“G.O.P. Edge As Dynamics Shift in House Races,” read a frightening headline in the New York Times this summer. How can this be happening after a record of ceaseless obstructionism by congressional Republicans?

Much of the explanation, of course, rests on the media’s far too frequent reliance on blaming Congress rather than Republicans in Congress. On this matter, the new HBO series The Newsroom‘s preaching is on the right track when it challenges the media to tell the truth about the Tea Partiers and the
harm they have caused.

As for the Senate, Michael Grunwald, in The New New Deal, confirms a point
I raised in my most recent column about the claim that Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus bill—maddeningly, the assertion continues to be made, most recently in a front-page story in the Washington Post‘s Outlook section.

What really happened was summed up for Grunwald by Joe Biden: “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything.’ … The way it was characterized to me was: ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.’ ” And one Obama aide told Grunwald that “he received a similar warning from a Republican Senate staffer he was seeing at the time. He remembers asking her one morning in bed: How do we get a stimulus deal? She replied: Baby, there’s no deal.”

Okay, Biden and the staffer may not strike you as the most objective of sources, but two men who were Republican senators at the time of the stimulus, Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter, have confirmed to Grunwald that Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, “demanded unified resistance” to the stimulus bill.

I also mentioned in the last issue that the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann identify the Republicans as the guilty party in congressional failure, but I failed to note that they join in The Newsroom‘s challenge to the media to make clear to the public that congressional Republicans and Democrats are “no more necessarily equally responsible than a hit and run driver and a victim.”

They were for it before they were against it

Speaking of Republicans’ “unified opposition” to Obama’s initiatives, I had known that the individual mandate to buy health insurance had originally been proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and was at the heart of Romneycare in Massachusetts.

I had forgotten, however, until recently reminded by Ezra Klein in the ,New Yorker, that the Republican alternative to Hillary Clinton’s bill in 1993, introduced by Senator John Chafee and cosponsored by eighteen Republican senators, including minority leader and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole, also featured a mandate.

Don’t forget 2010

When I read that there is an “enthusiasm gap” in the 2012 campaign that favors the Republicans by a considerable margin, I thought: If ever there was a time when the Democrats needed enthusiasm, this is it. The Republicans not only have a lot more money to spend on the campaign, but they have been making a massive effort to suppress Democratic votes. I remind readers of 2010, when liberals were devoting most of their attention to criticizing Obama instead of working for a Democratic congressional victory, thereby allowing the Tea Partiers to take over the House and produce one of the worst Congresses of all time.

For me, the most maddening example of what was going wrong with liberalism was the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity.” I’m a fan of both men, devoutly so in Colbert’s case, but they missed a great opportunity that day. They attracted a huge crowd of some of the brightest people around, people who ordinarily would be very active in a crucial political contest. But instead of using their humor to make clear to their audience that the coming election would be crucial, they devoted almost the entire event to showing how clever and above partisanship they were and how awesome their guests were. Only the eighty-four-year-old Tony Bennett urged the crowd to vote. And he just got out that one word, “vote,” over his shoulder as he was being hustled offstage to make room for the next act.

Where’s the beef?

One of the main problems of Obama’s health care bill has been the lack of public understanding of its provisions. Why doesn’t the public know? One answer comes from the Pew Research Center, which studied media coverage of the bill and found that only 23 percent was of substance, while 49 percent was about “politics and strategy.” Of course, the same is true every day on every issue as the media continues to focus on politics, not substance.

The me-first era

Both the very conservative Charles Murray and the moderate conservative David Brooks agree about what Murray calls the “segregation of capitalism from virtue.” I can remember that in the 1950s Wall Streeters like Chase Manhattan Bank’s David Rockefeller and businessmen like Scott Paper’s Thomas McCabe still liked to be called responsible, meaning that they made their money with at least some regard for the morality and the effect on the rest of us of how they made it.

Murray traces this sense of responsibility to the McGuffey Readers, explaining that

the books on which generations of American children were raised have plenty of stories treating initiative, hard work and entrepreneurialism as virtues, but just as many stories praising the virtues of self-restraint, personal integrity and concern for those who depend on you. The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived

Split by snobbery

The snobbery for which we criticized Spy was another development we did not like about the late 1960s. It was expressed most notably by the largely college-educated antiwar protesters who called blue-collar policemen pigs and justified their avoidance of the draft with words like the title of a Monthly article, “let those hillbillies go get shot.” The result was the separation between blue-collar workers and liberal Democrats that Republicans have since exploited. Remember how Spiro Agnew said, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals”?

Pill Payola

Television’s Dr. Drew—his last name is Pinsky—has been caught taking payoffs from the drug company GlaxoSmithKline for endorsing its antidepression drug Wellbutrin. Of course, Dr. Pinsky is just the tip of a giant iceberg of medical malpractice. If you have missed the movie Love and Other Drugs, be sure to see it. Part of the film is a totally delicious satire of the corrupt relationship between pharmaceutical salesmen and physicians.

Feed the beast

One reason why I fear we will never get real campaign finance reform is that the media industry is reaping such vast profits from the sale of time for all those commercials that are deluging the airwaves. Both the broadcast and the cable networks feast on this income, which also enriches local stations, especially those in swing states. According to the Wall Street Journal‘s “Heard on the Street,” political advertisers will spend $42 per U.S. adult this year.

Two scandals that weren’t

Two recent articles in the New York Times have made me wonder which Timeseditors were asleep the day they were published. One, by Motoko Rich, ran as the lead article on the front page with the headline “‘No Child’ Law Whittled Down by the White House—Waivers for 26 States.” The headline suggests, as does a considerable part of the article, that there may be something scandalous going on. It’s not until the eleventh paragraph, which doesn’t appear until the jump page, that the reader is given any idea that the administration is granting the waivers to provide flexibility and persuade states to adopt its Race to the Top program—though the words “Race to the Top” never appear in the article, and the program is only briefly explained in two of its twenty-nine paragraphs. Ironically, a subsequent lead editorial in the Times, instead of questioning Race to the Top, praised it for providing incentives for reform that are “long overdue.

The other piece was headlined “Obama Biography Brings New Scrutiny to President’s Own Memoir.” Its author, Michael Shear, explains that “there are new questions about how closely the president’s telling of his life hews to reality.” But we don’t encounter the first example of this departure from reality until the sixteenth paragraph of the article, and what a shocker it is: Obama said his step-grandfather was killed “while fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia,” when in fact he “died trying to hang drapes.” Obama has talked a lot about his real grandparents, but he has never made a big thing out of the story of his step-grandfather, which easily could have been family myth handed down to him. The other illustrations offered by Shear struck me as equally trivial: Obama combined the stories of two early romances, and he smoked more pot in high school than his own book had implied.

A problem with Obama books

What is most gratifying about Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal is that it
gives full attention to explaining the good about Obama’s stimulus program while also acknowledging the not so good. Most of the books about Obama, even excellent ones like Jodi Kantor’s and Noam Scheiber’s, devote considerably more attention to exploring Obama’s psyche or what is wrong with his approach to governing. Kantor’s book The Obamas, for instance, while calling the president’s legislative accomplishments “extraordinary,” devotes less than one page—it’s 192 if you want to check—to listing them.

Clinton’s catch-22

As the Clintons were entering the White House in January 1993, I wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine advising them about what to do and what not to do. Among my suggestions was not to repeat the mistake I thought Hillary had made with the Clinton education program in Arkansas.

Before introducing the Clinton bill in the legislature, she had toured the state, holding meetings to discuss the bill’s possible contents. By the end of her tour she had stirred up so much opposition to the possible reforms that the teachers held a near riot outside the governor’s mansion and the Clintons had to abandon the cause of education reform. So my advice was that when she had a major reform in mind, she should get her own bill together in private and send it to Congress.

That is exactly what she did with the Clinton health bill, and she was pilloried for it. As the criticism mounted, I was hoping no one would remember how wrong I had been. Or at least I thought I had been wrong, until Obama got savaged for not sending Congress a finished bill but instead allowing Congress and White House staff to shape it along the way. If there was ever a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, this was it.

Remembering Raspberry

William Raspberry was one of Washington’s genuinely wise men. As a black man he had the courage to criticize his fellow blacks: “civil rights leadership, for all its emphasis on desegregating schools, has done very little to improve them.” This was written in 1982. It is lamentably true today. Just last year, Adrian Fenty, the first mayor to have the courage to take on the issue of teacher quality, was turned out in favor of Vincent Gray—whose administration has been characterized by one scandal after another—because of Gray’s support by the largely black D.C. teacher’s union.

Fun with complex geometric shapes

Not only have Republican legislatures sought to suppress Democratic votes by passing voter ID laws, they are removing Democratic voters from close congressional districts by redistricting. In Pennsylvania, for example, Naftali Bendavid of the Wall Street Journalfound that as a result of redistricting, Republican Representative Lou Barletta had gone from “vulnerable to iron clad.” A map of his district showed that it had been radically reshaped. What would have fit into a circle now requires an irregular elongated rectangle. This made sure not only that many Democratic voters were now excluded, but also that the most likely Democratic opponent was placed just outside the district line.

Making the same mistakes again

Read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s and weep. In Afghanistan, Foreign Service and USAID employees are largely sealed off from Afghans, rarely fluent in the local language, frequently serving tours too short for them to understand the people or the country, and throwing too much money at problems that are usually far more complicated than we understand. It is the same story that we found in the Green Zone of Baghdad, which in turn repeated the sad story of all our mistakes in Saigon in the 1960s and early ’70s.

Chandrasekaran tells how the late Richard Holbrooke at a 2009 strategy session on Afghan policy “implored USAID and state department officials to increase the size of their initiatives.” Holbrooke, who as a young man had been a Foreign Service officer in Vietnam and should have known better, then said, “If you used to ask for 22 million and are now asking for 24 million, that’s not truly bold.”

You know?

Have you ever caught yourself abusing “you know”? Then you will sympathize with Barack Obama, who managed to use “you know” fifty-two times in just one interview, the one with ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts in which he endorsed gay marriage.

More Ginsberg memories

Now, to more memories of Allen Ginsberg. In some ways, Allen was a bad influence during that first year I knew him, in 1946-47. In teaching me how to be hip, he made me look down on those who weren’t. (You mean you haven’t read Rimbaud or Baudelaire!) But we also often just had fun. He liked jazz, and so did I. I can remember one morning I skipped class so that we could get the bargain rate—it was either 55 or 95 cents if you got there before 11:30 a.m.—at the Strand Theater, where the great tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet was performing with Lionel Hampton’s band. We also frequented the Three Deuces, one of the many jazz clubs that lined Fifty-second Street. It featured another tenor saxophone player, Flip Phillips. Late one night, we went to Carnegie Hall to attend a concert in the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series that featured both Jacquet and Phillips. I was still so un-hip that Allen had to explain to me that the strong aroma in the hall was from marijuana.

Herbert Huncke was the only friend of Allen’s I met that first year (by the way, Herbert later wrote a very accurately titled autobiography, Guilty of Everything). Allen was away most of the next, serving in the Merchant Marine, but during the 1948-49 school year he introduced me to Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lucien Carr, Vicki Russell, and Allen’s father, Louis. Carr seemed guarded and hard to know, but Kerouac and Cassady not only were open and affable, they could be downright exuberant. I would never have guessed the undercurrent of torment that was part of both men. Vicki was a hooker who wanted to use my apartment as a pad where she could entertain her johns, for which I would be rewarded with a commission. Thank goodness I wasn’t quite hip enough to accept that proposal.

Allen made a special effort for me to meet his father, and I think the reason was that Allen saw me as a “respectable” friend and there was part of him that, until at least 1954, had wanted to keep one foot in the respectable world. He often talked about how T. S. Eliot, as a bank official, Wallace Stevens, as an insurance company executive, and William Carlos Williams, as a family doctor, had combined lives in poetry with regular careers. The last time I saw him before I left New York to go to law school, he was wearing a suit and told me he was working for a market research firm.

Allen got arrested in 1949. I was on the subway one Saturday morning in March when, looking over another rider’s shoulder, I saw a photograph in either the Daily Mirror or the Daily News of Allen, Herbert, Vicki, and a new friend of theirs, “Little Jack” Melody, peering out of a paddy wagon. Little Jack, it turned out, was in the same line of work as Herbert, namely larceny, and was understandably apprehensive about contact with officers of the law. When a policeman
attempted to stop the gang as they drove around Queens, Little Jack immediately stepped on the gas. The result was that, in the subsequent chase, his car turned over. Though the occupants fled, some of Allen’s papers were left behind. They contained Allen’s address on York Avenue, which ultimately led to the arrest of Allen and his friends, and the discovery of either stolen goods or illegal substances at his apartment.The next day I got a call from Allen, who saidhe was in a Manhattan jail and wanted meto ask Mark Van Doren, a Columbia professorwe both admired, to help get him out.

I went to Van Doren, who did not immediately respond—I think his attitude was that Allen needed to be taught a lesson. But after I received several more desperate calls from Allen and paid more visits to Van Doren, the professor finally agreed to ask his friend, the civil rights attorney Morris Ernst, to help. But by the time I was able to tell Allen the good news, he was out of jail; his brother Eugene, who was a lawyer, had made a deal for Allen’s freedom in return for his committing himself to the Payne-Whitney psychiatric clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Years later at a Washington party Allen and I were attending, I started to tell this story, but Allen quickly interrupted. I later realized he preferred a version of the story in which the Columbia faculty had actually come to his rescue. This wasn’t really that far from the truth—but it wasn’t the truth. I came to understand that Allen was an active participant in creating his own myth and the myth of the Beats. From the time I first met him, he wove wonderful tapestries of the group that made me eager to meet them in spite of some of the outrageous things they had done. But I don’t think this in any way diminishes works like either Howl or On the Road. Most of the famous people I have known have not been above gilding their own image.

A shifting wind

A high-end costume jewelry store serving Washington’s wealthiest neighborhood ran a poll in 2008 based on how many McCain or Obama pins it sold. Obama won by a comfortable margin. This year, Romney is ahead by a 4-to-3 margin, which curiously enough happens to be the Republican fund-raising advantage as we go to press.

The post Tilting at Windmills appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“Do your own thing” is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century.

What is remarkable about this almost identical thought is that I’m sure Andersen’s thoughts are his own. I doubt that he even reads this column, a result that we pretty much assured by publishing an article making fun of the snobbish tendencies of Spy, a magazine he cofounded.

So I hope mine and Andersen’s is like the agreement between Murray and Brooks in suggesting that we are at last beginning to come together to figure out what’s gone wrong with this country.

The post How was the sense of responsibility lost? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Washington Monthly has long believed that such behavior by colleges doesn’t serve the broader interests of the country, and that rewarding such behavior is wrong. And so the magazine designed its own ranking system to do the opposite: to rate colleges based on how well they perform with the students they have, regardless of the students’ backgrounds or SAT scores, on metrics that measure the widely shared national goals of increasing social mobility, producing research, an inspiring public service.

One goal that has long been missing in the magazine’s rankings, however, is cost-effectiveness. After all, college may be a good investment, but not if you pay too much for it. Pursuing a college education still makes economic sense for most students, but that won’t be true for much longer if tuitions continue to rise, as they have for years, at rates faster even than health care costs.

So this year, the Washington Monthly rankings incorporate a new measure we call the “cost-adjusted graduation rate.” This involves tweaking the calculations the magazine has long used to derive a school’s social mobility score. In the past, we predicted a college’s graduation rate using the median SAT/ACT score of each school and the percentage of its students receiving Pell Grants and then compared it to the actual graduation rate. This year, we made two changes. First, to increase our ability to predict graduation rates, we used additional student and institutional characteristics, such as the percentage of students attending full time and the admit rate. Second, to get at cost-effectiveness, we took the gap between the predicted and actual graduation rate of a school and divided it by the net price of attending that institution. Net price represents the average price that first-time, full-time students pay after subtracting the need-based financial aid they receive.) The aim of our new cost-adjusted graduation rate is to highlight those colleges that use their resources to effectively educate students at a relatively low cost—and to call out those that burn though tuition dollars without much to show for it.

What did we find? First, that colleges and universities that do well by this measure tend to be public institutions. That’s not a surprise, given that tuition at these schools is kept relatively low by state subsidies (though per-student subsidies have been declining in many states). It also turns out that quite a few minority- serving institutions, such as the University of Texas-El Paso and Elizabeth City State University, score near the top of the list.

What may be surprising, however, is that some of the highly ranked universities from U.S. News, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California, rank near the bottom. Even though these institutions have high graduation rates, the types of students that they enroll are already expected to graduate at high rates. Moreover, these schools tend to be expensive, with net prices that can top more than $30,000 per year.

Here are some examples of different kinds of colleges and universities that are able to graduate the students who can be the most difficult to get across the finish line at a relatively low average net price.

Research Universities

SAN DIEGO STATE UNIV. (CA)
Predicted grad rate: 54%
Actual Grad Rate: 66%
Net Price: $7,817
Reason It Made the Cut: According to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, SDSU ranks twentieth in the nation for bachelor’s degrees conferred on ethnic minorities.

With a predicted graduation rate of 54 percent and an actual graduation rate of 66 percent, SDSU does an impressive job at graduating students given their demographics. This is due in part to a concerted effort by the university to collect and analyze data about its students. With data in hand, SDSU is better able to identify where students run into roadblocks and develop interventions that result in improved outcomes. These interventions include mandatory orientation for first-year and transfer students, special programs for low-income and first-generation college students, a dedicated office for the retention and success of students, and a strong partnership with San Diego’s local public schools to ensure that students in the pipeline arrive prepared.
RUTGERS UNIV.-NEWARK (NJ)
Predicted grad rate:49%
Actual Grad Rate: 63%
Net Price: $10,207
Reason It Made the Cut: Rutgers-Newark is a public, urban, nonflagship university that attracts mostly commuter students. Despite its nontraditional student population, its graduation rate is 14 points better than predicted.

According to U.S. News, Rutgers-Newark is the most diverse national university in the United States, with no racial group able to claim majority representation on campus. Its diversity, location, and relatively affordable tuition have attracted a growing student body, adding 3,000 students in less than a decade. As enrollments grow, Rutgers-Newark has pledged to remain accessible to large numbers of first-generation college students. To maintain this mission, the university actively recruits in the city of Newark, where one-quarter of residents live below the poverty line and the median household income is approximately $35,000. The university’s Academic Foundations Center houses both pre-college and undergraduate programs to provide outreach and support to students from disadvantaged backgrounds to help ensure their success.

Master’s Colleges

CALIF. STATE-FRESNO (CA)
Predicted grad rate:39%
Actual Grad Rate: 51%
Net Price: $5,590
Reason It Made the Cut: Although Fresno State’s graduation rate may seem low, this Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) performs 12 points better than predicted.

Approximately 38 percent of the students at Fresno State are Hispanic, and 52 percent receive Pell Grants. Many of the university’s students are the first in their family to go to college. While these characteristics normally yield a student population that is difficult to graduate, Fresno State does relatively well getting their students across the graduation stage. As a member of the Presidents’ Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, Fresno State has committed to gathering, reporting on, and using evidence to improve student learning. Using data has helped the institution to see where students fall through the cracks—those who are between their second and third years, especially those who lack connections and relationships with their major department. With this knowledge, department chairs reach out to every student between their second and third years to act as a point of contact and to provide support.
CITY UNIV. OF NEW YORK-STATEN ISLAND (NY)
Predicted grad rate:33%
Actual Grad Rate: 48%
Net Price: $6,675
Reason It Made the Cut: With 48 percent of incoming students receiving Pell Grants, this institution has a substantial difference between its actual versus predicted graduation rate.

As an urban, commuter institution, the College of Staten Island attracts a diverse group of students from the New York City metro area. Because of the difficulty in retaining commuter students, the college offers many programs to enrich students’ academic lives and provide incentives for them to stay invested in finishing their degree.

The SEEK program, offered through the City University of New York, helps underprepared students by offering them academic support and financial assistance. In addition, the college has three honors programs, including the Macaulay Honors College University Scholars Program for incoming freshmen who pursue their degree full time. These scholars receive a full tuition scholarship and participate in research projects. They are also provided an additional $7,500 fund as an incentive to study abroad and do in-depth research.

Baccalaureate Colleges
ELIZABETH CITY STATE UNIV. (NC)
Predicted grad rate:19%
Actual Grad Rate: 42%
Net Price: $1,442
Reason It Made the Cut: While a graduation rate of 42 percent may seem low, Elizabeth City State, a public, historically black university, only has a predicted rate of 19 percent. ECSU is doing much better than predicted, and at a very low net price.

Part of ECSU’s mission is to provide a studentcentered environment, delivered in a manner that enhances student learning. The university has many academic initiatives, including a summer school program
to help underprepared students get on track so they arrive in the fall ready to succeed. ECSU recently expanded this program and saw enrollment increase from 1,358 in 2009 to 3,118 in 2010. In addition to a summer program, the university maintains more than twenty other academic programs, including “Motivation, Opportunities, Determination, Excellence and Leadership (MODEL) Scholars,” GEAR-UP, Mathematics and Science Education Network, Upward Bound, and TRiO Programs.
COLL. OF THE OZARKS (MO)
Predicted grad rate:38%
Actual Grad Rate: 68%
Net Price: $9,854
Reason It Made the Cut: College of the Ozarks has a relatively low net price and one of the largest differences between predicted and actual graduation rates.

The mission of College of the Ozarks is to provide the advantages of a Christian education to youth who are without sufficient means to procure such education. Similar to Berea (see below), instead of paying tuition, all full-time students work approximately fifteen hours per week on campus to subsidize their education, allowing them to graduate debt free. Ozarks students can work an additional forty hours per week during summer breaks to help cover the cost of room and board, potentially bringing their total cost of attendance to zero. Additionally, students are expected to complete their academic program within eight semesters and require special approval from the dean of the college to extend up to a maximum of two semesters. This policy helps to ensure that students graduate on time. But College of the Ozarks has a low acceptance rate (9 percent) and a small enrollment (1,377 students), reaching only a very specific population of students.

Liberal Arts Colleges
BEREA COLL. (KY)
Predicted grad rate:50%
Actual Grad Rate: 64%
Net Price: N/A
Reason It Made the Cut: In addition to an extremely low net price, the gap between the predicted and actual grad rates is 16 points.

Since its founding in 1855, Berea College’s scriptural foundation, “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth,” has shaped the institution’s programs and culture. Part of Berea’s mission today is to provide educational opportunity to students primarily from Appalachia who have great promise and limited economic resources. As a result, more than half of Berea students are first-generation college students, and the average family income for an incoming student is $29,273. All students receive a four-year scholarship worth up to $96,400, and every student works approximately ten to fifteen hours per week to earn money to cover the cost of books and food. It is important to note, however, that admission to Berea is highly selective. Even though this college does a great job considering the students it enrolls, its capacity is small.
GRANITE STATE COLL. (NH)
Predicted grad rate:28%
Actual Grad Rate: 54%
Net Price: $7,485
Reason It Made the Cut: With an average student age of thirty-six, Granite State serves mostly adult, nontraditional students through a variety of flexible degree programs.

Granite State College is one of the four institutions that comprise the University System of New Hampshire. In addition to being New Hampshire’s leader in delivering online higher education, Granite State’s primary mission is to serve as the system’s college for adults. The college’s open admissions policy and multiple academic centers throughout the state ensure that its reach is broad. And by offering flexible degree programs in high-demand fields and credit for prior learning, the college makes it possible for students to balance the responsibilities of school, work, and family. Granite State also offers intensive classes to help accelerate the path to a degree, like a course that spans only four weekends or six Saturdays instead of twelve to fifteen weeks.

The post America’s Best-Bang-for-the-Buck Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One camp, a coalition of researchers and educators formed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, argued in a manifesto called A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that tackling poverty’s causes and consequences was the way to free disadvantaged students from the grip of educational failure. “Schools can ameliorate some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement,” the coalition wrote. But, it continued, “[t]here is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can substantially, consistently, and sustainably close these gaps.”

How Children Succeed:
Grit, Curiosity, and the
Hidden Power of Character
by Paul Tough
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pp.

In sharp contrast, a second reform group, led by then school superintendents Joel Klein of New York and Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C., and others drafted a competing reform manifesto under the auspices of an organization known as the Education Equity Project that stressed tougher accountability for schools and teachers, governance reforms for failing schools, and the expansion of charter schools. They largely refused to acknowledge that poverty rather than school quality was the root cause of the educational problems of disadvantaged kids, for fear that saying so would merely reinforce a long-standing belief among public educators that students unlucky enough to live in poverty shouldn’t be expected to achieve at high levels — and public educators shouldn’t be expected to get them there.

While one of the few reformers with feet in both camps, Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan, was named U.S. secretary of education, the Klein cabal won the policy fight. The Obama agenda has focused almost exclusively on systemic school reform to address the achievement deficits of disadvantaged students: standards, testing, teacher evaluations, and a continued, if different, focus on accountability. The administration’s one education-related poverty-fighting program, Duncan’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, is a rounding error in the Department of Education’s budget.

Duncan was right to align himself early on with both Democratic factions. Good schools can, of course, make a difference in student achievement just by being good. And the inadequate nutrition, housing, language development, and early educational experiences that many impoverished students suffer are real barriers to learning.

But in the last several years a new body of neuroscientific and psychological research has made its way to the surface of public discourse that suggests that the most severe consequences of poverty on learning are psychological and behavioral rather than cognitive. The lack of early exposure to vocabulary and other cognitive deficits that school reformers have stressed are likely no more problematic, the research suggests, than the psychological impact of growing up in poverty. Poverty matters, the new work confirms, but we’ve been trying to address it in the wrong way.

Former New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough brings this new science of adversity to general audiences in How Students Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, an engaging book that casts the school reform debate in a provocative new light. In his first book, about the antipoverty work of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Tough stressed the importance of early cognitive development in bridging the achievement gap between poor and more affluent students. In How Students Succeed, he introduces us to a wide-ranging cast of characters—economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists among them — whose work yields a compelling new picture of the intersection of poverty and education.

There’s James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, who found in the late 1990s that students who earned high school diplomas through the General Educational Development program, widely known as the GED, had the same future prospects as high school dropouts, a discovery that led him to conclude that there were qualities beyond courses and grades that made a big difference in students’ success. His inclinations were confirmed when he dug into the findings of the famous Perry Preschool Project. In the early days of the federal War on Poverty in the 1960s, researchers provided three- and four-year-olds from impoverished Ypsilanti, Michigan, with enriched preschooling, and then compared their life trajectories over several decades with those of Ypsilanti peers who had not received any early childhood education.

The cognitive advantages of being in the Perry program faded after a couple of years. Test scores between the two groups evened out, and the program was considered something of a failure. But Heckman and others discovered that years later the Perry preschoolers were living much better lives, including earning more and staying out of trouble with the law. And because under the Perry program teachers systematically reported on a range of students’ behavioral and social skills, Heckman was able to learn that students’ success later in life was predicted not by their IQs but by the noncognitive skills like curiosity and self-control that the Perry program had imparted.

Tough presents striking research from neuroendocrinology and other fields revealing that childhood psychological traumas — from physical and sexual abuse to physical and emotional neglect, divorce, parental incarceration, and addiction, things found more often (though by no means exclusively) in impoverished families — overwhelm developing bodies’ and minds’ ability to manage the stress of events, resulting in “all kinds of serious and long-lasting negative effects, physical, psychological, and neurological.”

There’s a direct link between the volume of such trauma and rates of heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, smoking, drug use, attempted suicide — and schooling problems. As Tough writes, Children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointment, and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their yearperformance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses [caused in part by disrupted brain chemistry] and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.

In particular, such stressors compromise the higher order thinking skills that allow students to sort out complex and seemingly contradictory information such as when the letter C is pronounced like K (what psychologists call “executive functioning”), and their ability to keep a lot of information in their heads at once, a skill known as “working memory” that’s crucial to success in school, college, and work.

The good news, Tough reports, is that studies reveal that the destructive stressors of poverty can be countered. Close, nurturing relationships with parents or other caregivers, he writes, have been shown to engender resilience in children that insulates them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. “This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy,” Tough says, “but it is rooted in [the] cold, hard science” of neurological and behavioral research, though such nurturing is often in short supply in broken, impoverished homes (and even in many intact households and communities).

As important, Tough contends, is research demonstrating that resilience, optimism, perseverance, focus, and the other noncognitive skills that Heckman and others have found to be so important to success in school and beyond are malleable—they can be taught, practiced, learned, and improved, even into adulthood. Tough points to the work of Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Learned Optimism, and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research has demonstrated that students taught to believe that people can grow intellectually earn higher grades than those who sense that intelligence is fixed. This commitment to the possibility of improvement, Seligman, Dweck, and others contend, invests students with the ability to persevere, rebound from setbacks, and overcome fears.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth, a protégé of Seligman’s, has done a range of studies—on college students with low SAT scores, West Point plebes, and national spelling bee contestants, among others—and has found that a determined response to setbacks, an ability to focus on a task, and other noncognitive character strengths are highly predictive of success, much more so than IQ scores.

That’s why some of the schools in the highly regarded KIPP charter school network have added the teaching of such skills to their curricula. And they’ve coupled their traditional academic report cards with ”character report cards” developed by KIPP cofounder Dave Levin, Duckworth, and others. Concerned about their students’ inability to make it through high school and college even though they’re prepared academically, they grade students on self-control, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, grit, zest, and social intelligence. Other experts add conscientiousness, perseverance, work habits, time management, and an ability to seek out help to the list of key nonacademic ingredients of success in school and beyond. Students from impoverished backgrounds need such skills in larger doses, Tough argues, because they often lack the support systems available to more affluent students.

To Tough, the logic of the importance of noncognitive qualities to students’ futures is clear: we need to rethink our solutions to the academic plight of impoverished students. The studies of Dweck, Duckworth, and others support conservative claims that individual character should be an important part of policy discussions about poverty. “There is no anti-poverty tool that we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable that character strengths,” Tough writes, a claim that won’t be easy for liberals to stomach.

But, Tough adds, the contributions of character traits to students’ success goes a long way toward refuting conservative “cognitive determinists” like Charles Murray, who claim that success is mainly a function of IQ and that education is largely about sorting people and giving the brightest the chance to take full advantage of their potential.

The research that Tough explores also undercuts claims by Klein, Rhee, and other signers of the Education Equity Project manifesto that we can get impoverished students where they need to be educationally through higher standards, stronger teachers, and other academic reforms alone.

What we need to add to the reform equation, Tough argues, is a system of supports for children struggling with the effects of the trauma and stress of poverty. He urges the creation of pediatric wellness centers and classes that help impoverished parents build the emotional bonds with their young children that are so important to the development of children’s neurological and psychological defenses against poverty’s ravages. He supports KIPP’s efforts to engender resilience, persistence, and other character strengths in its students, both in school and then beyond through support programs like KIPP Through College. Work by David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin and others have shown that even modest interventions, like teachers writing encouraging notes on student’ essays, motivate children to persevere academically.

Above all, Tough makes a compelling case for giving poverty greater prominence in the education policy debate. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has talked mostly about school choice and states’ rights in education, playing to conservatives and Catholics, as every GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan has done. But the new science of adversity could be the basis of a compelling reform agenda in a second Obama term—one that merges the competing progressive agendas of the last presidential election cycle.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post First-Rate Temperaments appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This half-serious whimsy, which appears in Ed Rendell’s latest book, A Nation of Wusses, is as much Clinton worship as it is Obama criticism; Barack Obama’s “substantive response [to the spill] had been right on target in every way,” writes the former Pennsylvania governor and staunch Clinton ally. “But [the] president hadn’t been visible enough down in the Gulf.” Rendell’s dig is a curious inversion of a recurrent right-wing attack: Obama, Rendell suggests, is all substance and no style. It’s also emblematic of a broader Clintonite critique of the president, one that has as much to do with well-intentioned frustration as with rose-tinted 1990s nostalgia.

This critique should not be confused with other popular left-leaning attacks on the president. It bears no relation, for instance, to the progressive charge that Obama didn’t push for a bigger economic stimulus bill, or hard enough for a public option, and that he caved to the banks in negotiating the bailout and the subsequent financial reform legislation. Nor would you hear it from centrist ex-Clinton strategists like Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, who decry the current president’s “divisive” policies on Fox News.

Instead, Rendell — along with a halfdozen former Clinton officials I spoke to — agree with Obama’s policies, but argue that he’s failed to use the presidential bully pulpit to sell them to the public. According to Rendell, Obama let the GOP define down his foremost legislative achievements — health care reform and the stimulus — and paid the price in the 2010 midterm elections. “How many Americans know that more than 40 percent of the stimulus spending was for tax cuts?” Rendell writes. “Hardly any, because it was never explained to them.”

It’s a refrain I heard often. “There has been, among the Clinton people, a concern that [Obama] hasn’t been consistently effective at the bully pulpit,” one former member of Clinton’s senior staff told me. “Clinton has a unique ability to infuse policy arguments with real passion. And that energy has at times been lacking in this president.” Bill Galston, a Brookings scholar and former Clinton adviser, was harsher. “His apparent inability to turn his communication skills as a campaigner [into] campaign skills as a sitting president is his single biggest failure.” Added another official, who worked in both White Houses, “Obama ran a campaign that was about selling not a vision of government, but a vision of himself.” Four years later, he’s still not “campaigning on what he’s accomplished and what he’s done.”

“Bully pulpit” is an awfully broad term. William Safire, in his indispensable Political Dictionary, defined it as the “active use of the presidency’s prestige and high visibility to inspire or moralize.” That meaning is consonant with the Clintonite critique, but it doesn’t completely do it justice. Lurking beneath the chronic gripe that Obama failed to “pivot” from his post-partisan campaign motif to a hard-boiled governing theme are hints that 44 simply lacks 42’s leadership mojo.

The official who worked in both administrations has a pet example. When the stimulus was passed in early 2009, only one member of the president’s inner sanctum — Vice President Joe Biden — was tasked with promoting it. Meanwhile, Obama was pitching health care and green jobs; economic advisers Christina Romer and Larry Summers were privately gaming out the bill’s big-picture effects; Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was doing damage control on the bank bailout; and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzsag was worried about deficit reduction.”The core to being an executive — what are the big problems — is focusing on a theme,” the official said. “Clinton was very disciplined about that,” he added, pointing out that staffers woke up each morning expecting to promote a “message of the day.”

Others in the Clinton camp seized on that crippling scourge—insufficient executive experience — to make a slightly different point; Obama needed to reassure an anxious electorate not by talking a big game, but through a series of more symbolic, piecemeal, moves. One former speechwriter (fondly) recalls Clinton’s 1996 gambit to inch into Republican territory by vouching for public school uniforms. “That was all about sending a larger meta-message that this was a president who got up every day to fight for the American people.” Obama, by contrast, “is a lot more about telling than about showing,” the speechwriter said. “He gives nice speeches, but he’s not really practiced in the doing. Part of that is because he was never a doer before he became president.”

Another former Clinton official, who wouldn’t let me identify him more specifically, argued that Obama showed his inexperience by letting Congress not only define his bills for him, but write them, too, in the cases of stimulus, health care, and climate legislation. “The result of that is it became extremely difficult to maintain a set of clear principles of what it is you are about,” he said. “Clinton had been a five-term governor. He really knew how to be an executive. And I think it took Obama a while to learn.” Rendell, no surprise, makes precisely the same point. “I think the president was hurt by being a legislator only,” he said in a June television appearance. “Too much of [stimulus and health care] was left up to the Congress. He sort of said, ‘Here’s my concept, you guys flesh it out.’ I think Hillary Clinton would have sent them a bill and said, ‘Here’s what I want.’”

This is where the Clintonites, their vision clouded by personal fealty, become less convincing. Rendell, who stumped hard for Hillary in 2008, seems to have forgotten that this very strategy failed miserably in 1993, when the Clintons pushed their health reform bill. Precisely because Obama saddled Congress with the responsibility of crafting the Affordable Care Act, it too was on the hook if it failed. (As are Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham for bungling climate change legislation.) Equally, talk of a leadership deficit ignores several of Obama’s high-profile unilateral actions: reversing Bush’s torture policies; authorizing military involvement in Libya; ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden; rescuing GM and Chrysler; and providing certain illegal immigrants relief from deportation.

But the weakness of the Clintonite gripe stems not just from papering over the Big Dog’s mistakes and minimizing Obama’s accomplishments. It also suffers from a blindness to Obama’s political obstacles and an overly credulous conviction in the president’s power to sway public opinion.

First, the economy is faring far worse today than it was sixteen years ago. In the summer of 1996, the national unemployment rate hovered around 5.5 percent; today it stands at 8.2 percent. In the modern era, only Franklin Roosevelt, who was backed by a strong New Deal coalition, has won reelection with an unemployment rate over 7.2 percent. In this context, Obama’s slim lead over Republican opponent Mitt Romney is something of a victory.

Second, Congress has blocked most of Obama’s agenda for the past two years, which has in turn exacerbated the country’s economic and fiscal crises. While Newt Gingrich’s famously intransigent 104th Congress allowed the government to shut down in 1995 and 1996, his 105th acquiesced to certain tax increases in a much-heralded 1997 budget deal that today’s House, beholden to a no-tax pledge, would deem dead on arrival. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have kept busy playing nullifier, filibustering everything from jobs bills to low-level judicial appointments.

Finally, the Clintonites place far too much faith in the bully pulpit. After all, when Obama does choose to use it, he’s not always rewarded. From Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum, in 2010:

Obama’s … sangfroid and equanimity in the face of the worst crises became a subject of fevered agitation among the press and some critics in his own party, who accused him of failing to exploit the ultimate power of the presidency, its bully pulpit. But the moment that Obama responded to a suggestion from the Today program’s Matt Lauer that] he needed to “kick some butt” regarding the oil spill — by allowing that he was, indeed, doing his best to figure out “whose ass to kick” — he was denounced by some of those same critics as demeaning the dignity of the presidency.

But even this anecdote obscures the larger point: what presidents say, especially in harsh economic circumstances, matters very little. As political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in a recent Presidential Quarterly article, the bully pulpit helps presidents set their agenda, but does very little to determine “how citizens or legislators respond to these issues.”

Which is all to say: if Obama had been dealt a better hand, he’d be cruising to reelection, and we probably wouldn’t be dissecting his communications strategy. Granted, the Clintonite critique I’ve identified is not completely unjustified. When a health care bill is broadly unpopular but the general public is in favor of most of its individual parts, clearly something’s been lost in translation. Indeed, Obama himself admitted in July that he spent too much of his first term governing, and not enough time telling a “story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.”

Still, I got the sense from the Clinton folks that they didn’t have a serious beef with Obama’s first-term performance. Rather, like Bubba himself, they’re backseat drivers who don’t want the newbie to wreck the car. “A lot of it is nostalgia,” says the official who worked in both White Houses. “Anyone you talk to that’s still in the immediate Clinton circle has no appreciation for the fact that not everybody is Bill Clinton.”

The post The Clintonites’ Beef With Obama appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A Conservative
Walks Into a Bar: The
Politics of Political Humor
by Alison Dagnes
Palgrave Macmillan, 255 pp.

Miller styles his act as a stream-of-consciousness rant that is heavy on cultural allusions and was, back then, laced with an acid scorn toward the unenlightened — especially hicks, rednecks, culture warriors, and other right-wingers. Here’s the flavor of Miller’s comedy circa late 2000:

And on Monday, movers went to the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, to transfer Bush’s belongings to Washington. The move itself took very little time once workers discovered that Bush had nothing upstairs. Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but as a comedian, with George W. Bush coming into office, I feel like the owner of a hardware store before a hurricane. I hate to see it coming, but I have to admit it’s good for business.

Then something odd happened. The attacks of September 11, 2001, turned Miller into a fawning admirer of the same president he’d once held in contempt. The change was striking not only because Miller was supporting a Republican, but because he lost his sense of irony and adopted the full complement of Fox News- Republican vices: the chest-thumping America-first bravado, the angry paranoia, the presumption of treasonous bad faith in anyone who didn’t share his views. This was especially jarring because the latter included most of Miller’s fans, who didn’t know what had happened to the guy. Dagnes, confused like the rest, watched her friends turn on Miller, and then watched the long arc of his career decline, from a failed stint hosting Monday Night Football, to a short-lived show on the financial network CNBC, and finally to his current role as comedian in residence at Fox News. Dagnes, who describes herself as “fairly liberal,” is touchingly devoted to her hero but also somewhat blinded by her fandom, because she attributes Miller’s shrinking audience to his reversal in politics. In A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor, she sets out to discover why conservative satirists number so few and whether this is something that we, as a country, ought to be concerned about.

Dagnes is a pleasant guide and companion, whose accessible (sometimes chirpy) prose helps the lay reader to grasp what I suspect is a punishingly dry canon of scholarship on political humor. Most of us, for example, would prefer her synopsis of the Norwegian psychologist Sven Svebak’s attempt to quantify and measure the sense of humor in 54,000 Swedes by administering his “Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ)” than to read the unabridged Sven for ourselves. (Trust me, I Googled it.) Another frustrating aspect of the scholarship is that it seems awfully haphazard and contradictory. One set of scholars studying The Daily Show accused Jon Stewart of “unbridled political cynicism” and cultivating distrust in his impressionable viewers. But two other sets of scholars concluded that satirical comedy increased viewers’ political awareness.

Do these hyperaware cynics even vote? And do they vote differently because of Stewart and his ilk? “The answers,” reports Dagnes, “are wildly divergent.” Some scholars have concluded that cynicism discourages participation, others that satire fosters enlightened engagement. One study determined that viewers of late-night comedy shows are more inclined to cross party lines (seeing politicians from the opposing party yukking it up with Letterman presumably casts them in a more favorable light). But Dagnes’s own earlier research concluded that such personalization “encouraged superficiality,” thus trivializing the discourse. Whole shelves groan with academic treatises on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — stuffed with typologies, program analyses, monologue exegeses — but they don’t seem to have proven much or illuminated anything particularly interesting about the audience.

In fact, much of the scholarship feels like it was primarily motivated by the authors’ desire to study something cool, and then retrofitted with exaggerated significance to justify the endeavor. Take the conclusion of two academics who studied Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live presidential debate skits in 2000: “Voters seeking to understand the substance of ideas in the debate may have found the parodies of the debate to be a useful organizing tool for their inherent complexities.” Only a Will Ferrell character would rely on a Will Ferrell debate skit to parse the complexities of modern presidential politics. An academic herself, Dagnes doesn’t avoid some of these pitfalls. As she explains in her introduction, she examined political humor to gauge the bias, studying the content of satirical shows, columns, and drawings.

I examined the guest lists of programs and explored other data on the target of political jokes, and surveyed the long and impressive history of American political satire from its founding until today. I analyzed the satirists, their skill sets, political ideology, liberalism, conservatism, and the goals of the entertainment industry.

In other words, she is attempting, like Sven Svebak, to quantify and measure something that doesn’t lend itself to quantification and measurement. Humor is subjective; an academic’s tool kit—scrutinizing joke targets, sniffing out “bias” in guest lists — doesn’t yield much insight about why there aren’t more conservatives on late-night television. Her dutiful slog through the litany of gripes from right-wing commentators and media organizations is likewise unilluminating (they blame nefarious Hollywood liberals).

What redeems Dagnes’s book is that she also interviewed a ton of comedians and television writers, who are amply and colorfully quoted throughout. This provides a real-world grounding absent from most other studies, although much of what she’s told goes against her thesis that these shows are a vital part of the political process — in fact, the interviews undermine the whole idea of academics parsing Daily Show transcripts. As the comedian Marc Maron explains, “The one thing I do know is that 90 percent of the time if you’re going to talk about politics the audience’s eyes [are] going to glaze over and not know how to take it in because they don’t fucking think about it.” When Dagnes cites the studies about how satire affects political behavior, the comedian Lewis Black replies, “Well, first, tell those academics to fuck themselves.… Really, tell them it is bullshit … satire doesn’t have that effect. If satire was really that important as a way to get things done, then, you know, more shit would be getting [done].” The common thread running through all these interviews is that professional satirists are almost exclusively concerned with being funny, and while many hold liberal views, they don’t expend much effort trying to impose them on others or imagine that they’d succeed if they did.

Dagnes isn’t having it. “Modern political humor,” she writes, “has become a powerhouse of cultural influence and Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and their brethren wield an immense amount of sway among voters, especially young ones.” And elsewhere: “As our news media soften considerably in their changing work environment, satirists (whether they like it or not) are filling some of the watchdog functions that journalists used to carry out.” But the notion that journalism has become so impoverished that hungry minds have turned to The Daily Show for news and moral guidance doesn’t hold up. Not only is there more and better national political journalism than ever before, spread across more platforms and easier to share, but it supplies the subject matter for The Daily Show and other shows like it, which don’t produce journalism, but riff on that produced by others.

So why do conservatives fail to turn political news into entertaining satire like liberals do? In 2007, with the Republican Party in tatters and Jon Stewart splashed across every magazine cover, Fox News Channel began broadcasting ,em>The 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was billed as “a conservative Daily Show.” It was a spectacular flop, because it put politics before humor. “It was mostly just loud and complainy with not a whole lot of basis in fact or reality,” says the Saturday Night Live writer Alex Baze. A writer for The 1/2 Hour News Hour told Dagnes that Fox News censored the best material because it was deemed “too controversial.” Surveying this landscape, Dagnes concludes that conservatism is philosophically incompatible with satire. “The nature of conservatism does not meet the conditions necessary for political satire to flourish: conservatism is harmonized and slow to criticize people in power, and it originates from a place that repudiates humor because it is absolute.” Any member of the Obama administration would heatedly disagree with the first claim; and there’s plenty of conservative humor if you know where to find it. Conservative satire flourishes in places like the Weekly Standard, particularly in the essays and articles of Matt Labash and Andrew Ferguson, and the cover art of Mark Fredrickson and Thomas Fluharty, whose paintings travestying braindead hippies and aging radicals are dead on and piercingly funny.

It’s true that late-night television is largely bereft of conservative humor — Fox News’s late, late-night (3 a.m.) Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld being a notable exception. To me, the conservative inclination to put politics before humor goes a long way toward explaining this disparity. It’s one reason why talk radio has been such a successful format for conservative entertainers (and such a challenging one for liberals, who have failed in their attempts to match it). You can’t cultivate a national television audience for a comedy show if being funny isn’t the first order of business. Throughout the time she was researching her book, Dagnes was toiling to convince Miller to talk with her, at first by touting her academic credentials and finally by approaching him through an intermediary. He declined every advance. This wasn’t very sporting of him, but on the other hand, the prospect of his career being rigorously examined couldn’t have held much appeal.

There’s something karmically fitting about the fact that Miller, whose act requires an audience with deep cultural fluency and a finely honed sense of irony, has wound up performing for the boobs who watch The O’Reilly Factor. His fall has been long and precipitous, from the comedy flagship of Saturday Night Live to the graveyard of Fox News. Miller is too sharp not to recognize this himself.

To Dagnes, the explanation lies in the complicated interplay of political philosophy and cultural climate. But what killed Dennis Miller’s career wasn’t that he became a conservative. It’s that he stopped being funny.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post Why Aren’t Conservatives Funny? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Killing the Poormaster:
A Saga of Poverty,
Corruption, and Murder
in the Great Depression
by Holly Metz
Lawrence Hill Books, 256 pp.

The Hoboken of the 1930s is as lost to us as the nineteenth-century whaling villages of Nantucket. (This is illustrated by the book’s title, which demonstrates that we are visiting a time before the invention of euphemisms.) Today, people with very low incomes are in general entitled to receive a variety of government benefits, from food stamps to housing vouchers to Medicaid. But in the early twentieth century, in Hoboken, the indigent received funds, intermittently and begrudgingly, from the city’s poormaster, a title that implicitly suggests a master-slave or master-servant relationship. In 1938, as Roosevelt’’s premature budget cutting refueled the Depression, Hoboken’s poormaster was seventy-four-year-old Harry Barck, who managed his office’s $3,000-a-month budget with a tight fist and a surly temperament. A big, bluff, irascible organization man, Barck—with his dismayingly apt Dickensian name—had held that office for forty-two years, through five political bosses and eight mayors. Barck was unchallenged in his administration of the funds, as his decisions about who got welfare and how much they received knew no appeal. For decades, the work performed by poormasters in New Jersey was administered at the state level. But with the Depression straining the state budget, power had devolved back to the cities, and Barck grabbed the opportunity. Armed with sharp disdain for “chiselers” and with statements like “I’m in favor of giving the old American pioneer spirit a chance to assert itself,” he zealously guarded the city’s coffers. At a time when Union City, a comparably sized town in the very same county (58,659 residents to Hoboken’s 59,261), was spending $6.34 per capita on relief, Hoboken was spending 90 cents.

Barck ran his office as a satrapy in the dominion of Bernard McFeely, the fifty-six-year-old mayor of Hoboken. Like James Curley in Boston, Tom Prendergast in Kansas City, and his neighboring municipal despot, Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, McFeely treated Hoboken like a plantation, using all the tools at his disposal—cash, appointments, favors, thuggery—to maintain control. Nepotism was rife: more than six dozen of McFeely’s relatives were on the city payroll, most conspicuously and usefully his brother, who, as chief of police, earned the same $5,000-a-year salary that the mayor did. Favoritism is a fairly oldfashioned means of maintaining power, but elsewhere, in the field of corrupt waste management, McFeely was a pioneer. The McFeely family cartage company had finagled control of Hoboken’s garbage contract in perpetuity, earning $1.5 million for services that, according to a New York Post exposé, should have cost $600,000. (Note that the average annual income for a Hoboken family at the time was $500.) One not very sophisticated way that profits were optimized was that the streets of Hoboken were left filthy.

Harry Barck began his last day on the job in fairly typical fashion, by receiving supplicants in his office in Hoboken’s great pile of a city hall. Twenty-three men and women had lined up to beseech Barck for niggling amounts of money that would nonetheless allow them to fill some bellies or turn on the heat. Barck usually responded to these entreaties with a blunt refusal, even though less than two years earlier a three-year-old boy named Donald Hastie, whose parents were denied aid by the poormaster, had died of starvation. This morning was no different; within fifteen minutes he had already dismissed six applicants, sending them off with a booming “Next case!” The seventh supplication took a little longer, and ended more dramatically, with a young dark-haired woman named Lena Fusco, whose three children had rickets, running out in tears, followed by a stormy Barck, wiping her spit off his face. “Lock her up!” he bellowed. “I won’t give her any more [bread] tickets!”

The encounter with Lena Fusco, as it would turn out, was just the undercard to what would prove to be the main event of Harry Barck’s life: a meeting with Joseph Scutellaro, a thirty-six-year-old construction worker and father of two who had been out of work for more than six months. The shrunken Scutellaro—he had lost a visible amount of weight during his unemployment, and now carried less than 120 pounds—had not always had difficulty finding work. His father, Frank, an immigrant, had built a prosperous construction business, and had even benefited from a cordial relationship with the McFeely regime. But Frank made the crucial mistake of supporting an Italian candidate against McFeely one year, and although he made a public show of fealty and abasement after his man lost, the Scutellaros had no friends at city hall. When the economy collapsed, Barck made the terms of estrangement clear. Although Joe Scutellaro’s family received some relief from the poormaster, help was inconsistent and meager; the last check he’d been given, four weeks before, had been for $5.70. A month later, down to a handful of pennies, with fuel cut off, the food gone, and the children ill, Scutellaro was reaching the end of his rope.

As Metz tells it, Scutellaro began politely enough, but grew angry as Barck’s response escalated in insolence. “Watch the mail,” a gruff Barck initially said, an answer that had proved unreliable in the past. No, Scutellaro insisted, his children were sick and hungry, to which the self-satisfied Barck responded, “What’s the matter with your wife? Can’t she go down and swing her bag along Washington Street?” Scutellaro, not irrationally, inferred this as a suggestion that his wife take up prostitution. In very short order, voices were raised, punches thrown, and the junior featherweight Scutellaro clocked the heavyweight Barck right in the face. The poormaster may have acted a tough guy, but he apparently had a glass jaw, for he fell face-first across his desk. Unluckily, he landed on the spot where he kept a metal spindle on which he neatly spiked rejected applications. The hole in his chest was so small and tidy that for a while it went unnoticed, and at 10:25 he was pronounced dead without the wound being attended. So fast had been the police to arrest Scutellaro for assaulting Barck that they had already finished booking him for simple assault; Barck’s death forced the cops to amend the charges to murder in the first degree. Irony of ironies, at the exact time of the fight, a mailman had delivered to the Scutellaro home an $8 relief check and thirty coupons each good for a loaf of bread. Before these items could be used by Scutellaro’s wife and kids, however, they were seized as evidence by the police.

Scutellaro became a cause celebre, particularly in the Italian community, which saw his treatment as emblematic of the routine discrimination that group suffered. In time, the woebegone carpenter attracted two staunch champions: Samuel Leibowitz, one of the sharpest attorneys in America, who had acquired a national reputation with his historic defense of the Scottsboro boys; and Herman Matson, a thirty-seven-year-old father of six, WPA laborer, and leader in the local Workers Defense League. While Leibowitz maneuvered against the machinations of a McFeely prosecutor who aimed to tag Scutellaro with a death sentence, Matson, working quite independently of the defense team, agitated with his wife Elizabeth on the streets against the corrupt practices and cruel relief policies of the McFeely administration. When Matson attempted to speak at a rally in a park one evening, McFeely goons battered him and beat his wife, causing her to suffer a miscarriage. After the beating, McFeely police arrested Matson for inciting to riot, and he ended up with his own headline trial full of famous lawyers and McFeely hacks.

Spoiler alert: the good guys don’t win, or not exactly. Scutellaro escaped a murder rap and a death sentence but was convicted of manslaughter, the compromise verdict of a jury that initially polled eleven to one for acquittal. He was given a sentence of two to five years, and served eighteen months. Matson was convicted of being a disorderly person, and though he served no jail time, he was blackballed from WPA jobs in New Jersey and had to relocate his family to the Bronx. Although McFeely remained in office for nine more years, the trials marked a turning point, after which he faced more criticism of his administration, a federal probe into the distribution of relief and accusations against the police department over civil rights violations, and the disgruntlement of key voting blocs. In 1949, he lost the support of the police department, and he was voted out of office. A year later, the new mayor dumped the title poormaster in favor of director of welfare.

Holly Metz deserves tremendous praise for accomplishing the difficult task of evoking the pain and pathos of a long-forgotten incident, and allowing it to illuminate our own problems involving wealth and work and unemployment. We may not be seeing Scutellaro-like need on a massive scale, yet we still see unemployment mostly as a matter of individual initiative and skills, and not as a matter of justice. We are still in thrall of the power and might of the tycoon, and if we do not accept McFeely-class corruption in our city halls, we tolerate it among the financial class. The Simpson-Bowles plan, widely heralded as centrist, cuts benefits for the middle and working classes while protecting the interests of the rich. The New York Fed all but ignores LIBOR rate rigging, while the Federal Reserve Board, which is legally required to minimize unemployment, continues to study a festering 8 percent unemployment rate. Any effort to discuss inequality is labeled as an attempt to wage class warfare. Killing the Poormaster shows that it took a spindle through a man’s heart to set a movement toward justice in motion; one hopes that it will be something less lethal that pricks the consciences of today’s moneyed elite.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post Broken in Hoboken appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When a presidential race is as close as this year’s, there is endless speculation about what might tip the outcome to Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. One of the most anticipated events is the debates scheduled for October, which are already being hyped as potential “game changers.” A common presumption about presidential debates is that one candidate can guarantee victory with a well-timed riposte or send their campaign into an irrevocable tailspin with an ill-timed stumble. After all, every political observer can point to truly “important” debates or moments during debates: the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon; the moment when Gerald Ford said, “There is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe”; Michael Dukakis’s answer to the question about whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were murdered; George H. W. Bush looking at his watch; Al Gore sighing.

That presidential debates can be “game changers” is a belief almost universally held by political pundits and strategists. Political scientists, however, aren’t so sure. Indeed, scholars who have looked most carefully at the data have found that, when it comes to shifting enough votes to decide the outcome of the election, presidential debates have rarely, if ever, mattered.

The small or nonexistent movement in voters’ preferences is evident when comparing the polls before and after each debate or during the debate season as a whole. Political lore often glosses over or even ignores the polling data. Even those who do pay attention to polls often fail to separate real changes from random blips due to sampling error. A more careful study by political scientist James Stimson finds little evidence of game changers in the presidential campaigns between 1960 and 2000. Stimson writes, “There is no case where we can trace a substantial shift to the debates.” At best, debates provide a “nudge” in very close elections like 1960,1980, or 2000. A even more comprehensive study, by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, which includes every publicly available poll from the presidential elections between 1952 and 2008, comes to a similar conclusion: excluding the 1976 election, which saw Carter’s lead drop steadily throughout the fall, “the best prediction from the debates is the initial verdict before the debates.” In other words, in the average election year, you can accurately predict where the race will stand after the debates by knowing the state of the race before the debates. Erikson and Wlezien conclude that evidence of debate effects is “fragile.”

Why are presidential debates so often inconsequential? After all, many voters do pay attention. Debates routinely attract the largest audience of any televised campaign event. And voters do learn new information, according to several academic studies. But this new information is not likely to change many minds. The debates occur late in the campaign, long after the vast majority of voters have arrived at a decision. Moreover, the debates tend to attract viewers who have an abiding interest in politics and are mostly party loyalists. Instead of the debates affecting who they will vote for, their party loyalty affects who they believe won the debates. For example, in a CNN poll after one of the 2008 debates, 85 percent of Democrats thought that Obama had won, but only 16 percent of Republicans agreed.

The impact of debates is also limited because the candidates are fairly evenly matched. Each candidate will have read a thick stack of briefing papers and rehearsed extensively. They will stick to their message and won’t be easily rattled. One candidate’s argument will be immediately countered by the other’s. Perhaps one candidate may appear more comfortable than the other. Perhaps one may momentarily slip up while the other does not. But the differences in their respective performances will be small. Candidates sometimes try to lower expectations of their own debate performance by claiming that they are just humble, plainspoken folks while their opponents are the second coming of Cicero. But Erikson and Wlezien’s analysis shows that across the series of debates in any given election year, the candidates tend to fight to a draw—much as one would expect two equally matched candidates to do.

Consider the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, which is remembered as anything but a contest between equals. In Theodore White’s famous recounting of the election, Kennedy appeared ”calm and nerveless”while Nixon was ”haggardlooking to the point of sickness.” Two Gallup polls suggest that after the debate Kennedy moved from 1 point behind Nixon to 3 points ahead, although it is difficult to know whether that shift is statistically meaningful. Both Stimson and Erikson and Wlezien find that Kennedy’s margin after all of the debates was only slightly higher than his margin on the eve of the first debate. Moreover, any trend in Kennedy’s favor began before the debates were held. Clearly 1960 was a close election, and many factors, including the debates, may have contributed something to Kennedy’s narrow victory. But it is difficult to say that the debates were crucial.

Ford’s erroneous assertion about eastern Europe in the second debate of 1976 is considered one of the biggest debate gaffes of all time. On the night of the debate, however, none of the debate viewers interviewed in one poll named the gaffe when asked about the ”main things” each candidate had done well or poorly. Only for viewers interviewed the next day did this gaffe become more salient—evidence that the public needed the news media to point out that Ford had made a mistake.
More importantly, Ford’s gaffe did little to affect the main trend in the fall campaign, which was a declining lead for Carter. According to Gallup’s polling, Carter had a 15-point lead before the first debate but only a 5-point lead after the second one. As Erikson and Wlezien put it, “Carter’s downward slide during the fall campaign seems to belie that this debate gaffe did much lasting harm.”

In 1980, the only debate between Carter and Reagan occurred a week before the election. Commentators judged Reagan’s performance favorably: it was “calm and reassuring,” wrote the New York Times’s Hedrick Smith the next day. A plurality of voters (44 percent) judged Reagan to be the victor, while only 26 percent picked Carter. Leading up to the debate, Reagan had about a 2-point lead, based on an average of the polls. He had a 5-point lead in the polls in the field on the day of the debate or in the two days thereafter. The debate seemed to matter, but it mainly nudged Reagan even further toward victory.

The 1988 debate between Dukakis and George H. W. Bush featured this famous question from moderator Bernard King: ”Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Dukakis said, ”No, I don’t, Bernard,” and then, in classic politician fashion, changed the subject to something he apparently did want to talk about: his record on violent crime as governor and his views about the war on drugs. His response was judged inadequately emotional, given that the question referenced his own wife. The postmortem in U.S. News & World Report said, ”The governor couldn’t summon a hint of emotion in his response to a jarring hypothetical question about the death penalty for someone who had just raped and killed his wife.” But voters couldn’t summon a hint of emotion about this alleged gaffe. Gallup reports that the two 1988 debates had “little to no impact on voter preferences.” Stimson estimates that these debates might have added a point to Bush’s margin, which would have only widened his lead, not handed him the election.

In 1992, George Bush’s glances at his watch in the October 15 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot have been characterized, in one account, as a ”display of impatience” that ”seemed to speak volumes.” Once again, that gaffe — and, in fact, all of the debates in 1992 — had only a small impact on Bush’s standing. According to Thomas Holbrook’s
detailed study, the second debate may have cost Bush only about 2 points. If anything, these debates mainly served to increase Perot’s standing at the expense of Clinton’s — although Perot’s rise could also be attributed to other factors, including his own thirty-minute campaign ads during this period.

This brings us to 2000, which is a clearer case of a small, but consequential, debate effect. Al Gore’s performance in the first debate—with its interruptions of George W. Bush and audible sighs— was widely lampooned and is also considered by some to be one of the “biggest blunders” in the history of presidential debates. After the debate, there was a swing of 2 or 3 points toward Bush, enough to give him a narrow lead. Erikson and Wlezien estimate that after all of the debates, Gore’s poll standing was about 2 points lower than it was before. Among the many factors that influenced the outcome of the 2000 election, the debates appear to have been one.

But, even in 2000, this focus on presidential debates obscures an important point: debates aren’t the only thing that voters are hearing and seeing in the weeks before the election. So even a careful comparison of polls before and after a debate assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that any change was due to the debate itself or to news coverage about the debate—and not to other events, television advertising, or the like.

Moreover, other events may outweigh any debate effect. The 1980 election provides one example. After the debate and before the election, all of the following took place: prominent aides to both Reagan and Carter were forced to resign; economic data was released showing rising inflation; there was continued news coverage of the congressional investigation of Carter’s brother, Billy; and, finally, Carter was again rebuffed by Iran in his attempts to negotiate the release of the American hostages who had been held for a year. The Carter campaign’s internal polling showed Carter slipping even more after the setback in Iran than he appeared to be after the debate. ”It was all related to the hostages and events overseas,” said Carter’s pollster, Patrick Caddell. Reagan’s larger-than expected victory appeared to confirm that there was a late trend in his favor. Whether these events definitively hurt Carter in the closing days of the campaign is as difficult to determine as whether the debate helped Reagan. But the broader point remains: presidential campaigns present voters with a steady stream of information that may overshadow the debates.

A month ago, Obama’s advisers declared that they expect Mitt Romney to get “a surge of positive media attention and a boost in the opinion polls after the first presidential debate.” That may or may not prove true. What history can tell us is that presidential debates, while part of how the game is played, are rarely what decide the game itself.

The post Do Presidential Debates Really Matter? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

All in the Family:
The Realignment of
American Democracy
since the 1960s
by Robert O. Self
Hill and Wang, 528 pp.

Four decades later, Thomas Frank, in What’s the Matter With Kansas, argued that the political right succeeded by distracting low-income white voters with social issues, such as opposition to same-sex marriage, in order to co-opt their votes for reactionary economic policies. More recently, the tide has turned, and many social or culture war issues (with the exception of abortion rights) now seem like winners for liberals. In 2009, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress foresaw “a likely diminution in the culture wars that have bedeviled American politics for so long.” In place of social issues, “we are likely to see more attention paid to health care, energy, and education”—that is, the core economic agenda. Republican nominee Mitt Romney has attempted to maneuver around staggeringly unpopular GOP positions, such as opposition to contraception. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’s call for a “truce” in the culture wars doomed his own political future, but only because he said out loud what Romney, and what’s left of the Republican establishment, plainly think. All of these accounts of recent politics, different as they are, share a common perspective: implicitly or explicitly, they treat economic issues as the real core of politics, while the claims of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians are peripheral.

Whether issues of social and cultural identity are manipulated by the right or pulling on the left, they are seen as diversions from the real “who gets what” of politics. In his new book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self, an associate professor of history at Brown, rewrites this story from its most basic assumptions. For Self, the author of an acclaimed account of integration and backlash in Oakland, California, the nature of the family, the role of women, the status of gay men and lesbians, and other subjects dismissed as “identity politics” or “social issues” are not peripheral at all, but unavoidably central to recent American politics. As Self puts it in his conclusion, “the politics of gender, sexuality, and the family since the 1960s have not been issues inserted into the public life of the nation. Rather, they have been one of the central grounds on which this public life itself has been constituted.” Self sees recent politics as a choice between a conception of the family as “adaptive and sociological,” including one-parent, unmarried two-parent, same-sex-parent families, and nonmarital sexual relationships in all their variety, and one that is “archetypal,” what former Senator Rick Santorum calls “Mom and Dad families,” with deep assumptions about gender roles and responsibilities at work and home.

Self tells the whole story of American politics through the lens of the battles about gender, sexuality, and family. It is not only the story of the women’s movement and the “homophile” organizations (which is what the movement we now know as LGBT called itself in the 1950s and ’60s) but also the evolving vision of manhood and a man’s role in society, which was tested by Vietnam and the changing economy. “Breadwinner liberalism” is Self’s brilliant term for the New Deal/Great Society vision of a just society—one in which a man can provide support for a nonworking wife and children, but that is also infused with an idealized, tough-minded manhood, exemplified by the men of the Kennedy family.

Self points out that the clear-headed Cold War liberalism of Arthur Schlesinger’s book The Vital Center, now widely admired and revived in Peter Beinart’s book The Good Fight, bore an unsubtle gendered vision—what else to make of all that stuff in the book about avoiding ”neurosis” and embracing “a new virility”?

Breadwinner liberalism was unsustainable, though, for both social and economic reasons. Pete Hammil in 1969 identified “the growing alienation and paranoia of the working-class white man” as the political phenomenon of the era, and that anxious backlash, driven both by race and a rapidly changing social order, foreshadowed the emergence of what Self calls “breadwinner conservatism,” in which restoring the structure of the “archetypal” family would prove more important than the actual breadwinning.

Self makes a powerful case for the larger importance of the LGBT and women’s movements, but he sometimes delves so deeply into the internal politics of each — for example, the conflicts within 1970s lesbian activism between those who adopted “butch” and “femme” roles and the “freaky” women who rejected that imitation of heterosexual norms—that he loses some of the connection to the central grounds of political argument, veering off into alleys that involve a relatively small number of people. But these movement stories, with a rich set of characters—many of them little known to the larger liberal world — are in themselves fascinating tales. Two recurring figures in particular, the legendary gay activist Frank Kameny, who was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service and took his case to the Supreme Court in 1961, and Del Martin, a San Francisco lesbian activist of subtle strategic intelligence, emerge as figures who should occupy a much larger place in our understanding of postwar American politics. Kameny passed away last year at the age of eighty-six, and Martin, who married her partner of fifty-six years in 2008, died later that year at eighty-seven. It is not just their longevity and final triumphs that Self calls on us to admire about Kameny and Martin, but their savvy and mature engagement in managing the wildly disparate impulses of early gay rights activism.

There is a bigger point to Self’s deep dive into the internal politics of the LGBT and women’s rights movements, as well as his analysis of the gender politics of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam-inflected politics of manhood and the military, and the sexual revolution. Rather than seeing identity politics as a single thing, distinct from economic issues, he shows that each movement or dimension of family politics had, at its best, an agenda that included both basic rights and economic supports that would help the changing family adapt — such as the effort to secure a strong child care program that foundered in the Nixon administration—which Self refers to using Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. (A pithier version of the distinction is the computer scientist Richard Stallman’s phrase, “Free as in speech, or free as in beer”— free beer, unlike speech, comes at someone else’s expense.) Each movement involved its own divisions, often those of race and class, between those who could afford to prioritize negative rights and, for example, low-income unmarried women, who needed more positive support to achieve equality. This structure works better as an analysis of feminism than of gay rights. Self argues that the negative rights within each movement won out:

what has survived in the new political environment are a handful of abstract rights: women’s market liberty, for instance, the constitutionality of abortion, and sexual privacy…. Meaningful rights varied with income and resources.

While the rapid shift in attitudes about same-sex marriage, and its legal status, is astonishing to all of us who have lived through it, it is also entirely consistent with Self’s dichotomy between negative and positive rights. Gay marriage became acceptable as soon as people looked up and realized that nothing was threatened, that it bore no real cost. And many liberals now regard these victories as almost too easy, compared to the challenge of expanding economic opportunity, which has to come at a cost to someone, even if only the very rich. “Where are the leaders when the issues are jobs and social investment?” lamented Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect when Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York embraced same-sex marriage.

Does Self refute the now-conventional story that identity politics tore apart the liberal coalition that existed from the 1930s to the ’60s? Not quite, which is unfortunate, because such a challenge would be useful and overdue. But he does add a great deal of nuance to the old tale. First, he shows that the emergence of a politics of rights, around the nature of the family, was inevitable — there’s no alternative history where you get to keep “breadwinner liberalism” unchanged, and if there were, none of us would want to live in that world. Here I’m reminded of the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey’s aphorism that “left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.” Neither one has that option.

Second, Self shows that an alternative form of the politics of the family was possible, one in which issues such as child care, health care, and an economic program of full employment that included women were fully realized. The fullest achievement of that agenda would have represented a kind of post-breadwinner liberalism that would support the shared aspirations of all families, including adaptive ones. That it didn’t happen is in part the fault of the movements themselves—as Self says, “the liberal-left insurgents of the 1960s and 1970s lost momentum, political allies, and purchase on crucial symbolic mythologies of the American family” — but was also related to larger economic and political forces affecting white men as well as the rights movements.

A significant shortcoming of the book is that it drops the story around the early 1980s, even though the final section promises to cover the period from 1974 to 2011. Beyond the Carter years and the rise of both the religious right and HIV-AIDS activism in the 1980s, it thins out, and familiar anecdotes, such as the Clarence Thomas- Anita Hill showdown, substitute for the extraordinary archival research and littleknown characters of the earlier chapters. As a result, Self omits one of the more interesting chapters in the history of the politics of family, which I would call the era of kidsas- politics. This period lasted from roughly the late 1980s, when Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg circulated a strategy memo with the title “Kids as Politics,” through the early George W. Bush years. Putting children at the center of politics would, it was hoped, restore the “positive liberties” that Self says were displaced in the earlier fights, and renew a sense of the purpose of government. Children could form a kind of common denominator between the adaptive model of the liberal left and the archetypal model of the right. If the focus was on children, it really wouldn’t matter whether they were growing up with one parent or two — married or unmarried, gay or straight — or in an adoptive or foster family.

Kids-as-politics didn’t fully live up to Greenberg’s expectations, but it didn’t do too badly. Also in 1987, Senator Jay Rockefeller convened the federally funded Commission on Children, which had the valuable effect of co-opting several prominent family values conservatives to support some of the positive social supports that were necessary for children to thrive, such as health care, child care, and a children’s tax credit. While the commission’s recommendations were considered overambitious on their release in 1991, almost all of them eventually came to pass: significant increases in child care, Head Start, and the Earned Income Tax Credit; the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act; the creation of the Child Tax Credit and its hard-fought expansion as the Additional Child Tax Credit in 2001; and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997. While kids-as politics didn’t stop the welfare reform of 1996, which was the inevitable outcome of the racial and gender backlash Self recounts, that bill’s other provisions — separate from the now-disastrous transformation of family support to a fixed block grant — greatly expanded child care and child support enforcement.

Although the Affordable Care Act and additional low-end tax breaks in the Obama years have extended some of the gains for children, for the most part the bipartisan era of kids-as-politics crashed in about 2002, when the Wall Street Journal deemed the families that benefited from the Earned Income Tax Credit and the other tax benefits the “Lucky Duckies.” With this move, the right began a new stage in the culture war, in which economics itself would replace the divisive power of gender, race, and sexuality. We face a choice between an “entitlement societ” that supports only people who “want things from government,” Mitt Romney tells us, or “an opportunity society.” Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently assembled data that supports the Romney worldview, warning that we are becoming “a nation of ‘takers,” and his boss, AEI President Arthur Brooks, has published two books that warn of an existential showdown between the believers in free enterprise and the forces of government. The language of irreconcilable moral viewpoints, such as characterized fights about abortion rights or gay marriage, has been ported over into the economic field, and people who believe government has a role in supporting the needy or economic growth are treated as alien — “foreign to the American experience,” as Romney said of Obama’s ideas. And so the fight is now fully back in the territory of economics, with the rising American electorate (unmarried women, millennials, professionals, and minorities) not only more socially tolerant but also more supportive of government’s role in the economy. Self’s book is a valuable reminder that the arguments about the family since the 1960s always had an economic dimension and were not a distraction. They also could form the basis of a richer liberalism that not only fully values the rights of individuals in their diverse identities, but also builds the kind of supportive economy and social contract that can enable everyone, in any kind of family, to make the most of his or her capacities.

The post Identity Politics Revisited appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Strom Thurmond’s America
by Joseph Crespino
Hill and Wang, 416 pp.

Today Strom Thurmond’s name brings to mind two sentiments: revulsion and disgrace. Here was a racist hypocrite who denounced the intermixing of black and white while secretly paying hush money to his own biracial daughter. He never apologized for his years as a segregationist, and even had the nerve later in life to deny that they ever occurred. Thurmond’s association was toxic enough to cost Trent Lott his position as Senate majority leader in 2002, when Lott suggested during an unguarded moment that the United States would have been a better place had Thurmond been elected president in 1948.

Yet as Joseph Crespino demonstrates in his outstanding biography, Strom Thurmond’s America, it is precisely Thurmond’s loathsomeness on racial issues that obscures his larger role in American politics. Like some malevolent Forrest Gump, Thurmond was there at all the major choke points of modern conservative history: the 1948 breakaway from the Democrats of the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic (or Dixiecrat) Party, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, and Ronald Reagan’s ascendance in 1980. A Democrat until 1964, Thurmond was the fulcrum on which the parties traded places on race issues. His trademark use of nasty populism dressed up in constitutional principle has echoes today on the far right — the territory of Rush Limbaugh and the shrillest of the Tea Partiers. Yet he also helped cement the association between conservatives on the one hand and big business, the Christian right, and anticommunism on the other.

Crespino, a history professor at Emory University, presents the right blend of narrative, scholarly analysis, and restrained outrage, reminding readers that Thurmond cared about far more than segregation. In 1957 the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action gave him the lowest score of any Democrat in the Senate: a zero. As Crespino writes, “Thurmond was the first southerner in the postwar period to bring together on a regional scale the visceral politics of white supremacy with southern business and industrial opposition to the New Deal.” Thurmond sat on the board of trustees of Bob Jones University, loathed communists, and never met a weapons program he didn’t like. As South Carolina’s governor from 1947 to 1951, he developed a talent for attracting companies to his state, trading his early pro-labor bona fides for reflexive hostility to unions. In 1962, the Kennedy administration incensed him by “muzzling” military leaders who had forced their troops to read material from the John Birch Society and other far-right groups. During a series of Senate hearings, Thurmond snarled invective in a high-pitched voice that merged the grievance of Dixie with the paranoia of Joseph McCarthy.

Two figures prompted Thurmond’s switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a move that reflected a fundamental realignment of American politics. The first was Harry Truman, and the second was Barry Goldwater. Thurmond and other southern Democrats broke with Truman in 1948 after the president issued executive orders desegregating the armed services and the federal workforce. A career grandstander, Thurmond seized the opportunity to grab the limelight by leading an informal association of southern Democratic governors and then becoming their impromptu presidential candidate in 1948. He won four southern states in the electoral college and made a national name for himself. Although he returned to the Democrats and remained with the party for sixteen years, its leaders never trusted him again.

After winning election to the Senate in 1956, Thurmond became one of the South’s most aggressive opponents of court-ordered desegregation. Invoking various Confederate rallying points, he declared “total and unremitting war on the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional usurpations and unlawful arrogations of power,” denouncing the Court’s “false and vicious ideology.” An outrageous demagogue, Thurmond called civil rights legislation “involuntary servitude” for whites, and subjected Thurgood Marshall to the equivalent of a literacy test during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings by quizzing him on arcane subjects as a means of embarrassment. Yet Thurmond coyly protested his innocence when racial violence ensued, as it did in his home state when a mob of white residents in Lamar attacked school buses carrying black children. As the Washington Post observed, Thurmond and his fellow travelers “have been playing with matches in public for some time now, and yet they want us to know immediately and for the record that if there is one thing they deplore it’s fire.”

Barry Goldwater lured Strom Thurmond to the Republican Party like a rancher sweet-talking a mustang. Aware that the party needed southern white voters in order to take back the presidency in 1964, Goldwater told South Carolina audiences that he wished there were more Thurmonds in Washington — this while Thurmond was still nominally a Democrat. Thurmond made the break in September 1964, dramatically declaring himself a “Goldwater Republican” and tirelessly campaigning for the Arizona senator. Goldwater and Thurmond found common cause in right-wing anticommunism — Goldwater too participated in the Senate muzzling hearings — and if their opposition to desegregation stemmed from different places (racism for Thurmond; libertarianism for Goldwater), the result was the same. Thurmond’s entrance into the party horrified moderate northern Republicans like George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller, and pushed the party’s platform to the right. At the time, Goldwater was unapologetic: he said he was merely “hunting where the ducks are.” Yet later he had second thoughts. He awkwardly declined to write a foreword for Thurmond’s 1968 book, The Faith We Have Not Kept, citing Thurmond’s enduring hostility to the Brown decision.

The party switch reflected the shifting allegiances of southern whites, but also revealed Thurmond’s expedient side. Facing the prospect of a Democratic primary challenge in 1966, Thurmond realized that years of infidelity to his party might finally cost him his Senate seat. And if he stayed Democratic and won, party leaders might punish him for supporting Goldwater by stripping him of his committee assignments. Despite his carefully cultivated image as the last southern man, all backbone and principle, Thurmond throughout his career sold out in spectacular moments of cravenness. His calculated decision to back Nixon over George Wallace in 1968 was another of those moments. Thurmond archly defended the move based on fidelity to his party. In truth, he figured Wallace for an also-ran from the beginning, and recognized that an alliance with Nixon meant real proximity to power. The existence and extent of an agreement or “understanding” between Thurmond and Nixon as the price of the former’s support is one of the enduring political narratives of the 1968 election.

Crespino is especially astute in discussing the way Thurmond’s overt racism fused with Nixon’s politics of white resentment to solidify the modern Republican coalition. Conservatives began dealing in dog whistles rather than water cannons. Crespino writes,

There were still millions of Americans who … felt queasy over hearing the issue of law and order so baldly put in Strom Thurmond’s southern accent. The old Dixiecrat seemed to be ventriloquizing ancient southern fear mongering about lawless black men. Yet the turmoil in American politics and in cities across the country over the past several years cast Thurmond in a strange new light. Amid such frustrations, a significant number of white Americans wound up empathizing with fears and resentments that Thurmond had been channeling for more than two decades.

In the 1970s and ’80s Thurmond nimbly repositioned himself yet again, uttering fewer racist statements and even voting to create the federal Martin Luther King holiday. “The humorless segregationist firebrand was slowly giving way to the quirky, age-defying senator in jogging shorts,” Crespino writes. Yet in the book’s most fascinating pages, Crespino reveals this harmless image to be yet another cynical pose. Aware of the changing times, Thurmond took steps to insulate himself against a black electorate that was not inclined to forget his comments about “the nigger race.” He grandly hired a black staff member and pushed the nomination of a black judge for the U.S. district court in South Carolina. He ostentatiously accompanied his daughter to her first day at an integrated public school — only to move her to a private school in Virginia once he was safely reelected in 1978. Crespino cites staff memos from Thurmond’s political advisers showing these moves to be nothing more than strategic efforts to suppress turnout among black voters. He was a Dixiecrat to the end.

Strom Thurmond’s America is a timely reminder of how easily bigotry can exploit and pervert electoral politics. Today’s intolerance — anti-Muslim invective, birther conspiracies, xenophobia — is not the same as Thurmond’s: overt racism is not nearly as prevalent. Some of the credit for this progress belongs to the many Republicans who have honorably worked to overcome their party’s legacy. Yet it is hard to deny that the voices of intolerance have gotten louder during the tenure of our first black president. Prominent Republicans openly use racial dog whistles and aggressively push policies like voter ID laws that disproportionately impede poor African Americans from voting. Thurmond’s taint, it would seem, is as thick as blood. It will take generations to wear off.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post A Malevolent Forrest Gump appeared first on Washington Monthly.