August 2012

Maybe it’s just me, but Romney’s bullshit on mothers’ work really pissed me off: slate.com/blogs/moneybox…

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 31, 2012

I see that Yglesias was annoyed, as was I, by the sections of Romney’s speech devoted to celebrating Mrs. Romney for being a homemaker — work that the GOP nominee characterized as far more important than his own in private equity (as well as, presumably, public office). For those who missed last night’s events, or were too gobsmacked by Clint Eastwood’s performance art to process Mitt’s address, here’s an excerpt:

I grew up in Detroit in love with cars and wanted to be a car guy, like my dad. But by the time I was out of school, I realized that I had to go out on my own, that if I stayed around Michigan in the same business, I’d never really know if I was getting a break because of my dad. I wanted to go someplace new and prove myself.

Those weren’t the easiest of days – too many long hours and weekends working, five young sons who seemed to have this need to re-enact a different world war every night. But if you ask Ann and I what we’d give, to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and discover a pile of kids asleep in our room. Well, every mom and dad knows the answer to that.

Those days were toughest on Ann, of course. She was heroic. Five boys, with our families a long way away. I had to travel a lot for my job then and I’d call and try to offer support. But every mom knows that doesn’t help get the homework done or the kids out the door to school.

I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine. And I knew without question, that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine. And as America saw Tuesday night, Ann would have succeeded at anything she wanted to.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of Romney’s paean to his wife. Indeed, their storybook relationship is the Romney family’s most appealing quality, and Mitt sounds his most human when extolling Ann’s many virtues. Still, his insistence that Ann’s “job” was harder and more important struck me as patronizing. If Romney considered his wife’s work so much more important than his own — and if he believed that she “would have succeeded at anything she wanted to” — then why didn’t he stay home and let her go out and earn? Lord knows they could afford to hire outside help.

There’s a doth protest too much quality to saying that Ann’s work wasn’t equally important but more important. Her struggles with the children while Mitt was away are described as “tough,” her performance “heroic.” Unsaid but implied: Ann sacrificed for the Romney family in a way Mitt, though he suffered, never truly did. Yet her suffering was worth it because it was in service to a greater cause.

This is not the kind of language we use to describe our equals; this is how we describe our martyrs. Maybe this partially explains why Romney’s comfortable acting as a vehicle for a set of policies indifferent — or outwardly hostile to — the interests of working mothers. Why be just another worker when the far more important task of martyrdom awaits?

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Nate Silver reminds us that while it wouldn’t be accurate to say Ohio is the only swing-state that matters, it matters a whole hell of a lot:

Ohio has a 30 percent chance of being the tipping-point state, meaning that it would cast the decisive votes in the Electoral College. That’s as much as the next two states on the list, Florida and Virginia, combined. It’s also as much as Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and North Carolina combined. […]

The reason our tipping-point calculus rates Ohio so highly is because it would usually suffice to provide Mr. Obama with a winning map, even if he lost many of those other states. If you give Ohio to Mr. Obama, plus all the states where the forecast model now estimates that he has at least 75 percent chance of winning, he’s up to 265 electoral votes. That means he could win any one of Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida or North Carolina to put him over the top.

And here’s what Ohio’s looked like thus far in the campaign:

(h/t Sully)

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Over at Lean Forward, my friend Ned Resnikoff recently wrote a post highlighting that, for all the talk of Obama “gutting” Clinton’s 1996 Welfare overhaul, it’s not at all clear that the reforms worked:

In a recent report, the [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] found that the program created by the 1996 welfare reform legislation—a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF for short—”is reaching only a small share of families with children in need.” In fact, between 1995 and 2005, “deep poverty among children rose during that decade, primarily due to a weakening of the safety net, particularly TANF.”

What we should note upfront, however, is that one’s definition of “worked” or even “reform” here is highly subjective. If the goal was to have less people dependent on TANF because they found sufficient income through employment, the program has not worked. If the goal was simply to get less more people off the federal government’s books, then it has.

Personally, I’d posit that a social insurance program that cannot function adequately in an economic downturn is almost axiomatically a failure.

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The Washington Post finds that opinions differ:

No close observer of American politics is going to find these results especially surprising, though it does seem interesting to me how much more than independents do Republicans ascribe African American voting patterns to bad character. I suppose that gap offers us some explanation as to why it is that the folks running the Republican National Convention have spent so much time placing any and all high-profile Republicans of color in front of the cameras. Independents basically agree with Republicans on the parasitic nature of black voters; they just don’t want to be quite so mean-spirited about it.

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Just another day in Nixonland:

A South Carolina lawmaker and the author of a voter ID law considered discriminatory by the Justice Department testified in federal court Tuesday that, while crafting the bill, he had responded favorably to a racist email in support of the measure.

State Rep. Alan Clemmons acknowledged his reaction in the second day of arguments before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over whether the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

It’s worth noting that by the standards of the Political Figure Embroiled in Racist E-Mail Scandal genre, this one is relatively tame:

Garrard Beeney, who represented the civil rights groups [joining the DOJ], presented emails sent to and from Clemmons’ personal account between 2009 and 2011, when he was working on the law. One, from a man named Ed Koziol, used racially charged rhetoric to denounce the idea that poor, black voters might lack transportation or other resources necessary to obtain photo ID. If the legislature offered a reward for identification cards, “it would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon,” Koziol wrote.

Beeney asked Clemmons how he had replied to this email. Clemmons hesitated a moment before answering, “It was a poorly considered response when I said, ‘Amen, Ed, thank you for your support.’”

That it was poorly considered is rather incontestable. He’d have been much better off advising Koziol to refrain from engaging in the kind of racial politics that is the hallmark of Democrats and liberals and people of color and basically everyone except conservative white men. More judicious, that.

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In the midst of a great — but really honking long — essay published in the latest issue of Jacobin, James Livingston touches on something I’ve been fascinated with for some time now.

The question, simply put: What is the culture war, anyway?

Livingston is arguing that the mental division some of us hold between the culture war (or “identity politics”) and economic politics is a false one. Our social norms, economic ideologies, political institutions all influence one another in a dynamic that is whirling, chaotic, and in many ways imperceptible. His ultimate argument is a bit more complicated than that; but that’s a start.

Money quote:

Social relations more generally have changed for the better, as the meaning of both liberty and equality has been broadened and deepened in accordance with the agendas of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement. These changes, too, are evidence of an ongoing transition from capitalism to socialism, for they transpose consent from the minor key of politics to the major key of society, from the voting booth to the workplaces and the common carriers and the schools. Thus they are moving us, hesitantly to be sure, from a strictly political to a broadly social democracy.

Note, accordingly, that the conservatives who invoke the specter of socialism when they draw the line on the “social issues” are closer to the truth of the matter than the liberals and leftists who dismiss identity politics as evasion of the “real” economic issues. Note also that the epochal changes in social relations which conservatives rightly fear also reflect the dispersal of power – the “self-organization” of society – that has enlarged the rights of persons vis-à-vis the rights of property since the 1930s (although the Roberts Court seems determined to reverse this trend).

Anyway, I wasn’t kidding when I said the thing was long. But at the same time, it is more chock-full of thought-provoking ideas and insights than anything I’ve read in a long while. I don’t agree with everything, and I think some parts are clearly better-argued than others. Still, I’m hoping it gets the attention it deserves — and not just because it would make it easier for me to blog about!

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Tom Smith is a Pennsylvanian who hopes to be Senator. He’s running against the incumbent Bob Casey, Jr., however, and from all reports is doing so from a significant remove. To put it bluntly, then, Tom Smith does not matter.

But that doesn’t mean Mr. Smith doesn’t deserve his 15 minutes of fame. And considering the circumstances, I’d his 15 are especially deserved.

You’ve probably seen this already, but if you haven’t: What got Smith on the top line of the nation’s news cycle for a day or so were his comments about — you guessed it — abortion and rape. In an awesome display of political incompetence, Smith managed to deliver an answer that, while intended to distance himself from the embattled Todd Akin, only served to make him look, if such a thing is even possible, even worse.

Politics PA has got the goods, providing both a transcript and an audio recording. Here’s what the transcript shows us:

Robert Vickers, Patriot News: In light of Congressman Akin’s comments, is there any situation that you think a woman should have access to an abortion?

Tom Smith: My stance is on record and it’s very simplistic: I’m pro-life, period. And what that Congressman said, I do not agree with at all. He should have never said anything like that.

Vickers: So in cases of incest or rape…

Laura Olson, Post-Gazette: No exceptions?

Smith: No exceptions.

Mark Scolforo, Associated Press: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

Smith: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape.

Scolforo: Similar how?

Smith: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

Scolforo: That’s similar to rape?

Smith: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I’m pro-life, period.

[…]

Scolforo: So what’s the similarity between those two, in other words? Just that there’s a decision involved?

Smith: (Pause.) A life is a life, and it needs protected. Who’s going to protect it? We have to. I mean that’s, I believe life begins at conception. I’m not going to argue about the method of conception. It’s a life, and I’m pro-life. It’s that simple.

Understandably, a lot of people have compared this exchange to Akin’s epic fup-uck, and I agree that there are some obvious similarities. For one, both men are saddled with trying to sound mainstream and reasonable despite holding views on abortion that are, for the time being at least, not mainstream or reasonable (though I’d argue they are rational). Both men are also quite evidently uncomfortable talking about the issue, something that I find rather amazing when one considers the heights to which they aspire. When they decided to run for Senate, did they not expect to have to parry dozens — hundreds! — of abortion-related inquiries? Perhaps this is a consequence of living in an ideological bubble…

Yet for their similarities, I think there’s a key difference between Akin and Smith; and it’s one that makes Smith looks at once better and worse in comparison. As was made abundantly clear by his ham-fisted attempt to enact “damage control,” Akin did not regret articulating his view that a woman cannot become pregnant if violently raped — he only apologized for saying “legitimate” instead of “violent,” or some other equivalent. Smith, on the other hand, is not forwarding such a medieval, alienated understanding of the female anatomy. His reactionary mind doesn’t quick reach back that far.

Instead, he reveals himself as one who believes an “out-of-wedlock” pregnancy is something any father would prefer his daughter not to have. Not prefer in the sense that I prefer George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; but prefer in the sense that it is only the moral unacceptability of abortion that kept Smith from demanding his daughter terminate the pregnancy. (As tends to be the case in these hypotheticals, the pregnant woman’s opinion on the matter is secondary — at best.) His focus, then, is on the fetus that is unwanted; the woman is hardly mentioned; and thus “the method of conception,” as Smith and others in his subculture euphemistically phrase it, isn’t particularly important.

Akin showed himself to be a fanatic and a fool. Smith? He’s just an insensitive dunderhead. Whether or not these men have expressed their beliefs so stupidly because the beliefs themselves are stupid — that’s for you, dear reader, to decide.

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