Two Flavors of Frustration
While “working” at home Thursday afternoon, I had the distinct non-pleasure of watching the Phillies get shut out by the Florida Marlins, 3-0. The shutout was the seventh the supposedly potent Phils offense has endured in 2008, after getting blanked a total of six times combined in 2006 and 2007 (and as I type, they're bidding for #8, with a scoreless game in the 8th inning). And yet again it wasted a strong outing by team ace Cole Hamels, who pitched into the seventh inning and allowed two earned runs while striking out seven. Hamels has the best ERA on the team at 3.35, but just a 9-8 record to show for it. The biggest reason why is the team’s utter lack of offensive support: in ten of Hamels’ 24 starts this season, the Phillies have scored two runs or fewer, including three of the shutouts.

In addition to losing a game of their lead over the second-place Marlins, the Phils also allowed the Mets, who were playing at the same time, to creep one game closer in the competitive NL East. New York won their game, 5-3, on a two-run walkoff homer by David Wright. But the Mets starter yesterday, Johan Santana, might be even more frustrated than Hamels: for the seventh time in 2008, he left the game with a lead only to see the bullpen squander it behind him. (The Phillies accounted for two of those, and unlike yesterday, the Mets lost those contests. It’s the only good thing the Phils have done against the Mets this season, as New York has won 9 of the teams’ 13 games.) For the year, Santana has been even better than Hamels: his ERA is 2.85, fifth best in the NL and more than thirty points below his outstanding career mark of 3.18. But his record is only 9-7.

There’s obviously a lesson (at least one) to be gleaned from all this, but articulating anything along these lines would seem to be little more than an exercise in clichéd statements of the obvious. All I can say for sure is that the Phillies have blown a lot of good work by their best pitcher, and that the Mets’ shitty bullpen could wind up costing me money in two fantasy leagues in which I paid top dollar for Johan Santana.

And on that note, I’m off for a short vacation. Back next Friday.

Burn the Witch vs. Soak the Rich
Probably like most people in my field, I get the Crain's New York Business Daily every afternoon around 4. Most days, there isn't anything particularly bearing on what I do (whatever that is), but they're relevant or interesting often enough that it's a worthwhile skim. Today is one of those days, with Crain's offering the news that New Yorkers evidently are concerned enough about the state's budget problems--which do not constitute a "fiscal crisis"; more on that in a bit--and sufficiently disgruntled with the current level of public services, that they're receptive to a so-called "millionaire's tax":

Even as personal budgets feel the pinch, the city and state finances are also reeling from rising costs and budget shortfalls. Gov. David Paterson estimated last week that the state budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 stands at $6.4 billion, after having swelled by 30% in less than four months.

To help offset the shortfall, voters surveyed by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute overwhelmingly approve of taxing the state’s richest residents with a “millionaire’s tax.” Nearly 80% of those surveyed, including a majority of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, were in favor of raising the state income taxes of residents who make more than $1 million a year.

The millionaire’s tax vote disappointed at least one business leader, who called the proposal gimmicky.

“The fiscal policy of the state needs to be balanced through discipline,” said Ken Adams, chief executive of the Business Council of New York State. “I know the economy is tough and people are worried, but we believe the solution is to cut spending, not look for new revenues.”

I know Ken Adams slightly; he's a longtime friend of the Center, was an outstanding member of the city Workforce Investment Board when he served as president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, and has been a source (always on the record, I think) for various things I've written. Probably because I've always thought highly of him, I'm less inclined to dismiss his words here as the typical, if not necessary and inevitable, protestation of a business leader on behalf of his constituents. But I think the most pertinent question is which solution to the budget problems of the state does more harm: increasing taxes on the best-off (which could spur relocation out of the state, thus shrinking the revenue pool), or cutting services through shrunken public budgets (which would exacerbate current deficiencies in education, social services, public facilities--libraries and parks--and so on)?

The Working Families Party, which for years has been calling for a rollback of the upper-income tax cuts passed during the Pataki Administration, doesn't find this a very tough call. They too cite the Quinnipiac poll, and posit the same choice between less spending and more revenues. But in their Budget Battle Bulletin blog post from yesterday, WFP calls upon a Nobel Laureate economist to make their case, while taking a whack at a conservative columnist:

Bill Hammond at the Daily News, however, isn't buying any calls for ration and calm:

“It would be easy for Gov. Paterson to play down the gravity of New York State's fiscal quagmire. It would be easy to ignore the steep slide in tax receipts, to pretend that Wall Street will bounce back in a couple of months…”

He goes on to bash calls for raising taxes on the wealthy as part of the solution to the budget gap:

“[Paterson] could just go along with the easiest of easy fixes - hiking taxes on the wealthy, further pummeling the state's battered economy.”

That’s an interesting argument, considering that the last time New York asked its most fortunate citizens to contribute a little more to keeping society running (2003 – 2005), the economy kept right on growing. In fact, although Governor Pataki had predicted a negative impact on the economy and on the number of high income earners in New York during the last budget battle, tax filers with incomes above $200,000 continued to grow steadily.

But Hammond raises the right question - what would be better for the state's economy, raising taxes on the wealthy or cutting spending?

Lucky for us, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, has weighed in on exactly that topic, telling Albany leaders in a March 17th letter:

“New York, like most states, is now facing an unenviable choice: either taxes have to be raised, or expenditures cut…When faced with such an unpleasant choice, economic theory and evidence gives a clear and unambiguous answer: it is economically preferable to raise taxes on those with high incomes than to cut state expenditures.”

“The reasoning is straightforward: in a recession you want to raise (or not decrease) the total level of spending – by households, business, and government – in the economy.”

Bill, you may want to slash New York’s healthcare and education spending for ideological reasons, but most New Yorkers don’t want to use the economic downturn as an excuse for more Bush-enomics.

Reading Hammond's original column, though, I see something that might be important: a quote from Governor Paterson about the addictive nature of taxes.

"I really don't want to discuss the issue of taxes, because as soon as you do, it perpetuates the addiction," he told the Daily News Editorial Board on Friday. "It was taxes, in many ways, that got us here. There's always somebody who will bail you out."

And here we get to the essential difficulty in debates like this one: the loudest voices belong to the ideologues, the likes of Hammond who (I assume, not knowing much of anything about the guy) view every tax increase as anathema and the WFP who, since they've been calling for higher taxes on the rich at every opportunity for years, through good times and bad, have little credibility to draw upon in advocating that solution for this particular problem.

So to me, that brings us back to the question I asked earlier: which direction yields less long-term pain? Another opinion piece published today, by a Queens Assemblyman named Rory Lancman, suggests that if we all calm the hell down a little, we actually can figure this out.

Lancman also explains why the state's current predicament is really not comparable to the full-blown fiscal crisis New York City faced the mid-1970s: back then, nobody would buy the city's bonds, and it looked like bankruptcy would be the near-certain consequence. Now, we merely face a series of budget shortfalls:$600 million this year, in the context of a $121.6 billion budget (less than half of one percent) and projected deficits of $6.4 billion, $7.7 billion, and $10.5 billion over the next three years. That's an unpleasant prospect, certainly, but one within the state's power to solve through taxing and spending decisions--as opposed to the city's fiscal crisis, which required outside assistance to solve. That said, it's a relevant precedent in that the city's fiscal crisis was so scary that public officials at both the local and state level have been loathe to decree tax increases or undertake big new spending initiatives ever since. The fiscal crisis made austerity a political winner.

[W]hy is it so important that we acknowledge that there is no crisis, but merely a serious challenge?

Because crises produce bad policies, while serious challenges produce serious, thoughtful responses.

Witness the rush to judgment of our state's editorialists and political commentators, crying out for cuts, cuts and more cuts to education, health care and our work force; and no new taxes, even for those earning over a million dollars a year. Have the fiscal and social consequences been thought out of our consigning another generation of New York City schools kids to an inadequate education after we finally got them their fair share of state education money; of denying access to health care for the working poor or elderly; of ignoring the gross inequities in our tax policies that leave middle class families paying a far higher share of their resources in state taxes than our wealthiest citizens?

The late summer, one-day special legislative session three weeks before the September primary elections called by the governor is a perfect recipe for the bad policies bred of overstated crises, and should give those who care about good government serious pause for concern. New York has a detailed and elaborate budget-making process, essentially running from January through March, culminating in an approved budget by April 1 (a target date the state has more or less hit with consistency the last few years after two decades of absurdly late budgets).

The process is filled with good government stuff we should be loathe to throw overboard for a one-day special session at the first whiff of stormy seas: budget hearings covering every subject area and state agency; detailed budget analyses and economic forecasts provided by each legislative chamber's majority and minority parties; public budget conference committee meetings and reports; and a state comptroller with the power and pulpit to arbitrate revenue disputes. Perhaps most importantly, the budget process is filled with context — the context of an overall budget that strives to meet the many varied and competing interests and needs of New York's extraordinarily diverse population — urban and rural; upstate and downstate; young and old.

Now, obviously Lancman has a pretty clear point of view here; he's with the WFP. (And in fact he's cited in today's WFP budget blog.) But his process description is the key point: we can run the numbers and make an informed decision. If those crying that a "millionaire's tax" will do more harm than good can prove their case with budget projections, then by all means let's emphasize spending cuts. If, on the other hand, his argument about the damage such cuts would do to the work of schools, hospitals and other publicly funded services is proven valid, then that's the proper direction for policymakers. It should be data, not ideology--anyone's ideology--that determines the course of action.

At What Cost?
Last year, when I (like everybody else) wrote off John McCain as a presidential candidate, the conclusion I drew was that he'd tried to run a campaign that, in style and substance, was a pale imitation of George W. Bush. It was satisfying, I though at the time, to see this go unrewarded even among the Republican primary electorate. Of course, I was wrong to write off McCain prematurely, and in fact his reversal of fortune seemed to coincide with a new emphasis on the parts of his record that deviated from Bush and current Republican orthodoxy. Even Republicans didn't want much more of Bush. (A fascinating question would be whether, in the absence of the 22nd Amendment, Bush could be renominated.) Between that relative distance and the fact that other candidates were, for one reason or another, even more objectionable, McCain outlasted his rivals and won the nomination.

But he's generally considered a decided underdog in the fall campaign against Barack Obama--betting markets give Obama a bit less than a 65 percent chance, and the excellent fivethirtyeight.com has him at closer to 68 percent as of this afternoon. The conventional wisdom on the race is that it's essentially Obama's to lose; if he can convince a majority that he's credible, he wins regardless of anything positive McCain might do. I think this is probably correct.

In an effort to change the dynamic, though, McCain has turned to his old tormentors--the people who ran Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004. And the lies and innuendo are piling up. Some old McCain hands disapprove--and have started to do so publicly. The relationship between McCain and the press, famously described by Chris Matthews as "his base," is going sour. And the Washington Post reports that candidate himself doesn't seem to be adapting well to the style of his new team, with its relentless emphasis on message discipline. ("[H]e is no Bush, his handlers say." Brrrr.)

Josh Marshall this evening has a concise summation of what seems to be happening here:

It was always clear that it was going to be hard for John McCain to emerge from this campaign with his reputation and the presidency, simply because of the rough terrain any Republican faces this year. At this point, it's clear that by the end of this, the reputation is going to be shot. There's just been too much demonstrable lying on the candidate's part, too much sleazy campaigning, too much outsourcing his campaign to Karl Rove. More and more editorialists and even some of the prestige pundits are starting to see it.

So that means, he has to win. Because if he doesn't, he's got nothing left. All he is is a four term senator from a medium-sized state with no legislative record. It's an eminently worthwhile task to chronicle his descent.

The battle between "good McCain" and "bad McCain" continues apace, however. The Post story I linked to above ends with an anecdote about McCain taking a question from the sort of rabid right-winger whom Bush essentially could undress on the trail: the questioner expressed his disdain for McCain's embrace of "amnesty" for immigrants and his support for "the global warming crowd's agenda." But rather than flatter the guy's ignorance, as the script calls for, McCain "launched into a long explanation of his role in a compromise on judges, something that conservatives often criticize him for." And he concluded by reminding his listeners--who presumably wouldn't place great value on such a thing--that "I've stood up against my party many times" because he thought it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps there's hope that McCain will keep his soul and lose the election, which seems to be the best outcome.

The Race is On
One reason I haven't been posting as much is because it doesn't feel very satisfying these days to put up blog posts that essentially link to someone else's article, to which I mostly add "what s/he said." But sometimes the point is so important that I'll do it anyway, and so here we are with David Brooks on one of his good days:

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.
...
America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.
...
[T]he skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country. Rising gas prices are bound to dominate the election because voters are slapped in the face with them every time they visit the pump. But this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation.

Second, there is a big debate under way over the sources of middle-class economic anxiety. Some populists [...]say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance. But the populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research, which powerfully buttresses the arguments of those who emphasize human capital policies. It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

As noted above, I strongly share Brooks's sense that this is the single most important issue the U.S. faces on the economic competitiveness front. But the answers aren't obvious, and there's a strong temptation to skip to the end--looking at college completion and skills attainment--when the real sources of the problem are early childhood development and primary and secondary school education, where we're really falling short. Brooks doesn't get into that one, but he does allude to the importance of early childhood development, citing the work of James Heckman, who "directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years."

(A digression: Brooks's contention, that inequalty is widening because "educational progress" hasn't kept pace with the advance of technology, is at least a little dubious. The number of Americans with four-year college degrees rose fairly sharply from 2001-2007. But over the same period, real wages for college graduates have declined by 1.7 percent, a sharper falloff than for high school graduates, two-year degree holders, or Masters holders. Professional degree holders have seen their compensation rise by four percent, so this certainly has been a good time for lawyers and doctors. You can see these numbers, and related statistics on education and compensation, here. The article to which it's attached is very worthwhile as well.)

So what's to be done? Support for universal pre-kindergarten seems to be gaining some political currency. (Ezra Klein writes about it, with another hat-tip for James Heckman, right here.) Tough to do, though, in a recessionary climate, no matter how much promise Heckman offers for the potential returns on investment, or how self-evident his conclusion that "[r]emediation for impoverished early environments becomes progressively more costly the later it is attempted."

And if support is gathering for some national role in pre-K education, how about for K-12 schools? This is something I'm working on for CUF right now, in connection with a publication that won't be out for four or five months yet; I'm trying to come up with recommendations for federal policy action to improve the performance of public schools here. There are a few tweaks to No Child Left Behind--a piece of legislation that, notwithstanding the high-minded language of its defenders about closing the educational attainment gap, manifestly wasn't written with big urban centers in mind--that would be helpful and more or less cost-efficient.

But I can't quite let go of The Big One: calling for much more national standardization of public school education. Blame Matt Miller, whose thinking definitely has had a big influence on me here... but the basic premise--if students in Brooklyn and Kansas are competing in the same "flat" world, shouldn't they be charged to master the same skills?--seems pretty irrefutable to me. And if the public views economic competitiveness as primarily a national challenge, isn't it logical that a national response would be appropriate?

The Heroes We Deserve
I haven't had much going on here for the last few weeks--owing to a lack of interest in politics, a new hesitation to write much about New York City policy/politics, general malaise and occasional despair, and the shitty, soul-damaging performance of the Philadelphia Phillies. On those subjects, suffice it to say that I still think Obama's going to win (and that it won't matter much, other than the symbolically important rejection of Bush Republicanism), I'm pissed about the coming transit fare increases and a bit bemused at some of the early 2009 mayoral campaign proclamations, I don't know what to do with my career, and the Phillies are a garbage organization run by arrogant and clueless morons and represented by the alienated, the overwhelmed, and the overweight.

Probably the best thing about July has been the movies. I saw "Wall-E" a couple weeks ago, and have twice watched "The Dark Knight." I don't make a habit of attending G-rated movies, or any Disney-related fare, but Wall-E was getting such strong reviews, and my brother liked it so much, that I thought it was worth a look. If you haven't gone, do so: it's beautifully made, rarely if ever insults the viewer's intelligence (indeed, much less so than probably 90 percent of films made for grown-ups), and has a message more complex and nuanced than its attackers on the right have considered.

The premise of "Wall-E" is that in the 28th century, humankind has long since evacuated an Earth overrun by garbage, and is approaching the 700th anniversary of a "five-year cruise" through the solar system while robots clean up the home planet. But the job was too big, and all but one robot has broken down; meanwhile, the uniformly obese humans have been so coddled by disposable food and having every need cared for by mechanized service provided through a mega-corporation, Buy N Large, that most can't even stand up anymore--not that there's anything to stand up for.

Evidently, "Wall-E" offended the delicate sensitivities of the always-put-upon right-wing:

Shannen Coffin: From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It’s a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however.

Greg Pollowitz: It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment. … Much to Disney’s chagrin, I will do my part to avoid future environmental armageddon by boycotting any and all WALL-E merchandise and I hope others join my crusade.

Glenn Beck: I can’t wait to teach my kids how we’ve destroyed the Earth. … Pixar is teaching. I can’t wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, “Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,” oh, this is the movie for you.

Putting aside the absurdity of politicizing an environmental message--pollution doesn't know party--I think the viewpoint of "Wall-E" is considerably more aligned with classical conservative values than these blowhards realize. The movie played to me as a criticism of human complacency--an indictment of how individuals lose purpose when they start ceding autonomy over their own lives. Happily, some on the right seem to agree:

Another lesson missed is portrayed perfectly in Coffin’s claim that WALL-E points out the “evils of mankind.” The only evils of mankind portrayed are those that come about from losing touch with our own humanity.

A much wider range of evils can be found in "The Dark Knight," which is probably the best movie of its type that I've ever seen. Less a "superhero" flick than crime thriller and psychological investigation, it has a tragic arc and an ultimately despairing message, suggesting that any redemption is provisional and ambiguous.

I'm going to get into some spoilery territory here, so if you haven't seen the film yet and like to go in "cold" (as I increasingly do with movies), it might be best to stop reading.

It takes the better part of two hours for this to come clear, but "The Dark Knight" is really about Harvey Dent, the Gotham City district attorney portrayed by Aaron Eckhardt. Batman himself (Christian Bale), well exposited in the first film of the series, "Batman Begins," is something more than a plot device, but ultimately it's not his story. As the film opens, Dent seems to be the embodiment of what Batman, the vigilante crime-fighting alter ego of narcissistic billionaire Bruce Wayne, is trying to accomplish in his beleaguered city: a hero who can make things better for the public acting within the law, an idealist who is nonetheless effective. Dent is who Batman wants to be, a fact shown most clearly by the DA's romance with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Bruce Wayne's oldest friend and love interest, and the embodiment of his hopes to enjoy a normal life after the struggle against crime is won and Batman can hang up his cape.

Dent begins to work with Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, in another terrific performance marred slightly by the moments when his English accent breaks through), the police lieutenant who has been working with Batman to expose and shut down organized crime in the city. But he's troubled by Gordon's practice of working with cops of dubious integrity--many of whom Dent had unsuccessfully investigated in an earlier job. This is in some ways the most important turn of the plot: Gordon leans heavily on his team, but their corruption ultimately is disastrous for Gotham. At the behest of the Joker (Heath Ledger), the brilliant criminal hired by the mobsters to kill Dent and Batman, crooked cops abduct both Dent and Rachel, putting them in mortal danger; the police and Batman can save only one, and it winds up being Dent--who is mutilated in an explosion.

He goes mad with grief and rage, and emerges as Two-Face, another vigilante whose concern is not the protection of the public but vengeance, as dictated by chance (the flip of a two-headed coin, one side of which was charred in the explosion that burned away half of Dent's face). In the end, he is subdued--but his reputation, and the aspirations of Gotham, would be ruined if the public found out about his crimes. Batman, with Gordon's reluctant acquiescence, agrees to take the blame for the murders Two-Face committed, allowing Dent to be remembered as a hero and martyr. He is "Gotham's White Knight," leaving Batman in the darkness.

I don't know if many others would characterize the movie in this way, probably because of the ferocious power of Heath Ledger's performance--the last of his career--as the Joker. Without question, Ledger steals every scene in which he appears: he's such a force of nature, and such a perfect foil for Batman, that you almost can't help sympathizing with him. The filmmakers made a conscious decision to show the Joker fully formed, rising to power over the criminal community, rather than furnishing him a backstory: the script includes a winking allusion to this, as the character offers varying explanations as to how he got the facial scars he covers with white makeup (referred to by an accomplice, more accurately, as "war paint"). Like Batman, he's human in his abilities and somewhat more than human in willpower: and he adheres to a moral code--"no rules"--in some ways more absolute than Batman's own.

In a traditional superhero movie, the morality of the good guys--the notion that conformity to an affirmative moral code is a strength, not a weakness--would prevail in the end. Not here. Though the Joker is captured (not killed, which I'm sure was a conscious choice with an eye toward bringing the character back in future films; with Ledger's demise, I hope they choose not to go this route), and his most appalling attempted crime is foiled, he's not defeated. Compromised from within by the corruption of Gordon's unit, traumatized by the searing pain and emotional tragedy inflicted upon him, finally swayed by the Joker's explanation of his own motivations, Dent was turned into a monster--a third force of nature.

But, the filmmakers suggest, corruption can't take root in barren soil. There's an earlier scene in which Dent, still heroic, seizes one of the Joker's subordinates, sticks a gun in his face, and begins flipping his coin to determine whether he'll shoot the man or not if he doesn't reveal information. We know that it's a two-sided coin--that the threat is a bluff--but the henchman doesn't, and neither does Batman, who dissuades Dent by telling him that the man is a paranoid schizophrenic and pointing out that Dent's tactics, if exposed, would undermine his prosecutions of the mob. The scene reinforces the message of an earlier conversation between Dent, Rachel, and Wayne over dinner, in which Dent spoke up for Batman's vigilante actions: just as Wayne wants to be Dent, Dent wants to be Batman. (Later, in a ruse to draw out the Joker, he "reveals" to the public that he is, in fact, Batman.)

Certainly I'm not the first person to point this out, but recent movie heroes--even superheroes--have worn their flaws on their capes. I suppose this reflects public tastes in a cynical time: with our national leaders exposed as liars and torturers, and our most prominent celebrities with their flaws on display every day, maybe it couldn't be otherwise. But bad times do seem conducive to good art; it was true in the '70s, and it's true today.

The Responsibility Hustle
I read something in the Times last night that bothered me quite a bit. As part of an ongoing series called "The Debt Trap," reporter Gretchen Morgenson tells the story of a 47 year-old Philadelphia-area woman named Diane McLeod, whose life is in ruins after incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

There are really two stories at work here: McLeod's own misjudgments and irresponsible behavior, and the enabling actions of creditors that, to paraphrase the article's title, gave her more and bigger shovels with which to dig herself deeper into debt. Morgenson seems more interested in the systemic problem:

Ms. McLeod, who is 47, readily admits her money problems are largely of her own making. But as surely as it takes two to tango, she had partners in her financial demise. In recent years, those partners, including the financial giants Citigroup, Capital One and GE Capital, were collecting interest payments totaling more than 40 percent of her pretax income and thousands more in fees.

Years of spending more than they earn have left a record number of Americans like Ms. McLeod standing at the financial precipice. They have amassed a mountain of debt that grows ever bigger because of high interest rates and fees.

While the circumstances surrounding these downfalls vary, one element is identical: the lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.

Through her early 40s, McLeod had no significant problem with debt: she alternated between stay-at-home motherhood and relatively stable employment, and she purchased a home in 2003 that appreciated, as they're supposed to. (I wouldn't know myself.) The easy credit terms of that purchase--because her credit was good, no down payment was required--wound up doing her no favors, of course. Nor did the refinancing she obtained a year later to consolidate $25,000 in credit card debt, which required about $9,500 in costs. To meet those expenses, McLeod withdrew from her retirement account, an action that bears an early-withdrawal tax penalty of $3,000, which she put on a credit card.

This is all bad enough. But the case Morgenson is setting out here only holds if, at the same time, liberals and others who deplore the enabling behavior of McLeod's "partners in her financial demise" grasp that she bears some culpability as well. After another couple turns of bad luck--losing her second job as a jewelry saleswoman, and a hysterectomy--McLeod really did herself in: "She made matters worse during her recovery, while watching home shopping channels. 'Eight weeks in bed by yourself is very dangerous when you have a TV and credit card,” Ms. McLeod said. “QVC was my friend.'"

The article doesn't disclose how much additional debt McLeod ran up while convalescing. But in all, it notes that she owed $237,000 for her mortgage--more than half again the original purchase price of the house, thanks to two refinancings--plus about $34,000 for credit cards. That number continues to rise as late fees and overage charges mount each month. She is likely to file for bankruptcy--as a rising number have done over the last nine quarters.

The real problem I see here is that while both McLeod (and the millions like her) and the corporations acted irresponsibly, only the individual suffers for it. The businesses are rewarded, to an obscene extent, for very similar behavior.

No Saints Need Apply
While the big political controversy of the week involved the New Yorker cover satirically presenting Barack and Michelle Obama as a Muslim terrorist and '60s revolutionary respectively, the far more interesting material is inside the magazine, where Ryan Lizza penned a very lengthy but fascinating account of Obama's early political career in Chicago. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the sensationalistic cover and the content within, which presents Obama's rise as utterly typical for any young, ambitious American pol: the expected themes of opportunism, self-improvement, strategic acumen and no small degree of cynicism are all present.

Lizza presents Toni Preckwinkle, Obama's local Chicago alderman (I think it's a gender-neutral term) and his first political mentor. She was among the first real believers in Obama--and among the first to become disillusioned with him:

Although many of Obama’s recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn’t. “I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors,” she told me. “I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m not sure that’s the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have.”

On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. “It’s a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners,” she said. “It’s a good place for a politician to be a member.” Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.

Far from the narrative his most ardent supporters have suggested--that this man of unique background was propelled forward by his unique talents--Lizza describes how Obama essentially engineered his own public persona:

Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too “upwardly mobile,” a place for buppies. [...] At the time, Obama was working on “Dreams from My Father.”

Many have said that part of the appeal of “Dreams” is its honesty, pointing out that it was written at a time when Obama had no idea that he would run for office. In fact, Obama had been talking about a political career for years, musing about becoming mayor or governor. According to a recent biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, he even told his future brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, that he might run for President one day. (Robinson teased him, saying, “Yeah, yeah, okay, come over and meet my Aunt Gracie—and don’t tell anybody that!”) Obama was writing “Dreams” at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995, when he saw his first chance of winning.

Later, he describes how Obama pushed his own luck too far, running for Congress in 2000 against incumbent Bobby Rush, a local icon and former Black Panther, and getting stomped. The lessons Obama drew from that: he couldn't run his style of politics in a district, like Rush's, that was overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly poor. His appeal was strongest amongst young white professionals--and accordingly, he redrew his Illinois State Senate district to better position himself for future success, including more deep-pocketed liberal donors. Money was crucial to his hopes: in 2002, as he began considering a U.S. Senate race two years off, Lizza quotes Obama's best friend recalling a statement of Obama's notable both for its crassness and acumen:

“Then he just laid out an economic analysis. It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, ‘Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory.”

The more I think about this, the less it all bothers me. For one thing, the criticisms of the Clintons during the primaries--that this guy was too airy and idealistic to win against the fierce Republican machine--looks pretty silly in light of all this history. (I never bought that one; Obama's hobbies are pickup hoops and poker, and you don't go in for things like that unless you're pretty freakin' competitive.) Maybe more to the point, anyone who has studied the careers of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt knows that those two men, whom I consider the greatest American presidents, did some things of which they shouldn't have been proud. Lincoln's shading on the slavery question from the late 1850s through the middle of the civil war surely infuriated the idealists of his day; the superb Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals, which Obama has enthusiastically cited over the last few months, celebrates Lincoln's sharply honed political instincts, not his idealism. Roosevelt climbed to the 1932 presidential nomination over the political corpse of his erstwhile closest ally, former New York Governor Al Smith, and won in a landslide despite a campaign notable for its lack of specific policy proposals.

About ten years ago, I worked briefly for the consulting firm Arthur Andersen in its political affairs shop while in grad school. One day the head of the division, a former chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, took me out to lunch at some swanky DC place. He told me stories about Joe Biden and some of the other big names he'd worked with, and imparted this bit of wisdom that has stayed with me: "They're all assholes. Anybody who runs for president has an enormous ego and almost no sense of his own limitations. And they have to be. It's not an undertaking that allows people who aren't assholes to succeed." With that in mind, Obama's less noble actions and attributes might be viewed as a feature, not a bug.

The National's Anthem
I thought this was kind of cool: my wife's favorite band, local (sort of) Brooklyn boys The National, have designed a t-shirt in support of Barack Obama. All proceeds will go to the campaign.



"Mr. November" is one of their better-known songs. I initially thought it was about Derek Jeter in the 2001 World Series, then maybe about high-school football, and finally, probably some experience unique to the writer. A lyrical sample:

I wish that I believed in fate
I wish I didn't sleep so late
I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders
[repeat]

I'm the new blue blood, I'm the great white hope
I'm the new blue blood
Given some of the recent concerns about Obama's commitment to progressive principles (albeit perhaps overblown), the chorus seems particularly timely:

I won't fuck us over, I'm Mr. November
I'm Mr. November, I won't fuck us over

Here's hopin'.

Stupid Hippies
I'm now a bit more than halfway through Nixonland, and it's doing something I didn't expect: making me far less sympathetic to the "New Left" than I previously was.

I don't think this was by any means the intention of author Rick Perlstein, a proud liberal who obviously sees his title character as the villain of the piece. (And it's probably worthwhile to note that the book isn't bringing me toward a greater sympathy for Richard Nixon himself, whose dishonesty and bad faith truly was breathtaking.) But the antics of groups like the "Yippies," particularly at the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, are indefensible; I would have wanted to beat the shit out of Abbie Hoffman myself.

[The Yippies'] bravura was inspiring. Their arrogance could render them little better than punks. In New York, the Lindsay administration enlisted Abbie as a community liaison to keep the peace in the East Village. Part of the deal was that the cops weren't allowed to arrest him. So he marched into the local precinct one day and made himself increasingly obnoxious. The captain who was his police handler, refusing the bait, retreated to his office. Abbie followed him inside and smashed the precinct's prized possession, the tropie case containing the precinct's service citations, sending the cop into the hoped-for rage. (p. 290)

What Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and their colleagues presented at Chicago as a "Festival of Life" reads to me forty years later like nothing more than a nihilistic glorification of anarchy, predicated largely on making the grown-ups (even more) miserable. (And Pete Townshend wins infinite points with me for shouting Hoffman down and bashing him in the head with his guitar at Woodstock.)

The Yippies probably weren't the worst actors, though; I'd leave that for some of the purely idiotic student radicals that Perlstein describes (again, with at least some sympathy). He sets up the campus conflicts of 1968-69 as "pukes versus jocks," using each side's derogatory term for the other. The lefty students--taking over buildings, harassing administrators and faculty, vandalizing libraries, destroying property--frequently faced off against fellow students who essentially wanted to keep going to classes and rejected the idea that these long-haired loudmouths spoke for them, as the media culture of the time constantly asserted. To my amazement, as I read this account, my sympathies are with the squares.

There's a strange tradition in liberal politics of left-leaning individuals who have more disdain for those further to their left than their real adversaries on the other side. Maybe that's what I'm feeling here. But I think it's more that the tactics of these attention-seekers were so destructive to the admirable causes they ostensibly championed. Perlstein describes a standoff at Cornell in 1969 in which an African-American student group bullied and manhandled fellow students, visiting parents and above all a dean who, over the course of the decade, had worked to increase black enrollment from about 80 to nearly 300 and had committed to establishing an Afro-American Studies department. They wanted more--and ultimately they didn't want anything:

Perkins [the Cornell dean] thought he was negotiating. He couldn't realize his adversaries were playing an entirely different game.

The militants had embraced a revolutionary dialectic. Escalating demands, impossible to meet, served "the objective of raising the level of awareness among blacks" to that of the vanguard, which would come to share with the vanguard "another objective, the destruction of the university, or at least its disruption." Issue unreasonable demands, and "the beast we are dealing with will use all the means at his disposal to maintain control of power." That would reveal the fascism behind the liberal facade. (p. 376)

Of course, when you start off assuming that an institution is a "beast," and refuse to be moved from that assumption, then beast-like tactics on your own part are self-evidently justified.

Perhaps the Democrats weren't able to pull off the admittedly tough political trick of endorsing the protesters' ostensible aims while strongly condemning their actions. Perhaps--this is the section of the book I'm now getting to--they didn't do nearly enough to differentiate between themselves and the fringe groups, making it that much easier for Nixon et al to disingenuously link them ("the party of amnesty, abortion and acid"). Either way, the Republicans have been running, and mostly winning, on the culture war ever since.

As I wrote recently, I don't think this is going to be as much in evidence this year (though the McCain campaign is evidently trying). That said, I'm starting to wonder if the real parallel might be not between the Democrats of 2008 and their predecessors four decades ago, but the fanatics of the left back then and those of the right today. The common thread is the arrogance and certitude: just as the Yippies and student radicals were absolutely free of self-doubt about their course of action, so too are the fanatics, in and out of government, who believe the current administration can do no wrong and that any action against "the beast"--government--is justified. It would be a fitting irony if their own hubris turned the tide back.

Frat Club
After a long day driving home from a holiday weekend and the Phillies' painful loss yesterday-into-last-night, I wanted to veg out a little and wound up watching "Old School" on TBS. I'd never seen it before, but the basic premise--three guys in their 30s wanting to recreate the fun of their college years--isn't very remote or hard to grasp for me. The leads (Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell) are all pretty good comic actors, and Jeremy Piven as the Crusty Old Dean seemed like an inspired choice.

It's an okay movie. The gags are uneven, I didn't much care about any of the characters, and some of the last-act plot resolution comes off like the writers just didn't care at that point. But what surprised me is that it's pretty much thematically parallel to one of my favorite movies of the last decade, "Fight Club." Both stories essentially revolve around the unarticulated yearning of chronologically grown-up men to find something more "real," some experience that allows them to reconnect with their truer selves. In "Fight Club," it's beating the holy hell out of other guys whom you basically like (at least initially); in "Old School," it's joining a fraternity that allows for boozing, hijinks, and wrestling in KY jelly with teenage girls. The most affecting moment in "Old School" comes when two of Luke Wilson's co-workers, real estate lawyers all, surreptitiously approach him in the office and beg to be admitted into the frat; Wilson's approach is fairly close to Tyler Durden's famous dictum that "the first rule of Fight Club is... you do not talk about Fight Club."

The real parallels are in the second half of each film, when it becomes clear that both sets of participants feel more invested in their escapist pursuit than in their workaday lives. There's no match in "Old School" for Tyler Durden's migration of Fight Club from an evenings-and-weekends hobby to something resembling a revolutionary army, maybe because the characters aren't as developed--but the level of devotion was sufficiently high that I was half-expecting the frat members to simply kill off Jeremy Piven's dean. (Instead, he's ultimately done away with in a manner that first comes across as shockingly funny, then just frightening--and I write this as someone who's gleefully and somewhat pointlessly killed off fictional characters myself.)

I guess my mild fascination with this mostly comes from the question of whether the writers of "Old School" consciously picked up on a theme from "Fight Club," a movie with a lot more critical heft, to weave into their fairly formulaic comedy. The wiki entry does cite a supposedly intentional homage, though it wasn't one that I picked up on while watching. (The same section claims that Ferrell's "Frank the Tank" drives the same car as the inadvertent murderer Frank from my absolute favorite movie of the last ten years, "Donnie Darko." I didn't notice any other similarities between that one and "Old School," however.) I often think about how writers of conventional mass-market entertainment, most of whom have better taste themselves and probably experience some level of frustration at the knowledge that they aren't making High Art, work out their issues; maybe this is one such instance.

Re-Fighting the '60s on the Page, Not at the Polls
The inextricable military, political and cultural wars of the 1960s might have had a pretty dismal effect on American politics, but they did prove a deep wellspring of literary inspiration. Last week, I finished Jim Webb's novel Fields of Fire, a fictionalized account of one Marine platoon fighting in Vietnam in 1969. Webb, whose fairly prodigious literary output surely will get much closer scrutiny if he turns out to be Barack Obama's vice-presidential nominee, doesn't much grapple with the geopolitical issues related to the invasion in this novel, which came out a few years after the end of the war; his soldiers rarely delve into whether the war is justified or not, whether it makes sense on a strategic level, how it fits into the larger struggle against Communism, or any of the other big questions that consumed so many thinkers of the period.

The only political ground Webb seriously covers in the book has to do with the domestic antiwar movement. In a word, he detests it: while those who actually went to jail rather than serve have the respect of the narrative voice and the author's proxies, the much larger number who either manipulated their draft process (by self-inflicted injuries, aberrant behavior, etc) or, worse, ran off to Canada, draw only contempt. There's a devastating scene toward the end of the novel, in which one of the protagonists--a Harvard undergraduate who drifted into service, was critical of the war both on the conceptual level and the tactics employed to conduct it, felt alienated from his fellow Marines, and came home after losing a limb--tries to address an anti-war rally only to be booed off the stage by affluent young people chanting pro-North Vietnamese slogans. Surely, Webb is somewhat unfair in giving no credit for honest idealism and principled opposition to the war--but he's also incredibly powerful in evoking just how far from the American mainstream the protesters must have seemed even to someone who felt a degree of sympathy for their views.

Myself, I'd thought of the period primarily through the lens of the war's opponents; my mother always said while I was growing up that she would send me to Canada rather than relinquish me for a war we considered unjust. Webb's contention--that Americans are free to exercise their conscience (go to jail rather than serve), but not to essentially ignore their obligations under the social contract--is a powerful one; I can't help but feel that the country would be in better shape if it was more widely shared. Of course, the other side of his view was on display in his memorable response to the 2007 State of the Union address, when he blasted the Bush administration on Iraq:

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

I suspect that Webb sees the failure of both sides, leaders and citizens, to live up to their respective obligations, as related... though I doubt he'd say as much unless directly asked. (The fact that he might say as much under any circumstance is one reason I suspect the increasingly cautious Obama won't choose him; the other, which I admit is a total hunch not substantiated by anything, is that I believe Obama is too much of an egotist to share the spotlight with someone who might be both a better writer and a deeper, more nuanced thinker than he is.)

Since finishing Fields of Fire, I've moved on to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, which I remember was originally to be subtitled something like "Guided Tours of the American Berserk, 1965-72"; I think the publisher must have thumbs-downed that idea. Perlstein's previous book was an excellent history of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, Before the Storm, which I read this past winter; the new one picks up pretty much where that book left off. I'm perhaps a bit too much of a fuddy-duddy when it comes to reading history to fully enjoy some of Perlstein's narrative flourishes, but his narrative is vivid and superbly readable--and through the first 130 pages or so at least (which is as far as I've gotten), he does an astounding job of setting up just how fractured the political landscape was, how irreconcilable the right and left seemed, through 1965 and 1966.

Though Perlstein is a serious lefty, he seems to have a good deal of credibility on the right: George Will wrote a relatively positive review of Nixonland in May, and Perlstein enjoyed an unlikely friendship with William F. Buckley, a significant character in both his books. (Perlstein also penned a glowing tribute to Buckley when the conservative legend died this past February.) Here's an interesting article that tracks Perlstein's relationship with his ideological adversaries; what's described here is something I myself aspire to, though unfortunately I tend all too often to get pissed off or lazy and fall back into an echo chamber... which I guess somewhat goes to Perlstein's argument.

That said, one critique Will makes of that argument, and Nixonland in general, seems on the money to me: his thesis seeks to explain too much, and its conclusion--that we're still essentially living in "Nixonland," where cultural division explains anything and everything about American politics--seems off the mark. Then again, maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, born of the realization that the candidates for the presidency this year are one guy who spent almost the entirety of the period Perlstein writes about in a Vietnamese prison camp--rendering him unable to participate in the cultural conflict of the time--and another guy who was a little kid (and also wasn't living in the country) for most of those years.

Free to Disagree
I haven't written in depth about Obama's cowardly and shameful move to support the Democratic surrender on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), in part because it depresses me and in part because I don't trust myself to get into the policy weeds on the question. But obviously it didn't thrill me. Some observers have seized upon this move, as well as the Democratic nominee's opting out of the public financing system for the fall campaign, as indications that Obama is a tougher and more cynical politician than many thought; I didn't share this view, mostly because it seemed self-evident to me that any Chicagoan in elective politics whose hobbies are poker and pick-up basketball is, on some level, a hyper-competitive and probably vicious mofo to start with. Nor does my disappointment with Obama on FISA either compel me away from supporting him (though I don't feel much like sending any money that way for awhile) or change my view that he has the potential for greatness in the presidency; Lincoln and FDR did some shady, cynical stuff too, and they were pretty good.

What does unnerve me a little is the tendency of many Democrats, even supposed progressives, to justify his moves through what seems like blind faith in Obama's goodness. Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, who does have the technical expertise to eviscerate the FISA deal (see link above), called out his fellow liberals on this yesterday:

It isn't that difficult to keep the following two thoughts in one's head at the same time -- though it seems to be for many people:
(1) What Barack Obama is doing on Issue X is wrong, indefensible and worthy of extreme criticism;
(2) I support Barack Obama for President because he's a better choice than John McCain.
...

The real danger is that those who defend Obama the Candidate no matter what he does are likely to defend Obama the President no matter what he does, too. If we learn in 2009 that Obama has invoked his claimed Article II powers to spy on Americans outside of even the new FISA law, are we going to hear from certain factions that he was justified in doing so to protect us; how it's a good, shrewd move to show he's a centrist and keep his approval ratings high so he can do all the Good things he wants to do for us; how it's different when Obama does it because we can trust him? It certainly looks that way. Those who spent the last five years mauling Bush for "shredding the Constitution" and approving of lawbreaking -- only to then praise Obama for supporting a bill that endorses and protects all of that -- are displaying exactly the type of blind reverence that is more dangerous than any one political leader could ever be.

Bingo. Obviously, I'm an admirer of Obama. I think he's the most genuinely progressive candidate at the national level we've seen perhaps since JFK (while Johnson, McGovern and Mondale certainly were more conventionally "liberal," their lefty faith was institutionally driven, with unions and government the mandated instruments of policy; Obama seems much more inclined to use whatever tools come to hand, which is the sort of pragmatic progressivism we need today), and I believe his temperament and style of leadership fits the modern presidency to a tee.

But the guy is neither a saint nor an infallible genius. He's clearly arrogant, and at times a little squishy. And if you take his rhetoric about democracy and public participation at face value, it's going to be the responsibility of the full public to call him on it when he fails to live up to his own professed ideals and always to evaluate him by the standard of his own professed principles. Lord Acton didn't distinguish between progressives and right-wingers; hero worship of Obama is no more palatable, and no better for America, than hero worship of George W. Bush.

Obama Talks Cities
I know it's not as interesting to the wire services as another substance- and context-free exchange of political accusations, but Barack Obama addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Miami this weekend. There was nothing earthshattering in the speech, but it did again show that Obama is the presidential candidate most deeply engaged with city issues since maybe Al Smith eighty years ago.

He starts by making an effective and concise connection between Bush-era policy failures at the federal level and added strain on local budgets and services:

You know what happens when Washington makes promises it doesn’t keep and fails to fully fund No Child Left Behind – because it’s your teachers who are overburdened, your teachers who aren’t getting the support they need, and your teachers who are forced to teach to the test, instead of giving students the skills to compete in our global economy. That’s why you need a partner in the White House.

You know what happens when Washington succumbs to petty partisanship and fails to pass comprehensive immigration reform – because it’s your communities that are forced to take immigration enforcement into their own hands, your cities’ services that are stretched, and your neighborhoods that are seeing rising cultural and economic tensions. That’s why you need a partner in the White House.

You know what happens when Washington listens to big oil and gas companies and blocks real energy reform – because it’s your budgets that are being pinched by high energy costs, and your schools that are cutting back on textbooks to keep their buses running; it’s the lots in your towns and cities that are brownfields. That’s why you need a partner in the White House.

This is smart and certainly accurate, but probably pretty close to boilerplate that one would expect from any Democratic presidential nominee. Perhaps more interesting is the new frame Obama deploys to discuss city issues--one that could yield political benefits in the suburbs as well as within city limits, and one that comports nicely with the vision of how local economies work that I've come to believe in after eight years of engagement with many of these questions.

...[T]he truth is, what our cities need isn’t just a partner. What you need is a partner who knows that the old ways of looking at our cities just won’t do; who knows that our nation and our cities are undergoing a historic transformation. The change that’s taking place today is as great as any we’ve seen in more than a century, since the time when cities grew upward and outward with immigrants escaping poverty, and tyranny, and misery abroad. Our population has grown by tens of millions in the past few decades, and it’s projected to grow nearly 50% more in the decades to come. And this growth isn’t just confined to our cities, it’s happening in our suburbs, exurbs, and throughout our metropolitan areas.

This is creating new pressures, but it’s also opening up new opportunities – because it’s not just our cities that are hotbeds of innovation anymore, it’s those growing metro areas. It’s not just Durham or Raleigh – it’s the entire Research Triangle. It’s not just Palo Alto, it’s cities up and down Silicon Valley. The top 100 metro areas generate two-thirds of our jobs, nearly 80% of patents, and handle 75% of all seaport tonnage through ports like the one here in Miami. In fact, 42 of our metro areas now rank among the world’s 100 largest economies.

To seize the possibility of this moment, we need to promote strong cities as the backbone of regional growth. And yet, Washington remains trapped in an earlier era, wedded to an outdated “urban” agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas; an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both.
...
[W]hat we’ve found time and time again is that when we take the different assets that are scattered throughout our communities – whether it’s a skilled workforce or leading firms or institutions of higher education – and bring them all together so they can learn from one another and share ideas, you get the kind of creative thinking that doesn’t come in isolation.

And that can lead to more innovation, and entrepreneurship, and real economic benefits like new jobs and higher wages. That’s what happened Pennsylvania, where something called Keystone Innovation Zones have led to the formation of nearly 200 new companies. And that’s why, in my administration, we’ll offer $200 million a year in competitive matching grants for state and local governments to plan and grow regional economies – because when it’s working together, the sum of a metro area can be greater than its parts.

This isn't to suggest that Obama has no anti-poverty plan; he does (John Edwards' endorsement should be enough assurance on that point), and the speech then goes on to detail some of its particulars--full funding of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Community Development Block Grant, stepped-up recruitment for teachers in city schools, and so on. But with that out of the way, he focuses on the new frame: "a strategy that’s about South Florida as much as Miami; that’s about Mesa and Scottsdale as much as Phoenix; that’s about Stamford and Northern New Jersey as much as New York City. As President, I’ll work with you to develop this kind of strategy and I’ll appoint the first White House Director of Urban Policy to help make it a reality."

Given the many strands of "metropolitan policy"--schools, housing, crime, transportation, services, and so on--it makes sense to have someone in a coordinating role. Maybe better, though, would be some kind of Metropolitan Advisory Council, perhaps on the model of the Defense Policy Board: there are a lot of ex-mayors and subsidiary officials out there with considerable expertise and a decent chunk of time on their hands. While groups like the USCM itself potentially fulfill this advisory role, current officeholders--many (most?) of whom inevitably harbor ongoing political ambitions--can't truly serve in the (gender-nonspecific) "wise men" role I'm thinking of here.

Speeches such as this one aren't likely to do much in helping Obama win the election. Most of the biggest population centers are in states he's going to carry anyway; a few of the larger second-tier cities (Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, etc) are situated in battleground states, but the trick there isn't persuasion, it's turnout. At most, a rhetorical shift from "urban" to "metropolitan" might placate a very small number of suburban fence-sitters. But what this speech did for me, and perhaps others, was to provide a reminder that Obama potentially offers something far beyond the satisfaction of putting someone with a (D) after his name in the White House and conclusively ending the tragic Bush era with the candidate farthest from the incumbent. (It's a reminder I particularly appreciate after the deep disappointment of his announcement on Friday that he supported the shameful Democratic surrender on electronic surveillance and retroactive immunity for the telecom companies.) By nature of his background in public life and his own policy interests, Obama could be the best president for cities since Roosevelt. That's potentially pretty exciting.

Numbers vs. Mojo
The Phillies are playing just really, really shitty baseball right now. As I write, they're about to be swept by Los Angeles of Anaheim of the Angels of Orange County of Nixonland, a defeat that will be their fifth straight, seventh out of eight, and ninth out of twelve. Depending on what happens in the Marlins-A's game now underway, they'll either be tied for the NL East division lead or one game ahead. Perhaps most exasperating is that the pitching has been relatively decent through most of this slide--much-maligned Opening Day starter Brett Myers gave them a good effort last night in a 6-2 loss, and ace Cole Hamels was great but for one pitch in seven innings today... and, as tends to happen when you hit a skid like this, the pitch was clobbered for a two-run homer.

I probably watch on average something like three out of every four games, thanks to mlb.tv. But owing to a flukish departure from my usual practice of not much leaving the house, I've missed a bunch of the recent losses: one of the Boston games, the first two against the Angels. Probably because of that, until today's game, which I've watched in its entirety, I was able to view the skid with relative equanimity: over the course of a six-month season, every team hits stretches where they lose a lot. The Phillies have a very good offense, but over the last week or so they've totaled something like 15 hits. Their best hitter, Chase Utley, was 0 for 24 until a double earlier today... and just now, as I was typing this sentence, a bench player for Anaheim, Reggie Willits, made a diving catch to rob Pat Burrell of a double that would have put the tying run at second with one out in the 8th.

This premise--that baseball on a day-to-day basis shows near-infinite randomness within a broadly predictable framework over a longer stretch of time (or a vast number of simulations)--is at the core of the revolution in statistical analysis that has overtaken the game in the last 30 years, and especially in the last ten. But when you're watching it--when you see Reggie Willits make a diving catch to take one away from Burrell or Chase Utley visibly sag after another poorly executed at-bat--it doesn't feel like something that's rationally explained. It just sucks, and makes one want to sacrifice a chicken or artificially manifest a rainout in hopes of prompting some supernatural reversal of fortune.

Happy Anniversary. Now Back to Work.
You probably missed it, but this is a week of mild celebration for Americans who work the crappiest jobs: the federal minimum wage was signed into law on June 16, 1933. New York Times "editorial observer" Adam Cohen tells the story and explains the significance:

When progressives set out to establish a national minimum wage, they faced stiff opposition. Industry insisted that government should not interfere with its relations with its employees. Organized labor was also opposed. (“If you give them something for nothing,” one labor leader objected, “they won’t join the union.”) The pro-business Supreme Court presented the biggest obstacle, ruling that minimum wages were unconstitutional.

The Depression provided an opening. Progressives injected minimum-wage and maximum-hours provisions into the NIRA. These provisions were technically voluntary, but if companies wanted the government to approve the minimum prices and production limits they desperately wanted, they had to agree to minimum wages. Most industries adopted a minimum hourly wage of at least 40 cents.

The Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, but the idea of a federal minimum wage had taken hold. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act — which a more progressive Supreme Court upheld — creating a mandatory federal minimum wage.

The new law was enormously effective: within a year, it brought millions of low-paid workers up to a wage of 30 cents an hour. It also had major weaknesses, notably that it was not indexed to inflation. Congress has to raise it, which leaves low-income workers at the mercy of politics.

I first took a serious look at the minimum wage four years ago, in the context of a report on working poor families in New York state. During the research, we engaged the Pataki administration's welfare office; the commissioner and his top advisers there were clearly conservatives and opposed a higher minimum wage, which we were considering including as a recommendation, but they were fair-minded people who weren't afraid of the argument and didn't hold against us the fact that we did ultimately urge the state legislature to raise the wage. (They did, that winter; much as I would love to assert that our advocacy had something to do with it, the timing--our report came out in November, the vote took place very soon after--puts that into doubt.)

The federal minimum wage increase passed by Congress last year, to $7.25 per hour, was higher than the $7.15 state wage, and thus superseded New York's change. The problem, as Cohen notes, is that the wage is not indexed to inflation--so every move to raise it requires a new act of political will. Perhaps not surprisingly, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen sharply since the late 1960s, which of course is when the conservative political ascendancy at the national level really took hold. From 1981 to 1990, and again from 1997 until last year, the federal minimum didn't go up at all.

Arguments against the minimum wage center on its supposedly harmful impacts to business, particularly smaller employers. Perhaps surprisingly, I haven't heard even right wing pundits declare that the higher minimum wage is the reason for the current economic downturn. (Granted, this position makes no sense; but that rarely seems to stop them.) Arguments for a higher wage generally engage both a moral case and a utility argument, that providing low-income earners with greater spending power exerts a stimulus effect since they tend to spend every added dollar on needed goods. This piece from CNNmoney.com briefly covers both sides, in the context of the debate early last year when the increase was being considered in Congress.

A brief search revealed no analysis of how the most recent federal increase has impacted the economy. But this report by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-affiliated research shop based in Lower Manhattan, found that in New York, employment in the industries most affected by the increase--retail and food service--grew at a faster pace than overall job growth in the state from 2005 to 2007, during which time the minimum wage rose each year.

The politics of the minimum wage touch upon the big sea change in American political culture I referenced above: the shift in default public mindset from assuming that government intervention in the economy was certainly well-intentioned and probably justified (a majority view from 1933 to sometime in the late 1970s) to suspicion of any interference in markets, no matter how justified by outcomes. This is probably something I'll be writing more about on this site in the months ahead, so be warned... though I'm also noodling something about horror movies, if you're into that.

Tim Russert Dies
I was shocked and upset to hear of Tim Russert's untimely death yesterday. And then I was a little surprised and confused that it hit me as hard as it did. Russert is--was! It's still hard to believe--the embodiment of the Washington journalistic establishment that has not served the country particularly well over the last decade. Particularly from the runup to the Iraq war through the Valerie Plame scandal and this year's presidential campaign, the relationships between the people in the news and the people reporting the news seemed to have way too much to do with how, and whether, stories reached the public. And Russert, whose passing elicited heartfelt expressions of sympathy from all points on the political compass, was at the center of all those stories even as he reported on them. The Democratic strategist/wonk Ed Kilgore years ago wrote about the centrality of "Meet the Press" to Washington culture in a blog post titled "How to Sound Like a Washington Insider";

10. "Meet." Short for the most important weekly gabathon, "Meet the Press," the Washington equivalent of Sunday School, as in "Didja see what Russert asked Frist on 'Meet?'"

I don't think it's unfair to question whether that was good for a democratic society.

None of this is to diminish from the wrenching grief his family and friends must be suffering. Tom Brokaw's emotional announcement of the sad event is powerful and obviously heartfelt. And I felt it too. It's almost impossible to imagine the political culture of 21st century America without Russert at the center of it, and the genuineness of his personality--the Buffalo Bills references if nothing else--surely contributed to that.

Senator Rahmbo?
This is really getting ahead of ourselves, but here's an interesting note on Political Wire this morning:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "is reported to be privately talking about Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, as the next senator from Illinois if Sen. Barack Obama wins the presidential election," according to Robert Novak.

I sort of like Emanuel--you never doubt that he cares, for thing--but I'm not sure this is a very good idea. Up until sometime in the '90s, the Senate was famously the "saucer" into which political passions, at full boil in the House of Representatives, were poured to cool them. But in the previous decade, a handful of high-profile House members moved to the Upper Chamber, and took their boisterous, confrontational, nastily partisan political practices with them: Rick Santorum among the Republicans and Chuck Schumer of the Democrats, to name just two. As a result, we've seen the Senate come more closely to resemble the House in rancor and hostility--but the minority in the Senate has far more tools at its disposal to vent its fury, from the hold to the procedural filibuster. The result is that legislation isn't so much "cooled," to use the Washington/Jefferson metaphor from the link above, as totally frozen.

At the risk of screwing up my own metaphor here by my ignorance of chemistry, it seems to me that introducing Rahm Emanuel into that Senate would be like eyedropping nitroglycerin into the saucer. This guy is the ultimate Democratic partisan, a potential Tom DeLay of the notionally progressive. Certainly there have been moments when I've said to myself--or bellowed in a room of sympathetic listeners--that the Republicans "can go fuck themselves." But that's not how the Senate is supposed to work--and if there's anyone in the Democratic caucus for whom principle seems to be a burden rather than a support, it's Rahmbo.

Emanuel had witnessed this struggle in Illinois, too: it was the party regulars versus the goo-goos. Emanuel, the Daley protégé, is a regular who believes money and a disciplined organization win elections. He seemed to see Dean as a goo-goo, a good-government reformer with a base of liberal idealists who are more educated and individualistic than your average Democratic machine foot soldier, but less reliable when you need someone to hand out palm cards on Election Day. The machine has been paving over goo-goos since the 19th century. As a beery alderman once put it, "Chicago ain't ready for reform."

Probably any successful political party, or even a movement within a party, needs both Emanuels and Obamas--bad cops and good cops, if you like. And I guess an argument could be made that Senate Democrats could use a little more spine. (Or a lot.) But I can't shake the sense that if you put a guy like that into the Senate, ultimately you lose more than you gain, and the politics of the country becomes that much more toxic.

Grace Note
As an Obama supporter who deeply distrusts the Clintons, I have to grant that the speech Sen. Clinton gave a few minutes ago really couldn't have been better. Justifiable pride in her campaign's accomplishments gave way to a strong endorsement of her erstwhile rival, and then a broad-based substantive case for why her former backers should give their allegiance and votes and energies to electing Obama in November. I guess if I were to quibble, a line or two about McCain--something to the effect that he's an honorable public servant whose positions nonetheless would be disastrous for the country--might have been welcome. But that's a small point in an outstanding speech--one that showed just how much better a politician Clinton has become over the course of the campaign. I'd always appreciated her mastery of policy detail and grudgingly admired her resilience and indefatigable (albeit at times delusional) approach. But today for the first time it became clear that the "growth as a candidate" the pundits keep talking about is real, and has more positive manifestations than, say, willingness to embrace a brain-dead pseudo-populism on a question like the Gas Tax Holiday.

My guess is that the speech will play well with one group of Clinton supporters--the emotionally invested feminists who will conclude that on the issues, Obama and the Democrats are so far preferable to McCain and the Republicans that they would come home, sooner or later, anyway. But the explicit appeal probably will speed that process and maybe boost their level of investment in Obama's success. I'm not sure, though, that she reached the second group: those "hard-working whites" who just felt more comfortable with Clinton, whether because of brand loyalty, economic arguments, style points, or bigotry. Meanwhile, I read on TPM that the McCain campaign will make a play for Clinton voters based on those same atmospheric/cultural arguments. It should be interesting to see whether economic self-interest (the old core Democratic argument to the voters in play, if you believe as most do that feminist-motivated Clinton supporters probably will come home to the Dem) trumps that Scary Black Guy/Thinks-He's-Better-Than-You ("Hyde Park academic") factor. Also if Obama tries to turn the tables and point out that McCain isn't exactly Mr. Blue-Collar by birth, marriage, or lifestyle.

Ironically it's hard to imagine a better potential surrogate for Obama pushing back against that Republican appeal than Bill Clinton. But I don't know if Obama would ask, and I don't know if the former president would accept, that assignment.

V-C Day!
Obama clinches the nomination!

I won't deny more than a little schadenfreude at the Fall of the House of Clinton. But this is really about a candidate I'm honored to support, a leader who represents the best of our aspirations and principles--and the nation's still-vital capacity for self-correction. There was no more eloquent statement the Democrats could make this year in rejecting the disastrous Bush presidency than nominating a man named Barack Hussein Obama, son of a mixed-race marriage and an immigrant father, community organizer and constitutional lawyer, champion of the country's finest reform tradition, meritocracy and the notion that American leaders can be both principled and tough.

(For that matter, the Republicans couldn't have made a stronger statement in rejecting Bush than nominating John McCain, who once honorably opposed Bush and still maintains that he represents a break from, rather than continuity with, the train wreck of the current administration. But they had fewer choices.)

I am trying to keep my hopes for this race, and for Obama himself, somewhat in check. The contest will have its ugly moments and Obama will make his share of mistakes. But Democrats picked the best candidate, and he will represent the party at its best. It's a time to celebrate.

Radio Day
I made two appearances on New York-area public affairs radio shows today talking about "Schools That Work," the career and technical education I authored for the Center for an Urban Future that came out last month. This morning I did a 15-minute segment on The Brian Lehrer Show, which airs on WNYC; in the afternoon I spent about a half-hour on Talkback, a show hosted by Hugh Hamilton on WBAI. Conveniently, their offices are on the 10th floor of the building in which CUF is located on the 20th. The links above are to the shows. On the latter, I should be about a half-hour in.

i've done a lot of radio interviews over the last five years or so, since the policy reports I write began to get some attention, but I found myself surprisingly nervous sitting down with Lehrer. I was gripping the table and very worried that I'd have to use the COUGH button (or that I'd catch my throat and would fail to use it). Part of it probably was that I'd been worried before I got to the studio because I gave away all my copies of the report and couldn't review it--which you think wouldn't be necessary after writing the damn thing for a year, going through countless drafts, and getting pretty deeply involved in this world of education that I hadn't much grappled with previously. And in a sense you'd be right; this was probably as much about a security blanket as anything else. I re-wrote my talking points on the subway heading there, and felt ready to go. But Lehrer moves so fast, and is so deft at going back and forth between multiple guests--I was on with a principal at one of the schools I profiled in the report, who joined by phone--that my nerves quickly gave way to mild frustration at having so little time to get to all the points I wanted to hit. (Well, that and his forgetting to give the URL where people could find the report.) On the whole I was pretty happy with how it went.

The Hamilton show didn't feel quite as good, though I don't think it was terrible either. I've been on with him a few times in the past, always (I think) previously by phone. The atmosphere in WBAI is quite different from WNYC--more like a college radio station, and if anything probably less formal than the overly professionalized WBRU-FM I remember from Brown. (I did a show at the AM station, and was program manager; people either showed up, or didn't.) The longer segment reflects that more relaxed atmosphere, and Hamilton asks more open-ended questions. These probably don't play to my strengths; I tend to give too-long answers, and it sounds like I'm thinking about it--which is good in-person, but bad on the radio, where it can come across as stumped silence. He also crossed me up a little about halfway through the segment, asking me if I myself attended a career and technical education high school. I didn't, and we moved on.

As he was walking me out afterward, Hugh apologized for the question. He'd been listening to the Lehrer segment in the morning "while ironing my shirt," and what he heard was John Widlund, the principal who was on with me, talking about how he'd gone to a vocational high school.

What's gratifying about this press attention--aside from the obvious ego-feeding stuff, which I won't deny--is that people really care about it. The calls we got on both shows, and the comments online at the first link above, make this very clear. After spending eight years mostly writing about workforce development, an important but not particularly easy-to-explain field of policy, I'm not used to having a public much interested in my work. I like it; it's a great motivator. And this particular question of how to balance work/career preparation (long- or short-term, for adults or youth) and education feels like something I'll be spending a lot more time on over the next few years.