When I turned 50 a few years ago, I started doing something sort of paranoid: I always jog with my driver’s license and medical card, in case I have a heart attack. So far it’s never come in handy, but I keep doing it.
Paranoia has its costs, though. Almost two weeks ago, I was at Logan Airport in Boston when I flipped my wallet open and stared at an empty plastic window. My driver’s license was in a t-shirt pocket in my laundry hamper. I had no other photo ID.
My first thought was to change my flight and come back tomorrow, but that would mean missing a whole day of the conference I was going to – the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix – so I went with my second thought: See what happens.
I got a boarding pass from a machine that didn’t care what I looked like, then waited in line with everybody else and apologetically told my story to the TSA guy. He called over a supervisor, who looked at what I did have: two credit cards and prescription bottle. Making no promises about what would happen when I tried to come home, he let me through.
Eight days later, TSA in Phoenix was more thorough. They scoffed at my credit cards and pill bottle, as well as at my business card (which has a photo), and the ID the conference had given me. They asked about my health-insurance card, which of course was keeping my driver’s license company in the laundry hamper. They would have liked to have seen some mail with my address on it or maybe a utility bill, which I might have packed if I had known I was going to forget all my other ID.
So they called up a government database and started asking me questions about myself: my address and phone number, my wife’s maiden name, other towns I had lived in, and so on. Some of the stuff I didn’t know, like the names of the neighbors in my apartment building. Eventually they did an explosives-residue test on my hands, and then let me through.
At no time was I treated with anything other than respect. No one implied that I was a criminal or that I was trying to get away with something.
While I was undocumented, I learned two things of political significance:
First, those advocates of voter-ID laws who claim it’s no big deal because you already need a photo ID to do absolutely everything else in this society – they’re just wrong. A lot of people will ask for a photo ID, but if you don’t have one they work around it. For example, some places took my credit card without asking. When someone did ask, nobody batted an eye when I said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll pay cash” or called my wife over to charge it on her card. They may have had other work-arounds, but I didn’t ask.
TSA definitely will work with what you have, because they’re just trying to verify your identity, not stop you from traveling. On the other hand, when you try to vote in a Republican state, you run into a process that absolutely won’t work if you don’t have an official state-issued photo ID, and even a state-university ID isn’t good enough. That’s unusual, and you have to wonder if that’s because the purpose is to stop you from voting.
Second, it was ironic that I was on my way to Phoenix, and that one of the things I would do there was protest the Arizona immigration law, S.B. 1070, which is sometimes known as the papers-please law.
I wandered around Arizona for a week with no proof that I’m a US citizen other than my white skin, my Illinois accent, and a nice pair of khakis. Nobody cared. I never had to explain myself and I never had cause to be afraid.
Everybody who heard my license-in-the-hamper anecdote thought it was funny and wanted to know how I got through TSA. But if I’d been brown, poor, and speaking with a heavy Hispanic accent, the story might not have been so entertaining.
So I was undocumented in Arizona and nothing happened. No drama, no excitement.
That’s how white privilege usually shows up: Nothing happens. Think about that the next time you’re out in public and nothing is happening.
The Supreme Court is kind of like a college student: It procrastinates, and then in the last few days of the term it comes out with an amazing barrage of papers.
This year, they even allowed themselves a temporary incomplete. The term was supposed to end last Monday, but they extended it to Thursday. Sure enough, that’s when they announced their most important decision, the one saying that ObamaCare is constitutional.
Usually, I focus the Sift on issues that I don’t think are getting enough attention, figuring that you already hear more than enough about whatever the media has fixated on. But sometimes the media over-coverage of the Issue of the Day is so confusing and full of spin that I feel like I need to straighten it out. So this week, two of the three articles are about the Court: one about the ObamaCare decision and one about the Arizona immigration decision.
The third article is my own story of accidentally traveling without ID: “I Was Undocumented in Arizona”. (Yes, you can get through TSA without a driver’s license or passport.) That will be the first story that shows up.
I’m also trying something different this week: I’m combining the weekly summary with the Nuggets or Short Notes. I still haven’t decided whether I like the idea or not, but we’ll see how it goes.
NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE WEEKLY SIFT RETURNS JULY 1.
There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now OK to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.
– Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin senate candidate, on being gay in politics
In this week’s sift:
Nuggets of the Week. Greece, Jamie Dimon, disrespecting the president, saying “vagina” in Michigan, the end of judicial restraint, an example of American exceptionalism, and President Bush’s head on a pike.
If not ObamaCare, what?Either through the courts or the ballot box, Republicans mean to get rid of ObamaCare. But Mitt Romney’s plans to replace it are surprisingly thin, and the vague plans he has only look good if you’re an insurance company.
What senate candidates deserve your support?You can only vote for candidates in your state, but you can volunteer and give money to anybody you like. Which campaigns are the best investment of your time or money?
Whether the Greek elections will lead to the end of the euro. But the conservatives won, so a lot of Chicken Littling went to waste. Background here. Krugman’s take here. Most insightful conversation I heard here:
Jamie Dimon’s “grilling” by the Senate Banking Committee, where all the senators other than Merkley and Menendez fawned over a bankster who learned nothing from the financial collapse other than how to do it again. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote:
This was an opportunity to show Americans how a too-big-to-fail commercial bank like Chase – supported by vast amounts of public treasure, from Fed loans to bailouts to less obvious subsidies like GSE purchases of mortgages and implicit guarantees of bank debt – uses the crutch of government support to gamble recklessly in search of huge profits, with the public on the hook for any potential downside.
That opportunity was missed. Only Jon Stewart fully captured the absurdity.
Press conferences have a very simple etiquette that is only heightened when the speaker in question is the leader of the free world. You listen to someone speak, you roll your eyes in the back row, you check your email and play Tetris on your smart phone, and as soon as the speaking is over someone says “time for questions,” and you raise your hand and ask a question that will lead directly into your column the next day.
What you can’t say in the Michigan legislature. The Michigan legislature is considering a bill that would severely restrict abortion. (The House passed the first part of it Wednesday.) Democratic Rep. Lisa Brown from West Bloomfield spoke briefly against the bill, making two main points: The regulations in the bill would cause clinics to close and people to lose their jobs; and not allowing abortions to save the life of the mother would force Jews to violate Jewish law. She closed by saying:
Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but “no” means “no”.
Judicial restraint was a useful concept for conservatives when the Supreme Court was liberal. But now that the Court is conservative, George Will wants to “unleash” it.
Conservatives, however, cannot coherently make the case for Romney as a shaper of the judicial branch until they wean themselves, and perhaps him, from excessive respect for judicial “restraint” and condemnation of “activism.”
The journal Democracy held a round table on “Politics in 2024“. This deserves more than a line, which maybe I’ll give it in a future Sift.
One way or another — either by decree of an activist Supreme Court or by winning in November and repealing the Affordable Care Act — Republicans are aiming for a post-ObamaCare world. What would they do then?
Despite the rhetoric against it, ObamaCare has never been just an extension of federal power for its own sake. It is an attempt to solve a serious problem: When President Obama took office, something like 50 million Americans did not have health insurance. Millions more had hollow health insurance: Their most likely health problems were labeled “pre-existing conditions” and not covered. Also, yearly or lifetime caps on what the insurance company had to spend meant that people were only covered if they didn’t get too sick. In short, millions of Americans with some kind of insurance still faced bankruptcy if they had major health problems.
The ACA is not a perfect solution. Some people will still fall through its cracks, but ObamaCare imposes federal standards that do away with hollow insurance, and (when it fully takes effect in 2014) it will considerably shrink the pool of uninsured Americans.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the best we could do, or whether the same or better results might have been achieved more efficiently with either more or less government intervention. But reasonable people can’t argue with this: If ObamaCare gets repealed, we’ll then face the same serious health-care problem that President Obama faced when he took office.
What would President Romney do about it?
The Romney campaign web site has a page about that. At first glance, it looks like a serious plan: It has 15 bullet points, each of which looks like a link to some detailed position paper. However, they aren’t links; they’re just bullet points formatted in blue.
That’s all you get.
Blanks, not bullets. A few of the 15 are standard conservative talking points that sound good but are basically empty, like capping malpractice awards. (I’ve explained before why I think this will accomplish very little. Short version: Malpractice awards themselves are a trivial part of the overall healthcare budget, and claims about “defensive medicine” don’t hold up when put to the test. States that cap malpractice awards don’t suddenly see their healthcare costs drop.)
Another empty bullet: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” Good as that sounds, it just restates what the HIPA Act established in 1996. People who spend their 20s in some Starbucks-barista type job could still be out in the cold when they finally do try to get insurance later on.
And yes, it would be nice to have “IT interoperability”, “non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution”, and “Consumer Reports-type ratings of alternative insurance plans”, but none of that is going to help you much if you get cancer. And actually guaranteeing such stuff would be too much government intervention anyway, so Romney just pledges to “encourage” and “facilitate” these changes.
States and individuals lose power to corporations. Romney’s website highlights this quote:
I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.
And yes, the substantive parts of the Romney plan do appear to move responsibility and decision-making from the federal government to states and individuals. However, when you assemble the bigger picture the bullet-points paint, the real story is that power moves to the insurance companies.
Here’s how: The federal government gets out of the standards-making business, apparently returning that power to the states. However, the bullet “Allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines” undoes all that state power. If consumers can purchase insurance in any state, then states can’t regulate the health insurance sold to their citizens. If Vermont has high consumer-protection standards and New Hampshire low ones, then health insurance companies will only offer Vermonters policies written in New Hampshire.
You could argue that the market will provide whatever consumers demand, but we’ve seen this scenario play out before, when interstate banking was deregulated in 1999. If you have a Citicorp credit card, you send your payments to South Dakota. Bank of America payments go to Texas. That’s because those states have low consumer-protection standards. Would you like to have a Visa protected by the more consumer-friendly laws of, say, Massachusetts? Good luck with that; you won’t find one.
The same thing happened 100 years ago with corporate charters. Half of all U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, because Delaware won the race to the bottom.
So we know pretty well what will happen to health insurance if there are no federal standards and insurance companies can sell across state lines: States will race to the bottom until a few states say that health-insurance companies can do whatever they want. Then all policies will be written in those states. There won’t be anything you can do about it, because nobody you can vote for will have any control.
Block grants. Romney’s first bullet reads “Block grant Medicaid and other payments to states”. The cost of Medicaid is currently shared between the states and the federal government. (This article says the feds pay 60% in Texas.) For its contribution, the federal government gets to establish standards.
A block-grant approach would have the federal government say, “Here’s some money for Medicaid; spend it however you want.” By writing that check, the federal government would completely discharge its responsibility for providing health care to poor people.
The assumption behind this approach is that federal standards are inefficient. Left to its own devices, a state might get more out of the money than it does with the feds looking its shoulder. That may or may not be true, and it can work in either a conservative or a liberal direction. (Vermont is hoping for some kind of no-strings arrangement as it moves towards a single-payer system.)
But something else happens when you move the federal government out of the picture: You break the link between poor people’s health care and the Federal Reserve.
As we have seen since 2007, the federal government can borrow money in large quantities even during a financial crisis. And since dollars are created by the Federal Reserve, it is literally impossible for the federal government to go bankrupt as long as it owes dollars.
But states can go bankrupt, and the threat of bankruptcy can force them to do otherwise unthinkable things. Since 2007, states have been canceling projects and laying people off in droves — not because they wanted to destroy jobs and not because they suddenly discovered they didn’t really need teachers or firefighters or highways. But tax receipts were down, needs were up, and something had to give.
If there were no federal standards and federal money involved, Medicaid would be the obvious place to cut during a crisis. (Texas keeps looking at abandoning the Medicaid system anyway, even if it means losing the federal money.) Sure, some people would die, but they’re poor and don’t have press agents, so who would notice? (When did you last see a headline like “Sick homeless man dies in alley”? Do you think it never happens?) And if the poor decided to move to a more compassionate state, so much the better. Win/win.
In short, a state Medicaid program can’t provide the same security as the current system. States can promise whatever they want, but in a crisis those benefits would vanish.
And even in good times, states would feel pressure to race to the bottom. Be hard on poor people and maybe they’ll go somewhere else.
Responsibility. Everybody looks with horror at the upward-sloping trend in healthcare spending. But there are two ways to deal that trend: Figure out how to deliver care to everyone more efficiently, as most European countries do. Or push the responsibility off on somebody else, with the ultimate result that federal government won’t be held responsible when there’s no money to take care of people.
Romney wants to go in the second direction. Under President Romney, we could expect more and more people to have hollow insurance policies (written in whichever state allows the hollowest insurance). More and more people will either go bankrupt when they get sick, or will depend on state programs that go unfunded in hard times.
Stacked up against that future, ObamaCare looks pretty good.
Last week a Sift-reading friend told me she had set aside some money to contribute to Senate candidates, and wondered where I thought it would be best spent.
We agreed that this is a good time to contribute. In general, early money is more valuable than late money, but (if you’re like me) you’d usually rather see your money spent in the general election than during the primary. So one of best times to contribute is right after the primaries bring the race down to a Democrat vs a Republican.
There are 33 Senate races this year, but a few simple criteria will narrow down the candidates worth contributing to or volunteering for.
I’ve never claimed to be non-partisan. (I try hard to keep the Sift honest, but I’m not trying to be neutral. I write what I believe, not just what I want you to believe.) So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my first criterion is that I’m only considering candidates who will caucus with the Democrats. (That would include independents like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Angus King of Maine.) Anybody committed to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader is off my list.
Whether that’s your serious-support list or not depends on how optimistic/pessimistic you are about what will happen between now and November. If you expect a big Democratic surge that isn’t showing up in the polls yet, then you might want to reach for one of RCP’s “leans Republican” seats, like Arizona, where Richard Carmona currently trails by about 11%. If you expect the opposite, you might want to defend one of the “leans Democratic” candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, ahead by 8%.
I don’t really have a hunch about the trend, so I’ll stick with the toss-ups. Next, I want strong progressive voices in the Senate. I want somebody who’s going to make me proud, not just be slightly better than a Republican. That takes Bill Nelson of Florida (not to be confused with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is worse) off my list. He has a history of joining Republicans on issues like eliminating the estate tax, and he’s generally one of the last Democrats to get on board for things like raising the debt ceiling. So, Bill, I’ll be rooting for you on election night, but I can think of people more deserving of my time and money.
Elizabeth Warren
Two candidates that jump right out at me are Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Both of them will face an avalanche of out-of-state money, Warren from the financial industry and Baldwin from the religious right.
Elizabeth Warren. Warren you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Massachusetts. I first noticed her when she was chair of the Senate’s TARP Oversight Committee. She did several very plain-spoken, hard-hitting interviews on Rachel Maddow’s show where she laid out exactly how opaque the program was and how few of the underlying problems were being fixed.
The best argument for putting Warren in the Senate was the Jamie Dimon testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. (More about that in the Nuggets.) Warren is exactly the person who should have been in that room.
She’s a Harvard law professor, so her opponent Sen. Scott Brown is trying to tar her with the Harvard elitist label. But she wasn’t born into the Harvard strata of society, she started in the working class and climbed the ladder. She understands ordinary people and wants to be in a position to watch their backs.
Current polls are about as close as polls can be: Brown 43.8%, Warren 43.5%. I expect Warren to win a close race for three reasons: Undecideds have a tendency to break against the incumbent, Massachusetts is a blue state, and Warren’s supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about her. But Wall Street really hates Warren, so Brown will have a lot of money to spend.
Tammy Baldwin. Unless you live in Wisconsin, you may not know much about Tammy Baldwin. She’s been in Congress for 14 years, and is the only openly lesbian congresswoman. (She was already out of the closet when she ran in 1998. Up until that time, the only gay representatives had come out while in office.) In 2010, National Journal’s ratings had her tied for being the most liberal member of the House.
Now, my first thought on hearing those facts would be: She’s going to get crushed. But so far that’s not happening. The Republican primary isn’t until August, and the RCP average has her trailing former Governor Tommy Thompson by 8.7%. But that average is skewed by a Rasmussen poll with a huge Republican bias (Thompson ahead 52%-36%). The other two polls have her behind Thompson by manageable numbers: 4% and 6%, which could just be name recognition. Marquette University’s poll has her ahead of the other two likely Republican candidates.
Other toss-up Democrats.Claire McCaskill isn’t exactly an inspiring progressive voice. (National Journal rates her exactly in the middle as the 50th most liberal senator.) But this is Missouri we’re talking about; what did you expect? I think she’s doing as much as the voters will allow, and that holding this seat is key to holding the Senate. Polls: Rasmussen has her behind by double digits, but PPP says the race is tied.
Jon Tester in Montana is another incumbent Democrat in a Republican state. Don’t expect his support on, say, gun control. But his heart is in the right place when it comes to keeping Wall Street in check. PPP and Rasmussen disagree about who is ahead.
Immigration is likely to be a huge issue in the Nevada race. Shelley Berkley is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, who was appointed when John Ensign resigned in disgrace. Nevada is a swing state that’s been trending blue as the Hispanic vote increases, but Republicans keep offering far-right candidates. Heller is a typical senate Republican, rated the 73rd most liberal senator. Berkley supports the DREAM Act; Heller wants to build a bigger border fence. The non-Rasmussen polls have this as a neck-and-neck race.
In Virginia, Tim Kaine vs. George Allen is a marquee match-up. Kaine has been governor and Allen senator. (Allen famously lost to Jim Webb in 2006 after the Macaca gaffe.) So far, I haven’t found anything thrilling on Kaine’s web site, and he seems to be running a vague I-was-a-good-governor campaign. But he’s narrowly ahead in the swingiest of swing states.
I confess I had never heard of North Dakota candidate Heidi Heitkamp until this morning. She’s running in a red state as a former state attorney general who fights for the people. Her web site is focused on local North Dakota issues, and I really have no idea how progressive she’d be. (She favors the Keystone Pipeline that environmentalists oppose.) Polls have her neck-and-neck with Rep. Rick Berg.
OK, it’s Monday. I’m awake. The week’s articles should start appearing in 2 or 3 hours.
What was everybody was talking about this week? Greece, the Senate Banking Committee’s love-fest with bankster Jamie Dimon, the reporter who heckled the president in the Rose Garden, and the female representative who got punished for assaulting the virgin ears of the Michigan legislature by saying “vagina”. But I bookmarked a lot of other interesting stuff for this week’s Nuggets and I still haven’t decided how much of it I have space for.
In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:
If not ObamaCare, what? Even if the Affordable Care Act survives its upcoming death match with the Supreme Court, Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal it. But his plans for replacing it are surprisingly thin. The vague principles he does endorse sound great — especially if you’re an insurance company.
What Senate candidates should you support? This comes from a Sift-reader’s question: Everybody’s talking about Obama vs. Romney, but the Senate is also up for grabs in November. If you have money to contribute or time to volunteer (and you don’t just want to focus on your local race), where should it go? I answer this question with two other questions: Did you know that the most liberal member of the House is running to become the first openly lesbian senator? And that her race is rated a toss-up?
And by the way: No Sift next Monday, because this week I’ll be at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix. They tell me that our plans for protesting the Arizona anti-immigrant law do not include getting arrested, but I haven’t seen Sheriff Arpaio’s plans. And while I understand that some great writing has been done in jail, I’ll bet the wifi signal is terrible, so I’m not going to stress over getting a blog out. The Sift will return July 1.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
– Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1977)
Changes in the Weekly Sift. It’s been almost a year since I re-formatted the Weekly Sift and moved it to weeklysift.com. I think it’s time for some changes again.
In August and September, three posts went viral, totaling over 100K of the 162K views the Sift has had all year. I think it spoiled me. Since then I’ve been searching a little too hard for the next viral post, and I think I need to shift back towards the Sift’s original mission: offering my readers a trustworthy condensation of the public debate, and saving them time by sifting through the info-stream and fetching out the occasional nugget.
The changes will be subtle. I’m still going to write my own articles when I can’t find anything that makes exactly the right point, but I’m going to refocus my efforts on serving my regular readers rather than seeking the attention of 10,000 strangers.
The obvious changes are that Short Notes has been renamed Nuggets of the Week, re-organized, and moved to the top of the blog. I’ve also added a Monday Morning Teaser to preview the day’s articles for those who come early. And when I don’t have changes to explain, the weekly summary will be shorter than it used to be.
In this week’s sift:
Nuggets of the Week. Everybody was talking about the Wisconsin recall, Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus, but other stuff was also worth your attention: what an oil pipeline break looks like, an anti-rape video from Scotland, the commencement speech you should have heard, how crazy Americans look to Germans, articles based on Chris Hayes’ and Joseph Stiglitz’s new books, the Netroots Nation videos, a fabulous photo from Milky Way Scientists, and more.
What Happened in Wisconsin?After all that, Scott Walker stays in office. How bad were the results? Should Obama be worried about carrying Wisconsin? Should we all be worried about the unprecedented money Walker raised and spent? And can you really buy an election with that much money? How?
Demonizing the Girl Scouts. It looks like the Catholic Church is joining right-wing Protestants in villainizing the Girl Scouts. Partly it’s the whole female-empowerment thing. But it’s also part of a larger pattern. Increasingly the Religious Right sees the American melting pot as a caldron of contamination.
Remembering Ray Bradbury. In 2012, we take for granted that you can find really good writing in genre fiction. Salman Rushdie writes childrens’ books, SciFi has Neal Stephenson, fantasy China Mieville, and so on.
Thank Ray Bradbury for that. Most pre-Bradbury scifi writers didn’t mess with sissy techniques like metaphor, while “serious” authors stayed far away from time travel or outer space. Ray started breaking down that wall, and the rest is history.
Nate Silver presented his state-by-state prediction model for the presidential election. Current prediction: Obama wins 291.8 electoral votes to Romney’s 246.2. (Decimals appear because Nate weights his averages by the confidence of his prediction. So his 63.4% confidence that Obama wins Virginia’s 13 electoral votes adds 8.2 EVs to Obama’s column and 4.8 to Romney’s.) He followed up with a summary of how different organizations’ electoral forecasts disagree.
Secret space plane? How cool is that? Next they’re going to tell us that Hal Jordan has test-flown it.
If you didn’t like the commencement speech at your graduation, why not overwrite that memory with a better one? Here’s the speech Atul Gawande gave at Williams. Atlantic links you to video of speeches by Neil Gaiman, Jane Lynch, President Obama, Steve Carell, Aaron Sorkin, and Fareed Zakaria.
After the LinkedIn password disaster, you may be looking to create new passwords that are easy to remember and hard to crack. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo explains a good technique, though he is misinformed about how recent it is.
To see how Germany views labor unions and public property, check out Thomas Geoghagan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent, which I reviewed in September, 2010.
Looking for transit-of-Venus photos led me to the Facebook page of Milky Way Scientists, who have a great photo collection.
The Nation gives Chris Hayes space to preview the argument of his new book The Twilight of the Elites. I think I’m going to have to read this.
Summary: A genuine meritocracy would have a lot of inequality (as talented people move to the top), but also a lot of mobility (as talented children rise from the lower classes). But what would happen after the elites gained enough power to keep inequality while shutting down mobility?
Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members; it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward; and it would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking and self-dealing, as those on top pursued the outsized rewards promised for superstars.
Sound familiar?
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is also thinking about the elite in his Vanity Fair article, also based on a recent book:
Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position.
Like me, you probably didn’t make to Providence for the Netroots Nation conference. Wasn’t it good of them to put so many of the videos online?
Steve Almond raised an interesting question in the NYT’s Sunday magazine: What if liberals doggedly pursued our own agenda, and stopped letting clowns like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin distract us?
This is something I wrestle with in the Sift: When do you need to know what the other side is saying, and when does a story just titillate your rage to no constructive purpose? (Comments welcome. Feel free to take today’s Girls Scouts article as an example.)
Short version: The long anticipated recall of Governor Scott Walker fizzled. Walker won the rematch against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by almost exactly the same margin (53%-46%) as their 2010 race.
So the upshot is that the union-busting Walker has already done will stand for another two years, as will his education cuts and the voter suppression law (if it ultimately survives its court challenge). But Walker won’t get any new shenanigans through the legislature until at least 2013, if then. That’s a big improvement on the way things were when the demonstrations started in February, 2011. Then Walker had solid majorities in both houses and could do pretty much whatever he wanted.
Exit polls. The big reason to doubt Obama is in trouble in Wisconsin is Tuesday’s exit poll: Obama over Romney 51%-44%.
Republicans spin this by claiming the poll had a Democratic bias:
Considering the exit polls the media relied on showed a razor-thin difference between Walker and his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the logic behind some huge lead for Obama, produced by the same exit polls, melts away. Walker defeated Barrett by a 7-point margin.
Apply that same analysis to Obama’s 7-point lead in the same exit polls and the race in Wisconsin is actually closer to being dead even.
This point is bogus. The early exit poll, reflecting only people who voted in the morning, showed a neck-and-neck race between Walker and Barrett. But Obama’s 7-point lead comes from the final exit poll, which shows Walker winning by about the right margin. (Atlantic’s Molly Ball describes how exit polls work.)
Doubting the process. Walker got 53% of the vote. But according to the exit poll, 70% of the voters were dubious about whether a recall was appropriate at all. Of the 10% who said a recall was “never” appropriate, 94% voted for Walker. 60% believe in recalls “only for official misconduct”; Walker got 68% of their votes.
I think the wording of the choices skewed this result a little. The only other option — that a recall is appropriate “for any reason” — is too loose. The actual justification for the recall — that compared to Walker’s radical policies, his vaguely conservative 2010 campaign amounted to fraud — might have gotten more than 27% agreement.
Still, it does seem that many voters set Walker a lower bar than he’d face in a regular election. For them, the question wasn’t whether Walker or Barrett would be a better governor, but whether Walker had done anything so egregious that the 2010 election should be overturned.
A good comparison here was the Clinton impeachment. Many people who disliked Clinton’s policies and thought his sexual escapades were shameful nonetheless believed that impeachment was unwarranted.
Not like Ohio. Another instructive comparison is Ohio, where Governor Kasich’s similarly vague cut-spending/create-jobs 2010 campaign led to a similarly radical ALEC agenda after the election. As in Wisconsin, Kasich’s attack on workers’ rights led to a popular backlash.
So it’s not surprising that some fed-up voters would be angry the recall itself. As one questioner at Netroots Nation’s Wisconsin post-mortem panel commented Friday: “If Wisconsin had had the same mechanism as Ohio, if we’d been able to go directly after the law, we would have gotten the same result.” (I watched the session’s livestream and haven’t re-watched the tape, so my quotations are only approximate. The fuzzily-sourced quotes below are due to my sketchy notes.)
Madison was the first Occupation
The message disconnect. The massive demonstrations in Madison in 2011 were the prototype for Occupy Wall Street. The Wisconsin protests had the same grass-roots, horizontally organized structure and the same independence from parties and candidates. As Harry Waisbren put it at Netroots Nation:
This movement is not about electing Democrats, it’s about ending the corporate subversion of our democracy.
But that led to a problem: The Occupy-style grass-roots movement was great at collecting one million signatures for the recall-Walker petition. But as soon as that petition was filed, the focus of the process necessarily shifted to electing Democrats — precisely what the movement is not about. Election campaigns continue to be top-down political-consultant-driven operations.
Things got worse after the primary, which was won by the centrist Barrett rather than the activists’ favorite candidate, Kathleen Falk. So rather than a referendum to restore workers’ rights, public education, and environmental protections, the campaign became a generic do-over of the 2010 Walker/Barrett race. As one Netroots Nation panelist put it:
Barrett never really focused on the messages that were coming up from the grass roots.
Now, maybe Barrett looked at his polling and decided those issues were losers. Who knows? But as a result, the logic of the recall slipped away. “The narrative was lost,” Waisbren commented. That led directly to the sense of the recall’s illegitimacy that was expressed in the exit poll.
In addition to these millions, millions more were spent by outside groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity on “issue ads” that couldn’t directly say “Vote for Walker”, but left little doubt who you should support. All told, the Center for Public Integrity estimates that $63.5 million was spent. Walker’s ads started appearing back in November. As one Netroots Nation panelist said:
No one who lives in Wisconsin could doubt that Walker owned the airwaves.
Campaign spending doesn’t mean anything because you can spend it incorrectly.
Similarly, Rudy could say that being seven feet tall doesn’t mean anything in basketball, because you might be clumsy. But what if you’re not? What can you do with a cash advantage like Walker’s if you spend it correctly?
Obviously, nobody’s going to vote for Walker just because they’ve heard “Vote for Walker” 100 times and “Vote for Barrett” only 10-15 times. Where Walker-level money comes into play isn’t just in repetition, it’s in re-defining reality.
The jobs issue was a key example. The slogan of Walker’s controversial 2011 budget was “Wisconsin is Open for Business“. His agenda’s whole point was that industry would create jobs if the state cut corporate taxes, broke unions, and stopped protecting workers and the environment.
It hasn’t worked. The Wisconsin Budget Project looked at statistics from the Federal Reserve and concluded:
If we use December 2010 as our baseline for analysis, the newly released data indicate that only one other state (Alaska) has experienced slower growth than Wisconsin.
And Bloomberg News — hardly a left-wing outfit — reported:
Wisconsin was ranked last among states and the District of Columbia in economic health in 2011, the first year of Walker’s tenure, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States.
Walker didn’t like those numbers, so he made up his own. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wisconsin had lost 33,900 jobs. But Walker’s re-analysis said that Wisconsin had gained 23,321 jobs. And then he blanketed the airwaves with this ad:
As Netroots Nation panelist Emily Mills pointed out, any state could adjust its numbers in the same way:
Whatever metric you use on jobs, if you apply the same metric to every state, Wisconsin is still dead last.
But nobody had millions of dollars to spread that message across the state, so Walker’s message stood.
That’s Wisconsin’s lesson for the post-Citizens-United era: The best use of money in politics is to define reality. Don’t just tell citizens to vote for you, create a virtual world in which voting for you makes sense.
What it means for November. Mitt Romney has a lot of disadvantages: He’s not very likeable. He’s a bad campaigner who has a habit of saying things like “I like to be able to fire people” and “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He’s a wooden debater who has yet to appear outside the conservative bubble. He has taken a lot of radical right-wing positions that he’ll have a hard time running away from. And he’s the poster boy for income inequality and financiers run amok.
Limitless amounts of money are going to be spent in the fall. And while Obama is no slouch as a fund-raiser, he’s going to be outspent by a wide margin, especially if you count the corporate-funded outside groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s Crossroads, whose ads I’ve already seen repeatedly during the NBA playoffs.
The bulk of that money isn’t going to be spent saying “Vote for Romney”. It’s going to be used to redefine reality. Millions already believe (falsely) that Obama raised their taxes, that he cut defense, that he isn’t really an American citizen, that he’s secretly Muslim, that the stimulus didn’t create jobs, and on and on and on. By November, millions more will believe other false things that make it logical to support Romney over Obama.
In Wisconsin, Obama currently benefits a little from Walker’s redefinition of reality: If the Wisconsin economy is getting better, maybe Obama isn’t so bad.
But now that Walker is safe until 2014, the up-is-down campaign will reverse itself. Wisconsinites can expect to start hearing that they’re in a depression, that things were never this bad under President Bush, and so on. It will make a difference.
The Weekly Sift 