Today at 11:12 AM39CommentsWhite Republican Debate Continues to RageBy Jonathan Chait Sam Tanenhaus’s historical essay in the latest edition of the New Republic, on how the GOP is unalterably the party of white America, runs along many of the same lines as my story in last week's issue of New York. Tanenhaus even discusses in depth the theories of John C. Calhoun, which I mentioned briefly, as did Frank Rich in an essay in the same issue as mine. (For any New York readers surprised at the double citations in a single issue, the explanation is simple: Subscriber surveys have found that our readers want more coverage of mid-priced restaurants south of 50th Street and also much more discussion of the philosophy of John C. Calhoun.)
Tanenhaus’s piece is a great read and provides a lot of depth in areas I only touched upon, such as the deep and conscious influence of Calhoun on the twentieth-century thinkers who founded the conservative movement. But I think it also loses the thread of its argument toward the end, and in so doing, misses what’s really important and alarming about the current moment of the Republican Party.
Tanenhaus consistently runs together white racial panic and the tactics of minority rule; the two have often been linked. My piece mentions the electoral college and the two thirds clause, which represented the successful effort by the South to turn its slaves into extra representation for the slaveowners. The attacks on the franchise at the end of the nineteenth century reflected, in different forms, the same sense of racial unease. Calhoun represented the fears of the slave-owning agrarian South being outnumbered by the growing North. But the same style applies to other elites maneuvering to retain their power in the face of diminishing numbers. Michael Lind, in a Salon essay on the white South, adds a fascinating detail I wish I’d found: After the 1920 census, Congress refused to reapportion itself — the only time in American history it failed to do so. Why? Because the 1920 census recorded vast increases in urban population, and retaining the 1910-era boundaries gave rural areas disproportionate representation.
In Tanenhaus’s account, the two things are not merely linked but essentially interchangeable. This leads to a confusing passage in which Tanenhaus described Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy as a “realignment, based on the politics of nullification” but then, in the next paragraph, asserts that after Nixon’s reelection, “Calhounism went into remission.”
I would argue that Nixon shows how Tanenhaus is running two different things together. Starting in the mid-sixties, the Democratic majority that had existed since the New Deal started to crack up, and the Republicans created a majority in its place based on the general belief among most whites that “big government” meant taking things away from them and giving them to lazy, criminal, or otherwise less deserving minorities. The time period from Nixon through George H. W. Bush was a time when the GOP most openly embraced racial politics — busing, welfare queens, Willie Horton, quotas, among others, were major elements of the party’s appeal.
That started to fade out with the election of Bill Clinton, who inoculated the party on racial issues by breaking as conspicuously as possible with his party on welfare and crime. George W. Bush reaffirmed Clinton’s political achievement by abhorring the sort of racial appeals politicians like his father employed. And in recent years, the minority population has grown to the point that Democrats can win Dukakis-esque levels of white support and still carry the national vote; therefore, a racialized politics that could beat Michael Dukakis can't beat Barack Obama.
But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.
Why? Because Republicans were winning. They didn’t need to block the majority from working its will because they usually were the majority.
It’s only since about 2008 that Republicans have turned to the methods I describe — massively expanding the power of the Senate minority, widespread voter suppression and other schemes to rig the vote, obstructing nominees to block laws they can’t overturn, using the Courts to enforce economic policies they can’t win through legislative channels. Republicans have turned to these techniques because the party's identity as that of white people, once the cornerstone of its political dominance, has turned into a trap from which it is wriggling to escape.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Before I Really Get Wound Up
I just got back from a meeting in rooms full of people most of whom are roughly half my age. Occasionally I would venture to try to talk to one of them but the futility of it all quickly became apparent. I have no opinion of Beyonce because I did not watch her halftime show. Indeed, I had never heard of Beyonce before the Super Bowl. Popular culture is for the young and I checked out a long time ago. Nose and tongue rings disgust me, and I want throw up every time I see pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Brittney Spears (not very often thank goodness). When did young women take up wearing boots? I sort of like it; it's just that I find it a little weird that's all. The young men walk around in a kind of daze as if they just got off the boat and are trying to figure things out in the new country. I know, I know: our parents said the same things about us. And I'm turning into a curmudgeon. But I have to admit that in my youthful days you wouldn't see OUR elders with ponytails and wearing crazy hair hats and trying to dance with women half their age. I'd better stop here before I really get wound up.
Friday, February 8, 2013
College and the Internet
News Friday, Feb 8, 2013 06:45 AM CST
The Internet will not ruin college
As cheap online educational options spread like wildfire, critics are sounding the alarm. They're too late VIDEO
By Andrew Leonard
Topics: Video, Education, Online education, online courses, MOOCs, MOOC, coursera, udacity, edX, khan academy, Technology News, Business News
I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. Hannibal kicked ass. End of story.
I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.
A friend of my son taught himself how to play the ukulele from YouTube videos last summer. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a threat to the college education status quo, but it should. Because the principle at work is irresistible: The Internet vastly decreases the costs of distribution of anything that can be digitized, whether you want ukulele lessons or Artifical Intelligence for Robotics. We can’t help but take advantage of this fact. Right now, if you want to learn remedial algebra or study the ancient Greek idea of the hero, as taught by a Harvard classics professor, you can, for free (or at the very least, for vastly less than what it would cost at a brick-and-mortar-and-ivy campus). Tomorrow, there will only be more options.
After years of hype about how the digital revolution was going to slice and dice the ivory tower, it’s all starting to happen very fast. It’s no wonder that alarm is spreading in many quarters. 2012, reported the New York Times, was the Year of the MOOC. Venture capital-funded Stanford spinoffs such as Coursera and Udacity are growing like weeds. Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in classes offered by edX, the nonprofit online education project started by Harvard and MIT. Cat: out of bag. Genie: out of bottle. Pandora’s Box: wide frigging open.
In mid-January, Udacity announced a deal, partially brokered by California Gov. Jerry brown, to provide a series of “remedial and introductory” courses for incoming students who, as has been the case for years, are arriving at San Jose State University woefully unprepared for college-level courses. On Thursday morning, Coursera announced that four of its courses aimed at undergraduates, a precalculus course from the University of California, Irvine, courses in genetics and bioelectricity from Duke, and another calculus course from Penn, had been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service.
These are important, critical steps, signs that soon students of all ages and economic backgrounds are going to be able to mix and match lesson plans that offer real college credit. But fast change is usually destabilizing, and a backlash is in full effect.
The critics of the evolving landscape are eloquent and impassioned and the points they make should not be ignored. The fact that Silicon Valley venture capitalists see a profit-making opportunity offers zero assurance that the public interest will be served. Details about the financial parameters of the Udacity-San Jose State deal are limited, but the possibility that any taxpayer money is being funneled directly to for-profit MOOCs at a time when the state university system is woefully underfunded should be sounding warning bells up and down the San Andreas Fault.
Quality assurance in the emerging MOOC world, at this point, seems pretty hit or miss. Coursera invited merciless mockery earlier this week when a professor at Georgia Tech was forced to suspend a huge online class due to operational difficulties: The topic: “Fundamentals of Online Education.” (Somewhere, Sophocles is chuckling at the irony.) There’s also little doubt that lectures delivered online to thousands of students at once, with limited capacity for feedback from educators to the educated, and huge logistical conundrums involved with assuring adequate grading and testing, are never going to be equivalent in quality to small seminars taught by brilliant professors who are able and willing to instigate vigorous classroom debate and keep copious open office hours.
One must also ask: What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.
For months, Clay Shirky, an academic at New York University who could be dubbed the High Priest of Inevitable Internet Disruption, and Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, have engaged in a fascinating debate about the implications of MOOCs for education. For a top-level view of the argument, readers are well served by Maria Bustillos’ distillation one week ago in the Awl, in her somewhat unfairly titled article “Venture Capital’s Massive Terrible Idea For the Future of College.” Or you can read the blow-by-blow back and forth here, here and here. (To further punctuate the timeliness of this debate, Shirky published another broadside in the Awl, “Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken” even as I was writing this piece.)
The exchange is great, not least because of the clear respect the two parties have for each other throughout (which is not always the case when the Internet’s impact on society is being debated), but also because, in my own view, neither side is necessarily wrong. Aaron Bady is absolutely right to be skeptical of the utopian protestations of people like Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, who has predicted that in 50 years there will be only 10 universities left in the world. The venture capitalists who are backing Thrun are looking for big returns, but big profits have never been a guarantor of a good education. And of course, all students are likely to benefit more from regular, physical interaction with vibrant student bodies and dynamic professors. Four years of education at a place like U.C. Berkeley? In a perfect world …
But Shirky is equally right to note that right now, we have an educational system packed with thousands of mediocre schools charging astronomical tuitions to offer hundreds of thousands of students mediocre educations. My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)
Shirky also has logic on his side when he notes how the disruption of education is merely the latest chapter in a book that’s been writing itself since we first started to log on in the mid-’90s. The music biz and journalism biz have been thrown into turmoil — education’s turn in the spotlight was going to come, sooner or later.
But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?
Late last night, while browsing some of the various course offerings available at edX and Udacity and Coursera, I had to restrain myself from suddenly diving into The Ancient Greek Hero, Professor Gregory Nagy’s spring 2013 edX offering that promises “to use the latest technology to help students engage with poetry, songs, and stories first composed more than two millennia ago.” It strikes me as a profound realization of the fundamental goal of the university — any university — that a course taught by an icon at one of the most elite institutions in the world would be accessible to me for just the cost of a few clicks.
But it seemed like too big a commitment to make while on deadline, so I ended up browsing what the Khan Academy had to offer in “medieval and ancient history.” The six videos available right now are hopelessly eclectic: hardly the stuff of a rigorous educational program in anything, but I was titillated by one title: “Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur.” I mean, how could one resist an Internet lesson in art history appreciation of an object 4 millennia old?
And I loved it. And I wanted more. And I’m utterly certain that the Internet will give me and my descendants as much or more than we can handle.
There are sure to be bumps in the road as snake-oil capitalists try to figure out how to extract profit by exploiting a medium that excels at delivering intellectual goods at the lowest possible cost. Can Coursera or Udacity really make money by charging token amounts for “certificates” that prove a student deserves college credit for passing an online course? I have no idea. Will edX keep expanding its free online offerings to the point that for-profit bottom feeders like Corinthian College simply can’t compete? I sure hope so, but again, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how this will all play out.
But what’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost. Sure, we should be skeptical of the promises made by snake-oil salesmen, but we should also be very excited. For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.
The Internet will not ruin college
As cheap online educational options spread like wildfire, critics are sounding the alarm. They're too late VIDEO
By Andrew Leonard
Topics: Video, Education, Online education, online courses, MOOCs, MOOC, coursera, udacity, edX, khan academy, Technology News, Business News
I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. Hannibal kicked ass. End of story.
I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.
A friend of my son taught himself how to play the ukulele from YouTube videos last summer. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a threat to the college education status quo, but it should. Because the principle at work is irresistible: The Internet vastly decreases the costs of distribution of anything that can be digitized, whether you want ukulele lessons or Artifical Intelligence for Robotics. We can’t help but take advantage of this fact. Right now, if you want to learn remedial algebra or study the ancient Greek idea of the hero, as taught by a Harvard classics professor, you can, for free (or at the very least, for vastly less than what it would cost at a brick-and-mortar-and-ivy campus). Tomorrow, there will only be more options.
After years of hype about how the digital revolution was going to slice and dice the ivory tower, it’s all starting to happen very fast. It’s no wonder that alarm is spreading in many quarters. 2012, reported the New York Times, was the Year of the MOOC. Venture capital-funded Stanford spinoffs such as Coursera and Udacity are growing like weeds. Hundreds of thousands of students have enrolled in classes offered by edX, the nonprofit online education project started by Harvard and MIT. Cat: out of bag. Genie: out of bottle. Pandora’s Box: wide frigging open.
In mid-January, Udacity announced a deal, partially brokered by California Gov. Jerry brown, to provide a series of “remedial and introductory” courses for incoming students who, as has been the case for years, are arriving at San Jose State University woefully unprepared for college-level courses. On Thursday morning, Coursera announced that four of its courses aimed at undergraduates, a precalculus course from the University of California, Irvine, courses in genetics and bioelectricity from Duke, and another calculus course from Penn, had been approved for college credit by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service.
These are important, critical steps, signs that soon students of all ages and economic backgrounds are going to be able to mix and match lesson plans that offer real college credit. But fast change is usually destabilizing, and a backlash is in full effect.
The critics of the evolving landscape are eloquent and impassioned and the points they make should not be ignored. The fact that Silicon Valley venture capitalists see a profit-making opportunity offers zero assurance that the public interest will be served. Details about the financial parameters of the Udacity-San Jose State deal are limited, but the possibility that any taxpayer money is being funneled directly to for-profit MOOCs at a time when the state university system is woefully underfunded should be sounding warning bells up and down the San Andreas Fault.
Quality assurance in the emerging MOOC world, at this point, seems pretty hit or miss. Coursera invited merciless mockery earlier this week when a professor at Georgia Tech was forced to suspend a huge online class due to operational difficulties: The topic: “Fundamentals of Online Education.” (Somewhere, Sophocles is chuckling at the irony.) There’s also little doubt that lectures delivered online to thousands of students at once, with limited capacity for feedback from educators to the educated, and huge logistical conundrums involved with assuring adequate grading and testing, are never going to be equivalent in quality to small seminars taught by brilliant professors who are able and willing to instigate vigorous classroom debate and keep copious open office hours.
One must also ask: What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.
For months, Clay Shirky, an academic at New York University who could be dubbed the High Priest of Inevitable Internet Disruption, and Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, have engaged in a fascinating debate about the implications of MOOCs for education. For a top-level view of the argument, readers are well served by Maria Bustillos’ distillation one week ago in the Awl, in her somewhat unfairly titled article “Venture Capital’s Massive Terrible Idea For the Future of College.” Or you can read the blow-by-blow back and forth here, here and here. (To further punctuate the timeliness of this debate, Shirky published another broadside in the Awl, “Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken” even as I was writing this piece.)
The exchange is great, not least because of the clear respect the two parties have for each other throughout (which is not always the case when the Internet’s impact on society is being debated), but also because, in my own view, neither side is necessarily wrong. Aaron Bady is absolutely right to be skeptical of the utopian protestations of people like Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, who has predicted that in 50 years there will be only 10 universities left in the world. The venture capitalists who are backing Thrun are looking for big returns, but big profits have never been a guarantor of a good education. And of course, all students are likely to benefit more from regular, physical interaction with vibrant student bodies and dynamic professors. Four years of education at a place like U.C. Berkeley? In a perfect world …
But Shirky is equally right to note that right now, we have an educational system packed with thousands of mediocre schools charging astronomical tuitions to offer hundreds of thousands of students mediocre educations. My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)
Shirky also has logic on his side when he notes how the disruption of education is merely the latest chapter in a book that’s been writing itself since we first started to log on in the mid-’90s. The music biz and journalism biz have been thrown into turmoil — education’s turn in the spotlight was going to come, sooner or later.
But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?
Late last night, while browsing some of the various course offerings available at edX and Udacity and Coursera, I had to restrain myself from suddenly diving into The Ancient Greek Hero, Professor Gregory Nagy’s spring 2013 edX offering that promises “to use the latest technology to help students engage with poetry, songs, and stories first composed more than two millennia ago.” It strikes me as a profound realization of the fundamental goal of the university — any university — that a course taught by an icon at one of the most elite institutions in the world would be accessible to me for just the cost of a few clicks.
But it seemed like too big a commitment to make while on deadline, so I ended up browsing what the Khan Academy had to offer in “medieval and ancient history.” The six videos available right now are hopelessly eclectic: hardly the stuff of a rigorous educational program in anything, but I was titillated by one title: “Sumerian Art: Standard of Ur.” I mean, how could one resist an Internet lesson in art history appreciation of an object 4 millennia old?
And I loved it. And I wanted more. And I’m utterly certain that the Internet will give me and my descendants as much or more than we can handle.
There are sure to be bumps in the road as snake-oil capitalists try to figure out how to extract profit by exploiting a medium that excels at delivering intellectual goods at the lowest possible cost. Can Coursera or Udacity really make money by charging token amounts for “certificates” that prove a student deserves college credit for passing an online course? I have no idea. Will edX keep expanding its free online offerings to the point that for-profit bottom feeders like Corinthian College simply can’t compete? I sure hope so, but again, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how this will all play out.
But what’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost. Sure, we should be skeptical of the promises made by snake-oil salesmen, but we should also be very excited. For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Krugman Makes a Good Point
That conservatives ASSUME that liberals are their mirror opposite. Not true!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 3, 2013, 7:11
Despicable Me
Funny: Angry Bear finds some of the usual suspects explaining How to Debate Paul Krugman, and the answer appears to be this: invent a straw man who bears no resemblance at all to the economist/columnist of the same name, and ridicule that imaginary person.
I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I could play the role of History’s Greatest Monster to so many people. Thank you for the honor!
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.
An hour spent browsing this blog would quickly refute all of this, together with the bizarre charge that I never look at evidence; you may not agree with my conclusions, but I sure do post a lot of numbers. But obviously looking at what I actually write would just be too painful.
Anyway, thanks guys, you made my day.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 3, 2013, 7:11
Despicable Me
Funny: Angry Bear finds some of the usual suspects explaining How to Debate Paul Krugman, and the answer appears to be this: invent a straw man who bears no resemblance at all to the economist/columnist of the same name, and ridicule that imaginary person.
I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I could play the role of History’s Greatest Monster to so many people. Thank you for the honor!
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.
An hour spent browsing this blog would quickly refute all of this, together with the bizarre charge that I never look at evidence; you may not agree with my conclusions, but I sure do post a lot of numbers. But obviously looking at what I actually write would just be too painful.
Anyway, thanks guys, you made my day.
The Country is with the President
Obama Realigns, the GOP Declines: The New Political Paradigm
by Robert Shrum Feb 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Karl Rove's prediction of a grand political realignment has finally come true—for Obama. Robert Shrum on the four tricks the GOP might use to wrest back control.
inShare.649 It’s a word seldom heard since Karl Rove brandished it after the 2004 election. On the basis of an Electoral College win secured by the precarious margin of one state, an Ohio rife with voter suppression, “Bush’s brain”—is that a compliment to Rove?—proclaimed an era of Republican realignment. It was short-lived, rebuked in 2006 when Democrats recaptured the House and the Senate—and refuted in 2008, when Barack Obama swept to a commanding victory across an expanded range of battleground states. After a last gasp in the 2010 midterms, in a time of acute economic distress, Rove’s fantasy was demolished in 2012, when the GOP waged a backward-looking campaign directed to the American electorate of a decade and more ago—two white, too old, too rural, too Southern.
Instead, the crabbed, plutocratic, intolerant Republican appeal did succeed—in mobilizing the new America, which convincingly voted for a second Obama term. But something more has happened here than the reelection of one president, as consequential as that is. We are witnessing a Rove in reverse—but this time, an authentic and accelerating realignment in the demography, ideology, and political identity of the American mainstream. And while Obama both reflects and reinforces the impetus to realign, the befuddled, hemmed-in GOP seems doomed to decline.
The shift from hardline bravado to postdefeat stress syndrome was signaled when the party reluctantly fled the potential political fallout of a Republican-inflicted economic crisis. Congressional Republicans backed off the fiscal cliff, surrendered the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and raised the debt ceiling rather than crashing financial markets and the full faith and credit of the United States. Paul Ryan has now conceded that the GOP won’t shut down the government to extort their preferred cuts in Social Security and Medicare—which they’re still trying to voucherize.
Following the tactical retreats of a party stubbornly clinging to its reactionary core, the president delivered his second inaugural address. Contrary to predictions that he would offer a collection of forgettable generalities, the speech was one of the great state papers in modern American history, boldly asserting political realignment without explicitly using the phrase. And it set off a great commotion in GOP ranks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bashed its “liberalism”—the reflex epithet Republicans have long deployed as a weapon of instant damnation. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Obama’s words showed “how out of touch he is.” Not since 1936, when FDR called for activist government to redress the shame of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” has a second inaugural elicited such partisan vitriol. Across the board, Republicans squealed like stuck elephants.
FDR also spoke then of “a sudden changed civilization.” And in the days before and after Obama invoked “new realities” that demand “collective action,” a cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president. On fundamental questions like the role of government, 61 percent of Americans favor “federal” action to deal with income inequality. In an AP-GfK survey, 80 percent agree that climate change will be “a serious problem ... if nothing is done.”
On social issues, where Republicans are imprisoned in the dogmas of the religious right, the degree of change is profound. Here is a headline from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll: “Majority for the First Time ... Wants Abortion to Be Legal in All or Most Cases.” According to Gallup, 53 percent support same-sex marriage—and another survey reports a double-digit margin for marriage equality. Americans have joined in the journey from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.”
Similarly, the anti-immigrant Tea types and the gun lobby, the masters of the GOP, are a dwindling minority of America. A Fox News survey, skewed conservative in most of its results, found that 66 percent of people favor “allow[ing] illegal immigrants to remain in the country and eventually qualify for U.S. citizenship.” And Gallup records 91 percent support for universal background checks for gun buyers—and 60 percent for a ban on assault weapons.
A cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president.
None of this means that all of this will happen now or in the immediate future, given an obstructive Republican House that is a one-ring, right-wing circus. But it does point toward the GOP as “a permanent minority,” warns the party’s former national chairman Jim Gilmore. Ominously he adds: “I don’t think the party dies immediately.” It probably doesn’t die ever because of House members in districts purposely drawn to be solidly red—and because the two-party structure is built into the system’s institutional DNA. But if Republicans don’t move toward the mainstream, they will never—or hardly ever—prevail at the presidential level, short of Democrats being discredited by a major scandal or held responsible for an economic or national-security catastrophe. (And no, Lindsey Graham, for all your strident whining, Benghazi doesn’t qualify.)
So what’s the GOP to do? Trapped between the preconditions for electoral success and the excesses of dominant hardliners, Republicans have four apparent paths: disenfranchise the voters, disable the economy, disguise their true character, or disenthrall themselves.
The first of these—purloining the presidency by awarding electoral votes on the basis of gerrymandered congressional districts in targeted purple or even blue states—would have resulted in a 2012 Mitt Romney win of 271-267 in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by 5 million votes. The scheme, endorsed by the current Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, was launched in Virginia; it would have given Obama, who carried the state, 4 of its 13 electors, with the other 9 handed to lucky loser Romney.
The plan has now died there—and in other places like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, despite that they have GOP governors and legislatures. The play was a conspicuous outrage, and some Republicans opposed it on the merits. Others probably rejected it out of fear. For example, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the far-right GOP candidate for governor this year, will have enough trouble with voters in northern Virginia without the added burden of defending a plan that would effectively disempower that region. Governors like John Kasich in Ohio don’t want to face that dissonant music either.
Grand-theft presidency is a notion still barely alive in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while it’s likely to expire there too, other tactics to disenfranchise, like long lines and onerous ID laws, will return next year and in 2016. They are, however, a double-edged cheat: they anger minorities and the young and motivate them to turn out.
The second path for the GOP—attempting to bring down the economy—is a clear and present possibility. That was the bookend to Paul Ryan’s disavowal of a government shutdown; instead, he said, the Republicans are ready and willing to allow the sequester—draconian, indiscriminate, and automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs that will hit March 1 unless Congress acts. The latest figures on gross domestic product preview the impact of a sequester; in the fourth quarter of last year, the economy “contracted” by one tenth of a percent. What “subtracted ... 2.6 percent from growth” was reduced government spending, along with a slowdown in filling inventories.
Austerity, cutting too deep and too fast, has now brought Britain to the brink of a triple-dip recession. It could happen here—and in 2010, a parlous American economy did give the GOP a robust midterm triumph. Afterward, Republican intransigence on jobs, infrastructure, and other measures for recovery did lead to slower growth, but not to political success in 2012. I believe that by then the tactic was too obvious—and it would be glaring this time around. Republicans have to worry that they would pay the political price.
That’s why Ryan may be shadowboxing on the sequester—as he and other GOP leaders were on the fiscal cliff, the Bush tax cuts, and the debt limit. There are also hawks in his own party who would welcome the domestic cuts, but mightily resist the defense ones. But you can’t have one without the other—and so there’s an even chance that we will have neither.
The next path forward for Republicans, an easy and false feint, is to trick America into thinking they’ve changed without changing much of what they stand for. It’s the cosmetic option—new slogans, same old substance; better communication, not better content. It’s typified by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered a fiery sermon calling on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” But he didn’t say which of the party’s dumb ideas he would jettison. And then returned to Baton Rouge to promote a wildly regressive tax system that would slam the middle class and the poor to lavish more on those who already have the most. There’s a new Republican idea—right?
Like Jindal, Republican leaders generally have talked about renewal, but walked away from making real and realistic changes. The party’s challenge is not its branding, but its products. You can only traffic so long in an anodyne phrase like “entitlement reform” before Americans figure out that you’re intent on shredding Medicare, Social Security, and education.
The last, best, and perhaps impossible alternative is for Republicans to heed the counsel of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president: “As our situation is new, we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
On gun regulation, take the prospect of a universal background check—which I’ve already noted has over 90 percent support among Americans. It could pass, and it just may—if some GOP members dare to do what’s right despite the National Rifle Association. But listening to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s January 30 hearing and the expostulations of fired-up House members, it’s possible to conclude that the GOP now stands for Guns Over People. Ironically, the more the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre batters on about turning schools into armed camps, the more he hurts his own cause and the Republicans enlisted with him.
In 1995, George H.W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA when LaPierre defended his description of federal agents as “jackbooted thugs,” even after the Oklahoma City bombing. Seventeen years on, maybe congressional Republicans could resign their role as rubber stamps for the gun fanatics. Now that would be genuine change.
So would GOP assent to comprehensive immigration reform—with a path to citizenship. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have forged a compromise with Senate Democrats. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter promptly denounced Rubio as “amazingly naive.” The National Review assailed him for having “lashed himself to ... the Ted Kennedy Testimonial Immigration Plan”—presumably similar to the one Kennedy negotiated with Ronald Reagan in 1986 and then with George W. Bush in 2006.
It may be painful, but this is an acid test for Republicans. If they can’t adapt here, they won’t adapt anywhere. Yet the brutish rhetoric inevitably coming from GOP opponents will only alienate Hispanics even more than they already are. And Rubio himself may ultimately be forced to abandon the effort. He’s already promised Rush Limbaugh that he won’t be “part of a bidding war” with Obama. Rubio’s preparing to run for president in 2016. He knows Republicans can’t take the White House without appealing to Hispanics. But he also knows another basic rule: he can’t be elected without being nominated—and in the end he will have to appease anti-immigrant primary voters.
Rove has just tried to rationalize the GOP’s plight, and discount the Obama realignment, in a Wall Street Journal column that is a collection of statistics without a coherent or relevant argument. He serves up the Kool-Aid of elections past without accounting for the crucial differences in today’s electorate. He cheers that Obama received fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. What does that prove about a president who overcame the economic headwinds Rove was certain to the last nanosecond would defeat him, as Bush’s brain resisted Fox News’s decision to call Ohio for Obama? Rove allows that the Republicans “have a perception problem” with Hispanics. If they don’t understand that their problem is more than that, look for 16 years of Barack—and say, then Hillary or Joe—in the Oval Office.
President Obama is a transformative figure in a transforming country. After his inaugural address, conservative columnist Rich Lowry complained: “He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country.” Actually, he already has. Not just on the Capitol steps, but in long months of campaigning, and now day after day, he hasn’t just been speaking to America. Much as it hurts Republicans to hear it, Barack Obama has been speaking for America.
by Robert Shrum Feb 1, 2013 4:45 AM EST
Karl Rove's prediction of a grand political realignment has finally come true—for Obama. Robert Shrum on the four tricks the GOP might use to wrest back control.
inShare.649 It’s a word seldom heard since Karl Rove brandished it after the 2004 election. On the basis of an Electoral College win secured by the precarious margin of one state, an Ohio rife with voter suppression, “Bush’s brain”—is that a compliment to Rove?—proclaimed an era of Republican realignment. It was short-lived, rebuked in 2006 when Democrats recaptured the House and the Senate—and refuted in 2008, when Barack Obama swept to a commanding victory across an expanded range of battleground states. After a last gasp in the 2010 midterms, in a time of acute economic distress, Rove’s fantasy was demolished in 2012, when the GOP waged a backward-looking campaign directed to the American electorate of a decade and more ago—two white, too old, too rural, too Southern.
Instead, the crabbed, plutocratic, intolerant Republican appeal did succeed—in mobilizing the new America, which convincingly voted for a second Obama term. But something more has happened here than the reelection of one president, as consequential as that is. We are witnessing a Rove in reverse—but this time, an authentic and accelerating realignment in the demography, ideology, and political identity of the American mainstream. And while Obama both reflects and reinforces the impetus to realign, the befuddled, hemmed-in GOP seems doomed to decline.
The shift from hardline bravado to postdefeat stress syndrome was signaled when the party reluctantly fled the potential political fallout of a Republican-inflicted economic crisis. Congressional Republicans backed off the fiscal cliff, surrendered the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and raised the debt ceiling rather than crashing financial markets and the full faith and credit of the United States. Paul Ryan has now conceded that the GOP won’t shut down the government to extort their preferred cuts in Social Security and Medicare—which they’re still trying to voucherize.
Following the tactical retreats of a party stubbornly clinging to its reactionary core, the president delivered his second inaugural address. Contrary to predictions that he would offer a collection of forgettable generalities, the speech was one of the great state papers in modern American history, boldly asserting political realignment without explicitly using the phrase. And it set off a great commotion in GOP ranks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bashed its “liberalism”—the reflex epithet Republicans have long deployed as a weapon of instant damnation. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Obama’s words showed “how out of touch he is.” Not since 1936, when FDR called for activist government to redress the shame of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” has a second inaugural elicited such partisan vitriol. Across the board, Republicans squealed like stuck elephants.
FDR also spoke then of “a sudden changed civilization.” And in the days before and after Obama invoked “new realities” that demand “collective action,” a cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president. On fundamental questions like the role of government, 61 percent of Americans favor “federal” action to deal with income inequality. In an AP-GfK survey, 80 percent agree that climate change will be “a serious problem ... if nothing is done.”
On social issues, where Republicans are imprisoned in the dogmas of the religious right, the degree of change is profound. Here is a headline from the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll: “Majority for the First Time ... Wants Abortion to Be Legal in All or Most Cases.” According to Gallup, 53 percent support same-sex marriage—and another survey reports a double-digit margin for marriage equality. Americans have joined in the journey from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall.”
Similarly, the anti-immigrant Tea types and the gun lobby, the masters of the GOP, are a dwindling minority of America. A Fox News survey, skewed conservative in most of its results, found that 66 percent of people favor “allow[ing] illegal immigrants to remain in the country and eventually qualify for U.S. citizenship.” And Gallup records 91 percent support for universal background checks for gun buyers—and 60 percent for a ban on assault weapons.
A cascade of polling has reaffirmed that on issue after issue, mainstream America is with the president.
None of this means that all of this will happen now or in the immediate future, given an obstructive Republican House that is a one-ring, right-wing circus. But it does point toward the GOP as “a permanent minority,” warns the party’s former national chairman Jim Gilmore. Ominously he adds: “I don’t think the party dies immediately.” It probably doesn’t die ever because of House members in districts purposely drawn to be solidly red—and because the two-party structure is built into the system’s institutional DNA. But if Republicans don’t move toward the mainstream, they will never—or hardly ever—prevail at the presidential level, short of Democrats being discredited by a major scandal or held responsible for an economic or national-security catastrophe. (And no, Lindsey Graham, for all your strident whining, Benghazi doesn’t qualify.)
So what’s the GOP to do? Trapped between the preconditions for electoral success and the excesses of dominant hardliners, Republicans have four apparent paths: disenfranchise the voters, disable the economy, disguise their true character, or disenthrall themselves.
The first of these—purloining the presidency by awarding electoral votes on the basis of gerrymandered congressional districts in targeted purple or even blue states—would have resulted in a 2012 Mitt Romney win of 271-267 in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by 5 million votes. The scheme, endorsed by the current Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, was launched in Virginia; it would have given Obama, who carried the state, 4 of its 13 electors, with the other 9 handed to lucky loser Romney.
The plan has now died there—and in other places like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, despite that they have GOP governors and legislatures. The play was a conspicuous outrage, and some Republicans opposed it on the merits. Others probably rejected it out of fear. For example, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the far-right GOP candidate for governor this year, will have enough trouble with voters in northern Virginia without the added burden of defending a plan that would effectively disempower that region. Governors like John Kasich in Ohio don’t want to face that dissonant music either.
Grand-theft presidency is a notion still barely alive in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while it’s likely to expire there too, other tactics to disenfranchise, like long lines and onerous ID laws, will return next year and in 2016. They are, however, a double-edged cheat: they anger minorities and the young and motivate them to turn out.
The second path for the GOP—attempting to bring down the economy—is a clear and present possibility. That was the bookend to Paul Ryan’s disavowal of a government shutdown; instead, he said, the Republicans are ready and willing to allow the sequester—draconian, indiscriminate, and automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs that will hit March 1 unless Congress acts. The latest figures on gross domestic product preview the impact of a sequester; in the fourth quarter of last year, the economy “contracted” by one tenth of a percent. What “subtracted ... 2.6 percent from growth” was reduced government spending, along with a slowdown in filling inventories.
Austerity, cutting too deep and too fast, has now brought Britain to the brink of a triple-dip recession. It could happen here—and in 2010, a parlous American economy did give the GOP a robust midterm triumph. Afterward, Republican intransigence on jobs, infrastructure, and other measures for recovery did lead to slower growth, but not to political success in 2012. I believe that by then the tactic was too obvious—and it would be glaring this time around. Republicans have to worry that they would pay the political price.
That’s why Ryan may be shadowboxing on the sequester—as he and other GOP leaders were on the fiscal cliff, the Bush tax cuts, and the debt limit. There are also hawks in his own party who would welcome the domestic cuts, but mightily resist the defense ones. But you can’t have one without the other—and so there’s an even chance that we will have neither.
The next path forward for Republicans, an easy and false feint, is to trick America into thinking they’ve changed without changing much of what they stand for. It’s the cosmetic option—new slogans, same old substance; better communication, not better content. It’s typified by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered a fiery sermon calling on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” But he didn’t say which of the party’s dumb ideas he would jettison. And then returned to Baton Rouge to promote a wildly regressive tax system that would slam the middle class and the poor to lavish more on those who already have the most. There’s a new Republican idea—right?
Like Jindal, Republican leaders generally have talked about renewal, but walked away from making real and realistic changes. The party’s challenge is not its branding, but its products. You can only traffic so long in an anodyne phrase like “entitlement reform” before Americans figure out that you’re intent on shredding Medicare, Social Security, and education.
The last, best, and perhaps impossible alternative is for Republicans to heed the counsel of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president: “As our situation is new, we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
On gun regulation, take the prospect of a universal background check—which I’ve already noted has over 90 percent support among Americans. It could pass, and it just may—if some GOP members dare to do what’s right despite the National Rifle Association. But listening to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s January 30 hearing and the expostulations of fired-up House members, it’s possible to conclude that the GOP now stands for Guns Over People. Ironically, the more the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre batters on about turning schools into armed camps, the more he hurts his own cause and the Republicans enlisted with him.
In 1995, George H.W. Bush resigned his lifetime membership in the NRA when LaPierre defended his description of federal agents as “jackbooted thugs,” even after the Oklahoma City bombing. Seventeen years on, maybe congressional Republicans could resign their role as rubber stamps for the gun fanatics. Now that would be genuine change.
So would GOP assent to comprehensive immigration reform—with a path to citizenship. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have forged a compromise with Senate Democrats. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter promptly denounced Rubio as “amazingly naive.” The National Review assailed him for having “lashed himself to ... the Ted Kennedy Testimonial Immigration Plan”—presumably similar to the one Kennedy negotiated with Ronald Reagan in 1986 and then with George W. Bush in 2006.
It may be painful, but this is an acid test for Republicans. If they can’t adapt here, they won’t adapt anywhere. Yet the brutish rhetoric inevitably coming from GOP opponents will only alienate Hispanics even more than they already are. And Rubio himself may ultimately be forced to abandon the effort. He’s already promised Rush Limbaugh that he won’t be “part of a bidding war” with Obama. Rubio’s preparing to run for president in 2016. He knows Republicans can’t take the White House without appealing to Hispanics. But he also knows another basic rule: he can’t be elected without being nominated—and in the end he will have to appease anti-immigrant primary voters.
Rove has just tried to rationalize the GOP’s plight, and discount the Obama realignment, in a Wall Street Journal column that is a collection of statistics without a coherent or relevant argument. He serves up the Kool-Aid of elections past without accounting for the crucial differences in today’s electorate. He cheers that Obama received fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. What does that prove about a president who overcame the economic headwinds Rove was certain to the last nanosecond would defeat him, as Bush’s brain resisted Fox News’s decision to call Ohio for Obama? Rove allows that the Republicans “have a perception problem” with Hispanics. If they don’t understand that their problem is more than that, look for 16 years of Barack—and say, then Hillary or Joe—in the Oval Office.
President Obama is a transformative figure in a transforming country. After his inaugural address, conservative columnist Rich Lowry complained: “He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country.” Actually, he already has. Not just on the Capitol steps, but in long months of campaigning, and now day after day, he hasn’t just been speaking to America. Much as it hurts Republicans to hear it, Barack Obama has been speaking for America.
Friday, February 1, 2013
On Shakespeare
Why do people consider Shakespeare such a great writer? The man wrote in cliches and hackneyed phrases. Consider: All's well that ends well. Something is rotten in Denmark. To be or not to be. The sound and the fury. Let's twist again like we did last summer. Come on now! Aren't great writers supposed to avoid cliches and hackneyed phrases?
Monday, January 28, 2013
New Glasses
Maybe I need new glasses. The stairs in our house sometimes look like an escalator and sometimes I have trouble finding the front door. I raid the ice box and take a bite of a squash before I realize it isn't a pear. Three week old leftovers are a health hazzard in our ice box. This morning I fumble with the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioner rather than the heat. The TV remote is a lost cause. Sheesh! I'm gonna get me some bold new glasses like Hillary Clinton and you'll see me coming a mile off.
Like · · Promote.
Kimberley Stewart and Sheila Bloom like this..View 2 more comments..Don Waller Squash for breakfast? You need coke bottle glasses
Yesterday at 10:24am via mobile · Like..Deborah Davis Weeks Please, none like hers!
23 hours ago · Like..Jody Britt Perhaps someone slipped you a pair of James Thurber's.
15 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson If I could write like Thurber I'd proudly wear Thurber glasses.
8 hours ago · Like..
Like · · Promote.
Kimberley Stewart and Sheila Bloom like this..View 2 more comments..Don Waller Squash for breakfast? You need coke bottle glasses
Yesterday at 10:24am via mobile · Like..Deborah Davis Weeks Please, none like hers!
23 hours ago · Like..Jody Britt Perhaps someone slipped you a pair of James Thurber's.
15 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson If I could write like Thurber I'd proudly wear Thurber glasses.
8 hours ago · Like..
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