Hillary is Not Going to Save Us

I've had private conversations on this point before on whether Hillary would run again for President. I have always said she would not. After the disastrous midterm elections, people who had dismissed her in 2008 began asking if she would, perhaps finally understanding the penalties of having been so wrong before. Today, myiq2xu has a post on The Confluence citing two news articles where HRC says pretty firmly that she's done with public service after the Secretary of State gig. Nope, Hillary is not going to save us, even if we ask nicely.

Pandora's Box

So the NYT is saying that Hillary will be Secretary of State. I am, of course, intrigued and pleased by the prospect, but note that I won't believe it until the official announcement. Indeed, I won't actually believe it until the confirmation hearings are completed and she takes the oath of office.

What I expect to see for the next week is mass hysteria among the Whole Foods Nation crowd who won't accept that this can be a legitimate appointment. The CDS will get worse, not better. They will do everything in their power to try to derail the nomination.

I don't have time for a longer post this moment. If you have not been reading Bob Somerby this week, go there right now (he's linked in the sidebar) and read very carefully what he has to say about CDS. The opposition to HRC as Secretary of State is rooted in the green light Obama himself gave to using irrational hatred as an acceptable political tool against other Democrats. (And this is why BTD is wrong about the conduct of the campaign.) Somerby appears to be the only critical analyst around who understands the implications of this.

Obama opened Pandora's box, allowing the pestilence of right-wing CDS to set up shop in the heart of left politics.

Anglachel

The Politics of States

Some are dismayed by the long time it is taking for the SOS decision process to come to a conclusion. I'm actually pleased to see what looks like some serious thinking going on about what role the Secretary of State is going to play in the next administration. Alegre has a great post, Open Thread: More SoS Chatter, talking about some new developments in the Senate including the promise of a subcommittee chair on health insurance.

My own opinion about the choice before Hillary is simply that she has no wrong decision in front of her. Both paths before her, Senate or State Department, have great rewards and great disappointments in store. They are different ways for her to do what she has always done, which is serve the public interest to the greatest extent of her talents and stamina. We as a country will benefit from her dedication, though the people of New York would clearly lose an effective and indefatigable congress critter should she chose the State Department.

I hope a little more that she will go with the SOS position mostly because we know what she'll do in the other role and because we have not had such a presence in that office for so long.

The yowling from The Village that She will just set up a parallel power center if not an actual shadow government is not entirely wrong, though not for the reasons they propose. They are the ones who have forgotten that "L'État, c'est moi," is not the law of the land, and that people who identify themselves as the emobodiment of the state rather than as the prime servant thereof are the ones at odds with the nation. To do so is to reduce the nation to an extension of a particular will, something that has no right and, indeed, no desire to resist the impulses of the prince. It is the politics of a social clique, not of states.

This is my point of push-back on both the professional Hillary haters and (more gently and with a lot more sympathy) on the Hillary supporters who are suspicious of Obama's intentions. We need to think about this appointment (whether or not Hillary decides to fill it) in terms of serious politics and effective promotion of US interests in the world. We need to consider the representation of the state to other states.

The office could be filled as it has been since at least Eisenhower as a high technocratic position, a place for someone who has not been in electoral politics, is often from a think-tank or academia, or else comes out of a civil service background. You have to go back to George Marshall to find someone who coming into office is a political figure in their own right. Dulles and Kissenger became such figures as a result of being SOS. Even Marshall is not really a good comparison as his political claim was his prominent military role under FDR, where he basically ran WWII. But he accepted the SOS post from Truman while better known and better liked than his boss. He took it up as an opportunity to do world-historic things. You know, the Marshall Plan, that little thing? Since then, all others have come from less illustrious backgrounds. In the case of Colin Powell, the office diminished him. Putting a technocrat into the post would be the safest political bet for the Obama administration and would reinforce the tendency towards an imperial Presidency. The Very Serious People would approve.

So what can it mean that the most prominent, attention getting politician in the country might accept the SOS role? It would be a political bargain and risk. It would mean betting that someone as capable and with the immense national and international authority Hillary commands is a net gain for your administration. To use someone of that stature, as Truman did Marshall, is to go all in on the policy side, because the selection of that individual becomes the touchstone for your policy. The expectation in return is that her prominence and ability will be an asset, more to your advantage than any real or imagined loss of power.

When the talking heads start foaming at the mouth about Hillary forming a parallel sytem, they recognize that power is something that is created, not granted, and that it will accrue to those who know how to use the tools at hand. The state department and foreign service is the most self-concious political class in DC, with the possible exception of the Pentagon. It is the part of our government that is most like the civil service found in other states. It is a veritable mandarinate. Under Powell and Rice, this group has been mocked and sidelined by Cheney and his dirty tricks crew. What could this department do if given a leader who will expect their best across a wide range of issues and events instead of subordinating them to a single-minded pursuit of coersive power? How will other governments respond to Hillary as SOS, particularly given her investment in human rights?

Thus, my curiosity and excitement over the possibilities.

Anglachel

Sounding Serious - Updated

Update - And the Guardian says its a done deal. I'm not certain this is so as in the body of the article they don't present anyone on record definitively saying yes, the deal is signed. It reports little more than the NYT article does, but with less asshattery. The reason I'd be inclined to believe this report despite the lack of sources is the Sidney Blumenthal connection.

This NYT article says to me the consideration of Hillary for Secretary of State is serious.

The "worry" about Bill Clinton is such bullshit, of course. It is no more than fear of the Unity Democrats that they will be over shadowed by this person they irrationally hate. The media is only too happy to drool over the maybes and perhaps and some people say and what don't we know, what isn't he telling us rumor mongering. It is no less than the manufacture of scandal. Calling Bob Somerby...

However, I have to admit I'm not sure I'd be happy to have Henry Kissinger praising my abilities.

Ignoring the specious scandal-mongering of the last part of the article, what the report says is that the decision of acceptance is based on conditions being met. That's serious and negotiations can fall apart for politically legitimate reasons. HRC will request a significant degree of power and autonomy to accept the obligations and burdens of the office because that is how she does things. You can approve of this or not, but that is part of her character. Is what she requests reasonable? Whether reasonable or not, will it be acceptable? There are balance of power issues that are not just personality conflicts (the tedious crap The Village and Blogger Boyz roll in like dogs with a rotting carcass) but involve questions of authority and state interests that matter when dealing with other sovereign states.

Pulling on the poli sci cap, this is a fascinating and significant development for the incoming administration. It is a real test of leadership and how the executive branch will be run. Can this administration put the interests of the country first? We have had 8 years of one that would not. And before the Obamacan zombies start screaming how I am not giving The Precious a chance, this is a challenge that any incoming non-incumbent president must face. Traditionally, a new president focuses on domestic issues in a first term because those are the issues you campaign on and that is what matters most to the electorate. Screw it up and you lose power. Really screw it up and you lose office. See Carter, Jimmy and Bush, George H.W. In both of these cases, they had domestic and foreign policy challenges. One had a failed foreign policy while the other had a successful one. They both got chucked out of office (Carter more decisively than Bush) because of the crappy domestic conditions. Two-term presidents tend to focus on foreign affairs in the second term because the domestic policy battle lines are settled. It gives them some stature and gets them out of the daily mud-slinging.

Obama has been signaling that he really didn't care too much about domestic affairs, offering lack-luster domestic policy positions (except for environmental stuff - whomever is writing those papers is the sharpest person he has in the policy shop) and indicating that he wants to be leader of the free world. The collapse of the economy has brought those intentions to a screaming halt. This presidency cannot be conducted through symbol, gesture and a desire to be the good guy who frees the world of the Bush Doctrine. Domestic affairs will dominate, but foreign affairs are as pressing as ever.

Regardless of who ends up in the SOS seat, the administration is going to have to make some hard decisions about the autonomy of that office. Where is policy actually developed? Who are those actors? Will you have integration or oppositional relations by design (which is different than whether individuals like each other)? I agree with the article that the two most significant cabinet choices are SOS and Sec. Treas. How much will these two coordinate and communicate? To what degree will domestic policy and foreign policy need to work in tandem due to the global nature of the financial crisis? Also, what about the VP? We have been seeing a more activist role for this office since Carter. Where will Biden fit in the overall picture?

Putting the conduct of foreign policy into Hillary's hands could be an extremely bold choice that is in the best interests of the country, even if not in the short-term electoral interests of the individuals involved. With reference to a comment in my earlier post asking about Samantha Powers, the answer is simple - if HRC is the SOS, Powers will get on board and do her job to the best of her considerable abilities or she will leave. That says nothing about Powers individually. It's just how the system works. But that points towards the as-yet-unanswered question of where and how power will be balanced in the administration. A confident executive gets the best, puts them in place, defines the ground rules, and tells people to be smarter and better than the boss in their area of expertise. Do not underestimate the dangers of this power model. The wrong mix of "the best", poor ground rules, bad rule following, titanic ego battles, and people with a great deal of autonomy being flat-out wrong in their judgment will wreck it, just to name a few common problems. Actions to limit risks introduce their own risks of missed opportunities, insecurity about and second-guessing of area leaders, negotiation partners not trusting the authority of who they are dealing with (Can you really promise me X?), and a failure to succeed because of risk avoidance, etc. These are not qualities specific to the SOS appointment, but will accompany any of the cabinet positions and major advisory posts.

Oddly enough, this story has little to do with Hillary and everything to do with Obama.

It is time to commit to a course of action.

Anglachel

Against Conventional Wisdom

While I'm sitting around here in the heat watching California's annual Apocalypse unfold, I thought I'd blog about the current political Apocalypse, namely the possibility of Hillary becoming Secretary of State.

There is a wide consensus that She Must Not Do This.

The professional Clinton haters don't approve of anything that involves her taking part in public life, so they can be ignored. Whole Foods Nation doesn't want that woman anywhere near The Precious for fear she will sap his vital fluids or something else equally silly. A certain cadre on the left is absolutely convinced she will launch a preemptive war against Syria and the Palestinians, being nothing but the cat's paw of Israel. (They think this about, umm, everyone as far as I can tell, even Obama.) Certain others simply babble incessantly that she is a hawk, and we can't have a hawk, no, that would be bad, she is a hawk... , subsituting assertions for argument or even a few stray facts. A shockingly large number of this latter group were originally supporters of the Iraq invasion, once again demonstrating that this country is an irony-free zone.

On the pro-Hillary side, people are shouting for her to stay away, it is a trap! There are a number of arguments being advanced, the most cogent among them being that the offer itself is not sincere but is just an attempt to inflict public humiliation, that she will be tainted by association with a failed Obama presidency, that she will lose her independence and be forced to advance a policy she does not believe in, that this is just an attempt to get her out of elective office and prevent her from advancing her domestic agenda, and that to take this position basically ends her elective office career. I find each of these points plausible and reasonably compelling. There is also the argument put forward from both pro- and anti-Hillary writers that she is not the best person for the job.

I'm going to go against conventional wisdom here and argue that not only is Hillary Clinton among the handful of people eminently suited for this particular office under current international conditions, but also that this is a position that will allow her to advance her agenda powerfully and broadly, will provide her with mechanisms for affecting the long term trajectory of domestic affairs, and is simply the smartest choice for serving the interests of the country. While I don't trust The Precious further than I can kick him, the burdens of office and the consuming nature of current events will circumscribe what he can do. Mostly, when I apply the cold eye of political science to the situation and set aside the junior high school popularity contests so beloved of the chattering class, what I see are some very solid reasons to want this person in this role.

First, let me address some of the reasons why she should not accept the offer, should it be made. One of the more compelling arguments against her taking the position is that to do so would mean sacrificing her position in the Senate where she can shape policy. Realistically, her level of seniority is so junior that she cannot effectively lead actual legislation. Given the Senate committee rankings, HRC would end up carrying water for too many people for too many years before she could take power directly. The crude rebuff she received from Kennedy's staffers about holding a sub-committee chair told me a great deal about the tit-for-tat spite of the hierarchy, which is the heirarchy of entrenched staff jealous of their status as much as that of individual senators clinging to theirs. To answer a question others have asked on the blogs, you bet your bippy "they" will diss her and her 18 million supporters. OTOH, she has already set expectations for legislation that others are going to have to meet. My judgment is that the Senate is her fallback position if the Secretary of State position does not materialize under terms she is willing to accept.

Which leads to concerns about the validity of the offer. There has been too much skullduggery from the Obama camp to take anything at face value, so suspicion is warranted. The diss over the VP slot is the model for whether this is a "real" offer, and bringing Richardson in on the heels of HRC's meeting is a very big red flag.

I will reach back to my Tea Leaves post and note that the political landscape is not what it was in August because the financial crisis is remaking conditions on the fly. If the conditions were the same as when Bush took office, or even when Bill Clinton did so, I would give more credence to the "He's just going to screw her over," argument because the stakes for Obama would be low, but they are not and the knowledge that bad decisions now will doom his administration should act as a brake on his more vindictive impulses.

Obama has less than two years to provide some kind of measurable economic improvement to the majority of the population, or he will lose seats in the mid-term elections and probably will be turned out of office in 2012. The domestic agenda will be all consuming under these conditions. Whatever plans Obama and his hangers-on may have had for his fairy tale presidency were jettisoned in mid-September. If he does not get the domestic situation on the right track at once - and he will only have one chance - then he is toast. This puts constraints upon him that most observors are not taking into account.

Let's talk about the Secratary of State office itself. This is not a time of peace and quiet industriousness around the globe. American hegemony is in doubt. For Obama to "play politics" with the Secretary of State position weakens American standing with other nations because it says "You people aren't important enough for me to give you our best ambassador. Your interests and your actions are of less concern to me than settling some political scores." That will not go over well, especially after the Bush years. No matter who he selects in the end, that person has to embody the full strength and resilience of the nation to other national actors. I suspect this is why Kerry is not making the cut - he is too much the milquetoast nebbish. I add that if all Obama wants is a technocrat in that position, he should pick Richard Holbrooke.

The need to deal with the economy and the interrelated domestic policy issues means that Obama must make a decision about the conduct of foreign policy. Either he must put it into a holding pattern and trust that events will not get out of hand for over two years, or else he must place it in the hands of someone who can execute it without hesitation and without any doubt on the other side that this person can act in the stead of the administration. In addition, given that the financial crisis is international, you need someone who is thoroughly versed in economics and the impact of financial markets on domestic policy.

If the choice is Hillary, Obama has no choice but to invest her with that authority or undermine the very reasons to have selected her in the first place. You cannot pick this person and not have her bear the full authority of the administration because to do so is to endanger national interests. It will make Obama himself appear weak, second guessing his picks for the office. When you select HRC, you are not picking some career bureaucrat - her selection must take cognizance of who she is in an international context.

A rock star. Someone known and respected around the world. Someone who understands better than Obama himself the implications of international actions by the president, having been the implicitly trusted mediator between a president and other international actors before. Someone who has no need to establish any credentials with the people she will meet.

So now lets look at Hillary in the context of the office. She is already an international advocate for women's rights. She defends human rights. She fights for working people, especially women. She is on a first name basis with many heads of state asnd is loved by general populations. She understands economics, trade, diplomacy, and war. Unfailingly civil and dignified, she cannot be bullied or intimidated. She will be a team player by being an unflappable leader, demonstrating by example how to do the job right. This is someone who has political vision and believes in the ability and obligation of her nation to do the right thing. And, yes, she is a hawk which pleases me a great deal when the loosest cannon around is Vladimir Putin. Touchy-feely only goes so far with sociopathic dictators. Beijing already knows they cannot push her around. She has standing in Africa.

But there are a few conditions under which it makes no sense for her to accept. The four most powerful positions in the cabinet are Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury and National Security Advisor. Gates will be Sec. Def. for the time being. In the past, the SOS and the NSA have engaged in power struggles that have worked to the detriment of foreign policy. If Obama has the sense to put HRC in as SOS, he may suffere a failure of nerve and decide to divide powers by putting an opponent in the NSA slot to "counter balance" her influence, and we would end up with political infighting. Unless that position is filled by someone who would work with the SOS and not be a pawn in some passive-agressive game, it would be foolish for Hillary to leave the Senate. It would need to be someone like Wes Clark or Richard Clarke. Likewise, if the Sec. Tres. is filled by some tired Wall Street insider hack, there will not be a partner to work with on economic concerns. (I myself would love to see Stiglitz. He's run the World Bank, he won't be bullied, and Wall Street has no attractions for him.)

As mentioned above, that Obama would have HRC and Bill Richardson as finalists for this office does not make me hopeful that he really gets what he needs to do. They are not comparable political actors. Richardson would be suited to a holding pattern foreign policy, for example, and that makes me doubt Obama's confidence in both the policy and the person he would put in place. Holbrooke would be a stronger choice if that is the case and would smack less of political favors. Nunn, Powell, Hagel and Kerry are simply inadequate for the challenge. The only other person comparable to Hillary for this position, frankly, is Bill, and I'm not sure Bill's ego could be contained at Foggy Bottom.

So, that is my argument against conventional wisdom. Much of it is driven by a realistic assessment of just how bad the next four years are going to be no matter what the new adminsitration does or does not do, and a desire to see the best possible outcome by using the best possible people. I do not think my personal wish for the political future can become reality, and the conditions under which that could happen are grim to imagine.

Anglachel

A Precious Victory

So I'm getting bitched out plenty in the comments and through email about how I never say a nice word about Obama and I"m soooo bitter and can't I get over it and why won't I say things that validates the writer's political choices, yadda, yadda, Ginger.

Sure, here ya go.

I want Obama to go to Georgia and campaign his heart out for a single day, just one day, so we can put another great Democrat into the Senate and remove Saxby Chambliss from office. You want to know why? Because it is going to take his star power to get out enough votes to make the difference in this runoff election. I don't think Hillary alone can do it. It's going to take both of them to do this. I want the Democrats to take back Max Cleland's seat. I want Democrats to put another person on their side fo the aisle in the Senate chamber.

And I swear, as sure as God made little green apples, that I want our African-American President-Elect to walk down in to heart of the Old South, take the stage, and show the hateful, authoritarian, revanchist bastards who have divided this nation since the moment of its founding that their days are numbered by being the factor that turns this "sure bet" election for Chambliss into a rout for Martin.

I mean, c'mon, how can this team lose?

Anglachel

Dignity

The last few days of political news has a familiar ring. From the Villagers outraged at the mere idea of former Clinton administration staff are part of the transition team, to the haughty rejection of Hillary as the leader on health care reform, to the rumors of HRC being considered for Secretary of State, to anti-Hillary sentiment among former Hillary supporters, to confused responses to whether Joe Lieberman should go because he's in bed with the Clintons (ewww, sorry, here's some bleach for your brain to scrub away that image) to whether he should stay because it is brilliant strategy by The Precious, and so forth, what we see is that for all the swooning over Obama, the center of the political universe is still Hillary Clinton.

The Unity Democrats and the newly amenable Village can't figure out what to do about this obstreperous woman. There she goes again, making statements and writing letters without asking permission or waiting for a signal. She won't quit. She is impervious to their childish maneuvers and rude behavior. Every expression of hatred, every act of frustration elicits a bigger smile and greater determination. How can she keep doing this when all the Very Serious People are telling her she is a political dead letter?

Easy. She has won the hearts of millions and has pledged herself to their defense. It is her driving passion. As Time magazine stated, "Clinton returns to Congress as a champion of women and the working class."

Every successful public figure is motivated by a passion for distinction. Call it ambition. It is a political virtue because it drives the actor to accomplish more even when there are no obvious rewards. It is not always a constructive distinction the person seeks, but our best leaders will be more good than bad. They wish to distinguish themselves in admirable ways. Hillary has chosen to distinguish herself by recognizing and honoring the dignity of the people she encounters, giving them the respect that they may not deign to offer her in return. By never failing to respect the dignity of those she met, Hillary maintained her own. There is nothing she has done over this long and dismaying campaign that she needs to be ashamed of, which none of her rivals can say for themselves. Instead, she has shamed them with her persistent, unshakeable dignity. Nothing they did could reduce her to their level.

You cannot intimidate someone who doesn't want what you have to offer or who will not be dismayed over territorial displays and backroom intrigues. Every vindictive claim that has been offered up by right, left and the media about what Hillary will/won't do/say (She'll sabotage! She'll kill him! She won't campaign! She'll backstab! She'll destroy rather than let someone else have it!) have all been exposed for the empty lies they are. Instead, we have been privileged to witness a very rare political phenomenon.

She has offered up herself, her time and her integrity, for the sake of others as they needed her help and even when they did little or nothing to deserve it. Her tireless campaigning on behalf of the party and ideology she believes in is unprecedented in the modern history of the party. Compare her hundreds of campaign appearances since the convention and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in PAC money for other candidates to Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, or Teddy Kennedy in their defeats. Hillary is exactly what she appears to be: a left of center moderate who is completely dedicated to improving the lives of her constituents and people throughout the nation on immediate pocketbook matters - living wages, health care, secure housing and personal dignity.

The distinction between Hillary and the other political actors of this season is that she treats everyone with diginity, even her opponents. Her criticisms are based in policy and practical politics, no matter how The Village mendaciously misconstrued her words. You do not hear her talking down to anyone. She never disparaged any voter who chose another candidate, never told anyone they were not needed, never mocked or ridiculed someone who wasn't part of her tribe.

I would say that her demeanor is true bipartisanship, by the way. She does not talk about Bunkers and Bubbas, demonizing classes of people, but speaks directly to political policies that do not serve us well. It becomes possible, and less daunting, to change political allegiance because it is not you who is under attack or even your beliefs, but support for a particular policy that has failed you. She didn't judge the voters, she judged the politics. This is why voters who were at the margins and who feel endangered were drawn to this leader. She talks in the language of interests and needs, not motivations and morality.

The authoritarians of the left do not like this. As with their conservative counterparts, they are intensely moralistic and judgemental (clinging to God and guns, the white party, bitter knitters, etc.), wanting to divide the political world into the saved and the damned. The need to punish enemies is part of the definition of success. They seek to discipline the souls that make up the body politic, demanding that we love Big Brother and not simply pick a government. You don't want to treat people with dignity in such a case, you want them to look upon you with awe.

I fully expect that Hillary will do things and support measures I do not like, which only goes to show that she is not me and that I should not confuse my will with the good of the nation. I trust her to be consistent and steadfast in her defense of human dignity, which is the human face of human rights. If you cannot see an opponent as a being to be treated with dignity (even as you vote them out of office), then what is to say you will be able to see anyone in such a light? This may not be Joan Didion's unexpressable uneasiness, but it is a great deal of my own.

So, a year on, this is why my respect for the lady in the pantsuit has increased. I expect the trend to continue.

Anglachel

Hillary on New Stimulus Boost

Hillary has sent a letter to Bush, Harry Reid, Robert Byrd and Daniel Inouye pushing them to act now and start new stimulus spending for Main Street and not sit on their butts for almost three months until the Golden Calf is installed at the White House for us all to worship. She prioritizes New York's stimulus needs, as is to be expected, but the letter is more general. She does her usual job of combining hard facts, common sense and political zingers for an enlightening read. A few highlights:

We are in a recession which demands decisive action. I believe that in order to stimulate this economy, we need to get people working, earning, and building – not just spending. We have borrowed hundreds of billions that have gone to banks and financial institutions and borrowed tens of billions more to energize the economy, yet the economic downturn has continued and the financial turmoil has worsened. What is clear is that any action we take – especially as we borrow more money to do so – must pay off in the near and long term. That is what America does best: we can address this crisis while preparing for our future.

However, we do have immediate needs that cannot wait between now and when the next Congress and the next President takes office. And although your Administration has voiced skepticism about the need for a stimulus bill, I believe that the current conditions call for a coordinated response now.

Good little zing about the Wall Street give away, though she's not too sharp as New York is a financial capital, and a delicious slap to Bush with"not just spending" as a solution to sustantail financial problems. zHer next paragraph, though clearly taking Bush to task, strikes me as aimed more at the current Senate leadership than at the lame duck in the White House. No, you can't just sit on your hands until after the Inauguration. You need to set expectations now and get the ball rolling.

Hillary then goes on and identifies specific programs - Unemployment Insurance, SNAP, Medicaid - that will immediately help her constituents who are facing jobs losses. She goes into some detail about Medicaid:

In the midst of one of the greatest fiscal crises to hit our states, an increase in the Medicaid FMAP rate would help prevent further and deeper cuts to health care and other essential services like education, child care and public safety. Rising demand for health insurance coverage through Medicaid due to increasing job loss is straining state budgets, and the federal government should act to help ease this growing burden on our states.

This is something that the Spousal Unit is very keen on, the Feds supplying the money for social service programs to ensure that the states to not rob Peter to pay Paul, or steal the kids' lunches to pay for their vaccinations. One of the biggest dangers of a protracted economic downturn is that states cut services to the weakest and must vulnerable parts of the population. A city park may endure a lawn brown from lack of water, but a child will not survive a winter with no food and no heat. Her mention of this is also an implicit criticism of the decision to deny her a formal leadership role in the crafting of health care policy and initiatives.

She goes on to discuss infrastructure investment, noting that this long term improvement "serves the dual purpose of modernizing our country’s deteriorating roads, bridges, and transit systems while stimulating the economy," and thus provides tangible benefit to the public, unlike throwing money at Wall Street, especially when the funds are disbursed without provisions for accountability. Hillary returns to a topic she has discussed for months, the mortgage crisis, and warns that there is more bad news waiting for us, but that we have the power to proactively address the problem:

The next wave of foreclosures looms, and we should address it immediately. It is critical that we modify unworkable mortgages into clear and stable terms if we are to prevent the bottom of the housing market from falling even further. I have proposed HOME, the Home Owners Mortgage Enterprise, based on the successful program enacted during the New Deal which not only saved one million homes but also turned a profit for the Treasury. We should continue focusing on initiatives large and bold enough to meet the scale of the challenges presented by the faltering housing market.

As I've said before, home prices have to come down in alignment with wages, so I disagree with Hillary about the bottom of the housing market falling even further. That must happen. I think she knows it (mostly because she's waaaay smarter than me) which is why she so consistently pushes the HOME program, which would purchase mortgages at cut rates from the toxic pool, rework them when possible by reducing principal and adjusting rates, and end up providing a controlled devaluation of the house market.

This stands in juxtaposition to the announcement just today from Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (h/t, Calculated Risk, FHFA Modification Program Details), where they do not wish to reduce outstanding principal in order to make a loan be affordable (no more than 38% of gross income). The press release is contradictory in that the first answer in the Q&A section states "It may include a change to the product (an ARM to a fixed rate mortgage), interest rate, amortization term and maturity date, and/or unpaid principal balance," which would seem to indicate that reducing principal is an option, but the answer to the question about benchmark ratios does not include changes to an unpaid principal balance among its options, "Once the affordable payment is determined, there are several steps the servicer can take to create that payment – extending the term, reducing the interest rate, and forbearing interest." The key here is that a HOLC/HOME style program can easily perform this action because of taking the mortgage back from investors (who eat the loss, which is the downside of risk) and issuing a sustainable rather than a profitable loan.

In the midst of the general celebration and self-congratulation over the elections, Hillary reminds the power brokers and the pundits that ordinary people are hurting and delays are unacceptable. My own Congress Critters are heading in the right direction, but have said nothing since before the election on these matters. Sen. Feinstein did find time to issue a press release on the theme for the Inauguration, bless her heart.

Hillary's overall message is Think Big, which is just what the good professors Krugman, Roubini and Galbraith all advocate when addressing the financial meltdown, and to do it now.

There's some change I can believe in.

Anglachel

PS - I found that I kept writing "reduced principle" instead of "reduced principal" when discussing the GRE press release. I am fully confident that the Bush Treasury can reduce their principles without limit.

Personal and Political

Echidne is a goddess, but you all knew that already, didn't you?

My own recent posts on women, violence and proximity were inspired by Echidne's series on why she is a feminist. If you have not yet read all of them, here are the links:

1. The Right to Go Out
2. Planet of the Guys
3. Our Father Who Art in Heaven
4. The Invisible Women
5. The Female Body As Property

She has completed that series with her current, magnificent post, The Longest Revolution, in which she addresses proximity. She makes this key point (my emphasis):

That women are so integrated on that most primal of levels probably explains why sexism is harder to see than other -isms which oppress people. If women are killed because of their sex it mostly doesn't happen in large public slaughterings but privately, one woman at a time, and in each case we wonder if the cause for the killing might not have been something personal, something unrelated to the gender of the victim. And note that while most racists don't have parents of the race they now hate, all misogynists do. -- It's all too close, too intimate, too hard to see because we lack the necessary distance, the necessary ability to see the possibly oppressed as a separate group.

This is crucial for understanding how misogyny can be simultaneously invisible to most people and yet part of the daily routine for millions of men and women. It's the core of what I am trying to get at when I talk about it being privatised and excused. I'm not a rapist, my girlfriend was just playing hard to get. I'm not a wife beater, she was bitching me out and wouldn't shut up. I'm not committing incest, I'm helping her explore her sexuality. I didn't do anything to her, she was asking for it.

When we do come across situations of women being slaughtered in significant numbers, or executed one at a time, or aborted in numbers large enough to skew sex ratios, or perhaps just kept in gulags of prostitution cut off from any source of protection and offered for rent in a booming sex market, we see the violence as the product of a killer with mental problems, or of an exotic society's bizarre customs, or where the women are participants in crime, instead of understanding women as a class systematically subjected to harm in a way that is unique to them and is due to being female.

Every day women must test the proposition that the men we know aren't a danger to us by putting ourselves in harm's way and seeing whether our trust is justified. In most cases, it is, and this is a good thing. In many cases, it is not and too often those violations occur with men whom we have trusted in the past, like a classmate, an intimate partner, a relative, a co-worker, an authority figure, people on whom our well-being depends.

So, I keep returning to the question, who are you? It doesn't matter what you say online or if you say anything at all. It's just words here. What matters is how you answer that question with your actions. I want you to think what you are doing. I cannot do this thinking for you, nor can I act in your stead. Mandos said "By deduction, what Anglachel must want is for men to help end the privatization of misogyny and rape. What form this is supposed to take is what eludes me." It eludes me as well, not because I can't come up with a nice, thorough, egalitarian to-do list of acts and attitudes I would dearly love to see made flesh in this world, but because you (both Mandos and the generic "you" reading these words) must inhabit a form of life that rejects misogyny and you must do this in the same manner in which you currently inhabit one that embraces misogyny; it can't be done by checking off a list of tasks.

It means reconstructing the world we have in common.

Hillary was talking about this thirteen years ago:

These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. But the voices of this conference and of the women at Huairou must be heard loudly and clearly:

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.

It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the
slavery of prostitution.

It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.

It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.

It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.

It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely -- and the right to be heard.

Tell yourself what you are doing to create a form of life where these things do not occur. That will say who you are.

Anglachel

Hillary on Healthcare

Statement of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Report Finding Health Care Premiums in New York Rising Much Faster than Earnings

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made the following statement after the release of a new report by the consumer health organization Families USA comparing increases in health care premiums and earnings in New York.

“The findings of this new report underscore the urgent need to reform our health care system. Over the eight years of the Bush Administration, New Yorkers have seen their health insurance premiums rise more than seven times as fast as their earnings. Across our country premiums are outstripping earnings, but New York has been particularly hard hit, with premiums rising more than 80 percent while earnings only increased by 11 percent. Workers in New York, especially employees of small businesses, are facing higher deductibles and receiving fewer benefits. In short, New Yorkers are paying more for less. Health care costs are consuming a larger and larger portion of family budgets at a time when so many New Yorkers are struggling to put food on the table and put gas in their tanks and the credit crisis threatens our entire economy. And even as health care costs have soared, so have the ranks of the uninsured. More than 2.5 million New Yorkers under age 65, about 15.4 percent, are now without health insurance. These are not just statistics. These are real people facing real and mounting challenges. It is now clearer than ever that we urgently need major reforms to reduce health care costs and ensure quality, affordable care for every single American. We cannot afford to continue down the path of the last eight years. I will continue fighting for this goal until we have the health care system that Americans deserve.”

On my agenda: universal health care, privacy rights, reversing declining incomes for middle income and lower wage earners, and battling misogyny.

Anglachel

Happy Birthday!

Falstaff on Events

Falstaff has two excellent posts up today:

• Op-edification - A thoughtful and open-eyed view of what changed the political race. It wasn't positions. It wasn't even personality. It was the implosion of Wall Street. There was no change in the campaigns from early September to now. McCain and Obama say the same stupid, irrelevant, substance-free things that have been babbling since June.
  
• The Luck Child Theory of History - This is a painful post to read. What could someone with plans, goals, and vision do when presented with this political challenge? We'll never know. We have The Precious. The One Ring never really did anything of its own accord, either, save perhaps slip from a few fingers at inopportune times, but it certainly inspired people across two ages to alter the course of events. Falstaff hits it on the head when he says:

  "So I’m now hoping Obama serves as the stone soup for the collective, wisdom-of-crowds birthing of a new era. I don’t think he has the capacity to imagine it or deliver it himself. I don’t believe he has greatness in him, just waiting to be catalyzed by this crisis. In fact, I think he’s got certain aspects of narcissistic personality disorder, and that that cripples him as a decision-maker and even, long-term, as an inspirer."

  That's a pretty weak reed to support social transformation, but it's what the power brokers and self-appointed guardians of public appearance have decided they want.

Talking to the spousal unit on the way to the garden center today, we discussed the coming bowl of left-over oatmeal that will be the Obama administration. Policy will not be driven from the administration because they are all about emulating Reagan's publicity machine, being cool and popular, not about delivering the goods. They'll genuflectat the altar of High Broderism and try to be on the good side the the Very Serious People.

The engine for change will not be the White House, but the Senate and to a lesser degree the House, and will depend on what gets sent up Pennsylvania Avenue for The Precious to sign.

I know where I'm placing my bets.

Anglachel

Democratic Women up for Election

Courtesy of Hillary, information and contribution links to Democratic women up for election:

Three Senate Challengers:

In North Carolina, Kay Hagan is running a great race and some polls even show her ahead. Kay will invest in helping families stay in their homes, reducing foreclosures, and finding innovative new ways to stabilize neighborhoods. She will seek public-private partnerships to renovate neighborhoods and turn foreclosed properties into affordable rental or ownership units.

Mary Landrieu has been working her heart out for the people of Louisiana, still focused on Katrina recovery three years later while her opponents are doing everything they can to knock her out of her Senate seat. Senator Landrieu is spearheading efforts to rewrite federal disaster laws, which are unsuited to deal with larger disasters like Hurricane Katrina and largely ignore communities that host disaster evacuees.

And Jeanne Shaheen is criss-crossing the battleground state of New Hampshire, working hard in a race that is one of our top pick-up opportunities. Jeanne and I both have a long record of advocating for expanding children's healthcare. While Governor, Jeanne launched the New Hampshire's Children's Health Insurance Program, which has provided affordable health insurance to tens of thousands of New Hampshire children.

Anglachel - I'd really love for Jeanne Shaheen to pick up John Sununu's old seat.

Running for Office for the First Time:

In Colorado, Betsy Markey is running against Marilyn Musgrave, one of the most conservative, anti-choice Republicans in Congress. She's facing a million-dollar attack plan from a GOP desperate to hold on to this seat.

In Pennsylvania, local businesswoman Kathy Dahlkemper has taken the lead in a race that many thought Democrats couldn't win. Her opponent, Republican Phil English, has held his seat since 1994.

Shelly Moore-Capito is the only Republican in West Virginia's Congressional delegation, and Anne Barth, who has worked for years with my Senate colleague and friend Robert Byrd, has the chance to make West Virginia a totally Democratic state.

Anglachel - Some new faces in the House would be a good idea, especially if we can replace wingnut Marilyn Musgrave with Betsy Markey.

Wes Clark is supporting women Democrats, too. He's one man who isn't afraid to promote women in the military or in politics.

3 Fighting Women

Gabrielle Giffords
Gabrielle Giffords is a first term Congresswoman running for re-election in Arizona's 8th Congressional District. Gabrielle's business experience has made her an effective leader, successfully pushing 7 bills and amendments into law while introducing over 20 pieces of legislation in the House. Her priorities include expanding health care for American families and promoting alternative energy research and development.

Gabrielle's a rising star in our Party, and we must keep her seat in Congress. But her race is one of the most competitive in the country, and she needs our help. The right-wing is pouring in national resources in an attempt to take back this seat. In fact, George W. Bush visited Arizona to campaign for her opponent earlier this summer, raising half a million dollars. Help Gabrielle fight back against the likes of George W. Bush.

Dina Titus
Dina has worked tirelessly on behalf of Nevada's most vulnerable citizens by promoting legislation that allows seniors and other Nevadans to purchase less expensive prescription drugs from Canada, mandates tougher penalties for criminals who commit identity theft, and increases penalties for offenders who perpetrate crimes against the disabled.

Her opponent, Jon Porter, has spent the last six years fighting for the Washington special interests. That's why he doesn't want to run on the issues and is up with the first negative ad in the race. I am asking you to join me and help Dina fight back.

Judy Baker
Judy Baker is running in Missouri's 9th Congressional District. It's a tough district with a partisan voting index of R+7, but her first poll shows her two points ahead of her opponent. This is exactly the kind of race the WesPAC community has made our specialty. We don't back down from the tough fights, and this is one of them.

Judy's experience saving rural health clinics and operating her own small business has made her a strong leader in the state legislature, where she has advocated for education and health care access. She stood up to the Republican governor's plan to cut 200,000 children and seniors off of Medicaid and voted to cut her own benefits instead.

The polls show Judy within striking distance of Republican Blaine Luetkemeyer. We need to help her make up the difference. Please contribute to Judy's campaign today!

Anglachel - Dina and Judy are two-fers. Electing them puts in a Democratic woman and takes out a Republican man. Not a bad exchange rate.

Put Democratic women into power at every possible opportunity.

Anglachel

The Lady Killers

I delayed a few days in writing this as I didn't want to rain on Paul Krugman's Nobel parade, an award he richly deserves, but even he says it's time to move on from that.

I was disgusted by Krugman's blog post on October 10, Not about the Financial Crisis, but not for the reasons most people had. Most writers focused on the comments about the right-wing hatred towards Obama and how afraid Krugman felt seeing this hatred. Part of me is just tired of the "They're all out to kill me!" story line Obama has been pushing since last year. News flash, Precious: Anyone who runs for or occupies the office of President becomes a potential assassination target. Ask George Wallace. Ask Gerry Ford. Why was Krugman so shocked, shocked, at the sight of angry right-wingers chanting violent threats? Political violence in this country is overwhelmingly from the Right, with a few notorious examples on the Left. It is often mixed with racism and always linked to authoritarian personalities who believe that they have some cause or mission that justifies their use of violence to achieve their ends. This is what ties William Ayers to Timothy McVeigh, and why ethical people shun Ayers to this day. He ordered the murder of people for ideological reasons and has never repented of his acts. It is to the credit of the Left that we don't have many like this. But what bothered me most about Krugman's post was not what he said, but what he left out.

He said:

We've seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons - they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn't just show up in fringe publications - it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

The problem, Paul, is that the Left has been doing the exact same thing to the Clintons and Clinton Democrats for the last eight years. The Incomparable Bob Somerby gently takes Krugman to task, as he does all self-styled progressives who avert their eyes to the sins of the SCLM (my emphasis):

THE DECLINE OF THE REST: Paul Krugman has long been our favorite top-level columnist-the one who almost always says something accurate and/or relevant. And of course, Krugman is the only high-end columnist who would have typed what follows. As we noted yesterday, this material appeared last Friday, on his New York Times blog: [quoting same paragraph as I did above]

There are shortcomings to that paragraph-which appeared as part of a short post on a larger subject. In our view, it's always a mistake when liberals fail to mention an obvious fact-the fact that the insanity of the attacks on the Clintons was quickly transformed, in March 1999, into the insanity of the attacks on Candidate Gore. And that twenty-month Group Insanity "didn't just show up in" conservative editorial pages, like that of the Wall Street Journal; it was heavily driven by famous "liberals" on the op-ed page Krugman shares. We especially think of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, who were still driving the most inane critiques of Gore even after his first debate with Bush. But the sheer insanity of the 1990s was widely purchased, all around. Even "liberals" signed up for the Clinton-hatred, then agreed to extend it to Gore.

None of these giants has ever explained why this insanity happened.

As Krugman put it, this history-changing episode has been "written out of the mainstream history of politics." Most career liberals still won't discuss it. For that reason, most voters have never heard that it even occurred.

Among top-end pundits, only Krugman will ever discuss this insanity.

Somerby's point, expressed mildly towards Krugman in recognition of the work Krugman has done to call out the idiocy, is that it is not just the Right that launched broadsides against some of the most talented and capable leaders we currently have, but the Left was fully involved in it, too. This election season, all of the worst attacks on the Clintons have been from the Left, right down to repeating the lies about murdering a personal friend, about their aberrant sexuality, about their criminal business dealings, about their insatiable lust for power. Cover the names and you couldn't tell Scaife from Josh Marshall.

What the two best critical voices on the Left have also left out in these criticisms, particularly glaring in Krugman's post given his focus on violence and assassination, is that this election season has not been marked by racism, but by misogyny of a very violent kind, and that this violence has come overwhelmingly from the Left. I don't think this is because the Left is inherently more misogynistic than the Right, but see it as a sign that expressing hatred of and desires to inflict violence upon women is as acceptable across the political spectrum as racism was in the first half of the 20^th Century. While Krugman was consistently critical of Obama and the more general lies his campaign promoted about Hillary Clinton throughout the primaries, he has a single blog post after the primaries were over scolding a general audience (Sexism? Who, us? )about the presence of "raw sexism" as one of a number of factors that made for a bad primary, but immediately walked back his criticism by saying "So this is no time for a protest vote."

And why not?

While he has a public freak out over some typical wing-nuts yelling violent threats, Krugman did not say a single word at the time (nor anything since) about Keith Olbermann's very public exhortation on national TV for some Democratic delegate to kill Hillary because she was politically inconvenient. As I said then:

...However, certainly within the liberal blogosphere and the MSM (I do not venture into the wingnut fever swamps), there is no drumbeat for violence against Obama.

This is not the case with Hillary. I have myself read comments advocating rape and murder. I have read main posts saying she was inciting violent acts against her, or saying they could "understand" the position of those who wished violent harm to befall her, her husband and her daughter. The descriptions of what Obama should do to Hillary verge on the pornographic. Not a day goes by that some prominent voice on the left or in the MSM does not demand her submission, subordination and public humiliation.

And now a major MSM celebrity and talking head, not some anonymous commenter on some obscure blog, has openly and unapologetically advocated that Hillary Clinton be marched into a dark room and murdered.

Think that is too far? A real stretch? Just a tad bit hysterical? Replace Hillary Clinton with Barack Obama in that formulation and you tell me what that means. If someone said this about Barack Obama, it would mean that this man be lynched to remove him from a path to power. Period. Full stop. No equivocations. It would be understood as nothing less than a call for the man's murder, and there would be an outcry from EVERY Democrat, even those of us who do not much care for Obama as a candidate, condemning those words, because that is what we are called upon to do when confronted with evil.

And, when those kinds of threats were made towards Obama, they were instantly and vehemently denounced and not just by Democrats. It was called for what it was, on the spot, and McCain was rightly held responsible for tacitly condoning the threats. The Right needs to be called out and condemned for its reliance on threats and acts of violence to advance its political goals. It is the party of Timothy McVeigh, of clinic bombers, of Abu Ghraib.

But the Democrats and the self-proclaimed progressive blogosphere have shown themselves to be more than willing parties to misogyny and violence against women. Along with Olbermann's homicidal fury, there were the widespread comments after the Kentucky Derby that the euthanized filly was a good example for what should be done to Hillary. The language and imagery I mentioned when writing about Olbermann resurfaces every time there is a breath of a rumor that somehow Hillary isn't campaigning hard enough for Obama. How she is going to pay if he loses, because... well, because she is there and women are the usual targets of violence when men feel disempowered, disrespected, disappointed that they didn't get what was owed to them. The deep irony of the Obama campaign's self indulgent "She wants us dead!" yowling over the RFK reference is that the parallel was between Hillary and RFK - trailing in the delegate count but persisting to the end despite threats and danger. She was the person in RFK's shoes and the one at risk of murder, not Obama, especially given the constant agitation against her at every level of the media.

I started to write up a post about misogyny and this election cycle and found I have been writing about it since November 4, 2007, almost an entire year. I doubt I will be finished after November 5^th, 2008. This campaign has been defined by false claims of racism and the brutal enactment of misogyny. The assaults on women as women show us that using misogyny to intimidate and eradicate female participants (voters as well as candidates) is excusable in a way that racist assaults are not. Racist attacks have to be dog whistled because they cannot be made openly without immediate backlash and condemnation by people in power and major opinion makers. Allan's "macaca" moment is an example of this, and I think the McCain campaign rally tapes will be another. Public imagery of Obama that has any racist overtones (such as the New Yorker cover, which I do believe was intended as satire) is greeted with anger and derision. There are words you just can't say in connection with Obama without having hot coals heaped on your head.

This is a good thing.

It is how our society should respond to attacks upon anyone for what they are. It is how any true progressive will respond, regardless of how the larger society behaves. But this outrage does not extend to women. Language and imagery denigrating women as women (bitch, shrew, whore, cunt, slut) are available on most of the well-trafficked locations of Left Blogistan, in the spring referring to Hillary, this fall referring to Sarah Palin. Cannonfire presents a few ugly examples of just how unfiltered the hatred has become, and is probably not safe for most workplaces.

The people at McCain's rally were indefensible, and we did not see any mainstream, reputable new reporter of public figure saying that he could "understand" why people would want to murder Obama, or even something less than that level of violence. We saw and heard exactly that kind of excuse summoned to dismiss threats and smears against Hillary and we are in a rerun of even worse with Gov. Palin. Violence and maltreatment of women has as long and, yes, as violent a history in this country as racism. Neither women nor minorities have been treated all that well, and both have placed their hopes in the Democratic Party to right past wrongs and prevent more in the future. This election cycle, whether the mainstream media will acknowledge it or not, whether the A-List blogs will cop to their gleeful gang bang of women they love to hate, has been a very public repudiation of one groups' hopes.

That female identification with Hillary and later Palin has been dismissed as either irrational (vagina voting) or actually a sign of secret racism exposes the ease with which misogyny is mobilized to try to belittle, badger, and dominate. Its very ubiquity makes it unremarkable and difficult to problematize. Our arguments and explanations on how we perceive our interests to be best served are trivialized as the whines of "bitter knitters" instead of serious challenges by engaged citizens. Insisting that we be heard garners a mix of aggressive bluster and wide-eyed faux-innocence.

Misogyny deniers try to focus on just a few figures, and explain away broad actions as being reasonable responses to these despicable, polarizing broads. No, no, it's not that we are kicking women down; it's that Hillary's a cold bitch! We'd like someone else. But not Ferraro, that racist, shriveled up old hag. And Chelsea is really just letting herself get pimped out. Then we defend teenage sexuality, except for that wanton slut, Bristol Palin, and her bigger slut, the mother I'd like to fuck (MILF), Sarah. But then how to explain the fury expressed at women who do not support Obama? It's any woman who does not toe the line, not just the politicians.

Too many doing this, male and female alike, will not accept that the modes of attack "work" because they rely on a background of bigotry and denigration that attaches itself to all female bodies. They can laugh at images of a fist smashing into Palin's face until her bones are broken and her teeth are knocked out because that is an excusable, if not precisely acceptable, way to treat women in this culture. I think of the photos of the faces of battered women in Annie Liebovitz's photo essay book, Women, and wonder what they would think of that imagery. The shirt "Bros before Hos" with Obama and Hillary's faces on it was a giggle fest for most of the left wing blogs ( at worst a "tsk, tsk, that's childish" objection) but "works" because women are whores and we brothers have to stick together against those greedy bitches. We all know women are just out to bleed you dry, just like your ex-wife did. The current pop hit "Whatever You Like" is little more than a sugar-coated version of a man asking to buy access to a woman's body, but the bro/ho relationship is clear.

Would there have been similar amusement on the Left if McCain supporters promoted shirts with a racial slur, such as "Homeland before Homeboys," or "Stop the buck here"? When someone proposed a PAC called "C.U.N.T" with an image of a star-spangled female crotch, it was seen as tacky at worst and usually as uproariously funny. What if there had been a PAC called "No Indulgence, Genuine Gains, Equal Rewards," with an image of a blackface minstrel in an Uncle Sam costume, or other patriotic emblems on a disembodied rapper (capped teeth, baggy pants, set of heavy chains and medallions, etc.), wouldn't that have been some good natured ribbing? You know, don't take it so seriously or personally. What about PACs called S.P.I.C., W.O.P., K.I.K.E., B.E.A.N.E.R, etc.? All in tacky fun, hey?

Calling Hillary a cunt or Sarah Plain a slut only work because of the misogynistic backdrop in which we understand that these are qualities of being female, and where they are used to shame, humiliate, intimidate and justify violence against the women so named, exactly as racial epithets are used to do the same on reviled minorities. These kinds of racial epithets and imagery were acceptable, even respectable, in popular culture. Alex Guinness' great movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, released in 1950, shocked me when I saw it in the 70s. Watch the movie trailer for the particular scene. Some versions have been dubbed to remove the offending word. I remember eating at "Sambo's" restaurants as a child, a chain marketed through racist imagery. It is now gone. Conversely, there are two "Hooters" restaurants within 10 miles of my house, where women's breasts are the central marketing tool for second rate fried food. It's promoted as a "family" restaurant, by the way.

What the campaign season has demonstrated is misogyny is as acceptable a weapon of social and political dominance as race demagoguery was through George Wallace's presidential campaigns. By Reagan, it was dog whistle time. I've written before why the fauxgressive Left is happy to profit from misogyny as a social condition in Just Like Grad School and Weeding out the Competition,

The reaction can be guilt rather than anger because there is really no chance that this class of people will ever get ahead as a class such that there would be competition. It may not be PC to say this, but there is a very rational basis for working class white racism that has nothing to do with believing minorities are lesser beings and everything to do with keeping that structural advantage in place. That's why the cynical claims of the Obama campaign about Archie Bunkers - when the target is actually the guilty upper middle class - doesn't ring true. Obama himself is no threat. He codes "white". The threat he offers is not raising up minorities but turning his back on all the working class and failing to enact policies and programs that will help those who are struggling. The real way to undermine racism is by increasing economic stability and prosperity, not by trying to shame people living on the edge as some kind of moral reprobates.

Change the makeup of that class and suddenly the privileged white boyz start getting nasty. The structural disadvantage that kept women from competing directly for previously male-only positions, structures both legal and cultural, have disappeared with enormous speed in the last forty years, especially the last twenty, and while entry of women into the workplace in professional and skilled labor ranks (they have always worked their asses off in retail, agriculture and service industries) has increased household income, it has also curbed a rise in male wages while offering increased competition for positions. Women's economic success has directly harmed individual male economic success and the concomitant social privilege. ...

The success Hillary is enjoying is flushing the fauxgressives out of the woodwork. Hillary hatred has permutations beyond simple misogyny, but the very real competition that women as a class offer these guys is what we see bubbling up in anti-feminist broadsides and pathetic attempts to reduce women's choices and aspirations to acts of vagina voting or bitchy resentment. What we are seeing in this election, from right and left, is the rage of white males who see their privilege under real threat and they don't like it one bit.

It's not the entire explanation, but I think it explains a large part of why Left Blogistan fell all over itself to see who could piss on women, candidates and voters alike.

There is no "answer" for it as long as it is a contest where the privileged have no intention of letting the dominated get a leg up, and where authoritative critical voices fall silent when wrongs are committed. Paul Krugman, I'm sorry to tell you that your willingness to push aside all the unpleasantness for the sake of winning the election, lecturing Hillary voters, us bitter knitters, to not go away mad just because we've been threatened with rape, murder, beatings and torture if we don't ditch that bitch and vote for The Precious has materially harmed women. You should have been screaming every day about how Obama had better put Hillary on the ticket or else watch half the party walk off, encouraging people to be angry over being treated with contempt instead of meekly getting the scraps from the table. Maybe if someone of your stature took seriously that treating women badly to their faces means treating them badly in social policy - the kinds of policies I have reason to believe you support - we'd have a hope of moving Obama out of his neo-Reaganite position and slightly towards something that moves the country towards the left.

Changing the subject doesn't change the situation.

For me, my political calculus has changed. There's never been a chance I would vote for Obama, nor that I would vote for any Republican, and for much the same reason - illiberal, misogynist, classist, and lacking a vision for the construction of progressive state. I also will not be forced out of my party and the institutional power it can command. However, my money will not go to general party funds or to PACs where it might be used to support candidates and party officials who refuse to fight back against misogyny. My votes will only go to women from now on. Male Democrats are going to have earn back my support by performing public, material acts to counter misogyny, such as promoting the ERA again, defending women's reproductive choices, passing UHC, which is of greatest importance to women with dependent children and no employer-based insurance, raising the minimum wage which affects women's job categories the most, defending Social Security, and supporting GLBT rights.

The lady killers are no more and no less than the racists of the Left, and should be treated as such.

Anglachel

Note - A few edits throughout to correct formatting problems and correct grammar. Reference to Annie Liebovitz's book added.

A Bitter Pill

This post has been stewing a few days while I waited for the Senate web site to get its brains unscrambled, but it looks like that won't happen anytime soon.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY) and Patty Murray (WA) have been at the forefront of a battle with the Secretary of HHS, Michael O. Leavitt, to prevent the Bush adminsitration from categorizing contraceptive pills and IUDs as abortifacients. Melissa McEwan wrote this up on Shakesville in July. Hillary co-wrote an op-ed for the NYT on this matter, Blocking Care for Women.

Sens. Clinton and Murray on July 16, 2008
Sens. Clinton and Murray on September 23, 2008

A few days ago, French Doc posted Punishing The Poorest Women, which uses a Nicholas Kristof column to talk about what the deliberate refusal of the Bush administration to provide effective contraception means to the poorest and most vulnerable people in these societies - more impoverishment, worse health, sick children and increases in infant and maternal death.

Oral contraceptives are the single most socially transformative invention of the 20th century, something that fundamentally altered how half of the species could act in the world. Women could now control their fertility with a great degreee of precision and without the assitance of men. Until this invention, all forms of contraception had to be some type of barrier method - a condom, a diaphragm, a cervical cap - or else sterilization. (I set aside IUDs for now, but consider them a variation on a barrier) If the barrier wasn't present, pregnancy could take place. Barriers were prone to high rates of failure, condoms required the cooperation of the male, and all required planning. With the pill, women could proactively protect themselves from pregnancy and could regulate their occurance with a minimum of effort.

The pill removed male agency and control from reproduction in a way no other contraceptive ever could. It was a direct assault on the male privilege of impregnating (and incapacitating) women as it suited them, and using the threat of rape and unsanctioned pregnancy to profoundly limit where women could go and what they could do. In the absence of modern medicine, every pregnancy was a life threatening event, and the most common cause of death for a fertile women. It also removed a great deal of power over lower status men who could now engage in sex without the fear of "ruining" a woman or having to forego sexual activity until they were able to afford a wife and children.

The social conservative assault on women has focused on reproduction because it is pivotal in controlling female behavior. The political conservative attack on reproduction also wants to control female behavior, but is more interested in this as a wedge agisnt the formation of privacy rights for anyone. See my posts Privacy and Privacy Rights and Equal Treatment for my extended argument about the attack on privacy by the Right.

What I realized as I read French Doc's post and thought about Hillary and Sen. Murray's fight to make Sec. Leavitt back down (and I give a shout out to their defense of Plan B, too), is that the life I lead could not have occurred without that medication. I recently went off the pill, and the mental shock of knowing that I am now vulnerable to an unplanned pregnancy was greater than I had expected. I now know what pharmacies in the area stock Plan B and who is open 24 hours. When I read about Gov. Palin's youngest child having Down Syndrome, I realized that was something that could happen should I get pregnant. With the financial meltdown, I've spent some hours figuring out "What if..." scenarios should this or that calamity befall us, and I have to factor in an unplanned pregnancy as a possibility. It has made me focus on who is defending my rights.

What makes this a bitter reflection is that I do not hear the senators' defense coming from the mouths of the Party leadership. I hear general blandishments about a woman's right to chose, but not a rigorous defense of the right to contraception in the first place. Before this election season, I would have said that the Democratic Party was sqaurely behind women's rights, but given the misogyny and the kinds of assaults aimed at first Hillary and then Gov. Palin specifically about their sexuality, fecundity, and what their sexual histories "said" about them, I have lost most of that certainty.

Are women's reproductive rights going to be one of those subjects, like gay rights, the Unity Democrats are going to be all bi-partisan about? Maybe keeping the foreign policy stuff in place to placate the Right because it's only poor black and brown women in distant places who will die as a consequence? Maybe rescind requirements that insurance policies have to cover hormonal contraceptives, and state they cannot be used to cover Plan B at all, as a way to get some bipartisan support for health care? Allow conscience clauses everywhere to prevent pharmacists from having to provide this medication to any women? There are a lot of ways to effectively remove a right that fall short of legally dissolving it.

I have no confidence that men on the Left are interested in defending women's rights, starting first and foremost with the right to control their own fertility without unjust burdens and barriers. I will be blogging more on the political uses of misogyny over the next few days.

Anglachel

Palomino Ponderings

Palomino is mulling over things that I have been considering as well. A few paragraphs (but be sure to read the whole thing - it is challenging):

The Republican brand is so thoroughly and deservedly trashed that all Johnny Mac can do is try to relaunch the culture wars by peddling oblique suspicions about Obama’s associates and his character. Hey, what a maverick. But the sales pitch only makes McCain look desperate, and the voters of Chillicothe, Ohio, aren’t buying. They’re even more desperate than John McCain, now that the local pawn shop is the town’s sole viable business. And in Pennsylvania, the Bitter Clingers are dropping their guns and bibles and having a come-to-Obama moment of their very own. ...

And now Obama has the election all but locked up. Hillary Clinton won’t be permitted to challenge a sitting Democratic president in the 2012 primaries, no matter how abysmal his first term may be. As a result, it’s entirely probable that she won’t run for president again herself, or not successfully, and certainly not before 2016, when she’ll be nearly as old as John McCain is now. She may even find herself marginalized in the Senate for at least the next four years; the Democratic leadership’s pointed lack of interest in her current proposals seems to indicate as much.

This is definitely not what I wanted. But it does appear to be what we’re stuck with. And as a wise person once said, you can’t win a fight with reality. That doesn’t mean you can’t fight to change a particular reality, but you do have to start from the way things actually stand (also known as living in the reality-based community).

I'm beginning to understand how Republicans like Lincoln Chafee must feel looking at the takeover of their party by the Movement Conservatives. What should be a celebratory election for me, the downfall of the Reaganauts, leaves me feeling angry and betrayed. The accidents of political and economic fate have brought us an anti-leader, someone who occupies a symbolic space without embodying the substance of what those symbols represent. I read people like Digby telling us that we have to settle for the importance of symbolism rather than actual substantive legislation and we should be fine with this, and I wonder how the the Left Blogosphere became more complacent than the DLC they revile so much. How is this different than being a Blue Dog Democrat? When did triangulation come back into vogue, except this time standing squarely on a party platform that holds rejection of partisan stances as its primary political purpose?

People who have been the most loyal to the party, their dedication and service spanning decades, were declared unfit to show their faces and told they were no longer wanted. In the caucuses, they were physically threatened. Others have been sent death threats, have been stalked, have had their property vandalized. The violence done to people within the party is outdone only by the denials that anything is wrong and we'd better make the best of the situation we're in. I can only compare it to being forced to cohabitate with your rapist, something I have had to do in my life so it's a familiar feeling.

Hitching your wagon to the Republicans won't get you far in these political and economic times, even if you can stomach doing so. Since the problem with the Democrats is their abrupt move to the right on social and economic issues, trying mightily to capture the poisoned ground left behind by the Movement Conservatives' mad dash into authoritarian rule, it would also simply move you closer to where they want to be. In truth, Nixon was more liberal than this.

I have no answer to the violence and cruelty than has seized my party.

But I'm thinking.

Anglachel

Manufactured Crisis

Honestly, I tried to follow the debate between The Precious and My Cranky Friend, but it was turn it off or throw up. Tom Brokaw presents the interests of the Very Serious People and wants to know what the candidates are going to do to cut spending, "entitlement reform," now that we have to give all of the money to Wall Street. Social Security, Medicare and Medicade are mentioned by name as prime candidates to cut.

The completely predicatable and ignored until warp-core meltdown manufactured crisis on Wall Street is used to bolster the perennial manufactured crisis of how are we going to kill off that pesky New Deal and Great Society stuff that only helps the little people. Pull up the ladder, Bo'sun, I'm aboard.

In lieu of actual presidential discussion, I present Hillary's cheeky and deliciously insulting letter to The Chimperor and his Hanky Panky today. She knows who created the problem and isn't afraid to rub Bush's nose in it, with a delivery all the more effective because of its politeness:

The ongoing credit crisis has severely restricted bank lending. The dramatic decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index underscores the lack of liquidity in virtually all markets except U.S. Treasuries. At the same time, global market turmoil is creating more uncertainty and anxiety here at home, when what is needed at this time is confidence to bolster the credit markets.

Our economy runs on credit and credit is in too short supply. As a result, many small businesses cannot receive the loans and lines of credit they need to make payroll, stock inventory, or expand. This is having a dramatic impact on jobs with 159,000 lost this past month alone, the ninth straight month of job losses and the greatest single month loss in five years. Banks’ restrictive lending terms will make securing college loans more difficult, while also increasing the pressure on colleges and universities who lost access to funds maintained by distressed financial institutions to raise tuition.

The municipal bond market has taken a huge hit as investors flee and financing costs skyrocket. Several states and municipalities are at risk of failing to maintain important government functions.

Shorter Hillary - Look at the mess you made, you bozo, so bad even your base is in deep doo-doo (as Poppy would say). Nine straight months of job losses, Chimp, way to go!

I love the patient lecture to these two - See, kids, this is how the economy actually works. This is how it affects ordinary people, the kind invisible to you. You are not going to be allowed to sit around and dither, running down the clock while your uber-rich golf-buddies manipulate the markets to extort maximum benefit from the bailout. Unlike the guy the DNC handed the nomination to, she's not afraid to talk about social justice:

The Treasury has already become a lender of last resort for large financial firms and banks. We must extend that same help to small businesses, students, colleges, local governments and all those who are bearing the brunt of the same widespread credit crisis. It is a matter of necessity and a matter of fairness: we are helping to keep large Wall Street firms stay afloat with lines of credit. We should do the same for small Main Street businesses as well.

It matters how you frame arguments. If you accept the terms that there are no choices except to "fix" social programs by gutting them in hard times, the times when they are most needed, then that is probably what you will end up doing. Sympathy for them, even belief in them, is toothless if not backed by the willingness to fight for them exactly when it is least popular among the Very Important People. The argument to make is not one about morality (good people do this, we are a better people than that), but an appeal to justice (What we do for the powerful must also be done for the ordinary.). You don't need an appeal to innate goodness or the charity of someone's heart if you are willing to write something into law and put the full force of the government behind it. This applies just as much to healthcare and equal pay as to financial protection in times of crisis.

Social justice does not happen because we are good. It happens because we are willing to legislate and mobilize power on behalf of those too far from the levers of power to dictate what they want. Paulson has tried to dictate what will be done for the sake of his personal friends but even more for his socio-economic class and their world-view - a world-view Brokaw is repeating as Conventional Wisdom as he moderates the debate. What Hillary does with this letter is interrupt the world view with an alternative argument of how social goods and resources must be allocated. Justice is not just about voting the black guy into office. It's also about defending the ability of small businesses, the kinds most likely to be owned by people who are not part of the ruling class, to get venture capital and use debt constructively, businesses more likely to keep money in localities and regions, helping shore up the economy. It's about ensuring that access to higher education is not quietly shut off by denying credit to the many, many applicants who are not independently wealthy and to the schools that may not make money themselves, but which are the engines of wealth creation.

I propose that we set aside $150 billion of the $700 billion rescue plan for an “Emergency Stabilization Fund” to make emergency loans and establish temporary lines of credit for small businesses; to allow colleges and universities to have short-term access to funding to reduce the pressure on tuition; and to increase direct loans to students as private lending has dried up. The Small Business Administration and the Department of Education could be temporarily empowered to implement these loan programs until the market has stabilized.

Think about that. 21% of the bailout to be reserved for something else. $150 billion to stabilize the economic food chain where it will have immediate effect. Talking about the needs of small businesses and education as equally important as the golden parachutes of the Merry Banksters. This broad is talking as if these people are entitled to some support from the government! The nerve! Doesn't she know that there's no credit, no loans for people who can't repay? If they were creditworthy, they'd have other ways to finance their lives than sucking off the government teat, heaven without end, Amen! Don't they know we need that $150 billion to fund our retirement villas in the south of France? Socialists, all of 'em...

Hillary's bit about municipal bonds is important as more and more municipalities have had to rely on them to cover the loss of Federal money for things like infrastructure and support services. The entire thing reads like tutorial in government finance - and now you do this, and then you do that, are you following me, boyz? It lacks the grand rhetorical flourishes and deep econo-geekitude of Roubini's recent writings, but it gets to the same place - the credit crisis will not be solved on Wall Street, though it must be addressed there. It can only be solved by intervention in the localities where wealth is generated and capital replenished.

She concludes with two items. First, her signature statement about the power relationship inherent in the financial meltdown:

By failing to tackle a mortgage crisis, we ended up with a credit crisis. If we fail to take on this credit crisis, we risk deepening a looming economic crisis.

As Gulliver discovered, ignore the little people and you are toast. Her final line is a challenge to more people than Bush:

But if necessary, Congress should be called to return to consider additional authority to implement this plan.

This is directed at more than the White House. Where is the Democratic leadership on this issue? Why are they not waging this battle on behalf of Main Street?

The crises we are facing are things of our own creation - manufactured right here at home. While there are a number of way to solve these problems, it matters what path is chosen and whose interests are defended.

Anglachel