Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan (who’s spent more time in the news lately than he’s normally used to) showcases the above video clip of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard verbally body-slamming the leader of the opposition party in the Parliament, Tony Abbott, for his sexism and misogyny. Sullivan then applies Gillard’s fiery speech to the American election and, in the meantime, coins a neologism:
Obama has trained his whole life not to be angry, so as to deflect and foil the raw racism of Hannity et al. But Gillard keeps her cool in tone while the rhetoric is brutal. Biden and Obama need to calmly but relentlessly tear into the inconsistencies, lies and cynicism behind Romney-Ryan. Expose the abortion reversal; expose the Medicare reversal; expose the pre-existing conditions lie; demand to see the math behind Romney’s ludicrous budgetary plan, and if he won’t provide it (because it’s impossible), call him out as the principle-free, chameleon salesman he is.
Obama let Romney shape-shift without rebuttal. Never again. The idea that the same policies that brought this country to its knees by 2009 should be put on steroids for the next four years should provoke outrage, not gentle disagreement. The fact that we cannot even know if Romney would actually do any of it because he is such a shameless liar and shape-shifter should also provoke amazement and incredulity, not good manners. Bill Clinton exposed the empty center of Romney with a wide knowing grin. But however he decides to do it, Obama needs to Gillard Romney in the next debate. To his face.
The New Yorkerpens its take on a hypothetical Republican version of the Garden of Eden:
The LORD created the animals and bade Adam to name them. Dressage Animals became known as “horses.” Domesticated Animals for Open-air Transport and other Domesticated Animals That Someone (Unknown) Let Out were called “dogs.” Another large animal was named either “moose” or “elk.” Probably “elk.”
Adam set out to build his own business by himself, beseeching the LORD to provide only paths over land and water. Adam’s understanding of this covenant was that these gifts were not to be tallied against his own achievement later.
Adam created Eve and then created a job for her by making her his first legal wife. They were naked and unashamed, especially the latter. Of these, it turns out, one is much, much better for business.
As it relates to fantasy and fever dreams, however, even that pales in comparison to this actual closing line from today’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece by former GE CEO Jack Welch:
The coming election is too important to be decided on a number. Especially when that number seems so wrong.
This was written, of course, in response to the backlash to his infamous tweet of just days earlier, when he accused the Bureau of Labor Statistics of fudging the unemployment numbers to boost Obama’s reelection chances:
There are times when a single statement so perfectly encapsulates a broader mindset that it practically begs to become a symbol of a certain era of history. The closing line of the WSJ op-ed feels like one of those statements. I use the word “feels” a bit ironically, as that’s the crux of the collective Republican delusion so eloquently recapped by Welch: “that number seems so wrong.”
Years from now, when people look back on the Tea Party era, this accusation against a department staffed by nonpolitical appointees (and whose numbers have consistently given the Obama administration headaches for nearly four years) will have a decently strong case to win the hotly contested quest to determine the single most ridiculous thing said during the Obama years.
No, not in policy — in temperament. Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum makes a point I’ve been starting to think about myself over the past few days, as conventional wisdom has settled on the narrative that Obama didn’t simply lose the first presidential debate, but did so to a catastrophic, earth-shattering degree:
…[L]iberals went batshit crazy. I didn’t watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn’t just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn’t even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama’s entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.
Drum’s analysis corresponds well to my own personal experience. I, too, watched the debate, feeling that Obama had whiffed at some major points and that Romney had clearly bested him. (All in all, I’d say my initial feeling on Obama was a bit harsher than Drum’s, but not hugely so.) However, as I digested the immediately panicked recaps and discussions of the debate among progressive bloggers and journalists, my views did begin to detach themselves from the actual debate I’d witnessed and attach themselves instead to everyone else’s analyses of what they saw.
In fact, there is evidence that this was a widespread phenomenon: people watched the debate, thought Obama had lost by a moderate amount, and later readjusted to a more extreme reading of the outcome and, correspondingly, shifted their presidential candidate preference. Nate Silver explains:
In a poll of about 500 voters that Ipsos conducted immediately after the debate, late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, Mr. Obama still led by five points. However, Mr. Obama’s lead was just two points in a poll Ipsos released Friday, which included interviews from Monday night (before the debate) through Friday morning.
The inference I make from these Ipsos polls is that Mr. Romney must have polled very well in the most recent interviews it conducted, late Thursday and early Friday morning, quite possibly leading Mr. Obama, in order to have made up so much ground.
It may have been that Mr. Obama’s problems were growing worse throughout the day on Thursday as criticism of his debate performance was amplified. That would also help to explain Mr. Romney’s very strong performance in the We Ask America polls on Thursday.
Indeed, Gallup’s polling suggested that Mitt Romney had benefited from a “historic win” and was now a far more formidable candidate than he had been just prior to the debate. It is clear that, whatever the reasons, Romney has surged in the polls following the debate last Wednesday. What remains unclear, however, is whether this was purely the result of his debating prowess or whether, in fact, many media members’ bias towards sensationalism and the need for a fresh narrative had helped tilt the scales.
In fact, Robert Wright, in a blog post for The Atlantic all the way back in that other lifetime of September 26th, predicted just such a media stampede:
If there’s one thing the media won’t tolerate for long, it’s an unchanging media narrative. So the current story of the presidential campaign — Obama sits on a lead that is modest but increasingly comfortable, thanks to a hapless Romney and a hapless Romney campaign — should be yielding any moment to something fresher.
The essential property of the new narrative is that it inject new drama into the race, which means it has to be in some sense pro-Romney. This can in turn mean finding previously unappreciated assets in Romney or his campaign, previously undetected vulnerabilities in the Obama campaign, etc. The big question is whether the new narrative then becomes self-fulfilling, altering the focus of coverage in a way that actually increases Romney’s chances of a victory. And that depends on the narrative’s exact ingredients.
Wright then proceeded to delineate just what those ingredients might be:
“Romney has a previously undiscovered sense of humor!”
“Sudden and unexpected foreign policy switcheroo!”
“Suddenly it’s Obama who seems off balance and gaffe-prone!”
“Romney surprisingly good in presidential debates!”
These predictions turned out to look more like prophecies just a few short days later. And the Left has driven itself nearly insane in the aftermath. One might have surmised that Chris Matthews’ immediate post-debate outburst (shown above) would have sufficed to capture the prevailing progressive angst. But even the MSNBC commentator’s rage has paled in comparison to the ongoing meltdown of The Dish‘s Andrew Sullivan, whose increasingly frenetic and unhinged rants heralding the premature demise of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign have now joined the vaunted Buzzfeed pantheon of animated GIF-dom.
Yes, Romney has now pulled even or ahead in many national polls. But it’s worth asking whether this development was something that, as Drum wonders, we brought upon ourselves, or whether the debate really was the objectively horrifying spectacle we’ve all now convinced ourselves it was. Drum learns the unusual — and, in my view, completely wrong — lesson from the event, suggesting that the media fallout could have been avoided by creating and employing more “hacks” who would spout pro-Obama cliches and aphorisms no matter how dismal the reality. But it is this very combination of ideological rigidity and partisan fanaticism that the Left so despises in its right-wing counterparts. Matching them hack for hack — aside from being impossible: Michael Moore is no match for Rush Limbaugh, after all — would destroy much of what we do better than the current iteration of America’s conservative movement.
Instead, perhaps the better alternative is simply to shut off the spin for the next debate. Whether we decide to watch the vice presidential debate next (oh, you’d better believe I’ll be watching) or hold out for the presidential town hall meeting, it would behoove us to turn on the television only as the debate begins and to shut it off immediately after it ends. Otherwise we risk turning into a collective horde of unthinking followers again — as I found myself doing in the minutes and hours and days following this first debate — each of us unconsciously revising our own eyewitness memories in favor of the more extreme version preferred by the chattering class. Let us try to do what we are always so insistent the Left does better than the Right today: let’s think for ourselves.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve probably heard that affirmative action is back on the docket of the Supreme Court this term. Even if you have been living under a rock, you’ve probably still heard about it. You may be sick of hearing about it already. (If so, stop reading.) While there is a whole hell of a lot that can (and will) be said about race-based affirmative action in the context of higher education–whether it’s about its consequences for certain minority groups, its main beneficiaries, its effectiveness or its future direction–I’m going to limit myself to an overview of SCOTUS’ recent affirmative action cases and try to point out some of the inconsistencies that the Court must resolve with Fisher v. University of Texas (to be argued this Wednesday), and then close out with a couple of thoughts on affirmative action in general.
Fisher arises directly from a pair of 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Jennifer Gratz, a white applicant to the undergraduate school, argued that UM’s practice of granting underrepresented racial minorities automatic “points” in an admissions equation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Barbara Grutter, a white applicant to the law school, argued that UM Law’s practice of taking race into account in its admissions decisions, period, was also unconstitutional.
Now for a little bit of constitutional law: in Equal Protection challenges, a government policy that affords differential treatment between the races is examined under a standard known as “strict scrutiny.” Strict scrutiny means that the policy can only be upheld if the government can show two things: (1) a “compelling state interest,” and (2) “narrowly tailored” means to achieve this goal. Applying this standard, the Supreme Court ruled for Gratz–striking down the undergraduate school’s “bonus” points for underrepresented minorities–but against Grutter. It distinguished the two admissions schemes based on the fact that the law school merely considered race as one of many potential “pluses” and not as an automatic “booster”. Significantly, the Court accepted UM Law’s rationale that student body diversity itself is a compelling state interest “essential” to UM’s educational mission, because we learn to reject racial stereotypes and see members of different groups as individuals (rather than spokespeople for their entire race) when we encounter them frequently in our classrooms.* It then found that the law school had narrowly tailored its use of race in the admissions process. While quotas and automatic points unfairly insulated candidates from comparison with other applicants, taking race into account as part of a holistic process did not. Thus, UM Law’s policy was constitutional. The majority opinion, authored by Sandra Day O’Connor, represented a compromise between the reality of the obstacles still encountered by underrepresented minority students and the American ideal of a pure, colorblind meritocracy. But Justice O’Connor also wrote that she expected race-conscious admissions policies to be “limited in time” and Grutter to be obsolete in twenty-five years.
Who doesn’t want to be a part of this?
The Court is sixteen years ahead of schedule, but it looks ready to limit or even overturn Grutter now. In Fisher v. University of Texas, Abigail Noel Fisher argues that her rejection from UT violates the Equal Protection Clause. Under existing Texas law, the top 10% of students in every high school in the state receives automatic admission to state-funded universities. Race is not taken into account for this group of students, which is how UT gets 70-80% of its incoming class. For the rest of the applicants who do not make the 10% cutoff (now competing to be part of the remaining 20-30% of UT’s incoming class), race is taken into account as one factor among many, per the Grutter rule. Fisher, who is white, didn’t make the top 10% of her high school, and didn’t make the cut when her application was passed down to the pool where race was taken into consideration. She contends that the UT plan is unconstitutional because Texas doesn’t need to give underrepresented minorities a boost in the non-top-10% pile. UT’s race-neutral top-10% plan already results in a significant number of Latino and African American enrollees and makes UT’s classrooms plenty diverse enough without having to disadvantage Asian American and white applicants, Fisher claims. Any further consideration of race is just a smokescreen used by UT to admit a target number of Latinos and African Americans per year–in other words, a racial quota, which is expressly banned by SCOTUS. Texas, on the other hand, doesn’t see a problem with making its classes more racially diverse than the top 10% plan would allow and thus considers race as merely one part (“a factor of a factor of a factor of a factor”) of its holistic look at the non-top-10% applicants.
Fisher never directly argues that Grutter was wrong to accept diversity in higher education as a compelling interest, only that UT has already achieved adequate diversity through race-blind means and should stop there. (In other words, there is a “tipping point” of racial diversity after which you become less diverse by admitting too many students of color, despite the irony that white students are currently admitted at a higher rate under Texas’ non-top-10% holistic consideration than under the top-10% rule, thus… increasing racial diversity at UT.) But Fisher also wants the Court to consider clarifying or overturning Grutter altogether because courts have been too deferential to schools’ admission schemes–not truly questioning whether there is both a compelling state interest and narrowly tailored means–thus turning Grutter into a meaningless and unworkable standard.
On this argument, Fisher may very well find a majority of sympathetic Justices. It’s helpful to her that the perspective of the Court has changed dramatically in the past nine years, now that Sandra Day O’Connor has retired and Samuel Alito and John Roberts have moved in. Justices Alito and Roberts have made no secret of their disapproval of race-based affirmative action. Importantly, Roberts ruled in 2007’s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 that Seattle could not use race as a “tiebreaker” when assigning elementary students to schools. Justice Roberts refused to acknowledge that diversity was a compelling state interest at the grade school level, dismissing Seattle’s goals of reducing racial isolation and racially-entrenched housing patterns. Unlike Justice O’Connor, Roberts believes that society is already colorblind enough, and that all this talk about racism is what’s really perpetuating racism: “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
No diversity for you!
Where things get sticky is when we try to make sense of Grutter and Parents Involved together. Parents Involved did not overturn Grutter; both are good law. Justice Roberts made sure to dispose of Grutter early on in his opinion, noting that it was limited to the realm of higher education and therefore did not apply to Parents Involved, which took place in the context of grade schooling. But this seemingly pat division raises inconsistencies when you look at what the Court is saying about diversity in each case: how can student diversity suddenly become compelling at the age of 18 and above when it hasn’t been for the last 12 years? Does it actually make any sense to say that elementary and high school students don’t need to be exposed to peers of different cultures and backgrounds, but then say that this exposure becomes of paramount importance when you leave for college, where you can then learn to reject racial stereotypes? Wouldn’t it be too late by then, and wouldn’t it make more sense to start teaching these lessons at an early age? Roberts wriggled his way out of this in Parents Involved by appealing to nebulous “considerations unique to institutions of higher education,” though he doesn’t bother to elaborate on how exactly this is different for grade school education. But either you believe that the state has a right to cobble together diverse classrooms in order to teach its young people acceptance and respect, or you don’t. It looks as though the Court’s conservative wing–Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito–is eager to take the latter approach.
I am confused but powerful.
As ever, it may come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the current swing vote who will surely play as crucial of a role now as Justice O’Connor did in 2003. (Justice Elena Kagan has recused herself, so a 4-4 tie would mean that the Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding the UT plan stands, but if Kennedy votes with the four conservatives, UT loses 5-3.) And on the topic of affirmative action, Justice Kennedy seems to be a bit confused. Kennedy dissented in Grutter. He agreed with Justice O’Connor that diversity was in fact a compelling state interest, but found UM Law’s admissions scheme unconstitutional because he did not think it was narrowly tailored. In Parents Involved, Justice Kennedy again found that the challenged plan met the compelling interest test but not the narrowly tailored requirement. His concurrence broke with Justice Roberts on the question of whether diversity is a compelling educational goal at the grade school level (Kennedy believes it is), but then slammed the Seattle plan for categorizing students as “white” and “non-white” and not being narrowly tailored. Ultimately, his vote alongside the Court’s conservatives decided the case in favor of Parents Involved and the Seattle plan was struck down. What’s unclear, however, is exactly what kind of a plan Justice Kennedy would find narrowly tailored enough, and whether the University of Texas scheme will meet this unknown Kennedy standard. While diversity may survive as a compelling state interest as long as Kennedy hasn’t changed his mind, the UT plan might not–and if it doesn’t, schools across the country will be sent scrambling once again to devise a plan that does pass muster.** Diversity is nice, the Court seems to be saying, but we still haven’t figured out what the best way to achieve that is, or where we cross over the line into too much diversity.
As a final note, it’s worth remembering that colleges and grad schools use affirmative action in their admissions decisions in a multitude of ways that extend well beyond race. Justice O’Connor noted in Grutter that the University of Michigan’s admissions policy included “many possible bases for diversity admissions,” including languages spoken, community service performed and hardships overcome. Studies consistently show that female students get better grades in school and outperform men in universities, but colleges use gender affirmative action to try to admit a male-female student ratio as close to 50-50 as possible (since a student body that skews too much toward one gender will hurt campus social life and be “unappealing”). Schools use geographic affirmative action–if there’s 50 applicants from California and 50 applicants from New York with perfect GPA’s and perfect SAT scores and one applicant from North Dakota with an almost-perfect GPA and almost-perfect SAT scores, there’s a good chance that the North Dakotan is going to be admitted ahead of at least some of the perfect California and NY applicants despite the lower numbers. Athletes get preferences. Legacies get preferences (sometimes getting a boost in admissions chances by as much as a whopping 45%). And the list goes on and on. If a school has 50 applications from clarinet players and one from a piccolo player and it just so happens that the university orchestra’s one piccolo has just graduated, the piccoloist might get a bit of a boost. Amidst a pile of 50 applications from students who speak French as a second language and one from a student who is fluent in Croatian, the Croatian speaker might get some special consideration.
Despite all this, very few people ever kick up a big fuss about the injustices in the admissions process that discriminate against non-athletes, non-legacies, non-piccolo players, non-Croatian speakers and women, choosing instead to cry foul about race-based preferences. After all, Abigail Fisher isn’t mad about the male students or the children of UT alumni who might have cost her a shot at being a Longhorn. She’s mad about the African American and Latino students who got in before her, because it’s somehow easier to swallow the idea that students of color are the ones “stealing” spots they don’t deserve, and that they bring less to the college or grad school experience than other “preferred” students do. Of course, the existing system of affirmative action is not perfect, and there are a lot of ideas out there about what we can do to improve it.*** But the Supreme Court would do well to consider the realities of the holistic admissions process–which already have built-in considerations that benefit white/upper-class/male applicants and that have largely been left unchallenged in the courts–before it tries to convince us that we’ve reached our colorblind ideal, sixteen years ahead of schedule.
—
*The idea that racial diversity in the context of education can be a compelling state interest is not a new one; SCOTUS had accepted this argument earlier in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.
**Or they could switch to a completely race-blind admissions process in which top-scoring students constitute all of the incoming class. In the absolute worst-case scenario for supporters of affirmative action, Kennedy may agree with Fisher’s argument that it’s time to stop considering race in higher education, period, and overturn Grutter.
***Richard Kahlenberg, who I’ve linked to multiple times in this post, has done extensive research into both race-based and legacy affirmative action and advocates a switch to income-based affirmative action, an approach which, he argues, would benefit many underrepresented minority students as well as students from lower-income white and Asian American families.
Victoria Kwan holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and has just completed a clerkship with a judge in Anchorage, Alaska. She tweets as @nerdmeetsboy and will continue to post periodically here on legal issues. Rumor has it she and Jay Pinho are dating.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger has a column today on the Daily Beast titled “Why I’m Voting for Mitt Romney:”
By instinct I still cling to my Democrat roots. But I admit that as I get older, on the cusp of 58, I am moving more to the center or even tweaking right, or at least not tied to any ideology. Those making more than $250,000 should pay more taxes, and that does include me. But I also am tired of Obama’s constant demonization, of those he spits out as “millionaires and billionaires,” as pariahs. Romney’s comments at a fundraiser were stupid, but 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income taxes. Yes, a majority are poor and seniors. But millions do not pay such taxes with incomes of more than $50,000, and whether it’s as little as $10, every American should contribute both as a patriotic obligation and skin in the game. This is our country, not our country club.
This constant emphasis on the “47 percent of Americans [that] do not pay federal income taxes” is as boring and repetitive as it is completely and utterly irrelevant. The fact that this figure continues to play a large role in our national tax discussion is proof positive of the utter lack of due diligence on the part of journalists around the nation, who’ve collectively abdicated their responsibility to readers by failing to dig deeper.
So for the millionth time, federal income tax rates do not matter. Total tax rates matter. Think about it: what is the central issue in today’s tax arguments? The key question is one of progressivity and fairness: how much, if at all, should tax rates rise with income levels? Should the poor have to pay the same percentage of their total income to their federal, state, and local governments as the rich do? Or should taxes paid to all levels of government rise relative to income, as income itself rises? Responses to this question are as numerous as respondents, and that’s OK.
It’s absolutely absurd, on the other hand, for people to continue basing their tax system preferences on deliberately misleading data. Federal income taxes cover only one portion of total tax liabilities. There are, additionally, payroll taxes, state taxes, and local taxes. And this is the key problem with using only federal income tax rates as indicative of anything.
The Republican Party knows this. It’s why its standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, insisted on the self-victimization of the 47% who don’t pay federal income tax — because it’s a number that sounds incredibly high, a number that advances the GOP’s agenda and lends legitimacy to the accusation of “class warfare” against Barack Obama.
The problem is that, just as one would expect, isolating the most politically advantageous portion of Americans’ total tax liabilities produces a phenomenally distorted piece of data. (Imagine if the Democratic Party insisted its national platform was widely supported throughout the entire nation, based on a poll conducted exclusively among New York City residents. This is an extreme hypothetical, to be sure, but it’s illustrative of the type of thinking being used by Republicans to disguise the truth about taxes.)
So what is the total income and tax intake of Americans? Here’s a helpful graph, courtesy of Mother Jones, that includes 2009 income and tax data:
Notice a couple things. First, the bars are not equally distributed: the first four pairs represent the lowest four quintiles of the American population by income level, while the last four pairs collectively constitute the top 20%. This is necessary because the top income quintile dwarfs the other quintiles, and leaving it in one piece would render the graph more difficult to interpret in a useful way.
Secondly, the share of total taxes paid by each slice of the population is roughly equivalent to its share of national income. In other words, our tax system is much, much less progressive than Mitt Romney & Co. would have us believe. And this is why, when politicians and — even worse — journalists start throwing around numbers like 47%, it would behoove us to look into the data instead of taking it at face value. It also means that, if anyone’s conducting class warfare, it certainly isn’t Barack Obama.
Jesse Pinho (no relation; we just have the same parents) mutes his TV every time he sees the above Levi’s commercial, and wonders why:
Levi’s #GoForth commercial is an excellent example of the intersection of individual and corporation, in which the corporation (Levi’s) more or less blatantly proclaims its jeans to be the standard-bearer of creativity, leadership, and individuality. Wear Levi’s, and you’ve staked your claim to “it.” (Exactly what “it” is, I’m not sure–but it’s certainly something good.) Add Levi’s to your curation of relationships, and it will perfectly complement your other inevitably cool qualities–your artistry, your go-getter attitude, your so-perfect-it-could-only-be-in-a-commercial haircut…
So why, then, do I find myself reaching for the remote the instant I hear “This is a pair of Levi’s”? What triggers this reaction? Certainly, annoying or poorly-done ads (I’m looking at you, 5-hour Energy!) prompt the same response, but the Levi’s commercial was neither of those. So what is it? Is the call to action too transparent? That is, does Levi’s offend me by toeing the delicate line between subtlety and overtness vis-à-vis manipulation of its audience? Certainly, someone who responds positively to being told that he is “the next living leader of the world” won’t respond so well to realizing that the compliment was proffered simply to coax him into buying some company’s product. But then, all advertising aims to do just that: it offers the viewer something she wants (a compliment, entertainment, humor, etc.) in exchange for 30 to 60 seconds of her attention. Or, at the very least, it beats the viewer over the head with some piece of information (“5-hour Energy… every day! Every day! Every day!”) so that its message–“Buy this!”–is inescapable.
Perhaps, then, it’s that Levi’s violates the contract between viewer and advertiser, in which the viewer suspends her cynicism every time a commercial is played. We viewers know that we are being manipulated into action when watching a commercial; and we’ve come to accept that, under one condition: that the advertiser does not insult our intelligence. Levi’s, however, fails to acknowledge this basic requirement, blatantly exploiting our perception of cool and forcing us to confront it in such literal terms that we’re made to feel uncomfortable. Advertisers should take note of this interaction, and learn from it one important lesson: that we’ll gladly consent to exploitation as long as you don’t remind us that that’s what we’re doing.
Look out for more stuff from Jesse coming up on this blog (as well as on his), primarily on the tech scene and related topics.
In the ongoing should-we-or-shouldn’t-we debate as to voting once again for Barack Obama, The Nationtakes stock of the situation and says yes:
Progressive opinions on Barack Obama’s first term are as conflicted as his record. These differences are a sign of a diverse and spirited left, and we welcome continued debate in our pages about the president’s record and policies. But that discussion should not obscure what is at stake in this election. A victory for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November would validate the reactionary extremists who have captured the Republican Party. It would represent the triumph of social Darwinism, the religious right, corporate power and the big money donors who thrive in a new Gilded Age of inequality. It would strike a devastating blow to progressive values and movements, locking us in rear-guard actions on a range of issues—from the rights of women, minorities, immigrants and LGBT people to the preservation of social insurance programs and a progressive tax structure. Inside the Democratic Party, Obama’s defeat would embolden the Blue Dogs and New Dems, who have greased the party’s slide to the right. Whatever disappointments we have with Obama’s first term—and there are many—progressives have a profound interest in the popular rejection of the Romney/Ryan ticket…
Indeed, this is true for any cause that progressives care about. Republican rule in Washington promises not just the closing of progressive possibilities but the repeal of gains won by the great social movements of the twentieth century. It would mean the entrenchment of the class interests of a tiny, disconnected elite that looks down on the rest of society with barely concealed contempt and has made explicit its aim to shred the social contract and rig the game in its favor, whether through an assault on voting rights, an expansion of the power of big money in politics or by stacking the courts with right-wing extremists.
The threat is clear: we can’t afford a Romney/Ryan victory…
Notice how it’s really more about defeating Romney than supporting Obama. But it looks as if that’s the only good option we’ll have next month: holding our noses and hoping for the best.
