helps
Bush
mitigate
his
greatest
vulnerabilities.
Old? At 61, Bush is younger than
67-year-old Romney and looks
like a fresh face compared with a
candidate who has twice tried and
failed to become president, and
who wasn’t even much loved after
he had won the 2012 nomination.
Bush is personally untainted by
failure -- electoral or governmental;
his executive reign over Florida was
widely considered a conservative
success.
Similarly, Bush’s deviations
from Republican orthodoxy appear
less toxic when he is compared with
the paterfamilias of Obamacare.
Over the course of his career,
investment and inheritance taxes and stern lectures about bootstrapon the wealthy, like Obama is pulling, then we’ll know nothing
proposing? Not on your life.
has changed.
You can argue - and many will
One thing’s for sure: as the - that it’s pointless for Obama
economy improves, both parties to introduce significant policy
are now being forced to address proposals like this when he knows
the underlying issues of stagnant they couldn’t make it through the
wages and inequality that have Republican Congress. But what
been an anchor around ordinary alternative does he have? He
people’s lives for the last few could suggest only Republican
decades. It’s fair to say this isn’t the ideas, but he wouldn’t be much
debate Republicans want to have, of a Democratic president if
and it’s easy to mock them for their he did that. Or he could offer
insistence that they’re really the nothing at all, and then everyone
party with something to offer the would criticize him for giving
middle class and the poor. But it’s up on achieving anything in his
a lot more productive to just take last two years. If nothing else,
them at their word and see what putting these proposals forward
they actually propose to do.
can start a discussion that might
So Mitt Romney says he has cast bear legislative fruit later on.
off his previous contempt for those Major policy changes sometimes
of modest means and now wants take years to accomplish, so it’s
to focus his 2016 presidential never too early to start. And if
campaign on the issue of poverty? Republicans have better ideas,
All right - what are his ideas? If let’s hear them.
they’re actually worthwhile, he (c) 2015, The Washington Post
should get whatever credit he’s due. 15-1-20
If it’s more trickle-down policies
Romney’s true north has been
highly variable. Bush is attempting
-- we’ll see if it lasts -- to establish
himself as a direct contrast to such
flip- floppery. (Bush knows that
the base knows that he knows that
the base knows that his stands on
Common Core and immigrants hurt
him.)
Bush’s principles offend the
base -- but perhaps not as much
as Romney’s pandering does. The
base never confused Romney’s
embarrassing
entreaties
with
fidelity; for the Tea Party wing of
the party, Romney is just as much
of an ideological threat as Bush.
And his mere presence in the public
sphere makes Bush’s spine appear
straighter, stronger.
Romney’s efforts to be the
establishment horse in 2016 have
surely complicated Bush’s plans
to be the same. But instead of
undermining Bush’s already dodgy
chances, Romney may have just
enhanced them.
Francis Wilkinson writes on
politics and domestic policy for
Bloomberg View.
(c) 2015, Bloomberg News
15-1-19
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14
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Eugene Robinson
GOP Stays Stubborn About Climate Change
We now know that 2014 was the hottest
year in recorded history. We also know that
President Obama can expect little help from
Republicans in Congress -- some of them
cynical, others clueless -- in facing the most
daunting environmental challenge of our time.
Scientists from NASA and NOAA announced
Friday that last year narrowly edged out former
record-holders 2010 and 2005 as the warmest
since reliable temperature measurements
began. Unlike those other scorchers, 2014
did not have the benefit of an El Nino
meteorological phenomenon, which tends to
boost temperatures.
“Hold on a minute,” I hear someone objecting,
“I seem to recall that last winter featured the
dreaded polar vortex, which brought frigid
arctic air to much of the United States. Some
warming!”
Is that you, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., new
chairman of the Environment and Public Works
Committee? The U.S. Senate’s point man on
climate change? Let me try to put this in a
way you might understand. The planet we live
on is really, really big -- so big that when it’s
cold in our country, which covers only a small
percentage of earth’s surface, it can be hot in
other places. At the very same time!
OK, I’m being somewhat unfair. Inhofe
actually reacted to the news of 2014’s record
heat by calling the reported increase tiny and
meaningless. But his long-held position is not that
climate change is overblown or misinterpreted
or poorly understood, but that it is actually a
“hoax” and a “conspiracy.” He wrote a book
taking this stance. At times, he has claimed that
global warming, if it were indeed taking place,
would be a good thing. And he has scoffed at
the notion that humans could ever have such a
massive impact on God’s immense creation.
Let me repeat: This is the man whose task
is to lead the United States Senate in setting
environmental policy.
GOP leaders in both houses tend to take the
standard Republican position on climate change,
which is basically to absolve themselves of the
obligation to take a position -- by asserting that
they are not scientists.
“Clearly we’ve had changes in our climate,”
House Speaker John Boehner said last week.
“I’ll let the scientists debate the sources, in their
opinion, of that change. But I think the real
question is that every proposal we see out of this
administration with regard to climate change
means killing American jobs.”
As Boehner knows, but finds inconvenient
to admit, scientists have had their debate.
It’s over. Among climate scientists, there is
consensus approaching unanimity that climate
change is being driven by the rapidly increasing
concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, which, in turn, is being caused
by the burning of fossil fuels.
It is known through direct observation that
carbon dioxide levels have risen an astounding
40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. The rise began after human society
began burning coal and petroleum products on
an unprecedented scale.
economies of scale and potential breakthroughs
are possible.
Domestically, Obama’s biggest impact will
come not from whatever happens with the
Keystone XL pipeline but from the Environmental
Protection Agency’s rule-making on carbon
emissions from power plants. Reasonable limits
will require a transition away from coal toward
cleaner fuels.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
who comes from the coal-mining state of
Kentucky, will squawk. But the EPA’s authority
to regulate carbon is well established. Instead
of pretending there’s some kind of debate about
climate change, Congress ought to be working
on economic development alternatives for coalmining regions that will inevitably suffer.
“Hottest Year On Record” is a headline that
encourages sanity on climate change. Break it to
Sen. Inhofe gently.
Eugene Robinson’s email address is
eugenerobinson@washpost.com.
To posit that this is some kind of coincidence
is absurd. People begin pumping carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere; the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere increases rapidly; and
these two facts are supposed to be unrelated?
Obama can, should and must make climate
change one of the major themes of his remaining
time in office. If he gets no help from Congress,
he has the obligation to do what he can on his
own.
Fortunately, he is off to a good start. Last fall’s
unexpected agreement with China on restricting
carbon emissions gave new impetus to the quest
for an international treaty on climate change,
which had seemed on the verge of collapse. With
the world’s two biggest economies -- and biggest
carbon emitters -- now putting new focus and (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group
resources into alternative energy sources, new 15-1-20
Ruth Gadebusch
Those Republicans!
I know it is just politics. Still, I never cease
to be amazed at those Republicans. My! They
are efficient! And, oh how they care about
protecting women.
Less than a month into session, 5 (yes, five)
bills have already been introduced regarding
women’s health. One of them is going to be
voted on this week, this early in the session.
Maybe even sooner than Mitch McConnell’s
Senate votes on the oil pipeline. After all, they
must celebrate the anniversary of Roe v Wade.
Wow!
Oops, that vote just got cancelled; although
for the wrong reasoning. They forgot to count
the votes. This 20-week abortion ban was just
too much for some of the Republican women.
Never mind, an even more expansive limitation
on women’s health care insurance coverage has
been introduced in its place.
Actually, it only took them three days to
introduce those five new anti-abortion bills!
They just don’t want to lose any time showing
their concern for women. Representatives Trent
Franks (R-Ariz.) and Marsha Blackburn (RTenn.) reintroduced a ban on abortions after 20
weeks of pregnancy, previously passed in 2013
by the GOP-controlled House. Senator David
Vitter (R-La.) introduced four bills that would
bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal
family planning funds, among other restrictions.
I think we can also see the fine hand of Senators
Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner involved too so I
add them to my Role of Dishonor.
They just can’t seem to sufficiently vilify
that dastardly organization known as Planned
Parenthood. Horror of horrors! It gives women
health services with a single digit percentage
being abortions, some of them actually to
save the mother’s life. How can we tolerate
such? That organization counsels teens about
responsible sex life. It helps young women who
have unplanned pregnancies to raise the resulting
babies in a healthy manner while continuing
their own education.
Believe it or not, Planned Parenthood even
provides services for males. After all, they too
have a role in making babies. They too must
accept responsibility. My goodness! What kind
of an organization can this be? The Republicans
are duty bound to stop such a group from
spreading the word.
Then too they have a duty to demand that all
observe their religious beliefs. Others just are
not the thinkers they are so must be saved. If
persuasion isn’t sufficient then laws must be
passed. There is hope in this great land now that
the Republican controlled House has been joined
by a Republican controlled Senate. Never mind
that the 46 Democrats in the Senate received a
substantial majority of votes nationwide above
the 54 “majority party,” Republican.
That young president with his ideas of
individual privacy and freedom must be stopped.
Why he even thinks all are due health care. And
we know where that leads! Worse yet, he thinks
undocumented people contributing to our society
Gadebusch continued on page 15
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
15
Gail Collins
And Now: Air Republicans
Tough week for the House
Republicans.
Speaker
John
Boehner’s high point must have been
not clapping when President Barack
Obama talked about job growth in
the State of the Union.
After that, things went downhill
fast. Anti-abortion groups converged
on Washington on Thursday to protest
the anniversary of the Supreme
Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The
plan was for the House to welcome
them into town by passing a bill
banning abortions after 20 weeks.
Didn’t work out.
The signs had been bad for
the Pain-Capable Unborn Child
Protection Act. In committee, its
sponsor, Trent Franks, R-Ariz.,
claimed that the number of rapes
resulting in pregnancy was “very
low.” He did not actually say that
a woman can’t get pregnant if she
didn’t enjoy the sex, but it seemed
for a minute as if we’d returned to
that neighborhood.
Whoops. The bill was amended
to provide an exemption for women
who had been raped. But that
sparked a new fight over whether
the exemption should be for all
victims of rape or just the ones who
had reported the crime to the police.
A group of Republican women,
including Rep. Renee Ellmers
of North Carolina, pointed out,
correctly, that most victims don’t
file such reports.
You may remember that
Ellmers was challenged last fall
by former “American Idol” runnerup Clay Aiken, who she defeated
handily. Now Aiken, who turns out
to have been filming his campaign,
is moving forward to become the star
of a TV reality series on elections.
Gadebusch continued from page 14
And probably having
more fun than Ellmers.
“I’m sorry Clay
Aiken lost,” tweeted the
conservative blogger
Erick Erickson when
Republican
leaders
gave up and pulled the
20-week bill from the
calendar. A contributor
on the Red State blog
followed up with the
somewhat less playful:
“Is Renee Ellmers
Worthy of Life?”
Actually, it turns
out that Ellmers is
a co-sponsor of the
Sanctity of Human
Life Act, which holds
that every fertilized
egg has “all legal and
constitutional attributes
and privileges.” Her
concerns about the
language of the rape exemption
seem to have been a mixture of legal,
philosophical and political concerns,
all of them nuanced in the extreme.
She suggested to National Journal
that her party shouldn’t be starting
off the year with an issue that wasn’t
of interest to “millennials.”
Rape exemptions have come
to dominate the abortion debate.
Abortion rights groups use lack
of concern for rape victims as an
illustration of the heartlessness of
their opponents. Their opponents
propose exemptions to show that
they’re reasonable. But, really, it
makes no sense either way. The
question of when a fetus inside a
woman’s body becomes a human
being is theological. If you truly
believe that human life begins the
planning - seemingly in keeping
with the Republican restrictions.
Can we wise up enough in
the next two years to recognize
the virtues of these Republicans
and accept their morals? Can the
nation be saved from these women
who would run wild without the
Republican restraints? Somehow
it just isn’t adding up for me. But
then, what do I know? I am a mere
female who has been known to
advocate some of these things the
ever upright Republicans abhor!
deserve consideration, other than
being locked up as criminals.
There is a bit of a problem in
denying Planned Parenthood funds
for family planning when they are
concerned about all those babies
the undocumented are having.
How can we reconcile opposition
to family planning with the
evidence that abortion rates drop
drastically when family planning
is available? Or that a large number
of these undocumented practice a
religion that severely limits family 15-1-22
moment a sperm fertilizes an egg,
you can’t admit any exceptions. The
only real debate is whether you get
to impose your religious beliefs on
the entire country.
Not that anybody’s trying to be
that rational.
“I’m going to need your help to
find a way out of this definitional
problem with rape,” Sen. Lindsey
Graham told the anti-abortion
marchers.
This was four days after Graham
announced that he was considering
a run for the Republican presidential
nomination. It’s very possible that
the phrase “this definitional problem
with rape” will last longer than his
candidacy.
In his speech, Graham gave a
shout-out to exemptions for rape
and incest.
“Some disagree, including the
pope,” he noted to the marchers.
Francis I has, indeed, been clear
and consistent on this matter, despite
the moment on a flight back from
Manila when he expressed concern
about people breeding “like rabbits.”
One theologian told CBS News that
people should understand that there
was a difference between the popeon-a-plane and the pope-on-theground, the latter’s comments being
more official.
Perhaps we could all use this
distinction in our daily lives. When
your spouse quotes something you
wish you’d never said, just explain
that was an “in-the-air” remark.
Anyhow, about the House and
abortion.
The moderate Republican women
scored a big win - at least until a
backlash from the right had their
aides shooing away reporters. But
other party members said they, too,
were sick of fooling around with the
Tea Party’s agenda.
“Week 1, we had the vote for
the speaker. Week 2, we debated
deporting children. Week 3, we’re
debating rape and incest. I just can’t
wait for Week 4,” Rep. Charlie Dent
of Pennsylvania complained to
Jeremy Peters of The Times.
Humiliated by the collapse of
the 20-week bill, House leaders
quickly substituted one banning
federal funding for abortion, which
is already banned.
“This was such a high priority
that they didn’t think about it until
late last night,” Rep. Daniel Kilddee,
D-Mich., sniped during the rather
lethargic debate.
The bill passed easily. No matter.
It was all just in the air.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
15-1-23
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February 4, 2015
LIBERAL DELINEATIONS
Liberal Opinion Week
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
17
18
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Susan Estrich
Forty-Two Years Later
It has been 42 years since the United States
Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that the
right to decide whether to go forward with a
pregnancy, prior to viability, belongs to a woman,
in consultation with her doctors.
Forty-two years of marches and debates and
occasional, horrible violence later, Roe remains
the law of the land. But constitutional law is scant
comfort when there is nowhere to get an abortion
in your area -- which, last time I checked, was
true of more than 40 percent of the counties in the
United States. The choice movement may have
saved Roe in the courts, but on the streets, the
access fight continues, sadly.
The politics of abortion have changed even
more. For the first few decades after Roe was
decided, abortion was, frankly, a problem for
many Democrats. The polls were equivocal,
the right to life movement was expanding
everywhere, and Democrats were carefully
phrasing their “personal” opposition to abortion
notwithstanding the Roe decision.
These days, it’s the Republicans who are
squirming about abortion, and not very discreetly.
They made all kinds of noise about voting on a
bill on Thursday, Roe’s anniversary, to ban all
abortions after 20 weeks. Of course, that would
be unconstitutional on its face under Roe, but that
wasn’t the reason the Republicans dropped the
idea.
They dropped it because even some members
of their own caucus wouldn’t support a bill that
would deny a rape victim an abortion unless she
reported it to the police -- even though rape is
one of the most underreported crimes. Unable
to pull together a majority to pass a symbolic
unconstitutional view, the Republicans settled
instead for having a meaningless vote on an old
bill that bars public funding of abortion, a bill
that has no chance of ever being signed by the
president.
You might think, with all the problems we face,
the House of Representatives would have better
things to do than sit around having symbolic
debates and passing symbolic bills, but frankly
that’s never stopped them, and it didn’t stop them
now. What did was the change in politics.
“There was a lot of discussion in our retreat
(last week) about this, and some of the new
people did not want to make this the first bill they
voted on, because the millennials have a little bit
of a different take on it,” Republican Rep. Ted
Yoho of Florida told the press. “But you will see
it come back, because the American people agree
with it two to one. It’s a hideous practice. It needs
to stop.”
Sorry, Ted. The two-to-one number is
meaningless. The question isn’t whether you’re
for or against abortion; the question is who gets to
decide: the woman, with the advice of her family,
her doctor, her minister, or the government. Ask
the question that way, and the government loses,
hands down. It isn’t just the millennials who
think the government should keep its nose out of
the gynecologist’s office. The millennials want to
keep getting elected. The old timers seem bent on
refighting the old battles.
care of the wanted babies; let’s help women have
healthy babies; let’s spend our energy figuring
out how to help prevent teen pregnancy. Let’s
talk about how we’re going to educate these kids,
which is a public responsibility, and leave the
Forty-two years should be enough time gynecologists and their patients alone. With so
to spend debating symbolic bills and litigating much to be done, and so much that we do agree
unconstitutional laws.
on, lawmakers playing games with symbolic bills
The Republican bill doesn’t help teen mothers. should be ashamed of themselves.
It doesn’t address maternal health. It won’t reduce Copyright 2015 Creators.com
infant mortality rates. There is so much we could 15-1-23
and should do that we all agree on. Let’s take
Eugene Robinson
What Is The GOP Thinking?
There they go again. Given control of
Congress and the chance to frame an economic
agenda for the middle class, the first thing
Republicans do is tie themselves in knots over ...
abortion and rape.
I’m not kidding. In a week when President
Obama used his State of the Union address to
issue a progressive manifesto of bread-andbutter policy proposals, GOP leaders responded
by taking up the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child
Protection Act” -- a bill that would ban abortions
after 20 weeks of pregnancy. But a vote on the
legislation had to be canceled after female GOP
House members reportedly balked over the way
an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape
was limited.
The whole thing was, in sum, your basic 360degree fiasco.
At least there are some in the party who
recognize how much trouble Republicans make
for themselves by breaking the armistice in the
culture wars and launching battles that cannot be
won. It looks as if the nation will have to stand by
until GOP realists and ideologues reach some sort
of understanding, which may take some time.
It’s important to understand that the “PainCapable” bill was never anything more than
an act of political fantasy. The only purpose of
the planned vote was to create an “event” that
the annual anti-abortion March for Life, held
Thursday in Washington, could celebrate.
You might think the demonstrators already had
reason to cheer. The abortion rate is at “historic
lows,” having dropped by 13 percent in the
decade between 2002 and 2011, according to a
recent report by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. The main reason is that there are
fewer unwanted pregnancies, which suggests
logically that if Republicans really want to reduce
abortion, what they should do is work to increase
access to birth control.
More to the point, according to the CDC, only
1.4 percent of abortions take place after 20 weeks.
This means the bill, if it somehow became law,
would have minimal impact.
But it won’t become law, as everyone in
Congress well knows. The White House has
announced that Obama would veto the measure,
if it ever reached his desk. To get that far, the bill
would have to pass the Senate, where Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell would have to win over
enough Democrats to cross the 60-vote threshold,
which is highly unlikely.
Theoretically, though, any reasonablesounding anti-abortion measure should at least
be able to make it through the House, with its
expanded GOP majority. But even in the context
of today’s far-right Republican Party, the “PainCapable” bill struck many House members,
particularly women, as unreasonable.
At issue, apparently, is that in making exceptions
for pregnancies resulting from rape, the bill
specifies that the rape must have been reported to
law enforcement. This restriction cannot help but
bring to mind the grief Republicans suffered in
2012 over Senate candidate Todd Akin’s appalling
attempt to distinguish between “legitimate rape”
and some other kind of rape.
Although the House leadership maintained
that all was sweetness and light, reporters heard
rumblings Wednesday that the bill was in trouble
with moderate Republicans, especially women.
Then unusual numbers of female GOP House
members were seen leaving the offices of the
majority whip. Then the bill was pulled and a
different anti-abortion measure -- prohibiting
federal funding for abortions -- was substituted.
I should note that there is no generally
accepted scientific basis for the premise of the
“Pain-Capable” bill. The American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said there
is no legitimate research supporting the idea that
fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.
I understand that for those who believe in
their hearts that abortion is murder, there is an
imperative to do something, anything, to stop it.
Some people have similar moral passion about
capital punishment or the thousands of lives lost
each year to gun violence.
Given that the Supreme Court has decided
abortion is a legally protected right, the antiabortion movement has done what it could -
Robinson continued on page 19
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
19
Ruth Marcus
Green Shoots of Sanity?
by the desire not to
offend voting blocs
(Hispanics, women).
Still, the episodes
represent a surprising
-- and welcome departure
from
turmoil-as-usual in the
House, with tea party
conservatives erupting
against what they view
as ideological perfidy
from
Republican
leaders.
From the inside, this
looks less like House
Republicans
getting
their
act
together
than Keystone Kops
leadership
and
a
rambunctious caucus.
“Week 1, we had the
vote for the speaker,”
said Rep. Charlie Dent,
a centrist Pennsylvania
Republican, referring
to the unexpectedly
large
conservative
insurrection against re-electing
John Boehner. “Week 2 we debated
deporting children. Week 3 we’re
debating rape and incest. I just can’t
wait for Week 4.”
Indeed, Weeks 5 and 6 could
be interesting, too. Boehner has a
bolstered majority this Congress,
giving him more leeway to take
In other words, sanity is relative, positions that alienate his most
and no doubt politically inspired strident members. With the Senate
in Republican hands, the House
Robinson continued from page 18
could be in the position of passing
- made abortions very difficult to bills that could be signed into law,
obtain in some states where the not lobbing futile protest votes over
pro-life position has sufficient to the Senate to die.
support. Hooting and hollering on
Capitol Hill do nothing for abortion At the same time, the 60-vote
opponents except fleece them of hurdle to avert a filibuster in the
campaign contributions.
Senate remains staggeringly high.
People, we are in an economic Even higher is the two-thirds needed
recovery whose fruits are not to overturn a presidential veto.
reaching the middle class. We Boehner has the dealmaker’s urge to
have a crucial need to address U.S. get results, and not simply oversee
infrastructure and competitiveness. protest votes and avert shut-down
We face myriad challenges abroad, disasters.
including Islamic terrorism and His Senate counterpart, Majority
global warming.
Leader Mitch McConnell, has even
If a renewal of the culture wars greater incentive to show voters
is your answer, Republicans, you that Republicans are capable of
totally misheard the question.
governing; 24 of his members are
Eugene
Robinson’s
email up for re-election in two years, a
address is eugenerobinson@ presidential cycle that could favor
washpost.com.
Democrats.
(c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group
The opening salvos between
15-1-23
the Republican Congress and
Are
we
witnessing
the
emergence of what might be called
a new “sanity caucus” among House
Republicans?
Earlier this month, 26 of them
voted against an amendment to
undo President Obama’s program
to shield so-called dreamers from
deportation.
Last week, House leaders were
forced to pull an anti-abortion bill
after a different but similarly sized
group balked at provisions in a
measure to ban late-term abortions.
To be sure, this is, to rephrase
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defining
sanity down.
On the immigration bill,
despite the moderates’ revolt, the
amendment to repeal Obama’s
Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) program passed,
albeit by the narrowest possible
margin. Meantime, a comfortable
majority voted to block Obama’s
more recent immigration actions.
Similarly, on the abortion
measure, the dispute was not over
the substance of the bill, which
would ban almost all abortions
after 20 weeks of pregnancy -- in
clear violation of Supreme Court
precedent. Rather the controversy
was over the rape exception, and the
requirement that such assaults be
reported to police.
the Democratic White House are
inevitably going to make things
look as if gridlock is the only
possible outcome; Republicans pass
a measure obviously unacceptable to
the White House; the president hurls
back a veto threat; House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi’s dwindling
band of Democrats stands united
against allowing Republicans to
override.
Republicans” -- lawmakers from
congressional districts that Obama
won in 2012 or that Mitt Romney
won by fewer than five percentage
points.
Examining
their
campaign
positions, she found striking
differences both in emphasis and in
substance between this group and
their counterparts on hot-button
issues such as immigration, samesex marriage and climate change.
“On issues like tax reform
and regulation of business, the
Obama Republicans could be just
what Boehner needs to create a
majority on a compromise with the
Democrats while allowing his tea
party supporters to defect,” Kamarck
observed.
To be determined. But we may
just be seeing green shoots of what
passes for sanity in the nation’s
capital.
Ruth Marcus’ email address is
ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
The tantalizing question is what
happens next in this legislative
tango, as reality dawns that majority
power has its limitations. So the
House sends the Homeland Security
funding bill to the Senate, where
under the ticking clock of funding
expiring in late February, its most
odious immigration provisions will
be removed.
The recent moderate Republican
rumblings could -- underline, could
-presage greater rationality.
“This is not yet a group,” one
Republican congressman told me (c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group
when I broached the notion of an 15-1-25
emerging “sanity caucus.” Still, he
said, “I think it does show people
Online Subscription
the Republican conference is more
Beat The Postal Delay,
diverse than the common perception
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of it and the leadership is trying to
manage it.”
www.liberalopinion.com
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings
Or call Toll Free
Institution identified 51 House
1-800-338-9335
members she describes as “Obama
20
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Clarence Page
Poverty Snops and ‘Bread Bag’ Politics
During her live, nationally televised
Republican response to President Barack
Obama’s State of the Union address, Sen. Joni
Ernst inserted a cute story from her childhood
that seemed to offer everything a homespun
narrative should offer -- except a point.
“You see, growing up, I had only one good
pair of shoes,” the 44-year-old former Iowa state
senator recalled. “So on rainy school days, my
mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to
keep them dry.”
Was that embarrassing? No, said Ernst,
“because the school bus would be filled with
rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags
slipped over their feet.”
A heartwarming story, I thought, but why
was she telling it? If childhood poverty is
a qualification for office, I should run for
president.
I turned to Twitter and, sure enough, a new
meme was born in the Twitterverse:
“For every kid to wear bread bags on their
feet,” quipped @loudspike, “we first gotta make
sure families can afford 2 loaves of bread.” I
liked that one.
“Now that she is a senator,” tweeted @
brewergreg, “she can finally afford ‘loafers.’ “
Good one.
“I might be wearing breadbags on my feet
right now, for all you people know,” typed @
tomtomorrow. In fact, Ernst wasn’t. Her feet
wore light-brown camouflage-patterned pumps
with 2 1/2-inch heels that set off another
Twitter storm. The 44-year-old Iraq War vet and
lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National
Guard was ready for battle.
Ernst’s bread bag story was intended to
illustrate how her parents taught her to “live
simply, not to waste.” That’s a softer version of
the message in her now-famous 2014 campaign
ad in which she strolls through a hog barn to tell
us that she grew up castrating hogs on a farm.
“So when I get to Washington,” she says, “I’ll
know how to cut pork.”
Blammo! The ad went viral and established
Ernst as a rising star in the Grand Old Party’s
tea party wing. She also became the leading
example of what The New York Times’ Mark
Leibovich called the “bumpkinification” of the
midterm elections.
“Bumpkinizing,” a term Leibovich attributed
to David Wasserman of The Cook Political
Report, is the process of deglamorizing a
candidate to enhance his or her appeal to
ordinary people by making the candidate look
and sound as ordinary, down-home and folksy
as possible.
There’s nothing new about pols dressing
down, hiding their advanced degrees and
inserting a few more aw-shucks bromides that
their granddaddy told ‘em into their speeches.
But in today’s media age and soaring campaign
costs, it takes skill to avoid overdoing the
hayseed approach as much as to underdo it.
Ernst, for example, avoided the pitfalls of,
say, Christine O’Donnell, who sunk her own
folksy “I’m you” ad in Delaware’s 2010 U.S.
Senate race by opening with, “I’m not a witch.”
(Gee, that’s a relief.)
disappointed to see him go full virtue-bully in
his new book by attacking Jay-Z and Beyonce
as examples of a “culture of crude.” Really?
Really? Obviously Huckabee’s trying to score
points with his base by attacking stars who
President Obama has praised in the past. But,
as “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart pointed out
in an on-air argument with the former Baptist
minister, hasn’t Huckabee listened to the lyrics
of “Cat Scratch Fever,” a hit tune by his own
friend, rock star Ted Nugent?
Huckabee feebly tried to argue that Nugent’s
song was intended for adults. Tell that to Tipper
Gore. She’s been blasting Nugent, among
others, for raunchy lyrics since the mid-1980s.
It’s tricky to play the bumpkin in politics. In
today’s media age, there aren’t as many rubes
anymore.
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.
com.
Watch for a new wave of poverty snobbery
to rise with the 2016 presidential race. Former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee leads the pack,
testing the waters with his new book, “God,
Guns, Grits and Gravy,” a bold bunch of awshucks pokes at the liberal “Harvard and
Hollywood folks” in their coastal “bubbles,” far
away from the good ol’ decent heartland folks
in the “flyover states.”
In the past, I have praised Huckabee’s
peacemaker approach to today’s polarized
politics. “I’m conservative,” he likes to say,
“but I’m not angry with anyone.” Nice. But
after his nice-guy approach went nowhere in (C) 2015 Clarence Page
the angry conservative talk-radio world, I am 15-1-25
Jules Witcover
The Republicans Take Over, Sort Of
With the Republicans now totally in charge
of Congress, they have the chance to make good
on their promise that things are going to change
on Capitol Hill. But their opening moves suggest
more of the same old same old.
The new House’s first legislative volley was
that golden oldie, abortion. It passed a bill, by
249-179, certain to be vetoed, banning use of
federal funds for abortions after 20 weeks of
pregnancy. It was brought up only after about
two dozen Republican female members obliged
the leadership to withdraw an even stronger
anti-abortion measure.
A sticking point in the tougher version was a
stipulation that for an exception to be granted
in a case of rape, the victim would have had to
report the attack to law-enforcement authorities.
The rebellious women argued that this condition
would only invite fiercer opposition from
abortion-rights groups in the 2016 political
campaign.
But tilting at windmills never ended with the
departure of Don Quixote.
One despairing Republican, Rep. Charles
Dent of Pennsylvania, summed up his House
colleagues’ opening behavior by citing a failed
effort to oust House Speaker John Boehner, and
then immediately pivoting to other lost causes.
“Week one we had a speaker election that
didn’t go the way that a lot of us wanted it to.”
Dent lamented. “Week two, we were debating
deporting children, and again not a conversation
a lot of us wanted to have then. And week three,
we’re now debating rape and abortion, again an
issue that most of us didn’t campaign on ... or
really wanted to engage on at this time. And I
just can’t wait for week four.”
One could only wonder whether one of the
chief organizational scolds in American politics,
the anti-abortion March for Life, was doing its
thing before the Supreme Court building across
Capitol Plaza had anything to do with the
timing.
In any event, the ripple of dissent from a
couple of dozen House Republicans had to be
disturbing to Boehner and Co. hoping for a new
day after the midterm congressional elections
that strengthened their hands. It came only two
days after President Obama’s State of the Union
address, in which, beyond the usual talk about
compromise, he served notice he was poised to
use his veto pen on any such ideological litmus
test legislation.
The Republican majority in the House rose
slightly as a result of the November midterms,
and the latest abortion argument brought some
moderate voices to the surface that should
lighten Boehner’s old task of warding off the
influence of the tea party and other conservative
members.
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, the new
Republican majority spent some of its time
rejecting two amendments to the GOP-backed
Keystone pipeline construction bill that would
have affirmed that climate change is real and has
been negatively affected by human behavior.
This is another issue on which many Republicans
continue to reject the wide scientific consensus.
Obama has also promised to veto the bill if it
reaches his desk.
As for Obama’s own priority of immigration
reform, he invited a congressional alternative
Witcover continued on page 21
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
21
Susan Estrich
The Money Primary
Will she or won’t she? She will.
And by the time she does, she will
have raised more money than any
primary contender in history. Just a
guess.
In theory, under the new rules,
the fact that Hillary Clinton has
locked up 99 percent of the big
Democratic money (OK, maybe
just a tiny bit less) would end the
conversation. The winner of the
money primary has always been
the candidate who collects the most
“whales”: the guys with money who
also know how to go and collect
it, the Terry McAuliffe model.
But with no rules at all, which is
essentially how it works out once
you work your way through all of
the loopholes, it really would be
possible for some gigantic whale
no one has even heard of to upset
the show. The super-whales -- guys
like Tom Steyer -- don’t have to go
to conferences and put together a
consensus. All you need to start a
campaign is a checkbook.
So the Democratic side becomes
a snooze-like series of pieces
about “what if” and “who then”
and “should she grow her hair
longer.” You know we’re in trouble
when they start focusing on who
Hillary will choose as her running
mate, which I actually expect to
see any day now. Meanwhile, the
numbers will be nothing less than else has to slug down those chicken
astronomical. There is very little wings, eat four breakfasts, manage
room in the caboose of this train.
to cast a vote and then hop a little
charter plane to some town in Iowa
But on the Republican side, where you’re keynoting a dinner
the fun has just begun. The money that half the people don’t show up
primary is on. If you’re Jeb Bush, for.
you at least start with a very long list This is how the candidates spend
and name recognition. Everybody the year before anyone but us is
Witcover continued from page 20
to his controversial executive
order, but he is still waiting for the
Republican response, at least in
English.
Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida,
commenting in Spanish on the
president’s State of the Union
address, said only that Republicans
wanted Obama “to collaborate
with us to get it done,” apparently
meaning through congressional
action. Freshman Sen. Joni Ernst of
Iowa, in her rebuttal (in her native
tongue) to the president’s speech,
did not mention the subject.
All this suggests that, for
political purposes, the new GOP
majority prefers first to recycle
old proposals certain to be vetoed
before getting down to any serious
discussions on the areas of possible
compromise both sides insist are
available. How long this dance
will go on before getting down
to business is anybody’s guess,
as time’s now a-wasting for lame
duck Obama.
Jules Witcover’s latest book is
“The American Vice Presidency:
From Irrelevance to Power,”
published by Smithsonian Books.
You can respond to this column at
juleswitcover@comcast.net.
(C) 2014 Tribune Content Agency, llc.
15-1-25
paying attention. They spend it
raising money -- and hopefully outtraining their opponents. The press
does the judging each quarter.
And as anyone who has ever
spent time raising money will tell
you, it’s a pyramid. You need a
small number of big donors, and no
matter how many press releases you
issue, very few people are going
to write a big check the first time
they meet the candidate (at least not
unless they’ve already been strongarmed by the likes of McAuliffe).
They want to develop a relationship
with the candidate. They want to
spend time talking about issues.
They want real input. “God help
us,” some aide is murmuring under
her breath. I was often that aide.
They do it because their industries
or businesses want access to the
administration (and ultimately more
favorable results). “The money is
beside the point,” they will say, and
everyone will smile and say, “Of
course, one thing has nothing to do
with the other” -- even when we
know it has everything to do with
the other.
On the Republican side, the
challenge for the whales will be to
fight all of those sharks who would
actually try to change the system
and elect someone from outside the
club. Good viewing.
There is nothing small-”d”
democratic about it. People who
pay to hobnob with presidents and
would-be presidents aren’t paying
a year’s mortgage to have a drink
and fancy hors d’oeuvres with him
or her because of their civic values.
Beat The Postal Delay,
Subscribe Online Today!
Copyright 2015 Creators.com
15-1-21
Online Subscription
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1-800-338-9335
22
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Harold Meyerson
Democrats’ New Faith
At long last, some tectonic plates of
American politics have begun to move. The
stagnation and decline of the incomes of the
bottom 90 percent of Americans have finally
shown up on the radar of our political class.
The United States’ economic doldrums have
been apparent for decades to anyone willing to
look. The brief but catastrophic recession of the
early 1980s permanently eliminated millions of
well-paying manufacturing jobs, chiefly in the
Midwest, and few of those displaced workers
were able to find work with comparable pay.
A gap between productivity gains and average
family income - which didn’t exist in the three
decades following World War II - opened in the
1970s and has only widened since. The only
period during the past 40 years when economic
gains registered in workers’ paychecks was the
late ‘90s, when the economy was close to full
employment. But in the current recovery, the
marked reduction in unemployment has been
accompanied by falling, not rising, wages, with
the gains in economic activity going to the
wealthiest 10 percent, and most to the wealthiest
1 percent.
But social reality seldom registers simply
because it exists (see: Republicans, climate
change). It took the Occupy Wall Street
movement, the fast-food strikers, the unions that
injected the issue of universal health insurance
into the 2008 presidential campaign - in other
words, it took activists who dramatized the
plight of both the poor and the middle class
- to bring to the surface problems that tens of
millions of Americans experienced but had yet
to hear articulated in our political discourse.
They’ve now been articulated quite effectively
by President Obama in his State of the Union
address. Obama has addressed these issues
before, of course, but this time was different. This
time, he had a concrete proposal to diminish the
shift from income derived from work to income
derived from investment - by raising the tax on
capital gains and using the income to provide a
tax credit to help working parents pay for child
care.
This time was also different because he spoke
for his entire party - almost certainly including
Hillary Clinton. Within the past couple of weeks,
Democratic House leaders have introduced
proposals to limit tax deductions for corporations
that give their chief executives performance
bonuses but don’t similarly reward their
workers. (They should go further and propose
reducing tax rates on companies that give their
employees wage hikes keyed to increases in
productivity and the cost of living.) Last week,
the Center for American Progress - a think tank
with close ties to Clinton - released a remarkable
study, authored by a group co-chaired by former
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, that
went beyond the standard diagnosis blaming
globalization and technology for workers’ woes.
The conduct of U.S. corporations, the authors
asserted, is also to blame.
“Corporations have come to function much
less effectively as providers of large-scale
opportunity,” they wrote. “Increasingly, their
dominant focus has been the maximization of
share prices and the compensation of their top
employees. In a world where mobility is always
a possibility, they have become less committed
to their workforces and their communities.”
As remedies, the authors proposed extending
profit-sharing to companies’ workers, enacting
legislation protecting employees who seek to
form unions, and making employers responsible
for workers they label as “independent
contractors.”
and you’d better believe they’ve polled on this
- it means taking a bite out of capital income.
Given the weight of money in politics, theirs
will be a halting and incomplete conversion, but
the signs of their new faith are too numerous
to dismiss. Their new emphasis may also help
them win back a share of the white workingclass voters who have increasingly been electing
Republicans. It likely won’t be a big share, but
the Democrats don’t need a big share to build an
electoral majority.
Indeed, the new Democratic focus puts
Republicans in a bind. The GOP would be
happy to increase workers’ incomes if it didn’t
involve diminishing the ability of wealthy
investors and CEOs to claim the lion’s share of
Americans’ incomes for themselves. Alas, for the
Republicans, that’s arithmetically impossible.
Once the national discourse turns to economic
inequality, Republicans, already averse to the
claims of science, will also have to dismiss the
validity of math.
Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American
Prospect.
Democrats have long sought to represent
the interests of both business and labor. At times,
this has led them into cul-de-sacs of self-negation
(something that the president’s simultaneous
advocacy of pro-worker tax policies and yet
another trade treaty sadly exemplifies). But they
seem to be finding a new ideological and political
sweet spot: They’re the party that rewards work, Special to The Washington Post
that seeks to increase labor income even if - 15-1-23
John Young
Vision vs. Blindness On Health Coverage
When he noticed weird stuff floating in
his right eye, he didn’t blink. He called an eye
doctor.
The next day, 24 hours after the abnormality
introduced itself, he had eye surgery – a
vitrectomy -- that very likely spared him the loss
of sight in that eye from a detached retina.
If he’d postponed action, said his
ophthalmologist, this might not have been
possible. Done early, the procedure has a 90
percent success rate.
The rapid response was possible because he
didn’t pace the floor wondering if he could afford
the doctor’s visit. With his health insurance, all
he would owe was a co-pay if his deductible was
met.
Not so for the person without. The procedure
costs $7,000-plus. Anyone got that kind of
change on hand?
It’s just one of the many dramas that opponents
of the Affordable Care Act want to ignore when
it comes to non-elective medical care.
One of those people is Sen. Rand Paul, an
ophthalmologist himself. To his credit, as with
many in his profession, Paul has done eye
surgeries for people without health insurance.
But charity covers only one at a time in this and
many other specialty fields.
Paul says that if we allowed the free market
to dictate health care, more people would be
served at lower cost. He uses the example of
LASIK surgery, which is not covered by most
insurance, and for which the price has become
more affordable due to competition.
The difference, of course, is that LASIK is
elective, not urgent, and someone who decides
to do it, if that person can afford it, can shop
around for the most affordable cost. The man
with the floaters in his eye had no time to shop
around.
Paul needs to face the fact that health care
generally doesn’t fit so neatly into the template
set forth by free-marketeers.
Left to make their own rules, insurance
companies would extend favorable premiums to
those who don’t need much coverage — until
they do — and health care costs overall would
continue to soar.
Drug companies would continue to enjoy
virtual monopolies. Providers would set whatever
prices they see fit, knowing that the scarcity of
their service will obviate any competition.
Regardless, the government would continue
to provide a sizable portion of health care via
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP.
These are programs from which this nation will
retreat.
Medicare and Medicaid cover the surgery for
a detached retina because of its urgent need.
That means that in all states that have refused
to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care
Act, a vast swath of people are in great danger
of calamity.
When it studied 20 states that have refused
Young continued on page 23
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
23
Joe Nocera
A Detainee’s Diary
Last week, several Republican
senators, including John McCain,
called on President Barack Obama
to stop releasing detainees from
the prison at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba. Their argument was that
after the terror attacks in Paris, the
122 prisoners still in Guantánamo
should be made to stay right where
they are, where they can do the
West no harm.
On Tuesday, one of those
detainees, Mohamedou Ould Slahi,
who was sent to Guantánamo in
2002 and remains there to this
day, is poised to offer a powerful
rejoinder. Three years into his
detention - years during which
he was isolated, tortured, beaten,
sexually abused and humiliated Slahi wrote a 466-page, 122,000word account of what had happened
to him up to that point.
His manuscript was immediately
classified, and it took years of
litigation and negotiation by
Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force
the military to declassify a redacted
version. Even with the redactions,
“Guantánamo Diary” is an
extraordinary document - “A vision
of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond
Kafka,” as John le Carré aptly
describes it in a back cover blurb
- that every American should read.
A native of Mauritania, Slahi,
44, is fluent in several languages
- he learned English while in
Guantánamo - and lived in Canada
and Germany as well as the Muslim
world. He came under suspicion
because an al-Qaida member, who
had been based in Montreal - where
Slahi had also lived - was arrested
and charged with plotting to bomb
the Los Angeles International
Airport in 1999. Slahi was
questioned about this plot several
times, but he was always released.
After 9/11, Slahi was detained again
for questioning. That time, he was
turned over to the U.S. authorities,
in whose captivity he has been ever
since.
Young continued from page 22
time, opponents of the Affordable
Care Act are rooting for a Supreme
Court ruling that effectively would
abolish health-care exchanges the
federal government set up for
recalcitrant states that didn’t want
to set up their own.
Ah, yes, what a coup that would
be: a ruling that pulls the plug
on health policies used by more
than 3 million Americans. It’ll be
worth one big touchdown dance
by people who have all their needs
met by the status quo.
With the help of health coverage,
one man was able to sustain his
vision. It is wrong and foolish
for the blindness of policymakers
to deny that same urgent help to
millions of others.
Longtime newspaperman John
Young lives in Colorado. Email:
jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
federal
dollars
to
expand
Medicaid, Harvard Medical School
calculated the human cost to be
16,526 preventable deaths a year
– 3,000-plus in Texas, 2,000-plus
in Florida.
Sixteen thousand deaths. That’s
9/11 times five. And what have we
spent since 9/11 to prevent another
9/11?
What was he accused of? Slahi
asked this question of his captors
often and was never given a straight
answer. This, of course, is part of
the problem with Guantánamo,
a prison where being formally
charged with a crime is a luxury, not
a requirement. His efforts to tell the
truth - that he had no involvement in
any acts of terrorism - only angered
his interrogators. “Looks like a
dog, walks like a dog, smells like
a dog, barks like a dog, must be a
dog,” one interrogator used to say.
That was the best his captors could
do to explain why he was there. Yet
the military was so sure he was a
key al-Qaida player that he was
subjected to “special interrogation”
techniques that had been signed off
by the secretary of defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, himself.
“Special
interrogation
Whatever the Department of
Homeland Security or the Pentagon
might conjure in the “war on terror,”
the returns from investing in health
care are clear. Preventive care
saves lives and averts catastrophic
costs. It’s undeniable. Yet we are
told that society cannot afford to
be smart about the spending of tax
dollars in that way.
The resistance to Medicaid
expansion is one thing. At the same 15-1-20
techniques,” of course, is a
euphemism for torture. The sections
of the book that describe his torture
make for harrowing reading. Slahi
was so sleep-deprived that he
eventually started to hallucinate.
Chained to the ground, he was
forced to “stand” in positions
that were extremely painful.
Interrogators went at him in shifts
- 24 hours a day. Sometimes during
interrogations, female interrogators
rubbed their breasts over his body
and fondled him.
It is hard to read about his torture
without feeling a sense of shame.
ruled in favor of Slahi’s habeas
corpus petition because the
evidence against him was so thin.
The government appealed, and the
order remains in limbo.
I asked Nancy Hollander, one
of Slahi’s lawyers, to describe
her client. “He is funny, smart,
compassionate and thoughtful,”
she said. All of these qualities come
through in his memoir, which is
surprisingly without rancor. “I have
only written what I experienced,
what I saw, and what I learned
firsthand,” he writes toward the
end of his book. “I have tried not
to exaggerate, nor to understate. I
have tried to be as fair as possible,
to the U.S. government, to my
brothers, and to myself.” One of the
wonders of the book is that he does
come across as fair to all, even his
torturers.
But the quote that sticks with
me most is something that one of
his guards told him, something that
could stand as a fitting epitaph for
Guantánamo itself: “I know I can
go to hell for what I did to you.”
Does Slahi crack? Of course:
To get the torture to stop, he finally
lied, telling his interrogators what
he thought they wanted to hear,
just as torture victims have done
since the Inquisition. “Torture
doesn’t guarantee that the detainee
cooperates,” writes Slahi. “In order
to stop torture, the detainee has
to please his assailant, even with
untruthful, and sometime misleading
(intelligence).” McCain, who was
tortured in Vietnam, knows this; c.2015 New York Times News Service
last month, he made a powerful 15-1-19
speech in which he condemned
America’s use of torture, saying,
“the use of torture compromises
that which most distinguishes us
Change Of Address:
from our enemies, our belief that
Please send your old mailing label and your new
all people, even captured enemies,
address three weeks prior to moving.
possess basic human rights.” That
Liberal Opinion Week
is also why it is so disheartening
P.O. Box 606
that McCain has allied himself with
Hampton, IA 50441-0606
those who want to keep Guantánamo
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24
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Thomas Friedman
You Can’t Dance Around The Topic Of Radical Islam
I’ve never been a fan of global conferences
to solve problems, but when I read that the
Obama administration is organizing a Summit
on Countering Violent Extremism for Feb. 18,
in response to the Paris killings, I had a visceral
reaction: Is there a box on my tax returns that I
can check so my tax dollars won’t go to pay for
this?
When you don’t call things by their real name,
you always get in trouble. And this administration,
so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is
refusing to make any link to radical Islam from
the recent explosions of violence against civilians
(most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in
Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by al-Qaida in
Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve
entered the theater of the absurd.
Last week the conservative columnist Rich
Lowry wrote an essay in Politico Magazine that
contained quotes from White House spokesman
Josh Earnest that I could not believe. I was sure
they were made up. But I checked the transcript:
100 percent correct. I can’t say it better than
Lowry did:
“The administration has lapsed into
unselfconscious ridiculousness. Asked why
the administration won’t say [after the Paris
attacks] we are at war with radical Islam, Earnest
on Tuesday explained the administration’s
first concern ‘is accuracy. We want to describe
exactly what happened. These are individuals
who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later
tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking
the religion of Islam and their own deviant view
of it.’
should worker harder on absorption. But both
efforts will only take you so far.
“This makes it sound as if the Charlie Hebdo
terrorists set out to commit a random act of
violent extremism and only subsequently, when
they realized that they needed some justification,
did they reach for Islam.
“The day before, Earnest had conceded that
there are lists of recent ‘examples of individuals
who have cited Islam as they’ve carried out
acts of violence.’ Cited Islam? According to the
Earnest theory ... purposeless violent extremists
rummage through the scriptures of great faiths,
looking for some verses to cite to support their
mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy
texts of Islam.”
President Barack Obama knows better. I am all
for restraint on the issue, and would never hold
every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few.
But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to
pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t
coming out of their faith community. It is coming
mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young
men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni
Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle
East and Europe.
If Western interventions help foster violent
Islamic reactions, we should reduce them. To
the extent that Muslim immigrants in European
countries feel marginalized, they and their hosts
A reader of last week’s column about Islamist
extremism wrote, “It is not really about Islam. It is
about things you understand all too well: poverty,
alienation, disenfranchisement, and a search for
meaning and identity. Identifying with Muslim
extremist groups gives terrorists a package of
support, doctrine, and legitimacy to draw on.” The
writer commented that, while Boko Haram does not
have “much to do with Islam,” through its militancy
it is able to attract money and training from groups
such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
The writer urged me to draw on my understanding
of “black alienation in the inner city” for insight
into the behavior of Boko Haram. A few other
readers echoed that sentiment.
Indeed, I’m all too familiar with the mistrust,
anger and sense of disconnection present in some
communities marginalized on the basis of economic
and social standing and race.
But is Boko Haram motivated by economic
deprivation or feelings of victimization? Or is it
something else? Something more akin to violent
religious extremism?
Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme, prelate of the
Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri, in northeast
Nigeria, doesn’t view Boko Haram as just an
opportunistic bunch of hoodlums using religion as
cover for their mercenary exploitation.
in the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat last week,
asked: “Don’t all these events now going on
around us and committed in our name require
us to break the fear barrier and begin to question
our region and our societies, especially the ideas
being trafficked there that have led us to this
awful stage where we are tearing at one another’s
throats - to mention nothing of what as a result
also happens beyond our region?”
And a remarkable piece in The Washington Post
Sunday by Asra Q. Nomani, an American Muslim
born in India, called out the “honor corps” - a
loose, well-funded coalition of governments and
private individuals “that tries to silence debate on
extremist ideology in order to protect the image
of Islam.” It “throws the label of ‘Islamophobe’
on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk
about extremist ideology in the religion. ... The
official and unofficial channels work in tandem,
harassing, threatening and battling introspective
Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere. ... The
bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic
extremism. ... They cause governments, writers
and experts to walk on eggshells.”
I know one in particular.
Something else is also at work, and it needs
to be discussed. It is the struggle within Arab
and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how
to embrace modernity, pluralism and women’s
rights. That struggle drives, and is driven by,
the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states
and Pakistan. It has left these societies with too
many young men who have never held a job or
a girl’s hand, who then seek to overcome their
humiliation at being left behind, and to find
identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other
Muslims who are not sufficiently pious and of
Westerners whom they perceive to be putting
Muslims down. But you don’t see this in the two
giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.
Only Sunni Arabs and Pakistanis can get
inside their narrative and remediate it. But
reformers can only do that if they have a free,
secure political space. If we’re not going to help
create space for that internal dialogue, let’s just
be quiet. Don’t say stupid stuff. And don’t hold
airy fairy conferences that dodge the real issues,
which many mainstream Muslims know and are c.2015 New York Times News Service
actually starved to discuss, especially women.
15-1-20
The Arab journalist Diana Moukalled, writing
Colbert King
There’s Nothing Secular About
Boko Haram
In an interview this week with the international
Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, Doeme
said that, within five years, Boko Haram has
decimated his diocese. Fifty churches have been
destroyed, with 200 more abandoned, he said.
The bishop stated that 1,000 of his congregants
have been killed, many by Islamists. He said, “The
[extremists] point a gun or a knife at them saying
that if they do not convert they will be killed. Some
of them have been killed for refusing to convert.”
Nigerian Christians certainly regard Boko Haram
as religiously motivated.
Since 2009, the bishop said, nearly 70,000 of
the 125,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Maiduguri
have fled their homes. So have half of the diocese’s
priests, with many seeking refuge in a neighboring
diocese.
The situation is so dire in northern Nigeria that
Doeme has asked for Western troops to help defeat
Boko Haram. The Nigerian military, he said, ranges
from inept to corrupt. “Among the soldiers there
were sympathizers with Boko Haram - some of
them were even Boko Haram members and many
of them just ran away,” he said.
Boko Haram is about more than
disenfranchisement and a quest for identity.
Its mission is to establish Islamic law - or at least
King continued on page 25
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
25
Clarence Page
How Speech Rights Went Wrong In France
For some Americans, France
can seem like a trip back in time, not
always in a good way.
“In terms of racial progress,”
writes Joel Dreyfuss in The Root,
“France looks more like the U.S.
in the 1950s -- minus enforced
segregation -- than America today.”
Dreyfuss, a former managing
editor of that black-oriented website,
now lives in Paris as he works on a
book about his family’s 300-year
involvement with Haiti.
He was reacting to a recent speech
given by French President Francois
Hollande about diversity after
Islamic terrorists killed 17 people
at the offices of satirical weekly
Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher
grocery store.
Unlike the United States, French
leaders seldom talk about how much
their fellow French increasingly
come in many colors. Their official
census doesn’t even count race,
religion or ethnicity.
But pretending that diversity
doesn’t exist has only hobbled the
country’s efforts to integrate the
country’s heavily Muslim immigrants
from North and West Africa into the
French mainstream. This divide is
particularly wide in regard to two
rights that enable diverse groups to
express themselves: free speech and
free press.
As violent demonstrations by
Muslims erupted in Africa and the
Middle East over controversial
caricatures
of
the
Prophet
Muhammad in Charlie Hebdo,
Hollande vowed that any acts
directed at Jews or Muslims would
be “severely punished” without
damage to the country’s democratic
traditions.
“There are tensions abroad
where people don’t understand
our attachment to the freedom of
speech,” Hollande said during a
visit to the southern city of Tulle,
according to Reuters. “We’ve seen
the protests, and I would say that in
France all beliefs are respected.”
King continued from page 24
and 3,700 homes and businesses
were destroyed in the Jan. 3 attack
on Baga near Nigeria’s border with
Cameroon.
“This is just the beginnings of the
killings,” Shekau said. “What you’ve
just witnessed is a tip of the iceberg.
More deaths are coming.”
Sorry to all who think groups like
Boko Haram don’t have much to
do with religion. But something is
loose in the land, and it’s a religious
fundamentalism fueled by hatred, the
likes of which most of us have never
seen before.
It’s been a while since I visited
ethnically and religiously diverse
Nigeria. Ethnic strains were evident
during my trips in the 1980s - the
country fought a civil war in the ‘60s.
But today’s violent religious extremist
threat was virtually nonexistent.
So, too, the case in Yemen, where
I first heard the Islamic call to prayer,
and in Egypt, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi
Boko Haram’s version of it - over
Nigeria. It is driven by a religious
fundamentalism that sanctions the
deliberate destruction of churches
and the slaughter of worshipers.
On Christmas Day it targets
churches. There’s nothing secular
about Boko Haram.
No less than Boko Haram leader
Abubakar Shekau has said so himself.
Claiming credit for a massacre
that took place in the northeastern
Nigerian town of Baga - in which
hundreds were shot on sight or
dragged from their homes and killed
- Shekau said in a YouTube video,
according to the Associated Press:
“We are the ones who fought the
people of Baga, and we have killed
them with such a killing as he [Allah]
commanded us in his book.”
Amnesty International said as
many as 2,000 civilians were killed
Yet, that “attachment to the
freedom of speech” didn’t sound
very tight after a week in which
French police arrested and charged
more than 50 people, including
four juveniles, with hate speech and
other alleged expressions of support
for terrorism.
I say “alleged” because expressions
of support for terrorists or terrorism,
like any other offensive speech is
often in the ear of the beholder.
One 28-year-old man, for example,
was found guilty of shouting support
for the attackers as he passed a
police station, according to the New
York Times. He was sentenced to
six months in prison.
More notoriously, the famously
anti-Semitic French-Cameroonian
comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala
was arrested for a Facebook post.
“Tonight, as far as I’m concerned,”
he wrote, “I feel like Charlie
Coulibaly.”
He was reacting to the popular
“Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”)
slogan by inserting the name of
Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who
killed four hostages at the kosher
grocery store and a police officer the
day before.
Dieudonne, as he prefers to be
called, says his tasteless remark was
no worse than the often tasteless
cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. On
Arabia and Sudan, where, in a
previous profession, I visited on
business.
Back then there was no al-Qaida
in the Arabian Peninsula in Sanaa,
no Islamic State receiving funding
from supporters in Kuwait, no
Saudi Arabian money flowing to
9/11 plotters and no reason for an
Egyptian president to demand that
imams help in the fight against
terrorism.
This is a different time.
“Alienation” and “a search for
meaning” may be contributing
factors.
So, too, hatred - leading to
mayhem and massacres committed,
albeit wrongly, in God’s name.
Sadly, it does have to do with
religion.
King is a former deputy editorial
page editor of The Washington Post.
(c) 2015, Special to The Washington Post
15-1-23
that narrow issue, he may have a
point. Charlie Hebdo proudly calls
itself a “journal irresponsible” and
is widely defended for carrying on
the French tradition for unshackled
iconoclasm.
But as the French see it, the right
to free speech is protected, not the
right to hate speech. After the pain
of World War II, France, Germany
and some other European countries
have passed laws against denying
the Holocaust and against any other
speech that appears to attack people,
not just ideas.
Yet, even by that narrow standard,
angry Muslims are not the only folks
who detect a double standard. Is it
what Dieudonne said that counts,
they ask, or who is saying it?
I feel the same about Dieudonne
as I do about Charlie Hebdo. I
strongly disagree with what he says,
but I defend to the death his right
to say it. That’s my paraphrase of
Voltaire’s famous quote. He was
French, too, although his immortal
wisdom seems too often to be
forgotten by his countrymen.
Dieudonne’s statement, painful
as it was, did not seem to glorify
terrorists as much as it expressed the
pain and frustration of many lawabiding Muslims whom Hollande
ironically is trying to reach. Just
as the murders at Charlie Hebdo
boosted the weekly’s sales, heavyhanded efforts to silence Dieudonne
may only deepen that divide.
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@
tribune.com.
(C) 2015 Clarence Page
15-1-21
26
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Charles Blow
How Expensive It Is To Be Poor
This month, the Pew Research Center
released a study that found that most wealthy
Americans believed “poor people today have it
easy because they can get government benefits
without doing anything in return.”
This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it
means to be poor in this country - the soul-rending
omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and
fatigue. This can be the view only of those who
have not known - or have long forgotten - what
poverty truly means.
“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among
the poor. Things are hard - the times are hard,
the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for
uninformed explanations issued by the willfully
callous and the haughtily blind.
Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it,
a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive
it is to be poor.”
First, many poor people work, but they just
don’t make enough to move out of poverty - an
estimated 11 million Americans fall into this
category.
So, as the Pew report pointed out, “more than
half of the least secure group reports receiving
at least one type of means-tested government
benefit.”
And yet, whatever the poor earn is likely to be
more heavily taxed than the earnings of wealthier
citizens, according to a new analysis by the
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. As
The New York Times put it last week:
“According to the study, in 2015 the poorest
fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9
percent of their income in state and local taxes,
the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1
percent will average 5.4 percent.”
In addition, many low-income people are
“unbanked” (not served by a financial institution),
and thus nearly eaten alive by exorbitant fees.
As the St. Louis Federal Reserve pointed out in
2010:
“Unbanked consumers spend approximately
2.5 to 3 percent of a government benefits check
and between 4 percent and 5 percent of payroll
check just to cash them. Additional dollars are
spent to purchase money orders to pay routine
monthly expenses. When you consider the cost
for cashing a bi-weekly payroll check and buying
about six money orders each month, a household
with a net income of $20,000 may pay as much
as $1,200 annually for alternative service fees substantially more than the expense of a monthly
checking account.”
Even when low-income people can become
affiliated with a bank, those banks are increasing
making them pay “steep rates for loans and high
fees on basic checking accounts,” as The Times’
DealBook blog put it last year.
And poor people can have a hard time getting
credit. As The Washington Post put it, the excesses
of the subprime boom have led conventional
banks to stay away from the riskiest borrowers,
leaving them “all but cut off from access to big And besides, having a car can make prime
loans, like mortgages.”
targets of the poor. One pernicious practice
that the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
One way to move up the ladder and out of Missouri - and the protests that followed poverty is through higher education, but even resurfaced was the degree to which some local
that is not without disproportionate costs. As the municipalities profit from police departments
Institute for College Access and Success noted in targeting poor communities, with a raft of stops,
March:
fines, summonses and arrests supported by police
“Graduates who received Pell Grants, most of actions and complicit courts.
whom had family incomes under $40,000, were As NPR reported in August:
much more likely to borrow and to borrow more. “In 2013, the municipal court in Ferguson
Among graduating seniors who ever received a - a city of 21,135 people - issued 32,975 arrest
Pell Grant, 88 percent had student loans in 2012, warrants for nonviolent offenses, mostly driving
with an average of $31,200 per borrower. In violations.”
contrast, 53 percent of those who never received The story continued:
a Pell Grant had debt, with an average of $26,450 “ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis-area public
per borrower.”
defender group, says in its report that more than
And often, work or school requires half the courts in St. Louis County engage in the
transportation, which can be another outrageous ‘illegal and harmful practices’ of charging high
expense. According to the Leadership Conference court fines and fees on nonviolent offenses like
on Civil and Human Rights:
traffic violations - and then arresting people when
“Low- and moderate-income households they don’t pay.”
spend 42 percent of their total annual income on The list of hardships could go on for several
transportation, including those who live in rural more columns, but you get the point: Being poor
areas, as compared to middle-income households, is anything but easy.
who spend less than 22 percent of their annual c.2015 New York Times News Service
income on transportation.”
15-1-18
Sam Pizzigati
Inequality Is Costing Us Big-Time
Have you ever wondered what inequality
costs the average American family?
That is, what price do we pay — in actual
dollars and cents — for tolerating an economy
fixated on pumping our treasure to the top?
That question has no simple answer.
How much, for instance, should we value an
added year of life? We know — from hundreds of
research studies over the years — that people live
longer, healthier lives in more equal nations.
We also know that more equal societies have
lower levels of mental illness, higher levels
of trust, and fewer teenage pregnancies and
homicides. Placing dollar signs on quality-of-life
indicators like these can get complicated.
On the other hand, dollar signs do come easy
when we’re talking about income and wealth.
The Economic Policy Institute has gone
through one exercise along this line. How much
income would middle-class Americans be making
today, EPI researchers asked, if the United States
had the same distribution of income now as our
nation had back at the end of the 1970s?
The difference between now and then could
hardly be starker. Since 1979, households in
America’s top 1 percent have more than doubled
their share of the nation’s income, from 8 to
nearly 20 percent.
What if this increase in inequality had never
happened? What if middle-class households were
taking in the same share of the nation’s income
they took in four decades ago?
EPI focused its calculations on 2007, the last
year before the Great Recession. In that year, the
average middle-class income in the United States
— that is, the average for the middle 60 percent of
American households — amounted to $76,443.
If America had been as equal in 2007 as it was
in 1979, that average income would have been
$94,310. In other words, inequality is costing the
average American family about $18,000 a year.
But the global economy, some might argue,
has changed fundamentally over the past four
decades. Simple comparisons of then vs. now,
they say, no longer tell us much.
For argument’s sake, let’s accept this rather
dubious claim — and make a different comparison.
Let’s contrast the wealth of ordinary Americans
today with the wealth of ordinary people in a
more equal country.
France makes for a good comparison. France
and the United States, the Swiss bank Credit
Suisse reported last fall, have about the same
total wealth per adult.
If you divide the wealth of the United States
by our adult population, that is, you end up with
$347,845 per adult. If you do the same for France,
you end up with $317,292 per adult.
Total equality, of course, reigns in neither
France nor the United States. But if both nations
Pizzigati continued on page 27
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
27
Petula Dvorak
The Absurd Reality Of Child-Care Costs
An editor said she was losing
about $200 a month.
An analyst said she just barely
broke even.
“Yes! That’s me. I’m losing
money going to work today. But
I’m late! Can we talk later?” said
another woman rushing to the office
after dropping her kids off at a daycare center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The fourth mom I talked to was
so underwater, the family simply
couldn’t afford for her to work. So
she quit her job as a fraud investigator
for a financial institution because
child care would have consumed so
much of her paycheck.
This is the absurd reality so many
middle-class families face, and it’s
especially devastating for working
mothers. That’s why about 15
minutes into Tuesday’s State of the
Union speech, women across the
country - Republicans, Democrats,
independents
and
apolitical
sideliners - whooped and hollered
when President Barack Obama
acknowledged the child-care crisis.
“It’s time,” he said, “we stop
treating child care as a side issue, or
a women’s issue, and treat it like the
national economic priority that it is
for all of us.”
Yessss, we all said.
“I applauded. I cheered,” said Erin
Hackney, 35, the fraud investigator
who quit her job to stay home with
her kids, now ages 9 and 6, in Burke,
Virginia. “Because women and the
value of the work that women do
is constantly undervalued in our
society.”
She loved her job. And she was
good at it. And she hated leaving.
So, what’s wrong with a little time
off to be with the kids? Scrimp and
save a little, make do, detractors say.
Raise your kids, and once they’re in
school, go back to work.
It’s just two or three years off, said
my family members who wanted me
to quit working.
But it’s never that simple. The
mommy-track penalty ends up with
huge, long-term costs. Two years
off usually means a complete career
rebuild. One year away from some
highly skilled jobs is like a 10-year
hiatus.
When
Hackney
considered
returning to work as a fraud
investigator last year, she said
technology had changed so much
that she didn’t have a chance. So
she’s now working as a teacher’s
assistant at her kids’ school.
“And there, we have a couple
women who are pregnant, and they’re
facing this down, and they don’t
know what to do. They’re doing the
numbers - salary, child care, hours
- and it just doesn’t work,” she said.
And we’re not even talking about
the country’s more than 10 million
single moms, who don’t have the
option of staying at home.
At that Greenbelt day-care center,
analyst Sarah Tater, 35, dropped off
her 2-year-old and headed to the
office.” We are just above water,”
she said. “But because I have one.
If I had two, then that would be the
tipping point.”
The nation really needs to catch up
to places like Finland or Germany,
where child care is important and a
priority.”
Over in Rockville, Maryland,
Diane Ferguson, 47, was racing to
pick her kids up from after-school
care.
She’s breaking even now. But in
the days when both kids were at an
in-home day care, she was spending
more than $450 a week on child care.
And the family was underwater.
Once the kids made it to preschool,
the family began to break even.
“I’m
self-employed,”
said
Ferguson, who runs her own
company editing government reports
and proposals. “Even though we
were upside down for a while, when
you’re in business for yourself, you
can’t just drop everything.”
The state of American child care?
When she heard that child It’s a mess, a mishmash of pricey
care made the State of the Union day-care centers with waiting lists
address, she said, “Thank goodness. a mile long, in-home day-care
operations that are either homey,
sketchy or both, and insanely
Pizzigati continued from page 26
expensive nannies and au pairs
divvied up their wealth on a totally wealth as France, typical American who are totally out of reach for
equal basis, the average American adults today would have almost most people. It’s friends and family
would have slightly more wealth triple their current net worth.
picking up the slack, and quiet
than the average person in France. So how much does inequality prayers while racing down the
cost America’s middle class? More highway shoulder to pass the traffic
What do we actually see?
than we realize. Much more.
jam and make the pickup deadline.
In France today, “median” OtherWords columnist Sam Meanwhile, study after study
adults — those with more wealth Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy shows that these are some of the
than the poorest half of France’s Studies associate fellow, edits most crucial developmental years
adult population but less wealth than the inequality weekly Too Much. for children, and we either make it
the richest half — have $140,638 His latest book is The Rich Don’t financially impossible for parents to
in net worth to their name. In the Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph stay with them or we pay caregivers
United States, by contrast, median over Plutocracy that Created the less than we pay janitors to nurture
adult wealth stands at a mere American Middle Class, 1900- our country’s future.
$53,352.
1970.
The bottom line? If the United OtherWords.org.
I thought I would have a hard
States had as equal a distribution of 15-1-21
time finding women like me, who
existed in that absurd, upside-down
world of paying to go to work. But
with every stop I made at a highquality day care, with every phone
call or email conversation I had, I
found women in the same situation I
was.
“But please don’t put my name in.
I don’t want people to know,” one
woman told me.
We need America to know how
absurd this is.
We also need to know that
America can do this - and has done it
before. I love that Obama mentioned
the wartime nursery schools where
Rosie the Riveter dropped off her
kids so she could go rivet.
“During World War II, when men
like my grandfather went off to war,
having women like my grandmother
in the workforce was a nationalsecurity priority - so this country
provided universal child care,”
Obama said.
Check out some of the footage
of women in shipyard coveralls and
pin curls dropping their children
off at these day-care centers. It was
considered a patriotic duty to put
your kids there, and the curriculums
at 2,500 centers were educational,
inspiring and nurturing. Kids got
snacks and hot meals, and some even
brought mom home a roast chicken
wrapped in foil so she could rest up
in the evening after a hard day at the
factory. All in the name of war.
It’s time that we put this much
care, importance and universal
consideration - men and women into caring for our children.
But now, it has to be in the name
of our future.
(c) 2015, The Washington Post
15-1-23
28
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
Nicholas Kristof
Where’s The Empathy?
The funeral for my high school buddy Kevin
Green is Saturday, near this town where we both
grew up.
The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple
organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of
inequality and a lack of good jobs.
Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin
- obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on
disability and food stamps - as a moocher. They
would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t
you look after your health? Why did you father
two kids outside of marriage?
That acerbic condescension reflects one of this
country’s fundamental problems: an empathy
gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many
affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy
or living cushy lives. A poll released this month
by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy
Americans mostly agree that “poor people today
have it easy because they can get government
benefits without doing anything in return.”
Lazy? Easy? Kevin used to set out with his
bicycle and a little trailer to collect cans by the
roadside. He would make about $20 a day.
Let me tell you about Kevin Green. He grew
up on a small farm a couple of miles from my
family’s, and we both attended the same small
rural high school in Yamhill, Oregon. We both
ran cross country, took welding and agriculture
classes and joined Future Farmers of America.
After cross country practice, I’d drive him home
to his family farm, with its milk cows, hogs and
chickens.
The Greens encapsulated if not the American
dream, at least solid upward mobility. The dad,
Thomas, had only a third-grade education and
couldn’t read. But he had a good union job as a
cement finisher, paying far above the minimum
wage, and he worked hard and made sure his kids
did, too. He had no trouble with the law.
Kevin and his big sister, Cindy - one of the
sweetest girls in school - both earned high
school diplomas. Kevin was sunny, cheerful and
astonishingly helpful: Any hint that something
needed fixing, and he was there with a wrench.
But then the dream began to disintegrate.
The local glove factory and feed store closed,
and other blue-collar employers cut back. Good
union jobs became hard to find. For a while,
Kevin had a low-paying nonunion job working
for a construction company. After that company
went under, he worked as shift manager making
trailer homes. He fell in love and had twin boys
that he doted on. But because he and his girlfriend
struggled financially, they never married.
Then, about 15 years ago, Kevin hurt his back
and was laid off. Soon afterward, his girlfriend
moved out, took the kids and asked for child
support. The loss of his girlfriend, kids and job
was a huge blow.
“It knocked him to the dirt,” says his younger
brother, Clayton, also a pal of mine. “It destroyed
his self-esteem.”
Kevin’s weight ballooned to 350 pounds, and
he developed diabetes and had a couple of heart
attacks. He grew marijuana and self-medicated
with it, Clayton says, and was arrested for drug
offenses.
My kids would see Kevin and me together and
couldn’t believe he had run cross country with
me, and that he wasn’t 20 years older.
Kevin eventually got disability benefits,
but he was far behind in child support and was
punished by losing his driver’s license - which
made it pretty much impossible to get a job in a
rural area. Disability helped Kevin by providing
a monthly check that he desperately needed, but
it also hurt him because he might have looked
harder for a job if he hadn’t been getting those
checks, Clayton says.
Yet it’s absurd to think that people like Kevin
are somehow living it up. After child support
deductions, he was living on about $180 a month
plus food stamps and a small income from
selling homegrown pot. He supplemented this by
growing a huge vegetable garden and fishing in
the Yamhill River.
Three years ago, Cindy died of a heart attack at
52. Then doctors told Kevin a few weeks ago that
his heart, liver and kidneys were failing, and that
he was dying. He had trouble walking. He was in
pain.
He was also worried about his twin boys. They
had trouble in school and with the law, jailed for
drug and other offenses. The upward mobility that
had seemed so promising a generation ago turned
out to be a mirage. Family structure dissolved,
and lives become grueling - and shorter.
Kevin wrote a will a few days before he died.
He bequeathed his life’s savings of $3,500 to his
mom for his funeral expenses. Anything left over
is to be divided between his children - and he
begs them not to fight over it. His ashes will be
sprinkled on the farm.
I have trouble diagnosing just what went
wrong in that odyssey from sleek distance runner
to his death at 54, but the lack of good jobs was
central to it. Sure, Kevin made mistakes, but his
dad had opportunities for good jobs that Kevin
never had.
So, Kevin Green, R.I.P. You were a good man
- hardworking and always on the lookout for
someone to help - yet you were overturned by
riptides of inequality. Those who would judge
you don’t have a clue. They could use a dose of
your own empathy.
Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof,
Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New
York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY
10018.
c.2015 New York Times News Service
15-1-24
Charles Blow
Library Visit, Then Held At Gunpoint
Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent
wants to get. It was my son calling from college
- he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been
accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!
This is how my son remembers it:
He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check
the status of a book he had requested. The book
hadn’t arrived yet, but since he was there he put
in a request for some multimedia equipment for a
project he was working on.
Then he left to walk back to his dorm room.
He says he saw an officer “jogging” toward the
entrance of another building across the grounds
from the building he’d just left.
Then this:
“I did not pay him any mind, and continued to
walk back towards my room. I looked behind me,
and noticed that the police officer was following
me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio
and said, ‘I got him.’
“I faced forward again, presuming that the
officer was not talking to me. I then heard him
say, ‘Hey, turn around!’ - which I did.
“The officer raised his gun at me, and told me
to get on the ground.
“At this point, I stopped looking directly at the
officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I
dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised,
then laid down on my stomach.
“The officer asked me what my name was. I
gave him my name.
“The officer asked me what school I went to. I
told him Yale University.
“At this point, the officer told me to get up.”
The officer gave his name, then asked my son
to “give him a call the next day.”
My son continued:
“I got up slowly, and continued to walk back
to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking
slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said,
‘Hey, my man. Can you step off to the side?’ I
did.”
The officer asked him to turn around so he
could see the back of his jacket. He asked his
name again, then, finally, asked to see my son’s
ID. My son produced his school ID from his
wallet.
The officer asked more questions, and my son
answered. All the while the officer was relaying
this information to someone over his radio.
My son heard someone on the radio say back to
the officer “something to the effect of: ‘Keep him
there until we get this sorted out.’” The officer
told my son that an incident report would be filed,
and then he walked away.
A female officer approached. My son recalled,
Blow continued on page 29
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
29
Charles Lane
A Modern Segregation Battle
Of all the manifestations of
crony capitalism in American
history, none is more sickening
than the concatenation of racial
prejudice, business greed and
big-government protection that
segregated urban and suburban
housing during the 20th century.
Solicitous of, and sympathetic to,
the fears of their white customers,
builders, bankers and real estate
agents went to enormous lengths to
herd blacks into ghettos when they
began to migrate north and west
from the rural South during World
War I.
Local courts enforced covenants
forbidding white home buyers to
sell or rent to African Americans
(or, often, Asians and Jews). Prior
to World War II, the real estate
business actually considered such
provisions ethically necessary
to protect property values from
the impact of what the federal
government called “inharmonious
racial groups.”
That last phrase appears in the
original underwriting manual that
the Federal Housing Administration
used to ensure that nearly all
mortgages it backed went to whites
living in white neighborhoods.
The New Deal agency actively
encouraged racial covenants from
1934 until 1948.
By then, though, “residential
segregation [was] deeply ingrained
in American life,” as a 1973
historical review by the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission put it.
Blow continued from page 28
was he not immediately told why he
was being detained? Why not ask
for ID first?
What if my son had panicked
under the stress, having never had
a gun pointed at him before, and
made what the officer considered
a “suspicious” movement? Had I
come close to losing him? Triggers
cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot
be called back.
My son was unarmed, possessed
no plunder, obeyed all instructions,
answered all questions, did not
attempt to flee or resist in any way.
“I told her that an officer had just
stopped me and pointed his gun
at me, and that I wanted to know
what this was all about.” She
explained students had called about
a burglary suspect who fit my son’s
description.
That suspect was apparently later
arrested in the area.
When I spoke to my son, he
was shaken up. I, however, was
fuming.
Now, don’t get me wrong:
If indeed my son matched the
description of a suspect, I would
have had no problem with him
being questioned appropriately.
School is his community, his home
away from home, and he would
have appreciated reasonable efforts
to keep it safe. The stop is not the
problem; the method of the stop is
the problem.
Why was a gun drawn first? Why
Thanks primarily to the Fair
Housing Act of 1968 and other
reforms, as well as the rise of a black
middle class and immigration from
Asia, Africa and Latin America,
the divide between black and white
neighborhoods is not nearly as
absolute as it once was.
Still, in 2010 the six metropolitan
areas with the largest black
populations scored nearly 80
points out of 100 on a widely
used statistical index of racial
segregation, according to census
data.
Which brings us to Wednesday’s
oral argument in the Supreme
Court. Texas fair housing advocates
sued that deep-red state’s housing
agency for allegedly distributing
federal tax credits for low-income
housing in a way that steered the
advocates’ black clients into mostly
black neighborhoods. The Texas
state government lost in the lower
courts and appealed to the justices.
In a narrow legal sense, the
court must decide whether the Fair
Housing Act permits such lawsuits,
based on the alleged “disparate
impact” of business and government
decisions, as lower federal courts
and the Obama administration’s
regulators have previously ruled
- or whether plaintiffs must meet
the much higher burden of proving
deliberate segregation.
In a broader sense, though,
the question is how active Big
Government should still be in
the fight to undo the residential
segregation that Big Government
did so much to create.
The justices are surely aware
that the Supreme Court, alone
among the three branches of the
federal government and the states,
consistently stood against housing
discrimination. In 1917, the high
court struck down openly racist
zoning laws that decreed where
blacks could and could not live.
When racial covenants arose as an
alternative, the court voided those
as well, albeit not until 1948. In
1968, the justices bolstered the
Fair Housing Act by ruling that
housing discrimination violated
a Reconstruction-era civil rights
law.
To be sure, disparate-impact suits
are a blunt instrument, especially
in an increasingly diverse nation
whose housing market is more
complex and, thankfully, more
data-driven and transparent, than
in 1968.
In Wednesday’s argument, Chief
exceedingly happy I had talked to
him about how to conduct himself
if a situation like this ever occurred.
Yet I was brewing with sadness
and anger that he had to use that
advice.
I am reminded of what I have
always known, but what some would
choose to deny: that there is no way
to work your way out - earn your
way out - of this sort of crisis. In
these moments, what you’ve done
matters less than how you look.
There is no amount of
respectability that can bend a gun’s
barrel. All of our boys are bound
together.
The dean of Yale College and
the campus police chief have
apologized and promised an internal
investigation, and I appreciate that.
But the scars cannot be unmade. My
son will always carry the memory
of the day he left his college library
and an officer trained a gun on him.
This is the scenario I have always
dreaded: my son at the wrong end
of a gun barrel, face down on the
concrete. I had always dreaded the
moment that we would share stories
about encounters with the police in
which our lives hung in the balance,
intergenerational stories of joining
the inglorious “club.”
When that moment came, I was c.2015 New York Times News Service
Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was not
wrong to note the inherent murkiness
of the disparate-impact concept: It
could be invoked against subsidies
to revitalize a predominantly black
neighborhood, on the grounds that
they reinforce existing segregation,
even though the money plainly
benefits black residents.
Roberts
suggested
that
courts might have no choice but
to remedy disparate impact by
allocating housing according to de
facto racial quotas, which would
create problems, constitutional and
practical, of their own.
Federal goals and targets for
subsidized lending helped many
low-income people, who are
disproportionately minorities, buy
houses - but also induced many
people to take on more borrowing
than they could handle, with
ruinous consequences.
Let it never be forgotten,
however, that prior to 1968, housing
was allocated according to rigid
racial quotas, de facto and de jure,
that systematically disadvantaged
minorities.
Measured against the mass of
historical housing segregation,
disparate-impact cases are notable
not only for their bluntness but their
relative weakness. Justice Stephen
G. Breyer had a point when he said
they have been around for 35 years
“and all the horribles that are painted
don’t seem to have happened or at
least we have survived them.”
When you look at it that way,
the stakes are rather low - too low,
you would have thought, to justify
Texas’ investment in the case at a
time when the Republicans who
run that state, and others like them,
say they want and need to engage
minority voters.
Lane is a member of The
Washington Post’s editorial board.
(c) 2015, The Washington Post
15-1-23
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February 4, 2015
Froma Harrop
Stop Making Excuses For Nonvoting Millennials
The recent economic crisis hit the American
middle class hard. But for the youngest adults
trying to gain a foothold in the good life, it’s been
devastating.
So why did so few millennials, the huge cohort
of 18- to 29-year-olds, vote last November? Only
21 percent bothered.
Let’s dispense with the excuse that they don’t
feel their elected government cares about them.
You don’t get served till you enter the restaurant.
The result of this passivity may soon be
apparent. President Obama has issued proposals
to restart the middle-class escalator in ways
that would be especially helpful to millennials.
They include free tuition to community college,
expanded tax credits for child care and a tax break
for middle-income working couples.
Because these things would be paid for with
higher taxes on the very rich, many will be a tough
sell to the expanded Republican majority. As we
know, the conservative electoral gains were a gift
from older voters, who turned out in relatively
high numbers.
Many of these folks spend their leisure hours
marinating in the glow of Fox News Channel,
where they are told what exemplary Americans
they are and how younger people without jobs
or savings are basically bums. The median age
of the Fox News viewer is almost 69. For Bill
O’Reilly’s show, it is 72.
Give these older conservatives credit. Their
sense that government doesn’t care about them is
precisely a reason they vote. They vote whether
they like or dislike the president. They vote if
it’s raining. In sum, they are doing what they’re
supposed to do. Vote.
Much blame for the voting age gap belongs with
the various spokesmen purporting to represent
the young, generally progressive electorate. They
often sympathize with the group’s reasons for not
voting rather than telling them to toughen up and
dive in.
I wish the TV comics dishing out news kibbles
amid the bleeped-out F-words would stop
telling the kids not to trust anyone, above all the
traditional media. The traditional news media, for
all their warts, remain a last holdout for grown-up
coverage. Actually, serious government reporting,
once you start following it, can be fascinating.
Toilet jokes not needed.
This trashing of the more reliable sources
drowns news consumers in the chaos of social
media, where well-written lies and propaganda
swirl among the honest reporting. Ironically, the
older folks still read the newspaper, even as they
often curse its viewpoints.
A poll of millennials conducted last spring by
the Harvard Institute of Politics blamed decisions
not to vote on a “decrease in trust” in government
institutions and a rise in cynicism. Really? Few
distrust government more than the older tea party
folks, who correctly see the voting booth as the
remedy for their discontent. They understand
that you end up voting for the preferable of two
choices, not perfection.
The other is to submit to them and not vote.
Too many young Americans choose the
submission route. Should the conservative
The younger voters, the Harvard pollster Congress shoot down proposals to help them
went on, “need to feel like they’re making a advance economically, they’ll see the price of
difference.”
going limp.
The most obvious way to make a difference The politically powerful know they need only
would be to vote, would it not? And by the way, one reason to vote: It’s Election Day.
it’s truly cracked logic to say that once good Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @
leaders magically get themselves elected, we’ll FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@
start voting for them.
gmail.com.
There are two coherent ways to deal with Copyright 2015 Creators.com
unworthy politicians. One is to throw them out of 15-1-20
office -- or keep them out -- through one’s vote.
Frank Bruni
Be Fruitful, Not Bananas
My mother always believed that when you
signed up for a regimen, you owed it your best
shot.
She was that way with diets. With aerobics.
And with religion. For my father she converted,
Methodist to Catholic, and she tried to follow the
script.
But in one way she couldn’t, and it became a
staple of her confessions.
“Forgive me, Father,” she’d say time and
again, in church after church, to confessor after
confessor. “I use contraception.”
She never met a priest who didn’t respond
with some version of the following, and I’m
paraphrasing with abandon:
“Of course you do. You’re sane. Ignore Rome.
Forget about the pope. There’s La-La Land, and
then there’s the real world, in which you are
clearly living. Say three Hail Marys because it
can never hurt, and be on your way.”
I’m being cheeky. I’m also being honest. There
is perhaps no church teaching more widely derided
and disobeyed than the hoary prohibition against
any birth control other than strategic abstinence,
known more euphemistically (and musically!) as
the rhythm method.
And there’s none that more squarely places the
Catholic hierarchy in opposition to modernity,
practicality and prudence, none that gives
Catholics more reason to regard some of the
church’s edicts as quaint anachronisms and to
follow their consciences in lieu of any commands.
It’s the gateway estrangement.
So when Pope Francis broached the topic
last week, he was bound to whip up a storm of
attention, even without a choice of words that “set
a new standard for the papal vernacular,” as The
Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo observed.
He was on the papal plane, en route from the
Philippines back to Italy, and he was reflecting
on the relationship between third-world poverty
and extra-large families. He told reporters that
Catholics needn’t feel compelled to breed “like
rabbits,” a zoological simile that’s sure to have
legs.
St. Francis was reputed to preach to the
birds. Pope Francis will be remembered for
quipping about the bunnies.
Was he signaling an imminent change in church
teaching, or was he merely getting carried away
with comparisons and colloquialisms, as he tends
to do? Just the previous week, after the Charlie
Hebdo massacre, he likened besmirching a
person’s religion to talking trash about someone’s
mother, an insult that he said was sure to provoke
a punch.
He immediately had to clean up and clarify all
of that, and he revisited the “rabbits” remark as
well, dispelling any notion of new doctrine. So
where does that leave things?
Some history first: The church came close to
lifting its condemnation of contraception back
in the 1960s, when a significant majority of
theologians, bishops and cardinals who were asked
to take a formal look at that teaching recommended
such a swerve. Pope Paul VI overruled them partly, it’s believed, out of fear that an admission
of error on the birth-control front might prompt
assaults on other teachings and open the fallibility
floodgates.
But given the church’s chauvinism, was
something additional in play? Patricia Miller,
a former Catholic who has written extensively
about the church and sexuality, advanced that
perspective in a book, “Good Catholics: The
Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church,”
which was published last year.
“Maintaining the traditional family, in which
men were leaders in the world outside the home
and women were confined to the domestic realm
by the demands of young children and repeated
pregnancies, was a key concern of the Catholic
Church,” she asserted, noting that in the 1950s,
Catholic bishops had gone so far as to excoriate
working mothers for giving child care short
shrift.
Whatever the case, the church’s voice on
matters sexual became only less and less relevant
to many Catholics.
Bruni continued on page 31
Liberal Opinion Week
February 4, 2015
31
Gene Lyons
Love Questionnaire Is More Humor Than Science
For a guy who watches maybe
250 ballgames a year, I’ve always
taken an interest in what was once
called the women’s page. After
studying the sports section every
morning, it’s the next thing I turn
to.
Newspapers no longer have
women’s pages. For complicated
reasons I’m reluctant to parse, they
now have sections euphemistically
devoted to “Style,” “Food,”
“Home,” etc., featuring fad diets,
exercise crazes and home decorating
trends. I head straight to the advice
columns.
It’s there you learn what should
be obvious from the massacres
and catastrophes elsewhere in the
news: Human beings are irreducibly
mad, and women no saner (if less
dangerous) than men. Read Emily
Yoffe’s “Dear Prudence” column at
slate.com regularly, and no frontpage headline will ever shock you.
Lunatic mothers-in-law are a regular
feature.
I’m also devoted to The New
York Times “Modern Love” series,
a recurring feature almost invariably
written by women mainly about less
dire relationship issues: husbands
who watch too many TV ballgames,
say, rather than impatient mothers-
Bruni continued from page 30
At my request, Gallup did a
special breakdown of its “Values
and Beliefs” survey from last May
and looked at how the principles of
people who identified themselves
as Catholics diverged (or didn’t)
from those of Americans on the
whole. Catholics were only slightly
less open to birth control, with 86
percent of them saying that it was
“morally acceptable” in comparison
with 90 percent of all respondents.
But Catholics were more permissive
than all respondents when it came
to sex outside marriage (acceptable
to 72 percent of Catholics versus 66
percent of Americans overall) and
gay and lesbian relationships (70
percent versus 58).
They’re well aware of the
Vatican’s pronouncements. They
just prefer to plug their ears.
And more so than his predecessors,
Pope Francis acknowledges the
discrepancy and seeks to move past it.
That’s the leitmotif that runs through
many of his most attention-getting
remarks and gestures, whether they
in-law who sabotage birth control
devices.
“What do women want?” Freud
famously asked. The most-emailed
“Modern Love” column ever
featured this timeless lament: “I
wanted -- needed -- to nudge him a
little closer to perfect, to make him
into a mate who might annoy me a
little less ... a mate who would be
easier to love.”
The answer was to leave off
nagging and handle the dumb
brute as an animal trainer would:
rewarding behaviors you like and
ignoring the rest.
Works for me.
Somewhat paradoxically, the
other main topic of “Modern Love”
is how to capture a man in the first
place. And there, I’m happy to report,
the Times has recently published an
all-time classic, an essay by Mandy
Len Catron entitled “To Fall in Love
With Anyone, Do This.”
If you’re a vulgarian like me,
i.e. a guy, you may think you
already know the answer. But this
is the New York Times, so it’s more
complicated than that.
Catron, who teaches writing at the
University of British Columbia, met
a man she fancied. So she reacted
apply to gays or to couples living
together outside of wedlock or to
Catholics juggling a dozen kids.
He’s not refashioning doctrine;
he’s reassessing the frequency and
stridency with which it needs to be
flung at people, especially when it
contradicts their experience of the
world and undercuts their connection
to the faith and the church.
“He’s wildly practical,” said
the Rev. James Keenan, a moral
theologian at Boston College.
by administering a pop quiz -specifically, a 36-item questionnaire
of extremely personal questions
formulated by a psychology
professor to be answered by a man
and woman sitting across from one
another in a bar.
Actually, a laboratory setting
was recommended, but Mandy
pretty clearly had her thumb on the
scales. The exercise is supposed to
end with the couple, all soppy with
“vulnerability,” staring into each
other’s eyes for four minutes. I have
to think the object of her experiment
must have been hoping the last bit
would be performed naked.
Otherwise, what would be the
point?
Now to me, the storied ‘60s
of legend and song were bad
enough the first time. Dreaming up
appropriately “sensitive” answers to
questions like “What roles do love
and affection play in your life?”
much less “When did you last cry?”
would strain my impoverished
imagination.
Mellow ‘60s-style aggression used
to make me crazy. I’d have flunked
Woodstock if I hadn’t skipped it.
Mandy’s quiz is reminiscent of
those dreadful days of yore when
people sat in circles toking up and
for that reason. “Did he intend it to
be? I have no idea. When he says
things, you don’t know if they’re
off the cuff or not, because he’s so
out there. He’s exciting that way.”
Unpredictable, too. The same trip
to the Philippines that bred “rabbits”
also sired a lamentation, during a
Mass in Manila, that was wholly
conservative and traditional. Francis
said that attempts to “redefine the
very institution of marriage” and a
“lack of openness to life” threatened
the family.
He sounded then like any old
pope.
But what he sounds like at
other times is the parish priests
encountered by my mother, who felt
that four children were fruitfulness
enough and was trying to make sense
of a creed that sometimes defies it.
There are musty traditions and there
is messy reality; a true pastor gives
the latter the respect it deserves.
When he brought up bunnies,
Francis was doing precisely that.
Keenan told me that while he
didn’t hear, in the pope’s reference
to rabbits, any clear challenge to
traditional teaching, he heard a
change in emphasis, from reminders
that artificial birth control is verboten
to a recognition that people have
good reasons, and sometimes even
a duty, to manage the size of their
families somehow.
“I don’t remember, ever, a pope
saying to Catholics that they should
be mindful of how many children
they’re having,” he told me, adding c.2015 New York Times News Service
that Francis’statement was significant 15-1-24
faking their “innermost” thoughts
about each other.
All too often, my honest,
uncensored thought would have
been something like, “Actually, I
wasn’t thinking about you. I was
wondering if the Red Sox are going
to sign another starting pitcher.”
Even the first item in Mandy’s
quiz, formulated by psychologist
Arthur Aron, would cause most
guys a problem: “Given the choice
of anyone in the world, whom would
you want as a dinner guest?”
The first name that pops into my
head is “Shakira.”
Somehow I think that’d be an
unwelcome answer. So I’d be lying
right out of the box. So much for
vulnerability.
And she’s going to say Pope
Francis?
However, by the time we get
down to Number 25, “How do you
feel about your relationship with
your mother?” why not go all in?
Freud wrote a famous essay about
Dostoyevsky, arguing that a man
raised by a quarrelsome, termagant
mother would end up gay.
Wrong. Farcically wrong. Freud
certainly never met me or my
brother. Reading that essay soon
after meeting the woman who
eventually took me home from the
shelter was the first time I suspected
that the father of psychoanalysis
might be as daft as that other 19thcentury genius Karl Marx.
No 36 questions were involved.
I was drawn to her from across
the room before I knew her name.
The graduate school dean who
introduced us put me on the spot.
Had I ever heard of her alma mater,
Hendrix College?
“No, sir,” I said. “They must not
play football.”
An Arkansas coach’s daughter,
she laughed. Both because she
thought it was a funny answer under
the circumstances, and because I
was right.
Dear reader, she’s still laughing.
Arkansas Times columnist Gene
Lyons is a National Magazine
Award winner and co-author of
“The Hunting of the President”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can
email Lyons at eugenelyons2@
yahoo.com.
Copyright 2015, Gene Lyons
15-1-21
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