“Bracketing Racism”: White Resentment, President Obama, And Appalachia
Steve Kornacki tries to do the math on Obama’s unpopularity throughout Appalachia:
A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about…
Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was an explicit factor for a sizable chunk of voters. Perhaps Obama’s race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, and the never-ending Muslim rumors, his status as the “liberal” candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays – people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own.
I think that “Chalking this up only to race” is a strawman, and its one that I often see writers invoke when talking about white resentment and Obama. Here’s another example from Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake:
But although no one doubts that race may be a factor, exit polling suggests that the opposition to Obama goes beyond it. And seasoned political observers who have studied the politics of these areas say race may be less of a problem for Obama than the broader cultural disconnect that many of these voters feel with the Democratic Party.
“Race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority,” said former congressman Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.). “The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues.”
The presumption here is that race can somehow be bracketed off from the perception that Obama is “ultra-left.” Thus unlike other shameful acts of racism, opposition to Obama race as a possible “factor” but goes “beyond it.” Or in Kornacki’s formulation Obama, presumably unlike past victims, is facing a complicated opposition which can’t be reduced to raw hatred of blacks.
The problem with these formulations is that they are utterly ahistorical. There is no history of racism in this country that chalked “up only to race.” You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain (Edmund Morgan again.) You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women. (Philip Dray At The Hands Of Persons Unknown.)
And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black, you will miss almost all of it.
In sum, there is very little about racism that can be chalked “only up to race.” Chalking up slavery, itself, only to race is a deeply distorting oversimplification. The profiling that young black males endure can’t be chalked up “only to race” either. It’s also their youth and their gender. Complicating racism with other factors doesn’t make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again.
I don’t mean to come down on Kornacki or Cillizza. But I think this sort of writing about race–and really about American politics–as though history doesn’t exist is a problem. Specifically, journalists are fond of saying “racism is only one factor” without realizing that any racism is unacceptable. It is wrong to believe Barack Obama shouldn’t be president because he’s black. That you have other reasons along with those–even ones that rank higher–doesn’t make it excusable. Likely those other reasons are themselves tied to Obama being black.
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor, The Atlantic, May 23, 2012
“There Are Known Unknowns And Unknown Unknowns”: What We Don’t Need To Know About Bain Capital
We’re asking the wrong questions about private equity.
The debate over Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital has moved through a number of phases, from “Did Mitt Romney do awful things at Bain Capital?” to “Should the Obama campaign be criticizing Mitt Romney for what he did at Bain Capital?” and now, “Is private equity a good thing or a bad thing?” Shockingly, people in the private equity business think the answer to the last is that it’s quite good. The predominant opinion from other people is that it’s sometimes good and sometimes bad, which from what I can tell it’s a pretty good summation of Romney’s PE career. At times, he helped start companies that went on to thrive, or helped companies perform better and survive. And at other times, he acted as what Rick Perry called a “vulture capitalist.”
But while it may be an interesting discussion for economists and economic writers to mull over, “Is private equity good or bad?” really isn’t a question we need to answer in the context of this presidential campaign. The question we need to answer is, “Does running a successful private equity firm mean you’ll be a successful president?” Mitt Romney’s answer to this question is, “Yes, because running a successful private equity firm means you know how to create jobs.” Barack Obama’s answer to this question is, “No, because being president is nothing like running a private equity firm. And also, Mitt Romney is a jerk for profiting while all those people got pink slips.”
It would actually help us understand this better if Mitt Romney talked more specifically about what exactly he learned at Bain that he’ll bring to the Oval Office. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get into much detail about his time there. If you asked him the question, he’d almost certainly say he learned that taxes should be cut and regulations should be scaled back, and that will create jobs. In other words, he’d repeat the standard Republican economic arguments, which really tells us nothing. But maybe I’m not giving him enough credit. Maybe there are some surprising insights about the working of the economy that he could only have gleaned at Bain. If there are, he hasn’t shared them yet.
And that’s really the rub. President Obama is right when he says that the presidency is a very different job from being a private equity CEO. Just when it comes to the economy, creating the right conditions for widely shared growth is not only a matter of wanting to do the correct things, it’s also about being able to accomplish them–convincing Congress to go along with your agenda, insuring that it’s implemented properly, balancing the competing interests that press on a president, and so on. Romney says he knows what to do because of his time at Bain (even if the substance of what he wants to do is the standard Republican wish list) but he hasn’t explained how his time at Bain taught him how to do it. He might argue that he learned that being governor of Massachusetts. But he almost never talks about his time as governor—it’s his time in the private sector that he says is the reason he can be a good president. And that’s not even mentioning all the other aspects of the presidency, like foreign policy, that I assume not even he would claim you prepare for by buying and selling companies.
Chances are slim that Romney is going to get too far into the details of what a private equity firm like Bain does, because the picture is mixed. Yes, he can point to some successes, companies Bain helped build or saved from decline. But that means he’ll also be asked about the failures. And as Tim Noah explains, the whole genius of private equity is that guys like Mitt Romney win either way. If the company they buy succeeds, they’ll get spectacularly rich. But if the company fails, they’ll still get rich, because the money they used to buy it was borrowed, and they were raking in huge management fees all along the way. That’s a story Romney would rather not tell. So he’ll stick to simple assertions, like “I know how the economy works.” Which leave us not knowing what he really knows, or doesn’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 23, 2012
“A Conservative Neurosis”: The Right’s Fixation With “Vetting” President Obama
“The Vetting” represents a peculiar species of conservative neurosis, which I discussed last week in the context of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many conservatives are convinced that somewhere hidden in Obama’s past is a magical key which will unmask him to American voters as the villain which heretofore only the fringe right has seen him to be.
This theory, while ostensibly an attack on the media for failing to do its civic duty is actually pretty insulting toward U.S. voters. Despite what conservatives seem to think, there hasn’t been a media conspiracy to avoid talking about Jeremiah Wright. I ran a Nexis-Lexis search for the phrase “Obama and Jeremiah Wright,” for both the period before the 2008 election and for all available dates. In each case, it returned more than 3,000 results—the limit at which Nexis requires you to cut down your search. Similarly I ran a Google News search for “Obama and Jeremiah Wright” and it returned 17,600 results, including 9,400 from before November 4, 2008. There was plenty of information available about Obama and Wright, the public just didn’t think it was all that important. That’s not a failing of the media or even of the public—it’s a failing of the unhinged right.
And as Friedersdorf persuasively argues, it’s an obsession that is holding back the right.
For Breitbart.com, the decision to commit substantial editorial resources to the president’s past had an immediate opportunity cost: there’d be fewer pieces on his first term in office and less opportunity to present arguments about why conservative policies would better serve the country. The decision seemed strange to me. Conservative media was around during the 2008 election. Was there really relevant information that they’d failed to uncover at the time? And while President Obama surprised civil libertarians with his governing choices, weren’t the things conservatives hated about him—the health-care bill, the Keynesian stimulus, the “green jobs” program—basically exactly what you’d expect from the campaign he ran, or from any liberal Democrat?
He then runs through the “The Vetting” series citing example after weak example of what Breitbart.com has, umm, found. I won’t recount the whole thing here—the piece is worth a full read—except to note that as he points out much of what they deduce about Obama is hardly secret or surprising. One example: “Charles C. Johnson broke the news that as a community organizer, President Obama worked with leftist Catholics to undermine conservative Catholics. This might’ve prepared us for Obama’s position on the Catholic Church and birth control … except his position itself was already clear!”
What’s the point after four years of Obama governing of trying to deduce from his distant past how he would govern? It’s a natural extension of this neurosis: If you’re convinced that the president is a secretive figure with a hidden past who must be unmasked before a duped public, it then becomes logical to think that he must be readying really, really, really sinister plans for his second term when he will no longer have to worry about facing voters.
And no doubt four years from now we’ll be treated to a raft of stories from the far right regions of the blogosphere frantically warning of how Obama’s hidden past foretells the ominous, secretive plans he has for his presidential library.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2012
“Why Bain Questions Matter”: Free Markets Should Serve All The People
Who are the dastardly enemies of free enterprise who decided to make an issue of Mitt Romney’s tenure at the private-equity firm Bain Capital? Er, those would be his fellow Republicans.
Listen to what Newt Gingrich said in January: “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.”
Or what Rick Perry said that same month: “There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible.”
When Democrats say things like that, they’re accused of being Bolsheviks who want to destroy capitalism. But even in the context of the GOP primary battle, where “moderate” was the ultimate epithet, Romney’s actions at Bain were seen as raising a legitimate and important question: Shouldn’t free markets serve the American people, rather than the other way around?
President Obama is right to raise this issue now. I wish he had done so during the debate on financial regulatory reform — only now is he posing the kind of fundamental questions that needed to be asked — but better late than never. In his defense, a tough reelection campaign does tend to focus the mind.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with private equity, which plays an important role in the economy. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with wealth; those who risk their capital in private-equity ventures should be rewarded when those deals pay off. No one begrudges Romney his offshore investment accounts, his mansions or his wife’s Cadillacs.
But as Romney himself acknowledges, free markets need rules and regulations in order to function. Some kinds of dealings are prohibited or even criminalized — insider trading, for example, because of the way it benefits a select few at the expense of other investors.
It is reasonable to ask whether some highly leveraged buyout deals, of the kind that Bain and other private-equity firms often conduct, should fall into the same thumb-on-the-scale category as insider trading.
Suppose a company is failing and appears beyond rescue. Suppose a private-equity firm buys the company with borrowed money, burdens it with more debt, and then spends the next few years firing workers, selling assets, eliminating pension plans — all while collecting handsome “management fees.” Then the company fails anyway, as it was fated to do.
What higher economic purpose has been served? Why is this not what Perry memorably called “vulture capitalism”?
The discussion we should be having goes far beyond the relatively small world of private equity. Look at the mounting losses at the nation’s largest and supposedly best-run bank, JPMorgan Chase — at least $2 billion and perhaps much more.
The transactions that produced the losses are numbingly complex, but essentially they involved betting both ways on the direction of various economic and business indicators. The idea was to balance the bets so that if the bank’s predictions were right it would make a lot of money; if the predictions were wrong, it would lose money, but not so much.
The bank got on a winning streak, so it made bigger and bigger bets. Then the bank’s luck turned, and Chairman Jamie Dimon discovered that the betting positions were unbalanced — instead of losing a little money, the bank was set up to lose a lot. Sharp-eyed traders at hedge funds noticed what was happening and jumped in to take advantage of a big spender on the skids.
That’s a classic Las Vegas story, but why should it be a Wall Street story? Should a bank whose deposits are federally insured — a bank big enough to crash the financial system — be standing at a craps table in the middle of the night yelling, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes”?
This is what Rick Santorum said in March: “I heard Governor Romney here called me an economic lightweight because I wasn’t a Wall Street financier like he was. Do you really believe this country wants to elect a Wall Street financier as the president of the United States? Do you think that’s the kind of experience we need? Someone who’s going to take and look after, as he did, his friends on Wall Street and bail them out at the expense of Main Street America?”
Good question. I’d like to hear Romney’s answer.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 24, 2012
“Untempered Individualism”: Conservatives Used To Care About Community
To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.
Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.
Today’s conservatism is about low taxes, fewer regulations, less government — and little else. Anyone who dares to define it differently faces political extinction. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was considered a solid conservative, until conservatives decided that anyone who seeks bipartisan consensus on anything is a sellout. Even Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of the longest-serving Republican senators, is facing a primary challenge. His flaw? He occasionally collaborated with the late Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy on providing health insurance coverage for children and encouraging young Americans to join national service programs. In the eyes of Hatch’s onetime allies, these commitments make him an ultra-leftist.
I have long admired the conservative tradition and for years have written about it with great respect. But the new conservatism, for all its claims of representing the values that inspired our founders, breaks with the country’s deepest traditions. The United States rose to power and wealth on the basis of a balance between the public and the private spheres, between government and the marketplace, and between our love of individualism and our quest for community.
Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea. As the conservative thinker Robert A. Nisbet noted in 1968, conservatism represented a “reaction to the individualistic Enlightenment.” It “stressed the small social groups of society” and regarded such clusters of humanity — not individuals — as society’s “irreducible unit.”
True, conservatives continue to preach the importance of the family as a communal unit. But for Nisbet and many other conservatives of his era, the movement was about something larger. It “insisted upon the primacy of society to the individual — historically, logically and ethically.”
Because of the depth of our commitment to individual liberty, Americans never fully adopted this all-encompassing view of community. But we never fully rejected it, either. And therein lies the genius of the American tradition: We were born with a divided political heart. From the beginning, we have been torn by a deep but healthy tension between individualism and community. We are communitarian individualists or individualistic communitarians, but we have rarely been comfortable with being all one or all the other.
The great American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. certainly understood this. In his book “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country,” he quotes approvingly John Stuart Mill’s insistence that “everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.” With liberty comes responsibility to the community.
Before the Civil War, conservatives such as Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay believed in an active federal government that served the common good. This included a commitment to internal improvements (what we now, less elegantly, call infrastructure), public schooling, and the encouragement of manufacturing and science. Clay, an unapologetic supporter of national economic planning, called his program “the American System,” explicitly distinguishing his idea from the British laissez-faire system. (The Club for Growth would not have been pleased.)
Abraham Lincoln, for whom Clay was a hero, built upon this tradition, laying the foundation for our public universities by backing the establishment of land-grant colleges.
Civil War pensions — the first great social insurance program and a central Republican cause — were supporting about 28 percent of men 65 and over by 1910. In 1894, the program’s most expensive year, the pensions accounted for 37 percent of federal spending. Sounds like a massive entitlement program, doesn’t it?
And the first American version of socialized medicine was signed into law in 1798 by that great conservative president, John Adams. The Marine Hospital Servicefunded hospitals across the country to treat sailors who were sick or got injured on the job. There is no record of a mass campaign to repeal AdamsCare.
Mr. Conservative himself, Robert A. Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio and Senate majority leader, urged federal support for decent housing for all Americans in the 1940s. Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system and established the federal student loan program in the 1950s.
More recently, Ronald Reagan never tried to dismantle the New Deal and acknowledged, sometimes with wry humor, the need for tax increases. He was acutely alive to the communal side of conservatism. Nearly all of the pictures in his 1984 “Morning in America” commercial — one of the most famous political ads in our history — invoked community: a father and son working together, tidy neighborhoods, a wedding, young campers earnestly saluting the flag. Reagan spoke regularly not only of the power of the market and the dangers of Soviet communism, but also of the centrality of families and neighborhoods.
George W. Bush, who promoted “compassionate conservatism,” built on old progressive programs with his No Child Left Behind law, using federal aid to education as a lever for reform. And he added a prescription-drug benefit to the Medicare program that Lyndon B. Johnson pushed into law.
In other words, until recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.
For most of the 20th century, conservatives and progressives alternated in power, each trying to correct the mistakes of the other. Neither scared the wits out of the other (although campaign rhetoric sometimes suggested otherwise), and this equilibrium allowed both sides to compromise and move forward. It didn’t mean that politics was devoid of philosophical conflicts, of course. The clashes over McCarthyism, the civil rights revolution, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Great Inflation of the late 1970s remind us that our consensus went only so far. Conservatives challenged aspects of the New Deal-era worldview from the late 1960s on, dethroning a liberal triumphalism that long refused to take conservatism seriously. Over time, even progressives came to appreciate some essential instincts that conservatives brought to the debate.
So why has this consensus unraveled?
Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.
Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his term encouraged conservatives, including the fledgling tea party movement, to distance themselves from his legacy. They declared that Bush’s shortcomings stemmed from his embrace of “big government” and “big spending” — even if much of the spending was in Iraq and Afghanistan. They recoiled from his “compassionate conservatism,” deciding, as right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin put it, that “ ‘compassionate conservatism’ and fiscal conservatism were never compatible.”
That would be true, of course, only if “fiscal conservatism” were confined to reductions in government and not viewed instead as an effort to keep revenue and spending in line with each other, which was how older conservatives had defined the term.
Obama, in the meantime, pitched communal themes from the moment he took office, declaring in his inaugural address that America is “bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions.” The more he emphasized a better balance between the individual and the community, the less interested conservatives became in anything that smacked of such equilibrium.
That’s why today’s conservatives can’t do business with liberals or even moderates who are still working within the American tradition defined by balance. It’s why they can’t agree even to budget deals that tilt heavily, but not entirely, toward spending cuts; only sharp reductions in taxes and government will do. It’s why they cannot accept (as Romney and the Heritage Foundation once did) energetic efforts by the government to expand access to health insurance. It’s why, even after a catastrophic financial crisis, they continue to resist new rules aimed not at overturning capitalism but at making it more stable.
For much of our history, Americans — even in our most quarrelsome moments — have avoided the kind of polarized politics we have now. We did so because we understood that it is when we balance our individualism with a sense of communal obligation that we are most ourselves as Americans. The 20th century was built on this balance, and we will once again prove the prophets of U.S. decline wrong if we can refresh and build upon that tradition. But doing so will require conservatives to abandon untempered individualism, which betrays what conservatism has been and should be.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 24, 2012
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