“Obama Is Right On Race; The Media Is Wrong”: The Rotten Apples Do Not Represent All Americans
It seemed as though President Obama couldn’t possibly say anything to make conservatives, particularly conservative members of the media, even more incredulous than they already are. But then he said what some apparently consider his biggest half-truth or untruth to date: that he believes the country is less racially divided now than it was when he took office. The disbelief was evident in article after article, with one conservative site using “President Pinocchio” in its headline.
The thinking seems to go like this: With protests across the nation over racially charged deaths, from Michael Brown to Tamir Rice, how could the president say with a straight face that our nation is not less divided than it once was? Especially when polls show that some Americans think we are. And yet the answer to that question can be found in Obama’s own words. “I actually think that it’s probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided,” he told NPR.
He’s right. Despite the images perpetuated by the media highlighting divisions—because that makes better television than images highlighting unity—we are not a nation at war over race. We are a nation suffering growing pains. We are a nation in which a few rotten apples are spoiling different barrels. There are a few among the police, whom some Americans no longer trust; among some of the communities currently at odds with the police; and among those more interested in securing 15 minutes of social media fame by stoking unrest than seeing our nation at peace. But those rotten apples do not represent all Americans. Those rotten apples do not represent America, and they certainly don’t represent a nation at war.
How do I know? Well, the numbers tell us so, as do all of our day-to-day interactions, just as the president said.
For starters, the number of interracial married couples reached an all-time high in 2012, three years after President Obama took office, jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 18 percent. Those numbers don’t include those who are dating or cohabitating, an indication that the number of interracial couples is actually higher, as American marriage rates are at an all-time low.
And while a majority of Americans may not be in interracial relationships, a large number of Americans are now either related to someone or know someone who is in one or has been in one. Furthermore, mixed race children are the fastest growing population in the country. Someone who once may have been less evolved on race relations could very well now have a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild who is of mixed race, which will likely spark an evolution of some sort. That evolution can be seen in Gallup’s tracking of national attitudes on interracial relationships. In 1958 4 percent of Americans approved of such couples. By 1997 half of Americans approved, and by 2012 the number was 87 percent, a steady year-to-year increase in the years since the Obama presidency began.
I have been reminded of this throughout the holiday season, in both big cities and small Southern towns, where I’ve crossed paths with a number of mixed race families. No one stared at them as though they were anomalies, because they aren’t anymore. They represent the face of the new America, an America the country’s first biracial president has helped usher in, despite what critics might say.
But then again, highlighting the new America doesn’t generate the clicks or the TV ratings that highlighting people spewing angry, racially charged rhetoric does. So the story has become “America is divided by race,” and though that doesn’t represent most Americans’ day-to-day experiences, some of us are buying into the media’s toxic narrative.
I almost did. While traveling this holiday season, a relative and I were pulled over by a police officer. It was late at night, in the South, and a relatively deserted area. The officer was white, male, and had a Southern drawl. Since my relative and I are both African American and have been following the same news coverage many of you have been, I was nervous. I even began texting a friend so someone would be aware of where we were and what was occurring on the off chance the experience took a turn for the worse. It didn’t. He was courteous, explained the legitimate reason we were briefly pulled over, and then let us continue on our way. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
The fact that many African Americans fear the police more than our white counterparts says our nation is still a work in progress. But the next time you are tempted to say our nation is worse off on race than it was before the president took office, ask yourself this: Are your day-to-day relationships with people of other races worse? The people you work with, or see at your grocery store, or your church? Are your personal relationships worse? Or is it simply that what you are hearing and seeing about race in the media seems worse?
If that is the case, then here’s a piece of advice: Turn your TV off.
By: Keli Goff, The Daily Beast, December 29, 2014
“Memo To Cops; Criticisms Aren’t Attacks”: In A Democratic Society, No Institution Is Above Criticism And Accountability
Bill Bratton made a number of sensible and decent comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press. More on those a little later. But let’s start with the one comment that wasn’t so reasonable, not for the purpose of bashing the commissioner but for prodding him in whatever tiny way I can to get him to do better, because any solution to this crisis rests largely on his shoulders.
The quote, the one that took control of the headlines, had to do with cops’ feelings about recent criticisms. “Rank-and-file officers and much of American police leadership,” he said, “feel that they are under attack from the federal government at the highest levels. So that’s something we have to understand also.”
We all know what “highest levels” means. It means the president. Hard to know exactly what Bratton’s intention was here, but in essence he endorsed the recent comment by his old boss and enemy Rudy Giuliani, who said on Dec. 21, “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.” Now that’s what one expects of Giuliani, because he once lived and thrived in that cauldron of racial conflict and he largely came out of it with his reputation intact (his pre-9/11 approval numbers were around 50-40—good, but could have been much higher had he not fanned so many racial flames over the years). But one doesn’t expect Bratton, who never really talked like that and who worked in Los Angeles to take steps to overcome that police department’s demented racial history, to think that way.
Maybe he was just pointing out that many police feel that way. Fine. But you know, people feel lots of things. Some of them are justified and some of them aren’t. And sorry: Neither Barack Obama nor Eric Holder, whom Giuliani also critiqued, said anything that qualifies as an “attack” (Bratton’s word) on cops. Here’s chapter and verse on that. Please read it. Obama and Holder have certainly spoken of the tensions unique to police-black American relations, but they have never, ever said hate police and have very often said exactly the opposite.
Bratton should acknowledge that truth. He was trying, I think, to demonstrate balance and equivalence. Earlier in the segment, host Chuck Todd had asked him if he understood and acknowledged that black people have a fear of police. To his credit, he said: “Oh, certainly. I interact quite frequently with African Americans of all classes from the rich to the poor, and there is not a single one that hasn’t expressed this concern.” So he was saying: We have these perceptions on the parts of blacks and cops, and we need to deal with them.
But these aren’t morally equivalent. Blacks, males especially, do have reason to be more afraid of cops than whites do. But cops have no reason to believe that they are “under attack” by the White House. Bratton might have said something that was closer to a real-world moral equivalence. He could have said, for example, that for many white cops, the unfortunate truth is that their experience teaches them that they need to take more caution when approaching young black males. But equating African Americans’ daily lived experience with the rhetorical fabrications of Giuliani, PBA head Pat Lynch, and a few other others is… well, it’s like saying that Eric Garner’s crushed larynx is morally the same thing as Lynch’s tender ego.
So ideally Bratton should have said something like, “I’ve seen no evidence that persuades me that there’s any kind of campaign against police at the highest levels of government.” If it came from him, some cops might actually be willing to hear it. He’s the only player in this drama who still has some credibility with both sides. He has struck a promising tone these last few days with his rhetoric about trying to “see each other.” He alone is in a position to start opening some eyes.
But the conversation can’t happen until police departments understand that some criticism of them is legitimate; that not everyone who levels criticisms is a cop-hater; and that in a democratic society, no institution is above criticism and accountability. We don’t criticize the armed services much in America these days—this isn’t the early 1970s, with anti-Vietnam protesters cruelly calling legless veterans pigs and so on—but by God, when something goes haywire (Abu Ghraib), at least there are some prosecutions and forced retirements. The CIA spends years getting away with the stuff it gets away with, but eventually, something happens like this month’s Senate report, and with any luck a couple of heads will roll.
These people put their lives on the line for the rest of us, too. It’s not only possible but also right to find the deaths of CIA officers in the field to be tragic while also demanding that they follow the law and international treaties the United States has signed. And it’s possible and right to be sickened both by the murder of those two NYPD cops and by incidents of police violence that seem to have a clear racial element to them. But somehow, it feels like the Army and the CIA, rigid as those institutions can be, are more responsive to democratic accountability than police departments. That’s the reality that needs to change. And in New York, at least, Bratton has to lead the way.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 28, 2014
“The Obama Recovery”: You Shouldn’t Conclude That Hitting Yourself In The Head Is Smart Because It Feels So Good When You Stop
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.
Let’s start with a tale from overseas: austerity policy in Britain. As you may know, back in 2010 Britain’s newly installed Conservative government declared that a sharp reduction in budget deficits was needed to keep Britain from turning into Greece. Over the next two years growth in the British economy, which had been recovering fairly well from the financial crisis, more or less stalled. In 2013, however, growth picked up again — and the British government claimed vindication for its policies. Was this claim justified?
No, not at all. What actually happened was that the Tories stopped tightening the screws — they didn’t reverse the austerity that had already occurred, but they effectively put a hold on further cuts. So they stopped hitting Britain in the head with that baseball bat. And sure enough, the nation started feeling better.
To claim that this bounceback vindicated austerity is silly. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University likes to point out, if rapid growth after a gratuitous slump counts as success, the government should just close down half the economy for a year; the next year’s growth would be fantastic. Or as I’d put it, you shouldn’t conclude that hitting yourself in the head is smart because it feels so good when you stop. Unfortunately, the silliness of the claim hasn’t prevented its widespread acceptance by what Mr. Wren-Lewis calls “mediamacro.”
Meanwhile, back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.
What’s the important lesson from this late Obama bounce? Mainly, I’d suggest, that everything you’ve heard about President Obama’s economic policies is wrong.
You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.
This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.
And what this bounce tells you is that the alleged faults of Obamanomics had nothing to do with the pain we were feeling. We weren’t hurting because we were sick; we were hurting because we kept hitting ourselves with that baseball bat, and we’re feeling a lot better now that we’ve stopped.
Will this improvement in our condition continue? Britain’s government has declared its intention to pick up the baseball bat again — to engage in further austerity, which does not bode well. But here the picture looks brighter. Households are in much better financial shape than they were a few years ago; there’s probably still a lot of pent-up demand, especially for housing. And falling oil prices will be good for most of the country, although some regions — especially Texas — may take a hit.
So I’m fairly optimistic about 2015, and probably beyond, as long as we avoid any more self-inflicted damage. Let’s just leave that baseball bat lying on the ground, O.K.?
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 28, 2014
“The Peacock Festival”: The Perilous Base-Courting Phase Of The 2016 Primaries Begins
Now that Christmas has triumphed yet again in the War on Christmas, taking place as scheduled, we can turn our attention to the presidential primaries. After all, the Iowa caucuses are only 401 days away. For quite a while yet, the candidates are going to spend their time figuring out how to bring base voters over to their side (and you should probably steel yourself for 500 or so repetitions of “It’s all about that base, ’bout that base” jokes from pundits showing they’re down with what the kids are into these days).
Here’s Anne Gearan in today’s Post:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for president, is working hard to shore up support among liberals in hopes of tamping down a serious challenge from the left in the battle for the 2016 nomination.
Clinton has aligned herself firmly with President Obama since the November midterms on a range of liberal-friendly issues, including immigration, climate change and opening diplomatic relations with Cuba. In an impassioned human rights speech this month, she also condemned the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation tactics and decried cases of apparent police brutality against minorities.
The recent statements suggest a concerted effort by Clinton to appeal to the Democratic Party’s most activist, liberal voters, who have often eyed her with suspicion and who would be crucial to her securing the party’s nomination.
But the positions also tie her ever more tightly to a president who remains broadly unpopular, providing new lines of attack for the many Republicans jostling to oppose her if she runs.
And here’s a story from Mark Preston of CNN:
The first votes of the 2016 campaign won’t be cast for another year but there’s already a race well underway: The Christian primary.
Republicans are actively courting white evangelical and born again Christian voters, knowing they will be crucial in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is urging people to join him next month in Baton Rouge for a day of fasting, repentance and prayer focused on the future of the United States.
On the same day, another gathering will take place in Des Moines, where at least five potential GOP presidential candidates will address Iowa voters on “core principles” that include “social conservatism.”
Later in the story, Preston notes that if Christian conservatives fail to unite behind a single candidate, their power will be diluted and a more “centrist” candidate could get the nomination. Which is both true and false. That could be the series of events, but we shouldn’t be too quick to assign causality (and there are no “centrist” GOP candidates, only some with weightier résumés who the establishment thinks have a better chance of winning; the ideological differences between them are somewhere between tiny and nonexistent). The truth is that the party’s born-again/evangelical base almost never unites behind a single candidate. The only time it has happened in recent decades was in 2000, when George W. Bush easily beat a weak field of opponents.
But there’s no doubt that the courting of the base will indeed occupy much of the candidates’ time. One common but oversimplified narrative has it that they have to do so in order to win the nomination, but it will cost them in the general election. The truth, however, is that this is a much greater danger for the Republicans than the Democrats.
To see why, look at what Clinton is up to. She’s coming out strongly in support of some moves the Obama administration has made recently and talking more about things such as inequality. That will warm liberal Democrats’ hearts, but will it actually hurt her in the general election? It’s unlikely, because her position on all these issues is widely popular. Are voters going to punish her for advocating an end to the Cuba embargo, which 68 percent of Americans believe should happen? Or a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which is supported by about the same number? Or some set of populist economic policies, when around two-thirds of Americans say government policies favor the wealthy? Some issues, such as police practices, may not be so clear-cut, but on the whole the things Clinton is saying now are unlikely to turn up in attack ads in October 2016.
The story isn’t quite the same on the Republican side. Christian conservatives actually have relatively few policy demands, and most of them are already covered by what any Republican president would do anyway (such as appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade). What they do demand is a demonstration of affinity and loyalty. They want to know that a candidate loves them and will be there for them throughout his time in the White House.
The danger for Republican candidates is that in the process of showing love to the base, they alienate other Americans. There’s no reason a candidate couldn’t do the former without doing the latter, if he exercised enough care. One area where it may be impossible is same-sex marriage, where the more conservative evangelical voters are still firmly opposed (though those attitudes are slowly changing), while most Americans are in favor. But what those voters mostly want is to be convinced that the candidate is one of them: that he sees the world the same way they do, loves what they love and hates what they hate. In theory, even an allegedly “centrist” candidate can accomplish that. But so often in the process of this courting, they end up looking like either panderers or extremists; that’s what happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney.
In the end, base voters in both parties want to be won over. They don’t want to go into the general election having to support a candidate they can’t stand. They may approach the courtship looking reluctant, but they’re still hoping that there will be a marriage at the end of it. And they don’t need to be convinced that their nominee is the best candidate they could ever hope for — they just want to decide that he or she is good enough. If the candidate loses, they may say afterward, “Well I never liked him anyway.” But in the meantime, getting enough of their votes in the primaries doesn’t depend on being the most religious (for the Republicans) or the most populist (for the Democrats). The question is what you do to make yourself good enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 26, 2014
“Bushleaguer”: You Can Expect A Jeb Bush Presidency To Be A Lot Like His Brother’s On Climate Change, Only Worse
Evidently, Jeb Bush is no longer on speaking terms with his father and brother.
The former Florida governor and (God help us) would-be GOP presidential candidate still insists that there’s room for skepticism on the issue of climate change. As Grist’s Ben Adler observes:
…Bush [simply] doesn’t believe in [human-caused] climate change! In a 2011 interview with Fox News, Bush said, ‘It is not unanimous among scientists that [climate change] is disproportionately manmade. … What I think on the left I get a little tired of is the sanctimonious idea that somehow ‘science’ has decided all this so therefore you can’t have a view.’
…[Y]ou could expect a Jeb Bush presidency to be a lot like his brother’s on climate change, only worse. Bush is even starting out this campaign to the right of where Mitt Romney was on climate science at this point in the last cycle. In 2011, Romney was chastised by the right-wing media for accepting climate science, even though he didn’t propose to do anything about the problem. Rush Limbaugh said that stance meant ‘bye-bye nomination,’ but Romney still won it, in part by later disavowing climate science.
History shows us three things about Jeb Bush: He is no moderate, he is not too moderate to win the nomination, and the Republican primaries will drag him further rightward.
Neither George H. W. Bush nor George W. Bush governed as climate hawks during their administrations; the former had a radical climate-change denier, John Sununu, as his chief of staff for the first three years of his administration, while the latter infamously censored and edited climate science reports to appease the fossil fuel industry (the late whistleblower Rick Piltz exposed Bush’s machinations in 2005). Still, Bush 41 and Bush 43 at least publicly acknowledged that human-caused climate change was real and a potential problem.
By denying human-caused climate change, Jeb Bush is, in essence, calling his father and brother liars. Is this really the sort of message he wants to send to the public?
Jeb Bush insists that he is a pro-lifer; this is supposedly why he stuck his nose into the Terri Schiavo case years ago. However, his continued refusal to recognize the reality and risk of climate change—which will take lives if carbon pollution is not addressed—exposes him as a complete fraud and someone unworthy of even being a presidential candidate, much less President. I know she’s not perfect, but if a denialist demagogue like Jeb is her opponent on November 8, 2016, then I’m absolutely ready for Hillary.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 28, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 