A president, just like me.

We Americans pride ourselves in being the prototypical democratic society, something we celebrate each July 4.  Our specialness stems in part from the fact that we, unlike most other countries, are a nation made up of immigrants rather than a predominantly indigenous population.  To be sure, some of those immigrants are now in their third, fourth or even tenth generation.  So there is an element of myth to our nation of immigrants story, and also a degree of lip service paid.  Down on the ground, as symbolized by the controversial (mostly struck down) Arizona law, we find some hostility and resistance toward immigrants these days, but that’s really nothing new.  At some point we, or our ancestors, were all looked on as strangers in the land.  We had funny names, strange accents — my mother who spoke perfect English pronounced shopping, chopping, to her dying day — odd customs or an unfamiliar/alien appearance.  Of course, those once strangers have been absorbed in the melting pot, have made their way and place in a now shared national story.  Well, yes and no.

From the days George Washington took office, we have been led almost exclusively by people who embody a stereotyped or, one might say aspirational, just like me look.  It turns out, just like me means Protestant Christian, Caucasian and definitely male.  In a sense, looking at our presidents probably gives us a more accurate picture of the American self-perceptive ideal than all those stories about immigrants and melting pots.  To date, only one non-Protestant, Jack Kennedy, has reached the White House and only in 2008 did we elect, again for the first time, a Catholic Vice President.   Needless to say, Barack Obama was the first elected African American and only time will tell if that is to be repeated any time soon or ever.  Whatever religious and racial barriers may have been breached, one significant barrier has not.  The presidency remains an exclusive men’s club, this despite there being (according to recent Gallup polling) more than 90% of us say we would vote for a qualified woman running for president. .

Gallup has been periodically asking the, would you vote for a ___ for president, since 1937.  Back then the study universe was limited to  women, Jews and Catholics.  Protestant was obviously the of course default.  By 1958 Blacks and Atheists were added (both scored badly) and in 1967 Mormons (reflecting George Romney’s candidacy).  Astoundingly, Hispanics weren’t added until 2007 and Muslims only this year.  Gays and Lesbians made the list in 1999 and 68% of respondents said they would vote for one (they are lumped together as one) in 2012.  There remain gaps.  Ethnic Indians aren’t included even though two are sitting governors and one, Bobby Jindal, is often mentioned as a potential vice president.  So too with Asians, a good number of whom hold public office, among them Chinese American and former Governor Gary Locke, now our ambassador to China.

Polls are interesting to some degree merely because they mirror what we’re thinking or what’s happening at any given time.   The inclusion of Hispanics and now Muslims reflects both.  But polls are often flawed, failing to include important data or asking the right questions in the right way.  According to Pew, another well regarded research organization,  Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.  So why aren’t they included in Gallup’s study?  There is also a big difference between how might you vote if the qualified candidate were African-American, and will you vote for Barack Obama?  

Gallup’s list has grown since 1937, but aside from Kennedy and Obama we’ve elected only male white Protestants.  People do act differently when a choice goes beyond the hypothetical and, just as when they are probed about, say church attendance, there is an element of not wanting to be seen in a bad light.  90+ percent of respondents say would vote for a woman, a Jew, a Catholic or an African American.  White, male, Protestant remains the default.  Demographics would suggest that may change in the years to come.  Our Latino community accounted for 56% of our growth rate from 2000 to 2010 and have themselves grown 43% in that decade.  At some point, one would expect the presidency and other high offices to be more reflective of the population.  And in that, no group lags more than women who account for 50.8% of us but 0% of our presidents.

Of greatest interest to me in the Gallup poll, and generally under reported, was that for the first time a majority (54%) of respondents said they would vote for an atheist.  Back in 1958 that number was 18% and by 1999 it had only climbed to 49%.  There are other studies that suggest the Gallup numbers may be generous and that a substantial majority of Americans would be uncomfortable with an atheist in the White House.   Indeed, were it not for younger respondents (18-29, 70% and 30-49, 56%) whose views tilt the total number toward majority, most older voters remain reluctant (an average of only 44% of those over 50 would vote for an atheist).  As  you might expect, Democrats and Independents are more receptive to an atheist than Republicans.  It is also not surprising that young people are more open to atheists as they are to Gay/Lesbian and, for that matter, to all other groups.  That is reinforced by a different but consistent finding, this time from Pew’s Religious Landscape Study.  While 16% of  the general population now identifies with no religion at all, that number rises to 25% among those under 30.  With all the negative news we have these days, including how narrow-minded so many of us are, our more egalitarian young people constitute a ray of brightness and hope.

CNN Journalist Anderson Cooper announced the other day that he was gay.  It was not big news because his identity had long been assumed.  But Cooper felt that a personal revelation like that might have interfered with his professional job.  I think we’re long beyond that, but these are very personal choices and his should be respected, not judged.  Just as gays and lesbians long felt it necessary to hide their identity, my guess is that many more people in public life than would care to admit so are neither religious nor do they believe in God.  Despite my characterization of our presidents being Protestants, the truth is a few including the great Abraham Lincoln had no church affiliation.  Lincoln invoked God, but we don’t know what he meant by it.   Jefferson, who did belong to a church most of the time, might well have not been very much of a God believer.  Again, we can only speculate.  The default in America for politicians remains being religious, preferably a religion just like mine (whatever mine might be).  Our polling has heretofore always confirmed that being an atheist is a political non-starter.  Perhaps, the new Gallup numbers suggest that could change in the future.  Perhaps, one day will bring more people out of God’s closet.  To be sure there is nothing wrong with believing in God, but a society in which women and men can be honest about their beliefs, including their atheism, would be an even better democracy..  Happy July 4.

Religion and politics: version 2012

Exactly how religion will ultimately play out in this 2012 presidential election cycle remains to be seen.   Last time around we had the candidates in both parties clamoring to establish their religious bone fides.  Pastor Rick Warren forced command nominee performances at his California megachurch where each man had to attest that he held Christ close to his heart.  Warren subsequently offered a prayer at the Inauguration, but little has been seen of him in this political year.  To my knowledge, there have been no Billy Grahamesque chitchats in the Oval Office.

With the President running for reelection, Republicans have had the primary season all to themselves.  While religion certainly didn’t disappear — most notably in the days when Rick Santorum had his moment — it didn’t really hold center stage.   That place was taken up as hopefuls focused their energy on pandering to the Teas, the force to be reckoned with post 2010.  Republicans may be attacking Democrats as usual, but they often seem even more at war with themselves.  That was evident in the primary states much as it has been in Washington where radical insurgents seek to gain control from the establishment.  Who knows how that will play in years to come, much of it likely dependent on November’s results.

There may be another more subtle reason why religion has receded somewhat: the emergence of a Mormon as the presumptive presidential nominee, a first.  The potential for getting into a Christian-Mormon conversation during the primaries was something to be avoided at all cost.  No candidate wanted to go there, certainly not the former governor.  You can speculate that the anybody but Romney effort reflected a possible anti-Mormon undertone, but I’d venture the candidate’s lack of color and more so his questionable conservative (as defined these days) credentials probably weighed more heavily.

Religion may have moved back a bit on the presidential campaign trail, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared from the larger political stage.   In fact, as reported by Reuters, we are witnessing a dramatic increase in partisanship from pulpits.  The article points to California Pastor Jim Garlow who defiantly tells his flock for whom to vote from his pulpit, consciously daring the IRS to intercede.  Law prohibits churches from promoting partisan causes and doing so could mean losing their tax exemption.  Garlow is not alone in thumbing his nose at political activity rules.  Far more important are the actions of America’s powerful Catholic bishops led my New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan.  The bishops have launched a full throat assault against President Obama (by name) and his administration in this election year.

Let’s put the tax issue in perspective.   Tax exemption status afforded religious institutions costs billions of dollars in annual federal tax revenue and even more, Reuters reports, in real estate taxes lost by now cash strapped municipalities across the country.  So the numbers and the stakes are high.  Of course, most religious institutions and leaders don’t cross the partisan line.  That makes the bishops’ blatantly partisan rhetoric especially noteworthy.  It should raise a red flag as a potential violation not only of the tax exemption rules but also of church/state separation.   So far the IRS is not taking the bait and that’s not altogether surprising.  It’s not that they might want to step in — remember big dollars are involved — but that in some real sense they are functionally being blackmailed into inaction.

Let me explain.  The argument being put forward by the bishops is that President Obama and his administration are hostile toward the Church and toward religion in general.  They object to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance cover women’s health, specifically contraception.  While this coverage requirement is totally waved for specifically religious institutions (churches, synagogues), it is not waved for hospitals and universities that, church-sponsored notwithstanding, serve the general public and purposes, employing, for example, non-Catholics.  Many of these institutions also are recipients of public funding of one sort or another.  The bishops argue their case within a framework of religious freedom painting the President as its enemy. 

The most extreme statement of their position came from Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky who disdained President Obama with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda.  Astoundingly, in doing so he likened  the President to notable villains and past church enemies including Stalin and Hitler.  Secularist agenda is a popular accusation made by the partisan right (think Santorum), assumably part of an ungodly conspiracy.  What worse charge can you levy against a leader in this most religious country?  Despite the provocations, the IRS finds itself in an impossible no-win situation.  If the agency pursues what seem to be clear violations of tax-exempt status it may well be seen, or painted, as partisan.  More to the point, acting against these tax exemption violations would only confirm that the Administration has gone to war with religion.  That looks like blackmail to me.

You and I do not benefit from tax-exempt status.  Whatever contribution we may make to political campaigns, unlike what we give to our church or synagogue, is specifically not tax-deductible, and for good reason.  If it were, our fellow citizens would in effect be financially underwriting our partisan political activity.  Having personal experience in leading a religious institution and remaining a strong proponent of a free pulpit, I understand the complexities of this issue.   Priests, ministers, rabbis and imams want to voice what they feel is right and consistent with their beliefs and must be able to do so.  Constraining their speech would fly in the face of our constitutional right of free religious expression.  At the same time, I don’t think that such free expression includes an absolute right to tax-exemption. 

I’m not suggesting that we do away with that exemption — many religious institutions depend on it for their survival — but that the strings attached are appropriate, and that they should be enforced. I could not disagree more with the bishops’ position on contraception or having its cost covered by insurance.  Family planning is an important women’s health issue, but also for society.  Nevertheless, I think they have every right to express their view and to be governed by their own teachings so long as it doesn’t morph into partisan talk.  That is, when it turns political in the specific, when they tell voters how and for whom to cast their ballots in, for example, a presidential election, there should be a cost.  Simply put, as a citizen I can put up with helping to underwrite their faith-related works but don’t want to underwrite their partisan politics any more than they want to bankroll mine.

Money, the subject of an earlier post, is coming at this and all our elections from many places, not all of them obvious.  It isn’t only individual contributors to PACs that are flying below the radar, so too is the abusive use of tax-free dollars under the guise of religious freedom.  The first costs are more obvious and substantial of course, but the second should neither be underestimated nor discounted.  Both, while perhaps for different reasons, are ultimately costs to our democracy.

What a day.

These are just a few random thoughts on a historic day. 

The decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act was taken by an institution that, as of the latest New York Times/CBS poll, only garners 44% of the public’s confidence.  It comes with yet another 5-4 vote, underscoring division rather than consensus.  In this case, to many people’s great surprise, it was Chief Justice Roberts who broke the tie.  Healthcare remains one of this wealthy country’s most perplexing problems and most volatile political issues.  It may be the latter, coupled with the Court’s low esteem, that prompted the generally conservative Chief to side with the more liberal Justices with whom he usually disagrees.  For the moment, Roberts may have saved any semblance of a Court seen as an honest broker.  Beginning with the controversial Gore v. Bush decision, it’s reputation has been in steady decline.  This one vote won’t change that. 

Perhaps a mark of how much things have changed can be seen by contrasting today with the Court’s 1954 landmark Brown desegregation decision taken in an even more charged political atmosphere.  The decision then was unanimous.  That was not so with the controversial Roe decision but it was still rendered by a clear majority: 7-2.  Justice Harry Blackman, a Republican appointee, wrote the opinion.  John Roberts has yet to show that he can build a consensus on controversial issues. 5-4 decisions do not enhance the Court’s reputation for impartiality, something that is desperately needed at a time when the nation is so divided.  Perhaps this vote suggests he may try harder in the future.  The circuitous legal path he took to uphold the mandate, suggests that he worked hard to find accommodation.  This time it was an accommodation of one, himself, but that proved enough now and he might build on it.

The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect legislation.  It’s appalling that this great nation still leaves so many of its citizens uninsured.  Ultimately, only single payer universal healthcare — Medicare for all — will accomplish that goal.  But it’s an important step forward.  One of the most ironic aspects of the current debate is that the mandate, the Act’s most controversial provision, was the 1989 brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.  It was incorporated into the bill as a way of overcoming the objections of the Right's beloved free enterprise insurance industry.  That conservatives so oppose it today is clearly more a demonstration of callous and opportunistic hypocrisy than of any ideological conviction. 

On the other hand, President Obama and the Democratic leadership did a shockingly lousy job of selling Affordable Care to the American public, including allowing it to be branded Obamacare.  Many are equally angered and mystified by this ineptness, especially given the President’s considerable oratorical talents.  Leaving aside that Republicans continue to be much more adept at selling, I think there are two principal reasons for this failure. 

First is that even before it was enacted, much of the President’s base found the bill wanting; indeed they considered Obama a sellout.  They refused to see what remains a giant step forward as anything more than what it didn’t include.  So the President found himself essentially alone when he should have had the wind at his back.   Liberals can be their own worst enemies.

Second, is something more important.  This has to do, of all things, with Obama’s extraordinary oratorical skills.  My own experience with the craft tells me there are essentially two kinds of public oration.  I’ll call the first stadium oratory and the second small screen oratory.  Excelling at one does not necessary translate into excelling at the other.  In fact, stadium orators often fall flat on their face in more intimate settings while masters of the small screen can’t inspire large crowds.  These require different skills.  For example, megachurch preachers who regularly speak before thousands might well fail badly in the intimate church around the corner.  There are of course exceptions.  Franklin Roosevelt was good at the stadium but also, perhaps even better, on the small screen of his day — the radio fireside.  That unique ability may be attributed to the fact that in his later public life FDR was wheelchair bound and thus forced to adapt to a communications intimacy that otherwise ran contrary to his larger-than-life stadium personality.

Obama is a great stadium orator.  It is what caught the nation’s attention in the first place and what carried him on to the presidency.  It isn’t an accident that he set up these huge events during the campaign culminating in his nomination speech in, yes, a stadium, his massive victory celebration in a Chicago park and the million-person Inauguration in DC.  With the exception of his historic Philadelphia address on race, his most persuasive and moving moments were before large crowds.  This isn’t to say that Obama can’t communicate in smaller settings, but that’s not his primary communicative skill, not where he seems most natural.  Selling healthcare suffered from this deficit.  Of course, Romney might have the opposite problem, which on the national campaign trail could put him at the disadvantage.

It will take some time and distance to assess where we are and what impact today might have both on the Court and on November’s election.  More certainly will follow.  At the moment, I join others in savoring the moment and in realizing that some progress is still possible, just when some had given up. 

 

The money that is really killing us.

We may remain in the economic doldrums with federal, state and local governments cutting vital programs, but money is flowing into political races like never before.   2012 is well on the road to being a record-spending year.  There is something grotesque about that — about this disconnect between service cutbacks and expanded political spending.  Money has consumed our politics.  The unending and relentless fund raising has crippled our government, even more so than has divisiveness.   Today, we are just as likely to encounter a lead story about fund raising as about the many issues that confront us as a nation or as a community.  It’s become just another game.  Score is being kept.  The ability to raise mega-bucks and to outspend opponents has become a key barometer of success.   The emails and letters we get from elected officials or from our political parties are more likely to be about contributions than about issues and they fill our mailboxes day in and out.  The old contention that money makes the world go round seems like a gross and laughable understatement.  No wonder that political office is increasingly the domain of the rich and super rich, the only of our citizens who can afford to play or stay in the game.

In November 2001, barely two months after the destruction of the Twin Towers, we New Yorkers went to the polls.  While still shell shocked, some of us felt a degree of relief in knowing that the often-polarizing man billed America’s Mayor by others would soon be history.  Fueled by a super ego and believing his own hyped press, Giuliani couldn’t quite accept that his time was over.  In fact, he went so far as to promote the notion of an extra-legal three-month term-extension so that he could personally get the city back on track.  It was more than presumptuous, but the man was, and remains, imbued by an exaggerated sense of self-importance.  We can all delude ourselves into thiking his humiliating run for the Presidency in 2008 served as a wakeup call.  Right!

The Billionaire media and information mogul Michael Bloomberg was elected that November.  Many people in New York and around the country think he’s been an excellent mayor.  Given two chances (I had moved by 2009), I could never bring myself to vote for him.  That had nothing to do with his lack of qualifications — he is an unquestionably able man.  My problem with Bloomberg was his self-financed campaign, pouring an unprecedented $73 Million into what seemed to me a bid to purchase the office.   That spending climbed to $85 Million four years later and a whopping $102 Million in 2009 for his third term bid, the one in which he engineered a suspension of term limits — ego is contagious.  It was said to be the most costly per vote expenditure of any election in American history.

Bloomberg is the first and still only billionaire public office holder.  Mitt Romney is among the super rich and officeholders like Congressman Darrell Issa (vehicle ant-theft devices) and retiring Senator Herb Kohl (department stores) are multi-millionaires many times over.  None, however, come even close to Bloomberg’s reputed $22 Billion net worth (number 12 on the Forbes 400).  While other billionaires are not seeking public office, they are increasingly injecting themselves into the electoral process.  The liberal George Soros has been doing so for many years much as in an earlier time did the ulta-conservative H. L. Hunt family of Texas.  These days, we have the Koch brothers who have a long history of supporting right wing causes and of course the infamous Sheldon Adelson, a self made billionaire whose casino and convention center holdings have also brought him to the top rung of the Forbes list.  Adelson (long a huge backer of Israel’s rightist PM Bibi Netanyahu) single handedly financed Newt Gingrich’s unsuccessful presidential bid.  He is among those who are setting a new standard for campaign spending in this election year.  Adelson and the Kochs are major funders of PACs but they are hardly alone.  The Huffington Post recently published a gallery of the largest donors, which makes for an interesting and disturbing read.   The list includes some labor organizations of course, but super rich individuals far outmatch them.

Much has been written about this year’s extraordinary campaign spending, most recently an excellent column by Frank Bruni.  Much of this accelerated spending can be attributed to the Supreme Court’s striking down much of McCain-Feingold and to its astounding Citizens United decision according corporations the same First Amendment rights as individuals.  Mitt Romney now famously put his own spin on it in declaring, corporations are people.  The issue of equating companies and individuals is an important one, but what interests me here, and why this post begins with Michael Bloomberg, is the unfettered and unchecked ability of billionaires to effectually purchase public office if not for themselves then for those who will represent their interests, translation: do their bidding.  Individual campaign contributors have always had special access to politicians (think Bill Clinton’s Lincoln bedroom guests), but that access has reached new proportions.  Remember, we are not talking about a corporation governed by managers and a board of directors, businesses with employees and often public shareholders, but of individuals responsible solely to themselves.  From that perspective, the Citizens decision is in some ways just as, or more, disturbing with regard to individuals — super rich individuals — as it is with corporations.

That one man can effectively purchase public office — though I’m sure Bloomberg doesn’t see it that way — presents a challenge to our very idea of we the people.  It is just another case, and profound one, of the gulf between idealized and real democracy.  Powerful interests have always played a significant role in both elections and governance.  But the kind of wealth that exists today, or more accurately the number of individuals who occupy that I can buy anything tier of the 1%, is probably rivaled only by the robber baron era.  All this big money spending has fueled the frightening and escalating high cost of campaigns.  

Barack Obama lifted the money bar to new heights in 2008 when he decided to forgo public financing.  The fact that so many of his contributions came in small denominations from a broad spectrum of supporters was heartening, but the total amount raised constituted an unmistakable red flag.  It may not be an exaggeration to call it a political Frankenstein.  That campaign turned out to be the most costly in US history — The Center for Responsive Politics pegs it at $2.4 Billion all in.  Obama’s decision was considered defensive and perhaps it was.  But when history is written, he and his heirs — all of us — are likely to regret it.  I doubt exploding campaign costs will stand as one of the President’s proudest and most positive legacies.  Just weeks ago an extraordinary amount of money went into little Wisconsin’s recall vote, the kind of spending that would have been unthinkable there just a year ago.  That experience alone should remind us how difficult, if not impossible, it is for ordinary people to run for any office these days and at virtually any level.

Among the members of the Supreme Court who are expected to announce some more significant decisions this week are a number of so-called originalists.  They, at least in theory, hold sacrosanct the Constitution, as written.  The Constitution is a great work, as much for its literal components as for the very fact that such a governing document exists.  Amazingly it remains largely relevant and precious.  At the same time, the Framers were just human beings — men to be precise.  They were acting and writing in the context of their time albeit heroically seeking to fashion a document that could endure.  And it largely has.  But they also, being products of their time, made some judgments that made sense then, but in retrospect were probably mistaken, even if well meant.   Among those was life-tenure for the Supreme Court and also the setting of two-year terms for the House.  The first is something to be left to another post; the second is relevant to this discussion of money.

The idea behind the short tenure for House members was to keep the legislators in touch with, and always accountable to, those whom they represented.  It is a noble idea, but one that has contributed heavily to our current legislative stalemate.  From the very early days Representatives, with painfully short terms, were forced to remain in constant campaign mode.  Rather than making them super responsive to constituent needs, it essentially forced them to be seeking support for the next vote almost from the moment they were sworn in for the current term.  That was distraction enough.   Now they have to add to that handshaking burden raising the huge amounts of money it takes to win that next election.  The cash required in large media markets can be and is astronomic.   The combination of non-stop pressing the flesh and filling the coffers is deadening.  Beyond all else, it has become a disincentive to do anything but tow the safe party line whatever that may be at a given time.  It most assuredly doesn’t lead to a profile in courage, something that has virtually disappeared from our political scene.

It could be argued that leaving governance to the rich, those who don’t have to grovel for contributions could reinvigorate political independence.  Michael Bloomberg is beholden to no one and has been able to do some things that others might not have chanced.  His effort to reduce smoking and now the consumption of high sugar beverages are clear examples.  But all that money has a cost.  His kind of independence in a democracy is a mixed blessing.  It affords power that can be abused and it promotes, like it or not, a ruling class mentality that is destined to diminish not enhance the nation.  The disparity that we have these days between those who have much more than they will ever need and those who need much more than they will ever have is growing.  The social implications of this imbalance are hard to ignore.  The money game of politics may be the chicken and it may be the egg.  It doesn’t really matter.  Another record spending election is very bad news for all of us.  That runs across whatever economic barriers may exist and across whatever ideology we may embrace.

Preserving back in the day.

Confession: I’ve been a lapsed blogger.  Forgive me; it’s been months since my last posting — March 20^th to be precise.  It isn’t that there has been nothing to write about, but that I’ve taken some time off to bring a more substantive piece of writing to conclusion.  More about that in the near future.  Some years back, I took an annual summer holiday in St. Barths, the small and exquisite island in the Caribbean that was only affordable (and then marginally so) off-season.   My rule for a stay that could be a month long was no newspapers, no news broadcasts.  Initially Internet connections in St. Barths were non-existent and then only spotty.  You should try vacationing from the news sometime; it’s more than pleasant.  In any event, what struck me each time that I reentered the world from that self-imposed hiatus was how very little had really changed, if at all.   It was a lesson in taking the long view, the kind that seems to elude us in this 24/7 world, particularly us Americans.  More to the point, I haven’t been blogging and you surely haven’t missed a thing.

Of course, in the immediate sense, much has happened  since my last post, most of it probably predictable.   Mitt Romney has sewn up the GOP nomination and still hasn’t generated much enthusiasm.  The money pouring in is more a tribute to the 1%’s yearning to get back in full control than any commitment to either the man or his ideology, whatever that may be.  The Arab Spring is going through its summer doldrums as long vested interests try to hold on to their past and prevent the future from taking hold.  Societal change takes time and is messy.  To expect anything other than backsliding is to get caught up in fantasy.  Even in America we’ve seen that change, as the President reminds us, is very hard.  Undoing what took decades to put into place is both painful and frustrating.   So what we see is an abundance of frustrated kicking and screaming on all sides of the political and social spectrum, but minimal progress.

Facebook, after a disappointing Wall Street debut, is being prematurely written off by some people.  Let’s remember that Amazon was launched with high hopes and subsequently dismissed as a loser with no earnings and a sagging stock price.  My guess is that Mark Zuckerberg, like Jeff Bezos, is not someone who will be sidetracked by the skeptics or current share prices.  Tom Friedman, looking at the dismal political situation in Egypt, rightly points out that politics takes boring groundwork not merely social interaction, but I don’t think the people running Facebook ever questioned that.  They facilitated the connection, not the doing.  Friedman’s main point is that the people on the Street have not yet gotten their act together, and together is the operative word.

The world’s economy, despite small pockets of growth, remains challenged — an under statement of course.  The old saw about when America sneezes still seems to pertain, but is probably much too glib and simplistic an explanation.  We’ve been blamed for the debt crisis and housing bubble, but obviously we weren’t alone.  The idea that all the countries in the world, including China (now having its own housing bubble), aren’t adult enough to make their own decisions and resulting mess just isn’t credible.  Europe is foundering in part because they never did the Euro right something everyone knew from the start.  Our fundamental problems continue to be more systemic than caused by any momentary excess, no matter how extensive. 

Little discussed is that the huge wealth disparity between the 1%ers and the rest of us, a disparity about which we are rightly wringing our hands, is nothing new.  In fact, it is just a modern echo of what has always been throughout most of human history.  Perhaps that’s why we’re witnessing the same wealth disparity across the globe — Western Europe, Russia, Israel, India and China as examples.  Yes many of us grew up in the post WWII period where a still newly created middle class produced some modicum of income/wealth equality.  But taking the long view of history, even that very modest income equality is the exception, not the rule.  Level playing fields are as much a myth as is the idea that change can come easily, much less be instant.  This is not to accept the status quo — the current wealth disparity especially in such a connected time might eventually do us in — but to put it in perspective.

Interestingly, much of what we’re experiencing today can be attributed to a desperate attempt by a range of players and interests to hold on to a real, or imagined, past.  The hard right turn in the party that Lincoln would likely disown represents much more of an attempt to turn back the clock than of any new ideological direction.   If you want to understand the heat of Tea Party rhetoric, remember that desperate people do desperate things.  Objectively speaking, many of those raising that flag high seem to be supporting ideas and interests that actually go contrary to their own.   I’m talking, for example, about the Medicare recipients who deplore universal healthcare or the very people being held down by Koch types who supply the ground force that turns their money into votes.    Of course, rationality has nothing to do with it.  Rather it bespeaks a generation of people frustrated by the undeniable fact that the brave new world seems to have made them obsolete.  In my view, technology, far more than globalization, has robbed them of their jobs and their future.  Back in the day is where they want to be and so, it would seem, they will do whatever is required to reverse progress.  The fact that so much of our electorate is profoundly uninformed, and our citizenry is increasingly undereducated, only compounds the problem.  But that’s another conversation.

No institution is more emblematic of this desperate hanging on to yesterday and fear of tomorrow than the Roman Catholic Church.   How else to explain the Vatican’s recent, systematic and relentless attack on its nuns?   Forget that the sisters are generally held in higher esteem than any other group of professionals in church.  Adding to the insult and intended humiliation, the Pope appointed male bishops to take control of these wayward women folk and steer them back on a track that obviously only a man can understand.  There can be no women priests, the pontiff reiterated early in his reign, because all of the Apostles were men.  Speak of back in the day!   It’s clear that from Rome’s point of view, one shared enthusiastically by its newly minted star Cardinal in New York, women are not capable of thinking for themselves, much less questioning male domination and decision making.  The US bishops, led by Dolan, campaign vigorously to undermine healthcare coverage in the United States so as to make sure contraception (practiced by the vast majority of Catholic women of child-bearing age) is robbed of enabling funds.

One would think that, rather than going after the professional and lay women in its organization, Rome would expend more energy in figuring out why so many of its male professionals went so criminally wrong, routinely aided and abetted by their supervising superiors.  How did the moral lessons of the Catholic faith lead to that and also to the financial misconduct within the Vatican itself?  Aside from some lip service paid, an incredible amount of obfuscation and only the bare minimum of action, Rome still wants to sweep this under the luxurious rugs that abound in the rooms where its leaders work or sleep.

What’s most interesting is that, at a time when religion and the church itself is losing ground in Western counties especially, this turn inward and backward only adds fuel to the fire of discontent.   Rather than delaying decline, it is speeding up and broadening the process of alienation.  The writer Anna Quindlen, a lifetime loyal Catholic, just left the Church over its treatment of women.  But that’s not my point here.  What I see is another example of unquestioned desperation — desperate people, including aged popes, do desperate things.  Benedict, much as does the Central Committee in Beijing, has been stacking the College of Cardinals (who will elect his successor) with the ultra conservative like-minded.  He seems to think that doing so can turn the clock back, or at least bring it to a standstill.  So it isn’t so much about ideology as about preserving what is comfortably known and that includes vast power for the chosen few.  Facebook is a threat to hierarchal institutions because unsupervised contrary ideas can go viral.   Educated women with their own minds to make up, represent a clear and present danger to the system, including continued male reign and domination.  The thing to focus on is not the Church’s pronouncements against contraception but on that 90+% of the faithful who essentially ignore yesterday’s dictates.  Authority is being challenged for sure, but equally is the misguided notion that back in the day was a good time.  Putin, the KGB warrior, may have left the Communist Party behind, but will be damned if the Russian populous doesn’t tow back in the day disciplined lines.

Can these desperate people win?  In the short term, it’s clear they can — in the long term, perhaps not.  At the moment that they may not in the future is academic because, while many of us may be looking there, we do have to live in the present.  In a time when those yelling loudest, having the biggest checkbooks or carrying the biggest sticks are fighting to retain the past, that’s unnerving.  Their desperation is our problem, perhaps our most urgent problem.

ERA at forty.

On March 22, 1972, in a bi-partisan vote, Congress passed a proposed 27^th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  They sent it on to the states for approval, an arduous process.  Thanks to the Republican Party’s subsequent change of heart and the hard right turn that culminated in Reagan’s election, the Equal Rights Amendment died in 1982 shy of but the three states still needed for ratification.  There is good reason to feel ashamed of this failure and also of subsequent failed attempts to reintroduce as we approach the fortieth anniversary of its passage this week .

Women have made substantial progress over the years even without the ERA.  But anyone who claims they have achieved true equality isn’t paying attention, much less living in the real world.  Despite all the progress in business, a few now sitting corporate CEOs, women continue to suffer a pay and job deficit relative to men.  There are only 17 women in the 100-member US Senate and two of them are leaving later this year.  Thanks to President Obama, we now have three women on the Supreme Court but that’s far shy of the majority needed to decide any case on their own.  The same can't be said about the six sitting men.  Women still lag in academia where there remains a numerical faculty, and most importantly tenure, gender gap.  Even absent hard numbers, I think it’s fair to say that we’re more apt to see a man’s face front and center in news coverage, print and digital, not to mention among the members of their editorial or business boards.

All this, perhaps only more so, can be said for people of color who continue to make great progress but badly lag their white counterparts, male or female.  The then Senator Obama didn’t see a single other African American face on chamber floor and as president, he doesn’t even have that token before him when looking out from the State of the Union podium.  The ERA spoke to federally protected equal rights and that means also the rights of, for example, black and Hispanic men as well as women.  One has to wonder how well state laws against marriage equality might have held up against ERA?  If women and minorities stand out for their underrepresentation across so many strata of our society, it remains something novel to have an openly gay person running for public office.  One of the very few, Barney Frank (who came out late), will also be leaving Congress this year and there aren’t many Christine Quinn’s running for mayor around the country.  The future of marriage equality is front and center in many places these days including here in North Carolina where a mean-spirited Proposition 8-like constitutional amendment is up for citizen ratification early in May.

It is always interesting to consider what is so — that women, African American, Hispanic, Gays and others find themselves behind even when theoretically they should not be there any more.   More instructive may be trying to understand why that is so.  As we proceed toward this year’s election there has been wide coverage of what is, to put it generously, a superficial and disheartening campaign for our highest office.  The shift toward the right that killed ERA has progressed well beyond what even Ronald Reagan might have imagined.  Some have described the rhetoric in 2012 as vitriolic — it certainly lacks civility.  But to some degree, it’s hard to take what candidates say on the stump that seriously.  Unfortunatly, they all pander and they all go over the edge, regardless of party.

What strikes me is not the candidates but the almost irrational anger one hears expressed by citizens interviewed along the campaign trail.  They just want to get rid of Obama and that seems to transcend any particular issue.  Now I know that other presidents have been subject to such hatred, FDR in his time and of course more recently Bill Clinton.  But the level of hatred seems more extreme this time around.   In fact, it has been reported that there have been an unprecedented number of death threats against the president, so much so that the Secret Service is overwhelmed.  It may well be that Hilary Clinton, as a woman, might have faced similar hatred or threats.  The question is why?

For sure racial prejudice, which remains alive and well in America, plays here.  And gender prejudice, albeit in a very different way, remains.  But looking at the object of the hatred is to miss the underlying point as, I would suggest, is attributing it to prejudice against any particular group.  The ERA failed to pass the requisite number of states not so much because people were anti-women per se, but that it signaled a different world.  Think of it this way.  If God wanted the world to be different, he wouldn’t have made it the way it was and had always been.  It isn’t that life might be different for women, which surely is the case, but that it would be different for men.  Let’s remember that throughout history, and that included the history of this great democracy, there was no equality between the sexes. 

As many men saw it, the ERA translated into greater competition in the work place but, much worse, it threatened home life as they knew it.  The women who opposed it, most notably Phyllis Schlafly, the right wing provocateur of the day, saw themselves as protecting traditional values, the same kind that seem so important to candidate Rick Santorum.  What the ERA, civil rights, Spanish speakers in our midst, gays out in the sunlight equals is changing our way of life.  Forget Social Security and Medicare, it goes against what may Americans feel is their real entitlement, the way portrayed by Norman Rockwell, the good old days.  What really makes them climb the walls is when their cherished way is described by the next generation as so yesterday.

Sure the Tea Party represents a highly conservative political view, but what get’s it’s followers out of bed in the morning is an obsession with the idea that things are not as they were and a resolve to turn the clock back, or at least stop it.  They don’t want to live with a redefined life, including redefined institutions.  That’s why they’re so exercised about the marriage issue and even about the idea of global warming which means that, using a seemingly silly example, they won’t be able to light their rooms with incandescent bulbs.  No one has the right to take away their picture of the happy couple — mom and dad — coming down the aisle much less question that the most elemental bit of matter isn’t properly the God particle — god made.

The 2008 election was about change.  Some people make derisive light of that these days, some bemoan that too little change has actually occurred.  They dismiss it as just a slogan, an unrealistic and perhaps even irresponsible promise.  I’d submit that change is what we’re all about in the twenty-first century, and at every level.  To me the change slogan reads as an alert, a wakeup call.  Many of us, perhaps most of us on some level, find change — not the idea but the reality — frightening.  We’re ready to do battle.  I understand, as Bill Clinton would say, your pain.  But before you continue on that journey to reverse what is, give some thought to Sisyphus.  Things are not as they were and will likely never be.  The ERA may have failed, the full rights it intended may experience some more delay.  Change may make some of us angry feeling that we can’t take it any more.  No matter, tomorrow isn’t just coming, it has arrived.  Perhaps not de jure, but de facto the ERA is here and it’s irreversible.  We should raise a glass and celebrate its anniversary.

Extreme Danger

…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!  (Barry Goldwater, 1964)

Barry Goldwater was considered at the extreme edge of the Republican Party in 1964.  His now famous quote was aimed at allaying the fears of voters that, as president, he might do extreme things.  Much like future political wordsmiths would do more successfully, he was trying to turn a word, in this case extremism, on its head.  He failed.  In years following his massive defeat Goldwater was said to have mellowed.  He emerged as a respected elder statesman capable of surprising those who saw him as one-dimensional.  According to his granddaughter C.C. Goldwater, he was pro-choice and a supporter of Gay Rights.   She says specifically that her grandfather …would not have been comfortable with the increasing influence of the Christian right over the GOP.   I’m with him on that.

Many of today’s far right Republicans credit Goldwater with being the heroic trailblazer without whom a series of conservative leaders, most notably their icon Ronald Reagan, could never have come to office.  They suggest that what was considered extreme five decades ago is now, thanks to Goldwater’s political heirs, mainstream.  Without accepting that characterization of mainstream, there is little doubt our politics and with it the country has moved to the right.  The Republican presidential primary of 2012, without a single (claimed or true) moderate voice in contention, puts that into sharp, sometimes shocking, relief.   Some people think the party has lost its mind.

Not so says NY Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat who denies the Republican Party has gone mad.  He suggests that the disastrous Bush years have left the party without a bench; that it finds itself in a kind of between generations limbo.  Poor unmentionable non-person (in this campaign) George W. Bush, has to carry the reputational blame for all that is wrong with the country and, of course, for the increasingly dim prospects for his party in 2012.  I rarely agree with Douthat but read him regularly and respect him as a fresh and thoughtful writer.  In this case, what he contends is sadly nothing more than old-fashioned spin and rationalization.  Perhaps the GOP isn’t crazy — I’ll give him that — but what they’re into this year and its extremism is absolutely mystifying.

A recent Rasmussen poll confirms that the vast majority (82%) of American voters consider the economy their number one concern.  No other concern comes close and others confirm these findings.  Nonetheless, based upon their campaigning (and what is truly mystifying), Republican candidates apparently don’t seem to see the economy as paramount.  Instead, they have returned the so-called culture wars and issues that don’t even register in the Rasmussen polling.  In fact these people give the economy astoundingly short shrift offering what amounts to more of the same old, same old.  Of course Mitt Romney boasts his special businessman credential — the guy who has created jobs.  His basic message: trust me, I know this stuff and can fix it.  But drill down and all he or any of his colleagues have to offer is the predictable robotic solutions: drastically cut government spending, lower taxes and let the free market do its work.  What’s mystifying is that the primary focus of the campaign being played out before our eyes, especially since Rick Santorum’s rise, seems to be about God and, of all things, contraception, not abortion.  None of this seems to be on the voters’ radar, except of course for those who count themselves among the religious right.  Primaries are aimed at the base, at the core of party support and ideology.  It is abundantly clear that the GOP’s base has become more extreme than at any time in my memory, or perhaps than ever before.

For more than a decade we Americans have been obsessed with religious extremism and where it can lead.  That focus has primarily been on Muslim fundamentalism justified by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.  It’s all about them, the alien other.  We should be equally concerned about our own religious extremists, I’d suggest much more concerned.  Rick Santorum, who a new NY Times/CBS poll suggests would draw as many votes against Obama as Romney, is one of them.  Santorum’s pronouncement on the contraception debate and his disavowal of church state separation, including totally distorting John F. Kennedy’s historic Houston speech, serve as markers for his extremism.  But perhaps even more so do his attacks on public and university education.  Santorum, as has been widely reported, said the idea that…government should be running schools…is anachronistic.  He called President Obama a snob for encouraging all American young people to attend college, which he characterized as indoctrination mills.  Then talking like a victim of minority persecution, he asserted, I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed.  I can tell you personally, I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views.  Of course he backs up none of these almost paranoiac assertions which some college friends have disputed.

To prove his point about the evils of college, the former Senator contends that as many as 62% of students who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave college without it.  Why?  Well college campuses are not a neutral setting[s}, but rather places …with political correctness, with an ideology that is forced upon people who, you know, who may not agree with the politically correct left doctrine.  Not surprisingly, Santorum and his wife have made a number of lifestyle decisions, including…home schooling their younger children sending their older boys to a private academy affiliated with Opus Dei, an influential Catholic movement that emphasizes spiritual holiness.  Of course, homeschooling (employed by many on the religious right) like Madrasahs, Yeshivas and parochial schools don’t have any such lack of neutrality. 

Extremist fundamentalism of the kind Santorum represents is by no means restricted to one religion. Today it’s common for us to associate extremism with Muslims.  In fact, many of the Jews occupying the West Bank are both fundamentalists and extremists, who by the way find American Christian fundamentalists among their strongest supporters.  Fundamentalism, regardless of faith, is built around two essential beliefs.  The first, that there is a God is shared by the religious of all stripes.  However individually defined, that god belief is grounding and has motivated millions of human beings to both live exemplary lives and to do good in the world.  The second, and the one that is so troubling and potentially dangerous, is that their specific extremist beliefs are definitive — that they alone are in possession of the one and only truth.  So they feel empowered to both speak for and to act in God’s name, which includes against those who believe differently.  Mr. Santorum, for example, sees any sex not connected with procreation as sinful, and thus would do all in his power to prevent it (facilitated by contraception) from happening.

The rabid characterizations made by Rush Limbaugh and the disgracefully tepid response to them by GOP candidates and leadership has opened a political Pandora’s box.  Republicans, it is concluded, are simply anti-women.  To let that happen at a time when more than 50% of the electorate is female mystifies to say the least.  Rick Santorum who himself made some horrendously inflammatory assertions about both homosexuality and marriage equality, most assuredly is not troubled by the Limbaugh message.  Quite the contrary his positions are exactly the same.   To me, these views are totally consistent with religious extremism, regardless of ideology, which is essentially sexist.  Women are seen in a subservient role with but one primary purpose: to carry (and then care for) children.  Having lot’s of children not only helps preserve the faith, not inconsequentially, it also keeps women busy and out of trouble.  Religious extremists like it that way and remarkably many of their women have been convinced that walking (far) behind their man, not getting in the way, or God-forbid competing, is a good thing, the right thing.

Barry Goldwater was soundly defeated in 1964.  I voted for Johnson and, like Republican primary voters today, deeply regretted the limited choice at hand.  Johnson escalated Viet Nam even further after that election and, while the shocking Daisy commercial suggested Goldwater would be a killer of the innocent, it was Johnson who ended his own life with plenty of real blood on his hands.  That said, Goldwater was all wrong about extremism.  It is never a virtue.  Extremism is the product of people who arrogantly think they possess the truth and that the ends justify the means.  They never do.  We execute the wrongly accused, doing great and unjust harm because a jury has been mistakenly convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.  As bad as that may be, that court of law language suggests something the opposite of extremism, namely that there always can (and should be) doubt.  What makes this year’s GOP bunch, and most especially Rick Santorum, so frightening is not that they diss women or think the government should shrink to as little as possible, but that they are so damn sure of their truth and consequently everyone else’s falsehood.  That’s a threat to any democracy, a real, present and extreme danger to all of us.