The headlines about my Congressman, Charles Rangel, continue unabated. Certainly you cannot blame the dailies or the TV networks for noticing the alleged ethics violations, an 80-year-old legislative battler who refuses at this hour to give up the fight. He’s gone from being an inspiring figure to some of us…to an embarrassment. Sure looks like it’s time to give it up, Rep. Rangel. Thanks for proving the lesson of George Orwell’s “1984” all over again: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
An entertaining and newsy lesson. But I wish that more attention would be paid to the electoral contest in Rangel’s district. A few years ago in another election season I interviewed Joyce Johnson. Now she’s among the candidates running against Rangel in the September Democratic primary. She’s barely mentioned, as are the others who want the job. They are not given much of a chance against Rangel, and Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV gets most of the ink when anybody does get around to writing about the actual primary.
Actually, it seems from here like nobody’s writing about the primaries at all. The New York Times has not even gotten around to many of its one-shot pieces about various metropolitan area elections. I live in a district where there are contested Congressional and state Senate primaries, but the only signs of that are, well, the signs with the contenders' photos. Or bumping into the people on the street, which is how I found out the Anna Lewis is running for state Senate in the district that for so long has been the province of Eric Schneiderman, who is now running for state attorney general. See, we've got races.
Alas, we do not have much coverage of them. Maybe our radio stations are doing a fantastic job and I’m just missing it. But I doubt it. I’m pretty much the last person to media-bash, but the outlets that make fun of voters for not turning out to the polls should at least, in the weeks before voting, present the notion that there’s an election. Otherwise, we’re all just helping our Members of Congress and other politicos win re-election without anything resembling a contest. That’s a journalistic ethics violation.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Monday, August 9, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Does That 'Liberal' Label Scare Kagan?
Just once I would like a Supreme Court justice to get to the bench before she begins disappointing me.
Alas, Elena Kagan has already had her sad moment. It came last week on the second day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Alabama’s gift to the Senate, Jeff Sessions, quizzed Kagan about whether she’s a “liberal progressive.”
Her amazing response: “I honestly don’t know what that label means.”
Here we go again. Back in 1995, Kagan wrote an article calling the confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade.” This week she proved herself right.
Oh, she had some nice moments. In post-Bork America, we allow our judicial nominees to have a personality. So it was okay when Kagan, asked about what she was doing on Christmas Day, responded with a quip about how she, like all Jews, was probably at a Chinese restaurant.
Personality is fine, but philosophy is not. So when it came time to defend liberalism, Kagan punted. A woman who clerked for the late, great Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall went out of her way to tell us that she was a separate and distinct entity from her one-time mentor. No kidding. He would have answered the question about being a liberal.
How did we get here, to this weird moment in American political life, a time when nobody wants to be called a liberal, especially a liberal? It probably started around 1980, when candidate Ronald Reagan tarred Jimmy Carter as a liberal. Sessions tossed “liberal” and “progressive” together, a legitimate move since around the age of Dukakis the “liberals” started shying away from that term and moving toward “progressive.” And the trend certainly continued through last summer’s confirmation hearings, when Sonia Sotomayor steered clear of any such terms. Then she got on the court and began judging things just like a liberal. At the hearings, though, it's been like a book: Smart Women, Foolish Judiciary Committee Choices.
With Kagan, it’s worse. At least for those of us who spend our days on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of us are having a bit of trouble believing that Kagan, raised as a Jewish New Yorker in the age of feminism, never got around to defining the phrase “liberal progressive.” If nothing else, she could go back to the Latin roots of the word “liberal,” which would be “libera,” meaning “free,” and navigate from there. She might realize that a liberal is someone who believes in individual freedom and common purpose and the universal rights of men and women, pretty much as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in December 1948. That document was the crowning achievement of former First Lady and international heroine Eleanor Roosevelt. She was, in case Elena Kagan has forgotten, also a liberal.
Liberals are victims of their own success. Good liberal ideas have been so accepted in the culture that they’re considered mainstream, not liberal. But Social Security is a liberal idea. So are federally-secured student loans. Housing and food for people in dire need. Unemployment benefits. Overseas, it’s a liberal idea to give aid to our allies. At home, it’s a liberal idea that women should be as free as men to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, although it took the conservative Reagan to first make that happen. Liberals championed the idea that African-Americans should be allowed to vote without paying a poll tax and that gay people should be allowed to get married. Good ideas.
Still, liberals seem ashamed of their heritage or ignorant of it. Liberals should be explaining their successes instead of going into a kind of linguistic hiding. Cause the jig is up anyway. People tend to notice who’s a liberal and who’s not.
All of which makes Kagan’s dance this week so weird and depressing. This is a person who is going to do battle with Antonin Scalia? Granted, confirmation hearings are no longer the place for extended discourse on such matters. That’s how it is. But there must be some middle ground, some way to permit just a little candid talk about judicial philosophy before we hand over a lifetime appointment. Jokes about Chinese food are just not enough.
Alas, Elena Kagan has already had her sad moment. It came last week on the second day of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Alabama’s gift to the Senate, Jeff Sessions, quizzed Kagan about whether she’s a “liberal progressive.”
Her amazing response: “I honestly don’t know what that label means.”
Here we go again. Back in 1995, Kagan wrote an article calling the confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade.” This week she proved herself right.
Oh, she had some nice moments. In post-Bork America, we allow our judicial nominees to have a personality. So it was okay when Kagan, asked about what she was doing on Christmas Day, responded with a quip about how she, like all Jews, was probably at a Chinese restaurant.
Personality is fine, but philosophy is not. So when it came time to defend liberalism, Kagan punted. A woman who clerked for the late, great Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall went out of her way to tell us that she was a separate and distinct entity from her one-time mentor. No kidding. He would have answered the question about being a liberal.
How did we get here, to this weird moment in American political life, a time when nobody wants to be called a liberal, especially a liberal? It probably started around 1980, when candidate Ronald Reagan tarred Jimmy Carter as a liberal. Sessions tossed “liberal” and “progressive” together, a legitimate move since around the age of Dukakis the “liberals” started shying away from that term and moving toward “progressive.” And the trend certainly continued through last summer’s confirmation hearings, when Sonia Sotomayor steered clear of any such terms. Then she got on the court and began judging things just like a liberal. At the hearings, though, it's been like a book: Smart Women, Foolish Judiciary Committee Choices.
With Kagan, it’s worse. At least for those of us who spend our days on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of us are having a bit of trouble believing that Kagan, raised as a Jewish New Yorker in the age of feminism, never got around to defining the phrase “liberal progressive.” If nothing else, she could go back to the Latin roots of the word “liberal,” which would be “libera,” meaning “free,” and navigate from there. She might realize that a liberal is someone who believes in individual freedom and common purpose and the universal rights of men and women, pretty much as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in December 1948. That document was the crowning achievement of former First Lady and international heroine Eleanor Roosevelt. She was, in case Elena Kagan has forgotten, also a liberal.
Liberals are victims of their own success. Good liberal ideas have been so accepted in the culture that they’re considered mainstream, not liberal. But Social Security is a liberal idea. So are federally-secured student loans. Housing and food for people in dire need. Unemployment benefits. Overseas, it’s a liberal idea to give aid to our allies. At home, it’s a liberal idea that women should be as free as men to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, although it took the conservative Reagan to first make that happen. Liberals championed the idea that African-Americans should be allowed to vote without paying a poll tax and that gay people should be allowed to get married. Good ideas.
Still, liberals seem ashamed of their heritage or ignorant of it. Liberals should be explaining their successes instead of going into a kind of linguistic hiding. Cause the jig is up anyway. People tend to notice who’s a liberal and who’s not.
All of which makes Kagan’s dance this week so weird and depressing. This is a person who is going to do battle with Antonin Scalia? Granted, confirmation hearings are no longer the place for extended discourse on such matters. That’s how it is. But there must be some middle ground, some way to permit just a little candid talk about judicial philosophy before we hand over a lifetime appointment. Jokes about Chinese food are just not enough.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Passionate Primaries
Tomorrow’s going to be an awfully interesting day for fans for American politics.
Two incumbent Democratic Senators, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both face tough primary challenges from the left. I stink at predicting, but I think Specter is toast. And I don’t know enough about politics is Arkansas to understand what will happen there.
Lincoln has tried to survive by being a centrist Democrat, but ours is not a kind world for centrists. Lincoln was against the public option in a health care bill, so liberals in her own party are taking aim at her. She alienated Republicans in Arkansas—something that I suspect is easy to do—by supporting parts of the president’s agenda. All this prompted Lt. Gov. Bill Halter to run against her, but the New York Times has a piece today(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/politics/17pennsylvania.html?scp=3&sq=arlen%20specter&st=cse) in the race where John Brummett, a columnist at the Arkansas News, quips of the Democratic primary: “All we’re doing here is picking someone to get beat in November.” The Republicans are likely to win the seat in the fall.
Over in Pennsylvania, the chickens are coming home to roost for Specter, who has always had a constituency of one: Arlen Specter. He was talking a lot last week about his reputation of bringing home the bacon for Pennsylvania. But his history is long…he’s the guy who trashed Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings a couple of political lifetimes ago…and it will not be all that sad to see him go. His challenger is in the Democratic primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, had the guts to run when it looked like he would not be able to beat Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party last year. Now Sestak seems like he would be as strong as Specter as the Democratic nominee.
The results will tell us something, yes, about the much-mentioned anger that’s alive in both parties, the anti-Washington mood. But turnout numbers always tell us something else, something important about the level of engagement of voters. Those numbers tend to be kind of sad, even in years when our papers and cable TV shows tell us that we’re awfully angry about things. The most important thing, in an exciting election or a boring one, is to vote.
Two incumbent Democratic Senators, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both face tough primary challenges from the left. I stink at predicting, but I think Specter is toast. And I don’t know enough about politics is Arkansas to understand what will happen there.
Lincoln has tried to survive by being a centrist Democrat, but ours is not a kind world for centrists. Lincoln was against the public option in a health care bill, so liberals in her own party are taking aim at her. She alienated Republicans in Arkansas—something that I suspect is easy to do—by supporting parts of the president’s agenda. All this prompted Lt. Gov. Bill Halter to run against her, but the New York Times has a piece today(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/politics/17pennsylvania.html?scp=3&sq=arlen%20specter&st=cse) in the race where John Brummett, a columnist at the Arkansas News, quips of the Democratic primary: “All we’re doing here is picking someone to get beat in November.” The Republicans are likely to win the seat in the fall.
Over in Pennsylvania, the chickens are coming home to roost for Specter, who has always had a constituency of one: Arlen Specter. He was talking a lot last week about his reputation of bringing home the bacon for Pennsylvania. But his history is long…he’s the guy who trashed Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings a couple of political lifetimes ago…and it will not be all that sad to see him go. His challenger is in the Democratic primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, had the guts to run when it looked like he would not be able to beat Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party last year. Now Sestak seems like he would be as strong as Specter as the Democratic nominee.
The results will tell us something, yes, about the much-mentioned anger that’s alive in both parties, the anti-Washington mood. But turnout numbers always tell us something else, something important about the level of engagement of voters. Those numbers tend to be kind of sad, even in years when our papers and cable TV shows tell us that we’re awfully angry about things. The most important thing, in an exciting election or a boring one, is to vote.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Michelle Obama's Ill-Timed Food Fight
As if the president’s poll numbers were not low enough, his wife has decided to go around the country telling people that their children are too fat.
Somebody should stop her.
At least that’s what I was thinking this morning, as I watched First Lady Michelle Obama tell “Good Morning America” about her own affection for fast food. “I love burgers and fries,” Mrs. Obama felt compelled to say to Robin Roberts. Yeah, sure, but not as much as the average American.
I looked at my TV and said aloud: “Is she really going to talk about this?”Unspoken was the part where I find myself amazed that she would choose to launch her initiative at exactly this moment, the wrong moment, right in the middle of the Great Recession and her husband’s first most serious political crisis. Not to mention the two wars underway.
Timing is everything in politics. And this timing stinks.
It’s weird cause I agree with the First Lady. Childhood obesity really is an epidemic. And it’s true too that Americans seem these days to be scared of exactly the wrong things, expressing almost unending anxiety about a terrorist attack without realizing that French fries are an even more pressing enemy. A lot more of us are going to die from our diets than any outside threat, no matter how manic the media attention on Al Qaeda makes us.
And still. I cannot help but think that with the Tea Party people in full fury, and even President Obama’s supporters wondering if he overreached in his first year, this is an ill-timed venture. In New York City, we have seen the resentment that can come when the government tells its people what to eat. On our bad days, we accuse Mayor Michael Bloomberg of instituting a Nanny State. Surely the White House does not need the label right now, as it pursues what conservative critics call a government takeover of health care.
With Mrs. Obama, it’s even worse, because the food fight she’s starting also looks a little like the dumbing-down of the First Lady. Mrs. Obama is the second straight First Lady to pretend that she is less intelligent than she actually is. Weird, but not really surprising in a country that took approximately 16 years to warm up to a strong woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So rather than use her still-impressive standing with the American people to address the issues of the day, Mrs. Obama is going off on a poll-tested tangent. Such is the life of a First Lady.
Maybe I’m being too critical—which, in turn, could have something to do with losing my job six months ago. Yeah, that’s it. My perspective is off. The problem is that I am hardly alone with this perception problem, and Mrs. Obama will be chatting about children’s diets on my psychological turf. Even with the unemployment rate officially slipping below 10 percent according to last week’s news, a lot of us out here are suffering. We’re either unemployed or under-employed or over-employed, needing to come up with five or six jobs to replace the one that we lost. We’re stressed, we’re fat and we do not need a beautiful thin woman talking to us right this minute about portion control and eating our greens. The East Wing of the White House has seriously misread the mood of the nation, something the West Wing has been doing for about a year now.
So here’s my memo to the First Lady: Let’s not have that chat about childhood obesity right now. Wait until more of us have jobs. Cancel the rest of the media tour. Instead, let’s make a deal. I’ll try to eat less white food and more vegetables and get to the gym three or four times a week—aerobic activity each time. I’ll do yoga on Wednesday nights. And you go back to talking about supporting our troops and working in the White House garden.
If you have any extra time after that, please use it to pass at least a little health care. My COBRA’s going to run out soon.
Somebody should stop her.
At least that’s what I was thinking this morning, as I watched First Lady Michelle Obama tell “Good Morning America” about her own affection for fast food. “I love burgers and fries,” Mrs. Obama felt compelled to say to Robin Roberts. Yeah, sure, but not as much as the average American.
I looked at my TV and said aloud: “Is she really going to talk about this?”Unspoken was the part where I find myself amazed that she would choose to launch her initiative at exactly this moment, the wrong moment, right in the middle of the Great Recession and her husband’s first most serious political crisis. Not to mention the two wars underway.
Timing is everything in politics. And this timing stinks.
It’s weird cause I agree with the First Lady. Childhood obesity really is an epidemic. And it’s true too that Americans seem these days to be scared of exactly the wrong things, expressing almost unending anxiety about a terrorist attack without realizing that French fries are an even more pressing enemy. A lot more of us are going to die from our diets than any outside threat, no matter how manic the media attention on Al Qaeda makes us.
And still. I cannot help but think that with the Tea Party people in full fury, and even President Obama’s supporters wondering if he overreached in his first year, this is an ill-timed venture. In New York City, we have seen the resentment that can come when the government tells its people what to eat. On our bad days, we accuse Mayor Michael Bloomberg of instituting a Nanny State. Surely the White House does not need the label right now, as it pursues what conservative critics call a government takeover of health care.
With Mrs. Obama, it’s even worse, because the food fight she’s starting also looks a little like the dumbing-down of the First Lady. Mrs. Obama is the second straight First Lady to pretend that she is less intelligent than she actually is. Weird, but not really surprising in a country that took approximately 16 years to warm up to a strong woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So rather than use her still-impressive standing with the American people to address the issues of the day, Mrs. Obama is going off on a poll-tested tangent. Such is the life of a First Lady.
Maybe I’m being too critical—which, in turn, could have something to do with losing my job six months ago. Yeah, that’s it. My perspective is off. The problem is that I am hardly alone with this perception problem, and Mrs. Obama will be chatting about children’s diets on my psychological turf. Even with the unemployment rate officially slipping below 10 percent according to last week’s news, a lot of us out here are suffering. We’re either unemployed or under-employed or over-employed, needing to come up with five or six jobs to replace the one that we lost. We’re stressed, we’re fat and we do not need a beautiful thin woman talking to us right this minute about portion control and eating our greens. The East Wing of the White House has seriously misread the mood of the nation, something the West Wing has been doing for about a year now.
So here’s my memo to the First Lady: Let’s not have that chat about childhood obesity right now. Wait until more of us have jobs. Cancel the rest of the media tour. Instead, let’s make a deal. I’ll try to eat less white food and more vegetables and get to the gym three or four times a week—aerobic activity each time. I’ll do yoga on Wednesday nights. And you go back to talking about supporting our troops and working in the White House garden.
If you have any extra time after that, please use it to pass at least a little health care. My COBRA’s going to run out soon.
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