Casual racism

Writing about where we go from here, Marc Ambinder said:

Eric Cantor, who won't escape the casual racism of being referred to as the "first Jewish majority leader," will appear as the voice of policy and conciliation.

Let’s leave aside the quibble that religion and race are two different things. As far as I know, “first Jewish majority leader” will be a truthful descriptive phrase, like “first Black President” or “first female Speaker” or (vaguely remembered from many years ago) “first male national officer of the Future Homemakers of America”. Perhaps Americans’ pride or happiness or gratification when positions of authority are attained by those who have historically found them difficult or impossible to achieve is a bit too artless for Ambinder but it’s hardly racist, casually or otherwise.

Extol Uniformity

I saw a car yesterday with two bumper stickers:

Celebrate Diversity

Go Vegan

So not all forms of diversity, then.

Brava!

The guys (and I use the word advisedly) over at The Corner are squabbling about an apparent conflict between two of what they call “conservative values”: being anti-abortion and being pro-family. This strikes me as the stupidest argument I’ve seen in a long time. I am not anti-abortion across the board but I simply don’t see how anyone can believe that abortion is a good thing because it reduces the number of single-parent families.

Thank goodness for sensible women. Kathryn Jean Lopez’ response to all this is:

There's no conflict. If you want to assume humans have no reason and can't be encouraged to exercise sexual discipline for the sake of self-respect, if nothing else — which I do not — there is another a word that avoids the "abort or be a single-mother" distraction equation: adoption.

That's not always an easy solution. But it actually is one that avoids ending a human life.

Amen, sister.

Figment and reality

Figment and Reality has commented on my earlier “Rape is a pre-existing condition” post. As so often seems to happen my response to him has grown to post length. I don’t disagree with what F&R has written - with one exception - so I suppose this is not technically a response to his comment. Rather his comment has provided a springboard for me to expand on some thoughts.

F&R writes:

If we follow the conclusion of the insurance company, it would be best if she bought the drugs on the black market to prevent being labelled with the pre-existing condition tag. Should she later discover she indeed contracted HIV, then since they did not know about it, they would be required to cover it. Instead, by being responsible, she is being penalized.

I agree wholeheartedly that this situation is - for both society and Susan - stupidly arranged. Obviously Susan should be able to take care of herself medically and clearly society is best served when people at risk of serious illnesses - particularly communicable ones - seek quick and aggressive treatment. The disconnect comes when people use this story to condemn the insurance industry. It is indeed in Susan’s best interest and in society’s best interest for Susan - anyone - to seek medical treatment without fear it will keep her from getting health insurance down the road. But by what logic is it an insurance company’s job to serve either Susan’s interest or that of society? Insurance companies are profit-making entities. They exist to serve their paying customers and - if they have them - their shareholders.

If society believes pre-existing conditions should never prevent someone from getting health insurance then society needs to assume the burden of making sure that happens. To force that burden onto private companies is stupid and short-sighted - unless the goal is to see the companies fail.

It is perfectly logical to use Susan’s case to demonstrate the need to rework our health care/insurance system so that pre-existing conditions do not prevent someone from obtaining health insurance and therefore top notch health care. However, to use Susan’s case to “prove” the insurance companies are the villains of health care or that the “bastards have brought [health insurance reform] upon themselves with their despicable practices” reflects either a total lack of understanding of the really rather simple realities of pre-existing conditions or a regrettable willingness to demonize an industry to achieve a political goal. Leaving aside the moral problems of demonizing companies - which are, after all, made up of living, breathing human beings just like you and me - the practical problem is that demonization does not lead us to figure out where the problems in the current system really lie. In fact, demonization virtually guarantees we will misidentify the problem; it is designed to do just that. And if we misidentify the problems we have virtually no hope of designing solutions which actually fix the problems.

F&R continues:

She had to go to a Doctor to get the prescription, he/she recommended the meds as Prophylactic care and she is now being told that her potential exposure is now a pre-existing condition and obviously did not have insurance at the time of the Rape.

Actually Susan did have health insurance at the time of the rape. The story specifically refers to her losing her health insurance and seeking new coverage. We don’t know why she lost her health insurance: she may have lost her job; she may have gotten insurance through her husband’s job and he lost his job or they were divorced; the premiums may have become too much for her to handle and she was looking for cheaper insurance; she may have had private insurance at the time of the rape and lost it when she moved to another State. All of which lead to Figment’s next point:

From what I read, the one very important part of any health plan discussion has to be true portability. With portability, pre-existing doesn't occur, as long as you don't have insurance lapses.

Yes, but. There is a problem with true portability for the insurance companies. JustOneMinute is suggesting a plan he calls “Once Covered, Always Covered”:

My Tough Love approach would be to rank insurance policies and legislate that anyone with, for example, a Class One coverage cannot be denied Class One coverage by another insurer at prevailing rates. In other words, people only have to pass through the door once; after that first insurance company covers them, they can buy coverage for life. People who take their chances and don't buy insurance when they are young face the risk of getting the Tough Love message (which will be as tough as that faced by the current uninsured, namely, emergency room and clinic care.)

This sounds very fair to those of us who buy health insurance: if we’ve faithfully paid premiums for years why should we be denied coverage for a “pre-existing” condition just because we now want to - or need to - buy insurance from a different company? That condition didn’t exist previous to our ever buying insurance; it just exists previous to our buying this particular health insurance. And that, of course, is the sticking point. If I’ve paid premiums for years to, say, United Health Care and now I’ve got diabetes why should Blue Cross Blue Shield have to cover me? It’s UHC that got all those premiums for all those years when I was perfectly healthy; why must BCBS take me on knowing my premiums couldn’t possible cover what I’ll cost them? Insurance companies are not fungible.

The counter-argument would be, I suppose, that this will all even out. But it won’t. I can easily envision a situation in which ABC Insurance has really low premiums but achieves that by paying health care providers as little as possible (resulting in very few who take their insurance) and by denying as many claims as possible. Meanwhile XYZ Insurance charges substantially higher premiums but pays health care providers very well (and has a huge network) and processes claims fairly. Why wouldn’t I enroll with ABC Insurance as long as I was well and switch to XYZ Insurance if I ever became seriously ill?

A similar situation arises if I live most of my life in a relatively poor State with relatively unsophisticated medical care. My insurance premiums are low. Then I become seriously ill; let’s say I have cancer. Now I move to New York or New Jersey to be near the world-class medical care available there; my insurance premiums are high. Why do the New Jersey insurance companies have to take me on? They haven’t seen a dime from me for 40 years and I’m going to cost them a fortune.

We can get around this, of course. We can write government regulations that make sure JOM’s Class One designation not only includes what a policy covers but also takes into account reimbursement rates and how many providers are in a network and the percentage of claims paid and whatever else an insurance company can do to make its policies more or less desirable plus some kind of weighting by State. (We have now re-invented the Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum designation in the proposed “Exchange” - which was itself a re-invention of the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan. She nagged.) We could require an insurance company to cough up some money when one of their policy holders switches to another company: prorate it based on years covered or something like that. Of course both of these ideas mean Yet More Government MicroManagement and so we’ve circled back around to something I’ve said before: if insurance companies are going to become public utilities we might be better off just going with a straight government program. It removes a layer of bureaucracy and cost and it puts government on the firing line rather than letting it blame all the intractable problems of health insurance on those horrible insurance companies.

F&R points out:

That was the intent of COBRA but it does not work as applied when the premiums under COBRA exceed your unemployment check.

Yes, COBRA is an idea that resulted from an attempt to do good without being willing to ante up any money.

Finally, the part of F&R’s comment that I do disagree with:

As far as the media playing to their audience, what else can we expect? They are rewarded financially by having larger audiences and our world runs on money. The headline caught me, just like the rest of us in this blog. If they (or you) had changed the title, few would listen or read about it. There is truth to the theory that "if it bleeds, it leads" in the newroom. Profits are what keep the news companies running but it is unfortunate that opionions get confused with real news.

I can buy that argument for newspapers and television which must capture readers to sell advertisements to stay in business. I don’t like it but I can buy it. I can’t buy it for your basic blogger who is - I assume - blogging in an attempt to add value to the very serious discussion we should be having about how our current health system functions, what causes the problems we see in it, and what we can do to fix those problems. I first found this story - and headline - at a blog that has done some helpful writing on cost shifting and malpractice - including an objection to Ezra Klein’s “Pollyanna-ish belief that ‘if doctors were just better, we wouldn't have these lawsuits’” because it “betrays a lack of real-world experience actually delivering health care.” I expect more from such a thoughtful blog than “if health insurance companies weren’t such bastards, we wouldn’t have a problem with pre-existing conditions like Susan’s.”

*****

Reading:

Megan McArdle is explaining how the public option can drive reimbursements for health providers below sustainability. (I discussed this problem here although McArdle is of course doing so much more pithily.) McArdle is also wondering how health care providers will react to health reform that will be bad for their reimbursement rates.

I’ve recommended David Mamet’s piece before but I think it’s worth re-reading in the context of demonizing insurance companies.

Rape is a pre-existing condition

[Updated October 22, 2009, at 7:10pm: I fixed the Category. It should have been Med Stories.]

I hate stories like this. A woman (let’s call her Susan) believed she had been drugged and raped so she took anti-HIV meds to be on the safe side. When she applied for health insurance she was denied coverage because she had a pre-existing condition and told to try again in a few years if she was HIV-free.

What happened to Susan was terrible. She did the smart thing for herself medically by taking HIV meds and as a result she made herself uninsurable for three years. That certainly doesn’t seem fair.

However the reason I hate stories like this is that they rely solely on eliciting an emotional response and have no interest in the sort of long analysis that needs to be done to figure out what such stories are really telling us. In fact stories like this are intended specifically to keep us from doing any such analysis. The title of this post expresses this perfectly. It’s the title of the post at Movin’ Meat where I found this story; a Google search for that phrase plus “Susan’s” last name yields 800 hits. The title is certainly dramatic and enraging but is it accurate - or even defensible? No.

Let’s assume the insurance company is correct that it will be three years before Susan can know for sure whether she has contracted HIV. That is, latent HIV is a medically valid pre-existing condition. The insurance company has not made a medical error in its analysis of the situation. I do not know for certain that this is the case but Movin’ Meat didn’t argue otherwise so I’m taking it as a working assumption.

So Susan does have a pre-existing condition and the insurance company is treating it accordingly. It is not rape that is a pre-existing condition but latent HIV. Those who insist this is an example of rape being a pre-existing condition are saying that the insurance company was wrong to deny coverage to Susan since her exposure to HIV was a result of rape but would be perfectly justified in denying coverage to Susan if she had been exposed to HIV:

- as a result of one episode of consensual sex;

- through sharing a needle once;

- because she was a health care worker who treated a patient with HIV; or

- because she was a newborn whose mother was HIV positive.

So let’s talk about what these beliefs will look like when translated into health insurance legislation. We will forbid insurance companies to deny coverage to people whose pre-existing conditions were the result of rape. On the other hand, people whose pre-existing conditions were not the result of rape can be denied coverage.

Somehow I don’t think that anyone who is pushing the “rape is a pre-existing condition” line really wants that kind of legislation. Stories like this are not supposed to lead one to draw conclusions - or even to think them through. These stories are designed to make those who read them angry and sad and horrified at the villain of the piece - the insurance company - in order to achieve a goal - support for health insurance reform that is not in the interest of insurance companies. These stories do not lend themselves to careful consideration of exactly why we find them heart-wrenching which means they do not advance the cause of thinking through what we find objectionable in our current health care system. And they certainly don’t support attempts to consider what correcting the perceived horror will entail. They have no balance, no other side.

Susan’s story is not about rape. It is about - or should be about - how we want to handle pre-existing conditions. This in turn should lead us to a discussion of why insurance companies handle pre-existing conditions the way they do - because if they didn’t exclude people with pre-existing conditions they’d go out of business. From there we should consider whether we want to force insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions. If we do then we have to realize that doing so will either drive health insurance premiums through the roof or put insurance companies out of business in short order. If we think putting health insurance companies out of business is a desirable outcome then we have to discuss how we’re going to handle health insurance instead. This almost certainly means some type of government intervention. The choices for government-run health insurance are the same as those for privately-run health insurance: everyone must buy in; buy-in is optional but pre-existing conditions get you excluded; or everyone who buys in is supporting those who wait to buy in until they’re sick.

On the other hand, if we want to avoid putting insurance companies out of business then we have to force everyone to buy health insurance from them. If we are not willing to do that then either we have to live with insurance companies denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or we have to live with sky-high premiums or we have to accept that government needs to provide health insurance in some way: either by taking it over completely or by providing health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. If the former then we’re back to the same three choices: everyone must buy in; buy-in is optional but pre-existing conditions get you excluded; or everyone who buys in is supporting those who wait to buy in until they’re sick. If the latter then there is no choice: we all support those who wait to buy in until they’re sick.

Framing Susan’s story as “rape is a pre-existing condition” short-circuits that entire discussion. It makes it clear that the only decent responses to her story are to insist that no insurance company should be able to deny her coverage for her pre-existing condition and to accept that insurance companies are clearly rotten to the core. Only someone with ice in her veins would read Susan’s story and then point out that an insurance company needs to remain solvent and that providing coverage to someone who may have an extremely expensive pre-existing condition will make insurance more expensive for everyone else who buys it. And only a monster would point out that - whatever advantages government-run health insurance might have - it does not eliminate the relationship between required coverage and pre-existing conditions. A government-run plan that does not require everyone to enroll will face exactly the same issue: what to do about someone who is not enrolled in health insurance, who may have contracted HIV, and who now wants to sign up. Conversely if private insurance companies operated in a community where everyone was required to have insurance coverage this situation would never have arisen.

On paper the Baucus bill understands this relationship. It requires insurance companies to accept applicants with pre-existing conditions; this resolves situations like Susan’s. It balances this requirement with an individual mandate: everyone must buy health insurance. This gives insurance companies a big enough pool of healthy people to dilute the cost of covering those with pre-existing conditions. It also - and more importantly - means that there will no longer be people with pre-existing conditions who are not insured but want to become insured. So from that standpoint the Baucus bill looks reasonable.

There are reports, however, that the fines for the individual mandate are being decreased. If they are decreased to the point that they are no longer coercive or if they are not enforced we will have written exactly the kind of bill that Susan’s story could be expected to produce: one containing an emotional response to the problem of pre-existing conditions but lacking any understanding of the realities that cause that problem.

And one more thing

In my previous post, I linked to a Daily Kos poll that asked:

QUESTION: Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?

That wasn’t the only question on that poll; there was one more which apparently preceded it:

QUESTION: Do you believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent?

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the purpose of this question much less why it was paired with the Obama birthplace question. Maybe the pollsters figured people who answered “Yes” would consider Obama to have been born in the United States even if he was actually born in Kenya?

I put my questions aside while I wrote but now I’ve done a little digging around and found this Daily Kos post which explains that this was intentionally designed as a bad poll question and intended to prove how crummy Gallup is at doing polls:

So why would only 42% of Americans say that they believe in this extensively-documented, measurable, well-established theory? Should we worry that America is hopelessly backward and mired in some kind of anti-science dark age?

No. For one very good reason: both the question itself, and the presentation of the results are deeply flawed. Intentionally idiotic.

The questions was written to press emotional hot buttons. It's not "were all the continents once merged into Pangea?" or "Was the North American continent once closer to Europe?" or simply "do you believe in continental drift?" It's were "America and Africa were once part of the same continent." If you think that doesn't matter, I invite you to look at the regional breakdown of results -- that particular association of words "America" and "Africa," probably accounts for the 10% greater "No" vote in the same region where "Birtherism" is at its height.

There’s more - and some of it is quite interesting and even valid - but you see the point they’re making here. The problem is there are, well, problems with this.

First, it’s not clear America and Africa were ever the same “continent”. Wikipedia makes it clear the answer depends on what you mean by “continent” and you can see the debate rage here where people are arguing about tectonic plates versus joined land masses versus bordering land masses. So “No” is arguably the more correct answer than “Yes”. Perhaps the “birther” region has a more subtle understanding of Pangaea than those ignoramuses in non-birther regions.* Who knows what answer the pollsters would have gotten if they’d asked:

Were the United States and Africa ever part of a single large landmass?

Second, there’s no control question. No one was asked whether America and Europe were ever part of the same continent, or America and China. If fact, no one was even asked if North and South America were or are part of the same continent. (Again, it depends on what you mean by continent.)

Third, “America” is kind of a vague term. If I was thinking of North America, I might say “No” even though I accept the truth of the great super-continent and even if I considered a joined landmass the same as a continent whereas if I was thinking of South America I’d certainly say “Yes”. Why? Because when I think of Pangaea I think of that bulge of South America tucked nicely into that curve of Africa. I know North America was part of the same landmass but I don’t think of it as being spooned together into one unit with Africa.

Fourth, the Daily Kos article does not present so much as a simple crosstabs to compare how the answers to the continent question match up with the answers to the Obama birthplace question. They simply assume that because more people in the “birther” region said “No” to both questions the same people said “No” to both questions, presumably in all regions. They may be right but their numbers don’t prove that. Why not do the extra hour’s worth of work to see if their assumption is correct?

Fifth, there is no discussion of the effect the first question has on the second. The idea that polling questions impact later questions in the same poll is hardly radical. It would be helpful to at least see a discussion of why the continent question was considered to have no impact on the birthplace question.

Finally, the Daily Kos articles concludes its review of the methodological problems with:

The poll above does reveal that Republicans are much more likely to not believe in the results predicted by continental drift. Which is interesting. But even that result is of little value when it's attached to a question so deeply flawed.

So the question is too deeply flawed to reveal scientific ignorance among Republicans but not too deeply flawed to reveal racism among birthers. My statistics professors are spinning in their graves - and if they’re not dead, this will kill them.

There is one point in the Daily Kos article I can wholeheartedly agree with - at least if I change just one tiny word. When asking why Gallup does such a bad job asking questions and such a good job presenting sensationalized results, the article concludes:

Because it gets headlines. Because it keeps them in the news between elections.

Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit. Maybe the Gallup Daily Kos organization itself is too ignorant to see the numerous flaws in what they're asking and how they're presenting it. It's hard to be sure.

*****

* Daily Kos itself distinguishes between continent and landmass and makes it clear that Panagaea was the latter and not the former. Bizarrely enough, they do this when they explain why “Yes” is the correct answer (emphasis mine):

The collection of all the continents into a unified land mass around 250 million years ago ... In around 300 million years, the continents will hold a reunion, once again forming a single mass before the moving plates carry them away on separate paths.

Oh, please (again)

(I may have to make “Oh, please” a category.)

JustOneMinute is writing about Andrew Sullivan’s latest offering on the Obama birth certificate issue. As JOM points out, Sullivan is now recanting his desire to see Obama’s Original Birth Certificate and is convinced the birther controversy is all about race. JOM does a good job poking holes in Sullivan’s weak understanding of this issue but there were two points in Sullivan’s article that JOM didn’t deal with.

The first one is a relatively small point but demonstrates the sloppiness of both Sullivan’s research and his thinking:

In fact, a majority of Republican voters — 58% — either do not believe or are unsure that Obama is a natural-born American citizen. That means most Republicans believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency because the constitution reserves it for those born in America.

Although Sullivan did not bother to provide a link, I was able to track down the poll that gave him that 58% number. The numbers break down this way for Republicans:

QUESTION: Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?

42% Yes
28% No
30% Not sure

Oddly, this poll did not appear to have a “Don’t know” answer (which is not the same as a “Not sure” answer). Furthermore, since the percentages add up to exactly 100% neither does it appear to have had a measurable number of respondents who said, “I’ve never though about it”, “I have no idea”, “What?”, or “You have got to be kidding”. Or, of course, all the respondents who actually said they didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t understand the question, or couldn’t figure out why the heck they were being asked this question got lumped into the “Not sure” group. Call me cynical but since this is a Daily Kos poll, I’m inclined to believe the “lumping” explanation.

Thus when Sullivan asserts that the 30% who who ended up in the “Not sure” group necessarily “believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency” he is making two errors. First, the “not sure” contingent are just as likely to not care or never have thought about it. (Even Kos only considers those who answered “No” to be “Obama-hating conspiracy theorists”.) So, for example, I could have written an article based on this poll and said:

In fact, only a minority of Republican voters - 28% - believe Obama is not a natural-born American citizen. That means the vast majority of Republicans - 72% - do not question Obama’s legitimacy as President, an office the Constitution reserves for those born in America.

Except I’d never write that because Sullivan’s got another problem tucked in there. The Constitution does not reserve the Presidency for those born in America. It reserves the Presidency for those who are natural born citizens - which as far as I can tell simply means those who were United States citizens at birth. Apparently Sullivan missed the fact that John McCain - born in Panama - also ran for President last year but it’s entirely possible some of the respondents lumped into “Not sure” didn’t. Which is Sullivan’s second error in assigning them to the “believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency”: even someone who had no idea whether Obama was born in the United States doesn’t necessarily think that disqualifies him from being President.

The second problematic point Sullivan makes and JOM doesn’t address directly is bigger and scarier:

The chilling implication is that a large number of Americans believe the president has no right to be in office and has fraudulently manoeuvred himself there.

I hope the secret service is on alert. If we thought racial panic had ended with Obama’s election, the resilience of this story in key parts of the country is a helpful wake-up call.

And how is this different from all the Democrats who thought Bush had no right to be in office and had fraudulently maneuvered himself there? You remember. All those people who thought - still think - that the 2000 election was stolen by Florida and the Supreme Court and the 2004 election was (I’m a little vague on this) stolen by voting machines in Ohio? Were those Democrats motivated by “racial panic”?

I’ve said it before: most of the birth certificate brouhaha has little to do with race and everything to do with exotic. We’d be hearing the same stories if Obama was born to an American mother and a Russian father, raised in the Ukraine by a Ukrainian stepfather (legal or courtesy), and then proceeded to spend literally incomprehensible sums of money; prop up Wall Street fat cats; buy two auto companies; let Congress write a climate change bill that is massive, expensive, and stupid; and let Congress write a health care bill (or two or three or seven) that scares people half to death.

This is about people who hate Obama’s policies and find him personally objectionable (socialist, Bill Ayer’s buddy, charming sociopath) trying to prove he’s not really their President or not really the President. It is exactly the same impulse that drove people who hated Bush’ polices and found him personally objectionable (fascist, stupid, in thrall to Halliburton, charming dry drunk) to try to prove he wasn’t really their President or wasn’t really the President. This type of endeavor is pointless, divisive, and incredibly tiresome. But it isn’t racist.

The real concern here is not that some people believe Obama was born outside the United States or that Sullivan is sloppy and slavish. The real concern is that if the drumbeat of “anyone who opposes Obama is a racist” gets louder it will do far more damage to the country than any birther conspiracy ever could. I worried about this during the campaign when the race card was so much in evidence and I was pleasantly surprised when the cries of “racist” largely disappeared after the election and through the first several months of Obama’s Administration. Now those cries are back and they’re incredibly dangerous. It is hard to imagine a more effective legal means of silencing opponents than to smear them as racists every time they speak up. I prefer to believe that Obama realizes exactly how dangerous this path is since he has not himself played the race card.

This re-dealing of the race card does make me wonder if I should amend something I said in my previous post:

[Democrats/liberals/progressives] are so certain that any decent, thinking person would agree with them they have no mechanism for dealing with those who don’t except to insist such people are either evil or idiotic.

Do you think I need to add “or racist” to the end or is that pretty much covered by “idiotic”?

The word "rage"

doesn’t begin to do justice to how I feel about this:

Hate crime disappears into the memory hole

Dudes search for something important in hate crime to be upset about

Somehow I just can’t convince myself that making racist comments is a more serious problem than murdering women. But I guess if the most important thing in your world is proving how vile conservatives are it's easy to dismiss Heidi Overmier, Elizabeth Gannon, and Jody Billingsley as irrelevant to what really matters here.

Oh, please

In last night’s press conference, President Obama weighed in on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates:

Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact.

An article (via Bent Corner) from television station WVCB in Boston has the following quote:

Spencer Kimball, an Emerson College professor and president of Kimball Political Consulting, said that he was surprised that Obama "elaborated upon" the Gates case.

"To bring it out as a racist issue is, in my opinion, very irresponsible. Race is a very decisive issue in our society, and to say that someone is racist or using racial profiling without all the facts in hand really only inflames those who want to make this a race issue," Kimball said.

If Kimball was surprised Obama would claim someone was racist without a firm factual basis he must have been in a coma during the recent election.

(On a happier note, rereading what I wrote during the campaign, I am delighted that neither Obama nor - as far as I’ve heard - his supporters are using the race card to attack those who oppose Obama’s policies. I don’t have much good to say about the President but I give him full marks for that.)

Fourth Wave, Part 2: Women in the workplace

In Part 1 of my musings on fourth-wave feminism, I discussed my history of feminism, said I would address the issue of abortion in Part 2, and planned to address women in the workplace in Part 3. However, the issue of how women view work has popped up repeatedly in my recent reading and so I instead want to address women in the workplace now. I’ll get to abortion in the next episode.

In Part 1, I talked about women in the workplace in passing when I referred to reading Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Lehan Harragan and Women’s Dress for Success Book by John T. Molloy:

To me, these were both “feminist” reading which I guess shows pretty clearly that I was not really interested in changing the game - I just wanted to play on equal terms.

I also pointed out that an article called The Feminist Awakening: Hillary Clinton and the fourth wave spent some time talking about women not knowing how to dress to run for President. About that I said:

If women had taken Molloy’s advice all those years ago, we’d have a standard “powerful professional woman” dress code established by now and we could all stop worrying about what to wear when running for President.

I also had a bone to pick with Amy Siskind’s article, How Feminism Became the F-Word:

Ms. Siskind wants to know where the outrage is over “the fact that women still earn 78 percent of what men do” or “the fact that our representation in politics, academia, and corporate leadership tends to hover around 16 percent.” Perhaps if women had taken Harragan more seriously and learned to play the games necessary to get ahead instead of expending energy demanding the rules be changed to suit us, we’d be earning more money and accruing more power. Furthermore, it’s been a while since I read Games Mother Never Taught You but I seem to remember that part of Harragan’s argument was that if women learned to play by the rules we would eventually amass enough power to change them.

I knew then that I wanted to cover this topic more fully and was even more interested in doing so after I found a Website called Kim Allen’s Online Presence. This popped up when I did a search for Games Mother Never Taught You and is owned by a woman who self-identifies as a third-wave feminist. I’m not sure the site is being updated any longer but I thought the book review section was a mother lode of jumping off points for discussions of feminism.

As I said, her site popped up when I did a search for Games Mother Never Taught You. In her review, Allen is quite dismissive of this book characterizing it as “a rare look at right-wing second-wave feminism” which “embodies the 1970's version of ‘make it on your own by playing within the system’-- ie, conservative feminism.” She finds the book “offensive in some sections” because “[i]t has nothing to do with making the obnoxious executive world better, and everything to do with twisting the age-old rules to your advantage, just as men have always done to get ahead.”

Obviously, I find her review somewhat naive: as I said in my quibble about Siskind’s article, if women had learned to play the corporate (and academic and political) game to our advantage we would have done much better over the last 35 years. And Allen herself concedes (emphasis hers):

But the general principles were actually sort of useful, I'm somewhat surprised to admit. Her frank assessment of how much of business is based on military and sports models is quite accurate, even in today's "horizontally-structured" small companies. Just because you don't have a direct chain of command and a drill-sergeant-like boss doesn't mean the basic principles have been totally abandoned. (In fact, assuming that they have been would probably be a big mistake).

I admit that I had a somewhat hazy concept of how executives advance, and now that I've tried to spot some of the patterns in my own company-- I was shocked to see that some of the principles apply. Not all, but some. I also learned a few things about salary negotiation and general professional behavior that help one to be fairly compensated in the world of work (an area where women persistently get the short end of the stick, partly because they don't know how these things work).

No women often don’t know - or don’t understand - how these things work which is probably part of the reason - although not the whole reason - women do in fact make less than men and hold only 16% of leadership positions.

What led me from her review to this post, however, was the phrase “obnoxious executive world”. At first I assumed she was referring to continuing grossly sexist behavior but in fact Allen says later in her review:

(Aside: one chapter was out-of-date, but not hilariously so. That is the one on sexual relations in the workplace-- you know, butt-grabbing and tasteless jokes. If the world was really like what Harragan describes in 1977, I have newfound respect for 2nd wave feminists who wanted to kill all men).

So I was left somewhat perplexed by what is so “obnoxious” about the executive world. Then TigerHawk put up a (ridiculous) video of Dr. Helen Smith interviewing Dr. Richard Driscoll about the role of fathers and said:

If you've watched the interview, I would respectfully suggest that Drs. Smith and Driscoll do not mention one of the big sources of female rage, the continuing preponderance in the workplace of men, male values (such as they are) and male behavioral impulses. That anger needs to come out, and the male partner is the most probable recipient. Inside more than a few marriages, therefore, husbands and therefore fathers take some of the blame for the suppressed frustrations of the day job, perhaps just because they are also men. That transference is as sexist, or more so, than the underlying outrage, but there is no corporate compliance program to deal with it.

Now we have a committed third-wave feminist and a guy on the conservative side both in agreement that women believe there is something deeply distressing about the workplace. It’s not that I don’t understand that the workplace can be difficult for women. Although sexism is not usually as overt as it once was, it does linger. Furthermore women still often bear all or most of the responsibility for childcare: balancing that with work can be difficult and even heartwrenching. Even given these problems, though, I was struck by the oddness of the term “obnoxious” and the intensity of the term “rage”. I don’t know exactly what either Allen or TigerHawk means but it brought into focus something that bothers me about the view many feminists - and perhaps many women who don’t think of themselves as feminists - have about the working world.

A certain set of feminists has always believed that existing social and business structures - corporations, universities, politics, even religions - were created largely by men (a belief I do not share, by the way). Being male-created, those structures are clearly, perhaps even definitionally, sub-optimal at best, dysfunctional most likely, and awful almost certainly. It never seems to occur to this set of feminists to look around and realize that most of those structures work remarkably well. Of course they don’t work perfectly: violence, poverty, war, discrimination, the whole laundry list of ills do exist in our society. But it seems to me that those ills - in fact the full and fervent expression of those ills - is the natural state of human beings. To ameliorate those ills at all is a condition devoutly to be desired and the simple fact is that such ills are least apparent in those societies where the supposedly male-created structures are most firmly in place. The history of the world is one of hideous brutality interrupted by stretches of relative peace and prosperity. I’m more grateful than I can say that I live in one of the best stretches of history.

This is why I view with skepticism some feminists’ insistence that the existing structures must be changed to fit their ideal of how society should look, should work, should hang together. I don’t know of any society that has done better than the ones currently forming the First World. Does that mean we can’t do better? Of course not. But the existing system puts food on my table and a roof over my head; warms me when it’s cold and cools me when it’s hot; cures my ills and delays my death; lavishes me with goods and experiences undreamed of 100 years ago; and affords me and other women in First World societies greater freedom from and freedom to than at any other time in history. I’m simply not happy about the idea of trying to dismantle a system that works in order to replace it with one that may or may not do a better job, may or may not do even as good a job. My goal for women is to be full participants in these endeavors, not to stand outside and throw brickbats.

Equally important, I do not consider the existing social and business structures to be masculine so much as simply human. One of the common feminist complaints is that such structures should be, as Allen puts it, “’horizontally-structured’ small companies”. This preference for non-hierarchical structures is common in feminism and is usually wrapped in references to the communal, co-operative nature of women and of the activities women historically participated in, like quilting bees and cooking large dinners together. This ignores the fact that women have always organized themselves around the concepts of status, hierarchy, and deference just as much as men have. Some woman had to organize those quilting bees and communal dinners, decide what color the quilt backing would be and whose dining room would host the dinner. Odds are it was the woman considered the leader of the community, probably the woman married to the highest ranking man. And the inverse is true also: men involved in a barn-raising or a community harvest were neither more nor less co-operative, neither more nor less hierarchical than women in quilting bees and kitchens. Given the opportunity, humans organize themselves in whatever way most efficiently allows them to achieve their goals.

Furthermore, women have always embraced more formal aspects of status, hierarchy, and deference. A woman may have taken her status from her husband in the past but that doesn’t mean she didn’t avail herself of it to the greatest extent possible. When Lord Whosis rode off to fight for the king and Lady Whosis was left behind to run the castle, she didn’t sit down with their serfs and discuss who would do what: she gave orders and she expected them to be obeyed. In more modern times, the factory owner’s wife expected deference from the men who worked for her husband and from their wives. The image of Colonels and Colonels’ wives required to dance attendance on the General’s lady is an enduring one.

In a great irony, some of the most compelling evidence that the concepts of status, hierarchy, and deference are important to all humans and not just to men comes from within feminism itself. In another of Allen’s book reviews, she writes about Manifesta, a book about third-wave feminism written by two third-wave feminists. In summarizing the book’s discussion of relationships between the younger feminists and their older counterparts, Allen says:

In particular, young women have begun to speak up about abuse at the hands of the elders in the movement-- being ignored or patronized (I use that term deliberately). The young women make coffee and play the supporting roles while being expected to worship the divas and icons of the Second Wave. This relationship sounds a lot like how men in general expect the women around them to behave.

Oddly enough, Allen does not draw from this what seems to me the obvious conclusion: the organizing principles of status, hierarchy, and deference are as meaningful for women as they are for men. She cannot see that the young feminists’ dislike of their role is not a matter of some feminist ideal of community but of the universal rebellion of the young against elders who hold the status the young want, command them through the hierarchy established by that status, and demand deference. The young feminists’ reaction to their elders is no different from the reaction of male junior executives to their bosses: compliance mixed with resentment.

Furthermore, by pointing out that the elders in the feminist movement expect the same behavior from their juniors that men expect from women, Allen makes an important point although again she does not see it. The problem with the way men treat women (or at least have historically treated them in the workplace) is not that status, hierarchy, and deference is intrinsically wrong; it is that tying status, hierarchy, and deference to gender is wrong. Failing to make this distinction is a problem for many feminists and perhaps for many women in the workplace. The goal often seems to be to create communal, co-operative enterprises where women think they will feel comfortable and get a better deal. When enterprises are competitive instead, women react badly. Far better for women to understand that the only realistic goal is to achieve more status and demand more deference within a hierarchy: flat social structures are not the human way.

For a final dose of irony, we need only look at the very recent NOW election. First, the fact that there is an election at all should give anyone enamored of the flat, communal, co-operative ideal pause. If the most powerful self-identified feminist organization in the world feels the need for leaders who hold ranked offices, exercise real power, and get paid serious money, why on earth would anyone believe that entities dedicated to making profits and crushing their rivals would see - or in fact derive - any benefit from exchanging their hierarchies for a more egalitarian model?

Second, the stories that are coming out about how the NOW election unfolded seem to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that women are just as willing to fight for power, just as willing to use whatever means are necessary, just as willing to destroy their opponents as any man clawing his way up the corporate ladder at Really Humongous Corp, Inc. These are not women sitting around a quilting frame discussing how to make everyone feel good about the outcome. These are ruthless competitors determined to end up on top. Although I can’t say I approve of some of the tactics used, I can point out that these women embraced the reality of their workplace and went after what they wanted with all guns blazing.

Would that more women in corporations, universities, politics, and religious organizations followed their leads. While women sit back and sigh that their working lives would be much better if only the working world would embrace its feminine side, the guys who work at the next desk over are plotting to take over the world and thanking their lucky stars women aren’t doing the same. As far as men are concerned, the less competition the better and if women are willing to take themselves out of the running without men having to so much as lift a finger, that’s fine with them.

And this, to come full circle, is where I think Allen made her biggest mistake in her review of Games Mother Never Taught You:

I called this book sexist because it is by 90's standards. Harragan unabashedly declares that men and women are at war in the corporate setting, and we will triumph by beating the men at their own game--gathering arsenals, performing espionage, strategically moving around, and always keeping our friends close but our enemies closer.

It’s not that men and women are at war with each other in the corporate setting; it’s that so long as women want to advance in the corporate setting they are at war with - competing with - everyone else in that setting. There are a hundred entry-level positions; 25 managers; 5 VPs; and one CEO. If a woman wants that one top position, she is going to have to compete for it with men and, yes, now with other women.

Does that mean a woman can’t be a feminist and still climb the ladder in corporate - or academic or political or religious - organizations? Of course not. Let’s say Sally is a feminist and is competing for a job against Bob and Nancy. Sally can feel free to make sure her boss knows Nancy is an incompetent idiot who couldn’t do a financial forecast if her life depended on it - provided she’s willing to say the same about Bob. Heck, Sally can even tell her boss that Nancy shouldn’t get the job because she has small children - provided she’s willing to say the same about Bob.

What Sally can’t do is attack her female competitors on sexist grounds - or stand by while others do so. If someone else says Nancy shouldn’t get the job because she has small children, Sally will either point out that the same is true of Bob or point out that Nancy is the best judge of how to balance her work life with her children. If someone refers to Nancy with any of the hundreds of sexist - and often sexual - slurs reserved for women, Sally will call them on it. Sisters may fight with each other but when it really counts they have each other’s backs.

And after the dust settles, Sally and Nancy can go out for a drink and talk about how they really need to get going on standardizing that “powerful professional woman” dress code.

Fourth Wave, Part 1: My history of feminism

Over at Reclusive Leftist, they (formerly “we”) are discussing how to define the fourth wave of feminism. I have to admit I was a little out of my depth over there. My view of United States feminist history pretty much goes like this:

First, there was Abigail Adams who wanted her husband to help the ladies out a little when the Constitution for the new country was written. He didn’t.

Then, way back before the Civil War, there were women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stoner who thought it would be nice if women could at least vote and, hey, maybe even own their own property and not be beholden to men for every single thing in their lives. They made the mistake of diverting some of their attention from the struggle for Women’s Rights to the Abolition Movement and boy did they get the short end of that stick. Women finally got the right to vote in 1920, fifty-five years after abolition. This is now called “first-wave” feminism although I have a sneaking suspicion those involved sincerely hoped it would be “only wave needed” feminism.

In the early part of the 20th Century, we had flappers, who were independent young ladies but seemed to be mostly about drinking in speakeasies and dancing on tables. Then came the Great Depression when men and women were equally poor. This was followed by Rosie the Riveter who did everything a man could do and more but when the War ended she was consigned to suburbia and told to have 3 children and buy a station wagon. This is how we got the 50’s.

In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and the phenomenon I personally know as The Woman’s Movement began. I was too young in 1963 to understand what had happened but the echoes of the book rang down through my teenage years. Then the first issue of Ms. magazine appeared in January, 1972, halfway through my freshman year in college and I was in.

I did consciousness-raising groups, one all-woman, one men and women together. Since I came within an inch of marrying one of the guys in the mixed group, I think in retrospect that the group did not exactly do what it was supposed to. The all-woman group, however, was a fabulous experience and whatever fourth-wave feminism turns out to be, I hope consciousness-raising groups are once again part of the the movement. Anyhow.

I was seriously, actively feminist all through my college years, reading, agitating for the Equal Rights Amendment, rejoicing at Roe v Wade, all the usual stuff. Then came graduate school and feminism faded into the background. I was still a feminist but feminism wasn’t really front and center in my life. My time and my mental energy were more than accounted for by my class work.

Somewhere in here I read Games Mother Never Taught You by Betty Lehan Harragan and found it amusing, helpful, and fascinating. I also read John T. Molloy’s Women’s Dress for Success Book and it made perfect sense to me. Men had a uniform - suit, tie, shoes - that signaled they were to be taken seriously in the business world. Molloy’s thesis was that women should develop their own uniform that signaled the same thing. To me, these were both “feminist” reading which I guess shows pretty clearly that I was not really interested in changing how the world worked - I just wanted to play on equal terms.

After graduate school came my first serious full-time job which also took all the time and energy I had, then being a partner in my own company, ditto. I was still a feminist but I didn’t read about feminism, interact with other feminists, or participate in feminist causes. It was just what and who I was. I didn’t even know that the era of feminism I personally experienced and participated in was known as “second-wave” feminism.

As I said, I remained a feminist through all this. The core of my feminism consisted of two pretty simple ideas:

1) Women’s professional, political, social, and personal lives should be a consequence of their circumstances, interests, and abilities - not their gender.

2) Women should have each other’s backs. That doesn’t mean women should never criticize each other. It means sexist criticism, sexist slurs, sexist attacks against any woman should be unacceptable to all women. Situations pitting one group of women against another for the benefit of a man or men should be unacceptable to all women. When one woman is attacked, insulted, denigrated, or shamed because she is a woman or because she is a particular kind of woman, all women suffer. Sisterhood is powerful.

Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s I found myself involved professionally with Incredibly Large Megacorp and it occurred to me, looking around, that it might be a good idea to sort of brush up on my feminism. I accordingly bought an issue of Ms. magazine. Imagine my shock at discovering that while I hadn’t been paying attention, the magazine had switched its focus from supporting women’s rights to supporting Third World peoples who had been oppressed by the Western European patriarchy. It had apparently escaped the notice of the editors at Ms. that an uncomfortably large number of oppressed Third World countries were run quite ruthlessly by men who not only oppressed their fellow countrymen but treated their fellow countrywomen far, far worse than any Western European patriarch would dream of doing.

Recovering from my shock at what had happened to Ms., I started taking notice of the wider feminist arena. Some feminists no long considered pornography or even prostitution anti-woman. I promptly swooned. When I revived, I noticed that a number of professional women - especially the female news anchors on cable TV - had clearly abandoned any type of universal female professional dress code. (Or, as an extremely liberal friend of mine put it, “Why do all the women in cable TV news shows dress like hookers?”) Much of feminist discussion now seemed to revolve around including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered concerns as an intrinsic part of feminism. Much of the rest of it seemed to revolve around, “Oh, goody. Sex!”

The idea that supporting pornography and prostitution had a place in feminism was anathema to me. The fact that large numbers of professional women were dressing to accentuate their sex appeal rather than their professional standing was disturbing. Sure, the idea that there’s nothing wrong with being attractive and people should be treated with respect regardless of how they dress sounds great. But I didn’t see lots of male newsmen showing up on camera in tight white T-shirts and tighter black jeans.

Sharing GLBT concerns is one thing but including those concerns as an intrinsic part of feminism gave me pause. Were women once again making the mistake of diverting some of their attention from their own struggle to that of another disadvantaged group? Or, given Ms. magazine’s current focus, the even worse mistake of diverting all of their attention to the struggles of every single disadvantaged group on the planet except women? As for sex, my generation of feminists liked sex, too. We just didn’t think that the single most important thing the Women’s Movement accomplished was letting women screw around as much as men did.

So all in all, it never occurred to me that what I was witnessing was third-wave feminism. It didn’t really seem to have anything to do with feminism and to the extent I gave it any thought, I viewed it as young women kicking over the traces - something they had the freedom to do because my generation of feminists had knocked down so many barriers for them and, beyond that, because Susan B. Anthony’s generation of feminists had knocked down the most important barrier for all of us. After all, I was old(er) and rather curmudgeonly and if this was what women wanted to do with their lives, so be it. If they wanted to call it “feminism”, perhaps that was an homage acknowledging their debt to those who had gone before.

Then came the Clinton administration. I’ve written before about my distress with women who were happy to support a man who facilely divided women into his own modern Madonna and whore groups: well-educated professional women who were honestly respected as colleagues and and less-educated pink-collar women who were sexual prey. Sisterhood was indeed powerful but now that power was mobilized against other women to benefit one man. Not exactly what I had in mind all those years ago.

As far as I was concerned feminism was dead, killed by the Clintons and the legions of women who were perfectly happy to attack other women, provided those women could somehow be labelled as “other”. I was still a feminist but my feminism had little to do with what I came to think of as Institutional Feminism, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Instead it was just me and my beliefs.

Then came the 2008 Presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s grace and grit in the primaries awakened the more tribal aspects of my feminism and watching other women rally around her made me hope that perhaps my version of feminism had merely been sleeping rather than being dead and gone. Unfortunately, that hope didn’t last long, killed by (mostly) young women who thought the misogyny directed at Clinton by the Obama campaign and by Obama’s lickspittles in the media was just fine because, OMG, Barack Obama is just so dreamy. My distress soon turned to horror as I watched the blitzkrieg of misogyny unleashed against Sarah Palin by women young and old who did the bidding of their Democratic masters, brutally attacking a woman simply because their men told them she was the enemy, not really their kind, “other”.

My heart broke. When I first became a feminist, we fought a fierce battle against the idea that women could be divided into two groups. One group, the good girls, were protected by society, treated decently, and allowed to live well. The other group, the bad girls, had no claim on society’s protection, were treated like dirt, and lucky to be allowed to live at all. Feminism would sweep that all away. We understood this division was just a way of keeping women in their place: bad girls were a warning of what would happen to women who didn’t toe the line. In order for women to be free to choose their own path, we had to protect bad girls as well as good girls. After all, bad girls were just good girls who didn’t do what they were told and every feminist on the planet was not doing what she had been told.

Madonnas and whores, the pedestal and the gutter. With the attacks on Sarah Palin we were right back where we started and once again being a good girl meant being a woman who did what she was told by men - in this case the men running the Democratic party - and being a bad girl meant being a woman who had the guts to forge her own path. Little Miss Attila put this better than anyone else I’ve read. She begins by writing about the Letterman attacks on Sarah Palin and her daughters but is making a broader point (emphasis hers):

They will rationalize what they are doing, and say that this is not American Sharia law: after all, we only enforce our notions of sexual purity when it comes to Republican women, or women and girls related to Republican women. [snip]

This is American Sharia, assholes. The practitioners of Sharia in Muslim countries are at least consistent in their contempt for women and in their practice of gender apartheid: you, on the other hand, want sexual slavery for some women in this country; others, whose opinions you prefer, can live in relative peace and freedom. You will allow it.

If you are giving women and girls the “gift” of not being badgered for being female, and threatened with misogyny and sexual assault, they are not truly free—only living in a state of grace, contingent upon performing the right tricks, spouting leftist verbiage like seals at Sea World, balancing balls on their noses in the hopes of getting fish thrown into their mouths.

This is what feminists knew all those years ago when we fought to so hard to support all women. In 2008 women claiming to be feminists, claiming to wear the mantle of their foremothers, tossed that hard-learned knowledge aside in their eagerness to please their owners; in their willingness to sell their souls for a seat at the table; in their fear that if they spoke up, talked back, didn’t play along, they’d be treated just like Palin and any other woman who dared deviate from Democratic political orthodoxy: thrown off the pedestal and into the gutter.

I had been correct back in the 90’s: feminism was dead.

Now it seems there is stirring in the underbrush. Fourth-wave feminism is lurking, not quite visible but clearly closing in. The problem is, no one seems to know exactly what’s out there. This is the question Reclusive Leftist is trying to answer: How would you define the fourth wave of feminism? Since she states firmly that the fourth wave “started last year with the auto de fe of first Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin” I hope, of course, that the fourth wave will re-establish the principle that women do not participate in or consent to misogynistic attacks on other women. I also hope that the fourth wave will be more inclusive, more willing to detach itself from liberalism, no longer tied to the Democratic party. A large part of this will be acknowledging that a vast array of positions, on everything from equal pay to abortion can be viewed completely differently by feminists who are also liberals than by feminists who are also conservatives.

I’m not sure what the final outcome will be with regard to reconciling the views of liberal and conservative feminists; sadly my experience in the discussion at Reclusive Leftist has dimmed my hope with regard to abortion. But that’s a story for the next episode.

*****

Reading:

The Feminist Awakening: Hillary Clinton and the fourth wave: This whole article is interesting - note that it was written before Clinton finally lost the primary campaign and long, long before Palin appeared on the scene. I was particularly struck by the discussion of how to dress on page 4. If women had taken Molloy’s advice all those years ago, we’d have a standard “powerful professional woman” dress code established by now and we could all stop worrying about what to wear when running for President.

How Feminism Became the F-Word: By Amy Siskind, one of the founders of The New Agenda, an attempt to define the fourth wave as uncoupling feminism from the Democratic Party and from a hard-line pro-choice stand. This is worth a look just for the contrasting Ms. magazine covers but do read the whole thing.

One small quibble: Ms. Siskind wants to know where the outrage is over “the fact that women still earn 78 percent of what men do” or “the fact that our representation in politics, academia, and corporate leadership tends to hover around 16 percent.” Perhaps if women had taken Harragan more seriously and learned to play the games necessary to get ahead instead of expending energy demanding the rules be changed to suit us, we’d be earning more money and accruing more power. Furthermore, it’s been a while since I read Games Mother Never Taught You but I seem to remember that part of Harragan’s argument was that if women learned to play by the rules we would eventually amass enough power to change them. (I expanded on this topic and ended up with about a gazillion words. This current post is long enough so I’ll leave that expansion for a future episode.)

How Will We Know When The Fourth Wave Has Begun?: Written in response to Siskind, this piece explicitly rejects any move away from “the Democratic, pro-choice agenda that has furthered the movement in many substantial ways.” To which I am inclined to reply: For what is a woman profited, if she shall gain the whole world, and lose her own soul?

A Fourth-Wave Manifesto: A fairly random selection to give a little flavor of how much the idea of what fourth-wave feminism should/will/can be varies.

Who's crazy now?

The second point in this brief note on Iran from Ezra Klein (via The Corner) seems to me at best incomplete and at worst backwards. After conceding that the government’s handling of the election undermines his argument that the Iranian regime is fundamentally rational and “says something very unsettling about the mental state of the regime”, Klein goes on:

The second is that it is likely to disrupt what was, to my mind, a very positive trend in the United States: the long-overdue effort to pressure Israel on the settlements. Among America's points of leverage was that Israel desperately needed our help to handle Iran. Among the trends freeing our hand was the apparent quieting of Iran's drumbeat of provocations. Now that Iran appears to be more of an independent problem and less likely to fall into a period of relative quiet, it's hard to imagine either Israel or America spending too much time worrying about their relationship with each other.

If I follow Klein’s argument, he’s saying that it’s too bad the Iranian government is crazy as a loon because that means the United States won’t actually be able to handle Iran which means we can’t use the offer of handling Iran to pressure Israel into shutting down their settlements so, rats, we’ll have to leave pressuring Israel for another better time.

I don’t think Klein has really thought this through. If the Iranian government is crazy as a loon then there’s a good chance Iran - and its clients - really do want to literally destroy Israel and thus Israel’s refusal to give one more inch unless it gets recognition of its right to exist and demilitarization of Palestinian territories is, well, perfectly rational.

In other words, the lunacy in Iran hasn’t cost us a golden opportunity to pressure Israel about the settlements. The lunacy in Iran has made it clear we shouldn’t be looking for such an opportunity in the first place.

Neither wise nor convincing

I generally like Victor Davis Hanson’s writing but I have to take exception to his recent post at The Corner called “Something Is Not Quite Right Here.” In it, Hanson says:

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

Well, yes, but there’s one problem. Sotomayor’s speech was entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice” and was the Honorable Mario G. Olmos Law & Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture. It was presented at a University of California at Berkley School of Law symposium co-hosted by the La Raza Law Journal, the Berkeley La Raza Law Students Association, the Boalt Hall Center for Social Justice, and the Center for Latino Policy Research. The symposium was entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation."

Under these circumstances it would have been remarkable if Judge Sotomayor had not spoken extensively of her experiences as a Latina and of the role of Latinos and Latinas in the judiciary.

This is not to say that Judge Sotomayor’s remarks about the superior wisdom of women or of Latino/as are not a cause for concern. As Hanson correctly points out, she has repeated variations on that theme many times over the years and I think it is an avenue which should be explored in her confirmation hearings. But claiming that her use of “racial epithets” in a speech which is supposed to be about ethnicity is somehow suspicious is neither wise nor convincing.

Wait! Obama has a speechwriter?

A man named Jon Favreau hit the news a couple of weeks ago when the Washington Post identified him as “President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter” and reported that:

... some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down ...

Some observers were quite outraged and I believe correctly so. You can read Anglachel for a round-up of feminist objections and for her own deeper analysis. Reclusive Leftist has some pungent thoughts on the sight of three men on a news program telling women to get over it. And in the “politics make strange bedfellows” department, the Washington Times is disgusted and furious.

My first reaction however was surprise. I thought only Sarah Palin needed an immensely talented speechwriter to “repackage” her. Surely I read in Time magazine that Obama writes his own speeches.

Oh, I see. Now that Favreau’s been spotlighted - or maybe just because Obama is safely elected - we’re hearing that Favreau had a bigger role in endeavors like the Philadelphia race speech and the convention acceptance speech than previously reported. (In fairness to Time, they did mention Favreau in their article about “How Obama Writes His Speeches” - although they equated him with Axelrod in terms of influence - and they did say Obama “delivered” his Philadelphia speech - silly me for thinking they were implying he wrote it himself.)

In all seriousness, only total idiots ever believed Sarah Palin used speechwriters and Barack Obama didn’t. What is sad about the whole "Favreau groping a Clinton cutout" incident is Hillary Clinton’s response:

... Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines cast the photos as evidence of increased bonhomie between the formerly rival camps.

"Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application," he said in an e-mail.

I certainly agree with Anglachel that no purpose would have been served if Clinton had acted out some type of revenge fantasy in response. But there’s a lot of working room between going ballistic and letting it slide. As I said in response to Anglachel, Hillary Clinton could have said something like:

Mr. Favreau is quite young so perhaps he does not understand how disrespectful he was being to me, to women in general, to the Office of the Secretary of State, and to the man who chose me to represent the United States to the rest of the world. I trust that Mr. Favreau’s supervisor will explain the penalties for sexual harassment in the workplace and that there will be no more incidents like this.

Instead Clinton chose to dismiss Favreau’s behavior as essentially a high-spirited prank. By doing so, she undercuts all the feminists who have been expressing outrage over the sexist attacks launched by the Obama campaign and Obama supporters against her (and against Sarah Palin for that matter). If it’s acceptable - even cute - for the President-Elect’s anointed White House Director of Speechwriting to grope a cardboard Clinton, then isn’t a Hillary Clinton nutcracker just a clever gag gift?

I’ve written before about my disgust with Hillary Clinton's willingness to abet her husband’s sexist approach to women of the “wrong” class and about how I nonetheless slowly and grudgingly began to respect her during the Democratic primaries. Unfortunately her willingness (there’s that word again) to laugh off Favreau’s actions brings me right back to where I started with Hillary Clinton: she has no problem enabling sexist behavior as long as doing so benefits her and hers.

*****

Reading:

Fresh blood for the vampire by Camille Paglia. I love this article for many reasons but its relevance here is this sentence:

Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

Admit it! You’re jealous of Jon Favreau!. This is Ann Althouse’s take on the the Washington Post’s recent story about Favreau as speechwriter. Althouse on the cardboard cutout incident is here.

So What If Sarah Palin Used a Speechwriter? by Betsy Newmark. Writing immediately after the Republican National Convention, Newmark points out that all politicians use speechwriters and concludes: “Big whippety doo.”

The Summers dilemma

Word is that Barack Obama is considering Lawrence Summers for the position of Secretary of the Treasury. This has presented me with my first Obama Presidency related dilemma.

I found Obama’s misogyny during the campaign disgraceful; Summers is probably most famous for supposedly saying “girls can’t do math.” I find it very difficult to resist the temptation to fan the flames of this fire by blogging about how even considering Summers proves that Obama doesn’t respect women and by emailing my woman friends who voted for Obama and saying, “See? I told you so.”

Furthermore the left-leaning media is giving Obama grief about this possibility. What could be sweeter than seeing Obama attacked by the same media that gave him such an easy ride during the campaign? I would be less than human if I did not experience a great urge to encourage such media outlets to keep up their attacks by joining the ranks of commenters who are criticizing Obama for considering Summers. (via neo-neocon)

Unfortunately I have taken a look at the “girls can’t do math” story and I simply can’t find much to it. The story is based on remarks Summers made at a 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.” Summers prefaces his remarks by saying that he is speaking only because he wants to get “some questions asked and some attempts at provocation.” and he restricts his remarks to “the issue of women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.”

I’ve tried a couple of times to summarize his remarks but cannot do so without doing violence to his meaning. In fact, I believe attempts to summarize them are what have led to the perception that he is sexist. To judge fairly you simply have to read his remarks for yourself. My conclusion is that Summers was advancing hypotheses for which he had some backup while conceding that not enough is known to be sure about what is really going on.

So I can’t really convict Larry Summers of sexism and, sadly, am going to have pass up this opportunity to club friends over the head with Obama’s sexism and to foment dissension in the Obama-supporting media. Even worse, the other controversies surrounding Summers don’t seem all that damning either. Wikipedia currently has a good summary of those incidents: follow the footnote links to the source documents and most of the controversies appear misrepresented or trivial. In fact, from reading the Wikipedia entry it looks like the charge with the most validity is that he wanted tenured professors to teach more of their own classes.

On the other hand, he does seem to have a talent for rubbing people the wrong way and that may be a bad thing under the current circumstances. Given the state of the economy and the incredible power vested in the Treasury by the bailout bill, it might be advisable to have a Treasury Secretary who plays well with others, thinks before he speaks, and can sound reassuring. Obama will simply have to balance Summers’ negatives - an (apparently unwarranted) reputation as sexist and otherwise politically incorrect plus a reportedly blunt managerial style - against a possibly overwhelming positive - many people consider him both brilliant and competent.

*****

It caused me terrible psychic pain to entitle this post “The Summers dilemma” rather than “The Summers dilemna”. As far as I can remember, I have always used the “mn” spelling rather than the “mm” spelling but my spellchecker and my dictionary both insist “mm” is and always has been correct. In response to which, I can only agree with baysailor’s comment:

*I* think that "dilemna' simply looks better on the page. I think "dilemma" is awkward and clunky.

First word after the election

I would never have been completely happy that Barack Obama won the Presidential election. Given my concerns about his policies and his inexperience, I would always have preferred a different result. All the same, I would have liked to be able to wholeheartedly rejoice in the fact that his victory has provided incontrovertible proof of how far the United States has come in healing racial wounds and has thus meant so very much to so many people.

Yet I cannot. I can appreciate the abstract importance of his election and honor the meaning it has for so many African-Americans. But I simply cannot be even the slightest bit glad Barack Obama has won the Presidential election. The misogyny unleashed by Obama, his campaign, and his supporters has been disastrous for women. While it has left parents of all races, ethnicities, and religions more able to honestly tell their sons that any little boy can grow up to be President of the United States it has also left them far less able to tell their daughters the same is true for little girls. Obama has asked all Americans to believe that "[our] dreams do not have to come at the expense of [his] dreams" but his own philosophy is quite different. He believed achieving his dreams required vandalizing women’s dreams and he was perfectly willing to do just that.

So I am not happy that Obama won and I am not likely to be. Nonetheless he will be my President after January 20 and I will support him when I believe he is right and oppose him respectfully when I believe he is wrong. And I very much wish him a wildly successful Presidency - we desperately need one.

Final word before the election

On August 3, 2008, Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry appeared on “Meet the Press”. This was just a few days after Barack Obama had made a series of stump speeches in which he said:

Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.

I deeply admired Senator Lieberman's response to that:

I want to say just a word about the, the racial question here. And I, I speak personally. In the first place, the McCain campaign is, to use Barack Obama's words, raising the question is he a risky guy? But it has nothing to do with his name or his skin color. It has to do with his lack of experience and bad judgment, his unreadiness to be president. When you use the expressions that Senator Obama did three times this week, you're making a personal insult to John McCain.

I, I know John McCain. I've been with him for 20 years, private and public. This man does not have a bigoted bone in his body. His wife and he adopted a baby from Bangladesh, who, who they love. It's just wrong for Senator Obama to have done that. It was right for the campaign to call him on it. Let me just add a final word, Tom. In 2000, Al Gore gave me the extraordinary honor of being the first Jewish-American to run for national office, and Al Gore said he had confidence in the American people that they would judge me based on my record, not on my religion. And I urge Barack Obama to have the same faith in the American people that they will judge him on his record, or lack of record, certainly not on his name or his race.

Why I would never vote for Obama

Misogyny

RFK/June

Confirmation bias

Let’s take a look at an article on ABC’s Political Radar blog, dated October 31, 2008, and headlined, “Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights”. The article begins:

ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

The article is referring to this interview. Palin’s one-sentence quote is taken from a longer exchange that can be found at the beginning of “Chris Plante Interviews Sarah Palin Part 2”:

Host: And of course Rashid Khalidi is not the only radical that Barack Obama’s associated himself with over the years and you also have been kind of out there on the pointy end of the spear talking about William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to a lesser extent perhaps but William Ayers and once again the role of the news media in this campaign when it comes to Barack Obama’s relationships over the years with Rashid Khalidi and William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and Father Pfleger and all of these other people. Is, is the news media doing its job, are you getting a fair shake, the Republicans getting a fair shake this year?

Palin: I don’t that that they’re doing their job when they suggest that calling a candidate out on their record, their plans for this country, and their associations is mean-spirited or negative campaigning. If they convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media. Look at Joe the Plumber, good old Joe the Plumber in Toledo, Ohio. He just asked a simple, straightforward question and the media started investigating and attacking him. So there is some fear there and in those terms, no, I don’t think that they’ve been doing their job in that kind of context.

Is Political Radar’s description of what Palin said accurate? Certainly the first sentence in the second paragraph is way off base:

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks.

Palin most certainly did not say “that her criticism of Obama's associations ... should not be considered negative attacks.” (Is there such a thing as a positive attack?) What she said was that it is not the media’s job to declare her criticisms of Obama “mean-spirited or negative campaigning”. In other words, the media does not get to decide what is and is not a valid criticism of her political opponent. (I believe that would be the job of the voters.)

There is nothing new about what Palin is saying in this regard: many who oppose Obama have expressed frustration that much of the media seems to consider virtually any criticism of Obama an irrelevant distraction at best and downright racist at worst. Palin is simply arguing that Obama has succeeded in getting the media to enthusiastically support his rules for the general election:

[Obama] can’t be called a “liberal” (“the same names and labels they pin on everyone,” as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can’t be questioned (“attempts to play on our fears”); his extreme positions on social issues can’t be exposed (“the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives” and “turn us against each other”); and his Chicago background too is off-limits (“pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy”).

After eliminating that sentence, what remains of Political Radar’s description is:

Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama. [snip] for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

The article has elected to confound two different points Palin made: her concerns about the First Amendment and her concerns about “our” being able to ask questions without fear of “attacks” by the media. Let’s separate these out.

The First Amendment concerns are the hook on which most of the commentary criticizing Palin for this interview has hung its hat. You can take a look at HuffPo (channeling Jeff Greenwald); ThinkProgress (which apparently feels no commentary is necessary - other than that picture - but does get full credit for providing audio - although not text - of the whole exchange); Daily Kos (channeling Alex Koppelman); Keith Olbermann (nope, not linking); The Young Turks; and a slew of other sources. The thrust of this commentary is that Palin is so stupid she thinks the First Amendment does (or should) protect her from the press when in fact the First Amendment protects both free speech by individuals and a free press from interference by the government. The Young Turks video provides the best summary:

She’s saying that the media is challenging her First Amendment rights when they say that she is lying or running a negative campaign. But the whole point of the First Amendment is freedom of the press. I mean, it’s in there. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Both things are in there. And second of all, it doesn’t negate your freedom of speech if someone else speaks. Third of all, you’re a politician. The whole point of the First Amendment was to keep our politicians in check.

(I’m not going to rant and rave about The Young Turks’ decisions to translate “mean-spirited” as “lying”. The whole discussion of what constitutes lying in a political campaign is a huge one that I suspect will become extremely germane if we end up with an Obama administration.)

Is Palin saying “that the media is challenging her First Amendment rights when they say that she is lying or running a negative campaign”? Maybe. It’s certainly one interpretation of what she said. However, I think that interpretation is most likely to occur to people who are already convinced Palin is stupid and doesn’t understand the Constitution. The very people, for example, who are (wrongly) convinced Biden wiped the floor with Palin when they discussed the Constitution during the Vice-Presidential debate.

There’s an alternative explanation that I find more likely. Oddly enough, I believe Governor Palin was agreeing with The Young Turks: “The whole point of the First Amendment was to keep our politicians in check.” You see, Barack Obama is a politician also. If the majority of the media goes along with his campaign’s desire to define his opponent’s criticisms of him as invalid then what keeps him in check? In Palin’s formulation, the press has not only refused to criticize Obama themselves, they have also delegitimized her attempts to do so. Palin is arguing - admittedly very sloppily - that when so much of the press is so supportive of one politician over another then the press is not doing the job envisioned for it by those who wrote the First Amendment.

Is she advocating somehow making the press do her bidding? I really can’t see that. So far as I know, Palin has not suggested anything like banning further interviews with a Florida station for raising unpleasant issues; ejecting non-endorsing papers from her campaign plane; or mobilizing supporters to flood WGN with phone calls for inviting a guest critical of McCain. In fact, despite her claims of mainstream media bias she hasn’t even proposed enacting a new Fairness Doctrine.

Rather Palin is using the power of the bully pulpit. She is stating that the press is not doing its job and expressing her concern about what the consequences will be if the voters do not realize that.

What about Palin’s second point, her concerns about asking questions without fear of the “attacks” by the media? Here Palin is talking about the chilling effect non-governmental actions - specifically media attacks - can have on ordinary people questioning politicians. Again I don’t think she’s advocating muzzling the press but is stating her belief that the press’ job does not include attacking citizens who challenge Obama.

The criticisms of Palin’s remarks have both sprung from and reinforced previously held beliefs about her: she is too stupid to understand the Constitution and committed to the “standard” Republican agenda of leashing the free press. Those beliefs have made it easy for the media - and those they inform - to focus on her reference to the First Amendment and ignore the full meaning of her remarks: the media are attempting to delegitimize not only her criticism of Obama but also any negative remarks leveled at Obama from any source. And should the full meaning of her remarks slip through, well, the “fact” that she is both stupid and thuggish renders her points invalid. After all, how could someone like her possibly have anything legitimate to say about anything?

I sincerely hope I’m alive twenty years from now when objective observers are able to take a long, hard look at the Sarah Palin phenomenon. The political analysis will be fascinating, of course, but even more interesting will be the sociological analysis of the class-based nature of Palin’s treatment by the media and the psychological analysis of how people so clearly saw exactly what they expected to see when they looked at Palin.