Framed

Sleepovers

The relationship between the Democratic Party and the liberal blogosphere has been good lately--maybe not so good that they're ready to move in together, but at least good enough that they've been staying overnight at each other's apartments pretty regularly.  Two recent events bear this out.

First is the tanking of Fox News.  After documenting the network's ratings slide today in Salon, Eric Boehlert offers this as a reason why:

The problem for Fox News is that it's the Democratic race that's creating most of the excitement, yet Fox News has been forced to mostly watch the race from the sidelines. That's because last winter, after the network tried to smear Obama for purportedly attending a radical Muslim school as a child, liberal bloggers launched an initiative to get Democratic candidates to boycott a debate co-sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party. (The boycott, powered by Foxattacks.com, was later extended to any and all Fox News debates.)

The point of the online crusade was not simply to embarrass Fox News or rattle Nevada Democrats for being out of touch with the grass-roots masses that distrusted and despised Fox News. The point, instead, was to begin chipping away, in a serious, consistent method, at Fox News' reputation. To spell out that Fox News was nothing more than a Republican mouthpiece and that Democrats need not engage with the News Corp. giant.

The lack of Democratic debates for Fox News has meant a huge setback for the news organization from a ratings perspective. Just look at the grand slam CNN hit last week when, on Jan. 21, it broadcast the much-talked-about Democratic debate from South Carolina. The CNN event not only creamed Fox News in the ratings, nearly tripling its audience that night, but the debate set a new cable news mark for the most viewers ever to watch a primary debate.

In other words, the liberal blogosphere asked the Democratic establishment a pretty good question: why confer ratings and legitimacy on a network that is so obviously working against our interests, and whose news programs are not generally watched by people who are going to vote for Democrats anyway?

The second W for the blogs came earlier this week as Senate Republicans and their Democratic allies failed to pass a sweeping new wiretap law that would, among other pernicious things, grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies that violated the law by permitting the government to place broad, all-encompassing wiretaps on its customers without first obtaining a warrant.  The fight against this bill has been led in the senate by Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold with the active encouragement of liberal bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher. 

Sometimes I wonder who are the leaders and who are the constituents here, and I get frustrated that elected Democrats don't get out in front of issues like Fox's partisanship or telecomm immunity.  Why should mere bloggers have to be the engines pulling the Democratic Party forward into battle?  But lately I've come to think that this de facto arrangement isn't so bad.  It gives citizens like me the powerful sense that our ideas and opinions do matter.  It's evidence that the party has started to open source its brain trust.  It provides elected Democrats with political cover ("my constituents demanded it!") for taking potentially risky political stands.

The interests of the ideologically-motivated blogosphere and the power-motivated Democratic officials are not the same.  There is a risk that we will all turn into a leftish version of Fox News.  So I still get uneasy about the idea of cohabitating with the Democratic party--but I guess there's nothing wrong with regular sleepovers.  After all, we're friends with benefits. 

Liberal

The CNN.com headline today reads, "GOP Debaters Argue Who Is Most Conservative."  It is a measure of the horrible legacy of Ronald Reagan that it is inconceivable that the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates would argue who among them is the most liberal.  Reagan trashed the word "liberal" quite thoroughly, and there hasn't been a candidate since with the guts to reclaim it.

Conversation

We shared dinner last night with a neighbor who is a  Clinton supporter.  As news of Obama's South Carolina win came in, the conversation went something like this:

Me (happily) : Obama has won South Carolina with 54% of the vote.

Neighbor (unconvincingly): That's the worst thing that could have happened to his campaign.

Me: Why do you say that?  He needed a win.

Neighbor: But he'll win because of the black vote, which will cause him to become more identified as the "black" candidate for President.

Me:  The Democratic Party electorate in South Carolina is majority black, so even if Clinton had won it would also be because of the black vote.

Neighbor: Yeah, but I'm looking ahead to the general election.  There are a lot of people--more than you realize--who won't vote for a black man, especially if he appears to be the candidate of black America.

Me: And how many of those people would be likely to vote for a Democrat anyway?

Neighbor: All I'm saying is race is going to be a big issue in this campaign if Obama is the nominee, particularly if he gets the nomination because of huge black support.  No one wants to talk about it, no one will say this to a pollster, but that attitude is there and it's more common than you think.

Me: I'm just so sick of this campaign being reported on in terms of race and gender.

Neighbor: I am too, but that's a reality now and it's not going to go away.

Well, OK, I paraphrased this exchanged a little bit to make us sound more articulate than we really were, particularly after a round of Susan's famed chocolate martinis.  At it's root, it was another one of those arguments about which is more important in a political contest: facts or perceptions. 

This morning, the facts came in.  Obama did indeed win the black vote by a large margin--78%--but also took a quarter of the white vote.   What jumps out at me is the statistic that 63% of people who had never voted before chose Obama.  Turnout was high; Obama himself got more votes than were cast in the entire South Carolina Democratic primary in 2004.  This suggests that Obama is actually doing what other politicians have only talked about doing: he is inspiring people who have not been engaged in politics to come out on election day.  That, I think, will more than make up for the loss of those voters who would vote Democratic only if the nominee was white.

It's Friday . . .

. . . and the streets are ours.  A little Mr. Johnny Rivers is in order, doncha think?  But doesn't he look like one of those big-headed caricatures on JibJab?

I love the go-go dancers!

Kenya

Am I the only one who sees similarities between Kenya's recent elections and the 2000 and 2004 elections in the U.S.?

A close race . . . voting irregularities . . . a declaration of victory . . . thuggish supporters of the "victor" designed to intimidate election officials and the "loser's" supporters.  In the U.S., a more "mature" (i.e., comfortable and passive) democracy, the result was sullen acquiescence.  In Kenya, where people apparently take the idea of democracy far more seriously than Americans do, the result has been mayhem.

We had the opportunity in the last two Presidential elections to show the world how a close and disputed election could be treated in a careful, lawful way.  We blew it.  It would be a stretch to claim that Bush, Rove, et als are responsible for the awful wave of violence that has rocked Kenya.  But when we fail to lead by example and squander our moral authority in such matters, we indirectly encourage mob rule.

Outsourcing the Public Welfare

Atrios posts a pretty good question:

How's that plan for putting social security into the hands of Citibank, Merrill Lynch and the other financial ‘wizards’ as President Bush had so strongly urged looking now?

The answer to this question is actually just another object lesson in the dangers of privatization.  When you privatize government services, you set up an inherent conflict between the functions and purpose of government (i.e., to serve the people) and the functions and purpose of corporations (i.e., to make money for their shareholders).  This conflict has played itself out again and again in news stories about the deplorable conditions for vets at Walter Reed, the out-of-control behavior of  mercenary forces such as Blackwater, and the seizure of control of the New Orleans public schools following Hurricane Katrina.  The conflict can also be seen in the convoluted health insurance plans being touted by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama  and  John Edwards, all of which envision the  health insurance industry administering a universal health care system instead of calling for a government-run single-payer system.

I'm not blindly anticorporate; there are many things that the corporate sphere does very well; the  strength and vitality of the U.S. economy testify to that.  My point, though, is that trouble starts when corporations reach outside the realm of the private production and sale of goods and services and enter the realm of government and provide public goods and services. 

That is why privatizing Social Security was and is a bad idea--and more generally, why I hope the next President will start to roll back the outsourcing of the public welfare.

Enough!

My frustrations with the race- and gender-war coverage that the Democratic primary is getting from the mainstream media just reached a high point.  Here is the racist, sexist blather from CNN that did it for me:

Recent polls show black women are expected to make up more than a third of all Democratic voters in South Carolina's primary in five days.

For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

No other voting bloc in the country faces this choice.

This kind of coverage is so lazy, offensive and wrong that I hardly know where to begin with it.

First there is the assumption that all black women vote according to physical features--skin color and gender--rather than according to their assessment of each candidate's stance on the issues, character, or experience.  Apparently black women are so simple-minded that the only way they might possibly determine how to vote is by asking themselves, "Do I vote for the black man or the white woman?"  The idea that a black woman might vote, say, for John Edwards (who is not even mentioned in the article) never occurs to the CNN newswriters.  The idea that a black woman might vote, say, for the candidate with the best health insurance reform plan, the most integrity, or the most experience isn't even considered.

Second, there is the line at the end about no other voting bloc facing this choice.  I see: so white men, for example, are clearly superior beings who would never think about voting along gender or racial lines.  CNN's crack political team evidently never met a white man who wouldn't consider voting for a woman or a black person.  The idea that white men might be just as blinkered and dumb as CNN assumes black women are is preposterous.

Third, this is Martin Luther King Day, so what better time to run a story about how Presidential candidates are judged by the color of their skin--or the function of their genitals--and not by the content of their character?

In the last two weeks I have read and heard all kinds of things about who dissed MLK, or whether Latino voters would rather vote for a black male or a white female.  I have heard nothing--nothing!--comparing the candidates' energy policies, the candidates' foreign policies, the candidates' economic policies, or the candidates' policies on Iraq.  All that stuff, I guess, is just way too hard for the mainstream media to understand and present.  Instead, we hear only about whether the black horse or the white horse, the mare or the stallion, is ahead.  I don't ever recall being more ashamed of my country's news media.

Facebooking

So much for Art.  What of Thought?  The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way.  Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways.  Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid.  Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out.  The number of blocks, however, was finite. 

"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements sometime.  What then?"  What indeed.  This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.

--V. by Thomas Pynchon

And so I've succumbed to the decadent lure of Facebook.  People who want to know more about me than anyone really should can find me here.

MLK Day

The first time I saw my father cry was when King died.

It's Friday . . .

. . . and I'm suddenly scared.