Cable TV and newspaper Op-Ed pages are full of pundits and campaign strategists using the latest election polls to opine glibly on the mood of America. Bored with this kind of bloviating, Salon decided to do the exact opposite -- and use the mood of America as a way to generalize about the election. We assembled three leading demographers and trend analysts to talk about which major nonpolitical factors are shaping the electoral environment -- from population shifts to major changes in public attitudes. We asked them about the state of America on the eve of one of the most epochal elections in modern history.
Demographer Cheryl Russell is the former editor in chief of American Demographics magazine, the editorial director of New Strategist Publications and the author of the just-published "Bet You Didn't Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts About Living in the USA."
Consumer-behavior guru Ann Clurman is the executive vice president for trends and futures consulting at the Futures Company, the firm produced by the merger of two other forecasting firms, Henley Centre HeadlightVision and Yankelovich. She is the coauthor of the 2007 book "Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... and They're Just Getting Started."
Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics magazine, is an expert on demographics and consumer marketing. He serves as demographic trends analyst for the advertising agency Oglivy & Mather.
I spoke with Francese, Clurman and Russell by phone. The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
-- Walter Shapiro
Salon: Welcome to you all. The whole idea of this conversation is, instead of generalizing about the country from the election, we have brought together three demographics experts and trend analysts to talk about how to generalize about the election from what they know about the country.
So where to start? Leaving the Wall Street meltdown aside for a few minutes, how would each of you say the country was different than it was four years ago?
Peter Francese: My feeling is what's different than four years ago, and it's only a little bit different, is the continuing concentration of income at the top of the income scale. Before the financial meltdown, there was enormous concentration of income in the top 20 percent, top 10 percent, top 5 percent of the income scale. And that distorted the picture of really what America is when the top 20 percent of households in America take home half of all the income earned. And I think there's been an increasing bitterness and anger about that, but I do think that the top 20 percent has suffered rather mightily over the last several weeks.
Salon: I want to come back to that in a second because I want to talk about how life has changed in the last four to six weeks because of the financial meltdown. But I was just curious, Ann and Cheryl, what leaps out at you about how the country has been changing in the last four years?
Ann Clurman: There has been a very well-known shift in power from marketers to consumers. Consumers have been really good at celebrating how smart they are, how empowered they are. We've been picking that up for at least a decade. What I think is really significant is what we're calling "personal authenticity." And what that was, that kind of reached a critical mass in 2004, it was a coming together of a number of values and trends that we described as consumers really working on internal clarity of their values. Not only were they kind of trying to understand what was really important to them, they began to develop the courage to act on [those things]. And part of that meant moving out of your comfort zone -- and I think that is very important to what's happening today. But also, this desire to get life right became a passion. What we're seeing today is a massive shift beginning to surface and that shift is not just being caused the last four or five weeks.
Salon: I'm curious what Cheryl has to say to the same question.
Cheryl Russell: I want to put a word in here for the demographics. There is this slow, inexorable change in our country toward much greater diversity. You might not be able to bank on the stock market, but you can bank on demographic change. And that change means that the United States is going to be a minority majority country according to the Census Bureau by 2042. And what's happening is that every year we become more and more diverse and the voices of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities are becoming more powerful. And in this election I think this is playing out big time.
Francese: That is an absolute fact.
Salon: I'm going to put the financial crisis on hold for a minute and ask, Could the America of 2000 or 2004 embrace a Barack Obama for president? Was America ready four or eight years ago for a mixed-race presidential candidate or was it just that Obama happened to come along in 2008? Is he a lagging indicator that America is changing or is this the first year where it's possible to imagine someone like Barack Obama being elected?
Clurman: Let me take the first crack at that. I know that demographics are critical and I'm going to leave that to the other experts. I've been thinking long and hard about this and my answer would be no, it wouldn't have happened in 2000 and 2004. First of all, critically, the changing demographics. Secondly, we have to look at the last eight years. I don't know what word you want to use for it -- I was going to say "heinous." Thirdly, the youth vote. That's a huge demographic shift, the coming of age of the millennials or the Gen Ys, or whatever you want to call them, and their feelings about all of this. I also want to go back to what I said earlier, which is, people are much more willing to move outside their comfort zone. And while I do believe unfortunately a lot of people are still uncomfortable with Sen. Obama's candidacy, they're going to go for him because they understand it's time to change the discussion.
One of the things we are telling our marketing clients, and one of the things I think Obama's people understand really well, is stop talking about what doesn't work, stop yearning for a time that was, stop talking about, "Gee, I wish we could still do this." With the new realities, we can't. That's old language. The language we need to use is changing the discussion entirely and to ask new questions. We tell everyone, "Think outside the box," and my argument would be, "Change the box in general." Apropos of this, I just got one of those breaking news e-mails, and apparently Advertising Age has named Obama the marketer of the year.
Russell: I agree with Ann. The times create a candidate. What we see playing out in the election today, it's really a long-simmering battle between the generations. It's the battle between the way things used to be and the way things will be. And everybody thought for a long time that the boomers would be the warriors in this battle. But in fact, boomers are actually, or many boomers are, conservative, so that battle never really played out fully. But now, it is their children, the millennial generation, that is on the front line of this battle.
Salon: What do you mean precisely by the millennial generation?
Russell: The millennial generation is basically young adults, technically anyone under the age of 32 this year. But basically it's the young-adult population. When you're talking about voters, you're talking about the "18 to 29" voters, the 18-to-31-year-old vote. So the older generations in 2000 and 2004 still had the upper hand numerically. But this year maybe the younger generations and the new voters will have the numerical upper hand. The financial crisis has driven many of the older people more in alignment in their attitudes with the younger generation. We may see it play out on Nov. 4 that the new way has the upper hand. But that remains to be seen because there are a lot of issues involved with the youth vote and the minority vote.
Salon: I want to come back to the youth vote in particular in a minute.
Francese: Let's never forget that Barack Obama would never have had a chance to become president of the United States were it not for the Internet. And that four years or eight years ago, the power of the Internet wasn't where it is today. He has raised most of his money off the Internet. He has energized the youth vote using the Internet.
Salon: But so did Howard Dean four years ago.
Francese: Not to the extent that Obama is doing it. Obama is an expert at marketing, if you want to call it that. And I think that his use of it to raise money and to energize his proponents has really put him head and shoulders above John McCain, who does not know how to do that. And so I think that it's that power, but there's a second item too. Through the appointment of several high-level Cabinet members in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice for example, and Colin Powell, the ascendancy of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice has made Americans comfortable with black Americans in positions of high, high responsibility and of power. Seeing Condoleezza Rice negotiating around the world with world leaders has made many Americans comfortable with the idea of black people in leadership positions. None of that was possible eight years ago.
Salon: Everyone keeps raising good points I want to come back to. But the thing I don't want to get lost is the question I was going to ask at the outset. Peter talked about income inequality as being one of the big changes in America in this decade. Ann talked about American consumers, particularly baby boomers, wanting to get their lives right. Now we have a situation where no one thinks we've gotten the economy right -- something like 9 percent of the American people think we're on the right track. How has this changed attitudes and just your sense, even demographically, of what are going to be both the short- and the long-term effects of this current crisis?
Francese: I will just jump in here quickly and say that one of the things I think is going to happen is it will lower the rate at which people are able to buy homes. And so the percentage of homeownership among millennials for a while, at least until the recession is over and credit is easier, is going to [drop]. We will see more young adults living at home with their parents than we might have. Because that happens in almost every recession that I've ever tracked. I think it will have a measurable effect on the structure of American households and how they live.
Russell: I really agree with what Peter is saying. This financial crisis and the feeling that things are going in the wrong direction have been a long, long time in coming. If you look at men's incomes, men's earnings, among men who work full time, their earnings peaked in 1986. That's more than 20 years ago. So for the past 20 years, why have household incomes been increasing? For one reason only: the working woman. And now, virtually every woman who is going to go to work is at work. That boost to household incomes is over. The only other remaining boost to household incomes is that we have the baby boom generation right now in peak earning years and that has kept the numbers from falling. For example, when the Census Bureau released its 2007 income statistics, household income increased slightly. The only reason for that increase was the baby boom generation in their peak earning years. People are realizing they are not getting ahead, and they don't see any improvement in the future, and that is one of the reasons they want change.
Salon: So the political slogan should be: Are you better off than you were 20 years ago?
Russell: People think they're better off because their wives have gone to work. So they've said, "My household income is higher than my parents' was back then." That's true, but it's only true because you have more earners and more workers. Every household has more workers than it used to.
Francese: And four years ago they thought they were wealthier because their houses were worth so much money. Not anymore.
Clurman: We've been tracking what we call our economic anxiety scale since last January. And of course there's hardly anybody who says they don't have any anymore ... [As early as] January 2008, people were beginning to take some stock of what was going on. And I also want to make the point that one of the major, major shifts that we see coming right now -- and it's just beginning to surface -- is a shift toward owning some of these problems that we face.
I think what's happening is, as the economic ground is shifting under consumers' feet, they're kind of waking up to all the other stuff they've been blocking. Like we don't really save any money; our kids don't really do well on an international basis when it comes to adding and subtracting. We've got two gas guzzlers in our garage and we may only need one. People are beginning to wake up, and in some very recent data we have, we found that 73 percent of people say that our society gives a pass too easily. People are going to stop pointing fingers at everybody else and starting pointing them at themselves.
Francese: That's why Barack Obama did so well in that last debate where the last thing he said [was], we're all going to have to make sacrifices. I think that resonated incredibly well with an awful lot of Americans.
Clurman: It really does. I think one of the reasons people are not quite as hysterical about what is going on is that they realize a lot of other people are in the same boat. Everybody is getting hit hard here. It's very interesting. We call it the "new responsibility marketplace," but it's kind of not here yet. It's coming, and slowly but surely we're going to see this rolling out. People are realizing on some level that it's time to pay their proverbial piper.
Salon: Just to clarify, you think that people understand the magnitude of the problem?
Clurman: They understand on some level. Some people who are up there intellectually understand this problem, but I think on some gut level, people understand that we have got a lot of really serious problems and what's happening is the economy has acted as a lightning rod for some serious thought about where are we going. Global warming, I forgot to mention that one. What's happening to the planet, what's happening to our lives.
Salon: But I don't see people going to find scapegoats.
Clurman: That's why there's an accountability and responsibility happening. What we saw in '91, during that recessionary period, we saw the baby boomers looking at the world collapsing around them and pointing fingers and whining and saying, "This isn't my fault." And now what we're seeing, because the times are different and the demographics are different, what we're seeing is people looking around and saying, "We've got some serious issues here and we've all got to take some modicum of responsibility." It's not enough to just change your light bulbs [from incandescent to fluorescent]. We've got to do something more about what's fundamentally wrong here.
Salon: So maybe the headline is "The baby boomers have grown up"?
Francese: Don't count on it.
Salon: What I want to do is come back to the other end of the group who hasn't really grown up. Is there a demographic reason why 18-to-29-year-old voters seem more vocal, seem more involved, seem to be turning out in greater levels in any election that I can remember since the 1970s?
Russell: We'll see if they turn out. They consistently disappoint. Hopefully this time they will turn out and boost their voting rate above, I think in 2004 it was about 42 percent.
Salon: I am someone who has always thought that one of the truths about American politics is the youth vote always disappoints. I find myself slowly moving to the other camp, but I will quickly go back to my heritage of being a skeptic if it doesn't materialize. I'd be interested in what the history has shown.
Russell: The youth vote has been declining. It did increase in 2004 over 2000. There was a big leap from 32 to 42 percent in the 18-to-24-year-olds. We could see another increase again. But more important, the thing that's happened in that youth market is the increase in the number of those voters. Since 2000, the number of 18-to-29-year-olds has grown by 4 million people, because that large millennial generation has filled the age group. So you have this greater number of people; you have a much more diverse population there than among the older generation. Only 60 percent of the 18-to-29-year-olds are non-Hispanic white. So you have a lot of people identifying with Sen. Obama and encouraged to take part, participate more because they see someone who is running for president who is more like themselves. I think a third factor in the youth vote is the Internet. The Internet makes a network out of young adults.
Francese: Like Facebook.
Russell: Everything that a young adult does, everything that happens to them today, is immediately communicated to the entire network of young adults, and that kind of communication power has amplified their voice.
Francese: There's a fourth item that I want to add to that. That is the vast number of young women who are going to college. The best-educated man in America is 55 years old. But the best-educated woman is only 35. So women are going to college at significantly higher rates than men, and there are many, many more young college-educated women than there ever were before in American history. And so that higher education translates into higher Internet usage, higher awareness of what the political scene is. I think that we are all going to be pleasantly surprised, including the three reasons Cheryl just gave, that the youth vote will surprise us pleasantly this time and not stay true to form and stay away.
Clurman: You've talked about youth being more interested and more galvanized since any point since the '70s, but we also need to understand that there's a fundamental difference here. In the '60s and '70s, a lot of it was all about idealism. I think what we have today, in addition to all those wonderful demographics we heard about, these kids are very practical. Very pragmatic. This isn't about, be all good and all be altruistic and if we all make sacrifices, everything in the world will be fine in two weeks. This is a very practical, pragmatic group that understands, it's hopeful pragmatism, if you will, and that requires taking some action.
Salon: Is it that women were just going to college at a disproportionately low rate and that they've just caught up with men? Or is there something else going on with gender roles?
Francese: No. There are a couple of reasons, in my view. One, we've obviously over the last 30 years made the switch from a manufacturing, construction-based economy which favors men who are not college graduates to an office-based employment category in which most people now work in offices and that favors women. Women can work in offices equally as well as men. And they are actually a majority of the professional managerial workers according to the Census Bureau data. They're 51 or 52 percent. Women are just as capable of taking managerial and professional jobs and doing them just as well as men but those jobs usually require college degrees. So women, who mature earlier in life than men, do go to college in greater numbers, significantly greater numbers. That's a fairly recent development.
Russell: I totally agree with what you're saying, and actually the percentage of women who go to college out of high school has been significantly higher than men for the last 10 or 15 years as women poured onto college campuses. It's totally true that women are much more educated than men. And if you look at married couples today, in 2007 for the first time among married couples, the percentage in which the husband is more educated than the wife is lower than the percentage in which the wife is more educated than the husband. There's been a real change in family life.
Francese: That changes the power structure within the household in terms of who makes the decision about one thing or another. If anything is going to allow household income to rise, it's the increasing educational attainment of the women breadwinners in that household.
Salon: I'm sitting here in Indianapolis, and one of the things that fascinates me is that the normally conservative suburbs of a city like this are trending a bit more Democratic, a bit more toward Barack Obama, because the standard 35-year-old college graduate who might be working for Eli Lilly here is more liberal on social issues than the Republican Party has been for the last 25 years. Are there demographic trends to buttress this?
Francese: Certainly I agree with that statement, but those people are also working in offices with black, Hispanic, Asian professional individuals and if it's Eli Lilly, if it's a large corporation, they have diversity programs, so they're more comfortable around minorities than someone who is 65 who may have never worked in an office or for a corporation where there were professional black, Hispanic, Asian individuals.
Clurman: I think the biggest dividing line is the age issue rather than the education. And the older generation holds the more traditional attitudes. The younger generations, for them race is not as big a factor. If you look at the age breakdown for the support for Obama, the older generation was first heavily toward McCain, and then the financial crisis moved it more toward Obama.
Russell: Ann, when you say older can you define what you're talking about?
Clurman: At this moment I'm talking about 65-plus. That generation is the one that was raised in a different time with different attitudes.
Salon: Is there anything -- in terms of trend analysis or demographics -- that either campaign is doing in not an individual ad or one comment but as a consistent theme that makes you think, "What country do they think we're living in?"
Francese: Sarah Palin is the classic example of that. What country does she think we're living in? If you listen to what she says at various rallies, she's talking to a very small segment of American voters who really are going to vote for someone that they think is like them. But in fact her anti-intellectualism does not play well in most suburban and other areas. Her constant play to people who she thinks are sort of put upon by the more intelligent, the more well-educated part of the society, and her constant talk about the fact that Obama is an elitist of some sort, is really misguided in the sense that it may appeal to a small group of people who feel aggrieved because they don't have the education to get ahead in this information-based society. But it is politically foolish in my view.
Russell: I think it has real tones of Spiro Agnew. It seems to me very, very dated. That whole anti-intellectual --
Francese: Anti-media --
Russell: Exactly.
Salon: The nattering nabobs of negativism.
Russell: Sarah Palin is playing on the rural versus urban battle in the United States. Americans have a love affair with the rural, but in fact most Americans are urban or suburban today. Unfortunately, our political system is set up so that the rural areas have a great deal of political power, in the Senate. I think that trying to play up this rural vote can be effective because so many Americans relate to it. But ultimately, the suburban and urban voter should numerically take precedent.
Francese: Only 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas.
Russell: Still, playing to the rural roots of America has worked well in politics over the years, and she's just continuing that line.
Francese: Except that she's pandering, because she's doing it in a negative way. She's saying the rest of the world is somehow bad. If you live on the coast, you're somehow an effete snob, that kind of negativism. It's one thing to glorify the rural roots, as Joe Biden has championed his rural roots --
Salon: His rural roots were in Scranton, Pa., which were basically more hardscrabble small-city roots.
Russell: Every presidential campaign in recent history has played up this rural connection.
Francese: But they've played it up in a positive way. They don't play it up by bashing people who are not rural; they merely say this is a fine way of life.
Russell: I think one of the criticisms of Obama being from Chicago is the rural versus urban fight.
Salon: Is there anything else that strikes you, non-Sarah Palin related, as awry in terms of what the candidates are talking about? Cheryl, in your book, I saw based on poll analysis that 65 percent of the American people consider themselves moderates. That certainly isn't the tone in politics or on cable television.
Russell: Right, most Americans are in the middle of the road. But there's been such a partisan split in the media that's taken place, with the different cable channels focusing on different camps and talk radio, that it's driven a wedge between Americans when in fact there's very little difference between most of them.
Clurman: One thing, and I haven't been following this judiciously, but I do remember in the beginning there was a little bit more boomer bashing.
Salon: Done by Barack Obama.
Clurman: Exactly, and I thought that was a huge, huge boo-boo. And it seems to me they have walked away from that, which I think was smart to do.
Salon: Our generation may be slightly fading but it is politically risky to put us in the crosshairs.
Clurman: There are 70 million-plus boomers, and boomers vote in high numbers, and technically Obama is a boomer. I was just stunned when I saw that in the beginning, because these people who are running this are so smart. What are they thinking? And I guess that a lot of their polling told them to walk away from that.
Russell: The youngest boomer today is 44, so he's definitely a boomer, and boomers are the largest voting bloc still. In this election, 38 percent of votes are going to be cast by baby boomers in November. And that is larger than any of the other generations that will be voting.
Salon: Is that partially because boomers are now at the age where they vote very heavily, or is that all population based?
Russell: Both factors are involved. The number of boomers, and that voting increases with age. Interestingly, the millennial generation we've been talking about is 19 percent of the vote this year. And that's up from 13 percent in 2004. Generation X is 20 percent, and the older generation, which is people older than boomers, 63-plus, is 23 percent. The millennial generation, in terms of the size of its vote, is almost as large as the older generation.
Francese: That's new. That's one of the reasons Barack Obama has a chance.
Salon: And that is as good a place to end as any. Thank you all for providing us with a different way to look at the election.
Nearly six months ago, Al Franken was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota. For his defeated opponent, former Sen. Norm Coleman, it was the end of a long, hard road -- a road full of legal challenges, ballot challenges, financial challenges and, one can only assume, profound personal challenges.
That’s not enough to stop Coleman, though. The current rumor, reported by Politico, is that he’s thinking of making a run for governor. This is an office he’s always wanted: Dick Cheney had to talk him into running for Senate instead in 2002. And with incumbent Gov. Tim Pawlenty leaving, apparently to run for president, it’s Coleman’s chance.
So the former senator is giving it some thought. However, one of his top operatives, Jeff Larson, is throwing some cold water on the rumor, saying, "I don’t think it’s something he really needs to do or really wants to do. I think he’d make a spectacular governor. I really do. I just don’t think he’s going to run." Another advisor, though, says that Coleman sees a gubernatorial race as a chance to "to put aside some of the partisan rancor."
And the almost-two-term senator himself? "It’s really nice waking up in the morning and reading the paper and realizing that nobody is trying to kill you politically today. I’m a public servant at heart, but I haven’t made a final decision on whether being the governor is the best way to do that,” he said.
A few people in my letters thread today claim to see "sour grapes" and "I told you so" in my post saying progressives have only themselves to blame for feeling betrayed by President Obama. Ain't no sour grapes -- I voted for him, of course -- but there is a helping of "I told you so," I admit, left over from the 2008 primary battle. And Tom Hayden's bleat of betrayal in the Nation today – Alex Koppelman writes about it here -- forces me to confess it.
Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too.
OK, that last part isn't true.
But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.
So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:
"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….
"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….
"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."
Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."
I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them. Certainly his Cabinet choices -- including Clinton herself -- are no more progressive than hers would be. Claiming a President Clinton would preside over "a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed" seems particularly silly today (and using "aging" as a pejorative was a poor choice from Hayden's particular demographic, but old habits die hard).
Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends. OK, my "I told you so" moment is officially over.
ACORN is rigging our elections, and undoing the basic principles of the American Revolution. Also, the community group is stealing from the poor. But that’s not surprising, because for all intents and purposes, it’s a mafia-type organization. Oh, and its tentacles are everywhere in the federal government, extending all the way to the president himself, and he in turn is shielding the group from prosecution.
This was the substance of a hearing that eight Republican members of Congress -- or, as they styled themselves, the “Joint Forum on ACORN ” -- held Tuesday. Over the course of the hearing, representatives and witnesses actually leveled all the above charges at ACORN, declaring the issue to be one “of importance to the American people,” as Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., put it. (If he restricts the definition of "the American people" to members of his own party, he's probably right.)
Since its employees were caught on tape in the prostitution-tax evasion sting, ACORN hasn’t had a lot of defenders. But if you thought the subsequent halt of federal funding for the group was the end of the story as a political issue, then you don’t know the modern GOP. Despite the grievous damage to the group’s reputation, Republican officials aren’t content just to damn ACORN with evidence of its clear failings. Instead, at the hearing they insisted on citing an array of unconvincing, vastly overblown allegations -- with a bit of racial panic thrown in -- as evidence that ACORN is destroying America and must be prosecuted.
Probably the top charge against ACORN is that it tampers with elections. The rhetoric surrounding this argument continues to be out of line with the substance. Said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation. And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”
As ever, there have been no instances cited of actual fraudulent voting, despite the implication that the entire electoral apparatus of the country is tainted. Nobody thinks voter registration fraud is a good thing, but the kind of fraud in which ACORN employees have been involved is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. The fraudulent registrations aren't intended to be used -- they're a way for the employee to squeeze some additional money out of the group by serving as proof they worked more than they actually did.
At the hearing, there was a new wrinkle to the argument about registration fraud, an idea that by dumping a stack of inaccurate registrations on local election boards shortly before the deadline, ACORN somehow disenfranchises legitimate voters because the boards can't handle the workload. Again, however, there was no evidence provided for the claim.
Still, there's no stopping these guys. Iowa Rep. Steve King took the crusade to bizarre new heights, saying he carries an acorn and a copy of the Constitution around all the time, to remind himself of the threat the one poses to the other. Then there was witness Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative election lawyer, who thinks that the failure to prosecute ACORN implicates the entire law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Said Spakovsky:
Congress should not only hold direct hearings on ACORN and its activities, but also oversight hearings of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Internal Revenue Service to obtain information on any investigations they are conducting into ACORN. If those agencies are not conducting any investigations, they should be required to explain why they are not carrying out their enforcement duties.
That would be, of course, almost exactly the argument that spurred some of the Bush administration's infamous firings of U.S. attorneys. The judgment of the fired prosecutors that there was no criminal case against ACORN for election fraud, in this line of thinking, didn’t exonerate ACORN -- it showed that the U.S. attorneys were incompetent at best.
And who could disagree, considering the almost superhuman way in which ACORN can apparently throw its weight around? After all, as several speakers at the hearing suggested, the group is just one huge criminal front. And, as Rep. Smith pointed out, ACORN’s got a guy in government. “President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter.”
There are two separate points that need clearing up here. First, the president was never an employee of ACORN. He worked for Project Vote, which is now affiliated with ACORN but was not at the time, though the two groups were close. He also represented ACORN, alongside two other lawyers, in one case. Also on ACORN’s side in that case was the Department of Justice. Second, it could be literally true that Obama was an employee of the group back in the early ‘90s, and it wouldn’t really be that damning a charge. That’s because, despite Glenn Beck's fantasies, ACORN is not a vast criminal conspiracy. What it is, instead, is an often horrifically incompetent and sometimes corrupt but frequently helpful organization.
It’s easy to focus on the horror stories about ACORN (and important to condemn its various bad acts), but accounts of its role in bringing political power and useful advice to poor people go largely unheard. It should be possible, in other words, to work on a vast, successful and widely lauded voter registration drive without being smeared as a big-city gangster. Granted, ACORN isn't helping itself when it fails, many years running, to clean up its act. But it's also clear that at this point, that doesn't really even matter -- for many on the right, including members of Congress, the myth of the omnipotent, evil group is all that matters now.
I may be the only person in the United States who was trying to wait for President Obama's Afghanistan speech to make up my mind about his war plans. Of course, I mostly failed at that. Sure, all of Obama's options are bad, but still, few decisions seem as clear-cut as this one. Escalation is hard to see as an exit strategy. Obama has no clear path to "victory." We are likely to waste more lives than we save. I thought that was true before Obama's big speech, and I still think it now, afterward.
At the moment he needed all of his persuasive powers, Obama gave the worst major speech of his presidency. I admit: I expected to be, even wanted to be, carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. But I wasn't, not even a little. I found the speech rushed, sing-songy and perfunctory, delivered by rote. I despise the right-wing Obama-Teleprompter taunts, but even I wanted to say, Look at your audience, not the damn Teleprompter, Mr. President. Obama looked haggard, his eyes deeper set, and I believe this decision pained him. But I'm not sure even he believes it's the right decision. Neocon Danielle Pletka tweeted happily mid-speech: "So far, could be Bush speaking," and later, approvingly: "count me gobsmacked." That makes two of us. Rep. Maxine Waters spoke for me on "Countdown" tonight when she opened her remarks by telling Keith Olbermann: "I'm very saddened."
On specifics: Obama lost me early by rehashing the history of our decision to invade Afghanistan, using mawkish and tired 9/11 imagery. We all know why we went in, and most Democrats supported it: to topple the Taliban government that harbored and supported al-Qaida as it plotted to kill almost 3,000 people in 2001. The question is why are we escalating now? I didn't hear a compelling reason. Obama sugarcoated the problems with the corrupt Karzai administration, and this year's disputed election, with a dismissive "although it was marred by fraud" it was "consistent with the constitution." Wow, that's inspiring. He told Karzai "the days of the blank check are over," but barely defined what that means. The most chilling story I read today was Juan Cole's, on the way Afghanistan's parliament is MIA, and the country's various governmental agencies, from ministries of public works to agriculture, have spent a fraction of the limited funds they have available. It made me hugely pessimistic that Obama's promise of a "civilian surge" had a prayer of making a difference. He needed to address the dysfunction within the Afghan government more specifically to convince me that he could find a way out.
The president also fudged by calling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border "the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda" -- yet it seems to me it actually matters to our strategy which side of the admittedly blurry border is the bigger problem. Finally, maybe most disputably, Obama insisted "we are not facing a broad-based insurgency." It may not be country-wide, but we are certainly facing a broad-based Pashtun insurgency, one that only seems to grow the more troops we send. Obama invoked Iraq -- mistakenly, in my opinion, many times -- but to the extent that the "surge" there was a limited if likely temporary success, it was because it met up with the "Sunni awakening," a homegrown rebellion against al-Qaida and a weariness with war among formerly insurgent Sunnis. Obama needs a "Pashtun awakening," but so far the only one on the horizon features Pashtuns waking up to fight the U.S. Some liberals might be encouraged by his promise to begin withdrawing troops by the summer of 2011, but given the uncertainty of the strategy, who can trust that?
So what's an increasingly disappointed Democrat and Obama supporter to do?
First of all, it would help to admit that in this case, Obama is keeping a campaign promise, not breaking one. Most liberal Obama backers probably either disagreed with his stance on Afghanistan, or didn't take it seriously. Still, many sold him as the only progressive candidate in the race, in stark contrast with the hawkish Hillary Clinton. That was never true, and Obama proved it last year when he made Clinton his secretary of state and kept Robert Gates as defense secretary. The howls of betrayal by progressives I respect like Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and Keith Olbermann are at least partly a measure of their own misunderstanding of Obama's candidacy. The American left needs to smarten up, and toughen up, if it wants to make deep, lasting change in this country.
I'm deeply disappointed, saddened even, but I don't feel betrayed. Obama has governed like the centrist he told us and showed us he is, from his early flip-flops on FISA to his Goldman Sachs-friendly bailout policies to compromising on the job-creation parts of his economic stimulus to his tepid backing of a healthcare reform public option. It's going to take hard work by activists on all of those fronts to push him to better solutions.
Still, I'd be remiss if I didn't stress, once again, that the president faced only bad choices in making this decision, thanks to the incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. Every day Dick Cheney becomes more despicable, most recently allowing his handmaidens John Harris and Jim Vandehei from Politico to transcribe his raspy, hateful utterances trashing the president on the eve of this crucial national security announcement. "Here's a guy, without much experience, who travels around the world apologizing," Cheney told his stenographers. He even accused Obama of giving "aid and comfort" to al-Qaida, which is, I believe, the definition of treason. Classy. The former vice-president is as deranged as the Birthers who used monkey imagery in a Washington Times ad to label Obama a "usurper." But he's Obama's best friend, because he reminds the left that as disappointing as this president is, on so many, many fronts, he's not Cheney. Small comfort tonight, but it's something.
Gail Collins started her new book, "When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present," before the historic year of the woman, 2008, when female politicians like Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin rose and fell and (in both cases, in different ways) rose again. Authors never know if the topics they choose will still be fascinating and important months or years later, when their books are published, but in Collins' case, the Gods of Publishing Relevance smiled on her.
I got to talk to Collins as part of my debut on Bloggingheads.tv, and you can see most clips of it here. The book opens on the eve of 1960, with the story of Lois Rabinowitz, a secretary who happened to wear slacks to pay a ticket for her boss, and found herself chided by the judge for disrespect. "When Everything Changed" grabs your almost certainly pantsed self right there, and makes you promise to give the book to all the young women in your life this holiday season. It closes with the so-called Year of the Woman, 2008, when Clinton and Palin cracked part of the glass ceiling for women in politics, but left plenty more for women to come, if they dare.
Looking over Collins' dizzying panorama, it's hard to believe women moved so far so fast, and still remain so far from full equality. I talked to Collins about why she thought she started the book the same year the terrific writers of "Mad Men" began their series. Short answer: the pill. Longer answer: Well, watch it.
We talked about how rare it is to see the struggles, and different priorities, of black, working-class and other non-white women depicted in a mainstream book on the women's movement:
I asked whether Collins felt like history was repeating itself in the 2008 Clinton vs. Obama Democratic Primary, in terms of feminists fighting with advocates of racial equality over who got to go first, black men or (mostly white) women:
Finally, in the lightning round: Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Which was more influential, "The Feminine Mystique" or "Sex and the Single Girl"? The biggest feminist legislative defeat: ERA or Comprehensive Child Development Act? And why Billie Jean King is an underappreciated feminist hero:
If clemency for Maurice Clemmons were the only fatal error committed by Mike Huckabee as governor of Arkansas, he might be able to shift blame to the state's law enforcement system and even run for president again in 2012. Yet the Clemmons commutation that he granted nine years ago is only one among several cases that raise serious questions about Huckabee's judgment.
Clemmons, the fugitive suspect in the shooting deaths of four police officers, was hit in the torso by return fire from one of the cops who later died, he escaped.
Having accumulated five felony convictions in Arkansas and at least eight felony charges in Washington, according to the Seattle Times, Clemmons was undoubtedly a danger to the community who ought to have been returned to prison long ago by law enforcement authorities. Only days before the police shooting, he was released on $150,000 bail from a jail in Pierce County, Wash., where he was incarcerated on charges of raping a child.
As Huckabee suggested in a statement released on Monday, courts and law enforcement agencies in Washington should probably share the blame for Sunday's carnage. "Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, " the statement said, referring to Clemmons, "it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State."
In short, Huckabee was arguing, the killings attributed to Clemmons were not Huckabee's fault. Certainly they were not his fault alone. But this incident has revived memories of other decisions he made that later led to terrible consequences. The damage to his political future will hinge on how deeply news organizations now delve into those cases -- and the bizarre faith-based rationale behind his use of the clemency and pardon powers of the governor.
Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state's draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.
No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee's tendency to believe such pious testimonials. "I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak," he explained in his clemency application in 2000. "I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family's name ... I have never done anything good for God, but I've prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start."
Surely the most notorious instance of misplaced mercy involved Wayne Dumond, a rapist and murderer now deceased, who was originally sent to prison in Arkansas for raping a distant cousin of Bill Clinton. During Clinton's presidency the Dumond case became an obsession among certain right-wing pundits and politicians, who insisted that Dumond had been framed and brutalized by the "Clinton machine." When Huckabee became governor, he supported a parole for Dumond, winning applause from the Republican right -- until the former prisoner raped and killed a young woman in Missouri. Dumond later died in prison, under suspicion that he had murdered at least one other woman after his Arkansas release -- a tragic outcome for which Huckabee has repeatedly tried to blame others, including his two Democratic predecessors in the statehouse.
The real engine behind Dumond's release, however, was a Baptist minister and ultra-conservative ideologue named Jay Cole, who also happened to be a friend of Huckabee. Cole would tell the governor about his visits with the supposedly innocent Dumond, when the minister and the prisoner would read the Bible and pray together.
Perhaps the worst instance of that same syndrome, chronicled in detail by Arkansas journalists, concerned an Air Force sergeant named Glen Green, who was sentenced to prison for life after confessing that he had raped and killed a teenage girl. After beating the woman with nunchucks, he violated her almost lifeless body, ran over her with his car and buried her in a swamp. But yet another preacher friend of Huckabee's named Rev. Johnny Jackson somehow persuaded the governor that this incredibly brutal killing had been an "accident" -- and that Green had repented, come to Jesus and therefore should be freed.
Two years ago, I noted that Huckabee knew almost nothing about the Green case beyond what his preacher pal had told him. He consulted neither the prosecutor nor the victim's family, and overruled the dissent of his own parole board. After he announced that Green would be released, the furious public reaction forced him to reverse the decision. Yet he continued to release murderers and other violent criminals despite angry dissent from local prosecutors.
Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader. Among the thugs who benefited from his mercy was a robber who beat an old man to death with a lead pipe.
During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee's arrogance and stupidity mostly escaped the full scrutiny of the national press corps, in part because his stint as a contender was so brief. But next time, if there is a next time, he should get no such free pass -- and his claims to divine guidance ought to be thoroughly debunked.
Note: This story was updated after publication with news of Clemmons' reported death.
Worlds Apart
Giuliani out, and maybe in, in 2010.
The Honeymoon's over.... But not the Marriage
Yabba Dabba, Dont Worry About It.
McCain Looks to Block Net Neutrality, Appease Telecom Donors