Anti-Careerists in Office
I haven't read the speech yet--I just downloaded it today--but given both my admiration (bordering on man-crush) for the guy and the fact that I come to this question pre-convinced from work I've done recently, I imagine I'll be fully behind Sen. Jim Webb's proposal this week to fundamentally reform the American prison system. Writing in Salon, Glenn Greenwald praises the Senator's courage and leadership in taking on an issue without obvious political upside, and makes a point that probably should be obvious, but isn't:

Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders. When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications: well, they have to take that position because it's too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it's the smart thing to do. That's the excuse one heard for years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and warrantless eavesdropping; it's the excuse which even progressives offer for why their political leaders won't advocate for marriage equality or defense spending cuts; and it's the same excuse one hears now to justify virtually every Obama "disappointment."

Webb's commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making is -- just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold's singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold's subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush's assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin. Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy. Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian consensus. Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

The political class wants people to see them as helpless captives to immutable political realities so that they have a permanent, all-purpose excuse for whatever they do, so that they are always able to justify their position by appealing to so-called "political realities." But that excuse is grounded in a fundamentally false view of what political leaders are actually capable of doing in terms of shifting public opinion [...]

Emphasis mine. I obviously agree, but I think Greenwald simplifies the story here in two ways: first, it's much easier to "affect and change public opinion" from the presidential bully pulpit than anywhere else, and indeed our most successful presidents from Jefferson to Reagan have carved out their places in history by doing this. But it's also not usually a matter of speaking truth to power, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington style, but rather moving the battleship by degrees over a period of (typically) eight years, such that by the end of a two-term presidency the middle of public opinion is well to the left or right of where it was at the beginning on questions of executive power, or slavery, or government intervention in the economy. Greenwald's stridency on this point suggests to me that he would have been as critical of the alleged equivocation and incrementalism and moral cowardice of Lincoln in 1861, or FDR in 1933, as he is of Obama today. The national mind never changes in a thunderclap of brilliant oratory; it moves in nudges, through compromises, and almost always with the wind of circumstance (Civil War, Great Depression, stagflation) at its back.

And so it is with Webb in this instance. He's not the president, of course, but he's making a case that would have been much more difficult to make two years ago, before the strain on public budgets made liberalizing corrections policy an economic imperative even for many who don't have a problem with overly punitive incarceration policies. And George W. Bush of all people gave him some political cover last year by signing the Second Chance Act, which signaled a new center of federal thinking around the moral claims of the prison population (around re-entry, in that instance). Not to take anything away from Webb, whose belief in prison reform goes back decades, and who really is taking a political risk in a law-and-order state where he won by the narrowest of margins--but to compare him to Russ Feingold in 2001, as Greenwald does, seems to stretch the point.

Greenwald's thought about why Webb is taking this unusually brave stand is maybe more interesting:

It may be unrealistic to expect most politicians in most circumstances to do what Jim Webb is doing here (or what Russ Feingold did during Bush's first term). My guess is that Webb, having succeeded in numerous other endeavors outside of politics, is not desperate to cling to his political office, and he has thus calculated that he'd rather have six years in the Senate doing things he thinks are meaningful than stay there forever on the condition that he cowardly renounce any actual beliefs. It's probably true that most career politicians, possessed of few other talents or interests, are highly unlikely to think that way.

I suspect this is exactly right, and that Jim Webb's self-image is bound up with his lofty office to a lesser extent than just about all of his colleagues. As a much-lauded soldier, novelist, journalist, and filmmaker at different points of his career, as someone who'd voted in 2000 for the guy he ran against and defeated six years later, he's probably both less institutionalized and less partisan than anyone else up there. It wouldn't shock me if he didn't even run again in 2012; my guess is that Webb came to the Senate thinking he would do three or four things, including an updated GI Bill (done last year) and prison reform and maybe some things on economics, and then retire to write more books. This isn't to say that he doesn't have an enormous ego like the rest of them, but it's based on other things.

Public officials like Webb or Mike Bloomberg or arguably Arnold Schwarzenegger seem to operate from a different starting point. Certainly Bloomberg and Ahnuld are different creatures, careening wildly across the ideological map and gratifying and pissing off just about everybody at one point or another. But they all do seem to have more appetite for big challenges and political risk-taking than their more traditional and career-oriented colleagues. And it's perhaps not a coincidence that none of them has ever lost an election.

The Mini-Series Writes Itself
Nate Silver makes an observation:

Because of a law that the Congress passed in 2001, the estate tax, which at is 45 percent this year with an exemption up to $3.5 million in assets, will be entirely repealed in 2010 before abruptly returning to its former rate of 55 percent rate in 2011.

Think there might be a few rich grannies pulled off a few respirators on December 31, 2010?

See, I think it's funnier if you take the word "rich" out of there. Because it's not like public understanding of the "death tax" is exactly comprehensive: while the truth is that fewer than 2 percent of estates are subject to the tax, which as noted above kicks in only at $3.5 million, thanks to a relentless and effective campaign paid for by some of the country's wealthiest families, the perception is that it affects a far larger share of the public. This, of course, significantly goosed support for total repeal of the tax--which was the point. A 2006 paper on the estate tax and public opinion by three researchers at Yale provides some of the details:

People know very little about estate tax levels and rates and rules, as evidenced by a January 2000 Gallup poll, in which most people (53 percent) admitted they simply did not “know enough to say” whether the “federal inheritance tax” was too high, too low, or about right. Obtaining accurate information can be difficult, especially when people have an incentive to mislead you. With little background knowledge, many people seem to guess that nearly everyone is taxed at death—a misperception sometimes encouraged by question wording. For example, in a 2003 National Public Radio / Kaiser Foundation / Harvard Kennedy School (henceforth NKK) survey, two–thirds of respondents either thought “most people have to pay” the estate tax (49 percent) or said they did not know (18 percent); and 62 percent of those opposing the estate tax said one reason was because “it affects too many people.” Controlling for socio–economic and demographic factors, and general attitudes towards the tax code, Slemrod (2003) uses results from this survey to estimate that the misconception that most families pay the estate tax “increases the likelihood of favoring abolition by 10.6 percent.”

I also remembered, in the course of Googling around on this subject--yes, I'm quite bored this evening--that Larry Bartels released a paper years ago titled "Homer Gets a Tax Cut," which of course is both wonderful and awful. Bartels' findings suggest that as a people, we're not only ignorant but painfully illogical as well:

The results of my analysis suggest that most Americans support tax cuts not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely fail to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people say that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them add that that is a bad thing—but most of these people still support Bush’s tax cuts and the repeal of the estate tax. People who want to spend more money on a variety of government programs are more likely to support tax cuts than those who do not, other things being equal. And people’s opinions about tax cuts are strongly shaped by their attitudes about their own tax burdens but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the rich—even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Some of these peculiarities appear to be mitigated by political information, but others seem perversely resilient.

So here's my pitch. It's December 22, 2010, and four lower middle-class couples in Anytown, USA are having a pre-Christmas dinner party. The mood is a bit subdued because three of the four couples have elderly parents in the hospital with various ailments that are chronic but not immediately life-threatening. Their costs for care are rising, with familial assets dwindling down. As the evening wears on and everybody starts to get a little drunk, somebody imperfectly remembers a campaign commercial from the midterm elections a couple months before about the insidious Death Tax and how it would ruin family farmers and small businessmen--but it doesn't kick back in until New Year's Day. Another guest observes that his father was a farmer once, so he probably would see the damned gummit take everything if Dad is still around when Dick Clark gets wheeled out. (This naturally assumes that Dick's heirs aren't having the same conversation, even though it's actually relevant for them...) And, goodness, a couple of their parents had owned, or still own, small businesses: they might be failing, but this would be the last nail in the coffin--and as this metaphor is voiced, everybody suddenly goes quiet... and then they burst out laughing. The plot is on!

To Praise and Bury BSG
Since there will never be a more congenial platform for excessive geekery than one's own blog, I'd actually planned a series of posts on "Battlestar Galactica" this week to celebrate the show's achievements and mark its conclusion. These were to include my twelve favorite BSG episodes (twelve Cylon models, twelve colonies...) ever and my surprisingly (or perhaps embarrassingly) detailed alternative vision for the fourth and final season, which I think the writers screwed up to a great extent. But for whatever reason--sloth, I guess--it didn't happen. Instead I'll just share some thoughts on what made the show intermittently great, and more than occasionally disappointing, and try to articulate where I think it sits in the historical evolution of television and science fiction.

While I don't really intend to get spoiler-y and dissect plot points and raise the many unanswered or unsatisfactorily answered questions left at the show's end, if you haven't seen the finale and plan to do so, it still might be wise to avoid reading all this until afterward.

The frustrating irony of Battlestar Galactica was that over its four seasons the show came to focus primarily on its mythology--the who/what/when/why questions of the Final Five and Starbuck's death and return and Earth--and the personal and emotional journeys of its characters. But in my view, the show really achieved greatness only when its story arcs focused on conflicts within the remnants of humanity, typically setting up two morally compelling positions held by individuals or factions of influence that proved to be irreconcilable. Ultimately what drove the narrative was the theme of actions and consequences: the genocidal attack that began the story, wiping out more than twelve billion humans and leaving the race all but extinct, was prompted, if not merited, by the humans' enslavement of the Cylons decades before. As the line of "personhood" between human and Cylon was blurred and finally erased over the course of the show, the question became whether the remnant of humanity, and/or their pursuers, deserved to survive. The show worked out its answer primarily and most effectively through the often fatal clashes between its human protagonists.

In the first season, these focused on collisions between military and political leadership that revolved around process versus outcomes, means that were questionable or outright deplorable set against ends that were not just desirable but necessary. In the episode "Litmus," then-Commander Adama refused to allow a "witch hunt" through the military court of inquiry, even though that witch hunt might have yielded knowledge about Cylon infiltration and sabotage that would have saved lives... and left the viewer wondering, hoping really, if Adama's bet on retaining the bonds of trust among his military personnel would prove a wise one. Later in the season and into the next season, starting with "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1," simmering disagreement between the Commander and the president of the Colonies--a woman unelected and possibly unstable, and in the grip of religious certitude fueled by knowledge of her own impending death from incurable cancer--split the fleet (and the story) into thirds, and provided the narrative foundation for a series of tightly written, excellently acted episodes.

Thus the template was set: BSG stories that placed protagonists in conflict, gave respect and consideration to both sides, and built upon what had gone before within the show would create a new standard for intelligent science-fiction drama. They did it again, probably reaching the dramatic pinnacle of the series, in the middle of Season Two, when the Battlestar Pegasus showed up under the command of Admiral Cain. Where Galactica and the civilian fleet under its protection were leaving known space, fleeing the Cylons, and hoping to find sanctuary with the possibly mythical "Thirteenth Tribe" on Earth, Cain and Pegasus had ransacked and abandoned surviving civilians and were conducting a series of hit-and-run assaults on the Cylons--hoping somehow to find a way to return to the Twelve Colonies and win a war that Adama had given up as lost at its outset.

Cain's was an absolutist military rule, featuring summary executions and the torture and rape of a Cylon prisoner. In the ethos of the show, she and her crew perhaps didn't "deserve to survive"--but her leadership on Pegasus was unquestioned and unchallenged, and indeed her conduct after the Fall of the Colonies was much closer to military protocol than Adama's had been; the repeated and flagrant violations against military practice led Cain to integrate the crews of the two ships, ratcheting up tension between the commanders. She'd also enjoyed far more military success against the Cylons pursuing both ships. When a conflict arose between the crews, with Galactica personnel assaulting and inadvertently killing a Pegasus officer, Cain sneeringly dismissed Adama's urging for a military tribunal by observing that he had dissolved his earlier court of inquiry: again, chickens had come home to roost. Ultimately the battlestars came to the brink of shooting war, and subsequently Adama and Cain each plotted to assassinate the other; both stood down at the last possible second. But Cain's past sins ultimately cost her her life, as the escaped Cylon prisoner killed her.

The series reached its peak toward the end of the second season, starting with a stunning episode, "Downloaded," that three-dimensionalized the Cylons for the first time and explored the evolution of this young species as well as some of the same moral questions that the humans had faced. The season concluded with a barn-burner of an election contest between the incumbent Laura Roslin, long since reconciled with the military leadership and staunchly supported by now-Admiral Adama, and her former vice-president Gaius Baltar, known to the viewer but not to the characters as the accidental author of the Cylon genocide. Roslin campaigned as the religious candidate, the leader of destiny whose importance was foretold in the sacred scriptures of the Colonials, absolutely committed to the mystical search for the possibly mythical Earth. Baltar ran as the pragmatic man of science, favoring colonization of a marginally habitable planet discovered in the course of their journey. Baltar won--but only after Roslin, previously presented as absolutely moral, was thwarted in an attempt to steal the vote. It proved to be a disaster as--again--past misdeeds led to present consequences. In this case, it was Baltar's decision to give the escaped Cylon prisoner who had murdered Cain a nuclear weapon; when she set it off, killing thousands, the blast signature alerted a Cylon fleet a light year away, and they eventually showed up to conquer the colony as the undermanned and outgunned Galactica and Pegasus jumped away.

The rescue of the humans at the start of the third season featured the best action episode of the series. But with two exceptions--the stirring trial of Baltar at the end of Season Three, and the shockingly great mutiny arc of the last half-season--this was the end of the show's moral and philosophical dimension. The second half of the series was a fairly conventional sci-fi drama, successful or not based on the quality of the stories and the craft of the presentation. Some intriguing plotlines were hinted at and fitfully pursued, and this is where I would have done things differently--made the endgame much more about Brother Cavil, Dean Stockwell's character who stood as not quite a parent to six of his fellow Cylons and not quite a child to the other five, and brought things to a conclusion on Kobol, the world from which the Colonial civilization sprang, rather than the somewhat cheesily sci-fi "Colony" on which the final battle was fought and the totally deus-ex-machina "Earth 2," a/k/a "our Earth," where the story ended. I would have killed off at least two major characters--Baltar and Roslin--as I think the story would have gained more from their deaths (martyring Baltar early in Season Four could have set up his cult as the Colonials' equivalent to Christianity, with the character Paula as his St. Paul figure) than their lingering. I felt the romantic storylines of the last season added little to the larger plot and often came across as a waste of time--the Ellen/Tigh/Caprica Six Cylon triangle in particular. It's hard to blame the show's creators and producers for lingering on characters whom they'd obviously come to love, but to me it represented their losing sight of what had made the show so frakkin' compelling through its first two seasons.

Annie and I have been watching "The Wire" all winter, and we're now almost done--near the end of Season Four. I think both the quality of this show and the way in which we've watched it--probably an average of four or five episodes a week, as opposed to the real-time manner of one per week then months or years of nothing in which we watched BSG--has colored my view of "Battlestar." Never have I seen any show that gives more credit to the viewer (sometimes probably too much credit) or was less sympathetic to its characters--killing them off or sidelining them for long stretches with something close to glee. The makers of "The Wire" understood something that BSG gurus Ron Moore and David Eick did not: that the show must be more than the sum of its parts. In the end, the obsession of "Battlestar" with those parts rendered the series less than what it once was, and what it ultimately could have been.

Which isn't to say that I'm not deeply grateful for the ride, or that I won't miss it very much.

For more on the end of BSG, including reviews from probably its two biggest fans among critics, see here and here.

The Disillusionment
So here we are not quite two months into the Obama presidency, and the comedown is in full effect. Some are wondering why the economy still sucks--why it's getting worse, if anything. Others are baffled and infuriated that the country is still enmeshed in two wars, and hasn't entirely rolled back the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" policies. The president's approval ratings seem no better than average for this point in a new term, and a meme is taking hold that Obama is trying to do too much, too soon--force-feeding an activist government agenda down the collective maw, with the increasingly likely result that he'll trigger a national gag reflex.

That extremists on the right are shocked and outraged that a liberal president has embraced liberal priorities, and that extremists on the left are incoherent with fury that an essentially conservative president in liberal disguise hasn't immediately and effectively undone all the damage they perceive from the last forty years, is both to be expected and probably a plus for Obama. But like every presidency, this one is in danger of being overtaken by external events--in this case, of course, the economy. The AIG bonus payments might represent less than a drop in the raging river of money we've redirected toward failed financial institutions, but I think that if the administration fails to get them back, Obama's whole agenda is probably compromised beyond salvation. The situation makes him look weak--helpless in fact--and for once, the man's eerie calm is a disadvantage, not a strength. People want him to seem as angry as we all are.

The financial bailout in general, and the AIG bonuses in particular, has such resonance because it reinforces a view that's emerged over the last decade across lines of party, class, race, and culture: the big shots play by a different set of rules. It's the one thing that binds together Bill Clinton's infidelity, the financial scandals of 2002 (Enron et al), the dumb and pointless war the administration took us into and the subsequent alleged war crimes of Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the crash of 2008. Those at the bottom--the grunts at Abu Ghraib, the people who took mortgages they couldn't afford--suffer the consequences of their own mistakes and misdeeds. Those at the top--criminals in suits--not only get away for the most part, but are rewarded with Medals of Freedom or additional millions.

Obama's candidacy and presidency was supposed to represent, among other things, a long-overdue shift back toward meritocracy: every action would carry a consequence, all would get what they deserve, for better and for worse. It's hard to imagine anyone less deserving of rewards than the men who staffed the Financial Products division of AIG. If they get paid for their failures, it will undercut everything this president hopes to accomplish and further disillusion millions of Americans who already are wondering if they were once again sold a bill of goods.

Late Night Baseball Musings
I just read Roger Angell's New Yorker review of the recently released book by Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci and former New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, The Yankee Years. I know Angell is a legend, and deservedly so--more on that in a minute--and he's 88 years old. Maybe he's aged out of having to submit article drafts to an editor; I'm not sure how else to explain these two sentences.

Torre’s calm and presence aren’t perfect throughout “The Yankee Years” (Doubleday; $26.95), a capacious fresh account of his great run in the Bronx, which he co-wrote with the Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci—there’s a nice moment when he tells a Yankee president to shut the fuck up, on the phone—but trust or its poisonous absence are recurrent chords in this narrative of the Steinbrenner empire during the Yankees’ four World Championships between 1996 and 2000, and their ensuing misses or near-misses from 2001 to 2007, when Torre was cut loose in humiliating fashion. Although “The Yankee Years” can be read as urban opera, with scenes taken from the Subway Series against the Mets in 2000 and the emotional resumption of play after 9/11, plus fabulous late (sometimes late, late) post-season duets with the Red Sox, it’s also a case history of the sad physical and mental decline of Emperor George, or an M.B.A. class in radical corporate thinking and its absence in a baseball time of unimaginable financial expansion, or a further take on high-salaried egos and frail character in the steroid era of sports.

That's 185 words right there, with one breath in the middle.

But that aside, it's a wonderful piece that actually made me want to read the book, my general distaste for the Yankees and relative lack of interest in Torre notwithstanding. Or maybe it's just making me want to read Angell's books. Either way, I found this one of the more insightful bursts of prose I've read about my favorite hobby:

Yankee fans love to look back on the good stuff and keep it on permanent replay, but there’s never enough of it, because these losing nights, the killers, keep coming back and take over in our minds. In the book, it’s a rush when you reach those latter-nineties or millennial late-inning Yankee explosions and Stadium-shaking endings, like the successive-night home runs against the same pitcher, Diamondback closer Byung-Hyun Kim, in the fourth and fifth games of the World Series of 2001. Two years along, Aaron Boone eliminates the Red Sox once again in the Championship Series, with his eleventh-inning lead-off homer into the lower left-field stands. Hold it right there—only you can’t. The two biggest games in the book by far are Yankee defeats: the D-backs’ seventh-game World Series effort in 2001, when Arizona rallies with a pair of ninth-inning runs against the untouchable Mariano Rivera to win their first and only championship; and the Red Sox’ tying rally (again against Mo) in the ninth inning of that 2004 A.L.C.S. fourth game—they’ve trailed in this series, remember, three games to none, and face elimination here—and then the twelfth-inning, two-run home run by David Ortiz that wins the game and begins the tectonic shift away from the Bronx and toward Boston.

"Hold it right there--only you can't." That's just perfect. This has been the strangest baseball off-season I can remember; just the changing of the weather and lengthening of days, plus the fact that I'm not going to Florida this year, has me craving the start of the season. But how can it ever be any better than October 2008?

Angell probably would answer (and indeed implies in his characterization of the Yankees' 2006 season, when the team won 97 games, was bounced from the playoffs by the eventual AL champion Tigers, and got to hear George Steinbrenner describe their season as "this sad failure") that it's in the journey, not the destination, where joy is to be found. True enough. And I know, and I've written on The Good Phight and elsewhere, that the Phils were the beneficiaries of good fortune in their run to glory last fall. Maybe what I'm really worried about is that having (vicariously) been to the mountaintop, I won't enjoy the climb as much.

Convergence
Maybe these two things I'm about to present have no connection, nothing in common. Or maybe, taken together, they're suggesting something about our future that we'd better figure out. I'm honestly not sure myself.

Item One is Richard Florida's much-discussed cover story in the current Atlantic, "How the Crash Will Reshape America." Florida brings his usual thesis to this analysis: cities with vibrant intellectual ecosystems populated by knowledge workers will thrive, or in this case suffer relatively less. New York in particular is cited as a "winner" in the post-recession economy (though how much consolation this will provide the upwardly revised estimated 270,000 New Yorkers who will lose their jobs is unknown). The southwest and the suburbs in general are losers in his scenario, bringing Florida somewhat in line with James Howard Kunstler's "Long Emergency" theory, and for somewhat the same reason: shrinking oil supplies and tighter credit markets will render headlong development unsustainable. Additionally, Florida sees the crash auguring the final disappearance of the old manufacturing communities scattered throughout the Rust Belt as well as in the non-unionized south. And though he's considerably less dire and dramatic about it, Florida again echoes Kunstler in suggesting that the crash will bring to a close the developmental patterns of the last sixty-plus years:

[W]e need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try. Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.

But different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

The imagination can run away from one pretty quickly in this scenario: I start thinking about abandoned suburbs turning into ghost towns or even tourist attractions like the frontier communities of the Old West, or vast swaths of "the heartland" reverting to nature. (Though I guess as long as the land remains arable, we'll grow food on it--just that no other jobs will be there, and hence no people.)

But the changing economic landscape brings me to Item Two: an analysis piece from last Friday's Times. In the wake of news that the U.S. economy shed another 651,000 jobs in February, there's a growing realization among analysts that a lot of the jobs we've lost are gone for good:

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

This dynamic has proved true in past recessions as well, with fading industries pushed to the brink during downturns before others emerged to create jobs when economic growth inevitably resumed. But with job losses so enormous over such a short period of time, some economists argue that the latest crisis challenges the traditional American response to hard times.

For decades, the government has reacted to downturns by handing out temporary unemployment insurance checks, relying upon the resumption of economic growth to restore the jobs lost. This time, the government needs to place a greater emphasis on retraining workers for other careers, these economists say.
...
The stimulus spending bill signed last month includes $4.5 billion for job training. That only begins to address an area long neglected, said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project in New York. In current dollars, the nation devoted the equivalent of $20 billion a year to job training in 1979, compared with only $6 billion last year, Mr. Stettner said.

“We have to seriously look at fundamentally rebuilding the economy,” he said. “You’ve got to use this moment to retrain for jobs.”

Naturally, I agree with Andy (whom I know a bit and have done some work with). If anything, I think he understates the extent of federal disinvestment in job training over the last three decades: as I recall, as a nation we spent closer to the equivalent of $30 billion in the mid-1970s, compared to less than $4 billion a few years ago. Given that the economy in the meantime has become only more reliant upon educational attainment and skills mastery, to say we've been going in the wrong direction is an enormous understatement.

But at the risk of basically repeating my last post, the problem is that "job training" isn't really what we need right now, at least not as it's come to be understood: short-term preparation, through soft skills or specific instruction, for a relatively menial job, at which point the individual receiving help pretty much is wished the best of luck. What's required is a massive investment in post-secondary education, something more like the GI Bill than any New Deal legislation. Eliot Spitzer, of all people, articulated a good idea about how to do this in a recent Slate column. (It's really too bad that Spitzer rendered himself a joke for the rest of his life; this guy was a quality public servant, even if personality-wise he was pretty much William Rawls with a lot more power.) It's hard to imagine much public sympathy for such an undertaking right now, though--despite the fact that without it, we won't be able to fully populate Florida's "landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation."

Whether we're talking about new spatial arrangements or new economic patterns that require a fundamental reorientation of the workforce and an unprecedentedly large bet on human capital, it seems clear that big changes will be needed; things aren't going back to the way they were. I'm starting to believe that until we as a country internalize this truth, there's no chance we'll pull out of the tailspin.

Needed: Tools for the Times
I'm currently putting together a short commentary piece for CUF looking at the question of how New York City should spend its approximately $70 million in workforce dollars from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This is a big chunk of change: the city's entire allotment under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) for FY2008 was only $66.4 million. So effectively we're getting an extra year of funding with a use-it-or-lose-it proviso attached: my understanding is that the money has to be spent by June 30, 2010. The city is likely to get an even bigger infusion of money to support public assistance programs under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); there's a good deal of overlap in the clientele for WIA and TANF, and they do some of the same things, but for reasons probably not worth going into it's preferable for me to focus on WIA in the piece I'm writing.

The problem in both cases though is that TANF, which was signed into law in 1996, and WIA, which passed in 1998, both emphasize short-term attachment to the labor force--or in plain English, getting a job ASAP. Rather than pile on another layer of bureaucracy, the Obama administration and Congress have determined that ARRA money should flow through existing channels--so the money has to follow the rules of those two programs and is bound by their limitations. And this presents a pretty serious problem: if the programs are designed to put people into jobs quickly, and contracts with service providers are predicated upon the providers' ability to make those job placements, what happens when there simply aren't jobs into which people can be placed?

What I think should happen, and what I imagine I'll write about when this thing comes out, is that we expand the definition of a successful program outcome to reflect current labor market realities. I heard from a colleague earlier this afternoon that even Ron Haskins, the conservative scholar now in residence at Brookings who helped author TANF in the mid-1990s, now believes that public assistance recipients should be eligible for more job training than the program facilitates. (A Google search failed to yield any written evidence of this, so I'm taking it on the credibility of my source.) In both TANF and WIA, that might mean more adult education and a recognition that if an individual advances from a fifth-grade reading level to a ninth-grade reading level, it might not help her get a job today but it very likely will in two years, all else being equal. Under WIA, that could entail expanding the time horizon for training, either through the individual training vouchers now available to customers of the system or by setting up something like the No Worker Left Behind program now running in Michigan, which would amount to helping facilitate community college enrollment.

As much of a political bugaboo as this might be, I'm going to invoke Europe: when the economies of the Continent tip into recession, the common practice is that people there head back to school--waiting out the lousy job market while adding skills to boost employability and earning power later on. We should embrace that approach here as well. Indeed, David Leonhardt notes in today's New York Times that we've done this before:

[T]he third factor — education — is the most important of all. It can make the pie larger and divide it more evenly.

That was the legacy of the great surge in school enrollment during the Great Depression. Teenagers who once would have dropped out to do factory work instead stayed in high school, notes Claudia Goldin, an economist who recently wrote a history of education with Mr. Katz.

In the manufacturing-heavy mid-Atlantic states, the high school graduation rate was just above 20 percent in the late 1920s. By 1940, it was almost 60 percent. These graduates then became the skilled workers and teachers who helped build the great post-World War II American economy.

Allowing programs such as WIA and TANF to more robustly support educational attainment while the economy continues to shed jobs would represent not a retreat from the "work-first" principles that informed TANF and WIA (putting aside for the moment the ongoing doubt on the part of liberals that work-first is such a good idea; another argument for another day, hopefully when there's actually some work to make it a non-academic discussion), but an investment in participants who will be able to command higher-value work when job growth resumes.

Uncharted Territory
It occurred to me this evening that if the Obama presidency fails, there's a very good chance that the next president will be neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

Now, this isn't to say that, 44 months before the next presidential election, we have the faintest idea about how Obama will fare. But I don't think that Matt Miller is wrong to assert that Obama's program and priorities, expressed most clearly (because, unlike the stimulus, it wasn't an emergency response) in last week's budget announcement, represent a profound ideological shift back toward assertive and proactive ("big") government. Nor do I believe E.J. Dionne to be incorrect when he writes that Obama's ambitious agenda carries the fate of American liberalism--which after all is getting its first real trial after 40 years of sitting on the shelf. If he succeeds--if decent growth returns by 2011-2012, a much larger percentage of the population has health coverage, and the country is on a firmer path toward environmental sustainability--then it's very likely that the Democrats, particularly their more liberal adherents, will be in the political driver's seat for a long while to come.

So we can hope, anyway. But if Obama's policies fail? Is the country really going to turn back to a Republican Party now unmistakably led if not defined by Rush Limbaugh, purveyor of Happy Meal Conservatism (and, it seems, conspicuous consumer of Happy Meals)? Unless the Republicans actually figure out how to transplant Newt Gingrich's brain into Sarah Palin's body, they'll have to take one, the other, the painfully unready Bobby Jindal (whose big problem is actually not his delivery--that will improve--but the fact that he'd be running for re-election in Louisiana and for the presidency at the same time in 2011), the intolerably dickish Mitt Romney ("winner" of a plurality in the straw poll at this past weekend's confab of right-wing junketeers), or some other loser who will have to kiss Rush's ring. Add that it'll be just four years after Bush--not enough time to forget that his policies dropped us into this hole, nor to mistake that his would-be successor will be pushing more of same--and I find it very hard to imagine a Republican winning.

No, we'll see a Savior Type--a businessman, most likely, who will blast Obama for his discredited faith in Big Gummit and lack of managerial acumen yet reject the Republicans for their cronyism, stale ideas, and fealty to social reaction. If not a businessman, then a general; I wouldn't be shocked to see an independent ticket emerge featuring one of each. Maybe this is why Mayor Bloomberg really wants a third term: 2008 wasn't his moment, but it's not at all implausible to think that 2012 could be.

Just Business
There are times I think that my not living in Philadelphia might give me a little more perspective regarding the doings and decisions of the sports teams there than fans immersed in a rabid media culture that's particularly obsessive on the subject of the Eagles. This weekend is probably one of those times, as the team said goodbye to safety Brian Dawkins when the free agent signed a contract with Denver. On BackSheGoes, they're tearing their hair out; the comment threads to articles on philly.com are full up with "that team is dead to me" invective.

I get it. Dawkins is probably my all-time favorite Eagle too; I've told Annie for years that if we had a son, he'd be named Dawkins Westbrook Fischer. The team has more salary cap money than they knew what to do with, and Dawk did get a trip to Hawaii for his seventh Pro Bowl after the 2008 season. After an awful early-season performance in a Monday Night Football loss to Dallas, Dawkins turned in one of his superhuman efforts six days later in beating the eventual Super Bowl champion Steelers, and his trademark ferocity and leadership were on display for the rest of the season as an otherwise young defense grew up week by week to drag the team into the playoffs and two big wins once there.

On the other hand, the Eagles have been down this road before. They're unsentimental about their aging stars, and thus far they haven't been burned when those guys--Troy Vincent, Hugh Douglas, Jeremiah Trotter the second time--have moved on. At age 35--my age--Dawkins might or might not have one great season left; he probably doesn't have two, and there's no earthly way he has five, the ostensible length of the contract. (NFL contracts are not guaranteed, however, and essentially this is a two-year deal when factoring in the money that is guaranteed.) The Eagles have a player they like on hand to replace him, second-year defensive back Quentin Demps, and/or could move veteran corner Sheldon Brown to safety--though that's less likely now that former Pro Bowl corner Lito Sheppard has been traded to the Jets. So they created a hole, but have options to fill it that might be more palatable, if much less emotionally appealing, than Dawkins at age 36. And as Inquirer columnist Bob Ford points out, the Eagles did make an offer; the Broncos made a much more generous one, and Dawkins did what most of us probably would do in that situation. Just business on both sides.

The real criticism, though, is that the team has lost its heart--or, worse, knowingly cut it out. This is a tougher argument to refute. Dawkins was the unquestioned leader of that defense and the most popular player on the team, maybe the most beloved athlete in Philadelphia. It's dubious that the team would have made that 4-1 closing push to the playoffs without his contributions on the field or in the locker room. And Dawk's evident passion and bottomless commitment contrasts with fans' perceptions of the flaky and self-exonerating quarterback Donovan McNabb, the stolid coach Andy Reid, the insincere owner Jeffrey Lurie, and the heartless money man Joe Banner.

But ultimately this move will be forgotten if they succeed next season and held up as a moral, even karmic indicator if they fail. For myself, the push at the end of the year bought the Eagles back a good bit of credibility: they've now made the playoffs in seven of the last nine seasons, including five NFC Championship Game appearances. They do piss off the fans--but they also sell out every game and generate more attention at the end of February than the defending World F'in Champions of Baseball, who have just begun play. Much as I loved watching Dawk play all those years and much as I know it will bother me to see him in a Broncos uniform, in considering that track record I can't just immediately conclude they were wrong on this one.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT DAMN THING? Vol. 1
I keep hearing about Twitter and the Amazon Kindle, and neither of them seem to have much purpose to me. Twitter evidently allows one to essentially text-message to a general audience a running answer to the question, "What are you doing?" But even the most self-obsessed person couldn't possibly think this is of general interest, unless perhaps you're a celebrity and/or public figure; I see that Obama used it during the campaign and once or twice since, but only for things that were redundant with emails they sent out. Now, I grasp that it's useful to let someone know you're running late--I do that constantly. But I do it through the conventional texting capacity. So really: what's the point of this other than whatever cachet it's supposedly acquired?

As for the Kindle... reading this review of the new device, I can see the potential value: editing documents while on the subway or in a car or waiting around somewhere would be very useful for me. And the reviewer's vision of the text-to-speech feature is potentially awesome (though I kind of like the idea of the Stephen Hawking/"Fitter Happier" voice reading, say, DeLillo as I'm falling asleep on a train). For now, though, I don't see the point; I'll just take the book wherever I'm going. As usual, The Onion seems to have the prudent take.

When I first starting thinking about how little , I worried it was a sign of impending old-man-dom: these kids and their newfangled devices, et cetera. But I'm not like this across the board: my wife is constantly disturbed by just how much I love the iPhone, for instance. It's just that Twitter seems really dumb, and the Kindle pointless, at least for the moment.

Three Pols in a Pickle
It's clear that the sour economy will be the biggest part of every political story over the next election cycle, exerting profound influence on voting outcomes through at least 2010 and probably beyond. Here in NYC, the downturn provided an excuse--though if that hadn't done, I'm sure another would have surfaced--for Michael Bloomberg to run for a third four-year term in office, thanks to machinations in City Council late last year. It's given focus to David Paterson's unanticipated governorship, now nearing its one-year mark. And of course it has dominated the first month-plus of Barack Obama's presidency. The sharply divergent fortunes of the three executive leaders offer some early clues about politics in the current recession.

Bloomberg is basically holding steady, with approval ratings and re-elect numbers either slightly declining or almost totally unchanged. Though the mayor is the only one of the three leaders whose tenure really predated the start of the downturn, nobody blames him for the recession; indeed, Bloomberg's record of fiscal stewardship in private business and public office, and perceived willingness to make the tough calls that the times will demand, comprise the justification for his third term bid. There seem to be two main threads to the case against him: the first is that Bloomberg simply doesn't care about any New Yorkers who fall below a certain tax bracket, and that his blindness to them drives policymaking in the city, and the second is that the mayor's stylistic demeanor--the political equivalent of bedside manner--leaves much to be desired. This encompasses his willingness to muscle aside the term limit law, an action that repulsed many good-government progressive types who gave enthusiastic support to the mayor's first re-election effort.

Personally I think there's at least a little validity to both beefs, given the main thrust and general tone of economic development policy over Bloomberg's eight years. At the same time, to conclude that the man altogether disdains the poor is to ignore the enormous amount of time and effort he's spent on reform of the public schools--a system not generally geared to Bloomberg's own social set--or the work of the Center for Economic Opportunity, which continues to pilot innovative programs to address the issues of entrenched urban poverty. And while Bloomberg's fairly transparent lack of regard for the norms and niceties of retail politicking can rankle, it's arguable both that this is a feature rather than a bug, and that it's vastly preferable to the reflexive pandering one would expect, and indeed already sees, from his Democratic opponents. My sense is that neither of them can take the Mayor--though that's not to say that he can't be taken.

And then there's Paterson. His polls are bad and getting worse, and he inspires no confidence--a terrible sign for a guy who hasn't yet run and won statewide on his own. Paterson is getting hammered every day by his putative allies: I receive daily e-mails from the Working Families Party devoted to statewide outrage at his evident reluctance to raise taxes on the very rich, and the powerful health care union is on the air seemingly every night complaining about his proposed cuts in that area. About the only folks who haven't come after the Democratic governor are the Republicans and the business community--groups that at the end of the day are very unlikely to support him. But as Paterson starts to wobble on some of his positions, they'll come too. A sure sign that Paterson has lost control is that colleagues are leaking on him, taking anonymous shots at his preparation and demeanor. His painfully inept handling of the U.S. Senate appointment marked the start of the governor's difficulties; the state budget situation could put him beyond hope for election next year. At this point I can't see voting for him, though if (God forbid) the choice is between him and the undead Rudy Giuliani, I probably will.

Finally, we get to Obama, whose non-State of the Union speech last night seems to have been very well received. I think thus far he's played the politics of recession very well: the public seems to buy into the notion that recovery will take some time, and they appreciate that he, and the Democrats in Congress, are at least throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. What I find interesting here is that for the better part of eight decades now, we've generally voted incumbents out when the economy sucks, and kept them in when times were good--a factor that probably distorted and exaggerated the political skills of every official, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to a lot of mayors turned Representatives or governors, who rode the wave in the mid-1990s.

But in a sustained downturn, I think the message is received that reflexive "vote the bums out" won't do anything more than provide a political sugar rush, if that. Franklin Roosevelt obviously managed to win re-election bids when the economy was still objectively bad (if better) in 1936 and 1940; locally, Fiorello LaGuardia won again and again. At the state level, Herbert Lehman held the governorship from 1933 to 1942. Bad times don't mean inescapable political doom, though the perception that one's up the job--a sense people seem to have of Obama and Bloomberg, but not Paterson--is a must.

Welcome to the Jungle
California's horrible budget squeeze was resolved this week with a compromise measure that included a pledge to put on the 2010 ballot a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would replace partisan primaries with an open-primary system in which the top two vote-getters would square off in the general election, regardless of party. The proposal, pushed for by a moderate Republican state senator named Abel Maldonado, is a top priority for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sits in the Sacramento governor's mansion today only because he didn't have to navigate a Republican primary on his way to the office. (Ah-nuld won a special recall election in 2003, when Golden State voters retired Gray Davis in the wake of a budget crisis that was actually much less severe than what the state just endured.)

The notion behind the reform is that partisan politics in California, and probably most everywhere else as well, tend to favor candidates who are more extreme in their ideology than most voters--simply because in a Democratic primary there's usually more incentive to run further to the left, and amongst Republicans the pressure tilts rightward. Nate Silver, who wrote (unfavorably) about this "jungle primary" proposal yesterday, has a couple good graphs that illustrate the point. Thus you wind up with a California House of Representatives delegation populated with the likes of Linda Sanchez and Lois Capps at the far extremes of the left, and Darryl Issa and various Duncan Hunters toward the rightward fringe. See this National Journal table for a clearer sense of how Cali's Democrats are further left, and Republicans further right, than is the norm: on a scale of 0 to 100 measuring liberalism in 2007 votes, just four of California's 53 Representatives fall between the numbers of 30 and 70 (and two of those are pretty much at 30 and 70 exactly). The same dynamic evidently plays out in state elections--which is a big reason why the California budget mess got so bad.

Early in Mayor Bloomberg's term, he tried to push for non-partisan elections in New York City. At the time, most of us regarded this as a sop to the Republicans to whom the mayor was then trying to show some bona fides; the measure was overwhelmingly defeated. (I'm pretty sure I voted against it personally.) The opposing argument at the time was that by removing party affiliations from the ballot, the measure would take from low-information voters a vital piece of information about a candidate's likely policy positions: you might not know what City Council candidate Jerome Shibotsky stands for, but if he has a D or an R after his name, that gives some clue. My understanding of the California proposal, however, is that party affiliation would still appear on the ballot: it's just that, in a strong Democratic district, the general election would more likely pit a moderate Democrat against a more liberal Democrat. If nothing else, that empowers the Republican voters in that district to support the former rather than waste their votes on the gay-hating gun nut who would be lucky to crack 20 percent.

Silver seems to dislike the proposal because he thinks it would lead to legislatures full of squishy centrists--and admittedly, life in the "Land of a Thousand Liebermans" is a pretty horrifying prospect. I don't agree. For one thing, his take both implies that ideology is the only determinant of who wins elections, and totally rules out the public-education/political-persuasion aspect through which a superior candidate can convince voters over the course of a campaign, and/or term in office. As an example, consider Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980: at the start of that general election campaign, Carter was pretty clearly closer to the the true middle of the electorate than was Reagan, and the polls had the race close or leaning to Carter through most of the summer and early fall. But Reagan was a better candidate, and obviously had far greater powers of persuasion... or, as some Dems of the time had it, obfuscation. That, combined with the lousy condition of the country, ultimately pushed enough voters toward the conservative Republican that he won in a walk.

Maybe more to the point, I think that the "jungle" system would at least produce officials more respectful of other views, rather than the current endless blood feud style of politics that characterizes the House. And more to Silver's point, a strong case probably could be made that for the Senate especially, this would come closer to the Founders' vision for the upper house than our current party-driven system. California's proposal seems unlikely to pass--both parties will oppose it strongly (if you're a far-left Democrat or far-right Republican, the interest you have in common is that the current system gives you a lot more cover), as will their supporting interest groups that get such solid representation by the more extreme office-holders. If nothing else, the campaign should be a great (final?) test of Schwarzenegger's own powers of persuasion.

This Just In: Brooklyn Rules
Given my recurring agita this winter about where we live (most recently noted here), I found this article deeply heartening:

[M]y suggestion [is] that Brooklyn is America’s quintessential city, ahead of even Manhattan. First, Brooklyn reflects a much more holistic melding of complimentary land uses, with residential, commercial, institutional, recreational, and retail and entertainment in close proximity of each other in many of its neighborhoods.

Manhattan, on the other hand, is much more Balkanized, with its various land uses much more clustered together, to the point of edging out other, potentially complimentary uses. That is not to say that there are no residential neighborhoods in Manhattan per se: However, Manhattan, like many of San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods, is a great place to live only if money is not an obstacle. Finally, Manhattan has a much-more transitory culture, whereas Brooklyn has become a preferred place for “New Yorkers” of modest to moderate means to settle down and raise a family.

Like a model city, Brooklyn manages to accommodate its density extremely well. First of all, like San Francisco, Brooklyn is a city of neighborhoods. Bedford Stuyvesant, Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Flatbush, Park Slope and Williamsburg are some of the more notable among Brooklyn’s 32 neighborhoods. It is remarkable, given Brooklyn’s density, that much of its housing stock is comprised of three and four-story brownstones, along with mid-rise apartment and coop buildings. For example, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, with a combined neighborhood population of almost 105,000 (slightly more residents than South Bend, Indiana and just under the population of Clearwater, Florida), have a wonderful scale both to their residential streets and their main commercial thoroughfare, 5th Avenue. They achieve a very walkable and synergistic mix of homes and businesses, as well as public and institutional uses.

I'm just starting to learn about land use, zoning, and (to a lesser extent) "urban form," ostensibly for a project I'm working on but more truly because it's friggin' fascinating. So this article might mean something different to me in six months than it does today. But if quality of life is like pornography--in that you know it when you see it--the part I bolded is the key, along with the "more holistic melding of complementary land uses" noted in the first graf.

And while I haven't seen numbers on this, I would be very surprised if the more extreme measures of inequality in New York City--we have the largest gap in income between the highest and lowest earning quintiles in the U.S.--are far less pronounced in Brooklyn, and the other outer boroughs, than in Manhattan. Not that income inequality is a huge problem in and of itself, but when coupled with relatively low rates of mobility--meaning that if you're born poor, you're gonna stay poor--it is a huge problem. This is a tougher point to get a quantitative hold on, though: the one study I remember seeing a few years ago looked at the whole country. (The news there was pretty grim.) My guess is that Brooklyn offers considerably more mobility than does Manhattan.

None of which is to say that the problems of affordability and preservation of community that the Center wrote about a few weeks ago aren't real and urgent. The most common refrain heard about critics of development in Brooklyn is that we must resist "Manhattanization": in brief, that Balkanization of neighborhoods and irresistible upward pressure on prices that characterizes the place across the East River. I think almost all New Yorkers would agree, however, that one Manhattan is exactly the right number.

Recessionary Diversions
Despite a schedule that affords me a lot of flexibility, I still usually find myself at the gym in the traditional after-work period, roughly between 5 and 7 PM. It's usually pretty busy around that time, and I've noticed it being more so this winter. A couple nights ago, though, I had some obligations during that part of the day and didn't get there until about 6:45. By the time I left about an hour later, it was so crowded I could barely walk through the place.

Business is booming for Netflix, another winner in our household--though that probably has to do more with Annie and me getting obsessed with "The Wire" than anything else. And I saw this article today suggesting that the video game sector is one of a very few sectors in New York City currently adding jobs; the piece also included a note that sales of games were up 19 percent for all of 2008. My brother manages a GameStop location outside of Philadelphia; he's told me all winter that you'd never know we were in a recession based on the volume of business they've been doing.

Clearly there's a substitution effect--or is it an income effect? Grad school was a long time ago--in operation these days. Obviously home entertainment is on the rise, and in light of what I wrote above I've recently found myself wondering if gym memberships--or even just actual gym use, as opposed to the common practice of getting a membership as a symbol of commitment and then never going--tend to rise when there's an economic downturn. At least in New York, this seems to be the case. (Evidently, however, our moronic governor has other ideas. What was that about rising lifestyle-related health care costs?) Meanwhile, theater and tourism are down, at least here in the city, and restaurants seem to be struggling.

The common trend here seems to be toward solitary pursuits: exercise, video games, even watching a movie at home. (This also makes me wonder if porn is counter-cyclical.) Movie attendance famously spiked during the Great Depression, though how that business will do this time seems less certain; some think it's recession-proof, others not so much. I think Andrew Sullivan wrote something last year about Americans in the current economic contraction, already in effect but then undeclared, again basically looking at a screen in the dark, but this time in their homes, by themselves or in small groups.

In the Middle of New York
CUF this week released a study on the challenges facing the middle class in New York City, marking probably the closest convergence to date of the Center's work and the life experiences of those of us who are employed there. "Reviving the City of Aspiration," which I didn't write but did spend a lot of time editing, has attracted a great deal of press: it was a featured story on yahoo.com this afternoon, cbsnews.com had a feature, the New York Daily News ran a whole package of stories on the report, and so on. All the coverage is available from the page linked above.

I think this attention is partly a reflection of the report's quality, and partly a fluke of timing: in a moment of nearly universal economic anxiety, the authors put their finger on the ur-worry of "losing the American dream" in a place that we at least--maybe in a fit of parochialism--consider to be the home of said dream. That the future of the middle class is very likely to be a big theme, maybe the big theme, of this year's mayoral election doesn't hurt either.

Probably because of the current recessionary context, the media coverage has focused on the bad news among the many data points the authors tracked down: the net domestic out-migration from the city in recent years, how much more we New Yorkers are paying for everything from phone service to auto insurance, our longest-in-the-nation commuting times, the fact that the median wage here provided access to the smallest share of homes, 10.7 percent, in any major metropolitan area of the U.S. There's an undercurrent of (fairly gentle) snark in some of the articles, amounting to "Costs a lot to live here, huh? Tell me something I don't know, smart guy."

But there are two points that I worry will get lost in the focus on bummer numbers. The first is that the bigger problem isn't that current "middle class" New Yorkers--a category that merits the quotes because we're really talking about couples and families with incomes nosing over the six-figure mark, who would be well off almost everywhere else but are effectively middle class here owing to the unmatched cost of living--will leave for someplace where their dollar stretches farther. This happens all the time, as Mayor Bloomberg said in his one remark about the report; it's not that big of a deal. What is a big deal is that the city doesn't seem to offer as much upward mobility into the middle class, for those who were raised here in worse circumstances, as it once did. I think we do a very good job of identifying some of the reasons why this is, but diagnosis is the easy part.

The other point, and I readily acknowledge that this is something I can write about here much more easily than the organization can, is that we all as individuals appreciate that numbers alone can't and shouldn't convey what it's like to live here, with its unique mix of pleasures and frustrations. The New York magazine blog post about the report actually got at this, commenting about a chart from the study (titled "Is the American Dream Out of Reach in New York?") showing the number noted above about the small share of homes that are within reach of a household making the median income:

Rough, right? Except that the chart may be a little mislabeled. "Is the American Dream out of reach?" Sure, we may not be able to afford buying homes here. But we grew up in rural areas, and our life goal wasn't necessarily to buy a home. It was to get the hell out of there and one day move to New York, where everything happened. We don't know about you all, but that was our American Dream.

I get that. But as someone who at least sort of fit that description--the Philly 'burbs weren't rural, but nor were they a place where anything, let alone "everything" happened--I also get that your motivations shift as you age and your life circumstances change. Much as I still enjoy aspects of living in New York, and Brooklyn especially, this cold winter has tested my patience with the city, exacerbating all the annoyances of high cost, limited space, and arduous transit that are always present and that the report details; if we ever do start a family, I think we'd want to go. And I hold that thought in my head alongside the memory that, after the last time I left New York in disgust with it eleven years ago, I couldn't get back here fast enough.

A Taste of Things to Come
I got an e-mail around 4.30 this afternoon from an organization called Picture the Homeless, for which I went to one low-dollar fundraiser at a bar three or four years ago at which I must have written down my e-mail address, because I've been getting their stuff ever since. Usually I delete their stuff without a look, but this one was titled "BREAKING NEWS: Let Our People Go!" I thought that seemed worth a look.

It was. PTH was one of the participating groups in what the Times described as a "boisterous protest" Tuesday morning, culminating in arrests, at a breakfast event for business leaders where Mayor Bloomberg was speaking:

Mr. Bloomberg was about five minutes into his remarks when at least 100 people barged into the main ballroom at the Grand Hyatt New York hotel in Midtown, holding signs that read, “Mayor Bloomberg, Talk to All New Yorkers,” and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.”

He stood stone-faced as the protesters filed in and surrounded several of the tables packed with bankers, developers and other business leaders who had paid up to $249 a head to hear him and others speak.
...
One of the protesters, Wanda Imasuen, of the Brooklyn-based organization Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, said that it was the exclusivity of the audience that spurred hers and several other groups representing low-income and immigrant city residents to disrupt the event.

“We don’t have a voice, we’re not at the table and we demand to be at the table,” Ms. Imasuen said. “We demand that the mayor gives us a meeting, not for corporate America to decide the fate of all New Yorkers.”

I actually attended an event last night at the New York City District Council of Carpenters building downtown, on "green jobs" and the federal stimulus proposal, at which a questioner mentioned this Bloomberg event today. Like many who speak up at such things, she seemed a little... well, let's go with "overwrought." The gist of her question was about why "labor wasn't at the table" in a conversation regarding the Future of New York City, which is how the conference was branded by Crain's New York Business magazine. The panelists weren't unduly upset; one of them, the political director for the Carpenters, stated "for the record" that, yes, the union was and is interested in the future of New York City, but they didn't worry that they wouldn't be a part of it because they weren't attending a breakfast that Crain's was doing. "Crain's has a lot of breakfasts," the director said.

But while some of us snickered at the exchange, the fact of this protest today makes me think she was onto something. People feel cut out of the action here: they see the mayor overturning term limits without needing any recourse to voters who had repeatedly supported the two-terms-and-done standard. They see Wall Street firms squandering unimaginable sums... and then getting billions more showered on them by the federal government with no strings attached. (I know there's another side to that story; I'm just talking about popular perception here.) The notion picks up steam that the rich and powerful--the people enjoying a swank breakfast at the Grand Hyatt New York hotel--are playing by a different set of rules. (As one admittedly oversimplified take on just how different, compare the state-of-the-art "Future" website, linked above, with that of FUREE, the group to which the protester quoted by the Times belongs. I could have designed and coded that thing. In 1999.)

If the whole game is rigged, the relative costs and benefits of doing something like barging into that room, waving signs and shouting slogans, start to look different than they do when you're convinced that you can get a fair hearing through the traditional channels. The eight arrests made at the scene, including someone from Picture the Homeless, will prove more than worthwhile to those detained given the publicity and, probably, fundraising surge likely to follow.

A few minutes later this afternoon, a colleague mentioned that Bloomberg has hired a prominent liberal advocate in the city to advise on his campaign. Reaction in the office ranged from "this proves he knows he's vulnerable" to "this is one more indication that he's just trying to scare potential opponents out of the race by co-opting key voices and locking up talent." There was also a bit of sentiment that this individual was "selling out"... though the person who raised that point also conceded that s/he might do the same if given the same opportunity, and that the advocate's likely next position--either in Bloomberg's third-term City Hall or his foundation--would provide a platform to do a lot of good.

As things stand right now, I don't see how Bloomberg loses this year; he's got too much money and too solid of a record, and the two guys most likely to run against him are, for very different reasons, fatally flawed candidates. (Personally, I'm still undecided about the race; the question remains unanswered whether a Bloomberg convinced of his own infallibility and ossified in his thinking is preferable to a Democrat who comes pre-corrupted by all the compromises New York City Democrats must make before they can get to that level.) But there is real anger and resentment in the city these days. I would be very surprised if Tuesday morning's protest is the last we see this year.

XLIII
Thoughts from the just-concluded not-quite-four-hour sportertainketing extravaganza:

• Watching the first quarter-plus, I was kicking myself for not having bet this game. The way I thought the Super Bowl would go was that the Steelers would find mismatches against the porous Arizona passing defense, Parker would run well enough to keep the Cardinals honest in defensive playcalls, and Roethlisberger would unleash some of his patented Elway Favre McNabb Roethlisberger magic for a few big plays. And that the Cardinals, confused by Pittsburgh's defensive alignments and unable to pass-protect against the 3-4, would make some mistakes and lose their composure. Up through the Steelers went ahead 10-0, that was the game.


• Actually, pieces of that story--the Big Ben improvisations, the Cardinals making mistakes and losing their composure (in terms of penalties)--did persist. But Arizona made the Steelers pay for blanket-covering Larry Fitzgerald through the second quarter, moving the ball with ease. They should have gone into halftime tied or ahead; that they didn't was owing to one of the greatest football plays I've ever seen, Steelers jumbo defender James Henderson making an interception in the end zone and, with fantastic blocks thrown throughout, steaming the length of the field for a pick-six to end the first half and give the Steelers a ten-point lead.


• This game might have represented the longest I've gone in my adult life watching the TV without changing the channel. I left the commercials on; I watched the halftime show. The trend of the commercials during the first half seemed to be selling products via entertainments that featured slapstick comedy violence that implausibly had no consequences. There were four or five examples, but the only one I recall clearly was a Doritos ad in which a man on a busy city street makes wishes regarding his surroundings as he eats Doritos chips: a hot woman's outer clothes fly off, a cop transforms into a rabbit, and so on. As the ad ends, he looks into his bag--no chips left. As he looks back up, a bus slams into him at full speed. Cut to black for text or product spot, then back through the front window of the bus, where our man is plastered but moving around unharmed. Oh, and there was a golfclub to the nuts in there somewhere.


• Bruce Springsteen played four songs--two old warhorse tunes from "Born to Run," a new song that he segued into without introduction that was obviously meant to suggest continuity between his classic and contemporary stuff, and "Glory Days" which he somewhat clumsily rejiggered with football-ish lyrics and some in-song banter with Sylvio Dante. He and the ban were entertaining, as always; Springsteen is a legitimately superb entertainer. Annie loved it without reservation; I, being something of an ass, went back and forth between thinking it was great and resenting the whole notion of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band playing at the Super Bowl for quasi-Bolshevist and other irrational reasons I can't fully articulate.


• The Steelers were a little reminiscent of the Eagles throughout the game: they couldn't quite close the deal in the red zone, settling for field goals when they could, maybe should have had touchdowns. Then, up 13 in the fourth quarter, they couldn't win battles on the line and grind down the clock, despite John Madden's repeated declarations that we were about to see "Steeler football," which evidently means running the ball.


• Don't get me wrong: Madden did a good job, as he always does. Calling a Super Bowl is an interesting assignment: on the one hand it's a pinnacle of football that the big fans are immersed in, so you want to point out the nuances of an offensive lineman's footwork or throw in details about how safety Troy Polomalu is often out of the play because he's neutralizing Larry Fitzgerald down the field. On the other, the audience is literally a few dozen times larger than a regular-season game, so you have to keep a lot of neophytes engaged, if not fully informed. It takes both the right type of broadcast personality and the right instinct as to when to add analysis and when to let the action talk to pull that off and make it work for both audiences. Michaels and Madden did this better than their CBS or FOX colleagues usually do. (And I'll admit to a little pride at NBC, where I worked when they last aired a Super Bowl eleven years ago, doing a great job with the broadcast.)


• Meanwhile, the Steelers must have gotten frustrated at Kurt Warner's ability to make plays even after they took away Fitzgerald, because I think they started zoning or single-covering Fitzgerald... who's the greatest receiver I've ever seen in terms of being a force in play, and seemed to be willing the Cardinals to victory late.


• As Fitzgerald made play after play in the fourth quarter, NBC cut to his father... not in the stands, but in the press box. Larry Fitzgerald Sr. is a sports columnist in Minneapolis, and he did not crack a smile or pump a fist as his son took over the game. The rule is no cheering in the press box; when I was in the business, at NBC events or sometimes just because I could get a seat, I had a hard time always keeping it, and I never had any flesh and blood in uniform. i really couldn't have been more impressed by this.


• After the Cardinals registered a safety of Roethlisberger with about four minutes left to cut it to 20-16, I really thought they might win; after Fitzgerald's second touchdown I thought they actually would. But Ben Roethlisberger, faced with basically the same situation Donovan McNabb was in two weeks ago--trailing the Cardinals by one score with time short but sufficient in the fourth quarter--was pretty much perfect. He evidently wasn't named the MVP, but I thought he should have been--and you just know that McNabb is going to suffer by comparison to both quarterbacks, who admittedly were great pretty much throughout.


• Speaking of which, I dislike Cardinals QB Kurt Warner in large part because of his relentless, obnoxious proselytizing in his post-game interviews, etc. As they were coming back, and particularly when they cut to his perhaps even more obnoxious wife, I kept thinking about how I imagined both Warners were giving it up pleading to Touchdown Jesus. I believe I limited myself to only two or three Where's your God/Messiah now, Warner?s over the course of the game, but it was fun to have as a little sub-narrative throughout.


• This was the fifth out of the last six Super Bowls, excepting only the Colts/Bears game two years ago, that turned out to be pretty thrilling and competitive. I wouldn't have guessed it--my prediction was Steelers 35, Cardinals 17, and I thought it might actually be more of a blowout than that--but there you go. Arizona's coaches and players put together a deeply improbable run that, if they'd finished it, would have been comparable to what the Giants did last year; ultimately a good story and some drama is all you can hope for, something that justifies the bombast and money and hype.

So now the two-plus weeks until spring training, the true dead zone of sports. I'll have to somehow entertain myself.

Update From the Wilderness
Marc Ambinder checks in from the RNC with a perceptive breakdown of Republican strategery during the party's first month fully out of power:

Here is the basic diagnosis of what ails the Republican Party from Dr. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. The internal organs are fine. No problem with the composition of the blood that pumps through the party's activist veins. The brain is top-notch -- Republican ideas are well considered, broadly desired, and politically feasible. The body, however, looks ragged; the accent is too...regional (Southern?). [...] The "sales job" theory is quite attractive to many Republicans because it relieves them of having to question whether Americans, at their corps [sic], are beginning to distrust what the party stands for, what the party does, who the party is. What a relief! All that's need are some cosmetics. Maybe it's Mabeline. McConnell's view is shared by many Republican current office-holders. It is not the view that Republican strategists tend to hold, and it certainly is not the view of the younger conservative intellectuals, like the Atlantic's own Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The massive data compiled by Gallup about party identification suggests that the party has an identity problem.

Other evidence, including exit polls from 2006 and 2008, locate this problem at a microskeletal level: it cannot deal with globalization, with a flat world, with religious diversity, with institutional decay. Since the 1960s, the GOP's DNA has dutifully replicated activist cells to inflame and attack on culture, and Democratic efforts to minimize the demands and pressure of culture haven't worked. The selection of Sarah Palin got them replicatin' again, but then reality -- in the form of a global economic crisis -- intruded, and Republicans couldn't fight their way out of a plastic bag.

I guess that Mitch McConnell, as the current embodiment of institutional Republicanism, pretty much has to say what he's saying here: admission that the product is flawed, not just the packaging, amounts to pointing a big finger at himself. This is not something that career politicians of any stripe tend to do.

But ultimately I think American parties recede into long-term minority status when their internal contradictions become too glaring for the median weak or non-partisan voter--the guy or gal who voted for Reagan, then Clinton, then Bush, then Obama--to ignore. It happened to the Democrats from the late '60s through the early '90s, when they were perceived as too willing to futz with the operations of the market in pursuit of specific outcomes but not willing enough to assert American prerogatives abroad or concede the relevance of certain moral/behavioral standards ("crime is bad").

They started to come back when, one, Bill Clinton took steps to close the gap between those two views--a more laissez-faire, business-friendly approach to economic policy, a more assertive position in foreign policy--and less crucially two, when the country began to evolve toward the liberal worldview on social issues like gay rights. Once this was resolved, the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis of a Democratic majority forged by structural and demographic factors made sense; the emergence of that majority was delayed, but not derailed, by the 2000 election shenanigans and the national derangement of 9/11 as well as the Republicans' tactical and organizational superiority in the two Bush elections.

Once the Democrats had the better candidate and organization, as well as the wind of Bush's failures at their backs, they emerged as the clear majority party last November. That this trend isn't even necessarily complete is shown by some fairly stunning Gallup data released yesterday: as of 2008, Republicans dominated (in terms of a double-digit advantage in partisan identification) in just four states--Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Nebraska. The Democrats enjoyed a double-digit edge in 29, plus four more with a nine-point advantage. This hasn't necessarily played out in national elections--McCain won Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri despite a strong generic Democratic advantage, owing presumably to the difference between a Kentucky Democrat and, say, a Rhode Island one--but it shows just how big a structural problem the Republicans have.

Thus, now it's the Republicans' turn to resolve their big glaring contradiction: a seemingly bottomless appetite for use of force abroad and moral compulsion at home, coupled with an absolute hands-off view toward the economy and contempt for redistributive social welfare in almost all its forms (the home mortgage deduction still seems aces with them). This mix of views helped get the country into the current mess, and offers seemingly no value in extracting us from the troubles.

The internal ferment that crested with Bill Clinton's plurality presidential wins and Barack Obama's majority win began in the 1980s with groups like the Democratic Leadership Council and the emergence of "New Democrats" like Gary Hart, Bill Bradley and Clinton himself. One can perceive the first signs of something similar amongst the Republicans, notably including the efforts of Douthat and Salam that Ambinder references; their prescription seems to involve at least a more serious engagement with economic concerns, first articulated in the "Party of Sam's Club" article I linked to years back and more comprehensively in their book Grand New Party, which I still haven't read. But those ideas haven't yet penetrated official Republican policy deliberations, such as they are.

Meanwhile, some on the right are considering it a symbolic victory that Obama's stimulus plan failed to win a single House Republican vote. But my guess is that the political optics just confirm how out of touch they remain.

Why Everyone Over Thirty or So is F---ing Crazy
Start with our parents, who grew up with this:


It's a 15-minute short, titled "Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow," which aired right after "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" on the Turner Classic Movie channel Friday night. It would be as difficult to overstate its banal absurdity as it is to give TCM sufficient credit for pairing it with Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of nuclear paranoia. You get the sense that Kubrick, making his movie about, among other things, the persistence of human myopia even when faced with the real and immediate prospect of humanity's extinction, was responding to cultural detritus like this and suggesting that at least we should acknowledge how profoundly fucked is its unspoken premise.

The hell of it is that I'm pretty sure Reading, PA--the center of action in "Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow," demonstrating Civil Defense activities leavened with a big dollop of small-town goodness--was literally in no danger at all when this was made in the mid-to-late 1950s. It's been a long time since I studied this stuff, but my recollection is that the USSR had very few weapons capable of hitting the continental U.S. at least until the very end of that decade: they would have needed to use bombers, most of which probably would have been easily enough intercepted. Western Europe, sure; maybe a few coastal cities like Washington, New York, LA and San Francisco, centers of government and finance and culture. But Reading? Really? Granted that Reading still had a six-digit population back then, in its heyday, it's still hard to imagine it cracking the top 100 targets of a nuclear strike.

That said, a cloudburst detonation over the center of town would have killed pretty much everyone there: the film notes, in the same avuncular/matter-of-fact narrator voice that describes neighbors as "good eggs," that the hydrogen bomb blast radius was three miles, inside of which everyone is vaporized. Reading is only about ten square miles. Game over, man.

Now, by the time we thirtysomethings were growing up, both nuclear-armed superpowers had redundancy of redundancy with arsenals of MIRVs loaded onto ICBMs and SLBMs. I remember reading, I think in Common Cause magazine around 1983 (I was a weird kid; I probably took it from my grandfather's den--or, perhaps worse, he gave it to me), that the USSR had the capacity to annihilate the entire human race something like 95 times over; not to be outdone, the United States could so more than 100 times. There was a sense--at least, I remember feeling the sense--that nuclear war was inevitable. Ronald Reagan famously joked about it in a radio soundcheck in 1984, and the culture was filled with reminders of apocalypse soon.

With the advent of Gorbachev in the mid-'80s, Cold War tensions began to ease, and by the time I started college in 1991 the USSR was no more and the prospect of total nuclear war probably more remote than at any time since the world first learned of the Soviet bomb. I don't remember feeling one moment of relief that, yes, I could stop worrying about obliteration from above. But it does have to figure in somewhere. Whatever the problems of the Millenials, at least they didn't grow up with that literally over their heads.